Lights in the Woods

Witness: Rachel E.
Location: Mechanicsville, Virginia
Date of Encounter: July 2000

My family and I moved into a rental house in Mechanicsville, Virginia when I was 15. The house had just been built by our landlord and we were the first occupy it. But my experience, however, happened in our backyard.

Our backyard was basically just woods and it had a trail that the neighborhood kids would cut through before our house was built and they still used it from time to time. It was around 1 AM and my friend Allie and I were outside on the deck getting ready to light some left over sparklers from the 4th of July when we both looked up into the woods and saw two red eyes staring right at us. From where we stood, about 30 feet away, the eyes were about six feet off the ground and they moved down the trail toward my house. As they moved we heard the crushing sound of dirt beneath it and the eyes moving in synch with the sound of the footsteps. There was nothing else to see but these lights moving in the darkness. After about 10 seconds we ran inside just as my sister was coming out to join us and we nearly knocked her over. We told her what we saw and she didn't even want to look outside to see if it was still there.

We tried to make sense of it, of course. The red light from these "eyes" looked like the little red light that laser pointers produce. And at that time, almost every boy in my high school had one to annoy people with. But in order for that red light to be seen, it has to bounce off of something, like a blackboard. There was nothing in the woods that night but bushes and trees and these lights were moving. And since we wanted complete darkness for our sparklers we didn't have any lights on inside or outside the house. We even turned the TV off before going outside. So it couldn't have been a reflection. These lights had nothing behind them, under them, or in front of them. These lights, moving and all, were just two lights in thin air.

Two nights later, my sister was in the upstairs bathroom and came running out to tell me she saw something out the window in the backyard. She told me she saw a bright, white light, about the size of a quarter, moving horizontally across the yard in the woods. It wasn't on the trail, but moving across our property from left to right. She said it disappeared when it reached the end of our property.

I finally decided to go into woods the next day to see if I could find any evidence. Because if something was walking out there the night before it should have flattened the bushes or something like that. But nothing was there. We never saw anything else after that. I believe all three of us saw the same spirit.