Paranormal Story Archives
May 2001
– Page 3
Skin
Walkers
by Brian D.
I grew up with religious parents, but I never believed in God until a large, organized week-long hike into the White Mountains during the summer of 1995 (I was almost 16). The whole week nothing too strange happened, but the last two days are very hard for me to talk about, because I personally find my own accounts hard to believe. It was two nights before we were supposed to leave, and me, as well as a majority of the older scouts (the whole thing was a Boy Scout program) had to do an 18-mile hike from our first camp up Mt. Baldy and then down the other side of Mt. Baldy to a new base camp in a valley. When we reached the top, the sun was almost fully down, and we all split up into three groups, the fastest of us going first. (All groups were heading down the exact same trail, which happens to be the only one.) The first group was me, my friend Travis, and my friend Chris.
Travis is Native American, and I was hiking about five feet behind him, with Chris trailing behind. It was a full moon that night, and the forest is so dense, you couldn't even see two feet into it. The sky was absolutely clear, but there were these sudden bursts of light, as if there were lightning in the sky, but no thunder, no clouds. Travis suddenly stopped, just before a bend in the trail. To make it short, we heard something rustling around up ahead, around the curve. We turned off our flashlights and were joined by Chris. The rustling continued, and I dismissed it as a squirrel or a raccoon. Travis told me to be quiet. Whatever it was stopped and made the strangest sound I have ever heard. It was high-pitched; that's all I can really accurately describe about it. We froze. We could hear it moving again, and that's when whatever it was started literally destroying the forest, heading straight down the hill just in front of us, but out of sight. It couldn't have been more than 20 feet away, and we could hear trees snapping, large branches breaking... it sounded like someone sent a very angry elephant running through the forest, right in front of us. We all thought we were going to die, but it kept moving away from us, tearing up trees the whole way, until it grew silent, a ways down the hill.
We decided to wait for the next group of scouts, and in the meantime, managed to try brainstorming what could possibly have made that high-pitched shrilly noise. We came to no conclusion. Nothing makes that sound, period. The next group never came, and I'll leave out what happened to us specifically next. The other two scout groups also went through some strange things that night. The second group passed by two strange hikers on the way down. My group, the first one down, never encountered these hikers. The third group also never saw theses hikers. The third group, had the worst luck that night. They, the slowest ones, ended up having to try and sleep on the mountain, on the trail that night. Needless to say, they didn't get to sleep. Travis told me later on about a Native American legend about things, or people, called skin-walkers. They're normal people who perform certain rituals and rites that enable them to turn into an animal, or a half-animal/human hybrid. I know it sounds too crazy to be true, but I can backup everything I have to say.
Another instance, one that I remember vividly, was when me and some friends went to a place outside of Flagstaff called "the haunted house" by teenagers in town. Rumors about the house abounded, and some of the windows on the house were actual witchcraft symbols. The place had gothic elements, also, though at a distance it appeared to be a nice, normal house. (It was for sale, by a real estate company, but was never bought, and I believe is has been torn down, because previous occupants had died in it, making it very hard to sell.) We all showed up there one night, because strange things always happened when we went there, and we were thrill seekers. We also knew about skin walkers, and knew that the surrounding forests have some Indian ruins in them. The whole area was coated with snow, it had been snowing like crazy for the past few days. We all got out of the two vehicles, and split up into two separate groups. My group began walking around the house, the side that faced the hill and the forest. All of a sudden, completely silent, we saw about five or six deer bolt out from the back of the house. They moved so fast, they covered the expansive distance from the house to the forest in literally, all of about 2.5 seconds. This distance is almost a quarter mile. I did manage to glimpse that their tails were long, like a wolf/German shepherd's tail. We all argued about whether they were deer or freakishly huge dogs, but the evidence, thank God, was right there. So we all went to go look at their tracks in the snow. It was strange. We couldn't find one print. Not one.
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