The Lets Read Podcast - 318: THE WOODS HELD A DARK SECRET | 10 TERRIFYING True Scary Stories | EP 303

Episode Date: October 28, 2025

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about the deep woods & encounters at swimming pools. HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT? [e-mail] FOLLOW ME ON - ►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial ► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/ ♫ Music & Cover art: INEKT https://www.youtube.com/@inekt

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. I'm going to be able to be. By 2014, my friend Lewis and I had been hiking buddies for years, and we went through the forest of Washington and Oregon together, baked ourselves to a crisp in the deserts of the southwest, and scaled the peaks of the Sierra Nevada side by side.

But next on our list was the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, or the Frank, as everyone cause it. We planned to hike in, camp out, and see what the place had to throw at us. We loaded up the car, drove north from California to Idaho, and set out for what was supposed to be a straightforward long-haul trip. The drive took two days of heading up the I-5, then east into Idaho's interior, and then before long, we saw the Frank's two million acres sprawled out ahead of us, a chunk of land so big that it dwarfed anything we'd tackled before. We parked at a trailhead near the middle fork of the Salmon River in a gravel lot with a faded sign warning about bears and firebands, and then pulled our packs out from the trunk. They were really heavy, but seeing as they contained our food, our tent, our sleeping bags, our water filters, and much, much more, they were our entire lives at that moment.

The first day we stuck to the trail, moving steadily through the pine and trees, and the forest was very quiet, but, It was kind of a gentle quiet, and we managed to make it around the eight miles before we ended up camping near a creek at dusk. And day two was pretty much more of the same. We pushed deeper into the woods. The trail was winding through the valleys and up ridges as the underbrush started to get thicker, and it was swallowing up the path entirely in certain spots. We didn't talk much.

We just walked, ate some trail mix, and checked out our maps every so often to make sure that we were headed in the right direction. At the end of the day, we pitched the tent on a flat patch of ground, boiled water for these instant noodles that we had, and then pretty much slept like the dead. 18 miles in, the Frank felt like ours. We felt dialed in, and we were ready for more. On the third day, we started to feel a little restless, for want of a better word. Trails were fine for tourists, but we'd come for something real. So when Lewis suggested that we ditch the path and cut cross-country and see what most people missed, I didn't argue.

We veered off the trail and the change was almost instant. The woods turned very dense, with trunks wider than my shoulders and roots that started to sprawl out like veins under the dirt. Moss was pretty much draped on everything, starting to dull the light of the sun coming in and carpeting the forest floor so thick that it was almost like sponge under our feet. We moved a little slower, avoiding rabbit holes and scrambling over fallen logs, and while it made for much rough going, it truly was worth it. The place felt completely untouched, like we traveled back in time by almost a thousand years. Then at one point, Lewis suddenly stops and tilts his head to the side like he'd heard something. A second later, I caught it too. This low hum,

steady and very out of place. It wasn't the wind or running water. It sounded artificial, almost mechanical. And me and Lewis didn't say anything to each other. We just obeyed our sort of mutual curiosity and followed that noise. The sound grew louder as we pushed forward than, after a few minutes, we broke through this thicket of saplings and saw it. A bunker sunk into a low rise.

A steel door was crooked in the frame, and its concrete shell appeared to be covered in scratched symbols, circles, zigzags, or lines that twisted into nothing really recognizable. And the hum came from inside, and once we were close enough, we could hear that it was some kind of heavy metal, all distorted and screaming vocals. It was then that I saw the door hung almost ajar, just an inch, but enough to allow the noise inside to be. spill out. Lewis and I stopped dead in our tracks just a few feet short of the bunker's door. The music was aggressive and violent, either death metal or some kind of hardcore. But it wasn't the kind of music that had us approaching with such caution. It was the thought of the people playing it inside. Lewis shot me this look. I mean, sure, there was a chance that it was just a bunch of metal heads throwing a party in some old abandoned metal bunker. But what if it wasn't just

that, you know? What if they were way out in the middle of nowhere for a reason? And I remember looking back at Lewis and gently leaning my head back in the direction we'd come as if to say, let's get out of here. And he nodded, then we turned to leave. We were aiming to put miles between us in that place before dark, and neither of us wanted to find either who was down there or what they were doing, but we'd only gone a few hundred yards before they found us. We were walking along discussing who in the hell would build a bunker way out in the middle of nowhere when two men stepped out from the tree line like they've been waiting for us. They were wearing full camo, with faces hidden behind balaclavas,

and each held a rifle that looked like something like an AK. Barrels were down but gripped very tightly. My blood turned to ice as Lewis and I stopped cold. I could hear him breathing beside me and I knew that he was sizing them up, the same as I was. The two men didn't move. They just stood there for a second. Eyes locked on us through those slits in their mass, with the hum from that bunker faintly audible through the trees behind us. And then suddenly, one of them raised their rifle. On your knees, he said. Arms up. His voice was flat, cold, and there was no room for debate. I looked at Lewis. His hands were

moving toward his pack straps. Counting the people back in the bunker, we were obviously outnumbered, and considering our pistols were still in our packs, we were incredibly outgunned, too. I started to ease my arms up, buying time when Lewis moved. He unclipped his pack, let it drop, and then took off running. The thud of it hitting the ground snapped me out of that days of fear that had come over me, and then yanked my own straps free, ditching that weight and bolted after him. As we ran, a shot cracked out overhead, loud enough to make my ears ring. The bark exploded off a tree to my left, showering me with splinters. I ducked, legs pumping, weaving in and out of the tree trunks as I followed Lewis,

and then behind me I heard someone yelling, cease fire, we need them alive. After hearing that, I thought that they'd ease up. But maybe only a few seconds later, more shots started coming out, lower now, kicking up the dirt around my feet. feet. They weren't aiming to kill. They wanted us slowed down, crippled, easier to drag back. My lungs were burning, but I kept going. Lewis was ahead of me, dodging tree trunks, but I matched him step for step. The gunfire suddenly stopped at one point, but we kept on running. I didn't know how far we ran. It had to have been a mile or two, but eventually we stopped. My legs were shaking. My chest was heaving as Lewis braced against a tree.

We'd check to see if there was anything behind us, but there was nothing. No gunshots, no shouts, just the wind rustling the canopy. We'd lost the men shooting at us, but we'd also lost our packs, meaning all of our food, gear, and maps were now in their hands. It was a pretty bad situation, one of the worst you could ever wish for. But there was nothing else to do but keep moving, so that's what we did. without our tents and sleeping bags that first night was brutal the temperature dropped fast cold seeping through my clothes and into my bones and my stomach growled loud in the quiet but there was nothing to eat and we just huddled against a fallen log and jackets were pulled tight around us

i kept my eyes open expecting those men to creep up on us in the dark with their rifles ready but they didn't louis barely slept either We just sat there waiting for dawn. Morning eventually came, and with it, it brought hunger. We found some berries growing on a low bush. They were sour and barely rife, and an ate a handful. I grimaced as everything was staining my fingers, and Lewis did the same. We knew enough to avoid the toxic stuff. Years of hiking paying off, but it wasn't enough to silence the hunger pangs.

We eventually used the sun as a good. guide when it peeked through the trees and we started moving south and towards the car. My head ached, this dull thud behind my eyes, but we had to keep moving. And the forest just stretched on, swallowing every sound but just our footsteps and my boots were rubbing blisters into my heels. And we walked all day, stopping only to scoop water from some stream with our hands. Night eventually came again and we found a shallow dip under an overhang of rock. We couldn't light a fire as that was probably too risky, but we had no food to cook anyway. I eventually slept in little bits, waking up to every rustle of leaves or shift of the

wind, and day three, I have to say, was the worst. My legs felt like lead. We found more berries, a few edible roots that Lewis recognized, but again, they barely touched the hunger. My vision blurred at the edges and exhaustion was starting to sink deep. I lost track of time and just followed Lewis's back as he trudged along ahead. He didn't look much better than I did. His shoulders were slumped and his pace was slowing, and we didn't talk about the men or the bunker or the guns. We just didn't say anything at all. We just kept walking. When we hit the dirt road, I swear that I could have cried with relief. It was nothing but a thin, rutted track cutting through the trees, barely wide enough for a truck but my god it was a road we stumbled along it until a ranger station

came into view it was a low wooden building with a pickup parked out front we were filthy scratched up our eyes sunken into their sockets the ranger inside a guy with a gray beard and a faded nps patch took one look at us and said i'll get you boy some coffee and as we sipped from our cups we told him everything, the bunker, the weird graffiti that we saw on the side with the symbols, the men with the rifles, and the fact that they chased us. He called the police who showed up an hour later and took our statements and sent rangers to check that spot, and we were hopeful. But when those rangers came back, they said the bunker was completely empty. No people, no gear, just the concrete shell and those scratched-up symbols. There was no sign of our packs either.

And the police didn't seem surprised. One of them even said the Frank had a history of militia activity, armed groups that had gather, train, and sometimes party out there, away from prying eyes. He figured we'd probably cross paths with a nasty one, violent types who didn't like witnesses, and we were lucky to be alive. They told us not to go back, not through that area anyway, and that was it. No arrests, no leads, just a warning and a shrug. In driving home, Lewis stared out the passenger window, staying silent almost the whole way.

I gripped the wheel, my knuckles were turning white, just replaying all of that in my head. The forest that had been ours once, a place of sanctuary and recreation, but on the drive back it felt like something else, something hostile and uninviting. Lewis and I didn't talk about hiking again for a while, not in the frank, not anywhere, and I've often wondered who, those men were and if they ever returned rifles in hand watching for the next pair of idiots to step too close. When this happened, it was late summer, and at the time I was female, 21 years old, finishing up college before med school. The only important detail, really, is knowing that we were a group of four girls, all around 20 to 21, having a small pool party in a raised

backyard pool at our shared house. It was maybe around 10, possibly a bit earlier. We'd been drinking on and off for about an hour or two, and spirits were high. We were having fun. We were relaxed and we were chilled out and it was the perfect evening. The sun was beginning to set over the forest on the outskirts of our suburban property and the mouth-watering smell of the Peterson's barbecue was making me hungry. And it seemed like they'd had the same idea as us. To have a backyard party and sometimes, when our music paused, you could hear theirs in the background. There had been a bunch of kids at the Peterson's party earlier, but now the raucous noise of children playing had died down and everything was chill.

The girls and I were just kicking back, listening to, well, whatever was popular with us back then, I guess, and enjoying a bit of downtime from the last grueling year of studying, work, and personal drama. We were drinking cocktails, the glasses sitting on the side of the outdoor above-ground pool, just having a good time. We were doing absolutely nothing to invite or deserve what came next. The back gate to our property opened. This wasn't particularly alarming in enough itself. and there was five of us total living in that house, and Janet B. was out at work and expected home soon. It could also have been Claire or Dana's boyfriends or any number of people, really. Our house was gathering central back then, and it was normal for trusted people to let themselves

in the back gate instead of coming in the front door, especially if they could hear us partying in the yard. I couldn't see the gate myself from the pool. I had my back to it, but it could tell from Kelly and Claire's reactions that whoever had entered through the back gate shouldn't have been there. Who the hell are they? Kelly asked. I turned around the pool. Three guys strolled into the yard. They looked around college age and sauntered over with confidence that I'd seen in a million frat dudes. I didn't recognize any of them, but maybe one of the girls did, and alarm bells weren't ringing just yet. Can we help you guys? Dana asked. A quick look at Claire and Kelly told me that they didn't know the boys either.

The lead frat guy gave this big, stupid grin. And even then, without any real evidence, I had a strong feeling that we might be in trouble. He looked almost wolfish and predatory, and I didn't like it. We were just in the area, thought we'd swing by, he said, or something like that. Kelly, always the smart ass, told him that he should swing back on out the way he came, and that made him laugh. No, seriously, I said. Are you guys looking for Janet?

They shot a look at each other. Janet? Sure. The bigger guy in the back said. They introduced themselves, probably with made-up names, I thought later, and I don't remember what they said their names were, so I'll always just call them Chad, Brad, and Vlad when I tell this story. Might as well get some fun out of an otherwise horrible incident.

Well, Janet's at work, I told them. I'm not sure when she'll be back. Chad at the front beamed again, saying, Well, that's fine. Well, wait. Why are you looking for Janet? Claire asked. Oh, you know.

She owes us. Brad said. Janet, really. Janet was the most sensible of all of us. She was the least likely to owe anyone money and the most likely to be out at work while the rest of us had a pool party. I guess I grilled them on it because Chad came up to the pool edge. Yeah, she owes us.

But any of you can pay up on her behalf if you're so inclined. He said, yeah, no thanks, I thought. So to explain our outdoor pool, it was one of those above-ground units that could be assembled, disassembled, and moved, rather than a pool built into the ground. It was sort of halfway between a pool and a hot tub, I guess. Like a hot tub, but bigger and without jets or heating. You know the type of old pool, I mean. Now, getting in and out required a ladder, a separate piece that clipped over the side of the pool.

One side of the ladder went vertically down into the pool and the other angled outward like a playground slide. Without the ladder, it was technically possible to get out by dragging yourself over the side and falling onto the grass. But it was awkward as hell and extremely undidding. dignified. Fine when you were alone, but not in front of these strange guys. And that's why it was so alarming when almost immediately, Vlad silently lifted the ladder up and away from the pool. Hey, don't be a dick, Kelly said, swimming over to that side. I sighed and rolled my eyes. I still wasn't actually scared yet. The boys have been so bold coming into the yard, I was certain that they had to be connected to one of us. Could it really be sweet square Janet? Hey, just making sure you

stay where we can keep an eye on you, Chad said. His voice seemed to be filled with cruel teasing. Yeah, we don't want you to attack us, Brad added. It's not what I meant, dumbass. Chad snapped, like he was mad that Brad had chimed in on his oh so hilarious joke. All three of them were staring us up and down, their eyes traveling across our bodies. We were all in hot bikinis, and the sun had almost fully set, but the garden was lit up brightly by our outdoor lighting. I strained to hear whether the Peterson's were still in their yard, and I thought so, and that felt reassuring. If anything too bad started to happen, I could yell out to them pretty easily. The boys talked to us for a few minutes about some nonsense that I don't remember. All the while, the three of them

circled the pool like coyotes, and it felt like they'd rehearse this. They could tell that they were unnerving us, that we were vulnerable, and I know that they were enjoying it. Then Chad started messing around trying to dunk Claire. If Janet was the sensible one, Claire was the shy one, the least likely to enjoy that kind of horseplay. Plus, she had a boyfriend that she'd been going steady with for a long time. F off! Claire yelled, don't touch me. "'Hey, chill out, babe. I'm just having fun,' Chad said, acting all hurt. "'Yeah, I think it's time for you guys to leave,' Dana said, beginning to pull herself over the side of the pool. In the blink of an eye, the almost silent Vlad darted over and shoved her quite forcefully back into the pool.

And that's when I knew that we were actually in potentially some danger. "'Hey, don't shove her!' I yelled, hoping the Peterson. could hear us at this point. Chad's face suddenly turned serious. I suggest you bitches shut up. Start talking. He said. Talking about what?

I asked. I looked at my friends and realized that Kelly, normally the loudest, most outspoken, most confident one of us, have been strangely quiet through most of this. Kelly, do you know these guys? I asked, and she shook her head. No, I don't know them. But, uh, so it's you, Chad said pacing over to Kelly.

The three of us instinctively closed in around her, only the pool walls between us and those guys. What's you? Dana asked. She's the one seeing her good friend Pete, Chad said. Kelly had in fact been seeing a new guy recently, Pete. Dana and Janet didn't like him so much, but I did. He was a bit of a stoner. take things too seriously, not long-term material for Kelly, or so I thought. He seemed fun enough for a fling. You're friends of Pete? Kelly asked, and she seemed relieved.

Well, he wishes, Chad said. Pete owes us a lot of money. We thought the other girl was his piece, but if it's you, maybe you can pay the debt. How much? Kelly asked, and she looked sick. I was still glancing towards the Peterson's yard. Don't even think about it. Brad growled and grabbed my shoulder. At the same time, Chad grabbed Kelly and Vlad grabbed Dana. Claire shrieked and backed up to the center of the pool. Stay right there, Chad told her.

Then as if to demonstrate why, the three boys dunked us all underwater and held us there. It wasn't hard to slip out of their grasp. We weren't in danger of drowning, but it still hurt, and it was still terrible. We joined Claire in the center of the pool, and that's when things started to get very unpleasant. If any of you scream or try to get out, or do anything, then I promise you, we will hurt you really, really badly, Chad said. He pulls out a switchblade from his pocket, just a small thing that I could tell in the dim light that it was incredibly sharp. I also knew exactly how much damage three grown men could do to four bikini-clad women before anyone could get there. Please just leave us alone, Dana said.

Pete isn't even here. He's not even stopping by tonight. Well, that just sucks for you, girls, then. Chad said. We want our money. We need it. And this one here's Pete's girl, so... How much does he owe? Maybe we can pay you. I asked. Chad started to eye me up. He owes us twenty bucks.

I kept eye contact with him, and then he burst out laughing. Brad joined in, and their cackles started to grate on me. No. He owes us some serious mullah, babe. Chad said, five grand. Oh, God. None of us had anywhere near $5,000 lying around the house, even if we wanted to hand it over to these weirdos.

What the hell is Pete 05 grand for? Kelly demanded. Chad made an exaggerated sniffing sound and rubbed his nose. Oh, this and that? Pete usually had a stash of harder stuff that I was used to. He often had small baggies of Coke, MDMA, and things like that. And Kelly had met him when she was trying to score some weed, so it wasn't too far-fetched to imagine that he dealt coke and owed these guys.

I always assumed people like Pete got their drugs from more cartel-like types, but I was wrong. I've since realized that dealers exist at every level in all walks of life. Yeah, so either you pay us yourself, or you get Pete over here to settle his debt, or maybe you girls could pay us back some other way. Chad chuckled. Brad clearly liked this idea, and he stared at me in particular, which I really didn't appreciate. Ew, no thanks, I remember saying, and I was considering what to do in that moment. We could rush them, or rush for the back gate, but we'd have to flop out of that pool first.

If all of us did it, maybe one of us could get away, but what would those guys do to the rest in the meantime? And how could I communicate a plan without them hearing? Claire had drifted to the other side of the pool, maybe just to get some distance, and we were so focused on Chad and Brad we didn't notice Vlad had circled around. When Claire got close enough, he grabbed her by the hair. She let out a small yell before his hand clamped over her mouth. Well, someone better make a decision soon. We're really going to hurt this one.

Chad said, Claire's eyes were starting to fill with tears, and she looked genuinely terrified, and my heart broke for her. I can go call Pete, I remember Kelly saying. And this was before smartphones. It was the era of brick-like Nokia's, and we all had cell phones, but we weren't glued to them, and we didn't bring them near water. So none of us had one at the pool. The only way Kelly could call Pete was by going inside.

She told the boys that, Chad considered it. Fine. I'll go with you, he said. Brad, Vlad, you watch these other lovely young ladies. He didn't say lovely young ladies, he said a nastier slur that I'm not going to repeat. Kelly don't, I said. I'll call Pete and it'll be fine, she said, but her face said otherwise. Chad helped Kelly over the side of the pool and guided her to the back door, gripping her arm.

She opened the sliding glass door, and I could see everything from the middle of the pool. I saw a flash of movement and heard a loud, shattering crash. Kelly had grabbed the lamp off that table just inside the door and smashed it right into Chad's face. He let out a huge bellowing scream and staggered back, falling over one of the patio chairs, and blood was beginning to pour down his face. Thank God, I thought. But Kelly wasn't done. She came running back into the yard, screaming and calling for help at the top of her lungs,

so loud the neighbors had at that point heard. Quickly, the rest of us joined in. Kelly charged it, Brad, swinging something that she'd grabbed from inside. It was one of the golf clubs, Dana's boyfriend, Chris, always left lying around. And Chris never got scolded for leaving these clubs out again after this. Kelly swung the club down hard, cracking Brad's forearm as he tried to defend himself. Chad was already bolting for that gate, and I swear I saw a shard of lamps. sticking from his cheek. He ripped the gate open and ran, and Brad was stumbling out after him.

It felt like only seconds later that Mr. Peterson and a couple of other adult men rushed in. They're getting away, Kelly screamed, but the men were more focused on checking in on us. They really had no idea what was going on. Vlad, for some reason, had kind of just stuck around and was sort of standing there, dumbfounded. He's one of them, I told Mr. Peterson, and one of his friends who turned out to be some off-duty cop grabbed this Vlad character and pinned him to the ground and basically sat on him like a pro wrestler. And it was a pretty hardcore ending to a terrifying, horrible experience.

We called the cops and told them everything. They spoke to Pete who denied owing these guys anything, but he was able to ID them. They were juniors at our college too. Trying to get them charged for what they did was rough since the only ones injured were Chad and Brad. We were going to push for assault charges, but in the end, we settled out of court with their families.

Their parents were super embarrassed by their dumb-ass sons. It wasn't a great payday, and no, it didn't feel worth it. I wish we would have done more to punish them. But at least the drug stuff wasn't something their families could buy their way out of completely. They avoided jail because, of course, money always talks, but they still got hit with some real consequences. expelled, probation, all kinds of things, and they knew better than to ever come near any of us again. Chad also had a wicked scar from that lamp I remember hearing, cooler than he deserved, honestly,

but I doubt he thought so. You'd think Kelly would break up with Pete after all of that, but no. I'm not kidding when I say they eventually got married and had a kid, and are still together to this day. We stayed in that house until our lease ended and then eventually moved out. Kelly and I stayed close, but the rest of the girls, including Janet, who hadn't been there that night, eventually drifted away. Kelly and I are still friends, and both she and Peter gave me permission to share this story, and you'll be glad to know that we've all settled down. Pete's a great dad, and both he and Kelly are nurses now. As for me, I'll keep that to myself, but I'll tell you one thing that I'm not, a swimmer.

These days, there's a lot of panic about changing rooms at public pools and gyms. Who can or who can't? Who should or shouldn't be in them? Now, don't worry. I'm not here to get all political. I'm not going to obviously. I'm not going to offer a take on that. I'm just bringing it up so you can understand why I always kind of laugh when it gets mentioned because it reminds me of something that happened to me in a dressing room where all rules, regulations, expectations, and social norms went straight out the window. And I thought that it was pretty freaking scary at the time, so I wanted to share it. I've been going to the pool religiously three times a week as part of a post-pandemic get-fit-again campaign, and it's actually

working. I was really proud of myself. I was sticking to my fitness regime. Diet was going well, blah, blah, blah. And I should probably add now that I'm a female and so this took place in the female changing room at the pool slash gym complex I'm still a member of to this day. Me and some of my other friends were in the changing rooms getting ready for a swim session. We'd started getting to know each other from seeing each other at the gym, so we'd begun timing our swim and workout sessions to spot and pace one another. There were four of us there that day, plus an elderly woman that I hadn't seen before. You know that kind of sound that lets you know that something bad is coming, but you can't quite describe it. Well, we all heard that, just the sounds

of a scuffle coming from somewhere outside the dressing rooms, loud bangs, indescipherable shouts, just general chaos. I guess we all looked at each other, frozen mid-change. My eyes shot to the hallway that led around the corner from the dressing room, and I think everyone else looked that way, too. A man came thundering into the changing rooms, and I'll never forget the side of him. He was dressed in filthy little blue shorts, almost comically short. He wore a white sleeveless t-shirt, also filthy and covered in stains. Then, at the ends of his wiry legs were these huge brown boots that smashed against the tiles as he ran. His hair was wild and disheveled, like it had been ripped out in clumps.

And it's not like I got a great look at the guy, but it was obvious that he was sick in some fundamental way. His skin was blotchy and flaky. He had cuts and bruises all over him, and his eyes were absolutely crazed as he burst in. And I swear to God, there were flecks of foam at the corners of his mouth. That wasn't even the really scary part,

nor the fact that he just burst into the women's locker room. The really scary part was that he was holding a massive, wicked-looking machete that appeared rusted and probably infected with tetanus. It didn't even look that sharp. It was absolutely freaking terrible when you're in the middle of changing your bathing suit for a swim. He paused for a second when he saw us and let out a sort of horrifying grunt scream, a guttural animal roar like a beast. The machete seemed to quiver in his sweaty palms and then he began running right at me.

I want to say that I was super brave and close-lined the machete-wielding maniac, but no. I screamed at the top of my lungs and fell back against the lockers. He came charging through and was followed almost immediately by a gang of armed cops chasing him, yelling for him to freeze. I barely had time to think, let alone react, but looking back now, I'm extremely glad that the man didn't think to grab one of us as a hostage. Instead, he thundered through the dressing room into the showers and out into the pool area, out of sight, and those cops chased after him.

As he ran, he shoved the elderly woman towards the cops, sending her face first into one of them, who caught her, steadied her, and then sprinted off to rejoin the pursuit. We all stood there, terrified, and completely shell-shocked. Scream suddenly erupted from the pool area where people had already been swimming, and then more yelling, and then a gunshot. We just stared at each other sort of like, what the flip just happened? Did that really just occur? The elderly woman was crying and shaking, so we went to check if she was okay, and thankfully

she was just kind of shaken up. We didn't have to wait long to find out what had happened. None of us wanted to leave the dressing room, and who knew what was still going on out there. Even though the noise from the pool area died down, it was still pretty tense. Thankfully, a cop came to get a shortly afternoon formed us it was safe to come out. None of us really felt like swimming anymore, so we'd already dressed again and exited the gym instead of heading to the pool. As we followed the cop to the front desk, I saw a machete man.

Now without his machete, I assume, being roughly escorted into a cop car. Turns out, he'd been strolling down the street in broad daylight, threatening people with that machete. The cops have been called and he ran, right into the gym, and then into our locker room. It was never clear if he actually intended to use the machete on anyone, and I'm immensely grateful no one was hurt, not even the elderly lady that he shoved. She never came back to that gym, though. I really can't blame her, to be honest. And thankfully, no one was injured when the cop's gun went off during the pursuit. As a responsible gun owner and an open carry state, I've been extra paranoid since then about triple checking that my safety is on. Then again, I won't go anywhere

without the damn thing now because you never know who's going to come bursting in wielding a huge blade at any time. As for the guy, they think that he was probably on bath salts or something which honestly checks out. Thankfully, the whole thing didn't leave any lasting scars. It's become the stuff of legends at my gym and those of us who were there that day still get first dibs on workout gear and are treated like celebrities. The perks of being attacked with a machete, I guess. I'm pretty sure the guy went to jail, but I don't think he's there anymore. The reason I'm writing this is because I think he's out. And I'll never forget the face of the madman who burst into the locker room, not as long as I live. So unless he has a twin brother, he's been released because

the other day, even though he looked much healthier and cleaner, I saw an identical looking man mopping the floor at Wendy's. up in Vuntut National Park in Yukon, Canada. On paper, the job was simple. Map the land, mark the trees, note the changes, but in practice, out there, it was anything but. The park stretched over 4,000 square kilometers, a sprawl of dense forest, jagged ridges, and boggy lowlands that could swallow a manhole. I'd been at it for years, comfortable with the solitude in the long days of nothing but myself in the forest. In late August of 1993, I was deep in the interior, further than I'd ever gone before. My pack was heavy with gear, the nearest road was a three-day

hike, and the ranger station even further. I was completely and utterly alone, and that's how I liked it. The day started normal. I woke up at dawn, broke camp, and headed north through a thick stand of spruce, and I'd been following a drainage line, plotting its curve for the survey when the trees ahead started to look a little off. They weren't standing right. They were tilted, leaning outward like they'd been pushed by some powerful force. I stopped, adjusted my pack, and squinted through the branches. Beyond them was a clearing, a rough circle punched into the forest. I stepped closer. My boots were sinking in slightly into the earth, and that's when I saw it. Everything within that circle, the trees, the shrubs, the dirt itself, it was all bleached and

ashy white, not burned, not frosted, just sort of drained of color. The trees kind of stood there like skeletons, their bark peeling and dry powdery flakes, and as I walked, the brittle ground crunched under my weight. I'd seen plenty in those woods, fire scars, beetle kills, even the aftermath of a bear tearing through a campsite, but this was different. I moved forward, drawn toward the center, despite the growing sense of unease in my gut. There, in the middle of it all, was a crater. It was small, maybe three feet wide and two feet deep, little more than a shallow scoop in that white earth, and I stood over it staring down. There was no meteorite, no rocks, no sign of

what had just made it, just an empty hole. I remember how still there was a little bit of the the air was. No birds, no winds, no nothing, and how I felt a sharp and sudden chill crawl up my spine. I couldn't place it, but something about that spot made my skin prickle, like I was being watched by very unkind eyes. I shifted my weight, and I decided that I needed proof. I dropped my pack and pulled out my analog camera. My hands were trembling as I fumbled with the lens cap, but I managed to line up some shots. I got some wide angles of the blasted trees and a few of the white expanse and then close-ups of the crater itself. The shutter clicked with each photo.

I took a dozen pictures, maybe more, becoming more and more unsettled as I did. This wasn't just another log entry. This was something my bosses needed to see, something the scientists were going to be very interested in. And once I was done, I packed the camera away and slung my bag over my shoulder and started. started that trek back, only too glad to be getting away from that place. I knew there had to be an explanation for it, but still the place just gave me the willies seeing the aftermath. The walk out of the woods was a long one, maybe six or seven hours in total, and I planned

to camp another night, but after seeing that strange white patch of forest, I wanted solid walls around me at that point. The first couple of hours were fine, just the usual ache in my shoulders from the weight of my pack. But then after a while, the headache started. I figured it was the strain, maybe dehydration, so I stopped and drank pretty deep from my canteen, but it didn't help. My stomach started twisting into knots, a kind of dull pang that got sharper with every step, and by the time I hit the last ridge before the ranger station, I was sweating like a pig. With a station in sight, I stopped and leaned against a tree to catch my breath, but then just as it felt

like my head was clearing, I threw up. I vomited. It hit me fast, a hot rush that left me gasping. I spit and wiped my mouth and realized that there might genuinely be something wrong with me. I stumbled through the door of the station just a few minutes later. The Ranger on duty, a guy named Pete, looked up from his logbook and just froze. I must have been a sight. pale, sweaty, and swaying back and forth, probably a little puk still on my shirt, and he grabbed the radio before I could even say anything and then bark something about a medical pickup. I didn't hear the rest. My legs gave out and I hit the ground and I puked again. Pete rushed over as my vision started to blur and I felt hands on me and then just nothing. I woke up in an ambulance. My head

pounded. My skin was thick with sweat and an oxygen mask covered my mouth and nose. The paramedics were there and their voices were very professional as they asked their questions like where I'd been, what I'd eaten, or if anything had bitten me. And I mumbled about the crater and the white trees, but the words came out just kind of jarbled. And I don't know if they gave me anything, but I remember blacking out again and the next time I opened my eyes, I was in a hospital bed. And the room was sterile. There were white walls and these beeping machines with an IV line tugging at my arm. And I just felt completely hollowed out, but I guess I was alive.

When a nurse realized that I was awake and that I could hear her, she called a doctor into the room. He was a tired-looking man with these very thin glasses, and I was relieved when he told me that it was good news. He said their best guess was that I'd been hit with some kind of viral infection, something really nasty that most probably came from an insect bite. But after stabilizing me with IV fluids and antivirals, I'd probably be out in a few days. I nodded. My throat was dry, but my mind went straight to that crater.

It wasn't a bite. I knew it wasn't. I told him about the impact site, the bleached circle, and the empty hole. And he listened, scribbling some notes and then left. And he'd said he'd keep it in mind, but I knew he wasn't. listening. Delirious people probably say crazy stuff to him all the time. All the doctors can do is work with what's in front of them. And I got discharged a few days later, still shaky but able to stand on my own, probably with a hefty bill. And back at headquarters, I handed over my camera. My boss, this gruff guy named Harris, took it off my hands after asking me to go over

what I'd seen. And after that, I sat in the break room while the tech developed the film. I needed those pictures. They'd showed that I wasn't crazy and then something real had actually happened out there. Now, just so you know, some National Park Service facilities used to have photo dark rooms to develop film photographs taken by rangers and photographers. And that tech eventually came back about 90 minutes later, and his face was just blank. He laid out the prints on the table and my heart sank. Every shot of the impact site was a white fuzzy blur, not overexposed, not under-exposed, just a static mess of nothingness. The other photos, the ones from earlier in the trip were fine, but the crater and the trees and the bleached white bark and soil, they were all

gone. I remember staring at the prints. My hands were clenching the table at the time, and the tech just shrugged, muttering something about a bad role. Harris didn't say much, he just told me that I had it rough and I should take it easy. And no one accused me outright, but I felt it. These sort of side glances, the way conversation stopped whenever I walked into a room. They didn't think that I was lying, but they sure as hell thought that I'd imagine the whole thing while burning up with some fever. And I tried to explain how the timing didn't fit, how I'd been fine until I left. that impact site, but no matter what I said, they'd still give me these insincere nods and

looks of pity. And without proof, it was just me talking, and my words simply wasn't cutting it. In the end, Harris told me to just drop it, and that it was bothering the rest of the team, so I tried to. Routine dolled the edges and just keeping busy with these mapping trails, counting trees, and filing reports made it easy to pretend that I'd moved on, but I hadn't and I really couldn't. Every other trip out, I'd scan those woods, sort of half expecting to see that ashy glow between tree trunks, and I wanted more than anything to find that strange white impact site again so I could mark it on my map, but at the same time, I didn't want to expose myself or anyone

else for that matter to whatever made me sick. And that's what made it easier to keep my mouth shut, but I never forgot about it. I started warning the new guys to stay away from anything strange. or unfamiliar. And they just kind of grin, thinking that I was spinning some tail or playing a trick on them, but I meant every word. The forest wasn't just trees and dirt. Sometimes it hides things, things that'll make you sick, things that just don't belong. Now time rolled on, and after my retirement in 04, I moved south to a little house near Whitehorse, and the nightmare's eventually tapered off, but that memory really stuck around. I'm old now, pushing 70, and I wanted to share

this with you all. My hands shake worse than they did back then and my knees creak when I stand up, but my mind works just fine and sometimes I get to thinking about what I saw up there back in the 90s. I kept those blurry photos, shoved in some envelope in my desk drawer and every so often I might pull them out and just stare at those white smears and sort of wonder. And after doing some reading, the meteorite theory just doesn't quite fit. There was no debris, no heat scars, and if I had been exposed to radiation or some kind of chemical, then the doctors would have found it in my system during one of their tests, I assume. And I guess I can't roll it out entirely,

but I'm not a believer in anything celestial or intergalactic. And most likely there's a total rational explanation for what I saw and what happened to me afterwards. I just can't for the life of me figure out what that is. I'd like to know, don't get me wrong, but at the same time in my old age, I guess it doesn't matter. Because whatever it is, if I ever see it again, I'm walking straight the other way. I attended a charter school in Minnesota in the early 90s, back when that type of school was

really popping off. A new one had opened the year before I was due to start school, and I guess it appealed to my parents. In my memory, the school was in a converted mansion, but I was about five, so who knows how accurate my memory of this place is. I remember it being a damp and musty place with a small number of students. Us little kids were on the first floor, then the classrooms for older kids were on the next floor up, and then the teacher's rooms above that and an attic. As you move through the school system, you move from classrooms deeper into the building, I guess. I didn't stay at that school long enough to have classes on the second floor, so I don't remember what they were like. I do remember being in the attic once or twice,

though. Maybe one Christmas, and I can't remember why, but thinking about it makes me feel weird and unsettled. I hate it when someone says, now for a bit of backstory. but you need to know a little bit about the family that ran the school. There was our principal, Mrs. Howe, and she ran the school. If you've ever seen the old British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, that's exactly what Mrs. Howe looked like. She could have been her twin, honestly. Then there was her husband, Mr. Howe, and looking back,

I had no idea what he did at the school. He was like some kind of businessman. He'd occasionally teach us children's subjects, but I don't think he was actually a teacher by profession. He was a weird guy. I remember him being ridiculously tall and lanky, thinning hair and wet, watery eyes. He'd mumble and sort of stutter, but if he got mad at you, then he got really mad. His face would go red, and his eyes bulged when he yelled.

We were all a bit afraid of him, but also kind of disgusted, I guess. He just had this air of being gross for some unknown reasons. Mrs. Howell, I remember being pretty stern, and then occasionally. really nice head of the blue, especially to me. She gave me a Christmas present once, and I never understood why at the time. None of the other kids at the school got a Christmas present from the principal. The house had three kids, and one of them, Wally will call him, was in the same class as me, and I guess these days you'll call him special needs. He was really clumsy, a little gangly kid who was happy all of the time, except when he'd inevitably

heard himself in some accident or another. Then he'd howl and ball for a hot minute, and you always knew that he was entering the classroom because he'd somehow managed to crash through desks and chairs and send everything flying. Then there was the middle child, who I guess must have been a high schooler. She was only around occasionally, after classes and during weekend events, and anything where I guess her parents dragged her along. She was a pretty standard 90s goth-looking girl, and as a little kid I knew nothing about her. She was just kind of there. Then there was the oldest son, Dom. He was in his early 20s and was back from college after graduating around that time. We didn't think anything of it as kids, but he was hanging around that school all the damn time, just the principal's adult son,

lurking around an elementary school. He was a normal guy, although also extremely tall. And almost every memory I have of the two years that I spent at that school, he was around. Sports day, Christmas festival, bake sale, even during the school weeks. I don't know if I'm remembering his looming presents more than it actually was, but you can see how this is weird already, right? They were a weird family, but of course, a little kid doesn't really pick up on things like that, or consider how odd it is to have both a weird husband and a weird adult son just hanging around your school all the time.

Eventually I did find it weird, though, and then eventually, terrifying. This school also had a pool. The school was in the countryside just past suburbia, so there was a lot of trees around the outskirts of the grounds. The pool was an outdoor pool built in a forest canopy, just down a path from the play areas where we had recess and to the right of the school playing field. That first summer at the school, we didn't use the swimming pool at all.

And I remember all us kids being super disappointed after we'd been so excited to see it when we originally started. The second year, though, it was a really hot summer beginning in early May, and they hired people to come and clean the pool and give it an overhaul. It was a huge deal. Everyone was excited about the pool finally getting to be used again and to become a bit taboo. We'd get yelled at massively if we went to the pool area when we weren't supposed to, which I guess is fair enough because it would have been dangerous if anyone fell into the uncovered pool.

It was always uncovered back when we didn't use it and filled with leaves, tree branches, insects, and very foul, disgusting water. So instead of buying a cover or hiring a pool cleaner, they just instilled this fear of God into us not to go near it. But then they cleaned it, got a actual cover, and we could go near it again. We had swimming lessons overseen by our various teachers, and there was a recreational swimming club held on Thursdays where we could just play in the pool with floaties and toys.

the dressing rooms for the pool were two small shacks under the tree line boys and girls they were old buildings i had no idea what the school was before it was a school but the changing rooms felt like they came from that time despite being a fairly expensive charter school they didn't spend much money on upkeep as far as i can remember and i guess cleaning the pool exhausted their pool budget because the changing rooms were absolutely foul you had to be really careful not to sit on or brush again against the benches because there were wooden and splintery. There were spiders and other insects all over the place and it was just icky and gross and oftentimes if we had swimming, we'd just wear our swimsuits to school that day under our clothes so it was just at least quicker to change

and get into the pool. We also had a rule that we weren't allowed to lock any doors at that school ever. This was because one kid had gotten themselves locked in the bathroom stall for in the entire lunch break and had a panic attack. So instead of fixing the locks and improving things, we were just told to not lock any doors so we wouldn't get stuck anywhere. We didn't even consider locking the dressing rooms or anything because of this, even though they had old bolt-type locks. This is why Dom, the weird adult son that I mentioned earlier, was able to just stroll

into the dressing rooms. I don't know why he, of all people, had been tasked with making sure that the kids were changed and ready for swimming. He would sometimes oversee us. in the pool, but again, he was just the principal's adult son, not really a teacher. For sure, not something they'd get away with these days, at least I hope not, but in the early 90s of the charter school, absolutely, especially when you know certain things about this school that we'll eventually find out here. Now, anyway, it wasn't at all unusual for Dom to burst in

on kids changing. He even made a joke of it. He'd burst in and yell boo, and of course, we'd all laugh at this. It was just a boy bursting in on other boys. He didn't do it to the girls. And I remember even back then, I didn't like it at all, but at the age, I had my own issues going on and really struggled to vocalize discomfort or fear. This one particular day, we were coming up to the summer break, and it was blistering hot out, a very sweaty day, and I was dragging my heels. The rest of my friends had already changed and were in the pool, and I was taking my time getting into my swim trunks. I hadn't remembered to wear them from home, so I was fully halfway through changing when the door creaked open. Boo! Dom said. His voice was quieter than

usual. I'm sure he knew I was alone in there, but I didn't think that at the time, of course. My heart was immediately pounding. I'd only been alone with Dom once before, in the attic that previous Christmas, and he made me super uncomfortable and scared then, so he made me feel the same way now. Hurry it up, Ben, he told me. Everyone's out there playing already. I expected him to leave, but he didn't. The door had swung shut behind him, and he just stood there watching me with his arms folded. He was holding my swim trunks over the front of myself, and the only way that I could put them on was by doing it in front of Dom.

This made me feel a coldness deep down inside my belly that I'd never really felt before. I really didn't want to do this in front of him, but he was an adult and the principal son, and I didn't want to get in trouble by saying anything either. Instead, I compromised and turned my back to him, quickly slipping the trunks up my legs. Boo! Dom grabbed my shoulders. I hadn't heard him come up behind me, and in the split second it took me to realize what had happened, and imagining him sneaking up on me while I was changing,

I felt awful in a way that I cannot describe. I whirled around and fell backwards against the bench, which was rough and splintery and cut into my bare legs. And immediately I started crying because I was a little kid and I was scared and hurt. And Dom's face got angry. Hey, don't cry. He scolded. I was just playing a trick on you.

Don't be a little baby. He reached forward and, grab my arm, hard, and it hurt. He pulled me to my feeding around him. Again, it really hurt. I wasn't used to physical punishment and I was worried that he was going to spank me or something. I don't know if I intentionally shoved him or he tripped or what. Now, officially, he tripped, but of course he would say that because he wouldn't want to explain what he'd been doing to me in the first place. He stumbled backwards, slightly, and knocked against the flimsy wall of the dressing room. Suddenly I heard a sound that I wasn't expecting at all. A strange thwomp sound and then wild,

strong buzzing. Something had been knocked clear from the rafters of the changing room. It was a freaking wasp nest. An angry, disturbed wasp nest getting smacked to the floor in the tiny confines of the changing room, and pretty much immediately a huge cloud of wasp swarmed out of the remnants of that paper hive. Dom let out this sort of strangled cries that began to buzz towards him angrily. Then he ran forward and fully shoved me out of the way, so I fell back and hit the wall on the other side. It took him in a moment to open the door, and again, I can't say for sure, because it was all kinds of chaos with a whole wasp attack scenario, but I am certain that he had to unlocked the door to get out, which means that he'd locked it behind him when he came in.

Whether this was a detail I've added in my mind later or not, I don't know, but I don't think so. Dom ran out, screaming like a high-pitched weirdo, and the cloud of wasps followed him. I was already crying, but my eyes welled with fresh tears as I felt a sting on my right shoulder. And that's all, though, just a singular sting. And when I went outside, it was still chaos. Teachers were batting towels at wasps while others ushered the kids out of the pool. Dom himself was swatting and flapping at the wasp with his bare hands, still shrieking over and over. I just ran to where my friends were going and got out of there.

It took a while for the wasp to disperse and for some teacher to recover our clothes, so we were all sitting around on the playing fields in our swimsuits. Nothing really happened immediately after all of this. We didn't see Dom at the school again. I heard that he'd suffered from a lot of wasp stinks. Good, the creeper. And when that school year ended, I was told during that summer that I'd be changing to a different school next semester. It was never explained why, but I didn't really need to ask.

Even at that age, I knew Dom had tried to do a really bad thing, and that this was a good reason for me to leave that school. I didn't really mind leaving my friends. I had friends who already went to the new school as well, so it'd be fun. And I only found out much later that it was a lot weirder and creepier than I knew. The principal and her husband were basically scammers, running a school and getting charter funding as well as tuition fees, while spending the absolute bare minimum on upkeep, curriculum, and student safety.

So some real tax-dodgy things there. Eventually, Mr. Howe was pursued by the law for some kind of fraud or embezzlement. A wild story in itself, but one I can't really share because the details are so unique. uniquely weird that it would be too easy to work out who these people were. Not that I want to protect them, just myself. Maybe I'm being overly cautious. They were bad, bad people after all, but the principal was still out there, and who knows, maybe there's a way that she could be litigious. Don isn't still out there, though, at least not now. My mom found out via the local paper a few years after the embezzlement things that Dom had been sent to prison for completely

unrelated crimes. Yeah. Sadly, in his 40s, he'd gotten into a relationship with a woman who had two kids and abused both of them. I don't know the details of the abuse and I don't want to know. It chills me enough knowing the lucky escape that I had, and I try not to fixate on the fact that I'm certain the changing room door was locked when he tried to leave. Maybe I would have been fine, but that That doesn't stop me from thanking God for those wasps, and hopefully it really hurt when they stung that predator, because he absolutely deserved that, and far, far worse. I was part of a search and rescue team dispatched to Olympic National Forest in the summer of 1983. The call came in late Tuesday night just as I was finishing a shift at the station.

Terry Fishgold, a local hiker who had been walking the trails for years, hadn't returned from one of his solo trips. His wife had waited until Monday evening before she called it in, figuring he'd just stayed at out longer than expected. When he still wasn't back by Tuesday, she gave us the details and a description of his gear. His last known location was a trailhead near the Quinault River, and his intended destination was a ridge around eight miles north. It sounded routine. Terry knew the forest and we had a clear starting point, so I'd have bet my last dollar on us finding him by sundown. But as it happened, that particular search and rescue operation proved anything. but routine.

Including local law enforcement and a bunch of civilian volunteers, around 30 to 40 of us gathered at the trailhead just before dawn on that Wednesday. We loaded up with the usual, radios, first aid kits, maps, rope, and flashlights, and then split the search area into a grid. My team and I took the western edge of the grid near the river while the others fanned out east. The plan was to sweep north, hit the ridge by nightfall, find fish gold, and bring him home. Then at exactly 5.47 a.m., we hit the trails. The first few hours dragged on with little to report. We moved slow, scanning for broken branches, scuff dirt, or anything that

might show Terry had passed through. We'd called out his name every so often, but apart from that, the forest was quiet. But then, around noon, the voice of one of my team members buzzed through my radio and broke the silence. He'd found something. I adjusted my course and then hiked a half mile east to meet the rest of my team. When I got there, they were all looking up. High up in some tree about 30 feet off the ground was a backpack. It was torn open, its straps were flapping, and the contents had spilled out onto the branches and ground below. From its appearance alone, we knew it was fishgolds, and it was just as his wife had described it,

a green Kelty with a red patch stitched on the side. One of my team, a guy named Jim, volunteered the climb up, rigging a rope and harness while we watched from below. And the tree was thin, its branches were too slender to hold much weight, yet the pack was lodged up there, caught like it had been thrown with an impressive amount of force. When Jim brought it down, we saw the damage up close. The fabric was shredded, with long gashes running through it. No bites or scratches from what we could tell. It was more like something sharp had ripped it apart.

Inside, Terry's water bottle was cracked and a soggy sandwich sat just half eaten and crushed with the dirt. And there was no blood, though, not yet from what we could see. That came afterwards. Two hours later, one of my team radioed in. She'd found one of Terry's boots in a small clearing. I hiked over and there it was. Just like the Danners his wife had mentioned him wearing, brown leather, laces tied,

standing upright like he'd stepped right out of it. No blood, no damage, just the boot sitting there alone. We marked the spot and moved on figuring the other one would turn up close by. It didn't. About an hour later, one of the other teams called from the eastern edge of the search ring, almost two miles away. And when I heard what they had to say, my blood turned to ice. They'd found the second boot, but it wasn't empty.

Terry's foot was still inside, cut off just above the edge. ankle. The bone break wasn't clean. The skin was torn and a few flies were circling it. And the blood was still sticky too, meaning it hadn't been there very long. The other team said that they snapped a few photos for the report and then they bagged it and moved on, but after that, the forest started to feel heavier to me. We'd seen bad injuries before, falls, shootings, animal attacks, but this didn't fit. A bear might tear into someone, but it wouldn't leave a foot in a boot, severed clean, and dropped miles from the other one. We widened the search after that, breaking the grid into tighter sections, and not long after we noticed the

blood. The first time I spotted some, it was on a tree. It was a small smear, no bigger than a coin, staining the bark at eye level. One of my team found another spot ten feet away higher up like it had been flick there. Then another pointed out more droplets splattered across the cedar's lower branches. We started marking them with flags and it didn't take long to see the pattern, or rather the lack of one. The blood was everywhere, tiny specks of it spread across the forest in every direction. I'd taken a few steps and find another dot, and then another, like someone had taken a blood-soaked rag over entire sections of the woods. But later, Afternoon, we'd covered almost half the grid and found nothing. No body, no clothes, just the pack,

the boots, and his blood. A few hours later, the sun was starting to set and a fog was rolling in. We stuck closer as a group not really talking much at all. We just kept moving, marking blood spots and searching for our missing hiker. Night came fast and we set up a base camp near the ridge. The plan was to rest as much as possible and then pick up at dawn, but I couldn't sleep. sleep. The forest was too quiet. There really didn't seem to be any wind or animals, just this sort of eerie silence. Then at around midnight, I heard a branch snapping. It was loud and sharp, maybe a hundred yards out. I sat up, grabbed my flashlight, and swept that beam across the trees, but I didn't see anything move. I stayed put and things stayed quiet till I was

relieved, but it was the same unnatural quiet, the kind that you'd never hear in the woods at night unless something's making everything else stay quiet. I got a few hours of sleep after a teammate took over the watch, but morning didn't bring me any relief. We packed up and pushed north, following that blood trail, and it kept going, smeared on trunks and dotted on branches, with some spots so high that I had to tilt my head all the way back to see them. I found one mark on a pine tree ten feet up, with no limbs below it to climb. The blood looked fresh, like it had been put there while we slept, and I remember that sense of creeping apprehension growing as I marked it on the map. One of my team found a cluster of droplets on a rock,

arranged in a rough half circle. Another spotted more on a fallen log, a thin line of blood streaking the moss. We stopped trying to make sense of it at that point. We just kept going, and hoping to find Terry, or by then, what was left of him. And by noon on the second day, we'd reached the outer edge of the search area. But on account of the pieces we'd found, the prospects of finding Fishgold alive were getting slimmer by the minute. We tried our best, covered all of the ground we'd set out to, but it was no good. We called off the search on the afternoon of the third day.

Terry was obviously dead. No one could lose that much blood and still be walking around. We radioed it in, packed it up, and left the rest to local law enforcement. When we hit the trailhead, I looked back. The trees were just standing still. The fog was starting to roll in again, and officially, Terry wasn't anywhere in the grid. But my gut told me that wasn't all the way true. The official report listed this as an animal attack.

The bear made sense for the torn pack and the severed foot, but I knew that it wasn't right. No bear could toss a pack 30 feet into a tree, onto branches too weak to hold its weight. No bear could spread blood across miles of forest, painting it on bark and rocks like some deliberate mark. I've seen bear kills, the torn flesh, the scattered bones, the mess of guts left behind. But this. This was different. The report got filed. Terry Fishgold was declared deceased and his body stayed unrecovered.

It was one of three failed missions that we had in the 1980s. Most of us moved on after that and took desk jobs or left the field entirely, but I couldn't let it go. The pack and the tree stuck with me, and every so often my mind would wander off, and I'd see the pack hanging there, shredded and out of reach. I'd think about that foot in that boot, too, all raggedly severed like it had been torn off and dropped for us to find. I'd remember all that blood and how the branch snobled.

snapped, sharp and close, and how I'd been almost certain that something was out there watching us. The team didn't talk about it much after. One of my search and rescue team members, Paul, stayed in touch the longest and years later, I asked him what he thought actually happened. He simply told me, we didn't find him because he wasn't there to find. And I knew what he meant. I just didn't agree that he wasn't there. Whatever took Terry wasn't a bear, but it tore him apart piece by piece and marked the forest with what was left. I think he was still there too, or I know he was, because of how fresh the blood was on that second day. Another team member, Lisa, quit search and rescue a year after. She moved inland away from the trees and didn't

leave a number. And Sarah disappeared too, not missing, just kind of gone, not forwarding an address. Our guy, Jim, stuck around much longer, and he got kind of quiet and he started to drink more, and I heard that he took a job with the Forest Service. Irony of ironies, really, though he never really talked about that mission. I don't blame him. We all carried it differently, but we carried it all, nonetheless. I kept the map from that search. The blood marks are still on it, little X's in red ink stretching across the grid like a web. I don't look at it often, and when I do, it's not unusual for a shiver or two to run down my spine. Terry was gone, but something else was there instead, waiting in the woods we'd never search again.

I think I'm older than your average listener. I'm 61 and this happened when I was 12 and Clarkie was 11. I'm also English, as in from England, so I'm sorry in advance for anything that entails. I'm weirdly nervous about writing this up and I guess you don't need to know this, but I'll stress that this event has haunted me my whole life and if I think about this too long I actually start feeling sick and I think it'll be pretty understandable why. I met Clarkie when I was in primary school. We met in the infants, our first year at a small suburban primary school, and became fast friends on day one.

From that day on, after I first found him playing with action figures on the play mat in the corner, we were inseparable. He was my best friend and I was his. We had other friends too. We were just normal, regular kids who became part of the normal regular lads at primary school. In fact, if you'd ask me back then, I would have said that we were the popular kids, at least out of the boys. Always up to something, always getting into some kind of trouble or other. Nothing serious, though, and adults tended to love us quite a lot, just as much of the other kids wanted to be our friends. I was always more of the leader, and Clarkie was more of a follower, but the relationship felt equal.

We were partners in crime, and when it came time for us to move on to big school in the town, and neither of us really had any reservations. Christ on a cracker, what naive little lads we were, though. If you don't know, the school system works a bit differently in the UK. We don't have middle school, just primary straight into secondary. This means that when you're 11, you suddenly shift to a much bigger, much more crowded school with other students as old as 16 or 18, depending on the school. All of a sudden, we've gone from being kings of our little primary school

to being tiny little squirts surrounded by hulking, terrifying monsters. We were not prepared, man, just absolutely completely out of our depth. We strolled up that driveway like Kings and with the passage of just one single day came crawling back out no more than broken, quivering wrecks. It's a huge crash down to earth to make the shift from primary to secondary and to this day, I insist it's actively damaging for kids to have such a sudden, extreme, transition. Clarkie and I had simply assumed that all the kids from our primary school would be put in the same classes together, but they actually do the opposite. They spread students around

to try and encourage them to make new friends, which just feels kind of cruel to me. In mine and Clarkie's case, we were not only in separate houses, similar to a U.S. home room, but the six houses in our school were split into two, so only students from three houses had classes together. He was in blue and I was in red, which meant that we didn't even have a single class together. Thankfully, we still got to see each other at break and lunch, but damn, it was rough. And on top of that, we suddenly became deeply, painfully unpopular. I could speculate a million reasons why, but ultimately it doesn't matter. Both of us were severely struggling to make friends, and we wouldn't even stick to each other

because we spent most of our days totally separate. it. Sure, we still hung out after school every day and on the weekends, but it just wasn't the same. It actually hurt. When you're a lonely, unpopular kid, you seem to become a beacon for even more trouble. And as such, Clarkie and I became the targets of bullies. One group from my half of the year bullied me, one from Clark's bullied him, and usually never the twain did meet. These little arseholes aren't even important. I don't even remember who they were, and I'm sure that they grew up to become decent enough blokes. They weren't just some year sevens who made our year seven miserable.

They weren't the cocks, though. And that's what Clerky and I called the group of Year 9 boys, but only behind their backs when we were in the safety of my house or Clarkies. In school, we didn't call them anything. We didn't even make eye contact. Jake was a big lumbering oaf who looked like he'd be a dumbarse, but was weirdly creative in his scathing insults. Jonah was completely unremarkable in every way.

except he had this cruel twinkle in his eye. Jonah had a tongue that could dish out insults, which hurt as much as any punch. And they would do both. They would insult and punch us. Those two, and a rotating group of other faceless friends they had, the sidekicks would change, but Jake and Jonah remained a constant threat. Always there, always needling, always kicking the backs of our shoes, or pouring glue in an unattended school bag, or cutting a necktie.

If we were shoved on the stairs, you could be sure that Jake and Jonah were nearby smiling malevolently at us. If someone threw a bottle at me, I could guarantee they'd be close by. Every fist, every jab, everything that really truly hurt had all seemed to come from these two. It didn't matter whether Clarkie and I were together or apart. They always seemed to find us multiple times each day and dish out some cruel and unusual form of punishment. I'm not sure they ever explained what we'd done to offend themselves. much. It was just an established known thing that our existence disgusted them and we would suffer for it. You know what bullies can be like, I guess. You've read enough stories about this vile,

cowardly lot, but let me tell you, they were way worse in the past. And we hated school. Our first term there, from September through Christmas, was hell. Then the spring term was no better, worse in fact. How our parents didn't notice anything I'll never know. It used to drive me mad how nobody would just notice the bags under our eyes, or how we'd become quiet and withdrawn and ask us what was wrong. Why did I never consider just telling them something was up in the first place? You just didn't tell people back then. Dobbing someone in would lead to a fate worse than death. Even people who still liked you would hate you if you daub someone in, even a bully, or so I thought. Absolutely stupid looking back. Anybody who'd behave like that wouldn't be worth

caring about in the first place, but I guess it's easy to think with adult logic when you're an adult. Then the summer term came and were introduced to something that we'd never even considered, the school pool. We knew we had a school pool, of course. It was a big building just separate from the main school, but it always seemed like something the other kids got to do and not us. Then, in summer term of year seven, we saw swimming on our lesson planned photocopies and there was much rejoicing in my form room. I didn't particularly care either way because I was so depressed in general because of the bullying,

but that changed when I dragged myself to swimming class and found Clarkie waiting there and queue outside the changing rooms. It turned out that our summer PE lessons were split by gender, so boys could do swimming while girls did netball, and then girls did swimming later in the week while boys did cricket. I hated cricket, but that's not the point. Swimming was fun and it meant that I actually got to spend some time with Clarkian classes. It was about five swimming lessons in.

We had our swimming lessons on Monday and it was the last class of the day before home time. Clarkie and I lingered in the changing rooms waiting for everyone else to leave before we showered and changed because when you're a bullying victim, you soon learn not to do anything in front of others that could leave you vulnerable. In those days, there really wasn't much in the way of health and safety. So our P.E. teacher had gone off somewhere, probably hurrying for a cigarette and coffee. He'd even given us the keys to the changing room and asked us to lock up when we were done. And for all the bullying, adults still liked us, I guess. Man, Clarkie said, swimming is fun.

And we were still in our swimming trunks. We could go back in, I joked. Clarkie's eyes lit up. Let's do it. And I was surprised and a little thrilled to see that old spark of life back in my friend, which is why I didn't think twice about just running back into the pool area and jumping in. I didn't really consider how much trouble we could get in for playing in the pool unsupervised. It hadn't really been drummed into us how dangerous it was, which I guess was a systematic failing in itself.

But as long as we kept out of the deep end, it wasn't like we could get in much trouble playing in water, right? Barking laughs echoed around the pool room, and I surfaced to see Jonah and Jake strolling in from the changing rooms. They were fully dressed in their school uniforms, shoes on, and everything. Why were they even here, though? Even in the warm water, I felt my skin go icy cold and goose pimpled. Clarkie whispered something to me an alarm. Well, well, well, if it isn't the little idiots, I remember Jonah saying, and that's what he called us. Maybe they weren't as creative as I give them credit for looking back, but that's what they said.

Oh, crap, I whispered. We were in the center of the pool far from any of the exit ladders, and even if we did get out on the other side, Jonah and Jake were in front of the exit to the changing room. What's that, idiot one? Jake asked. Come here, Jonah said. Neither Clarkie nor I moved.

Jonah clapped suddenly and lunged forward like he was about to jump into the, the pool. He yelled again at us, telling us to come here. We're not going to hurt you, Jake said. Yeah, Jonah added. We think it's neat that you broke in here. Maybe you're a sound. Sound is pound, Jake echoed. And we had to swim over there. What choice do we have at that point? If you ever went into a swimming pool in Britain in the 70s or 80s, you'll know that some of them had these drainage holes along the sides, covered by a metal or plastic, great. In some pools, I had been in before or since, they were bolted down, and others they were loose. At our school pool, they were supposed to be bolted down, but I guess this one had come

loose because Jonah now lifted it up. Dare you to stick your head in the hole? He said, and the water lapped over the gap in the tiles, and I just shook my head. Come on, boys, Jake said, be cool. We'll be nice to you if you do it. And I shook my head again. To this day, I have no idea why Clarkie did it. Really, what could they have done to us? Did he genuinely believe our worst tormentors would suddenly stop bullying us and become our friends if he stuck his head in that hole? Maybe he simply didn't consider that his head might actually fit.

Clarkie was very, very small, even for our age, and I was over a head taller than him. He was a really small boy. What's down there? Jake jeered. take a look and clarky surfaced how just put your head in and look over the edge jake said clarky leaned forward again into the hole and he let his body float up so his face angled down quickly jona shoved the grate down pushing clarky's head further into the hole clarky began to flounder and splash trying to twist and turn to surface to get some air and i swam beside him yelling

let him out. Jonah stood with his foot on the grate, head thrown back laughing like some supervillain. Clarkie flailed and splashed and was starting to panic and, Christ, how did Jonah not see what could happen? I don't think he meant for it to happen. Well, I know he didn't, but still, it did. Clarkie struggled hard, jerked and twisted in the water and suddenly we heard a muted yet clearly audible, clearly awful, cracking sound. It was the worst thing I'd ever heard. Almost immediately, Clarkie stopped moving entirely. His bodies started to drift down and his head still caught in the grate, the angle almost impossible.

Jake noticed before Jonah did. Jonah was still standing there, pinning Clarkie in place, and Jake tugged his sleeve and gestured to Clarkie. Jonah went immediately still and suddenly white. It was like immediate shock. had hit him, and I could see him starting to shake. He stared at me, dead in the eyes. Please don't tell anyone, he said, and he looked like he was about to cry, and then he and

Jake ran off. Please don't tell anyone. No threats, no rage, just him begging me not to tell. I ripped the grate off and pulled Clarkie free, but of course, it was too late. His neck rolled limply on his shoulders, and the angle had somehow led to him breaking his own neck as he tried to free himself. I thought Jonah and Jake had simply run away, and I was shaking myself, crying, cradling Clarkie in my arms, trying to work out what the hell I was going to do. Thankfully, I didn't have to wait long because they returned, the P.E. teacher and another teacher in tow, and they'd gone to get help at least.

There was no opportunity for Jonah and Jake to pretend they weren't there or weren't involved. They clearly known to go and get a teacher which made it obvious they knew something. In the aftermath, my dilemma was whether I should tell anyone that Jonah had essentially killed Clarkie, my best friend. In the end, I went along with the story that we'd all been screwing around in the pool and Clarkie had stuck his head in the grate for a dare and got stuck and hurt himself. I didn't say Jonah had been standing on the grate at the time. Maybe this was the wrong thing, but I do genuinely believe Jonah was remorseful, and it would have ruined his life if I'd spoken up.

Maybe he'd have deserved it. As it was, I don't think anyone really believe my story anyway. Instead, they just thought all three of us had killed Clarkie. His parents could never look at me or speak to me again. My own parents could hardly look at me for a while, although they never directly suggested they thought that I was to blame for me. anything. The bullying did stop though going forward, not just from Jake and Jonah, but everyone. In fact, more than once I saw a few kids look at me with a mixture of fear and awe. I'm not sure

if this was because they thought I'd snap someone's neck or because Jonah and Jake threatened anyone away from giving me crap. Either way, it's nearly 50 years later. God, I'm old, and I still miss my best friend. He didn't deserve what happened to him. He was the sweetest, kindest boy, and he simply wanted to be liked. But now he's dead, and I've never spoken up about exactly how he was killed. I have no idea what became of Jake and Jonah after they left that school, and I've never made any attempt to find out. I hope they made something of their lives and that Jonah hasn't wasted the opportunity I gave him by staying quiet

so that I can at least believe Clarkie would approve of my decision. A long time ago, my buddy Andre and I went hiking on the Lost Coast Trail. We'd been at it since early morning, walking along the trails, laughing about stupid stuff from work, and just kind of soaking in the piece. By noon, my legs were pretty much screaming, and I could tell Andre was feeling it too, so we stopped to check the map and catch our breath. We found a little clearing just off the path with a big flat rock that looked good enough to sit on.

I dropped my pack, pulled out my water bottle, and took a long swig while Andre unfolded the map. He was always better with directions, so I let him figure out where we were. were while I rested. Andre was kind of just muttering to himself, tracing a finger along the map when it happened. This huge shadow slid over us, like someone had flicked a switch and turned off the sun for a second. It wasn't a little patch of shade either. It was big enough to cover the whole clearing. I remember freezing mid-sip, water dribbling down my chin as I looked up, but the sky was still that perfect endless blue with not a cloud in sight. And Andre must have seen it, too, because he stopped talking and snapped his head up just as it passed over and the light returned.

What the hell was that? He sounded spooked, and I didn't answer right away. Instead, my eyes were darting around, scanning the treetops in the skies for anything that might explain the large shadow that passed over. But there was nothing. There were no planes up there, no birds, and this was way before drones, too. I didn't know of anything that could have made a shadow that big, let alone something that could move so fast and so quiet, it was almost gliding. And then the breeze hit. It came out of nowhere, stiff and cold rustling the trees around us and kicking up dust from the trail.

It didn't feel like normal wind. It felt like it was chasing whatever had passed over us, like it was part of it somehow. I felt the hairs on my neck stand up, and Andre went pale. He lowered the map and spun around, looking in every direction. You saw that, right? I just nodded because what else was there to say, really. We stood there for a minute, maybe two, waiting for something to happen. And my heart was thumping at a mile a minute, and I could hear Andre breathing hard next to me.

The woods had gone quiet. There were no birds, no bugs, just silence. It was like everything was holding its breath, the same as we were. were. I kept expecting to see something break through the trees or drop out of the sky, but it was just nothing. The sun was back, bright as ever, like it had never left. We should go, I said, and Andre didn't argue. He grabbed the map off the ground and stuffed it into his pack, and we started moving. Neither of us said it out loud, but I knew that we were both thinking the same thing. Get out of there now. We didn't even bother,

sticking to the trail. We just headed straight back the way we came, cutting through bushes and trees and ducking under branches. I kept my eyes on the sky, half expecting that shadow to come back, and I could tell Andre was doing the same. Every light breeze or rustle of leaves made me jump, and I had this awful feeling whatever it was would come back. It took us maybe an hour to get back to the trailhead, though it felt like longer. I was burning up, and my shirt was soaked with sweat by the time we saw the parking lot. Andre's truck was still there, right where we'd left it, and I don't think I've ever been so relieved to see a beat-up old Ford.

We threw our packs in the back and climbed in, and for a while, we just kind of sat there, catching our breath, staring out the windshield at the trees. And after a while, Andre broke the silence, asking, it was probably just a bird, like a hawk or something flying low. shadows can look bigger than that than they are right he didn't sound convincing but i could tell that he was trying to talk himself into it right i said nodding even though i didn't believe it and the wind was just a coincidence he agreed as he started the engine and i could hear the relief in his voice like saying out loud made it true we're just freaking ourselves out of

out over nothing. He said, and I wanted to agree with him I really did, but I couldn't. A bird made sense, a big turkey vulture or an eagle swooping down, catching the light just right, and the breeze could have been random too. It's not like the weather stays still in the woods, but deep down I knew it didn't add up. That shadow had been too big and too solid. It wasn't some flimsy bird shape. It was thick, heavy, like something massive had passed over us. Then the way it moved, so smooth and quick, it didn't feel like anything I'd ever seen in the sky before. We drove back to town mostly quiet, radio filling in the space between us and country songs, and every now and then, Andre would just glance at me and I could tell that he was still rattled, and so was I.

When we got to my place, he didn't stick around like he usually did after a hike. There was a was no cracking open a beer or rehashing the day. He just said that he'd see me later and peeled out like he couldn't wait to put distance between him and what happened. And to be honest, that night I couldn't sleep. All I could think about was that shadow and the breeze and the way the woods just went quiet. I told myself it was stupid, and we just spooked ourselves like a couple of kids, but I really couldn't shake it. And eventually weeks went by and we didn't talk about it again. and life went back to normal, or at least it tried to, with work and bills and the usual grind helping us keep our minds off the shadow. I even went hiking again, though not on that trail,

and nothing weird happened. But every time I'm outside now, especially on a clear day, I catch myself looking up. I don't know what I'm expecting to see, but I can't help it. That shadow's still there in the back of my mind, and I still get the feeling that whatever caused it wasn't just some bird. I looked it up online. once late at night when I couldn't stop thinking about it, I type stuff like big shadow and sky and unexplained things in woods into Google before scrolling through pages of conspiracies and blurry photos. Some people talked about UFOs, others about giant birds or government experiments, but none of it seemed to fit, not entirely anyway. Whatever we saw or whatever we didn't see

seem stranger than that, like it was something that didn't belong. My mind, wandered, exploring possibilities, but in the end, I felt silly. I just shut my laptop, feeling dumber for even trying. Andre and I still hang out, but we really don't hike much anymore. It's not like we decided that. We just stopped planning trips, and I think we both know why. Neither of us wants to say it, but the day changed something. We can't really laugh it off, call it a fluke, but there's this sort of quiet thing between us now, a sort of shared secret that we don't touch. Sometimes I wonder if it's still out there circling the woods, waiting for someone else to come across it. I'll never forget how small it made me feel, standing in that clearing

watching the sky for something that never showed itself. I don't know if it's dangerous, or if it's just there, but I know deep in my gut that it isn't normal. A few years back, I decided to go for a hike by myself. It wasn't something I did often, but I'd been feeling cooped up like I needed to get out and breathe some fresh air. I grabbed my keys, threw a water bottle into my backpack, and drove out to this trail that I'd heard about. It was an hour or so from my house, tucked away in some woods that I'd never explored before. And the drive was quiet, just me, the hum of my engine, and the trees blurring past the windows. I parked my car in a little gravel lot near the trailhead, locked it up, and started walking,

but that's where things get a little fuzzy. The next clear memory that I have is me driving back home, hands on the wheel and the sun dipping low like hours had just slipped by. But everything between? Gone. There was a black spot in my head, like someone snipped out a chunk of film and stitched the ends back together. I tried to piece everything back together that night, sitting on my couch with a beer that I barely touched. I could picture myself pulling into that lot, the gravel that was under my tires, the faded wooden sign marking the trail, and I could even see myself stepping into the woods and hiking steadily along the trail. There's this one fleeting image that keeps popping up, me walking through those woods, everything calm, but

that's pretty much it. Everything else is just a blank wall in my mind before I'm back in my car, driving home like nothing happened. It creeped me out very badly, and I kept asking myself what the hell could have happened, but I couldn't think of anything. The next day I called in sick to work. My head was feeling pretty heavy and I couldn't focus. And I kept staring at my hiking boots by the door. They seemed to be caked in mud, little pine needles sticking in the laces and all the proof that I've been out there, I guess, but I couldn't remember stepping in that mud or brushing against those trees. I started wondering if I'd hit my head or something, so I went to the doctor. He poked at me and asked some questions. He checked my eyes and my reflexes, all that kind of

stuff, and he said I seemed fine, that there were no signs of a concussion or anything weird, and he told me to come back right away if it happened again and got another one of those memory gaps. I said I would, but driving home from that appointment, I felt this in the pit of my stomach. He said I was fine, but I didn't feel right. That evening, I remember sitting on the couch in front of the TV, but I wasn't really watching. I was just thinking sort of like waiting for something to click. I thought maybe I'd just zoned out on that hike, like when you drive somewhere familiar and don't remember the turns. But that wasn't that.

This was hours upon hours that I couldn't remember, like they'd been stolen from me. So I got up and grabbed my phone and looked up that trail online. It was called Black Pine Loop, some old path not many people used anymore, and I scrolled through a couple of hiking forums hoping for something useful, but most posts were a whole bunch of nothing. People talked about deer sightings or how the trail needed upkeep. But then I found this one threat, buried deep from a guy who'd hiked a few years before me. He said that he'd felled off the whole time, like something was wrong with the woods. And he said he found a stretch of trail where the trees looked wrong, very thin, twisted like they had some type of disease. He didn't mention anything about memory loss or anything like that.

But reading about those trees got me thinking. and then by the time I got to overthinking, I shut my phone off and didn't look again. And days eventually turned into weeks and I tried letting it go and I didn't tell anyone about it, not my friends or family. I mean, really, what was they going to say? Hey, I went for a walk and forgot the whole damn thing. They'd probably think I was nuts. I'd catch myself zoning out, staring at nothing. Sometimes I'd think it was happening again and panic would start to hit. But thankfully it hasn't. But still, I couldn't shake the feeling that whatever happened with that time loss was tied to that trail.

When I was a kid, my family loved the outdoors. My dad was in the Air Force, stationed at Hill Air Force Base in Utah, so we often went to Farmington Canyon, especially in the fall when the trees turned bright red and gold. The drive took about an hour, but the dirt road was scary. It hugged tight against rock walls on one side with a steep drop on the other. Sometimes cars had to creep past each other, inches from the cliff, and I'd look out my window and see tiny trees. trees far below, and I remember kind of just shuddering. One trip stands out back in the 90s. I was thrilled because we were camping in a tent, a rare treat for me.

My dad's bad back usually meant day trips or cabins, but this time we borrowed an old 70s tent from a garage sale. Me, my parents, and my siblings, and our two dogs piled into the car. We reached the campsite by a creek in the late afternoon and then set up the tent, laughing as the dogs just chased each other. We built a fire, ate some hot dogs, and then when it got dark, we doused the fire and crawled into our sleeping bags. I fell asleep to the sound of the creek, but sometime later I woke up. One of our dogs was growling low, his fur bristling, and at first I thought it was just a rabbit because earlier we'd seen a few hopping around.

Then I heard it. Crunch, crunch. The sound of footsteps on the forest outside. My whole body froze, stiff as a board. Someone was out there, moving around our camp. I was so scared I could barely breathe. The footsteps got closer and I heard them circled the tent slowly. The dogs growling got louder, but I stayed still, too scared to move.

And I could tell the person was poking around, maybe checking our stuff. They even tugged at the car door, but it was locked. Was it a camper from another site? Someone lost or something was. worse, someone who wanted to hurt us. I heard them crunching again, louder right by the tent, and I squeezed my eyes shut praying that they'd go away. The dog growled sharper and suddenly the footsteps stopped. They then started again faster and moving away. I laid there, my heart was pounding until I couldn't hear them anymore. I don't know how long I stayed frozen,

but eventually I heard my dad's whisper. He'd been awake the whole time. time listening to and he didn't say it, but I could tell he was scared. He waited a bit, shook my mom and siblings awake, and then announced that we were leaving. We packed up fast. No one talked much, just stuck sleeping bags and tore down the tent by flashlight, and the dog stayed close, but they were still on edge. It was around 1 a.m. we piled into that car. The Canyon Road was darker than ever, and as we drove, I kept looking out the window half expecting to see someone in the shadows. My dad mentioned seeing cars full of college kids heading up earlier and he said maybe it was one of them, but he didn't sound too sure. We got home safe, but I didn't sleep that night. None of us

did. Was it someone who was lost looking for help, a thief checking campsites or someone who lived in the woods watching us from the dark? I'll never know. But even now, years later, when I hear the crunching of footsteps on the forest floor, my heart skips a beat. Hey, friends, thanks for listening. Don't forget to hit that follow button to be alerted of our weekly episodes every Tuesday at 1 p.m. EST. And if you haven't already, check out Let's Read on YouTube, where you can catch all my new video releases every Monday and Thursday at 9 p.m. EST. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you in the next episode.

Thank you.