I'm using a voice transcription thing on my phone since I don't really like typing and I'm not the best with words. This was god, I don't even know, like seven or eight years ago now, maybe six. I'm not really sure.
My life's been a bit chaotic since then, so my head's filled with all sorts of memories and whatnot. Anyway, this was New Year's Eve back when I was still dating my ex, Duda. We were on our way back from a party when everything went down.
It must have been well after midnight because I remember being extremely tired. Also, I'm sure you don't need me to tell you that driving on New Year's Eve isn't exactly the smartest decision, but we had no choice. The party had been at Duda's friend's place, but we were late additions to the guest list, so there weren't any sleeping arrangements left for us.
The drive was actually pretty long, maybe 30 minutes, give or take. The roads were pretty much empty, which I remember being grateful for. It had snowed earlier that day, so the streets were icy as hell, and honestly, the last thing I needed was to be dodging traffic on top of everything else.
Dudo was half asleep in the passenger seat. I had the heat cranked and some random rock playlist going just to keep myself from drifting off. You know how it is.
We were maybe 10 minutes from her place when it happened. Okay, so I don't even know how to describe what I saw. One second the road ahead was completely empty and the next there was just a woman literally standing in the middle of the street and she wasn't like crossing or anything.
She was just there facing my car like she'd been waiting for us or something. I remember my brain just not being able to process it fast enough. I was already slamming on the brakes before I even realized what I was looking at.
And then I realized she was holding a knife. It was down by her side. This massive kitchen knife, the kind you'd use to like carve a turkey or something.
My headlights were hitting her fullon, and I could see her face was all twisted up like she was crying or screaming, or maybe both. It was sickly. I don't think I've ever reacted faster in my life.
I yanked the wheel to the right to avoid hitting her, but the second I did, she lunged at the car. I heard the impact before I understood what happened. Despite the chaos of everything unfolding so quickly, I knew exactly what happened.
She had swung the knife at my car as I passed. Even though I had avoided her, the swerve combined with the ice was just too much. I felt the tires lose grip, and suddenly we were spinning.
Duda had woken up by then and immediately started freaking out. I was gripping the wheel like it would actually do something, but there was nothing I could do. The car was not under my control.
We spun a full 180 and were basically facing the other direction by the time the car stopped. After recovering from the shock of almost dying, I looked up through the windshield and felt sick all over again because we were now facing the direction we'd come from, which meant we were facing the woman. She was maybe 30 ft away, still holding the knife, illuminated by my headlights like something out of a horror movie.
And she was limping toward us, like she was trying to move fast, but she was clearly injured. She was also screaming something I couldn't understand. Just this guttural, incoherent noise that sounded more like an animal than a person.
It was, and probably still is, the most terrifying thing I've ever witnessed with my own two eyes. I remember Duda yelling at me to do something, but I was just frozen. I couldn't look away from this woman lurching toward us.
Her clothes were dirty and torn, and her hair was all matted and wild. I don't know if she was on drugs or having some kind of mental breakdown or what, but there was nothing behind her eyes. There was nothing there.
It honestly looked like she was a dead person walking. She was maybe 15 ft away when my survival instincts finally kicked in. I threw the car in drive and slammed on the gas.
The tires spun on the ice for this terrifying second before catching and we started moving. I thought we were clear. Like I thought that was it.
But of course I was wrong. I don't know how she moved that fast. Like one second she was in front of the car and the next she was on it.
She threw herself onto the hood and I felt the whole car shutter from the impact. Duda was screaming. I was cursing.
And this woman was clinging to the hood of my car with one hand while stabbing the windshield with the other just like over and over again. I felt like she was trying to get into my car and kill me. I felt like I was going to die.
I couldn't see or think. I just started swerving the wheel back and forth as hard as I could. The woman was sliding around on the hood, but she wouldn't let go.
She was still screaming that horrible wordless scream, and her face was inches from the glass. And I swear to God, her eyes were locked on mine the entire time. On the third or fourth swerve, she finally lost her grip.
I watched her roll off the side of the hood and hit the pavement really hard before sliding into the shoulder. The car fishtailed again, but I managed to keep it under control this time. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw her lying there.
She wasn't moving. Part of me wanted to stop. I know that sounds insane given what just happened, but I thought maybe I'd killed her.
Like maybe she was just some mentally ill person who needed help and I just killed her. Duda grabbed my arm and told me not to stop. She was shaking and kept saying we needed to go, that it wasn't our problem, that we couldn't get involved.
I said we should at least call the police, but she also shut that down immediately. She said the cops would blame us since we've been drinking and that there was no way they'd believe our story. She said we'd get arrested or something.
Looking back, none of that made sense, but Duda had this way of making everything sound urgent yet logical in the moment. She was always like that. Very persuasive and borderline manipulative.
Honestly, I left that woman on the side of the road, drove to home, and didn't tell anyone. I still feel sick thinking about it. The damage to my car wasn't even that bad.
just the cracked windshield, the knife marks on my driver's side window, and a few scratches on the hood. Surprisingly, there wasn't even any blood on the car. I got it fixed like a week later, but the guilt stuck with me for months.
I kept checking the local news, waiting to see a story about a body found on that road or a missing woman or something, but nothing ever came up. I don't know if that made me feel better or worse, honestly. Part of me wonders if she got up after we left and just walked off into the woods or something.
Part of me doesn't want to know. The thing that really messed with me, though, was Duda. She acted like nothing happened.
Like within a couple days, she was back to her normal self, making plans, going out with friends, whatever. I brought it up once and she got annoyed with me, telling me I was being dramatic and that we did what we had to do. I remember just staring at her and thinking like, "How can you be so cold about this?
A woman tried to kill us and we might have killed her and you're willing to just forget about the whole thing. " We broke up a few months later for unrelated reasons. Well, mostly unrelated, but I'd be lying if I said that night didn't change how I saw her.
Maybe I'm the crazy one, but an experience like that is not something you can easily forget, let alone move on from in 2 days. I might have ended someone's life that night. That deranged woman might have ended my life that night.
That's not something you could just forget about. I went to Cal Berkeley for undergrad. It's where I met one of my closest friends, a guy named Garrett.
His real name is Guo. But when we first met freshman year, he introduced himself by his quote American name, and it just stuck. He's originally from Hong Kong, came to the States to study computer science, and is genuinely one of the smartest people I've ever known.
After grad, we went our separate ways geographically. I moved to New York for work, and he went back to Hong Kong for the same reason. We're both in our late 20s now, both doing pretty well career-wise, both single.
We try to see each other at least once or twice a year, whether that's him flying out to visit me or me taking a trip to Asia. I know it's pretty fortunate to be able to travel so frequently, so I never take that for granted. This incident happened last New Year's Eve, and I still think about it constantly.
I've told a few people, but no one really knows what to make of it. Nor do I. Oh, by the way, Hong Kong is 13 hours ahead of New York.
That means when it's midnight in Hong Kong, it's only 11:00 a. m. on December 31st in New York City.
Garrett celebrates both the regular New Year and the Chinese New Year. So, he was out partying that night, same as me, just half a day earlier. I spent New Year's Eve with my two closest friends in the city, Ryland and Arie.
We started at Ryland's apartment for drinks, then made our way to this rooftop party in Williamsburg that one of Aris' co-workers had invited us to. It was honestly pretty fun and decently upscale, at least for Brooklyn. Around 11:30 or so, I started talking to this girl.
She was standing near the bar by herself, and I honestly just walked up and introduced myself. We hit it off immediately. She had this energy about her that I can't really describe.
Super easy to talk to, funny, engaging. We talked for maybe 5 minutes before she pulled me onto the dance floor. Her name was my trae.
I remember asking her to repeat it because I'd never heard it before. She laughed and told me everyone just calls her my tree because that's basically how you pronounce it. I thought that was kind of charming.
She pulled out a pen and spelled it for me on my hand just in case I quote forgot. Things escalated quickly from there. We danced, talked some more, and kissed at midnight.
By around 12:30, she asked if I wanted to get out of there. So, we grabbed an Uber back to my place in the East Village. I'll skip the next few details, but I will say it was a great night.
We stayed up talking for a while afterward, and I learned a decent amount about her. Here's everything I remember. She was originally from San Diego.
She was an artist, more specifically a painter, and she mentioned she used to do graffiti and murals before transitioning to more traditional stuff. Her middle name was Mia, which was also the name of one of her cats. The other cat was named Cosmo.
Her birthday was April 28th. Her best friend growing up was from some tiny town in Germany called Hillisheim. Her dad was a patent lawyer.
These are random details, I know, but they become important later. Trust me. At some point, she mentioned her clothes smelled like the bar, so I threw them in the wash for her.
She borrowed one of my t-shirts to sleep in. We fell asleep not long after that. I can't remember really what time it was.
When I woke up the next morning, she was gone. At first, I didn't think much of it. People leave after hookups.
It happens. I figured she slipped out early to avoid any awkwardness, which was fine. But then I started noticing things that didn't add up.
The first thing was my apartment door. I have a standard lock that you can only lock from the outside with a key, meaning it doesn't autolock. When I got up to use the bathroom, I noticed the lock was still engaged, which meant either she had somehow locked it from the outside without a key, or she'd never left at all.
But both of those were impossible scenarios. I checked the rest of the apartment. My place isn't big.
One bedroom, one bathroom, a living room, a small kitchen. There's no second exit. The windows also don't open more than a few inches.
I even searched my closet like an idiot, as if she might be hiding in there, but she wasn't. The impossibility of the situation made me start questioning my sanity. I started wondering whether my drunken state had caused me to imagine the whole encounter entirely.
I kept pacing around my apartment frantically, as if she would just appear out of some corner and reset everything back to normal. Her clothes were also gone from the dryer, which added to the mystery, and the shirt I lent her was nowhere in sight, proving that she had slept over, but she was nowhere. I stood there for a while trying to figure out what the hell had happened, but no explanation I could come up with made sense.
To make matters worse, I soon realized that I never got her number or any form of contact at all for that matter. For the rest of the day, I tried to piece together everything I could remember about her. the details I listed earlier.
That's pretty much everything. I kept repeating them in my head because I knew I'd forget eventually. Later that afternoon, I randomly felt compelled to call Garrett.
I don't know why exactly. It was just a super bizarre impulse that just kind of came out of nowhere. It wasn't like I had anything specific to tell him.
I just had this weird urge to ring him. We caught up for a bit, talked about work, talked about our respective New Year's celebrations, the usual stuff. He seemed a little off, though.
Eventually, I asked him what was wrong. He sighed and told me he met a girl the night before. They had hit it off, gone back to his place, and she left the next morning without saying goodbye.
No number or contact or anything. And he was bummed about it. I laughed and told him the exact same thing happened to me.
Like the exact same thing. But here's where things get really freaky. He told me her name was Maitra, like my tree.
I felt this weird chill run through me. I asked him to describe her and he started listing details. Everything matched up almost perfectly.
Her birthday was April 28th. She was from San Diego, a painter who used to do graffiti. I cut him off before he could finish and asked if she had a cat named Mia.
That's when he went a little silent before saying yes. You could imagine what happened next. The two of us spent like 15 minutes just listing as many things as we could remember about her and all of it lined up.
It was actually kind of horrifying. It gets worse though. He actually had pictures with her, something I didn't have, and he showed them to me.
It was the exact same girl. I'm 100% certain. We tried to rationalize it, but every explanation we could come up with was ridiculous.
And here's the thing. Hong Kong is 13 hours ahead of New York. Garrett met her around 11:00 p.
m. on December 31st, Hong Kong time. I met her at around 11:30 p.
m. on December 31st, New York time. That's roughly a 12-hour difference, but a flight from Hong Kong to New York takes at least 15 hours, and it's usually longer, more like 16 or 17.
Even if she had somehow gotten on a plane the second she left Garrett's apartment, she couldn't have made it to that rooftop party in Williamsburg in time. The math didn't work. It was literally impossible.
And even if we ignore the flight time somehow, how would she have known to go to that exact party? How would she have ended up talking to me? How would she have known to use the same name, the same details, the same everything?
I still don't have answers to any of these questions. Neither does Garrett. We've talked about it probably a dozen times since then, and we always end up at the same place.
We don't know what happened, and we probably never will. Neither one of us saw that girl again. The thing that messes with me the most is how real it all felt.
I know for a fact that she wasn't some drunken hallucination. I literally talked to her for hours. She slept in my bed and then she just vanished from a locked apartment with no other exits.
Garrett and I don't really know what to do with this. We've both tried looking her up online, but May Trey with no last name and only vague details about being an artist from San Diego doesn't exactly narrow things down. We found nothing.
New Year's Eve is fast approaching, which is why this is all fresh in my head again. Usually, the insanity of crazy, unexplainable experiences fades over time. But for some reason, it feels like the opposite for me.
The more time passes, the freakier it is to think about the possibility that I may have slept with a ghost on New Year's Eve. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I don't have a better explanation for what happened. This story is one of my dad's.
Before he had kids, my dad and my mom used to travel a lot. He had made some smart business moves in his mid20s, so he had money to spend and the free time to spend it. They were both big skiers, but the only good skiing that was accessible to New York City was in Vermont.
So over the years they actually purchased a few lodges up there. The first one was in Lello. They bought it from some guy named Mr Black who lived on West End Avenue in the city.
It was this old black shuttered place that my dad always referred to as the Black House. Partly because of the shutters and partly because of the previous owner's last name. They'd sell quarter shares to friends and cycle things out every few months to help cover the costs.
They kept the place for a few years before eventually switching to a second property. The second lodge was about halfway between Lello and Rutland, right along Route 100 and what locals called the Lake District. There are like five lakes in a row along that stretch of road, and the house sat right on the edge of one of them.
My dad's friend, Victor, and his wife, Lisa, went in on that one with them. Victor and my dad had been close since college, and the four of them would take trips up there together pretty regularly. This happened one New Year's Eve.
I can't remember exactly what year, but it was obviously before I was born. Lisa and my mom were away for a friend's wedding or something. I can't really remember the specifics, but it's not that important.
What matters is that Victor and my dad decided to take a trip up to Vermont by themselves to ring in the new year. It was the night of December 31st. The two of them were upstairs cracking a few beers and just catching up.
The upstairs of that lodge had these fulllength windows that looked out over the lake, so they'd sit up there, listen to music, and watch the snow. It was snowing, of course, but not so heavily that you felt trapped. My dad said it was really peaceful that night.
One of those nights you share with a good friend where you're both just happy to be far away from everything. They had the radio on, waiting to hear the countdown from Time Square. And then all of a sudden, things got crazy.
They were mid-con conversation when a huge flash of light came from somewhere across the lake. My dad said his first thought was fireworks, but the flash didn't come from the sky. It came from the ground up and there was no sound, just the silent blinding light.
Victor stood up and walked over to the window trying to make something out across the lake. My dad asked what he was looking at and Victor said he thought he saw something moving out there. It was dark obviously, but there was enough visibility from the snow on the frozen lake that you could see if you concentrated.
So after a few seconds, Victor becomes convinced that there's a person out there. My dad told him that was impossible. There were no houses on that side of the lake.
There were no trails, no roads, no anything. It was just pure woods on the other side of the lake. But Victor wasn't having it.
He started throwing on his coat and boots, saying he was going to take a look. My dad tried to talk him out of it, but Victor was already halfway down the stairs. My dad grabbed his jacket and followed.
The two of them burst out onto the back deck, and that's when they heard a voice, a young voice. It sounded like a little boy yelling, "Help! " over and over again.
My dad said it was faint at first, but unmistakable. There was definitely a child screaming for help somewhere out in that frozen lake. It had been well below freezing for months, so the lake was completely solid.
No question about it. My dad said they didn't even think twice. They just started walking across.
As they got closer, they could make out a figure standing on the ice, maybe 20 or 30 yards off the far bank. It was small, a kid for sure. My dad said he could see the shape of him against the snow.
But then there was another flash. My dad said it was so bright he had to shield his face and drop to his knees. He couldn't see anything for a few seconds.
Then when he finally opened his eyes and looked up, the kid was just gone. There was nothing out there but empty ice and snow. My dad said that's when he and Victor went from curious to terrified.
They turned around and started racing back toward the house. My dad said he was running as fast as he could without slipping. Victor was a few steps ahead of him when he suddenly yelled and pointed up at the house.
He was saying there was someone in the window, but not an adult, a little boy. My dad looked up, but didn't see anything besides the dark glass reflecting the snow. Victor swore up and down that he saw a kid standing right there looking down at them.
My dad didn't know what to say. He just wanted to get inside. They made it back to the house and searched the whole place.
Every room, every closet, every corner, but there was no one there. The doors were all locked and the windows were shut. There was no sign that anyone had been inside.
They decided to call it a night after that. My dad said neither of them really wanted to talk about what happened. They just went to their rooms and tried to sleep.
Neither of them had even noticed midnight come and go. My dad woke up twice that night. Both times he swore he heard a child laughing somewhere in the house.
He lay there in the dark listening, but it always stopped before he could figure out where it was coming from. The thing that freaked him out the most wasn't the kid on the lake or the figure in the snow. It was the light.
That bright, blinding flash that came out of nowhere. He said he and Victor talked about it for years afterward, trying to come up with some kind of explanation. Lightning, a flare, fireworks from some distant town, but nothing made sense.
There was simply no source. It just happened twice and then it was over. They ended up cutting the trip short.
My dad said they never talked about that night with my mom or Lisa. Not until years afterward at least. My dad still doesn't know what happened out there.
He's told me this story maybe three or four times over the years. And every time he gets to the part about the light, he just kind of trails off. I asked him once if he thought it was something supernatural, and he just shrugged and said he didn't know what else it could have been.
