So let me start by saying that this is a real story: My brother and I are extremely experienced desert campers and we have lived near deserts pretty much our whole lives. I have never in my 20 years of life ever for one second believed in anything paranormal or anything to do with evil spirits, unlike my brother who has always sensed presenses and been able to see mostly what we call djinn also know as demons, until last night which is safe to say marks the last time we will be camping alone in the desert.
We always have the same place we like to go when we want to camp with minimum effort and our day started as normal as ever but as we got closer and closer to our destination I saw my brother’s mood completely shift aand when I asked what was wrong he just shrugged me off and told me to just keep driving. When we arrived I felt completely fine but my brother was still unusually quiet (it was around 1pm at that point and we were planning on leaving at around 12-1 am. Because of the heat we made the terrible decision to setup unnder a few trees and a source of water, which in Middle Eastern culture is where the djinns live at night, not that I believed that at the time of course) however we still setup our camp and continued on as normal.
Now my brother always says that when he feels a presence (or several in this case) he gets extremely unlucky… First he almost dropped a box of coals on his foot, then he spilt an entire bottle of coke on his phone, then he dropped it into the sand then proceeded to smash his elbow on the edge if the chair he was sitting on (which is now very swollen) and last but certainly not least when he was looking through one of our boxes he felt something cold and sharp press right against his arm and he realised it was an unsheathed knife (which we packed with its case the previous night before and he later said it felt like something pushed his hand into it, right were his veins are). All of these events consecutively within a matter of a few hours was certainly making us both uneasy and I for the life of me couldn’t figure out why he was suddenly so unlucky.
As I was staring to question his clumsyness a random couple appeared out of nowhere informing us that they were stuck in the sand an needed help (we drive a land cruiser and they had a Nissan Altima so we didn’t expect to encounter as many issues as we did). We first dug them out without any issues but as we pushed them out of the sand but the got stuck again. If you know anything about dune bashing or desert camping then you understand the physics behind how wheels get stuck in sand and the way this nissan was stuck was incredibly unusual, it was literally stuck somewhere with plenty of space available for grip (and later in my brother said that as we were digging them out of the sand, thats when he really started feeling an evil presence around us but didn’t want to say anything as to not ruin the trip and freak me out) so we ended up having to tow them out of the sand, which again was far harder than it had to be, first our tow strap broke off of their bumber (toe strap cost 200 dollars and was fine but their bumper was slightly damaged) then we almost got stuck ourselves and a 20 minute job took more like 90 (which again was extremely unusual and with hindsight just the beginning of all the crap to come).
When we came back to our camp we noticed how everything around us had gotten unusually quiet, the area we were in has hundreds of birds around and as far as we have seen 3 cats who sometimes pay us a visit, but there wasn’t a single noise at all other than our fire (which was dying out unusually quickly). It gad gotten dark quickly so we had scrambled to build a fire to cook our dinner before we were asked to help the couple and I had noticed the silence but it didn’t bother me however my brother suddenly grabbed my hand as we were sitting down to eat and said with clear fear in his voice that was should go as quickly as possible and that he didn’t feel safe, to ease both our minds we prayed (we are Christian so of course we thought it would help us) but I think it accelerated everything that happened and just made whatever was there with us angry.
We quickly finished our dinner (and me being the skeptic I was completely fine and pretty much just humouring my brother) util I started getting the nagging feeling that it was time to pack up and leave, it hit me like a wave and I was quite taken a back by the feeling so I voiced it to my brother and he agreed that we should pack up right away and leave. We started packing up (at a normal pace like we were just tired and wanted to leave) and that when we heard a sound very close to us, on the opposite side of the pond which wasn’t that big, that I could only describe as the sound of death itself and it seemed to go on for several minutes and when I say that we looked at each other in absolute fear I genuinely mean I was ready to have a heart attack right there and then. At that point, after being forzen for a few minutes and quite reasonably so after hearing that bellowing screech so close to us, we turned on the car, drove it back so we could see better with the headlamps and just started throwing everything into the car without much care but with a whole lot of urgency…and it was like after the screaming thats when shit really hit the fan.
First it was the sound of twigs snapping and footsteps all around us, then it was the shadows behind the trees and I tried everything to try and get those shadows to change shape, walking around the trees and moving the lights but nothing it looked like there were people just staring at us the whole time and you could really feel it too, we really felt like we weren’t alone and that we weren’t with friendly entities either. We also noticed that all 3 cats were huddled right behind our car (away from the trees so they were not the ones snapping twigs) but literally did not care if they were not going to move I was still getting out if there (thankfully they left when we started reversing) but they too looked absolutely terrified and were just starting at the trees too. It also felt like whatever was there was getting closer (and I have never felt anything like it, it was a gut feeling and you just know its one of those natural instinct you should not ignore). Thankfully we were able to pack up quickly (our tent was very close to the trees though so that was a nerve wracking experience) and whilst we are packing it is still very silent (its very normal for the birds around that area to continue making sounds until 2 or 3 am) and at this point it was about 8pm so it was highly unusual.
I personally think I was most terrifying as I was driving away back onto the main dirt path to leave the desert (I know cars very well, I know how they drive in the sand and I know our car especially well because weve had it for so long and I could instantly tell that the steering was off and completely fighting against me which fixed itself the second we were on the highway) , the sound of twigs snapping was still all around us and it was loud enough to be heard over the sounds of the car and on the path was what seemed like every bird that was in the area, just standing there and staring at us until we got close enough to force them to walk (not even fly) away. At one point my brother just grabbed me shoulder and told me very sternly to just keep looking in front of me and under no circumstances to look through his window (it was the tone of his voice that told me to listen to him for the love of god). We were in a part of the desert where we had to pretty much drive through the whole of the accessible areas to get onto the highway and there wasn’t a single person around us, the only thing we saw was a very clearly abandoned toyota hylux positioned behind a small dune and hidden by the trees but was far enough from our campsite to easily be ruled out as the source of the original screech. The worst thing I saw was as we were closing to the exit (now we know these deserts very well, we’ve both grown up here and have been riding dirt bikes and quad bikes in these deserts since we moved here and we know what wild life to expect, cats, birds, spiders, goats, camels, mice, foxes maybe even the occasional scorpio or if you are really unlucky a snake but that is it, there is nothing else in these deserts) we saw standing in the middle of the path, staring directly at us, a deer…a god damn deer (Ive only ever seen 1 deer in 16 hears of living here and that was in someone’s garden as a pet). Its safe to say I was in complete shock, and the deer was just not moving at all until I got close enough that we could practically smell the thing before it slowly walked off the path whilst looking right at us. We quickly moved past the deer and again my brother, with a gasp and then very sternly, said to keep my eyes right in the road (I asked him as we got on the highway what it was that he kept seeing and he very reluctantly told me he kept seeing large figures around us anytime we went through a bend and they were all either pointing right as us or ahead of us…Im very glad he didn’t tell me at the time cus I would have been shitting mysel). We still were yet to encounter anyone but we still very clearly heard sounds all around us (and again not the usual bird or cat but very clearly big and unrelenting). When I saw the exit I was as happy as I have ever been but that quickly fade when once again we saw another deer standing right in the middle of the road slowly waking away and looking right at us except this time it didn’t really look like a deer more like a kangaroo mixed with a deer and its eyes were milky and it looked rotten and horrible, but I didn’t much care I just stepped on the gas and fortunately it had gotten out if the way in time.
Now when you exit the desert you can either turn right onto a long stretch of highway or you can go left and go through a small town then take the back streets to a parallel highway and as I was about to turn right my brother once again, with that same tone if voice, said to go to the town and go to the right (later he once again said he saw a line of figures pointing ahead of us so if we would have gone that way we wouldn’t have made it home in one piece). Thankfully as we made it farther and farther awayy and close to our home the gut feeling of being watched was going away and of course having never experienced something like this before I was distraught and wanted to talk about it. My brother told me as we were going home that because we were alone the djinn wanted to mess with us, that they wanted to scare us and most likely cause us harm and that the way they get to you in such rural places is to force you to stop and then do whatever they want (which make sense as to why there were so many animals on our path). He also said that they cause bad luck and he could feel them the second we entered the desert (which explains his clumsyness all day and the car that got stuck in such an unusual manner). This is also my younger brother (by 3 years) and naturally any time he ever told me about this sort of thing I always just dismissed it as him scaring himself…
I can excuse the sounds we heard and shadows we saw last night, I can excuse the gut feeling as just being scared but I cannot excuse the 2 deer we saw staring right at us and I cannot excuse the car just randomly fighting against me as I was driving. The deer completely freaked me out as did the tone of my brother’s voice (Im also sorry if this us written sporadically, Im still shaken up and trying to make sense of everything) and its safe to say we are not going camping there again and its safe to say Im never dismissing my brother when jt comes to this kind if thing again and god am I so thankful that we made it home safely.
Edit: I also forgot to mention that as we were setting up our tent it was fighting us, we would secure one end of it into the ground and instantly another end would pop out and after we finally managed to get it set up it looked as if something was pushing it in and it collapsed once before we got it back up and again it looked like something was pushing on it which is something neither of us have ever experienced before and we have set up tents in the middle of a sand storm before