I Think My Boyfriend Is A Skinwalker
I started noticing the switch up with him around two months ago. To give a really short background I (27F) and my boyfriend (28M) have been dating for almost two years now. The relationship has been nothing short of great so far, and we've talked about proposing and getting married soon, as well as having kids.
But about two months ago, something changed. It started when we decided to go camping in New Mexico to do some stargazing and wilderness hiking.
I was initially against this idea, as I wasn't confident in my navigational and survival skills, and I was afraid that something bad might happen. My boyfriend was kind of a jerk and told me it was just my anxiety talking and I shouldn't give in to “womanly hysterics” (whatever the hell that meant), and that he was sure “we would have a great time”.
So the trip date comes around, and I begrudgingly make preparations to go. As we took the long drive out there, I actually became more excited about it, and my nerves faded away as I began to take in the surrounding desert scenery with curiosity.
We used a light pollution map tracker to find the most remote location we could and found a path off a set of dirt tracks to get to a general location we liked. Of course, we did NOT book anything or make reservations at any official camping sites, but my boyfriend insisted this would save us money and hassle, and most of the official campgrounds are full of people and noise and we wouldn't get the “maximum nighttime experience” as he had put it.
I found this a little strange, but this was my boyfriend so I trusted him nonetheless. Our car is not an offroader or jeep, but a typical sedan he fitted with offroad tires, so we had to be extra careful to not get stuck or lost anywhere, as we had no cell reception. The little care he seemed to have during all this was honestly off putting, but I had no reason to suspect anything unusual.
Anyways, we got to a nice, open spot in the desert, there were a few butte formations in the distance and some mountains on the horizon. The soil was mostly sandy and rocky, with scraggly knee-high bushes and weeds surrounding us. We pitched a tent and he went about setting up his telescope equipment while I prepared us something to eat.
The trip itself lasted 2 days and 2 nights, and nothing out of the ordinary happened until on the second and final night. After we finished stargazing around 1AM, we went to sleep in our tent. Sometime later I awoke to what I thought was a yowl or scream. I wasn't sure what it was at first, but then it happened again and this time I was fully conscious.
I went to wake my boyfriend up but he was already gone. I sat up terrified, thinking maybe something happened to him. All of the sudden the tent zipper began to slowly open from top to bottom. I froze, afraid to move. Then, quickly my boyfriend's head came in, then the rest of his body.
I breathed a sigh of relief. I asked him where the hell he went. He said he went to “take a leak”, and I asked about the scream. He shrugged and said it was probably a bobcat or something.
Then I saw the blood on his leg. As I got closer to take a look with the lantern I caught a whiff of him. He smelled horrible. Like a mix of iron and piss with something else I couldn't identify.
“What? Oh that, I must have cut myself on a thorny bush.” He said nonchalantly.
“Is that why you screamed?” I asked.
He gave me a puzzled look and said he didn't know what I was talking about, and I should just get some rest. The way his eyes shifted when he said this…it was almost like they were glassy, the way the light reflected off of them. It gave me the creeps. I asked if it was OK if I could sleep in the car for the rest of the night. He looked annoyed for some reason but didn't protest.
I woke up to the sun already out. My sleep curled up in the back of the sedan was uncomfortable to say the least, but at least I felt safer with the doors locked than outside in a tent.
My boyfriend was already sitting out on a lawn chair drinking a beer, and despite it being early morning, he had sunglasses over his eyes. I questioned why he wasn't packing our things, and he just gave me a dull look until I asked him if we still planned on leaving today. At which point he made some sort of exclamation and tossed his half drunk beer can into the brush.
I stood there with my mouth agape. My boyfriend never litters. Like, ever. As a matter of fact he occasionally talks about how much he hates people who litter, and that they are the worst people. I shockingly asked him if he seriously planned on leaving that there, and how I thought he hated littering. He just went “right” and picked it up and moved on like it was nothing.
When we left, it was like my boyfriend was behind the wheel for the first time. He was swerving and jerking the pedals for a while before we got a stable course and got out onto the highway. I asked him what he was doing and he said something about “the road being rough” or whatnot.
On the highway our car hit a huge coyote. Our car's exterior and front were badly damaged, and we both were banged up a bit, but I was mostly ok. I said we should call the hospital but my boyfriend gave me a wide-eyed look of terror like I’ve never seen him have, and firmly insisted that he was OK to drive and begged me not to call any authorities. He promised to get checked up at home if he was still hurting. I was still dazed from the situation so I just agreed and brushed it off. I wish, I wish, I wish, I had done something then, maybe something could’ve turned out differently…
At home he claimed to have gone to the urgent care, where they diagnosed him with some bruised and a cracked rib, and gave him some painkillers. The weird thing is that I didn't see any paperwork, invoices come in the mail or any receipt in our bank account for any medical expenses or evaluations, which I found really suspicious. I asked him about this and he just tried to shrug it off, and said not to worry about it, and that he threw away the doctor's reports. How convenient.
These weird occurrences kept on happening all throughout the week. It would honestly be too much to list them all. Many of them were so subtle that honestly, someone who hadn't known him very well would barely even notice these changes. But I did.
For example, my boyfriend NEVER stayed up late, but now it seems like he's barely sleeping at night. At times I wake up and just see him sitting on his side of the bed, staring at seemingly nothing. Other times I've woken up to him staring at me. Not like, looking or admiring, but in a pondering or examining sort of way, like a predator does with its prey.
One time I walked into the bathroom to see my boyfriend pulling at his skin on his neck. He looked pale and I could see his neck vertebrae shifting under his skin in an… almost unnatural way.
Speaking of the bathroom, my boyfriend's hygiene seems to be getting worse and worse. He always smells and his skin always seems slimey or oily or something. And like there's globlets of dead, dark grey skin on his neck, shoulders, back, etc. Like the kind you get if you don’t scrub your skin for a while and the dead skin builds up a layer that then scratches into a clump if you scrape your fingernails over it. I confronted him about all this, hoping he would clean himself up more, and he just gave excuses like “he works at a construction job, and the summer heat is making him sweat more” and yada yada.
I tried brushing it off that he's been stressed lately and hasn't had energy to get the grime off, but it just keeps getting worse. At this point I've started telling him to sleep on the couch because I'm starting to get scared. His hair seems to be falling out more rapidly and it has never looked worse and more unkempt, like a wild dogs’.
He's stopped being so kind and gentle, it’s like he’s forgotten the cute words we used for referring to each other, almost like he was replaced by someone who didn't have any memories of our past relations. In general he's becoming more and more antisocial, I never see him go out with his friends anymore. In turn I've tried to get out of the apartment more as I'm honestly nervous to be alone with him.
He talks very little, mostly with grunts and almost choppy English, like a parrot or a crow trying to speak.
This might be the worst one, it pains me to even write this. He forgot about our anniversary. Our two year anniversary. I was expecting him to propose to me, as he had been hinting at that the months prior and this was the most likely date he would choose. But he just…didn't remember. Like at all. I was waiting for the surprise all evening and when he said he was going to sleep.
I burst into tears and asked him if he had forgotten, to which he replied “what?”, confirming he DID in fact forget. I left to stay with a friend the rest of the night. I took off work the next day as a sickday, as I just felt awful. All of this has been so stressful on me and it’s taken a toll.
In the evening he came with tulips and a gift card. He knows I'm allergic to tulips. At that moment I felt so terrified. Who the hell was this in my house? This couldn't be my boyfriend, I just knew something was very, very wrong with him. If that’s the case, where is my REAL boyfriend?
This is where I began to suspect there was something more going on than just relationship problems. I searched up couples counseling online, and listed off a few of the things I've experienced with my boyfriend in Google.
After scrolling for a while I came across a reddit story talking about “skinwalkers”. The name piqued my interest and I began to dig, reading stories and comments for hours about their behavior, nature, etc.
With every post and new piece of information the puzzle began to click in my mind, and I began to grow increasingly sick.
The next few days I scoured the internet for information on skinwalkers and similar doppelganger entities. Surely they couldn't be real however? I really, really wanted to believe it was all just in my head, but I just couldn't keep disregarding the increasingly bizarre behavior
I started keeping tabs on his daily routine, his habit changes, incidents, the things he said, into a diary. Down to the littlest things. Like how I caught him writing with his right hand. Before he was sort of ambidextrous, but always preferred to write with his left hand.
That's when the dead animals began to show up. At first it was the carcass of a dead squirrel outside the door. It looked mangled and bloody. I thought maybe the neighbor's cat dragged it up and had my boyfriend clean it up, who did so reluctantly.
I found a dead rat in the kitchen trashcan. Also mangled like the squirrel, but it looked to be partially consumed. I didn't even bother asking my boyfriend for an explanation, I was just afraid I might trigger him to attack me before I could defend myself.
Then a few days later another rat on the porch. I went to the duplex neighbor to complain in case it was their cat, and they apologized and said they'll keep an eye on their cat more closely. But I couldn't help but suspect my boyfriend at this point.
Then it was the cat. The neighbor's cat was lying in front of our porch when I got up to check the mail one morning. It appeared to be gutted and all its entrails were scattered about the concrete steps. A few crows were pecking at its flesh, meaning it had been there all night. My boyfriend had left the bed early in the night to “take a leak” as he said plainly, but was gone for at least 20 minutes.
I gagged and ran back inside crying. What kind of sick person does that? I just knew it had to be my boyfriend. No, not my boyfriend, whatever the hell was wearing my boyfriend's skin.
The neighbors called the cops, who told her it was a known group of “troubled kids” down the block pulling a prank, and asked if they would like to press charges. I don't even think the cops believed themselves to be honest…
My neighbor was also suspicious. She asked why her cat would be gutted in front of my half of the porch, and how it's “not the first time a dead animal has shown up on the porch”. The cops did question us, but they couldn't prove anything, and I couldn't tell them I suspected my boyfriend of being a skinwalker, what would they think? They would think I'm the crazy person and assume I've been the one killing animals and leaving them out on my own porch.
After the police incident, the dead animals stopped showing up on my porch.
My friends began to get concerned over me. They said I looked like a mess, and asked what was going on. I just told them relationship problems and that I wasn't interested in talking about it. I think I've barely slept in days, I'm constantly crying and stressed out, wondering where my loving boyfriend went and what the hell this thing wearing his skin was.
Sometimes at night, I hear what I think is a rapping or scratching at the window. I'm too terrified to look. I'm terrified that a skinwalker is going to kill me and take my identity. I'm terrified my boyfriend is going to kill me.
This all came to a head last night. The evening was the same as the previous few. I got home from work, ate a snack, and he got home from his job. I went to the bedroom to cower and scroll social media, and he went to the living room to do who knows what?
I feel exhausted, emotionally and physically and around 11PM I turn the light off to cry myself to sleep. Maybe 30 minutes later I'm jolted awake as the door slowly creaks open and he enters my room. He hasn't done this in over a month. I know tonight's the night.
But I am not prepared for what happens next. It's totally naked, almost hunched over, climbs into bed on top of me.
I freeze from panic, not sure what to do, just trying to hold my breath and hope he doesn't do anything. That's when it grabs me by the shoulder and I scream. I punch it in the throat and throw it off me.
It falls onto the floor and makes a sickening wheezing sound like that of an angry elk. I quickly use the moment to pull the knife out of my desk drawer I have kept for this moment and aim it at it.
It stood up and its face went pale. The skinwalkers' shifty, beady eyes look at me in fright now, like a cornered animal with nowhere to go.
I don't remember exactly what was exchanged next, it all happened so fast.
I remember it pleading with me. Begging me to remember, saying it was my “boyfriend”. That it wasn't trying to kill me, it just wanted to have intimacy with me. It said I was crazy, and that I was making a big mistake.
But it was too late. It had already blown its cover and there was nothing it could do to convince me otherwise. My boyfriend was gone, and this thing was going to pay for what it did to him.
I lunged. Stabbed. I don't remember how many times. There was so much blood. It squirmed and fought back. It was strong, but eventually it gave out. I remember gutting it like it had done to the neighbor's cat. It would pay for what it did.
I remember cutting its skin off in a flap.
I remember cutting its skin off…in a flap…off its body…attached to the muscles underneath...
I dug around in his organs and under his skin, expecting to see something underneath. But there was nothing. There was…just him. It was just his normal body.
I took a step back as the adrenaline wore off and I vomited. I had just killed my boyfriend. It… it was just my hysterics all along. There was no skinwalker, he didn't get replaced. It was him. My boyfriend the whole time.
I actually killed my boyfriend.
I thought my boyfriend was a skinwalker.