[0:13]It was 2022. I was living in the Bay Area at the time, Oakland specifically, and I'd driven up to visit my parents in Eureka for the weekend. If you've never driven Highway 101 along the Northern California coast, it's beautiful during the day and kind of a nightmare at night. Like long stretches with no other cars, no cell service, barely any lights, kind of ominous really. I left my parents' place around 8 p.m. on a Sunday, which was stupid in hindsight. I should have just stayed the night and driven back Monday morning, but I had an early shift and figured I'd rather just knock out the drive. Famous last words I guess. The first couple hours were fine. The stretch I was on had narrowed down to a two-lane road at that point. That's how most of rural 101 is once you get north of the bay. It was somewhere around Trinidad when the fog started rolling in. Fog on that part of the coast isn't unusual, but this was different. Within maybe five minutes, it went from clear visibility to barely being able to see 20 feet ahead of my car. It was actually really bad, worse than I'm describing. I slowed down to maybe 35 and kept going. The smart thing would have been to pull off and waited out, but there's really not a lot of places to stop on that stretch. And honestly, I just wanted to get home. I figured if I took it slow, I'd be fine. Here's the thing about fog that thick, though, and any California driver knows this, but it messes with your sense of space. You can't see landmarks, you can't tell how far you've gone, you can't see what's coming up ahead. It's disorienting as hell, especially when you're already tired. After another half hour or so of driving, I saw a figure standing off the side of the road. I say figure because that's genuinely what it looked like at first. Just a shape on the shoulder, maybe 50 feet ahead. As I got closer, I could see it was a person, a guy based on how tall it was, and he was just standing there facing the road. He wasn't walking or waving me down like he needed a lift, and it didn't look like he was on the phone either. He was genuinely just standing there. I slowed down even more as I passed, because I was worried about clipping him if he stepped out into the road. He didn't move, though. He didn't even turn his head to watch my car go by, which was really creepy. I got a good look at him as I passed, and there was nothing about his face that struck me as particularly unusual. My first thought was maybe his car broke down somewhere and he was waiting for a ride, which would make sense, right? Except, I hadn't passed any cars on the shoulder, and there was no reason for him to be standing in that exact spot, facing that exact direction. There was nothing there. I thought about turning around to ask if he needed help, but something about the whole thing felt wrong. It wasn't my problem, so I just kept driving. About 10 minutes later, though, I saw him again. I'm not exaggerating, it was the same guy. Same build, same dark clothes, same stance on the shoulder. The only difference was that this time, he was on the left side instead of the right, but everything else was identical. I actually said, what the hell audibly out loud to myself, because there was no way this guy could have gotten ahead of me. I was the only car on the road, and there weren't any cross streets or shortcuts or anything like that. The only explanation was that it was a different person who just happened to look exactly like the first guy and was standing in exactly the same weird way. I didn't want to look at him as I passed, but I couldn't help myself. I had to confirm whether it was the same guy, and after getting a good look, I was dead certain it was. But this time, the guy actually locked eyes with me as I passed, and I couldn't look away fast enough. Seeing his head snapped to my eyes was really freaky, and I instantly regretted making eye contact. I sped up a little, not a lot, because the fog was still thick, and I wasn't trying to drive off the road. But I sped up enough that I was pushing 45. I wanted distance between me and whatever the hell was going on back there. The fog got even worse after that, though. I could barely see the center line at that point, so I really had no choice but to slow back down. I was having trouble thinking straight, which I attributed to the mixed effect of how tired I was, how hard it was to drive, and what I had just seen. I kept trying to rationalize it, but I couldn't. My train of thought was interrupted, though, because not three minutes later, my headlights exposed something ahead. There was another person up there, only this time, he was standing in the middle of the road. I had no choice but to stop, which is exactly what I did. This time, he was wearing a hood that was covering his face, so I couldn't see what exactly he looked like. But I had a feeling it was the same guy. He once again didn't move, which is when I started really getting scared. We were at a standstill, and even though I couldn't see his face, I could feel him looking at me. I didn't know what to do. I flashed my brights at him a few times, trying to get him to move out of the way or at the very least react, but he didn't. I put the car in reverse, and when I looked in my rear-view mirror, I nearly died. There was someone behind me. There was a person back there, creeping towards my car. I yelled holy shit and put the car back in drive. I was boxed in, but I didn't care. There was an actual threat on my life now. I pulled hard to the right, crossing into the opposite lane to get around the guy blocking the road ahead. The guy didn't move, and I thought I was in the clear, but then something hit my car from behind. It wasn't just a light tap. It was violent. The whole back end of my car jolted to the right, and I heard this awful crunching sound, like metal on metal. I maintained control of the car and kept driving, thinking I had gotten into an accident with another car. But when I checked my mirrors, there was nothing behind me. Nothing at all, not even those people. As if the situation wasn't already freaky enough, that made it so much worse. I wasn't waiting, though. I sped off as fast as I was comfortable going with how heavy the fog was. By the time I hit the 101 interchange, I could actually see again, and for the first time, I felt my brain starting to relax. But the more I calmed down, the more I thought about what had happened, and this might sound surprising, but I genuinely concluded that I hallucinated everything. Here's the thing. I had been driving for almost four hours at that point, I was exhausted. I had been staring into fog for god knows how long, barely able to see anything, completely alone on a dark highway. So an extremely vivid hallucination didn't seem that far-fetched to me. Why it was so oddly specific was beyond me, but there was no other explanation for me having seen those people or having felt a wreck that didn't actually happen. By the time I made it home, I was just ready to sleep the whole thing off and try to forget about it. But then I walked around to the back of my car. The rear bumper was destroyed. There was a massive dent running almost the entire width of it, which meant whatever hit me had hit me way harder than I thought. It also meant that I actually had been hit, meaning I hadn't hallucinated anything. I stared at the dent for like five minutes. There wasn't any paint transfer, which there definitely would have been if I had been hit by another car. But if it wasn't another car that had hit me, I had no idea what could have caused such considerable damage. I did end up calling the cops to report what I saw, but it was more so just to get the info out there. I've thought about that night a lot over the past four years. I've gone through every possible explanation I could think of. What I've accepted is that I hallucinated the figures, and in my panic attempt to drive off, I hit a guard rail post or a mile marker or something like that. The thing that gets me is this, though. I can accept a hallucination, but for me to hallucinate one thing, the figures, while actually experiencing the other, the crash, is something I have trouble accepting. The fact that there was actually damage to my car has always made me think there was something more malicious going on that night.
[8:23]This happened this past spring break, so we're talking only a few weeks ago. I'm still in college, I'm a senior now, and I went back to my hometown for the week like I always do. The problem with going home, though, is that there's genuinely nothing to do there. I grew up in one of those suburban towns that's technically close to a city, but doesn't have any of the benefits of actually being in one, meaning no bars or night life or anything really within walking distance. When I'm at school, I've always got something going on. But back at home, it's a ghost town. The other issue is that none of my hometown friends had the same spring break schedule as me. I've got maybe four or five people I still keep in touch with from high school, and every single one of them was either still in class or already had their spring break earlier in March, so I was looking at a full week of doing nothing, which I really wasn't thrilled about. I should probably also mention that I've been trying to cut back on some stuff lately, nicotine and alcohol, mainly. I figured a week at home with nothing to do was either going to make that worse or give me a chance to reset. I decided I was going to work out every single day instead. I was going to lift in the mornings and run in the afternoons, keep myself busy just so I could stay out of my own head. That's how I ended up going for a run on a random Tuesday afternoon. I remembered this loop I used to do back when I ran cross country in high school. It's exactly three miles from start to finish, starting and ending at my house. The route takes me through my neighborhood for maybe a quarter mile, then cuts into this wooded trail that winds through a small patch of forest before spitting you back out onto the street about a block from home. I've probably run that loop a thousand times between freshman and senior year. The woods is the best part, honestly. Running on pavement destroys your knees, but the trail through the woods is soft. It's quiet in there too, which is something I always look for on my runs. So I headed out around five. The sun wasn't going to set for another couple hours, so I wasn't worried about visibility. What I did notice, though, and I noticed it the second I stepped outside, was the fog. I don't know how to describe it other than to say it was thick in a way I'd never seen before. I've lived in that town my whole life, and I don't remember fog like that. It looked fake almost, like I was in some ambient video game or one of those lo-fi YouTube videos with the anime girl studying. Everything past maybe 30 or 40 feet just dissolved into haze. I thought about skipping the run, but I talked myself out of it. The trail through the woods is a straight shot. One path with no forks or diverging paths. I've been through there so many times, I could probably do it blindfolded. Getting lost wasn't even a possibility. I had my Garmin watch on, so I could track my pace and distance. I started my workout, did the quarter mile through the neighborhood, and entered the woods. The fog was even thicker in there, which made sense since the trees blocked out a lot of the remaining daylight. I couldn't see more than 15 or 20 feet ahead of me, but the trail is easy to follow. For the first mile and a half, everything was normal. I was running a little slower than usual because of the visibility, but it wasn't too bad. I remember checking my watch around the mile mark, then again at a mile and a half. The issue started around the two and a half mile mark. At that point in the loop, I should have been approaching the end of the trail. The path curves to the left, you go up a small hill, and then you're out, back on pavement. I know that section by heart. Hell, I know every section by heart. I've literally run that loop hundreds of times. But when I looked down at my watch and saw two and a half miles, I was still deep in the woods. I figured my watch was just being weird. It was at least four years old at that point, so I assumed its GPS signal was getting interrupted by the dense tree coverage or something. The fog could have been messing with it, too. These seemed like reasonable enough explanations, though, so I just kept running, assuming I wasn't as far along the trail as I thought. But then I passed three miles, which was when I knew something was up. Three miles is the entire loop. At three miles, I should have been standing either in my driveway or on the street. Instead, I was still surrounded by trees on both sides, still running on the same dirt path with no indication that I was anywhere close to getting out. So I stopped. I'm not a paranoid person, and I'm not superstitious either. There must have been some rational explanation for what was going on. I caught my breath and tried to think, but I genuinely could not figure out what was going on. There was only one trail, which I knew for a fact. There weren't any forks, branches, or alternate paths. The only way I could have gotten lost in there was if I had physically left the path and waded through the brush and undergrowth, which I definitely hadn't done. I checked my watch again. 3.1 miles. The number kept ticking up even though I was standing still, which told me the GPS was definitely having issues. That was the only part of the whole thing that made any sense. I didn't really have a choice at that point. I could either keep running forward and hope I eventually hit the exit, or I could turn around and retrace my steps. The second option seemed smarter. If I just ran back the way I came, I'd eventually get to the trail head where I started, and from there, I knew exactly how to get home. So that's what I did. I turned around and started running back. The fog had gotten worse. I didn't know how that was even possible, but it had. I had to slow my pace just to make sure I didn't run off the trail by accident. After about a mile of running, so about four total miles at that point, I heard something. Like I said earlier, it's usually dead quiet in the woods, which I suspect is the case because it's too small for a lot of animals to inhabit. So hearing a sound out there was something my brain wasn't prepared for, but the sound itself was so much worse. It was something I'd never heard before. The closest I can get to describing it is a moan, but that's not quite right. It was lower than a moan, more like a drone, and it fluctuated. It would swell up, then dip back down, then swell up again, almost like a siren, but human. I can't overstate how wrong it sounded. It wasn't someone calling for help, and it didn't really sound like someone in pain, either. It was just the sustained, wavering noise that didn't seem to have any purpose. I started running faster. But you have to remember that I had been running for over four miles at that point. I could only go so fast, and the exhaustion only made the situation that much more terrifying. Running faster only tired me out more. And the more tired I got, the more scared I got. The sound didn't stop, no matter how fast I ran. Whoever or whatever was out there was matching my speed. Every time I glanced over my shoulder, and I did multiple times, I couldn't see anything. There was just fog back there. I ran with the sound following me for what felt like forever. I had no other choice. It was the scariest moment of my life. After an eternity of running, I finally made it out of the woods. I ran into the street and nearly threw up out of exhaustion. The fog was still impossibly thick, even outside the woods. I turned around and looked back into the woods. To my horror, there was something standing right in the middle of the trail. Just a little ways beyond the trail head. I say something because I don't know what else to call it. It was just a shape, this dark mass of a silhouette. It was way taller than me, and I'm 6'1". This thing had to be 7 feet tall at least. It wasn't moving closer or further away from me. It just watched me. I could feel it. If it weren't for the fact that it was gently swaying back and forth, I would have questioned whether I was looking at a tree or something. The droning sound had stopped, but I wasn't giving it another thought. I turned and ran home without looking back. That was a few weeks ago now. I'm back at school at this point, but I haven't been able to think about that night. I can't get that image of what I saw in the fog out of my head. That black mass and that god awful sound. I told my parents about what I saw, obviously, and they both seemed convinced that it was just a tall person trying to scare me or potentially attack me, which I guess is possible, but I don't believe that. How were they able to make that noise while running to keep up with me? Impossible. And how tall they were too. I don't know what was in those woods that night, and I probably never will.
