I want to tell you about the worst camping trip of my life. Not because anything overtly horrible happened, but because I know — with a certainty I can't fully explain — that something was very, very wrong in those woods.
This was three years ago. Me, my cousin Brianne, and four of her friends drove out to camp in a rural area of Maryland for a long weekend. I didn't know most of them well. There was Marcus, who I liked immediately. There was Stephanie, who was fine. There was a guy named Derek who I didn't trust from the first hour and couldn't tell you exactly why.
The first night was normal. Campfire, drinks, everyone telling stories.
The second night, around midnight, Marcus said he was going to take a walk. He'd been quiet for a couple of hours. When he came back twenty minutes later he sat down and didn't say anything. I asked if he was okay. He said yeah, he'd just seen something weird. I asked what. He said he wasn't sure. An animal, maybe. Big. Walking upright for a second before it dropped to all fours.
Nobody made a big deal of it. We went to bed.
At 4 AM, I woke up to the sound of someone crying outside my tent. Quiet crying — not desperate, more like someone trying not to be heard. I unzipped just enough to look.
There was a figure sitting at the dead campfire with its back to me.
It was Brianne's posture, her hair, her jacket. I almost called out to her. Then I noticed Derek was standing about fifteen feet behind the figure, facing the woods. He was completely still. His arms were at his sides.
I watched for ten minutes. Neither of them moved. The crying stopped. No one moved.
In the morning, Brianne was in her tent, asleep, and said she'd been asleep all night. She wasn't wearing her jacket. It was in her bag.
I told Marcus what I'd seen. He went quiet for a long time. He said: "Don't ask Derek about it."
I asked why.
He said the thing he'd seen in the woods — the thing that walked upright for a second — he'd looked at it longer than he'd admitted. He said it had turned and looked back at him. He said the face wasn't right. He said he thought, at the time, that it was a person trying to look like an animal. Or an animal trying to look like a person.
He said it had smiled at him.
We packed up and left that afternoon. We said it was the weather.
I still don't know what I saw at the campfire. I still don't know what Marcus saw. What I know is that the thing in the woods — whatever it was — mimics. It copies. It gets close enough to get the details right and then it gets a little bit wrong.
I know this because Derek's voice, for the rest of that trip, was just slightly off.
And Derek doesn't know that I noticed.