As they left the woods, Tom felt very tired. Like something had drained him. Later that week I was visiting at Rob’s house and the subject came up. They told me about how they had felt when they went to the rock. They wanted to go back again and check it out, so I agreed to go with them. We all felt fine until we actually entered the woods. As they had said it did fell like someone was watching you. I quickly surrounded myself with the white light of protection. The fear subsided, but the feeling of being watched didn’t. We found the rock and talked. Rob and I climbed onto the rock and Tom stood a few yards away next to the edge of the clearing. The rock was in an area that attracted kids, who either partied or took drugs near it. It was littered with the broken glass of the beer bottles of past visitors. It was the only area of the woods that formed a clearing, with no trees overhead, so that the stars could be clearly seen. If the woods had a heart, this was it, and most paths lead to the rock. I watched the surrounding trees and could almost feel a presence in the woods; at times even thinking I saw a shape of some kind. Tom started to feel drained again. He said he thought he saw a little girl for a second and Rob froze. Many years back, when we were still in grammar school, a little girl had been abducted, raped and then killed near the woods. They found her body the next street over from the woods. Her killer, who happened to be a cousin of a fellow classmate, was eventually found and convicted. Rob speculated as to whether or not he had taken her here and then dumped her body somewhere else. We all got shivers.
We all closed out eyes and tried to see if we could sense anything. Rob mentally kept seeing a door in front of him. As the same time, Tom was trying to see if he could get anything about the area, suddenly said, ‘Someone else is here, and he’s here for you Rob.’ Just before that moment, Rob had been trying to picture his grandfather, who his family had always thought of as a guardian angel since he had passed over. Rob tried to open the door he could see, within his mind, mentally. Suddenly Tom shouted, ‘Rob, whatever you are doing, stop now!’ Rob stiffened and was a little freaked out. He jumped off the rock and said that we should leave. He later said that he had had some kind of out-of-body experience and saw something, just briefly, and yet long enough to scare the hell out of him.
As we left the woods that night, I could feel something right behind me, and it left as soon as we hit the street. Tom felt very tired. I asked him if he had ever heard of protecting himself. Tom being a wiccan, I figured that he did. He said he hadn’t, so I told him how to do this mentally. Rob was actually shaking, and was physically cold to the touch, even though it was a hot summer night. We soon after departed and went our own ways home.
Sometime later I was telling my sister about the area. She expressed a wish to check it out. I contacted Rob and Tom and we all went and checked it out again. Tom said that he had tried to contact whatever it was that inhabited the woods during a wiccan ceremony. It had talked weird and remembered us visiting it. It had described Rob as ‘He who walks long’, Rob being about 6’5”, and myself as ‘The shining one’. Tom said that it may not make sense to us, but to him I shine brightly; which is strange because my features are very dark (hair and skin). It said that it wasn’t happy about how people treated the woods. Once again Tom was very drained. We felt the same feeling of being watched in the woods and went back to Rob’s and talked about it.
A few days later, Rob told the story to his brother Dave. Dave decided to go check it out with his friend Cliff. They parked in a parking lot right next to a Catholic Grammar School. They went into the woods and felt weird, but nothing happened. They left the woods and got in the car and it was dead. No lights, no clicking noises, nothing. A bit shaken, they pushed the car out of the parking lot and onto the main road, but still nothing. They walked to a pay phone and called for help, and Rob came and picked them up. The next morning they returned with Tom, who performed a ‘purification ritual’ (circling the car with some seawater and mumbling words). When they tried to start the car again it started right up as if nothing had happened.
About a year later, the Catholic School dug out a small portion of the woods and made a playground. It seems that they own some of the land, if not all of it. The rock was not disturbed, it being a little deeper in the woods, but we always wondered if anything strange ever happened in the playground.
Several years later, Rob was telling the story to a female friend. She was intrigued so they went to the rock and immediately felt as if someone was watching them. This time, however it was not from the side, in the trees, but from above. They were quickly spooked and left immediately. When they got to the edge of the woods, the girl felt foolish. She tried to talk him into going back into the woods. In the middle of the conversation, they heard something very loud coming from the woods, like a shout. Not sure his mind was playing tricks on him, Rob asked her what she had heard. She said she swore she had heard someone shout out his name. That was exactly what Rob had thought he had heard as well. Very much shaken, they left immediately.
To many that go into the woods, the area around the rock seems like a normal place. During daylight hours it is not foreboding and the woods are well lit by light coming through the trees. But at night strange things happen to this day.