A stange encounter

The only sounds that could be heard was the howling wind and slight swaying of the trees, it was quiet… maybe too quiet. You would expect maybe the movement of some animals through the bushes or the crackling of snow under their feet, but nothing. It was pitch black all around, just the light of a flashlight reflecting on the fresh snow. Set looked around slowly walking forward, he heard about this place from a few fellow paranormal investigators, they told him something about this place felt off but they weren't able to get any evidence. The trees first got really close together making it hard to find a good path but after a bit the forest opened up again, he pointed the light around him and an eerie white mist could be seen covering the forest floor. Still nothing but the wind, it was weird and the hairs in his neck stood up when he thought he noticed a figure in the mist. He blinked a few times trying to see if it’s just in his head but all the way back a strange shape almost human-like stood right in between two thick threes. He called out, maybe it was another person but the thing kept still. The light quickly spun around when he thought he heard a rustling behind him, two small round eyes stared straight at him, maybe a fox or something? Whatever it was it at first seemed to look straight at him but then he noticed, no it wasn’t looking at him it was looking at the thing he saw between the trees. More rustling bushes this time to his left, another critter staring in the same direction as the first. Set slowly turned back to where he saw the figure, it was still there… motionless. The snow crackled again when he slowly moved towards the thing, one step… two steps… a blur and the thing was gone. But not just the shadow had disappeared, the howling wind that he heard the entire evening, that same wind that kept destroying his audio recording… was gone. Dead silence, and when he looked around all the animals had run to. Slowly he moved forward crunching the snow below his paws with every step when he noticed a pair of footprints. The hair on his back stood back up, now he knew for sure that he wasn’t alone.  Each next step he made next was careful. deliberate. matching the ones he found in the snow. His heartbeat started to race as he got closer and closer to where he noticed the strange human-like shape. The quiet felt so eerie and wrong but when he arrived at where he thought he saw the thing, the footsteps just stopped and all he could see was a big branch flat on the snow with another part sticking straight up in the air. Was this what he had seen, but what about the footprints. Suddenly it seemed like the creepy silence got even quieter and all he could hear was his own heart beating loudly in his chest. Until he heard the snap of a branch behind him. In just seconds his eyes widened, he felt a cold shiver run across his back and he turned around as quickly as he could, pointing the flashlight in the direction of the sound… nothing, it was completely empty. As sudden as it left it reappeared, the wind picked back up and the silence was broken. Everything seemed back to normal, just that the battery indicator on his camera had gone from 87% all the way down to 13% and when he looked at the recording time he noticed that somehow, in what for him felt as just a few seconds, several hours had passed. 

When he later reviewed the footage he could hear the snap on camera and just after a bright light blinded the lens. He sped up the video but it stayed like that for a while. Sometimes he paused thinking that he noticed something but during the entire part that he missed it just was a bright bluish white screen. Then the light disappeared but in a way that almost felt like the camera zooming out while it had been focussed on a bright light. A small orb disappeared into the forest when the camera suddenly spun around, at the direction of the snapped branch. He tried to explain it, posted about it on social media but nobody had ever heard of anything like it. Some think he was possessed, others just refused to believe it and kept saying that he faked all the footage. Whatever it was that he encountered that day, one thing was for sure. This to him was a moment he wouldn’t forget and a moment that definitely put one strike in his ‘the paranormal might be real’ book.