Reader Submission: Voices in the Woods

Here’s another creepy tale from the same person who shared “Footsteps on the Stairs“…

“This next one happened last summer with my brother, his wife, my daughter, and I. It was around June or July, and it gets so hot and humid in this part of Georgia. We drove to the Crockford/Pigeon Mountain Wildlife Preserve here in Walker County to try and get in some swimming at what is called ‘The Blue Hole’ by locals. However, the swimming hole was too crowded, so we decided to go up the mountain and explore while waiting for people to leave.

The whole area is deep woods, broken only by dirt roads. People camp at the bottom near the swimming hole. The part we went to was a few miles away from everyone, and we left the pickup truck since the roads were too narrow for it.

The four of us were walking up this gravel road for a good half hour to 45 minutes and for some reason I can’t recall, my brother walked on ahead because he wanted to check something out. He was supposed to come right back, but he didn’t. After nearly an hour, my sister-in-law and I started to worry about him.

The woods were absolutely silent, and I pointed this out to my sister-in-law when I realized it. No birds, no bugs buzzing. We reached a bend in the road, and it felt like we were in a pocket of isolation where no living thing was. We were calling for my brother, even yelling for him, but he didn’t respond. My sister-in-law started to worry that maybe we’d have to go back and call an ambulance or police in case he’d fallen or something. We also started to feel like we were being watched, and she told me she heard a girl whispering ‘Shhhh’ in her ear though my 11-year-old and I were the only people nearby and neither of us had shushed her.

Finally, my brother came back down from the top of the mountain and said he’d seen a fox and decided to follow it awhile but had then gotten a little lost. Before we even had a chance to tell him about the shushing sound, my brother said ‘Do you guys get the feeling we’re being watched?. We agreed with him, and that’s when she told him the story.

After that, the four of us went downhill as fast as we could to make our way back to the pickup. My sister-in-law then said she felt like somebody was following us so my brother turned around and yelled ‘Be gone!’ I’ll mention here that I felt nauseated from the time we first approached the bend in the road until the time we left that area. My daughter also had a headache until we left.

You might say it was campers fooling with us, but we saw no one else, no tents or vehicles, and the whispering in my sister-in-law’s ear was too close for it to be a hiker hiding behind a tree. It was right in her ear and in her face, as if it had been me or my daughter, but we were busy yelling for my brother, not ‘shushing’ his wife. The designated camping area was miles away, and I still don’t know why I felt nauseated until I got away from the bend.

I found out after looking the place up online that the area had been a mining town in the 1920s called Estelle and there’s also a cemetery reputed to have activity by that name where some of the town’s citizens were buried. My sister-in-law is a CNA at a nursing home in Lafayette, and a girl she works with there does amateur investigating. The friend once went to Estelle Cemetery with her husband and something scratched his legs while he was there.

But anyway, those are my experiences. Thanks for being interested. I’ve kind of scared myself while remembering these and typing them out.”

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