There are a lot of locations in the world that seem to be perfect for strange encounters and ghostly phenomena. Dark, remote wildernesses? Check. Decrepit old buildings? Check. Abandoned, rotting structures? Check. Another that could probably be included in this list is the innately creepy cornfield. Here rows upon rows of tall stalks stretch out into the distance, concealing what hides inside. While looking out at these somewhat unsettling places one can easily imagine seeing the corn move, something cutting a swath though it, something mysterious, unseen, and perhaps horrible. This is not just a scenario for movies, as there have been plenty of accounts of encountering very bizarre entities, monsters, and apparitions in cornfields, which make them every bit as creepy and unsettling as anything you can imagine.
Many of the accounts we will look at here are difficult to classify, making it murky as to whether we are dealing with mystery monsters, ghosts, demons, or what. A very creepy encounter was reported on ThoughtCo. and is told by a witness named Frank Semko, who says he once worked at a rural cheese factory in the state of Minnesota that stood right up against a vast sea of corn. In the summer of 2004, he says that he was on a break on a night shift, looking out over the forlorn cornfield and watching bats flit about when something very unearthly caught his eye. He says of the surreal sequence of events that would follow:
As I was watching the bats, I looked down at the edge of the cornfield. Something was moving there. It was the size of a small child and very, very skinny. Pale, with something that looked like a head of straight, black hair. It moved in a sort of jerky gait, like someone dancing “the robot” badly. It moved in chunks: legs, then hips, then torso, shoulders, neck and finally head. It was looking back into the cornfield, or at least I felt like it was. I felt prickly all over. I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was a heron or something at first, but it looked too much like a person. It didn’t move like a person, though. Gradually, step by step, it moved toward me.
Letting my curiosity better my fear, I moved toward the edge of the dock, which was raised a few feet off the ground. When I got within a few feet of the edge, the thing looked at me. I was paralyzed. I could have run, but I was stuck somewhere between terrified and intrigued. It moved, its “face” still pointed at me. It ratcheted its body in that disconcerting, jerky movement toward the cornfield and went into it. I tried to watch where the field moved as it passed, but the corn remained perfectly still. I noticed that all the crickets were silent. After a few minutes, nothing happened. I stood out there for an hour, but it never came back. I never saw it again.
What sort of creature was this? We’ll probably never know. In another case we have a witness named Jennifer Lozano, who had her own bizarre experience at a cornfield in the state of Indiana, where at the time she says she lived with her mother and step father at the top of a small hill out in the middle of nowhere overlooking “acres and acres of cornfield and woods.” She claims that one day she went out exploring the area and walked some distance out along the silent cornfield where it bumped up against and kissed the woods. This was when something very strange would make its presence known. She says:
I was walking back and I caught a fast flash of something all black move behind a tree in the woods. I stopped and looked and at first I didn’t see anything so I began walking again but after a few steps I seen it again and this time it didn’t hide. What I saw that day was not only unexplainable it was pure evil in a form. It stood there looking at me and it’s head and neck hung to the side in a very abnormal way as if it was broken. It stood about 4 ft tall and its arms were very long and hung all the way to the ground. It looked as if it’s entire body was burned or very thick like skin and it had no hair or ears on its head. Then I noticed that steam was rolling off this thing like crazy and it then let out this loud scream that scared me so badly I began to run full speed through the field towards the house. I felt as if my heart was gonna beat outta my chest and I could hear the leaves crunching as this thing was definitely coming after me.
I had about a million things going through my mind at this point and I was wondering what would happen to me if this thing does catch up with me. I gave a quick glance back and I seen it closer than it had been and gaining speed as it was using its long arms to help it run kinda like a gorilla would. All this time its also letting out this gurgling sort of scream that I cant really explain. Finally I reached the house and began to tell my mother what had happened and I hadn’t even finished when we both heard something pounding on the outside of the house. We both began to scream and cry and it sounded as if it was going to beat the walls down.
After an hour of tormenting us this thing just stopped and when my dad got home my mom and I told him what happened. I was sure he would never believe us but to my complete surprise he went and got some other people and his hunting rifle and went looking for the creature. Of course they never caught it and after a year went by my dad and I were outside one night talking and it came up in our conversation. He told me that the reason he knew we were telling the truth was because two nights before that he was burning some leaves out back and he saw it standing in the middle of the field and heard it screaming like a banshee. I will never know what that thing was but around the same time that year there were at least 7 different reports of a ‘thing’ in the woods.
What in the world? It is curious that a similar creature was reported as being seen by others at the same time on many occasions, and one wonders just what that otherworldly thing could have possibly been. From the state of Illinois comes the account of a witness who says that her own encounter happened while driving with her husband along a lonely rural road in central Illinois that passed right through an expanse of cornfields on both sides. It was described as a clear summer evening, and as the stalks blurred by them in a hypnotic cycle something would give them quite a jolt. She says:
Something ran across the road in front of me. It was about the size of a toddler, but it looked like a skeleton, or so skinny, it’s limbs were about the size of a skeleton. It was also bone-white and very fast. I have been thru college; I have a bachelor of science, and have taken biology classes as well as zoology. That creature was something I’ve never seen before. My husband looked ahead just as it left the road and said he just saw something, but couldn’t describe it.”
What could this bizarre creature have been? Was it some sort of alien, and unidentified animal, or what? Also defying any easy category is a report from 2018 at a location described as being in Knox County, Ohio. According to a report by Ron McGlone, with the Mutual UFO Network, there was an account from July 31, 2018, in which a motorist was driving along a highway going along a cornfield when something vaguely humanoid came bursting out of the cornstalks to lope across the road and disappear into the corn on the other side at “a tremendous burst of speed.
Although it happened very fast, the witness said it was seen quite clearly, and that it was a bipedal, hairless brown-skinned creature standing around 7 to 8 feet in height, with a “tall slender body, arms and legs small in diameter, hands and feet looked oversized for its body proportion, small neck with oval elongated head.” McGlone says he spoke directly with the anonymous witness and even went to investigate the secret location of the sighting but could find no evidence of the creature. Again, what could this thing have possibly been? Another sighting from Ohio, this time from Washington County, near the town of Churchtown, was given by a witness who says the encounter happened in July of 1984, when he was 17 years old. He explains that he had gone to see a fireworks festival at the nearby town of Beverly, and on his way back the rugged backroad took him through a swath of darkened cornfield and he says:
As I drove about 15 mph along these back roads, I rounded a slight turn where the banks on either side rose about six feet. On both sides of the road were fence and cornfields. Then, on the left side of the road behind the fence was a large hair covered, gray or white colored figure standing by the fence line. I was stunned and didn’t say a word and just kept driving along slowly looking at this thing. As I went by it just looked at me. I didn’t have a clue what to do.
One wonders if this is a case of perhaps a white Bigfoot lurking in the cornfield, which sounds pretty far out but wouldn’t be the last time this has happened. According to Cryptozoology News, in 1997 there was a similar report from near the town of Belvidere, in Franklin County, Tennessee. The witness, known only as “Cary,” says his sister and cousin were out at the time testing out the sister’s new car at night along a road surrounded by dim, swaying cornfields when a massive, white hair covered creature with a cone-shaped head stepped out of the corn. He says:
The car had bright lights on and they were able to see this creature crossing the road and into the darkness beyond the fence. Both came home talking fast and looked scared. My younger cousin kept saying they had seen a monster.
This same witness also claimed that his brother had an encounter with perhaps the same creature just a few days later in the woods nearby. This certainly seems like a Bigfoot in nature, although why it was hanging around in a cornfield is anyone’s guess. On the site 99wfmk there is also an account from Winn, Michigan, along a lonely dirt stretch of a lane called W. Coe Road, which meanders through large stretches of cornfields. In 2003, an unidentified truck driver says he was driving down the road at 2 in the afternoon on a clear day when a beastly creature described as “unexplainable, dark, dirty, manlike,” came crashing out of the cornstalks to stand there and stare at him as he drove by. Interestingly, some locals have also claimed to have seen something large and hairy moving through the corn in that area from time to time.
Besides Bigfoot, aliens, and other unearthly monsters, some anomalous cornfield encounters seem to involve something a little more supernatural and ghostly. One Reddit poster tells of how he had been driving through central Illinois with some others on their way to Chicago. They had been driving along a remote stretch of I-55 that passes through rows of cornfields as far as the eye can see when the witness noticed something decidedly odd. He says:
It was really late and everyone was asleep in the van except my friend’s mom and I. I was sitting on the right side in the back when we passed by what looked like 2 teenagers coming out of the cornfield the right side of the road. Now….normally that isn’t that weird. Plenty of kids end up wandering through corn fields at some point in IL. What was weird is where they were and how they looked! I will never forget the boy. He was probably 15/16 years old wearing a white linen shirt and brown pants with suspenders. His hair was short but curly and brown. He was handsome and PALE with dark circles under his eyes And I mean like… Gerard Way looking eyes. He looked like he had blood on him and the girl he was with looked bad. She was wearing a blood covered dress and she also was pale with dark rings under her eyes.
Now…where we were was really strange. That corn field was HUGE and there weren’t any entrances off of I 55 that we could see. My friends mom immediately freaked out thinking they drove their car into the cornfield and must have been super hurt. We were driving pretty fast and she had a van full of kids so instead of pulling over she grabbed her Nokia and called 911. I remember that she reported the mile marker and told the police they looked like they needed help. And that was it. I never figured out what happened. I honestly think they were ghosts. Their movements were so strange and their placement was just…odd. There is no way teenagers would be hanging out on the side of I 55 dressed like that around midnight.
Were these ghosts as the witness suspects or just some teenagers messing around? Illinois seems to have a lot of such reports, and another was made in 2009 by a witness on Your Ghost Stories. She says that during her university days at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign she had been involved with taking horseback riding lessons. She explains that in order to get to these lessons she had to drive through miles and miles of cornfields at night, and during these quiet drives she would often see dancing tiny orbs of pink, green, and yellow light flitting about among the stalks and sometimes even floating across the gloomy road and up over her car. This already already seems odd enough as it is, but it is nothing compared to what she would come across on this particular evening. She says of her very strange and rather harrowing experience:
One night it was particularly dark, and I was the only car on the road. Suddenly ahead of me I saw this massive tall rectangle that was even blacker than the night around me. It was a perfect rectangle, like a great big oversized door, and it was on my side of the road but hovering maybe a foot off the road. It looked like a portal! But I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me for sure, so I rubbed them, blinked, squinted… But it was still there, and getting closer. I moved my head way over from side to side, and the road, corn, and stars disappeared behind it as I did so, so it was something solid or at least real. There was now a car behind me, and the “portal” or whatever it was getting bigger and bigger really fast, so I was sweating what to do. Finally, at the last moment, I braked hard and swerved into the left lane and back again, skirting around it. I looked in my rearview mirror, and the car behind me had just gone straight, not seeing what I had. And when I turned around, the “portal” wasn’t visible anymore… W-E-I-R-D.
The scariest thing that ever happened was one night when I was really happy, singing along loudly to a bouncy happy song on the radio, all of a sudden in one instant all the hair on the back of my neck and on top of my head rose a bit and although I couldn’t physically see it, I KNEW that something was reaching out really fast from the floorboard of the passenger seat with a scaly clawed hand to grab my right leg. I screamed at the top of my lungs and swerved into the left lane. Luckily, again, I was the only car on the road. My memory’s a little fuzzy about this part, but I think my scream made the feeling immediately fade.
So I continued on down the road and tried to get back to my happy singing. But a few moments later it happened again and it was reaching even faster as if it were trying to reach me before I could scream. But I screamed really loud, screeched to a halt, wrestled my seatbelt off, and threw myself out of the car. It was dead silent outside, with the corn blowing in the wind a bit. The happy music still playing in my car and the beeping of my car door standing open were the only other sounds. I stood there shaking and breathing fast for a little while, until I was able to release all the fear and tell it very strongly and angrily to LEAVE ME ALONE and GET OUT OF MY CAR! I waited until the heavy feeling of foreboding passed, and until I felt happy again, so it couldn’t come back and feed off my fears when I got back in the car. Finally I got back in and finished the drive without any more mishaps. That sure was freaky though! What a crazy stretch of road! I wonder to this day what all of those things were.
What could this have been? A fairly weird report from outside of the United States was given by a witness from the UK, and explains that he used to visit relatives out in the countryside every summer. On one clear day he was out exploring with several friends and his dog, a husky named Wolfie, and they took a path that they had never taken before, which led them to a huge field of corn. At first it seemed like a wondrous dream, but this would soon turn into a nightmare, of which the witness says:
After about 2 hours, we came across this cornfield, it was such a relief, it was great, the corn was taller than our heads and had a warm comforting glow about it. We decided to have a game of hide and seek which I suggested because I could cheat by using the dog. After about 4 games, I was the seeker and I was traveling through the vast amounts of corn, using wolfie to track them down. He would sniff his way there and bark once we were there.
He was pulling me towards the prize, when he froze and began to whimper, I had never seen him like this. He was running behind me and barking and crying, it scared the hell out of me. Suddenly it went freezing cold, the temperature was about 20 degrees and there I was, shivering like a leaf. A black figure swooped past me in the next row of corn, wolfie pulled with all his might in the other direction yanking me to the floor. He pulled free of his collar and ran off.
I laid dazed on the floor, oblivious of what had just happened, when I heard Clarke (one of the 3 friends I had with me that day, also my best friend) scream. I shot up and followed the noise, when I got there, he was on the floor shaking, rocking backwards and forwards like a mad man, I didn’t dare approach him, he was freaking me out. At this time, he still hadn’t noticed I was there until I shouted for angus and chelsea, he turned around and shouted to me to stay away and picked up a rock and threw it at me, cutting my head open. More than anything I was shocked it didn’t hurt but I guess that was the shock, I just turned around and ran, I don’t know what I was thinking, about halfway through, I saw angus and chelsea holding wolfie, put wolfies collar and lead back on, told angus and chelsea to run and set off running again.
Usually I was the slowest runner of my friends but I was miles in front of them, I ran for about an hour when I finally got out of the long path, I collapsed on the pavement out of breath with wolfie nuzzling his head into me, also panting desperately. Chelsea and Angus shortly followed, without Clarke, we sat on the pavement for 2 hours waiting for clarke, by this time my face was a crusty red scab with red hand smears, then we saw a staggering figure stumble out onto the road. It was clarke, his face was torn to shreds as were his clothes, I ran towards him, yet again he shouted at me to stay away, so chelsea asked what was wrong, he answered to her. He told her that a man in the field had told him that I would be the cause of a death of someone close to him, and that a woman dressed in rags had attacked him.
This is pretty hard to know what to make of. Was this some sort of ghostly apparition, a demonic possession, or something else? What makes it all even odder still is what the witness says happened to his friend Clarke after the terrifying ordeal. He says that they never spoke after that, and that Clarke began to display very erratic and anomalous behavior, prone to violent outbursts and suicidal thoughts. As to the aftermath of this brush with the paranormal, the witness says:
We never spoke to Clarke after that, he became just another face, but his mum and my mum were friend and they would regularly meet up at my house, and this one time when clarke’s mum was at my house, I was outside messing about on my bike, she was just getting in her car to go home when a car flew round the corner and sped towards me. She ran up, pushed me out the way but sadly she was hit and died 2 days later in intensive care.
2 years later at school, I was in toilets throwing up when clarke burst in and grabbed me by my hair, dragged me across the floor and banged my head on the floor several times, shouting he said it would happen. Angus burst in and grabbed him off me and restrained him while I picked myself of the floor, I ran and got help. After that we never saw him again, he moved away the next day, that’s why he had done it that day. The last I heard of him he had moved to Texas and tried to kill himself, but failed. To this day I miss Clarke and I will never go in that evil field ever again.
This sounds almost like some sort of negative energy had attached to him and followed him home from that accursed cornfield, to take root in his mind and influence him and those around him, but it is hard to say. Finally there is a case of not just a ghost or demon, but of a whole vanishing phantom house sitting out in a cornfield, this time in testimony given on True Ghost Tales. The location is not made clear, but the witness says:
Okay, when I was a kid (around 12) my buddy and I used to play in a cornfield. It was our favorite place to play. So we knew this area very well. We had been going there since we were in second grade. Anyway, keep in mind this is just a huge cornfield. I’d estimate it’s about a mile and a half from one end to the other. So one evening we went out there and noticed a light toward the other side. So we walked out there and found a house. But there was never a house there before. The lights were on and it looked like it had been there for years. We freaked out and ran home. And when we finally got the nerve to go a few days later, it was gone. I have had many bizarre experiences in my life. But this was one of the most puzzling.
This house could have been a lot of things. It might have been a sort of ghostly image of a place that once stood there, perhaps infused with some tragedy or past that has imprinted it into the very fabric of reality here. This is often reported, these ghost buildings which are nothing but afterimages of another time, captured on the landscape and projected like an image on film. It might have been a peek through the veil between our reality and some parallel dimension, where this house does exist but was only glimpsed through this momentary thin spot between worlds. It also might just be the overactive imagination of a child or a tall tale, but it is rather spooky all the same.
These are without a doubt a collection of very strange, often creepy, and sometimes downright terrifying accounts of the unexplained things people have happened across hidden away from view beyond that blanket of cornstalks. What were these things? Where did they come from and what did they want? We will probably never know, but the next time you are passing a cornfield or walking through one, it might be a good idea to keep an eye out.
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