In the woods at night anything can happen: in your mind. It’s what makes the telling of scary stories around the campfire so effectively scary. Once, when I was a kid, my mother lowered her voice around the campfire and told us about a vandal attacking the campground’s bathroom, the night before. It was really creepy when she told it.
Because it’s so easy for a mind to run to terrifying cliffs in the dark, in the woods, I try to keep my mind in check: the large animal outside my tent is a deer or an elk, not a bear. The scary guy wearing cotton clothes and carrying a large knife on his belt is not a killer, just a novice backpacker that doesn’t know what to wear or bring. Only thing is that sometimes the big animal is a bear and sometimes the scary guy is a murderer.
I arrived at a shelter on the Appalachian Trail about 8pm. There were two worried hikers at the picnic table. They motioned to an opened backpack in the shelter and said, “Checkout the reading material�. There were a bunch of books on survival and a camouflage bible. Whoever it was, he was packing a lot of weight. All his gear and food was left in the shelter. One of the hikers had found a bag of knives about ½ mile down the trail.
About 10 pm, we got out a map and figured out where the nearest road was. One of the hikers had a cell phone and called the police to report the abandoned backpack. About 1 am two sheriff deputies showed up. They looked through the back pack and found a note that said:
To whom it may concern, I have murdered my father and gone to the woods to live. I have had to abandon my mission and am returning to Chesapeake to do something that you will read about in the papers. Anyone is welcome to any of my gear.
I just want to die.
Shaun Cubage Age 16
One of the deputies looked around the dark deep woods and said “he could be hanging from one of these trees.�
The police took all the knives and the note and said that they would send someone for the rest of the gear in the morning.
A couple months later, curious about what they had found out about the mysterious backpack, I called the sheriff department and asked them what happened. They said the police went to the boy’s house. They knocked and when no one answered they broke in and found the father dead. Two days later the boy turned himself in.
