I've seen and heard a lot of weird things in the woods, but this blows them all out of the water. Or woods, rather. Nothing I've seen or heard has ever come close to being this.

I was about three miles out when I started putting together the weird sounds. Crunching noises, like someone chewing on ice mixed with joints rolling, coupled with a slithering sound like something heavy being dragged through the leaf litter.

I was out there with a friend, because hiking alone is stupid and dangerous. I noticed the sounds first. I stopped walking to listen for a second, I think I said something like "Hey, John, do you hear that?" When my friend stopped to listen too, the slithering stopped. The crunching kept going, though.

It was a really nasty sound, the kind you can feel in your neck that makes your spine want to twist up. Like somebody chomping down on something hard, like that sound when you roll your neck or crack your knuckles. The kind of sound you can feel in the fillings of your teeth.

It was unsettling enough that neither of us wanted to stick around and find out what was making the noises. Neither John or I are fearful people, but something about those crunching noises sounded wrong, out of place and threatening.

We started walking again, and the slithering started up again. At first we thought maybe it was my walking stick making the dragging noise, but when I held it up away from the ground, the slithering didn't stop.

John suggested weakly that maybe we were dragging our feet and that was what was making the noise, but we both knew that wasn't it. The trail was too steep and too rocky to drag your feet on.

Our next guess was a snake, but snakes in Indiana don't get big enough to make dragging sounds like whatever was making that creepy slithering sound.

That was about when we started to hear the heavy breathing, like somebody behind us was panting down our necks. Once that started up we really began shitting ourselves with fear. Because black bears have been sighted recently in Harrison County, a stone's throw from Perry County where Mogan Ridge is.

We were certain that any second a bear was going to jump out of a stand of trees and eat us both alive until the whispering started. At that moment, we knew it was not a bear. Bears do not whisper. Nothing in the woods whispers. Not even mockingbirds.

That just made it so much worse. Because whatever was breathing down our necks, whatever was crunching and slithering behind us, it was speaking, and it knew our names.

John, John. Ash, Ash. John, John, John- Ash, Ash, Ash.

Look at me, John, look at me. Ash- look at me. Turn around, turn around, turn around! Look at me!

And all the while it whispered, the chomping sounds continued. I began to fear that those sounds were it chewing on the bones of the last hiker to come through here.

I braved a glance over at John, and John braved a glance over at me, and there were tears running down his face like the Ohio River was flowing out of his eyeballs. I can only assume the same look of terror and despair was etched into my own face.

I wanted nothing more than to run away- run all the way to the end of the trail and get in the car and never, ever come back here. To never go within ten feet of another tree ever again. But the hill we were climbing was too steep to run up. I could only walk, slowly, up the hill, this, this thing behind me all the while, whispering to me, saying my name.

I don't know how long it went on- hours, maybe? It felt like days. We ran whenever we could, wherever the ground was flat enough, we ran. But no matter how fast we went, we could never seem to outrun it. It was always right behind us, whispering in our ears.

Ash,Ash, Ash, such a waste of talent, such a waste of potential. Will your parents miss you, when I've stripped the skin from your flesh? Will they notice you're gone when I've sucked the marrow from your bones?

I thought the nightmare would never end. I thought I'd die on that trail, my bones picked clean and scattered among the rocks, no one would ever know where I'd gone. That I'd dragged my friend to death alongside me.

I've never run so fast as I did when I realized the trail had begun to loop back around to the trailhead, that I was almost to the car, only a quarter mile more to go.

I don't remember falling, I only remember something grabbing my ankle and pulling me down, dragging me backwards. The sound of my own screams ringing in my ears. John screaming. John pulling on my arm, dragging me out of the creature's grip. Crawling up the last hill on my hands and knees, rocks slicing into my skin. Screaming. And then light.

The parking lot. John pulling me back to my feet, running to the car.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, tires screeching, I looked back, and I saw it.

Tall, corpse-pale, skeletal, skin stretched taut over bones. Hunched over on all fours, limbs inhumanly long with too many joints.