Storyteller (15:13)
So in spring of 2015, I was a sophomore in college. I went to Appalachian State, which is small school in the mountains in North Carolina. Has tons of trails, beautiful scenery, rivers, streams, everything you could imagine along the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was, it was a. It was a hot spot for hikers and those who just love being in nature. Three close friends of mine and I went to grab dinner. It was a weeknight. We had no plans afterwards, so after we ate, we just sat there thinking of ideas, of things we could do. At this point, the sun hadn't set yet, so we still had some daylight ahead of us. It's probably around 6 or 7 o'. Clock. Usually when you had free time, you would end up on the Blue Ridge Parkway going for a drive or maybe hanging out at a scenic overlook. I remembered a spot that I had actually visited the year prior with another group of friends. And I suggested it to this group as a place that maybe we should check out. This place was unique. It wasn't something you would find on a map. It's not something you would find at the visitor center or anything that anyone would recommend. On the Blue Ridge Parkway, there's a section of road that's held up by pillars that wraps around the mountain. Kind of looks like a bridge. And the bridge is being held up by pillars, has what appears to be a tunnel underneath with a gate to that tunnel entrance. That gate had corroded off and you could shimmy your way up into the tunnel. It was a little bit of a tight squeeze, but you could do it. So I pitched it to them to see if they'd Be interested in going. And yeah, they were all in. One of the guys, Matt, just had this terrible feeling and he didn't want to go in. So me and Nick and Andrew, we make our way in the same way that I'd done the year before, via the corroded gate entrance. We one by one shimmy our way in and start exploring the different sections of tunnel. I was a little scared at first just because it is a pitch black tunnel and you're shimming your way in where both your back and chest are up against a tiny narrow entry. But we went in and we explored. We thought it was fun. There was a lot of graffiti all over the place and it was just cool exploring the inside of a tunnel. As cars would pass by, you would hear them driving over you. It's really loud. You hear like the don't go. When they, you know, when they hit the bridge itself, the car, it makes a really loud sound which echoes into the tunnel. But that was the only sound we heard. We didn't hear anything else inside the tunnel. Pentagrams everywhere, upside down crosses. I know a lot of it was not there the year before, so that indicates that this tunnel has seen someone in the last year. One of the first things I saw was in that first section was a circle of candles, like a collection of candles. It looked like maybe someone had done some sort of seance, but overall just a bunch of like ominous graffiti tags everywhere. Tons of upside down crosses, pentagrams, you name it. Everything we just walked past was. It was scary, but with me and two other guys, I was just trying to keep it cool and I didn't want to be like I was the most scared one there. So we keep going just one by one, section at a time. So the whole tunnel is about a half mile. We just keep going section at a time, just exploring, just looking at things on the walls, just being kids, exploring until we get to maybe about halfway through. We made it about halfway through the bridge before I came to a halt just above the crawl space into the next section of tunnel. Ahead of us was a graffiti tag in all caps that read, he's in there with some arrows pointing to the crawl space. He's in there. We all, one by one, made it kind of clear that we were all kind of spooked out. But no one wanted to be the one to say, hey, let's turn around. We laughed it off and just proceeded into that crawl space. I mean, everyone was probably concerned, like, what could that possibly be? But at this point, we had already Been halfway through the bridge. We weren't going to let that be the reason why we stopped. So we kept going. I was the first one in. I crouched walk through that crawl space with the other two behind me. And then before I was able to fully stand up into the next section, that's when I saw some sort of movement ahead of me. At the end of the next section, I saw just movement. It was kind of hard to make it out since I had the flashlight on my phone, which can only see a few feet in front of you. At that point, I had reached for Nick, who was third in line, still making his way through that crawl space. And he had, like, a legitimate flashlight with batteries. So I reached back and told him to hand it to me. And with this flashlight, I pointed in the direction of the movement. It was maybe 2 to 3ft tall, dark gray color with hind legs like a deer, but shorter arms up front, green glowing eyes. It just didn't have any defined edges, which was the scariest part. Usually when you look at something, you can make out its border on the background, whatever it is. This did not have that. It was fuzzy. It just blended in. In the five seconds I was aiming my flashlight at it, it jumped diagonally across the tunnel, wall to wall, faster than any animal I've ever seen move without making a single noise. I would describe it if you were to take a bouncy ball and throw it down a narrow corridor, how fast that ball would bounce from corner to corner. Just in no direction. Like, no organized direction. It was just bouncing repeatedly wall to wall. So after I'd seen it initially, I turned around. I told Nick and Andrew that, hey, we need to get out of here as soon as possible. Andrew then takes the flashlight from me to look at it for himself. And at this point, I'm already walking back towards the previous crawl space. He was terrified. He, like me, could not explain what it was that we had just seen. I mean, you live your whole life knowing what certain animals are, even if you haven't seen them. You know what a giraffe looks like if you've never seen a giraffe in the wild. But this was. This was not something that anyone had ever seen or heard of or just encountered. This was. This was unworldly. I'm panicking. This is the scariest thing I'd ever seen in my life at this point. And still to this day, honestly, talking about it is making me shake a little. When we exit the tunnel is when Andrew makes it clear to us that, hey, that thing Was approaching us the entire way back. Slowly approaching, but bouncing off the wall the entire time. We make it back to the car. It was a pretty quiet car ride back. Everyone was really scared. I don't think I got much sleep that night at all. I got home by this point. It is probably, I don't know, 10, 11 o' clock the next morning. I was taking a shower, getting ready for class. I would sometimes brush my teeth in the shower. And this morning I was. I spat down into the shower drain and I could see that something had exited my mouth that I didn't previously feel. I could see it in the toothpaste water circling the shower drain. It was the size and shape of a dime. Red in color, but transparent. Kind of grossed out by it. I just ignored it, thinking that if it was serious, it would probably happen again and I could go see a doctor. I just finished up, got ready for class and went on about my day. So later that afternoon, I ran into Andrew. It wasn't planned and I was actually hoping to avoid him since I hadn't talked about what had happened the night before with anyone and just didn't want to talk about it again. He tells me that something strange had happened that morning. He describes that he spat out blood, but it was quote unquote, a clot in a circle. And I told him the same thing had happened to me. And we knew immediately that we had to go find Nick. Later that evening we met up with Nick and sure enough, that was the first thing he greeted us with this morning. I spat up blood is what Nick said. Some. Some days go by, might have turned into maybe a week or two of just thinking, what. What could it have possibly been? We're all rational individuals, so demon came to mind. We started doing some research, the three of us in the school library. Different types of demons, demonology and what they look like. After some time, we found a picture that had a demon with the same color and fuzzy shape of what I remember in the bridge. And it was said that this demon is only ever summoned onto earth when someone specifically calls for its protection. And that's what it does. It protects the area. If I had to guess, someone had visited that tunnel in the 12 months that I was gone and did some sort of ritual where they called onto this demon asking for its protection. And when it saw us, it protected that area by scaring us. Well, we all agreed that we would never go back. However, the story didn't keep quiet with Nick and Andrew.
