I guess I should start with some background. I’m in the military, I’ll leave the branch out, but of course not without allusion, we’re the best despite being the most underpaid. My friend who this story involves, I’ll give him the pseudonym of Garcia, he’d probably hate that, but that’s just how friendships go. This all took place in South Korea. The story I’m about to tell is honestly 100% true.
When we arrived in Korea we paired up with a Korean unit who’s numbers matched our own. The purpose was mainly to refine tactical skills, so we spent a lot of time training with the Koreans. One of the training areas contains a more or less graveyard. In this wooded area graves were spread out and only appeared as small, but noticeably taller than the ground, mounds of dirt. And of course, like every graveyard foreign to you, you’ll hear of how it’s haunted, and you’ll have less-than-intelligent people buy into every story they hear. Well this graveyard is supposedly a place where a large number of people were slaughtered. One of the stories unique to this area is that throughout the night you could hear the shrill screams of the slaughtered.
Every night, a roster is made for pairs of individuals to stand guard while the others slept. The Koreans would return to a barracks of their own every night, while we slept in tents organized into a small area. Since we were in a small area, generally free of threat we would have one pair of rovers posted every hour, and they would be relieved on the hour. After a couple nights in, you would hear guys exchange stories about how they heard the screams and the common embellishment that they heard more than just that, which Garcia and myself would always just brush off. We had never heard anything and didn’t even deem it necessary for explanation, it was just the power of suggestion at work.
After a very long day of extensive training it was time to set up the nightly watch roster. Garcia and myself caught a shift a couple hours past midnight. We like to regard ourselves as two of the better infantrymen we are with and so we live this up with a level of stupid pride and machismo. We were excited to stand that hour, creepily in the middle of the night and hopefully experience some of these “hauntings” and, in essence, debunk them. Before we racked out prior to our shift, we hung out in our two-man tent and exchanged creepy ghost stories we created.
When it was time for our shift, one of the rovers peeked into the tent and woke me up. I in turn kicked Garcia and told him it was our turn. He groggily mumbled something entirely incomprehensible, but it was enough to let me know he was awake. I decided that I would go relieve the two rovers and he’d be right behind me. Well I was partially right at least. About two minutes later he was in tow and came to my side. There were two make-shift stools set up in the middle of this tent city and you would generally do a lap and then sit for a minute. We silently did our lap, which I attribute to the sleepiness and made our way to the stools.
We sat down and shot the shit for a few minutes, just mindless small talk, and that’s when it happened. I heard the single most blood-curdling scream I’ve ever heard, I immediately jumped up on the alert, and tightened my grip on my rifle. I frantically looked around to where I heard the scream and it was straight into the most densely wooded area in this graveyard-strewn forest. Garcia sat there with this aloofness, glanced at me and started laughing. For me, that was creepy enough, I turned back to him, “What the fuck are you laughing at?” I said, actually starting to anger. He looked over to the direction of the scream, back at me and said, “That was a fucking bird, I’ve heard ones just like it back home, Stupid.” That was calming, he was still in character, calling me Stupid mockingly, so I looked back to the woods and sat back down.
As I sat there and in between conversation I began to notice how eerily silent it was, it occasionally made the hair on the back of my neck stand. We got back up and did our lap. Halfway through as we neared the side of the woods where that thick patch of forest was Garcia kept insisting that we ought to check it out, just to complete the experience. If there was one thing I was adamant about at that point it was staying the fuck out of that patch.
He started to get mad at me, which happens occasionally, we’re both very stubborn, but every time we roved by he would always bring it up and his anger increased each time we passed it, until he decided to change his approach. He tried to challenge my manliness, which normally works, but not tonight. I told him we can look tomorrow morning, which was met with a cold silence. We sat back down, our shift almost over and I could feel his anger for not checking it out tonight. I went to wake up the next pair of guys, and came back to the stools. He tried to get me to go one last time, since our relief was about to come anyway, and I again told him no. This was met with a heated argument, me leaving him with a “Fuck you” and walking back to our tent.
I unzipped the tent and saw something inside. I quickly flipped the light on my rifle on and put it on whatever was in there. Inside laid Garcia, peacefully at rest. In a panicked motion I glanced back over to the stools. There sat a man who was no longer Garcia, not even really a man. I mean, it looked human but that head, that head was terrifying. It was egg-shaped and I don’t mean how some people’s heads have the shape of an upside down egg, I mean it looked like a god damn egg, right side up, it was slightly larger than a normal head should be, suchly shaped as aforementioned, but featureless. There were no eyes, there were no ears, no mouth, no nose, no hair, no anything. And pale, that notebook-paper white. It just faced me.
Then it happened again, that fucking shriek. My eyes tore away from that thing for a second to look back at the patch, and as soon as I looked back over it was gone. I took off toward the stools, nothing. I climbed on top of them and surveyed the small camp. Nothing amiss except one fucking tent unzipped. I hauled ass over to it, but it was only the tent of the two relief rovers. I made my way back to my tent, everything was normal. Everything was normal everywhere, I mean, the silence was gone, nature made it’s noises, I heard snores of my brothers-in-arms, everything was fucking normal.
I woke Garcia up and told him everything, he thought I was messing with him and went back to sleep. I couldn’t sleep. I unzipped part of the tent to reveal a mesh net and I stared into that patch until the sun came up. We left that training sight that morning.
After Garcia saw how dishevelled I was he finally believed me. Once we made our way back to one of the main bases in Japan, I was freaked out enough where I had to know if it was just me. On my own accord and unknown to my unit I went through a whole health evaluation and everything checks out. Nothing spooky or paranormal has happened to me since that night, but damn does that shit give me nightmares sometimes. I guess it really is haunted all along.
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Credits to: GpJoe
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