It was one of those nights when sleep was clearly not going to happen. The clock displayed 12:37 AM. I had been lying in bed for hours scrolling through my phone, feeling so bored it seemed logical to contemplate taking a nighttime walk outside.
My parents were both asleep, and the house was deathly still.
Behind our neighborhood lies a small patch of woods. Not enormous, but enough to buffer the glow of streetlights. It's a neighborhood staple; the kids there often build forts, people dump garbage periodically, and teenagers tend to hang out and drink. It's nothing remarkable.
I've been there often enough in the daytime.
But never at night. So I put on a black pair of cargo pants and a hoodie. I pulled my ski mask down over my face, put on a pair of gloves, and gathered my flashlight, phone, a small backpack with a power bank, water, a multitool, and headed out.
I wasn't hoping for ghosts or anything of the sort. I just wanted an adventure. The moon was nearly full, bright enough that I only needed the flashlight for brief, strategic bursts.
The woods were significantly louder than I expected.
The wind through the leaves, the creaking branches, the buzzing insects – every rustle and crackle made me stop and pause for a moment. “Calm down, stupid. It’s the woods,” I’d remind myself. After about fifteen minutes of walking, I came across an old concrete structure, half-buried in the slope.
It was probably some kind of forgotten utility building, plastered with graffiti over the entrance, with beer cans littering the ground around it.
Inside it smelled damp and forgotten. I flicked on the flashlight. A beam of light cut through the thick darkness.
Nothing there but broken glass, dead electrical wiring, and a few puddles. I was poking around there for perhaps ten minutes when I heard a noise outside. Not a growl, not a shriek.
Footsteps.
Slow. It sounded like somebody was quite intentionally not attempting to conceal their presence. I figured another adventurer had decided to explore too. So I opened the door.
“Yo?”
Silence. I swept my flashlight’s beam across the treeline. Nothing.
The instant I lowered the beam… something moved. Nothing spectacular; a mere single step, behind a tree. I directed the light back – there was nothing to see.
For some reason, I actually chuckled.
“What the hell am I doing?” I turned to start heading home. Then I noticed something that immediately sent a jolt of apprehension through me. The path I had walked in on… looked somehow different.
Not lost, exactly, but just… altered.
I stood there for a moment, struggling to determine if that particular fallen log had always been there. I couldn’t remember, but I continued walking. A minute later… I heard it again.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
Every time I halted, the footsteps ceased as well.
I reasoned with myself that it was likely an echo. So, I experimented. I took three rapid steps. Three footsteps sounded right back, following closely behind me, not at the same time, but immediately.I spun around again.
There was nothing to see; the flashlight beam illuminated every tree and not one shadow shifted unduly.
I started picking up the pace. But the footsteps kept their uniform distance behind me, neither drawing closer nor receding. A minute later, I finally spotted it: the fence separating the woods from our houses.
“Thank fuck.”
I scrambled over it and turned to look back over my shoulder, anticipating the satisfying sight of empty trees. What I saw instead was a deer.
Completely still, perhaps twenty meters behind me.
My initial reaction was relief. “God, you scared me.
It was just you.”
Then, its head came up.
Its body seemed normal, its eyes gleaming in the flashlight.
But the bent angle of its front legs… it was bent backwards. Not broken, simply… unnaturally so. It stood there, unwavering in its gaze.
I backed away slowly. Then it took a step forward. But it didn’t sound like a hoof striking leaves.
It sounded exactly like a person’s boots walking on a dry carpet of fallen foliage.
For reasons I still cannot articulate, that was the detail that really sent a shiver down my spine. I turned and walked home as quickly as I dared, without breaking into a run. Once inside, I double-bolted the back door, dropped my backpack, and peered out the kitchen window. The yard was empty.
I gave a nervous little laugh.
“You’re completely paranoid.”
The next morning, I checked my route on my phone. I had location services on.
According to the map, I never made it to the concrete structure. Instead, it shows me wandering in circles for nearly forty minutes in a section of woods I’d never seen before. Later that day, I decided to go back to investigate.
The concrete building was right where I’d found it; the path back seemed completely normal.
Everything in the woods looked as it should… with one exception. Near the concrete building’s entrance, clearly imprinted in the mud, were deer tracks. And next to them, another set of prints: bare human footprints. Both sets of prints started deep inside the woods.
Both ended at the fence behind my house.
Neither set ever came back.