When my boyfriend first brought up moving into his cabin in the middle of the barren Arizona desert I was absolutely not on board. I’ve always been a bit more delicate in composition and I was not keen on doing what I saw as leaving civilization to do manual labor and be dusty. But I knew it was where he was happiest, and I loved him enough to try and make it work. So, we packed up our apartment and our two little dogs and made the trek across the state. The property itself is quite pretty for what it is, 40 acres with a thick coating of thorny plants and scraggly junipers. The cabin is pretty barebones, just a single room with a small loft, but we put the little money we had saved into upgrading the place as much as we could to be more comfortable. In the beginning, it was actually quite nice to be able to decompress and spend time in nature. The wildlife in the area is abundant, and at night the stars are brighter than I’ve ever seen. I was achieving a peace that I hadn’t had in a long time. For months, things were fine. But they started to go downhill with Ruthie.
We lived far from the highway, about a half hour drive on a dirt road, and our neighbors were few and far between tucked into little trails between the trees. Ruthie was our nearest neighbor by far, living in a rotted-out trailer only a couple of miles up the road from us. We saw her often because we had to pass right by her to get to the main road. She was very overweight, with a mouth full of decayed teeth and clothes covered in soot and dirt. It gets really cold in the area at night, and she would sleep by her stove putting wood in it as it went out. Unfortunately, that resulted in her accidentally burning herself several times over the course of us knowing her, and she would often have large, oozing sores on her body. My boyfriend, Henry, often helped her with odd jobs and other things she did not have the strength or wherewithal to do like chopping wood or hauling her water in for her because she couldn’t always afford to pay someone to do it.
While she was incredibly sweet, she was too unhealthy and not mentally well enough to maintain her home and herself. Henry once went into her trailer to fix the stove and told me he saw maybe 10-15 cats roaming around with the litter boxes completely full. She also had a couple of goats and would add animals to her poorly managed collection like rabbits, chickens, and dogs. It was honestly one of the more depressing things I’ve seen in my life, both her with her swollen, painful body and her pets in enclosures much too small. But we helped where we could, and tried to make sure she had enough food.
It was my birthday weekend, so we decided to drive to my family’s house a state over to celebrate. We were only gone for a few days but when we got back Ruthie was gone. It wasn’t just Ruthie either, her entire home was missing, with her belongings mixed with trash scattering the area. When we got out to investigate, we discovered several carcasses. Her animals were all dead. But the strangest part was that they were all in various states of decomposition and ranged from stark white bone to stinking piles of fur and skin. Some cages still had remnants of the animals that were in them, where they seemingly were unable to escape. It was incredibly troubling, but only a couple other people in the area knew of her, and none knew her last name or where she could have gone. Henry and I tried to make plausible theories, like she had decided she wanted to move to a different area, or had family come to collect her, but she didn’t have very much money, no family that we knew of, and for all of her poor ownership she would never leave her animals to die in that way. We were sad about it, because for all of her flaws we had come to care about her. We couldn’t find her family or any other trace of her, so we tried to look forward and put it behind us. Unfortunately, that was just the start of the trouble.
The next strange occurrence happened a few weeks later. Henry was on a job, and I was outside passing the time, playing with the dogs. Our dog Petal started barking and growling toward the tree line. When I turned to look, I saw a very tall figure walking through the trees about 30 yards away, it scared the shit out of me. It’s very rare to see anyone, but there were some people around, ranchers and hikers and such, so I called out and shouted hello to them. They stopped and then slowly turned around. He appeared to be male. Something was off with his face, but he was a bit too far to see clearly at first. He just stood there, silent. I repeated my greeting, but he remained silent. I became uneasy, and the longer I stared at him the more I was able discern. His eyes were the main problem, pitch black and abnormally large, and his limbs were unusually long as well. He was dressed in regular clothing like he was a hiker or something, but he was barefoot, and his hair was matted clumps, full of leaves and twigs. Petal kept barking like crazy but didn’t make any move towards him. We maintained uncomfortable eye contact for several seconds before he slowly turned and continued on his way. I couldn’t shake off the icky feeling but when I told Henry he told me it was probably just someone who was passing through and didn’t realize they were on someone else’s property. But after that, more and more things happened in quick succession that took away the rest of the peace I had managed to find.
Part of the problem with what started happening was that they never happened when Henry was home. A few days after I saw the man in the forest, Henry was gone again for work, and I was cooking lunch. I left my pot of soup on the stove and ran to the outhouse. When I returned, the door was wide open, and the pot was overturned. This was easy enough to explain away, but later that day I found pieces of bone on the front steps. Again, easy to explain away because our dogs sometimes carried things in, but I hadn’t let them out of the fence that day and I knew that those bones weren’t there before. There were other annoyances. My garden was completely uprooted while I was taking a nap, and laundry I had hanging on a line was torn down. I kept on hearing tapping on the side of the house, but there was never anything there. There were times I swore I could hear someone talking and it would give me the worst heebie jeebies, but I was never able to see anyone. I kept thinking it was all in my head, but things kept escalating.
Henry had to leave town for a couple of days for a job. It was late on a particularly stormy night, and I getting ready for bed when I heard a loud KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK on the door. I practically jumped out of my skin, and the dogs were losing their minds. I moved to the door and asked who was there. There was no response, and the only windows in the cabin were on the sides so I couldn’t look out and see who was there. After a little bit of time, I was able to tell myself that it was just the wind and rain beating against the door. Eventually I had to pee badly enough that I was even able to talk myself into being brave enough to go outside to the outhouse when the rain had stopped. I took the dogs and did my business as fast as I could, but the dogs had started barking at the broken-down truck we had in the driveway. I heard meowing and yelled at the dogs to stop. We had had a stray cat wander in a couple of months previously who had settled in, and I didn’t want the dogs hurting it if another cat had found us again. The meowing was pitiful and loud, but when I bent down with my flashlight to look under the truck, I saw the face of a very human woman shining back at me. The eyes were abnormally large, and she was smiling broadly while loudly and methodically meowing like a cat. Of course, I freaked the hell out and ran with the dogs inside.
I called Henry absolutely hysterical, and he says that I was just imagining things, that I didn’t like being alone and had an overactive imagination in the dark. I was determined to call the police, but he talked me out of that, saying that we were difficult to find and they would likely take a couple of hours to respond, or at least too long to do anything meaningful. He also reminded me he would be back soon and if I was really uncomfortable, I could walk to our neighbor Gisele’s house in the morning. He managed to calm me down quite a bit, although I locked the doors and windows and made sure I had the gun ready, and my phone charged. Henry had taken the working car so I couldn’t drive anywhere, and Gisele was a good two hour walk away.
Nothing else happened that night, or any of the following nights after Henry returned. Several days had passed and things had returned to normal which had me thinking it was okay to relax and that I was definitely imagining all of the shit that had happened prior. But then Henry had to leave for work again, leaving me alone overnight. All day things were normal. But that night, I’m woken up by a KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK once again. But this time more aggressively, repeating over and over again. The knocking moved from the door to the windows, methodically tapping on the glass. I opened the blinds, only to see nothing there. Instead of barking and growling, the dogs were both whining and whimpering in their bed. This time I didn’t care, I was calling the police. But when I went to grab my phone, it was missing from its charging cord. The tapping got faster and more aggressive, and I was frantically looking for anywhere the phone might have gone. I was straight up about to shoot at the glass when the tapping abruptly stopped. I diligently stayed up watching the window but at some point, fell asleep. When I woke up the sun was shining and the only trace of someone there were two large indentations under the window. My phone was back on its cord.
Henry is back again, but he still doesn’t really believe me. Unfortunately, we also really can’t afford to leave anyway. Part of why Henry is gone so much is because we genuinely do need the money. I’ve been trying to stay diligent, paying attention to my surroundings and not straying too far from the cabin. I’m starting to hear more things now though, what sounds like faint voices in the trees or whistling when I am outside. Earlier tonight I let the dogs out to use the bathroom I took a picture because I thought the sunset was nice. It ended up being a little too dark to photograph well, but I noticed something in the picture that made my heart drop. On the right-hand side there is something in the trees. I didn’t see anything at all when I took the photo, but to me there is unmistakably something watching us on the right. Henry doesn’t see it, even when I point it out he says that he literally just sees trees and shadows, but I swear it’s there and I can’t shake off the feeling that I am undeniably not alone. I just worry about the next time he leaves me alone and it’s once again just me and the trees.
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