Just Creepy: Scary Stories - 3 Disturbing Cave Exploration Horror Stories

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

3 Disturbing Cave Exploration Horror StoriesLinktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepyStory Credits:►Sent in to https://www.justcreepy.net/Music 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! 💀

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Ross, work your magic. I need to write this down while I still can, while I still remember the order of things. The doctors keep asking me to go over it again, and the investigators from the Bureau of Land Management have been here three times now, and every time I tell them what happened, they look at each other the way people do when they think someone has lost their mind. But I haven't. I wish I had. That would be easier.

My name is Owen Price. I'm a geological surveyor for the state of Colorado. And on October 14, 2003, I was part of a four-person team sent into the Harwell Mine Complex in Mineral County to locate members of a previous survey crew that had entered the system nine days earlier and never came out. The Harwell Complex isn't on most maps. It was a silver mine that operated from 1881 to 1897, and then it was a storage facility for the county until sometime in the 1920s, and then it was nothing.

The mine connects to a natural cave system that runs deep under the mountains. Nobody knows how deep because nobody has ever fully mapped it. The original miners broke through into the caves by accident in 1889 and lost four men in the first week. The cave system is massive, miles of it. The county sealed the connecting tunnels in 1903 and the mine entrance was gated shut in 1951. But in 2022, a group of hikers found a new opening, a sinkhole had collapsed about a quarter mile south of the main entrance

and broken through into one of the upper galleries. That got the BLM involved. They needed to assess the structural integrity of the whole system, figure out whether there was a risk of more collapses, whether the area needed to be closed off to the public. The first survey team went in on October 5th, six people. They had three days of supplies, a full communication setup, and detailed instructions to stay within the mine tunnels and not enter the cave system under any circumstances. On October 8th, their GPS transponders stopped transmitting, all six within the same hour. Search and rescue went in the next day but turned back after 300 yards. The tunnel had partially collapsed in two places. The air quality readings were borderline. They reported

hearing sounds deeper in the complex that they described in the official report as intermittent, percussive echoes of unknown origin. That's the cleaned up version. I talked to one of the SAR guys later, off the record. He told me it sounded like something hitting the walls, over and over, and then stopping, and then starting again, but closer. Nobody wanted to go back in. So they called us, my team. We were a technical survey crew with confined space rescue certification and experience in unstable mine environments. Four of us. Me, Dana Wellford, the crew lead, Thomas Herrera, structural engineer, and Kevin Oshiro, the communications and mapping specialist. Dana had 18 years in mining survey. She was calm in ways that made other people calm. Thomas was

quiet and precise and had a habit of testing things three times before he trusted them once. Kevin talked too much when he was nervous, which was most of the time, but he was the best underground mapper I'd ever worked with. He could build a three-dimensional picture of a tunnel system in his head, while the rest of us were still reading the compass. We arrived at the Harwell entrance at 6.15 in the morning. It was cold, 31 degrees, and the sun hadn't cleared the ridge yet. The original mine gate had been cut open by the first survey team. Their vehicles were still parked in the clearing. Two white BLM trucks with the logos on the doors. Nobody had touched them. The keys were still in the ignition of one. I remember that detail because it seemed wrong. They'd left in a hurry,

or they'd expected to come right back out. We geared up in near silence. Helmets with mounted lights, backup flashlights, respirators, radios, a GPS unit, 48 hours of food and water, first aid kits and a pair of atmospheric monitors. Dana gave the briefing and it was short. Go in. Follow the main tunnel. Find the first team or find evidence of what happened. Do not enter the cave system. If air quality drops below acceptable levels, we turn around. If we lose radio contact, we mark our position and retreat. Simple enough. The entrance was a horizontal at it cut straight into the mountainside. The timbers around the opening were old growth pine, darkened to the color of coal, and the crossbeams had warped and split in places, but the structure was still holding.

Pass the mouth, the air changed immediately. Warmer. Damp. The smell was mineral and stale, with something under it that I noticed but didn't identify at the time. Something organic, faint. The tunnel ran straight for about 200 feet, and then curved left and descended at a shallow grade. The walls were rough-cut stone with timber supports every 8 to 10 feet, and the floor was packed earth over rock, worn smooth by a century of foot traffic and orcarts. Old rail tracks were still bolted to the floor in some sections, rusted to the point where they crumbled if you stepped on them. Kevin was mapping as we moved, marking distances and turns on his tablet. Thomas was checking the support structures, tapping beams, examining the rock above us.

Dana led from the front. I was in the back. For the first 40 minutes there was nothing unusual. The tunnel branched twice, and both times Dana followed the main bore, the largest passage, the one the first team would have taken. The air was stale but breathable. The temperature held steady at about 54 degrees. Our radios worked. Our lights worked. Everything was fine.

Then we found the first collapse. The ceiling had come down across the full width of the tunnel. A pile of broken rock and splintered timber about six feet high, completely blocking the passage. Tomas examined it for a long time. He said the collapse wasn't natural. The support timbers hadn't failed from age or load. They'd been broken, snapped laterally. He showed me the fracture pattern. The wood had been struck from the side hard, and the grain had sheared clean. I asked him what could do that. He didn't answer.

Dana found a way around. There was a narrow side passage about 30 feet back, an old ventilation shaft that ran parallel to the main tunnel and reconnected on the other side of the collapse. It was tight. We had to take our packs off and push them through ahead of us. The walls were close enough to touch on both sides, and the ceiling scraped the tops of our helmets.

Kevin's breathing got loud in the confined space. Nobody said anything about it. On the other side, the main tunnel resumed, and that's where things started to change. The first thing I noticed was the marks on the walls. They were scratched into the stone at irregular intervals. Not carved, scratched, gouged, deep grooves in the rock, each one about four to six inches long, in groups of three or four.

They were at roughly chest height, and they appeared on both walls, sometimes on the ceiling. They didn't form letters or pictures. They were just marks. Random, frantic. The edges of the grooves were rough, and the rock dust from the scratching was still on the floor beneath them, which meant they were recent.

Tomas ran his fingers along one of the grooves and pulled his hand back. He looked at the rest of us and said that the scratch was deep. Whatever made it had removed a quarter inch of solid granite. Dana told us to keep moving. 200 yards past the collapse, we found the first helmet. It was sitting upright in the middle of the tunnel, and the light was still on, though the beam was weak and yellow. The helmet belonged to a woman named Dr. Sarah Hagen.

Her name was written on a strip of tape on the back, along with her team designation. The chin strap was broken, not unbuckled, broken, snapped. And the left side of the helmet had three deep gouges across the surface. The scratches went through the outer shell and into the foam liner beneath. Kevin picked it up and turned it over. There was blood on the inside, not a lot, a smear. He put it down and didn't say anything, and we kept walking. Over the next quarter mile, we found more signs of the first team.

A dropped pack with the contents scattered across the floor. A radio with the antenna snapped off. Water bottles, a clipboard with survey notes that stopped mid-sentence, and more scratches on the walls. Hundreds of them now. Some of them overlapped. Some of them were at floor level. Some were eight feet up. Then we found the blood. It was on the right wall of the tunnel at a point where the passage widened into a small gallery, one of the old ore sorting chambers. The blood was smeared across the stone in a long, dragging streak, waist height, running for about 12 feet. It was dried but not old, still dark, still red-brown, not black, and at the end of the

streak there was a handprint, clear, fingers spread, pressed hard into the stone, and then dragged downward, leaving five distinct trails. Kevin said something I don't want to write down. Dana told him to stop talking. The atmospheric monitor beeped. Thomas checked it. The oxygen levels were fine, but the CO2 was climbing. Not dangerous yet, but heading the wrong direction. Something ahead was producing carbon dioxide, or something was reducing the airflow. I asked Dana if we should turn back. She didn't answer right away. She was looking at the wall past the blood, at more of the scratch marks, but these were different. These were organized. Rows of short vertical lines, grouped in sets of five with a diagonal line through each group.

Talley marks. Someone from the first team had been counting something. I counted the marks. There were 37. I don't know what they were counting. I don't want to know. Dana said we'd go another 500 yards. If we didn't find any survivors by then, we'd mark the position and pull out and let a full rescue operation handle it. That was the right call. We should have made it sooner. The tunnel narrowed again and descended more steeply. The timber supports were older here, and many of them had failed entirely, leaving raw stone overhead with cracks running through it.

The floor was wet, water was seeping from the walls in thin streams, and the air tasted of iron and limestone. Our lights reflected off the wet surfaces, and created moving patterns on the walls that kept drawing my eyes to places where nothing was there, and then we reached the shaft. The tunnel ended at a wall, not a collapse, a wall, built from stacked stone blocks, mortared in place, stretching from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. It was old.

The mortar had calcified and gone hard and white. This was the seal, the barrier between the mine and the cave system, built in 1903 after the miners died. Or it had been a barrier, because someone had broken through it, the lower right section of the wall. wall had been dismantled. Blocks pulled out and stacked to the side, leaving an opening about three feet wide and four feet tall. The edges of the remaining wall were clean. The blocks had been removed carefully.

This wasn't an accident. Someone had opened the sealed shaft on purpose. Through the opening, there was darkness. Not the kind of darkness that your light cuts through. The kind that swallows the beam. Our headlamps reached maybe 20 feet past the wall and then just. stopped. The cave beyond was enormous. The air coming through the hole was cold, 15, maybe 20 degrees colder than the tunnel, and it carried a smell that hit me in the back of the throat,

wet animal, decay, ammonia, and something else. Something I had never smelled before. A thick mineral heaviness that coated my tongue and made my sinuses burn. Nobody moved. Dana stepped forward and aimed her headlamp through the opening. The beam caught the cave floor, which was covered in a layer of fine silt or dust, white-gray, undisturbed, except for a path of footprints leading away from the opening and into the dark.

Six sets of boot prints, walking in single file. The first survey team had gone through. Dana turned to look at us. She was about to say something. I could see her forming the words. Then something screamed, not screamed.

That's not right. there isn't a word for the sound it made. It came from the other side of the wall, from the cave, and it filled the tunnel so completely that I couldn't tell what direction it was coming from. It was high-pitched and sustained, and had a vibration in it that I could feel in my chest, in my teeth, not a howl, not a shriek, mechanical, almost. A frequency that didn't belong to anything alive, and yet it was clearly alive because it changed pitch. It rose and fell and rubbed. rose again, and there was a pattern to it, a rhythm, and then it stopped. The silence afterward was worse. Kevin whispered, what was that? Dana held up her hand, wait. We waited. 30 seconds,

a minute, two minutes, nothing. Tomas had his hand on the wall. He said he could feel vibrations, faint, rhythmic, coming from the other side of the sealed shaft. He said it felt like footsteps. Heavy, slow, getting closer. Dana said one word, out. We turned. We started back up the tunnel. We moved fast, but we didn't run. Running underground in a mine with unstable timbers and wet floors will kill you just as fast as whatever you're running from. We walked with purpose. Dana in front, me behind her, Tomas behind me, Kevin in the back. We made it about 200 yards. Then the sound came again, the same scream but closer, and this time there was a second sound with it, a rapid scraping, stone on stone, something moving through the opening in the wall,

something pushing through that three-by-four foot gap, and the scraping was its body against the blocks. Kevin said, it's coming through, nobody responded. We moved faster. The tunnel was ascending now, and the floor was slick and my boots kept losing traction on the wet stone. Dana's headlamp bounced with each step and sent wild shadows swinging along the walls behind us. The scraping stopped.

And then there was a new sound. Impacts. Rapid heavy impacts on the tunnel floor. Not footsteps. Too fast. Too irregular. Something moving on more than two legs and moving fast. And each time it struck the ground, the sound was sharp and hard.

Claws on stone. Or bone on stone. Kevin started running. I heard his breathing spike and his footsteps break into a sprint, and Thomas grabbed for his arm but missed. Kevin ran past me, past Dana, his headlamp beam swinging wildly, and Dana shouted at him to stop, but he didn't stop. Behind us, the thing was getting closer. I could hear it in the acoustic of the tunnel, the way the sound changed as it moved through the space. The impacts were getting louder. It was fast, inhumanly fast. It was covering ground at three or four times our pace. Dana grabbed my arm and pulled me into the side

passage, the ventilation shaft we'd used to bypass the collapse. She shoved me in ahead of her and pushed Tomas after me. Go, she said. Go, now. I went. Hands and knees in the narrow passage. Pack abandoned behind me, helmets scraping the ceiling, the stone under my palms wet and cold. Tomas was right behind me. Dana was behind him. And then Dana screamed. It wasn't a scream of fear. It was pain. A short, brutal sound cut off almost immediately.

Behind her, behind all of us, there was a rush of air and a sound of tearing fabric, and then a wet impact against the tunnel wall. I turned around. I couldn't see past Tomas. He had stopped moving. He was frozen in the passage, and his light was pointed back toward Dana,

and the shadows it cast were wrong. They were moving. They were shaking. And in the gap between Thomas's shoulder and the tunnel wall, I could see Dana's headlamp on the ground behind her, lying on its side, and in the edge of that light I could see her leg, just her leg, from the knee down,

and blood, a lot of blood, on the walls, on the floor, spreading, and past her, in the darkness where the ventilation shaft met the main tunnel, I saw something, just for a second, A shape, pale, large, limbs too long for its body, folded and pressed into the narrow space. It was hunched in the opening, and its head was tilted sideways, and I couldn't see features, I couldn't see a face, but I knew it was looking at us, I could feel it, not with any sixth sense, with my skin. The air pressure changed when it moved. I could feel it breathing. It reached forward with one arm. The arm was long, absurd.

thirdly long, and the hand, or what I have to call a hand, had fingers that extended a foot past where fingers should end, and each one terminated in something curved and dark and sharp that caught the light. That arm reached into the passage, passed Dana's body, and one of those fingers touched the soul of Thomas's boot. Thomas made a sound, not a word, a vibration in his throat. His whole body was shaking. The finger hooked into the rubber of his boot sole and Pulled, gently, testing. I grabbed Tomas by the collar of his jacket and hauled him forward. He came alive and started crawling, scrambling, tearing through the passage,

and behind us the thing screamed again. And this time it was right there, filling the ventilation shaft with that sound. And the walls vibrated and loose stone fell from the ceiling onto our backs and into our hair. We burst out the other side of the passage and into the main tunnel, the side with the entrance. I turned and looked back into the ventilation shaft and saw nothing. Just darkness. But I could hear it, moving, scraping, trying to fit through the passage. The shaft was narrow, maybe 18 inches across, and whatever it was, it was bigger than that.

I could hear stone breaking. It was widening the passage. I pulled Thomas to his feet. He was bleeding from somewhere, his face, his hands. I didn't look closely. We ran. We ran back up the tunnel. The grade was against us and my lungs burned and my legs shook, and I couldn't think about anything except the next step, the next breath, the circle of light ahead of me. Behind us the sounds continued, the breaking of stone, a grinding, cracking noise that echoed up the tunnel.

And then silence, and then the impacts again. It was through. It was in the tunnel behind us. Tomas tripped and went down hard on his hands and knees. I hauled him up. We kept going. The tunnel curved to the right and the incline steepened, and I could see tracks on the floor from our earlier passage,

bootprints in the dust. And I followed them because I couldn't think. I just followed the marks on the ground. Behind us, the thing had stopped screaming. The only sound it made was the rapid percussion of its limbs on the floor of the tunnel, and it was getting closer. Then I heard Kevin, ahead of us, up the tunnel, his voice echoing off the walls. He was shouting our names.

I screamed back at him. I told him to run. I told him to get out of the mine. The tunnel straightened, and I could see daylight. A faint gray rectangle at the end of a long ascending passage. The entrance. Three hundred yards away, maybe less. But the thing behind us was faster than we were, and I could feel it closing, and the

sound of its movement had changed. The impacts were heavier now, more spaced out, as if it had reared up, as if it was taking longer strides. We reached the point where the tunnel narrowed. An old timber frame, half collapsed, creating a bottleneck. I pushed Tomas through first. He stumbled and went down on the other side but got up again. I squeezed through after him. My jacket caught on a splintered beam. I ripped free, leaving fabric. behind. I looked back. It was there, 40 feet behind me, and I saw it in the full beam of my headlamp, and I will see it every time I close my eyes for the rest of my life. It was pale, not white, not albino, the color of cave stone, a gray that absorbed light instead of reflecting it.

The body was long and low to the ground, but it had straightened up, partially, and its torso was vaguely upright. The limbs. I counted six, maybe more. were jointed in ways that don't make sense, bending backward and sideways, and the fingers or claws at the end of each limb were what had been making the scratches in the walls. They were dark, almost black against the pale body, curved, each one a foot long at least. The head was the worst part. It was too large for the body, and it was smooth. No features, no eyes that I could see, no nose, just a mouth. A wide, horizontal slit that extended from one side of the head to the other, and it was open,

and the inside was dark and wet, and it was the source of the sound. As I watched, the slit contracted, and that scream came again, so close that my ears cracked, and something warm ran down the side of my neck. It moved toward the bottleneck. Its body contracted and elongated, and it pushed itself through the narrow space between the timbers. The wood groaned. The beams cracked. And the tunnel collapsed.

Not all of it, just the section around the bottleneck. The old timber frame finally gave way under the stress, and the rock above it came down in a rush of dust and debris that blew past me and filled the passage with choking gray air. I fell backward. Something hit my shoulder, a rock, a piece of timber, and I felt the bones shift in a way that sent a bolt of heat through my whole arm. I lay on my back in the dust in the dark for what felt like a long time.

My headlamp was cracked, but still working. The beam cut through the haze and showed me the collapse, a wall of rock and broken wood filling the tunnel from floor to ceiling, completely blocking the passage. On the other side something hit the wall, hard, once, twice, three times. The whole pile shuddered. Dust cascaded from the ceiling. Small rocks fell and bounced off my legs. Then it stopped.

The silence was total. Thomas was sitting against the wall 15 feet ahead of me. He had both hands pressed against the sides of his head and he was rocking slightly. I called his name. He didn't respond. I called again. He looked at me but his eyes weren't right. They were unfocused, wide.

I got up. My shoulder was dislocated. I could feel the joint sitting wrong under the skin. My right arm hung loose at my side and the pain was constant and searing. but I could walk. I pulled Tomas to his feet with my left hand. He stood, but I had to guide him. He walked when I pushed him.

He stopped when I stopped pushing. We made it to the entrance in eight minutes. Kevin was outside, standing next to one of the BLM trucks. He was on the satellite phone, talking rapidly, gesturing with one hand. When he saw us, he dropped the phone and ran over and grabbed Tomas, and the three of us walked out of the mine and into the daylight. It was 1142 in the morning. We'd been underground for just over five hours.

The sun was out. The sky was blue. The air was cold and thin and clean. And I stood in it and breathed it and felt absolutely nothing. The rescue helicopter arrived at 1230. They took Tomas first. He hadn't spoken since the tunnel. The EMTs treated my shoulder on site.

They relocated the joint, which I do not recommend experiencing, and wrapped my arm in a sling and put me on the second helicopter. Kevin rode with me. He talked the entire flight. I don't remember most of what he said. I remember him asking about Dana. I remember shaking my head. I remember him going quiet for a little while after that.

The BLM sent a full team to the Harwell complex two days later. Twelve people, with structural engineers and a collapse rescue crew and armed rangers. They entered the mine and reached the. the collapse site where the bottleneck had been. They cleared enough debris to get a camera through. The tunnel on the other side was empty. No sign of the thing I saw. No sign of Dana's body.

They found blood. They found more scratches on the walls. They found a boot, one of Dana's, with three parallel cuts through the leather and the steel toe bent outward. They found the sealed shaft wall at the end of the tunnel, with the opening exactly as I described. But they did not find Dana, and they did not find any of the six members of the first survey team. The BLM sealed the mine, permanently. They collapsed the main entrance with controlled charges and filled the sinkhole with concrete.

The official report lists all seven people, the six from the first team and Dana. As missing, presumed deceased due to structural collapse and adverse underground conditions. I know what I saw. Tomas knows too, I think, but he hasn't spoken to anyone. about it. He's in a care facility in Grand Junction. The doctors say it's acute stress disorder. They say he may recover. They say he may not. When I visited him, he was sitting in a chair by the window, looking at the mountains. I sat with him for an hour and didn't say anything, because what would I say? I think he knew I was there. His hand twitched when I put mine next to it. Kevin filed

his own report. It was technical and precise, and contained nothing about the thing in the tunnel, because Kevin didn't see it. He was ahead of us. He heard the sounds. He heard Dana scream, but he didn't see it. He told me once, over the phone, two months after, that he was glad he didn't see it. He said he could hear in my voice that seeing it had done something to me that hearing it hadn't done to him. He's right. I've replayed it thousands of times, the shape of it, the way it moved, the size of it, the impossibility of it, something that large, that fast, living in a cave system that no one has mapped, that no one knew was inhabited. I've thought about what it eats, what it does in the dark, year after year,

decade after decade, in that cold black space under the mountain. I've thought about the miners in 1889 who broke through the wall and lost four men. I've thought about the sealed shaft and the hundred and twenty years of silence behind it, and the survey team that opened it back up without knowing what they were opening. I've thought about the tally marks on the wall, 37. I think about them a lot. Here is what I know. Something lives in the cave system beneath the mountains in Mineral County, Colorado. It has lived there for a long time. It is large and fast, and it hunts by sound, and when the mine was sealed, it was contained. And when the seal was broken, it was not contained anymore. They filled the sinkhole with concrete. They could

collapse the entrance. But I've looked at geological surveys of that area. The cave system extends for miles. There are fractures and fissures throughout the region. The ground is limestone and granite, riddled with passages and voids. And the system connects to other systems that connect to other systems. And nobody, nobody, has ever mapped all of it. They sealed one entrance. There are others. I sleep with the lights on now. All of them. And I don't go into the mountains anymore. I don't go into basements. I don't go anywhere that the ceiling is low and the walls are close, and the dark is the kind of dark that your light can't cut through.

I tell myself it's contained. I tell myself the concrete and the collapsed entrance are enough. I tell myself that it stays in the deep places, in the cold and the wet and the black, and that it doesn't come up. But I don't believe it. And sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet and the windows are dark,

I press my hand against the floor and I hold still and I wait. And I feel vibrations, faint, rhythmic, coming from below. And I tell myself it's the furnace or the water pipes or the foundation settling. And I don't believe that either. Hey, honey, it's mom. Did you know if we switch to Verizon we can get four phones for $0 plus four lines for $25 a line? Call me back. Me again.

That's just $100 a month for four lines on Unlimited Welcome. Plus four phones, no trade in needed. Call me. It's mom. America's Best Network, Verizon. That's the one we're talking about. I'll send you text. America's Best Network based on Root Metrics, Best Overall Mobile Network Performance, U.S. second half, 2025. Four new lines and a limit and welcome in auto pay. See Verizon.com for details. Who cares about your poops? Ollie does. That's why Ali's science-backed gut health lineup helps support your family's regularity. From daily probiotics to fiber gummies your kiddos will love. Find it all on Ali.com.

That's OLLLY.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This happened in the fall of 2019, and I've gone back and forth on whether to talk about it. I told a few people early on, my girlfriend, a couple of close friends, and they all had the same reaction. They'd go quiet, nod, and then try to explain it away. I stopped bringing it up after a while, but it's been years now, and I still think about it more often than I'd like to admit.

I need to get it out somewhere. I've been caving since I was 19. My buddy Nolan got me into it. He'd grown up in eastern Kentucky, and his dad used to take him into wild caves when he was a kid. By the time I met Nolan in college, he already had hundreds of hours underground. He taught me everything, how to read the rock, how to make him. manage rope, how to stay calm and tight spaces. I trusted him completely. By 26, I'd done maybe

40 or 50 trips into various cave systems across Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and a handful in Virginia. Some were well-mapped tourist systems we'd sneak into after hours. Others were true wild caves with no trails, no lights, no handrails, just raw geology and darkness. The cave I'm going to tell you about was in eastern Tennessee, about two hours south of Knoxville. I'm not going to name it or give specifics on the location. I know that's frustrating, but I have my reasons, and they'll make sense by the end. It was me, Nolan, and a guy named Derek. Derek was newer to caving, maybe a dozen trips under his belt, but he was solid, calm, athletic, good at following instructions. The three of us had done a few trips together already, and we worked well as a group. Nolan had heard about

this particular cave from a guy he knew through an online caving forum. The entrance was on private land, but the owner was apparently fine with people going in as long as they signed a liability waiver and didn't leave any trash. Nolan handled all of that. He got us the coordinates, printed out a partial survey map that someone had uploaded to the forum, and we set a date for the second weekend of October. We drove down on a Friday night, camped near the property, and woke up early Saturday morning. The weather was cool and overcast. I remember the leaves were just starting to turn. We packed our gear, checked our lights, and hiked about 40 minutes through dense forest to reach the entrance. The entrance itself was unremarkable. A horizontal crack at the base of a

low limestone bluff, maybe three feet tall and six feet wide. You had to duck to get in, but once you were past the first ten feet, the ceiling rose to about eight feet and stayed there. The passage was wide and dry and the floor was mostly flat gravel, easy walking. We moved in single file, Nolan in front, me in the middle, Derek in the back. Our headlamps cut bright white cones through the dark. The air was cool, probably mid-50s and very still. no wind, no sound except our boots on gravel, and the occasional drip of water from somewhere deeper in. For the first 30 minutes, it was a textbook cave trip. Nolan would stop every now and then to check the survey map, point out a formation, or mark our route with small reflective tabs

he'd stick to the walls with putty. We passed through a couple of rooms, one with a low ceiling covered in tiny stalactites, another with a shallow pool of water that we had to wade through. unusual. About 45 minutes in, the main passage narrowed to a tight crawl. We got down on our bellies and pushed through maybe 20 feet of low sandy passage before it opened up again on the other side into a much larger room. Nolan called it the junction because the room had three exits besides the one we'd come through. The survey map showed two of those exits had been partially explored. The third was marked with a question mark. We took a break in the junction, ate some granola bars, drank water, checked our gear. Derek asked about the unmarked passage, and Nolan

said the guy from the forum had mentioned it, but warned that it got tight and he'd never pushed it very far. Nolan wanted to try it. That was the whole reason we'd come, to explore something new. I was fine with it. Derek was fine with it. We packed up and headed into the unmarked passage. It started wide, but got narrow fast. Within 10 minutes we were in a hands and knees crawl and the ceiling kept dropping. The floor changed from gravel to clay, and the clay was damp and cold and stuck to everything. My gloves, my knees, my elbows. The smell changed too. It went from that clean mineral smell you get in most caves to something heavier, earthier, organic almost. I didn't think much of it at the time. Caves smell different in different sections. Fat guano, decaying plant

matter that washes in from the surface, standing water, there are plenty of explanations. We crawled for what felt like a long time, probably 15 or 20 minutes. The passage twisted and turned, but never quite pinched out. There was always just enough room to keep going. At one point, Nolan stopped and said he could feel air moving against his face, which was a good sign. Moving air usually means the passage connects to something bigger ahead. He was a was right. After another few minutes of crawling, the passage opened into a tall, narrow corridor. We could stand up again, but only barely. The walls were close on both sides, maybe two and a half feet apart. We had to turn sideways to move through some sections. This went on for a while.

The corridor would widen, then narrow, then widen again. The floor sloped gradually downward. I checked my watch, and we'd been in the cave for about an hour and 45 minutes. We were deep, and then we came to the room. It was big. That was the first thing I noticed. After all that tight passage, suddenly there was just space. The ceiling was high enough that our headlamps couldn't reach it, just blackness up above. The floor was flat and dry and covered in a fine, pale dust that puffed up around our boots when we walked.

The walls curved away on either side and disappeared into the dark. Nolan let out a low whistle. Nobody's been in here, he said. He was grinning. This was what he lived for. Setting foot somewhere no one had been before. Or at least somewhere that felt that way. We spread out a little and explored the room.

It was roughly oval-shaped, maybe 60 feet long and 40 feet wide. The ceiling, when I angled my headlamp just right, looked to be about 25 feet up. There were some nice formations along the far wall. flowstone cascades and a few columns where stalactites and stalagmites had joined. Derek found another passage at the back of the room, smaller, roughly circular, about four feet in diameter. It went back into the rock at a slight downward angle. Should we push it? Derek asked. Nolan checked the time. We'd agreed on a turnaround point of three hours in, which gave us plenty of time to get back out before our lights started getting low.

We had about an hour left. Let's take a look, Nolan said. If it goes tight, we turn around. We went in. Nolan first, then me, then Derek, crouching, not crawling. The passage was smooth, and the air was noticeably warmer. That organic smell was stronger here, heavier. It sat in the back of my throat.

After about five minutes, the passage opened into a second room, smaller than the first, maybe 20 feet across. The ceiling was lower. maybe eight or nine feet. The floor was the same pale dust, but there was something different about this room. It took me a few seconds to realize what it was. There were marks on the walls, not carvings exactly, more like scratches, long parallel scratches in the limestone, grouped in sets of four or five. They were at various heights, some near the floor, some at chest level, some above my head. They covered large sections of both walls. Are those claw marks? Derek asked. His voice was quieter than it had been. Nolan walked up to one of the walls and ran his fingers along the

scratches. Could be geological, he said. Differential weathering. You see stuff that looks biological all the time in caves. He didn't sound totally convinced. I didn't say anything. I was looking at the marks near the floor. Some of them were deep, half an inch into the rock at least, and they didn't look random. There was a pattern to them, short bursts of parallel lines, spaced evenly, repeated over and over. Whatever had made them had done it with force and consistency. There was another passage at the far end of this room, too, even smaller, maybe three feet in diameter. I could feel air moving out of it, warm air, with that same heavy, organic smell. I want to see what's back there, Nolan said. We're running low on time, I said. I checked my watch. We had about 50 minutes before our agreed

turnaround. Just a quick look, five minutes. I didn't want to go. That's the honest truth. Something about those scratches, that smell, that warm air pushing out of the dark. It all felt wrong, not dangerous in any way I could name, just wrong, but I went. We all went. The passage was tight. We had to get down on our stomachs and army crawl. The dust on the floor here was thicker, almost powdery, and it got into my nose and mouth as I pulled myself forward. My headlamp caught Nolan's boots a few feet ahead of me. I could hear Derek breathing behind me. We crawled for maybe three minutes. Then the passage opened up, and I pulled myself out onto the floor of a third room. This one was different. It was small, maybe 12 feet across, low ceiling. I could touch it if I

raised my arm. The walls were smooth and curved, and the floor was covered in that same pale dust. But there were things in the dust. Objects. I couldn't tell what they were at first. My headlamp picked up shapes, small, angular, scattered around the room. Nolan was already on his feet, moving his light across the floor. He stopped. Bones, he said. He was right. They were bones, small ones mostly. I'm not an expert, but they looked like they came from animals, rodents, maybe bats, possibly something larger. They were dry and brittle, and there were hundreds of them. the floor was littered with them. Could be an owl roost, Nolan said.

Owls regurgitate pellets full of bones. If there was a connection to the surface above us, there's no owl getting down here, I said. We just crawled on our stomachs for three minutes. Nolan didn't respond to that. He was moving his light along the far wall. There was another passage. Of course there was.

This one was different from the others, though. It was tall. and narrow, maybe five feet high but only about a foot and a half wide, a crack in the rock essentially, and the air coming out of it was warm and thick and smelled rotten, not just organic, rotten, and there was sound. I need to be precise about this because it's the part that still gets to me. The sound was rhythmic, slow and steady, about one cycle every four or five seconds. It was coming from deep inside that narrow crack in the wall.

If I had to describe it, I'd say it sounded like breathing, heavy, slow breathing, like something large, asleep. Do you guys hear that? I asked. Derek was standing behind me. He nodded. His face had gone pale, even in the warm light of our headlamps. Nolan was closer to the crack.

He was leaning toward it, tilting his head, listening. Could be air pressure, he said. Barometric breathing. Caves do that. The pressure equalizes with the source. surface and it creates a rhythmic airflow. I knew about barometric breathing. I'd experienced it before. It's a real phenomenon and it does sound strange if you're not expecting it. But what I'd heard in the past was subtle, a gentle push and pull of air like the cave sighing. This was louder,

wetter. There was a thickness to it that air pressure alone doesn't explain. Nolan, I think we should go back, I said. He held up a hand. Hang on. He edged closer to the crack and tried to aim his headlamp into it. The narrow opening made it difficult. He had to press his face close to the rock to see anything. It goes back a long way, he said. I can't see the end, but I think it opens up. There might be another room back there. We don't have time, I said, and I don't want to go in there. We can come back. I just want to. And then his headlamp caught something. I saw his whole body go rigid. His hands came up and braced against the rock on either side of the crack.

He didn't move for maybe two full seconds. Then he stepped back, fast, almost tripping over the bones on the floor behind him. We're leaving, he said. Right now, his voice was different. The casual confidence was gone. He sounded clipped, controlled, the way someone sounds when they're trying very hard not to panic. What did you see? Derek asked. We're leaving right now. Go. Nolan pushed past me toward the passage we'd crawled in through.

He didn't wait for us. He got down on his stomach and started pulling himself into the crawlway. Derek looked at me. I looked at the crack in the wall. The breathing sound was still there, steady, patient. I turned and followed Nolan. We crawled back through the tight passage faster than we'd come in. My knees were banging against the rock. Dust filled my mouth and nose. I could hear Derek right behind me, breathing hard. When we emerged into the second room, the one with the scratches on the walls, Nolan was already on his feet and moving toward the next passage. He wasn't running, but he was walking fast, faster than you should move in a cave. Nolan, what did you see? I asked again. Not now. Keep moving. We went back through the passages, the crouching corridor,

the large room with the high ceiling, the narrow, sideways corridor, the long, crawl through the clay, back through the junction. We barely stopped. Nolan was moving with a single-minded urgency I'd never seen from him before. This was a guy who would normally stop to photograph every interesting formation, who would sit in a cave room and just listen to the silence. Now he was practically speedwalking through the dark. We were about halfway back through the main passage, maybe 20 minutes from the entrance, when Derek stopped. Hold on, he said. Hold on. He said. Hold on. I need a second. He was bent over with his hands on his knees. He was out of breath. We'd been moving fast for a long time. We're not stopping, Nolan said. Just 30 seconds. I need to catch my

Derek. We are not stopping. Something in Nolan's voice made Derek stand up straight. He looked at me. I shook my head. I didn't know what was going on either. But I knew enough to trust Nolan's judgment in a cave. We kept moving. It was maybe five. minutes later that I heard it, behind us, way behind us, deep in the cave, back the way we'd come, a sound. It wasn't the breathing. This was different. This was sharp and sudden and loud enough to carry through hundreds of feet of rock passage.

It was a scream, or something close to a scream. It started high-pitched and broke apart into something lower, something guttural and ragged. It echoed off the walls and bounced around us and then faded. The three of us froze. Nobody said anything for a long time. What the hell was that? Derek whispered. Move, Nolan said. Go. Now. We went fast, not running. You don't run in a cave, but as fast as you can walk on uneven ground in the dark. My headlamp bounced with every step. The walls of the passage blurred by. I could see Nolan's reflective tabs marking our route, one after another. small bright points pulling us toward the exit we were maybe ten minutes from the entrance when nolan stopped so suddenly i almost ran into him he turned off his headlamp lights off he whispered everyone now i killed mine derrick killed his total darkness the kind of darkness that has weight i couldn't see my hand in front of my face i couldn't see anything the silence was enormous and then i heard it footsteps behind us in the

passage we'd just come through. Slow, deliberate footsteps on gravel. Getting closer. Not animal footsteps. Not the skittering of bats or the scurrying of a rat. These were heavy bipedal footsteps, one after another, steady and unhurried. Something was walking toward us in the dark. Go, Nolan breathed, barely audible. Go, don't turn your lights on. We moved. In total darkness, hands on the walls, feet shuffling forward. I've never seen. I've never never been so aware of the sound of my own breathing. I tried to keep it quiet. I tried to keep my footsteps soft, but the gravel crunched under my boots no matter how carefully I stepped. The footsteps behind us didn't speed up. They didn't slow down. They just kept coming, steady,

patient. We moved in the dark for what felt like an hour but was probably three or four minutes. Then I felt the air change, cooler, a faint breeze on my face. The entrance was close. Nolan turned his headlamp back on. I did the same. The passage ahead curved to the right, and beyond that curve I could see it. Gray light, daylight, the entrance. Run, Nolan said.

We ran. I don't care about the rule against running in caves. We ran hard, ducking under the low ceiling at the entrance, stumbling out into the overcast afternoon light. I tripped on a route and went down on my hands and knees in the leaf litter. Derek came out right behind. me and nearly fell over me. Nolan was last. He came out of the cave and didn't stop. He grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet and we kept going. Through the trees, up the hill, all the way back to the

truck. Nobody talked. We threw our gear in the back, got in, and Nolan started driving. Derek was in the back seat. I was in the passenger seat. The cab smelled damp and earthy from the clay still caked on our clothes. We were about ten minutes down the road before anyone spoke. Nolan, I said, what did you see in there? He was gripping the steering wheel hard, both hands, staring straight ahead. There was a man, he said. Derek leaned forward from the back seat. When I looked through the crack, Nolan continued. There was a room on the other side, maybe ten, fifteen feet back, and there was a man sitting in it. Sitting? On the ground, cross-legged, Facing the crack, facing me.

When my light hit him, he was already looking right at me. What do you mean already looking at you? I mean he was sitting there in the dark, facing the crack like he was waiting. His eyes were open. He was looking right at the light. My whole body went cold. Own it all. Pay off your home.

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Your style can make you cash. Start selling on Deepop, where taste recognizes taste. What did he look like? Derek asked. Nolan was quiet for a long time. He was naked, he said finally. thin, extremely thin. His skin was pale, not white, but gray, grayish. His hair was long and dark and matted down against his head and shoulders, and his face, he stopped. His face was wrong. I don't know how to describe it. The proportions were off. His mouth was too wide. His eyes were too far apart. And he was

smiling. When my light hit him, he was sitting there in the dark, naked, smiling at me. Nobody said anything. The bones, I said after a while. Nolan nodded slowly. The scratches on the walls, I said. He nodded again. The breathing. That wasn't barometric pressure, Nolan said quietly. I knew it wasn't. I just didn't want to say it. We drove in silence after that. I kept thinking about the footsteps in the dark, the way they'd been so steady, so unhurried. Whatever had been walking toward us, It hadn't been chasing us. It had been following us, at its own pace, like it knew the cave better than we did, like it knew it could catch us any time it wanted and had decided not to, or like it was hurting us out. We stopped at a gas station about an hour later. Nolan went inside. When he came back, he had three bottles of water and a look on his face I'd never seen before.

Derek, he said, take off your pack. Derek had been wearing his small caving pack the whole time. We all had. He slid it off and set it on the tailgate. Turn around, Nolan said. Derek turned around. There were marks on the back of Derek's shirt, four long, parallel tears in the fabric, running diagonally from his right shoulder blade to his left hip. The shirt was ripped clean through.

The tears were evenly spaced about an inch apart. Derek's face went white. What? What is it? I pulled the torn fabric aside, underneath, on Derek's seat. skin, there were four shallow scratches, thin lines of dried blood. They matched the tears in his shirt perfectly. I didn't feel anything, Derek said. His voice was shaking. I didn't feel anything. None of us had an answer. Derek had been last in line the entire trip. Whatever it was, it had been close enough to touch him, to rake its fingers, or whatever they were, across his back,

and he hadn't felt it. We drove home that night. Didn't get him. Didn't get him. We drove home that night. Didn't camp, didn't stop except for gas. When I got home, I stripped off my caving clothes and threw them in the trash, took the longest, hottest shower of my life, sat on my bedroom floor afterward, and just stared at the wall for a long time. I talked to Nolan about it a few times over the following weeks. He was shaken in a way I'd never seen from him. This was a man who had spent more time underground than most people spend in their cars. Caves were his element. They were where he felt most comfortable and most alive. And something in that cave had taken that away from him. He went back to caving eventually. I know that because he still posts trip reports online,

but he never mentioned that cave again. When I brought it up once, maybe six months later, he just shook his head and changed the subject. Derek quit caving entirely. I don't blame him. As for me, I've been back underground a handful of times since then, short trip. well-mapped systems, always with a group, but it's different now. Every time I'm in a cave and the passage narrows, or the air gets warm, or I hear a sound I can't identify, I think about that room, the bones on the floor, the scratches on the walls, the breathing coming out of that crack in the rock. And I think about what Nolan said in the truck,

about the man sitting cross-legged in the dark, facing the crack, already smiling before the light hit him, like he'd been listening to us coming for a very long time. I don't know what lives in that cave. I don't know if it's a person, or if it was ever a person. I don't know how it eats, or how long it's been down there, or where it came from. But I know it was real. I know it followed us through the dark.

I know it touched Derek. And I know that when we turned our lights off and tried to be silent, it didn't slow down. It didn't hesitate. It walked after us at its own pace, steady and calm. Because the dark wasn't its enemy. The dark was where it lived. I'm never going back to that cave. I'm never telling anyone where it is.

And if you're a caver reading this, and you think you know which system I'm talking about, don't go looking for it. Some places are empty for a reason. I was 12 when my family moved from Chicago to a house in rural West Virginia. My dad had taken a job managing a lumber operation outside a town called Elkins, and the house that came with the position was a three-bedroom place at the end of a gravel road,

surrounded on three sides by dense forest. The nearest neighbor was over a mile away. The nearest store was a 20-minute drive, for a kid who had spent his entire life in a city where you could hear traffic at all hours. It was a different planet. I hated it at first. I missed my friends. I missed sidewalks and streetlights and being able to walk to a gas station.

The woods felt like a wall that had been built around me. At night, the silence was so complete that I could hear my own heartbeat when I lay in bed. But I adjusted. Kids do. By the time school started in September, I had made a friend named Jackson. He lived about two miles down the main road in a small house with his mom and older sister. Jackson had been born in Elkins and had spent his whole. life in those woods. He knew every trail, every creek, every ridge within walking distance. He was the kind of kid who carried a pocket knife everywhere and could tell you what animal

had left a track in the mud without thinking about it. It was Jackson who told me about the mines. We were sitting on the back porch of my house one afternoon in early October, and I was complaining about how there was nothing to do. Jackson looked at me and said, you know there's mines back there, right? I didn't know that. He explained that the hills behind my house were full of old coal mines from the early 1900s. Most of them had been sealed up or had collapsed on their own, but a few were still open. He said he'd been in a couple of them. Not deep.

Just a little ways in. He said they were cool and creepy and that we should go check them out. I said yes immediately. I was 12 and bored and living in the middle of nowhere. An abandoned mine sounded like the most interesting thing within a hundred miles. We went the next Saturday. My parents thought we were just hiking, which was technically true. Jackson brought a backpack with two flashlights, a pack of batteries, some granola bars, and a water bottle.

I brought nothing because I didn't know what I was doing. We followed a trail behind my house that ran along a creek for about a quarter mile, then cut uphill through thick woods. The leaves were changing, and the ground was covered in a layer of orange and red that crunched under our feet. After about 20 minutes of climbing, Jackson stopped and pointed. Ahead of us, cut into the side of a steep hill, was an opening. It was maybe five feet tall and four feet wide, framed by old timber that had turned black with age. The ground in front of it was bare dirt, and there were a few rusted pieces of metal nearby.

Rail spikes, Jackson said. From the old cart tracks. We turned on our flashlights and went in. The first thing I noticed was the temperature. It dropped fast. Within 30 feet of the entrance, the air went from cool autumn to cold and damp, and it stayed that way. The second thing I noticed was the sound. Our footsteps echoed in a way that made the space feel bigger than it looked. The tunnel was narrow, barely wide enough for both of us to walk side by side, and the ceiling was low enough that Jackson, who was a few inches taller than me, had to duck in place.

We didn't go far that first time, maybe 200 feet in. The tunnel was mostly straight, with a few sections where the walls had crumbled and the floor was covered in loose rock. There were old wooden support beams along the ceiling, some of them cracked, some of them bowed under the weight above. It smelled like wet earth and something metallic. At 200 feet we found a split. The tunnel branched into two directions. Jackson shined his light down both. down both. The one on the left looked partially collapsed. The one on the right continued into darkness.

We'll come back, Jackson said. We need better lights. We went back the following weekend with better flashlights, extra batteries, and a ball of twine that Jackson had taken from his mom's garage. The twine was his idea. He said we could tie it off at the entrance and unwinded it as we went so we wouldn't get lost. It was a smart idea, and it made me feel better about going deeper. This time we took the right branch. It went on for a long time. The floor sloped gradually downward, and the air got colder and heavier the further we went.

There were side passages every hundred feet or so, some of them barely big enough to crawl into, others wide enough to walk through. We stayed on the main tunnel and kept the twine unspooling behind us. About 500 feet in, we found a large open area. It was some kind of junction where several tunnels met, The ceiling was higher here, maybe eight or nine feet, and there were old wooden structures along the walls, shelves maybe, or equipment mounts. Everything was rotten and falling apart.

Jackson was fascinated. He walked around the space examining everything, picking up old bolts and pieces of rusted chain. I stood near the center and listened. The silence in that part of the mine was total. No wind, no dripping water, no animal sounds, just nothing. We explored that junction for about 30 minutes and then headed back. When we came out of the mine entrance and into the daylight, I felt a rush of relief that surprised me. I hadn't realized how tense I'd been until it was over.

Over the next few weeks, we went back four or five more times. We mapped out the main tunnel in several of the branches. Jackson kept a notebook with rough sketches of the layout. We found old tools, a rusted lunch pail, a section of iron rail still bolted to the the floor. It became our thing. Every Saturday, if the weather was decent, we'd hike up to the mine and push a little further in. By late October, we were comfortable down there, maybe too comfortable. The last time we went was October 26th. I remember the date because it was the Saturday before Halloween, and Jackson and I had been talking about doing a nighttime visit.

We decided against going at night, but we did decide to go later in the afternoon than usual, around 3.30, which meant we'd be coming out around dusk. We hiked up to the entrance and noticed something right away. There was a truck parked on the old logging road about 100 yards downhill from the mine. It was a faded red pickup, older model with a dented tailgate in West Virginia plates. We'd never seen a vehicle up there before. The logging road was overgrown and hadn't been maintained in years. Jackson looked at the truck and then at me. Probably a hunter, He said, that made sense. It was almost November, and deer season was about to start.

People scouted these woods all the time. I didn't think much of it. We went into the mine. We followed our usual route, past the split, down the right branch, all the way to the junction. Jackson wanted to explore a new side passage we hadn't been down yet, one that branched off to the left about 300 feet past the junction. We tied off a fresh section of twine and headed in. This passage was different from the main tunnel. It was narrower and rougher, with more debris on the floor and less intact support structure.

The walls were uneven and jagged, and in some places we had to climb over piles of rock, where sections of the ceiling had come down. The air was stale, and had a faint chemical smell that I couldn't place. We pushed about 200 feet down this passage before it opened into a small chamber, maybe 15 feet across. There was nothing in it, just bare rock walls and a low ceiling. A dead end. We were standing in that chamber, Jackson sketching in his notebook. When I heard something, it came from back the way we'd entered, a sound that didn't belong.

It was faint and distant, but it echoed clearly through the passage. A voice. Not words I could make out. Just a voice. Low, male, and too far away to understand. It lasted a few seconds and then stopped. Jackson and I looked at each other. Hello, Jackson called out.

His voice bounced off the walls and faded. No response. Probably the hunter, Jackson said. Maybe he saw the entrance and came in to look around. Yeah, I said, probably. We waited a minute or so and then started walking back through the side passage toward the junction. We moved slowly. I'm not sure why.

Something about hearing that voice had changed the way the mind felt. It was the same tunnel, the same cold air, the same darkness beyond our flashlights. But it felt different. We reached the junction and stopped. Jackson held up his hand and we both listened. Nothing, just silence. Then from the direction of the main entrance we heard it again. The voice.

This time it was louder, closer. And this time I could make out something about it that sent a chill through me. The man was laughing. It wasn't loud laughter. It wasn't a cackle or a shout. It was low and steady and sustained, the kind of laugh that doesn't have a joke behind it. It echoed through the main tunnel and reached us in the junction

as a thin, warbling sound that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Jackson turned off his flashlight. I did the same without being told. We stood in total darkness, the kind of darkness where you can hold your hand in front of your face and see absolutely nothing. Not a shape, not a shadow, nothing. The laughing stopped.

Then we heard footsteps, slow, steady footsteps, coming from the main tunnel, coming toward us. Jackson grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the side passage we'd just come from. We moved as quietly as we could, feeling along the wall with our hands, stepping carefully over the debris on the floor. We didn't turn our lights on, we didn't talk, we just moved. About a hundred feet into the side passage we stopped.

Jackson pulled me down into a crouch against the wall, and we sat there. From the junction we heard the footsteps arrive. They slowed, stopped. Then the laughing started again. It filled the junction and bled into every connecting tunnel, including hours. It was closer now and I could hear it clearly. There was nothing natural about it. It was flat and rhythmic, almost mechanical, and it went on for a long time.

30 seconds, a minute, I couldn't tell, then a new sound, a sharp metallic click, then another, then a third. Jackson leaned close to my ear and whispered so quietly I almost didn't hear him. He's got a gun. That's a hammer being cocked. I felt something drop in my stomach. My hands were shaking. My legs were shaking. I pressed my back against the cold rock wall and tried to breathe without making any noise. The footsteps started again. moved around the junction, pausing, resuming. I could hear the man's boots on the loose rock. He was walking slowly, exploring the space the same way Jackson and I had explored it the first time, casually. Then the footsteps entered our passage. He was coming down the side tunnel, the one we were

sitting in. I could hear each step getting closer, crunch, crunch, crunch, slow and even. Jackson squeezed my arm hard. The footsteps continued. He was maybe 50 feet from us now. I could hear his breathing between the steps, heavy and slow. Then the laughing started again, and this time it was close enough that I could hear the texture of it, the air moving through his throat, the way it hitched slightly on each exhale.

I pressed my hand over my mouth and tried not to exist. The footsteps stopped. For a long, terrible stretch of silence, nothing happened. He was standing there in the dark, maybe 30 feet from us, maybe 20. I had no way to know. I couldn't see anything. I couldn't hear anything except my own blood moving through my body. Then the footsteps started again, but they were moving away, back toward the junction, slow and steady, crunching over the rock, getting quieter and quieter

until they faded completely. Neither of us moved. We sat in that pitch black passage for hours. I know that sounds impossible, but we did. Neither of us moved. Neither of us moved. We sat in that pitch black passage for hours. I know that sounds impossible, but we did. Neither of us was willing to turn on a light. Neither of us was willing to stand up. We just sat there, pressed against the wall, listening. Occasionally we'd hear something. A footstep, or what sounded like a footstep, somewhere in the tunnels. Once I heard the laughing again, but it was far away, in a part of the mine I couldn't place. Sometimes there was nothing for 10, 15, 20 minutes at a stretch, and I'd start to think he was gone. Then there'd be a sound, and I'd stop breathing. I have no idea how long we sat there. It felt like forever. At some point, Jackson

leaned over and put his mouth directly against my ear. We have to go. Our parents are going to call the cops. He was right. We'd been gone for hours past when we were supposed to be back. If we didn't come home, people would start looking for us. But go. Going meant moving through the junction, back up the main tunnel, and out through the entrance. All of it in the dark, or with flashlights that would give us away. We decided to use the lights. We had to. Moving through a partially collapsed mine in total darkness was going to get one of us killed.

We figured if we moved fast enough, we could make it to the entrance before the man could react, assuming he was still in the mine at all. Jackson turned on his flashlight. hours in total darkness, it was blinding. I squinted and turned on mine. The passage ahead of us was empty. We moved fast. Through the side passage, over the rock piles, out into the junction. We both swept our lights around the open space. Empty. The tunnel leading back to the entrance stretched out in front of us, dark and silent. We ran. We ran up the main tunnel, past the side passages, past the split, up the gradual slope toward the entrance. Our footsteps were loud and our

breathing was louder and I didn't care. I just wanted out. The twine was still strung along the floor and I followed it like a lifeline. Then I heard something behind us. Footsteps, fast, running. I didn't look back. I just ran harder. Ahead of me, I could see the entrance. Not daylight. It was dark outside, but the darkness at the entrance was different from the darkness. of the mine. It was open. It had air. We burst out of the mine and into the night. The cold air hit my face and I gasped. The woods around us were pitch black. No moon, or at least none that I could see through the canopy. Jackson grabbed my arm and we ran downhill. We crashed through brush, slipped on leaves, tripped over roots. I fell twice and got back up without stopping.

We hit the creek trail and followed it blindly, our flashlights bouncing ahead of us. When we We finally broke out of the woods and into my backyard, there were lights everywhere. Two police cars were parked in the driveway, their light bars flashing blue and red across the front of the house. My parents were on the porch. Jackson's mom was there too. A deputy was standing in the yard with a flashlight, and he turned when he heard us crashing out of the tree line.

My mom ran across the yard and grabbed me. She was crying. My dad was right behind her. Everyone was talking at once. The deputy was asking where we'd been. Jackson's mom was holding his face in her hands, looking at him. We told them everything. The mine, the voice, the laughing, the gun, sitting in the dark for hours, running, the footsteps

behind us. The deputies went up the hill with more officers about 20 minutes later. They found the entrance. They found our twine. They followed it into the mine and cleared as much of it as they were willing to go. They didn't find anyone. The red truck was gone. The logging road was empty.

There were bootprints in the dirt around the mine entrance, but they couldn't get usable impressions. After that night, my parents made it very clear that I was never to go near those mines again. Jackson and I didn't argue. We didn't even talk about it for a long time. It just sat between us, this thing we'd been through, too big and too strange to discuss casually. The police followed up a few times over the next couple of weeks. A detective from the county sheriff's office came to the house and had me go through the whole thing again. He asked if I'd seen the man's face. I hadn't.

He asked if I could describe anything about him. I couldn't. He asked if I thought it was possible we'd imagined it. I told him about the footsteps, the laughter, the metallic click of the gun. They never found him. No suspects, no arrests, no further incidents reported at the mine. I moved back to Illinois for college and never returned. to that area. Jackson and I stayed in touch for a while, but eventually drifted apart the way people do. The last time I talked to him was around 2020, and neither of us brought it up. But I think about it.

I think about it more than I should. Not the hiding, not the hours in the dark, not even the sound of the gun being cocked. What I think about most is something I didn't mention to the police, because at the time, I wasn't even sure I believed it myself. When we were running through the main tunnel toward the entrance, and I heard the footsteps behind us, they were fast, very fast. Faster than a walk, faster than a jog. Whatever was behind us was running at a full sprint. But the footsteps didn't sound right.

They were uneven. They didn't have the rhythm of someone running on two legs. There were too many impacts, too close together, hitting the ground in a pattern that I I couldn't make sense of. I told myself it was the echo. I told myself it was the acoustics of the mind playing tricks, the sound bouncing off the walls and overlapping with itself. But Jackson heard it too.

I know because years later, the one time it did come up, I mentioned the footsteps and he just looked at me and said, I know. He didn't say anything else, and I didn't ask.