I will never live near a Navajo reservation again.
My wife and I always dreamed of living off-grid on our own land, but we were never able to afford anything—not even a small quarter-acre lot. We were sick of paying rent for shitty houses and apartments that charged way too much for the condition they were in, so we started wondering if there was anywhere we could actually afford to live.
After scouring the internet, my wife Meagan found one acre of land in Laguna, New Mexico, for three thousand dollars. That blew my mind. After we bought it, we were so excited that we packed up and moved almost immediately.
So my wife, my two kids, our two dogs, two cats, and I packed everything we owned into a uhaul and drove nineteen hours and forty-nine minutes to our new home.
The first few days were rough, but we started figuring things out. Before moving, we had ordered one of those big sheds that look like tiny houses so we could convert it into a home. We expected it to be there by the time we arrived, but Valencia County made things difficult with permits and zoning laws.
Luckily, we had some great neighbors who let us borrow an old motorhome to stay in until the shed arrived.
That’s when things started happening.
We had this shower tent set up outside, and one day while Meagan was taking a shower, she saw something strange: a transparent silhouette of a woman carrying a lamp close to her chest, walking toward her before vanishing right in front of her eyes.
We started calling her “the Lamp Lady,” but later we found connections to something called Spider Woman, a figure from Navajo and Pueblo legends. We saw her multiple times after that. She never seemed malevolent, but seeing something like that in the middle of nowhere was terrifying.
The second occurrence happened when I wasn’t there, but Meagan and the kids told me about it afterward.
They heard someone outside the camper say, in a Hispanic accent, “Hello? Is anybody there?”
Meagan went outside to check, but nobody was there. Even the dogs stayed quiet.
At the time, it seemed minor, but it was only the beginning.
As soon as the shed finally arrived, it felt like we had pissed something off.
It was the middle of winter, snowing outside, and we had no way to heat the shed yet, so we all bundled together to stay warm.
In the middle of the night, I heard it.
“Daddy, can you help me?”
It sounded exactly like my daughter Emery, but she was lying right behind me.
I reached back to make sure she was there and immediately panicked.
“NOBODY GO OUTSIDE!” I yelled.
I looked at Meagan, and she was staring back at me wide-eyed and petrified. She heard it too.
At the time, I worked in Albuquerque at a restaurant called Campo with a Navajo man named Joshua. I told him about everything we’d been experiencing.
He explained that some people in the tribe practiced black magic, and some would even kill the people they loved most to gain certain abilities.
Yes, I’m talking about skinwalkers.
Not the internet version where every creepy thing gets labeled a skinwalker. I mean the real stories people out there genuinely believe in.
Joshua gave us cedar stakes and cedar wood scraps to create a barrier around our property. He told us to burn the scraps, keep the ashes, and place stakes at the four corners of our land. He also told us to sprinkle cedar ash under the doorframe and windowsills in case the barrier failed.
One night, while Emery was in the outhouse, she saw a dark figure standing near the fence by the road. She said it had to be at least ten feet tall. Then she watched it drop down onto all fours and run off into the darkness.
After that, things like that started happening regularly.
Dogs with unnaturally long legs.
Black shadow figures.
Disembodied voices.
Eventually, we started brushing it off because it happened so often, but then something happened that put me on edge again.
By then, I had started working at Texas Roadhouse. One day, a young Navajo guy I worked with told me he knew who I was.
“My grandma’s been watching you guys ever since you put that shed up.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up instantly.
“Watching us? Why?” I asked.
“Oh, you just piqued the interest of some of my family. You live off 6, right?”
I hesitated before answering.
“Yeah. Highland Meadows.”
“You don’t have to worry about us,” he said, “but some people around the reservation practice witchcraft, so be careful.”
I stared at him without blinking.
“Like skinwalkers?”
He nodded.
“Not everyone likes white people out there, and you could be seen as unwelcome.”
I told him about the cedar barrier, and he smiled.
“That’s good. As long as you stay inside it and don’t go outside at night, you should be fine.”
Not long after that, we found our dog Sweetie Belle dead in a field.
No wounds.
No broken bones.
Just blood coming from her mouth.
A couple of days later, Charlie died the same way.
I went back to work intending to ask that same guy about it, but he had quit a few days earlier.
I never saw him again.
One day while walking the property, I discovered one of the cedar stakes had been broken.
I tried replacing it, but I guess just any cedar wouldn’t work.
That night, our door handle started turning while we were sleeping.
I grabbed my gun and pointed it at the door until sunrise.
I barely slept anymore during those days.
Another night after work—we usually stayed in town while I worked because we didn’t want to be out there after dark—we came back to find the shed door standing wide open.
After that, we stopped going outside at night completely.
We would hear whistling and disembodied voices surrounding the shed after dark.
Then I saw it.
At first, I thought I was dreaming.
A humanoid snake with needles for teeth was staring through our window, drooling as it watched me.
Years later, I finally brought it up to Meagan.
She said she saw the same thing.
So did Emery.
Eventually, we left New Mexico and moved back to Alabama.
But I’ll tell you this right now:
I will never live near a Navajo reservation again.