Transcript
Home Depot Advertiser (0:01)
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Jack Wagner (0:40)
Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode features two stories from three different people. I loved both of these interviews, but they ended up being a little too short to be their own episode. So we decided to put them together in terms of the paranormal. These stories really don't have much to do with each other. The incidents themselves aren't that similar, but there are some small similarities between the two stories and we thought for that reason they would fit nicely together. Both of the stories involve two people walking on a hiking trail in the woods and seeing something that they can't explain. And in both of them, the person we spoke to is out walking with somebody they used to date. The first one comes from a guy named Sean and he had an experience while he was out on a hike with his ex girlfriend. The second comes from a girl named Delaney who also had an experience while on a hike with her ex boyfriend. Like I said, I really loved both of these and and I think you will too. This is episode 124. The title is Off Trail and you're listening to Otherworld.
Sean (2:03)
Hello, is this Bobby?
Delaney (2:04)
Yes.
Jack Wagner (2:05)
It is at its core, the science.
Home Depot Advertiser (2:06)
You can't argue with.
Jack Wagner (2:08)
I'm worried about.
Sean (2:09)
All of a sudden it is up in the sky. It's almost frustrating that it's happening.
Home Depot Advertiser (2:12)
I'm literally, I'm gonna die. Its limbs were just like wrong.
Sean (2:17)
Everybody moves back into the light, even if it takes them a.
Home Depot Advertiser (2:43)
My name is Sean. I'm from Long Island, New York, 26 years old and I'm currently living in Studio City, California. Mostly trying to get into the film industry, but you know, it's ended up being mostly working at bars, worked as a mover, office administrator. It's. I've had maybe like seven or eight jobs in the three years that I've been here, all overlapping. So when this happened, it was kind of between the tail end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020. It was on Long island, specifically Manorville, where I grew up. I feel like it kind of has a reputation for being a weird enough place. Maybe I'm biased, but particularly Manorville. It's known as like the gateway to the Hamptons, but it's really just in the middle of the pine barrens. It's essentially like a semi rural area of cookie cutter developments separated by huge swaths of woods. So growing up, I spent a lot of time hanging around in trails because most of my friends, you know, we were all in the same developments and the best way to get to them was through trails. I mean, one of the best things we even had to do was take like an hour and a half walk to get to 7:11. If that kind of illustrates how really little there was around there. I do think it was a great place to grow up for that reason. Like, it did feel like, you know, kids kind of ran the trails. You would run into people, and growing up, that was really cool. I mean, I was really never afraid in the woods at all. The thing is, as I got older, I started recognizing that some of it was a lot eerier. It didn't help that the Long island serial killer that like got caught maybe two years ago. Four of those bodies were found in Manorville in some of the same trails that I was going through all the time as a kid. There was always this feeling that like, you could go down the wrong path and, you know, something could potentially be there. I mean, it's kind of like a Stephen King town in Manorville. Like, there's something that feels kind of off. So really where this story starts is getting home for Thanksgiving, that last semester of College. Flash forward 2019. I'm a senior in college and my girlfriend at the time and I had just recently broken up. We had been pretty much together since 10th grade onward. So it was a, you know, it was a fairly heavy situation and she was in New York City, I was in Boston. In hindsight, it was definitely bound to happen. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that we had been together that long. And, you know, we were living really different lives at the time. We met up the day after Thanksgiving and she wanted to catch up or, you know, just kind of have closure, get coffee or something. We agreed to meet up pretty late that night, maybe around 9 or 10. I think it's worth noting that we also, we lived in the same development. So there's maybe a three block walk between us. But I decided to just pick her up in my brother's car instead. We drove back to in front of my place and for a while debated going inside to talk about it. But to be honest, it felt like it should have been maybe an hour conversation at most. So we just kind of stayed in the car, which is actually where a lot of this started. Like you can imagine it was a very loaded conversation. But at the same time, like we brought beers. At the time, I was smoking, she was smoking. So we were going through cigs in my brother's car, which really wasn't the most courteous thing to do. But either way, an hour turned into two, hours turned into three, and by the end, I would say we were actually having a really good time. It really felt like a relief in being so worried about this conversation. And we both kind of went back to that, you know, best friend who used to date level. So it gets really late and the conversation's been going on this long. We end up going back into my house and I got out of the car, went into the house, and I remember being like, oh shit, I forgot to lock it. So I went back to the car to lock it. And we go inside, she spends the night. So 5:30 the next morning we get up to leave and we get in the car. And you know, when you spend that long in a car, it always gets all condensationy, regardless of whether or not you're smoking and talking in it. So we get in the car, I unlock the car, and again, it's only like a two minute drive to her place and we're kind of quiet, but I look up in the rear view and on the back, in condensation was the word help. It was strange enough to make us take another lap around the neighborhood, just talking about, what is that? And to be fair, we were kind of laughing about it. I think I even made the joke, like, I don't. I don't know what Steve is doing in his car. Like, what the fuck is that? So that's pretty much where we left it. Just as a weird, strange thing. I dropped her off, I even a couple days later, I ended up driving her to the train to get back into the city. So it wasn't something that was at the forefront of our mind whatsoever. A couple months go by and the semester's over. It was actually my last semester in Boston because my school had this thing where you could transfer to LA for a semester to work an internship and, you know, try to get some footing. So my buddy and I, who I moved out here with, were planning on taking a big road trip after the Christmas break. He lived in Texas, so we had all these stops Planned on the way. And I knew it was going to be my last time on Long island for a little bit. I ended up going over to her place New Year's Day, another attempt at like clearing the air. Another half assed closure attempt. I don't know. The next day we woke up, it was a cloudy day. It was already like, it was lightly raining. Something felt off and I kind of marked that up to the situation. And the rest of the morning went on pretty much as usual. We were just hanging out, having coffee for a couple hours and trying to figure out what to do do for the rest of the day. Anytime she would come back to Maneville, she liked going on walks by herself now and going into different trails, going into new trails that she hadn't been to before. We were letting the afternoon drag on a bit. By the time noon one o' clock rolls around, she's like, okay, so we going on a hike or not? We're going on a walk or not. And I had this distinct, you know, I'm, I can definitely be lazy, especially in the mornings, but I had this very distinct foot dragging feeling about the whole thing. And this I now remember. She said, regardless of whether or not you go, I'm going alone. And almost immediately I felt like that's, it didn't feel right. I was like, okay, yeah, fine, I'll go. And she wanted to go to this place she'd only been to once before. It was actually a town over in Shirley, the Wertheim Nature Preserve. It was kind of a cloudy day. It wasn't really much of a day to go out and enjoy the outdoors. But it cleared up and by about 3 o' clock we drove over. We get there and it's, you know, it's, it's a nice trail. There were maybe only two or three other cars in the parking lot. And it was one of those trails where you, you know, you enter at the exit. It's basically just a big loop you could take different paths in. So on our way in we saw multiple parties coming out. So we pretty much figured we were the only people in the jail. And what I thought was so weird was we both were kind of immediately creeped out. A lot of me now wonders if some of this weird feeling that had been there since the beginning of the day, in hindsight, we kind of both marked it up to something along the lines of feeling watched. But we, you know, we kept going. And the thing is, at this point, we got to the trail late and it's winter in the northeast it's already fairly dark by the time we hit the, you know, kind of the destination point of the trail, which is a little, like, rinky dink dock. I was already pretty eager to go and, you know, all else aside, I just don't want to be out when it gets cold and dark. So we wrap around, then take the loop back. I don't know whether it was just the time of day or the fact that the woods were still crackling because it had rained recently. Something about the air felt distinctly thin. The air felt, like, rarefied. It felt almost vibrational. And at this point, we were getting into the early stages of twilight. So we're wrapping back and, you know, again, still joking about how weird this whole thing feels. She's walking maybe a couple feet ahead of me to my left, and the rest of the trail is kind of covered to me by woods. Like, I'm at a bend, my view is a little obscured. And the first thing she says is, oh, there's a person. And that was followed up by her saying, wait, Sean, what is that? And then what is that? Louder and more severe. I go around the bend, and I see this long, skinny, like, luminescent, almost didn't have a form at first. It was in the center and looked more or less like something bipedal. I would guess it was something around 7 to 8ft tall. That was my gauge when I saw it most plainly. It just looked like a long, skinny streak of light on two legs, no arms. It was stark white, which has that almost moonlighty reflective quality. It came to a point at the top when I first saw it, and it seemed relatively like, stable or more physical at that point. And then as soon as it moved, it didn't look exactly the same in any two moments. It just darted into the woods without making any remote sound. And it almost looked like it was zigzagging between trees to where for a half second, it would be closer, and then it would take an angle and then suddenly look 5, 10ft further away than it was a second before. This is all maybe from 30ft away, 40ft away. For a split second, it would look like it was nine feet tall. Another, it would look four, maybe, but the depth kept changing until it just completely faded into, like, behind bushes in the distance. Especially by the time we got to the point in the trail where it would have been when we first saw it. Trying to put it into perspective with the trees around it, it was hard to gauge zigzagging in a way that really doesn't make sense. And we both froze. And we were just watching it, trying to track it for a second. Especially towards the end when it was getting further away. It almost looked like an enormous cattail in the way they kind of bob and made no noise. It was after it rained, so the woods are crackling, but we. We heard absolutely nothing while it's ripping through these bushes maybe 30ft away from us. It wasn't translucent. Like that's. That's actually one of the things that always strikes me about it. Thinking about it now, like, it was almost too solid. It was very physical, especially in being twilight. It was just very stark against everything, if this makes any sense. It almost looked like something that was overlaid over everything else, to be honest. Now a lot of how stark white it was is the thing that really sets it aside because of the fact that it was a dark day and it. This thing looked like it had no bearing on the environment around it. Branches it was running into. And like the bramble it was going through it. It didn't move. And I've replayed this in my head more than anything in my life at this point. If this was something I was looking away from at the wrong time, it would have been so easy to miss. But we both locked onto it and just kind of watched it recede into the distance in five or six seconds. Both of us were pretty freaked out. It took us almost an hour to get to that point in the trail. So my first thought is, okay, well, whatever that was, we have to just keep walking in the other direction. This, you know, kind of unlike the. The help thing at first, this we really weren't laughing about, especially based on feeling pretty isolated and the fact that the weird feeling that it kind of hung over the day just felt like it was validated. And the other thing that's making the whole thing worse is the fact that it is rapidly getting darker, like hitting now the middle to tail end of twilight. So we keep going on and eventually turn on our phone flashlights. It gets to that point. I didn't realize this at the time, but, you know, we were now holding hands, which we were not. I didn't realize I was grabbing pretty tight. I think I was trying to put on a face of not being as freaked out as I was. So we. We walk on for maybe five, ten more minutes. I'm looking at the woods the entire time she's looking ahead. We have our flashlights on, and she gives the biggest, like, gasp I've heard out of someone. It's. It sounded like the Wind got knocked out of her. And I look over to where her flashlight is in front of us. And in the ground, maybe four feet across, is the word HELP etched in very scratchy, almost threatening letters. At this point, she froze like mouth to hand. I have never felt my stomach drop harder. My main thought was, we need to leave right now. My creeping thought that kept coming in was not only that, I can't believe this is really happening, it was almost the thought that, like, if this is happening, then literally anything could happen by the time we get out of this trail. If we get out of this trail. We now started really walking hard, not running. I think I was stupid enough to even at the time say, don't run, mainly because I don't. We were still far enough. I don't think we even would have had the energy to make it out as we were going. Eventually she's able to kind of snap out of it a bit. And they were both walking extremely fast. And I told her, you look ahead and I'm gonna look behind. I mean, it probably looked pretty ridiculous from afar, but I was speed walking backwards, just looking at the woods and flashing a light around. To be honest, it was probably only something like 20 minutes. I could hear my heartbeat the entire time. She asked, should we run? And we pretty much just start booking it from there. I was wearing Timbs at the time, and I almost immediately tripped, which again, when you see it in movies like everybody else, I always thought it was ridiculous when people trip at the worst possible time. Having experienced it, it now makes a lot of sense. It's almost like I forgot how to run. You know, honestly, we made good time. I mean, she was an athlete, I am not. So we. We got to the end of the trail, so fucking relieved we're catching our breath. I even just looked back at the mouth of it for a while and went back to the car. We were the only car there, as we thought, got in, caught our breath, went to drive out. And we didn't really talk about it much on the the ride back in specific, but I remember trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the night or where to even go from there. And both of us wanted to be in a loud public space. So we got friends and we went to a bar nearby us. We told them the story, but kind of like we both told like an abridged version of it because we were clinging to a certain amount of rationalization about it. And even the rationalization was horrifying. I got home and I again gave Like a very abridged version of it to my parents. I remember even taking a shower that night and just replaying that. That same six seconds of seeing this thing over and over again. I actually ended up, you know, taking legal pads and trying to, like, draw it and be like, no, that wasn't quite that. It's not quite this. The next day I went over to her place and that was when we first started talking about what we think it actually was. We both immediately threw out the desperate sort of rationalizations we had to get through the moment and admitted that we have no idea, but it was nothing normal. While we were talking, she went, wait, fuck, look. And there was a candle lit by us. I was like. When she said that, I was like, oh, God, it's back. And it wasn't. She was just staring at the candle and she was like, that's what it looked like. That's how it moved. And it suddenly clicked to me that it was like, oh, wait, this. It did kind of seem like a impossibly white, skinny candle flicker. At this point, I was really just trying to put it all out of my head. And I was leaving for this road trip in two days, so I left. I went on a road trip with my friend. We. I told him the story. He was blown away by it. I ended up having a panic attack on the trip while I was thinking about it too much. We were in New Orleans and he was like, oh, you should get like a. Get a reading. Like, I. I wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. My ex and I really. She barely will talk about it. She's thoroughly of the belief that this was something that doesn't want to be discussed. And she's very superstitious about evoking it or potentially bringing it back. She's made her peace with it by putting it away. I find myself coming back to it maybe too often. One of the things that I've made peace with is the fact that whatever this is, and I can't remotely claim to know what it is, other than that it was something supernatural, is probably the only thing I can give. But it has opened me up in kind of a positive way to look at the world with a lot more openness and a lot more curiosity, because if something like that is possible, then, you know, who am I to. Who am I to shut down any other belief? When it came time to. To move out to la, I did very eagerly, just because, you know, since then I haven't been fully comfortable at home, you know, even going back for holidays If I'm out at night and I'm around quiet woods or just in the Pine Barrens, I mean, I haven't been in a trail since.