By KEN KORCZAK
Author’s note:
About 25 years ago, I placed a classified ad in several small-town newspapers here in conservative, rural northern Minnesota.
Here is what the ad said:
“Have you seen a UFO, ghost, or anything you can’t explain? Please call me: 555-5555. Confidentiality guaranteed.”
These are the stories that resulted.
Additional note: NOT ALL the calls I received from my classified ad involved UFOs.
The following is one of the strangest:
THE LONELY ROAD IN THE FOREST
The rugged gravel road that winds like a serpent through the thick forests of Minnesota’s Northwest Angle seems especially lonely when you travel it by night in a rattling old pick-up truck.
That’s what David Severy — who told me he was a retired middle management oil company executive from Ohio — was doing one humid summer night in August of 1991.
He was headed for a cabin at the Northwest Angle Resort in Angle Inlet where he was supposed to join his buddies who had arrived ahead of him for a week of fishing.
It was after midnight and David was road-weary, to say the least.
He had started out early in the morning from Esther, Iowa, and had driven all day to reach the wilds of the northern peak of Minnesota — “The Angle!” — as the locals call it for short.
But now, after hundreds of miles, David’s ’65 GM decided it had enough. A sudden loud clunking noise erupted underneath, and the old pick-up lost momentum fast.
I don’t care who you are, it’s a scary feeling to have your truck go dead at night in the middle of the mysterious wilderness of The Northwest Angle.
David had driven this road before and had often seen large bears, moose, wolves and sundry feral beasts prowling the edge of the forest.
Now he was faced with walking along this wild road in the inky blackness of night with God-only-knows-what manner of hairy brute waiting in the dark to jump out at any free warm meal walking by.
David pounded the steering wheel and cursed his old GM, but all the foul language in the world can’t fix a blown U-joint.
He thought about waiting for someone else to come along. However, anyone who has driven the Angle Road knows that the chances of another car coming by late at night are next to none. (Note: This was 1991 and most people did not carry cell phones.)
Cursing his luck, David reached into his cubby for a flashlight and a .22 caliber pistol. The rusty old handgun probably hadn’t been fired in five years. Not much of a “gun guy,” David kept the pistol truck for what he describes to me only as “for whatever emergencies.”
Even so, the thought now of shooting at something in total darkness made him even more nervous.
Suddenly, David’s luck seemed to change.
As soon as he switched off his headlights, he noticed a faint yellow glow coming from deep in the woods on the east side of the road.
“A cabin!” he thought.
He got out of his pick-up and walked toward the light. When he reached the edge of the forest, he could see that the light was still a considerable way into the woods, but it was difficult to tell how far. It was also impossible to discern the exact nature of the light.
It might have been a cabin window, or maybe a campfire. Reluctantly, David stepped into the woods keeping his eyes on the yellow glow. He told me:
“To be honest, I was so scared I was shaking…I mean, there I was out in the black woods with a dim flashlight in one hand and an old pistol in the other. I kept thinking I’d run into a bear. But the worst, I think, is what your own imagination projects out into the dark unknown.”
The woods were wet with dew. The pungent smell of rotting leaves and moldering timber hung in the air, as did patches of mist drifting up from the forest floor. Branches tore at David’s clothing and slapped his face with stings as he moved along. He stumbled often and cursed every time.
All the while, he was filled with fearful uncertainty. He had no idea what the light was! His heart pounded and his mind raced with wild ideas.”
Maybe it was a UFO!
Maybe some murderous lunatic, like Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, hiding out in a shack!
As he got closer, however, David began to sense that what he was approaching was stranger than anything he imagined. About 20 yards away, David made out the shape of three men standing around some manner of large light. In David’s words:
“It definitely wasn’t a campfire,” David said. “I’m sure of that. It didn’t flicker like a campfire. It was a steady glow. It was like a large globe on the ground. And those men were just standing around it, stiff-like — they just didn’t seem right. You usually sit around a campfire, but these guys were stiff and just strange, somehow. Their body language was off-kilter, not natural.”
Despite his fear, David called out to the men. Hearing the shout, the three shadowy figures jerked, whirled around to face him and stood rigidly. Then, according to David, something bizarre happened:
“The light they were standing around transformed instantly into a campfire … I mean, I didn’t see it directly, but one minute it was a steady, glowing light and the next it was a flickering, cracking, smoking campfire!”
Not sure what to think, and without options, David approached the men, squeezing his pistol hard in his sweaty palm while hiding it behind his back. When he got closer the weirdness got weirder. David said:
“They were ordinary-looking men, I suppose, but the way they were dressed was very odd. I mean, one of the guys was wearing a cape! How often do you see anyone in northern Minnesota wearing a cape out in the woods!”
The man with the cape also sported a thick purple shirt with no buttons and matching purple pants. He was wearing tall leather boots. His face and hair seemed normal. His cape was clasped at the shoulder with a magnificent gold ornament that glinted in the firelight.
The second man was wearing pants that were “like knickers,” David said, and were “bunched up like riding pants.”
The man in the riding pants had a shiny bald head, and he wore a loose black sweater tucked into his knickers which fit tight around the waist. He was wearing what David called “thin street shoes.”
The third man wore a long gray cloak that covered most of his body, but he could also see that he wore purple pants and high leather boots. He had long brown hair and a heavy mustache. They had no vehicle that David could see — no sort of RV or 4×4. They also had no camping equipment, no tents, not even anything to make a fire with, such as an axe or hatchet for gathering wood — nothing.
At first, the three men stared at David as if he were as if he was a circus freak, but they quickly to quickly recover and tried to act normal. David said:
“They TRIED to act normal, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that these guys weren’t from around here. Either that, or they were playing some kind of weird game. I just don’t know.”
David stepped up to the fire and said hello. He started to explain that his pick-up had broken down on the road. The man with the bald head stepped up to him, smiled broadly and said in stilted, almost robotic English:
“You have lathed your feet and joined us here to be happy! All three!”
David said:
“I just didn’t know what to think about what he said. It was a weird statement. ‘Lathed my feet?’ What the hell? I thought maybe these guys were Russians, or some kind of foreigners or something who were trying to enter the United States illegally through Canada and the woods of The Angle, or something like that. I don’t know. It just didn’t make much sense.”
Then the guy with the cape moved forward and pushed the bald guy aside. He asked:
“The Ayon? Is it of, Sir?”
David said:
“I’m not sure what you mean. What do you mean by Ayon?”
The three strangers all swerved and darted their eyes at each other significantly as if they were all part of some kind of conspiracy. Then the caped man said:
“You more to say. We hear more to say!”
At this point, David was more certain he was talking to foreign smugglers or border jumpers, like maybe from a remote region in Romania, although he could not fathom their accents. They didn’t sound like Slavs, Russians, Romanians or like any other foreign accents he might recognize. They sounded like people speaking an artificial form of dictionary English.
David said:
“I talked to them some more, but it was extremely awkward. I mean, they were nice, and everything, but nothing they said made any sense. They were speaking English, but it was all mixed up like they were putting together words from a dictionary without really knowing what each word meant in proper context.” There was nothing to do but take his leave. David said goodbye to the three strangers.”
The man in the cape said:
“For positive yes!”
Thus, David made his way back through the woods and found the road again. He spent several hours tramping along in the dark, walking he figures possible 20 miles, finally gaining Angle Inlet without getting eaten by a bear.
“After I showed up, I told my buddies about the strange guys in the woods and they teased the hell out of me, saying I was drunk or high or loony or something. I eventually just stopped talking about it — I don’t like to even bring the subject up anymore because nobody really takes me seriously. But it’s one of those things you just don’t forget about. It’s like an experience that was on the edge of being paranormal, yet there could be a logical explanation for it.”
One last thing: After a week of fishing, David repaired his pick-up and returned home. One of the words the bald man had said was pronounced phonetically like “Ayon” but in a sort of drawn-out way like “a-a-y-o-o-n.”
This seeming neologism kept running through his mind. He got out a dictionary and started looking for similar words or words that sounded similar.
He finally settled on the word “Aeon.” Aeon was another form of the word “eon,” which means: “an indefinitely long period of time; an age.”
David told me:
“Why would he be asking me what eon it was? Were they time travelers? Lost time travelers? They were certainly dressed like nobody I had seen before. Sometimes I think they were from another time. Maybe they were wizards. But then I think: Nah, they must have been smugglers, maybe from some obscure place like Transylvania or something. I just don’t know, but I’ll always wonder about it.”
A FINAL NOTE:
I originally sold this story to FATE magazine, but in that version, I used a fictitious name for David because he wished to remain anonymous. However, David Severy has since passed away, and I am released under our original agreement to use his name.
For more stories of the paranormal, please see: KEN-0N-MEDIUM.
What an awesome story. I could see this as a Ray Bradbury short on tv. Only, this is a true story. I can see this happening, I believe in time travel. I wonder about these things ever since I was a kid. How does it work, I used to ask God. lol. I asked what my purpose was & why I was here. Strange, I even wonder why I did that.
You are so right about that, Evelyn. I’m a huge fan of Ray Bradbury. This saga also sounds like something the science fiction writer Jack Vance would come up with except this appears to have really happened! At any rate, there seem to be many events of “high strangeness” occurring all the time that so many people don’t know about our realize. Thanks for your comments!