I was 15, during the pandemic, my dad and I would take almost daily road trips to different parts of Colorado. One time we went really far out and decided to not go home and stay overnight. To give a good idea of our location, it was obviously far away from any town or group of people, other than campers who might have been in the woods. We were right on the edge of some pretty big mountains, and the nearest city to us was most likely Steamboat Springs.
My dad and I had a good day. But while we were hiking and fishing, I felt an ominous presence near the river we were sitting at and where we were parked next to. I noticed footprints leading to the woods. I decided to go looking deeper into it at one point by telling my dad I needed to poop, which was true, but I wasn’t planning on doing it until after I investigated the situation. I only found footprints; they were leading deeper into the forest, but I didn’t want to follow them any more than I already had. While we were eating dinner an hour or two later, I noticed a man looking at us from behind a tree. I would’ve been scared, but he was dressed like a hiker and he was pretty far away from us, and he probably just was looking at us for a second because we were the only other people for likely several hours. I told my dad about it, and we decided we were going to investigate it together, but by the time we got our gear together, the man was gone. We brushed it off, finished eating dinner, and went to bed in the car.
At about 11 that night, I woke up. I wanted to go back to bed and tried to, but I had drank a lot of water that day, so I couldn’t ignore the urge to pee. I woke up my dad and told him I couldn’t hold it. Keep in mind that my dad and I were both completely naked, and I didn’t feel like putting anything on since, again, we were the only people for several miles. I got out of the car and closed the door before I started peeing. About 30 seconds later, my stream was still going strong, and I had at least another minute left before I was done. I was just staring off into the distance opposite the woods, feeling like the biggest man alive, when suddenly a brief flash caught my attention. I looked towards the woods, but nothing was there, so I assumed it was just my vision tripping out. But when I looked at the river, I noticed odd patterns in the current, and it looked like a huge swarm of creatures were gathering close to the parts where said currents were starting. I couldn’t see very well because it was the middle of the night, and being a 15-year-old boy, I didn’t feel like investigating any further, even though I was pretty freaked out. About a minute later, I was done peeing. I went back into the car and fell back asleep.
The next day, once I woke up, the first thing i did was check if the currents were still weird, but they weren’t so I went to help my dad pack after eating breakfast, Once we finished, we started driving, but before we got far away, the police pulled us over. My dad and I were obviously confused, we wondered what we could have done in the middle of nowhere that could get us into trouble. My dad asked the officer what we did wrong. The officer said we didn’t do anything, but they needed to take us in. As it turns out, the hiker we saw in the woods was a known sex offender and rapist. The footprints I went to investigate were from him after he kidnapped a girl who was just 2 months older than me and brought her into the woods to rape and kill her with the help of his friends. Once they killed her, they realized it was too much of a risk to burn her body and potentially alert my dad and me as to what they did. So they dumped her body in the river and let the fish eat her until they had just enough material that they could safely burn. While he was waiting for the fish to eat her, he noticed me peeing. The flashes were him taking pictures of me. He and his friends planned on doing the same things they had done to her to me. However, once he and his friends realized they still couldn’t safely burn her remains, they drove about an hour south of where me and my dad were so they could finish her off, but the police caught them there after several months of planning to capture them. I don’t want to think about what that man would’ve done to me if I went to investigate that night.