The Visitors

Whitley Strieber's strange story of abduction

Photo by Hendrik Morkel on Unsplash

Even before it happened, Whitley Strieber’s life was changing. In the months leading up to his abduction, he adapted strange new habits. They grew out of a sense of unease, the source of which was subconscious, something he couldn’t put his finger on. He was afraid, had become paranoid, purchasing a shotgun for protection at his cabin in upstate New York, where he and his family spent half their time, and where experiences would later take place. His New York City apartment felt dangerous to him, the thought of staying untenable. He desperately wanting to leave.

In the months before Christmas of 1985, he had put his apartment and cabin on the market. He and his wife had decided to move to Austin, a city they loved far from New York. They had a private school picked out for their son, and when a house they both adored was for sale, they flew out eagerly to see it. Whitley stepped outside as the realtor showed them the kitchen, the bedrooms, the place where they would soon live.

The home overlooked a canyon, and the darkening sky spread out massive beyond it. It should have been beautiful, a sharp contrast to the city life he was trying to escape. Yet his stomach knotted as he peered at the emerging stars and the dark blanket of indigo stretching for miles. He felt as if it was watching him, that night sky. He called the whole thing off, thinking that his mental health must be very bad. His wife, of course, was furious.

His behavior worsened throughout October, the month that he bought the shotgun. He was demanding, irritable, unreasonable. He felt anxious, and checked the house after they went to bed regularly. He had purchased a motion detector, a light with a few bulbs for the front of the cabin earlier that year. It had gone off late one July night, accompanied by the sound of footsteps scurrying away from the pool they had in the back, to the road in front of the house.

Whitley had gone out within a few seconds, eager to catch whoever it was outside of their rural home. But by the time he opened the door, no one was there. He checked the forest, even the roof, but there was no sign of anyone. Afterwards, the light never worked properly, and he removed the bulbs in the fall. His anxiety about intruders was heightened.

Whitley and Anne’s relationship grew strained, and by the end of October, after he had called off moving to Austin, she had given him an ultimatum: knock it off or it’s over. Seeing the possible end of their marriage, Whitley adjusted. He withheld his unease, and his behavior began to get better, little by little. That is until the little beings he would later call the visitors took him.

It was the day after Christmas, December 26th, 1985, and Whitley Strieber was forty years old. He was a successful horror writer, known for his novels The Wolfen and The Hunger, married to his wife Anne Strieber, and the father of a boy, only seven years old at the time when his journey into the strange began.

Snowfall had covered the ground on Christmas Eve, and the white clung heavy in the days that followed. They went sledding in the morning and cross country skiing in the afternoon. When night fell they spent it quietly, eating leftovers and drinking seltzer waters. After he and Anne put their son to bed, they spent time listening to music and reading together in front of a fire until 8:30, when Anne got into bed.

The day had been pleasant and uneventful. Yet Whitley made sure to lock the doors and set the burglar alarm. He also began his nightly routine, one that he hid from Anne, of checking each room to ensure that no one was in the house. He looked under the guest bed, and saw nothing. His shotgun was in its place, resting against the wall a few feet from his headboard.

Seeing that the house was secure, he finally laid down and drifted into dreamless sleep. Only two or three hours had passed when he was awakened suddenly by a loud whooshing sound in the house. He listened, fully awake and aware, his limbs electric in the way that only comes from adrenaline, and heard what sounded like people, lots of them, rushing around his living room.

That doesn’t make sense, he thought, and laid back down in bed, an action he later described as unexplainable. He didn’t go look, didn’t worry about what the noise was. He simply laid back down in bed. He looked at the burglar alarm on the wall. The row of glowing lights indicated all was well. No door or window had been opened. The noises therefore couldn’t belong to an intruder.

The room was dim, lit up by the alarm and the soft glow of snow from the outside. He was ready to fall back asleep when he saw that his bedroom door was moving, closing slowly. He sat up in bed, searching for who could be closing the door. It was a figure, small, only three and a half feet tall, as tall as a child. His own son was taller, and seemed sturdier than the being in front of him.

He could see maybe the top third of the figure’s body as it bent around the door, peering into his room. It had a round hat on its head, dark holes for eyes, and a simple downturned line for a mouth. The figure wore what looked to him like a breastplate or some type of armor, decorated in concentric circles. As he stared at it, wide awake and sitting up, the figure suddenly rushed towards him in the darkness, and the world went black.

When he awoke, he was aware that he was naked. He felt no bodily sensation, only knew that he was a mass in space, and he was moving out of the room, being taken somewhere. His arms and legs were spread, extended as if he was in mid-leap, frozen there. He was paralyzed, unable to move his limbs or feel sensation. Panic enveloped him, every part of him, and he blacked out again.

When he came to, he found himself in the woods outside of his house. He was sitting in a depression in the ground, his knees bent to his chest. There was no snow on the ground, and he still felt completely paralyzed. He could not feel his limbs, his face. A small individual was next to him on his left side. He could see that it wore a gray and tan body suit, tightly fitted, and some type of face mask.

He felt that he was under the control of someone else, of something else. He could only move his eyes, and made out another figure to his right in his periphery, but he could not see what it was, only that it was wearing blue coveralls. It moved busily, working on the side of Whitley’s head.

Suddenly, he was moving again. Tree branches passed in front of him, and then he was above the treetops looking down on the forest. A gray floor materialized beneath him. He looked around, and saw that he was in a round room. Clothing was strewn about the floor. The place was messy, with tan and gray walls.

Small beings were cradling him. Feeling started to flow into his body, and he was filled with complete dread. He felt like he was dying. The room was close and confining. The air was dry and stuffy, and tiny people moved about quickly. He found their movements to be disgusting, ugly, and realized that he was trapped. He thought about Anne and his son, and desperately wanted to be back home with them.

The room was lit, but by what he could not see. He moved his head, and felt drugged. One being stood to his right and another to his left. They worked busily, rushing around the room again. One of them brought a tiny grey box with a sliding lid to him. He tried to look at the being’s face, to focus on the details, but it was blurry. In fact, only the beings looked blurry to him. When he focused elsewhere around the room, he could make out details without issue.

The box was given to a tiny squat being. They sat crouched as if they were covering something, hovering over it. It was the box he had seen earlier. They slid it open and Whitley saw out of the corner of his eye that there was an extremely thin needle, revealed only by the shine of it in contrast to the box’s black surface. He knew that they were going to insert it into his brain. He started screaming, his body flooded with terror.

“What can we do to help you stop screaming?”

It was one of the beings at his side. The voice was electronic, female. He noticed absurdly that the women’s accent was midwestern.

“Will you let me smell you?” he asked, and immediately became embarrassed, confused by his own request.

Another being, one that he couldn’t see held his arm and cradled him.

“Okay, I can do that.”

It held a thin arm in front of his nose, and the odor flooded Whitley with relief. It smelled like cardboard, as if the being was made out of paper. The scent gave a sense of familiarity, grounding him in reality again. The hand was sour, not human, but something alive and organic. He felt calm.

There was a bang and then a flash, and he knew immediately that the operation on his head was finished. He could feel tiny hands on him, feeling flooding into muscles. His was standing with his feet on the floor, and he slid them to avoid falling as he sank down. No sooner had he tried to sit than he was lifted up, and put into what looked like an operating theater.

He was in the center of a table that sat in the middle of the room. Three tiers of benches surrounded it, and on them were seated beings, small with round eyes as opposed to slanted like he had seen earlier. He has no memory of the operating theater or what happened, if anything, while he was there. The next memory is of tiny hands touching him. He felt like he was being passed along rows of insects, and the feeling filled him with fear.

Suddenly he was in the messy round room again, the one that he had encountered when he first arrived. A couple of stocky beings held his legs apart, one of them holding an ugly object for him to see. It was gray and scaly, triangular and narrow. It seemed to have wires sticking out of it. They inserted it into his rectum, and he felt the wires come to life and swarm inside of him as if it was alive. He was horrified, and felt like he was being raped. After they removed it he saw it was mechanical.

When I read the description, I couldn’t help but think of the bug in The Matrix.

One of them took his right hand, and made a small incision on his forefinger. Then, there was nothing. Not even blackness or sleep. He simply awoke on December 27th with no memory of any of the events. There was distinct unease, and an intense memory of a barn own that had stared at him through the window during the night.

He told his wife about it, even looked out on the roof to see if there were tracks in the snow. There were none. He called a friend of his to describe the experience, but when he said the words they felt hollow. He didn’t believe that it had happened, but he remembered it vividly.

That day his mood was dark. He was distant from his wife and son, a complete shift in his personality from the day before. In the evening, he started to feel ill. He had chills and felt exhausted. He laid in bed, listening to the sounds of his wife and son. The noise filled him with dread.

By December 28th he fell into a deep depression. He was working on a complex non-fiction book at the time about American-Russian relations. He tried to write but found that he couldn’t concentrate on the piece. Instead, he began a short story titled Pain. It was the last writing he would do for seven weeks.

As he worked on it in the coming days, his mental and physical ailments worsened. His finger became infected, by what he didn’t know. There was a tiny wound there that he couldn’t remember getting, as if a splinter had worked its way in, but he was never able to find it. He had rectal pain, and found it hard to sit for long periods of time. Bouts of fatigue would overcome him, and he would feel muscle weakness and total exhaustion throughout the day. He felt cold, feverish, but when he took his temperature, it was always between 96.6 and 98.8.

His mental state worsened. He had a vague feeling that something bad had happened, but he couldn’t for the life of him think of what it was. Alone, he felt watched. He couldn’t sleep.

His personality deteriorated over the coming days, and his wife Anne worried that what had reared its ugly head in October was back. He became demanding and accusing. He was easily confused, hypersensitive, and increasingly short with his son. He became obsessed with possible toxins in their food and water, trying to make sense of the barn owl incident, a memory that he knew could not be real. He dreaded phone calls, suspicious of everyone, even friends and family. His work was suffering as well.

It wasn’t until a day in January after skiing that everything came roaring back. A sudden and intense pain overtook him just behind his ear. Anne looked and saw only a tiny scab where the needle had gone in. And that was when he remembered. Terror and disbelief overtook him as strange images, as vibrant as childhood memories, flashed in his head. He broke out in a sweat. His heart raced. And he knew in that moment that he was losing his mind.