Just Little Children.......Right?

Costa Rica (place where I live) has many national parks and virgin forests, many of them by the beach. Well, around the 50’s when this happened, some of these beaches where still very much alone and there where only a few people who dared "rough it" and spend the night camping with only the stars as their cover. My friends uncle was one of those people. This happened around December 1959, and my friend’s uncle was "camping" with another friend. They were about 21 years old at the time and had found this desolate beach after walking for about 5 hours from a small coastal town. Camp was made at sun-down, and they started to talk about nothing and everything long into the night. You know how this conversations seem to bend time, so before they knew it they had talked almost ‘till midnight (he knew the hour because he checked it after what happened). Everything had been peaceful and quiet until that hour, with only the surf murmuring to them, when they started to hear a rumble coming towards them from the forest. After a while they identified it as a truck. Apparently the forest wasn’t that virgin after all. The rumble made itself even louder until it was almost on the beach. The uncle and his friend where a little disappointed since they wanted to rough it alone, but a little company isn’t bad after all. Suddenly the truck jumped onto the beach, about 150 meters from where they were, and made a frantic u-turn on the sand and came to a stop. They both looked at each other wondering what this was all about, when a man came out of the front of the truck. Since it was a clear night (full moon according to the uncle) they could tell that the truck was a kind of army truck, the kind they used in WW2 to carry soldiers. This truck was sort of common since it had been used in Costa Rica’s civil war in 1948. The man walked to the back of the truck and opened it. The uncle’s friend was about to shout at the man to come over, when from the back of the truck small .. children started to come out, one by one, until there were about 25 standing on the beach. They were all the same height and had the same figure, thin and with rather round heads. The man said something to them and they made a circle with the man at the center, and started to dance around him. Obviously the uncle and his friend where speechless. After all, what were they doing? The small children seemed to repeat a strange chant, with a choir of voices that went from high pinched voices to low, almost bass-like voices. The two friends looked at each other, and without thinking it over, the uncle called out, "Hey you! Nice dance. What are you doing?" At this the children froze immediately and the man turned to them and uttered a shriek. The shriek, I was told, made the hairs in the uncle’s spine rise, but apparently he hadn’t seen nothing yet, for the children slowly started to turn around, broke the circle and made a wall between the two friends and the man. The uncle and the friend got up and sensing something wasn’t going right, quickly headed for their things, just in case they had to run for it. In order to do this they had to turn their backs to the children. They picked their stuff up, and when they turned around they saw the man was lying on the sand, as if he was dead, and the worst of all was that the children’s eyes started to shine a very dim green. At that moment the two friends felt a hum in their ears that started to get louder. Fearing for their lives nad sanity, they turned around and started to run like hell, screaming prayers and pleading for God to let them leave that cursed beach. They ran for about 10 minutes, not daring to turn around. When they finally did stop and turn, nobody was behind them. The hum in their ears had lowered a bit, but was still present. Needless to say they walked back to the coastal town, scared to death and with their underwear not-that clean. Before they arrived, they swore to each other not to tell the story, for they would be tagged as crazy. They never did rough it again.

The humming continued for a week and a half, "...a hum that would drive you crazy..." told my friend’s uncle to me, but no other side effects did happen to them. They kept their secrecy promise for 10 years, until the friend told the story to his wife, who asked the uncle if it was true. Since then the story has been kind of hush-hush in that family, but still known to most everyone.What did they stumble into? A strange cult or celebration? What happened to the man? Who was he? And ... who where those eerie children? Guess we’ll never know.