This happened spring break about 4 years ago. My girlfriend Anissa wanted to do something low-key. She'd been talking about a cabin trip for months, just somewhere to disappear for a few days with no obligations.
Her brother Hunter was on break from school and was staying with us at the time anyway, so he came, too. I found a place online. >> [music] >> It was pretty deep in the woods, which was the point, and it was cheaper than it had any right to be.
I remember thinking that briefly and then not thinking about it again. We got there Friday night around dinner time. The place felt genuinely cut off.
You couldn't see the road you'd driven on from the front porch, which I actually liked at the time. >> [music] >> There was an outbuilding off to the side of the property, like a large shed, which was padlocked. Hunter played with the lock for a second and said it looked new, like it had been swapped out recently.
I said it was probably just the owner keeping equipment in there. We didn't really think much of it. It was getting dark, so we went inside and immediately started making dinner.
That first night was fine. We had a few drinks on the porch and went to bed pretty early. I can't remember exactly when, but it started lightly raining at some point.
The woods were really loud, which was a major surprise, at least to me. It was this constant wall of insects and frogs, [music] and something about it was actually really calming. I do want to mention that at some point before falling asleep that night, I heard something bigger moving around out there, although I figured it was just a deer.
I fell asleep not long after that. What woke me up was a sound like something hitting the side of the cabin. I don't know what time it was exactly.
Let's just say 2:00. I froze there in bed for a minute, wondering if what I heard was just part of my dream or not. Right when I was about to try falling back asleep, I heard another thump, which sounded identical to the first one.
I rolled over to see if Anissa was awake, but she wasn't. So, it was up to me to investigate. I really didn't want to, but if there was a bear poking around out there, it would have been better to know about it than to not know.
So, I reluctantly got out of bed and grabbed one of our flashlights. I didn't want to go outside, but the outdoor visibility through the cabin windows was limited. Despite that, I noticed what appeared to be footsteps on the ground near the outbuilding, which was incredibly alarming.
Those footprints could not have been ours because none of us had been outside the cabin after the rain had started, at least not to my knowledge. I reasoned [music] that it was possible Hunter had gone out there without me realizing, so I figured I'd ask him in the morning. Still, I was pretty confident that he wouldn't have done that, which made the situation all the more eerie.
The footprints didn't look like an animal's, although they were too far away to tell for sure. And if I'd been unwilling to go outside earlier, there was absolutely no chance I was doing so after seeing what I saw. I made sure the place was locked up and went back to sleep.
Unfortunately, the night was far from over. I woke up a few hours later to knocking on the front door, which is one of the most terrifying things I can imagine waking up to. Hearing that knocking meant there was a stranger out there, which actually got my heart going a little bit.
It was just so late. I couldn't think of a good reason why someone would be knocking on a cabin door in the middle of nowhere at 4:00 a. m.
The knocking woke up Anissa, who was about 10 times more scared than I was. I had to do something. So, I walked over to the door.
Before I could even announce myself, the person [snorts] on the other side said he was a forest ranger and that there'd been some kind of incident in the area and he needed to do a welfare check. I paused a bit before responding, mostly out of fear, but it was obvious he already knew I was there. I told him we were all good and didn't need to be checked up on, saying I just wanted to get back to sleep.
I thought that would do the trick because he paused for a little while before saying anything. But then, instead of leaving, he said he'd need to ask us a few questions. I was instantly suspicious, and I was almost [music] fully confident the person on the other side of the door was not any kind of law enforcement.
At that point, Hunter had woken up, too, and was standing behind me. I whispered to him to call the police, saying I'd stall the guy at the door. I went back and forth with him, giving him nothing answers without telegraphing my suspicion.
After a little back and forth, Hunter walked up to me and whispered that the police said no rangers had been dispatched to the area. That's what I suspected, but hearing Hunter actually vocalize it made my heart rate kick up again. I was scared and downright panicking at that point.
It was 4:00 a. m. We were truly in the middle of nowhere, and some guy was banging on the door pretending to be a ranger.
I don't know how, but it felt like the person on the porch could sense my fear because he raised his voice and started banging on the door a little harder. I told the person I wasn't going to open up and I wasn't going to answer any questions, which only seemed to anger him. He started demanding I open the door, threatening to kick it down, and telling me I'd be arrested for failure to comply.
That's when Anissa screamed at him to go the away, which only made things worse. He started kicking the door, and when it didn't give, he stopped around the cabin. I yelled at Anissa to go lock herself in the bathroom, which she did.
Hunter and I grabbed some knives from the kitchen and just kind of tracked the guy's sounds around the cabin. I was beyond terrified, but I had no choice but to prepare for a fight. This guy meant us harm.
This guy was trying to break into our cabin and kill us. Before I could react, one of the windows shattered into a million pieces. That guy had thrown a rock through it.
I was ready for him to jump through, but he didn't. It was the tensest moment of my life. After what felt like forever, with Hunter and me just staring at a broken window, I heard police sirens approaching.
I'll fast-forward through this next part. The police searched the area, but miraculously, they couldn't find the guy. Hunter was furious.
He was practically yelling at the officers that the freak had been on the property less than a minute before they arrived, so he had to be close by still. The officer said there was nothing they could do and advised us to just pack up and leave. So, that's exactly what we did.
It's not like we had much of a choice. But Hunter wouldn't let go of how incompetent those officers were being. It was only after the fear and adrenaline wore off and we were driving away that I realized how truly insane what just happened was.
For someone to even know about that cabin in the first place was so unlikely. It was like they planned it. And what they even wanted was a mystery in and of itself.
All in all, it was an extremely uncomfortable and unsettling experience. This happened back in 2016 when I was a senior in college. I was in a frat, TKE, and one of the traditions that came with being in Greek life, at least at our school, was that you spent spring break with your brothers and whatever sorority or sororities you were affiliated with.
The groups were typically huge, usually 30 or 40 people, and everyone packed into the same rental or resort for the whole week. I won't say it was the most wholesome experience you could have in your early 20s, but I also won't pretend I didn't have a ridiculous amount of fun doing it. That particular year, the plan was Acapulco.
I don't remember whose idea it was originally, but within a few weeks, we had something like 40 people booked at this resort on the Pacific coast. The main character in this story isn't actually me. It's my buddy Sahil.
I'm going to try putting this as nicely as possible. He was the kind of person who, no matter what situation you put him in, was going to find a way to make it louder and more complicated than it needed to be. I say that with total affection because Sahil was genuinely one of the best people I knew in college.
He just had absolutely zero self-preservation instincts and no impulse control, which was especially problematic because he was incredibly impulsive. We were maybe three or four days into the trip when a group of us decided to go to the local clubs. It was a great time, right up until Sahil, true to form, started scanning the room looking for someone who could get him something.
Let's just say stronger than whatever was in his glass. I'm not going to bother spelling things out, but it shouldn't be too hard to connect the dots here. It was a terrible idea.
We were in a foreign country in a city with a reputation that wasn't exactly clean. Plus, nobody in our group spoke any Spanish. I told him to drop it.
A couple of the other guys said the same thing, and Sahil said he would, but I knew he wouldn't. I had been through his too many times. We kept an eye on him for a while, but the place was genuinely enormous, and after a while, we kind of stopped tracking where he was.
He was a grown-ass man. I wasn't about to waste my night babysitting him. I figured he was somewhere in the crowd.
Sahil disappearing into a crowd was not unusual. I went about my night with my other friends, and it was a great time. Sahil never turned up, though, which I found stranger and stranger the later it got.
I don't remember what triggered it, but one second we were all drinking and partying, having a good time, and the next, we were all frantically trying to contact Sahil. He wasn't answering anyone's text messages, and when we called his phone, it went straight to voicemail, meaning it was dead. That wasn't good.
Sahil may have been a crazy dude, but he was an organizational freak. He wouldn't just let his phone die like that. After a little while longer, we made the call to leave.
Odds were he was back at the resort and we'd find him passed out in his bed. The sidewalk outside was a mess of people trying to get cabs all at once, so a few of us walked about a block and a half before pulling out phones to call a driver. It was probably around 1:00 in the morning.
So, we're just standing there waiting on a driver when who do we see but Sahil stumbling towards us out of the darkness. We ran up to him and it was immediately obvious that something seriously bad happened. He was a complete wreck.
His shirt was torn almost fully off and his face was completely swollen. Not to mention the fact that he was limping. We got him into the car and back [music] to the resort.
A couple guys kept asking him what happened and he kept saying he'd explain later. It wasn't until we were back in one of the rooms that he finally started talking. Here's what he told us.
He found a guy near the bar. The short Mexican guy who didn't speak much English. He had a friend with him who was supposedly doing the translating.
Sahil made it clear what he was looking for and the guy understood. Sahil told us he was reluctant right away because something felt off about the translator specifically, but he couldn't put his finger on what. Then the short guy pulled out a small sample and offered it to him right there and Sahil tried it.
He said it was good and that's kind of where his judgment evaporated. After that, the short guy said he couldn't do business inside the club and told Sahil to come outside with him. Sahil knew he shouldn't have gone, but he went anyway, which I mean, what do you even say to that?
They walked out a side exit. There was a car waiting just outside the door. Before Sahil really understood what was happening, they were already pulling him into the backseat.
They drove. He said it felt like maybe 15 or 20 minutes, but he was panicking and not exactly thinking straight. So, he honestly wasn't sure.
What he was sure about was that they went rummaging through his pockets the second the car started moving. They robbed him and when he tried to resist, they beat him senseless. They destroyed his phone and stripped him of everything of value.
What saved him was that at some point during the drive, one of the guys asked him why there were so many Americans in the city right now and Sahil, without really thinking about it, explained that he was there on spring break with dozens of other students from the same university. We're all staying at the same resort. He had no idea at the time that he was essentially talking his way out of being killed or trafficked.
The two guys went back and forth in Spanish for a while after that. Then the car pulled over and they threw him out. He landed on some random road he didn't recognize and just started walking.
He didn't know where he was, so he had no choice but to just walk in the direction he thought the car had driven and by some miracle, it turned out to be the correct decision. I really don't know what would have happened to him had he not run into us or if he had left the club 20 minutes sooner. We debated calling the police for about 3 seconds before unanimously deciding that was probably the worst idea for everyone involved, Sahil included.
Besides the guys in our immediate group, nobody at the resort ever found out what happened. I've been keeping this one bottled up for quite a while now. This happened during spring break of my junior year.
I graduated a while ago, so we're going back a few years here. I should mention that I'm kind of a paranoid person. I've just always been naturally observant, skeptical, and cynical.
Those honestly aren't the healthiest traits to have. I end up spending a lot of time overthinking and worrying about things that don't matter, but I can't control it. My ex-girlfriend, Anna, had this friend named Lena.
Lena was the type of girl who always knew where the party was and was plugged into every group chat and social circle imaginable, which is why it wasn't surprising in the slightest when she approached Anna with a spring break plan. She said a girl she knew had told her about a lake house trip out in the Ozarks. According to Lena, a bunch of people from that girl's sorority and some of the affiliated frats were renting this big house on the water for the week.
Pretty standard to be completely honest. I wasn't exactly the spring break type, but Anna really wanted to go and I didn't have a reason not to. So, I figured what the hell.
There were four of us, myself, Anna, Lena, and Lena's boyfriend, Colby. Colby opted to drive because he had the biggest car, which was pretty chill of him. It was a long, but good drive.
Everyone was in a good mood. The final stretch was this long twisting road that didn't have many houses on it. We pulled up to the house around 5:00 in the afternoon and my first thought was that Lena had severely undersold it.
The place was massive. Right on the lake with this humongous wrap-around deck and a dock that went way out over the water. It was the kind of house that makes you wonder who actually owns it.
There were also way more cars in the front of the house than I was expecting. Lena had made it sound like there'd only be 15 to 20 people, but I counted at least 25 cars in the grass lot next to the house with more parked down the road because there wasn't room. That's where Colby had to park.
We walked up the front steps to see a guy standing near the front door. He seemed to be about our age or maybe a little older. He introduced himself, but I don't remember his name, so I'll just call him the host.
He seemed friendly enough, but the very first thing I clocked about him was that his speech seemed rehearsed. Like he'd had this exact conversation multiple times. And to be fair, he probably had, but it still felt weird to me.
You know those safety speeches frat pledges have to give before letting you into a party? It felt kind of like that. He gave us the rundown.
He told us where to find our rooms, how to navigate the house, when we could do this or that. Typical house rule stuff like that. Then he brought up the car keys.
He said the roads around the lake were narrow and dangerous at night, especially after people had been drinking. He told us it was a liability thing and that they were collecting everyone's keys at the door. He had this whole little speech about it.
Colby sort of shrugged it before handing his keys over. The host made a big show about thanking Colby for playing by the rules, which I thought was kind of obnoxious. Then he opened the door and let us in.
I made a mental note of what he was doing with the car keys and I was pleasantly surprised to see a big bowl of other car keys on the table in the foyer. The host tossed Colby's keys into the bowl and told us to have fun before stepping back outside and closing the door. We went and found our room, which had two double beds and a tiny balcony that overlooked the water.
We put our stuff away and went back downstairs. Lena was really eager to find her friend, so we followed her. It didn't take long to figure out where the main lounge was.
It was this giant open room on the first floor that was lined with full glass windows, so you could get a wrap-around view of the water. It was honestly pretty awesome. There must have been at least 30 people hanging out in that one room, but the weird thing was that Lena didn't recognize a single one of them.
They all looked like college kids, Greek life people even, but Lena couldn't find her friend or anyone else she knew in the crowd. I wasn't just going to stand there in the corner, so I walked over to the fridge, grabbed a beer for myself and Colby, and made my way over to the pool table, which no one was using. I've never had a hard time connecting with new people, so I didn't really care that we didn't know anyone.
Colby didn't seem to care either. We played pool, talked, drank, and just enjoyed the vibe. Our girlfriends came over a little later and told us Lena's friend wasn't answering her phone.
They seemed overly concerned about it, but Colby and I told them it was fine. And it was fine. I'm not going to lie, the first night was actually really fun.
Colby and I socialized with a bunch of people who were all really dope. Anna and Lena got along with the girls and there seemed to be an unlimited supply of alcohol and games. There was one thing that was nagging at me despite all the fun I was having.
It was the host. He wasn't really partying, but was always there walking through the rooms and occasionally talking to people. My first thought was that he was enjoying some slightly bolder substances in some back room with a select few people, but I felt like that was unlikely because I never saw a drink in his hand.
At one point, I saw him standing near the back door with a clipboard, like an actual physical clipboard with paper on it and he was writing something down. Most of the party felt like strangers getting to know each other, which is kind of what I expected, but there were maybe eight to At first, I just thought a big portion of the group already knew each other, but I couldn't help but notice that some of the people who seemed familiar with each other introduced themselves during games and whatnot. As more time passed, I also realized that the four of us weren't merging with some bigger group that all knew each other, but rather the whole group was split into a bunch of smaller groups like ours.
Besides those 10 or so people, no one knew anyone beyond the people they had pulled up with. I mentioned it to Anna and she said I was overthinking things, which was probably true. She was also pretty wasted at that point, so I wasn't going to complicate things.
Lena's friend never showed up that first night. The next morning, I woke up earlier than everyone else. I went down to the kitchen and made myself a coffee.
Then I went out on the deck to sit by myself for a while. I made note of the fact that the bowl with everyone's keys wasn't by the front door anymore, which was a little odd. I wanted to be left alone, so I chose to sit on the side of the house with the driveway to my left and the water to my right.
It was actually really peaceful. Around mid-morning, >> [music] >> I noticed a couple I'd seen the night before packing up their stuff. They said goodbye to a few people and I watched them drive out of sight.
>> [music] >> Fast forward to later that night and we're sitting by the bonfire. I was sitting with Anna and a few other people when I happened to glance across the fire toward the far end of the circle. There was a couple sitting together slightly further back from the group than everyone else.
They were positioned with the fire between us, which made it harder to get a clean look. But I kept watching. I realized it was the same guy and girl from earlier, the ones who had left in the morning.
I was dead certain of it. I told Anna, and she gave me this confused look. She hadn't seen them leave, so she probably assumed I was misremembering things.
There wasn't much I could do to convince her, so instead, I just got up and immediately made my way through the house. I remembered which car was theirs, so I was going to see if it was still gone. I made it to the driveway, and to my surprise, the car wasn't there.
Despite that, [music] I was positive the people I had seen were the ones who had left, but by the time I got back to the bonfire, they were gone. I couldn't find them anywhere, and it bugged me for the rest of the night. I didn't bother telling Colby or Lena, and every time I mentioned it to Anna, she told me I was being a psychotic buzzkill.
The next morning, I made it a point to wake up really early again. I wanted to go for a walk. I'm not really sure what it was I was looking for, >> [music] >> but I needed to convince myself that I wasn't trapped, and that there was something outside that house and those people.
About a quarter mile down the road, past a bend where you couldn't see anything from the house, there was an equipment shed, some kind of storage building for groundskeeping staff. I walked around it, and my jaw damn near hit the floor. It was the couple's car from the day before.
I was sure of it. I just stood there. I don't know how long.
I wasn't scared. It was more like confirmation of something I already knew, but I hadn't been able to prove. I turned around and walked back to the house without telling anyone.
I was starting to freak out after that. Why would someone pretend to leave? And then I started thinking about those people they had been saying goodbye to, and I wondered if they were in on it as well.
I knew what I had to do. That afternoon, I found that couple near the dock. It took me a really long time to find them, and I had to make up some excuse to tell Anna.
I didn't even sugarcoat it. I just bluntly asked them if they had left the morning before. They both gave me a funny look and acted like I was crazy, but I could tell my question struck a nerve.
I swear to god though, it was like everyone around could hear our conversation. There weren't that many people around, but while I was standing there, everyone quieted down a little bit, and I couldn't help but feel like there were eyes on me. Luckily, Anna appeared out of nowhere and told me to have a drink with her.
I initially wanted to press that couple, but the way everyone else reacted made me feel deeply uncomfortable in a way that's hard to describe. I told Anna everything, and she actually took me seriously when I brought up the car detail. Then she went on to tell me that she had picked up on some weird stuff herself, like some of the girls having almost identical backstories and stuff like that.
I suggested leaving early, but she told me that was probably premature. Either way, the bad feeling I had gotten the first day was getting worse and worse. By the time I woke up the next morning, I made the decision that we were leaving.
Anna agreed. Colby and Lena were a different story. Colby straight-up laughed at me.
He said he wasn't cutting the trip short because I had a theory. Lena admitted it was weird that her friend had basically ghosted her, and that she didn't recognize a single person in the house, but she wasn't ready to panic over a parked car. We argued about it for a little, and I was actually stunned by how stubborn they were both being.
It's not like Anna and I could have left on our own. We needed Colby's car. We ended up compromising, and the plan was to stay one final night.
I was cool with that until we went downstairs for breakfast. Every single set of eyes was on me. I felt it, and I didn't like it.
It wasn't obvious, and I tried convincing myself I was just having a paranoid freakout, but people were definitely looking at me. A lot of people, which I found incredibly off-putting because most of the people that were looking at me hadn't even been part of the group that had seen me question that couple. I started feeling like something really, really terrible was going to happen if we stayed in that house for even a moment more.
Anna felt the eyes too, because she whispered to me that people were looking. I got up from where we were sitting and walked right over to the host, who was standing near the corner of the room. I told him we had to take off, and that I needed my keys.
He smiled like a robot, then asked if everything was okay. I told him something came up, and we needed to head home, to which he actually asked, "What happened? " I hadn't thought of a fake excuse, so I just told him it was a family emergency.
He kept diverting the conversation, saying things like some people had planned a boat thing for the evening, and that the nights always get better as the end of the week approaches. He was doing everything he could to get me to stay, all while still smiling at me like a freak. I didn't care.
I told him again that I needed the keys. I cannot verbally explain how awful that feeling was. There was a room full of at least 20 people, and every single one of them was staring at me.
The host didn't respond, and his Mr Charming Guy act was gone. He wasn't smiling anymore. He gave this blank, dead-eyed look that creeped me out.
Some random girl who was sitting nearby broke the silence by saying, "That's not a good idea. " I turned around to look at her, and she was scowling at me. I didn't know what to say.
I looked across the room and saw Anna, Lena, and Colby, and they all looked horrified. The host finally said, "Okay, fine. " or something like that, and told me to follow him inside.
I saw Anna getting up to follow me, but when he saw her move, he put his hand out and said, "No. " in a loud, aggressive way that genuinely startled me. It was almost violent.
He told me that only I was to follow him, so that's what I did. He led me through a maze of hallways before we reached a room with everyone's keys hanging on hooks. He didn't even ask me which set was mine.
He just picked them out because he clearly already knew. I thought he was going to attack me or withhold the keys, but he handed them to me. Then he said, "You're making a mistake.
" I didn't give a As soon as I had the keys in my hand, I made my way back over to my group. When I got back to that main room, the music was back on, and people were laughing and talking again, like nothing had happened. It was freaky.
Anna, Colby, and Lena were in the same spot, and I told them we were going. We were packed and out of there in 10 minutes. The entire time I felt like someone was going to try and stop us, but no one did.
As Colby started driving off, I looked back at the house to see the most unsettling thing yet. There were about a dozen people standing on the deck watching us leave. They were standing in a line, not talking, and it was very obvious they were watching us.
I noticed a couple more people looking through the windows, which pretty much confirmed what I had been suspecting all along. There was something up with that house. For the rest of the break, Lena tried getting in touch with the girl who had supposedly organized the trip.
She called and texted and tried every platform she could think of, but got absolutely nothing back. She was starting to think something had actually happened to her. It wasn't until we were back at school that Lena finally tracked the girl down.
This is honestly the craziest part of the story. It turned out that her phone had been [music] stolen about 2 weeks before spring break. She had gotten a new number, but hadn't told everyone yet.
The person who told Lena about the plan wasn't her friend. It was some stranger. Not a single message came from her.
We talked about going to the police, but none of us could articulate what crime had actually been committed against us. We went to a party. It was weird.
Nobody technically did anything, but it was off to the point where I felt like one more night of that would have had some kind of consequence, one that I can't even imagine. This is something I'll never stop thinking about, mostly because it's such a mystery, and the more you think about it, the less it makes sense.
