Honor the Horrors of the Internet

Where the World Stopped

I go walking and biking along a paved path that winds around some of the new developments in my area. It goes along the main highway, through the new homes, and eventually behind some older homes on the border of the farmland on the edge of town. And when I say on the border, I mean reach out and you'll touch corn stalks. On the other side is a small but dense forest. It is a popular path for walkers and joggers, but as I began walking every day in the summer on the path, I started noticing something very odd.

The first day I noticed was on a windy day. Minnesota is pretty flat so it is always windy, but this was a gross hot wind. I was walking with my earbuds in, and the second I reached the part of the path the goes along the farmland, the wind stopped. I only noticed because it was so hot, so I really was burning up without even the slight breeze. I chalked it up to the tall corn blocking the wind. But I kept my music playing, so I didn't notice anything else.

A few days later, I walked when it was drizzling out. When I reached the same part of the path, I stopped, because the black pavement was totally dry. I could see around the curve where the pavement got wet again, but for about 7-10 yards, that path had not seen any rain. Again, it didn't bother me too much- there were tall trees on the other side and it wasn't unheard of that the leaves would block the rain from the path.

A week later, after no incident, my music stopped.

I can't even explain it to this day. I wasn't worried at that time, so I didn't notice the coincidences, but I would enter that stretch of path, and silence. My music would just stop playing. My iPod would not be frozen, I could turn the music back on. It was like I just pressed the pause button. I always have my iPod clipped to my tank-top neckline, on locked mode. There was no way I bumped it on accident. But for the next three or four days, my music stopped on that path.

I started getting uneasy, because during the times I walked (it was summer and I was off class, so I'd go around 10-11 in the morning) there weren't a lot of other people. Then there was nobody. It was like people stopped walking. It was getting hotter, so that could have been why, but it was still scary. And I would be listening to music, and when I entered that area of the path, it would just stop.

I didn't want to scare myself, but the anticipation began to be unbearable. My stomach would clench and I would tense up yards before that part of the path, because I knew I was about to be enclosed in perfectly still silence. No wind, no rain, no music. Alone, on that small, secluded section of the path.

I stopped walking when I saw the bike.

I was fully aware of the strangeness of the situation at this time, so I was looking around the bends in the path before I got to the freaky spot. A tingle started in my feet and went up my spine when I saw a black bike, small but not a child's bike. It was one of this little trick bikes teenagers ride. It was on its side in the one-foot-wide strip of grass between the corn and the path, and the back wheel was still fucking spinning.

I was terrified of that whole situation. I didn't know if a kid was fooling around in the corn, or if there were other kids further ahead on the path, but that bike had not been there long. I squeezed my eyes shut and ran down the path, afraid some kid was going to jump out at me.

My music stopped, and I could hear my breath, and I was panting so hard and it was just so fucking quiet, and I ran down the path so fast that I didn't even realize I had emptied out into a relatively quiet cul-de-sac at the end of a developing neighborhood, face-first on the gravel.

A slight breeze blew, I saw a woman watering her lawn, and a truck was doing a turn-around in a driveway two houses away. I had scraped my hands badly and I was starting to cry, I was so rattled. I got up and walked home, my iPod off.

I started walking the same path but got off on the opposite fork from then on. It was a shorter route and went along a really rotten pond, but I couldn't go on that little part of the path by the farmland anymore. I have this feeling now that the world just sort of stopped on that stretch of path, and I was being asked to listen to something. I was being asked to notice something that I wasn't noticing. The silence, the calm in the weather. It was just so empty.

This next part is a little weird to explain, and it may not sound creepy, but it is to me.

My brother bikes during the night on that same path. I hate that he does that, because biking at night is dangerous anywhere, but my brother has a physical disability, AND there are no lights on that path. I hated it even before the creepiness. But he's older than me, so I kept my mouth shut.

One night, he got home at about one in the morning, and I was on my laptop at the kitchen counter. He told me that there were flashing lights in the cul-de-sac by his friend Jesse's house, and that was the cul-de-sac closest to the path. There was an ambulance and a police car there. In the farmland, it is hard to get to a lot of the old farm houses, so emergency calls route the vehicles to the cul-de-sac and they go in by dirt road.

We never found out what those vehicles were for. It wasn't for any of the people in the neighborhood, and nobody seemed to have any answers. I could never see any houses through the corn, but there must have been something out there.

I still think something happened out there that was too weird or too horrible for us to know about. Someone got lost, or hurt, or something was found.