We Heard Something Imitating Our Voices in the Forest

2 min read

There’s an old rule among people who spend real time in remote forests: if you ever hear something imitating our voices — or anyone’s voice — in the woods, you leave. You don’t investigate. You don’t call back. You just go. I didn’t believe that rule until the night it happened to me and three of my friends.

We were camping deep in the backcountry, far from any marked trail, the kind of place where the nearest other human was probably miles away. After dark, we sat around the fire talking and passing a bottle. At some point, my friend Cal called out toward the truck, where his girlfriend Mara had gone to grab something: “Mara, grab the bug spray!”

From the darkness, maybe fifty feet out past the firelight, a voice repeated it back: “Mara, grab the bug spray!”

We all laughed. An echo, we figured, or some clever bird. Cal shouted it again, grinning, playing along. The voice repeated it again — but this time, it wasn’t Cal’s voice anymore. It was mine. Perfectly, exactly mine. Saying Cal’s words. The laughing stopped all at once.

The Chorus in the Dark

Mara came walking back from the truck. And the voice in the dark said, in her exact voice, “I’m back, guys.” But Mara was standing right next to us, bug spray in hand. Her mouth hadn’t moved. Her face went white as she heard herself speak from the trees.

Nobody said a word. Cal slowly reached down and put his hand on the hatchet by the fire. And then the voice changed again — now it was using all of our voices at once, overlapping, a chorus of the four of us speaking together. It said something none of us had said that night, something that wasn’t an echo of anything: “Come closer to the fire. It’s warm. Come closer.”

We left. We didn’t pack a single thing. We grabbed our flashlights and we walked the four miles back to the truck in the dark, close together, nobody speaking a single word — because we were all terrified that if we spoke, it would learn more of us.

What Followed Us Out

The entire walk, we heard ourselves calling from the trees on either side. Laughing. Chatting. Fragments of our whole evening, played back to us wrong, following us through the forest. Our own voices, used against us, drifting just out of sight in the dark on both sides of the trail.

When we finally reached the truck and threw ourselves inside, the voices stopped — abruptly, all at once, right at the treeline. As if whatever it was couldn’t follow past the edge of the woods. As if something invisible held it there, bound to the trees.

I’ve never spoken loudly in the woods again. I don’t call out to my friends; I walk back and tap them on the shoulder. Because you never know what’s out there listening in the dark. And you never, ever know what it’s learning about you, one word at a time.