I have a vacation home in the forest of southern Norway. I regularly visit the home on weekends and holidays. The first strange occurrence I can recall happened 2 years ago, in February 2022. The sun sets early in the winter here so I arrived at the cabin shortly after sunset. I equipped my headlamp and started unpacking the car. The cabin is situated in a clearing around 50 meters from the parking lot. While I focused on carrying the items from the car it took me a second to realize that the forest had suddenly gone silent. The usual rustle of leaves and distant bird calls disappeared, leaving a void that felt unnerving. The trees were still moving in the wind, but they no longer produced any sound. I stood in the clearing and listened to the silence. I remember feeling exposed and I looked around, scanning the treeline with my headlamp. A few moments later the sounds of nature returned as if nothing had happened. This was a minor experience, but one that still lingers on my mind, it was the first time anything like this has happened to me. I’ve read a lot of stories on Reddit over the years and this sudden silence seems to be a rather common occurrence. However, experiencing it first hand is just something else entirely.
The next experience happened just two weeks later. I woke up in the middle of the night to a weird noise coming from outside. I peeked through the blinds in the bedroom and realized where the sound had come from. There is a small outdoor playhouse situated near the edge of the property close to the tree line. It has been repurposed into a shed to store gardening tools. The sound had come from the wooden door to the shed being slammed shut, and the recoil from the impact had left the door in a halfway open position. In retrospect, going outside to investigate wasn’t exactly the brightest idea, but I got dressed, grabbed a flashlight, and made my way outside. As I reached the shed, I discovered that the padlock had been unlocked and was laying on the ground. A few centimeters of snow revealed a set of footprints that went parallel to the tree line before leading into the woods. A sense of unease washed over me as I realized I wasn’t alone. I hurriedly closed the door to the shed and ran back to my cabin. Before entering, I glanced towards the tree line, feeling an intense dread, as if something was watching me from the darkness. I stayed up until morning and in the comfort of the sunlight I went outside to investigate the footprints again. It turned out that the footprints circled the whole property along the tree line including on the path leading to the car parking. The footprints looked bipedal, but had around twice the distance between each imprint as my own.
November 2022. I was in bed and listening to a podcast when I heard what sounded like footsteps on the roof. They moved slowly from one end of the house towards my bedroom and stopped directly above me. There was a sudden silence, and I tried to rationalize what I had heard. It’s not unusual for squirrels to wander on the roof, but whatever this was sounded a lot heavier. The silence continued for a few more minutes, which turned into an hour and I eventually just fell asleep. The next day, I found deep scratch marks on the door leading to the attic.
Out of all the inexplicable occurrences I’ve encountered, this one remains the most unsettling. In the summer of 2023, my girlfriend and I decided to stay at the cabin over the weekend. I was in the living room watching TV while my girlfriend had left to go to the grocery store. There is a backdoor in the kitchen, and the kitchen is not visible from the living room. Suddenly, I heard my girlfriend call out from the kitchen that she needed help carrying the groceries from the car. Assuming she had returned early, I walked out the front door and made my way down the path to the parking lot. Halfway there, I noticed that the car was absent. I stood there motionless for a second and felt dizzy, wondering if I had imagined her voice. I had the choice between going back to the cabin to investigate or trying to make my way to the main road, which is a 20-minute walk on a gravel road through the forest. Again, in hindsight, maybe it was a stupid decision to go back to the cabin, but I walked back to the front door and peeked inside. I listened for a few seconds, but I couldn’t hear anything. That’s when I noticed that the forest was completely silent as well, like nature was holding its breath. I combed through each room, searching for any indication of an intruder, but to my relief, nothing seemed out of the ordinary except for the back door being unlocked.
I don’t know what has been causing these unexplainable occurrences over the last couple of years. The cabin has been in my family for a few decades, and as far as I know we have never had anything weird happen before now. I’ll be going there next week, and I’ll be happy to provide photos of the place, and I do have a few more stories if anyone is interested. The positive thing that has come of all of this is that I never forget to lock my doors.