Greetings, All. My granddaughter led me here; told me it’s a place where people who enjoy the spooky and the supernatural come to get their fix. She is helping me share my own story; thought you folks might be tickled by it.

These events came back to me at a recent family reunion. For fun, the last of us awake that night went in a circle and swapped our “scariest moments” stories. It was a good time, and as family members shared UFOs and creaky attics and near-death experiences, a trick floorboard in my mind popped up, exposing something my subconscious had long kept hidden, perhaps for my own good. So when their eyes all turned to Grammy K, likely expecting tales of past-era poverty or teenagers with tattoos or the trials of childbirth, I leaned in and recounted to them the time I found a lost man in the woods.

It caused quite a stir with the family and, at the insistence of my darling granddaughter, I share it with you now.

This is something that happened when I was in my 20s. I won’t embarrass myself by telling you how long ago that was but, suffice to say, I am quite a bit grayer above the ears these days. My first husband, Ronald, was a ranger, and for five years we lived together on BLM land. Our regular backcountry excursions instilled in me a passion for the out-of-doors that was uncommon for a lady back then. Women might be found on a long walk or at a national park with their husband and children in tow, sure. But I was partial to taking a knapsack and charging into pure, isolating wilderness, often spending two or three days at a time following trails or inventing my own. Those excursions were often my greatest peace, especially after Ronald passed in our sixth year together.

It was about a year after Ronald’s passing and I was setting out for a two-day trek in the Pacific Northwest. Washington or Oregon I think, though that detail still remains beneath the floorboards. The trail looked attractive on the map, as it followed a river through a vast mountain valley that separated two small towns. I believe it had once served as a supply route between the towns before the road system came, after which it was merely a recreation trail, though not one to be taken lightly. The locals would warn all but the most avid outdoorsmen to avoid the route, as there was a point in the valley that required a difficult river fording. This ford occasionally took the lives of the cocky or the unprepared, sending their bodies bobbing downstream to be recovered by the town at the other end.

But I reckoned I was avid enough.

A friend dropped me off at the trailhead, as I had left my car parked in the town at the other end of the valley. I was immediately put to task by a steep hike up to a mountain saddle and a precarious descent down the other side. It was past midday before I was rewarded with even terrain in the valley below. I managed the infamous river crossing cautiously and without incident, then resumed the trek on the opposite bank.

The trail followed the river a few more miles before it leaned away, sending me from high grass and wildflowers into a forest of evergreens. The sun was beginning to angle towards the western range as the trees closed in behind me, shrouding my world in a gentle emerald dim.

I made my way over the soft earth beneath the trees, grateful for the shade after a day exposed beneath the summer sun. The air was muted by a mossy quiet and the limbs of the evergreens sliced the light into haphazard bars of gold. It was a dense, verdant, old-growth forest. The kind that feels like a cathedral. Proud and reverent and secretive. I have always loved and sought such places.

The trail took me downhill and the shade grew darker still. There came a point where the pine needles underfoot fully obscured the path and I paused, carefully peeking around evergreens to spot where it might pick up again, trying not to lose my place. I had my compass and map, but only food enough for a day and a half, and didn’t want to be lost in the boondocks if I could help it. This was all before the age of the satellite phone, mind you.

After a few moments of unsuccessful scanning, I decided to backtrack to see if there was perhaps a “Y” in the trail I had missed. I turned 180 degrees to find myself looking into the eyes of a man, some ten or twelve feet behind me. I had no clue how long he had been there. My brain, in the panic of the moment, skipped right past surprise and landed directly on bewilderment.

“Oh, goodness, hello!,” I spit out, mostly on impulse. I am sure he could see the shock in my face, but he gave no sign of it.

“Sure easy to get lost out here, isn’t it?” he replied in simple, even tones.

His appearance was the perfect outdoorsman, practically out of a sportsman’s magazine of the day. Work boots and canvas pants, held up with suspenders that ran over a navy, double-breasted shirt. The plaid cuffs of his sleeves were rolled up above the elbow, and the sleeping bag strapped atop his rucksack poked up from behind his head. Yet, despite his textbook appearance, he didn’t feel like a woodsman to me. His bearded face was middle-aged, but the skin was deeply creased and drooping at the neck and jowls, as if much older. Beneath wild black eyebrows were grayish eyes that seemed unable to focus on any spot in particular. Splotches of sweat darkened the pits and neckline of his shirt, and he gave off a rank odor that disgusts me even in memory. He offered me a strained, toothy smile, as if he had heard descriptions of smiles but was trying it out for the first time.

“It certainly could be,” I replied with exaggerated politeness, re-centering myself internally. “Sorry for my surprise- I didn’t hear you come up behind me.”

The man ignored the comment.

“Are you lost out here, too?” he asked. His expression remained ‘polite earnest’ but behind the foggy, gray eyes I detected something else, something I couldn’t put a word to. Instinctively, I began to take mental inventory of what weapons I had at my disposal. The best I could come up with was my Swiss Army Knife, which was unfortunately tucked into the bottom of my knapsack. I could hear Ronald’s deep, stern voice echo in the back of my head somewhere, saying “you should be packing a gun, Kristy. You never know what you’ll run into.”

I shooed Ronald’s ghost and its “I-told-you-so”s away and turned my focus back to the man.

“Certainly not lost, no,” I responded carefully, not wishing to make myself any more vulnerable than I already was. “But you said ‘too.’ Are you lost out here?”

The man rocked on his feet, his eyes scanning vacantly in my direction.

“Yes, lost. People wander out here; get lost,” he replied. His voice was gravelly, delivered in flat, dead tones. “But sometimes I find them. Find them wandering through the forest, stepping and breaking. Trying to find their way. So I help them. Take them back to the river, so they can follow it out. I can help you, too; help you find the river.”

At that he set his empty eyes upon me, truly locking his with mine. His expression transformed into something equal parts pained and furious, as if I had betrayed him in some horrible, intimate way. A primordial part of me awoke and a wave of adrenalin screamed to sprint into the maze of evergreens surrounding us. But a firm, clear voice of instinct told me to stand still. So, like a mouse being fixed upon by a house cat, still I stood.

“Well, I’m not lost, though I am sure this trail can be a bit of trouble for some. I certainly appreciate the offer, though,” I said, in the most friendly tones I could muster. Few sunbeams were making it through the trees overhead, and knew I needed to move things along.

“But I think I better get moving while I still have some light. I have some friends hiking in from the other end expecting to meet me at camp tonight, so I can’t afford to get too off of schedule.”

This was a lie, of course. But I wanted him to think others would be coming along soon; that I was expected. But inside I wished more then than ever that Ronald was with me again.

The man practiced his disconcerting smile once more and his eyes blissfully unfocused.

“Yes, still have some light,” he echoed in his staccato. “The walkers get lost, making little circles in the forest. If you lose the way, I’ll lead you to the river.”

In the tension of the moment, I didn’t process his words. But it was clear that something insidious glared out from behind them at me.

“Oh of course, thanks, I’ll keep that in mind. Happy trails!” I practically shouted, eager to detach, and commenced a rigorous power-walk in the direction I had left off at, unsure if I was continuing on the true trail or not. After a few dozen paces, I began blessedly to see indications of the path and took back to it.

A few minutes of concerted near-jogging later, my heart thumping in my ears and my pack thumping against my back, I slowed to a walk and watched over my shoulder to see if the strange man was following me. I had put in some considerable distance and in the greenish-dark murk of the forest, I saw nothing but ferns and evergreens. Then, coming around far back on the trail, there he was.

Not necessarily following, I suppose, but walking in my same direction, staggering down the path about sixty yards behind me. He moved awkwardly, almost drunken, like someone learning to walk on a prosthetic. In the moment my eye caught him, his head snapped up, and even from that distance I could feel cold gray eyes lock to mine. And I knew then it wasn’t coincidence. I was being followed.

I whipped my face forward and picked my pace.

The last miles of that day were hiked briskly and stressed. No matter how much speed I put into my pace, the man would always somehow catch up behind me down the trail, despite his disjointed walk. I would lose him for five or ten minutes, then catch some sight or sound of him, persisting ever forward. And so I had no peace; never breaking, often run-jogging, but never able to get more than a few minutes of isolation before I would hear his feet cracking branches along the path or see his dark silhouette come around a bend in the trail far behind me.

The last tangerine rays of sun had faded from the forest floor when I realized I would have to stop. I was losing the last of my visibility, and although I was tempted, I knew that hiking in the pitch was foolish. Using my torch to find my way around would make me a beacon to the man in the night. But on the other hand, hiking blindly would mean almost certainly losing the trail, getting me no closer to escape, and could mean injury or death if I was unlucky. And I was not feeling lucky.

Instead I resolved to make my way as far off-trail as I dared, quietly set up camp, and wait for the first light of daybreak to serve as a starter pistol for a mad dash to the end of the valley. I didn’t love the plan, but no better ideas came to me.

So I crept past the tree line, quiet as a fox, and gingerly set up my one-man pup tent behind a couple interlocked evergreens that stood vanguard between my camp and the direction of the trail. The spot was encircled by ferns and brambles, the best cover I could find. From amber dusk to pale moonlight, I had just enough light to see what I was doing as I moved quietly on sore legs and blistered feet.

I didn’t bother with dinner or coffee or any of my rituals typical of a trip to the backcountry. I scarcely remember drinking water. What I do remember is laying atop my sleeping bag, unwilling to constrict myself within it, fully dressed, with my Swiss Army knife clutched in my fist, the blade out and ready. I spent my time breathing evenly, staying silent, and listening.

After a couple hours I began to calm. The man had never been more than about fifteen minutes behind me down the trail, so if he was a tracker he would have long since traced me to camp. If not a tracker, I suspected he had already overshot my camp, making a successful backtrack to my location near impossible. I was just beginning to form an estimate as to how long before daybreak when I heard movement in the woods.

It was the snapping, cracking of something moving ponderously over the forest floor, probably twenty to forty yards away. I prayed, for the first and only time, that it was a bear. The only other thing in those woods heavy enough to make that much noise would be a ungulate, which tend not to move so sporadically or loudly. My every muscle froze as the intermittent creaking and snapping moved towards my camp. I held my knife to my chest like a cross, watching the moonlit side of my tent wall for a shape to take form. Then, after a light snap some ten yards to my left, the woods went silent.

I laid there, tense as a plank of wood, terrified to so much as breath. I stared at the shadows of the ferns and tree boughs that the moon cast against my tent wall, waiting for one of them to transform into the shape of the man and lunge. But no phantom assailant came. The shadows slowly lengthened and dissipated as the moon moved through the heavens up above, but I remained fixated on the blueish wall of my pup tent, counted breaths, and waited.

It must have been hours before I dared to turn my head away from the direction of the snapping in the forest. The moon by that time had angled in the sky towards the other side of camp, and as I righted myself I saw, on the opposite wall of my tent, the shadow of the man. He loomed above the canopy, perfectly still, perhaps just an arm’s reach away. I was taken with panic, and in the wan late-evening light, the silhouette’s head turned ever so slightly, so as to look directly down at me.

“Little walker. I knew you’d get lost. Let me help you find the river.”

The man’s voice had changed. It was no longer the masculine voice I had heard delivered in gravelly staccato on the trail earlier. It was vaguely feminine; sweet and melodic; every word dripping with acid. It was the voice that would come from a spider, if a spider could speak. And when I heard it, I knew I was going to die.

“I’m not lost,” I thought. Or perhaps I whispered it. Either way, I remember it took all I had to make the words come. “I know where I’m going.”

At that, the man reached out and pressed his palm against the upper wall of the tent, imprinting a black handprint against the fabric.

“If you are here, then you are lost,” replied the voice from inside the man.

“And the lost belong to me.”

The handprint against my tent spasmed and I watched as the head of the silhouette convulsed and rolled back. Black shapes emerged from where the man’s mouth was; slender tendrils that twisted and unfurled upward from the man’s throat, coiling and writhing in the air around his head, making a grotesque shadow puppet show out of the moonlit wall of my tent.

In the terror of the moment, my impulse was to scream. But somehow, in the hot foam of fury and indignation that I should die at the will of this incomprehensible thing, the scream choked out in the form of words:

“I AM NOT LOST!”

I surged up and in a miraculously clean cut, sliced the tent’s fabric from the canopy to the floor in the direction of the man’s shadow. The hand pulled away and I sprang outward, blindly prepared to sink the Swiss Army knife into anything it might find purchase. But before I could clear my exit, I heard a man’s “HEYYO” from the trees not far off camp.

It was a deep, soulful bellow that rattled me and carried like wind around the evergreens and brambles. I knew the sound in my heart. It was Ronald’s voice, the call he would make when we would hike together in the wilderness to ward off bears. Only now it came with such force that I felt it in and around me; a wave of feeling and a foghorn of sound. In that same moment, I heard the garbled, vicious words of the thing speak, I know not what, and by the time I was righted to my feet outside the tent, ready to attack, there was only silence.

I scanned the shifty darkness of the woods, watching the trees and shadows around me like a hare watches the skies. My heart was pounding, my body still ready for the fight. But I was alone. No man. No silhouette. No creature. No Ronald. Just a woman alone in nature, panting through the adrenaline and fear.

After some time I shook off my dread, stuffed my ruined tent back into my knapsack, retrieved my torch, and carefully picked my way back to the trail in the dark. From there I began the route again, holding my torch out like a nightwatchman, eyeing the tree line while being careful not to lose the beaten path. Occasionally I thought I heard movement far back behind me on the trail, but the light of my torch never caught anything in the shadows of the forest.

A few miles later, daylight began to trickle through the canopy of the evergreens. An hour or so after that I noticed the trees becoming smaller; farther apart, and the rush of the river in the distance became the soundtrack to my walk. By the time the trail rejoined the river, the woods were well behind me, and I soldiered on through open valley in a stupor. At some point I reached the meager town where I had left my car parked; by the time I realized I was walking on pavement, I was practically at town center.

I am sure I drew disconcerted looks from the locals at the tap house when I staggered in, a mess of matted hair and sunken eyes, with my knapsack bulging and half-zipped. But I took no notice. It had always been my and Ronald’s tradition after coming back out of the backcountry to celebrate with a bourbon and a beer. I ordered two of each, as I knew he had joined me for a final hike, but that it was on me to drink on his behalf. The barmaid took my order with the pouty indifference of someone who had served stranger orders to stranger patrons, and went to task.

I had finished both bourbons and most of the second beer when a commotion broke me from the solitude of my thoughts. The excitement was directed at a tiny television mounted in a corner behind the bar, and the pouty barmaid turned up the volume at a request.

It was the county news station, where a pallid man in a sports jacket was breaking a press release from the sheriff’s office. The news ticker read “Sheriff recovers body of drowned hiker.”

The camera cut to the sheriff explaining that the man was a hiker from Canada who likely drowned while attempting to ford the river in the valley pass. He had been dead for three days before washing into town on the high river later that morning. Several bar patrons issued tuts and low whistles, the dirge of the cynical and unsympathetic.

While the sheriff issued a tired warning that the river fording was dangerous and not be attempted by those without proper training and experience, my thoughts went to the man. To the confident pilgrim of nature he must have been. Perhaps too confident, even. Until a few days ago, when he got himself lost in some very old woods, where he weaved and wandered through the evergreens, hunting for a trail. Until something found him. Something that took him to the river, where it takes all its lost travelers.

But I was never lost.