By Tim Binnall
An Irish woman says that a recent walk in the woods took a frightening and possibly mystical turn when she got lost in the forest and then heard an eerie disembodied voice that many have suggested was a fairy trying to lead her astray. According to a local media report, the chilling experience occurred earlier this month when the unnamed witness went on a stroll in a wooded area near her home in the county of Meath as part of an effort to "get my steps up for a challenge" at her job. The jaunt seemed normal at first, until she came upon two identical trees at the end of a path and the proverbial fork in the road sent her on quite the strange adventure.
Stepping between the trees, she touched them both and noticed that one was warm while the other seemed to be wet and cold. Taking a left, she found that the path led to a "really overgrown forest," which seemed like the wrong way to proceed, so she returned to the spot and took a right, but that "similarly went nowhere." Now somewhat confounded, the woman decided to simply walk back along the path in the direction from where she had originated, however now the area "didn't look familiar." At attempt at figuring out where she was via Google Maps proved to be futile due to a poor signal, so she opted to "keep trying paths" under the assumption that "I'd eventually get somewhere."
As she ventured down a trail "towards a really overgrown area," she suddenly heard a very high-pitched woman's voice calling out "over here." The witness initially suspected that this might have been a mom trying to wrangle her children, the mood quickly changed when the mysterious stranger unleashed a chilling laugh. "I have never felt such fear in my life," the woman later recalled on Twitter, "the backs of my legs tingling and the hair standing on the back of my neck." The experience got even more unnerving when the witness heard the ethereal voice call out and laugh once again, but now it was emanating from the opposite side of the woods.
At this point, she says "I knew something wasn't right" and "got this really bad feeling that things were not going to end well for me if I didn't do something." Although her first instinct was to flee the scene, the woman observed that she actually had no idea which direction she should run. She then remembered a bit of fairy lore surrounding people who find themselves in such situations and proceeded to turn her t-shirt inside out. "I felt like it was just mental," she conceded, but stressed that "I just had to do it." Strangely, it would seem that this tactic may just worked as she soon found the two trees along the path and followed it until the silence that had previously surrounded her turned to the sounds of birds and people.
Incredibly, when she got back to her car, she checked her Fitbit and saw that she had inexplicably acquired a whopping 10,000 steps during the puzzling ordeal. Although previously a skeptic of the fairy legends long associated with her country, the woman conceded that the unsettling experience has given her second thoughts about the veracity of such tales. After sharing her story on social media, she discovered that the incident may have been a case of 'stray sod,' which is a phenomenon wherein a person is said to stumbled upon enchanted grass that causes the traveler to become disoriented and lost. What do you think the woman experienced while walking in the woods? Share your thoughts with us at the C2C Facebook page.