Just Creepy: Scary Stories - 3 Abandoned Town Horror Stories That Will Ruin Your Sleep

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

3 Abandoned Town Horror Stories That Will Ruin Your SleepLinktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepyStory Credits:►Sent in to https://www.justcreepy.net/Timestamps:00:00 Intro00:00:18 Story 100:19:55 Story 200:39:48 Story 3Music by:►'Decoherence' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.auBusiness inquiries:►[e-mail]#scarystories #horrorstories💀As always, thanks for watching! 💀

This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You know those friends who support your preference for podcasts over music on road trips? That's the energy State Farm brings to insurance. With over 19,000 local agents, they help you find the coverage that fits your needs. So you can spend less time worrying about insurance and more time enjoying the ride. Download the State Farm app or go online at StateFarm.com. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. It's said everything happens for a reason, but maybe everything happens.

for a Reese's. Take noise-canceling headphones. Do they block hearing to heightened taste? Hmm. That sound seems to show. Everything happens for a recess. I almost didn't go. That's the thing I keep coming back to. My cousin Marcus offered to handle it. He said he had a week free, and it wasn't a big deal. He'd drive out there, take photos of whatever was worth keeping, load the truck, sign whatever needed signing. I almost said yes. I was in the middle of a job. I was in the middle of a job, I had plans the following weekend, and Holt, Nevada was a nine-hour drive from Sacramento for a place I'd been to exactly twice in my life. But Uncle Roy had left everything to me, not Marcus, not my Aunt Della, not any of the three other people who actually stayed in contact

with him, me. And I felt like I owed him the small dignity of showing up myself instead of sending someone else to box up his life. So I went. Uncle Roy was my dad's older brother. He moved out to Holt sometime in the late 80s when there was still a reason to live there, a silver and copper operation that employed a few hundred people, a diner, a gas station, a bar, a school with 40 kids in it. By the time the mine closed in 2003, most of those people had already left. The ones who stayed did so out of stubbornness or poverty, or some combination of both. Roy stayed because he owned his house outright and had a pension and claimed he

liked the quiet. I visited him once when I was 11 and once when I was about 22. Both times I remember thinking the town felt wrong in a way I couldn't name. Not dangerous, just empty in a way that got into you, buildings with the windows boarded, streets with no cars, a water tower with the town's name still painted on it, the letters going chalky and pale. Roy died in February, heart attack, alone in his house, and the county didn't find him for almost two weeks. That detail bothered me more than I led on to anyone. Two weeks. The man had lived there for 30-something years, and nobody noticed he was gone for two weeks.

I drove out in the middle of April, left Sacramento before five in the morning, took I-80 east and then dropped south, and by early afternoon I was on a two-lane state highway cutting through high desert that looked the same in every direction. Flat brown earth, low scrub, distant ranges going purple at the horizon, horizon. No other cars. The radio lost its last station somewhere around Winnamooka, and I drove the final 90 minutes in silence. Holt was down a county road that wasn't marked on most maps anymore. I almost missed the turn. The sign was still there, but it had been hit

by something and was bent almost parallel to the ground, the lettering facing down at the dirt. The town itself was about a mile and a half in from the highway, 60 or 70 structures maybe, houses mostly, small single-story ranch homes built during the mining years, designed to be functional and nothing else. A few commercial buildings along what had been the main drag, a church, a community center with a caved-in roof on one side, gravel streets, no traffic lights because there had never been enough traffic to need them. I counted maybe six or seven houses that looked like they might still have somebody in them, maintained yards, intact windows, vehicles in the driveways. Roy's lawyer had mentioned there were still a handful of residents,

old-timers who wouldn't leave regardless. Roy's house was on the north end of town, set back from the street on a quarter-acre lot. One story, wood frame, painted a color that had started as tan and faded toward gray. A covered porch in front. A detached garage off to the side. Behind it, nothing but open desert for miles. I pulled into the driveway at around two in the afternoon and sat in the truck for a moment, just taking it in. The house looked okay. Better than I expected, honestly. Roy had kept it up. The porch railing was intact. The windows were unbroken. The yard was dry, but not overgrown. His truck was still parked next to the garage, a 1994 F-250, the red paint gone dull, one tire flat. I had a key from the attorney. I let myself in and spent a few minutes walking

through the rooms, getting a feel for the scope of the work. Roy had not been a man who threw things away. There were boxes stacked in the second bedroom, furniture that looked like it had been there since the Nixon administration, a garage full of tools and equipment and things I couldn't immediately identify. The kitchen had food still in the cabinets. His clothes were still in the closet. It was going to take at least three days, probably four. I had a sleeping bag and a pad in the truck. I'd planned to camp out in the house rather than drive 40 minutes back to the nearest motel in Dunbar. The utilities were still active. Roy's lawyer had told me the estate was covering them until the property sold. So I had water and electricity, which was more than I'd expected.

I made a list of what needed to happen, ate the sandwich I'd packed, and by six o'clock I was tired enough from the drive that I stopped working, and sat on the porch with a beer from the six-pack I'd brought. That's when I first noticed it. There was a house across the street and two lots down. Small place, same basic construction as Roy's. The windows were intact but dirty. The front door had a padlock on it. There was no car in the driveway, and the yard was a decade past any kind of maintenance. Dead brush grown up waist-high along the fence line. A rusted lawn chair tipped on its side in the middle of the yard.

The light inside was on, not bright. A single lamp or maybe an overhead on a dimmer. But it was light, warm, and yellow, coming through the dirty front window. I stared at it for a while. Figured it was just a timer. Some people set timers on lights in vacant properties to discourage break-ins, though I wasn't sure who would be breaking into anything out here. I made a note to ask around about it and went back inside to make dinner. I fell asleep early, maybe 9.30.

The sleeping bag was on Roy's old couch because I hadn't wanted to sleep in his bed without washing the sheets first, and I hadn't gotten to that yet. I woke up at some point in the night, and I don't know what woke me. no sound, no movement. I just came out of sleep the way you sometimes do, all at once, already alert. I lay there for a moment in the dark and then looked at my phone. 2.14 in the morning. I went to the bathroom and on the way back I glanced out the front window. The light in the house across the way was still on.

That was fine. What was not fine was that there was now a light on in the house directly across the street from Roy's, a boarded-up place with plywood over every window, and I could see it bleeding through the gaps in the boards. Thin yellow lines. Steady, not flickering. I watched it for maybe three minutes. Nothing changed.

No movement inside, no sound. I went back to the couch and did not sleep for a long time. In the morning, it all looked less strange. Daylight has a way of doing that. I walked across to the boarded house and looked at it up close, and confirmed that yes, there had been light coming through the boards. I could see the scorch marks on the interior edge of one board where something had gotten hot. Maybe wiring, maybe an old bulb that finally burned out.

I told myself it was probably a short bad wiring in a vacant building doing what bad wiring and vacant buildings does. I spent the day working, went through Roy's kitchen, his living room, his bedroom, made a donation pile, a trash pile, a keep pile. The keep pile was small. I called Marcus in the afternoon and we talked through what was worth saving. That evening I drove the 40 minutes to Dunbar to get supplies. Food, more beer, contractor bags, a case of bottled water.

While I was there, I stopped at a gas station and mentioned to the woman behind the counter that I was staying out in Holt for a few days. She gave me a look. You got family out there? Inherited my uncle's place. Roy Carver. She nodded slowly. You know there's still people living out there, few of them.

You want to check in with them. Let him know you're around. Anyone I should talk to in particular? There's a man named Gerardo Vasquez. He's been there the longest. He'd be the one to know if anything's going on. I thanked her and drove back. That night I found Gerardo's house,

not hard since it was clearly occupied, with a light on the porch in a relatively maintained yard. I knocked and he answered. He was in his late 70s, heavy-set, wearing a flannel shirt. He looked at me the way you look at someone you've been expecting. I introduced myself and explained why I was there. He invited me in for coffee. His house was warm and cluttered and smelled like wood smoke.

We sat at his kitchen table and I told him about the lights I'd noticed, and he was quiet for a moment before he responded. How many? he asked. Two, one across the street, and down, one directly across. He turned his coffee cup slowly. Were they there when you went to sleep or did they come on after? I thought about it. The first one was on when I got there.

The one directly across. I noticed that one around two in the morning. He nodded. He didn't look surprised. He also didn't look like he was going to offer an explanation. Is it squatters? I asked. No, he said.

Just that. Teenagers messing around? He shook his head. There are no teenagers in Holt. I waited. Those lights, he said finally. They move around. I've watched them for years.

They'll be in one part of town for a while. Then another. It's not a pattern I can tell you, not one I can predict, but they move. What causes it? He looked at me over his coffee cup. I don't know. The wiring in those houses has been dead for decades. The power was cut to most of the abandoned properties in 2007 when the county stopped maintaining the infrastructure.

I checked it myself. Breakers pulled, lines disconnected. He set the cup down. And yet, I drove back to Roy's house with a lot on my mind. I checked the breaker box before I went to sleep. It was in the utility closet off the kitchen, a gray metal panel about the size of a briefcase mounted to the wall. I opened it and stared at it for a while. Every single breaker was in the off position, not tripped, off. And from what I could see, the main line coming into the box wasn't connected to anything. There was a gap where the service entrance wires should have attached to the main lugs. The box was completely isolated.

The lights in the house worked fine. I stood there in the utility closet for a long time, looking at that panel, and then I closed it and went to sit on the couch. I didn't try to explain it that night. I just noted it the same way you'd note that a door you locked is somehow open again, with a cold, practical awareness that something is wrong without being able to define what. Outside, when I looked through the front window, there was a light on in a house three doors down from where it had been the night before. The next day I worked fast. I wanted to get as

much done as possible before dark, though I didn't say that to myself in those terms. I told myself I was just making good use of the daylight. By four in the afternoon I had Roy's bedroom, and the second bedroom mostly cleared. I loaded what I could into the bed of my truck, the keeper items, the boxes I was taking back to Sacramento. The rest I piled in the front room for the charity pickup I'd arranged. At some point during the afternoon, I walked out to get something from my truck and noticed Gerardo standing at the edge of his property, looking up the street. He was still for a long time. I raised a hand to wave, and he saw me and walked over. You leaving tomorrow? he asked.

Probably, why? He didn't answer right away. He looked up the street again. I'd leave tonight, he said. If you're close to done, I'd leave tonight. What are you talking about? The lights moved again last night, three of them now, all on the north end of town, your end. He met my eyes. I've seen this before, maybe four times in 20 years. They get close like this, and then something happens. I don't know what, because I've never been the one they were close to. He paused. Roy was here for all four of those times.

I asked him about it once. He wouldn't talk about it. I looked at him for a moment. You're serious. I wouldn't bother you with it if I wasn't. I thought about the disconnected breaker box. I thought about the light bleeding through the boards. I thought about Roy living alone out here for 30 years, dying alone, no one noticing for two weeks.

What are you going to do? I asked. I'm going to lock my doors and not look out the windows, he said. Same as I always do. I watched him walk back to his house. I worked until about seven, which meant I finished in fading light and had to use a flashlight for the last hour. I hadn't been able to make myself leave while there was still work to do. That probably sounds like stubbornness, but I think it was also that I didn't want to admit the lights were making me afraid. By the time I threw the last bag into the truck bed it was full dark. A moonless night, deeply dark the way desert nights get when you're far from any city. The stars were out in force. So many of them had almost looked wrong, like someone had been excessive about it. I stood by the truck for a moment, quiet,

no wind. Then I saw them, three lights, not in the same houses from the night before, In houses I hadn't seen lit before, all on my side of the street, spaced maybe a hundred yards apart, all on, all steady, all the warm yellow of incandescent bulbs in rooms that should have had no working electricity. I got in the truck. I didn't go back inside for anything. I had my keys, my phone, my wallet, everything else I'd already loaded. I started the engine and backed out of the driveway and pulled onto the gravel street. I drove south toward the county road. Slowly, because it was dark, and the streets weren't lit, and I didn't want to hit anything. I was about halfway through town when I saw the figure. It was standing in the middle of the road, about 40 yards ahead of me. The headlights hit it straight on, a person or something shaped like one, standing perfectly still, facing me.

No movement at all, not a flinch at the headlights, not a shift in weight. I slowed to a stop. I sat there looking at it and it stood there looking at me and for about ten seconds nothing happened. Then movement at the edge of my headlight beams. Two more shapes stepping out from between the houses on either side of the road. They stopped at the shoulder and stood the way the first one was standing. Still, facing forward, facing me, like they had been waiting and were not surprised that I was here. There were more of them further back.

I could see them at the outer edge of what the headlights could reach. Four or five, maybe more, all still, all facing the truck. I put the truck in reverse. The engine cut out. No coughing, no warning, no stuttering, just off. Like someone had turned a key. The headlights died with it. The instruments on the dash went dark.

Everything went quiet. I sat in total darkness with five or six or more of those things standing in the road ahead of me. The lights in every house went off at once. I mean every light. the three on my side of the street that I'd been watching, a couple more further south that I hadn't noticed until they weren't there anymore. All of them, the same instant. The town went from a scattered few warm windows to nothing.

I tried the ignition, nothing, tried it again, nothing. On the third try, the engine caught. The headlights came back on, the road was empty. I looked left, right, checked the mirrors, nothing. No figures on the shoulders. No shapes between the houses. The road ahead was clear and dark and I did not look for long. I put it in drive and pressed the accelerator harder than I needed to and drove south.

I had just cleared the last building on the south end of town when something hit the driver's side door. Not a tap. Not a bump. Something that hit the door the way a car door hits a post when you open it too wide. A single heavy impact that went through the whole frame of the truck and landed in my chest like a fist. The door bent. I felt it move against my arm before I yanked it away. I saw the metal bowing inward at the center panel in the half second my eyes went to it before

I forced them back to the road. I did not stop. I drove to the county road and turned north onto the state highway, and I drove at 80 miles an hour in the dark until the sky started going pale, and then gray, and then I saw the first gas station outside of Dunbar, and I pulled in and sat in the the parking lot with the engine running until it was full daylight. The dent is still in the door. I've looked at it many times since then, when I'm being practical about it and trying to work out what could have hit me at that speed, at that angle, with that force. The metal didn't just buckle, it folded, a clean inward curve about 14 inches across at the widest point, like something pushed rather than struck. I've come up with explanations, a rock thrown at speed, some piece of the road,

A bird, though no bird is heavy enough to do that to a truck door. None of them fully hold up when I think about it for too long. I filed the paperwork on the property from Sacramento. Handled everything remotely. The attorney asked me if I wanted to schedule a return visit to oversee the final walkthrough, and I told him no. I never spoke to Gerardo again. I got his number from the attorney.

He was listed as a neighbor contact in some of the property documents, and I called him once, about two weeks after I got back. He answered on the third ring. I asked him if everything was okay out there. He was quiet for a moment. Then he said, the lights are gone, back to where they usually are. I asked him where that was. East side, he said, far east side, same six houses they've been in for years.

I asked him what he thought they were. He was quiet again, longer this time. When he answered, his voice was flat and careful. The way people sound when they've thought about something for too long and decided it's better not to. I think they're waiting, he said. I don't know for what. I stopped trying to know for what a long time ago. I thanked him and we hung up and I haven't called back.

The property sold eight months later. The new owner was a land investment company out of Reno. I don't know what they plan to do with it. I don't know if they've been out there yet. I hope they go during the day. I've been a park ranger for a land. 11 years. I've worked search and rescue. I've pulled bodies out of rivers and talked people down from ledges. I'm not someone who scares easily, and I'm not someone who embellishes. What I'm about to

tell you happened in early September, three years ago. I've written an official report. I've given statements. I've sat across from two separate federal investigators and told them everything I'm telling you now. They listened, took notes, thanked me, and then went very quiet in a way that made me feel like I'd confirmed something they already suspected, but hadn't wanted to confirm. I still have the scar on my left forearm, 14 stitches. I still sleep with the light on sometimes, which is something I'm not embarrassed to admit anymore. The complaint came in on a Tuesday morning. A backpacker, solo hiker, early 40s did this kind of thing every fall, had been moving through the backcountry in the northwest corner of the park when he heard what he described as heavy chopping sounds

like someone splitting logs, but wrong. He said it went on for a long time. He also said he smelled wood smoke where there shouldn't have been any. When he tried to move toward the sound out of curiosity, he heard something moving parallel to him in the tree line, keeping pace. He described it as big, and it wasn't trying to be quiet. He turned around and hiked out. He filed the report when he got to the trailhead. He was shaken enough that he sat in his car for an hour before driving. I spoke with him on the phone. He was a measured, careful talker. He didn't dramatize things. He said, I don't know exactly what I heard, but I know I wasn't alone, and I know I made the right call leaving. I wrote it up as a possible illegal hunting or logging violation and flagged

for follow-up. The northwest corner of the park is one of the least trafficked sections. The trail system thins out up there. The terrain gets steep and rocky. The forest gets dense, and there's no real destination that draws casual visitors. No scenic overlooks, no swimming holes, nothing worth the extra eight miles of hiking. Rangers get up there maybe four times a year, usually just for routine patrol. The complaint placed the sound somewhere around the six mile mark off the Sutter Creek Trail, which is a secondary access route that most people don't even know exists. I told my supervisor I'd hike in and take a look.

She told me to take the radio and check in every two of us. hours. Standard procedure. I said I would. I went in the following Thursday. The first four miles were unremarkable. I've hiked that trail enough times that I don't have to think about it. Second growth Douglas fir, some older cedar mixed in, the ground soft with years of needle drop. The creek runs along the left side of the trail for most of the lower elevation, and you can hear it the whole time, which I find calming. The weather was clear. It had rained two days before. so everything smelled clean and wet. Around mile four, the trail starts climbing.

The creek veers off east and you lose the sound of it, and the forest gets quieter. That's normal up there. What I noticed first, around the four and a half mile mark, was that it was too quiet, no bird noise, no squirrels in the canopy, nothing moving. I told myself the rain had pushed things around, that wildlife behaves differently after a soaking,

that there was nothing unusual about it. I checked in with my supervisor at Mile 5. Good signal, clear connection. She asked if I'd found anything. I said not yet. She said to keep her posted. The trail gets rough past Mile 5. It's technically still a maintained trail,

but it gets that overgrown neglected quality. Branches crossing the path, the tread getting soft and indistinct, the markers spaced farther apart. I had my GPS and a topo map. I wasn't worried about getting lost. What I noticed at mile five and a half was the smell. Wood smoke, faint,

and something underneath it that I couldn't identify right away. Something animal. Not rotting. Not sharp. More like the smell of an unwashed body, but heavier and older, like it had soaked into wood and cloth and been there for a long time.

I stopped and stood still and breathed through my nose, trying to place it. Then the smell was gone. or maybe I'd just gotten used to it. I stood there for a minute, listening. Nothing. I kept moving. The camp appeared without warning. I came around a bend in the trail, pushed through a stand of young hemlock that had grown over the path, and then I was standing at the edge of a clearing, and the clearing was large, maybe 200 feet across, and it was not natural. The trees ended in

a ring that was too clean, too consistent. The ground inside had been cleared and leveled, and in the clearing, arranged in a circle, were seven cabins. I stopped. The cabins were old. That was the first thing. Not recently built old, genuinely old. The logs dark and weathered to the color of charcoal, the roof lines sagging in places, moss on every surface. They had no windows that I could see, just shuttered openings in the walls. The doors faced inward, toward the center of the circle. In the center of the circle there was a large fire pit, stone ringed, and it had been used recently. The ash was gray and dry on top, but I could see it was dark underneath. Maybe two days old, give or take. I stood at the edge of the clearing for a long time. I counted the

cabins again. Seven. I looked at the spacing between them. It was exact, or close enough to exact, that it would have taken some effort to get it that way. The doors all faced the same direction toward the fire pit. There was something arranged about it, something that had been thought through. I took out my radio and checked in ahead of schedule. Told my supervisor what I was looking at. She was quiet for a moment, and then asked me to describe it again, which I did. She told me to hold position and not approach, that she'd call it into the district office.

I told her I was going to take some photos. first and get closer for a better look. She told me to wait. I waited about three minutes. Then I moved into the clearing. The ground between the cabins had been worn down to bare dirt by foot traffic. Not occasional foot traffic. The paths between the structures were packed hard, the kind of surface that takes years of repeated use to form. The paths connected every cabin to every other cabin in a web of routes, and they all connected to the central fire pit. I looked at the dirt and I could see footprints, bare feet, multiple sizes, some of them large. I crouched and looked at one of the larger prints.

The toes were spread wide, almost spayed. The skin ridges in the print were deep and pronounced. I straightened up and looked at the nearest cabin. The door was a heavy slab of split wood, hanging from leather hinges. It was closed. I moved toward it, then stopped. The logs of the cabin wall had carvings cut into them. Not decorative carvings, or not decorative in any way I recognized.

They were territorial marks. I know that sounds like a specific conclusion to jump to, but when you looked at them, that's what you thought. They were cut deep into the wood, and the cuts were fresh enough that the wood inside was still pale. Lines, angles, a repeated symbol that looked like a wide V with a vertical stroke through the middle. It appeared on every cabin I could see.

It appeared on the trees at the edge of the clearing. The nearest tree to where I was standing had it cut into the bark at eye level, and at knee level, and at the height of my shoulder. I took photographs. I kept my voice recorder running. I noted the GPS coordinates. Then I heard something. It came from the cabin to my right, the second one,

clockwise from where I was standing. A low sound. Not a voice. Not an animal sound exactly. Just a low, continuous sound. like someone breathing through their nose very slowly and with great attention. I turned to face the cabin. The door was open about four inches.

It hadn't been open when I first looked at it. I stood there with my hand near my radio and watched the gap in the door and nothing moved. But the sound continued, slow and regular, and I had the strong sense that something was watching me through the gap and assessing something about me. I took two steps toward the cabin. The sound stopped. I said,

Hello, Park Service, I'm not here to cause any trouble. Is someone there? Nothing. I said it again. Nothing. I backed up slowly until I reached the edge of the clearing. Then I got on the radio and told my supervisor what I was seeing. She told me the district office had no record of any structure in that location.

No historical record. No permit history. Nothing. She said she was putting in a call to the county sheriff, and that I should hold position and not any. enter any of the structures. I told her I thought someone was inside one of them. She said, Hold position, David. I said I would. I was still standing at the edge of the clearing when I heard something behind me and turned around. There were three of them standing in the

tree line, maybe 30 feet back from the clearing's edge. They were standing still, watching me. I didn't hear them arrive. They were just there. I'm going to describe what I saw as carefully as I can, because I know how it sounds, and I want to be accurate. They were people. That's the first and most important thing. They were human beings, but they were, I keep using the word wrong in my head, and I'm not sure I have a better one. The proportions were off, not dramatically, not in a way that would have made you stop and stare from across a room, but enough that once you noticed it, you couldn't stop noticing it. The arms were long.

The shoulders were wide and pulled forward. The posture hunched without being hunched, like the natural resting position of the body was not quite upright. The hands were very large relative to the body. The foreheads were pronounced. Two of them were men, adult men, though I'd struggle to tell you their ages. One was shorter than me. One was taller.

The taller one had a full beard matted to a point. The shorter one had no beard at all, and a face that was hard and flat and expressionless. The third figure was smaller, possibly younger, hanging back behind the other two, watching. They were wearing clothes. I want to say that because it's easy to let the memory drift toward something more extreme than what it was. They had clothes. Rough, patched, clearly old, but clothes. The taller man had a leather belt with something hanging from it that I couldn't identify at first.

When he shifted his weight, I saw it was a knife. The handle was pale and carved. I said, Hi, I'm a park ranger. I'm just doing a routine inspection of the area. I'm going to need to ask you some questions. No response. I said, is this your camp?

Do you have a permit to be in this area? The shorter man tilted his head. It was a precise bird-like movement. He looked at me the way you'd look at an animal you'd come across on a trail, calculating whether it was a threat, whether it was food, whether it was worth engaging with it all. The taller one said something. It wasn't a word I recognized. It was a short sound, guttural, a single syllable, and it was directed at me. I said, I'm sorry, I don't understand. Do you speak English? The taller one said the sound again, louder. I put my hand on my radio.

That was when the shorter one moved. I don't fully understand how he crossed. 30 feet of ground so quickly and quietly. I heard the sound of his feet on the dirt for maybe two seconds before he was close enough that I had to move. I went sideways and got my arm up, and he caught my forearm with something. I found out later it was a short length of rope with a stone tied at the end, and it hit the outside of my forearm hard enough that I dropped my radio. I heard it hit the ground. I ran. I went back the way I came, through the hemlock stand, back onto the trail. I could hear at least two of them behind me. They were fast and quiet, and they didn't call out to each other the way you'd expect. No shouting, no communication I could

identify, just movement. I had maybe 30 yards on them when I hit the trail and started downhill. I'm a runner. I run trails in my off time. I stay in shape for this work. For about two minutes I maintained the gap and thought I might actually open it up enough to get clear. Then I felt something close around my right ankle, and I went down hard. The net came out of nowhere. It was heavy, heavier than any net I'd ever handled, waded at the edges with what felt like rounded stones, and it was already over my legs before I registered what was happening. I hit the ground and got my hands up and managed not to take the impact on my face, but the wind went out of me and I lost a few seconds. When I got my hands underneath me and tried to push up, the net was already tangled around

my right leg up to the knee, and my left ankle was caught in one of the weights. I got the net off. That took another 30 seconds, maybe 40. My hands were shaking. I could hear them in the trees to my right, not on the trail, off trail, moving through the brush. Keeping pace. I got up and kept moving. The deadfall traps started around mile five and a half on the way back. I know they were traps because one of them went off while I was next to it, not in it, a heavy log rigged to drop across the trail, triggered by a cord stretched at shin height. I saw the cord at the last second and jumped it, and the log came down behind me with a sound that felt like it was inside my chest.

I didn't stop to look at it. The second trap I only found because I was watching the ground after the first one, and I saw the disturbance in the dirt where the trigger had been buried. I went around it wide, off the trail, and got back on. I was screaming into my radio by this point. I'd found it on the ground where I dropped it, back near the clearing. The screen was cracked, but it was working, and I was giving my location in trying to describe what was happening,

and I don't know how coherent I was. My supervisor's voice kept coming back, telling me help was coming, telling me to keep moving toward the trailhead. The third trap I didn't see at all. It was a covered pit, maybe four feet deep, lined with sharpened stakes. I went through the covering, branches and leaf duff laid over the mouth of the hole, and I dropped, and by pure luck I landed on the edge rather than the center, and got one arm over the rim and hauled myself out with my legs dangling over the stakes for a very long second.

I scraped my forearm on something, the edge of the pit, I think, or a root. And that's where the 14 stitches came from. I didn't stop. I couldn't stop. The ledge, the trail, at around the four-mile mark, crosses a section of exposed granite that runs along the edge of a ridge line. The ridge drops on the right side. A significant drop, one we'd posted signs about for years because hikers with poor situational awareness occasionally got too close to the edge.

On a clear day, you can see the river below, 40 or 50 feet down, running fast and cold through a narrow channel. We'd had search and rescue calls from that section before, though never anything fatal. I came out of the trees and onto the granite shelf and kept running, staying left, away from the edge. The rock was dry, good traction. I heard them come out of the trees behind me. I turned to look, which I shouldn't have done. But I turned, and there were two of them, the taller one and the shorter one, both on the rock, both moving,

and the shorter one had something in his hands. It took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. It was a harpoon, that's the only word for it. A long shaft with a heavy iron head, dark with age. The shaft wrapped in something dark at the grip. He was holding it in both hands. He was not running anymore. He had slowed to a walk.

The taller one was still coming. I ran for the edge. I don't know how you decide to jump off a 30-foot ledge. I don't think you decide. I think your body just processes that the alternative is worse, and your legs just keep moving, and then there's no more rock under you. The water hit me like concrete. I went under.

I can't tell you how deep I went, far enough. I kept my limbs loose and let the current take me for a moment, and then I kicked for the surface and came up in a channel of fast water, and got turned around twice before I got my feet under me, and found a shallow section and dragged myself to the bank. I looked up at the ridge. The harpoon was buried in the rock face about six feet below the ledge. It had hit while I was in the air. The shaft was still vibrating.

I couldn't see either of them on the ridge anymore. I lay on the riverbank for a while, breathing, and then I got up and walked out. The sheriff's department went in that afternoon with four deputies and a state forestry officer. They found the clearing. They found the cabins. They found the traps on the trail. All three of them, plus two more I hadn't encountered, and they found the harpoon, which they photographed and logged.

They found the fire pit, still warm. They did not find any people. The district office ran a search of historical records for that part of the park. They found something, a single reference in a forestry survey from 1922, to an unofficial settlement in the northwest quadrant that had been cleared and abandoned prior to the park's establishment. no names, no follow-up documentation. The original survey notes mentioned that the settlers had been uncooperative with removal

and that the matter had been referred to county. The county had no record of any such referral. The federal investigators who came out six weeks later took the harpoon with them. One of them, before they left, asked me if I'd gotten a good look at the people in the camp. I said yes. He wrote something in his notebook. He asked me how many generations I thought a family could survive in a place like that, cut off, without any outside contact.

I told him I didn't know. He nodded and closed his notebook, and that was the end of the conversation. The camp is still out there. The structures are still standing. The park service flagged it and fenced the access trail, but the budget for demolition hasn't come through, and I don't think it will. I've been told not to patrol that section of the park anymore, which is for the public. fine by me. More than fine. I still have the scar. Fourteen stitches, mostly healed now, running along

the outside of my left forearm. The doctor who stitched me up asked what had caused it. I told him I'd fallen in the field. He said the wound pattern was consistent with that, consistent with the edge of something rough and hard, rock or wood. He was right about that. He just didn't know the whole picture. Neither do I, honestly, but I know enough. I want to be upfront about something, before I get into this. I'm not someone who scares easily. I've spent the better part of six years driving alone into the middle of nowhere

to photograph places most people have forgotten exist. I've spent nights in houses where the floors were rotted through and the walls were held up by rust and habit. I've walked through towns where the only sounds were wind through broken glass and the occasional pop of metal expanding in the heat. I'm used to being alone in places that feel wrong. That's actually part of what I like about it.

it. So when I tell you that what happened in Heela Flat genuinely frightened me, not the atmospheric, kind of exciting kind of creepy feeling I usually get, but real physical fear, the kind that makes your hands stop working right, and your throat close up. I want you to understand that's not me being dramatic. That's just what it was. I got into urban exploration photography, about six years ago, right after I got laid off from a job I'd had for nine years. I won't bore you with the details of that. The short version is I had a lot of free time. I'd always owned a decent camera, and I started looking into what was around me that most people drove past without stopping. I live in southern New Mexico, which means there's no shortage of abandoned things. Failed mining towns,

dried up agricultural settlements, old trading posts that ran out of road traffic when the highway moved. The desert out here doesn't rot things the way humidity does in other parts of the country. It desiccates them. preserves them, almost. A building abandoned in 1950 can still have its curtains hanging in the windows. The paint fades and the wood splits, and the glass goes milky with dust, but the structure stays. That appealed to me. I liked the idea that these places were still there, still waiting. For the first two years, I stuck close to home, photographing places within a two-hour drive.

After that, I started ranging further out. I'd get a tip on an old forum, or find a reference in a county history archive, or just spot something on satellite imagery that looked interesting, a grid of streets where there shouldn't be streets, the dark rectangle of a foundation, the faint shadow of something that used to be a town. Then I'd drive out and see what was left. I never brought anyone with me, not because I was being secretive about it, but because the people in my life weren't interested, and honestly I preferred the solitude.

When you're alone in a place like that, you can take your time. You can sit with a room for an hour if you want. You're not managing anyone else's energy or waiting for someone to get bored. I had a system. I'd arrive during daylight, do a full walk of the site before I touched my camera, get a feel for the layout. Then I'd start shooting. If the light was good, I'd stay until it was gone.

Sometimes I'd set up camp nearby and go back at dawn. A lot of my favorite shots have come from. that early morning hour when the sky is still pale gray, and the shadows are long, and everything looks like it's just barely holding on. That's what I was planning to do in Hela Flat. I'd found a reference to it in a scanned copy of a county assessor's report from 1989. The report listed it as a formerly inhabited settlement, currently unoccupied, infrastructure decommissioned. Before that, it had been a company town, the kind built specifically to house workers for a copper mine about four miles to the east. The mine closed in 1971. Most people left within a year after that. By the mid-70s it was

empty. The assessor's report mentioned a water tower, a community building, about 40 residential structures, and a grid of unpaved streets. There were no photographs in the report, which was partly why it interested me. Most of the places I'd found through archives had already been documented by other photographers. Hila Flat hadn't shown up in any of the exploration communities I followed. It wasn't on any of the lists. As far as I could tell, nobody had been out there to shoot it. Getting specific coordinates took some work. The settlement wasn't labeled on any current map. I cross-referenced the legal description in the assessor's report with topographic maps and satellite imagery until I found what I was looking for. A faint grid of streets visible from above.

A cluster of shapes that didn't match the surrounding terrain. And the thin vertical line of the water tower about 200 yards north of the main cluster. I drove out on a Thursday in late October. The drive took just under three hours from my house, the last 45 minutes on unpaved roads. I had my truck, a full tank of gas, two days of food and water, my camera gear, and a sleeping bag. I'd told one person where I was going, my neighbor, a retired woman named Carol, who kept an eye on my place when I traveled. I'd given her the coordinates and said if she hadn't heard from me by Sunday evening to call someone. She'd heard that from me before. It was just part of the routine. I arrived a little after two in the afternoon. The day was clear and cold, which is typical for that part of New

Mexico in October. The sky was the kind of deep blue you only get at altitude and the light was good, sharp and low, casting long shadows even in the middle of the day. The town was more intact than I'd expected. I parked on what had been the main street and sat in the truck for a few minutes, just looking. The buildings were adobe and wood frame, the adobe structures in better shape than the wood ones. Most had their windows intact, or at least partially intact. A few had doors. The main street was maybe 300 yards long, lined on both sides by what had been a mix of commercial and residential buildings, a post office, a general store. A small building with a faded sign I couldn't read, and a row of worker cottages on each side of the street. The water tower

stood at the north end, visible above the roof lines. It was a standard old-style elevated tank on a steel frame, the kind you see all over the rural southwest. The tank itself was painted a dark rust color, though I couldn't tell from a distance if that was intentional or just age. There was a light mounted near the top of the tank. A small red aviation warning light. The kind installed on tall structures to alert low-flying aircraft. It wasn't on, not in the afternoon light. I got out of the truck, stretched, and started my walk-through. The first thing I noticed was the smell. Most abandoned structures have a particular smell. Dust, old wood, sometimes animal waste, sometimes the chemical sweetness of slow decay. This place smelled

like that, mostly. But there was something else underneath it. Faint enough that I wasn't sure I wasn't imagining it. Cigarette smoke. Not fresh, but not old either. The kind that settled into a space over time. I told myself it was probably coming from outside. Wind carries things in the desert. I walked the length of the main street, then the side streets, then came back and started looking more carefully at individual buildings. The photography could wait. I always do the walk first. The buildings were mostly what I'd expected. Interiors stripped of anything valuable, floors covered in decades of dust and debris, rodent nests in the corners, a few pieces of furniture too ruined to be worth taking. One house still had a cast iron stove in the kitchen,

bolted to the floor, too heavy to move. Another had a wooden bed frame in one of the back rooms, the mattress long gone. Normal stuff. Nothing that surprised me. I was about a an hour into the walkthrough when I noticed the footprints. They were in the dust on the floor of one of the larger houses near the center of the street. Fresh looking, not crisp exactly, but not filled in or blurred the way old prints get. Work boots, large, a deep tread. They went in through the front door and across the main room toward the back of the house. I stood there for a moment. I wasn't immediately alarmed. It wasn't impossible that another photographer or hiker had been through recently. The roads were rough but passable with the right vehicle. I followed the

prints to the back room and found they stopped there. There was nothing in the back room, just debris, a collapsed shelf, and a window with most of the glass still in it. I went back outside and stood in the street. There was nobody around. No other vehicles. No sounds except the wind and somewhere in the distance a crow. I kept walking. The second thing I noticed was the door. It was on a house three buildings down from the one with the footprints, a small single-story adobe on the east side of the street. The door was wood, unpainted, weathered gray. Almost every other door in the town that was still hanging was either stuck completely open or stuck completely shut, warped into its frame by decades of heat cycles. This one was closed,

but not latched. When I pushed on it with two fingers it swung inward an inch, then stopped. The hinges had some resistance, but they moved. Someone had either opened and closed this door recently enough that the mechanism wasn't seized up, or the dry desert air had preserved it better than most. I wasn't sure which. I pushed it open the rest of the way and went inside. The interior was like the others. Dust, debris, the smell of old wood and time. One main room, a kitchen area, a back room, nothing obviously out of place. I almost missed it. I almost missed it. On the floor of the kitchen, in the corner nearest the back wall, was a small pile of ash, gray-white, fine, the kind left by a cigarette or a small fire.

It was surrounded by a faint ring of cleaner floor where dust had been displaced, as though someone had crouched or sat there. I took a photograph of it without really thinking about why. Then I went back outside and tried to think clearly, Okay, so someone had been here. recently, based on the footprints and the ash. That wasn't necessarily alarming. People came out to these places for all kinds of reasons.

Teenagers, hikers, other photographers, scrappers, though there wasn't much left to scrap. Sometimes people camped and abandoned structures for the same reason I did. They were there. They were out of the wind. And nobody was going to tell you to leave. I didn't see any camping equipment, no bedroom. no bed rolls, no food wrappers, no water containers. I told myself I was building a story out of almost nothing

and went back to my truck to get my camera. The light that afternoon was exceptional. I spent four hours shooting, and I knew by the end of the first hour that I had some of the best material I'd produced in years. The low October sun came in at a severe angle that cut through the doorways and windows and lit up the dust hanging in the air

and made the interiors look like something out of a painting. The water tower in the late afternoon was particularly good, long shadow stretching south across the street, the rust-colored tank against the blue sky, the frame catching the light in a way that showed every joint and rivet. I shot until the light was gone, then sat on the tailgate of my truck and ate dinner and watched the sky go dark. That's when I saw the light on the water tower blink on. I almost choked. I sat very still and watched it, red, slow. One blink every three seconds, roughly. The same pattern as any aviation warning light,

steady and consistent. I watched it for a full minute, counting the blinks, telling myself I was wrong about what I was seeing. I wasn't wrong. I got out my phone and looked at what I could find about the town. No grid power had served Gila Flat since the early 1980s. The assessor's report from 89 had specifically noted

that utilities had been decommissioned. There was no reason for that light to be working. Even if the fixture itself had been preserved, which was plausible in the dry desert air, there was no power source. Aviation warning lights draw current continuously. You can't run one off a battery that's been sitting for 40 years, unless the battery wasn't 40 years old.

I sat with that thought for a while. Solar, I told myself. Someone could have installed a small solar panel on the tip, tank to power the light. Maybe the county had done it as a navigation marker for small aircraft. Maybe some preservation group had done it as part of a project. There were explanations that didn't require anything strange, but I kept thinking about the footprints, the door with the working hinges, the ash on the kitchen floor. I decided I wasn't going to sleep in the town. I'd planned to camp there, but I drove my truck about a quarter mile down the road instead and pulled

off behind a rise where I couldn't see the main street. I could still see the water tower light from there, blinking red against the black sky. I slept poorly. I woke up several times and looked at the light. It was always on. In the morning I went back. I told myself in the daylight that I'd been overreacting. The light was probably solar-powered. The footprints were probably a hiker from weeks ago who just happened to leave clear prints in a protected interior. The ash was old and I'd misjudged it. I spent the morning shooting. I was focused on the interiors of buildings I hadn't gotten to the previous day, the ones on the back streets. Most of them were similar to what I'd already seen. The third thing I noticed was the cigarette. I found it in the

back room of a house on the westernmost street, near what had been the edge of the settlement. The room was small and the single window faced east, which meant it would have been in shadow most of the day. There was a wooden crate against the wall under the window, the kind used for dry goods, turned upright to serve as a seat or table. On top of the crate was a cigarette, not a stub. More than half of it remained, unsmoked. It had burned down on its own and gone out. The ash was still attached, the whole length of it intact, unbroken. That only happens when a cigarette is set down carefully and allowed to burn untouched. I held my hand near the ass. I held my hand near the ash without touching it. Warm, not dramatically warm, but noticeably warmer than the ambient temperature

of the room, which was cold in the morning shade. That cigarette had been lit within the last few hours. I straightened up and looked out the window. The view from that room looked east across the back of the settlement, toward the other structures, and beyond them the open desert. Nothing moved. The morning was completely still. I walked back to my truck fast, not quite running, and sat inside with the doors locked. I thought about leaving. I almost did. But I'd been looking for this town for months, and the light was exceptional, and I hadn't

finished shooting the water tower up close, which was the photograph I most wanted. I gave myself 20 minutes to calm down. Then I made a decision. I would spend two more hours shooting, focus on the water tower, and then leave. I would be back in my truck on the road before noon. I spent those two hours working efficiently and trying not to think too hard. I got the water tower shots I wanted. I shot the main street from several angles in the morning light. I kept my ears open and I kept looking around, but I didn't see anyone and I didn't hear anything. By 11.30, I was packed and

ready to go. I drove back to the main street to do one last pass before leaving. I had an irrational but persistent need to look at that house with the ash on the kitchen floor one more time. I don't know what I expected to find. I just felt like I needed to look. I almost wish I hadn't. The footprints had changed. I hadn't looked at the floor closely enough on my second visit to the house. But now, standing in the kitchen again, I could see them clearly. The original prints I'd seen the day before, the work-boot tread, moving from the front room to the back, were still there. But there were newer ones overlaid on them. Smaller, different tread. These came in through the back window. I turned and looked at the back window. The bottom half of the glass was intact.

The top half was missing and had been for a long time. The frame was weathered bare and the sill was layered in old dust. But on the inside of the sill, below the intact, lower pain. There were two marks where the dust had been disturbed, handprints almost, more like where someone had put their hands to brace themselves while they stepped through. Someone had climbed in through the back window and stood in the kitchen and watched. The prints showed they'd stood in one place, facing the front of the house for what looked like some time. The dust was compressed in a defined area rather than just brushed aside by movement. Then they'd turned and gone back out the way they came.

I didn't wait after that. I walked out of the house, got in my truck, and I drove. I didn't stop to get my tripod from where I'd left it leaning against the community building. I didn't stop for anything. I just drove. I made it back to the main road. I drove for about 20 minutes before I felt like I could breathe normally again. I pulled over and sat with the engine running and thought through what I'd seen.

someone was in that town not a hiker who'd passed through someone who was using the space who kept coming back who had a reason to be there that they hadn't advertised to anyone the light on the water tower the fresh signs of occupation and now the window prints

someone had seen me in that house and stood there watching me through the kitchen and not announced themselves that last part was what I kept coming back to a normal person someone with nothing to hide would have said something. Hello, I'm here too.

Even if they'd been startled, even if they'd wanted to give me space, a person with normal intentions would have eventually made their presence known. They hadn't. I thought about calling someone, the sheriff's office maybe, but I had nothing concrete, no crime, no description of a person, just footprints and an ash pile in a working light on a tower that shouldn't have power. I wasn't sure what I'd even say. I drove home.

I'm telling you all of this because what happened that night is the part I haven't been able to get out of my head. And the earlier details are what make it make sense. I didn't go back the next day. I went back the following week. I know. I've had people tell me that was a mistake, and they're probably right. But I'd left my tripod there. It was a good one, expensive, and beyond the money I'd been using it for four years,

and I knew exactly how it handled. I didn't want to lose it. And I told myself that whatever was happening in Gila Flat was probably intermittent. Whoever was using it was likely not there every day, and if I went back in the middle of the week midday, I'd get my tripod and be gone in 20 minutes. I drove out on a Wednesday. I arrived around noon, parked on the main street.

Midday light is harsh and flat and not good for photography, which meant the town looked different than it had before, bleached out, shadowless, smaller somehow. The water tower light was off. The street was empty. I walked straight to the community building where I'd left the tripod. It was still there, leaning against the wall exactly where I'd left it. I picked it up, slung it over my shoulder, and started walking back to the truck.

I passed the house with the kitchen ash on the way. I didn't mean to look inside, but I did, out of habit, out of the same compulsion that had made me go back to it the week before. There was a bedroll in the main room, not elaborate, just a sleeping pad and a dark-colored blanket rolled up and pushed against the far wall. Next to it, a small plastic container with a lid, the kind people used to store food, and a lantern, the battery-powered kind, dark. Someone was sleeping there. I left without running, but I moved quickly.

I got to my truck, put the tripod in the bed, got in, and started the engine. As I turned to back out of the street, I glanced in my rearview mirror out of reflex. There was a man standing at the far end of the main street. He was maybe 200 yards away, which in the flat midday light was close enough for me to see that he was tall, wearing dark work clothes and standing completely still. He was facing me. He might have been watching me. At that distance I couldn't see his face.

I backed out onto the access road and drove away, and I didn't look in the mirror again until I was on the main road. I thought about it for the next three days and told myself I was done with Heela Flat. Then I went back. The third time I went back, I'm still not entirely sure why. There was something unfinished about it. I kept looking at the photographs I'd taken

and thinking about the ones I hadn't gotten yet. The town at night, the water tower light blinking in the dark. As a set of images, the collection felt incomplete without them, and underneath that, I think there was something else, something stubborn, and maybe not very smart. I didn't like the idea of being run out of a place by someone who hadn't even said a word to me. I hadn't done anything wrong. I had as much right to be there as anyone. I drove out on a Friday afternoon, arriving at the town around four.

enough light left to shoot the golden hour, then I'd stay into the night and get the tower shots. I'd be back on the road by midnight. I did the golden hour shoot. The light was as good as it had been the first time, maybe better. I worked the main street and the side streets, and then spent an hour on the water tower, shooting it from every angle, getting the shots I'd planned. At dusk, I moved into one of the houses on the second story. Not all of them had second floors, but a few did, and I'd found a good one near the center of the main street with a window that looked directly at the tower. I wanted to shoot the light coming on at full dark, and from the second floor, the angle would let me get the tower against the sky, without including too much of the street.

I set up by the window, the light came on right around full dark, same as before, red, slow, one blink every three seconds. I shot it for a while, got some frames I was happy with, I'd been there maybe two hours when I saw the man. He came from the east side of the settlement, from the direction I had not been watching. I saw him cross the open space between two buildings and walked toward the base of the water tower. He was moving in a way that suggested he knew where he was going. No hesitation.

He reached the tower and started climbing the ladder. I pulled back from the window. My instinct was to not be seen and I wasn't sure why that instinct was so strong, but I I trusted it. I stayed back from the glass and watched. He climbed slowly. The tower was maybe 70 feet tall, and the ladder was on the east side, partly shadowed, and I couldn't see much detail. Just the shape of him moving upward, hand over hand, steady. He reached the top. He moved around the top of the tank, and then the light went out. Not a flicker, not a failure. It went out the way a light goes out when someone turns it off. One moment's a moment.

it was blinking, the next it wasn't. The sky over the tower went completely dark. I didn't move. I stood back from the window in the dark room and I didn't move, and I tried to think about what that meant. He'd climbed up there to turn the light off, which meant he knew it was on, which meant he'd been watching the town and he'd seen me arrive, or he'd seen my truck, or he'd seen my light moving around in the houses, and he'd decided that the red light on the tower was something he didn't one anymore. He'd turned it off so I couldn't see it, or so something else couldn't. The second thought was worse and I pushed it away. I stood there in the dark room and waited. My eyes adjusted. There was starlight coming through the window, and I could make out the shapes of things,

the frame, the floor, the doorway behind me. The footsteps started maybe ten minutes later. I heard them on the street below, slow, even, not hurried. The sound of the sound of boots on packed dirt moving in a measured rhythm around the perimeter of the house. I held completely still. They went around the front, then down the east side, then quiet for a moment, the back, and then up the west side and back to the front. One circuit. Then they started another. I counted three full circuits before I let myself think clearly enough to make a plan. The front door was not an option. The stairs were on the interior east wall. The footsteps had been closest on that side. which meant the east was where he was spending the most time.

The window I'd been shooting from faced north, toward the tower, but it was a 12-foot drop to the street, and I'd have to lower myself and hang before dropping, and even then I'd probably roll an ankle. The back window. The back of the house faced a stretch of open ground before it reached the next row of buildings, and beyond that the desert.

There was no street back there, no reason for him to be watching that side as closely. The drop looked like about eight. or nine feet from the sill, not nothing, but survivable if I went feet first and bent my knees. I moved quietly to the back room. The window was intact. I ran my fingers along the frame and found a latch at the top. It was old and stiff. I put both hands on it and worked it slowly, stopping every time I heard the footsteps approach the backside of the house. It took maybe five minutes to get it open. I pushed the window up. Cold air came in. I looked to,

down, eight feet maybe nine. Below was bare dirt. The footsteps were on the front side. I sat on the sill, turned myself around, lowered until I was hanging by my hands from the sill, and dropped. The landing was hard. I went down to one knee and stayed low and listened. The footsteps were still going. Front, east side, pause, I moved. I ran across the open ground to the back row of buildings, got into the shadow of one, worked along it to the edge, and then ran again into the open desert. No path, no light, just stars and flat ground and occasional scrub brush that I moved around or through, and a direction that I was pretty sure was south, toward where I'd left my truck. Behind me, I heard nothing for a long time. Then I heard something, footsteps, not on dirt,

on something firmer, moving at pace with mine, not running. but not slow either. I ran. I'm not a runner. I'm in decent shape for someone in their mid-forties, but I haven't run for distance since I was in high school. I ran anyway, across desert scrub in the dark with nothing but starlight and the occasional pale shape of a rock to navigate by. And somewhere behind me, and to my right there was someone keeping pace, not gaining, not falling back, just there. I hit the access road before I expected to and nearly fell. I turned south on the road and ran down the center of it and I could hear the footsteps stop. No gravel sound behind me, just silence.

My truck was where I'd left it, 200 yards down the road. I got in, got it started, and drove. I reported it to the Katrin County Sheriff's Office two days later. I gave them the coordinates and explained what I'd seen, the bed roll, the food container, the man on the water tower. They said they'd look into it, About three weeks after that, I got a call from a deputy whose name I've lost. He told me they'd gone out to the site.

There were signs of long-term habitation in several structures, some camping equipment, food stores, personal items. Whoever had been living there was gone by the time they arrived. The deputy said they'd found no evidence of anything illegal and had no basis for further investigation. He asked if I'd had any trouble out there. I told him about the night I'd fled. the footsteps, the person I'd heard following me. He didn't say much to that.

He asked if I'd seen anyone clearly enough to describe them. I said no. There was a pause, and then he said something I've thought about many times since. He said that this wasn't the first call they'd gotten about that area, that there'd been at least two others over the past few years, both involving people who'd gone out there to explore and come back saying the same thing, someone watching, someone following, nobody ever seen clearly. He didn't say anything else after that, and neither did I. I've looked at my

photographs from those three visits probably a hundred times since then. Mostly they're what I expected, the buildings, the street, the tower, but there's one frame I keep coming back to. It's from the second visit, the midday one, the one where I saw the man standing at the end of the street in my rearview mirror. I wasn't shooting then. The camera was in the bag on the past passenger seat. But I had shot the main street on my way in that day, about ten minutes before I found the bed roll. One frame, looking north up the street toward the water tower. The buildings on either side, the tower at the end, the flat midday sky. In the gap between two buildings on the east side, about halfway up the frame, there is a shape that I did not notice when I

edited the image the first time. Dark, vertical, standing in the shadow between the structures. The right height to be a person, the right proportions, standing very still, which is why I missed it. I was looking at the buildings, not the spaces between them. I don't know how long he'd been standing there before I pulled onto the street. I don't know how long he watched me before I saw him in the mirror. I know he was there when I thought I was alone, and I know I wasn't the first person he'd watched leave, and I know that the light on the water tower, the one that shouldn't have worked. The one he climbed up to turn off was on that first night before he knew I was there. What it was for I still don't know, but it was for something. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel

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