It was in eastern Tennessee and I lived in western North Carolina. I drove some drunk people back to their cabin about 20 miles from the track by a lake. After that I drive home by myself. There weren’t any highways that went through the mountains to take me home without going way out of my way to take I40. So I took some narrow, sketchy backroads straight through the biggest and thickest part of the Appalachians.

Right after crossing into North Carolina, at like 2 am, the GPS has me turn onto another backroad and I followed it. I go down for a couple miles but it gets more and more secluded. All of a sudden I’m at a dead end with a few shacks basically in a circle. I turned around and booked it out of there so fast. No music or nothing the entire rest of the way home.

I’ve had some nightmares about that moment and in them I see a wendigo on top of one of the shacks. Usually just seeing that makes me wake up but sometimes I don’t. When I don’t wake up it chases me and I either drive like junior johnson and escape or I go off the road and crash into a tree.

Honestly most of that drive was beautiful. I loved driving through the mountains at night and seeing the silhouettes of the trees and mountains. But that moment made me a believer that some spooky stuff goes down in those mountains. I didn’t believe in that stuff before that. Literally the night before I walked up a mountain in the middle of the night a little off campus at app state to sleep in my truck and it was so peaceful.