New Hampshire in the dead of winter is a quiet kind of beautiful, also a quiet kind of terrifying.

If you've ever driven down Route 112 through the White Mountains at night, you know exactly what I mean.

Once you leave the interstate, the street lights just stop.

The towering pines press in close on either side of the asphalt, their frozen branches

casting long, scalable shadows across the road.

There's no cell service out here, no digital lifeline.

If your headlights cut out, you are instantly plunged into a darkness so thick and heavy

that it feels physical.

And on the night of February 9th, 2004, that darkness was absolute. Around 7.30 p.m.,

a local resident living on a sharp, unlit hairpin of a turn on Wild Amunusuk Road in

Never Hill, New Hampshire. What kind of name of a street is that? Well, that person heard a violent,

sudden impact. She ran to her window and looked out into the freezing night. Resting against

the snowbank on the wrong side of the road was a dark, crumbled Saturn sedan. Through the gloom,

she saw a soft, eerie, red glow pulsing from inside the cabin of the car.

It was a faint, crimson heartbeat in the middle of a frozen wasteland.

She picked up her landline and dialed 911.

Minutes later, a heavy school bus came rumbling down that same winding road,

its yellow headlights cutting through the dark.

The driver, a local man named Butch Atwood, pulled his massive bus alongside the disabled car.

He looked out of his side window and saw a young woman standing there in the cold.

She was shivering, visibly shaken, but apparently unhurt.

Her dark hair framed her pale face.

...