All right, I'm gonna start storry back up in the next morning. I abruptly woke up the next morning right as the sun was coming up, and I saw Sam was already getting ready, so I jumped up to catch up, because every moment that we're still here, the woman is still out there in the wood suffering. I get ready like I'm late for the first day of school. Rangers already at the edge of the campsite with a appears to be groggy, tired Nick. All of us climb into one of those off roading golf carts. Thank god we had a vehicle, because I was not looking forward to a fifteen mile hike there and back and then joining a search party. Me and see them jog up, and we just hopped the back seat quietly because we're trying to execute this mission and get this over with. When the ranger turns on the engine, we hear we hear a zip come from a tent, the zippers being opened, and it come storming out of her tent towards our cart. We start driving away and it's a little downhill the hole as we descend, so once we are about thirty feet away, you can't see over the ridge there anymore, but you could see her storming up to the edge of the trail and just stand there. This woman looked very angry that we lied to her. She stands dead center of the trail for about five seconds. Then she just turns and sprints into the tree line. Sam sees it and asks, where do you think she went. The ranger cuts us off and says, keep your head on a swivel. She's getting desperate. We're driving for about ten minutes, and the trail continues to get more and more narrow as we go. It's about a five miles stretch. For the trees are just about three feet away from each side of the cart, and for the next five miles we find out exactly where she went. She was periodically popping out of the tree lion screaming things at Nick, Mommy loves you, Take mommy home. Where's your father? She just continued to scream and cry, Pa, please don't leave me, Please don't leave me. She'd never made an attempt on the vehicle. It just seemed like she was tracking us and following us and continuing to try and manipulate Nick. But let me tell you, it never got less creepy that she was always ahead of us. And finally we get to the lodge and we see the father out front, standing outside of his truck, looking pretty confused and frustrated. We tactically pull up neck to the truck, planning to get Nick into his vehicle as soon as possible and as quickly to get him out of there. But the second we stop, Nick jumps out of the vehicle and runs his dad, crying, see and I want to go home. His dad gives him a quick pat on the back and says, don't worry, I'm taking you home. Wait in the car. I have to talk to these guys real quick. We walk up and he walks up to excuse us. We're walking up to him, and he says to us, and he seems very frustrated when he asks, this, are you guys going to tell me why I had to rush here first thing in the morning. I have no idea what we're gonna tell this guy, but we need to get him out here as quick as possible. The ranger steps up and quickly replies that every child on this campsite needs to be here with a responsible adult. As a father's asking where the mother is she pops up out of the woods, completely out of nowhere. She is hauling it towards us, announcing to everybody, the whole crowd, there, finally my husband is here. Finally my husband is here. She's walking up to him, starting to approach him, kind of like maybe like she's looking for a hug or looking to be embraced. He puts his hand up and he starts backing up towards his truck, and he says, I cannot believe you right now. She just kind of says, in a sad voice, I just want my husband to take me home. He cuts her off, immediately talks over her, and he says, Kristen, don't play that shit. We've been divorced for over a year. He starts scanning her. He's looking her up and down and with a look of disgust on his face. And I take a look at her. She's looking really drawn out, sleep deprived and exhausted. In that moment, I can't help but wonder if she's in mayor of the real Christin. But the father cuts off my train of thought and says, you promised me you were done drinking, and I gave you one week alone with him, and you can't keep yourself together. She gets out a little bit a little whimper and says, can you please just take me home? And he says absolutely not, pull yourself together and take yourself home. He then storms to his vehicle and drives off. I'm thinking, Wow, I can't believe just did our job before us. For a brief second, it felt like we won, like a victory. This is until she takes off, sprinting back into the trees. The three of us look at each other and we all have an understanding what is happening. She's trying to beat us back to the camp so so you can switch into somebody else before we get there. That moment of relief immediately turned into the most bumpy, chaotic off roading experience of my life because we have no idea how long it's going to take her to get back, but we know at even our top speed it's going to take us several minutes. The ride back was far too loud for any of us to talk and have any sort of type of conversation, so I'm just in my head thinking, what are we going to do with her? Will we get when we have to go search for the real Christen. What's the point in finding her if we come back and it's a and it's found a new host already, and we're gonna have to go through the same process all over again. When we pull up to the campsite, I was damn near expecting this thing to be dragging somebody else into the woods, with how desperate it looked when it darted towards the tree line end of the woods before we left the area. Come to our surprise, the campsite is completely vacant. Sand just blurts out. Where is everybody? The ranger Filt, tells us that he had the camp guides take everybody onto the pontoons for a fishing day, so nobody was at the campsite for her to pray on while we were gone. But they might get back before we find the real Christen. So we have to make this thing come with us on any by any means necessary. We hop off the call of cart. We are walking with the with purpose now towards the campsite, assuming that she's hiding somewhere, But she's just sitting in the middle of the campsite on a log by the bonfire, rocking back and forwards. I see something on the lone next to her. As we get closer, I realize that I'm seeing three crows sitting on the log next to her. They're just standing there, perfectly perched up on this log, with the exact same spacing between them, as if they're in a form forming something. As we're walking up, I'm mentally preparing to have to fight this thing and drag it into the forest with us to search for the real Christin. I could tell by the way everybody was walking up that nobody has any idea how this interaction's going to go. Assuming she's going to be violent, that's all we could assume. But I know that I'm prepared to do whatever I have to do to save the real Christin. I know they are too. The park ranger sternly says to it, you're coming with us right now. She just keeps rocking and mumbling. She's mumbling this, do you know what the crows are? Do you know about the crows? He cuts her off immediately, he says, you're coming in the forest with us right now to find that woman. It looks up at us, almost excited, with real optimistic look on its face. It's really delicately standing up and starts walking towards the tree line and says, I'd love to go in the forest with you. Sam immediately takes charge and says, let's do a triangle formation. Sam points to the ranger and says, you're at the front and we'll be on either side of her. Scan the right, I'll scan the left, and she'll stay in the middle of all of us so she can't get away from us. Me and the ranger are both not sure about this, so the mimic seems okay with this idea and just takes her place in the middle of the formation. It makes me very uncomfortable with how willingly she wants to do this, but we don't have a choice at this point, and we need to just go. We started to go into the tree line. I'm trying to do my job and just keep scanning the right for clues or you know, where we can find Christen. But I can't help but keep checking on her to make sure it's not getting any crazy ideas. But we're walking about three minutes when I peek back and there's something different about it. I take a better look at her, and her face looks full and vibrant, her bags under her eyes are gone, her posture perfect. She's almost giving off an aura early similar to the glow of the stairs. The forest is super dense and there's not a lot of sunlight that gets through the trees. Sam and the ranger look completely shaded, but she looks like the sunlight is hitting her. This makes me internally pantic, because I already didn't like how happy she was to come in here. I really don't like that once we're in here, she seems to be thriving. I look away from her just to start looking for more clues. As we keep hiking, everything in the forest starts looking the same. I start to feel a little disoriented and dizzy, but I just focus on the trees. Before I know it, I feel like a lot of time has passed. I'm out of touch with the situation. It feels like I'm an infinite loop of paranoia, and I realize I haven't checked on her or anybody else in the group before. It feels like ours. So when I finally pulled myself together away from the haze, I panned back to the group and the park ranger is standing where she was in between me and Sam. And she's at the front of the group. Me, Sam, and the ranger are just standing single file behind her. I have no idea when that switch happened. I can tell that Sam and the ranger haven't realized that which happened yet. I'm not even looking for clues at this point. I'm just disoriented and confused, barely remembering why we're even out here, until the park ranger shakes his head really hard, like he's shaking the trance off, and blurts out stop. He slaps me and Sam on the chest stop us from walking. This is the first time I've seen a real panic in the Ranger's eyes. He starts questioning me and Sam if we have any idea how long we've been out here or what direction we went. We all frantically check our watches and phones, but none of them seemed to be working. She had stopped walking about ten feet ahead of us and just turned around and calmly looking at us. The ranger storms up and yells, where'd you take us? Aggressive? Borderline violent? She just gently replies, I took you where we were meant to go. Silly. She just lightly lifts her hands and points to her right. We all turn our gaze and see this massive, hallowed out tree with a big oval gap in the front of it, with glass stairs spiraling around the outside of it. There were like the stairs that you would see in the loft, but they were sticking out of the bark of the tree. And I realized that the real Christen is sitting in a fetal position, completely motionless, inside the oval gap, and we're just standing there. I just believe for a moment, questions start flooding my brain. Why would this thing take us directly to Kristin? Is it surrendering? Is it a trap? Was it planning to lead us here the whole time? I take a better look at the tree, and it's giving off some the same illumination that her in the first staircase we're given off. I start to get those intrusive thoughts again. I feel oddly drawn to it, but I know better than to act on them, because of what happened the first time. I look back at the other guys to see their reactions on their faces. But when I look at Sam, the mimic is right next to them, with her hand on his shoulder, whispering in his ear. I didn't see this thing walk up to him. I take a step towards them. Before I get a word out, it whips his head towards me and says porcupine. Sam's eyes are completely glazed over. He's just daring at the tree, motionless. She takes a slight pause, tilts her head, takes her hand off his shoulder, and he immediately starts sprinting towards the tree. He gets a little bit of a head start of me, but I started chasing him right away because I could tell this something is off. As we're getting closer to the tree, I tell he's not spreading towards Kristen. He's sprinting towards stairs. The direction he's spreading is like five degrees off from the oval gap. But I close it on him and I get one hand on his back. I'm slowing him down, but I can't stop him from getting to the second step of the stairs. Once he touched it, it felt start. The stairs gave off a vibrating pulse with each step. It's almost like somebody banging on a drum. I gave my second hand on and rib him upstairs. I get him to the ground. I have to restrain him with all my strength because he's trying as hard as he can get back at these stairs. Sam is not small or feeble by any means, and I have to use all my strength to restrain him. But he's not fighting me. He's not hit me, he's not pushing me, he's not even looking at me. His eyes are fixated on the stairs and he's just clawing to get back to them. Gets to the point where I don't even think I could restrain him any longer, until he suddenly stops and goes limp. His eyes revert back to normal. He just looks at me and goes what happened? He seems okay? So I look to see what stopped him, and I see the ranger pulling Christen out of the tree. It seems like the moment he pulled her out, he stopped. Me and the ranger look at each other as to say, what now. We all look back towards the mimic, and this thing had a satisfied, devious look on his face. That wasn't until his face started to fade away to nothing, And just like the ranger explaining with the hippie, starts to evaporate, and once it completely disappears, I look back to Sam to see if he's okay, and he gives me the nod that it's all good. This is messed up. This as creepy as hell. So this this, this mimic of Kristen with the missing person that they're looking for at this point in time. Now got the son out of the park safely. This thing leads them to her. But before doing that, they're all walking along and they somehow get in this trance where and the person telling the sharing the story says he's just looking for clues. Then he looks back in the in the strategic position they were all walking in with him to the left, his friend of the right, and the park ranger leading the pack with the with it, as we're calling it, the mimic in the middle. All of a sudden, when he looks back in this trance, everything's changed. The lineup's changed, the way they're walking's changed. It was as if she was leading them where to go now. Yeah, she was in the front now and the ranger was in the center, and they were all following her for an amount of time, unknown amount of time, and it seems like the ranger finally who this time is just falling behind right, they're all just following her. Now he snaps out of the trance and he says, like stop, taps the other guys on the back of chest, are what it said, to kind of get them out of the trance, And yeah, you get the feeling that he was just desperate to get them out of that chance, they said, slaps them on the chest. You can imagine the feeling of like his desperation at this point, like, you know, he doesn't know how long they've been walking like this, and he knows something bad happened. This thing was suddenly leading them. I could feel like when he described it, I can almost feel the force of like, yeah, that damn just slapping them across the chest to like knock them their senses back in. Yeah, that was a very spooky part of the story. It's this whole part there, but all along she actually led them to the real person, who was sitting in a walled out area of a tree with a new set of stairs right by her. So they all start heading to or they don't know he actually he doesn't know. Him and his friend are heading towards her the stairs. He knows he's feeling the urge you go to the stairs, but he's not got to do that. This time, Spread takes off running on to the stairs and he has to yank him off. Really an identical situation to what happened with him earlier, except for I think his friend made it up an extra step. And then he's basically holding his friend down that his friend's going nuts, wants to get right back up, has to get on them stairs in the woods, and all of a sudden he just stops, stops fighting it, stops fighting the urge. And as soon as he stops, he looks over and he happens to see that the exact same time where the park ranger is pulling the real Christen out of the tree. And then this thing, just like the park ranger said happened with the hippie earlier. They went missing, and which is you know that the next day they found the dead body of the hippie and they said it was two days later, which is creepy enough as it is, but yeah, it just evaporates into the woods. Yeah, and and Ky go back up the hole and the tree. When've you know, you've heard stories of men or changelings, they're always there's some kind of hole in the tree kind of connection to their beginning, their origin, or their birth. Yeah, so just to see that kind of pop up again, I was like, yeah, I'm settling even And I think the the troubling part is even though the park Rangers basically predicted like how this could play out, he still is powerless, right, and became victim to the trance. And let's not forget about the creepiest thing about the trance, that is, when Sam realized they're in the trance, he started walking towards his friend because he saw this mimic talking in his friend's shoulder. I said, Sam, right, I met it wrong his friend Sam's shoulder. Yeah, I mean he was like at a hand on the shoulder, right and talking like whispering into Sam's ear, And before he could get close enough, the thing just whifts his head out out of him and says this safe word that they established the night before, Porky. Right, they're laying in the Tan and I and they said porcupine is are safe word. If any thing happens, if we're spread up, we're split apart, anything weird happens at all, we will know if each other's okay. If the word for Kee kinda said, and that's what the mimic just said to him, right, Yeah, So yeah, I wonder it was this, you know, was it able to read it mined or was the you know mimic listening to them the night before like nearby. Yeah, it's either way. The creepiest part might be that the mimic seems happy, like it just accomplished something. Yes, the devious smile they described her
