About one year ago, I organized a night out with the guys, four of us. We met at my house to walk to dinner; it wasn’t a long walk, just about 5 km. I live in Australia, so it gets a bit cooler at night. We started walking when it got darker. The walk goes through mostly neighborhoods; it’s a middle-class area, and there’s hardly ever any crime, just a break-in now and then.
About 3 km in, there’s a shortcut straight through the Australian bush. It is a concrete path, but it is hardly maintained. It’s roughly 1.5 km of the path, and then you get to the shopping center that way. Even in the day, the path is dark because it sits in the middle of an old dried-out creek with two large hills on either side. There is a steep drop in the middle of the path, so it was pretty fun to ride down on your bike as a kid, though it was better maintained back then.
We got to the bush, and as I said, it was getting darker, so I got my phone light out to see if any snakes might sneak up on us; wouldn’t be the first time. As we got to the steep bit of the path, I jokingly shoved my mate Tom into Connor; he did the same, and I slipped and fell over into the red dirt. My blue Adidas cap fell off, and weirdly we couldn’t find it; it must have just blown deeper into the bush. I shrugged it off; it was a cheap knockoff anyway. We got to dinner; we didn’t drink because the guy whose birthday it was was Muslim, so it didn’t seem appropriate.
At about 9:20, we started the walk back with a few groceries in hand for breakfast in the morning. We got to the bush part; it was pitch black, like you can’t see anything dark. I got my phone out and put the light on; we were talking about religion, just the usual philosophical talk about demons, gods, and politics, as we all are pretty interested in. One of my mates is pretty jumpy when it comes to scary stuff, so when we all heard a rustle in the bush, I gave him a shove. He jumped and laughed it off, but then, five seconds later, we heard a scream. It made the hair on the back of my head stand up; it was a woman’s scream, blood-curdling. I had never heard anything like it. We all looked at each other. We kept walking in silence, a bit faster the way we were going. I couldn’t justify what I heard, so I ignored it.
Before we got to the steep dip of the hill, I took one look back. I saw a light, like a phone light, flickering among the trees. My heart raced as I turned back to my friends, trying to act nonchalant. “Did you guys see that?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.
Tom, who was walking beside me, shook his head. “See what?”
“That light, back there,” I said, pointing vaguely in the direction we had come from.
Connor scoffed. “Probably just someone out for a walk, like us.”
The light followed us almost at the same pace as we walked up the dip, and it disappeared when we exited through a turn of the trees.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling of unease that had settled over me. We continued on our way, the darkness pressing in around us like a suffocating blanket. Every rustle of leaves made me jump, and I found myself constantly glancing over my shoulder, half expecting to see something lurking in the shadows.
As we reached the steep dip in the path, I slowed my pace, my senses on high alert. Something felt off, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. And then, just as we were about to descend, I heard it again—the same blood-curdling scream, echoing through the night, but this time, we were walking towards it.
This time, there was no mistaking it. It was the sound of someone in unimaginable agony, their voice raw with despair and suffering. My blood turned to ice in my veins as I realized that this was no ordinary scream. It was the sound of someone who had lost all hope, someone who had reached the depths of despair and seen no way out.
I stumbled backward, my heart pounding in my chest. “We need to get out of here,” I gasped, my voice barely above a whisper.
But before we could move, the air around us seemed to grow thick with darkness, suffocating us with its malevolence. And then, emerging from the shadows, came a figure—a woman, her face twisted in agony, her eyes empty and soulless, hanging in the moonlight.
I screamed, the sound tearing from my throat in a primal burst of terror. But even as I tried to flee, I knew it was too late. We were trapped in a nightmare of our own making, haunted by the specter of someone who had chosen to end their life in the depths of the Australian bush.
We got home after a long night of answering questions, and in my mailbox, I saw the same cap I lost that night. Something very unholy happened that night that I hope to forget…