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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/ShotMobile3075 on 2024-09-24 01:51:20+00:00.

My name is James, and for 11 years, I’ve been haunted by something that happened when I was 14. I live in Saint Stur, a tiny mountain town with less than 600 people. What happened to me that October changed my life, and to this day, I still don’t understand it.

On October 4th, 2013, my father, grandfather, and I went elk hunting early in the morning. It was quiet—eerily quiet. You could barely hear the animals moving. We hiked about four miles from the trucks when everything went dead silent. My grandpa, trying to ease the tension, joked, “When the woods go quiet, there’s a predator around. Guess they know how mean we are.”

I laughed, but it didn’t help. Something about that morning felt off, like we weren’t the only ones out there. I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching us.

We didn’t see anything all day, so we decided to head back. As we got closer to the trucks, the feeling of being watched grew stronger. About 250 feet from the trail, we heard a scream. It was so close—closer than anything should’ve been without us seeing it. My grandpa told us to move fast. We all piled into the truck, and as we backed up, I caught a glimpse of it.

A tall, dark figure, like a twisted mix of a man and a deer, its claws sharp and teeth razor-like. It was smiling. My grandpa saw it too, because he didn’t say a word the whole way back. He just focused on getting us out of there. We didn’t make it home until 6 PM.

Later that night, I overheard my grandpa and dad talking. My grandpa asked, “Did you see it too?”

My dad didn’t believe him, said it was all stories he used to tell. But I knew it was real. I told them I saw it, and I could tell by the look in my grandpa’s eyes that he believed me. My dad, though, said it was just paranoia after hearing that scream.

But it wasn’t a mountain lion. My grandpa said it was something else. Something older.

That night, I went to bed, but I woke up around 5:30 AM to the sound of my grandpa trying to stop my dad from going back into the mountains. He was convinced it wasn’t over. And deep down, so was I.

My dad never came back. They searched the mountains, but they never found a trace of him.

Weeks went by. Then the knocking started.

Every night, a knock at my window. And every night, I heard my dad’s voice. “Let me in,” he’d say. “I forgot my keys.” But the voice was always just…wrong. Like someone trying to imitate him but not quite getting it right.

For years, I lived with that knocking. My grandpa told me never to answer. And I didn’t.

When my grandpa passed away, the knocking didn’t stop. It just changed.

Now, it’s his voice I hear too. Both of them, calling to me from the woods. Every night, they get louder. Every night, it gets harder to ignore.

I know it’s only a matter of time before whatever took them takes me too. I don’t know how much longer I can resist.