According to the official police reports, there was never a rescue team searching Blackridge Forest the night my friends disappeared.
No park rangers.
No volunteers.
No emergency dispatch calls.
Nothing.
But something found us out there.
And it knew exactly how humans were supposed to look.
My name is Jason Mercer.
Last October, me and four friends traveled into Blackridge National Forest to film a documentary about missing persons cases connected to an area locals call “The Quiet Zone.”
Over forty people vanished there over the last twenty years, and nearly every survivor report mentioned the same things:
Whistles in the woods.
Voices calling from the trees.
And rescue workers that didn’t look right.
At first the trip felt normal.
We joked around, filmed drone footage, interviewed locals, and camped deep inside the forest.
But the farther we hiked, the quieter everything became.
No birds.
No insects.
No animal sounds at all.
Just silence.
Then our GPS stopped working.
Our batteries drained for no reason.
And that night, my friend Dylan discovered someone standing behind our tents in the background of our footage.
A man in a rescue uniform.
Completely motionless.
Watching us.
Nobody had seen him while filming.
A few hours later I woke up to somebody whispering my name outside the tent.
I thought it was one of my friends until I realized everyone was asleep beside me.
When I looked outside, a rescue worker was standing between the trees smiling at me in the dark.
The next morning an entire search-and-rescue team appeared from the woods claiming they were sent to guide us back to safety before a storm arrived.
At first they seemed normal.
Until we noticed they never blinked on camera.
They repeated conversations word-for-word.
They somehow knew things we never told them.
And every time they smiled, it looked forced.
Like something pretending to be human.
That night Dylan disappeared.
We found his camera beside a creek.
The footage showed him running through the woods while hearing our voices calling for help around him.
Then the camera caught one of the rescue workers standing in the trees.
It didn’t have a face.
Just smooth pale skin stretched where features should’ve been.
That was the moment we realized the rescue team wasn’t human.
We ran.
The deeper we got into the forest, the worse things became.
Voices copied us from the darkness.
Fake cries for help echoed underground.
We eventually found abandoned tunnels beneath an old ranger station filled with VHS tapes from missing hikers dating back decades.
Every tape showed the same rescue team.
Same uniforms.
Same smiles.
The things living under Blackridge were copying people.
Replacing them.
And they used rescue workers because humans instinctively trust them.
Only two of us made it out of those tunnels alive.
At least I think Maya made it out.
When we finally reached the highway, police vehicles were already waiting for us.
Maya started crying the moment she saw them.
Then one of the officers smiled at me.
The exact same smile Captain Rainer had.
That was three months ago.
The disappearances around Blackridge are still happening.
And sometimes late at night I still hear radio static outside my apartment window followed by a voice calmly saying:
“We found another group.”
Credit: J.Lepert
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