Shadows of the Valley

Article 1- https://www.reddit.com/r/Erutious/comments/14a5id0/the_ghost_grass_hermit/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Article 2- https://www.reddit.com/r/Erutious/comments/18mh245/beware_the_toy_makers_woods/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Hey guys, it’s me again, back with more of my travel diaries.

I heard how much you liked my trip to Maine, so I figured I would share my latest travel with you. I was in Arizona, taking in a local festival when my editor asked if I would investigate a Mesa about three hours away. I wasn’t really on board, I had met someone at the festival and was looking forward to spending a couple of days with them, but when I saw the advance check he sent along I was excited to get underway.

I know, I know, but I have bills to pay, too, and festivals come and go.

So, I hopped in my rental car and headed to The Lost Dutchman State Park near Phoenix. The state park is pretty interesting. Lots of red rock and cacti, kind of reminding me of old westerns I used to watch with my grandpa. There are a lot of Buttes, and you have to be careful about critters getting into your campsite, like most places out in the desert. The instructions I was given were for a particular canyon with a name that was nearly unpronounceable to me. I’ll have to type it out phonetically when I go to write the article, but the native Americans who lived in the area called it Watcher Ridge. Apparently, lots of campers in the area had reported seeing strange figures up on the ridge that surrounded the valley, and it was supposed to be pretty cool, if not a little spooky.

I asked some of the park Rangers about it, and they told me they had never seen anything like that, but anything was possible.

“You do see weird stuff out here from time to time,” one of the park rangers told me, “ and you do get kids who come out here to use drugs sometimes, not that that would change their experience. These are old places, and sometimes they are home to old things. Watch yourself out there and make sure you’re being safe.”

I asked him if he had any advice for capturing photos of the watchers, and I wish I had listened to what he said.

“My advice is that I wouldn’t. Things like that don’t like to be looked at for too long, and they certainly don’t like having their picture taken. Do yourself a favor, young man, take some pictures of the Butte, do a little camping, and see your watcher, but only write about what you see. People go missing out there, and it could always be because they decided to take more than memories home with them.”

I drove the car down into the canyon and by nightfall, I had a firepit dug and my tent pitched. I walked around a little as the afternoon grew shadows, taking pictures of wildlife and the gorgeous views. It was hard not to feel intimidated by the towering buttes that surrounded my campsite, and I took a lot of pictures. As the sun set, I made my way back to my tent and started making inroads on dinner.

I sat by the fire a little while later and watched the sky come to life. It was a beautiful night, the stars spreading out before me like a tapestry, and I was feeling cozy as I sat beside my fire and took it all in. I still hadn't seen any watchers, but the reports I had said they didn't come out till later. It was early spring, and the next closest fire was a little dot on the horizon. It felt like I had the park to myself, and as I sat looking at the stars, I thought that if the watchers had this kind of view every night then it was no wonder they stayed.

Speaking of the watchers, I kept an eye out for them as the night grew late, but I didn't see any. I had made sure to put myself amidst three large buttes which was the best place to see them, or so said the accounts, and while they were quite imposing, I had yet to glimpse one of these mysterious figures. I reached for my phone and opened the email I'd gotten, looking over the accounts that my editor had been sent.

There were three, one from a solo hiker, one from a couple on a camping trip, and one from a group of college students who had come out to party.

The solo hiker, who called himself Frank, talked about stopping for the night in the valley and seeing the figures on the cliff side. He had been camping in the valley where I was now, just his sleeping bag and the stars when he had noticed some weird shapes on the rock wall. They were vaguely humanoid, or at least human-shaped, and had been watching him intently. He couldn't tell much about them, but they had looked like shadows that had just been cast up onto the rock wall. He had ignored them and they had watched him right back and when he'd woken up the next day, they were gone.

The couple had said much the same, except that when her husband had flashed his lantern at them, more had appeared on the adjoining butte. Her husband had thought it was funny then, and kept flashing his lantern at them until the ledge was ringed in shadowy figures. His wife had begged him to stop before it got that far, and as they sat in the canyon and watched the gathered shadows look down at them intently, the mood had begun to shift. Suddenly it wasn't quite so much fun with all those ominous eyes on them, and the couple had packed up in a hurry and stayed at a Howard Johnson that night.

I looked up before reading the last one, checking to see if they had come while I was doing research, but no such luck.

The third account was by far the strangest.

A bunch of college kids from the University of Arizona had come out to camp for the weekend and pursue academic matters in the desert.

And by that, I mean they came out here to drink beer, bother people who had come for a quiet weekend, and generally be a nuisance for the park service. They had set up about five tents, two barbecues, and tried to set up a volleyball net before the park service stopped them. They had requested the spaces for the weekend, but they had only lasted until the wee hours of Saturday morning. There were four different accounts, but they all boiled down to one story.

The twelve of them had started drinking before the sun went down, and five of six of them were still drinking at about two in the morning. They had built a large fire, something they probably weren't supposed to do, and were sitting around it and telling stories or anecdotes or whatever. They were all three sheets to the wind, and that was when one of the guys had said they should tell some ghost stories. No one seemed to remember who had suggested it, but Parker was telling a story about a shadow figure that had dogged his heels one night as he went back to his dorm when one of the girls noticed the figures on the ridge. The boys had started out puffing their chests and saying how they better stay away from their girls or they would mess them up, but as the figures stayed up there, the group started to get curious. They claimed there were two at the start, but as they watched them, they noticed two more farther down. One of them thought they had binoculars in their pack, but as they used them to look at the assembled figures, everything changed.

The figures had started getting angry then, their shadowy forms moving fitfully as the four became eight, became sixteen.

The report claimed they had started coming down the butte, just descending like ants out of a hill, and the drunk kids had decided to put out their fire and get in their tents. All six had pilled into the same tent, waking up the two people already inside, and they said that all at once it was like something was shaking and pushing the outside of the tent. They could hear people yelling from the other tents too, but if anyone went outside, they never said. This went on for about five to ten minutes before it stopped as quickly as it had begun.

All twelve of the kids had went to check on the campsite, and they said it looked like an army had ransacked it. Grills were trampled, coolers were reduced to foam pulp, and the chairs they had been sitting in around the fire were metal and cloth hulks. The kids hadn't even bothered to clean up. They had got into their vehicles and left, leaving their campsite behind. They had called this report into the forestry service, refusing to come and clean their campsite, and were likely on some kind of list now. They would have to choose some other national park to trash in the future, I thought, as I stifled a yawn and reached for my paperback.

I looked back up at the butte and hoped they wouldn't make me wait all night.

I yawn again as I found my spot in my much loved copy of Clash of Kings and settled in to wait.

The longer I read, the more the words began to run together, and it wasn't too long before the book lay across my chest and I was snoring beside the small fire, my head propped up on my rucksack. The fire was low, thankfully, and nothing came up to inspect me, nothing with sharp teeth and a rumbling belly, at least. The night went on around me, the moon sliding across the sky, and if the watchers on the butte saw me, they didn't say anything.

Not yet, anyway.

I slept till around one, and when I jerked awake I was aware of little beyond how low the fire had become and how late it had gotten. I cursed, closing my book and stuffing it back in my rucksack as I sat up and rubbed my face. It couldn't be helped, of course. I had driven all day, set up a campsite, and then tried to stay up all night. Something would have to give, and I suppose my body would need to recharge sometime.

I had turned to get my rucksack so I could take it into the tent with me, when I saw something on the lip of the butte behind me. It was a smudge, more like the idea of a shadow, but the longer I looked, the more I saw something hunkered up there. The moon was nearly full, the light casting everything in an ethereal light, and as I glanced along the ledge, I became aware that I was surrounded. The ledge was full of shadowy figures, and as they goggled down at me, I reached for my camera.

They hadn't liked when someone had looked at them through binoculars, but I needed a shot for the article.

I lifted the camera, zooming in a little as I tried to get as many as possible in frame, but I had been careless.

When I clicked the button, the flash went off, and in the dim light it seemed like a miniature sun.

I could see them through the little window, the zoom pretty good on my camera, and the way the kids had described them hadn't done them justice. They boiled down the side of the butte, like lava from a volcano, and I grabbed my pack and made a run for my truck. I tossed the pack in, climbing behind the wheel as I keyed the engine and peeled out of the campsite. It took me close to a mile to realize I still had my camera in my hand, and it took everything I had not to toss it roughly into the backseat. I needed those pictures, but I needed to be alive to turn them into my editor and get paid.

The moon was almost full, as I said, and it cast the flatland below the butte in stark light. I could see them roll over my campsite, and as they came after my car, I continued to floor it. They were fast, but after a mile or two, I stopped seeing them. By the time I got to the edge of the camping area, they were gone, but I still kept driving until I made it to the visitors center near the entrance to the park.

I slept in the backseat with the doors locked until the sun came up, and then I went back to clean up my campsite.

I was a little braver than a bunch of kids, at least when the sun was up.

My campsite was destroyed. The tent was wrecked, pulled up and shoved about twenty feet from where I had staked it. The campfire looked like a marathon had run over it. The little camp stove I'd brought was equally flattened, and I was pretty glad I had remembered to grab my backpack. I took some pictures of the campsite too. Might as well give the readers the full picture of what they might encounter. I cleaned up the mess, pilling it into the back of my rental car, and dumped it all into the dumpster near the rangers station.

“Looks like you got more than photos,” came a voice from behind me.

I turned to find the ranger from the day before, his arms crossed as he leaned against the side of the bus shed that sat near the dumpster. He didn't look mad, more bemused than anything, and I couldn't help but chuckle a little as I nodded. He was right, I hadn't listened and I had paid the price.

“Ya, guess I should have listened.”

He shrugged, “Eh, I didn't figure you would. Some people just have to go looking for things, and they need proof to take back. I'm just glad you made it out in one piece.”

I asked him what he meant, and he glanced behind him before stepping closer.

He clearly didn't want to be heard.

“I didn't lie yesterday, I have never seen anything like what you're talking about. That being said, we do find abandoned campsites from time to time. It's usually people just camping in their sleeping bags under the stars, the ones who don't have access to a tent. Even a simple door seems to keep them out, but that won't stop them from pushing it. We had a fella get his RV pushed over a few years back and we had to get a tow truck out here to pick it back up. His kids had been stargazing and must have noticed they had an audience. We started telling people to be careful, but we haven't had a disappearance since last year and I didn't think they would bother you. Guess I was wrong.”

I got a hotel not too far off to finish my article. The lodge is “rustic” but it still has HBO and a whirlpool tub in the suite.

The article is coming along nicely, but the memories of that night in the valley may take a little longer to finish with me.

Stay tuned for more of my travel articles, I'm sure I'll take you with me again sometime.