Mary (4:33)
In the pandemic, I decided to go back to college and finish it once and for all. I was living in Harrisonburg, Virginia, which is in the Shenandoah Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains. My boyfriend, now fiance, was living there with me. Harrisonburg is a small little mountain town that has the locals, but also a ton of college students because it's a college town. I'm in my 30s, so it was kind of tough to find people my age to hang out with, and we didn't really have many couple friends in the area. There's a lot of breweries and wineries and distilleries and stuff out there in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We went to a winery one day with our dogs. We saw this couple there who looked at first glance like they were probably around our age and they were playing cornhole by themselves. Everybody knows that cornhole's a four person game. We had been drinking a little wine and I was like, should we go ask if they want some teammates? We walked over there and we're like, hey, you know, y' all want to play cornhole together? And so we got to hanging out with these people and talking to them, and I'm normally not the type of person that's like, hey, come back to my house and hang out. But we were having A good time. They actually were the exact same age as us, so we were like, cool, maybe we can have, like, a couple friend to hang out with. They had just moved to the area. I'm like, hey, y' all want to come back to the house? We can order some pizza, hang out, you know, keep this going for a little while? And they're like, yeah, for sure. So we all go back to the house, we order pizza, and everything was cool. We had a great time. And they're like, let's get together again. We had gotten together with them one other time. We floated the Shenandoah River. My fiance's brothers were in town, so we all were just kicking it and had a fun day. Went to a brewery after and then went home. Another time that we hung out with him. Super chill. They invited us to go camping with them. This would be our third time ever hanging out, and we're thinking, like, yeah, like, for sure. I was in the middle of midterms since I was back at college. I was like, yeah, I have a lot to do. I'm down to go hang out for a little while, but I'm not quite prepared to, like, overnight camp tonight. We looked, and the campsite was only, I think, like, 35 or 40 minutes away from where we lived. So we were like, yeah, we'll just drive there, chill for a while, come back home, sleep at the house. We drove out there. They had this little campsite that was like one of those drive your car up to it, park had a little fire pit, point five down to the lake, zero point five back up to your campsite where you can set up your tent. Something weird that I noticed when we got there was there was no other campers at all anywhere in the park, which is pretty weird, especially during that time of year. It was, like, really nice out, like, kind of starting to get into fall. That's when a lot of people like to camp. And it was a weekend. So I'm thinking, hmm, okay, that's odd. Maybe some rain is, you know, in the weather, you know, forecast or something. I just kind of brushed it off. We're hanging out. We started having some drinks. I brought some of those Topo Chico seltzers, just a few of them. And my fiance and I were gonna drink those that we would eat and hang out for a bit, and then we were going to go back home. They had their own beers, and then they had a bottle of Bullet rye. I hate any kind of dark liquor. It makes me sick. They're like, hey, let's all have some of this bullet, and they start passing around the bottle. My fiance takes a swig. They take swigs, and I take, like, the microscopic amount of dark liquor because it makes me ill. We keep hanging out. We're eating some food, we're chilling. I keep having a few seltzers. You can tell that they were getting pretty drunk, but they were staying the night there, so whatever. But I was trying to be cautious with how much I was drinking because I knew that I would be driving. My fiance had more to drink than I did, maybe by like, two seltzers. But he was also just being low key. So we're hanging out by the fire. The guy goes, hey, do y' all want to walk down to the lake? We're like, yeah, sure. Because it was dark. I didn't want to take my cell phone down to the lake because it was sandy and stuff. And I was worried that I would drop my phone and lose it out there on the beach. So I put it in my car in the center console, and I grabbed two headlamps. I had my headlamp, gave the other one to my fiance so we could see walking down there. We were walking down to the lake, all four of us walking down that little wooded 0.5 path to get to the lake. When we got down there, I remember being down there for a minute. I remember the sand on the beach. I remember seeing the husband on the beach, and I see his face and then blackness. My fiance and I both woke up in the woods. He was laying on his back with his head turned perfectly. I was laying on top of him with my head turned perfectly. Almost as if we had been laid there and our heads turned. That way we didn't choke on our own puke. I woke up and started throwing up. My teeth were chattering, and I was just, like, feeling so disoriented. I started to shake my fiance, and I was like, babe, babe, something is not right. Wake up. And he was so out of it. He woke up and started screaming like, help, Help. Where am I? You know, didn't even know who I was for a second. And I'm like, snap out of it. In the back of my mind, I'm thinking, I don't know where I am. So shh. Shut up. Reorient ourselves and figure out where we are. He finally started to come to a little bit. We ended up hiking, essentially because we were in the mountains. We were an hour deep into George Washington National Forest, and thank God we woke up on a trail and not in the center of the woods, because at least there was a trail where we could follow to get out. But how we got an hour away from the campsite, and for both of us to be blacked out for that amount of time, I have no idea. We hiked back to the campsite, finally made our way, but the whole way back, we were feeling sick. I'm throwing up. He's throwing up. We're shivering. We can't figure out where the hell we are. And then we finally make it to a road, and we follow the road back all the way to the campsite. And the entire time, it almost felt like someone was watching us. The whole way back, I was looking at my fiance, and I was like, when we get back, we need to leave. Something is not right. I have a bad feeling we need to go. I don't care if we are drugged. I don't care what's going on. We need to leave. I was in a tank top and shorts and crocs, and I didn't have, like, really any dirt or scratches on me, and neither did he, which was odd, because, again, we were an hour away into the mountains, and there's no way that I would have hiked an hour in the backcountry in crocs with shorts on and not have mud or scratches or something on my body. When we got back to the campsite, the first thing I did Was go to my car and grab my phone and saw what time it was. And it had been, like, six hours. What the hell? How did we just lose all this time? How would both of us simultaneously pass out an hour away from where we were? Yeah, we were drinking, but there's no way that four seltzers Would have made us blackout for six hours of our life and not know how we ended up there. That's when my fiance's like, hey, man, what's going on? Something's not right. Are you in the tent? Are you awake? Are you asleep? What's going on? The dude wakes up, and he's like, huh? Where's Mary? My fiance and I look at each other, and we're like, what the hell? What do you mean? She's not in the tent with you? No. Last thing I remember Was asking if we all wanted to go down to the lake. But then I decided to stay back up here with the dog, and y' all went down there, and then I woke up underneath the picnic table, and I have no idea what happened. It just felt like bullshit. It felt like a lie. He didn't seem Panicked at all. He wakes up and his wife's not in the tent with him. And then he just doesn't seem freaked out in the slightest. And then he says that he didn't go down to the lake yet. I specifically remember before losing that track of time seeing him down there on the beach by the lake. To me, he changed his story, and that was really suspicious. So he comes out of the tent and we start looking for her. We start walking down that little path, the point five, that leads to the lake, which is connected to the campsite. And she is sitting on the trail slumped over with her head, like, bent over in the dark in the woods. And she's just sitting there, slumped over. It's kind of weird that she's just slumped over, sitting in the woods in the dark while he's asleep in the tent. And when we woke her up, because she was like, asleep, she seemed extremely out of it as well. I don't know if she was, you know, just really drunk or what, but she seemed out of it, like she had no idea what was going on. She gets back into the tent with him. The entire time, I'm looking at my fiance and we're communicating to each other through our eyes and our looks. We need to get the fuck out of here. When we get in the car, I was driving, but both of us were unwell. It was three in the morning at this point, and we're both, like, feeling sick and freaking out. We're running the situation through our minds. What if it was this? What if it was that? Was it them? Did they drug us? Did we get abducted by aliens? Like, what exactly was that we're driving in? The whole ride home, I don't recognize anything until I pull up in my driveway. Okay, I'm home. It was almost like my brain didn't process where I was until I pulled up right in front of our apartment the next day. We were violently ill. We probably should have gone to the hospital, but we didn't. I had put my phone in the car, but my fiance had his phone on him. And it was actually a brand new iPhone, so he hadn't gotten a case for it yet. We went down to the lake. He had his phone on him. Well, when we woke up an hour into the mountains, he, like, looking in his pockets to see if he could find his phone, and he didn't have it. So he's thinking, shit, I lost my phone somewhere along our journey. So the next day, I was just so freaked out. I literally called the ranger to ask Them if anything sketchy had ever happened there before, if they had any other campers there during that time. And then also that we were missing a cell phone. The guy was like, okay, yeah, I'll let you know. He said nothing weird like that had ever happened down there before. They did not have but one other camper apparently, and they must have been on the other side of the campground, because I saw no one when we were there. A couple days later, the ranger called me and was like, hey, good news. One of our rangers found your cell phone. He had picked it up and thought that it was broken, so he just tossed it in the trash can in his trailer. Okay. Did he try to turn it on or anything? And he was like, I'm not sure, but I'm going to go see if it's still in the trash can. And I'm like, yeah, please. So he went. He found this iPhone in the dude's trash can. He just threw it away. It was cracked, severely cracked, but on the back backside of the phone. So the front screen was, like, fully intact. He was like, I'm just going to mail it back to you. So he mailed it back to me. At that point, obviously, the phone's dead. I plug it in, it never cuts back on. The ranger was like, we found that phone in between campsites 5 and 6, but we were nowhere near campsite 5 and 6 when we woke up in the woods. So how the hell did his phone get all the way over there? And then we're the opposite direction in the mountains? When I got that phone back, I wanted to see what was on it. Then a part of me really didn't want to know what was on there. I wasn't sure if it was the couple who had done this to us or if there was something paranormal going on. Just because there's a lot of things that happen in the Appalachian mountains, and I believe in it, we decided that we would never hang out with them again. I did some research on George Washington national forest. I've found a couple stories where people had said that they had gone on hikes just for the day and lost time completely. That makes me wonder, like, is there something going on in that section of George washington national forest? Like, is there some sort of entity? Was it some sort of alien abduction? Or. I don't know, you know, is there something out there? I would like to think that it wasn't the guy. But then also, if it wasn't the guy, what could it have been? And how much more terrifying is that?
