What would you do if a friend swore she heard a woman crying for help in the woods, and nobody else could hear a thing? That is how one of the strangest Predator-style encounters I have come across begins. It ends with four hikers lost a short walk from a trail they knew well, staring up at something see-through perched 50 feet up a tree.
The story was posted to the r/aliens subreddit about five years ago by a user named 01101001100. It took place in California’s San Bernardino National Forest, and it has a little bit of everything that makes these cases so unsettling. A phantom voice, a sudden loss of direction, a forest gone dead silent, and a translucent humanoid that seemed to be watching them right back.
The poster opened with a line a lot of witnesses could relate to:
“OK, I totally understand if no one believes this, because we are still unsure of what the f*** happened, but we sat down, and came to a consensus on the events, and all agreed we witnessed the same thing.”
A Voice Only One of Them Could Hear
The group was four friends on a two-day hike, Thursday and Friday, sticking mostly to known trails and mostly hiking during the day. On Friday they were making their way toward Clark’s Summit when things started to go sideways. Literally.
“As we were walking, one by one we noticed that we were veering off the trail. I asked my friend in front of me why he was going off the trail, and he asked our friend who was in front of him the same thing. The friend in front told us ‘I can hear a woman talking, you guys don’t hear that?’ (we didn’t hear anything).”
The friend in the lead was a woman, and she was certain she was hearing another woman in trouble, and close by. It was already getting dark, and the rest of the group wanted to keep going and set up camp. She wasn’t letting it go.
“Okay, I get a bit spooked now because she’s absolutely serious, and we absolutely could not hear whatever she was hearing.”
According to her, the voice said things like “I’m over here” and “Please help me,” and it sounded hurt and crying.
Lost a Few Hundred Yards From the Trail
Here is where a weird hike turned into something else. By the poster’s estimate, they only went about 300 to 400 meters off the trail. That is not far. Yet they couldn’t find their way back.
“We don’t have any fancy gear or GPS stuff because we’ve never needed it, but we’ve been on this trail enough to know we hadn’t gone far, yet we couldn’t find the trail in any direction after [walking] for about 15-20 mins. I started to feel weird, kinda dizzy/lightheaded, and when I mentioned this the other two said they felt weird as well.”
Then came the line that stuck with me most:
“It was like something had changed the environment around us, or moved us somehow to another location.”
Fully dark now, they did the smart thing. They stopped walking, found a clearing, and set up their two tents, figuring the trail would be easy to find once the sun came up.
Something in the Tree
They never got the chance to sleep.
“Before we could even lay down to rest, I noticed a tree near us was moving as if something was climbing it. It was really dark, and I wear glasses so I really struggled to see, so I called them over to see. I thought it was an animal at first… But it wasn’t an animal, it wasn’t anything! I could see the ‘outline’ of what roughly looked like a human shape, but it was transparent, like completely see-through. The best way I can describe it, is the way heatwaves look on the pavement in the summer, you know, that wavy/liquid effect.”
Everyone saw it. The only reason they could pick it out at all was the way the leaves and branches around it shifted as it moved.
It settled on a large branch about 50 feet up and just sat there. As the poster put it, “It’s like it was watching us watch it.” The group stood frozen, whispering theories back and forth. The poster thought optical illusion. The others went straight to aliens.
Then they noticed something worse.
“The other oddity is that after staring at this thing for about 10 minutes, we noticed all the normal forest sounds we heard prior had stopped COMPLETELY. I mean the only noise was us talking, and the leaves under our feet. The hairs on my neck stood up, and I had goosebumps all over when I realized this, like something was truly wrong.”
After about ten minutes, the figure climbed higher until they lost it in the dark canopy. They circled the base of the tree with their necks craned, but the trees were too close together and the night too dark to see the top. They never heard it jump to another tree, so as far as they knew, it was still up there.
Nobody was sleeping under that.
Back on the Trail in Five Minutes
They packed up and started walking toward the moon. What happened next might be the strangest part of the whole thing.
“I s*** you not, after about 5 minutes of walking, we were back on the trail! I literally dropped my bag and said what the f*** out loud. We all stood there confused, looking around trying to confirm what we were seeing.”
Twenty minutes of wandering couldn’t find the trail. Five minutes of walking away from that tree put them right back on it.
The poster summed up the feeling better than I could:
“Whatever happened, it seemed kind of, I guess predatory. Like it seems like something was luring us, or trying to confuse us.”
He added that no drugs were involved, and that his female friend still thinks the others were messing with her about not hearing the woman.
The Voice in the Woods Is an Old Story
If the calling voice sounds familiar, there is a reason. Several commenters on the original post connected it right away to Missing 411 cases, where people vanish in national forests and parks, often after briefly splitting from their group. One user pointed out that it almost sounded like something was trying to get the friend in front to wander off alone. Another made the same point a little more bluntly: as long as the group stayed close together, it never got its chance.
As one commenter pointed out, being lured away by a cry for help or the voice of a loved one is a theme in legends around the world, from will-o’-the-wisps in Europe to skinwalkers and “stick Indians” in Native American lore. The same commenter noted that “the silence” is something people describe again and again in all kinds of strange encounters.
And this isn’t the only translucent humanoid case with that detail. In a well-known account featured in Missing 411: The Hunted, an Ohio hunter named Jan Maccabee described the woods going dead silent right before she saw a mirage-like shape move past her tree stand.
One commenter who said they had hiked those same San Bernardino mountains described their own moment there. They turned a bend and felt a shift. The birds, the creek, and even the wind in the leaves went silent, and they couldn’t hear the hikers ahead or behind them. When they turned back the way they came, everything switched back to normal.
What Could Explain It?
It is fair to look for ordinary answers first. Getting turned around in the dark happens to experienced hikers all the time, and being lost can make everyone feel shaky and lightheaded. A raccoon or ringtail climbing a tree at night, seen through glasses in near darkness, could look like a lot of things.
Sound can carry oddly in mountain terrain too, so the voice could have been a real person far off, or an animal. One commenter even suggested infrasound, low frequencies we can’t hear but can feel, as a possible cause of that sudden sense of dread.
But those explanations each cover one piece. They don’t explain why only one person heard the voice. They don’t explain a group of friends all describing the same see-through, man-shaped outline that sat still and watched them for ten minutes. And they don’t explain the forest going silent, or walking straight back to the trail after failing to find it.
I keep coming back to the order of events. A voice draws them off the trail. They get lost and disoriented. Then something is waiting in the trees. Whether this was an alien, some kind of interdimensional being, or something we don’t have a word for yet, the poster’s word for it feels right. Predatory.
Final Thoughts
This group did a few things right. They stuck together, they stopped moving once they were lost, and they didn’t follow a voice into the dark alone. Maybe that is the only reason they had a story to post at all.
If you hear someone calling for help in the woods and nobody with you can hear it, it might be worth asking yourself who, or what, is doing the calling.
Seen something unexplained? Email Reports@ParaRational.com
