Reports from the Void: ‘Bat-Human Looking Creature’
Reports from the Void is a repository to share those stories for which we do not have enough information to make a full report. This is usually because of little or no communication from the witness following their initial submission. The Singular Fortean Society will always provide as much information as possible regarding any correspondence during our attempts to speak with those involved.
This series is meant only to present you with the full breadth of the information sent to us and makes no judgments towards the veracity of any stories shared within it.
The Singular Fortean Society received the following email with “Bat-Human Looking Creature” in the subject line on April 14th, 2023.
It was around midnight, and I was out having a smoke. I was enjoying gazing up at the stars and I noticed something floating/gliding in the sky. It almost looked like a human in a black cloak, but it was moving almost ghost-like. I don’t know, it’s very hard to explain because I was only able to see it for [maybe five] seconds, which felt like it was ten seconds by how creeped out I was.
Judge me for saying this if you want but I just didn’t want whatever it was to see me staring at it while it went by. I don’t want a paranormal creature focused on me.
Investigator Tobias Wayland replied to the email in an attempt to interview the witness but received no response.
This individual is not alone in fearing the attention of such a creature. Extreme fear, or even a sense of evil, is not unusual in reports of encounters with winged humanoids.
In January of 2020, Wayland spoke to a woman from Berwyn, Illinois, who wished to report her sighting of four winged humanoids that took place in 2001.
The woman was alone in her backyard at night when she reportedly saw them fly overhead.
“They didn’t hear me, they were too high up to hear me, but two of them looked directly at me, and when they looked at me, they had red eyes,” she said. “I freaked out, because they looked directly into my eyes. I ran into my house, and I was starting to cry because I was freaking out. My cousin, who has since passed away, said, ‘What’s wrong? What happened? What’s the matter?’ But I was too afraid to speak; I just wanted to go back outside to make sure they were gone. I went out there and they were gone. They never came back. I was afraid for weeks after that to go outside.”
Wauconda, Illinois resident Paula had a similar feeling when she witnessed a mysterious beam of light outside her bedroom window.
On April 20th, 2014, Paula was sitting by a window in the bedroom of her ground-level apartment near the Lakewood Forest Preserve when she saw a bright beam of light “come shooting down” across the street.
The light retracted at one point, only to reappear a moment later.
Paula fell back onto her bed in shock.
“Oh my god, this thing sees me!” she remembered thinking. “I had the deepest feeling this thing saw me, it knows.”
Several years later, Paula said she saw a hulking, hunched over, winged being one morning while taking out the trash.
Paula said she felt a palpable sense of evil emanating from the bat-winged monster.
“This is evil,” she recalled. “I’m seeing evil.”
In another reported sighting, a man named Daniel, who claimed to work in cargo for an airline at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, said he felt the presence of evil after driving by a red-eyed, winged humanoid near the airport.
“I kind of freaked out,” he said. “I saw that something wasn’t right […] It felt really evil. It had those red eyes. How could any creature have those?”
And in a 1976 sighting report from Waukegan, Illinois, a man claimed to have felt suddenly scared, as though something was watching him, prior to being accosted by a black, winged being with glowing red eyes.
The above reports are not the only cases in which witnesses describe these feelings, but rather, are a fairly representative sampling of such experiences.
Opinions differ on the cause of what witnesses are feeling during these experiences. Some believe that the extreme fear and sense of evil might represent a parapsychological effect, while others believe that these are examples of normal human reactions to the unexplained and contain a level of implicit bias.
