Picture it, Upstate New York 2007…
A small group of young 20 somethings decide to hang out in one of the larger cemeteries in the greater Capital Region. I was 19, and co-led a small group of 8 or 9 people to a spot that overlooked our city as we were on a substantial hill. (if you know, you know)
I came up here frequently at the time for various reasons with different circles of people I hung out with. And we were just drinking some beer and hanging out together we always carried in and carried out never littered or disrespected anything.
So I was in the middle of our group, and there was 3 a head 2 behind and the rest of us just chilling. We walked around a good portion and had to walk past a large pond to get to our spot.
All was fine as we joked, caught up and took some pictures here and there. My best friend for this story we will call him Ben was up front as we came to a rather large turn.
He also had the bag that had all of our drinks in it, and there was a large section of woods to our left, graves to our right and the road snakes forward uphill or to the right.
As we came to turn we all heard a child loudly crying from the woods. We all stopped and looked around and at each other as it kept going. A few of the girls called out to get no response I started walking a head and everyone behind me followed to catch up.
We weren’t super close but the cries in a quiet place like were pretty loud what we saw was a little boy run out of the woods dressed in nice clothes white collared button up, dark hair, slacks and dress shoes.
He stopped in front of Ben and hugged him still crying. We all stopped as he looked around at us started to console the boy as he kept crying. Everyone at this point is like what the actual hell?
So we all catch up and are circled around him at this point and we are all trying to get him to talk or tell us where his parents are.
I start looking around we are pretty far from roads, houses, and my gut sank because I felt like this was too convenient. And I turned around and hit the kid with my flashlight and ask him in stern voice how did you get out here?
He starts laughing, and his voice gets a little deeper and louder as he shoved Ben knocking him down and he ran back into the trees laughing hysterically. We all look at each other at the same time, and our friend Joe says, “Time to fucking go!”
We all started running back the way we came we ran with no lights for a bit before we got back to the entrance we came in. A few of the girls swore they heard something running in the trees but saw nothing concrete.
We drank our beer in a trail entrance nearby and all just decompressed what we saw. This wasn’t the first or last time we came to this place but we agreed to lay low from coming back anytime soon.