Woods At Night

All of this took place in the summer of '98. I had just turned 17 at the time.

It really started when I would take walks in the woods in the afternoon. There was about 20 acres of trees and brush behind my house and it was peaceful to walk through. However, whenever I got near the back, around the neighbors woods, I would get this bad feeling like things in the trees were watching me. Many a times I ended running all the way back home. Sometimes I thought I would catch a glimpse of something trailing through the branches, but never more than a fleeting image.

My mom had a dream about the woods once. In it we were all in the yard between the woods and the barn. She saw something moving in the woods and yelled for us to run. We all ran down the driveway when a bunch of vines shot out of the woods and impaled us. The vines dragged us into the woods. That was the end of the dream.

One night I held a sleep over. All of my friends and I were going to stay in tents that night. In the middle of the night we all heard a far off thumping. It was like a giant was jumping on the ground every few seconds. The sound was distant, and it eventually stopped, and we all went to sleep.

I kept having these sleep overs because they were so fun. The next one we were all on the trampoline or around the fire. Some of my closest friends saw that the sky was really clear that night. I had an idea: we could go to the farm field just through the woods to look at the sky and the lights from the city about ten miles away. We took the small path over to the field, but when we got there we decided it didn't feel right and we started back. Out of curiosity, I shined the flashlight down the fork we didn't take. In that second we all saw something horrible, twisted, knee-high, ugly, terrifying. We hauled out of there real fast all the way up to the house. Everyone else asked what the problem was. We told them. So two of them went down and came back up and said they saw nothing. No one really believed us. I was scared to have my window pointing towards the woods.

Nothing really happened all that much after that. I pretty much forgot it ever happened. One night I was out with my girlfriend 'till 3am. I got out of her car and she left. I went up to the house and found every door and front window locked. I had to work in the morning and I wanted a little sleep so I had to find a way in. I remembered that the previous owners daughter used to sneak in and out all the time through my bedroom window. So I flipped on the back floodlight and started to cut through the garage to the back of the house. Then I heard voices. Outside and in the woods. I thought it was the neighbors because they liked to trespass a lot. Just as I opened the back garage door, the voices stopped. Just in front of me, down the steps leading to the path into the woods, was a shadow. Not mine, not a trees, not some trick of the floodlight. No, this one was upright, in three dimensions. It looked like a person in shape, and I could see the ground and trees straight through it. In a second, it jumped into the underbrush and disappeared. I wasn't particularly scared, but I was not going to check on the voices or my window. I shut the door, turned out the lights, and slept in the back of the car.

I moved out a little later and haven't been back since. I still don't think I will ever go into those woods at night ever again.