An Appalachian night patrol paranormal story: Night patrols in the mountains are usually quiet. Too quiet, most nights. I drive the same path, check the same gates, shine the same flashlight into the same dark woods. There’s this one spot—up near the ridge—where I’m supposed to stop, park the truck, and just sit for a while. Watch. Listen. Report anything unusual. We don’t carry weapons. Just a flashlight, a radio, and our instincts.
That night, something felt off the moment I reached the ridge. The air was heavy. Still. I left the truck running and stared out into the dark. Then, from somewhere deep in the woods, I heard a voice.
It wasn’t just any voice.
It was my mom’s voice. Soft, sweet—familiar in a way that hit me right in the chest. And she used the name I haven’t heard since I was a kid.
“Hey Bubby, whatcha doin’?”
I froze. My mom wasn’t out there. She was miles away, safe in bed. She wasn’t in the Appalachian woods at 2 a.m.
I locked my eyes on the steering wheel, trying to collect myself. That’s when I noticed the odometer.
20666.
It was the last three digits that chilled me: 666.
I told myself I imagined it. That it was the wind or some echo bouncing off the ridge. I turned up the heater fan, tried to drown out the silence, but then—
“Sweety, I’m talking to you!”
That was it. I slammed the truck into drive and gunned it down the dirt road, kicking up gravel behind me. I didn’t stop until I was halfway to my next checkpoint. My hands were shaking, so I reached for a bottle of water to calm myself.
Just as the bottle touched my lips, the CB radio crackled to life.
“Don’t drink the water.”
I dropped the bottle like it burned me and chucked it out the window. No hesitation. I drove straight back to the security station, heart pounding like it wanted out of my chest.
The other security guard was there when I returned. I told him everything—my mom’s voice, the odometer, the radio. He looked concerned but calm. Said he’d go check it out himself.
So he left. Drove up to the ridge.
Hours passed. I was staring at the clock when it hit 4:07 a.m. That’s when my phone buzzed.
A text. From him.
But it was all in Russian.
I copy-pasted it into a translator.
It was a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The passage about death. About whether it’s better to suffer or to end it all. The kind of thing that gives you goosebumps when you’re not sitting alone in the dark.
When the other guard came back, I asked him about it.
He looked confused. Said he never sent a text. Didn’t know any Russian. Swore he didn’t touch his phone nor did his phone have a sent message to me. Just my responses of “What?”
We haven’t talked much about that night since. But I have to keep going back to the ridge. Alone. After what I heard.
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