So the day finally arrived; the first day of hunting season, and to say Earl was excited would have been an understatement. He wound his way back to the old driveway he’d used to go to the old woodsman’s house, and this time he went further on down the overgrown road past the place. He noticed as he went by that it didn’t look like the old timer was home. In fact, it looked as if no one had even been there for a very long time.

It was a fine, cool autumn afternoon with sunshine that seemed to portend a good hunt. The weather forecast that morning had predicted a cold front would come through the area, and although the wind might cause the deer to lay up and not stir, if there would be any rain, the dampness would at least quieten the leaves he’d have to walk through. The old road was getting muddy, and even though it had been fairly dry of late, this was one of those areas where the ground just never seemed to get completely dry, so his truck did a lot of spinning in the ancient ruts, especially going up the many hills through the woods.

He found a bit of a clearing where he parked, and grabbed his pack and rifle, and set out to look for deer signs. Finally he was walking on what he was sure was a game trail through the ever-thickening brush, and for the first time he began to get a weird feeling, almost like he was being watched; like he wasn’t alone in those creepy woods. After what seemed like miles of that overgrown trail, he began to notice an area of unusual darkness in the thick woods up ahead. Was it some kind of dilapidated building out here in the middle of nowhere? It sure seemed to be, but what? As he approached he could make out the dark upright remains of what used to be a house, and it looked as though it had once been a big, two story building, now rotting and in disarray. The windows upstairs were all broken out, leaving black portals that felt like eyes watching for unsuspecting intruders into its domain.

The place gave Earl the creeps, it had an evil feel, and as he saw the old road, now only a trail, went on past it, he trudged ahead, trying not to look, but there seemed to be some irresistible attraction that kept drawing his gaze to that horrid house. As he was passing the closest point to the house, he saw a couple of aged crows complaining to each other in a huge sycamore tree. A few ochre leaves fluttered in the light breeze, and as Earl looked up into the tree, he noticed that clouds were starting to drift in ahead of the cold spell. He picked up his pace, both to try and get where he was going before the weather got bad, and to get away from the spooky place. A few starlings fluttered from the brush and finally! He was past the old house! He knew the weather was about to take a turn for the worse, but his attention was spurred back onto the hunt when he came upon a tree rub, where bucks rub all the velvet off their antlers which takes the bark off small saplings; it diverted his thoughts from the eerie woods, at least for now, and back to the big buck for which he’d come here.

As Earl stealthily walked further into the vine-infested darkness, he remembered the odd way the old man looked at him when he asked for permission to hunt there, and he remembered that he’d wondered what that was all about. It wouldn’t be the last time he gave it thought. A quarter of an hour after he passed the creepy old house, the wind started to pick up and the air rapidly began to cool. The cold front had arrived, and with it, the sky began to darken as the first of the rain began to come down. Earl’s hunting clothes were fairly weather resistant, so the light rain didn’t immediately bother him, but he knew it would soon get muddy, and walking would become difficult, but of more immediate concern, the gathering darkness of the woods seemed unusual, even for a storm, because it wasn’t all that late. He could still see fairly well though, and after all the trouble to get here, he wasn’t ready to give up on that deer, besides with the rain soaking the woods, his walking through the leaves was, as expected, much quieter.

About the time the game trail he’d been following played out, he noticed something odd – a very old moss-covered concrete wall, or what was left of it. It was out through the dark woods, and he could see that it was high near a corner and irregularly eroded as it stretched through the darkness until it reached the ground. If Earl had known it, he would have recognized this as being the last trace of an ancient drying oven for lumber, but he had no idea of the sordid history of the Duff Mill that once operated in the very place where he now stood.

A crack of thunder rumbled off to the northwest, and Earl started to grow concerned that he’d get caught out in the coming storm, hours away from his truck, and there was no way he was going to take shelter in that creepy old house he’d passed earlier. He wasn’t necessarily superstitious, but there was something extremely unsettling about that house! He began to look around the concrete wall to see if there was anything resembling cover around it. It had indeed become very dark for that time of the evening, but as he searched for shelter, a sudden flash of lightning revealed a tangled mat of thick vines draped inside the corner of the wall. It wasn’t exactly waterproof under the snarled briars, but he might be able to spread his poncho, which he always carried in his pack, over the vines and it might keep some of the rain off.

As he began to make his way towards the wall, he heard a solitary old crow nearby, but instead of the normal cawing cry, he could swear the crow was screeching “no, no!”, and the calls seemed to grow more insistent as he moved in the direction of the old wall. “NO! NO!” This was upsetting, to say the least!

He stumbled on through the darkness in the rain, which was by now getting heavier, he tripped over something about knee-high, but it didn’t feel like a tree stump – it was harder, like a rock, and sure enough, as he looked down through the tall weeds, he saw that it was a slab of limestone. In the gloom, he could make out that it had been shaped by someone long ago and obviously placed there. As he reached down to feel of what appeared to be a flat side, his fingers traced crude chisel marks in the stone which, even though they were by now illegible, revealed that it was a very old grave marker – and another lightning flash revealed that there were more of them close by, some standing eerily and others leaning this way and that. Still others were lying in dark and lonely mounds, which he now suspected of being ancient burial sites, and to make matters even spookier, in places, the ground had been washed away over the years and in the brief lightning flashes, he could see what he thought might have been bones of long-dead inhabitants washed out of shallow graves, scattered and mingled among the mossy cold rocks.

The rain had grown into a torrent as he hurriedly pulled the poncho out and did his best to drape it over the vines in the corner of the old concrete wall and crawl under it, with lightning flashing all around, and then all he could do was wait until the storm abated. By now he’d decided to call off the hunt, as it would probably be too late to resume it after the rain stopped, and he was soaking wet and thoroughly tired of this spooky place. He kept hearing weird noises, almost like some kind of unhinged raspy laughter, but he tried to convince himself it was the thunder and wind playing on his imagination. The old graveyard was playing mightily on his thoughts too.

It was getting late in the evening, still a couple of hours before normal dark as the rain began to subside. The wind was still gusty, and Earl, somewhat shaken by the events of the day, looked out from under his crude shelter to see if he might be able to get out of there without drowning. It was still raining lightly, but had grown very cold, and he was wet. Just as he was about to gather himself together and leave, he noticed a movement out in the gloom. There was someone – or something – silently moving out there just a few yards away! He knew there was no way it could be a living person out there in those decrepit woods in the storm, but it didn’t look to be an animal either. It almost resembled some kind of greyish mist, sort of drifting through the dark brush, but with definite form and purposeful movement, and he ducked back under his shelter thinking that he’d glimpsed more than one!

A sudden chill came over him that wasn’t coming from the cold air as Earl was beginning to realize this place was inhabited by something he’d only heard about or watched in horror movies. Prior to this dark and eerie evening, Earl had never given much thought to the supernatural, but he now knew he was witnessing something horrifying. And he was afraid – afraid of something unknown – something old, dark, and unexplainable.

Flashes of lightning lingered after the storm had passed, showing he was in a mess of tangled vines and thickets interspersed with a few very old hardwood trees, some with late autumn leaves stubbornly clinging to thin branches and undulating in the strong breeze, they almost looked like spidery fingers clawing at the dark air. It was by now late evening, and Earl realized that if he was going to get out of that dreadful place before it got too dark to see, he’d have to get himself together and start moving, so as hard as it was to come to grips with crawling out of his makeshift shelter and moving through that horrifying cemetery again, he had to get going. The noise that sounded like laughter he had been hearing didn’t go away with the storm, in fact, it seemed louder, as if it was coming toward him.

While Earl sat there shivering, trying to get his nerve up to leave, his mind went back to the evening he stopped and asked for permission to hunt on that property. He was beginning to think he understood now why the old timer acted so surprised that someone would actually want to go out there into those foreboding woods. There probably had been others who had seen things here, maybe things as terrifying as what Earl was experiencing, but why didn’t he warn Earl? He did say something about not letting the sun go down on him in those woods, and now Earl knew why, and if it was going to get spookier after nightfall, Earl didn’t want to be there, so he crawled out and just left the poncho, grabbed his gun, and began to pry himself out into the deepening evening.

So far no more spooky apparitions were moving around, and as the storm moved away, it actually got a little lighter, and Earl was both thankful and apprehensive, because the waning daylight allowed him to get a better look at the old graveyard, and he really didn’t want to see any more of it. Yes, those were bones he had seen earlier, in fact there were a few skulls among the bones lying face up, staring with empty eyes that he almost felt like were watching him as he hurriedly moved through. In one especially dark corner of the area, Earl couldn’t help but feel and especially sinister presence lurking in the blackness. This seemed to be where the unsettling laughter was coming from, and Earl made haste to get away.

He finally got through the old cemetery and back to the game trail he’d come in on, but as the evening darkness grew, he realized he still had to go back by that awful old house. He wished he knew those woods better so he could figure out a different route back out of there, but as it was, he had no other choice. It was icy cold now, and he was able to see the gloomy dark old house with the black windows glaring down at him from some dark upstairs bedroom that hadn’t been slept in, at least by a living soul, in scores of years. He hoped it was his imagination, but there seemed to be a dark grey mist drifting out of those windows, long without panes or sills. There were vines growing up the walls, over the doors, and dead limbs fallen from surrounding trees embedded through the roof in places. There was no way to get through the tangled vegetation and get into the old house, even if someone wanted to. Yet there seemed to be a strange glow emanating from one of the downstairs window openings, almost as if there was an old lamp burning inside! Earl could have sworn he heard that same evil laughter he’s heard down at the old graveyard.

Earl could see his breath in the gathering darkness, and he found himself panting as he tried to avert his gaze from the window with the impossible light inside and he wanted to throw down his rifle and cover his ears to block out the insane laughing – by now he was actually running and on the verge of panic. The sun was going down and he was still a long way from his truck! He looked behind him on the trail and to his horror, he saw what appeared to be a vivid apparition of an old woman standing there leaning on an ancient garden hoe, silently motioning for him to come back, and her hands and arms were soaked with blood! As horrifying as the sight was, Earl felt an overwhelming sadness at her visage, but he did not stop to try and figure out what it was about.

Soaked to the bone and exhausted beyond belief, Earl reached his truck and shivering and shaking, he finally fumbled his key into the door and climbed in. The wheels were deep in mud which had washed down the old road in the storm, and he wondered if he was going to be stuck there. The creepy laughter had subsided, but he could still hear it far away now. He couldn’t remember a more relieved moment in his life than seeing the interior light of his truck and hearing the engine start. After rocking back and forth in forward and reverse, he was able to get the vehicle moving and turned around. After much slipping, spinning, and sliding, he found himself approaching the old cabin where he’d stopped, it now seemed like ages ago, to talk to the old man, and to his amazement, the cabin was gone! Completely and utterly not there! In fact, there were giant oak trees growing in the very spot where the cabin had been! Earl had been set up for this whole thing, by someone, or something, returned for an encounter with the living from long ago!

Earl spent a lot of time in the ensuing years wondering just what those ancient oak trees out there had witnessed long ago. He found out bits and pieces of information about the old mill and settlement where he’d chanced to have his adventure, and after some time was able to piece together just what he had happened upon. As for me, well, I’m amazed at the things a person can overhear listening to idle conversations during a rained-out golf outing.