Last summer, a girl who lives near here was getting ready to go out for the evening when she heard a strange report on the radio. The reporter said that a maniac mass murderer had escaped from a nearby prison. “Watch out,” they said, “for a man with a hook for a hand.” He was known to be crazy and dangerous, and the police asked for everyone’s help in reporting anything out of the ordinary.
The girl thought it was strange, but wasn’t too worried. She was too excited about the evening ahead. Her boyfriend was coming to get her so that they could go out to a movie. A few minutes later, he pulled up in his car and she bounded out the front door to meet him to start their evening of fun.
On the way to the movie theater, as they drove down the dark, twisting road, they heard a thump on the passenger side of the car, and then a rattle near the front tire. The girl and her boyfriend were startled. “I don’t think that I hit anything,” he said. “I wonder what that noise could have been?”
The boyfriend was worried that something was wrong with the car. He wanted to pull over to check things out. But the girl was worried that they were going to be late for the movie. She tried to talk him out of stopping. They started to argue as he parked on the side of the road. She begged him to just keep driving. As they sat there, him explaining that he’d only be a minute, they heard another thump on the side of the car.
“That’s strange,” the boyfriend said. “We’re not even moving.” The girl began to feel nervous. She asked again if they could just go to the movie, now as much because she was scared of the strange noises on the dark, deserted road as anything else. Her boyfriend again said he’d be just a minute, and just as he started to get out of the car, they heard another thump, and a long, screeching sound like metal scraping on metal.
The girl and her boyfriend looked at each other and without another word, he put the car in drive and hit the gas. They made the rest of the drive to the movie theater in record time, sitting silently, waiting.
When they got to the theater, the girl had started to feel a bit foolish for getting spooked over some silly noises. “I’m so sorry,” she said to her boyfriend, “I don’t know what I was so upset about.”
He forgave her, and they got out of the car laughing at their silly fight – until the girl closed her car door. One look and she was frozen in fear, terrified, as she saw the long scrape on the passenger side of the car leading to a metal hook hand, still lodged in the handle on the car door.
The girl ran straight inside and called the police, but after weeks of combing the woods, they never found the hook-handed killer. They say he still wanders around these parts, and people have even seen a man with a hook hand stalking through the woods late at night.
