William Royden

The playground was almost exactly as I remembered it.

Then Cording told me another story.

He seemed to become more and more determined as he spoke to make me understand what he was dealing with.

Unlike the story of the murderer Irwin Settle, this was one I had never heard.

Very early on a snowy December Sunday in 1999, the local airfield received a distress signal from a Cessna 182 coming from the north into Tessa, the town just south of Robinson.

The traffic controller heard only the words Mayday, Mayday, and then the screams of a man and a woman inside the cockpit.

The plane came in over the trees on the east side of the school grounds.

and crashed less than 200 feet from the playground.

It cartwheeled along the ground and went into the woods, remaining mostly intact.

There were three inches of snow covering the grass at the time after a heavy fall early on Saturday night.

Several people in the neighborhood heard the crash, but the police and ambulance response was slower than normal because of the snow.

The first person to get to the crash site was actually an eight-year-old boy

When the authorities arrived on the scene, the boy told them what he had seen, but they did not believe him.

He claimed that when he had gotten to within view of the plane's cockpit, something enormous had slithered out of it.

To him, it looked like a gigantic crocodile, except its skin was a perfect white.

Its head was quite small, and it seemed to have dozens of small legs on each side of its body.

legs that grasped the side of the plane and held tight as it moved.

The boy said the creature had moved quickly, going deeper into the woods and disappearing.

Inside the cockpit, the authorities found the remains of two people, a man and a woman.

They had been completely ripped apart, their heads, arms, and legs torn off their torsos.