It's a nice sunny day, and you're cooped up in your room playing Xbox when your mom walks in and says to get outside and get some fresh air.

You roll your eyes and walk outside. You take the nearby forest, trail, because it looks inviting.

Minute after minute, the forest gets darker, and when you finally decide to turn back, you can't seem to find your way out.

You're trapped in the deep dark woods, and now you swear you just saw something peek its head out from behind a tree.

Welcome back to unexplained encounters. I'm your host, Darkness Prevails, and you can find me on Twitter at DarkPrevails,

where I tweet my shower thoughts about dinosaur chicken nuggets.

Enjoy these allegedly true and terrifying dark woods stories and other creepy tales, and be sure to send me your scary stories at darkstories.org,

so I can narrate them on this show. Also, be sure to check out eeriecast.com for more creepy podcasts like this.

Now, let's begin.

I don't think that's a coyote from Dragon Soul.

I think there's something living in the National Forest up the road from my home that isn't a normal animal.

I recently moved states about two months back, buying a home that sits in a small neighborhood on the side of a mountain that's just outside a National Forest.

For the sake of privacy, I won't mention which.

Because of this, we often get wildlife wandering through our yards, mostly deer, elk, and skunks.

I've got four horses of my own that live on the property with me and my family, and seeing as they are trail horses, they don't generally spook at wildlife.

In fact, my four-month-old Philly is friends with the deer herd that wanders through.

I say this to let you know that they aren't spooked by normal animals going through, which will make later events more strange.

When we first moved in, we found a half-decade deer carcass hidden away up a hill in front of our driveway,

which is weird because this is a neighborhood with people coming and going, so why would a predator decide to eat here?

And as far as I know, none of my neighbors are active hunters.

Even so, I doubt they'd just leave a carcass there if they'd killed it.

There were no prints we could find, nor evidence of another animal, so we kind of just left it alone and moved on.

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