A woman and her boyfriend are asleep in their cabin near Sylva, North Carolina, when she hears an unknown voice mimic her and her boyfriend. There was a rustling sound outside as well.
I recently stumbled upon the following account:
"This happened to me in January of 2019 in Western North Carolina around the small town of Sylva. I was participating in a week-long program to get certified as a First Responder for wilderness first aid and rescue. I am studying to become a forester and it is important to know how to keep people alive in the woods when things go wrong.
There are two primary locations in the complex, a classroom with some bathrooms and a kitchen where we spent most of the day in class and ate meals. There is group of one-room cabins on top of a steep hill directly north of the classroom where we would sleep. An important thing to note about the cabins is the heating system. Each cabin has a small, but powerful, radiator in it that makes the cabin feel like a sauna if left on for too long. Since it was January in the Appalachians, it was pretty chilly outside at night, so the heat was needed. In order to strike a balance between boiling in our beds and getting hypothermia, we would turn on the radiator and leave a window open so that warm and cold air could circulate and create a reasonable temperature. The radiator and the open window were at the front of the cabin, next to the door, and my bed was directly across from the window.
The incident happened on the 5th day (a Thursday) of my time there. My boyfriend and I (who was enrolled in the program with me) had settled down for the night in the cabin we shared with one other person. We had gone to sleep as normal and were sleeping soundly on two bunks that we had pushed together so we could sleep next to each other. Some time during the night, I was woken up by some shuffling on the other side of the room near the window. I heard my boyfriend say in a complaining voice "Can't we close this window? I wake up feeling frozen". I woke up more and sat up in my bed groggily, about to answer him, when I heard another voice say, "If we close the window, it'll get too hot and we'll wake up sweaty." I snapped awake and froze where I was sitting. The voice that had "responded" was my voice. There is something very strange and wrong in hearing your voice repeated back at you. In the dark, I looked down next to me where I saw my boyfriend sleeping soundly. At this point, a mortal dread had a tight grip on my chest and I forced myself to not move or even blink. I was focused intently on the place near the window, fearfully anticipating more of my own words. I heard more shuffling outside the window and my same words were repeated, "If we close the window, it'll get too hot and we'll wake up sweaty," followed quickly by my boyfriend's voice again, "Can't we close this window? I wake up feeling frozen." Towards the end of the last repetition of my boyfriend's words, there seemed to be an unevenness in the enunciation, like raising and lowering the pitch slightly.
I remained frozen in my bed, feeling my hand fall asleep in my propped up position. I sat there for what felt like 15 or 20 minutes, listening to whatever it was shuffle around in front of our window, separated from me by some odd 10 feet and window mesh. Eventually, the shuffling became more frequent, and a weird mumbling sound came from outside the window, with no real words being said (or none that I could make out). This particular behavior didn't last long before the shuffling sound moved to the left of the window to the door, where a scratching sound began to manifest. As the sound moved, I saw the silhouette of a medium height (5' 6") figure that moved in an uncanny way, like when a baby animal tries to walk for the first time but isn't quite strong enough to stand up correctly. It sounded like someone was scraping some dry sticks against the wood of the door, not aggressively, but kind of like an impatient dog asking to be let in. This scratching slowly moved around the cabin, stopping when it reached the wall that I was closest to. My ears were strained to hear anything that might indicate further action, but all I could hear were footsteps on the dry leaves. The footsteps eventually move away from the cabin and down the other side of the hill and didn't return for the rest of the night.
I stayed unmoving from my position for at least another half hour before my body re-adjusted itself slightly, letting blood flow back into my asleep limbs. I was wide awake until the my boyfriend's and other roommate's alarms went off some time before dawn to get ready for the day, which felt like maybe 2 hours but I couldn't be certain because I didn't have a clock. My boyfriend was surprised that I was awake before him, as I am typically a later sleeper, but I just told him his alarm woke me up and tried to act somewhat normally. We got up and got ready for our day, but I refused to leave the cabin until the sun began to peak over the mountains. For the rest of the week I was on edge and felt like there were eyes on me whenever it was relatively dark out, though I am not sure how much of that was raw paranoia.
In the day following the incident at night, I had realized the lines that were repeated to me by the voice were a part of a conversation that my boyfriend and I had had earlier in the week, and I came to the conclusion that whatever it was had been outside our cabin and heard us talking. This scared me a great deal, as I also realized that it had likely been lurking there in the following nights as well without us realizing it and might do so again for our remaining nights, though it ended up not coming back. I waited to tell my boyfriend about this until we had left the program because he scares easy and was already a little wary of walking in the woods at night up to the cabins. It should be noted that I know this to not be a sleep paralysis experience, as I have had them before and they were nothing like this (not to mention I was able to move).
I am asking for advice in addition to getting it off my chest, as this winter I will have to return to the same location to renew my certification (expires two years after acquisition) and I want to know as much as I can so I can hopefully avoid another encounter. If there is an entity that exists in my area, I'd be glad to hear about it and what I can do (if anything) to avoid it." CP
PLEASE NOTE: The Arcane Radio YouTube archive has been moved over to the 'Beyond Explanation' channel. All future Arcane Radio productions will be posted at 'Beyond Explanation' henceforth. You may want to subscribe to 'Beyond Explanation' so that you don't miss an episode. Thanks.
'Winged Cryptids: Humanoids, Monsters & Anomalous Creatures Casebook' is now available in paperback & on Kindle
