A Thing Of Nightmares

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Be Busta (1:30)

G'day mates, it's Be Busta here. And before the episode begins, I would just like to let you know that Be. Scared, which is produced along with Studio71, features scary stories from around the globe on a weekly basis that aim to fuel your nightmares with a smile. And if you enjoy the podcast, it would be great if you could hit that subscribe button and drop a review. Thanks for listening, guys. And without further ado, let's begin.

My friend and I had driven out to the mountains in Western Montana one weekend in September of 2016

We were both broke college students and our idea of entertainment at the time was finding places where we could get away from people for a few hours.

That afternoon, we'd followed an old forest service road farther than we had intended. Eventually, though, we found a flat turnout beside an abandoned fire lookout trail. There was a steep drop on one side, dense spruce on the other, and absolutely no other vehicles anywhere around us. So we decided to stay until dark. We cooked on a little camping stove, drank some cheap coffee, and sat on the hood of my friend's SUV, watching the sun disappear behind the mountains.

Now, the first thing that I noticed afterward was just how quickly the birds stopped. Not gradually. It was more like one minute there were insects buzzing and birds calling somewhere down in the valley, and then there was just suddenly nothing. My friend noticed it too. Huh, that's weird, he said. I laughed and told her that we were just hearing things because we had been sitting around in the woods for hours. Then something moved through the trees below us. We both heard branches snapping. Whatever it was wasn't particularly quiet, but it sounded heavy.

We waited for a deer to appear, but instead three elk came crashing through the undergrowth. They ran straight across the road in front of us without even looking at the vehicle. They seemed spooked.

A few seconds later, another one followed, then another and my friend stood up. Why are they running? I certainly didn't have an answer. We watched the darkness between the trees, but nothing followed them. Eventually, we decided that we had had enough, so we packed everything into the SUV and we climbed inside. The problem though was that the road that we used to get there had become much harder to see after dark. There were no lights, no markings, no cell service, just a really narrow track through the forest.

We drove slowly and maybe about 10 minutes later, we came to a fork. I was certain that we had taken the left branch on the way up, but my friend thought it was to the right. We argued about it for a minute before choosing the left and well, we were wrong. The road narrowed almost immediately, branches scraping across the roof and then the track descended sharply. My friend was driving and I had the map pulled up on my phone, even though there was no signal. The little blue location dot kept jumping around like crazy, but I could still see the route that we had taken earlier. And according to the phone, we were heading away from the main road now.