Do Not Go to the Superstition Mountains in Arizona! (Part 1)
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1acs12u/do_not_go_to_the_superstition_mountains_in/
Do Not Go to the Superstition Mountains in Arizona! (Part 2)
https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/1adlup8/do_not_go_to_the_superstition_mountains_in/
I was ahead of Abdullah and the guide, but I could hear them both running behind me. I could faintly see the arch ahead of us because the desert was just starting its morning glow and my only intention was to be the first one to the arch. I didn’t look back to see if they were okay. As long as they were in earshot, that was enough to keep my conscience clear to stay just far enough ahead of them to be the first one to the next clue. In all of this chaos, the clue was still my main priority and I only stopped to turn back to check on my friends when I got five feet from the arch.
I had been using my flashlight to point directly in front of my feet as I was running so I didn’t roll an ankle and when I turned around and pointed it back towards my friends, expecting to see them running side by side, they were a little bit further than I thought they were and I had to wait for them to jog up into my spotlight. I gave the flashlight a quick shake as they were approaching the spotlight to draw their attention, and when I stopped shaking it and held it directly onto them I realized it wasn’t them. Just about five feet away from me, what I thought was the guide and Abdullah, was the legs and the torso jogging side by side in unison to a complete halt with the torso in a full handstand with its back towards me, but the legs belt buckle was facing me.
For some reason, the way that it stopped right in my spotlight, I had a feeling it was trying to tell me something and I didn’t have that fear that I had initially. I almost felt defensive of the arch behind me, less in fear of my safety, and more in fear of whatever this thing is knowing that this is the third clue. As I’m standing there, staring at this split anatomy, the legs almost hop in a cartwheel fashion and reconnect to the bottle of the torso, but it’s backward. The back of the torso is facing me, but the front of the legs are facing me. As it finishes it’s cartwheel and stands connected with its back still to me, but its toes facing me. And just like it did on the ledge when I was watching it through binoculars, it reaches its hands up and starts to go into a backbend.
As it’s falling into the backbend, the long hair that was covering its face falls off of its face due to the gravity of finishing the backbend. It was so confusing what I was looking at because he was in a backbend, but the features of his face were upside down. His eyebrows and eyes are on his chin. His nose is upside down and his mouth is on his forehead. So his head is upside down in a backbend, but his face is looking at me in an upright position.
He has a maniacal smile filled with gold teeth. The only way I know how to explain it is like looking at a contortionist who copied and pasted his face upside down and we’re just staring at each other, but again I still have this feeling that it wants to tell me something. So we both just stand there motionless until it starts talking.
All it says is, “You’re at the arch, but he’s at the mine.” And it starts chuckling before it says, “I wonder if he’ll look for you before he goes in.” And it erupts into laughter as it kicks off its feet into a full handstand again and takes off running on its hands into the darkness at full speed as if it’s capable of sprinting on its hands. I just see this upside-down face with a piercing gold smile staring at me until it disappears.
A wave of rage washes over me; not fear, not worry for my friends or my safety, but rage. So I immediately turn around and run up to the arch and stand in the center of it. I look to the right and I can see Weaver’s Needle from inside of this arch so I know it’s the right one. I turn in the other direction, looking down into the valley, and start scanning for movement. It takes a few minutes, but the morning glow is getting brighter by the second so I turn off my flashlight and it almost helps me see better because just a few moments later, I see some movement right at the bottom of the hill. I could tell it was Abdullah by the way he was walking and the shape of his backpack. I just stand up there watching him for a few minutes.
I could tell he’s not trying to hide or trying to run and he’s not calling out for me so he’s not looking for me. But he’s looking for something. He purposely split up from me to look for the mine because he knew I was going to run to the arch, but he had the foresight to run to the valley below because he knew it must be on the opposite valley of Weaver’s Needle so he’s trying to beat me to it. I’m seething with rage at this point, but I just keep watching him for a hint of reassurance that I’m right about his intentions and I get what I’m looking for.
It’s getting even brighter at this point and I see him stumble across a ditch that’s shaped like a funnel and I remember the Dutchman’s last clue. “My mine is shaped like a funnel, not a doorway.” And I watch Abdullah discover the funnel mine. Instead of celebrating and calling out for me, he ducks behind a boulder and starts peaking around looking to see if anybody spotted him finding it, but he doesn’t look up. He didn’t see me see him and I knew without a shadow of a doubt he wasn’t even trying to split it two ways. I don’t know what came over me, but I started descending the hill ready to confront him. The only thing running through my mind is anger and betrayal. I sneak up behind him and stop on the opposite side of the funnel mine from where he’s hiding with his back to me.
I blurt out, “Look at you hiding. I knew you wanted it all to yourself.”
I scared him because he basically jumped as he turned around, but he replied, “What are you talking about? Where is that thing?”
And I just keep following up with accusations, “You weren’t looking for that thing a minute ago. You were looking for the mine. Why are you worried about it now that I caught you?”
He starts defending himself saying that he was looking for me and he just happened to stumble across it. I tell him, “I was watching you. If you were looking for me you wouldn’t have been staring at the ground in the hillside.” I see a tingle of fear in his eyes and he looks me up and down and he just says, “Doug, calm down. What are you planning to do with that?” I don’t know what he’s talking about so I look myself up and down and in my right hand I have my flashlight, but in my left hand I’m gripping a jagged rock. I don’t even remember picking this rock up on the way down, but in the moment I was happy that I had it.
Right as I’m about to take a step towards him, we hear the guide’s voice to my right. It’s like he came out of nowhere. All he says is, “Don’t you see what it’s doing to you? Don’t you see what it’s doing to us?”
When I look at him, he has tears running down his face and he starts pleading. He says, “I’m begging you guys. This isn’t you. This is what these mountains do. Can’t you see it? Can’t you see the clues everywhere?”
We’re both just looking at him in silence and he starts pointing around us to the hilltops and continues, “Don’t you see the other columns? Don’t you see the other arches? They’re all over this mountain range. You can see Weaver’s Needle from every arch. There are columns on every hilltop. There are hundreds of piles of stones that look like old stone houses. People have carved thousands of men into the rocks as fake clues. They’ve dug countless funnel mines in search of the gold. You could find these clues in every square inch of the mountain range. I’m begging you, don’t end up like them. Don’t throw it all away for fool’s gold.”
None of what he said is getting through to me. I’m as angry as I was when he started talking. The only thing that snapped me out of it was his last line. “Go look inside, then let me help you get home.”
I look back at the funnel and immediately go into it feet first. You have to slide in feet first and then you enter a cavern. When I get inside and turn my flashlight on, I take a swing at a protruding edge of the cavern to chip off a piece of the wall to see if there’s anything inside of the wall and there’s nothing. There were no gold bits and the caverns are only 5 feet long. It’s empty. No gold in sight. I feel shame wash over me. I feel embarrassed for the way I acted and I dropped the rock and climbed out of the mine.
We all just look at each other with no words and I just shake my head signifying that there’s nothing in there. The sun is almost fully up at this point, and the guide just starts walking towards where we came and we follow him. There were no conversations, jokes, or laughter on the hike out, just an overwhelming sense of shame. We didn’t stop the whole way back because it was still early and moderately cool and none of us seemed to want to extend this trip any longer. When we finally arrived back at the parking lot and we were ready to part ways, the guide broke the silence. He still had tears in his eyes.
All he said was, “I’m so happy I was able to get you guys out. You both have good hearts and you didn’t deserve to die in those mountains like the rest of them.” He gave us both hugs, like he really meant it and me and Abdullah gave each other hugs because our actions weren’t a good representation of how much we care about each other.
We start walking back towards our car. There was another car in the lot with three friends unpacking their truck, looking so excited, looking like they felt exactly how we did when we first arrived. As we were walking past them, I noticed that they were looking at a hand-drawn map, clearly reminiscent of the treasure maps we saw online before we came. I knew exactly why they were here and I knew I had to say something, but I didn’t have the energy to give them an enthusiastic warning.
So in passing as they asked us how it was out there, all I was about to say was, “If you want to enjoy your time out there, leave the maps and the clues in the car.”
I could tell they didn’t like my energy and I just said, “Trust me,” as I was walking away. To this day I wish I said more. Me and Abdullah get into the car and sit in silence for a moment before we start apologizing to each other. I tell him how sorry I am for the way I acted near the mine and that I don’t know why I jumped to those conclusions or why I grabbed that rock. He said something I’ll never forget.
“You were right to jump to those conclusions. I don’t know what came over me, but everything you said you saw was true. I did run away from you and I was trying to hide the mine from you. I don’t know why I did it. It didn’t even feel like it was me doing it.”
Right then I knew we experienced the same thing out there. We were consumed by it. We were consumed by the thought of unimaginable wealth and something was wrong with those mountains. Something was wrong with those mountains when you went in there with the wrong intentions.
As we were driving away, we drove past the group one more time and the guide must’ve been putting on his customer service front because it looked like he had already changed into clean clothes. He had the same excited facial expression when we arrived, chatting with the new adventurers. I realized he saved us and he deserved more of a thank you than we gave him.
We drove all the way home and let a few days pass before we talked about it again. We both agreed it was the right thing for us to try to find his phone number to call him and thank him properly. So we went to the Superstition Mountains website and as we were searching for contact information, we saw a missing person’s report on the front page. It was those three guys that we saw in the parking lot with a message at the bottom asking for anybody to call in with any information they had about their whereabouts.
We had to call and we got on the phone with a woman and told her how we saw them in the parking lot with the guide before we had left. She said something very interesting. She said there were no active guides on duty there due to the COVID restrictions, but we assured her that we had hired a guide the day we were there. She asked us his name and when we told her, she stuttered and replied that we must be a little confused. She thanked us for the information and told us to google that name because we must be mistaken.
So we opened a new tab and googled the guide’s name. We find his Instagram. We start going through his pictures and it’s clearly him. It’s the man we spent an entire day with and all of his pictures are photos from hikes and adventures. So we didn’t get what she meant until we checked his most recent picture. His last post was a selfie of him arriving for a hike at the Superstition Mountains in 2018. So we go back to the Google search page and scroll down a few tabs and we find an article written about him from 2018. The article was an obituary and it read that he had gone missing in the Superstition Mountain range in October of 2018 and they found his body at Weaver’s Needle two months later.
But we saw him. We spent an entire day with him. He’s the reason we got out. He talked us out of turning on each other and he led us out of that park. I don’t know if anything that I saw there was real. The hermit, the legs, or even the fool’s gold. The only thing that I know is that he saved us and there are things that happen in that mountain range that I can’t explain.