I have always been in love with conspiracy theories back when I was young. There was something extremely intriguing about the mysterious nature of them. The mere uncertainty of whether spaceships or cryptids were real or not aroused a specific kind of curiosity in me. It made me want to go out there and find out for myself. It made me wonder whether those myths and legends were strictly fictional or whether there was in fact some truth to them.
Back when I was a little kid I used to believe everything I saw, and since my parents decided to leave me all the freedom I wanted to view anything across the web, I was able to delve into each possibly imaginable mystery. From various creepypastas to countless internet mysteries, I was engaged in everything.
As I started to grow up I realized that none of the so-called “mysteries” were real, at least not how I had imagined them. Hence, I ceased to be naive and left behind my guilty pleasure of researching unsolved cases that were characterized by something that was yet to be deciphered, something utterly unknown. I decided to invest my time in sports instead and when I entered high-school, I was able to make the varsity team.
Time passed and I eventually reached my junior year. School was not particularly pleasant, especially being the only black guy surrounded by a bunch of Kentucky hillbillies, but I did what I could and managed to befriend some people. In fact, I would go as far as to call myself back then popular, since I had a very easy time with girls, a fact that was supported by my presence in my school’s athletic community. As a consequence, most of the people I sat at lunch with were people from my basketball team.
One particular autumn day, sometime around late September or early October, I was enjoying the exquisite American cafeteria cuisine. The weather was crisp and the sun was still shining around the clock, but the leaves had started to fall to the ground, creating an enormous carpet of orange and yellow leaves that I loved to gaze at. While slurping down my watery chocolate milk, I heard my friends enter the cafeteria.
“You fucked up, David, your parents are gon’ whoop your ass like Abel’s great-grandparents got their asses whooped back two hundred years ago.”, said John, who had built a reputation for never holding anything back whatsoever, regardless of the subject matter, as the rest of the guys sat down at my lunch table. Racist jokes were common, and I myself happened to find them funny, so I never objected and even laughed at them too.
“Man, give me a break. A C- isn’t even that bad. I wouldn’t be talking trash if I were you and through some heavenly sent wonder got “sick” right the day of the exam.”, reproached Marcus. He was a very laid back guy, and someone who I felt genuinely liked me as a friend. Everytime we hung out, I knew he acted a certain way towards me because that was naturally his way of being, whereas I could tell that the others were stuck into prejudice from time to time.
“Did Mrs Croft display the results?”, I inquired. “As always, you got a B- if I’m not mistaken.”, reported Marcus. I was content with the feedback, because I never really tried hard academically, to be frank. As long as I passed, I didn’t care about getting exceptional grades or moving on to study at a prestigious college. This was mostly due to me relying on sports to get me a scholarship. I didn’t really care which one, as long as I could play basketball and get my degree.
A few minutes into our deeply philosophical debates regarding the butts of the girls in our grade, Marcus mentions something Mrs Croft had pointed out earlier in the day, which I omitted as I was clearly too concerned with playing web games on my Chromebook.
“We’re going to Indianapolis next week, it’s supposed to be some school expedition for educational purposes or some shit of that sort I guess.”
“What the fuck are we going to learn from driving across corn fields and barns for a couple of days?”, asked John in his typically unapologetic manner.
“You act as if Kentucky is some place covered by skyscrapers and highways. To me it’s just a couple of days without school, and I’d take no school over school every single day in the calendar.”, said Marcus.
Suddenly, I felt as if something struck me. “Indiana?”, I thought. Immediately, I remembered hearing about something in the news a few days ago.
“I heard there’s some sketchy stuff going on over there.”, I pointed out, “I saw it on the TV earlier this week. Three die in human sacrifice, police suspect a murderous group to be on the run.”
The whole lunch table broke out in laughter. “Seems to me like buddy has mistaken Indiana for India or something. I don’t know what news you watched, but the most dangerous thing you’ll find in Indiana are the farmers that’ll threaten you with a gauge if you lay a foot on their property and maybe a few cows if you’re lucky enough to find any.”, John argued as he was openly ridiculing me.
Fast forward a few days and I’m waiting with my classmates in the school parking lot for the school bus to come. Our teacher is counting us, making sure everyone is present. To this day, I still don’t know who thought it would be a good idea to put 70 sweaty teenagers together in a bus without air conditioning. Add to this that the bus was nearly in shambles, as our school district couldn’t afford a new one, and the fact that it was shaking worse than a southerner that goes up to New York for the first time and you end up with a recipe for disaster, not to mention that the drive was about four hours long.
We all give our horrendous attempts at what I will call freestyle rap in the back of the bus and listen to music on the speakers. Some of the guys try to get something going with the girls but all we can do is hold back our laughter as we watch them fail horribly. Everything that could happen on that bus, would happen. We were just trying to keep ourselves entertained.
Right upon exiting Louisville, maybe 20-30 miles into Indiana territory, my sleep gets disrupted by a brusque brake and I can feel my stomach moving up my thorax from the shock my body absorbed upon being propulsed in the air.
“What the hell happened?” I asked, my eyes blinded by the afternoon sun.
“Fucking redneck roads, that’s what happened.”, I hear someone from the left side mutter.
The bus driver pulls up to the right, gets out of the bus and takes a quick look at it. I experienced that uncomfortable feeling when you know some bad news is about to be announced but everyone in the room is still possessed by a visible glimmer of hope.
“We popped a tire. We’ll have to call a tow truck.”, pointed out the driver who, despite being a woman, looked like a 250lbs NFL linebacker.
The dissatisfaction was written all over the students’ faces but there was really nothing we could do about it at that time but wait.
We fool around, pass the time, but no tow truck shows up. The sun begins to set and everyone is obviously distressed. Luckily for us, there was a motel a couple hundred yards off the spot we stopped at on the highway. The school district financed the whole trip and to be honest it was just fair of them to at least give us a place to sleep after making us ride over here in that abomination of a bus that was clearly beyond obsolete.
After walking for around five minutes we arrived at the motel. The teacher makes the basic rules clear: no boys in the girls’ rooms and vice versa, no alcohol or cigarettes, no smoking pot. We assumed we would have to get squished in those rooms, since we were so many, but it turned out that there were just enough rooms to house four people per free space. I group up with John and Marcus and we take in another guy, Donnie. I only knew him because we had a few classes together, but besides that we did not really interact a lot. He also turned out to be very temperamental and would get angry very easily, so I tried to avoid him as much as I could.
In any case, John and Donnie decide to go down to the gas station to convince someone there to get beers for them. In the meantime I’m stuck in the room with Marcus. It was not a particularly eventful evening, so I decided to turn on the TV. No signal. For some reason that made me feel uneasy. I go out on the balcony and I’m immediately hit by a revolting smell of burnt metal. I could not tell which type of metal, perhaps copper or iron, but what I could tell was that it was making me dizzy. There were some guys in the room next to ours that shared a balcony with us, but they did not seem concerned even to the slightest. Why was I the only one smelling it?
I go back inside and feel increasingly more stressed for some reason I could not make out. I tried to convince myself that I simply had a long day, but the lie was in vain since I had not even an ounce of tiredness in me. I go out on the balcony again and stir up a conversation with our neighbors. The smell seemed to have gone, or at the very least faded a little. By then it was already dark and all you could see was a thin, yellowish line stretching out across the horizon.
John and Donnie had returned by the time I went back into our room. As I suspected, their attempt was a big failure. Being unsuccessful might have been the catalyst for them coming up with an alternative idea for an adventure.
“When it gets pitch black, we sneak out.”, proposes Donnie.
“Are you out of your fucking mind? I thought you didn’t manage to buy those beers, but by the look of it you gulped them all down right away.”, rebuked Marcus.
I understood him. Our teacher was not the type of person you would like to get into trouble with. She was perhaps the most vengeful person I knew and the plain thought of her calling our parents made me agree with him even more.
“I didn’t know you turned into a pussy right after we crossed the border to Indiana. Must be the air of the Midwest or something.”, John revolted.
“It’s simple. We get some of the guys from the other rooms together and we wait until midnight, then we sneak out of the backdoor in the janitor’s room.”
When we arrived we had seen the janitor leave through a door at the back of the parking lot, so we figured that since there is a back door that leads out, then there must be a door on the inside that leads inside the janitor’s room. Indeed as we entered, I was able to make out a gray door that was right at the other end of the hallway beneath our room, right next to the shabby elevator. If we hurried, no one would notice.
After about half an hour of arguing, considering the fact that we were bored to hell after spending that afternoon in the motel, we agreed to sneak out into the woods. I knew it was a stupid plan and I knew we did not have the vaguest idea of what we were going to do in the woods, but there was something about the whole thing that got me invested. Perhaps the nostalgia of my early years of internet research on humanoid entities living in the forest got the best of me. I was determined to go out there, and most importantly I was ready to get scared.
A few cans of Dr Pepper later, we slowly crawled to the room next door, since the creaky floor was too noisy for us to be walking on it. After knocking for about five minutes and trying to convince the others that we were not Mrs Croft, they let us in. John explains our plan to them and they all seem just as aroused by the idea as the rest of us, besides Marcus, who let himself be persuaded just so he did not have to spend the night alone listening to the radio.
At this point we were about nine guys. We open the door carefully and again make our way to the elevator emulating a herd of sheep, something not particularly uncommon to the town of nowhere we were stationed at. About ten yards away from the elevator, I hear a female voice inquire: “What the hell are you doing here this late?”
My heart sank for a moment. I thought of how dumb we were for listening to Donnie’s idiotic plan. I turn around and, hit by a feeling of relief, I see Becky, a girl in my math class, standing there and staring at us. We explain our situation to her and she wants to come with us, despite still wearing her pajamas.
After running over a couple of buckets in the janitor’s storage, we found the backup key and we took it with us so we could enter when we were going to return. A putrid fragrance hit my nostrils as we exited the building. It was not the same as before, but a rather moldy, smokey one.
Despite my instincts pleading me to stay at the motel, I keep going. We find an entrance to the woods that one of the guys illuminates with a flashlight. Our trip was a lot less creepy than I had imagined, since we were so many and we had a bright source of light. It felt more like a relaxing evening walk.
Everyone else could agree with that, so we decided to go off the narrow path and are now walking through every kind of bush and tree imaginable. Subsequently we find a log that we all sit on, as if collectively telling each other that we should go back. We were maybe half an hour deep into the woods and our situation started to feel like a Grimm’s fairy tale. But as we were all quiet, I noticed some mumbling coming out of the side of the woods left to me. It got increasingly louder to the point where everyone else could hear it.
“It’s probably just an animal, let’s get out of here.” implored Becky, who was visibly tired and scared. The guys convinced her to go and check it out, maybe take a picture and leave. We move towards where the sound originally came from. At some point I could see something that seemed to look like a campfire.
“Turn off the flashlight, you bum!” whispered one of the other guys. Then we approach and I can see a big wooden structure that was surrounded by a ring of fire, which was probably made with gasoline or alcohol. “We might just have found the gingerbread house.”, I thought. We stay ducked behind some leaves and roots of some bigger trees. Meanwhile Becky was upset:
“I told you we should’ve just gone back”.
“Shut up and stop whining like a little kid!”, answered John.
Right then we see a group of people holding hands and forming a big circle. They were wearing some garments that resembled puritan clothing, but a lot more modest and very awkwardly put together. Some of the women had bruised up faces. What I found interesting was the way they were arranged in that circle. There were significantly more women than men and the men who were part of the circle had some women match their clothes in some way or another. Some had matching scarves, others had the color of their pants matched with the color of the womens’ dresses. Besides a few barrels that were positioned right next to the ring of fire, there was no other visible object that was observable. One detail I remember is the symbol engraved on the wooden statue. It was a peasant cutting open his hand and feeding the blood to a snake.
The statue did not take any specific form. It was not a person, it was not an animal. It seemed much more like the silhouette of a primate that got its tail and ears cut off and had all of its facial and bodily features removed.
“What branch of the KKK is this?”
“I don’t know, but whatever they want from us, they can take Abel and let us go.”, answered John, trying to prove his comedic aptitudes when we were obviously witnessing some sort of ritual.
“It’s not the time for your funny jokes, fuckface. Let’s roll out of here.”, replied Marcus.
The people around the statue began passing a needle that everyone had to pierce the tips of their fingers with. Then they would press them on the fingertips of the person next to them until the circle was closed.
“You always think you’re better than me because you were born a few inches taller and you get more playing time during the game. Now you think you can boss me around? I’ll show you and those Amish bastards what it means to make your own rules.”, said John as he quickly got up and revealed himself to the people in the circle. Marcus tried to grab his foot but it was already too late.
“Working hard but hardly working, huh?”, interrogated John as he was approaching the people with his arms wide open and a gross smile printed on his lips.
The men said something in a language I couldn’t make out. I thought it was German, but it sounded too scratchy, even for German standards. One of them walks towards the barrel. He digs his hand into it and rapidly grabs a loaded shotgun. The expression on John’s face, at least as far as I could recognize it from the light of the fire that lightly shone on it, went from pride to anguish. “I come in peace, I swear. Look, look, look, we can talk! I have something for y-”
A loud, banging explosion interrupted what was going to be John’s last words. The mush that once was his brain was now splattered all throughout the area 6 feet behind him, making a sound that was similar to raindrops hitting the leaves and grass on the floor. Consequently, the lifeless body fell to the ground, from where it was picked up by one of the men and carried inside the circle.
“Everybody stay down, don’t make a fucking sound!”, I whispered while doing my best to cover Becky’s mouth with my hand. She was crying uncontrollably and nearly suffocating. Her red, steamy face and the teardrops falling down her cheeks like a river wet my hand and made it slippery.
I looked over and saw the people bring out some kind of instrument from inside the barrel. It looked like a cork opener, but bigger, with sharper edges. A man with a long, brown beard grabbed John’s carcass and started to screw the device right into his chest. I could hear the bones of his ribs crack like sticks. Another man brought an additional tool, something that looked like a rusty, giant forceps. He inserted it into the freshly crafted cavity and started to spread his ribcage in two. The sound reminded me of the sound a watermelon makes when you cut it open partially and split the rest of the opening apart with your hands, as I was listening in agony. The men, and now also women, started digging into his body, before eventually setting it on fire. Everyone wanted to just run away, but we couldn’t move until they were gone because we knew they had a gun and could do the same to us that they did to John without too much effort. After what felt like a few hours later, and was in reality a few minutes, the people set their statue on fire as well and took their barrels.
As soon as we knew we were free to go, we sprinted away from the site. I do not know where we ran or how we did not fall flat on our faces from being in the woods at 2am in the night, but eventually we reached some outskirts and tried to find the closest police station. My phone has a signal again so I look it up and it is just 1000 feet away from us.
We try to explain the situation to the officers and it turns out the teacher already called in because she noticed we were missing. We were all traumatized. The cops went on a search the following day and indeed found the site we had reported seeing. They had found some of John’s cremated remains as well. I could simply not believe that what just happened was real. I thought I was still at the back of the bus, deep in my slumber as we got towed away to the nearest repair shop where our bus could be fixed.
The expedition did obviously not take place any further, but one thing is certain; I will never forget that night. I am not afraid of the unknown, because I am not afraid to die. I don’t blame our curious young nature at that time, but I blame John’s quick temper and pride that made him prove himself in front of all of us.
After the incident, I did not speak much to any of the guys that were with me that night. Marcus left the basketball team and eventually transferred schools. He holds himself accountable for John’s death to this day.
The next time you try to show someone how great and fabulous you are, perhaps think twice. There is no need to prove to anyone else what they already know, namely that you are insecure about yourself.