[Hello everyone.
To start, a friend of mine told me a freaky story about his time in the woods of his dad’s cabin some time ago that I thought you guys might like. Since he’s not the type to go online to share his experience or even go online in general, really, I’m here to make him an account and transcribe his story while he recounts it to me again. If I feel the need to interject, I’ll enclose it in brackets so you know who’s talking. From now on this is what he’s told me with him by my side to make sure its all right. Feel free to pose any questions and I’ll ask him myself. So, here’s his story.]
To give off some context, my pa has a small cabin on a big plot of land out in the countryside. While it ain’t that far from civilization, it still ain’t a good idea getting into any trouble out there. The signal on my phone likes to give out when we make it out there but that sort of thing happens all the time. Anyway, I take a trip out to that cabin with my pa every once in a while to make sure it’s still standing after a storm or to see if anyone’s paid the place a visit. My pa’s getting up in years too so I like to make sure I’m there with in in case he takes a bad fall. We take an old logging path to reach the cabin from the tree line of the forest and, without a four wheeler, it takes about 45 minutes on foot to reach it.
So, late last summer, my pa and I decided to check out the cabin after a big storm blew through the county the week before. For most of the walk to the cabin everything was normal. Deer and squirrels in the brush, all kinds of birds in the trees, that type of thing. We had even started following the trail of a bob cat that had walked along the same path we did with the occasional droppings telling us where it had been. Easy to tell with all the fur in the scat. Well, we followed it all the way to where the logging part of the forest ended and my pa’s property line started. There’s these small slopes that make it easy to tell where that property line starts where my pa pushed dirt out of the way to make a path with a tractor before I was even born. At the first slope was another pile of bobcat scat but as we pressed on I noticed the signs of the bobcat had totally disappeared. Didn’t pay much mind to it. I ain’t a master tracker and I figured we’d loose the trail anyway.
As we got about 15 minutes from the cabin I started to feel like I was being watched. The feeling wasn’t too bad, you kind of get that feel’n from time to time in the woods, but over time it got worse and worse. It wasn’t until then that I noticed the animals in the forest were a hell of a lot more quiet. Not totally silent, mind you, but it was enough to make me look over to my pa to see if he noticed but by the looks of things he didn’t. It was like the forest was hold’n its breath and the animals were look’n at us waiting to see what we were gunna do. [I asked him what he meant by that but shook his head.] By the time we got to the cabin I was more interested in look’n out into the forest rather than see’n if the cabin was OK. I stood on the porch look’n out past the trees as my pa went inside to check everything. I didn’t see anything, never did the entire time we were out there, but I still felt like a thousand eyes were on me. When my pa came outside he looked out into the trees with me. After a minute I brought up how it felt like something was watch’n us but I felt kinda embarrassed to mention it. All that was out there was a bunch of plants and animals but something in my gut said otherwise. I was surprised to hear my pa agree that he felt the same thing.
We didn’t stay very long after that. On the way back on the same trail we came in on my pa wanted to check the salt lick we leave out for the animals in an old tree stump a few hundred feet from the cabin. At this point I didn’t want to stick around but I let him check it while I stayed on the trail check’n my phone for a signal. Like I said, never had much of a signal out in the countryside. I could see ‘em checking the salt lick and look over it for a minute making me call out ask’n what was the hold up. My pa called back saying no animals had came to visit the salt lick. [He’s taken a break to get some water now but i can tell he’s choosing his words carefully now.] I went over to check with ‘em and he was right. We had left out a block of salt for the animals a few months back but the thing had hardly been touched. It was in a puddle of water that had made it dissolve a bit at the bottom so we knew it had been there for a while but there wasn’t even any tracks in the mud around it. Normally a salt lick like that disappears after a week or so. My pa and I took that as a sign to head out of there.
As we walked the trail out of there that feel’n of being watched didn’t let up. If anything, it just got worse, even when we passed the property line and back into the logging part of the forest. The animals were pretty quiet here too when they were just fine when we went through about a half hour ago. I felt like run’n out of there at that point but my pa could hardly walk without take’n a break now and then, yet alone keep up with me at a sprint. At about half way through the forest we turned the corner to find the remains of something right in the middle of the trail. It was old, by ‘bout a month by the look of it, but we hadn’t walked past it on our way in even though it was the same trail we came in. Maybe we missed it, but I doubt it. It was about the size of a small dog, maybe larger, but it was too mangled to tell what it was at a glance. It was about the size of a bobcat, now that I’m think’n about it. We didn’t stick around to look at it and took another trail instead. At about this point I was start’n to feel pretty tired. There wasn’t very many valleys we had to cross to get where we were at and I had felt pretty good start’n out. By then it felt like I had spent all day walk’n in those woods. My pa said he didn’t feel the same way when I mentioned it but by the looks of it I think he was lying.
At about 10 minutes from the tree line we both took a moment to catch our breath even though we hadn’t had any problems walking that trail before. Just as we were about to keep move’n we heard what sounded like an owl hooting off in the distance. It didn’t sit right with me, though. I didn’t know of an owl that called out like that in the middle of the day. [He stopped for a minute to gather his thoughts before starting again.] Now that I’m really think’n about it, that owl sounded more like something make’n the sound of an owl. My pa must not have noticed how it sounded since he hooted back to it like he has ever since I was a kid. I felt like tell’n him to hush up right then. Nothing about those woods felt right in my gut ever since we passed that property line. We waited in the silence for a minute before that ‘owl’ hooted back. It was closer, though, a lot closer than what an owl could fly in that time. That’s when I told my pa I didn’t like what I was feel’n and that we should get out of there. He didn’t say anything but I could tell he agreed. We kept walking, all the while the hooting from that ‘owl’ got closer. I hadn’t brought along a knife or anything so I grabbed a sturdy branch from the ground and kept my eyes on the tree line. Thankfully that ‘owl’ seemed to lose us and jumped what sounded like hundreds of feet across the valley in a few seconds before going silent.
As we got to the end of the trail and over the last valley I was ready to throw in the towel climbing up that hill when my energy came back to me like it never went away in the first place. I tossed that branch back into the forest as we got to the truck and I haven’t been back since. When my pa wants to go back to check back on the cabin, I’m bring’n my revolver along for whatever was make’n those owl noises.