The NoSleep Podcast - Nosleep Podcast #8

Episode Date: September 18, 2011

Our eighth episode of The Nosleep Podcast brings you tales from the darkness of foreboding forrests to the psychological torment of lost hope. Featuring horror stories from the Reddit.com horror writing community, these stories will make the dark hours of the night creep slowly past. This episode features these stories:The Woods written by Kyle Thomas (Redditor mountainbrewer) and read by David Cummings (Redditor MikeRowPhone).Can You Hear the Birds Singing? written by Douglas Bramlett (Redditor writermonk) and read by David Cummings. Laurel Highlands written by Bill Penfield (Redditor 1-800-VISIT-PA) and read by David Cummings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Through the murky darkness of the night, when fear banishes sleep. It's the No Sleep podcast. Born from the nightmares of Reddit.com's No Sleep Forum, and featuring tales from Reddit's authors of horror, we present you with tales intended to frighten and disturb, and keep you awake as the night slowly creeps. past. For first tale is entitled, The Woods. The peaceful seclusion of a rural homestead can be a relaxing retreat, but the nighttime woods can also conceal a dark menace. This story was written

by Kyle Thomas and is read by David Cummings. My fiancé lives about 90 miles from my hometown. As a result, I end up driving there every week during the summer to visit for a few days. My fiancé lives in the country. Her father and most of her neighbors owns five acres of land, half of which is wooded. It's enough land to prevent any neighbors from seeing what's happening on their property. Normally, that's fine, but sometimes privacy isn't all that great. My fiancé and I had gone to bed. my room is a small room that her mother uses for crafts

and it is the closest to the woods. I was woken up around one or two in the morning. I heard noises coming from outside. No big deal at first. Her family owns a sheep, a goat, and some chickens. At first I thought it was some animal, and being groggy, I rolled over and started falling asleep again. Then I heard the noise again,

and I realized that this noise was unlike what I normally hear. It sounded like the wood to the exterior of the house was being scraped by something. This disconcerted me immensely and instantly brought me into a stone cold clarity. I lay in bed and listened to the sounds outside. I would hear the scraping sound for a few seconds at a time and then silence. Sounds then started coming from inside the house. My blood boiled cold. I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, walking the hallway, and stopping right at my door.

The feeling was nauseating. I could feel my throat tightening, restricting my breath. Then the door opened. It was my future father-in-law. He asked if I heard the sounds outside. I told him yes. He told me to put on my shoes and meet him in the kitchen downstairs. As he sank down the stairwell, I threw on my chakos and went to the kitchen.

I saw Jim, my fiancé's father, putting on tennis shoes. Then I took a look at the kitchen table and knew something was wrong. Jim was a sensible man, a former Marine, and a jack-of-all-trades. He didn't do something unless he thought it was necessary. necessary or beneficial. So when I saw two machetes on the table, I knew shit was getting real. He told me we were going outside to take a look around and handed me one of the machetes. The girls, my fiancée, her mother and sister, were awake at this time as well, but stayed

inside and locked the door after Jim and I stepped foot onto the porch. I looked into the night. It was calm and dark and the occasional bruise. made the night seem nice despite the circumstances. The gibbous moon offered just enough light to navigate the yard. Jim and I stepped off the front porch walking east, where most of their property was located, and also happened to be the direction the noises had been coming from. We intended to walk to the goat pen and check on the animals,

and then check the perimeter of the house. We never made it to the goat pen. About halfway, roughly 300 feet, we stumbled upon a blanket. On top of the blanket were four wine glasses and an assortment of knives, a saw, and some hooks. This freaked me out enough as it was. Then Jim told me that these were knives and tools traditionally used by butchers. We bent down and just kind of stared at those tools. Then we were startled when we heard a banging.

on the window behind us. We turned around and saw my fiancé banging on the window. Nothing was said, we booked it to the back porch and rushed the door, which thankfully was still locked. We banged on the door and asked, or more like yelled, for the girls to unlock the door. No one answered. My mind raced of horrible thoughts that sicken me even to this day. Jim and I both assumed the worst and were yelling for someone to let us in. I was able to break in via the window when my fiancé unlocked the door and let us in. I asked her in a stern tone why she was banging on the window. She told me that she had been standing at the kitchen window watching her father and me when she saw something or someone in the woods. Apparently the figure was very close to where

Jim and I had been standing. She was banging on the window to alert us. because in our trance we had not noticed the figure approaching us. Upon hearing this, Jim told my fiancé to call the police while he walked over to the kitchen window. He was staring out the window for a bit when I stepped up beside him to take a look as well. I peered into the forest. At first I saw nothing. Then in the distance I saw two figures moving behind the trees. Jim must have seen them too because he rushed off.

to the back of the house. While he was gone, I saw two more interlopers, obviously people at this point. Jim returned to the kitchen carrying two shotguns and a box of shells. He handed me a shotgun and some shells and told me to stay inside with the girls. Jim absconded from the house and started to walk along the east perimeter of the property, heading towards the woods. Eventually, we lost sight of him, so we went back to the kitchen. and watched the forest. It was maddening, watching, looking out of that small window over the kitchen sink.

I don't know if my mind was playing tricks on me, or if I really did see figures in the forest. Mostly I saw rickety old trees in the night swaying in the wind. It had been about five minutes since Jim had left when I saw the first flash in the forest. Then I saw two more in quick succession, and then a fourth muzzle flash a few seconds later. The light and sound of the shotgun pierced the night and made the girls scream.

I didn't blame them. It was quite possible that their father could have been attacked by these people. I didn't have time to comfort them because I saw a figure emerging from the forest. It was Jim jogging back to the house. I let Jim inside. He told me he had snuck up on the forest. interlopers and opened fire. While he didn't kill any, he certainly ran them off the property. About ten minutes after Jim got back in the house, the police arrived. We told

them about the sounds, the butcher's tools and wine glasses, and the people in the woods. Jim told how he had snuck up on them and drove them off his property. Once the police took our stories, they had the forensics team come to collect the evidence. Jim must have shot someone because they found blood in the woods, although no bodies were found. I finally found out what the scratching noise was. The interlopers had carved a three-foot-by-three-foot pentagram into the side of the house. Seventeen days passed before the group was caught. My fiancé called me early one Wednesday morning.

She said that the group from that night had been caught. Apparently, this group was into the occult or something similar. They had broken into an elderly couple's house and brutally murdered the couple. They then used a new set of butcher's tools to dismember the bodies and use the wine glasses to collect and drink fresh blood. The police caught them in the act, thanks to two stoners who had seen the group break into the elderly couple's house. The police questioned them about being at my fiancée.

place. They confessed that they had been there and planned to do similar things to her family. They stopped because they saw me and being as they were now outnumbered, decided not to go through with it. The police asked why then they had stayed so long and carved the pentagram into the house. One of the men, I was told, started laughing at this question and supposedly stated that he and his fellow occultists were the least we needed to fear. I don't know what that means. What I do know is that the police came back a few days later and recommended that Jim cover up the carving and beef up security around the house. Now, when I look into the woods, I no longer see privacy. I see the cover of darkness. Our second tale is entitled, Can You Hear the Birds Singing?

Horror comes in many forms, and the horror born of loss can be the most disturbing of all. This story was written by Douglas Bramlett and is read by David Cummings. Smoky darkness, he reached out blind to grind painfully against his shoulder. He gritted his teeth and continued to grope about. Finally, his fingers crawled across the tiny curve of her fingers. He gripped her hands suddenly, tightly, like a swimmer reaching for the shore. They had moved from tenement to tenement, trapped in the endless cycle of government housing, government welfare, government hassle. He didn't really know how to care for her without her mother, but she was all he had, all he was.

Every day he would trudge home after whatever job he currently had that week, but he would, but he was all he would trudge home after whatever job he currently had that week. week, bones and body aching with the pain of too many years of hard work and two few days of rest. He would trudge home, stopping first to pick her up at government-appointed daycare with its too many screaming brats and too few caring eyes. Walking away from that, her hand in his, he stood straight and tall, his step filled with energy and life, but still some warmth in her hand. in her hand. She squeezed back weakly. Somewhere beyond the darkness, he could hear the sirens still,

the screaming. He had been startled awake by the wailing of a smoke detector, one floor below. It had made him bolt upright, his shoulders screaming in answering pain. He stumbled across the dark apartment, vaguely realizing that he couldn't see because of the already rapidly spreading smoke. Tripping over some toy in his blind rush, he cursed softly under his breath and fell. Pain lanced upward. He rolled to one side and felt for what he had landed on. He had to hold it very close to see it in the dim light. It was a toy truck. He had picked it up at the Salvation Army last week, broken already when he bought it.

He was startled to recognize a spread of blood, his own, from his throbbing knee, and, frustrated, flung it across the room. He heard an answering crash of glass from somewhere and a few feeble beams of light stabbed inwards towards the ceiling, tracing the sinuous patterns of smoke around in swirls. Great, he thought, probably have to pay for that window. He got up and limped as quickly as he could toward her door. He wandered the sterile halls, peering blankly at the various numbers. It was all a shock, both wonderful and painful. One life given, another life taken.

He could still hear his wife's mother screaming, cursing him. A few curious eyes peered from doors, but as in most places in the city, no one got too curious. He stumbled on in a daze until his feet found him before a closed door. Nursery read the tarnished plate. He opened the door and saw her for the first time. Even behind a pane of glass, even tiny, newborn, she captured his heart. He marveled at the beauty and despair that filled him. The door swung open and a roiling cloud of smoke sucked the air from his lungs.

He flung himself into the darkness even as the ceiling swung down. He awoke again in darkness. His face was pressed against the brightly colored blanket that covered her floor. He remembered the joy and wonder in her eyes when he first brought it home. Spread out, it was a map to another world, marked with castles and forests, lakes, and dragons. She hadn't cared that it was faded or patched or discolored in places. She had hugged him tightly and hurried to spread it out. Blanketing her room, it had allowed her something to be hers in a world where everything they had was handed to them before being taken away.

She had loved that blanket. His face, deep in the green moth-eaten spread of some mythical forest, he reached out towards the mattress where she slept. They emerged from underneath the small copse of trees out into the park. He heard the sharp intake of breath as she was filled with awe and wonder. Is it real? she had asked. Laughing, he assured her that the park was real, watching her dart off amongst the grassy hills, dancing along the thin, glassy stream,

laughing with the other children in the playground, filled him with a sense of her own wonder. They had lived so long in government gray and smoke-stained yellow that he himself had forgotten for a time what green life looked like. Emboldened by a spring day, a new paycheck and a day off, he had gotten her up before dawn. They had trekked across town, riding dingy, diesel-smelling buses through graffiti-covered streets.

Finally, they had had to cross a huge busy street, filled with honking horns and cursing cabbies. Now he watched her play, watched her wonder and amazement. She had never seen trees before, he realized. Realization brought an attendant sense of sorrow. There was so much she had missed because he had been stubborn enough to keep her. Perhaps if he had let her go with her dead mother's family, she would have had a better life. His welling tears were pierced by her cry of, Daddy! He scooped her up as she ran towards him, spinning her laughing in the air.

Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, can you hear? Can you hear the birds singing? The smile on her face banished all doubts, all fears, all pain. Laid in the darkness for a long time, listening to the dim screech of sirens below, holding her hand. Some part of him knew that the window, perhaps part of the wall itself, was gone. He remembered being drenched by an incredible wash of water at some point. Unable to do more than twist and roll, he still did his best to try to shield her, even if he couldn't reach her. He spat ash and plaster from his mouth again, coughing harshly.

Smoke still surrounded him like a blanket, but he was aware of its slow crawl towards where the window had been. His burning eyes were fixed towards that wall. He wasn't able to turn or move much anyway. Forty stories of. Up, through the wash of smoke and rubble, he saw the sun begin to rise. Its pale beams seemed to part the smoke, a fresh breeze coming off the not too distant Atlantic to clear the air.

Almost simultaneously, he heard two new sounds over the cacophony of sirens, screams, and collapsing walls. The sound of someone, a fireman perhaps, calling from the front of the apartment, and somewhere, out in that bright beam of sunlight, birds. He squeezed her now cold hand again for the last time. Honey, can you hear? Can you hear the birds singing? Our final tale is entitled Laurel Highlands. A hiking trip is a great way to get back to nature, until you realize you're not alone. This story was written by Bill Penfield and is read by David Cummings.

Backpacking alone is a bad idea. I know. I sat staring at a tiny goddamn fire, wondering why I hadn't prepared myself for this. In my defense, when you plan a two-week-long hike with friends and, you expect to meet up with them on day three, you tend to forget that on those first couple nights you're going to be alone. It just doesn't occur to you. You don't think you're alone, just in transit. In fact, shit, before that third day when you all meet up and share a fire, the trip hasn't even started yet. At least, that's what I forgot, anyway. I get jittery in the woods at night, even when camping with others. Every sound gets amplified by paranoia. I've been

rattled out of a tent before, only to find myself having a staring contest between a flashlight and a chipmunk. Inside the tent, it all sounds the same. Possum, deer, mice, chipmunks, raccoons, bears, people, it's all just leaves moving somewhere out there in the dark of the woods. So I thought the first night was going to be bad. I surprised myself by falling asleep pretty quick. I figured it out in the morning. It had been a windy night, kind of breezy, and the beautiful deciduous forests of Pennsylvania

sounded like the ocean just above my head. It was pretty, it was nice, and it masked the sound of anything running around out there. There was no wind, on night two. Before sunset, while I set up my little tent and let an MRE heat up a bit, there were birds gossiping in the trees, chipmunks arguing with each other on the ground, and I'm pretty sure I heard a deer or two walk by up the trail a bit. The forest was noisy. Birds gave way to crickets and frogs. The sun went down, I bagged up my trash, and went to sleep.

It took me a little longer this time. When I woke up, the forest was silent. My watch gave me the bad news. 2 a.m. If you've never been in this situation, I'll try to describe it the best I can. Imagine you're in a nylon box whose walls are inches from your hands and its ceiling is a couple feet from your face. The sound your sleeping bag makes as it brushes up against the edges of the

tent as you make the slightest of movements seems disturbingly loud, like opening a bag of chips in a movie theater. You don't want to bring any attention to yourself, so you don't move, at all. And you're stuck like that until you can fall asleep. Shit's not easy. Add to the fact that you didn't see one vehicle at the trailhead parking lot two days ago, and you haven't seen or heard another hiker on the trail at all, and you're probably about 25 miles from a road in either direction, well, believe me, you start listening for shit. And that's exactly what I was doing right then. I was uncomfortable, effectively paralyzed from anxiety, trying to allow my eyes to adapt to the darkness, listening for whatever was out there. The way it works, usually, is you hear a faint rustle

of leaves in the distance, then a crash or two, then discernible footsteps on top of the forest fodder, then they slow down a bit once they get close. Something smells your stinky clothes, and it goes on its way, reversing the process. It's the going away part you want to hear. I probably stared up at the top of the tent in absolute silence for about an hour. I didn't hear any animals at all. That was unusual. Then it happened. There were no footsteps in the distance to warn me.

This wasn't the slow, cautious movement of the nocturnal. This was loud and quick. I heard a nylon line slide against a tree and the crash of my backpack that had been hanging above the campsite out of reach. I heard fast, light footsteps walk up to the bag and unzip the main compartment. I heard the contents of the backpack get dumped onto the ground a couple feet to my left, between the tent and the extinguished fire pit.

Then I heard nothing. No, I take that back. The one thing I could hear was the sound of my own goddamn heart beating way too fast, betraying my panic to whatever was out there. Of course, nothing could have heard my heartbeat now that I think of it, but I was using rationality for other purposes at the time. At that moment, there were only a few things I knew for sure. First, it wasn't a bear or raccoon.

The footsteps didn't match up and it didn't struggle with the zipper. It sounded like a person. Second, either they had been near the campsite the entire time I was setting up or they managed to sneak closer silently. Either way terrified me for different reasons. reasons. Last and most important, they were still here, and they weren't moving either. Reaching for my flashlight and unzipping the tent wasn't an option. I felt way too vulnerable. My sleeping bag wasn't made for quick movements. I didn't have a weapon. I didn't even have a knife

worth a damn, nor do I know how to use one. Even if I did, I wasn't about to go out there. It's not like the tent provided any protection from anything, but it didn't matter. I wasn't going out there. So I just waited. I would wait it out. They would go away. Sooner or later, I would hear footsteps, and they'd leave. I didn't hear anything.

I have no idea how long it was after the crash. I was so scared. It could have been a couple of minutes. It could have been an hour. I don't know. The long silence was unbearable, but eventually I gave in, accepting whatever was to come, to get it done and over with. At least, in my own passive way, I still wasn't going out there.

I peaked my mouth from the sleeping bag into the cold air. Hello? I asked, immediately regretting it. Silence. Hello. she replied, alarmingly close to my tent. My skin flashed cold. There was a person outside my tent in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. There was a person outside my goddamn tent in the middle of fucking nowhere in the middle of the goddamn night.

What the fuck? What the holy fuck do I do now? I wasn't expecting a response, but I heard a response. clear as day. This wasn't in my head. Somebody was out there. Can I help you? I think I asked. Maybe she was another hiker

and just wanted to camp near somebody else for security or whatever. Panic came in waves, terrifying, then logical explanation and right back again. Nothing, no reply, uncomfortable silence. The Just a Hiker Theory emboldened me enough to grab the flashlight, sit up in my sleeping bag, and shine the light out the window of the tent.

This was a bad idea. There wasn't a goddamn thing out there, just my backpack and all my shit scattered in the fodder of the forest floor. The food and trash was in that bag. I'd have to restring it to the tree or animals would end this trip in a few minutes of scrounge. But I wasn't about to go out there yet. Hello, I asked again. Nothing. A new problem emerged.

Now that it was on, I couldn't bring myself to shut off the flashlight. So I sat there holding the flashlight, waiting to hear something, anything, for hours. Eventually, the sun rose and I stepped outside and immediately peed on the closest tree. I didn't even slip on my shoes. I'd had to go since that second hello. I had sat in my own torture the whole goddamn night because I was too afraid to leave the tent. No breakfast.

I packed my things back into my bag as fast as I could. Thank the maker of compression sacks as I stuffed my tent and sleeping bag together. Put on my shoes and found the trail. I was fucked. 25 miles in two days was over. okay for me by myself, but I had planned on doing better. At this rate, I wouldn't meet up with my friends that night like I had wanted unless I wore March 20-some miles up and down some pretty impressive mountains all day, without stopping, and well into the night. And if I did that,

there was no guarantee I would be able to find their campsite in the dark. They could be anywhere just beyond the trail. I would have to do this hungry and on a about four hours of sleep, looking over my shoulder the entire time, just in case somebody who decided to dump my supplies and then silently slip away, chose to follow me. So I was fucked. I was miserable. I still didn't see anybody else on the trail in either direction. The weather was humid and I was going too fast.

I was sweating too much water and not taking breaks. The hills were getting steeper. The entire forest seemed to change. It wasn't inviting anymore. It was millions of places for something to hide just out of my view. I hiked, scared. The lack of sleep made inclines harder. Going downhill quickly felt too much like running away from something.

I couldn't get my mind off the previous night. My imagination went to a few words. regrettably dark places that would probably haunt me later. I hiked. And even after all that, I still only managed 15 miles when I had to put down my pack and admit defeat. I wasn't going to meet up with anybody tonight. I'd have to camp. I needed to camp. I needed to sleep. My feet were wrecked. The blisters on my heels were of the unsatisfying kind that could not be. I needed to sleep. My feet were be sliced into relief. I hadn't cut my toenails in a couple of weeks, and the excess nail from each toe dug into the next. I built a small fire and numbed my feet at its side. Fires in the

northeast burn quickly. You can gather a pile of wood the size of a refrigerator and still not have enough for an entire evening if you're sleeping suddenly became impossible. So you either have tiny fires or collect a whole lot of wood. So I had made two mistakes. I hadn't gathered any wood, really, and this fire was pretty large. It was too dark to go searching and I couldn't motivate myself to try. I just wanted to sleep in my tent with the glow of the fire outside to comfort me a bit. It's not safe, but I thought it would help. The fire goes out slowly. I fall asleep, She came back. There was a fire burning freshly outside the tent when I awoke that night.

A continuation of my fire. Someone had put more wood on. And there was her shadow flickering quietly on the wall of my tent as she sat between me and the fire. I waited for her to go. Her shadow was a slightly blurred silhouette, but I could tell she was sitting. It wasn't until she had got a little closer that I realized she hadn't been watching the fire. She had been staring at the tent. She moved so quietly.

If she thought I was sleeping, I wasn't about to reveal otherwise. She reached down to the zipper at the bottom of the tent. I mashed my eyes closed and slowly buried my head into the sleeping bag. I just wanted her to go away. She was unzipping the door of the tent. I felt the flap of the door rest on top of the sleeping bag. I could hear the campfire outside. I could feel her arms slide against the far wall of the tent and land on the floor,

holding the weight of her body over me. She was staring down at me. I could feel her there just inches away. She whispered. I couldn't open my eyes. I couldn't move. I didn't dare move. I couldn't respond.

I didn't know what this was. Whoever was holding themselves above me wasn't moving. She was unnaturally still. I moved my arm just slightly inside the sleeping bag. Then my leg. I felt only the tent. I opened my eyes. there was nothing. Nothing was inside the tent with me. A few mosquitoes found themselves trapped at the top of the ceiling. The door was still open. The fire still cracked outside. I lifted up my head. She wasn't out there either. At least nowhere I could see beyond the light of the fire. It was 1.30 a.m. The sun would not rise until 6.15 a.m.

and if I could not find my friends the next day, it would be a three-day hike back to my car. It was a long time before I gathered the courage to reach out and close the door of the tent. I stared out into the dark beyond the fire, waiting, waiting for the sound of footsteps that would at least give me a direction to defend, waiting for the bugs on the ceiling to find the emptiness of the door, waiting for her to come back, to emerge into the light of the fire, to see if she matched what I imagined in my head. And what I pictured terrified me. Eventually my hand felt the switch of the flashlight which triggered some small spasm of boldness inside me that allowed me to zip the door shut. The zipper stuck on a fold halfway to the bottom, and I panicked a little, expecting something to run in just then

that moment of weakness. Nothing did. The tent shut, I put my back to the woods and faced the dimming fire. I woke up late, a half day's worth of sunlight wasted. I didn't even bother with the trash I'm embarrassed to say. I just left it. I stuffed the tent and the sleeping bag in the pack and took off down the trail. I had no idea what I was going to tell my friends. This was the The kind of thing a very confident listener usually responds with, Okay, you need to go to the police. Somebody was trying to rob you. I needed that.

I needed company. I needed some outsider to tell me not only that this could be explained, but there is an appropriate and very necessary step that we will all now take to correct the problem that I am incapable of seeing because of being scared shitless. I walked imagining what they might say. Or maybe they'd laugh. Maybe they'd be right to laugh. It wasn't until sunset when I realized my mistake.

On a north-south trail, you'd have to be pretty goddamn dumb to get lost. There are no branches going to smaller trails or connections to different networks or any of that. It's just a line through the woods. I was hiking north, so I camp on the west side of the trail. Wake up, get back on the trail, turn left, there's north. As you walk, you find that the sun rises on your right and sets on your left, right east, left, west. And there was a beautiful sunset that night, to my right. I had turned left onto the trail like I've done every morning, but I must have camped on the wrong side.

For seven hours, I had been thinking of. about finding my friends and thinking about her. Her, emptying my bag, her, crawling over me while I slept, fucking with my head, and all this time I was walking in the wrong goddamn direction. I now had no way to reach my friends to tell them. For a moment, I felt compelled to turn around and run as fast as I could, to warn them about her maybe. For just a moment.

But no, I was done. I didn't step off the trail. I just kept walking, resigned but petulant. The trip was over, sure. It was a fucking nightmare, but it was over. It wasn't going to be two weeks of this goddamn shit. I was done playing this game. Done.

All I had to do was just keep walking all the way to my car, straight through the night, no camp, no nothing. Fuck it. Just keep walking. Except I wasn't that stupid. My anger quickly turned to fear. If I missed a painted blaze marking on the trees in the dark, I'd be lost. It's just woods on both sides. National Park for miles.

Then state game lands beyond that. It could be done, but it wasn't easy. I argued with myself as I set up the tent in the dark. I spent too much time convincing myself that putting a carabiner through the two zippers on the tent door like a luggage lock would be an effective way of keeping out the unwanted. Had I known what was going to happen that night, I probably would have prepared better, or maybe I'd just run as fast as I could. At first, it sounded like rain, like drops of water hitting the fly of the tent, a couple at a time. But this was not loud like rain. This didn't have the distance or the weight behind it,

the water collecting in the leaves of the canopy above before spilling down on the unlucky below. That's a heavy sound. This was quiet, softer. I shook the flashlight alive and looked up from the sleeping bag. Outside the tent on the screens, on the rainfly, on the walls, on the door, crawling everywhere. Wasps with yellow and black bodies that pulsated a couple of times a second,

alert in the beam of the flashlight. The flashlight flickered off. I heard something fly uncomfortably close to my ear. Something inside the tent. I jumped my arm up from inside the sleeping bag. The wasps outside grew louder, agitated. I shook the flashlight to keep it on. I looked for holes in the tent or gaps in the zippers. The carabiner was still secure in the door zippers. As I pushed in the arm to let it free, the wall of the tent moved, angering the nest outside. I unzipped the door as carefully as I could, trying to hold the shape of the fabric with my body to keep it from falling inside, along with everything crawling on it. I noticed a handful crawling inside of the mesh of the ceiling before one made a go at my door.

face. It landed just under my eye and stung my hand as I swatted it away. The tent shifted. The door fell open. The wasps fell inside. They were on my back between the folds of my shirt. I couldn't reach them. I rolled on the ground. They bit me in reprisal. I took off my shirt and waved it uselessly in the air, slapping them away from my back. The buzzing stopped. It just stopped. I tried to look back to the tent, but I didn't know which direction to look. The canopy opens up over the trail, but in the woods, I can't see. I dropped to the ground and felt around for the flashlight.

Something moved in the distance. I froze. Footsteps. I heard footsteps to my right. They stop. Silence. Hello? She couldn't be more than 40 feet away.

My fingers scanned the leaves and moss and dirt for the flashlight. My knees are on rock. The footsteps are steady. She is walking straight for me. She doesn't need light. My hands touch metal. I flick the flashlight on and pointed in her direction. The leaves of the saplings cast huge shadows behind.

them. I see her moving. The flashlight flickers. I am shaking. The light is shaking. I see her hair. She is only beyond the second layer of trees in front of me. I am stumbling backwards, trying to keep the light that way. The light trips with me and catches her eyes. Her eyes reflect the light back, like a dog's. The flashlight dies. I hold it ever. I hold it ever. I. Anyway, I am crawling backwards. She's here. I feel her nails on my face. Her skin is cold.

She is silent. I run. Behind me. She is screaming. About halfway there, when I climbed my way up a hill to a ridge and looked down on the valley and didn't see the parking lot yet, just miles and... and miles of trail. Honestly, I broke down. I cried openly.

I didn't have shoes. My back hurt. My hand was swollen, and I thought she was hunting me. How do you deal with that? I lost it. The worst night of my life wasn't the night I saw her. It was the night after.

When I was sure she was just behind me as I walked. I didn't turn around, I just cried and walked through the dark. I knew if I turned I would see, well, that again. There wasn't much more I can tell you about that night. I was a wreck. I was terrified all the way back, but I have to say I'm happy I didn't run into any other hikers right then. I can only imagine what I must have looked like, how I must have sounded. When I was in my car, driving back home, I didn't even look in the back seat.

I was so fucking scared. Even in my own fucking bed in my apartment nowadays, sometimes. I want to tell you that I figured it out. I can't. I have no goddamn idea. My friends didn't see her. They hiked south when I didn't show up. They found my note in the trail register.

and walked it all the way to Ohio Pile without any problems at all. But I am not the only one who has experienced this shit. Seven Springs, Normaville, Mill Run, Ohio Pile, and Confluence to as far north as Laurel Mountain and New Florence. And not just hikers. People have seen her, so at least I'm not crazy. I haven't been back. I won't go back there.

This concludes this episode of the No Sleep Podcast. Thank you for listening and for letting us share the blackness of the night with you. To learn more about the podcast and the ways you can help us make more episodes, please visit nonsleepaudio.reddit.com.