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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/googlyeyes93 on 2024-09-14 18:58:29+00:00.

For about ten years now, I’ve been a ranger in the Okefenokee Swamp Park. It’s the largest blackwater swamp in the entire United States, and takes up a good chunk of southeast Georgia. The place is massive, home to all kinds of wildlife from foxes to alligators to the occasional bear.

Over the years, I’ve found that it’s not only wildlife that inhabits these swamps though. There’s something else out here, not human, of course, but the swamp hides its fair share of secrets from the world beyond its waters.

One of my earliest memories was during my first year as a junior ranger. I was young, maybe twenty five or so when I got the job, and they were drip feeding me new duties as the days went by. Eventually I got to the point where I could do patrols myself if there was anything that needed to be checked on, and they finally gave me the keys to the fan boats we would use to get into the deeper parts. That’s what gave me my first scare.

It was getting dark out and some folks came into the station, telling us they had been out hiking and lost one of their buddies. Not too uncommon, considering if you take a wrong turn there’s nothing but water and dense trees to find your way back, and unless you’ve got a keen eye, you’re not going to notice the difference. Now the sun was going down, and they say they hadn’t seen him in a few hours, despite calling out for him the entire way back.

So, it fell on me to go out there and search while Lena, my partner on duty, was the one to take the report. I grabbed the big-ass flashlight we use for night searches, the boat keys, and headed out the door to see what I could find.

They said they had come from the Western part of the swamp, a more densely wooded region prone to a lot of flooding. Not a great thing right now as the clouds were coming out for a thunderstorm yet again. Moonlight was in and out, sliding behind clouds and plunging me into darkness every few minutes before re-emerging again for brief illumination whenever it felt like it. The trees above were casting eerie shadows, and every movement from around me made me jump as the night grew darker.

Mosquitos were the worst damn thing out here. Plenty of the bastards were swarming me, almost blocking the floodlight as they swirled around in the beam. It was hard enough seeing anything tyhrough the shadows of the trees out here, but seeing millions of tiny bugs make shadows the size of dogs in the distance? That does some weird shit to your brain. The heat didn’t help much, either, making my clothes stick to my sweaty skin.

I was out there maybe two hours, moon high overhead and sun long gone now, when the first shower finally came. Rain started falling slow at first, just a drop here and there as thunder gave ominous rumbles in the background. An occasional flash of lightning would overtake my surroundings, completely overpowering the beam of my flashlight and making the entire swamp around visible. That was when I first started to notice them.

It looked like people at first, hiding behind trees, obscured in shadows and branches to keep from being seen. Some were taller than others, some a bright, sunbleached white while others appeared covered in mold and dirt. The first one I barely caught in the light as it ducked back behind a tree, long white fingers on one hand being the only thing I saw before they slipped back into the darkness behind it.

I saw another one ten minutes later, though this one was… much more clear. It was in the middle of the trees, partially submerged in some of the water and muck below. From the waste up, there was a mostly decayed body, stripped by the bugs and weather down to the bone already, ribs holding rotten ribbons of flesh on them. It disappeared as quickly as my light hit it, one rotting eye still staring at me from its skull as it submerged under the water, leaving me shaking in fear.

Despite trying to get a message back to Lena, I didn’t have any signal going through on my walkie. I was finally around the space where they said they had lost their friend, and I started yelling for him, despite how scared shitless I was. Everything I had seen up to that point I was able to just… rationalize I guess. It was my first time out in the swamp on my own, especially this late at night, and the weather wasn’t helping my nerves.

Ahead of me the trees opened up in a clearing, nothing but a small pond unmarred by roots or trunks sticking through. The rain stopped suddenly, moon appearing from behind the clouds now and shining down on the dark black water below, reflecting its light.

There, standing in the middle of the clearing with hands stretched high into the sky, as if pleading for the moon to come down and meet it, was a body. Hell, a body was probably putting it mildly, as this thing was stripped of all flesh, empty sockets where the eyes should be as it stared up into the moon above. From where I was in the boat, I could see it was dressed in a long, flowing white gown. Almost like a wedding dress. I couldn’t tell if it was looking in longing, reverence, or both as it reached further toward the moon. It was standing atop the water’s surface as if it was a smooth glass floor, not even making ripples across the water as it was glowing in the moonlight beneath her.

As I was watching, more skeletons and decaying bodies emerged from the water, gliding upward to surround the skeletal bride as she continued reaching for the moon above. They grabbed her, dragging her back down below the surface of the water, as the moon was once more hidden by clouds above. I tried shining my floodlight over to see if there was anything still there, but the clearing was completely empty, just shadows dancing off the waters surface again.

I turned tail and ran that night. We ended up finding the guy that was missing the next day, somehow wandered right over to one of the nearby highways, though it was a hell of a walk for him to get there. Lena didn’t believe me when I told her about the skeletons and decaying bodies in the water, simply looking at me like I was absolutely insane.

A year or so later, we were the unlucky site of a murder. Or at least, it was initially called a murder. Some poor girls body was found floating in one of the more touristy areas, totally drained of every damn drop of blood. All they were able to find was one puncture wound in between her neck and shoulder. That wasn’t from any animal known to be in the park, so Georgia Bureau of Investigations came in to look around.

I got paired up to lead a guy named Sully around the swamps, investigating to see if we could find any sign of where she was killed or a possible weapon, even. Good guy, we ended up getting to be friends in the couple of weeks we were going around the whole length of the Okefenokee. One thing we agreed on- the amount of destruction being done to the environment out here needed to stop.

There was a mining operation about to start nearby, extracting lithium through strip mines right outside of the damned swamp borders. That was just the latest issue too, because a few of the major train yards had been dumping chemicals for the last few decades that was just now coming to light. God knows it added to the cancer clusters that have been popping up in the youth around here, taking kids way too damn young.

What we found one night though, almost a week after beginning our investigation, made us both see that the problems were only going to get worse. Another body had turned up a day earlier, causing a whole other fuss as GBI was still trying to get a handle on the situation. This was a big guy, too. They matched him up with a trucker that had gone missing a couple of weeks ago, big rig found empty and abandoned on the side of the highway nearby. His body was pretty messed up, decay setting in, but he had a similar wound with the same telltale sign- his body was absolutely drained of blood.

Sully and I spent the next day tracking deep into the swamp, trying to figure out where it could have come from based on the faint currents through the waters. After about seven hours of tracking from sunup, we found something.

A shallow clearing in the middle of the northeast quadrant, tons of trees clustered around it that kept it mostly closed off, but a small gap between that became a floodgate essentially when it rained. We theorized that was what was letting the bodies loose, allowing them to drift over to the more populated areas of the swamp where they would be found.

Our theory was somewhat backed up almost immediately, and we definitely found the origin point of the dead people. Inside this clearing, bodies were piled up in various states of decay. Every single one was drained of blood, the newest corpse probably being only a few days old at most. Alabaster white skin was glowing against the dark waters, making me feel nauseated in the humid afternoon. The whole area smelled of death, with the bodies adding on to the decay from rotting trees and vegetation. It was worse than the time I found a rotting bear near the park entrance, poor bastard almost torn in half by a car that hit him.

They all had the same puncture wound, though it was on different sides for some of the bodies. Probably just wherever the killer was able to get a good angle in. Sully pulled out his radio to make a call back to the station, letting them know what we had found. Unfortunately they said it was going to be a bit be…

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