THE GRAVE THAT WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE OPENED — THE SECRET THE DOGMAN WAS HIDING FOR OVER 100 YEARS | PART 4
THE GRAVE THAT WAS NEVER SUPPOSED TO BE OPENED — THE SECRET THE DOGMAN WAS HIDING FOR OVER 100 YEARS | PART 4
For three days after I saw that photograph, I didn’t sleep properly.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw that old stone.
Those words carved beneath the moss.
“IT IS STILL HERE.”
I kept trying to convince myself there was a normal explanation.
Maybe it was a warning about a person.
Maybe it was an old family message.
Maybe someone had carved it decades ago as some kind of strange memorial.
But deep down…
I already knew.
Because I had spent eleven years walking through that cemetery.
I knew every stone.
Every broken marker.
Every tree.
Every corner where the grass grew differently.
And that grave…
That grave was different.
The next morning, I drove back to the cemetery.
I didn’t tell anyone where I was going.
Not my family.
Not my friends.
Not even Daniel.
Because I knew what he would say.
He would tell me to stay away.
And maybe he was right.
But there was something I needed to understand.
For years, I believed I was watching the Dogman.
I thought I had discovered something impossible.
A creature that shouldn’t exist.
But now I wondered…
What if the Dogman wasn’t the discovery?
What if it was only a clue?
When I arrived, the cemetery looked abandoned.
The gate was open.
That immediately bothered me.
Because Daniel had always followed my rule.
The gate was chained after dark.
Always.
I stepped inside.
The morning air was cold.
Too cold for that time of year.
And then I noticed something strange.
The birds were silent.
Not a single sound came from the trees.
No squirrels.
No insects.
Nothing.
The entire cemetery felt like it was holding its breath.
I walked toward the old section.
The area I had avoided for years.
The area the Dogman avoided.
The ancient graves from the 1800s.
The place where the ground was hard.
Where the roots were thick.
Where nothing had ever been disturbed.
Until now.
The hole was still there.
About three feet from the old grave marker.
The dirt around it was dark.
Fresh.
But what caught my attention wasn’t the hole.
It was the smell.
A strange smell.
Like wet soil mixed with something old.
Something forgotten.
Something that had been trapped underground for a very long time.
I stood there staring down into that hole.
Then I saw something.
A piece of metal.
Half buried in the dirt.
I reached down and pulled it out.
It was a small iron box.
Covered in rust.
Heavy.
Old.
The kind of box people used before plastic and modern containers existed.
There was a symbol carved into the lid.
A symbol I had never seen before.
A circle.
With four lines crossing through the center.
And underneath it…
A word.
A name.
“HOLLOWAY.”
I knew that name.
Not because I had heard it recently.
Because I had seen it before.
In the cemetery records.
There was an entire family section with that name.
The Holloway family.
One of the oldest families buried there.
But there was something strange.
The records showed that the last Holloway burial happened in 1891.
After that…
Nothing.
No descendants.
No additional graves.
No information.
Like the family simply disappeared.
I carried the box back to my truck.
I should have opened it there.
I should have looked.
But something stopped me.
A feeling.
The same feeling I had experienced the night I saw the Dogman standing beside the open grave.
The feeling that whatever was inside…
Was not meant to be found.
I waited until I got home.
I placed the box on my kitchen table.
The same table where I had watched those camera videos years earlier.
My hands were shaking.
Not because I was afraid of what was inside.
Because I was afraid that I already knew.
Inside the box were papers.
Old papers.
The edges were damaged.
The ink was faded.
But they were still readable.
The first page had a date.
October 14th, 1891.
And the first sentence made my blood run cold.
“We have confirmed that the creature beneath the woods is not an animal.”
I stopped reading.
I just stared at the words.
Then I continued.
“For twelve years, we believed the beast was the danger. We were wrong.”
“The beast is the warning.”
My hands went numb.
Because those words described exactly what I had discovered.
The Dogman wasn’t attacking.
It wasn’t hunting people.
It was watching.
Protecting.
The journal belonged to a man named Thomas Holloway.
He was not a groundskeeper.
He was not a hunter.
He was a doctor.
And according to his writing, something happened in those woods more than 130 years ago.
Something that caused the Holloway family to create rules.
Rules that were passed down.
Rules that eventually reached Harold.
One entry was marked with a strange symbol.
The date:
November 3rd, 1887.
Thomas wrote:
“The creature came to the cemetery tonight.”
“At first we believed it came for the graves.”
“The townspeople wanted to destroy it.”
“They believed it was a demon.”
“But when the wolves came from the northern woods, the creature stood between them and the town.”
I read that sentence three times.
The wolves?
No.
Not wolves.
Something else.
Something worse.
The next pages described strange events.
People disappearing near the forest.
Animals refusing to enter certain areas.
Trees marked with symbols nobody recognized.
And something Thomas called:
“The Hollow Ones.”
According to the journal, the Dogman had lived near the cemetery for generations.
It buried food.
It marked territory.
It watched.
But it never crossed into certain areas of the woods.
Because something else lived there.
Something that even the Dogman avoided.
Then I found the page that made me stop.
The handwriting became messy.
Like Thomas had written it while terrified.
“Tonight we saw three of them.”
“They walked without sound.”
“They do not move like animals.”
“They do not move like men.”
“They watch before they come.”
I closed the journal.
Because suddenly everything made sense.
The Dogman wasn’t watching the cemetery.
It was watching the forest.
That night, I called Daniel.
He answered immediately.
“Did you find something?”
I stayed silent.
Then I asked:
“Daniel… have you seen anything beyond the fence?”
There was a long pause.
Too long.
Finally, he whispered:
“Yes.”
My heart stopped.
“What?”
“I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d think I was crazy.”
“Daniel.”
He breathed heavily.
“Three nights ago, I saw something standing between the trees.”
“What did it look like?”
Another pause.
Then he said:
“It looked like a person.”
I felt relieved for half a second.
Until he continued.
“But it was too tall.”
I gripped the phone tighter.
“How tall?”
“I don’t know.”
“Daniel.”
His voice dropped.
“Because it wasn’t standing completely upright.”
I felt a chill.
“What do you mean?”
“It was bending down.”
“Like it was looking at something.”
“What?”
“The Dogman.”
The line went silent.
I couldn’t speak.
Daniel continued.
“They were both there.”
“The Dogman was near the fence.”
“And that thing was behind it.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because the camera stopped working.”
I looked at the old journal sitting on my table.
The pages.
The warnings.
The history nobody remembered.
Then Daniel said something that I still think about.
Something that changed the entire story.
“Mark…”
“What?”
“I think the Dogman isn’t guarding the cemetery.”
I waited.
“I think it’s guarding us.”
That night, I placed the journal beside my bed.
I thought about everything.
The graves.
The cameras.
The creature.
The woods.
Then, at exactly 3:12 AM…
My phone turned on by itself.
A notification appeared.
A message from an unknown number.
No words.
Only a photo.
I opened it.
And my entire body froze.
It was a picture taken from outside my bedroom window.
A picture of me sleeping.
Taken that night.
I jumped out of bed.
I checked every window.
Every door.
Nothing.
No footprints.
No damage.
No sign anyone had been there.
Then I looked at the photo again.
There was one detail I hadn’t noticed.
In the reflection of my window…
Behind the camera…
There were two figures.
One was tall.
Thin.
Standing like a person.
The other was lower.
Covered in dark hair.
The Dogman.
The Dogman wasn’t watching me.
It was standing behind me.
Protecting me.
But the taller figure…
The one standing behind it…
Was looking directly into the camera.
And beneath the photo was a message.
Four words.
The same words from the old grave.
“IT KNOWS YOU RETURNED.”
I didn’t sleep after that.
Because I finally understood something.
The cemetery was never the center of this story.
The graves were never the important part.
The Dogman was never the mystery.
The real mystery was what had been waiting in those woods all along.
And now…
Whatever was out there knew my name.
It knew where I lived.
And it knew I had uncovered the truth.
The next morning, I made a decision.
I was going back to the cemetery one last time.
Not to investigate.
Not to film.
Not to prove anything.
But because there was one question I needed answered.
A question that had been buried for more than a century.
Why did the Dogman choose me?
And why…
After all these years…
Did it finally allow me to see what was behind the trees?
TO BE CONTINUED — PART 5: “THE NIGHT I ENTERED THE WOODS BEHIND THE CEMETERY AND FOUND WHAT THE DOGMAN WAS HIDING…”
