Do you believe in the paranormal? That question is important here, as some parts in this story get a tad bit dark and explore a world that a lot of people dismiss as mere superstition. I aim to tell some brief stories and describe some of the things that happened when we were in the woods and when we were out of them. I saw and heard a lot of things I can’t quite understand and I’ve always wanted to put this stuff out there somehow, I figured this may be one of my best chances. Before I can get into it though, I feel like some backstory is due.
Younger Years When I was kid, I had an imaginary friend named Dirk, my parents though this was just a young mind doing what young minds naturally do. I told my parents that Dirk lived in my closet, I treated him like a friend, always bringing him up in decisions | made. My parent didn’t pay this much mind, this is until they decided they should start redoing the siding on the inside of the garage. My dad tore away the siding only to find something that he wouldn’t tell me about until I was around seventeen. In the wood under the siding two names were carved, one of those names was Dirk.
This made my parents nervous about my “imaginary friend”. As I got older I would pick up on more and more things that didn’t seem quite right and We would soon move to the house I live at now, the house next to the woods. The Beginning I remember the first weird thing that happened in those woods. It was one of the first days we lived there, and the sound of a dog whining wailed from the woods. The woods were in full bloom, a lush green canopy loomed over the dense forest. The whining from the woods got louder, and finally my dad decided that it was time to find out what was going on.
He ventured off into the dark green foliage of the woods, fifteen or twenty minutes would go before he finally emerged. He told us that he had found the dog, a small beagle cowering in a small patch of bushes. The whining dog noticed him, and despite its small size, quickly went from timid and scared to oddly aggressive. The dog bared its teeth and began growling intensely, my dad said he thought this was odd and decided it was best just to leave. The whining stopped and we never heard from, or saw the dog again.
I didn’t think much of the incident at the time, as I was focused on making friends with the neighborhood kids. I ended up making friends with Gavin, Spencer, and Cameron, a few of the neighborhood kids who would experience a lot of odd things with me, things much stranger than the beagle. The Crew Gavin and Cameron were a few years younger than me, Gavin was athletic with curly blonde hair and a cavalier attitude, while Cameron was extremely tan with dark brown hair, Cameron was a little less athletic and was an avid gamer like most of us were at the time.
Cameron was only in the neighborhood every other week or so though. Spencer was a year or two older than me, probably ten or eleven at the time, he was extremely athletic, he was taller and had longer dirty blonde hair. These three became some of my best friends, and they were the ones who introduced me to the woods. We would often go to the woods to skip rocks and wallow in the shallow waters of the creek, exploring the miles of woods became common place as we would gather objects to build clubhouses throughout the woods.
Per the older people in our neighborhood we found out the woods had once been a junkyard, so junk to build clubs with was bountiful. We would often travel the woods like tribe of nomadic people, we wanted to leave no stone unturned since it was rumored that the woods contained caves in them somewhere, and we desperately wanted to find these caves. We never did find the caves but our travels exposed us to several key locations that would harbor weird activity in the future. Gather you Bearings
The locations of interest were all unique, we had found a small swamp with a ledge overlooking a step drop off that the creek had formed through flooding, what looked like the foundation of an old house deep in the woods surrounded by densely wooded hills and what appeared to be a deep old well. The well entrance appeared to be cobblestone and was plagued by moss, the hole itself was ten feet across and ten feet long, if you peered into it you could see where large slabs of stone had en nearly fifteen feet down to rest at the bottom.
The slabs of stone acted like makeshift barricades, obscuring our view of the dark passage that stretched beneath the hole. There was also a location where we sometimes went to do some repelling, it was a stone plateau, with archaic stairs carved from rock leading to the top. The last key area was the main area, an area right across the creek from my house, this area faced three field used for farming, they were split by various paths, and from this point you could get almost anywhere in the woods. These places would be important, as strange occurrences would either happen at these locations, or the areas right around them.
A Series Of Unfortunate Events For a while things in the woods seemed normal, we all had fun and things seemed calm. Going into the woods to hangout was something that we all looked forward to, and the scenery in the woods seemed so much brighter. I remember how golden rays of sunshine pierced the forest canopy, flooding the forest floor with warm light. This didn’t last, Weird things started happening to people in the group, Gavin and Spencer ran into a hunter in the woods. They said the man was acting weird, and told them he wasn’t going to hurt them, they decided that running was their best option.
The hunter apparently shot at them and chased them for several minutes. Gavin and Spencer also encountered two packs of coyotes that chased them in broad avlight on two separate occasions. It wasn’t common for coyotes to bother us at day, we could often hear their howling at night, but they had never been that brazen during the day. another occasion, I was with Gavin and my younger brother Blake, we were in a more remote part of the woods when I heard Gavin yell “Dogs! “. A Large German shepherd and a what appeared to be the world’s most muscular Rottweiler tore through the woods towards us.
We ran behind some piles of logs, which were almost four and a half feet tall, only to see the dogs vault them and continue their charge. We managed to escape, oddly it’s because when the dogs hit a certain spot they just stopped. I don’t remember seeing any collars to indicate an invisible electric fence, maybe it was a boundary they had been trained to adhere by, we never did find out. These kinds of events made us weary of the woods, and heightened our sense to sound, movement, and even tracks in the woods.
