It is my fault. I brought it with me.
In my defense, there is no way I could have known. Not beforehand. Even if you had told me, I never would have believed it. I would have taken it the same way I take all the folktales and scary stories I had ever read, a fascinating look at cultures and a way to scare myself a bit.
I am still not sure how it followed me, I will probably never figure that out but I know for sure where it found me. I had dropped my wife off at the art studio where she was creating pottery. The road that took us to the studio had a jogging trail that led to a hiking loop in the woods nearby. Since I did my best to get in at least a two mile walk each day, I felt this would be a good way to pass the time. Besides, I had never hiked this trail before.
As I approached the trailhead I saw the sign that included a small map and listed the trail as a half-mile loop. It wouldn’t take me long but it would get me out of the miserably intense sun for a few minutes.
The woods appeared very thick as I approached the trailhead, but a few yards along the trail the trees thinned out quite a bit. Aside from a few with a diameter of 3 feet, most were very thin. It was easy to see the entirety of the loop from any point along it. While I would never get a sunburn hiking the trail, enough light got through the canopy that I could still clearly see that it was a bright afternoon. Across the middle of the loop was a slightly wider trail. While the rest of the trail appeared to just be foot worn, the path across the middle appeared to have been packed dirt.
On the far side of the loop from the trailhead path I began to get the sensation of being watched. With each step, I became more and more convinced that something was staring at me. I told myself it was probably a coyote. Even though we were in suburbia, it was common knowledge coyotes still lived in the wooded patches around the area. As new neighborhoods replaced wooded patches, they would be sighted out in the open looking for new places to live.
Soon, a feeling of malice joined the sensation of being watched. Maybe it was a rabid coyote stalking me. I wanted to look around me to check, but was also self conscious that perhaps I was overreacting and it was simply another hiker. I casually, I hope it looked that way, looked over each shoulder. No sign of another hiker. I spun a 360.
Nothing.
No hikers, no coyotes.
But still the feeling persisted. If anything it got worse. Whatever it was, it wanted me.
I broke into a fast jog. Coming around the final turn of the trail I became overcome with a sense of dread. Whatever it was was extremely close. I turned back onto the trailhead path toward the road. About five meters from the entrance to the path the feeling just left.
I no longer felt like I was being watched. No more malice or dread. I shrugged off the experience. Maybe I was just being silly. Surely something had been watching me, but it was surely just some of the wildlife. A coyote, deer, gator. There was a local urban legend about haunted woods nearby. Perhaps I had let that idea freak me out a bit.
I finished my jog, picked up my wife, went home, and forgot about the experience.
The next morning I got to work early, as is my habit. I teach a 730 am lecture at the local branch of a larger state college. I like to teach my courses early for two main reasons. First, it gives the rest of the day to focus on my research and secondly the students that sign up for early classes are generally more motivated. I normally get to my classroom about an hour early so I can eat a small breakfast while I set up for my four back to back lectures. I normally show up even before the custodians have turned on the hallway lights.
As I turned down the hallway to my lecture hall I was struck by the way the red lights from the badge readers at each door made the facility look like some futuristic prison from an action movie. In some ways I feel this place does institutionalize the students and faculty.
All of the sudden, I felt like I was not alone. Just a sense of someone else being near me. I figured the custodian was rounding the corner to turn on the hall lights. As I pulled out my badge to scan into my room I heard a voice as clear as day.
“Thank you”
It wasn’t a feeling or in my head. Someone had spoken to me.
But no one else was in the hallway. No one had walked, or run, away from me. No one was anywhere near me.
But I had heard the voice. It had sincerely thanked me.
I needed coffee, and soon. Maybe some bourbon.
The remainder of my day passed like every other here. I taught, sat for my office hour, then formatted footnotes for my next book. Nothing exciting. It was so routine, I forgot the phantom thanks.
Two days later, while sitting my office hour, I received a campus safety text about a missing student. They had last been seen walking to the parking lot the previous afternoon. At the time I brushed it off with the large number of other safety texts we all got. Now I know it was the beginning of a pattern.
In the coming months an average of one student a week went missing. I was concerned about safety, but not my involvement. It was not until the video that I began to suspect I had a part in this.
About three months after the first disappearance someone leaked security camera footage of one of the missing students to YouTube, which soon made its way to the news.
In the video, the student in question could be seen running across the breezeway connecting the Humanities building to the library. The video was clear because it was late afternoon and the sun was brightly illuminating the breezeway. He was clearly running from something. As he came close to the library entrance, he stopped in his tracks and flexed like he was being electrocuted. He then straightened up and walked slowly off the breezeway and toward the treeline nearby.
That could have been it for me, but I noticed something odd. Replayed the video over and over. At different speeds. I had to keep playing it because I could not believe what I saw. In the moments before the student stopped and jerked, a shadow came across the breezeway at amazing speed and merged. I can’t think of a better way to put it, with the student.
As I watched the shadow, I remembered the sensations from the hiking trail and heard in my mind “Thank you.”
This was somehow connected to me and that day on the trail.
I began doing some local research on the area near the hiking trail. The areas south of it, containing several thousand acres, had once been the economic powerhouse of this stretch of the Gulf Coast. It had been a patch work of rice paddies, sugar cane fields, and cattle ranches. The area was, however, a bowl. Surrounded by the Gulf and higher, but less fertile, ground around it there were few ways in and out.
One was a dirt road that used to run through where the hiking trail now is. As a matter of fact, the path cutting across the center of the loop was one remaining section of the old road. It had connected a few of the paddies, fields, and a fishing village to the main highway so the locals could take their goods to market. The road existed from about 1845 to 1957.
And there was so much more.
A staggering number of people went missing along the road over the decades of its use. It averaged out to about one person about every three months or so. And they all seemed to go missing during the day. No real investigation was ever mounted. For sure, each disappearance was reported and investigated, but it did not seem that anyone ever put a pattern together. No urban legend even seemed to pop up, from what I could find. People just seemed to take missing farmers and fishers as a hazard of taking the road. Of course at this time cougars were still in the area, but still that seemed odd.
The use of the road had been discontinued when the suburbs began to develop and the paddies were filled in. A main highway was built a few miles to the east and that area fell into disuse. From 1957 until about two years ago, the area was a neglected swamp. Then the hiking path was built.
I also discovered that the road had been built over a former Native migration path.
I tried to research the local Native lore as well. That was also a dead end.
Mostly.
The tribe that had lived in the area was never very big. Between hurricanes and mosquitoes, they never thrived. This was especially true when they became wedged between the Europeans, Apaches, and Commanches. There was so little information that there was not even a consensus as to what the tribe was called. Each outside group had their own name for them and no one seemed to bother to have asked them. The few members that survived contact with the Europeans soon assimilated into the Apaches or Commanches.
There was only one bit of information about them that I found relevant. When asked to describe the by one settler, the Apaches and Commanches stated they were “living as cannibals”. Another settler disputed this translation. He claimed the phrase that the natives used translated more to “living near the cannibal.”
Archaeologists showed that the local tribe lived on the coast, harvesting oysters during the winter to early summer, then moved inland during hurricane season. What stands out is that their migration paths took them widely around the bowl area and the future site of the road as much as possible. That path was taken, but obviously less than others. As if it was a last resort. The archeologists speculated this was due to flooding and mosquitoes.
I was beginning to have another theory.
But what did the cannibal translation mean?
That soon became clear.
After the initial rash of disappearances, they slowed down. Within a year it was about one disappearance every three months.
Campus security stepped up and implemented new policies with each disappearance, but nothing changed.
I contacted every expert I could think of and the references they gave me over that year, but no more clarity than my initial research gave me was to be found. The clarity came from a very macabre source.
One day a student complained about an overpowering stench of rot while down at the stream in the woods. The student had been taking samples from the stream for their environmental science class. This prompted a search by campus PD.
What they found turned everyone’s stomach, but especially mine. In a depression near the creek, deep in the woods was found a pile of bodies in various states of decay. Each body was eventually identified as one of the missing students. Soon rumors of strange damage to the bodies began to circulate.
When the official statement was released it was stated that not only had the students been eaten, DNA testing showed that each student had eaten their own flesh.
Large amounts of their own flesh.
Well, now I know which translation was correct. And why the local tribe had avoided that area.
Somehow, the entity had used me to bring it to new, more fertile hunting grounds. And it thanked me.
I have been researching so much, I have changed my specialty from the history of WWII seaborne logistics to Native American mythologies. I have still found nothing.
I brought it here, and I need to get rid of it.
If anyone knows anything about a spirit, demon, or other entity that hunts in daylight and consumes the flesh of the victims it possesses I would definitely appreciate the lead.