Everyone loves the woods. Something about the fullness of life teeming within them paired with the emptiness gets everyone buckwild about going for a nature stroll. But some forests, as a result of their popularity, can become terrifying cesspools of overcrowding, criminal activity, and, yes, hauntings.

We were recently reached out to by a young man in his twenties, who wouldn’t give his real name but called himself Pete for the sake of conversation. Pete is one of these wandering souls who find their solstice in walks alone through nature trails, but because of what he encountered a few mornings ago, he may want to rethink his future leisure activities.

The morning of May 12, 2018 in Hellertown, Pennsylvania was pretty rainy and gloomy. And, as all normal people, Pete thought he would take a walk! His morning went a little like this:

“I was running for a bit down Main Street, and yeah, it was wet. It had rained for most of my run, but it wasn’t raining that much when I turned down Water Street to take a lap around the park. Mid-lap, a dog caught my eye and I veered over to ask the owner if I could pet it. I love dogs — anyway, so that’s how I came to see a trail that I knew about but had never been down before. I didn’t have anywhere to be until 3 that day, so I thought, ‘Why not?'”

Pete said that the trail started on the edge of a wood, and depending on which way you go, you can take a walk through them before you get to these huge cinder piles. Pete took the branch that leads almost directly to these cinder piles, and jogged and walked around them a few times, but on his last lap, he began to notice strange occurrences.

“I jogged one or two laps around the piles, and then I saw a deer and stopped running so I could see how close I could get to it before it ran away. Not very close, it turned out, but then I kept walking because I felt I was enjoying myself. I was on my fourth or fifth lap when I heard a ukulele off somewhere to my left.”

The ukulele, he describes, wasn’t playing a song, but rather, sounded like it was trying to pick out a succession of chords — it kept repeating the same pattern with variations each time.

“I went, I was sort of like, ‘Who brought a ukulele to the woods at 6 in the morning?’ Yeah, it intrigued me, so I followed the sound to a collection of pillars that looked like they might have held up a bridge at some point. The pillars had graffiti everywhere on them. I looked around, but nobody was anywhere near and the music had stopped.”

The confused young man, at this point, wanted to find this mystery musician. He called out if anyone was around, but nobody answered. But what he saw next confused him even more.

“Not a soul was answering me, in fact, there was nobody around. I would know — and I mention this because of what I’m about to say — because those woods were loud. I mean, you couldn’t walk a step on the ground without a 25-foot radius around you knowing you were there. I hadn’t heard any footsteps going away from the pillars, or coming to them, which is why it was weird when I heard and saw a young boy sprinting past me. He looked, like, 12 or 13. I heard the footsteps as if they had started near me, not as if they had been running down and come from either direction of the trail.”

The boy was wearing a t-shirt and shorts, even though it was 50 degrees outside that morning, but the oddest thing about him was that his clothes were soaked. His clothes were soaked, but his hair was perfectly dry. Pete watched him run down the trail, out of sight. He looked the other direction, and when he didn’t see anyone, he resumed his walk, going in the same direction that the boy had ran.

“It was weird, but I wasn’t scared, at that point, not yet. Yeah, I was confused, I was all like, ‘I’ll go this way, in case I see him again. Where are his parents?’ I didn’t know. I kind of hoped that I didn’t run into him.”

But his confusion would only get worse.

“So not even ten minutes later, I’m on the other side of the cinder piles, on the same path, but this place has got the piles on one side of it, and cliffs that overlook the path on the other. I was putting in my bluetooth earbuds when I saw a group of maybe six or so kids — teenagers, maybe. I forget what genders, but I’m sure there was a mix of girls and boys. They were standing on one of the small cliffs, talking to each other and gesturing at something on the other side of the cinders, that I couldn’t see from where I was standing. Then they looked down at me, stared for a bit, and retreated back out of eyesight.”

He says he got the impression that they were just hanging out at first, and had went away when they saw a grown-up. Much like the ukulele, he had wondered why they were out here so early. But when he got back to the pillars where he had saw the first boy, he saw him again, this time, among the same teenagers he had seen on the cliffs. They were all running, but not in an organized manner; in a panicked, we-need-to-get-somewhere-fast manner. They ran straight past him without even giving him a glance.

“I can’t explain to you why I was so scared. I don’t understand how they all could have gotten to the complete other side of the woods without making a sound, but I knew they were just kids.”

However, the strangest thing he saw that morning was the first boy he had seen, drenched, not even ten minutes before — was completely dry. He could tell from the way he was moving.

“No way he dried off that fast. No way.”

So he did what any rational person would do in this situation — he chased after them. When he caught up enough to see the group, he heard the youngest boy yell “Razem!” in a thick, youthful Scottish accent. Some of the others yelled it too, but they had American accents.

“They were just running, screaming, ‘Razem! Razem!’ Not even out of breath, just kept running and screaming. Finally, when they turned a corner and I couldn’t see them anymore, they stopped screaming and I stopped hearing their footsteps. I came up to the same corner, turned it, and came…”

To the end of the path. The end of the path that was in the opposite direction. He hadn’t even remembered running past the fork in the road, the fork he knew took him back to the place he was standing.

“It was too much for me. I went home, no questions answered, and spilled everything out to my wife. She told me to tell someone who could ask the question: did anyone else see anything like this?”

Did anyone else see anything like this? Share your experiences in the old Thomas Iron Site.