"I’ve been spending a lot of time lately researching true crime and mysterious cases, but I find myself stuck in a loop of the same 'mainstream' stories.

​I’m looking to broaden my horizons and dive into cases that aren't necessarily the ones everyone knows, but that have left a lasting impact on those who follow them. Whether it’s a case with a unique investigative twist, a strange psychological element, or just a story that you feel deserves more public attention—what are your top recommendations?

​I'm really interested in stories that stay with you long after you've finished reading about them. What are the cases you always find yourself coming back to?"

The ship was found on December 4, 1872, drifting in the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 650 kilometers from Gibraltar. What made the discovery so strange wasn’t just that the vessel was empty, but that everything else looked completely normal.

The ship itself was not damaged, there were no clear signs of a struggle, and nothing obvious that could explain why the crew suddenly disappeared.

Even more confusing was the fact that personal belongings were still on board and the cargo had not been touched. Over time, this combination of details turned the Mary Celeste into one of the most famous examples of a “ghost ship” in maritime history, surrounded by speculation and theories.

I went down this rabbit hole for a project I was working on and the more I read about it the harder it gets to call it an unsolved case. Unsolved suggests they tried.

This took place in November of 1985. The Van de Steen family, two parents and two children, finish their Saturday shopping at a Delhaize supermarket on Parklaan in Aalst, which is a small Flemish town about an hour west of Brussels. It is the long weekend of Saint-Martins Day, the children's festival in Flanders, and the parking lot is full of families doing exactly the same thing as the Van de Steens. They walk back to their car at around 7:30pm. Gilbert, the father in front with Rebecca, ten years old. Thérèse, the mother, a step behind, holding nine year old Davids hand.

Three men get out of a Volkswagen Golf. Dark clothes, balaclavas, and theatrical face paint smeared over the balaclavas. They open fire in the parking lot before they get to the supermarket doors.

Rebecca sees them raise their shotguns at her father and shouts at them. Her exact words were "dont shoot, thats my dad." She did not realise she was trying to negotiate with three men who walked into a Belgian supermarket parking lot to murder strangers for sport. They shoot Gilbert first, then Rebecca. Thérèse, still holding Davids hand, tells him to run. Then they shoot her.

David runs into the supermarket and hides by the comic strip rack. One of the gunmen finds him there. In the book David wrote about this 25 years later, he says the man looked down at him, grinned, and shot. Nine bullets at a nine year old. But David survived. He is the only member of his family who did.

Inside the Delhaize the killing continued. Witnesses said the gunmen were laughing while they shot people. Roaring at customers on the floor. Enjoying it apparently. The whole attack lasted about fifteen minutes. The total cash they took from the supermarket was less than 18,000 euros. Eight people died that night and nine more were wounded.

Then the gang walked out. The leader, the tall one police would later call the "Giant", walked calmly alongside the moving Volkswagen and climbed in through the rear hatch while the car was still in motion. An armed gendarmerie patrol that had been checking the parking lot every twenty minutes that night pulled away from the lot about fifteen seconds before the first shot was fired. Three municipal police vehicles in the area tried to start their engines when the gunfire started and could not. One police van pursued the Volkswagen for a few kilometers and then lost it.

The men who killed Gilbert and Thérèse and Rebecca Van de Steen and five other people that night drove west and were never seen again.

Aalst was their eighth attack. Between March of 1982 and November of 1985 the same three men killed 28 people across Belgium. Supermarkets, restaurants, a textile factory, a gun shop. The first wave from 1982 to 1983 was about money. The second wave in 1985 wasnt about money anymore. Three Delhaize supermarkets in six weeks, twenty-six dead total in the four 1985 attacks. Then they stopped forever.

The buckshot loaded in their shotguns was a rare type used by Group Diane, which was a Belgian gendarmerie special forces unit. Some of the police officers who exchanged fire with them at earlier robberies said the gang was using gunfight tactics that were taught in Belgian police academies. The Volkswagens were modified by someone with mechanic grade facilities. The bulletproof vests they wore had been stolen from a textile factory in Temse before that factory's contract to manufacture vests for the Belgian police was public information.

In 1986, a year after they stopped, divers searched a stretch of the Brussels Charleroi canal at a place called Ronquières and pulled out bulletproof vests, ammunition, and a service firearm that had been stolen from a gendarme. The same stretch of canal had been searched in 1985 and the divers had found nothing. Forensic analysis done in 2013 concluded the items had only been in the water for a few weeks before they were "discovered" in 1986. Somebody who knew where the canal was going to be searched, and who had access to evidence from the case, wanted those items to be found at that time and not before.

In January 2019, a retired officer from the Delta unit was arrested on suspicion of evidence tampering. The Delta unit was the police group assigned to investigate the Brabant Killers. But he denied everything.

The closest Belgium has ever come to a name is Christiaan Bonkoffsky who was part of the same special forces unit whose ammunition type matched the gangs shotguns. Dismissed from the unit in 1981 for an accidental discharge, the year before the first attack. Originally from Aalst, which was the town of the final attack. When he died in 2015, his brother kept quiet for two years and then went on Belgian television in 2017 and said Bonkoffsky had confessed on his deathbed. He said he was the Giant.

Bonkoffskys height fit the sketch, his military background fit the tactics. His hometown fit the location of the final attack. His dismissal in 1981 also fit the timeline. In 2018, Belgian police announced that DNA from Bonkoffsky did not match samples from the crime scenes. The investigators who disputed the result pointed out something the state never publicly addressed. The DNA at the scenes belonged to three men. Ruling Bonkoffsky out of being one of them does not rule him out of being the other two. Noone officaly questioned this after.

The Belgian Gendarmerie itself had been founded in 1795. It survived Napoleon, two world wars, and the entire Cold War. The Brabant Killers case was one of the contributing reasons it was abolished in 2001. Three men with shotguns and face paint did what no foreign army had managed in two hundred years. They killed an entire branch of Belgian law enforcement.

On the 28th of June 2024, the federal prosecutor of Belgium stood at a press conference and closed the case. The numbers she gave were 1,815 leads checked, 2,748 sets of fingerprints examined, 593 DNA samples compared, and zero identifications. When she finished speaking, a woman named Irena Palsterman, whose father Jan was killed in the Aalst Delhaize parking lot when he was 40, said three words in Dutch. "Vandaag begraven we Vrouwe Justitia" which translates to: "Today we bury Lady Justice."

The federal prosecutors office was still publicly asking, as recently as 2020, for help identifying a man with a three and a half centimetre wine stain birthmark on the back of his neck. He took part in the Beersel raid in October 1983 and multiple witnesses described the birthmark in detail. That birthmark has been on the back of someones neck in Belgium for forty years. Either he died, or he is alive and old now, and nobody who ever spent time around him made the phone call.

In 1986 somebody mailed Belgian police an anonymous photograph of a man holding a Franchi SPAS 12 combat shotgun, standing in a forest. The note that came with it said the man was a very important person in the Brabant Killers case. The photograph was reissued by federal prosecutors in 2020 and ran on the front pages of Belgian newspapers. But nobody came forward.

Whoever those three men were, they had access to classified factory contracts, special forces ammunition, gendarmerie tactics, advance knowledge of police canal searches, and somebody on the inside who pulled an armed patrol away from the Aalst Delhaize fifteen seconds before they opened fire on it. Belgium did not fail to find them because the case was unsolvable. Belgium failed to find them because somewhere along the way, finding them stopped being the point. 28 dead, 22 wounded, 40 years of state silence, one prosecutor at a podium in 2024 saying it is over.

David Van de Steen is 50 years old now. Rebecca would have been 51 this year.

Under a law passed by Belgium in 2024, the case has no statute of limitations and can be tried at any time, by anyone. If anyone is left to try.

Sources:

David Van de Steen - Niet schieten, dat is mijn papa (2010)

Belgian federal prosecutors office, press conference 28 June 2024

VRT and RTBF retrospective coverage, 2014, 2020, 2024

Het Laatste Nieuws archive, 1985-1986

The Guardian and Sky News English language coverage, June 2024

What’s the most disturbing thing you’ve ever seen that nobody else believed actually happened? I mean really disturbing not just creepy or weird, but something that genuinely changed the way you think about reality, people, or the world afterward. Something you still think about late at night

I'm a fire safety inspector, and we have a really large customer in my town that I spend my entire month going to the different sites they have around the city.

I have a set of grand master keys that open every door in every building, from rooftop access to penthouses to server rooms.

But in the basement of the headquarters of this customer, there is a room labeled 'plenum'. It's the only door none of my keys open.

Being unfamiliar with the word I asked one of the old pipefitters that knows everything about everything, and once he explained it to me, I still don't understand why I would have access to something as hazardous as an open elevator shaft, but not this one room in the basement of headquarters?

I don't mean to sound like a conspiracy theorist, I just can't wrap my head around why I wouldn't be allowed in there if it's just an air duct 'plenum'? And it's in the basement of headquarters, and my keys open every other door at a dozen different sites around the city...

I rarely, if ever, post or comment on Reddit, but I’ve been reading r/Glitch_in_the_Matrix and similar subreddits for a while now because I vividly remember experiencing 3–4 strange “glitches” myself.

I’m really curious if anyone here has experienced anything similar, so I decided to post all of the glitches I remember.

Here is the oldest glitch I remember:

This happened around 2015–2016. I experienced this strange event with my best friend on an evening before school was unexpectedly canceled because of snow the next day.

We lived in a small city that basically had one main avenue you could call the town center. We were walking down that avenue toward our homes, which were next to each other. While walking, we were passing a plastic bottle cap back and forth between us. The streets were mostly empty except for a few shop workers smoking cigarettes outside their stores.

At some point, either I or my friend accidentally kicked the bottle cap across the avenue, and it rolled under a staircase. I’m not sure if it happened right at that moment or shortly after we gave up on the cap and kept walking, but then a strange-looking man in his late 40s or early 50s approached us and asked how to get to the main coach station.

We were already heading in that direction, and the highway leading to the station was close to our homes, so we told him he could walk with us and we would show him the way. At that time, the road was closed to traffic, and he didn’t seem like someone who would take a taxi or bus anyway.

As we walked, we started talking with him, and it became one of the weirdest conversations we’ve ever had. Since this was about 10 years ago, I can’t remember every detail, but I clearly remember two strange things he said.

One was a weirdly poetic sentence about roses. That was the moment we realized something was seriously off about him. We started wondering if he needed mental help, but at the same time we were scared because of how strange he acted. After a while, my friend and I silently nodded to each other, thinking we should politely get away from him.

One thing I can never forget is that he kept saying he was “waiting for the ship” — specifically, his father’s ship.

At one point, we asked where he was from, and he literally answered, “Laboratory.”

We said, “What do you mean? Where were you born?”

He replied again, “I am telling you — laboratory.”

When we reached the highway intersection, we told him to keep walking straight for about 5 kilometers and that the coach station would be on the right side. We said goodbye and left.

About 20–30 seconds later, we decided to look back to see if he was still walking there, but he had completely disappeared.

To this day, we still can’t explain what kind of person he was, where he was heading, or what he meant by “laboratory.”

Edit 1: He actually said "Laboratuvar" meaning "Laboratory" in Turkish. We were talking in Turkish.

It was July 31, 1978, and a self-proclaimed Mormon prophet was found dead under mysterious circumstances inside a car. A few days later, on the eleventh floor of a luxury hotel in Salt Lake City, Utah, the man's wife gathered her seven children on the balcony. Some jumped, obeying the widow's commands; others wept, clinging desperately to the railing and trying to resist, while several people on the street screamed in terror, attempting to stop the tragedy.

In a matter of minutes, an entire family was destroyed. But the most disturbing aspect of this story is not only its brutal ending, but also the fact that a virtually unknown man managed to convince several people outside his family that he was a prophet sent by God, and even the deity himself incarnate.

Video about the deadly Mormon cult of Immanuel David: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz8pBjTi89k

I have always loved Edinburgh. The hills, the castles, and the extremely traumatic and violent, yet rich history of the city has always been really interesting to me.

For those unaware of Edinburgh, the whole city was once up in flames, and at the same time, there were homeless people living in underground vaults. These vaults were originally meant for merchants to store their goods, but they couldn’t really use them because of the porous rock they were built from. It rains all the time in Edinburgh, so everything stored there would just get wet and spoil.

Apparently, homelessness was illegal back then, and people could be killed for it. So instead of being out on the streets, people started hiding in these abandoned vaults.

Now, because the rock so porous, when the city caught fire, the heat didn’t just stay above ground. It seeped down into the vaults.

The vaults basically became ovens. And the people inside melted alive.

There’s also the issue of witchcraft, which was really prevalent at the time.

The “witches” weren’t really witches in the way people think. Most of them were basically early doctors, people who used herbs and natural remedies to treat illnesses.

But that didn’t really matter.

The king lost his mind over it and started ordering executions. People were dragged out and killed in the middle of the town, often publicly.

All of these stories have always fascinated me. So when I got the chance to visit Edinburgh in December 2022, I was really excited.

Originally, it was going to be four of us, two of my friends, my girlfriend (now my wife), and me. It was a 3-night, 4-day trip.

For the first two nights, we stayed in a hostel. For the last night, we had booked an Airbnb with two bedrooms.

However, one of my friends backed out at the last moment.

The trip was meant to be a mix of scenic treks and scary stuff, including a midnight tour of the Edinburgh cemetery (apparently the largest in Europe).

It was amazing, and I genuinely loved the whole vibe of the city.

Everything felt exactly how I’d imagined it would.

Until the final night, when we moved into the Airbnb.

We checked out of the hostel around 12:30 in the afternoon, kept our luggage in their storage room, and roamed around the city all evening. We decided to check into the Airbnb around 7–8 pm.

The Airbnb wasn’t too far from the hostel, and our luggage had wheels, so we just walked there.

The only issue was that our flat was on the 3rd floor, with no elevator.

Me being the only guy in the group, and a gentleman (of course), said I’d carry everyone’s bags upstairs.

I wanted to get the lighter bags up first before dealing with the heavier ones, so I went up alone.

The door was dark grey, with a metallic “3” screwed right in the middle.

I unlocked it.

The moment I stepped inside, I could sense something was wrong.

Very quickly, I felt like I was being watched.

I had this immediate urge to check all the windows and the balcony doors, just to make sure everything was locked properly.

The whole apartment was clean, with a sort of 1980s theme going on. It was obvious the owner had sent a cleaner before we arrived.

The kitchen had things like a Smeg toaster was modern, but designed to feel old—pastel colours, rounded shapes.

The dining table was dust-free, with four chairs and utensils neatly arranged on both sides of the plates.

Nothing looked out of place.

Except for... The empty wardrobe in our bedroom with one of its doors wide open.

Normally, it wouldn’t have been a big deal.

But with the rest of the apartment spotless, and the cleaner making the effort to line the forks and spoons neatly by the plates, why couldn’t they have just shut the wardrobe door?

For some reason, I was fixated on it, when I heard my girlfriend and my friend come up the three floors, and were standing in the living room. I quickly shut the wardrobe door and walked back out into the living room as well.

They were in complete awe of the place and didn’t think anything was wrong with it.

As I started taking my girlfriend’s and my bags into our bedroom, I noticed something else, something I had completely missed during my first inspection.

The two bedrooms were right next to each other. They should have been sharing a common wall.

But from the living room, you could clearly see there was a gap between them.

Not a small one either.

There was enough space to fit a small storage room in between.

When I looked closer, I realised there was something there.

A door.

The owner had covered it up with wallpaper, but you could still see it, the faint outline, the edges pressing through. This freaked the hell out of me. 

Ever since I was a child, I’ve experienced certain things that I can’t really explain.

Very rarely, I get a feeling—an intuition—that something is wrong with a place.

In 30 years of my life, I’ve probably had that feeling maybe three times.

This was one of them.

I had goosebumps all over my body.

First, it was the feeling of being watched when I entered the apartment.

Then the open wardrobe.

And now this hidden room… which wasn’t even hidden properly.

What kind of Airbnb was this?

By the final night in Edinburgh, we were completely exhausted from all the walking. We decided to order in, we also wanted to make the most of the fancy cutlery.

But throughout dinner, I couldn’t stop thinking about the wardrobe… and the hidden room.

And that feeling of being watched hadn’t gone away. If anything, it felt stronger.

Anyway, we finished dinner, talked for a while, and decided to go to bed.

Our bedroom was the larger of the two.

It was long, with two massive windows on the left and blackout curtains covering them. The headboard of the bed was placed against the wall, so the hidden room was directly behind us.

On the other side of the long room, there was a couch, right next to the wardrobe.

A quick description of the wardrobe, it matched the theme of the apartment. Old. The kind you’d expect to see in a horror movie.

It was about three-quarters the height of the wall, with a Victorian look to it

Because of how tired we were, my girlfriend and I fell asleep almost instantly.

This is where things went up a level.

Maybe it was me being paranoid before going to bed, or maybe all the haunting stories of Edinburgh were finally getting to me, but I woke up around 12 am with that same feeling of being watched.

My heart was racing. My breathing was heavy.

I was awake, but I kept my eyes shut.

I was afraid that if I opened them, I’d be looking at someone… or something… staring right back at me.

Still, I opened my eyes slightly.

Just enough to see through my eyelashes.

My gaze went straight to the wardrobe.

The door was open again. Just slightly.

But that wasn’t what froze me. At first, I thought I saw something hanging over the edge of the door.

Long black hair.

I slowly shifted my gaze upward.

And then I saw it.

Pale white hands.

Gripping the top of the wardrobe door.

A white robe.

And a face… Hidden behind the hair.

Someone was crouching on top of the wardrobe. Watching me.

Maybe it was my heavy breathing, or just how loud my heart was pounding, but it woke my girlfriend up.

At that point, we had already been dating for 8 years, and I had told her about my “intuitions.”

So when she asked me what was wrong, I didn’t hesitate.

I told her about the figure on top of the wardrobe.

About what I was seeing.

She couldn’t see anything.

 

But looking at how I was breathing, and how fast my heart was racing, she reached over and turned on the bedside lamp.

The room lit up. And the figure disappeared. Almost instantly. 

The way it disappeared is very hard to explain.

It wasn’t like in movies, where something fades away into mist.

It felt more like… a glitch.

Like a couple of frames were missing from a video, and everything just skipped forward.

One moment it was there. The next, it wasn’t.

We decided to keep the lamp on for the rest of the night, and I somehow managed to fall asleep again.

However, I woke up once more with that same feeling of being watched.

This time, it was stronger than ever.

I could see the light was still on, but it didn’t help at all.

If anything, the dread felt worse.

My heart started racing again. My breathing got heavier.

I was lying on the right side of the bed. With my eyes still closed, I reached out to my left and felt my girlfriend next to me. She was still there.

And that’s what made it worse. Because I could also sense someone else. Right next to me. Standing by the bed.

A woman.

THE woman.

The same one who had been crouching on top of the wardrobe.

I could feel her leaning over me. Looking down at me. Her long hair felt like it was just inches away from my face. I was terrified that if I opened my eyes, I’d be staring straight into hers.

I’m so thankful my girlfriend woke up again and realised something was wrong. She told me there was no one else in the room.

I whispered to her that the woman was standing right next to me. That scared her too. But she still got out of bed and turned on all the lights.

Even with my eyes closed, I could feel the room light up.

And once again… The figure vanished. Like there had never been anything there at all.

We spent the rest of the night with all the lights on.

The next morning, we had plans, so we checked out quickly and went about our day like nothing had happened.

My other friend, who had slept alone in the second bedroom, tends to get scared very easily with horror stories.

So my girlfriend and I decided not to tell her anything at the time.

We only told her a few months later.

She said she remembered feeling completely fine that night. She slept like a baby.

I haven’t had an experience like that since.

I’ve even been back to Edinburgh once more, just because of how much I love the city.

I obviously didn’t stay in that Airbnb again. And nothing happened. Nothing even close.

I still think about the figure, the wardrobe and the house still get the chills. Even while I was writing this story down, I could remember how I felt in those moments and how glad I was to have my girlfriend and now my wife next to me that day.

So as a preteen I always went to this church camp over the summer in the Angeles National Forest.

One summer, I was grouped up with a fun group of girls and a counselor who didn’t keep a close eye on us and one time during free time we got into her make up and found it funny to do some clown makeup with some lipstick. We thought it funny to spend that free time messing with other campers and counselors when we ran into two of the male counselors starting a game of tag. We joined and during tag, we targeted one of the counselors. As we were chasing him, he started heading out towards the forest and we figured if he’s running out there well so can we. We lasted maybe one or two minutes chasing after him when suddenly we could no longer see or hear him in front of us and it was like he just he just stopped and went to hide. Me and the 2 girls I was with were confused but as we were looking out for him, we were like hello, where’d you go? That was when we noticed some weird like kind of pale human looking figure in a tree across from us so we figured it was him. We called out saying “hey we could see you come on like it’s over we got you” when we didn’t get an answer. Calling out for him again, there was still no reply. It was just kind of swaying back-and-forth in silence. Then we were a little weirded out. Like why wouldn’t he answer us?

A moment later two boys that we used to know had showed up behind us who must’ve been falling behind. They asked us who we were talking to. We told them, there’s something in the tree can’t you see it? They were like oh yeah what even is that. The two went to check it out as me and the two girls who are with me stayed back. As they reached the tree where we were looking, the figure had suddenly it was like it just disappeared and we were like it’s gone. We even called out to it and the boy saying the thing in the tree it just disappeared like it’s not there. So they went to you know look in and around the tree and they were like yeah like there’s nothing there. So we figured maybe it was an animal. But how do you not hear or see it run away? It was like it just disappeared into thin air. Creeped out, the boys came back towards us and we just kind of stood there in confusion for a bit, still confused as to where our counselor went. We decided to head back towards camp and it felt like a couple minutes to get back, we know we didn’t go far. When we finally made it back into camp, a group of counselors were there waiting for us, including the male counselor who we had been playing tag with. They all looked really worried and confused as to why we were out there. They asked us how could we be gone for so long, that it’s been hours, it’s not safe for us to be out there alone, especially with no permission or supervision. We didn’t know what they meant. We were out there with him, our counselor and it had only been a couple minutes. They told us it had been hours and the counselor who we had been following said to us that he never went out there. One minute we were here and then next we weren’t, that he would’ve never let us go out there. We thought that was impossible. Who were we following if not him? But with that, we tried to explain that no we weren’t alone, we were following him We swore to them that it was him who decided to run out there and the one we had been chasing and that the next he was gone. They all told us that wasn’t possible, he’s been out here looking after the other kids during the game until he lost sight of us. We kept asking him, “Then who were we following?” They told us that a story like ours isn’t funny. It ended there. They didn’t give us any kind of punishment for wandering out into the forest, but it stayed on all of our minds.

The five of us that managed to end up out there didn’t tell them about what we saw in the tree, just that we’re sorry we wandered out and got lost for so long. It was still stuck on our minds a lot though. Because what do you mean hours went by? And what do you mean that our counselor never went out there with us? The next day, the five of us decided we wanted go see where we went again, because the day before sounds literally impossible. So around the same time during free time, we decided to wander off without telling the counselors because we didn’t want to get in trouble and headed down the exact same trail that we went on with our counselor (well our supposed counselor) the day before. It had just happened, so it wasn’t like any of us forgot which way we went. We knew exactly what direction we took and everything, but as we went down the trail, the same surroundings that we remembered were in no way familiar. It was almost like a completely different area. It was almost empty. It was like just one big clearing where there were trees surrounding us, but everything that had been standing there the day- the tree from before- everything was just gone. We were all creeped out so we thought to go father out. Maybe we took a wrong turn or something.

We knew we were just out there for what was only maybe 30 minutes. The boys had watches, and not even an hour had passed since we left camp. We thought it would be an appropriate time to go back since we couldn’t find what we were looking for, weirded out and confused. Because we got lost, we gave up. As we headed back, we noticed that everybody was in the big clearing in camp, almost like free time had already been over and when we reached our camp counselors, they said that they had started the games already. They already had lunch. What made us think that was OK to wander out like that again if it wasn’t OK the first time? We said again we were only out for no more than 30 minutes. We thought free time ended in an hour. We should’ve been fine and they said no free time ended at three. We’re like OK it’s 230. Checking the time, we saw that it was 4. So once again, we somehow managed to get so lost that we let hours go by even though we never made it very far from camp at all.

Because of this, our counselors gathered the five of us up and asked us what we were going out there for. We said because of yesterday: we were chasing our counselor during tag into the forest, when all of a sudden we couldn’t find him. It was like we just lost him when we saw this thing in a tree and went towards it out of curiosity until it was like it just disappeared into the air. Our counselors looked at us like we’re crazy cause there’s no way. But they let us continue. We said that after a couple minutes we accepted that it was gone and started to head back to camp since we couldn’t find our counselor and that’s when he told us we were gone too long and then that he claims that he never even went out there with us in the first place. We then explained we went out on our own to figure out what it was we saw out there. We didn’t tell them we got lost again and that it was like the place we were at never existed. They repeated that we were out too long again. But we swore that it was only it was only minutes, not hours.

After that, we accepted that we know who we saw, and the adults were never going to believe us. We knew how long we were out there, and we knew what we saw. We left it at. There was no good explanation for it,we don’t know what it was that we saw out there, or who we were REALLY following, but we know it was something. Is there something wrong with the national forest? Is there something out there? The five of us still don’t know, but some of us still talk about year later today. Maybe there’s some kind of explanation for it but to this day we don’t know how to explain what it was we saw out there.