The weather has been suspiciously good in the part of Northern New York where I live, and since my husbands family are avid outdoors people, they have several camps dotted around their property. One is near a lake, and is one of the most peaceful places I’ve ever been, and since the weather has been so nice I begged my husband to go with me for a weekend to the lake camp two weeks ago.
The camp is actually a little cottage, built into a hill and a few feet away from the edge of the water. When it was built by his grandparents, they made a little concrete patio and landscaped it to make a perfect little haven. The lake isn’t warm enough yet to do any water sports, but the view alone is gorgeous enough to tempt you to stay. My husband, contrary to the rest of his family, is not a fan of the outdoors, so I had to beg him to go walking along the shoreline with me under the pretense of looking for deer sheds.
We had passed the rest of the camps without finding anything much of note until we came to the northern side of the lake. This side of the lake is undeveloped, and the going is tough since the ground is still soft and muddy and the underbrush is thick with brambles and honeysuckle bushes. However, there’s still an opening from when the family invited loggers to come in and clear off some of the land, and we found it shortly after getting to the northern tip.
As we approached this edge of the woods, I had started feeling an undefinable feeling of dread. I don’t deny I’m an anxious person in general, but the good walk and concentrating on where I was going had ensured my mind was definitely too occupied for my normal formless anxieties. Here, I had the feeling we were trespassing somewhere we really shouldn’t be. Almost simultaneously with this feeling, I looked down as I stopped, and noticed an unusually straight branch laying amongst the forest detritus. I was so focused on this branch that my husband had passed me and entered the tree line before I could stop him, but stop he did where I figured out what I was looking at.
I think I said “oh my god” because what I was looking at was a femur. It had been laying out in the elements so long that its color had changed to a slimy brown, and its sockets had been buried under grass and dead leaves. We live in the middle of nowhere, so finding bones isn’t that unusual, but this femur was long and straight, and looked uncomfortably similar to the femur of a human’s. My husband, hearing the alarm in my voice, immediately turned around and came back to find out what my problem was.
We both stopped and stared at the femur and spent a few moments going back and forth about the provenance of the bone and what we should do. But looking farther along the leaf litter simultaneously solved our problem and gave us a nasty little shock. What had been mistaken as tangles of tree roots was the rest of the deer skeleton, surprisingly intact. I say surprisingly because when animals get to a body, the bones always get scattered. Here, they lay perfectly connected en situ and untouched, as if the deer had died where it had fallen. There were no obvious signs of trauma that suggested what had caused the demise of the deer.
My husband commented it was a shame it didn’t have antlers or we could have taken them. The image of the skeleton, laying as perfectly as if it were in a grave, spooked me, though, and I chided him. He eventually herded me away from the skeleton or I would have stood there until the sun went down trying to figure it out.
By this time, I really felt as though we shouldn’t go into the woods. But the woods themselves were almost magical- the diffused light filtering in gave it a feeling of serenity I couldn’t place. Even the lack of birdsong from the newly returned birds couldn’t completely disturb the feeling.
We stopped when we found a very large tree with a stump from one of the trees taken down as a little bench in front of it. We ended up staying a few more minutes and enjoying each others company as married people before heading back. By then I was having regrets. I was really feeling that we shouldn’t have gone in and certainly not stayed.
But my husband felt I was being silly and tried to put my misgivings at ease. And even now, i still struggle. Maybe he was right, and I’m making too much of it.
But when I think about what happened later that evening when we went to bed, I can’t help but think something very strange was going on. The sun had set, and the light was still a purply blue when I decided I was going to sleep early. The hard hike had tired me out in a good way, and we both felt we would have no problems falling asleep.
I wasn’t so exhausted that I didn’t notice the bathroom window ajar as I was going about my nightly routine. It was still below freezing at night and the abrupt little stream of cool air had me shivering. I went to go close it, muttering about careless relatives and heating costs, when I heard something in the bushes that separated the cottage from the next row of camps.
It sounded big, but the deer in the area are good sized and aren’t particularly graceful navigating in the underbrush. My brain was still trying to determine the source of the noise when I heard a call coming from the dark.
“Help!” The voice called. “Please help me!” The voice definitely sounded in distress- there was a fraying to the voice that made it sound desperate. But even so, it was nearly eight o clock at night (I get up at four am normally, okay), in late February. We hadn’t noticed any other vehicles or people at the camps with us the entire time. Who would be out there, in the dark, trampling though the thick bushes and the freezing cold brooks?
Still disturbed, I went out and saw my husband standing in the living room with his head cocked and knew he could hear it too. We both felt it was our responsibility to go out and make sure nobody had gotten thrown from a recreational vehicle and was calling for help, because driving vehicles around in slippery mud in the early spring is actually a sport people like around here. So we both put on heavier clothes and boots and headed over to the shrub line where the voice seemed to be coming from.
As we approached, the voice came again, definitely a man as I had thought before and definitely in distress. “Help! Please help me!” But something about the call this time had the hairs on my arms and neck prickle, made me throw out my arm to catch my husband’s shirt. I’m quite a small person, just under five feet, and my husband is heavily muscled from hard work, but something within me sensed danger. The shouting voice had sounded exactly the same as it had the first time, like it was a recording being playing back.
“Something’s not right.” I told my husband at his half annoyed half determined glance. My husband isn’t a religious or even spiritual man. He hasn’t seen or experienced something he couldn’t explain in some way. But there, as we were standing, staring into the woods in the dark, I think he felt something too.
The voice called again, sounding exactly the same as it had the first time. The same intonation, the same vocal fry in the word “help”. And then there was a laugh. Just as clear as the cry had been, and just as obviously made from the same voice. It was darker than the cry, and just as full of malicious glee as the cry had been full of pain and desperation.
I think my husband actually said “nope” as he turned around, grabbed my shoulders and frog marched me to his truck we drove there in. We left everything in the cottage, our phones, our clothes, our food, we even left the lights still on as my husband backed the truck up the hill from the camp. I had kept my eyes on the tree line the whole time and against the dim light reflecting off the water, I swore I could see something moving back there. It could have been a tree, I suppose, since it was far too tall to be a human, but it seemed to be moving against the way the rest of vegetation went.
I don’t know if my husband noticed it too, because I could hear him swearing as he shifted into drive and pulled in a wide circle to get onto the path. But his eyes were on the path, so he definitely couldn’t have seen the skeleton of the deer, laying close to the edge of the shrub line, between one of the other camps and the road.
I swear it was exactly the same one we had seen in the woods.
We drove home and spent a few ardrenaline filled hours up, talking to each other about what it could have been, and we both decided (probably for our own sanity) that if it was anything it was probably some drugged up local messing with us. Eventually we went to bed, locking the doors for the first time in the ten years we’d lived in the house, and my husband eventually fell asleep.
Every creak of the house and passing vehicle kept waking me that night, but I fell asleep too. But since then, nothing has been the same.
Edit: Also, if anyone has any advice or experiences similar to this, please comment. I really need help here, things have been crazy and I’m terrified most of the time.
I might not update what’s been going on very soon because we’re going to be spending some time away from the house.