Creepypasta Stories

A Slight Misunderstanding

*Introductory Note* What you're about to read actually happened while on an internship during Fall of 2014. In order to protect people's privacy, I'm not including the names of my friends, the name of the company I was employed with at the time, or the name of my university. But after you read my account, if you feel skeptical or otherwise have any questions about my experience, feel free to e-mail me at 2453396381@qq.com. I know the address looks like a spam e-mail, but QQ is actually an extremely popular social networking site in mainland China as Facebook, Twitter, and all the western networks are blocked by the Chinese government. The reason for the suspicious username is that your QQ number is randomly generated and assigned to you when creating an account (that's right, your identity is literally reduced to an itemized number until you provide personal details on your account).

In fall of 2014 I got a job as a supervisor over 13 volunteer English teachers. I would be working in a Chinese city called Weihai [pronounced 'way high'] located in Shandong [shawn doe-ng] Province. The company that hired me sends English teachers to Mexico, India, China, Russia, and Ukraine each semester. I was super excited at the opportunity because not only would I have the chance to live in China again (I'd originally been one of the volunteers for this same program several years prior), but my university was willing grant me a semester's worth of Chinese language credits as an academic internship. I could get good job experience, live abroad in a country that I consider my second home and complete a semester of school, it was my dream semester!

In Weihai, the volunteers and I lived and worked at a prestigious international private school. They treated us really well, one of the biggest perks being that in addition to taking the same vacation days as the school's faculty that took place over China's national holidays, we also got an extra week or two of personal vacation time. It was during one of these vacations that I had one of the most disturbing experiences of my life.

Two of my friends from the group, I'll call them Sara and David, decided they wanted to travel down south to China's Guangdong [gwahng doe-ng] Province during the Dragon Boast Festival. I suggested that we visit Yangshuo [yahng sh-whoa] a little-known village surrounded on all sides by the region's gorgeous mountains. I'd visited it a year before and wasn't about to pass up an opportunity to visit there again. Search Google images of Yangshuo's scenery and you'll understand why I'm so crazy about the place.

Yangshuo isn't a large town, but even so, if you plan to do everything that you want to while you're there, you need transportation since most of the things to do are out in the countryside. The problem was that we'd chosen a super busy time of year to visit such a popular tourist location. All the traffic in the area the entire 6 days we were there was literally a continuous traffic jam, so taking cabs or hiring rickshaws wasn't an option. We were fine though, as we'd rented some bikes which gave us the freedom to go anywhere we wanted. It actually worked out even better than relying on cabs because we would be able to get to some of the places that were out of the way an inaccessible by car.

I remembered some mud caves pretty deep in the countryside that I'd visited before. It was about an hour outside of town by bike, so it was more than a little out of the way, but its secluded nature was one of the reasons it was such an appealing destination, especially during such a busy holiday where it was a nice to have a break from all the tourists. I convinced Sara and David to make the trip to these mud caves, explaining how we'd already done everything there is to do immediately around the city. They reluctantly agreed, and the morning of the 5th day, we grabbed our bikes and headed out.

We rode for an hour. An hour and a half. Two hours. After the two hour mark I realized that I must've gotten us lost. Granted, it had been quite a while since I'd last been there, so I think it's understandable that I didn't remember the route. Regardless, I felt stupid and guilty because I'd talked up the mud caves so much to my friends and it looked like we weren't even going to make it to them. Not only that, we seemed to be in a completely isolated section of countryside. I spoke the language, so finding our way back to town wasn't going to be a problem. Provided we found another person. From what it looked like, we were in the middle of the wilderness. I was worried that I'd inadvertently wasted one of the last days of our vacation.