I honestly don’t even know where to begin or how to describe what just happened to us. I am still shaking. Im gonna try and give as many details as I can but I still don’t understand most of what happened.
My boyfriend, Toby, and I drove to Missouri to meet his family, it was 23 hour long drive with only a half hour of sleep and many 5 Hour Energy’s to keep me going. The drive there went great, I spend most of the night doing 95 through the desert in Arizona and New Mexico (We we’re coming from California). We went there to pick my dog up that they’d been watching during my deployment earlier this year. We spent about 4 days there just BBQing and hanging out before loading up the car with snacks, luggage, and my dog before heading back. This is where everything went to absolute shit.
The first 10 hours of the ride back was pretty uneventful except for some asshole cop that kept trying to bother me. The idiot wrote me a citation for no reason and it had someone else’s name, address, and license plate on it which was weird. But besides that, the first half went pretty smooth. As we made our way through Texas my map app started warning me that there would be some flooding as we got into Arizona. I wasn’t really that worried about it, I flew through there last time and I was sure it’d be just as easy on the way back to Cali. I could not have been more wrong.
My app ended up rerouting me into an entirely new place, this wasn’t the empty desert I drove through before. Now it was taking me through some bush lands in the middle of the pouring rain. There were no main roads or other cars around and it was pouring down hard. My boyfriend and I tried to joke and lighten the mood but we were scared. The roads here were starting to flood and we had absolutely no way to call for help because of course there wasn’t any service. Believe it or not, that isn’t even the worst part of our trip.
Eventually we did make it out of the bush lands but it was still pouring and the roads were continuing to flood. We got rerouted again, forcing us to drive through Tonto National Forest. I was pissed. This added another 5 hours to our drive, we still hadn’t seen another car for over 4 hours, we needed gas, and we were starving. That’s when everything went downhill. We were driving through the forest on an unpaved road, thick tree line on both side and what looked like small tipis made out of tree branches. It looked like someone tried to camouflage them using mud and leaves stuck to the tops. We didn’t think much of it until we saw a human leg tied to a tree. I’m not talking about just a foot or a bone. There was an entire human leg, from thigh to toes, covered in blood and tied to a tree facing the road. I slowed down at first thinking I was just seeing things but my boyfriend just started screaming at me to go, hit the gas and don’t look back.
At this point it’s 6pm, it’s cloudy and it’s just starting to get dark. We kept driving in silence for about 10 min until I asked him what he saw. A human leg. So I wasn’t imagining things. We tried to rationalize it but it was definitely human, not an animal part, and I don’t know of any animals that can tie knots like that. Whoever put that leg there had to have been human. My boyfriend was sure it was some sort of warning and begged me not to stop until we were out of Arizona but we completely were out of gas and still the only ones on the road.
I kept driving for about another 15 minutes before the car shut off. We had a gas can in the back with about 2 gallons left in it. We had no idea how long it would take to get out of the forest but it was all we had. I decided to stop our route on the app and look for a gas station instead but there was still no service. Now we had no idea where we were going cause I couldn’t get anything to load, not even our previous route. Toby decided to get out and grab the gas can while I waited in the drivers seat. It’s still raining and it’s getting darker by the minute so I can barely see him when he goes to open the trunk. All I heard was him yell FUCK. I rushed out side to see our dog Hershey taking off into the woods and Toby chasing him. That idiot had let the dog run right out of the car.
After 5 minutes of waiting for them to come back I started getting worried. I ended up getting the flashlight out of the trunk and going after them leaving the car locked in case someone else came by. The forest floor wasn’t doing a very good job of absorbing the rain so it wasn’t long before my sneakers and socks were drenched. I called out for him and our dog for what felt like forever when I felt a hand clamped on my shoulder. I spun around to see Toby looking incredibly pissed off holding our soaking wet pup by his collar. We walked back to the car listening to the wet ground squelching beneath our feet and shivering. We were so preoccupied trying to dry off and putting the gas in the car we didn’t even notice the people around us. On both sides of the road, hidden behind trees, there were about 20 figures in burgundy colored robes. I tapped Toby’s shoulder, motioning to the tree-line. We both held our breath trying to hear anything other than the rain.
All at once, the hooded figures rushed our car trying to yank the doors open and shaking the car as if they wanted us to flip. I started the car and floored it all while Toby was yelling, Hershey was barking, and the hooded figures screamed at us in some language I’d never heard. And. It. Was. Still. Raining. With no GPS and a quarter tank of gas I went as fast as I could not stopping until we found a small town. We filled the tank and didn’t stop driving till we had made it all the way back home.
I will never drive through Arizona again, I have no idea what the fuck that was or what they wanted. If Toby wasn’t there to see it, I wouldn’t have even believed myself.