It was March 2020, just a few days before Spring break. I’d gotten just a day’s notice that I had to pack as much as I could carry and leave my university and go home. It was weird, but when I got off work that night, I did as I was told, packed as much as I could, and headed toward Atlanta from Knoxville. I didn’t think Covid would be such an issue at that point, but I had been horribly wrong.
The only problem I thought I’d have was staying awake on the drive. I like driving, but if I get bored, I tend to nod off. I worked until about ten that night and didn’t leave Knox until about 11:30 and it was a four hour drive to my parents house in the Northern burbs of Atlanta. I wouldn’t get home until 3:30, and I hated using the main highways. Going 40 west towards Nashville, take the connector through 75, so on and so forth. I had memorized the back ways, going down 40 a while before getting off at exit 25, then thru Cleveland until I got to Tennessee Hwy, then a plethora of tiny towns and country roads until I got to Jasper, GA, then on hwy 5, making my sure way down to the comfort of my mother’s home.
I didn’t have trouble staying awake through the drive like so thought I would. I had my music, I loved driving at night, and I had about 5 beverages to keep me company. Something about having unmedicated ADHD and more than one beverage just makes it easier to stay stimulated and awake and interested in what I’m doing. The issue, which I had not considered, was that I would be driving on old 411 for a time. Its other name is The Trail of Tears Highway.
From the name, you can guess why it’s called that. I’d driven on that road more times than I could count, but never at night. During the day I always noticed that while the scenery around the rural, scenic highway was beautiful, it was also horribly quiet, something about it always standing my hairs on end. I always shook it off, “It’s just the suffering that was here, it’s just remnants of a horrible past.” And while that may be true, what I fucking saw the night I went home was most certainly fucking real.
It started with this cold feeling down my spine, an animal instinct screaming in my head. I hit the gas, something hysterically nervous rising in my throat. I can’t even remember what music I was singing along to. Just the feeling of dread. That something was not right. I started putting a little more pressure on the pedal when I finally looked to see what was making me so uncomfortable and I screamed. I screamed and for the first time in a long time I prayed to God with panicked tears running down my face because as clear as day, lit up with my back lights, was something long, on all fours, pale like the pages in old books, with an almost human face. But the mouth was too wide, the teeth too long, the eyes too big, shining like silver dollars in the dark.
I could see every detail, and my foot hit the fucking floor, but it kept pace. I was on a rural, winding highway, going 80, then 90, then a 100, praying that whatever it was would leave me alone, that if I left the area it roamed perhaps it would stop following me. But it didn’t. I kept looking back, kept seeing it, it never changed, it stayed consistent. And it was looking at me. In my rear views I KNEW it was looking at me, and that feeling stayed rapped around my heart and lungs. I couldn’t get away, it was still there, an hour later, and my car wasn’t heavy enough for me to be going as fast as I was, I’d gone too fast in it before and found myself about off the ground, but I wasn’t thinking about that.
I got out of Tennessee, crossed state lines into Georgia, and it was still there. I got halfway from there to Jasper, desperate to stop because O was shaking so bad, but something told me to keep going, to make it to my father’s house as he had placed a blessing on it and renewed that blessing every night.
I finally made it home that night at 2:30 in the morning having sped the entire last half of the journey, collapsing into my mom’s arms as a grown ass woman, panicked and delirious. Fuck cops, they aren’t near as frightening as what I saw and what I was chased by. It kept up with my little Toyota going a hundred miles per hour for a fucking HOUR. I thought I’d seen the Wampus Cat at first, but I thought it over and thought there was no way. She only roams the Appalachians, she don’t come down from her home and she certainly wouldn’t fill me with that awful, slimy feeling of animal panic like that thing did.
So my next option was the one I was really hoping wasn’t true, but what other option was there? No other unnatural being in North America has been documented as running quite that fast. I could see it’s breath, I could see every muscle of its huge, emaciated, pale body shift and move as it chased my tail lights. I know what that motherfucker was, but I won’t type it out, won’t even say it aloud. I know better.
And I also knew that seeing those meant that something bad was going to happen to my family. And I waited, tried to put it out of my mind, but disaster did strike. That thing was a sign, my seeing it meant the worst scenario. Not a month later, my great aunt had a horrible accident while it was raining, she’d slipped on the front porch step and somehow, instead of falling on her butt, she ended up breaking her neck, becoming quadriplegic by a series of insane events; the freak accident itself, laying in the rain screaming for help in a puddle of her own blood so big we had to power wash the driveway the next day. Then came the medical malpractice from Ballad Health, and I curse that company and the powers that be every day. The most active and spiteful and wonderfully tomboyish woman I’d ever met will never walk again.
And I blame myself. What if I’d gone to visit her a day early? What if I had just gone and used the main highway; then I would have never seen that demon straight from Tsagalai nightmares. I’d thought they were only out west on the Diné Rez, but I was wrong.
I still shake a bit thinking about that night, sometimes the details are clearer and others all I can remember is the panic, knowing instinctively that if I stopped, if I slowed down for even a moment, something horrible would happen to my very soul.
I never drive that way at night, now, and it’s not even necessary as my parents moved back home to East Tennessee, much closer than they were before. But I’ll never forget it.