So I've had this experience that I've only told close family, but after seeing that ole kiwi has a paranormal thread, I can kinda write it out for posterity's sake so here it is.
I was in Afghanistan with the Marines over 7 years ago. I was on a platoon patrol base that was maybe 15-20 meters from the nearest compound. We began to get engaged just about 2-3 times a day there, and in order to allow the Marines time to sleep, we were sent 18 Afghan police personnel to stand watch while we were getting what little sleep we could get. The insurgents rarely hit us at night because we had NVGs and other technology that made fights at night not worth it for Taliban, so it didn't matter how poorly trained the police were because the minute we heard a shot it would wake everyone up.
Well the Afghan police usually had the best hash ever, so one night I couldn't sleep, and decided to climb up on every post, until I found somebody with hash. The first two posts were a bust, and the third post was my next destination. As I came closer I saw three dudes up in the bunker which was abnormal, and they were pointing and whisper shouting to one another. Because of the HESCO barriers around the PB, I couldn't see what they were pointing at so I climbed the ladder up there. When I got up on the post, the commander (who was NEVER awake at night) grabbed me by the shoulder and started pointing out among the buildings, it was at this point that I noticed that one of them was sobbing gently almost like he was a scared kid. I looked in the area the commander was pointing at, through my RCO (or acog if you were in the army), and didn't really see anything until a TREE MOVED. It took a few seconds for me to really register what happened and my mind couldn't really correlate what I saw but the more I focused the more I realized what I was seeing.
What I thought was a large tree trunk (probably 20-25 feet high) CROUCHED and disappeared behind a set of compounds. I actually "yelped" when it fully disappeared and that woke up our 0331 team (machine gunners in the Marines) who slept in a tent closest to the wall. I pretty much didn't bother with the ladder, but jumped off the post and started yelling to the MG team what I saw and they all woke up and kicked the afghans off the post and setup the 240. It hadn't "stood back up" yet and for a minute, I thought I had imagined it, or the stress of the deployment had me way more fucked up than I realized.
We were staring at the area I showed them so hard, I felt like my eyes were gonna explode, and then it fucking stood back up and began walking left to right and it's legs were so fucking thin, one of the Sgts said it looked like a stick insect. By then, EVERYBODY was awake on the patrol base, and unlike in horror movies, all but three people saw it. It kind of moved like stop motion. It gave most of us a headache, and our pointman, who was literally made of stone, peed his pants. It finally got about 500 meters away before we lost sight of it. If I was to describe it, I would say it was over 20 feet tall, had really long skinny legs and VERY long arms but I couldn't see where they ended because of the compound walls. It was very dark in overall complexion and seemed to be almost textured like tree bark.
When we got home, my unit had a lot of suicides (10 out of 33), and everytime I talk to one of my buddies from my unit, the spindly horror is literally the first thing that's mentioned EVERYTIME. To this day, I have no idea what it was, but I know it wasn't deployment stress because 1. We all saw it, and 2 it glowed when viewed under thermals. I try not to think about deployment too much, but I've heard similar stories from other units in the area, and some units said they were followed by it during night patrols, but it never got too close to them. If anybody has any ideas or could offer a psychological explanation for shared hallucinations, please lemme know.
