Don't Play In The Woods

My story takes place in a small town in central Arkansas. During the summer of 2012, I was hanging out with a couple of my friends in town. The day was very uneventful and boring, and my friends and I don't handle boring very well. We decided to hop in my truck and go for a drive and see if we could find a party or something going on that evening. It was about four o' clock in the afternoon when we decided to drive around.

We drove around town for the better part of an hour and found absolutely nothing to do, so we thought it would be a good idea to start checking out the surrounding towns in the county. The closest town was Vilonia (a small town mainly inhabited by hunters and farmers) so we went there first.

Once we got there, I immediately drove toward the outskirts where it was more likely to find a social gathering of some sort. After a little more driving around, we decided to give it a rest and call it a day.

On the way back, though, one of my companions told me to stop the vehicle because he thought he'd seen something of interest. Wanting more than anything to have something entertaining to do, I complied. I stopped, turned around, and drove slowly until my friend pointed out what he had seen. I pulled off to the shoulder and the three of us exited the vehicle to see a narrow, almost unnoticeable foot trail no wider than two and a half feet wide. I looked at my friends and they looked back at me with intrigue and curiosity in their eyes. We talked about it for a few minutes, debating whether or not the trail was private property. In the end we decided to see where the trail led anyway.

It was around six or seven in the afternoon by the time we reached the end of the trail and at the end, in a clearing, sat an old, structurally unsound looking cabin. I got a weird vibe from the place as soon as I saw it. My friends, on the other hand, were all about going inside to look around. I objected to doing that immediately by saying, "What if somebody lives here?" but to my dismay, both of my friends pointed out that there was no door. It was fallen on the ground in front of the cabin as if it had been removed and left to the elements.

Once inside, all I could smell was dirt and mold and other earthy smells. We also discovered that the cabin was bigger than what it looked like on the outside. There were four rooms: a front room, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a bedroom. Also, it wasn't empty. The whole cabin had furniture and personal effects. If everything hadn't been covered in dirt, dust, and other things, you would think that somebody did, in fact, live there. Given this, we each decided to check out a different room. Darren (the one who noticed the trail) took the front room, Zack took the kitchen, and I took the bedroom. The bedroom, like the rest of the cabin, wasn't at all outstanding. In fact, it was very quaint, as one would expect from a cabin.

I got to looking around the room, picking things up and examining them. I looked around for maybe five minutes when I noticed a change in the air. Suddenly the air in the room felt thick and heavy, and I found it harder to breathe. At first I thought I was getting sick or something, but then I felt it. Someone was behind me. Right over my shoulder. I could feel hot breath running down the back of my neck, and I could hear breathing. I turned around but no one was there. But I could still feel that eerie, unsettling pressure. No sooner than I had turned around I was joined by Zack and Darren who asked me if I had felt something like a heavy weight on my shoulders. I told them I had. I was about to tell them about whatever it was that had been standing behind me when, what was probably the most terrifying thing in my life happened to me. The pressure returned and I felt my feet leave the ground. The next thing I knew, I was flying through the air and crashing through a mostly intact window. The combined impact of the window and hitting the ground knocked the wind out of me. I was conscious for a few more seconds, then I blacked out.

I wish to this day that I could blame what happened on my friends. But how can I? How can I blame someone for throwing me out a window when neither one of them were standing within arm's reach of me? I have no way of explaining this phenomenon other than that it had to be an angry spirit of some kind. Maybe it didn't like me going through that bedroom, or maybe it didn't want any of us in the cabin. I don't know.

But I did go back to where Darren found the trail a few weeks later. Against my better judgement, I started down the trail to the cabin, but when I got there (and this is the part that a lot of you probably aren't going to believe), the cabin wasn't there. It was as if the cabin never existed. There was no evidence that anything had ever been there. And I'm positive that it wasn't a vivid dream or anything like that, because my friends remember it. I haven't had any paranormal or supernatural encounters since, and I hope I never do.