Lighthouse Horror Podcast - If You're Alone In The Woods And They See You, Don't Even Breathe | Scary Stories

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

Don't even breathe... Story from Kasai_Ryane Make sure to check out more of their work at u/Kasai_Ryane | Author's podcast                     Original Post: An Unwelcome Audience : r/nosleep                          Original YouTube link: If You're Alone In The Woods And They See You, Don't Even Breathe    For more stories like this one, check out my YouTube channel: Lighthouse Horror | YouTube  Patreon: Lighthouse Horror | Patreon Merch: lighthousehorror.com  Sound Effects: Freesound Zapsplat  Music: Lucas King - YouTube Myuu - YouTube  Incompetech Thank you for listening to this scary story! If you enjoyed this new creepypasta story, please check out some of my other horror stories. We'll be uploading new scary stories, new true stories, and new creepypasta stories every day!

I've always had a weird group of friends. They all went into manly careers like logging, oil rig work, construction. I'm the black sheep of our little group of high school buddies. I went into IT. They give me shit all the time about working on nerd stuff and I give them shit back. Me no like computer. Me dig holes. I'm an unlikely addition to their group of friends, but it works somehow.

So, there we are in a bar. This is one of those rare occasions when everyone's back in town together and we're getting drunk, swapping stories about horrors on the job. Someone talks about when part of their oil rig blew up, killing three people a few years ago. Danny, an actual lumberjack, talks about seeing a guy working, not ten feet from him, get his arm torn clean off by a log line, just a quick zip and a limb went flying. He held a shirt to the wound as the wound as the the man bled out, babbling and whining in agony until a life-flight came two hours too late. And all the while I'm sitting there, knowing I've got a story. But it's not the kind of story I'd usually bring up to a bunch of drunk sort of friends.

Not the kind of story I'd tell anybody. It's the kind of truly unsettling memory that you worry should you tell it. You might give it life. You might feed it somehow, make it more real. I carry it around in the back of my mind like a caged, dangerous animal, not considering letting it out. Until now, everyone said something already, and I'm just sitting there, looking sheltered, looking obvious. So I ignore that voice in my head that says, don't. I ignore my dry, tightening throat.

Don't. I've got one. My voice cracks. And they look surprised. I'm surprised. They all give me doubtful, amused looks. Go on then. The looks say.

And so I do. I work from home on our 30 acres outside of a small town in Alaska. I live alone. No kids. It's a college town, just a small liberal arts college of a few hundred, but it's the hard of the town. The campus is huge, with the natural beauty of the area being a big draw. Reservation land neighbors the campus, and the tribe sort of acts like park rangers for the hundreds of miles of forest trails. My own land borders part of the campus on the other side.

One day I'm out at the edge of the cleared part of my property, right behind my house. It's probably about 200 yards from the house. I'm watering a set of raised beds I have right near the tree line, just enjoying the scorching sunny day. And that's when something weird happens. There's this sound like a record of someone speaking coming from a few hundred feet into the woods. It's like someone talking to you through a bad cell connection, where only parts of the words are coming through, and it's just noise. But you can tell it's supposed to be words.

I just... I... I... I just... They're listening to the noise. Curious, but not afraid. I didn't even turn the hose off. I think, looking back, that's why it took me so long to get freaked out, to start taking

it seriously. Weird things like that, supernatural things. They happen at night, deep in the woods. Not at one o'clock in the afternoon, while standing right in your backyard. After about thirty seconds, it just stops. I turned the water off, then figure out if it actually stopped or just got quieter. Nothing. I file it away as a minor oddity.

Something to be brought up later as a casual conversation token, or more likely, forgotten. That was my first regret. Fast forward a couple of weeks. I'm on a hike at the back of my property, on one of the trails I started last summer, which is pretty overgrown at this point. I'm strolling, lost in thought beneath the tree, cover, simply enjoying the gorgeous midsummer weather. I'm pulled from my thoughts when I hear the odd sound in the woods.

Far in the distance, there's the sound of garbled human speech. The forest around me, though, is oddly quiet. Now I'm not much of a risk-taker, and I generally prefer looking irrational to looking dead. I casually turn and walk back towards the trail entrance, not wanting to encourage any large predators by fleeing suddenly. What the hell's making that sound anyway? I resolved to bring Danny along to check it out when he comes to visit in two weeks. Two weeks later, I'm back at the trailhead. Alone, because Danny bailed on me. I told him that if I died, I'd be coming straight to his apartment to haunt the shit out of him. I'm looking down the seemingly innocuous forest trail.

I steal myself. I check my pack, bear spray, and brand-new. new bowie knife, which I have no idea how to use. It's just a sound, I tell myself. I start down the path. A few miles and about an hour in, I hear the first signs of that odd sound in the distance. It's maybe a hundred yards ahead and just off the side of the trail. The forest, however, moves and rustles with life in that familiar, reassuring way. I carry on.

As I approach the origin of the sound, I put my hand to the hilt of my bowie knife. The source of the sound, now within 20 feet or so, is not immediately apparent. It's the same stream of incoherent babble, but with a distinct crackling sound to it. Looking up, I see a small black speaker fixed to a tree about ten feet from the ground. Huh? Fairly confident the speaker poses no threat. I take my hand from my knife and inspect it. Written on the side of the speaker in white paint is the name of the local college and

the words forestry department. Ah, a clue and a reasonable explanation. Go figure. Content that I won't have to stab anything or haunt any apartments this day. I head back home. During a slow day the next week, I call the forestry department of the college. I'd like to speak to the dean. No, I'm not a student.

No, they don't know I'm calling. The dean answered in a bored voice, but seemed eager to answer my questions, as if I were the highlight of an otherwise mundane day. As it turns out, the speaker is, or was, a sort of live art project in which students could write and record poems to be spoken aloud in the forest.

It's solar paneled, but he suspected the connection to the speaker I found had gone bad. Once per semester, someone was supposed to come out and upload new MP3s to a waterproof MP3 player near the base of each tree. He went on to say that they discontinued the project due to outcry from the nearby tribe. Initially, he ignored their request to take down the speakers, but the vice president of the college eventually stepped in when complaints persisted, worried about souring good relations with the tribe. They'd probably missed my station when they went to take them all down, he said. Mystery solved. Hiking season passes without

incident. About a month after the snows finally melt, I decide to go on another hike on the trail with the speaker. I've got some overnight camping gear with me, and I plan to camp out near my turnaround point, a few hours away. I almost miss the speaker when I'm about an hour in. It's completely silent now. I stopped to poke at the electronics a bit, but there's nothing obviously wrong with it. The fraying connections appear to have finally worn out over the winter. I continue down the trail. About two hours later, I've set up my tent and prepared a simple camp. It's late afternoon, but I'm restless. And with a few hours of daylight left, I decide to walk ahead of my turnaround point for a little bit. I pick a little offshoot trail that leads upward, perhaps with the

promise of a nice view. Just a few minutes into the walk, my mind is drifting. I'm just soaking up the late afternoon sun and basking in the first good weather of the season. I've picked the perfect time to explore. Damn, this is nice, I think to myself. And a moment later, I hear that familiar, unsettling sound of speaking in the distance. I pause on the trail, my brain still registering the noise as something innocuous. This sound is a little different, and even so far away, I can tell me. that it's a higher quality than the first speaker. I get closer and have to go a little off the

trail to make out the words. It's definitely missing that crackly sound so I can easily make out the words. It's the sound of a woman reading poems, just as the dean said. Less perturbed than I once was. I decided to sit on a rock near the speaker, pull out my water, and take a little break. I'm sitting there listening to the sounds of the forest and the voice reading the familiar poems. It still feels a little eerie, though, and after just a few minutes I decide it's time to get going again. I toss my water bottle into my pack and stand to leave. And that's when I hear the other voice. Someone nearby is babbling these crazy nonsense words.

I perk up, curious, but not yet afraid. It has this strange warbling sound, like the natural rise and fall of pitch in a sentence, but in all the wrong places, like someone turning random words in a sentence into questions. It's the kind of sound you'd laugh at, if you weren't alone in a forest, miles and miles from help. The forest goes dead silent around me, as if flipping a switch. The sound begins trailing close through some thick brush in front of me. I'm totally frozen in place, just listening to this ridiculous noise like a giant's

basso baby voice. I utter under my breath. What the hell? I see just a glimpse of something coming through the brush, and then my trance is broken. My conscious mind is slammed to the back seat as my animal instincts send me sprinting back toward the trail. I'm already careening back down the trail before I eat. I even realize what I was running from.

And then it hits me. A wall of realization. A great towering cloud of cold, crippling realization. I actually stumble. My neurons fire in slow motion. The implications are forming in my mind like a slowly condensing water droplet just before the release and then the fall. My chest tightens and I take a sudden sharp breath.

It was a hand, some kind of elongated, grotesque hand reaching through the brush, a body to match that distorted voice. It's then that I hear it again, on the path right behind me. What the hell? It warbles, like it's learned a phrase for the first time, and it's trying it out loud. And then I'm running. I'm barely touching the ground, feet flying down the tight forest trail in the late afternoon sun. Tree branches are slapping at me as I barrel down the path.

Careless. Mindless. My nerves are on a knife's edge for the entire sprint back to camp. Ears pricked, skin covered in goosebumps, I enter a clearing and slow to walk cautiously into camp, my hand hovering lightly over my bowie knife. I see my tent in the small clearing, where the main trail splits into these smaller tributaries. The tent sits in the shade, flap partially open. I stop, staring at it.

It would take about ten minutes to pack it up. I contemplate it for about half a second. Nope. And then I'm moving again. Back on the main trail now. I'm holding a sustainable jog, but after about thirty seconds later, I slide to a stop, because I hear something new, and then I hear nothing. A quiet deeper than anything before.

No distant birds, no rustling leaves, no quiet breeze or chirping insects. There's only complete and unnatural silence. It's almost suffocating. It's like having a giant glass jar dropped around me. One second, there's a rich blanket of forest sounds, and the next, it's like I'm in a vacuum. I freeze. I can feel my heart pounding out of my chest, but otherwise I'm as silent and still as the forest around me. The air is hot, still, and dead on my sweaty skin, like standing in a silent summer attic. An odd thought occurs to me. An intuition that I shouldn't move. People always

get that feeling like they're being watched, but it isn't quite like that. It's not like being watched. It's like I'm being examined, and my guts telling me to blend in, to do what the bugs and the birds and the trees are doing. Sit still and wait. Do as they do. This isn't something you run from. Do as they do. And survive.

So I wait. Frozen in an awkward position mid-stride, mid-breath, refusing to. even blink or look around. I stand there, like a store mannequin in the closet, watching through wooden slats as something very bad looks back at me, trying to figure out if I'm actually a mannequin or just something pretending. We look at each other like that. This force and I, for ten seconds, my head is swimming with terror.

20 seconds. My lungs are screaming for air and my heart is pounding. Still, it examines me. And suddenly, the gaze is broken. It's focus on something else. My vision narrows to a pinpoint because my brain is clamoring for oxygen. Far off, I hear a rustle of leaves. And then slowly it comes my way. Not the rustle of a creature, but a great collective. exhale from the forest. The sound of the forest returns in great sweep past me. I bent, put my hands to my knees, and join in with a heaving gasp of my own. The rest of the trip back is a barely restrained panic.

I jump at every twig snapping, but I'm in a forced calm, because the logical part of me knows I can't run forever. I set my pace at a brief hike for two hours into the late evening. It's getting dark by the time I get back to my property. In the bar, my friends are all statue still, faces slack. No one's touched their drink in five minutes. My whole body's shaking as I absent-mindedly run the fingers of both hands up through my hair. It was like...

It was like I was staring down the barrel of a gun. A gun I couldn't see. But I knew... I knew that if I had... so much as twitched. I wouldn't be here right now. It would have known I was there. It would have known I was real. And I never went back for that tent, I say, taking a sip of my beer and taking a little grim satisfaction in my friend's stunned, distant faces. They let out a few half-hearted, nervous chuckles at my attempt to lighten the mood, but otherwise everyone seems

intensely interested in their drinks, the table, or the floor. Shit, man, one of them eventually says. Yeah, I reply. We're all pretty quiet and unusually pensive until we pay our tabs and leave the bar. On the way out, one of my buddies pulls me aside and asks, Was that really true? All of it, I mean. I just sort of squint.

and look up at the stars in the Alaskan sky. Eventually the words I'm looking for come to me. There's shit out there that no one can explain. Things that don't have names. And I think every now and then someone comes across one. The smart people, the lucky people like me, are the ones who get to tell their stories. He looks at me for a moment longer. Then, seemingly content with my answer, he nods and walks to his car.

Night, he says, Of course, I don't tell him there's more. I don't tell him it wasn't some ethereal, invisible force staring me down in the woods. It was a monster. A lanky, horrid, yet somehow human thing. It was in the shape of a man, but it was no. Oh man. God gave me two gifts that day.

The first was sparing my life and the other was keeping that creature in the periphery of my vision. I did tireless research after that incident in the forest. I found out about a missing homeless man and the dismembered corpse the cops found in the woods. Parts of a corpse anyway. And I found out about something called the akondicity. I think that's how you say it. A follow-up call to the dean from the nearby university got me that, and it got me a meeting

with the grandson of the shaman who asked the university to take the speakers down. I met with him the very next day. I don't know how well I can explain it. I don't think of it the same way my grandfather does. Ida says. I follow up immediately. Try me. You know how everything that's alive.

of today has some of the same DNA. Like if you go back far enough, we all have a common ancestor, even really different things like germs. Well, I think the Akkadixoteer in that family tree. I think they come from something else. He sort of trails off, perhaps expecting skepticism from me. Two days ago, maybe. But he doesn't know that I have good reason not to be a skeptic. The These things aren't a joke, you know." He tells me, fingers wrapped around a Frapachino. People at the college think my grandfather's crazy. They only listen to him because he's respected in the tribe.

But even though they respect him, most of the tribe thinks he's crazy too. Do you think he's crazy? I ask him. About this? He looks grave. And the sudden seriousness from this. man surprises me. No, he's not crazy. He's not crazy. Because I saw one. It was like five or six years ago. I was out in the woods on an ATV, just weaving through trees and I was going too fast.

I was stupid back then. I did a lot of stupid shit. Anyway, I'm in some pretty sparse woods, so it's easy to see far off. And I see this animal laying down. in the distance. I turn my ATV to get closer and I can tell it's a deer. As I'm pulling up to it, I cut the engine and just roll to a stop about 20 feet from the thing. I think it must be hurt or something because its back legs aren't working and it's pulling itself along by its front legs. Thinking I'll need to kill it. I go to pull out my knife. As soon as I reach down, this thing's head just snaps towards me. And I don't mean it heard a sound and sort of looked around then saw me.

It just immediately jerked its head right towards me. It, um, it didn't look right. It was like someone tried to make a deer, but didn't have all the right parts. It was all twisted and gangly, with these nasty, swollen, eyes, just staring at me. And I got this feeling like it was trying to figure me out, trying to figure out what I was. And then a couple seconds later, it just turned and dragged itself away. Wow, I say, with real awe. I pushed my ATV as fast as it go back to the house, and that's when my grandfather told me about the Akkadixity.

He said they were bad spirits that spawned deep in the forest. They're attached to signs of life, noise, sight, stuff like that. And when they find something alive, they sort of copy it, but they disassemble it first. Once they've copied something, they try and find more of it to make a better copy. I don't really know why. It's just what he told me. Most of the time they're harmless, but every now and then one shows up in the shape of a deer, a dog, or something else, and then some men go out and take care of it.

Huh? So what did they do about the one you saw? They went out to find a deer, a real deer. When they caught one, they brought it to the akondixote. The only way to kill him is to make them copy something already dying. We sat in silence there for a moment. Drinks forgotten. I saw one.

What? He says surprised. And I think I know why your grandfather wanted the speakers taken down. What he was afraid of. It happened. Wait, wait, slow down. What are you talking about? There's a human, a kadixity out there.

A few hours later, we're standing at the trailhead behind my apartment. It's turning into evening now, with only about an hour of real daylight left. There's a group of men nearby from Ida's tribe, talking to each other in hushed voices. Behind them are a dozen or so women and children. And some of the women are crying. Ida, what's going on? I ask and whispered tones, but he motions for me to wait as the circle of shaman breaks up. An older man in his early 60s, who I assume as Ida's grandfather, walks over to us at the entrance to the trail. He doesn't stop to talk to us, but just nods his

head in our direction and continues past us down the trail. He has a wiry sort of strength to him, despite his age, and the feathered garb and war paint on his body lent him an air of danger. I see an ornate stone dagger on his belt as he goes. Eventually I speak. When's he coming back? And Ida just gives me this flat, mournful look. He isn't coming back.

And then I remember Ida's words. The only way to kill them is to make them copy something already dying.