First off, this is a true story. Don’t believe it if you want, but I know what I’ve experienced and what I still deal with.
When I was younger my family and I would go to a cabin in the woods in a small town in Ohio. My father called it the “vacation home”. The cabin wasn’t ours, but belonged to a very religious elderly couple who had no children. We met them at our church and my father became close friends with the elderly man named Luther. They were kind but very odd people, and would let us stay at the cabin whenever we’d like as long as we kept the fire burning the whole time we were there, even through the night. Which again, was very bizarre, but a relatively easy request. The great part about the cabin was the lack of phone, television or internet service. It felt like I was going back 50 years in the past. It helped our family bond without all those modern distractions.
My father would sleep in the cabin. It was a decent size with about 12 beds in it, two sets of bunkbeds per bedroom. But my brother and I would sleep in the treehouse about 75 yards away. The treehouse wasn’t what you’d expect with a ladder and everything; it had stairs and a rail with a small deck at the base of the steps. Whoever made it put countless hours of time and work to construct it. The small treehouse also had two sets of bunkbeds which didn’t leave much room for anything else, but my brother and I were ecstatic to sleep in it anyway.
Everything was great until one evening in the autumn of 2009. I woke up in the middle of the night to a loud slam from the screen door proceeded by footsteps slowly descending the creaking stairs from the treehouse. I took a quick glance at my watch, pressed the LED button, and my face illuminated as I read 1:30. I stood up, threw on some sweatpants and went to look outside. I heard the crackling of the fallen leaves in the brush below. It sounded like someone was slowly walking away from the treehouse further into the forest. I hesitantly descended down following the crunch of the leaves.
Now let me defend myself and my reasoning behind following the sounds. No, this isn’t a Scooby Doo episode and I’m not part of the Mystery Gang. I wasn’t going to go out of my way in the dead of the night to find the culprit during the witching hour… My younger brother Justin, has somnambulism, which is commonly known as sleepwalking. So for him to go walking around in the middle of the night wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. His doctor told us when this happens we should slowly guide him back to bed without trying to wake him because it could lead to a very bad outcome if he becomes frightened.
After reaching the forest ground, the crunching continues and I follow the noise. The sky was extraordinarily dark that night with the clouds masking the moon and star’s illumination, so I couldn’t make out where Justin was going. I lost track of time but I know I’ve been following him now for quite a while. At this point I say screw what the doctor said and start to jog after Justin. I’m barefoot so I’m stepping on countless amounts of sticks, feeling the pain from splinters penetrating the soles of my feet, as well as rocks gashing my feet open and causing me to stumble on more than a few occasions. If he didn’t know I was behind him, he definitely knows now. But something’s not right… Every step I take in stride is matched by him. He’s moving forward at the exact same pace as I am. Step for step and I’m unable to close any distance. My brother has never done this before and I’m starting to question if the person I’m following is even Justin at all! As doubt sets in, my heart races and I begin to panic, my breath becomes shallow and my mind is firing neuron after neuron trying to figure out what I should do. With everything in my body racing, I don’t even realizing that I’m now sprinting; full speed as fast as my lanky 15 year old legs will take me. My legs eventually tire and I stop in some sort of field. But where am I? Where are the trees?
I look around and terror creeps in as I watch the gloomy fog getting thicker. A deep sense of fear I’ve never experienced before. The hair on my arms starts to rise and I feel nauseas. A heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach begins as I realize I’m no longer in the forest. But how could that be? The forest surrounds our cabin for a 2 mile radius! Truth be told, I don’t know where I am but I know it’s a place I shouldn’t be at, for any reason at this hour. The grass is high with small headstones protruding out as I then realize that this was a dwelling place for the dead. Pity and discomfort sets in as I realize this is where a legion of dreams, hopes, and aspirations were left unfulfilled, buried to die within the corpses of the forgotten. The cemetery was old, very old with tombstones weathering away radiating a faintly yellow hue. And in the distance a small mausoleum protrudes from the fog looking as if it has been undisturbed in the past 2 centuries. It’s so quiet; I can’t hear the sound of the wind through the trees or even my own shallow breathing. But I still feel the blood rush throughout my body with each and every sporadic pulse. Looking ahead I see a small patch of moonlight. Focusing on this small, illuminated patch of ground stands a lonely, unmarked headstone. This headstone is different; it isn’t colored and weathered like the others. It looks more recent, as if it’s been placed there within the last 20 years or so. My feelings of pity shift to nervousness as something draws me toward it. I walk slowly, step after step, toward the site and as the fog clears I see a small girl curled up with her head buried into her knees. Her body quivers and I can tell she is crying but she emits no sound whatsoever.
I am (was) by no means a believer in ghosts. I like to think of myself as a very logical person, but what happened next still troubles me to this day and leaves me sleepless. Stupidly, I walk toward her and stutter as I say “Uhh, are you ok?” Immediately realizing that might have been a very bad decision, I start to turn away hoping, praying that she didn’t hear me as I prepare to sprint back toward the pitch black forest. Suddenly, the wind stops again and the temperature plummets about 30 degrees. Out of nowhere a dark, echoing, eerie, voice behind me says “You shouldn’t have followed it…” I look back and see the girl, about 12 years of age standing in front of the headstone and facing me. Her clothing was faded grey and tattered, her hair was long and black, she had cuts, burns and bruises all over her body and her lips were sewn shut with bloody openings of flesh in between the stitches as if she had been trying to open her mouth recently. The moment we made eye contact I felt my body seize up. There were absolutely no white areas in her eyes. They looked very sunken in and were completely pitch black, void of any color whatsoever. I felt a severe sense of depression, misery and pain throughout my body in an instant. That’s when she simply lifted her arm, her lifeless eyes still fixated on mine, and pointed to my left.
Looking in the direction she pointed, in the dense forest brush, I see a pair of piercing red eyes glaring back at me. “Yea, screw this!” In an instant, my adrenaline takes over. I sprint, full speed toward the only safe haven I know of… The cabin… And in the midst of my sprinting, I pray to God that I’m running in the right direction. I hear deep, heavy breathing from some sort of beast directly parallel to me in the denser part of the forest. The breathing sounds like a huge horse like creature, exhaling two great huffs of breath every second. Glancing over to what’s making the noise, I see those same piercing red eyes! Out of nowhere, an image of hell fire and brimstone encompasses the forest ground I’m running on, with shrieks from the condemned emitting from all angles reaching such a decibel that my head feels ready to erupt! In an instant, the image disappears and I’m still running, sprinting, through the forest. Still hearing the beast huff with every stride, and still seeing those god damn, fire red, hell brought eyes 20 feet to my right, directly matching my speed.
I begin to feel a great icy cold presence behind me clashing with the warmth and sweat of my back. In the heat of the moment I look behind, and my heart drops into the deepest pits of my stomach, the girl I seen at that headstone, was standing 5 feet away! Not even running, standing there, emotionless, with her eyes dark as tar glaring directly into mine. I turn back around to continue my pitiful escape and my bare foot collides with a massive rock. I hear a great crunch from my foot that causes immense pain and I come crashing down. As I fall, the ground becomes scorching hot. I feel a splitting pain from my head as it collides with another rock. Blood, sweat and tears rush down into my eyes and I black out. The moment before I black out, my arm feels like I was submersed in dry ice. An immensely cold sensation that truly burns to the touch!
My head is thumping with pain as I wake up to the orange and red beams of light landing on my face through the floorboard of the treehouse. The bottom deck to our treehouse, again remember its two floors high, is barely above the ground. In order to get under there, it would require someone to prone crawl and squeeze their body to fit. That’s where I awoke face up, confused and bloody. I reach to touch my head and feel dried blood, but don't feel any cuts or lumps from the rock I collided with. There’s insects crawling all over my body and in my state of confusion, I understand my first necessity is to get out from under here. There isn’t even enough room to roll over onto my stomach so I have to use my elbows to do a bizarre variation of a crab walk to get out from under the deck. Thinking it all may have been a strange dream, I walk up the stairs to the bedding area of the treehouse. I reach to open the door and see, hoof marks burned into the wood directly in front of the door going down the stairs. But yet, no tracks were from coming up the steps, only descending. “What the hell?...” Regardless, I need to make sure Justin is ok. I begin to turn the doorknob and realize its dead bolted shut. Gazing through the window, I see Justin peacefully sleeping away. Not a worry in the world. Completely oblivious to what happened to me last night. Justin never deadbolts the lock. I’m not even sure if he knows how because it was an old lock and required some jingling to get it closed all the way.
My arm still burns so bad, and it’s sore to the touch. I hobble on my injured foot, back down the stairs and step into an opening where the sun is shining bright to see a small hand print bruised into my arm. “Ok, that definitely wasn’t a dream”. When my brother awakes, 2 hours later, I tell him about what happened. He said he heard someone talking in a “funny language” outside the door and fell back asleep thinking it was me. Other than that, “nothing out of the ordinary”. I show him my arm and the bruise, now turning a dark shade of purple. He says “I don’t see anything man, you sure you weren’t just having a bad dream?” In an effort to comfort me with a bit of humor he says “Maybe, I’m not the weird brother anymore and you were sleepwalking too!”… It didn’t work… This doesn’t make sense...
My father is still sleeping in the cabin, which is odd because he’s the type that always wakes up unnecessarily early. I limp inside with intentions to wake him and see that our fire was out, I immediately hear Luther’s voice saying how it’s imperative to keep the fire lit at all times. Did he know something? Why are we the only people he’s allowed to stay at the cabin? He would always go out of his way to ask if I’m praying every single night. He didn’t have children but has 12 beds in the cabin and 4 in the treehouse. He hasn’t even stayed at the cabin in over 10 years. Why?
Luther died about a month after everything happened, and it turned out his wife died nearly 6 months earlier. Not even his family knew about her death… Needless to say, I didn’t return to the cabin. I never got around to telling my father out of fear he would think I’m crazy or possessed, and the month following the event I couldn’t get any sleep. Every time I close my eyes my heart begins to race, I hear the helpless cries of the damned asking for mercy, and I hear voices whispering in a dark, harsh sounding demonic form of language all around me in the dead of night. I refuse to sleep alone and moved back into my brother’s room at our actual house. My father would tell me I need to grow up but he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand that I see things, and beings, whenever I drift in and out of slumber. Or what it’s like to always have a fire burning nearby out of constant fear. To this day, I refuse to sleep without a candle lit. No one understands, and the scariest part is, if I never wake, nobody will know why and there’s nothing that anyone can do to save my soul. Because deep down as much as I try to hide it, I know I should have died that night. But I truly believe that girl saved me. I still see that… hellish creature at times. And since then I’ve seen many other paranormal creatures. That feeling of despair, misery and hopelessness will forever be with me. I’ll never understand everything, but what I do know is that I never want to learn of the fate I escaped on that horrifying night in the autumn of 2009.
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