Stroies about the Waiting Man

The Legend of the Waiting Man - Nebraska, 1967

The sky stretched low and gray over endless corn. Harold Cline had worked the same 120 acres his father had, quiet land outside a place called Lancaster. He knew every fencepost, every coyote cry in the dark. It was late July when he first saw the shape. A tall, wrongly tall, standing deep among the stalks as twilight bled away. At first he thought it was a scarecrow, maybe something kids put up to spook him. But the scarecrow moved. Just enough to know it wasn't wind. Each night after, it was there again. Always still. Always a little closer to the house. By the fifth night it had reached the fence line. Harold stopped going outside after dark. He sat by the window with his shotgun watching the tall shape in the fields. By the seventh night, his wife found him pale, trembling, muttering that it was smiling. She didn't see anything when she looked out, just the sway of corn in the wind. But Harold swore he saw it move between the rows, taller than the stalks, arms dragging in the dirt. The last entry in his weather notebook reads:

"He's almost at the porch."

No one saw Harold again after that night. When the sheriff broke down the bedroom door, all they found was his left foot by the bed. No blood trail. No sign of struggle. Just that foot, and the window wide open to the corn. The report was filed, then sealed. Locals said government men came and took the pages. The corn grew back strong that year. Too strong, some said.

If you drive through Lancaster County now, you can see the Cline place from the road, nothing but a collapsed barn and rusted silo. But sometimes, if you stop after sundown and stare long enough, there's something tall in the field. And it's always a little bit closer when you blink. 

The Waiting Man is a fictional horror character created by Carl Sundström that will soon be seen on screens all over the world. A feature film with the same name, written by Carl Sundström and Nathaniel Pellikka Erlandsson, is in pre-production with a preliminary release date in late 2026.