That third footstep in the dark...

About three months ago, during an overnight activity at the end of last sem, I was walking late at night to my area. The grass had been left to grow for a while and I'd sometimes snag a foot in the tangles. It was hard to see because the street lamps nearby only gave a yellow glow, leaving every shadow pitch black. The ground was uneven and I was clomping along in boots a few sizes too big (my boots had disappeared the night before). It was a slow, careful walk in near-blind conditions for a gal with next to no night vision.

I'd just passed through an area shielded by bushes, and while adjusting to the dark and the light, I realized the dark around me wasn't a flat black. I'm the sort of gal who'd see faces and figures in the darkness when none is to be found there. A few years back, when I was a cadet, I was playing sentry at an odd hour, half asleep but I was the last shift. When morning came, all the others who'd held my post would complain of an eerie feeling that came from a tree to the left. I topped their stories - during my shift, I thought there was a man there, so tall that his knees were six feet in the air, but he was seated so his head was between his knees. That or he was headless. :) Ghost stories and sentry duty seem to go hand in hand. It was funny how some of them freaked out. (The phantom is similar to folk descriptions of Tikbalang sightings, but I'll explain that some other time).

The hour was somewhere past midnight. The silence was eerie, traffic in the distance only casting faded echoes in our direction. Once in a while, a taxi would pass by down the nearby street, but beyond that I could only hear the rustling of the trees, the wind, and my own footsteps. I'd try to pull my scarf up to guard my face against the cold, but my captured breath would fog my glasses, and that just wouldn't do. Who knew it could be so cold at night, this close to the equator.

I needed sight, but in the dark, I knew my eyes weren't reliable. So as I stepped carefully through the grasses towards my area, I depended on my ears to tell me what was real and what wasn't. And my ears told me I was alone. The only noise beyond silence was the crunching of grasses and branches with my own two feet.

As I neared a log, the hairs on the back of my neck suddenly rose. A meter in front of me, I heard a footstep. I paused. There was only the cricketing of bugs, and that soft buzzing silence. In the dim light, all I saw ahead of me was a log that I wanted to sit on. I took another step. For every two of my steps, I'd hear a third one, just in front of me! It was just as loud and heavy as my own steps. And when I'd stop - I could hear no breathing, I could see no crouched figure. But the noise came from an arm's reach away! What was it? A one-footed dwarf? Finally I just pulled out my flashlight and turned it on.

What I found in front of me, depressing the grass around it, as large and as heavy as a foot in a sneaker (like that wandering hand from the Addams family...) - a frog.

Palaka, it is called. It didn't ribbit, but it is larger than a closed fist. It really is as big as a sneaker. This was my third footstep in the dark. This was the loud noise, the phantom in front of me that had scared the heck out of me for maybe two minutes. I tried to catch it but let it hop on. Tucked my flashlight away and spent the next two hours either sitting on the log, or beside it. There was one passing taxi that moved unusually slow, until it was just by me. Maybe the driver was looking for somewhere to take a leak, thought one of the trees might be nice for that. Suddenly it sped up and zoomed out of sight. Elo (another former cadet) and I joked that there would be ghost stories in the morning, probably about a ghostly girl sitting on a log or whatnot.

Didn't have my camera with me that night, but I caught this picture of the same type of frog, a few weeks later in the daytime. :)
It's always fun to find out where those midnight phantoms and ghost stories really come from.