I shut the engine off and decided to stretch my legs. There's a small trail there that leads down toward a bench maybe a hundred yards from the parking area. I'd spent a lot of time in the woods so being out in the forest at night didn't bother me. I knew what normal nighttime woods felt like.
And I also knew when something felt off.
As I walked down the trail, the stillness felt unnatural. No breeze. No insects. No rustling. Nothing. I sat on the bench and looked through the bare branches while the moonlight spilled across the slope below. It was beautiful, but something about it felt wrong. Like I was being watched.
Then I heard a Snap. A single limb breaking somewhere downslope, maybe fifty to a hundred yards away toward the Bellamy Creek drainage. At first I didn't think much of it deer snap branches all the time. Then it happened again. And again.
What caught my attention wasn't just the sound it was the pattern. The breaks started coming from different directions. Not like one animal moving through the woods. I counted five, maybe ten distinct snaps, each spaced about four or five seconds apart.
Then the timing changed. The snaps started coming faster… one every second or two… and they seemed to be moving in a circle around me. That was enough. Instinct kicked in, and I stood up and headed back to the car. When I got inside the car, I didn't start the engine right away. I just sat there with the keys in the ignition, ready to leave if I needed to.
At first, nothing happened. Then something hit the hood. It sounded exactly like a Douglas fir cone hitting steel hard, solid, unmistakable. The problem was that there were no pine or fir trees there. Only deciduous trees, and by that time of year all their leaves had already fallen. There was nothing up there that could drop.
Then another hit. Then they started falling faster like something was throwing them.
They weren't rocks or dirt. Every impact sounded the same weight, the same size, the same hollow thunk of a heavy cone hitting metal. The hood, the roof, the trunk maybe even the sides of the car. But I couldn't see anything falling. Nothing bouncing off. Nothing rolling away. Just the sound.
I looked up toward the treeline in front of me, expecting to see bare trunks and branches in the moonlight. Instead, I saw figures. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. The shapes looked like people standing among the trees. They weren't trees. They were tall figures six to seven feet high wearing what looked like long hoods or cloaks. Completely black. No faces. No hands. Just darkness beneath the hoods.
Some stood still. Others seemed angled toward me. It was like they absorbed the moonlight instead of reflecting it. I turned to my left, toward the grassy median beside the car, and saw more shapes there. Maybe three to eight of them, lying flat on the ground like bodies. Each time I looked away and then looked back, they were closer.
But they never moved while I was watching. No sound. No crawling. Just different positions every time my eyes shifted.
Then I noticed something near the driver's side of the car. Three smaller figures, only five to ten feet away. These weren't tall like the ones near the trees. They were crouched or hunched close to the ground, almost like children playing. Under each hood there was a faint flicker like someone trying to light a cigarette lighter that never quite caught. Meanwhile the impacts on the car were coming faster and faster.
At that point, instinct completely took over. I turned the key, threw the car into Drive, and sped out of the overlook as fast as I could. As I pulled away, those smaller figures were right beside my door. If the window had been open, I'm certain I could have reached out and touched them. They just watched. I drove for about five miles before finally pulling over. Nothing had followed me.
When I got out and inspected the car, there wasn't a single dent. No scratches. No debris. Nothing at all that explained what I had heard hitting the car.
I've looked at that location on maps many times since then. But I've never gone back in person. Not once. I haven't even driven that stretch of the Parkway again. There's one detail that still bothers me, though. When I later looked at the spot on Google Maps, the overlook where I had parked appeared to be on the wrong side of the road. I clearly remember pulling into it on the right side from the direction I was traveling.
But according to the map, it should have been on the left. I've tried to make sense of that for years, and I still can't. For a long time, I never told anyone about this."
Now, I'm telling you."
