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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/davidgrayPhotography on 2024-11-14 13:36:10+00:00.

So a bit of backstory here. In third grade I became friends with John. John lived up near the top of a mountain range in the middle of a forest. To get there you have to drive up a steep, long, winding road, and it takes about 20 minutes or so to get there from my parents’ place in town. About a minute or two up the road it becomes a dirt track that leads deep into heavily wooded land. The road does eventually come meet with civilization again, but only after you’ve dodged potholes, downed trees after storms, and realized that you could have just turned around, taken the highway, and ended up in the same spot in a fraction of the time.

John has always been full of seemingly endless energy. If you gave him the choice between waiting half an hour for a ride home, or walking the two hours, he would walk. So every time I’d go to his place to stay, I’d find myself going on multi-hour walks that left me stiff as a board the next day, even as a 12 year old kid in the peak of his physical fitness. We’d sometimes wander deep into the forest, or along dirt tracks, or up paths only really used by the electricity or phone companies or the fire department to maintain services for the handful of people who live up there.

This story takes place about 20 years ago when I was in high school, and I still feel really uneasy remembering it, all these years later. A few weeks prior to this story, John and I had been to an abandoned fire watch tower that was probably built in the 1940s or so. Most of it had been knocked down due to the weather, and you could still find planks of old wood half buried in the ground, but the 360° view was great, and it was the perfect place to get up to no good, like setting off fireworks, smashing glass bottles, drinking, whatever. The tower was up one of these maintenance roads, off the dirt track. Once you found the overgrown track which doesn’t show up on any map, not even forestry maps, you come across steep and winding path, and only accessible by foot, or by four wheel drive if you’re brave or stupid enough. There was a secondary path that was only accessible on foot, and it went straight up the side of the hill and was even steeper. If you valued your leg muscles, you’d take the longer, winding path.

So it’s probably 1am or so, and John and I are sitting downstairs watching TV, eating snacks, and playing games on the computer. He suggests we sneak out of the house and go for walk. I agree, and we rug up and creep out the front door, up the driveway and out onto the road. John suggests we go back to the fire tower, because the night sky would be super visible from up there, being away from town lights and partially blocked by the trees. I reckon that sounds good, so we start walking.

I can tell you, being up in a forest, in the middle of the night, is very spooky. The only sounds you hear are the wind through the trees, and the occasional rustle as some animal goes shuffling off into the undergrowth. You MIGHT see a car go past, but given that there were only 4 houses between John’s place and the fire tower, you’ve got a better chance of being struck by lightning. I’ve got my phone with me (no good, as there’s no signal that far up the hill), and a battery powered flashlight that also turns into a camping lantern when you extend the body.

After a good deal of walking, we come to the overgrown track and we start our climb. At this point I’m puffed and quite spooked because shit, it’s nearly 2am and I’m miles away from civilization in near pitch dark. I’ve got the torch extended into a lantern, but it doesn’t help me much. We’re walking along, when I hear a noise. I throw out my arm and stop John.

“Did you hear that?”

He stops and listens. His sense of hearing is keener than mine, as he can tell the difference between wind in the trees and a car in the distance driving up a road, something I couldn’t do.

“Eh, it’s probably an animal” he says, unperturbed, but he hesitates a bit before he starts walking again, a little slower than before. I follow him, probably about 2-3 steps behind. He’s probably right, as there’s some pretty big wildlife around these parts, like wombats and kangaroos, the latter which can weigh more than an entire adult and are about 8 times as powerful.

I’m looking around, when I hear the noise again. It sounds like a grunt with an almost angry tone to it. I stop, and John stops too. He turns around and looks at me to see where I am. The sound came from our left, but has stopped. If it were something like a koala (which makes a grunting noise) or a kangaroo (which makes a more subdued grunting noise), you’d expect some extra sound, like movement, or additional grunts of warning or calling or whatever. But this was just a grunt that could have been human, then dead silence, except for the wind.

“Hello?” John calls out. No response. I can see him frown in the lantern light. We stand still for a minute or two, listening for more sounds, but nothing comes. We walk on. After a bit, we start talking again, talking about TV shows and what we reckon about other kids at school, when up ahead I see a brief dull flash of green that quickly goes out. We’re in the middle of the forest, so it wasn’t something in the sky, it was very close to the ground and partially obscured by some trees. I point ahead, but there’s no need, as John saw the same thing.

“What the fuck was that? You saw it too, right? A green light or something?”

“Yeah. it looked like a light from a screen or something”

“Nobody lives up this way, so it can’t be that. There’s a weather station nearby, but that’s up the top of the hill and doesn’t have any lights on it”

I retract the lantern back into a torch and shine it ahead. The beam is too weak to see that far. The road veers off to the left anyway, so it’s not going to see much through the thick trees. I shuffle my foot and hear the crunch of rock and dirt under my sole. After a few moments of glancing back and forth between each other, we uneasily walk on. As we walk past the place where we saw the green light, I shine the torch in. The light hits a few trees, but I see nothing. The rest of the walk up was uneventful, except for a wombat that lumbered out from the bushes and made its way steadily down the hill off to the right.

We spent about half an hour stargazing. Saw a couple of satellites, a shooting star, and just watched the world go by, laying on a patch of grass at the top of the hill. Eventually we get up and head back, as it’s nearing 3am and we want to be home before John’s parents wake up. I’m pushing myself up from the ground, when I see a little orange dot on the edge of the clearing. I pick up a rock that is nearby, and say to John “oi, over by the trees there”. He looks over and sees it too. It looks like someone puffing on a cigarette, as it increases in intensity, then fades off to a barely noticeable point of light.

Now John is a really good aim. When you live up in a forest and near dirt tracks, you’re surrounded by rocks, and it’s fun to pick some up and throw them at stuff, see if you can hit targets, like branches or bottles dumped on the side of the road or whatever. He stoops and picks up a rock too.

“Hey! Who are you?” he calls out, startling me, as I wasn’t expecting him to do that. The light moves down a bit, as if being held by someone’s side. It then comes back up and increases in intensity before fading back down. I’ve been around enough smokers to know what the action looks like, and I’d bet my bottom dollar it’s someone pulling on a durry. John pulls his arm back and with amazing speed, throws his stone at where the light is. It comes very close to its intended target, as I hear it “plunk!” off the tree and the land among the grass. The light stays dim, but moves ever so slightly. John grabs another rock and walks over towards the light. I’m shining the torch in that direction, but again, the weak beam shows me nothing. As we approach, the light drops to the ground and goes out as if stepped on. When we get to the edge of the clearing, there’s nobody there, but as I point my torch to the ground,

“a cigarette! It’s still smoking too. That was definitely a person” I say, swinging the torch back up into the trees. again, there’s nothing.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here” I saw, nervously. John nods silently and we back off. We decide to take the secondary path, straight down the side of the hill. We’re moving pretty quickly, as we’re freaked the fuck out. It’s definitely a person, but they’re not responding to us. Looking back, I think the green light might have been a phone’s display, as this was the early 2000s, before smartphones, and even before colour screens.

We scuttle down the side of the hill, grabbing onto trees to steady ourselves. I skid to a stop and tell John to as well. There’s definitely a noise behind us. It’s a grunt, but also the rhythmic “thud, thud, thud” that was unmistakably footsteps. Basically shitting ourselves at this point, we double our speed. I trip and fall over a rock or a root or something on the ground, and John keeps barrelling ahead, maybe not aware that I’d fallen, or maybe not daring to stop. I get up, vaguely aware of the pain in my palms where I fell on them, and I keep going. The flashlight, which is back in lantern mode and the strap looped arou…

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