I joined the Cross Country team in seventh grade.
Not because I was particularly athletic, but because my parents wanted me out of the house.
I was told that I could choose what sport to join, but I had to join one.
And since I lacked the coordination and physical skill to participate in soccer, basketball,
volleyball, tennis, and virtually any other sport, running seemed like my best bet.
I spent the next few years running Cross Country.
Throughout the summer and fall, practices were held at the local park every single weekday.
(Yes, you heard me right.
During summer break, when I should have been sleeping in and lounging about, I was training.
My only consolation was that I had friends on the team—misery loves company, and all
that.)
Practices basically consisted of the coaches telling us to run wherever we pleased, as
long as we were back by the specified time.
This complete lack of supervision and accountability was a kid’s dream come true, and my friends
and I spent every day running around the woods and trails, goofing off and exploring the
park to our hearts’ content.
I may not have been one of the best runners when it came to actual Cross Country meets,
but I was comfortably in the middle of the pack, and that was good enough for me.
The park we ran at was enormous, covering over three thousand acres total, and was the
crown jewel of the local community.
A lake was at its center, with paved paths for walking and biking encircling it.
Playgrounds, picnic benches, and pavilions dotted grassy fields around every corner.
There were even a few golf courses, swimming pools, and an ice skating rink.
(We couldn’t actually utilize these during practices, for obvious reasons—I’m simply
making the point that this park was huge.)
But the hiking trails were the most fun.
Hidden in the trees, away from the prying eyes of our coaches and nosy dog-walkers,
we could run as fast or slow as we wanted.
And, as I’ve mentioned, exploring was our favorite pastime.
And we found some...interesting stuff.
I didn’t fully appreciate how weird some of our discoveries were until years later,
long after I’d quit the team (a story much too long to fit in this post).
I suppose it probably has something to do with us being kids at the time.
But after looking back and talking with people who didn’t grow up in my hometown, our experiences
in that park were definitely not normal.
Here’s a few stories I thought I’d share.
1.)
The woods of Pennsylvania, where I lived, are chock-full of deer.
The park was no exception.
However, in the park, the deer were...different.
Not in a cryptid, “Not-Deer” sort of way—for the most part, they looked completely normal.
No, it was more in the way they acted.
They weren’t aggressive, necessarily, they just...weren’t as skittish or wary of humans
as they should’ve been.
Initially, I chalked it up to them just growing accustomed to people in their habitat.
But over time, I realized that while that may have played a part in their behavior,
there was something else going on.
It’s really hard to explain, but the best way I can put it is that they felt off.
One day, while my group was running down one of our usual trails, we rounded a corner and
suddenly came face-to-face with a young buck standing in the center of the path.
We skidded to a stop.
The buck just stared back at us with its big black eyes, completely still and unmoving.
We couldn’t have been more than ten feet away.
After the initial shock, we turned to each other, unsure of what to do.
None of us spoke.
There was a strange tingling feeling in the air, like the breeze just before a tornado
hits, and I don’t think anyone wanted to be the one to break the silence.
All the while, the deer just stood there, watching us with an unconcerned, albeit intense
gaze.
Mandy, one of the most impulsive among us, took a sudden step forward.
I think she was trying to scare it off, or at least get some kind of reaction.
She stomped her foot down as she stepped forward, the soft thump echoing through the quiet forest.
All of us flinched...all of us, that is, except the buck.
It didn’t even blink.
Just continued to stare with those freaky black eyes.
We ended up turning back the way we’d come, hightailing it to the main path.
It was kind of a bummer, because we’d been wanting to explore the abandoned greenhouse
that day, and this particular trail was the only one we knew of that could get us there.
But with the deer blocking the way, we decided not to risk it.
I glanced over my shoulder once as we ran away, and through the trees, I swear that
thing was still standing there, watching us.
Another time, I’d taken a “shortcut” that wound up with me falling into a thornbush
and getting a deep, nasty scratch that stretched from my ankle to just above my knee.
It only stung a little bit, but it was bleeding an awful lot.
Despite my protests, the group insisted we go back to “homebase” (a.k.a. the pavilion
where the coaches were waiting) for the first aid kit.
On our way back, we spotted no less than six separate deer.
All of them stood just a few yards from the trail, silently watching us pass.
That would have been unsettling enough...but then, the deer started following.
As we continued on, they’d slowly walk in the same direction, maintaining their distance.
When I pointed them out to the others, we all stopped.
So did the deer.
We started jogging.
Although I never actually saw the deer speeding up, they somehow managed to keep up, tracking
us down the path, stopping whenever we did.
Occasionally, another deer would suddenly appear and join them, until there were maybe
a dozen total.
All of them staring.
I was glad when my friends started running even faster, as it meant I wasn’t the only
one who was spooked.
It was at that point that I stopped looking for the deer, focusing instead on keeping
my eyes straight forward.
I could sense them in my periphery, though—dark, ever-present shadows in the corners of my
vision.
I was now sprinting in my haste to get out of those woods.
My heart was racing, and it had nothing to do with the physical activity.
We finally reached the treeline, and the deer didn’t follow us any further.
We made it back to homebase, panting and gasping and looking to all the world like the dedicated
Cross Country runners we were supposed to be.
The head coach took one look at my leg and immediately grew concerned, pulling out the
bandages and asking what happened.
I’m not sure why I said what I did.
Maybe it was because I was still a little freaked out, and wanted to make light of the
situation.
Ease the thick cloud of tension hanging over our group.
Or maybe my sense of humor was just that terrible.
Regardless of the reason, I made some stupid joke about the deer going carnivore.
The coaches didn’t laugh.
After the brief silence and some awkward glances exchanged with my friends, I forced a chuckle
and told the head coach I was kidding, explaining that I just had a run-in with a thorn bush.
None of us missed the way all of the coaches visibly relaxed before patching me up and
sending us on our way again, though not before lecturing us on the importance of coming back
to homebase straight away if one of us was bleeding.
By the time we got back into the woods, the deer were gone, much to our collective relief.
Not that any of us would ever admit to being scared.
2.)
There were a bunch of graves scattered throughout the woods.
They made for good meetup points, and the ones we hung out by the most often were called
“the horse graves.”
I’m not sure when that name started, only that Cross Country kids had been referring
to the spot by that name for years before we got there.
It was honestly nothing special—just two mounds of raised earth side-by-side, each
marked with a decent-sized stone.
It looked like there might’ve been writing scratched into them, once upon a time, but
they were so faded that no one could make out what they said.
We used to get running starts, then jump over them or on top of them.
We liked to theorize about what was really buried there; they felt too small to actually
be horse graves, unless they were colts.
I think they were probably dogs or something.
(Sometimes, when we were feeling really morbid, we’d discuss the possibility of people being
buried there.
But human graves felt different, so we knew that most likely wasn’t the case.)
The rumor of them being “horse graves” probably started because of the farm that
was just up the hill and through the trees.
But the farm was only there about fifty percent of the time, so that adds to my skepticism
on the matter.
3.)
Once, a girl in the grade above us left her running group to use one of the nearby porta-potties.
They waited for her to come back, expecting her to only take a couple minutes.
When ten minutes passed and she still hadn’t returned, they started to get worried.
Just when they were about to go check the porta-pottie, the girl came tearing through
the trees, screaming hysterically.
(My friends and I were in a different area of the park about a mile away, and even we
heard it.)
She was covered in scrapes and bruises, and kept saying “something grabbed her.”
She was in hysterics, and apparently didn’t give a lot of detail beyond that.
But the general conclusion everyone reached was that someone had waited for her outside
the porta-pottie, then attacked her when she came out.
The police were called, and they even brought a helicopter to circle around the park for
a few hours, which we all thought was pretty cool, until we found out what had happened.
Practice was cancelled for a couple days, since there was apparently a manhunt going
on.
None of us ever saw anything about it in the news, though.
The whole incident spawned a bunch of stories and rumors about the “porta-pottie serial
killer,” who’s apparently still roaming the park to this day.
When asked, the girl refuses to talk about it.
All the information I’ve got comes straight from her friends—the ones who were waiting
for her while she used the restroom.
None of them buy the story that some guy attacked her.
But they also won’t say what they think really did it, so...I guess no one will ever
know.
4.)
Scattered throughout the forested areas of the park, there are these cages.
Big metal cages covered in vines and ivy, just randomly sitting in the middle of the
woods.
Some of them are chain-link, kind of like those little fenced-in areas for electrical
equipment (except, there’s no electrical equipment).
Some of them have metal bars.
I’ve even seen a few covered in barbed wire.
All of them are empty.
Kids will often dare each other to go inside them, but I don’t know of anyone who actually
has.
Even though they’re all rusted and the locks probably don’t even work anymore, I don’t
think anyone really wants to risk getting trapped inside.
And as fun as they are to find, they tend to make everyone a tad uneasy as well.
One day, we were running through a place we called The Swamp when my friend Jen spotted
something metal through the trees.
We’d been in that area a bunch of times before, so we were excited to find something
new.
Upon closer inspection, we saw that it was a cage.
We couldn’t see any barbed wire, so naturally, we all took turns poking it.
Hesitantly at first, but then we grew bolder, until pretty soon Mandy was climbing up the
side like a monkey and Emma was drumming it with sticks like it was a xylophone.
I was about to join Mandy on top of the cage when something caught my eye.
I squinted, leaning in to examine it closer.
Spanning across six of the bars were four strange, white marks.
I curiously ran my fingers over them, surprised to find that the marks were actually grooves
etched into the steel.
When I pulled my hand away, some fine powder dusted my fingertips—metal shavings so small,
they were nearly microscopic.
I remember frowning down at them for a moment.
I remember stepping back, getting a better view of the markings.
And suddenly, I was hit by three sudden realizations.
The marks had been scratched into the cage with something very, very sharp.
The shape and size of the scratches resembled claw marks.
They’d been made recently.
I told the group that we needed to go.
Everyone sensed the seriousness in my tone, and soon, we were back to running through
The Swamp.
It wasn’t until we’d gotten further away from the cage that I told them about what
I’d found.
They were silent for a while.
Emma tried coming up with some “rational explanations.”
After all, there weren’t many animals that could leave scratches that deep—not that
lived in the park, anyway.
Bears came to mind, but no one that we knew of had ever seen a bear in the area.
She said I was probably just mistaken, and that they couldn’t have been claw marks.
I know what I saw, though.
And I can’t help but hope that it was a bear.
(Because if it wasn’t...well, let’s just say that we used bears as a scapegoat for
lots of things in that park, and I’d rather not consider the possibility of something
else being responsible.)