Creepy Classics & Monster Bash News

Like me, some things that pique my interest go beyond just watching the cool old classic monster movies.

Over the years from when I was a little kid till today, people have told me odd and borderline crazy stories. While, believe it or not, I'm basically very skeptical. Nonetheless I always listen to people when they tell me about odd things they've experienced or seen. It is interesting.

Early on, this would have been when I was in third grade, my teacher announced an oddity to the whole class one morning. Her name was Mrs. Shields and it was at Grove City, PA's Central School. It was the town's elementary school back from the early 1900s through the 1970s. It has since been torn down and a McDonald's is now at that location. Mrs. Shields perhaps thought she had to tell someone and us eight-year-olds wouldn't call her crazy. She was our teacher.

I'll never forget her, at the front of the classroom, presenting her story to us kids. She accounted that the weirdest thing had happened to her that morning. She said, out of her shower head, little, tiny frogs were coming out, filling her bathtub. Us kids all listened in amazement. She was dead serious and I would guess her age at the time to be maybe 50-60. In the years since I've wondered about that. How on Earth, even if you had well water, could little frogs come out of your shower? Have you ever heard of such a thing?

Then there was my own mother telling me a story about a weird "Green Man" that was a local legend in western Pennsylvania. A monster-man that roamed the streets at night. I was again maybe seven or eight years old. She didn't say at the time, but I later found out that there was a disfigured man who had been hit by lightning that would walk around at night near New Castle, PA. And, even more stunning, I found out, in just recent years, that my Uncle Wally Bixler was friends with him and would go to the store for him. My mom never told me that, I guess she must have known. You can look up "The Green Man" on the Internet and even see photos of my uncle, as a teenager, with him. There's more about him and photos in the book I wrote called "Flashback."

There were tales of a vampire that walked the streets in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. While visiting an aunt and uncle of mine as a kid I heard of this. I was introduced to the neighborhood kids and they all spoke of this with great sincerity. They really seemed afraid when it became dark. One boy told me that he would look out his second story bedroom window at night and see the cloaked, dark figure walking under the street lights. Stories of missing children were in the newspapers at the time. Kinda creeped me out.

A dinosaur in the basement? One year at a Christmastime gathering at my Great Grandmother Christy's house an uncle of mine from Florida saw me reading a book on dinosaurs. He was an older great uncle. He said you know I saw a small one of those dinosaurs in my basement. I killed it with a shovel. "What?," I perked up. He wasn't just telling this to me, a little kid, but to many of my relatives with great sincerity. He heard banging around in his basement, turned on the light and went down. There as a large lizard about three or four feet tall running around the basement on its two hind legs! He grabbed a shovel chased it around and killed it with the shovel. He sure didn't seem like he was lying to everyone. Apparently there are such lizards, I don't know if they're native to Florida, or how it got in his basement. He didn't know how it got in there either. It must have been an older house, because I don't think many houses in Florida even have basements.

Finally, as this is getting to be a long essay this week, very recently, some friends (brothers) showed me a photo that they acquired from a close friend of an alien. I believe the story was that their friend's grandfather or uncle has seen this creature in their back yard and grabbed a camera. It was a very dark photo and a little blurry. The brothers scanned it and hit it with contrast on a computer and lo and behold it was a very believable photo of the standard gray alien.

The weird stories always interest me, though I am skeptical. I have a few of my own that I never really talk about. My wife has heard, at least one. Someday I really need to put them in writing. There's only a few of them over all my years...but, they have stuck with me.

-Ron Adams 
Ligonier, PA 
November 2025