E.R. COOK

Happy Halloween! As always, the month of my favorite holiday has gotten away from me. For whatever reason, every year I plan a great month of decorations, costume parties and general fun. But every year life decides it has other plans and before I know it, the month is over and everyone is talking about Christmas (if they aren’t already).

At least this year my boyfriend and I have been devouring scary movies. We got hooked on Dario Argento’s Italian classics last year when we got to see a viewing of Suspiria at the Stanley Hotel (Yes, that hotel from the Shining) with a live performance of the soundtrack by Goblin. Don’t know who they are? Yeah, we didn’t either. But safe to say you need to check them out. They basically invented scary music for horror movies (Ok, maybe not invented, but definitely helped define it). The movies we’ve seen so far are great to, even with the English dubs which aren’t always the best but push the stories along. They’re more the art of horror – stills and shots where nothing happens, hints and ideas of things to come – then BAM! Someone gets run over by a train. All while music plays that makes your skin crawl like a thousand maggots are writhing over them. Its easy to see how they became cult classics.

But in the spirit of my favorite time of year, I thought I would share a ghost encounter. I say encounter instead of story because this happened to me and I saw it with my own eyes. While it will be the inspiration for an upcoming story for a compilation I’m writing, I thought I would share the true tale on here. I am going to change some names just for privacy sake.

So buckle up. The Shadow Walker comes.

—

It was a regular weekend like many others in Colorado. I forget the month exactly, either August or September. Still hot enough out to be miserable during the day but the nights were getting cooler. We had packed up the truck with our in-bed camper and trailer and were taking the trials bikes out for the weekend to help a friend set an event.

Trials motorcycles, for the uninformed, are a slow speed motorcycle sport pretty popular almost anywhere else in the world other than maybe North America. The motorcycles are made to be light, torquey, and durable. They have to be. The whole point of trials is to take them over rocks, logs, streams, whatever lays in your path. Think car rockcrawling but on two wheels. If you look up videos, you’ll probably find a lot of amazing insane stuff by some guy named Toni Bou over in Spain. He’s a fourteen plus counting World Trials Champion, both Indoor and Outdoor. I go over twigs and pebbles compared to him. But its an amazing sport. It’s how I met my boyfriend, and we love nothing more than going out and riding. We also like competing in events.

In America, setting events is mostly volunteer and takes a lot of man hours, so when our friend Tim asked us to join his family for the weekend to help set an event we went. Especially because it meant that we got a chance to ride a place that was normally closed to trials riders. Sledgehammer Gulch.

The area lies to the west of Colorado Springs in an area called Eleven Mile Reservoir. I was familiar with the area after an unexpectantly bad night where, in the world before my boyfriend, I had the bright idea to go camping by myself. Sleeping in a hammock. The area is full of gravel roads and random houses, jeep trails that go from flat, wide roads to steep, rocky trails that might as well have ‘abandon all hope’ signs at their entrances. Tall pines tower over dusty grassland and outcroppings of rocks, all set off by a glittering lake far in the distance. Yet, when you get on top of the rocks and stare out over the landscape, you are instantly enveloped in a glorious world of wilderness, danger and beauty mixing in an intoxicating dance, with sunsets that set the sky on fire. But once night falls, the landscape shifts and you are instantly dipped into darkness so black you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Where every snapping twig could be a bear, or a mountain lion, or as my brain liked to helpfully supply that night, a gigantic BigFoot coming to tear you out of your hammock and dismember you.

Needless to say that was the last time I camped alone at Eleven Mile. And I spent the rest of that night locked in my truck.

Sledgehammer Gulch was new to me though, an area I had not explored on my ill-fated trip. My boyfriend had been there once before a few years before, but I had never been. But even he wasn’t quite sure he remembered exactly how to get to the spot we needed. And to start us off on the wrong foot, we didn’t really have a firm idea where we were going, just a pin out in the middle of nowhere. Which would have been fine but as we got closer to the spot, we lost reception on our phones and Google Maps completely froze. The app crashed and we couldn’t pull up the map.

So, we did probably the worst thing you could do – we wandered. We went down this road and that, my boyfriend either murmuring ‘this looks familiar. . .yes, yes this is right’ only to go a mile or two and find out it wasn’t, or for us to drive to where the last pin point had led us, only for him to go ‘no, no this doesn’t look right.’ Meanwhile, I’m frantically trying to figure something out on my phone, and the light is dying. And because there was no cell service the one lifeline we had – calling Tim – was out of the question.

Dusk was falling as we pulled into this gas station that we had passed countless times already as we wove and retraced our steps over the last five hours. We were both exhausted, exasperated with each other, hungry and on our last frayed nerve. We sat there, swaying between giving up and going home or pushing on. I don’t know what finally tipped the scales towards pushing on, but we did. Back to the last point of the map that we had already visited several times.

However, this time, we somehow saw something through the headlights. A trail leading off the road that we had not seen before. A lightbulb. A thought clicked in my boyfriend’s head. He remembered this! Irritation flashed through my mind for a moment. We had already passed this point so many times! But now was not the time to dig or rip. Now, all I wanted was to be stopped, to be camped and to be ready to enjoy my weekend.

Carefully, we started picking our way down the rutted trail. Our headlights flashed on other camper trucks and trailers here and there among the pines, but mostly we saw nothing but empty trail. No people, no animals. Nothing but trees appearing out of the darkness as our headlights shone on them. The trail continued on, meandering in and out of the random openings for the primitive campsites. The woods were silent as we crawled and scanned the darkness, not quite sure where our friends would be.

We finally halted as the trail curled around to the right. The trail split. One trail went off to the left, away into the woods. The main trail kept going up a hill. My boyfriend couldn’t remember which one was right. So, we decided to get out and explore on foot, as we didn’t want to risk getting stuck in a place we couldn’t turn around.

I chose to go forward, up the hill, as we didn’t have any lights other than our phones in the truck and I would at least have the headlights for a while. But almost as soon as I got out of the truck, I thought I spied someone on the top of the hill.

The night was pitch black, but even in the blackness, the faint light of the headlights was outlining a human figure. The figure was tall, maybe eight or ten feet, but that was the only detail I could see. They were pure black, almost like the darkness of the night had coelesced into a solid figure. I pushed it out of my mind, and immediately thought it was our friend Tim, who was a tall, thin man. The extra height was an illusion, caused by the night and my mind.

I started walking forward. “Hey Tim!”

The figure did not move.

I thought he couldn’t hear me, so I started waving. “Hey Tim, its us! David and E.R.!”

Nothing. But the figure did start walking forward, towards me, down the hill.

I thought maybe he couldn’t hear me, or I couldn’t hear him because of the truck engine behind me (I have bad hearing sometimes). So, I just kept walking forward.

Which is when I noticed the truck lights. They were now hitting the figure. And he was still pitch black. There was no face. No clothes. No skin. Just black solid shadows in the shape of a man walking down the trail. A ten foot man walking down the trail. The light streaming to each side behind him.

The skin prickled on the back of my neck. Then I laughed. Stop being silly. It’s just your shadow! I mean, the truck lights are behind you.

In this time, my boyfriend had gotten back to the truck. He called out, “Hey Tim!”

When the figure didn’t respond, I heard him say, “Huh. Must be your shadow.”

“Must be.” So, I stopped walking.

Only. . .the figure didn’t. And now I saw what really was puzzling me. The figure had its own shadow.

I stood there for a second or two, watching as this dark mass walked down the hill. It made no sound, no crunching of stone or swish of clothing to give it away. But still it advanced. Silent.

I don’t remember if words were said or if my body just said “Run.” But I bolted back to the truck and got in. My boyfriend slid into the driver’s seat, and without a second thought he turned the truck to the left.

We bounced down the trail in the darkness, creeping along, not talking about what we’d just seen. But as the darkness surrounded us, our last nerve frayed. We had no idea where the trail was going. I demanded we stop before we drove off a cliff.

The night enclosed us as we set up the camper to sleep. As the last light went out, it swarmed in. So dark I couldn’t see. We navigated by touch, embracing each other as a fitful sleep stole over us.

The next morning we went back to the main trail, and found our friend’s camp over the hill, about 100 feet down the trail. He had no idea we had gotten that close the night before, had not heard me call. They had gone to sleep when the sun went down.

I still don’t know what I really saw that night. The rational part of me wants to believe what the skeptics would say, that it was an illusion. That it was my shadow. But I know what I felt. It was real. It was other.

We went back to that event a few weeks later. But we made sure that we were there before the sun went down. And that people were around us. The event passed without any incident. But we’ve never gone back to that area.

My boyfriend refuses to talk about it. To this day, he still leaves the room whenever I tell the story.

I don’t know what the Shadow Walker wanted, what its intentions were. I don’t know if it was a ghost, or something else unknown to this world. A creature from another dimension? A dark spirit? An elemental?

But I do know whatever it was, there is far more out there than our minds can understand. But just because we can’t understand it, doesn’t mean its not real.