A“I had been on the phone with my then boyfriend and he said something that made me think he was a chauvinistic, not nice person, and I remember telling him that if he knew anything about me, he knew exactly where I was gonna go. And I hung up the phone and got in my car. I drove to the park. The sun was kind of down below the tree line but it wasn’t dark yet, and I pulled into the parking lot. I thought it was weird that there were two cars pulled side by side and talking to each other. When I got out, the guy in the was truck just staring at me in a horrible way. You when someone just looks at you like they’re looking through you as if you don’t exist. Well, this is weird, it’s late and no one’s ever here. And then I thought whatever, they’re leaving. I don’t care, I have my own problems.”
“I only took my keys with me because I didn’t want a big purse banging around. I headed across the field, which you have to cross through to get to the woods because there’s no trail… I was taking my time and calming down… And then I started realizing it got really quiet. I didn’t hear the birds and the squirrels anymore, I just heard something big moving through the woods. I was thinking in my head maybe it’s a dog. And then I heard the voices. The first voice is a male’s voice and he said ‘I know I saw her go in this way, she couldn’t have gotten that far.’ Then the second voice comes, and it’s quieter, and it says, ‘Shh, she’ll hear you.'”
“Okay, so there are two men in the woods and they’re looking for something, obviously. And I kept thinking it must there dog, they must have lost their dog. And then I thought they wouldn’t try to sneak up on it… I stood their frozen because that’s the kind of person I am… I could hear them getting closer to me. And I don’t know how long I stood there waiting for them to get to me, but I was completely frozen. And then I heard the other voice. It was distorted like if you heard someone talking through a closed door or talking under water. You could understand what they were saying but the voice wasn’t right. It wasn’t in my head because it had a volume and a pitch that changed that my thoughts definitely don’t do. I could almost feel where it was coming from… It was behind me and a little above like it was taller than me. It just said, ‘go to the river now.’ I don’t know if I was more scared of the fact that there’s some disembodied voice or a person talking to me or there are two men in the woods.
“I listened to the voice because I didn’t really have other options. I took off towards the river. I was making a ton of noise because I was just going as fast as I could and the voice came back and said, ‘no, quietly.’ I got to the river and jumped down the embankment. I squished myself against it, squeezing down into the smallest, tightest ball I could. The voice the kept telling me to stay. And I just sat there, hoping whoever was in the moods was going to leave and that I wasn’t having some kind of breakdown. And I kept hearing them moving through the woods and I could tell they had split off… As I sat there, the voice just kept telling me to stay and quiet, over and over again, like it was trying to comfort me.
“I could hear what sounded like someone was right above me and If I leaned out, they could see me. But I had to look, I just tilted my head up a tiny bit and I could see the tips of these construction boots hanging over the edge. And I could see hanging next to them, this dirty old rope. Just swinging next to them swinging… I don’t think I even thought anything, I was so scared. I just tried to not breathe. It felt like hours, but I know it couldn’t have been that long. The voice even was completely silent. There was nothing but me hearing this man breathing. He started to walk away at some point. And the voice kept telling me to wait. So I waited. And finally, the voice said, ‘go, now to the field. Go now.’
“It was screaming at me so loud. So I ran through the woods and just got out to the field, far, far, from the cars and street. It was getting dark and I could see the parking lot but it was so far away. I’m running and I start hearing footsteps running, and first, they’re farther away but they’re so much faster than I am, barrelling after me… and there was nothing… I fully expected to see at least one of the men there but it was silent. The only thing I could think was that the footsteps must have belonged to the voice. And I hear it again screaming at the top of its lungs that I need to run right now. And the footsteps come back and they’re in pace with me, running next to me through the field. I had a thousand crazy thoughts because none of this made any sense. Finally, I get to my car… and I see both the cars were parked in different places with nobody in them. I refused to look behind me. If there hadn’t been a voice, I would problem be a missing person’s case… It got me out of there.”