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Welcome to MicroTerrors.
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Scary stories for kids.
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Where it's always the spooky season.
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Full of chills.
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Thrills.
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And spine-tingling spooks.
MicroTerrors are family-friendly frights
for those ages eight and up.
And while our stories are for younger years,
we are still talking about things that go bump in the night.
And some children may not be able to handle what others can.
Parental consent is recommended.
Now, for tonight's MicroTerror!
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The Dover Demon.
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The following is a fictionalized story
based on an alleged encounter in April of 1977
in Dover, Massachusetts.
The name so the people involved,
as well as some details have been changed.
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The night was cold.
Flurry's drifted aimlessly through the air,
gently landing on the windshield
a 17-year-old Sam Barnhill's car.
He just left a birthday party for his friend.
While there, Sam realized that being a senior in high school
and having a traditional birthday party
thrown by his friend's mom was a little odd.
These were the kind of birthday parties
that needed to be had at a bowling alley or movie theater.
Not a house with party favors.
They were too old for that now.
Those thoughts aside, however,
Sam still wondered what was in the zip-tied party favor bag
on the passenger seat next to him.
He hoped for some kind of chocolate.
Chocolate was a craving he could never shake.
The quiet in the car,
compared to the pop music that had played relentlessly
at the party, was too obvious to ignore.
Sam reached down and turned the dial on the dash
to bring music through the car's area.
He couldn't do pop again,
so he turned it to the rock station.
The drums were pounding.
The guitars wailed and the singer led out an emotional hell.
Sam looked up from the radio and back at the road.
The flurry is where starting to come down a little faster now.
He flipped on the windshield wipers and cringed
as they smeared the snow across the glass,
blurring his view.
Through the blur,
he could see a broken stone wall that lined the road.
It was a landmark of sorts
that he had always remembered from when he was a kid.
He'd be at the back seat of his parents' car
and whenever he saw the stone wall out his window,
he knew that there was an upcoming curve in the road,
which would then take them through a stretch of woods,
and eventually to the road that his house was on.
Sam sat forward, squinting through the glass.
He couldn't afford to smash his car into a rock wall.
This was his dad's car after all,
and Sam couldn't even imagine the wrath that would ensue.
Sam's all the shoulder lines on the road
start to curve and turned the wheel slightly with it.
The world around him seemed to grow darker,
or maybe it was just his imagination building anxiety.
With his left hand, he flipped on the brights.
The halogen bulbs on the front of his car
exploded into blinding beams of light,
lighting up the stone wall ahead of him.
The light reflected off of something
perched upon the wall near the edge of the tree line.
Sam squinted again through the rapidly waving wipers
and blurry windshield.
It couldn't make out what was on the wall,
a small animal perhaps?
A child?
As his car continued to turn with the curve,
Sam was able to get a better view now.
Now it did look like a child, or a small person.
But it was completely white, glowing within the bright lights from his car.
It had long, tendril-like fingers and toes
that gripped the broken stones.
Its head was oval-shaped, like a watermelon,
sitting upright on the thing's bony shoulders.
As Sam continued to drift around the bend,
he looked out the passenger side window,
just as the strange little creature turned and tilted its head
like it was looking back at him.
It had two large eyes that seemed to radiate an orange glow.
Sam's jaw dropped.
He had never seen anything like it in his life.
It almost looked like...
The car hit a slick patch on the road and swerved violently.
Sam faced forward and grabbed the wheel tightly with both hands
and slammed on the brakes.
The car locked up, as slid sideways,
blasting hard into the rock wall,
before falling completely still.
Sam caught his breath and turned off the music.
His first thought was of his father yelling at him for reckless driving.
His second thought was of the strange creature on the rock wall.
Sam turned around in his seat and looked out the back window.
Illuminated by the red brake lights,
he could see the rock wall disappear into the darkness of the curve
and the road behind him.
Nothing sat upon the wall now.
Sam grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment
and stepped out of the car.
The cold air hit his face,
instantly turning his cheeks red.
He breathed heavily, watching his breath puff out in front of him.
He clicked the flashlight on as he slowly walked behind his car,
keeping the beam of light trained on the stone wall
where he'd seen the unknown creature.
He scanned the wall as far as the flashlight would let him see,
but he still saw nothing.
The wind started to pick up,
outlawing eerily as it set the falling snow into a chaotic frenzy.
Sam continued to slowly approach the stone wall.
When he got close enough, he rested his hand on one of the cold stones.
He looked up to the dark woods and aimed his light into them.
It barely penetrated the thickness of the forest at reach.
Suddenly, he heard a wet slap on the pavement not far away.
Sam's heart nearly ripped out of his chest as he snapped his attention to his right.
He aimed his flashlight,
but saw nothing.
Then a series of wet slaps erupted behind him.
He spun around,
his beam of light landing on the creature again,
skittering across the road on all fours like a prancing cat.
Sam gasped, and his entire body went numb.
The cold he felt was gone,
now replaced by the fluttering warmth of anxious fear.
He followed the creature with his light as it crossed the road,
and then stopped.
It turned around,
stood up on its back legs and curiously stared at Sam.
The light bouncing off its eyes like bike reflectors.
Sam began to tremble,
his teeth chattering against one another.
The creature continued to stare.
As small as it was, he was intimidating and didn't make any sense.
Sam couldn't explain what he was seeing,
and that's what scared him the most.
He was looking at something that couldn't possibly exist.
Then, out of nowhere,
the creature dropped back down on all fours
and scampered off into the woods on the other side of the road.
Sam could do nothing,
but stand there completely baffled and frightened by what he witnessed.
Tour, the creature didn't seem to be a physical or violent threat,
but just the sheer existence of it was the scary part.
If something like that was real,
what else could be?
Sam called the police to report his accident.
When they asked him what happened,
Sam told the officer the road was slick,
but he was distracted by something he saw sitting on the rock wall.
He told the officer of the small, human-no-aid creature,
with a large head and two glowing eyes.
The officer took the report, but with a smirk.
"What is this?"
The officer chuckled,
"Some sort of widespread prank?"
Sam cocked his head confused by the officer's statement.
"What do you mean?"
"We had a similar report from another kid about your age an hour ago.
Carter Gamble, I think his name was."
Sam didn't know who that was.
Another report of that thing?
"Yeah, the officer laughed.
Anything get out of admitting fault to an accident, huh?"
"Did Carter tell you to spend this nutty tail too?"
"I don't even know who that is," Sam said.
"What about Missy Fisher?
Do you know her?"
"She's in your age group too.
She reported something similar last night.
She said it followed her home like a cat or something."
Sam shook his head.
"I don't know her," he mumbled quietly.
Within the hour, Sam's car was towed to a local body shop.
His father came to pick him up from the scene where he scoffed
at the story Sam told him.
His father was a one to believe such fantastical things,
but neither was Sam, not until he was put in the situation.
Now, he didn't know what to believe.
When they got home, Sam retreated to his bedroom with his tail between his legs.
His father was mad and his mother didn't understand why he would make up such a story.
"Exactly," Sam thought, "why would I make up a story like that?
I have nothing to gain from it."
Whether or not he was believed by his parents, Sam knew what he saw.
And now, he knew that two other people had seen it too.
It was real.
There was something very strange lurking out there in the cold, dover nights.
Sitting down at his desk, Sam flipped on a light.
He pulled out a sheet of paper along with a pen.
He sketched an image of what he saw, an oval head with two large eyes
resting atop a small, frail body.
Its fingers and toes were longer than they should have been.
Sam pushed the sketch away and looked at it as he sat back in his seat.
He studied it, as so many people did after him.
The mysterious visitor, which came to be known as the Dover Demon,
was never seen again after that.
It has baffled the community and the world.
Ever since its brief appearance in Dover Massachusetts,
was it the ghost of a small child, a species unknown to the modern science,
an extraterrestrial that had lost lost its way?
In the case of the Dover Demon, every possibility could be the definitive answer.
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Thank you for listening to MicroTerrors.
Join us each Saturday for another scary story.
For more fun, visit our website at microterrors.com
where we will also have spooky games you can print out and play.
Like wicked word searches, mysterious mazes and more.
Microterrors.com is also where you can find us on your favorite social media
and even send in your own scary story for us to tell.
Plus, you'll learn more about our author, Scott Donnelly,
who has other horrors for both young and old.
I hope you'll join me again soon.
For MicroTerrors, scary stories for kids.
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