The Second Sighting: Steam and Silence

It was January 1951, and a record cold front had frozen much of Columbia. A maintenance crew was dispatched beneath the University of South Carolina to check the steam tunnels—those long, concrete arteries winding under the campus, pulsing with heat and silence. Around 2:13 a.m., two men entered through a hatch behind the Horseshoe, descending into the hiss and clank of aging pipes. That’s when they heard it: a low, wet gnawing echoing from deep in the dark. What they found was never written in any official report. But one of the men, Carlson, a Navy vet, spoke of it once, decades later:

"It was crouched at the end of the corridor. White. Thin. With bones all around it. It had three eyes. Only one looked at us… the other two didn’t blink."

The thing didn’t run. It tilted its head. Then vanished, slipping through a small maintenance grate no man could fit through. The tunnels were sealed for months. Security was doubled. But the air, Carlson said, “never stopped smelling like feathers and smoke. ” Since then, janitors, students, and night-shift staff have all whispered about things heard below, scratching, breathing, laughter. But nobody goes down there anymore. Not unless they want to meet the Creeper again.