Please note: this story was provided by the author and published as is.
SGT. FAYE “[sigh] Alright.
You feelin’ okay? Need anything; coffee, water?”
CHRIS “No… Thanks.”
SGT. FAYE “Alright. Well, we’ll get started here then. I just need to, uh—I gotta read this out for the recording and everything. Ahem.
This is Seargent Mitchel Faye, Wyrd County P.D.. Today’s date is November 10, 2023. Friday. The time—current time is 2130. I’m here with Miss—is it—your full name is Christina…?”
CHRIS “Christina Hadley. People just call me Chris.”
SGT. FAYE “Chris. Before we start, I have one more thing I need to read to you, and I’ll have you sign something… let me just – ah, there it is – and then we’ll get started.”
CHRIS “Okay…”
SGT. FAYE “Alright!
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to talk to an attorney prior to any questioning and have them present during any questioning. If you can’t afford to hire a lawyer one will be appointed by the court to represent you before questioning if you desire one. You may stop questioning at any time by refusing to answer further or by requesting to consult with an attorney prior to continuing with questioning or the making of any statements.
That all sound good?”
CHRIS “Sure, yeah…”
SGT. FAYE “And if I could just get you to sign this here, it says ‘I have read the statement of my rights and I understand what my rights are. I’m willing to make a statement and answer questions. No promises or threats have been made to me and no pressure or coercion of any kind have been used against me–’”
CHRIS “But I-I was threatened.”
SGT. FAYE “Pardon?”
CHRIS “I said I was threatened? One of the officers last night—he said if I didn’t come in—that you would find me and then I would be considered a-armed and dangerous, a danger to myself and the community, that they wouldn’t be so nice the next time. He said if I tried to run they’d let the dogs after me, let them rip me apart and-”
SGT. FAYE “Whoa, whoa! Hey, alright. Is that why you assaulted an officer? … Hm? I saw Officer Lawrence when he came in; you did quite a number on him. That what happened? Self-defense, you felt you were being threatened?”
CHRIS “I-I-I didn’t mean to do that! I was just—out of it, and then I was being grabbed, I thought—”
SGT. FAYE “Hey, hey, it’s alright. Listen, let’s just have you sign this for now, and I’ll look into that. But for now, let’s get on, hm?”
CHRIS “Yeah… Yeah—fine, whatever…”
SGT. FAYE “Okay. Why don’t we work backwards. Can you tell me about the scene the officers found you at?”
CHRIS “Um… what about it?”
SGT. FAYE “… what about it—uh, well, according to the other officers it was a… ‘pretty upsetting sight’.
Could you describe it in your own words?”
CHRIS “Yeah, um… well it was out by Copper Creek.
You know, they’ve got a few nice hiking trails out there and I had… gone there j-just to walk around, I guess. And I—th-there was… someone else… out there. Which I mean I guess that isn’t that weird, it was a nice evening out, other people are allowed to walk out there but-”
SGT. FAYE “Was there someone out there who you believed meant you harm, Miss Hadley?”
CHRIS “I- I don’t know, I don’t…”
[A beat]
SGT. FAYE “They said when they found you, you were covered in mud, and there had clearly been some sort of struggle… Why was that, Chris?”
CHRIS “I… it-it wasn’t…
… You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”
SGT. FAYE “Miss Hadley… Chris. You may not believe it, but I have heard a hell of a lot of strange things in my time working here, and I have seen a hell of a lot of strange things.
Whatever happened out there, you can tell me.”
CHRIS “You’re just saying that. Saying what you think I want to hear to get me to talk. You’ll just lock me up; stamp ‘clinically insane’ on my file, stick me in some mental hospital somewhere and—”
SGT. FAYE “Nothing like that is going to happen. Chris. All I want to know is what happened out there so I can figure out how best to help you.”
CHRIS “… Fine.”
SGT. FAYE “… Okay, good. Now, why don’t we back up a little bit – can you start at the beginning? Why’d you go out in the woods to begin with?”
CHRIS “I… started getting phone calls.”
SGT. FAYE “Phone calls. Alright. When did they start?”
CHRIS “Like… I don’t know, a month or two ago? Probably longer, I didn’t really pay attention to them for a while, I think, because I just thought they were scam calls. They all showed up as ‘Unknown Caller,’ and like, I’m not gonna pick up the phone for some random number, am I?”
SGT. FAYE “Was it the same number every time?”
CHRIS “I think they were different? Maybe some of them were the same. But they kept happening. And eventually, I started getting them all the time. When I was in class, or at work, while I was getting ready in the morning. It got so annoying that I started blocking every number that I got one of those calls from, but it didn’t really seem to do anything.
A couple of other people I knew said they had started getting more junk calls too – m-my mom, for one, and my friend Carlos, a couple of people I talked to in class. So, I figured, hey, must just be a new scam making the rounds, it’ll pass. And… I mean, yeah, it did. After about a week those constant calls just kind of… petered out. For a few days everything was back to normal.
And then… I got another call.
I didn’t answer. Obviously. I thought it was just another scam. But this one did something the others never did. It went to voicemail.
That’s not too strange, even for scam calls, usually it’s just some—poorly pre-recorded message about renewing your insurance or how you’re going to be arrested for tax fraud or something. But when I listened to it… it was just static. Or I thought it was just static. But then… I could have sworn I heard… breathing. Like someone on the other end of the line breathing into a receiver. It… kinda freaked me out to be honest, but it clearly wasn’t anything important, so I deleted it.
But right as my finger was hitting the delete button, someone started to speak. I only heard the first syllable, but it was like a woman saying “hey,” or “hello,” or… something?
Look—I dunno. I deleted the message and got on with my life.”
SGT. FAYE “So… and I’m sorry if I’m not making the connection… how are these phone calls related to your incident in the forest?”
CHRIS “I’m getting there.
Those calls started happening more. But it wasn’t just sporadic this time, they happened once a day, every day, quarter to seven. And every time, they left a voicemail. And every time I listened to them, it was just that—silence, that static that almost sounded like breathing. And every time—I mean every time—I would listen to see if the caller ever said anything.
Some of those voicemails went on for like 8 minutes. I-I didn’t even know messages could be that long. And there was always nothing until the split second before I hit delete, when there’d be a slightly garbled, suddenly plosive syllable of some word that would get cut off.
“park” — “car” — “I’m”
I listened to some of those messages all the way through, and nothing. Until I went to hit delete.”
SGT. FAYE “Do you still have any of these voice messages on your phone?”
CHRIS “I don’t think so… I deleted most of them and the ones I didn’t would just sort of…”
SGT. FAYE “Sort of… what?”
CHRIS “Sort of… die off?”
SGT. FAYE “… die?”
CHRIS “Yeah, like…
I would go into my voicemail app and the screen where one of the little audio players for the message would be sort of… glitchy. Li-like I had cracked my screen, or the pixels were all wonky or something—even though the actual screen was fine. And none of my other apps had any problems. It was just like… corrupted, or something. I don’t know. And over the next day or two it would get grainier and glitchier until it was just… *pop* gone.
And then one day, I picked up the phone… and there was…
There was definitely someone breathing on the other end. Like, hard, fast breathing. Panicked. It was still kind of… muffled, and staticky, but it sounded like it was probably a woman—just like the other voicemails had been.
But this time, every once in a while, I could make out her saying something. It was barely audible, but it was like… ‘lost,’ then ‘Oh, god…’ and ‘please.’
It was still pretty garbled, though, so I couldn’t tell if she was trying to make, like… a whole sentence.”
SGT. FAYE “Why didn’t you call the authorities?”
CHRIS “Hah! And tell them what?! That I’ve been getting phone calls from—from ghosts or monsters or something for the past month and a half? That I had no evidence to prove it, but ‘trust me’ because I kind of heard a woman I don’t know breathing into the call; just don’t ask to hear the message because it disintegrated in my phone?”
SGT. FAYE “… Well. When you put it like that.”
CHRIS “Yeah. That’s what I thought…
[sigh] And then in one of the voicemails I heard ‘Copper.’ And in another ‘Creek.’
… I shouldn’t have gone into the woods.
I don’t know what I was thinking…
But… but I wanted answers. I wanted something to prove that I wasn’t making everything up. I wanted to go into the woods and get scared to death by a bunch of deadbeat teens who had been playing the long-con for a YouTube video or something. I wanted to see if I was right.
CHRIS “… So I went out there.
I didn’t even tell anyone. Didn’t bring anything except my phone and my wallet. And you know what? Everything was completely normal.
I walked around. It was nice. I saw an old couple looking at birds. I saw a woman with her kids. A few people walking their dogs. Even after it got dark, things were just… fine. I mean I was freaked, obviously. Kept jumping every time a branch rustled, but it was just quiet.
… When I saw a beam of light in the distance—a flashlight—I figured, like… a freaky monster probably wouldn’t use a flashlight to get around the woods. I turned on my own phone light, so I wouldn’t spook whoever was walking around if we ran into each other, or in case it was a hunter or something.
But when I turned my light on, the one in the distance flicked off. Which—Weird. But not that weird. So I kept walking around.
I was getting ready to call the night a failure—or… I-I mean a success, I guess. I didn’t get murdered in the woods, call that a job well done! But it still… anyway.
I was about to head back to my car when I saw another person. They weren’t too far away, but I couldn’t really make them out, a smudge of slightly darker shadow in the green-black backdrop.
So I… I pointed m-my light towards them and… it—I saw—sorry….”
SGT. FAYE “It’s alright, take your time.”
CHRIS “I saw… someone. Something.
Their back was to me, about 25 feet away, and… I-I- mean, they looked human. Of course they would look human, though, right? I mean, it was a human. I think. But when I first saw it – her – I was kind of relieved. It was much less worrying coming across another girl my age than like, I don’t know, a random dude twice my age.
And I—God, it was so stupid of me. My first instinct was to talk to her, see if she wanted to walk back to the parking lot together. I barely thought twice about it. I started to walk over but… when I stepped forward, so did she.
I stopped. I thought maybe I startled her, or she was doing her own thing. I waited, but she didn’t move anymore, and she hadn’t turned around to see me.
So, I stepped forward again, and again she stepped in time with me.
CHRIS “And like—at this point I figured she had to know what was happening. That maybe it really was some kids fucking around. So I called out to her. You know, ‘haha, very funny, I get it, can we please all get out of the woods now?’
But the—thing, the girl, was just silent. I ran my flashlight over the nearby trees to see if there were any other people like, hiding out, but it all looked empty. And then, I got this… like, this sick feeling in my throat. And that tingly sense you get in your back when you’re being chased, like your skin is… bracing for being touched, you know?
CHRIS “I looked back at the girl, and she was just gone.
And, fuck that, I mean—I’d had enough of the creepy Blair Witch shit and now there was some weirdo I didn’t know sneaking around the woods, I just—I was done. I kept looking around, figured she couldn’t have ran off far. I almost didn’t see her. Looked right by her before realizing what I had seen.
There she was. Standing a little closer, maybe… 20 feet off to my right, now. 15? Except this time, she was standing so I could see her profile. Just—standing, arms at her sides, facing forward.
It was then that I realized who she was. That I saw… my face. I felt like I was in a dream, like—like this couldn’t be real, you know?
CHRIS “Their—her—I-I’m sorry, I don’t know… Like, how do you even talk about that? Like, I could describe it, but… I mean, do I need to describe her when you can just look at me and know what I saw?”
SGT. FAYE “Give the details as you remember it. For the recording’s sake.”
CHRIS “Um, okay, I-I mean she was wearing the same clothes as me—jeans, a plain dark sweater. Even her hair was the same. I just—I couldn’t… I just stood there, shocked stupid.
And then, slowly, and smoothly, the other me turned her head to the right to mirror my pose. And I was looking at the back of her – my head again.
CHRIS “I tried to leave. Walking backwards so I could keep my flashlight on that—thing, so she wouldn’t leave my sight again and appear somewhere else. But then she just started walking backwards too, so I couldn’t gain any distance on her. One of her arms was outstretched, like she was holding something just like I was holding my phone. I had to keep glancing behind me so I wouldn’t trip over roots, but looking back meant that she looked back, looked at me. And when I would turn back around, it was like there was a delay in her movements, and I would see her face.
She looked… focused. Determined.
CHRIS “That was it. I had to get out of there and I wasn’t that far away from the car, so I turned and ran.
Over the blood rushing in my ears I could hear the crashing of leaves and foliage as she broke into a run behind me, sprinting after me. I was being chased, now, and what’s worse is that it felt like those woods just went on forever. Like, I didn’t think I was too far from the car, but I realized that I was so focused on keeping distance between me and that thing that… she must have been steering us through the trees without me really noticing. I… I thought I was going to die in those woods.
So, I did what you’re told since you’re a little kid – when there’s an emergency, call 911. So I did. Or I tried. I don’t know if the call went through, I think I had spotty reception. But I guess they got something, because the cops showed up not too long after… after she…”
SGT. FAYE “After she what?”
CHRIS “Well, since I had my phone up to my ear, I didn’t have the flashlight pointing up ahead, and the woods kept getting denser. I wasn’t really paying attention to my surroundings and I tripped, slid down this muddy slope that led into clearing.
When my vision settled, I was on the ground, in the damp soil and underbrush, bruised and scraped up and… and then I saw… me walking down the slope like she had all the time in the world.
I scrambled to get back on my feet but I’d twisted my ankle pretty badly in the fall. And then she was just—there, in front of me. She pinned my shoulders to the ground with her knees, got her hands around my throat, and just… looked at me. And she just looked like… me. I thought maybe up close, she’d look like a monster but… it was just me. I’m pretty sure she was crying…
“That’s—that’s when she tried to—I mean—I don’t know if you’ve ever been strangled before but… I kind of… don’t remember a lot of it. I remember trying to fight, trying to get her off me, you know? I think I did, at one point, but she just grabbed my ankle and dragged me back. Got me pretty good in the nose. But I couldn’t breathe, I could barely see. I thought I was going to die…
“That’s—I mean, that’s when the police showed up, I guess.
I was blacking out, so it’s fuzzy. I heard shouting, but I didn’t really understand what was going on. Then there was just… loads of men with guns pointed at me.
I-I didn’t mean to hurt that officer, I just thought—I guess I was still in fight or flight. I didn’t know why they were there.”
SGT. FAYE. “Do you remember seeing the other woman run away?”
CHRIS “N-no, it was like, one second she was there, the next, she was gone… I guess she left when she heard the cops come…
And they didn’t… they never found me—The-the other one?”
SGT. FAYE “Not yet, no. But t evidence of a struggle does lend credence to your statement.”
CHRIS “Ok…
So… is that it? I-I mean, can I go?”
SGT. FAYE “We’re gonna keep you overnight, make sure everything’s in order. Just a precaution.”
CHRIS “[groan/sigh] fine…
I-I get a phone call, though, right?”
SGT. FAYE “Yeah. Uh—Officer Mills here can take you now, make your phone call, and we’ll get you set up for the night. Mills?”
[a beat] [CHRIS & OFFICER leaving]
SGT. FAYE “[sigh] …
Miss Hadley certainly appears in possession of all her faculties. Medical already cleared her – no psychosis, no concussion.
This with the signs of struggle and eyewitness accounts placing Miss Hadley in the woods during the time of the incident – I do not believe Miss Hadley has fabricated the events she’s recounted. In fact it’s my recommendation we treat this as a confidential case, with all the severity that entails…
Now, what I find most notable is that Miss Hadley shows no sign of bruising, a broken nose, or physical trauma of any sort to her throat – despite her claims of suffocation…
SGT. FAYE. “… I spoke to Lawrence after they brought her in – according to him, Chris was found kneeling in the dirt alone, staring down at her hands. She wasn’t responsive when they tried talking to her. Lawrence has gone on record himself admitting he got… worked up – adrenaline, he called it. He said he didn’t know why he reacted like that just that ‘something wasn’t right about her,’ he could just feel it…
Emergency dispatch received a call around the same time Miss Hadley indicated. It was over poor reception but was definitely made by a person in distress… I avoided this detail in our interview, but the call was placed at 6:48 PM… Maybe it’s irrelevant, yet I find it interesting that the voicemails placed to Miss Hadley were done at the same time…
… There’s a lot about this that reminds me of Blair’s obsession from 2010. [sigh] But I’m not so sure. In Chris’ case there’s no body. No wounds. And as far as we know Forthayes wasn’t getting any calls.
I can’t find the link…
I’ll go on record myself to say this: It is my professional opinion we keep ‘Chris’ under careful supervision until we can get some answers and identify this anonymous caller...”