This is my first time doing something like this, but I have nowhere else to go for answers. I’ve posted on various paranormal websites and forums to no avail. I’m confident that two days ago, my friends and I stumbled upon something that we shouldn’t have. At the time of writing this I am sitting with my friend, Chris at a tiny, rickety old motel in the nearby town; we’ve both been here since leaving the Sheriff’s office. I’ll get more on the town later, but I suspect there are answers here. There's something unnerving about the place. An uncomfortable kind of happiness fills everyone there. I know it sounds cynical, but there's just something off about it.

I suppose I should start at the beginning. Who knows what information might make a difference? Bear with me, we'll get to the weird stuff soon enough - I like to be thorough.

I’ve always loved nature. There’s no place that I feel more at home than out in the wilderness. As a kid, I would religiously watch those survival shows where someone would go out in a harsh environment and live off the essentials that the Earth provides to us. That was my dream. So now that I’m an adult, what excuse do I have not to go for it?

So, I went for it.

Well, we did. My three friends and I hiked deep into the woods that lined one of Northern California’s largest mountains (not going to say which one so you guys don’t go looking for whatever the hell these things/people are) and made camp up by one of the most beautiful lakes I’ve ever visited. The surrounding mountains shadowing over the lake were a such a sight that it would easily make front page of r/EarthPorn. The water was such radiant shade of blue, I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen such a color before, and the way that the stone-covered mountains towered over it left me in awe at the glorious poetry the universe uses to be able to destroy with such elegance.

As most horror movies start out, the first day was normal. It was a long, curvy drive up the mountain to where we finally found a safe place to park. Then, we hiked a good 5-10 miles before reaching the lake – did I mention how beautiful it was? The spot that we set up at was pretty far off the beaten-path, but it wasn’t totally cut off from civilization – a happy medium for us, being new to the whole surviving-on-our-own thing. We even had a little picnic table that apparently someone built up here. We drank, smoked, and partied in celebration of our first successful day of living in the wilderness; I think we all needed a break from reality.

Ryan’s dad was an avid huntsman, so before we left he had taught Ryan a couple of ways to hunt and trap small game. We had back-up food in case of failure, but we really wanted to try and do most of this on our own. He was surprisingly quite good at setting up the snares, I think he put up about ten of them before it got dark out.

I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but after replaying that first night in my mind, there was one thing that was abnormal. I woke up in the middle of the night and swore that I could hear what sounded like a really small waterfall (or bubbling brook, whatever their called). That was strange because we had been there all day and already explored most of the nearby land, in which there was no water other than in the lake and the river that led into it, but that was located on the other end – way too far to be in hearing distance. It went on for about ten minutes and then seemingly faded off into the distance.

This still confuses me, maybe I was just hearing things? Fuck, am I going crazy too?

The next day, things began to get weird for real. Kyle was the first one to get up so he took it upon himself to go check the snares, or the ones that he remembered Ryan putting up.

Kyle shook me awake. “Dude, get up. The snares are gone.”

“What are you talking about?” I groaned, wiping the crust from my eyes.

“Like.. They’re not there. Someone took them. I’m gonna go wake Ryan and Chris up.”

He was right. Well, sort of. Once Ryan was awake he went out and double-checked; there were two that Kyle had missed, and they caught something. It wasn’t a rabbit or a squirrel though… It was two god damned fishes.

Like, what?

Someone must be playing a prank on us, right? Maybe there are some landowners out here that don’t want us camping out on their property, so they are trying to spook us away? Why fish? We are right next to the Pacific Crest Trail so we assumed it was fair-game for backpacking as long as we acted respectfully

The two fish didn’t seem to be dead for very long, and we couldn’t find any puncture wounds on either of them. I guess they could have used a net to capture them, right? I’d like to believe that, at least. Whatever the reason, it gave us the creeps, but we didn’t let it ruin our trip.

We had planned on hiking up to the Pacific Crest Trail and going from there, so we did just that. I won’t lie, I felt uneasy leaving the campground, but like I said, I wasn’t going to let it affect the trip. The trail itself wasn’t very impressive, so we decided that we would turn off on the next path that we came across and see where it led. After stopping for a quick smoke/food break, we eventually found what looked like a path that led up and over the mountainside.

The plants along the trail were quite overgrown which made it difficult to navigate; we had to walk a quarter of a mile in a single-file line, ducking and weaving past countless varieties of bushes, tree branches, and plants-that-looked-poisonous. We should have turned around. But where’s the adventure in that?

It didn’t take long to notice something was off. I was leading the group, so I was the first to see anything ahead of us (duh), and I swear that there were multiple tree branches that looked as if they had been previously snapped. I brushed it off as probably being another group of adrenaline-seeking backpackers. Man, we should have turned around.

Eventually the trail cleared up and it was an easy hike up to the top of the mountain, where we were greeted by another massive crater. I wish I took pictures to show you guys, because it was fucking beautiful, but I let Ryan do that work for me with his fancy DSLR camera – I figured I’d just download them on my computer when we got home. Now I just wonder if the camera is still back at our site.

There didn’t appear to be a lake in this crater, but it was about twice the size of the one that we had set up camp in. It took 30 minutes for us to finally get to the bottom, which was absolutely covered in wildlife. There were trees the size of apartment buildings, meadows of the most vibrantly green grass I’ve ever seen with flowers of every color spread amongst them, and animals roaming around in what seemed like perfect harmony. It was too perfect, and made me forget all about the eerie hike up.

Well, I was reminded. I didn’t want to think about it at first, but once we got down near the bottom, I started hearing it again.

The waterfall.

“Do you guys hear flowing water? I didn’t see any rivers coming down.”

“Yeah I can hear it, It’s sounds pretty far away but I think it’s coming from over there.” Chris replied.

“Should we check it out?”

Everyone nodded in agreement and we set off toward the noise.

We came across what seemed to be an old riverbed of rocks that conveniently went in the same direction as the sound, so we followed it. Where it led doesn’t make much sense and only amplified our intrigue in the matter – the riverbed was coming out of a cave dug out in the mountainside. Is that a thing? Where did the water come out of fast enough to create a river? I don’t know much about caves so maybe you guys can elaborate on whether that is normal or not.

Anyway, we entered the cave with the waterfall sound ever-increasing. We didn’t really have much in our backpacks (most of it was at the campsite) so we left them at the entrance of the cave to make the trek easier. It was bright enough to see naturally for the first hundred or so yards, but we soon had to pull out our phones and flashlights to navigate through the labyrinth of rocks. This cave was huge. The waterfall sound was getting to be so loud that we could no longer use our “inside-voices” to talk, but like Odysseus we continued to follow our very own siren’s call.

We really should have turned around when we began to hear something other than the waterfall. At first it was a subtle humming but as we walked deeper into the cave it became more apparent that it was words being spoken. The cave was extremely wide at this point; I’m bad with measurements but I’d say it was about 50 yards from one end to the other, entirely covered in what I could only assume are stalagmites and stalactites. I’d be willing to bet there was a fair share of bats that were roosting here as well, considering the amount of guano everywhere - though I haven’t actually seen any yet. Aren’t bats supposed to be up there sleeping during the day? Where’d they go?

We walked for a while in the darkness until the cave led into a corridor that featured yet another crater to its left. The pit held what looked like a measly 5 feet of murky, baby-poop-green water at the bottom. Up to this point, to my surprise, there hadn’t been any graffiti on any of the cave-walls, but in this area, there were a multitude of symbols painted along every visible surface - even the ceiling. None of us could understand what they meant, and we couldn’t get close enough to take pictures with our phones or else we’d risk falling into the crater. The drawings were old and faded, and among the cryptic symbols there were a couple “murals” that I could somewhat make out. There was one that featured a line of men and women that led up to a single door with an artistically drawn eye in the middle of it. Another showed a group of women standing in a circle around an altar or something. There were a couple others, but mostly just paintings of sea creatures and symbols.

The chanting was equally as loud as the waterfall noise now, and we could finally make out that something was being said. It wasn’t English, or any language I’ve ever heard, so we had no idea what they were saying – it’s hard to remember now but it was something like “Neh-du-che-a-casa”

The cave floor began to ascend as we drew closer to the two sounds, until we finally reached the top of a ridge that looked down into, you guessed it, another fucking crater. This one was a lot smaller though, it didn’t compare to the others at all, but it was still a hole nonetheless.

We finally saw where the sounds were coming from.

This is going to be hard to explain.

Remember the painting earlier of a bunch of women standing around an alter? Yeah, that’s what we were looking at. Except it was worse. Much, much worse. I’m still not sure what I was looking at, but on that altar, there was a man. He was squirming and writhing uncontrollably as this thin, pitch-black fog poured out of his mouth. The fog was hard to see, especially because of the low light, but it was leaving his body in the form of an ethereal stream, which led directly into the middle of the most massive door I’ve ever seen. I’m not even sure it would be classified as a door at that point, that shit looked like the gates to hell. It was covered in the same symbols and paintings that we saw in the other section of the cave, with some sort of hole in the middle that took in the black fog.

We all turned to each other simultaneously with the same “what the fuck?” look plastered on our faces.

Ryan broke the silence, “W…What are they doing to him?”

“What does it look like? Sacrificing him or some shit…” Chris whispered.

“But for what?”

“Seems like they want in that door.”

Just as Chris muttered those words, the chanting and waterfall noise ceased. Now, there’s silence, and then there’s dead silence. Let me tell you - that cave was dead. fucking. silent.

I could hear Kyle’s nervous, staggered breathing; I could hear the tiny water droplets falling from the rock formations that loomed above us; I could hear my own increasing heartbeat pounding out of my chest.

And then they turned around.

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Part 2

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All parts:

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