- Working at KSC
- NASA Old Headquarters building on KSC destroyed.
- Flintknapping points
- Vampires of Kennedy Space Center and the O&C
- Demons of Kennedy Space Center
- Demons of Kennedy Space Center, corpus callosotomy
- Ghosts of Kennedy Space Center, End of Spiders
- Dreams of Kennedy Space Center, lovers and pyramids.
- Witches of Kennedy Space Center
- Cave Bears of Kennedy Space Center
- Aliens of Kennedy Space Center, uninvited guests
- Remembering Kennedy Space Center
- Lake 33 Killing Relic
Bridgeway Park
Bridgeton Missouri
The Night Visitor
Disclaimer.
I began reading this stopped.
This is not some made up tale. This is 100% factual & so could even be a little boring, because nothing happened other that we were terrified little children.
A haunting of Apple Tree Lane
The trickster or ?
My brother and I had not talked about our secret visitor for years, in fact, nearly forty years.
In North St. Louis County, Missouri, in the city of Bridgeton, the area now known as Bridgeway Park was once my childhood home—a place where childhood wonder and a touch of inexplicable fear intertwined.
I visited the park recently.
As a child, Apple Tree Lane ended between the house and my father’s blacksmith shop. Brookford Lane now accesses the park.
I traced the old road to the modern circular playground where our ancient two-story barn once stood and then up the slight rise where people hit balls on the tennis court, the location of our old Civil War-era farmhouse with the dirt basement.
I knelt and placed a hand on the tennis court, trying to remember.
A weathered veranda had once wrapped around the structure like a skeletal embrace, creaking with the weight of forgotten stories. Here, beneath the shadows of gnarled mulberry and pear trees, my brother Rob and I shared a bedroom with bunk beds pressed against a window that framed our childhood’s greatest mystery. A nightly visitor as elusive as a half-remembered dream that paced the veranda.
We were six and eight when the visits began.
It came only at night, between the hollow hours of midnight and dawn. Its presence announced itself not by sound but by a primal unease. There, bathed in the delicate glow of a single porch light, emerged a creature that defied simple explanation.
Rob’s lower bunk bed sat level with the windowsill—a cursed front-row seat. We’d watch it move around the veranda through the faded window panes.
It was neither wolf nor man but a grotesque alchemy of both: a hunched, white-furred thing with limbs too long for its body, its claws moved silently against the porch boards.
Some nights, it sat or paced, its gait disjointed, as though testing the boundaries of its form. But the worst was when it stopped and stared at my brother and me.
Those eyes—would lock onto ours through the glass. Fear would overwhelm us, and we’d shelter beneath the blankets or pillows,
We never told our parents. What could we say? The creature belonged to the liminal space between imagination and truth.
The farmhouse itself seemed to harbor the thing. Artifacts littered the land—flint knives, arrowheads, echoes of those who’d walked the soil long before settlers. I found one such knife buried near the porch, its edge still sharp, as though the earth had coughed up a warning.
To this day, I still have the knife, a beautiful Burlington chert blade of a style distinct to the St. Louis area.
Years later, Rob would call it a “dog demon.” I’d liken it to a ghost-wolf, a king of forgotten woods. Our theories clashed, but our terror aligned.
On its final visit, dawn had barely broken. Fog clung to the pasture as Rob glimpsed it rolling in the grass between two horses. The animals stood oblivious in the mist while the creature writhed like a thing savoring the dirt’s cold kiss. Then it saw him.
In a blur, it charged—up the porch steps and pressed its snout to the glass. Rob lunged for the blankets, where he stayed until the sun burned the fog away.
The farmhouse and barn were torn down soon after we moved to the Weldon Spring area. The land, once slated for subdivisions, became Bridgeway Park.
Decades passed.
On a return trip to Missouri for a family reunion, I mentioned “that thing on the porch.”
Rob’s face paled and we laughed, but our laughter was edged with the old fear that adults can safely laugh at.
He confessed he’d dreamed of it, our nightly visitor—long into adulthood.
In our recollections, Rob spoke of it as a dog-like demon; I remembered it as Wolf or coyote-like, pale in color under the yellow light, with a ghostly quality that defied categorization.
What made me think about the visitor?
In my third novel in the Freedom’s Quest series, I wrote a story of a Native American meeting a Wolf-king, a spirit with ancient eyes, in a cave of shadows. Only when the draft was finished did I realize I’d described the porch creature down to its crooked claws.
I had not thought of it in some odd forty years. Some mysteries burrow into you and come out at unexpected times.
I departed the park with a final glance at where our bunk beds once stood. But I wonder—when twilight bleeds into the trees, and the park falls silent, does something still pace the tennis court? Does it peer through the dusk, searching for two wide-eyed children who dared meet its gaze?
Perhaps some legends outlive their witnesses. Maybe the creature remains, a guardian of thresholds, forever caught between wolf and ghost, demon and god—the trickster of all human cultures.
The thing is, the coyote trickster appeared again in my latest book, “Lake 33 Killing Relic, a Weldon Spring story.”
I had not planned on it; it insisted on being told. I was trying to tell a story of Rob falling into a mountain lion den on Howell Island, but my old visitor forced its way into the story.
Welcome back, old friend.
If you get a chance, visit the park, place a hand on the tennis court, and listen.
11700 Brookford Lane
Bridgeton, MO 63044
Return Home from Bridgeway Park
My next book, available on Amazon
(paperback and e-book)
For pet lovers around the globe, "It's a Matter of Luck" is a collection of heart warming stories of horse rescues from the slaughterhouse.
Available on Amazon
It's a Matter of Luck: Inspirational, Heartfelt Stories of Horses Given a Second Chance.
by Kim Ryba & Lina T. Lindgren
Warning: This book may cause your eyes to water in a good way. (speaking from experience after reading it)
Please give Kim and Lina a heartfelt review on Amazon!
Author Bruce Ryba at Kennedy Space Center Launch Pad 39B & Artemis 1. "We are going to the Moon!"
Author's discussion (that's me) on You Tube of a book review on Amazon
For the video versions of information, please check out my YouTube Channel (Turkeys, Flintknapping, dive stories etc.)
My fictional series/stories on Florida history:
Freedoms Quest (book one)
Struggle for the northern frontier and other lost tales of old Florida.
Available on Amazon
Desperate times call for bold action.
In a desperate move to retain Florida and protect the treasure-laden galleons on their dangerous return journey to Europe, the King of Spain issues a royal decree offering refuge to all English slaves who escape Florida and pick up a musket to defend the coquina walls of Saint Augustine.
In another bold gamble, the King offers refuge to the dissatisfied Indian nations of the southeast who will take up arms against the English.
Clans, traumatized by war and disease, cross the Spanish Frontier to settle the cattle-rich land and burned missions of Florida.
Follow the descendants of the conquistador Louis Castillo in remote Spanish Florida, a wild and swept by diseases, hurricanes, and northern invasions.
Book Two: Available on Amazon!