The Rake That Comes for You in the Night

by Brian Dunning
October 28, 2025

This episode was sponsored by Brad Pritikin

Sponsor an episode!

They say it is tall, pale, thin, with its gray skin stretched tight. Its eyes are sunken, hollow, black, and expressionless like those of a doll. It is hairless and naked, its nose merely vestigial, its lips thin and its teeth sharp. The Rake, so they say, would be taller than a man if it stood, but it never does; moving about instead like a spider on all fours, forward, backward, upside down, it doesn't matter. The Rake only comes out at night, in wooded or suburban areas — and it watches you, following alongside under cover as you walk. But before it attacks, it reveals its most terrifying trait: it speaks, in a thin, raspy, cadaverous voice. Tonight, for Halloween, we're going to look at the urban legend of the Rake. From whence does it come, and what has happened that has persuaded some people that it is a real creature, and not mere folklore?

There are two names by which this legendary creature is known: the Rake, and also the Pale Crawler. Any differences you may hear between them fall well within the error bars of witness descriptions, so for simplicity's sake, tonight we're talking about both under the name of the Rake. Details on the creature are somewhat slim, including fundamentals, like whether this is considered a magical creature, or an actual physical being? Is it a single long-lived individual, like Nosferatu; or is it a race of beings that come and go with normal lifespans? From the perspective of the skeptical investigator, the lack of such basics makes it tough to get a good start.

There are, however, a number of case studies of specific encounters that we can look at — and they range from uselessly old and unreliable to… well, you'll see when we get there… a little bit more reliable than most would be comfortable with.

One of the oldest tales is known only from a few lines shared and reshared on the Internet; it does not appear in any books that predate the Internet. It's known simply as "The Mariner's Log" from 1691:

He came to me in my sleep. From the foot of my bed I felt a sensation. He took everything. We must return to England. We shall not return here again at the request of the Rake.

No names or specifics are given, other than an accompanying assertion that this was the final log entry; so this one's a little tough to track down. The next case is from nearly two centuries later, and is claimed to have been translated from a Spanish journal entry from 1880:

I have experienced the greatest terror [repeated three times]. I see his eyes when I close mine. They are hollow. Black. They saw me and pierced me. His wet hand. I will not sleep. His voice.

Once again, no attributions at all, so basically worthless as evidence that anything happened. But then we get closer to the modern era. In 1964 a suicide note is claimed to have mentioned the Rake:

As I prepare to take my life, I feel it necessary to assuage any guilt or pain I have introduced through this act. It is not the fault of anyone other than him. For once I awoke and felt his presence. And once I awoke and saw his form. Once again I awoke and heard his voice, and looked into his eyes. I cannot sleep without fear of what I might next awake to experience. I cannot ever wake. Goodbye.

Found in the same wooden box were two empty envelopes addressed to William and Rose, and one loose personal letter with no envelope.

Dearest Linnie,
I have prayed for you. He spoke your name.

Again, no names, no specifics, no print reference prior to the existence of the Internet, and not a very good fake suicide note by whoever wrote it (note that I am jumping to a conclusion here); but I will retain an open mind as our investigation continues.

The next is a tale told by an unnamed woman in 2006. She and her husband awoke in the middle of the night to see a Rake sitting on the foot of their bed, hunched over and apparently injured. It ran into the hallway, toward the children's rooms. She gave chase and flipped on the hall light in time to see the Rake crouched at the end of the hall, now covered in blood; it fled down the stairs and the parents ran to their daughter Clara's room. They found her in a state they described only as "badly injured," and she spoke a single line: "He is the Rake."

They packed her into the car and the husband rushed her to the hospital, but sadly he never arrived; the car plunged into a lake, and both perished. But the oddest detail was given thus:

Being a small town, news got around pretty quickly. The police were helpful at first, and the local newspaper took a lot of interest as well. However, the story was never published and the local television news never followed up either.

Imagine such news not being published in a small town? It strains credulity.

So let's move past the unverifiable stories, and onto the most recent case that has been exhaustively verified, and that has received far more attention in recent years. On July 21, 2021, at 11:00pm at night, a man (identified only as "T") made a 911 call from his pickup truck to the Pender County sheriff's department in North Carolina — all of which has been verified by the sheriff's department. During the 11-minute call, the man described landmarks he was passing, all of which check out for the drive time.

Here are some clips from the actual 911 call provided by the sheriff's department, slightly edited to remove pauses, repetitions, and superfluity:

They continue talking for a moment to establish exactly where he is, but before they can finish, he hits something which flies up over his roof and lands in the bed of his pickup. Listen to hear the thud when he hits it:

He then slams on his brakes, causing the thing to fly up out of the bed of his truck, over the roof, and onto the ground. He then speeds off, and tells her what he just did.

There was very little discussion about specifically what it looked like, really just this, a few minutes later:

A few minutes later they got back to the reason he called in the first place:

Long story short, the police never found anything, no creature, no bleeding man on the side of the road. Four years later, the YouTube channel Carolina Case Files tracked T down and interviewed him, and also a sheriff's deputy. This added new details to the story, and if you've been listening to Skeptoid for a while, you know that's always something I'm gravely skeptical of. Not only do memories change over the years, often dramatically, they usually change in the direction of what's being talked about in pop culture — which was the Rake. Nothing in the 911 call indicates that the thing he hit was a Rake or anything weird, just that he didn't know what it was. Animals right in front of your headlights often look super weird.

The details added in the YouTube video included that the bloody man was dressed in what looked like a Civil War uniform, and that the creature had a "super scrawny long body". When he hit the brakes and launched it out over the front of his truck, it stood up to a full height of seven feet and bolted off into the woods. Police found scratch marks on the truck which could have been caused by anything, but no other evidence.

What really happened? Who knows. This could have been anything. He could have passed the ghost of a Civil War soldier and then crashed into a Rake, or he could have hoaxed the whole call, punching his dashboard to make the thump, or he could have passed a hitchhiker and hit a deer, or he could have been on DMT and unknowingly hallucinated the whole thing. The point is that the 911 call is not useful evidence of anything. I could speculate, but speculation is not evidence.

Is T's terrifying nighttime adventure even connected to the legend of the Rake at all? I certainly don't see any firm connection; you know how I feel about the Rake-like details added four years later, and even that YouTube video was just a guy telling a story. None of us have any way to know if he's elaborating, misremembering, remembering something that was unclear, etc. His story is just not useful evidence.

Guys telling stories turn out to be a much larger part of the Rake folklore. Luckily, we stand on the shoulders today of Internet researchers who have already done this work. The assertion is that in 2005, someone posted on the messageboard 4chan:

hey /b/ lets make a new monster

This started a thread called "Operation Crawler" where various contributors literally crowdsourced all the details about the creature. The problem is that this cannot be verified, because 4chan did not implement an archiving feature until the following year. So all of this comes from a Redditor called Oxil, who told the moderator Tom Berry, who repeated all of this to the Where Did This Image Come From? YouTube channel, which put out a video with all the links and screenshots that could be found.

The first person to take this crowdsourced creature, by then called the Rake, and post an actual, archived, verifiable Internet post was Brian Somerville. On July 20, 2006, using the name panda6, he posted a blog titled "Horror Theater - The Rake". And guess what it was: It was all of those stories at the top of this show. They are all 100% fiction. Somerville's blog has been copy-and-pasted countless times to countless websites, and the Rake is now Internet legend.

And that's how a monster is born.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning