Just Creepy: Scary Stories - Disturbing Forest Horror Stories

Episode Date: May 18, 2026

Disturbing Forest Horror StoriesLinktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepyStory Credits:►Sent in to https://www.justcreepy.net/Timestamps:00:00 Intro00:00:18 Story 100:52:52 Story 2Music 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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free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming, Ontario. One day you're negotiating with... suppliers. The next, you're installing a shelf in the back room. Running a business means moving in many directions all the time. TD's new small business banking accounts are built for how your business moves. It's how we're making banking more human. It was the second weekend of October 2003, and I had taken three days off from work to scout a section of Daniel Boone National Forest I had never set foot on before. I had been hunting whitetail for 19 years. Most of that time I hunted my

late-uncle's farm in the next county over, 340 acres of mixed hardwoods and pasture that had been in our family since the 1960s. He passed away in February of 2022, and his widow sold the property to an out-of-state buyer eight months later. The new owner did not want hunters on the land. Not me, not my brother, not the two cousins who had hunted that ground their entire lives. He sent a certified letter, polite but final, and that was the end of 19 seasons. So I spent the summer doing what every hunter without land does. I sat at the kitchen table with a stack of topographical maps from the Forest Service and a magnifying glass, and I looked for somewhere new. I marked 19 possible spots in three different Ranger districts.

I drove out to 13 of them on weekends through July and August, walking the roads and checking access. By the middle of September, I had narrowed the list down to two, and the best of the best of The better of the two was a section along Rock Creek in Macquarie County, on the southeastern edge of the National Forest about 47 miles from my house. Rock Creek had everything I wanted, a long ridge running northeast to southwest, with hardwoods on the eastern slope and a creek bottom thick with Greenbrier at the base, a saddle between two knobs where deer would funnel through during the rut, an old logging road that came in from the north and dead ended at a gated turnaround about two miles from where I planned to hunt.

The closest paved road was four miles away. The closest house was further than that. I had been out there once already, on the 18th of September, just to walk the road in and check the access. That first trip was uneventful. I drove in, parked at the gate, walked maybe a mile, and turned back. I saw two squirrels and a pile of bear scat, nothing else. The trip I want to tell you about was four weeks later on the 14th of October.

Modern gun season opened on the 11th of November, which gave me a little less than a month to learn the area. My goal that morning was to walk the eastern slope, find the saddle, mark a tree where I could hang a portable stand, and clear two or three shooting lanes with a folding saw. I had packed a sandwich, two bottles of water, a small first aid kit, my binoculars, a hand saw, two rolls of pink flagging tape, and my phone. I did not bring a rifle because the season was not open, but I did have a folding pocket knife clipped inside my front pants pocket. I left my house at 5.45 in the morning. I stopped at a gas station off Kentucky Route 92 to buy coffee and a breakfast biscuit, and I pulled up to the gate at the end of the logging road at 722. The sun was already up, but the light was still soft, and the air had that clean, cold edge to it that tells you fall has finally settled in over the

Cumberland Plateau. The first thing I noticed was the gate. The forest service gate at the end of the logging road is a heavy metal swing arm, painted yellow, with a chain and a padlock that holds it closed across the road. The lock is supposed to be locked at all times unless a forest service truck or a permitted contractor is coming through. On my first visit in September, that lock had been closed and the chain had been pulled tight. On the 14th of October, the chain was hanging loose. The padlock was still hooked through one link, but the chain itself had been pulled off the gate arm and was just dangling down toward the dirt. From a distance the gate looked closed, but anybody could have walked right up and swung that arm open with one hand. I stood there for a minute trying to decide

what to make of it. The most reasonable explanation was that a Forest Service crew had been in there recently and had not bothered to lock back up. The second most reasonable explanation was that another hunter had figured out the lock could be picked or pride and had been driving into Scout. Neither of those things were good news, but neither was the kind of thing you call the sheriff about. I parked my truck in the small gravel pullout 20 yards back from the gate, the same place I had parked in September. I grabbed my pack, locked the truck, and started walking. 200 yards in I noticed the van. It was off the road to my left, maybe 30 feet back into the trees, parked in a small clearing that had probably been a log landing decades ago. It was an older Ford Aconaline, white originally,

but now a dirty gray-brown from rust and dried mud. The windows in the back had been covered from the inside with what looked like cardboard and duct tape. There were no license plates on the back. Whoever had parked it there had backed it in, and somebody had pulled branches and a section of old camouflage tarp across the front to break up the outline. I did not walk over to it. I stood on the road and looked at it for maybe 30 seconds, and then I kept walking. I told myself there were a dozen ordinary reasons for a van to be parked back there. Somebody had broken down. Somebody had left it for parts. Somebody was camping illegally. Mushroom pickers came into the National Forest all the time. people dumped vehicles back in the woods to avoid paying the disposal fee.

I had seen worse-looking trucks abandoned in worse-looking places, but the cardboard in the windows bothered me, and the branches across the front bothered me more. Somebody had tried to hide that van, not park it, hide it. I kept walking. The logging road went uphill for about half a mile, then leveled out and curved to the east. The trees on either side were a mix of red oak, white oak, hickory,

and the occasional sweet gum. The understory was sparse this time of year, with most of the leaves still hanging on the trees and the brush dying back. Visibility was decent. I could see 50 or 60 yards off the road in most directions. About three quarters of a mile in, I saw the first boot print.

The road had a wet stretch where a small spring seeped across the gravel, and the mud there held tracks well. There were two sets of prints, both heading in the same direction I was walking, One was a hiking boot with a normal lug pattern, maybe a size 10. The other was older. It was a work boot of some kind, with a heel that was wearing down hard on the outside edge. The outside of the right heel had a deep curved groove worn into it, and that groove was leaving a distinctive

mark every time the heel came down. Whoever was wearing those boots walked with a heavy roll to the right. The prints were fresh, the edges were still sharp. There had been no rain in three days. But the spring kept that mud wet all the time, so I could not tell exactly how old the prints were. It could have been 30 minutes. It could have been six hours, but it was not days. I kept walking. I told myself that boot prints in a national forest were not a crime. A quarter mile past the spring, I saw the first piece of orange tape. Orange survey tape is a common site in the woods. Forest service uses it. Loggers use it. Hunters use it. Surveyers use it. Seeing a piece tied to a branch out there should not have meant anything to me at all. I use pink flagging tape myself, which is why I had brought two rolls of it in my pack.

But this orange tape was tied wrong. A normal piece of flagging tape is tied at chest height or higher on a branch that faces an obvious path or boundary line. It is meant to be seen. It is meant to mark something. This piece was tied about waist high. On the back side of a small dogwood, six or seven feet off the road. You could only see it if you were already past it and looking back. I walked over and untied it. There was nothing written on it. No flag number, no initials, just a foot and a half of orange plastic ribbon. I tied it back where I had found it. I am not sure why. I think part of me did not want whoever had put it there to know somebody had been looking at it. Over the next 20 minutes of walking, I found four more pieces, all of them tied the same way, on the back side of

small trees or saplings, all visible only from one direction. And the direction they were visible from was not the direction of the road. They were visible from a line of travel that ran perpendicular to the road, cutting east through the timber and down toward the creek. Somebody had marked a private path through these woods, and they had marked it so that the markers could only be seen by somebody walking that path, not by somebody walking the road. I stopped at the fifth piece of tape and stood there with my hands on my hips, listening to the woods. The forest was doing what a forest does in October. There were squirrels working the leaves. There were a couple of crows somewhere down the draw. The wind was moving through the high branches. I told myself I had two

choices. I could turn around and go back to my truck, drive home, and pick a different piece of national forest to hunt this year, or I could keep going to the saddle, get my work done, and be out of there by lunchtime. I kept going. I have replayed that decision a thousand times since. The saddle was another half mile up the road, and then a couple hundred yards off into the timber on the east side. I left the road at a big white oak with a lightning scar down one side, and I dropped into the woods toward the ridge. The walking was easy. The leaves were dry. I made very little sound. I came up onto the saddle right where my map said I would, and I sat down on a deadfall to drink some water and eat half my sandwich. The view from up there was good. I could see the creek bottom below me,

the slope rising up on the far side, and a clear deer trail working along the contour about 40 yards down slope from where I was sitting. I sat there for 10 or 15 minutes, walking up. watching, letting the woods settle around me again after my walking had stirred them up. That was when I saw the roof. It was about 60 yards north of me, tucked back into a small flat between two big oaks, and it was almost invisible. The roof was made of green corrugated metal that had gone almost black with lichen and rust. If the sun had not caught one corner of it the right way, I never would have seen it. I sat there looking at it for a long time. The longer I looked, the more I could see. Plywood walls, weathered gray, a small platform at the base where the front

wall sat, a burlap-covered window opening on the side facing the deer trail. It was an old box blind. The kind people used to build before the Forest Service started cracking down on permanent stands in the 1990s. It looked like it had been sitting there for 20 or 30 years. I should have walked away from it. The smart thing would have been to Markets location on my map, finish my work at the saddle and leave. If somebody else's old blind was on my saddle, my saddle was no good to me anyway. I should have written off Rock Creek and gone home. But I am a hunter, and I am curious about other people's setups, and the blind was right there. So I got up off my deadfall and walked over to it. The first thing I noticed when I got close was

that the ground was wrong. The ground around an abandoned blind should be the same as the ground around any other tree in the woods. Leaf litter, moss, fallen branches, maybe some old beer cans if college kids had been out there. The ground around this blind had none of that. The leaves had been packed down flat. There was a worn path coming in from the backside, not from the front. Somebody had been walking to that blind regularly enough to wear a path into the forest floor.

I walked around to the door. The door was on the side opposite the burlap window, facing back into the timber instead of out toward the deer trail. There was a rusted hasp screwed into the plywood and a padlock hanging in the loop. The padlock was open. It was hooked through the loop, but the shackle was unlatched. I looked at that padlock for a long time. The body of the lock was old and rusted, but the part of the shackle that fit into the body was clean and bright.

That lock had been opened and closed many times, and not long ago. I told myself I would just look. I would crack the door, see what was inside, and back out. I would not touch anything. If somebody was using this blind, I needed to know it before opening day so I could pick a different spot. I lifted the padlock out of the hasp, set it on the small ledge by the door, and pulled the door open. The smell came out first. It was a closed-up smell, a lived-in smell, the kind of smell that comes off of a man who has been wearing the same clothes for a long time in a small space

with no ventilation, body odor, wood smoke, propane, stale cigarettes, and underneath all of that, the sweet rotting smell of food trash that had been sitting in a closed container for too long. I covered my nose with the back of my hand and stepped inside. The blind was bigger than I had expected, about eight feet by ten, with a low ceiling that I had to duck slightly to clear. There was no floor, just packed earth covered with cardboard flattened down and taped together. The walls were plywood, and they had been insulated on the inside with sheets of pink fiberglass that somebody had stapled up and then partially covered with old wool blankets. Along the right wall was a cot, a real cot, the folding metal kind they sell at Army Surplus

stores. There was a sleeping bag on it, a camouflage military bag, unzipped and pushed down toward the foot, a stained pillow at the head end, a small flashlight on a milk crate next to the cot, and beside the flashlight, an open paperback book with the cover torn off. Along the back wall was a folding card table with a single burner propane camp stove on it, two pots, a stack of plastic plates, a fork, and a hunting knife with a four-inch blade. A small green propane bottle was sitting under the table. Beside the camp stove was a coffee can being used as an ashtray.

The can was three-quarters full of cigarette butts. On the floor under the table was a five-gallon bucket with a toilet seat fitted on top. I did not look inside it. I did not need to. Along the left wall was a rough shelf built out of pallet wood. The shelf held cans of food. I counted as I looked. 23 cans of Vienna sausages. 11 cans of beanie weanies. 14 cans of chef Boyerty ravioli.

Six cans of beef stew. several cans of pork and beans, a bag of rice, a bag of cornmeal, two plastic jugs of water, gallon size, half empty. On a separate small shelf below the food shelf, somebody had laid out a row of items in a neat line, a pack of double A batteries, a pack of 9-volt batteries, three cheap phone chargers, all with different connectors, a roll of duct tape, a spool of fishing line, a small pair of pliers, a coil of wire, a red plastic lighter, a box of waterproof matches, and at the end of the row, three small notebooks, the kind you can buy at a drugstore for a dollar, spiral bound with stiff cardboard covers. I told myself again that I would not touch anything.

I told myself I would back out, close the door, leave the lock the way I had found it, and get to my truck. And then I looked up. at the wall above the cot. The wall above the cot was covered in photographs. There were a lot of them, more than I could count standing there. They were attached to the plywood with thumbtacks and pieces of duct tape, layered over each other so that the edges overlapped. Some were printed on regular printer paper, with the colors faded and bleeding. Some were on cheap photo paper, glossy and curled at the edges. A few were Polaroid-style instant prints with the white borders. They had not been organized. They had been added one at a time, over a long stretch of time,

and the older ones at the bottom were yellowed and worn, while the ones on top were still fresh. Every single photograph was of a person, or of two or three people. Every single one had been taken outdoors, and every single one had been taken without the subjects knowing. There was a woman with a long braid and a green pack photographed from behind as she crossed a small wooden footbridge. There was a father with a young boy at a trailhead parking area, both of them facing away from the camera, the father unloading something from a small SUV. There was a college-age couple sitting on a flat rock and eating something out of a plastic container. There was an older man in an orange vest walking down a fire road, his rifle on a sling over his shoulder. There was a woman in

shorts changing her shoes by the open back door of a sedan, bent down, the photographer behind a tree maybe 30 yards away. There was a woman tying her hair back next to her car. There was a teenage girl with a small dog on a leash. There were hikers, hunters, fishermen, mushroom pickers. I felt my pulse start to thump in my ears. My mouth had gone dry. I made myself look away from the wall, and that was when I saw the notebook. The top notebook on the small shelf was lying open. I had not noticed it before because I had been looking at the row of items, not at any one of them. The notebook was a cheap spiral-bound thing with college-ruled paper. The page it was open to had a list written down it in heavy block letters with a ballpoint pen. The list was vehicle

descriptions, silver Toyota Tacoma, dent and tailgate, two stickers on rear window, Red Ford F-150, lift kit, mud tires, dog box in bed, black jeep wrangler, soft top, kayak rack, green Subaru Outback, roofbox, dog crate inside white Chevy Silverado, fleet stickers, ladder rack. The list went on. I counted later from memory. There were 26 vehicles described. Each one had a description, and next to most of them, in different colored ink, somebody had added notes. Days of the week, week, times, the word alone in capital letters next to four of them, the word couple next to two, the word kids next to one, with a question mark. My truck was on the list. It was the seventh entry.

Dark blue Chevy Silverado, 2016, ladder rack, faded NRA sticker on rear window, hunting decal on driver's side. Beside it, in red ink, Sept 18 alone. The 18th of September, was the date I had driven out there the first time. The day I had walked in a mile and walked back out. I stood there in that blind with the smell of that man's life filling my nose, and I felt something cold come up the back of my neck. I made myself move. I pulled my phone out of my pocket with hands that were shaking, and I took four photographs, one of the wall of photos, one of the open notebook, one of the food shelf, and the cot. One down the length of the blind from the door. I did not turn the flash on. The light from the open door was enough.

Then I put my phone back in my pocket and I backed out of the blind. I pulled the door closed. I put the padlock back through the hasp the way I had found it, with the shackle unlatched. I stepped back from the door three steps, and I stood there for a count of five trying to make my hands stop shaking. The crows had gone quiet. I do not know when they had stopped. They had been steadily since I came up onto the saddle, and at some point in the last few minutes they had quit. The woods around me were silent. I started walking. I did not run. I made myself walk at the same pace I had come in at, because some part of me thought that if I was being watched, running would be the worst thing I could do. I walked back up out of the flat where the blind sat,

came up over the small rise, and dropped back down toward the saddle where I had eaten my sandwich. I had not made it 20 steps past my deadfall when I heard the cough. It was a single cough, short and wet, the cough of a man clearing his throat. It came from somewhere behind me, maybe 50 or 60 yards back, somewhere down in the flat where the blind was. I froze. I did not turn around. I stood there with one foot half lifted and I listened.

There was nothing else. No second cough. No footsteps. No voice. voice. Just that single sound, and then the silence of the woods. I started walking again. I walked faster. The logging road was a quarter mile back through the timber, up the slope and over the ridge. I knew the line back, because I had walked it in. I kept my eyes on the trees ahead of me, and I tried not to listen for the sound of anybody behind me. I tried not to imagine the shape of a man

stepping out of the blind and looking at the door and seeing that something had been touched. About 150 yards from the road, I heard the first footstep. It was somewhere off to my left, down slope, maybe 40 yards out, a crunch of leaves under a boot, just one step, and then nothing. I kept walking. 30 seconds later, another step, same direction, same distance. I stopped. The footsteps stopped half a beat after I did. I started walking again, three steps. The footsteps started up again, three steps. Then both of us stopped at the same time. He was matching me. I cannot fully describe what that felt like. It was not the same as being followed. Being followed is one person walking behind another person. This was something else. This was two people walking in

parallel through the woods, with one of them invisible to the other, and the invisible one timing every footfall to disguise itself inside the sound of the visible one's footfalls. He had been doing it for at least a minute before I noticed. I reached the logging road and stepped out onto the gravel. The forest on the other side of the road was thinner than the side I had come out of. I could see 80 or 90 yards down slope. I stood at the edge of the road and I scanned the trees on both sides, and I did not see anything, nothing moving, nothing colored wrong, just trunks and leaves and shadows. I turned right and started walking down the road toward my truck. I made it about a hundred yards before I heard him cross the road behind me. I heard the gravel

shift under his boots. I heard him cross from the east side where the blind was, to the west side, where the slope dropped down toward the creek. He did not try to disguise the sound this time. He crossed the road at a brisk walk, and then he was gone again, into the trees on the downhill side. He was getting ahead of me. I understood it then in a way I had not understood it before. He was not following me. He was working around me. He was using the slope and the brush to circle in front of me.

And somewhere down the road, between me and my truck, he was going to come up out of the timber and be standing there waiting. I pulled my phone out of my pocket. The signal indicator showed no bars. I dialed 9-1-1 anyway. The call failed before it ever rang. I tried again. It failed again. I typed a text to my brother Daniel.

The message said, At Rock Creek logging road, someone is following me. Need help. I hit send. The little circle next to the message spun for a few seconds, and then a red exclamation point appeared. It had not gone through.

I told the phone to try again. It tried again. It failed. I started walking faster. I was still on the road. The road went downhill from where I was, with a long curve to the left, and somewhere down that curve was the spring where I had seen the boot prints, and beyond that was the place where the van was parked, and beyond that was the gate and my truck. I had to make a decision. I could stay on the road and walk straight into wherever he had set up to meet me. or I could leave the road and try to make my own way out through the woods. If I left the road, I had two choices. I could go up the slope to my right, which would put me on top of the ridge, and force me to either come back down to the road, eventually, or walk three miles north along the ridge, to come out on a different forest road. Or I could go down the slope to my left, which would put me down into the creek bottom. The creek bottom was thicker, harder going, but it ran roughly to,

parallel to the road for about half a mile before bending east. If I could get down into the bottom and stay close to the creek, I might come out somewhere near the gate without having to use the road. I chose the creek bottom because I knew he had already crossed to that side. I figured he would expect me to stay on the road or go up the ridge to avoid him. Going down toward him was the last thing he would expect, and the brush down there was thick enough that I could move under cover. I left the road at a clump of mountain laurel and dropped down the slope. The slope was steeper than it looked from the road. I had to grab saplings to keep my footing.

The leaves were dry on top, but slick underneath where the moisture from the previous week was still working its way out. I covered maybe 60 yards downhill before I had to stop and catch my breath. I crouched behind a deadfall and listened. For about 30 seconds there was nothing. Then I saw him. He was downslope from me and to my right, maybe 70 or 80 yards away, moving through the laurel on a line parallel to the road. He was wearing a faded camouflage jacket with a hood pulled up over his head and a dark-knit

cap underneath the hood. His pants were dark and his boots were brown. He was carrying something at his right side that was longer than his forearm and held vertically, but I could not see exactly what it was from that distance and through the brush. He was moving at a steady walk, not hurrying, with his head turned toward the road and his shoulders slightly forward. He had not seen me. He thought I was still on the road above him. I stayed crouched and I watched him move. He passed below my position and continued down the slope toward where the road bent left. He was making his way to a point on the road that I would have had to pass through if I had stayed up there.

He was setting up an ambush. I waited until he was out of sight. Then I started moving again, downhill and to the left, in the direction opposite to his line of travel. I was now putting distance between myself and him, but I was also working further from my truck. The creek was below me and I could hear it. I just needed to get to it, follow it south toward the gate, and try to come out somewhere I could see my truck, before I committed to crossing the road again. I had been moving for maybe five or six minutes when I heard his voice for the first time. It came from up the slope behind me.

He had figured out I was not on the road and he had circled back to find me. His voice was rough and flat and not loud at all. He was not yelling. He was speaking in a normal tone, which somehow made it worse, because the woods were quiet enough that I could hear him plainly even from a hundred yards away. You came out of there with something. I did not stop. I kept walking, picking my way through the laurel.

You went in there and you came out of it. with something in your pocket. I want it back. I felt my legs go light. He had not just heard me. He had seen me. He had been watching the blind from somewhere, and he had watched me come out and walk away. I know your truck, 16 Silverado, two stickers in the back window. I know where you park. I broke into a run. The brush slowed me down. I was tearing through Greenbrier and shoving my way through Laurel, and I could feel things ripping at my pants and my jacket. My pack caught on a branch and yanked me backward. I shrugged it off, let it fall, and kept going. You come out here alone. I seen you the last time. His voice was closer now.

He was moving fast through the timber above me. I could hear branches breaking under his boots. He was not bothering to be quiet anymore. The creek came up in front of me without warning. I came through a wall of brush and almost went over the edge of the bank. The bank was steep and muddy. eight or nine feet straight down to the water. Rock Creek itself was maybe 15 feet across there, with water moving fast over a bed of stones. It was not deep, but it was moving with enough force that I could hear the rush of it through the brush. There was a normal crossing about half a mile upstream, where the bank flattened out and the creek widened into shallow gravel. I had seen it on my map. He had heard me running, and from his position above me he would have figured out by now,

that I was working downstream, away from the normal crossing. If I tried to use the normal crossing, I would have to backtrack toward him. If I tried to cross where I was, I had to get down the bank without breaking an ankle, through the water without getting swept against the rocks, and up the bank on the far side. The other bank looked just as steep, maybe steeper. I went down the bank where I was. I sat down on the edge and slid on my backside, using my heels as brakes. I made it about halfway down before the mud gave out under me and I went the rest of the way down in a slide that ended with both of my boots in the water and my back against the base of the bank. The water was cold. It came up to my knees. I felt it soaked into my pants immediately. I heard him crashing through

the brush above me. I got my feet under me and I started across. The bottom of the creek was made of slick round stones and I could not see well through the moving water. I fell once. My right knee came down hard on a rock and I felt something tear in the meat of my calf below it. I came up gasping, soaked from the chest down, and I shoved myself the rest of the way across. The far bank was easier than I had feared. The mud was softer, and there were exposed roots I could grab. I was pulling myself up with my hands and pushing with my one good leg when he came out of the brush on the bank I had just left. He was 30 feet away, direct. directly above me on the opposite bank. I saw him fully for the first time. He was shorter than I had

expected, maybe five foot eight, maybe five nine, thin under his layered jacket. His beard was long and gray and tangled and dirty, and the skin around his eyes was sunken and red. He was holding a hatchet. It was an old felling hatchet, the kind with a 30-inch hickory handle and a heavy single-bit head. He was holding it in his right hand down at his side, and his hand on the handle was shaking. You give me that picture back, he said. I did not say anything. I pulled myself up another foot of the bank. Whatever you took in there, you give it back. I didn't take anything, I said. My voice did not sound like mine. You took something. I seen the shelf. Something's moved. I had not moved anything. I had stood in front of the shelf. I had stood in front of the shelf,

and looked at the notebook, but I had not touched it. He had come back into the blind after I left, and he had looked at his shelf, and he had decided that something was different, and he had become certain of it the way a person becomes certain of things, when they have been alone, in the woods too long. My brother's at the gate, I said. I texted him. He's already called the sheriff. He laughed. It was a single short sound with no warmth in it. No, you didn't. Phones don't work out here. been out here a year. They don't work. I'm recording you right now, I said. I pulled my phone out of my pocket with my left hand. The screen had a crack across it that I had not noticed before. I must have hit it when I fell in the creek. The screen was black. I did not know if the phone

was on or off. I held it up anyway, with the back of it toward him so he could not see the screen. He hesitated. It was only for a second or two, but that pause was a pause was enough. I used it. I scrambled up another two feet of the bank, grabbed a thick root with my left hand, and hauled myself up onto level ground. He came down the bank. He came down at the same way I had, sliding on his backside with his boots out in front of him, but he was carrying the hatchet in one hand, and that threw his balance off. About two-thirds of the way down, his right boot caught on a route, his body twisted, and he went sideways into the bank. I heard the hatchet come out of his hand. I heard it land in the mud at the bottom. I did not wait to see what happened next. I turned

and I ran. I ran with a limp because my right leg was not working right. The pain in my calf was a steady deep ache and the knee felt swollen already. I went uphill and away from the creek, working my way up the western slope through brush that ripped at me as I went through. I did not look back. I could hear him behind me. He was in the creek now, splashing through the water. He was yelling something I could not make out over the sound of my own breathing and my own footsteps. The slope leveled off after about 200 yards. I came up onto a small bench where the timber was a little more open. The logging road was somewhere to my right, north of me.

The gate and my truck were further on. I worked my way north through the bench, keeping low, trying to move quietly through the dry leaves and not doing a very good job of it. I did not hear him behind me anymore. That should have been a comfort. It was not. I did not know if he had given up or fallen, or stopped to retrieve his hatchet or worked around me again.

The not-knowing was worse than the knowing had been. I pulled my phone out again. The screen lit up this time. The crack was bad, a long jagged line down the middle, but the display still worked. I had one bar of signal. I tapped Daniel's name and held the phone to my ear. It rang.

Hey, he said, where are you? Rock Creek, I said. I could barely get the word out. There's a man. He's chasing me. I'm hurt. What? Call 911. Call the McCreary County Sheriff. Rock Creek logging road, the gated one off Kentucky 92. I'm trying to get to my truck. Are you... Just call. Stay on the line if you can. Okay. Hang on. I could hear him moving around in his house. I could hear his voice talking to somebody else, probably his wife. I kept walking. The line crackled in and out as I moved through the timber. It took me 20 minutes to get back within sight of the road. I came out behind the curve, downhill from where the spring was, and I stopped behind a big oak to look. The road was empty. I could not see the van from where I was, but I knew the spot it was parked. Daniel came back on the line. Sheriff's got two cars rolling. They want to know if you can describe him. Older, gray beard, camouflage jacket, dark cap, maybe five-eight. He had a hatchet. He's in his 50s or 60s, I think. He's been living in an old blind back there. There's a van parked off the road, an old Fort Econa line, gray and white, no plates, covered with branches. I could hear Daniel relaying this to somebody, probably a dispatcher on his other line. They want you to stay where you are if it's safe. They don't want you to engage. I'm not engaging. I'm trying to get to my truck. I don't know where he is right now. I lost him at the creek.

Okay, stay on the line. I started moving again, working down the road from behind the cover of the trees. I was watching for any motion, any color that did not belong. The road curved out below me. The pullout where my truck was parked was another 200 yards down. I could not see the truck from where I was. The gate was past it. I was. made it to within 50 yards of the pull-out before I could see the truck. The truck was where I had left it. The driver's side was facing me. Nothing looked obviously wrong from a distance. I worked my way down the last 50 yards staying off the road, in the trees. I was breathing through my teeth because of my leg. 20 yards from the truck I stopped and looked at it more carefully. The driver's side

rear tire was low. It was not flat. The truck had not settled all the way down on the rim. but the tire was visibly soft, and the bottom of it was bulging out under the weight of the truck the way a tire does when it has lost most of its air pressure. I scanned the woods around the pullout. I could not see anybody. I walked to the truck, fast, and I crouched down by the rear tire on the driver's side. The valve stem cap was missing. The valve itself looked like it had been pressed and held open until enough air came out to make the tire low, but not flat. He had been here. He had come down to my truck while I was still in the woods, before the chase even started, and he had let

the air out of one of my tires to slow me down if I made it back. He had been planning to take his time with me. I unlocked the truck, climbed in, locked the doors, and started the engine. I put it in drive, and I rolled forward slowly. The tire flopped under me. I could feel it pulling the truck to the right. I'm in the truck, I said into the phone. He flattened one of my tires, not all the way. I can drive, but I'm slow. Just get to the gate. Sheriff's coming up Kentucky 92 from the south. They'll meet you. I drove out at maybe 10 or 12 miles an hour, slower in the rough spots. The road was washboarded and rutted, and the soft tire made the truck feel loose under me. I kept watching the trees on both sides. I kept watching the rearview mirror. I never saw him again, not from the truck. He did not come

out of the woods. He did not stand at the edge of the road. The drive out from the pull-out to the gate took me almost ten minutes, and the whole time my hands were on the wheel and my eyes were moving from the mirror to the road to the trees and back. The gate was still hanging loose the way I had found it. I had to stop, get out, swing it open, drive through, and close it behind me. I did not get out of the truck on the gate side without looking around for a long time first. I left it open behind me. Somebody else could close it later. I met the first McCreary County deputy three quarters of a mile down Kentucky 92. He had his lights on. He pulled up beside me window to window and I rolled mine down.

I do not remember what I said to him. I remember he looked at my face and my pants and my hands, and he told me to follow him to a wide spot in the road another quarter mile down. We pulled over there. Two more cruisers came in within five minutes. Daniel pulled in behind them about ten minutes after that. He had driven the whole way at 80 miles an hour to get there. The deputies were professional and patient.

They took my statement standing on the side of the road, with my truck idling beside me, and the heater running because I was shivering hard from being wet. They had me show them the photographs on my phone. The crack across the screen made the images hard to see, but they were clear enough. The first deputy looked at the photo of the wall of pictures, and then he looked at the photo of the open notebook.

And then he looked at his partner, and his face changed. They called for more units. They called for a Kentucky State Trooper and a Forest Service law enforcement officer because the Forest Service officer knew the back roads of that district better than the county deputies did. Within an hour, there were nine law enforcement vehicles parked along the gravel pullout at the gate, and a tactical team was being assembled to go in on foot. They had Daniel drive me to the emergency room at the hospital in town.

My calf had a deep bruise but no fracture. My knee was sprained. I had a six-inch gash on my left forearm that I had not noticed during the whole walk-out. I needed 11 stitches. I sat in the bed in the emergency room for four hours, and I drank three cups of coffee, and I tried to stop shaking. The deputies went into the woods that afternoon. They did not find the man. He was gone before they got there.

They found the blind. They found everything I had. had seen, and a lot more that I had not seen, I had only looked at the wall in one notebook, and one shelf. The deputies, working with a Kentucky State Police crime scene team that came in the next morning, cataloged every object in the blind. There were four notebooks total, not three. The other three contained more vehicle descriptions, more notes about routines, and pages of handwritten observations about specific people. Some of the observations went back almost two years, there were 41 photographs on the wall. There were another 63 in a manila envelope

under the cot. Some of the photographs in the envelope were of the same people, taken from different distances on different days. The state investigators were able to identify the location of most of the photographs based on the backgrounds, and they were able to put names to 28 of the subjects within in the first week. In a footlocker at the foot of the cot, the deputies found 17 wallets, nine sets of car keys, four cell phones, three women's hair clips, a pair of women's sunglasses, a child's small backpack with a cartoon character on it that turned out to be empty, and a stack of license plates wrapped in a plastic grocery bag. The plates had been taken from vehicles in trailhead parking areas across three different counties over a span of at least

18 months. None of the plate thefts had ever been reported, because most people do not notice when their front plate is gone if their state only issues a rear plate, and most of the plates were front plates from out-of-state vehicles. Behind the blind, in a small hole covered by a piece of plywood and a layer of leaves, the deputies found a trail camera. The camera was not pointed at the deer trail. It was pointed at the worn path that came up to the back door of the blind. It was set to motion activate, and it had been running for at least four months on a fresh set of batteries. The most recent image on the camera, time stamped two hours before the deputies recovered it, was a photograph of me. It was a clear shot, taken from waist height.

I was walking up the path toward the back door of the blind. I was looking at the door. My right hand was on the strap of my pack. The trail camera had captured the moment when I first saw the worn path and decided to follow it. That image is now part of the evidence file. I have not seen it. I have been told what it shows. The man himself was not caught for six days.

Those six days were the worst six days of my life. The deputies told me there was no way for him to know where I lived. The plate on my truck was a rear plate, and he had been photographing me from behind, not the rear of my vehicle. But I knew he had been close enough to see my plate at some point, and the notebooks in the blind had not been fully read yet, and I did not know what he knew. I stayed with Daniel and his family for those six days. We kept the curtains closed at night.

Daniel slept on the couch in the living room with his shotgun beside him. Daniel's wife took the kids to her sister's place two states away, just in case. I jumped at every car that came down their street. I did not sleep more than two hours at a time. He was caught on the morning of the 20th of October. A woman who owned a small farm about 17 miles south of the trailhead heard her dog barking at her tool shed around 5.45 in the morning. She turned on the floodlight in her yard and saw a man coming out of the shed with a gas can.

She called 911 and stayed in her house. By the time the deputy arrived, the man had walked half a mile down the road. The deputy stopped him. The man matched the description that had been circulated to every department in five counties. He had a beard, a faded camouflage jacket, and a knit cap. He was carrying a small backpack. The backpack contained a hunting knife, two of the wallets from the footlocker, three of the cell phones, and a folded piece of paper.

The folded paper was the photograph he had taken of me from the 18th of September. I have been told he gave a partial statement at the time of his arrest and a fuller statement two days later after he had been arraigned and assigned a public defender. I have not been told everything he said. What I have been told is this. He was 61 years old. He had been living off the grid in some form for the better part of seven years. He had outstanding warrants in two other states. The warrants in one of those states were for burglary and aggravated assault going back to 2016. The warrants in the other state were tied to two open-stalking complaints involving women he had followed home from trailhead parking lots in 2019 and 2020.

He had never been charged with anything more serious than that, but the state investigators believed, based on the contents of his notebooks and the items in his footlocker, that he had been escalating. He had not killed anyone that they could prove. They told me this. They also told me they were still investigating. The photographs of women in the blind were what most concerned them. The red circles drawn around some of the women's faces in the photographs were what most concerned them. I gave a formal statement two more times in the weeks after his arrest.

I sat in a small room in the sheriff's office in Whitley City, and I went through every minute of that day. I sat in another small room in Frankfurt with two state investigators, and I went through it again. I identified the photograph he had been carrying as the same photograph I had seen on the wall of his blind. I identified items from the footlocker that I had not seen but that they showed me. The trial is scheduled for the spring of 2006. I will be a witness. I have already been told what to expect. I have not been back to Rock Creek.

The Forest Service closed the area for two months after the arrest while the state crime scene team finished their work, and then it reopened to the public. I know other hunters who have hunted that drainage since. I have not. I got my pack back. A deputy walked the line I had described and found it where I had dropped it. Most of the contents were intact.

The folding saw was missing. He had probably picked it up. I got the photograph of myself back. The original photograph from the 18th of September. It came in a sealed evidence envelope along with a release form, almost five months after the arrest, after the prosecutor's office finished cataloging what could be returned. I did not open the envelope for a long time.

When I did, I sat at my kitchen table and I looked at the picture for a long time. It is exactly what they described. I am standing beside my truck, my back to the camera, reaching into the bed. The angle of the photograph means it was taken from a position somewhere in the trees on the south side of the gate, about 50 yards from where my truck was parked. He had been close enough to me on the 18th of September that if he had walked 20 seconds in my direction, I would have heard him. Daniel told me something a few weeks after everything settled. He told me the text I had sent him from the creek bottom,

the one with the message about being followed, had never actually come through to his phone. What had come through was a separate location pin, sent automatically by my phone when the battery dropped below 20%. The pin had no text attached to it. It was just a map dot. If Daniel had been at work, or outrunning errands, or asleep, he would have seen a location pin from his brother in the middle of the Daniel Boone National Forest

with no message and no context, and he would have thought nothing of it. The reason he had picked up when I finally got through was because the pin had bothered him, and he had been staring at his phone trying to decide whether to call me back when the call came in. If I had not gotten that signal back when I did, if the pin had been the only thing he ever received, nobody would have come looking for me until the next morning at the earliest. By then I would have been 17 hours overdue, in the woods, in the cold, with a soaked body and a torn leg and a man in those woods who had a list of vehicles and a wall of pictures. I still hunt. I want to be clear about that.

I am not going to let a man in the woods take from me a thing I have done since I was 11 years old, but I do not scout alone anymore. I do not hunt alone anymore. My brother and I go together, or I go with one of my cousins, and one of us carries a small handheld radio in addition to a phone. I have a satellite communicator now, the kind that sends an SOS signal to a dispatcher who can route it to local authorities. I clipped it to the chest strap of my pack the day I bought it, and I have not unclipped it since.

I do not walk past old hunting blinds. If I see one, I mark its location on my GPS. I note the direction of any worn paths around it, and I report it to the Forest Service when I get home. I do not open doors. I do not lift padlocks out of hasps. I do not look through windows. Whatever is on the other side is not worth knowing about. If somebody else is using the woods the way that man was using the woods, somebody else can find out about it.

The blind itself was torn down by the Forest Service in late November of 2003. They burned the wood and packed out the metal roof. There is a small flat between two big oaks on the eastern slope above Rock Creek, 60 yards north of a saddle where deer crossed during the rut, and if you stood there now, you would not know that anything had ever been built there at all. The ground has come back. The leaves have covered it. I think about that flat sometimes.

I think about how easy it would have been to walk past it on the 18th of September and never see the roof through the trees. I think about how the only reason I saw it on the 14th of October was because the sun caught the metal at the right angle. I think about how many other flats there are and how many other drainagees in the Daniel Boone, and how many other old roofs, and how many other doors with rusted hasps and silver shackles. Then I think about the woman with the long braid crossing the footbridge. I think about the father and the boy at the trailhead.

I think about the teenage girl with the small dog on a leash. I think about whether any of them ever found out. I think about whether they ever will. And then I check my pack, and I clip my satellite communicator to the strap, and I call my brother to ask him what time he wants to head out in the morning. This was three years ago. I still haven't camped alone since. Not once.

I was 23 when it happened. Living up in Northern California, working a warehouse job that I was bad at, in a relationship that was already mostly over, but neither of us was admitting it yet. I had this thing back then, where I'd disappear into the woods for a night or two, whenever I didn't want to deal with my life. I'd grown up hiking with my dad.

I wasn't an idiot in the woods. I knew how to filter water, hang a bear bag, read weather coming in over a ridge. I'm not saying that to brag. I'm saying it because, every time I tell this story, somebody wants to find the part where I screwed up, I already know.

The screw up wasn't the gear, or the route. The screw-up was that I felt something was wrong and kept going anyway. It was late September. The summer crowds had cleared out and the weather hadn't turned cold yet. I had a Saturday and Sunday off, which almost never happened. And on Friday afternoon I decided I was going camping. No reservation, no real planning. I threw my pack in my car and drove up toward a national forest area I'd been to before. Trail wasn't anything special, six miles in to a little Alpine Lake. I'd been there once two years before with friends and remembered it as quiet and pretty and not too hard. Easy weekend. I got to the trailhead around 4.15 in the afternoon, which honestly

was too late, but I figured I could make the lake before full dark. There were two other vehicles in the lot. One was an older blue Subaru wagon with a bike rack on the back. The other was a white van. No company name on the side, no ladder, no logo, just a plain white cargo van with no side windows, backed into the far corner of the lot facing the exit. I noticed it. I want to say I had a bad feeling, but I didn't really. I noticed it, registered that it looked a little off, and then forgot about it. I'm going to come back to that van. The hike in was nice. First mile and a half is gentle. Through tall pines and that warm afternoon light you only get an early fall when the air starts going dry. I lost service maybe ten minutes from the lot, and I remember actually feeling

relieved when the bars dropped off. No work group chat blowing up. No text from my girlfriend asking where I was. Just me walking. That part of the day I still remember as good. About 45 minutes in, the trail flattens out into a long section that runs along the side of a ridge. Narrow, but clear. Trees on both sides. Steep drop to the right. I was probably a hair under two miles from the parking lot. That's when I heard somebody running.

I want to be careful here because the sound is the part everybody asks about. It wasn't a deer. I've heard deer crash through brush before, and it doesn't sound like that. This was feet on dirt. Human feet. and it was on the trail not next to it, coming from up the trail downhill toward me. I stopped walking. A few seconds later he came around a bend ahead of me.

He was maybe 70 yards out when I first saw him, sprinting, not jogging, not trail running with a hydration pack and little gaiters and any of that. Full speed, arms pumping, head forward. He had on dark sweatpants and a gray hoodie with the hood up. No pack, no water bottle, nothing. Something about him was wrong from the first second. I'm not talking about anything supernatural. I just mean he didn't move the way a person on a trail is supposed to move.

He was running like he'd just left somewhere bad, but there was nothing behind him. I stepped off to the right side of the trail to let him pass. He didn't pass. He stopped. That's the part I want you to picture properly. He was running full speed, and then he stopped, not slowed down, stopped. both feet planted, body still tipped forward from the momentum, and then he just held there, standing in the middle of the trail, staring straight at me.

I raised one hand, I said something dumb, I think it was you good, or you all right? I don't remember exactly, something in that range. He didn't answer. I couldn't really see his face. The light was behind him and the hood was up, and at 70 yards you don't see somebody's face anyway. But I could tell he was facing me. He wasn't bent over catching his breath. He wasn't fumbling with a phone or a watch.

He was just standing. I said it louder. Hey, you okay? Nothing. Then he took one step backward. That was the moment my stomach dropped. I want to explain why, because writing it out, it sounds like nothing. One step backward.

So what? But if he'd kept running past me, I would have forgotten him by the time I got to the lake. If he'd yelled back that he was training or that he was lost or that he was hurt, fine, normal. The backward step was wrong because it was the kind of movement a person makes when they didn't expect to see somebody, and they're recalculating. I looked behind me, partly out of instinct. The trail was empty. When I turned back he was still there. We stood like that for 10, 15 seconds, maybe longer. It felt much longer. Then he turned and walked off the trail, into the trees on his left side and was gone. He didn't crash through anything.

He didn't break branches. There was no sound of brush moving. He stepped between two trunks and that was it, like a door closing. I should have turned around. I want that on the record. Two miles in, alone, no service. A man just sprinted at me and stopped and stepped off into the woods. The correct move was to walk back to my car.

Every single part of me knew it. But there's a thing your brain does where it doesn't want to admit it's scared, because admitting it's scared means you came out here for nothing, and you have to drive home in the dark, and the whole weekend is wasted. So it makes up reasons. He was probably a trail runner. He probably had earbuds in. He probably felt embarrassed because he stopped weird in front of a stranger.

There's probably a side trail I don't know about. I'm probably just freaked out because I'm alone. I stood there a couple more minutes, then I kept hiking. For the next mile I was a mess. Every squirrel in the brush made me turn around. My pack straps creaked and I'd flinch. Once a branch shifted somewhere behind me, and I actually stopped and listened for a solid minute.

But I never saw him on the trail behind me, not once. Eventually the trees thinned out a little, and I could see the lake basin through them, down and ahead of me. And that helped some. It looked normal. It looked the way I remembered it. The sun was getting low, though. I needed to pick a sight fast. The lake was the way I remembered it. Not a huge lake. Kind of a wide, shallow alpine pond with rocky edges and some flat spots in the trees where people had camped before. What I didn't remember was how empty it was. Two cars in the lot and nobody at the lake. No tents, no smoke, no voices. I stood at the edge and listened for a couple of minutes, and there was nothing. I told myself the Subaru people were probably day hikers on a loop that went somewhere else. And the van guy could have been anywhere.

Maybe wasn't even hiking. Maybe was sleeping in the van. I picked a site about a hundred yards back from the water, flat patch under some pines, with a fallen log on one side and an old fire ring made of stacked stones. Fires probably weren't allowed. I'm not going to pretend I checked. It was getting cold and I was already on edge and I wanted a fire, so I built a small one.

Not big. Just enough to sit next to and cook ramen on while I told myself I was being stupid about the guy on the trail. By full dark I was feeling something close to okay. Not good, but okay. I'd eaten. Tent was up. Food was hung on a branch about 30 yards from camp. I had my headlamp around my neck, a pocket knife clipped to my belt,

a small can of bear spray and a metal hiking pole leaning against the log next to me. There was an emergency whistle on my packstrap that I'd had for years and never used. I remember running through all of it in my head, the whole inventory, the way you do when you want to believe you've got everything covered. Then around 9 o'clock I heard running. The first time it was far off, across the lake or up the slope I couldn't tell. Just a quick rush of footsteps, then silence. I sat very still next to my fire and listened.

For about a minute, nothing. Then it came again. Closer. It was the same sound from the trail, feet hitting dirt, fast, then stopping all at once. I stood up. My fire was low at that point, more coals than flame, but it was still throwing light maybe 10 or 15 feet. Past that was just black.

I couldn't see anything beyond my own little circle. I tried to hold my breath. so I could hear better. Nothing. I tried to convince myself it was a late camper coming in, somebody who'd started even later than I had, and was hustling to find a sight before they couldn't see anymore. I knew it didn't quite fit. People don't sprint a six-mile trail at night with no light. But I needed an explanation, so I picked one. Then the running came again. This time it was close, 20 feet, 30 feet, somewhere in that range. Hard running for about five seconds and then a hard stop, right at the edge of where my firelight died. I grabbed my headlamp off my neck and clicked it on

and swung it at the dark. Trees, brush, the side of my tent, the fallen log, nothing else. Hello? I said. My voice came out small and stupid. Is somebody there? Nothing came back. I kept the headlamp pointed where I'd heard the running. My hand was shaking enough that the beam was jumping all over the trees. There's a quality the woods have at night. After a sense, sound has just happened and stopped, where the quiet feels wrong. I don't know how else to put it. It's not the same as silence. It's silence with somebody in it. The footsteps came back, not moving away from me, moving around me. He would sprint for a few seconds and then stop. Sprint, stop. Sometimes the sound came from behind my tent, sometimes from the slope side.

Once it came from the direction of the lake, which didn't make sense because the lake side was open, and I should have heard him moving between positions. I didn't. He was just suddenly there, and then, suddenly somewhere else. He knew the woods around the camp better than I did. That was the only explanation I could come up with that fit. I have bearspray, I yelled. Back off! It came out shakier than I wanted. I think I sounded like a kid. There was no answer. Then I heard him breathing, not panting, not the way you breathe after sprinting. He was breathing slowly and quietly, the way you breathe when you're trying not to be heard, and he was close, behind me.

I spun and put the headlamp on him and the bear spray up and there was nothing, just trees and dark. I kept turning in a slow circle trying to see in every direction at once, which I want to say does not work. One headlamp is not enough. Every time the beam went one way, the other three directions became somewhere a person could be standing. my fire popped loud and I almost dropped the bear spray. That was when I made the decision to put it out. I know that sounds backward. Fire is supposed to help. But the fire was telling him exactly where I was and giving me almost no useful light. I was the lit up thing in the middle of the dark. He could see me a lot better than I could see him. I kicked dirt over the coals as quiet as I could. Some of it hissed.

Then I turned off the headlamp. The first few seconds, seconds with no light were the worst. My eyes hadn't adjusted, and I was basically blind, just crouched next to the log holding bear spray in one hand, and the hiking pole in the other. The pole was mostly useless, and I knew it, but holding it made me feel slightly less like an idiot. I could hear the lake somewhere off to my left, water moving quietly against rocks. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears. After a while, my eyes started to come back. The moon wasn't full, but there was enough of it that I started picking out shapes through the trees. The pale outline of my tent.

The log. The trunks. A lighter patch of ground where the old fire ring was. That was when I saw him. He was standing behind a tree about 30 feet from camp. It wasn't his whole body. He was using the trunk as cover. I could see one shoulder, the side of his head, part of his leg.

He was completely still, not the stillness of somebody who was hiding because they didn't want to be seen, the stillness of somebody who was watching and didn't care that I might see him. I couldn't make out his face. The hood was still up. The tree blocked too much, but I could tell from the height and the shape of the shoulder and from the gray of the hoodie that I was looking at the same person from the trail. He leaned out a little, just enough that I could see more of his head. I didn't move. He didn't either. We just held there. I had no idea how long. I would guess 10 seconds, maybe 20, but I'd believe somebody if they told me it was three. My grip on the bear spray was so tight my fingers had gone numb. I remember thinking very clearly that if he came at me from 30 feet, I'd get maybe one spray off before he was on me. And if my hand was shaking the way it was, I'd probably miss. Then he stepped back. He didn't run. He didn't crouch and move sideways into the brush. He just slid back. backward behind the tree and was gone. I waited for him to come back into view. He didn't. That was the moment I decided I was leaving. Six miles in the dark, twisted ankles, getting lost, all of it. I didn't care anymore. Staying felt worse than going. At least if I was moving I was doing something. I packed terrible. I want to say that for accuracy. I did not roll my sleeping bag. I did not pull the stakes out of the ground properly. I think one of them is

probably still up there. I yanked the tent poles, collapsed the whole thing in a heap, and shoved it under the top straps of my pack with the rainfly half attached. I left behind a camping mug I'd had for years because I forgot it next to the fire ring, and I wasn't about to go back for it. I stopped every few seconds and listened. Sometimes I thought I heard movement out past the camp. Sometimes I heard nothing, which was somehow worse. I put the headlamp on its red setting because I didn't want to be a beacon, but I also needed to see the trail. Bear spray in my right hand, hiking pole in my left. Pack basically thrown together. Before I left the site, I looked one more time at the tree where he'd been. Nothing. I started walking fast. The hike out was the longest

six miles of my life, or six minus however much, because I think the campsite was a little short of the full lake distance. I'm not going to run because I'd grown up hiking, and I knew running in the dark is how you blow out a knee. So I walked as fast as I could without losing the trail. Every bend I expected him to be standing there, every shift of leaves I imagined him stepping out of the brush. I kept looking back over my shoulder, which made me stumble more than once. I almost lost my footing twice in the first ten minutes. About ten minutes in, I heard running on the trail behind me. I stopped and killed the headlamp. The running stopped too. Half a beat after I did.

I stood there with my hand on the bear spray and tried to listen past my own breathing. Nothing. No steps. No breathing besides mine. Just the woods. I turned the red light back on and kept walking. A few minutes later it came again, behind me, faster this time. I didn't stop.

I sped up. The running sped up to match me. I finally just turned around and yelled, Stay away from me, into the dark behind me. And the running stopped instantly. That happened, I think, three times, maybe four. I'd walk, I'd hear running, I'd stop or yell the running would stop. Sometimes I thought I caught a shape moving between trunks off the trail to my left. Sometimes I didn't. I want to be honest and say I don't know how much of what I saw was real

and how much was my brain putting a person into every stump and shadow. I was past the point of trusting my own eyes. But there was one moment I am sure was real, and I want to tell you you about that one carefully. About a mile and a half from the parking lot, the trail crosses a dry creek bed, just a wide, shallow gravel cut, maybe 10 feet across, with the trail dipping down into it and back up the other side. The trees open up enough there that moonlight actually reaches the ground. As I stepped down into the gravel, I looked back up the trail behind me. He was standing on the trail, maybe 50 yards back, not hiding behind anything, just on the open trail, facing me. I could see the gray hoodie clearly. I could see his arms hanging down at his

sides. I still could not see his face. The hood was pulled forward enough that the angle of the moonlight didn't reach it. I raised the bearspray and yelled. I think the actual words were, I'm calling the police, get away from me. Which was a lie because I had zero bars and he probably knew it, but I wanted him to think there was a chance I had service. He didn't answer. Then he took one fast step forward, I ran. I'm not going to pretend I remember the next part well. My pack was bouncing against my back. The tent slid loose at some point and was hitting my shoulder every other step. Branches scraped my arms because I was off the center of the trail and not watching where I was going. The red headlamp light was jumping around so much I couldn't see more than a few feet

anyway. I remember thinking I should drop the pack, but I was too scared to stop and get the straps off. When the parking lot came into view through the trees, I almost lost it. Like I almost started crying just from seeing my own car. The Subaru was gone. The white van was still there. That stopped me for a second. Just half a second, but it stopped me. The van hadn't moved.

Same corner. Same direction. No lights. No movement that I could see. I didn't care. I ran across the gravel, got my key in the door, threw the pack into the passenger seat, and got in. I missed the ignition slot twice.

My hands were shaking so badly I dropped the key once. When the engine turned over, I locked the doors and put the headlights on. The headlights swept across the van for maybe a second before I pulled out. I thought I saw somebody sitting in the driver's seat. I want to be careful with that, because the windshield was reflecting my headlights, and I was already losing it. But there was a pale shape behind the glass where a face would be, sitting still. not turning to look at me, not ducking, just there.

I reversed too hard, clipped a wooden post with my bumper. I didn't stop to check it. I just pulled out of the lot and drove. I drove for about 15 minutes before my phone got service. I pulled into the first gas station I saw, a little shell off the highway, and I sat in the lot under the lights. My hands wouldn't stop shaking. I called my brother first because I didn't want to call the police and have to explain

everything and sound crazy. My brother answered half asleep, and I told him a guy had followed me out of my campsite. He told me to call the cops anyway, even if I didn't know what I'd say. So I did. A deputy met me at the gas station about 40 minutes later. He was a younger guy. He listened patiently and took notes. I told him everything. The trail, the campsite, the footsteps, the figure behind the tree, the van. I told him about the face I thought I saw in the windshield. He didn't roll his eyes. He didn't tell me I was overreacting. But I could tell from how he was writing that he didn't have much to work with. I hadn't been attacked. I didn't have a good description. I hadn't taken a photo of the van or written down a plate because I never thought to.

He said he'd drive by the trailhead and check the lot. He said if the van was still there, he'd run the plate. I didn't hear back from him that night. I got a motel room about 20 minutes down the highway because I was too tired and too jumpy to drive home. It was one of those little places off the highway, 60-something dollars, with a TV bolted to the dresser. I barely slept. Every time I started to drift off, somebody would walk past the room and I'd jolt awake. The next morning, around seven, I drove back to the trailhead. I know how that sounds. I knew how it sounded at the time. I had a couple of reasons for it. My mug was still up there at the campsite.

My tent was crammed half-packed into my passenger seat, and I wanted to actually break it down properly. And honestly, the biggest reason was that I wanted to see the lot in daylight and prove to myself that I hadn't lost my mind. I wanted tire tracks where the van had been. I wanted somebody else parked there now, a normal hiker with a normal dog. So I could feel like the whole thing had been a creep messing around,

and I'd just had a bad night. The van was gone when I got there. The lot was empty except for my car, which was when I saw the damage. The driver's side door handle was bent, not broken off, pride. There were scratches around it like somebody had jammed a flat tool, a screwdriver or a pry bar or something,

behind the handle and pulled. The rubber seal around the window was torn at the front corner. There were gouges in the paint near the lock, all the way down to bare metal. I walked around to the rear passenger door, and there were similar marks there too. Lower down, like somebody had tried the front door, failed, and moved to a second spot. And then I saw the handprint on the windshield. It was on the driver's side, fingers spread out wide, a whole hand, dirty, smudged into the glass right where somebody would put their palm if they were leaning forward to look in through the windshield at the steering column. The angle of

it was wrong for a passer-by. It was the angle of somebody trying to see something specific. Nothing inside the car had been taken. They hadn't gotten in, but they had tried hard. I stood there in the empty lot, and I want to tell you something that I haven't really told anybody else about the moment, because it's hard to describe. Up until I saw the damage I had been spending hours half convinced that I'd overreacted. Some part of me had been doing this thing all morning where I'd build a case for it being a weird hiker, a meth guy, a hunter who'd been drinking, my own brain making it scarier than it was. And then I saw the door handle and the handprint, and that whole case fell apart in one second. Somebody had been at my car while I was six miles from it.

Somebody had known I was gone. Somebody had either followed me in from the lot or had been watching when I left. They'd come back to the lot at some point during the night, while I was either still at the campsite or on the trail. running out, and they had tried to break into my vehicle, and then they'd left, between when I peeled out of the lot and when the deputy came by to check. I called the deputy again. He came back out. He took photos of the damage.

He told me when he'd swung past the trailhead a few hours after I'd called, around two in the morning. The van had been gone, and the lot had been empty except for the post I'd hit with my bumper. He told me he'd walked a lot with a flashlight and seen no broken glass, and no obvious signs anybody had been camping in the gravel near the road. He said there was nothing left for him to work with, no plate, no clear description of the guy, no physical injury, no witnesses. I asked him if he thought the guy from the trail was the guy who tried to break into my car.

He said, could be. I asked him if he thought the guy had followed me to the campsite. He took a long second to answer. Then he said, I think you made the right call leaving. That's the closest I got to an answer from anybody official. I filed an insurance claim, got the door handle replaced, got the paint touched up. The handprint on the windshield I washed off myself at a car wash on the way home,

and I felt bad about that later because that was probably evidence. I didn't think of it in the moment. It was just there, and I wanted it gone. The aftermath isn't dramatic. I didn't quit my job or move across the car. country. I went to work on Monday, and I didn't tell anybody for a long time because I didn't know how to, but for months I couldn't walk through a dark parking lot without checking every car. I couldn't hear somebody running behind me on a sidewalk without my whole body going stiff. I started sleeping with a kitchen chair shoved up against my bedroom door, even though I lived on a

second floor, and there was no realistic way for anybody to get in. A couple of times I woke up sure that I had heard footsteps stop outside my window. which couldn't have been real because there was no balcony or ledge for anybody to stand on. My brain was just running the program over and over. The thing that has stuck with me the most is that I don't know what he wanted. I don't know if he was somebody living out of the van who liked to scare solo hikers and thought it was funny. I don't know if he was trying to break into my car for valuables and got distracted when he saw me hiking out alone. I don't know if he wanted the keys to my car specifically.

I don't know if he was trying to get me to come back to the lot in the dark with him already there. I don't know if the sprinting on the trail was him testing what I'd do, the way somebody tests a lock by jiggling it. I don't know if the campsite stuff was him trying to scare me into running and leaving my pack behind. I don't know if he had a name. I don't know if he's still out there. I don't know if anybody else ran into him after me and what happened to them. If he'd attacked me, at least there would be an ending.

If he'd said one thing to me, I'd at least have a voice to remember. I have a memory of a man in a gray hoodie running full speed down an empty trail, planting his feet when he saw me, and then standing there. And then later, in the dark, standing behind a tree 30 feet from my tent, and then later, on the trail behind me in moonlight, taking one step forward, and then later maybe, a pale oval behind a windshield I never got a real look at. I still hike sometimes. Daylight only, never alone.

I do not arrive at trailheads in the late afternoon. I do not ignore vehicles that look wrong. I told a friend of mine the whole story about a year after it happened, and at the end of it she asked me what I'd do differently if I had it all to do over again. And I gave her the obvious answer. I'd have turned around the second he stopped on the trail. I'd have walked back to my car and driven home and felt stupid about it for a week. and that would have been the end of it. And what I've thought about a lot since is that the woods

didn't do anything wrong that day. The woods were the same woods. The trail was the same trail. There wasn't anything haunted out there. There was just one other person, and he was the wrong person. And once I was out at that lake alone with him, there was no version of the night that ended anyway other than how it ended. With me running out in the dark and being very, very lucky he didn't catch up to me on the trail. I sold the tent. I gave away the stove and the canister. I haven't slept alone outside since.

Be safe out there.