On This Night
On this night I laid in the grass, I waited on my girlfriend to pull up in her yellow bug. We were going camping with some friends of ours at some spot out in a forest near the Harper's Crossroads area in North Carolina. Apparently the place was haunted, but I beg to differ. She pulled up honking her horn at my. She thought I was some sort of mad man because I like laying on the ground and watching the sky… “Hunter, come on!” I knew she wasn’t the kind of girl to keep waiting, but I love her, so I got going.
Coincidentally it was Friday the 13th, so when we got there we immediately set up our tents. It was somewhat triple date camping trip. Me and Bella have a tent; Nick and Jennifer and together in a tent; and Rain and Emily, our female friends, are together. We got to the camp site and it was very odd, there was a huge symmetric circle on the ground where all the grass was dead. Just all dirt, not even the rich soil you find in normal forest. Even the dirt was dead...
We set up the area, when Nick and I got back from gathering wood we started a camp fire. “We should tell ghost stories!” Rain suggested.
“Why? Ghost stories are overrated.” I said.
“Don’t be such a downer, Hunter! Here everyone get around the fire, I’ll go first!” Everyone gathered and I just followed because I didn’t just want to be standing there. “This one’s called ‘The moon-eyed people...”
“In the mountains of the Southern Appalachians, here in North Carolina, the remains of ancient stone structures line the ridges. Some of these are additions to natural rock formations, others are entirely man-made; nobody knows who built these structures. Are they the remains of an ancient war fought in the Appalachians? Are they all that's left of the Moon-Eyed People?”
That’s when Emily, her girlfriend, started to take over “The Moon-Eyed People are a race of small men who, according to Cherokee legend, once lived in the Southern Appalachians. The Moon-Eyed People were said to being physically very different from the Cherokee, being bearded and having pale, perfectly white skin. They were called Moon-Eyed because they were unable to see in daylight, their sensitive eyes being blinded by the sun. For this reason, they were strictly nocturnal, and lived in underground caverns. Cherokee cosmology is complex and fascinating, and describes a universe where humans share the world with other, non-human, supernatural peoples. However, what's interesting is that The Moon-Eyed People are never described as being supernatural, but are remembered as another group of humans who were physically very different than..”
“When does this get interesting?” Nick said from across from me.
“Let me see you do a better story!”
Nick stood up, he took that as a challenge, handing his jacket to Jennifer. “Hold my jacket baby!” He cleared his voice and spoke. “On certain rainy nights, on a very certain highway out by high point, drivers will see a young woman in a white evening dress standing by the side of the road. She will be desperately trying to flag down any passing car. If anyone pulls over to help the young lady, she climbs meekly into the back seat of the car and says that her name is Lydia. She will tell the driver that she's just been to a dance and now she's trying to get home-“
“Is this Carrie? Because Stephen Kings already went there in two different movies!” I jokingly said to him.
“No, it’s called Lydia the hitchhiker. Now listen, she gives the driver an address not too far away, and he kindly agrees to take her there. The driver may try to engage Lydia in conversation, but she seems distracted and in a world of her own, so he just leaves her in a respectful silence and concentrates on the road ahead. When the car pulls in to the address that the young woman gave, the chivalrous driver invariably hops out to open the door for her — only to discover that she has vanished-“
“Yeah, yeah, and then the guy goes to the door and the old woman at the door says she died in a car wreck by that overpass in 1923. You're not the first one, and I suppose you won't be the last! We’ve heard it all before.” I told him.
“I was pretty scared, until you had to ruin it!” Jennifer said.
“Yeah, Hunter, why do you keep being such a negative nelson?” Bella leaned over to me and said, I just rolled my eyes.
“These stories aren’t that scary. And b
esides I hate ghost stories anyway.”
“What if I had a better one?”
“But Bella, you hardly have a scary bone in your body...”
“Trust me, I have a few tricks up my sleeve.” She stood up… “The Devils Tramping ground. a mysterious, perfectly round and absolutely barren circle about forty feet in diameter in the pine woods of Chatham County. Not a tree, not a flower, no lowly weed, not even a single blade of grass will grow in the limits of the circle. Some say even the dirt is dead” I looked around, I’m sure she was just trying to freak us out but she had just described this site. “And, what's even stranger, any object left in the circle before dusk will have been violently moved outside its bounds by dawn.”
The girls gasp, “I think I heard something!” Rain said getting up to ponder around. “Emily come with me!”
“I’m sure it’s just an animal or something, sit down so we can hear this.” Rain started to walk off and Emily just rolled her eyes. “Dammit Rain!”
“Where was I…? Men have tried to spend the night in the circle, but not one has succeeded and remained sane. Something they see on their vigils drives them out of their wits, never to recover. For The Devil's Tramping Ground has earned its name. It's said that there is where The Devil himself walks at night.” As she tried to continue her story we heard a scream and it definitely sounded like Rain or Emily.
“What the hell was that?” I jumped up and Bella grabbed my hand.
Her grasp on me was tight, like she was trying to force me to stay. “It was probably nothing, maybe just the devil himself. Come, let me finish my story…” I sat down, she was literally digging her nails into my arm. I felt blood. In his Tramping Ground, The Devil spends his nights pacing around and around in a circle and turning his bitter mind towards ways to bring human souls to damnation. It's the scorching heat of his cloven hoof prints that kills the vegetation and has rendered the soil barren. He angrily brushes aside anything left in his path, her great strength easily able to toss aside even the heaviest objects. When she walks in his private spot on earth, The Devil drops the illusions with which he disguises herself when he appears to men. In his natural state the face of this fallen angel is so horrible that no man can see it and remain sane.” She stared me in the eyes as she told her story.
“HERself?” Was I actually… frightened?
“The devils tramping ground isn’t the place to fool around, because the devil… well he likes it when the living walk his ground.”
And that’s the moment my life flashed before my eyes, all I remember was seeing a big pair of red eyes and the hearing the screams of all our friends. I woke up in the hospital with sweat dripping from my forehead.
On that night, and since that night I’ve had nightmares of the devil. Since that night, my friends have all went missing; Rain, Emily, Nick, Jennifer, and even Bella. On that night, I now believe in ghosts.
