574 | It Wakes Up Every 17 Years (DON'T GO NEAR THE TREELINE)

A new species of insect is discovered every 90 minutes. Did you know that? The insect kingdom dwarves our own. It's impossible to know what might lie underneath one rock, or hide within a hollowed out log, let alone what might awaken only once every several years. I received this creepy and very emotional story from someone named Locus Locale, which he has titled, It Woke Up. In this story, we learn that in Missouri during the summer of 1998, allegedly some very bizarre killings occurred, which aligned perfectly with the awakening of cicadas. But it was not these insects who were behind it. Whatever it was, it wakes up every 17 years. If you're in Missouri in 2032, all I can say is you have been warned. Cicadas don't come out every year. They sleep underground for over a decade, then emerge all at once in what scientists call broods. Brood 4 woke up last month as of writing this. 17 years of silence, then suddenly they're everywhere again, screaming from every tree. This is what happened in Carthage, Missouri, in the summer of 1998. There were five of us. Me, York Rager, Eric Navarro, Laramie Williams, and Marissa Delaney. We'd been friends since third grade, when Laramie moved to town and got assigned the desk next to mine. By the summer before eighth grade, we were inseparable. Crazy how when you're that young, friendship doesn't require maintenance or explanation. You just show up at someone's house, and you start hanging out, and nobody thinks anything of it. York was the one who got us into trouble, though. He was not the smartest kid in our group. Not by a long shot. But he had a fearlessness to him that the rest of us lacked. He'd climb anything, jump off anything, and he would poke at anything with a stick. His mom called it bravery, and my mom called it a death wish. Either way, he was usually the first one through a door, and the rest of us followed, because someone had to make sure he didn't die. His house was the default hangout spot. His backyard was where we built the bike ramps, and his basement was where we watched movies on the big TV his dad had bought, but then never actually used. Eric was the biggest, almost as tall as York, but much broader. He looked like the kind of guy who should be playing football, but wasn't interested. He was a quiet guy, and that made people underestimate him. He'd sit there while the rest of us talked, and you'd think he wasn't paying any attention, but then he'd say something that cut right to the heart of whatever we'd been circling around for twenty minutes. He was kind, too. Genuinely kind. He'd give you his last dollar and never mention it again. Laramie was like me. A dork, a shrimp. We were the two smallest kids in our grade, and we'd bonded over that shared indignity back when we first met. And he would laugh too loud when something really got to him. He read more than anyone I knew. Mostly science fiction. I often saw him with these weird paperback books that had spaceships on the covers. I think he found most of them at garage sales, and he would devour them in a single afternoon. Marissa was the only girl, and she'd punch you if you made a big deal about it. She was a tomboy in the way she dressed and acted, wearing jeans and old t-shirts strictly, always racing with York to be the first one up a tree, or to catch a frog, or to be the first person to do something dumb. Whatever dumb thing we decided to do that day. and yet there was something delicate about her too. She had smaller hands and she would tuck her hair behind her ear when she thought. If you couldn't tell already, I had a crush on her, at least back then, and I never did tell anybody. I was the anxious little worrier in the group, the one who thought three steps ahead, constantly checking what time it was, when I needed to be back home for dinner. And it was me who owned the camcorder. Well, technically it was my dad's. A Sony Handycam he'd bought to film my sister's dance recitals, then forgot about it in the hall closet. I'd been, uh, borrowing it, without asking, since April. We were making a movie. A horror movie. We were 13-year-olds, and that's what 13-year-old boys, plus one girl, make. Though we didn't have a script, no real plot, no real plan, we just had the camera and some vague idea that we'd figure it out as we went. The cicadas came up in late May. Brewed 4 is what they said on the news. A periodical cicada emergence that happens every 17 years. I did not know what that meant back then. But I did think they were incredibly loud. You can't really describe the sound to someone who hasn't experienced it before. This isn't your regular nighttime bug noise. It's a big wall. A physical pressure against your eardrums that starts at dawn and doesn't stop until after dark. That summer it was so loud, you had to shout to have a conversation outside. You'd go to bed with the drone still ringing in your ears, and you'd wake up to it already full blast. After a few weeks, you stopped noticing it, mostly. It just became what the world sounded like. We spent that June filming test footage and goofing around with the camera. York would narrate everything in his fake deep voice that he thought sounded like a movie trailer. There, me and I took turns being the cameraman. We shot at the abandoned gas station on Route 71 or in the woods behind the middle school. A couple times we shot in York's basement with the lights off, trying to make it look all spooky, like a haunted house. None of it was very good, but we didn't care. We were making a movie. It was cool. It ended up being York's idea to find a better location than these. I remember how he explained it. We need something real, he said. We were sitting in his backyard, passing around a two-liter of Mountain Dew. Something that actually looks scary. Not my grandma's basement. Isn't it your basement, Goober? Marissa said. And your grandma's dead. Whatever, same thing. We need somewhere creepy. Somewhere with the, what do they call it, atmosphere? Like where? York shrugged. My brother told me about this old farm out past the county road. Says it's been empty for years. Nobody lives there anymore. I looked at Eric, who was sitting against the fence with his arms crossed. Quiet as usual. He'd been quiet all afternoon. Uh, you know anything about it? I asked him. He turned to look at me, then turned away. The Hensley place, he said. That's what he's talking about. Past Sugar Creek, out toward the edge of the county. My mom said a family used to live there, but something happened. Didn't say what. York was already on his feet. So let's go check it out. What else are we going to do today? That was York for you. Decision was made, the consequences unconsidered. Time to go. We biked out there that afternoon. It took almost an hour, longer than any of us had thought, and by the time we got close, we were sweaty and tired and starting to regret the whole idea. The road turned to gravel and then to dirt. That dirt road ran between fields that hadn't been planted in years, overgrown with weeds and wild grass that came up to our handlebars. The cicadas were louder out here. I remember thinking that. Away from town, away from cars and air conditioners, and all the other sounds of humans, the drone was overwhelming. It felt like being inside a big grinding machine. The Hinsley place sat at the end of the road. I wasn't sure what I'd been expecting. Something dramatic, maybe, like the haunted house at the end of the street that you see in movies. But this place, well, it just looked sad. A two-story farmhouse with white paint peeling off in strips, and windows that stared out into nothing. There was a barn behind it that had partially collapsed, one wall leaning at an angle that made you nervous just looking at it. There was farm equipment scattered around the property, tractors and plows and things I didn't have names for, all of it rusted and overgrown. Holy crap, York said. This is perfect. He was right, though. It was perfect. The afternoon light came through the trees at an angle that made everything look golden and rotten at the same time. The tall grass moved in the breeze. The cicadas screamed. If you were going to film a horror movie, you couldn't ask for a better location. We spent an hour exploring, filming everything. York narrated in that fake deep voice again while I held the camera, describing the abandoned death farm and the ghosts that walk these cursed fields. Marissa found a rusted scythe too, which had been leaning against the barn. She posed with it like the grim reaper, while Laramie made spooky noises off camera. Eric wandered the perimeter real slow, looking at things, of course not saying much. We were filming the barn when I spotted a man. He walked right out of the farmhouse without making a sound. One second the porch was empty, and the next he was standing there, and he was watching us. He was an older man, about sixty or more, with grey hair hanging past his ears, and clothes that looked like he'd been wearing them for weeks. He didn't yell at us or move towards us. He stood there with his hands at his sides and watched us. Crap, York said, someone does live here. Uh, I think we should go. I was moving towards my bike. Come on. We rode back to town faster than we'd come. Pedaling so hard it looked like something was chasing us. It wasn't until we were back on paved roads that we slowed down enough to catch our breath. That guy was creepy as hell, Laramie said. His glasses had fogged up from the exertion. He was wiping them on his shirt. He didn't do anything. He just looked at us, Eric said. Yeah, well, looking at us was creepy enough. Did you see his face? I had seen his face. That was the thing I couldn't stop thinking about. That man had not looked angry that we were trespassing on his property. He hadn't looked confused or annoyed either. He looked worried, even scared. Like he wasn't concerned about us being there, but concerned for us being there. We should have stayed away after that. Any sensible group of kids would have found somewhere else to film their stupid movie. Forgotten all about the old man on the creepy farm, but we were 13. And the location was perfect. York had made up his mind. He was talking about going back there before we ever got home. And the more we talked about it, the more we were convinced ourselves that we'd overreacted. He was just some hermit who didn't like visitors. We'd be more careful next time. We'd avoid the house, stick to the barn and the fields, and he would never even know we were there. We went back four days later. There was no hermit outside when we arrived. so we left our bikes in the tall grass near the road and crept onto the property like we were spies infiltrating enemy territory. The afternoon was hot and still. The cicadas were so loud they were vibrating my bones, it felt like. We filmed for about an hour. I got some good shots of the barn interior, dusty light coming through holes in the roof, old hay bales rotting in the corners. Marissa did a monologue as the ghost of a farmer's daughter that was actually pretty good, her voice going soft and eerie. Even Laramie applauded her when she finished. York found a rusted pitchfork and insisted on being filmed holding it like a weapon. Normal stuff. Kid stuff. It was Eric who first noticed it. he's boarding up his windows he said we were taking a break in the shade of an old oak tree passing around a water bottle which had gotten warm in laramie's backpack eric was looking toward the farmhouse real focused like he didn't make that face often but when he did it was when something didn't seem quite right to him i looked too and he was right the windows on the first floor of the farmhouse, which had been dark but visible on our first visit, were now covered with boards nailed haphazardly over them from the inside. You could see the fresh yellow of new lumber against the gray weathered siding. So, maybe he's fixing the place up, York said. You don't board up windows from the inside if you're just fixing a place up. You replace them, or you board them up from the outside so the boards are flush. Eric paused. You bored them from the inside, if you're trying to keep something out. Keep what out? Eric didn't answer yet. He kept staring at that farmhouse. Marissa moved closer to me. I could smell her shampoo, and for a second I forgot about the farmhouse entirely. This place gives me the creeps, she said quietly. but don't tell York I said that. I won't. We went back twice more over the next two weeks. Each time there were more changes, more boards on the windows, a trench dug behind the house that had not been there before. About two feet deep and twenty feet long, the dirt piled up beside it. The grass around the farmhouse had been cut short in a wide circle. It was like the man wanted clear sidelines in every direction, like he wanted to see something or someone coming. We stopped seeing him outside after that, but sometimes while we were filming, I would catch a glimpse of movement behind the gaps in the boarded windows, his shadow passing by, or his eye catching the light for just a second as he watched us I was sure of it He was watching and waiting and preparing and I wasn sure why The other thing I noticed the thing I didn yet mention to the others was the sound. You see, the cicadas near the Hensley Place were beginning to sound different. There was something underneath the main drone, a lower frequency that you couldn't quite hear, but could definitely feel. I guess I was the only one whose teeth ached from hearing it. It gave me a headache. But maybe it wasn't just me. All of us were growing more irritable and short-tempered. It didn't match the excitement we had when we filmed the movie. Sometimes we would snap at each other for no reason, then quickly apologize and forget about it, but then snap again ten minutes later. and there was something else a feeling i got when we were on that property like being watched but it had nothing to do with the old man in the farmhouse it was bigger than that older even it's really hard to explain but the feeling would hit me at random moments and i would freeze up put the camera in my hand and start rapidly scanning the tree line, looking for something that I didn't even know. After our third visit, I started to have dreams. Nothing I could describe clearly. Often I forgot what it was. But what I do remember were these dreams of darkness. I would see movement, and I would sense something large circling outside my field of vision. When I'd wake up, my heart would be pounding, and the cicada drone was already outside, and I would lie there until dawn trying to convince myself it was nothing at all. It wasn't nothing. I just didn't know it yet. I was still young enough to believe that bad feelings could be ignored, that nightmares didn't truly mean anything. To me, the world was basically safe. Nothing terrible could happen to a kid in a small town in Missouri in the summer of 1998. I was about to learn otherwise. and unlock access to members-only audiobooks all at the same time. Just go to eeriecast.com slash plus and become a member today. It's cheap and really helps us out. That's eeriecast.com slash plus. Thank you. The idea for a night shoot was York's. We were in the basement on a Thursday afternoon, watching the footage we'd collected so far. It wasn't bad, honestly. We had some genuinely creepy shots of the barn, and some pretty good acting from Marissa. Enough raw material to maybe edit into something that resembled a real movie. But there was something missing. The footage looked flat, like daytime flat. Nothing like the horror movies we were trying to imitate. We have to go shoot at night, York said. That's the problem here. Everything we've got looks like a home video because we're filming in the middle of the day. Real horror movies are shot at night. All the scary stuff happens in the dark. Laramie pushed his glasses up his nose. How are we supposed to see anything? We don't have movie lights. The camcorder has a night mode. That green stuff, you know, like military footage. It'll look way creepier than this. I didn't love the idea. the Hensley place was unsettling enough in daylight. The thought of being out there after dark, with the boarded-up farmhouse and the watching hermit, and that low frequency underneath the cicadas, it made me nauseous. But York was jumping ahead, planning things. We would tell our parents we were sleeping at his house. Then we'd bike out after sunset, film for a few hours, then bike back before anyone knew we were gone. It would be an adventure, he said. It would make the movie actually good. And he wasn't wrong. Eric caught my eye across the basement. I could tell he had the same reservations I did. But neither of us spoke a word. That's how it worked with York. He charged ahead. We followed to make sure he did not die in some horrible way. We left around nine o'clock on a Saturday night. The sun had been down for an hour, but the sky still held some light. A beautiful deep blue you get in late summer, when the days are longer and the darkness comes slow. We rode in single file down the county road, our bike lights cutting through the dark ahead. The cicadas were roaring in the fields around us. Marissa rode behind me. I was acutely aware of her presence, and I could hear her bike tires on the gravel. By the time we reached the Hensley property, the sky had gone fully black. There was no moon that night, just a sliver of one hidden behind clouds. Now the farmhouse was just a dark shape, under the stars, lightless, those boarded windows invisible in the dark. The barn was creepy. It was just a void where the stars weren't. A black mass that seemed to absorb all light. This was a mistake, I said. Don't be a baby. York jumped off his bike, pulling the camcorder out of my backpack where I'd been carrying it. Could you turn on the night vision? We'll just get some footage and get out of here. I powered on the camera and switched it to night mode. The world turned green and grainy through the viewfinder. shapes emerging from the dark in a flat and ghostly way. There was the barn, the tall grass, Laramie making a face at the lens. We filmed for maybe an hour, creeping around the property and whispering commentary, constantly trying to scare each other. And for a while it was actually fun. The fear I'd felt on the ride faded into something more like excitement, a jittery energy. We weren't supposed to be here this late, and there was some adrenaline to that, you know. York kept wandering too far ahead and having to be called back. Laramie and I stuck close together, the two shrimps watching each other's backs. Marissa wasn't scared, or if she was, she didn't want to show it, while Eric moved through the dark like he belonged there, silent and watchful. I was filming the tree line behind the barn, and suddenly, the cicada sound changed. At first, it was a normal wall of noise, the steady droning we'd been hearing all summer long. But this shift, it was like a frequency drop. The low hum I'd been feeling underneath the main sound became the main sound itself, and it wasn't a hum anymore. It was like a pulsing rhythm, and I swear every time it pulsed, my muscles would flex on their own, like they do when you flinch at something. I stopped moving then. I tried to lower the camera, but couldn't bring myself to do it. I tried to turn my head, but I couldn't. My muscles were seizing up, and I was frozen there. The viewfinder pressed to my eye, staring at the green-tinged tree line while my heart slammed against my ribcage. In my peripheral vision, I could see the others. They were frozen too. York had his flashlight raised, and his mouth was open like he was about to say something. Marissa was reaching toward my arm, her hand stopped mid-motion. Laramie was mid-step, one foot off the ground, balanced impossibly like a statue. And there was Eric, standing like a stone, only his eyes moving. He seemed to be tracking something. Only my camera moved. My finger was still on the record button, and the tape was still rolling, capturing whatever was about to happen. Something moved at the edge of the trees. I saw it in the viewfinder, a shape separating from the shadows. Tall, at least seven feet, if not more. It had these angular, long limbs, and it moved through the tall grass without making any sound, without even disturbing the stalks, like it was drifting instead of walking. It was heading towards the farmhouse. The front door opened. The old man stepped out onto the porch. He was carrying something in his arms, some bundled up thing wrapped in cloth, and he walked down the steps into the yard with stiff movements. He was terrified, but acted as if he had no choice in the matter. I wanted to scream at him to run. I wanted to close my eyes, but I could do no such things. The man walked maybe thirty feet from the house, then stopped. He set the bundle on the ground. It took me a moment to see what it was in the darkness. It glistened, though. It was meat. Raw meat, dark and wet. Maybe a whole animal's worth. But why? the shape in the grass changed direction it had been moving toward the house but it suddenly curved directly toward the man toward his offering the cicadas pulsed louder the frequency made my head feel like it was going to burst the man himself stood very still i could see him murmuring something his mouth moving, but I could not hear anything over the cicada noise. To me it looked like he was either praying or pleading. Perhaps it was the same word over and over again. The shape reached him. I saw it clearly for just a second when the moon passed through a gap in the clouds and I caught it in the faint light. limbs like a mantis too many joints a body that was almost human shaped but distorted and a head that had turned toward the man with movement that was sudden, precise and mechanical the man tried to run but he got only two steps what happened next took maybe fifteen seconds the shape unfolded around him. Those long limbs wrapped around the man's body and lifted him off the ground. Then it started to pull, not tear, but pull, like it was disassembling him along seams. The man, he came apart in pieces, and each piece came apart somewhere into that mass of angles and joints. There was no blood or spray, but there was the wet sound of separation and the man getting smaller and smaller until there was nothing left of him at all. When it was over, the shape stood in the grass where the man was. The ground underneath was now dark and wet, so there had bin blood. The offering of meat, though, sat untouched a few feet away. The cicadas shifted back to their normal frequency. My body unlocked. I stumbled backward, dropping the camera, and I fell on my rear in the grass. Somewhere nearby, York was making a sound that wasn't quite crying, but wasn't yet screaming. Laramie was running toward the bikes. Eric grabbed my arm and hauled me to my feet. Move, he said, his voice steady, but his hand trembling. If we don't move, we die, he told me. Marissa was now beside me, her face pale. She didn't say a word. She grabbed my other arm and pulled. Together, we ran, grabbing our bikes, and we pedaled harder than I'd ever pedaled in my life. Down the dirt road, onto the gravel, then onto pavement. We did not stop until we made it to the edge of town. By then, my lungs burned and my legs were jelly. My mind was somewhere else entirely, stuck on repeat. watching the shape reach the man over and over again. We ended up in York's backyard, collapsing on the grass behind his house. All of us were breathing hard and couldn't speak. But the cicadas were still going. They had not changed in town. Here, it was just the normal summer drone. The same sound we'd been hearing for weeks, and somehow, that was comforting. It was like here, nothing had happened. Everything was fine. What the hell? Laramie kept saying. His glasses were crooked, but he didn't seem to care. What the hell? What the hell? We have to tell someone, York said. His voice sounded like it was going to go hoarse. We need to call the cops. York shut the hell up. It was Eric. He was sitting with his knees pulled to his chest, staring straight ahead. If you call the cops, the blame isn't going to go to some monster you tell them about. They're not going to believe us. It's going to go to us, the group of trespassing teenagers. But we have it on video. The camera was recording, right? York looked at me. You got it on video, didn't you? I realized then I didn't have the camcorder. I had dropped it when I fell. It was still out there, somewhere in the grass near the barn, probably recording nothing until the battery died. I dropped it, I said. I dropped it, and we left it. Marissa put her hand on my shoulder. I don't think she meant anything by it, probably just a gesture of comfort. But I felt it like electricity. Even in that moment even with everything that had just happened I noticed her touch Nobody said anything for a while We lay there in the dark behind York house listening to the cicadas, trying to understand or come to terms with everything. I kept expecting to wake up, that this was a dream, and I'd be in my bed with the morning light coming through the window, and none of this would be real. But that moment didn't come. We moved into, then stayed in York's treehouse until dawn. We didn't sleep. We kept watch and listened. When the sun came up, we went inside and told his mom we'd been up late watching movies. She made us pancakes and didn't ask any questions. This could have been a normal, memorable morning. A good day in a normal world. Two days later, I went back for the camera. I had to. My dad was going to notice it was missing eventually, and I could not think of any way to explain losing it without being severely punished. So I biked out there alone in the middle of the day, my hands a shaky mess the entire time. The Hensley property looked the same. The farmhouse, the barn, and all that rusted equipment. There was no sign of what happened. No body even. The blood was gone. No dark spot in the grass where the man had been standing. Just the empty farm and the cicada noise under a hot July sun. I found the camera and the grass near the barn where I'd dropped it. The battery was dead. I took it home and charged it and watched the footage with my finger hovering over the eject button, ready to stop the tape if it showed anything that I did not want to remember. It didn't. The night vision footage was blurry and green, mostly useless. You could make out the shapes of trees or the outline of the barn. There were glimpses of the others moving around. You could see me stumbling backward then fall. Then you could hear us running, our footsteps and our breathing, and Laramie saying what the hell over and over as we fled toward the bikes. But the thing itself, anything of importance really, wasn't shown. The movement I thought I caught of that thing emerging, it was all glitchy or blurry appearing now. Either the result of dropping it or the device getting covered in morning dew, but probably both. The only evidence that anything had happened was the audio. I captured the pulse underneath the cicada drone, undeniably. Without a word, I put the tape in a box in my closet, and tried to forget it existed. We were kids who witnessed something they shouldn't have, so we didn't feel like talking about it. Not directly, not to each other. Whenever we were together, which wasn't often in the week following, we would make eye contact but look away. Were we ashamed of something? Were we the ones in the wrong by witnessing what we'd witnessed? I kept expecting someone to find a body, to raise an alarm. But no one did. That old man had been living alone on that property for years. No family checking on him, no mail carrier wondering why he wasn't picking up his packages. The man was just gone, and the world absorbed his absence without flinching. Two weeks later, after the night at the Hensley place, York showed up at my house unannounced. The guy looked tired and thinner than I remembered, even though it had only been about fourteen days. He stood on my porch with his hands in his pockets and asked if I wanted to ride bikes with him. We ended up at the park near the elementary school, sitting on the swings, not swinging, not even looking at each other. The cicadas droned on. Somewhere nearby, some younger kids were playing on the jungle gym, shouting and laughing. Eventually, York said to me, Man, I can't stop saying it. Every time I close my eyes, it's just there. I know what you mean. Eric thinks we should just forget about it and move on. Pretend it never happened or something. Can we even do that? York shook his head slowly. I don't think so. But I don't know what else to do. I didn't either. We sat there on the swings for a while longer, listening to the cicadas and watching those younger kids as they played. Again, such a normal view, a normal moment. But underneath it, always, the knowledge of what we'd seen. What was out there in the dark at the edge of town? Had it been there all along, waiting for something? Maybe it's gone, York said. Maybe it was just there for him, for that family, or I don't know. Maybe that now he's dead, it'll leave. I wanted to believe that, and I told him that I did. But I didn't believe it, and I doubt he did either. Here's the thing about being 13 years old. You can see something that rewrites your entire understanding of the world. Something that could shatter you into pieces. And three weeks later, you're eating pizza and arguing about whether the Chicago Bulls could beat the Utah Jazz in a rematch. The human capacity for compartmentalization is strongest when you're young. The brain hasn't fully hardened yet. It can still flex around the impossible and keep functioning. By the first week of August, we were hanging out again. It happened gradually. York called me to see if I wanted to bike to the gas station for slushies. I said sure. We ran into Eric on the way and he tagged along. Laramie was sitting on his porch when we passed by, reading one of his sci-fi paperbacks. And York asked if he wanted to come. After a moment of hesitation, he did. And Marissa caught up with us on her bike, near the edge of town, appearing out of nowhere the way she usually did. Just like that, Five kids on bikes, same as it used to be, riding through the summer heat. But we still didn't talk about the Hensley Place. It was forbidden as a topic. Though we didn't declare it, it was an unspoken agreement. A sealed subject, locked away so we didn't have to look or think about it. And that was fine with us. That was what we needed to do to move on, to go back to normal. And that camcorder, it sat in my closet for another week, before Marissa asked about it. Guys, we should finish the movie, she said. We were in York's basement, sprawled across the furniture, watching a rerun of The Simpsons. We got all that footage. It seems stupid to waste it. The thought of watching that footage, though, put a sort of pain in my stomach. But Marissa wasn't talking about the night shoot. She meant everything else, the daytime stuff, the scenes we'd filmed before everything went wrong. Honestly, I don't want to do horror anymore, I admitted. So we do something else, a comedy like a fake TV show or something, Marissa set up, warming to the idea. We make fun of local access or do stupid commercials, whatever. It'll be funny. It'll be something we can actually show to people. York was nodding along. Eric hadn't spoken yet, but he wasn't objecting either. Marami was already grinning, his brain clearly spinning with ideas. And I realized, looking at them, that we all needed this. We had to replace what that camcorder had meant to us. We needed to use it for something good, something light, that could overwrite the memories of green-tinged night vision and shapes in the grass. Okay, I said. Okay, but I get final cut. The next three weeks were some of the best times of my life. I know how that sounds, given everything that happened, but it's true. We threw ourselves into the new project, with an energy that boarded on Manic, filming every day, sometimes twice a day, generating hours of footage that was stupid and brilliant, and exactly what we needed. York created a character called Chuck Brubaker, a weatherman for a fake local station who was clearly losing his mind. He wasn't a natural actor, but that was part of what made it funny. Every segment he'd get a little more unhinged, predicting increasingly impossible weather events with this earnest intensity that made it impossible not to laugh. Tomorrow we're looking at partly cloudy skies with a high of 72, followed by the collapse of linear time itself. Back to you, Diane. Laramie and I did fake commercials together. Our masterpiece was a spot for a product called Beef Drink, which was exactly what it sounded like. Laramie played it completely straight, adjusting his glasses and talking about the refreshing taste and convenient packaging while holding a glass of what was actually chocolate milk mixed with food coloring. I was the skeptical customer who got converted. Marissa laughed so hard during filming that we had to do eight takes. We filmed everywhere. York's backyard, the parking lot behind the grocery store, the elementary school playground after hours. Marissa did woman-on-the-street interviews where she'd approach strangers and ask them absurd questions with complete sincerity. Most people thought we were weird. A few played along. One old woman gave a five-minute answer to the question, If you could be any type of cheese, which cheese would you be? And we used every second of it. Eric was behind the camera for a lot of it. He had a goodbye, better than mine honestly, and he seemed happier observing than being filmed. Sometimes I'd catch him smiling at something one of us did, a quiet smile that made his whole face soften up. He didn't talk a lot, but when he did, it mattered. The swimming hole became our regular spot that August. It was a wide bend in the creek about a mile outside of town, with a rope swing hanging from a big oak tree and a rocky beach where he could set up towels. We'd bike out there in the afternoon heat, spending hours jumping off the swing and filming each other's dives. We'd float in the cool water while the cicadas screamed in the trees around us. One afternoon, we filmed a fake nature documentary. Eric was the narrator, doing his best, David Attenborough, while York played a rare species of idiot in his natural habitat. Here we observe the North American idiot, Eric narrated, as York pretended to drink from the creek like an animal, engaging in its primary survival behavior. York then broke character and splashed Eric. It devolved into a water fight and none of us could breathe from laughing. Marissa sat next to me on the rocks during one of those water fights, both of us drying off in the sun while the others wrestled in the shallows. Her hair was wet and slicked back, and she looked different somehow. Older, I think. I wanted to say something to her, something that mattered, but I couldn't think of what. So I just sat there, aware of the inch of space between her arm and mine, feeling like that inch was the most important distance in the world. those are the memories I try to focus on now the ones I replay when I can't sleep at night just five kids in the water the sun on our shoulders the whole summer stretched out ahead of us like it would never end we had a sleepover at my house mid-august Marissa couldn't come because her parents wouldn't let her sleep over with a bunch of boys which was probably fair But the four of us stayed up until four in the morning watching movies, working through a stack of rentals from the video store. The Truman Show, which had just come out on video. Men in Black, if I recall. And I'm sure that we watched half of Starship Troopers before we got bored and switched to something else. Somewhere around two in the morning, the conversation got really philosophical. We were on the floor of my living room, surrounded by empty chip bags and soda cans. The TV was playing the menu screen of whatever movie we'd just finished, but I can't remember which. Do you think we're real? Laramie asked. He was lying on his back, staring at the ceiling, his glasses folded on his chest. Like, really real. Or do you think we live in a simulation, like Truman? Truman wasn't a simulation, York said. It was a TV show. He was a real person in a fake place. Same difference. How would you know if your whole life was fake? You wouldn't, Eric said. He was sitting by the couch, arms folded, that thoughtful look on his face. That's the whole point. If the simulation is good enough, there's no way to tell from inside. That's terrifying, guys, I said. Is it? Eric shrugged. I don't know. If you can't tell the difference, does the difference matter? Your experiences are still your experiences. The people you care about are still real to you. But then they're not actually real. What does actually real mean, even? It's not like you can get outside your own perception to check. We stayed on that topic for almost an hour, going in circles, getting nowhere, but enjoying the conversation for its own sake. That's what being 13 was like for us. You could spend half the night debating questions that philosophers have argued for centuries and feel like you were discovering something new. Every thought felt fresh, every idea worth exploring. I remember looking around the room at some point during that conversation. York gestured while making a point that didn't quite make sense while Laramie pushed his glasses up and launched into some theory he'd read in one of his books. Eric listened waiting for his turn to speak These were my best friends in the world the people who understood me better than anyone else I had no idea it was one of the last times we all be together like that We fell asleep on the floor around dawn and woke up in the early afternoon with stiff necks and bad breath, a vague sense that we'd figured out something important but couldn't even remember it. The last week of August arrived faster than any of us expected. Suddenly, summer was almost over. School started in ten days, then eight days, then five. The air had that late summer quality. It was still hot, but with an edge to it. A hint of the fall waiting just around the corner. The cicadas were still loud, but they'd peaked sometime in mid-August. And now they were starting to thin out. That drone losing some of its intensity. It was, of course, York who proposed the campout on a Tuesday. We were sitting in his backyard, not doing much of anything, and he brought it up. One last thing before school starts, he said. A proper send-off. We camp out in the backfield and build a fire and stay up all night. Film the final episode of the show. The backfield was the big open space behind York's house. about ten acres of grass and wildflowers that ran down to a creek and a line of trees. His family owned it, but didn't do anything with it. We'd played there hundreds of times over the years. It felt safe. It felt like it was our place. I'm in, Marissa said immediately. Yeah, okay, sounds fun, I said. Laramie, though, was quiet for a second, but then he nodded and pushed his glasses up. Sure, one last adventure. We picked Friday night. We set up tents and built a fire. We roasted hot dogs and marshmallows, filming the big finale of our fake TV show. Our parents all said yes. It was innocent enough. Just kids being kids, squeezing the last drops out of summer before real life started again. None of us talked about why we were staying close to York's house. None of us mentioned that the backfield was the opposite direction from the Hensley place, as far from those overgrown fields and that empty farmhouse as we could get without leaving town entirely. We didn't have to say it. We all understood. Friday came. It was clear and warm. We hauled our gear out to the field around six. Three tents and sleeping bags and a cooler full of food and soda. York's dad helped us dig a fire pit, showing us how to stack the wood properly. Then he left us alone with a reminder to put the fire out completely before going to bed. We got the tent set up and the fire going, just as the stars started coming out. The sky was huge out there, away from the streetlights, and you could see the Milky Way smeared across it like someone had spilled something beautiful. The cicadas were singing, but it was just the normal sound, the background noise of summer we'd been hearing for months. Nothing wrong at all. I set up the camcorder on a rock near the fire pit, angling it to catch all five of us in frame. We were going to film the final broadcast of our fake TV show. York had written a whole script for Chuck Brubaker's last weather report, increasingly unhinged predictions that ended with him announcing his retirement to become one with the storms. We did three takes. The first one fell apart because Laramie couldn't stop laughing. The second one was pretty good, but York forgot his lines near the end. But the third one was perfect. All of us playing our parts, building to a ridiculous climax. Where Chuck Brubaker walked off into the field, with his arms raised while the rest of us did fake crying. After that, we just hung out. Hot dogs, marshmallows, talking about nothing important. Anxious about school starting up again soon. Which teachers we hoped to get. Marissa mentioned she was thinking about trying out for the volleyball team. And York said she'd make it easy. You're the most coordinated person I know, he said. And Marissa rolled her eyes, but I could tell she was pleased. What about you? She asked me. Any big plans for 8th grade? I shrugged. Survive, I guess. Inspiring, Laramie said. Everybody laughed. I remember the firelight on their faces. The smell of wood smoke and those beef franks. The sound of Laramie laughing at something York said. A real laugh. Too loud. The kind of laugh that made you laugh just hearing it. Everything felt right and safe. Marissa was sitting next to me. close enough that our shoulders almost touched. At one point, she leaned over and whispered, this was a good idea. The camp out, I mean. I'm glad we did this. Yeah, me too, I said. Around midnight, we did ghost stories for the camera. That had been York's idea, a way to get more footage. But we made a rule that nothing could be actually scary. Everything had to be stupid. So Laramie told a story about a ghost who haunted a specific toilet at Denny's, getting way into the details. I did one about a vampire who was allergic to blood and survived on tomato juice. Eric, deadpan and serious, delivered a five-minute saga about a mummy who wasn't actually undead. Just a guy who'd gotten wrapped up in toilet paper and couldn't get out. The laughter went on. The fire was starting to get low, and the night was almost quiet save for these cicadas. Around 2am, Laramie stood up. I gotta pee, guys, he said. I'll be right back. He walked toward the tree line at the edge of the field, about 50 yards from where we sat. I watched him go without really thinking about it, just tracking his silhouette as it moved through the tall grass, getting smaller in the darkness. He looked so small out there. I mean, he was small. The two of us both were. He reached the edge of the trees and stopped. I assumed he was finding a good spot with some privacy. And that's when the cicadas changed. I knew immediately. The sound shifted and dropped. It became that pulse I'd heard at the Hinsley place. the frequency that vibrated your skeleton, the one that meant something was coming. My body locked up. I couldn't move or speak or do anything but stare at Laramie's silhouette at the edge of the trees. Beside me, my friends had gone rigid too. I could see York at the very far side of my eye, frozen mid-reach for another marshmallow. I could feel Marissa's hand on my arm, gripping tight, but neither of us could move. Laramie turned around. I saw his face catch the faint glow from our dying firelight. He looked so confused, so very scared. His glasses reflected the fire, and he opened his mouth to say something, but I never figured out what it was, because something came out of the trees behind him. I couldn't see it clearly. It was too dark and too fast, and my eyes wouldn't focus on it properly, but there was an impression of height and wrong angles and limbs that bent too much. The same thing we'd seen at the Hensley place, The same shape that had taken the old man apart while we watched. It reached for Laramie. He didn't even scream. I don't really know if that makes it better. There was one quick surprised sound. Then the shape folded around him and pulled him backward into the trees. There was a rustling, a cracking of branches. But nothing at all. The cicadas shifted back to normal then. My body unlocked. I was on my feet before I knew I was moving. Running toward that tree line and screaming Laramie's name. The others were on my tail. We crashed into the trees with flashlights. Sweeping the beams everywhere. Calling our friend's name over and over. There was nothing there. No sign of him. Just dark woods and cicada noise. We searched until dawn, covering every inch of those woods down to the creek and along its banks, through the brush and into the neighboring fields. But we found nothing. York's parents called the police when we came back at sunrise stumbling and hoarse unable to explain what happened we told them Laramie had gone to use the bathroom and never came back that we had searched desperately all night but we could not tell them about what we saw the search went on for weeks Police, volunteers, dogs, helicopters. They checked the creek for signs of drowning. They checked the roads for signs of abduction. They interviewed everyone we knew and plenty of people we didn't. And they interviewed each of us at least a dozen times. A theory was settled on. That Laramie had wandered off into the dark, gotten disoriented, and fell into the creek. His body had likely swept downstream and would probably never be recovered. A tragic accident. A senseless loss. A memorial service was held at the end of September. The entire town showed up. Laramie's parents sat in the front row and looked like people whose insides had been scooped out of them. His mom kept touching his school picture, the one they'd put on an easel next to the podium. as if she was trying to make sure this was real. I sat in the back with the others. We didn't talk. We didn't even look at each other. We sat there and listened to people say nice things about Laramie, about how he read more than anyone, and laughed too loud. I kept the camcorder footage from that night. I'm not sure why I even did. The tape shows the fire and the ghost stories. Laramie doing his bit about the Denny's toilet ghost. You can see him in the background of some shots laughing and pushing his glasses up, looking happy and alive. But the last shot is blurry, and it's of him saying something about needing to pee. He walks out of frame, and the camera keeps recording the fire for another 40 minutes until the battery dies. You can hear us searching on the audio. Calling his name getting more desperate. More panicked. As the minutes pass and he doesn't answer. You can hear York start to cry around the 20 minute mark. And you can hear Marissa saying, This isn't happening. Over and over. Like a prayer. But you can't hear what took him. I listened to it hundreds of times probably. trying to find some evidence that what I remember was real. But there's nothing there. Nothing but normal cicada noise. That was enough to destroy our friendships. There was no fight or falling out or anything. But we became objects of our own trauma. Looking at York or Eric or Marissa just reminded me of Laramie and that thing in the woods. York's family moved away the next year. Eric went quiet, and we lost touch entirely before graduation. Marissa and I almost stayed friends. We tried, but every time we were together, there was an absence between us, probably the space where Laramie should have been, and eventually it was easier to just stop trying. I left Missouri the day after I graduated high school, and I've never been back. I went to college in Oregon and got a job. I'm married now, and I built a life as far from Carthage as I could get. I don't talk about the summer of 98. I left the tapes with my family a long time ago. I've spent 17 years trying to forget what happened. Most days, I almost manage it. But I'm writing this in 2015. And Brood 4 emerged again last month. The first time in 17 years. And I can't stop thinking about Laramie. I never got to say goodbye. None of us did. He was there and gone so fast. Wherever he is now. Whatever happened to him after that shape pulled him into the dark? God, I hope it was quick. I hope he didn't suffer. I hope whatever he saw at the end wasn't as terrible as what I've imagined every night. For seventeen years. During my school years, I only acquired a single friend I could call a best friend. And it was well into my later days. I can't imagine the pain one might feel to see one of the closest friends in the world be ripped away from them by something that should be impossible. Good night. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Unexplained Encounters. I've been your host, Darkness Prevails. Get to know me personally on X at Dark Prevails or on my show, Night Watchers, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, your favorite podcast app, or just search YouTube for Night Watchers. But if you want more scary story narrations from me, check out Tales from the Break Room or Alone in the Woods. Until next time, everyone, stay safe out there and stay creepy, because this world is a strange one.