Firstly, let me say that these two stories I'm about to relate to you take place in the Atlantic coast American state of Maryland, in a river called The Magothy which runs through the center of the state and to the Inner Harbor of Baltimore, Md. I was in a quiet stretch of the river in a town called Pasadena with my good friend, whom I'll be referring to as "Boof" which was what we affectionately referred to him as, for the sake of his anonymity. This first experience happened on a lazy summer day where in Boof and I were diving off of one of the piers which line the banks of this stretch of river, swimming around briefly and returning to dry land to repeat the process all over again. Everything was happening as normal, the water was a cool reprieve from the oppression of the summer sun and the high humidity which can be found in Maryland. We were still in high school although I can't remember what grade we were to be entering, meaning that this story probably took place July or August in either 2000 or 2001 while spending a weekend with Boof's father at his house. The river and pier were located across the street from where we were staying at one of Boof's Father's good friend's houses but none of this information is particularly relevant to the story at hand.

It was a constant rhythm we had been maintaining. One of us would dive in, the other would wait at the edge of the pier until the prior surfaced. Once back to the surface, we would swim in a wide arc to remove ourselves from the diving zone and loop around to climb back up an emplaced wooden ladder which was hammered onto one of the pylons of the pier's structure. Once free of the diving area, the other would perform whatever sort of fancy aerial maneuvers they wished to complete on their way to their aquatic entrance. In this fashion, we spent hours that day. Some neighbor kids showed up for a little, dove to their heart's content and then receded back to the comforting embrace of their domiciles with us continuing the circular motions we had adopted as a means of entertainment. It was finally nearing dusk, the sky began to garner an orange hue at its boarders and the sun was slowly ebbing below the horizon but it was still in the inception of this event so we didn't feel any rush to remove ourselves from the water. It felt too nice and we didn't want it to end quite yet. It was at this time that a strange event had transpired. I did a haphazard and lopsided back flip into the water, smacking the surface hard on my face and stomach which caused a rawkus bit of laughter to explode from Boof's mouth. Upon surfacing and hearing the noise which I found to be grating in my irritation, I grumbled a inaudible threat and lazily made my way through our circular path back to the ladder to exit but in my journey, I heard Boof's voice pipe up as he poised himself on the edge of the pier.
"Now this is how you back flip." He said, giving me a confident smirk over his shoulder before compressing is body and uncoiling it like a spring which had just been released. His technique was good, he had good elevation and his rotation was at a speed which allowed him to land on his feet upon the surface of the water for a fraction of a second before casually entering it, with a minimal splash since he entered feet first. I gotta admit, it was a damn good backflip.

So there I was, stinging and red faced as I trudged up the ladder and made my way to the edge of the pier in preparation for the second attempt at my grand flying maneuver. All I had to do was wait for Boof to surface and move away from the landing zone. And wait I had to do. So far in our exploits on that day, we splashed through the water and then rebounded to the surface in only a few seconds, no stagnation because that meant the person preparing for a dive had to wait which got hot and boring on a day like that day. But nearly half a minute had elapsed and Boof was nowhere to be found. My initial belief was he was goading in his own fashion. Stretching out the time before I could reattempt the back flip as if allowing his victory bell to resonate for a prolonged period of time. He was sitting on the river bed, waiting for me to worry so he could surface with a giant shit eating grin. He was the joker of our dynamic duo, after all. So I waited, heedlessly blind to anything other than the fact that he'd pop up in a minute and rub it in. This was a joke, right?

Right?

At this point, we were passed the minute threshold and my sensibilities were telling me that someone who smoked regularly and didn't exercise regularly would have difficulty holding their breath for this amount of time, despite the fact that they may be a healthy young man. This was getting to a point of being unnatural and, since I knew my friend so well, I knew something wasn't right. It was at this point that I peered into the murky depths for any kind of sign of him. A distant movement. A sprinkle of bubbles to rise to the surface. A blur in the distance. But the heavy turbidity of the water blinded me to any events happening below its gentle current. So with as much haste as I could muster given the growing sense of danger which was stabbing at the back of my brain, I turned and dropped to my stomach at the edge of the pier and thrust my arms forward to plunge my hands into the cool confines of the liquid, waving them somewhat frantically to try and grab anything. His hand, his wrist, his hair. Anything.

A further thirty seconds elapsed until I realized that my blinding searching was fruitless. I retracted my arms from the water and placed my palms on the edge of the pier to push myself up from my stomach so that I may run and get help. Bubbles lazily drifted to the surface and popped before my arms as a testament to the effort I had just exerted under the waves. But something followed. A white blur was darting to the surface as if to grab me from my perch and pull me beneath the waves so that the Magothy could capture two victims on this day. My initial reaction was to jump back, but I paused in shock of everything which had transpired in the last two minutes. Then it happened, Boof's hand burst through the surface of the water, up to his wrist, with such violence that silt laden water splashed in my eyes. It churned the air, searching and probing for help followed by a thick series of large bubbles like from an underwater scream. It was almost instantaneous. Boof's fingertips found the air and my hands found his wrist and put the full effort of their muscles into hefting my dear friend from the abysmal void. There was heavy resistance, but only for a moment before Boof was free to scramble for a breath of beautiful fresh air. Finally, after almost two and a half minutes, Boof was breathing oxygen in deep gulps as if relishing the ability to fill his lungs. He was visibly shaken, his face pale and his eyes bloodshot but he exited the river soon afterwards with a lot of help from myself. Once back onto the pier, he looked to the water and then to me and said.

"A hand grabbed my foot when I was down there." I attempted to dissuade him that he may have been tangled in a root but he insisted that something had actively grabbed a hold of his foot as he entered the water and held him under to try and drowned him. He said he looked down and saw a shadowy figure standing on the bed of the river, but it was too murky to make out definite details. After that short conversation, Boof stood and hobbled away from the river and back to his father's house. I followed, quietly contemplating what happened and what he said, but I didn't know how to take it. He's never blatantly lied to me before so I don't see any reason to not believe him. Luckily, he had a limp for a few days and bruising on his foot but he pulled through with no permanent injuries but he wouldn't step foot near that river for several months following.

Fast Forward to autumn that same year and we were once again spending a weekend at Boof's Dad's house in Pasadena. It was a nice get away from the suburbs for us because the area was much more rural and scenery and mindset then where we lived. The people were a more simple folk and the atmosphere was much more pleasing to an old country boy like myself. So on this particular night, we started a bonfire in his Father's front yard and we were sitting by the fire when I get a phone call on his Dad's house phone (Since I didn't have a cell phone at this point in my life as cellular telephones were just starting to garner popularity.) which was an odd enough occurrence because I was old enough at this point to not be bothered too often by my parents when I was away from home. Maybe something happened that I needed to be kept abreast of but I couldn't believe I'd get a call there unless it was an emergency. The phone call, it turns out, was from a young lady I had dated a few years previously while I was in middle school. She called my house, got the phone number from my Mom and called Boof's Dad's which was odd. It wasn't "crazy Ex-girlfriend" odd but odd nonetheless. We talked for about a half an hour, I got her phone number and then got off the phone to an unenthusiastic Boof who had been sitting next to me the whole time in utter boredom. I was feeling energized, personally, so I suggested we find a canoe and go exploring on the river to bring the spark of excitement to our lives again. Boof agreed, although reluctantly as he was still remembering the aforementioned event, but I ushered him onward and before he could realize we were hopping fences in the neighborhood to try and savage ourselves a mighty vessel for which to set sail.

Realistically, the only sea worthy vessel we found was a square pool raft which was inflatable and pink but beggars can't be choosers and we decided that it would suit our purpose well enough. It had high walls along all the sides and was long enough that each of us could kneel down with enough space to be comfortable. So we pilfered the prize from a random backyard and scampered to his Dad's friend's pier where we found a set of hollow plastic oars which we were to use for propulsion. With nothing but the blue light of a full moon and a full pack of cigarettes between us, we dropped the raft into the Magothy and carefully loaded ourselves in it. I took the bow position since I was much more physically imposing then Boof, who would have described himself as somewhat scrawny back in these days. He sat in the rear and mainly worked as a rudder, using his oar off the back of the raft to steer and control us which worked for us. I can't say I'd ever really canoed before but I'd seen people do it so I figured out how to paddle in a way so that we didn't just sit there spinning. Stroke on the left side, two strokes on the right side, two strokes on the left side etc... and it wasn't long before we were lazily drifting down the center of the river. After the first bend in the river, which put all of the houses from view, was when the journey started to feel like the adventure I had hoped it would turn into. The lighting was minimal as we had no artificial illumination and the light pollution from backyard and dock lights were now being blocked by the natural flow of the river bank and general geography of the area. We were alone, two men adrift an island in a sense and it was something of a rush to have that sort of freedom at that point in our lives.

Eventually, after a length of time I could never determine because we had no manner of telling time, we came to a large camp which rested on the bank of the river. Lights dotted windows in small cabins which were scattered sporadically throughout a lightly forested partition and our curiosities were piqued. So we beached the vessel, driving the oars into the soft sand of the beach and using that as mooring to capture and contain our raft. After making sure our raft wouldn't drift away, he scampered up the beach and through the trees in a stealthy approach to the cabin closest to the water's edge and peered through a darkened window. Rows and rows of beds lined the walls, all of which were empty leading to an anticlimactic ending of our trespassing. However, the excitement was renewed upon hearing a deep bellow in the distance unleash a steady stream of obscenities at "some damn kids skulking around!" The torrent of vulgarities hit us like a brick to the ribs, causing us to jump back and rush back to our raft. Once safely to out vessel, and followed still by the foul mouth of an unseen adult, we released our raft from captivity and piled into it as it drifted back out to the river under the guidesmanship of Boof and the physical locomotion of myself. This event had us wired but we felt like it may be a good time to start heading back since we'd be fighting the current so the journey home would take twice as long and we felt we had been journeying for a good length of time so far. So we turned the raft and I began to make long strokes with the oar so as to get us home before the bellow could spot us on the water.

What followed was an undetermined stretch of time which was all the more uneventful by the events which would happen next, I now know in hindsight. As I was oblivious to anything other then the task of rowing, I was shirked from my revere by a voice screaming "What the Fuck!?" behind me and a violent jostling of the raft. The voice was familiar but different, as Boof's tone was twisted by sheer terror. The jostling of the raft was perpetrated by Boof's recoiling from the left side of the raft in abject horror. These actions stopped my motions so that I could turn to look at what had frightened my friend so completely, a friend who'd been on many ghost hunting excursions with myself and explored a multitude of the "creepiest" structures we could find in our small state. A friend who was battle hardened to all manner of gore and horror, yet was retreating from something right now like a mouse from a cat.
"What? What're you talking about?" I asked in return as I gave a cursory observation of the surface of the water to my left, seeing nothing but lightly lapping waves and ripples from an undetermined origin.

"Something was over there, man! Something big was surfaced! I hit it with my oar!" He yelled, pulling the offending oar into his lap in the raft. "We need to get out of here! What if it's a fucking alligator!" He responded, which almost made me laugh. I attempted to reconcile his sensibilities.

"Boof, chill out. It was probably a log or something. Maryland ain't got no gators, now ya hear!"

With that being said, I went back to rowing at a leisurely pace much to the chagrin of my companion who wanted nothing but the most expedient escape from this horrible malady which had stricken him with the paralysis of fear. But then I felt something. The bottom of the raft moved, yet Boof or I hadn't. It bowed upwards in the small space between us to an extent that we were eventually physically lifted by the object. It was hard like bone or a rock. In a reflex, Booth swung his fist down like a sledgehammer on the obstruction which jolted violently and rescinded to the depths. Ok, I was then a believer that something was out here on the water with us and there was a possibility that our lives were in mortal danger. It was the following shot of adrenaline being released into my brain which gave me a sense of clarity which was always beneficial to a perpetual over-analyzer like myself. It was almost instantaneous to that moment that I began to question what sort of indigenous creatures lived in the area that were large enough to catch Boof's attention in the darkness of the moment while still being strong enough to lift us both by way of the raft. We don't have alligators in this state although it may be possible for them to migrate north far enough to end up in the Chesapeake Bay but the likelihood of that is slim to none. I've heard of Bull Sharks making their way into the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay before, once however they are a species known to be highly aggressive and would have attacked us instead of nudging our woefully inadequate boat so they are an unlikely candidate. Rays of some variation get into our waterways but their wings and long tail are a dead giveaway when dealing with one of their kind. I was at a loss, and becoming increasingly scared at the implication of an unknown assailant flipping out pathetic floatation device and devouring myself and Boof at its leisure.

It was during the torrent of thoughts which were swirling within my mind that I caught my first actual glimpse of it. It surfaced about ten yards away from me on the right side, silently lifting itself from the surface of the water. In partial, at least. I saw the silhouette of a concave object lift from the water without making so much as an abnormal drip, the blue light of the moon gleaming across the sheen water which enveloped the object for the moment of its time in the open night air. A chill ran down my spine, the mystery and adrenaline and Boof's panicked pleas for us to flee at an expedient pace were too much for me to rationalize in that moment. My heart thundered in my chest as the concave sunk back beneath the water leaving nothing but some gently expanding ripples as a memory of its appearance. My next thought may have been a more fanciful notion depending on how you feel about the zoological possibilities of our world. Years before a "concept" or "Creature" was popularized in the area in which I live which garnered some slight attention in the local media, if I remember correctly. A plesiosaur-type creature was spotted in the Chesapeake Bay which affectionately earned it the moniker of "Chessie". Could this creature which seemingly attempted to capsize us, which moved effortlessly beneath us from one side to the other, be the fabled "Chessie" of bygone decades? Could a Sea Monster exist in this river in the middle of this somewhat pointless town in a somewhat pointless state? If this was something other worldly, would it see us as a meal? My fight or flight reaction was pulling my attention from legible thoughts to definite action and I put oar to the water to get us out of there and to dry land and safety, our departure being heralded by Boof cursing the creature fervently and swing his flimsy oar at it with as much might as he could muster.

It seemed as if I was relying on instinct for the rest of the journey home, seeing the world through a tunnel vision so focused I would only see the safety of our home pier and my arms turned into pistons with only one function on this earth. Get this piece of shit raft moving as quickly as physically possible which, thankfully for us, was rather quick. At that point I was one year out of a 7 year football career so I was of an athletic build and could easily manage the heavy exertions of this endeavor as a light exercise. We were back in mere minutes, and leaped from the raft onto the pier, leaving the poor raft to ride the currents of fate. Without stopping to take so much as a breath, we made it back to Boof's father's house and to the comfort of dry land. I'm not entirely sure what had set us off on that night and why the conclusion we immediately jumped to was that the object was a predatory creature which was hungry. Perhaps it was Boof's reaction which made me think less of the situation in which we had found ourselves, or the fact that there are no large aquatic animals which call Maryland and the Magothy river home so something that large and moving under its own volition was out of place and unwanted. Maybe we linked the previous event from a time prior to this one and concocted an idea in our minds that there was a malevolent force at work in those dark waters. I do know that subsequently I have spent time researching possibilities, both those accepted by common scientific branches and those accepted by branched commonly deemed "quasi-" or "pseudo-" Science. I have checked histories, folklore, urban legends and other strange events from that area and the state in general. Goatman, Tractor Man, The Zodiac Bar, Extreme Satanic Cults, The Snallygastor. Maryland's rich history of oddities is well documented but I could find nothing relating or pertaining to anything that happened on those two occasions.

I do know this, what happened with us that summer evening and that autumn night were enough to stop myself and Boof from ever entering the Magothy again and my heart still races when I think about that night.