Another report of high strangeness comes to us courtesy of a reader who was reminded of the incident by this story.
This actually reminds me of the night my family drove through a hollow in the little Mazda pickup truck. My sister was in the front with Mama and our older brother Mark was in the back with our dog, Frodo. Suddenly they heard Frodo going berserk, so Mama started to slow down, but Mark threw himself against the window and yelled for her to GO FASTER, FASTER, FASTER! Then he lunged back towards the tailgate to grab Frodo and keep him in the truck bed.
Mama hit the gas hard, even though the road was curvy and when she got down the mountain to a well lighted area, she stopped and got out to see what had been the matter. My brother was white faced with terror and said that something with red eyes had tried to catch up to the truck and nearly succeeded when she’d slowed down. We never figured out what it had been, but Mark said the red eyes had been higher than the tailgate of the pickup. To this day, if I go through that hollow at night, I go fast!
I can’t remember the name of the road, but it was in the shadow of Hanging Rock in North Carolina. Oh and I remember my brother saying that he could hear the sound of, whatever it was, running, but it wasn’t a hooves striking pavement sound when someone suggested it was a donkey, mule or horse. We knew that sound, having had a pony or a horse for all of our lives at that point. He said it just sounded big and it’s feet slapped the pavement loudly, but didn’t clack like hooves.
For more vicarious thrills and chills, read my sci fi-horror novel Nethereal.
Ooooh! How did I miss this one?! Excellent.
Back in my young and stupid years, as opposed to old and stupid, I used to wish things like this would happen to me. I'd like to think I'm more wise now.
Relatable sentiment!
Btw, if you don't want to miss a post, you can subscribe to Kairos via email. Signup's in the left sidebar.
I should NOT have read this in the dark hour before twilight. No coffee necessary this morning, but I didn't want to open any curtains until I could see daylight.
These stories made me think of a few things I'll leave to the Venerable Kolchack, he who stalks in the night. I can do the archival research. I'm thankful to have not been foolish enough to try investigating, only to become a statistic.
1. It makes me wonder about the frequency and total number of single vehicle crashes in some places, especially without contributors like alcohol, known deer herd, or foul weather.
2. Disappearances of single people or small groups on camping or hiking trips into backwoods or just isolated areas occur, but do they have a recurring or total pattern?
Concerning patterns of disappearance,you should look into the Missing 411 series by David Paulides. I haven't read the books (there are about 10 I think) but I have (lazily) watched some youtube summaries of more interesting cases and the second movie. Missing 411 deals with cases of missing people that defy usual explanations (i.e. experienced hunters, small children turning up many miles away, no detectable cause of death, no alcohol or mental illness, dogs can't track them, etc.), and the way they tend to cluster (primarily around national parks, but not always). I'll be damned if it isn't some intriguing stuff.
Thanks for the recommendation. I can start there. Some of the stories here intrigued me, with a mix of disappearances and some witnesses who were lucky and escaped that fate. You begin wondering about how wide and weird the world can get, and if some old fairy tales held horrible grains of truth, not just as teaching tales.
I think I'll read them in the daytime, in case.
For a Paulides story that perfectly aligns with your speculation, check out Bob Gymlan's YouTube video The Boy That Was Taken from the Smokies.
Caution: Don't watch it tonight if you have an early day tomorrow.
Re: Lonely places with unusually high incidences of single-vehicle crashes, that's an intriguing angle I hadn't considered. Thanks.
As for the baffling and more frequent than you'd think disappearances, the Finders exposé leads me to suspect that there's a network of secret hippie communes that teamed up with the CIA back in the 60s, and now they're running child trafficking ops out of national parks.
Wow. Incredibly interesting videos. I was listening to them when my wife and I were doing Saturday housework. The whole family was engrossed by them
The Paul Paulides data points are just crazy. Especially the German aspects.
A couple of the cases Paulides mentions made me think of the Anthony Duarte and Kevin Gannon (two retired NYPD Police Officers) and their Smiley Face Killers theory; a working Serial Killer Group or cells of them.
The serial killer theory is interesting, but some of them seem like pretty "high risk" targets for kidnapper/murderers.
Like experienced hunters, stationary, armed, around 100 meters from the nearest member of their group. And not only is there never a shot fired, but never even a yell or sounds of a scuffle (I'm not a hunter but deer can be spooked by less than that, so presumably that should be detectable in such dead silence). That's ninja-master type stuff. And it's not just that they semi-regularly pull it off, but that they've NEVER botched it. It seems implausible that anyone could do something so risky for so long without ever fucking up even once. Unless such cases were actively suppressed by the authorities?
If that's the case then I want off this ride.
I don’t think the Serial Killer Gang angle applies to all or even most of the disappearances Paulides mentions. I only note that a number of them have potential to fit into that pattern.
"Unless such cases were actively suppressed by the authorities?"
We know from the Finders case files that they are.