DO THE HILLS HAVE EYES?
This weekend I had somewhat of a reunion with my dad who I have not seen in 4 years and spent some time with my son, brother and his kids. It was my sons birthday on Saturday and he wanted to go fishing. I had not been in over 15 years or more so it sounded fun. We spent most of the day looking for places to fish and unfortunately most places I used to fish as a boy were not accessible due to severe storm damage from the hurricane. On Saturday night we spent some time on google and decided on this lovely place to go Sunday morning. Normally we hike in the Adirondacks because I’m familiar with that area having grown up there but no one wanted to spend to much energy hiking as teaching the boy’s to fish was the order of the day. This little place involved just over a mile hike from the main road and seemed perfect. My main purpose for writing tonight is to document what I thought was a very creepy thing that happened to us yesterday. As we were hiking along the trail I noticed a few feet off the trail what seemed to be human remains. I touched my brothers arm and told him to keep the boy’s back as I went over to investigate. Fortunately, when I approached the pile it was just some torn up child clothing semi covered in some leaves, soil and moss.
What was really strange to me was that there was a beer can and a bag of used skewers in the pile. If someone is leaving garbage on the trail what possible relationship could the child’s clothes have to do with a beer can and some skewers? I looked around a bit more and behind a bush I found some used duct tape that was fashioned in a way that it looked to have been used to bind someone. It was a lot of duct tape. A lot.
Most people might dismiss this as trash and keep walking. We proceeded with the hike but I could not stop thinking about it. Could the hurricane have uncovered valuable evidence?
After fishing for a bit my brother looked at me and said, something does not feel right. I think we should leave. I said sure but at that moment my sons fishing line got snagged in a log off of the shore. I told him go on and we’ll catch up. It was taking me a very long time to get the snag out and my son was getting ansy and said, I’m going to go on up ahead and catch up to them. I looked at him and said, absolutely not. You never split up in situations like this. You’re staying with me and that’s that. The wind picked up and we looked at each other with concern as the most horrible smell came into the area. My son said, is that a bear smell? I knew it wasn’t. It reminded me of the one time I smelled a dead body in New York when an elderly gentleman had died in an apt. upstairs from me. Coming in to the hallway was this putrid smell and once you have had the smell of death up close and personal, you never forget it. I told him yes, its a bear, don’t worry, we are down wind. I packed up the gear and we got out of there catching up to my brother and his sons about 15 minutes later. When we got home my brother and I talked about if we should call the police or not. I could not help but think someone had abducted a child and buried the evidence on this remote trail. Judging by the sign in sheet at the trail head, it was not used that much. In fact. No one had hiked there in 6 months. One of the clothing articles was a navy blue nike sweat shirt. Perhaps they might have a last seen wearing this description on a missing child list. I thought about my instincts to not let my son leave my sight, the smell, the duct tape, and called the state police. The investigating officer called this morning and said they were going to the trail today to examine our concerns. I really don’t know. What would you do? I certainly don’t want to send the police out to the wilderness to pick up someones trash. But at the same time, everything just felt really strange. I will write more on this if anything develops.
