5 TRUE SCARY STORIES Encounters in the Woods (3)

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My mother was about fourteen or fifteen years old. The
incident occurred in a heavily wooded area near Birmingham, Alabama.
My mother is the oldest of five children. She has
three sisters and a brother who is the baby of
the family. One weekend in the cooler months of the fall,

(00:20):
my grandfather decided to take the whole family, my grandmother,
my mother, and all the aunts and uncles, so seven
people total, into the woods for target practice with a rifle.
My mother grew up quite poor and they didn't always
live in the best of neighborhoods, so my grandfather wanted
to teach the kids how to defend themselves with the

(00:42):
rifle if need be. Like I said, it was later
in the fall, so the trees were bare and there
were lots of leaves on the ground. The wooded area
is just off a dirt road, so this was a
fairly isolated area that they were in since it was
so far off the beaten path. My grandfather became startled

(01:05):
when he heard a roar of a car engine so
deep in the woods. My mother remembers the car being
a blue Ford Galaxy, so it kind of looked something
like this. Despite the fact that my grandfather had a gun.
He totally freaked out and told my grandmother and the

(01:25):
kids to hide under a pile of leaves in the woods.
He hid with them. The man in the driver's seat
got out, dragged a woman's body out of the car,
and just dumped her there in the woods and drove away.
After my grandfather was sure the man was gone, everyone
came out of hiding and the woman sat up and

(01:47):
stared at them straight in the face. My grandfather asked
the woman if she needed help. She said no and
that she would be fine. She didn't seem to be
injured and obviously didn't want help. She hadn't put up
a fight with the man when he was dragging her
out of the car. She must have known him or something.

(02:08):
So my grandfather cut the shooting lesson short and decided
to rush the kids home to safety. Well. On the
trail back to the dirt road where my grandfather had
parked their car, they passed the man in the blue
Ford Galaxy driving out of the woods. My mom looked
over and noticed that he had a huge machete laying
across the front seat beside him. My grandfather made sure

(02:33):
that the man could see that he was carrying a rifle,
but everyone was careful not to give away what they
had just seen. The man struck up a small talk
with my grandfather, asked him how he was doing and
what they were doing out in the woods. My grandfather
explained that he had just taken his family out for
some target practice with the rifle. The man told him

(02:56):
to have a nice day and continued driving. The next day,
my grandfather went back out to that spot in the woods.
There was not a body there. However, he did find
the woman's wig, her purse, some kleenex, and a pair
of eyeglasses. He collected the items and took them home.

(03:16):
According to my grandfather, that area of the woods was
known for having shallow graves and being a dumping site
for bodies. My mother became hysterical when he walked in
the door carrying that stuff. My mother became hysterical when
he walked in the door carrying that stuff. She started screaming,

(03:38):
he killed that lady, He killed that lady. My grandfather
ended up taking the items to the police station, but
my mom doesn't think anything ever came of it. She
never heard anything else about it after that. Well, she
did hear one other thing about it. Early the next morning,
my grandmother called my mom when she arrived at work,

(04:02):
just before the kids left for school. She told them
not to take the bus that day and that she
would come home and pick them up and drive them
to school. When my mom asked why, my grandmother said,
because that car is waiting for you at the bus stop.

(04:25):
It was March during spring break. I was sixteen at
the time, and me and about twenty other people went
out into the woods in Surrey County and got a
cabin on this nice little retreat center. We planned on
staying there for four days. For a bit more detailed,
the cabin was surrounded on all sides by woods. To

(04:47):
the west of the cabin were some hunting trails and
a creepy abandoned trailer next to a small clearing with
a single pine in the center. To the east was
a large field. At the end of the field, there
is a slope leading down to a beach. When going
down the slope to the right, there is an acre

(05:08):
of higher elevation, and to the right of that was
a valley that could be accessed from the beach anyway.
On the last night, a group of about eight of
us decided that we would go down to the beach
and sit around and sing songs while playing guitars. It
was about eleven PM and everything was going fine, and

(05:28):
then three of the guys decided that they would head
back to the cabin to go get some food. They
had been gone for about ten minutes before one of
the guys got a call from his brother. His reaction
to the call made it seemed like something had happened
or someone was hurt. When he got off the phone,
he said, we all have to leave right fucking now,

(05:52):
in a very hushed and panicky voice. We all asked
why he told us that, and apparently while the others
were walking back, they found a rabbit at the top
of the trail and its head had been cut clean off,
not ripped off like an animal's doing, but cut like
someone had took a knife to the rabbit. So we

(06:13):
automatically thought they have to be fucking with us. We
all begin to walk back, brandishing the guitar and metal
pipe as weapons in case they weren't fucking with us.
About halfway up the hill, we hear rustling and twigs
snapping to our right, where the valley is. It sounded

(06:34):
like someone was walking up the side of a very
steep slope. We told them to knock it off and
that if it was a joke, it wasn't funny. The
movement to the right stopped very suddenly. We kept going.
Once we neared the top of the hill, I turned
on my phone's flashlight and right on the ground in

(06:56):
front of me was a rabbit with its head cut
c off. We took off running and heard something coming
out of the woods after us. We didn't stop running
until we got to the cabin. When we got there,
we found all the guys were sitting inside. We locked
every door in all the windows. Me and two of
the other guys stayed up all night to keep watch

(07:19):
to make sure whatever it was didn't follow us back
to the cabin. We all fell asleep around six thirty am.
When we woke up at eight, someone was flipping their
shit about a decapitated rabbit head.