A group of friends and I used to do “moonlight” trail rides. At first we’d ride out when the moon was full or nearly full, but eventually we had so much fun riding late at night in the pitch dark, we’d just go out whenever. Our horses really enjoyed it, and they knew the (very flat, very wide) trails even better than we did, so on more than one night, while completely lost in the pitch dark woods, we just dropped the reins and let them walk us home. They got to be very seasoned at it. Nothing spooked them. We rode on only one road and it was a dead end through a locked gate into the forest, with no houses on the stretch where we rode. A little ways down the road, a hanging tree marked the start of the forest on our left and open farm fields lay to our right. Where I’m from, a hanging tree is any massive, old tree with branches of a certain height and width to be good for doing dark deeds. We called it the Sleepy Hollow tree because there was something about its bare winter branches against the sky that just gave you a feeling it had in fact been used for those dark deeds. Even in summer, when it was green and bushy, it just never looked friendly. One night just the two of us went out. Moonless night. Fall in the air. Probably ten or eleven o’clock, lights going off in the houses at the other end of the road.
That night we were riding along in the dark, chatting, when the horses began to spook and stop, ears pricked, bodies quivering, staring. Again, these horses had ridden this trail weekly if not nightly for months. They knew it backwards and forwards and never blinked. My friend kicked on but I was getting a bit of a bad feeling and slowed up, steering my horse away from the spot where the forest started at the base of the Sleepy Hollow tree. That was definitely what she was spooking at. Then, out of nowhere, absolutely nothing shot out of the shadows of the tree. Not a shape, not a creature. Just noise, something rushing in at our horses’ hooves, growling and grumbling. Let me be clear, it was dark. It was not that dark. I could see the patched spots in the asphalt where it was a little darker in some areas. I could make out every inch of my friend’s horse ahead. I could not see what was rushing us. Our horses couldn’t find it either. They spun this way and that and the whole time the noise was right there at our feet. Both horses finally spun and took off down a dirt road leading into the farm fields. Not going to lie, I didn’t even try to stop my horse, I just wanted to be away from whatever it was. We ran maybe a hundred yards down the lane, but the sound didn’t follow us off the road. The horses let us stop them and we waited around, deliberating. There were multiple ditches between us and the way home if we tried to cut through the fields and I wasn’t keen on testing our luck at getting our horses safely through them. This was before the days of phones having flashlights and in hindsight, wouldn’t a flashlight have been a smart thing to bring along in case of an emergency/demon from the great beyond? With no other options we crept back to the road. Our horses looked up and down the road, heaved a sigh of relief and turned to take us to the trail, glad to move past it. I was not and I immediately voted to go home, because I did not want to go trail riding in the dark for an hour, only to try to come home by the road and find ourselves blocked by something we couldn’t see.
We never met it again. To this day I have no idea what it was. If I’d caught a glimpse of a shape, a shadow, a movement, it would be one thing, but it was the absence of anything that really bugged me. You could hear it. You could hear it come onto the road at you. You could track the direction it came from. You could hear it bristling its way up to you. You just could not see it. I still think about that one. I miss those moonlight trails. I do not miss whatever that thing was.
Probably some pissy mammal we disturbed, right? To this day my friend and I still call it “the demon,” and it’ll stay that for us. :lol:
