Hello to Mr Hanks and company,
I wished to relate something to you
that happened to me and a friend a while ago. First I am 32 years old
and I currently live in Pennsylvania but I am originally from Ohio. I am
often skeptical of some out there claims but after listening to Gralien
Report, Mysterious Universe, Jim Harold, Grimmercia, and Expanded
Perspectives I had to open my mind back up a little bit about
preternatural things like spirits, ghosts, maybe other things, etc etc.
So onto my account – back in
September of 2008 my best friend Ciera (pronounced Sierra) and I went to
a park named Hocking Hills in Ohio for a day retreat from our busy
lives. We had decided on this at random when we first got together early
in the morning just after sunrise; it was a nice warm late summer day
and we’d just got the wild notion to go for a drive to Hocking Hills
since the area is well known for its several walking trails, a cave or
two, and several waterfalls and running water / creek areas. The day was
very warm maybe roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit / 21 degrees Celsius so
we had worn shorts and short sleeved T-shirts. The park was full of
people and there were walking families, couples, and a lot more all over
the place
We started down a trail we had taken
many times before, one that would force us to cross a paved road near
it’s end in order to continue, and played with our mobile phones. I
remember it was roughly around 12:00 pm EST at the time and we kept
walking forwards around a small hill and up the steeper part of the
trail which was near the road. As we walked we were passed by a group of
backpackers before we reached the road and one of the people turned
around to warn us to be aware of a wash out up ahead if we were going to
take the trail into the woods across the road, they recommended we
follow the one next to the fire tower instead as it by-passed a small
clump of downed brush.
The guy pointed to a small branch off
the main trail to our left and told us good luck or something like
that, we walked up the little trail and I remember Ciera stating the
path we were on wasn’t showing on her park-map application on her phone.
I recall telling her it was most likely new or something done for the
wash out. That was about the end of our conversation and we moved on. We
crossed under where the power lines were strung up into another part of
the woods and ended up near the road.
As we crossed it to the tower trail
just across from where we stood, I noticed there was caution tape all
over the fire tower, there was a pungent smell in the air which we could
not identify, the windows on top of the tower appeared to be taped up,
grimy, and there were flies all over the area. We walked past it,
commenting how odd it was, and continued down the trail we had been
recommend to take, but it was one neither of us had noticed before on a
previous walk to the area. This trail took us past the fire tower and
then cut into the woodlands; as we walked into the forest maybe a couple
hundred feet or so we took notice that no one seemed to be around and
in fact not only did we feel isolated from others but we felt very
chilled without explanation. Ciera pointed it out verbally while I was
thinking it, but we just continued walking. Eventually the air started
to get noticeably chillier and damper. This did not seem unusual at
first but as we continued to walk the air seemed to go from warm to what
felt like the mid-50’s Fahrenheit / 10’s Celsius and we started to
shiver.
It was also getting darker as we
continued forward; at first I thought it was just due to the green
leaves on the trees and maybe a passing cloud over head but the darkness
really did not improve as one expected. As we walked we looked around
and there were nothing but trees on all sides, there should have been a
forest edge somewhere as the area wasn’t really that big but aside from
some hills and tall pine trees there wasn’t a real ‘ending’ to the
woods. We expected to see the edge near the road.
My friend took out her phone to use
her GPS because she instinctively felt lost but her battery was nearly
gone, I took mine out of my back pocket and it was also near dead. The
clock on it showed “EE:EE” for the time (meaning it couldn’t update as
it was an older style slide-phone with keyboard and camera that, when
set to auto-adjust, would contact the mobile phone network every 15 min
for time updates).
It was only then as the light grew
dimmer that I noticed the area seemed a so silent. Our footsteps, the
leaves we stepped on, grass, twigs, and our breathing just echoed but
there were no animal noises. Ciera got spooked and I did too, she
mentioned it was very out of the ordinary and I agreed but I couldn’t
shake this sense of foreboding that something was amiss. I tried to
rationalize it but I really, honestly, couldn’t figure any of it out at
all.
We just pressed onwards and after
going down a small hill and back up it seemed to have gotten a lot
darker, like just near sunset dark. My friend grabbed my arm and started
freaking out about how weird it got – then the air seemed to have gone
still and we had a feeling of something wrong. She dragged me as she
took off running forward looking for an exit, for some odd reason we
never thought to turn around at all and just got back the way we came.
It never seemed to occur to us as we ran but the spookiness continued as
we could hear our steps echo off the area as things just felt like they
grew more gloomy feeling.
Then ahead of us down another small
dip in the trail we could see two large honeysuckle bushes on either
side of the trail like a gate. We made a mad dash for these bushes and
just as we pushed through the plants something odd happened – we were
over whelmed by a change in our surroundings as light, sound, and warmth
returned all at once. It was like stepping outside of a cold, empty,
and dark building to a warm busy street. We stood at the edge of a place
known as Ash Cave, which has a large water fall not too far away with a
u-shaped cliff. I turned around to look back from where we emerged and
while the bushes were the same the area was so different, brighter, not
silent for sure because there were hikers near the falls, and warmer. In
fact our skin was cold to touch which just reinforced the strangeness.
We took a moment to rest from that little run.
Logic attempted to set in and we
decided the trail we came up must have just appeared creepy because
there may have been clouds over head or a storm blew by but when we went
back between the bushes there was no trail.
Nothing looked like it had a few seconds ago. Ciera walked around the
bushes twice and it was the same bright sunny day with no darkness and
no trail. We waited, it was blue sky over head and we could see the
edges of the forest and other people. The trail had simply vanished as
it we had never walked it.
On returning to the normal trail we
were use to and headed back, we took out our phones and the time had
finally updated, it was now 4pm. The normal trail would only have taken
an hour to walk fully so it was a loss of three full hours! When we
ended back near the fire tower on the normal trail we noticed it was
normal looking as the windows were no longer taped and very crystal
clean, and there was no pungent smell. We don’t know what it was, but it
certainly was creepy. Of course I jokingly told her later that day over
dinner we had entered the faerie realms by mistake and were lucky to
get away, she didn’t find that funny of course but either way we both
felt we should share this with you and if anyone out there has had a
similar experience perhaps they can provide insight or share their own.
I also mapped out the spots I mention above as GPS Google Cords:
Where we parked 39.417079, -82.525668
Where the trail head is 39.416284, -82.523969
Where trail to go by the wash out went 39.410145, -82.523196 to 39.406292,-82.529016 to 39.405647, -82.529390
Where we crossed the road 39.405579,-82.530086
Ranger Fire Tower 39.405858,-82.530737
The Main Trail 39.405871,-82.530783
The ‘Mysterious Side Trail’ which is not there 39.405732,-82.53062
Where we came out at when we passed the bushes 39.399488,-82.539029
Where we logically SHOULD have come out 39.399803,-82.537403
At the time I was staying in the town of Derry, in
Northern Ireland, and had decided to take a day trip via public transit
to the beach town of Buncrana. The bus trip seemed to take much longer
than expected and when I asked the driver which stop was to be Buncrana,
he laughed and said I had missed it ages ago. Not only that, but this
bus service was infrequent and the next one going back in the direction
from which we’d come wasn’t going to be for several hours. The driver
let me off in a small village, the name of which escapes me, and I began
hitchhiking back toward Derry. It was raining heavily that day, so it
was lucky my first ride came quickly – two older Irish men who kindly
took me back as far as Buncrana.
Buncrana isn’t a large place, so it
was a short walk to the beach from where the men dropped me off. At
some point in the drive the rain had stopped and as I arrived at the
beach the sky was clear and a late afternoon sun was beginning to set
(this was in December). It was a lovely scene, but after a while I
noticed it was eerily quiet and the only living thing I could see for
any distance was a black dog, which had turned up when I wasn’t paying
attention. It was unremarkable, so far as dogs go – I know sweet
piss-all about dogs but I think it was a black lab – but it behaved in a
curious way; wherever I went along the grass near the beach, the dog
followed, staying about 5-6 feet away. Whenever I stepped closer to
him, he began to growl and bark. Eventually this behavior and the quiet
started to wig me out and I began walking toward a large hotel looking
the water some distance away. My thinking was I’d have a cup of coffee,
harmlessly (and, no doubt, poorly) flirt with a waitress then head back
to the highway and thumb a ride to Derry. The black dog paced me the
entire trip to the hotel, maintaining the same amount of distance, and
the closer I got to the hotel, the more unnerved I was by the whole
situation and the more desperate I got for that coffee and some human
interaction. When I arrived at the hotel – the Inishowen Gate Hotel,
I’ve since learned it’s called – I was devastated to see that the whole
place was boarded up – windows, etc – and just as deserted as everything
else.
What made this more odd than it might
ordinarily be was the size of the place – this isn’t a small hotel, and
it’s unusual to see a place that big and in a spot that choice,
unoccupied. I didn’t explore the building much because by this point
the sun had passed the horizon and well, I was still unnerved. Turning
away from the hotel, I saw the black dog was gone just as quickly and
quietly as he’d come. From the hotel I walked along the water’s edge to
a boat launch, where I watched a bank of fog roll down the hills across
the water. By the time I looked away from the coming weather there was
a group of about five or six cats who had turned up to keep me company.
For whatever reason, this eased my mind a bit and I started walking
back towards town.
My memory of the day is murky but the
way I recall it, I went from a kind of cavernous silence to “regular
small town” in a matter of moments; suddenly there were people, cars and
noise. Soon enough there was rain again, too. It took two rides to get
back to Derry, the second of which was with a middle-aged man who had
grown up in the area. We were talking about the scenery around Buncrana
and he told me he’d been married in the hotel on the water. When I
mentioned it was now closed he sounded surprised – apparently the place
is a bit of a local institution – but didn’t press the subject further.
As I said at the beginning, the story
from yesterday’s broadcast brought this back to me. While it did sound
a little too “Silent Hill” to be real (it also brought to mind Stephen
King’s short story “Crouch End”), the parallels with my experience,
particularly the shuttered hotel, were hard to ignore and so I decided
to figure out which hotel it had been and see whether they had been
closed during the winter of 2008. The clerk I spoke to at the Inishowen
Gateway Hotel this afternoon informed me they do not close during
winters and, as far as she knows, it was not shuttered during winter
2008.
This story, like a lot of the strange
and unusual things I’ve experienced/collected (for a book project,
which I won’t shill until the ink is dry with Llewellyn in June) is
something for which I have no explanation and tends to be something that
comes up after a few drinks. I don’t know that these events amount to
or mean anything but as a recent listener to the podcast (this is my
third week subscribing) I was enthused to have something to contribute.
Any thoughts you may have on the subject are very welcome.
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