I will try and keep this as short as possible from memory.
Growing up, my friends and I built a tree fort that bordered our neighborhood trailer park. It was built high in a live oak deep in a wooded area that we tended to always hang out in. Many a Pokémon battle, truth or dare, comic book trading, horror movie talk, were held in this fort.
One day several of us were ogling after a Playboy that our friend Tyler had just found (something he had discovered in the same woods, weird that this is a thing) when we heard a strange noise outside. It was a cackle. Like a witch’s cackle. All of us froze. The sound seemed to echo throughout the woods. There was a nearby pond and between cackles we also heard the pond disturbed with splashes. It would be one cackle, and a splash in the pond. Repeat. This went on about 5 times as we all sat in the tree fort dazed.
Now mind you this was the year 2000, the Blair Witch Project had just come out a year before and it had been much of our discussion in the fort if it was real or not in many heated debates. Needless to say we freaked out after about the 3rd cackle and splash.
We all bolted from the fort and scrambled down the ladder to our bikes only to be met by none other than my sister down at the end of the wooded trail laughing her ass off. We got played. We laughed, we hollered. We accepted the defeat of the prank.
About a month later. All of us are in the fort and we all decided to take a knife and carve our names into the tree supporting the fort. We got about halfway into my friend Kenny carving his name when we hear something creepy and something we have heard before outside the fort. A cackle. The cackle however felt a bit more….impressive? We all chuckled at this attempt by my sister upping her witch game and decided to carry on. However it continued and the cackle became more of a cry and it sounded extremely desperate and uncomfortable. Like something crying for help or for its life. It become hard to ignore.
We decided to descend the fort but we still weren’t freaked as much having already been pranked, but when we got down from the fort we weren’t met by my sisters’s laugh but just the silence of the woods.
Then we heard the cackle again. We looked around but no one had jumped out as the result of a prank. We stood still for a bit more until the woods in front of us shifted like something was coming for us. Just like some Stephen King story or Stranger Things episode, we all ran and mounted our bikes and peddled for safety while a cackle behind us echoed in the woods.
Later that day in the comfort of my home, I learned from my mom that my sister had been gone all day at her shift at K-Mart.
To this day I don’t know if it was just kid paranoia, or if all of us that day experienced something really strange.