After 18 years of living in this neighborhood, I have yet to see or hear anyone talk about an incident related to this.
So… I’m your average kid who likes to chill out after school or college as we adolescents may call it. I love to just go for long walks around the area and like only come back home to eat or sleep or the usual studying. Otherwise, basically, I dwell outdoors. As I live alone since my family is in another state in another estate owned by us. But for me ..well I decided to stay put and focus on my college and other affairs at my current residence which was our first home, so yeah there is a lot of nostalgia involved and an abundance of “me time ” too.
Usually, I would just go for regular jogs or walks basically everywhere around my neighborhood, thus I know it like the back my hand. The neighborhood is rather preppy, and it’s filled a few rows of houses, mostly vacant apart from one or two maybe. It’s quite far from town but we do have a mini town nearby where my college is located , so yeah the chances of starving to death is basically non-existent. Then again it does kind of gets quiet at times.
Well, to be frank, it’s quiet all the time. People here basically mind their own business and are busy in their so-called busy lives too. Don’t mean to show but the houses here are quite classy so you know the inhabitants are well to do. Anyway, on the outskirts of my neighborhood, there is a river and path to a small forest. Small because I know little about it and I never explored the full length of it ever. Although passing through the regular route is not something new to me as I been doing it a lot for the past few years. The path isn’t the smoothest but it certainly is good enough for you to lead it in or out.
From all my years I would walk or jog in for about 2 kilometers or so until a small creek, and then I would turn around and walk back. You could say that the creek was my border or marker but I never needed to go any further, it was nothing but trees and more trees. I use to venture in often because it was cooling and during later hours, you would a get a chilling forest fog. But that never bothered me before and neither did I see many people go in or go out besides some kids or some men with their fishing lines. It was about a week ago after college, I had extra activities so I had to leave later than usual.
Well, we all know by now that my fetish for walks has preceded me. So at about 6.30 in the evening, I decided to go in as usual but rarely and I mean rarely at this hour. I was walking as I’d always, nothing out of the ordinary except for a few rodents, birds and squirrels. Not to mention the creeping hooting of owls. Yup, not such a good idea buddy, oh well as I reached the creek. For the first time ever, I was shocked until my mouth was where my chin used to be. Just beside the creek there was an oak tree, and below I saw a girl in white, some-what like a robe but it was white as in as white as they can get.
She had long straight black hair. I could not determine her ethnicity because I was about 50 feet or so away from her. She was literally sitting there in a posture most of us would sit on the floor just staring at the forest. Well technically could only see a small bit of her face. At first, I thought maybe she’s lost or maybe she came to you know to cool off. Or maybe….well I didn’t put too much thought on that one. After a careful diagnosis of the situation which barely took 2 minutes, I decided to approach possibly initiate a conversation or sort of help out as it was getting darker by the minute. And a forest ain’t no place for dinner.
As I walked to her I felt a chill down my spine, I sort of got the Goosebumps. Every hair in my body had risen. To be honest I was thinking…” what am I doing?. Then I thought well let’s get it over with. When I was about 2 feet away from her, not behind her. I called her.. “excuse me miss, it’s getting late, You should go home”.
Not a single response… She didn’t even move a muscle, just kept staring at that direction. I said again ..” look, girl, I’m not exactly sure what you went through or what you might be doing here, but don’t you think it’s a little late”?.
Again not a movement from anywhere. The weird thing was, although she was there, I could not sense any life from her. As if she was virtually not there. Could even see a moment at all not even the back movement of a person breathing. She just sat there like a statue. I was getting late so I decided let’s face her and tell her this on her face. The moment I stood in front of her,my worst nightmare came true. Her eyes were like transparent as if she had spooky contacts on. Her face was covered with bloody scars like slashes. Her lips were torn. Basically, that whole figure told stories of death. And my heart skipped a beat. The worst was still to come.
In a split second her eyes, I may never forget those eyes, diverted their attention towards me and started staring at me… For a few seconds, I was terrified and legs were frozen. Suddenly I heard a sound. An owl. The hoot of the owl got me back to my senses and I could feel my legs. I darted towards the other direction and sprinted as fast as I could without looking back. After about 2 minutes, I was out of the place.
And believe me, It’s hard to explain how relieved and lucky I am with who knows what I saw. But I’m just glad I managed to make it out in on piece. It’s been over a week since that happened. In these days, I never went back there and I would always like to cross the way into the forest as quickly as I can. Because until now, I’m still not aware of whatever that was lurking in there. I didn’t tell anyone about this. Just kept it to myself because people here and the people I know might not believe and would likely take it as a joke. But it was anything but funny…
–END–
