Just Creepy: Scary Stories - 3 TERRIFYING Forest Encounters

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

These are 3 TERRIFYING Forest EncountersLinktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepyStory Credits:►Sent in to https://www.justcreepy.net/Timestamps:00:00 Intro00:00:18 Story 100:09:44 Story 200:36:45 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! 💀

Not loving your AT&T or T Mobile Bill? Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news. Bring your AT&T or T Mobile Bill to Verizon and we'll give you a better deal. And we'll give you a better deal to Verizon and we'll give you a better deal on the best network. That's Verizon. Best Network based on root metrics, best overall mobile network performance U.S. second half 2025, all rights reserved. It must provide a recent consumer mobile bill in the name of the person who gave me the deal. Additional terms, conditions, and restrictions, a better deal. I need to say this out loud, or whatever the written version of that is. I need to put it somewhere outside my own head because it's been three weeks and I still can't sleep right. And my wife is starting to look at me, the way you look at someone you're worried about, that careful look. So here it is. I've been hunting whitetail in the Allegheny since I was 14. I'm 41 now. I know those woods the way you know your own kitchen in the dark, where the edges are, where things drop off, where the light comes through in the morning.

I'm not some weekend warrior who gets spooked by a coyote. I need you to understand that before I tell you the rest. It was the second week of November. I'd set out before dawn from the truck, hiking about two miles into a ridge I like. Good sight lines, mature oaks, a creek at the bottom that deer follow like a highway. I'd been sitting in my stand since maybe 5.15,

just waiting for the world to turn on. Nothing unusual at first. Cold. Still. The kind of quiet where you can hear your own blood moving. Around 7.30, I noticed the birds had stopped. Now that happens. A hawk comes through.

Everything shuts up for a minute. But this wasn't a minute. This was long. I remember checking my phone at 7.34 and thinking it was odd. And then checking again later. And it was 7.51 and there still wasn't a single sound. Not a chickadee. Not a crow.

Not even the creek. Which, I know how that sounds. The creek was maybe 80 yards below me. I'd been hearing it all morning, and then I wasn't. I want to say I got a bad feeling right then, but honestly, I just thought it was strange. I was more annoyed than anything. Dead woods means no deer moving. Then I smelled it.

It was sweet. Not floral sweet, wrong sweet. Like fruit that's gone so far past rotten, it circles back around to something almost pleasant, but your body knows better. My stomach turned before my brain caught up. I've smelled dead deer, dead bear. This wasn't decomposition. This was something else wearing the smell of decomposition. I don't know why I said it that way, but I'm leaving it. I started scanning the trees below me. The stand put me about 20 feet up in a big red oak, and I had decent visibility for maybe a hundred yards in most directions before the laurel thickets swallowed everything.

I couldn't see anything wrong, but something was wrong. You know that feeling when someone's standing behind you? Not the paranoid version, the real one, where the hair on your arms goes flat and your breathing changes before you've even decided to be afraid. It was like that, except it was coming from everywhere, from the ground, from the air. Like the woods themselves had become aware of me in a way they hadn't been before.

I chambered around. I remember the sound of the bolt was so loud in that silent, It almost made me flinch. Then I saw it move, down by the creek bed. Something was moving through the hemlocks, and I caught it only in pieces. A glimpse between trunks, a shifting of shadow that didn't match the wind because there was no wind. It was big. That was my first clear thought.

Bigger than a deer. Bigger than a bear maybe. Though it was hard to tell because it moved wrong. I've watched bears walk my whole life. They have a rhythm. This thing moved like it was remembering how to move. it was remembering how to move, like each step was a decision. I put my scope on it, I shouldn't have done that.

Through the glass, at 9x magnification, I could see it more clearly, and I want to be careful here because I know what I saw, but I also know what it sounds like. It was tall. Tall the way a person is tall, not the way an animal is tall, upright I mean, but the proportions were off, the limbs were too long. The way it moved through the brush, it seemed to fold around the trees rather than push through them. And it was dark, not like fur or skin, but like something that wasn't reflecting light correctly.

Like a hole in the shape of a thing. I am not a superstitious person. I watched it for maybe ten seconds through the scope before it stopped. Just stopped. Mid-step. The way nothing in nature stops. Animals decelerate. This thing simply wasn't moving anymore.

And then it turned its head and looked up at me. I don't, I can't describe the face, not because it was so horrible, but because my brain won't hold onto it. I've tried. I've sat in my truck in the driveway at 2 a.m. and tried to reconstruct it, and all I get is this overwhelming sense of recognition.

Not that I recognized it, that it recognized me, that it had known I was there the entire time and had just decided in that moment to let me know. It didn't have eyes. I'm almost sure of that, but it was looking at me. My hands were shaking so badly the scope image was jumping. I remember thinking very clearly.

I am a man with a rifle, and I am 20 feet off the ground, and I am afraid in a way I have never been afraid before. I didn't shoot. I need you to understand. I have shot at charging boar. I have put down a wounded buck at 10 feet. I am not someone who freezes. But every part of me, every instinct I've built.

built over 27 years in the woods was screaming the same thing. Do not engage. Do not let it know you are a threat. Be small. Be nothing. It watched me for what felt like five minutes, but was probably 30 seconds. Then it moved again, toward me. Not fast, slow, deliberate, weaving between the trunks, and I could hear it now, not footsteps

exactly, but a sound like something heavy being dragged through dry leaves, except there was a rhythm to it that didn't match its steps. Like there was more of it than I could see. I climbed down. I don't remember making the decision. I just remember my boots hitting the ground and the shock of it going through my knees and then I was moving. Not toward the truck. I wasn't thinking about the truck. I was just going away. Downhill at first, which was stupid because it had been downhill. But then I cut north along the side of the ridge and I ran. I've never run through woods like that. branches hitting my face, my rifle banging against my back, the laurel grabbing at my legs. I fell twice. The second time, I hit a rock with my knee and something popped and I got up

anyway because the alternative was staying on the ground in those woods. I could still smell it, that sweet, wrong smell. It was getting stronger. I didn't look back. I want to tell you I looked back, that I have some detail to offer about whether it followed me or how close it got. but I didn't look back. Something deep and old in my brain had made that decision for me, and I have never been more grateful for an instinct in my life. I ran for maybe 20 minutes. I don't know when the sounds came back,

the birds, the creek, the normal rustling of a living forest, but at some point I realized I could hear them again, and I stopped, and I put my hands on my knees, and I threw up. My phone said it was 8.40 a.m. I limped back to the truck by a completely different route. Took me an extra hour. I sat in the cab with the doors locked and the engine running and my hands on the steering wheel, and I didn't move for a long time. I went back three days later, in daylight. I told myself I needed to get my stand and my pack, which was true, but really I think I needed

to prove to myself that the ridge was just a ridge. The stand was fine, the pack was fine, but the tree I'd been sitting in, that big red oak I've used for six seasons, there were marks on it. Long vertical marks in the bark, starting about eight feet up and going to maybe 15, deep enough that the pale wood underneath was showing. They looked like something had reached up and just dragged downward. Five marks, roughly parallel, too wide apart to be a bear, too high to be a buck rubbing velvet, too deliberate to be storm damage. I pulled the stand down. I haven't been back. Here's the thing that keeps me up. The thing I keep circling back to in the dark. When it looked at me, when it turned and I felt that terrible recognition, I didn't just feel

fear. There was something else underneath it, something I don't have a good word for. It was like standing at the edge of a very high place and feeling the pull, not wanting to jump, but understanding suddenly that you could, that the distance between you and the void is just a decision. It wanted me to come down from that tree, and some part of me, some quiet, honest part buried way below the panic, had wanted to. I don't go into those woods anymore. I tell my wife it's the knee. She almost believes me. But sometimes at night, when the house is quiet and the windows are dark, I'll catch a smell, just for a second, sweet and wrong and familiar. And I'll lie there, very still, and I'll listen for the moment the birds stop.

They haven't yet. My name's Aaron. I'm 34. I work in IT for a logistics company in Salt Lake. I'm telling you this because I want you to understand that I'm not the kind of person who sees things. I don't believe in... Well, I didn't believe in much of anything, honestly. I thought people who told stories like this were either liars or people who got scared in the dark and filled in the blanks with whatever they'd seen on TV.

That was before October. My buddy Marcus and I have been doing back country trips in the Uintas since college. The high Uintus wilderness, up in northeastern Utah, if you haven't been, it's one of the most remote stretches of forest in the lower 48. The range runs east-west, which is unusual for the Rockies, and once you get past the Mirror Lake Highway corridor and push north into the drainage basins, you can go days without seeing another person. That's what we liked about it.

We'd been doing a late-season trip every October for almost a decade. Same general area each time. We'd park at the Upper Stillwater Trailhead near Mountain Home, hike in along the river, and set up a base camp somewhere past Sergeant Lake. From there we'd do day hikes, fish if the lakes hadn't frozen over yet, drink bourbon around the fire, normal stuff, guy stuff. This was October 18th, 2024. A Friday.

We got to the trailhead around noon, which was later than we wanted, but Marcus's truck had been making a noise on the drive up through Duchenne, so we'd stop to check it. Nothing wrong, just a heat shield rattling. But it put us behind. By the time we shouldered our packs and started walking, the light was already that low golden October light that makes everything look like a photograph of itself. The aspens were mostly bare by then. The trail was covered in leaves. The first couple miles were fine. They always are.

You're on a maintained trail. There's usually horse tracks from outfitters who run pack trips through there, and the sound of the stillwater fork keeps you company. It's a wide, easy drainage. You don't feel like you're in the wilderness yet. You feel like you're on a long walk. It was around mile four that I started feeling it. Now look, I know how this sounds.

I'm sitting here in my apartment in Sugarhouse telling you I started feeling something in the woods, and you're already putting me in a box. I get it. But I need you to understand that I've done this walk a dozen times. I know what the air feels like at 9,000 feet in October. I know what the silence sounds like when the river bends away from the trail and the trees close in. I know all of that. This was different. The best way I can describe it is that the woods got attentive. That's the word I keep coming back to. Not quiet. They were quiet, sure, but they're always quiet that time of year. The birds have mostly gone. The squirrels are frantic but sparse. No. It was more like the quality of the silence changed, like something in it

shifted from passive to active, like the silence was now a thing that was listening. I didn't say anything to Marcus. You don't say something like that to Marcus. He's a mechanical engineer. He thinks intolerances and load-bearing capacities. If I told him the forest, felt like it was listening to us. He'd have roasted me for the next two days straight. So I kept walking. We hit the meadow below Sargent Lake around 4.30. The sun was behind the ridge line already, and the temperature was dropping fast, maybe high 20s. The meadow grass was brown and stiff with frost. We picked a spot we'd used before, a flat area in the trees on the south side with good wind protection and a fire ring someone had built out of Riverstones years ago.

We set up the tent, got a fire going, ate some freeze-dried chili, normal. Marcus was talking about a project at work. Something about a conveyor system redesign. I was half listening, feeding sticks into the fire when I heard something move in the trees behind us. I want to be clear about what I heard because it matters. It wasn't a branch cracking. It wasn't an animal moving through brush. It was a single deliberate footstep, a boot on frozen ground, that specific crunch of a heavy soul on frost-stiffened pine needles. One step, then nothing. I turned around. Marcus stopped talking. You hear that? I asked. Yeah. He was looking past me, into the dark between the trees. The fire was throwing just enough light to make the nearest

trunks visible. Lodgepole pines, thin and straight like bars. Beyond them, nothing. We sat there for maybe 30 seconds, not moving. The fire popped, a coal split and sent up a little fountain of sparks. Nothing else happened. Elk, Marcus said. Didn't sound like elk. What else would it be?

I didn't answer that, because the honest answer was I don't know, and that's not an answer Marcus would accept. We were eight miles from the trailhead. The nearest maintained road was the Mirror Lake Highway, which was probably closed for the season by, then. There was no reason for another person to be out there. Hunters, maybe. It was bow season. But we hadn't seen any vehicles at the trailhead, and you don't bow hunt in the dark. We let it go. Finished our bourbon, went to bed. I woke up at 2.47 a.m. I know the exact time because I checked

my watch, a habit from years of backpacking, where you wake up disoriented and the time is the first thing that re-anchors you to reality. Marcus was breathing slow and deep next to me. The tent fabric was taught with frost. And outside, something was walking around our camp. Not circling, not pacing, walking, like a person walking through a parking lot. Measured, unhurried steps. Crunch, crunch, crunch, a pause.

Then more steps, in a slightly different direction. I lay there, and I want you to understand what happened to my body in that moment because it was something I've never experienced before. Every single hair on my arms stood up, not figuratively. I could feel them lift. My jaw clenched so hard my molars ached. And some part of my brain, some very old, very deep part, was screaming at me to not move, to not make a sound, to play dead. I've been around bears, I've had a moose charge me on a trail near naturalist basin. I've heard mountain lions at night. None of those things made me feel like this.

Those things triggered adrenaline, a desire to act. This was the opposite. This was a command from somewhere inside me to be still, to become invisible. The footsteps stopped, right outside the tent, maybe four feet away, close enough that I could hear breathing. But here's the thing. Here's the part that still keeps me up at night three months later. The breathing was wrong.

It wasn't the breathing of something with lungs that were working the way lungs are supposed to work. It was too regular, too mechanical, like someone who had learned what breathing sounded like and was performing it. In, two, three, four, out, two, three, four, in, two, three, four, out. Perfect rhythm, perfect timing, no variation, no hitch, no catch, no deepening, just metronomic, performed breathing. It stood there for what I think was about five minutes. I can't be sure. Time does strange things when you're that afraid. Then it walked away, not quickly, the same unhurried pace. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch, getting softer and then gone. I didn't sleep again. When the sky started graying around 6.30, I got out of the tent. I told myself I was

going to look for tracks. That's the rational thing to do, right? Something walks around your camp, you check for tracks. You figure out what it was. Elk. Bear. Some weirdo hunter who got lost. You find the evidence and you file it away and you move on. I found tracks. They were boot prints. A hiking boot or work boot. Something with a heavy lug soul. Size 11 or 12 maybe. They came from the north, from deeper in the drainage. And they went around our campsite in a rough figure 8 pattern before stopping right where I'd heard the breathing, right outside the tent wall nearest my head. Then they went back the way they'd come, north, into the back country,

away from every trail, every road, every logical point of origin. I stared at those tracks for a long time. Marcus came out, saw me crouching, came over. He looked at the tracks. He didn't say anything for a while, which is how I knew he was bothered, because Marcus always has something to say. That's weird, he said finally. Those were there last night.

That's what we heard. Someone hiking through? At three in the morning, eight miles from the trailhead? They stopped outside our tent, Marcus. They stood there. He rubbed his jaw, looked north, the direction the tracks led. The trees were thick that way, lodgepole giving way to spruce and subalpine fir as the drainage climbed toward the divide.

Dark timber. The kind of forest where the canopy is so far. dense that the floor is just brown needles and shadow, even at noon. Could be a weirdo, Marcus said, some hermit type. Could be, you want to pack out? I thought about it. I actually thought about it seriously, and I want to be honest about why I didn't say yes. It was pride. It was embarrassment. I wasn't going to let a set of boot prints, a set of boot prints, chase me out of a trip I'd been planning for six weeks. We had three more days of food. The weather was holding. And in the daylight, standing there with coffee in my hand and Marcus next to me, the whole thing felt manageable,

explicable. Someone had walked through. Maybe they were camped further up the drainage. Maybe they'd been curious about our fire and come to investigate and then thought better of introducing themselves. It was thin, but it was enough. No, I said, Let's do the day hike we planned, up to Ryder Lake. Marcus shrugged, works for me. Ryder Lake sits in a cirque about two miles north and a thousand feet above our campsite, right below the spine of the Uinta Ridge Line. It's a beautiful hike if you don't mind some route finding.

There's no maintained trail, just a use path that threads through deadfall and talus. We'd done it before. It's one of those places where you come over the last rise and the lake is just there. this impossible turquoise thing sitting in a bowl of gray rock, and you feel like you've discovered something, even on your third visit. We left camp around 8.30. I made a point of noting how our campsite looked. The tent, the fire ring, the packs hanging from the bear line.

I told myself I was being thorough. I think I was already planning to check if anything had been disturbed when we got back. The hike up was normal for the first hour. The use path follows a creek drainage through densely. timber crosses a few boggy meadows, then switchbacks up a steep rocky slope to the lake. We were in the timber section, maybe a mile from camp, when Marcus stopped. You smell that? I stopped, sniffed.

And yes, I did smell it. A thick, ripe, organic smell. Not decay exactly. Not a dead animal. More like, I don't know how to describe it except to say it smelled like something alive that shouldn't smell that way. sweet and rotten at the same time, like overripe fruit and raw meat and turned soil. It was strong enough to make my eyes water.

Bear kill, maybe, I said, cached somewhere nearby. That's not what a bear kill smells like. Marcus was right. I'd smelled bear kills before. They smell like death, specific, sharp, ammoniaic. This was something else. This was warm. It radiated.

It felt like it had a presence of its own. We pushed through it. The smell faded after a few hundred yards. But here's what I noticed. The woods had gone completely silent. I mean completely. No wind, no birds, no creek sound, even though the creek was right there, right below us. I could see the water moving, but I couldn't hear it. Like someone had turned the volume down on everything except our own breathing and our own footsteps. Marcus, yeah. Do you hear anything? He stopped, listened. I watched his face change.

Not dramatically. Marcus doesn't do dramatic. But I saw his jaw tighten and his eyes narrow, and I saw him scan the tree line in a way that wasn't casual. No, he said. We stood there for a moment, two guys in their thirties with expensive packs and trekking poles, standing in the woods listening to nothing.

Then Marcus did something I'd never seen him do in all our years of backpacking. He unclipped his bear spray from, his shoulder strap and held it in his hand. Let's keep moving, he said. We kept moving. We never made it to Ryder Lake. About half a mile further up, where the timber starts thinning and the terrain opens into boulder fields, I saw something between the trees ahead of us that made me stop so fast

Marcus walked into my pack. There was a person standing in the trees, maybe 60 yards ahead, just off the use path, in a gap between two spruce trees, standing perfectly still, no, not perfectly still, swaying, very slightly, like a tall plant in a breeze that wasn't there, back and forth, back and forth, maybe an inch or two in each direction. It was subtle enough that I couldn't be sure I was seeing it at first. My eyes kept trying to turn it into a branch, a shadow, a trick of the light coming through the canopy, but it wasn't any of those things. It was a person. I could see the shape of shoulders, a head, arms hanging straight down. They were wearing something

dark, dark brown or black, and they were just standing there, swaying. Do you see that? I whispered. Marcus didn't answer for a second then. Yeah. Is that a person? I don't know. We stood there watching. I don't know for how long. The figure didn't move, not in any meaningful way. Just that slight, rhythmic swaying like a metronome, like the breathing. That same mechanical performed quality, and then it tilted its head, not turned, tilted. Sideways, like a dog hearing a frequency it doesn't understand. Except no dog tilts its head that far. The head went over at an angle that was,

Look, I know human geometry, I know what next do. The head tilted until it was nearly resting on the left shoulder, and it stayed there. That's when Marcus said, We're going back. He didn't say it like a suggestion. He said it the way you'd say get down or run. A command, a fact, and I didn't argue.

I didn't even think about arguing. Every single cell in my body agreed with him. We turned around. I want to tell you that we walked calmly back down the trail. I want to tell you we were measured and rational. But what actually happened is that we walked very fast. Not quite running, but that urgent, stiff-legged walk that you do when your body wants to sprint. But your brain is telling you that running will make it worse.

running will make you pray. We didn't talk. I kept looking over my shoulder. Marcus didn't look back once, and later he told me that was on purpose. He said he was afraid that if he looked back and it was closer, he would lose it. We made it back to camp in 20 minutes, a hike that had taken us over an hour. The camp was wrong. I knew it the second we came into the meadow. I could feel it before I could see it. Something about the air, the light, the way the frost on the grass had been disturbed. Our tent was fine. The bear line was fine. The fire ring was undisturbed, but our boots were gone. We'd left them outside the tent vestibule. Two pairs of camp shoes, actually. Lightweight slip-ons we wore around the campsite, so we didn't have to keep

lacing up our hiking boots. We'd been wearing our hiking boots. The camp shoes were just neoprene things, almost like slippers. They were gone. And in their place, right on the ground where the camp shoes had been. There was a pile of small bones. I'm not a zoologist. I couldn't tell you exactly what animal those bones came from. They were small, mouse-sized maybe, delicate little rib cages and tiny femurs and jaw bones the size of my thumbnail. Clean. No flesh, no fur, completely clean like they'd been boiled, and they were arranged, not scattered, arranged in a neat circular pile spiraling inward. Marcus stood over them for a long time. His hands were shaking. I'd never seen Marcus's hands shake before, not even when he'd gashed his shin open on a rock

scramble two years ago and I'd had to butterfly it shut. We're leaving, he said, right now. I didn't argue. We collapsed the tent. We packed in maybe 10 minutes, which is fast when you're doing it with shaking hands and you keep looking up at the tree line. We left the bear line. We left the bear line. We left the firewood. We left the camp shoes, obviously, because they were gone. And we left the bones. The hike out was eight miles. We did it in just under three hours, which, if you know anything about backcountry hiking with full packs, you know, is almost jogging pace. We didn't stop for water. We didn't stop for anything. Marcus walked in front. I walked behind.

And the whole way out, I had the feeling, the absolute certainty. that we were being watched, not followed, watched. There's a difference, and it matters. Something that follows you is behind you, something that watches you is all around you. It's in the trees to your left and the ridge above you, and the creek drainage below you all at once. It doesn't need to keep up with you because it's already wherever you're going.

I kept seeing things at the edges of my vision, shapes between trees that resolved into stumps or rocks when I look directly at them, shadows that moved wrong. Once, and Marcus didn't see this, or at least he never admitted to seeing it. I looked up at the ridgeline to our east, and there was a figure standing on a rock outcrop maybe 300 yards above us,

standing still, that same silhouette, head tilted. When I looked back five seconds later, it was gone. We made it to the truck at dusk. Marcus drove. He drove fast. We didn't talk for the first 45 minutes, minutes, all the way down through the canyon and back to Dushain. Finally, at a gas station on Highway 40, sitting in the truck with the engine running and the heater on full blast, Marcus looked at me. What the hell was that? I don't know. That was a person. I don't think it was.

It was standing on two legs. It was wearing clothes. I know. So it was a person. Did it move like a person? He didn't answer. He stared through the windshield at the gas pumps, at the fluorescent lights making everything flat and bright and safe. A normal Friday night in Dushan, Utah. A teenager walked into the convenience store. A truck pulled up to the diesel island. The bones, Marcus said. A person doesn't do that. Even a crazy person doesn't do that. Not in the time we were gone. Those bones were clean. I know. That takes time. That takes, you'd need to boil them, chemically treat them. And the arrangement, it was precise, like something was communicating. I know. But communicating what? I didn't have an answer for that. I still don't. Marcus dropped me at

my apartment that night. We didn't hug, which sounds like a stupid detail, but Marcus is a hugger. He's one of those guys who grabs you in a bear hug every time he sees you and every time he says goodbye. That night he just looked at me, nodded, and drove away. I want to tell you that was the end of it. I want to tell you we came back to Salt Lake and went to work. on Monday, and slowly, over the following weeks, the whole thing faded into a weird story we'd tell at parties, something that would get exaggerated over time until it was more funny than scary. I want to tell you that, but something followed us back, not literally.

I don't mean there was a creature riding in the truck bed, I mean something changed after that trip, something in the quality of my days and my nights, something I can't fully explain. It started with the smell. Three days after we got back, I was sitting at my desk at work, and I caught a whiff of it. That same warm, rotten, sweet smell from the timber. Just a flash, just a second. But unmistakable, I looked around. Nobody else seemed to notice.

The HVAC was running. Someone had microwaved fish for lunch. I told myself it was the fish. It wasn't the fish. Then the sounds. Footsteps outside my apartment door at night. when I live on the third floor of a building where nobody walks the halls after ten. One footstep.

Two. A pause. Then nothing. I'd open the door and the hallway would be empty. Just carpet and fluorescent lights and the faint hum of the elevator. Then the dreams. Not nightmares exactly. Just a recurring image.

A dark space between two trees and something standing in it, swaying. And in the dream I know it's watching me. and I know it can see me even with my eyes closed, and I know it's smiling, or doing the thing it does instead of smiling, the thing that uses the muscles a smile would use, but isn't a smile because smiling is something you learn, and this thing learned it wrong. I called Marcus two weeks after the trip. We hadn't talked, which was unusual for us. Normally we'd be texting about the trip for days afterward, sharing photos, making plans for the next one. He picked up on the fourth ring. His voice sounded flat. I was going to call you, he said. Yeah. Have you been,

are you sleeping okay? My stomach dropped. No, have you? A long pause. I could hear his wife in the background talking to one of the kids. Normal sounds. Safe sounds. Something's outside my house at night, Marcus said. I hear it walking in the yard. The dog won't go outside after dark anymore. He just stands at the back door and growls. I went out with a flashlight last Tuesday, and there were footprints in the garden bed, bootprints. Same tread pattern. I sat down on my kitchen floor. I don't know why the floor. I just needed to be low. Have you told anyone? I asked. Who would I tell? The cops. Hey officer, something from the woods followed me home. They'd think I was on something. What about Sarah? She thinks it's a prowler. She wants to install cam.

What's a camera going to show, Aaron? What's it going to show? I didn't answer, because the truth is, I was afraid of exactly what a camera would show, and I was more afraid of what it wouldn't show, that the footage would be empty, that whatever walks around Marcus's yard at 3 a.m. Whatever stands in the gap between the trees and sways and tilts its head at an impossible angle, and breathes in a perfect mechanical rhythm, that it wouldn't be on the recording, that it exists in a space cameras can't reach, or worse, that it would be on the recording, and it would be looking directly at the camera, and it would be wearing a face we recognized.

I haven't been back to the Uintas. I don't think I'm going back. Marcus and I still talk, but we don't talk about it. The dreams have gotten less frequent, once a week now, instead of every night. The smell comes and goes. The footsteps in the hallway have stopped, or I've stopped. I stopped hearing them, or I've gotten so used to them that they don't register anymore. I don't know which of those options is worse.

I read about Skinwalkers after we got back. I read a lot. Navajo accounts, Ute stories, forum posts from people who've had experiences in the Four Corners region, in the Uinta Basin, on the reservation. I know the Uinta Basin has a history. I know about Skinwalker Ranch, about the Ute legends, about the property near Ballard, that the government studied for years. I know that the Ute people say the Uintas have been wrong for a long time,

that there are things in those mountains that are older than the name anyone has given them. I used to think those were just stories, cultural artifacts, metaphors for the fear of wilderness, the fear of the dark, the old mammalian terror of being prey. Now I think the stories are instructions. I think there are warnings from people who encountered what we encountered and survived long enough to pass the message on. on. And the message is simple. There are places you don't go. There are things you don't look at.

And when the woods go quiet and the air gets heavy and something in your blood starts screaming at you to be still, to be invisible, to play dead, you listen. You listen because that instinct is older than language, older than thought, older than anything you've ever been taught. It comes from a time when our ancestors shared the dark with things they couldn't name, things that could walk like us and breathe like us and stand in the places we stand, things that learned what we look like and how we move and what sounds we make, but learned it the way you'd learn a foreign language from a textbook. Close enough, almost right, but never quite. And if you're smart, if you're lucky, you come home and you close the door, and you turn on every light, and you tell

yourself it was nothing. But you check the locks twice. You listen to the hallway, and And you never, ever look out the window after dark. Because it might be looking back, and it might be wearing your face. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th, and the signature Southern Country Rock of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at Yamavatheater.com.

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mom will love. Make Mom's Day at 1800flowers.com slash Spotify. That's 1,800flowers.com slash Spotify. I'm a hiker. Have been for about 12 years. Not the weekend warrior Instagram summit type. I mean, I've done the AT and sections. I've done the Wonderland Trail. I've spent weeks alone in the backcountry of Olympic National Park. I'm not telling you this to brag. I'm telling you because I need you to understand that I don't scare easily out there. The woods have always felt more like home to me than anywhere else. That's important context for what I'm about to say. This happened in early October, in a stretch of national forest in northern Washington. I won't say exactly where. I know that sounds like I'm being dramatic, but by the end of this, you'll understand

why. I don't want anyone going out there to look for it. I'd planned a five-day solo loop, nothing crazy, maybe 40 miles total, following a series of old logging roads and unmaintained trails, the kind of trip where you might not see another person the entire time. That was the appeal. I'd been going through some stuff, a breakup, job changes, the usual life falling apart things that make a person want to disappear into the trees for a while. The first two days were perfect, I mean that. October in the Pacific Northwest is something else. The light goes golden. The air smells like wet cedar and decay. And the forest is doing that thing where it's dying beautifully.

I set up camp both nights near water, cooked simple meals, read a little. My head was clearing. I was sleeping well. I remember thinking, on the morning of day three, that I felt more like myself than I had in months. Day three is when it started. I was following a trail that didn't appear on any of my maps. That's not a unusual out there. Old paths crisscrossed the forest, made by loggers or hunters or whoever, decades ago. They show up as faint lines through the undergrowth, and if you know what to look for, they're easy enough to follow. I'd been on one of these since mid-morning, heading roughly north by northwest, when I noticed the trail was getting more defined. Not less, the way these things usually go, more. The ground was worn smooth and clean like it was used regularly.

I didn't think much of it. People live out in those woods sometimes. Off-gritters, hermits. I've stumbled on their camps before, usually just a tarp and some pots. You nod, exchange a few words, and move on. So I kept walking. Around noon the trail opened up, and I came to a clearing. Now clearings happen in forests.

Trees fall, fire comes through, logging crews take a section out. But this one was different. It was almost perfectly circular, maybe 80 feet across, and the grass inside it was short. Not mowed short, I don't mean that, but short, uniform, like a lawn that hadn't been tended in a couple of weeks. The trees surrounding it grew right up to the edge and stopped, like they'd been told to. Their branches didn't extend over the clearing. They just stopped at the boundary, every single one of them. I stood at the edge. I stood at the edge for a while. Something about it made me hesitate. Not fear exactly. More like the feeling you get when you walk into a room where two people have just been arguing. A thickness in the air. A sense that

you've interrupted something. But I was curious. I'm always curious. That's my problem. I stepped into the clearing and the first thing I noticed was the silence, not quiet, silence. Out in the forest there's always sound, birds, wind in the canopy, insects. The creek I'd been following had been a constant murmur all morning, but in the clearing, nothing. It was like someone had pressed mute on the world. I could hear my own breathing, my heartbeat, the rustle of my pack. That was it. I walked to the center. The grass felt strange under my boots, dry and brittle, despite the rain we'd had the night before. Everything around me was damp, dripping, green. But this grass was the color of straw in August. In the exact center of the clearing, there was a stone. Flat, about the size of a

manhole cover, set flush with the ground. Gray. No markings on it that I could see. Just a smooth, round stone, perfectly placed. I knelt down and touched it. It was warm, not sun warm. The sky was overcast. It hadn't seen direct sunlight all day, probably not for days, but the stone was warm like it had been sitting next to a fire. I pulled my hand back and I swear, I know how this sounds, but I swear the warmth followed my hand, like it clung to my skin for a moment longer than it should have, like it was reluctant to let go. I stood up. I looked around the clearing. Everything was still, silent. The trees at the edges stood like walls. And I had the most overwhelming sensation that I was being watched, not from any particular direction,

from everywhere, from the ground, from the sky, from inside the trees themselves. I told myself I was being ridiculous. I'd been alone for three days. Solitude does things to you. I know that. I've felt it before, the creeping paranoia, the tendency to read significance into random things. I told myself that's all it was. I took some photos, drank some water, and I left. I went back the way I'd come, found my original route, and kept hiking. By evening, I'd put another six miles between me and the clearing, and I'd mostly stopped thinking about it. I made camp by a stream, ate dinner, watched the light die through the trees. That night, I dreamed about the stone. In the dream I was kneeling beside it again,

but this time it was night, and there was a light coming from underneath it, a faint amber glow seep out around the edges. I could hear something beneath it too, not a sound exactly, a vibration, a hum that I felt more in my chest than in my ears. I reached down and tried to lift the stone, and it moved easily, much too easily for its size, and underneath was, I woke up. It was 2.47 a.m. I was in my tent, in my sleeping bag, and I was drenched in sweat. My heart was hammering. The dream had been so vivid, so textured, that for several seconds I genuinely did not know where I was. I lay there, breathing, waiting for my body to calm down, and that's when I heard it. A hum, low, barely audible, more felt than heard.

Coming from the north, from the direction of the clearing, I told myself it was the wind. I told myself it was a distant engine, a generator at some far off cabin. I told myself a lot of things in that tent, lying very still, staring at the ceiling. The hum lasted about ten minutes, and then faded. I did not go back to sleep. When morning came, gray and damp, I packed up fast. I'd planned to continue north, then loop back east and south to my car, but north meant back toward the clearing. I recalculated.

I could cut east early, at a few miles but avoid that whole area. easy decision. So I turned east. Here's where it gets bad. I hiked east for two hours. Good pace, familiar terrain, second growth forest, the occasional old stump the size of a dinner table. I crossed a creek, went up a ridge, came down the other side, and walked into the clearing. The same clearing. I knew it was the same one, the perfect circle, the dead grass, the stone in the center. The silence that dropped over me like a hood the moment I stepped past the tree line. Everything identical. I stood there and I felt something I hadn't felt in a long time. Real, honest fear. I pulled out my GPS unit. It showed me exactly where I should be, six miles east and slightly

south of where I'd camped the night before. Nowhere near the clearing. I checked my compass. It was pointing north, steady, normal. I looked at my map, nothing made sense. I was where I was supposed to be, but I was also here. In this place I shouldn't have been able to find again without deliberately retracing my steps. I backed out. I didn't turn around. I backed out slowly, keeping my eyes on the stone. I don't know why. It felt necessary. Like turning my back on it would be a mistake. Once I was in the trees again, the sounds returned. Birds, wind, the creek somewhere below me. The world came back.

I checked my GPS once more, reoriented, and headed south this time. Due south, away. I walked for three hours. I didn't stop for water. I didn't stop to eat. I just walked, fast, putting distance between me and that circle of dead grass. The forest was doing everything forests do. changing, shifting, offering little landmarks.

A moss-covered boulder here, a nurse log there, a patch of Huckleberry going red, normal things, real things. And then the trees thinned and the grass turned pale and the silence came down. The clearing. I felt something break in me. Not dramatic. Not a scream or a collapse.

More like a wire snapping quietly inside my chest. I stood at the edge and I looked at the stone, sitting there in the center, round and gray and waiting, and I understood something that I couldn't quite put into words, that I hadn't been walking away from this place, that there was no walking away from it, that the forest, or whatever lived in the forest, had decided I was going to be here, and my opinion on the matter was irrelevant. I sat down at the edge of the clearing, just sat, right there on the wet ground, my back against a tree. I was shaking, not from cold.

I sat there for a long time. I'm not sure how long. The light didn't change, which was wrong. It should have. Hours were passing, but the sky looked exactly the same. That flat, gray Pacific Northwest overcast, frozen in place. And then very slowly something changed. The stone in the center of the clearing started to glow, faintly.

That amber light I'd seen in my dream, seeping up from beneath it, pooling around its edges like liquid. The hum started too, that low, chest-deep vibration, the one I'd heard in my tent, but louder now, closer. I should have run. I think about that a lot. I should have gotten up and run in any direction and just kept running until I hit a road or a river or another human being. But I didn't. I sat there and I watched, because part of me wanted to know, that same curiosity that's always gotten me into trouble,

that need to see what's under the stone. The light grew brighter, the hum grew louder, and the grass around the stone began to move. Not like wind was blowing it, it was bending toward the stone. Every blade, every dry stalk, leaning inward, pointing at the center, like the stone was pulling everything toward it. Then I felt it, the pull, subtle at first, like a gentle tug on my jacket, like someone had hooked a finger through my collar and was easing me forward. I pressed my back harder against the tree.

The pull increased, not violently, patiently, the way gravity works, constant, unhurried, inevitable. I grabbed the tree trunk behind me. The bark was wet and rough under my fingers. The pull was stronger now. My boots were sliding forward on the damp ground, cutting little furrows in the dirt. I hooked my arms around the tree and held on. The hum was inside me. I could feel it in my teeth, in my ribs, behind my eyes. It wasn't unpleasant. That's the worst part. It felt like recognition, like the vibration in a tuning fork when it finds its matching frequency. Like something in me was responding to something in the ground, and the two were trying to come together. I understood, in that moment, that the stone wasn't pulling me.

Something beneath the stone was. Something that had been waiting there for a very long time. And it knew me. I can't explain it better than that. The pull wasn't generic. It wasn't like gravity or wind or magnetism. It was personal. It knew the shape of me, not my body, but whatever you want to call the thing that lives inside my body, and it wanted that. Just that. The amber light was pulsing now, rhythmic.

And I realized the rhythm was my heartbeat. It was synchronizing with me. Or I was synchronizing with it. The distinction didn't seem to matter. I heard something then. Under the hum, a voice. No. a voice, the memory of a voice, like someone had spoken my name a thousand years ago, and

the echo was just now reaching me, worn smooth by time, barely recognizable but unmistakably meant for me. I can't tell you what it said. I don't think it used words, but the meaning was clear. Come down, come down and rest. It sounded like the most reasonable thing in the world. My arms were tired. The tree was rough and uncomfortable.

The ground was cold and wet beneath me. But down there, under the stone, it would be warm, it would be quiet. No more thinking, no more hurting, no more of the relentless noise of being alive. Just stillness. Just that amber light folding around me like a blanket. My arms loosened. I felt them do it. Felt the muscles relax, the grip slacken.

My body was making the decision without me. I was sliding forward slowly, my boots finding no purchase on the slick ground. The stone was maybe 40 feet away. The light was beautiful, warm and golden and impossibly deep, like looking into a sunset that went all the way down. I think I would have gone. I think, if nothing had changed, I would have let go of the tree, and walked to the center of the clearing, and knelt beside the stone, and lifted it, and gone down into whatever was beneath it. And that would have been the end of me, not the end of my life, maybe, the end of something else.

Something I don't have a word for, but something did change. A bird sang, one bird. Somewhere behind me, deep in the forest, a varied thrush let out that long, single-note, ethereal whistle they do. It cut through the hum like a knife through cloth, clean, sharp, real. And for one second, one second, the pull faltered. That's all I needed. I don't know where the strength came from.

adrenaline, survival instinct, something deeper than either of those things. I wrenched my arms tight around the tree, and I hauled myself up, barked tearing the skin off my forearms, and I got my feet under me, and I turned. I turned my back on the clearing. The pull hit me like a wave. My knees buckled. I grabbed a branch, grabbed another tree, and I moved. One step. Two. The hum was screaming now. Not louder exactly, but more urgent. the way a child screams when you're walking away from it. The amber light was behind me. I could see it casting my shadow long and thin on the ground ahead of me,

and my shadow was reaching back toward the clearing like it didn't want to leave. I ran. I don't remember much of the next hour. Pieces. Branches whipping my face. My pack slamming against my back. The ground uneven beneath me. Roots and rocks trying to take my feet out from under me.

Falling once, hard on my hands and knees. getting up immediately, not looking back. That was the rule I made for myself. The one clear thought in the animal panic of my brain. Do not look back. The hum faded, slowly, grudgingly, the way a headache fades, leaving a ghost of itself behind. The sounds of the forest returned. Birds, wind, the creek of trees. I was gasping, my lungs burning, my arms bleeding from the bark. I slowed to a walk, Then I stopped. I was on a ridge. Below me to the south I could see a valley and at the bottom of the valley a logging road, a real one, gravel, tire tracks. I almost cried. I think I did cry actually. Standing on that ridge with blood on my arms and my heart trying to beat its way out of my chest, looking down at the most beautiful strip of gravel I'd ever seen. I made it to the road by late afternoon. I followed it east for four miles until it connected with a county highway. A woman in a pickup truck stopped for me. I must have looked half dead.

She drove me to a gas station. I called a friend. I didn't tell the woman what happened. I barely spoke at all. She kept glancing at me, at my arms. And I think she thought I'd fallen off a cliff, or gotten lost, or had some kind of breakdown. She wasn't entirely wrong about the last one.

My car was parked at a trailhead 12 miles from where I emerged. I got a ride there the next day. I drove home. I haven't been back to the woods since. That was three weeks ago. Here's what I keep thinking about. What I can't stop thinking about. I've hiked hundreds of miles in my life. I've navigated by compass and GPS through terrain a lot more challenging than that stretch of forest. I don't get lost. That's not ego. It's just a skill I've developed over a long time. And yet I walked three different directions and ended up in the same place. My GPS was working fine.

My compass was working fine. I was working fine. The forest moved. Or the clearing did. Or something rearranged the world around me while I was walking through it. The way you'd rearrange furniture in a room while someone's blindfolded. I've looked for the clearing on satellite images. Google Earth.

USGS surveys. Everything I can find. There's nothing there. No circle of dead grass. No break in the canopy. just uninterrupted forest, the same as everywhere else. And here's the other thing. The thing that makes me feel sick when I think about it too long,

that pull, that warmth, that voice, or whatever it was, offering rest, offering quiet, part of me wanted it. Not in a desperate way, not in a death-wish way, in a homecoming way. Like I'd been away from somewhere for a very long time, and I was finally standing on the threshold again, and all I had to do was step through. I didn't step through. I'm here.

I'm fine. I'm sitting in my apartment, and the lights are on, and I can hear traffic outside, and everything is normal. But sometimes, at night, when the city gets quiet, I swear I can feel it. The hum. Faint. Distant.

Patient. Like it's still there at the center of the clearing, glowing softly in the dark, waiting, not urgently, not angrily. just waiting. The way something waits when it knows, with absolute certainty, that you'll come back. And the thing that keeps me awake,

the thing I can't get past, no matter how many lights I leave on, is that I'm not sure it's wrong. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart? Well, that's Tova's reality. An elderly widow working at an aquarium.

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