Creepy Hiking Story

I had a random realization today. Whenever I hear a pileated woodpecker call, I feel like I'm in some Stephen King novel and some gruesome mutant is going to come wandering out of the shadows or something. Makes me downright paranoid. Especially when I'm working on something by myself, when I know no one else is even around... pretty creepy. And that also brings to mind a story I have, about hiking in the woods one day a couple of years ago...

My then-husband, our two kids, and I went hiking in the pygmy forest one day, not too far from our house. We were headed up an old trail near a creek, going for some old logging roads out there in the woods. On the way out, first 3/4 mile or so, it was idyllic. Nice sunny day, birds chirping, water in the creek running, warm out but nice in the shade. We were hiking uphill on what used to be a logging road itself, in fact, but it had been many years disused. When we got to the top of the hill, we stopped for a minute and had a breather, since the kids were so little.

A couple minutes later, after we had started up again, following another disused logging road out toward where I knew there was a junction where a bunch of roads came together, I started to hear pileated woodpeckers calling to each other in the woods. No other birds, no other noise. Just the wind sighing in the trees, and the woodpeckers. That made it feel a little creepy, but sometimes the forest is quiet, right? No big deal. So we kept walking, heading for the junction. We were talking, joking about feeling like being in Maine, being in a Stephen King novel, telling the kids what kind of footprints they were seeing, naming trees, that sort of thing, when I looked up and saw a pile of dirt on the road ahead. Okay, whatever, people build jumps for their dirt bikes out there. I got that, known that since I was a kid. As we got closer to it, though, I knew it wasn't a jump. Shaped wrong, I could tell even before we were close enough to see what it really was. Closer we got, the weirder it felt.

So we get up next to it, and stop, and what should lie on the other side but a hole shaped just like a grave, only not that deep. Maybe almost three feet deep, two feet wide, and six feet long, and dug in some hard-pan clay with a lot of determination. Knowing what I do about hard-pan clay, I could tell it had been dug when the clay was pretty dry. I could still see shovel marks in the clay on the sides of the hole. Now that must have been someone who was really pissed, I joked, but the joke fell pretty flat. Now the kids were starting to get a little freaked, just like we were, so we kept going down the road, making light of the hole and trying to pretend not to be so creeped out by it. We hiked on for maybe another half mile, passing assorted trash piles and lots of pygmy cypress trees and huckleberry bushes. We passed by a couple of turn-offs and walked the straight road, until we came across something else random and weird.

An altar. Built of cast-off chimney bricks, or some sort of old bricks, anyway. Complete with dog skull.

At that, we decided to turn around and hike back a different way. Some way that didn't go past the grave-shaped hole.

So we hiked back, found the junction, and took a different road. This road, though, went through a clearing that had once been a big turn-around for the logging trucks and tractors that must have been in use years before. Sometime since then, in the meantime, large amounts of old tree stumps had been hauled into the clearing. Lots of them bore signs of burning, and I knew this had been an old party spot in past years. No one had quite succeeded in burning any of them all the way, no matter how old and dry they were. At this, the kids started really whining, they were very freaked out. Through all of this, there was little noise. Even the woodpeckers had stopped.

So, we picked up the littlest child and took turns carrying her back home. Moral of the story? You should never take the kids hiking when you don't know what's out there. Also, when life gives you a sign like the grave-shaped hole, turn the hell around and go home, it's not likely to get better. Good news is, it was creepy but nothing overtly bad actually happened. Just a lot of whining from the children, which is pretty normal. And the back strain of carrying the girl child up hill to our driveway. That is pretty normal too, of course.

And the hole? It's still there. Went back last Fall with my daughter and my sister, and saw it again. I could still see the shovel marks in the clay on the sides of the hole, and all I can wonder is Gee, who dug that? And why? Complete weirdness, in Northern California.