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The original was posted on /r/ghoststories by /u/GalacticSonder on 2025-07-03 17:34:00+00:00.
I was up north for a trip in my late twenties (2019). Me, my best friend, and a group of 10 total. Four cars. Same hotel and I shared a room with my bestie. Barbecues, bonfires, fishing — the usual stuff you do on a trip like that.
But one night, almost everyone went to bed early. Me and my closest friend stayed up by a small fire on the beach. It’s so dark there, you can’t even see the water — you just hear it. Even with a fire burning, it’s just black.
After an hour or so, we got hungry. Most of the food was in another room, but we were too lazy to wake anyone up. We decided to grab McDonald's — the only one still open was across the Mackinac Bridge in the Upper Peninsula.
It was around 2:30 a.m.
Crossing the bridge at that hour felt… weird. Quiet. Still. There was no traffic, no lights — just the towering structure of the bridge itself. The kind of eerie calm you can’t explain.
We crossed into the UP, just two guys in a truck. No distractions. No intoxication. Just empty roads and the sound of the tires humming over pavement. At first, everything felt fine.
Then the GPS got weird. The McDonald's was supposed to be 14 minutes away, but it kept redirecting us. Like it was pulling us deeper and deeper off the main roads.
Eventually, we realized we hadn’t seen a single car. No intersections. No lights. Just black forest on both sides.
And then it told us to turn.
The road was barely a road — cracked pavement, only wide enough for the truck by maybe a foot on either side. Cliffs dropped steeply on both sides, so a single wrong move would've sent us tumbling. Still, we took it. Stupid, I know. But we thought it was just some shortcut. We'd be eating in ten minutes, tops. Less than a minute in, my friend leaned in: “Yo... the GPS just went all white.” It was blank. No roads, no signal. My phone too. Dead silent. We were alone. No service. Just our headlights trying to light a road that barely looked real anymore.
The pavement was uneven. Covered in dust and dirt. But still oddly… deliberate. Like someone had made this stretch look official — just enough to fool someone into taking it.
Then the truck jolted violently. We hit something hard. Our bodies lurched. We jumped out, carefully avoiding the edge, and looked underneath. There was a massive boulder, almost entirely buried beneath a thin layer of dirt. It looked like it had been placed there — hidden. The truck was stuck on top of it. And just ahead of us was a gate. A massive, iron gate. At least 12 or 15 feet high. Double doors. Chained shut. But no fence. No house. Just that gate. No reason for it to exist — and yet there it was.
It blocked the road entirely. And the road ended right there. No way through. Just that towering thing in the middle of nowhere.
Panic set in. We tried everything. Pushing, rocking, lifting. We used wood as leverage. Nothing worked. We were stranded on a road that didn’t belong to anywhere.
After nearly an hour, we tried rocking the truck from the inside, in sync. Somehow the engine coughed to life. I floored it in reverse, careful not to go too far or slip off the cliff. But now we had another problem: we had to reverse the entire way out. Half a mile. On a narrow dirt path. In complete blackness.
I drove backward, inch by inch, my hands shaking on the wheel. My friend held his flashlight out the window, helping me guide each tire. That’s when it happened.
We heard it. A laugh — a man’s voice — just outside the passenger window. My friend snapped back inside, shut the window, and didn’t say a word. He just sat there with his eyes shut.
I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know. We kept going, slowly reversing, afraid that something — or someone — was waiting behind that gate. Watching. Or worse, following us. Then we saw the lights.
Dozens of them. Floating through the forest on both sides. Not flashlights. Not headlights. They moved wrong. Some were yellow, some white… and one was a glowing, almost electric blue. “Lanterns?” my friend whispered.
But they weren’t. They drifted in patterns. Like a procession. Like watchers. And then came the scream.
It wasn’t a man. Or a woman. Or an animal. It was all of them, and none of them. One voice made of many, echoing across the trees like a warning. It shook the truck. It shook my bones. It didn’t sound like it came from lungs.
I floored it.
Branches tore at the sides of the truck. I didn’t care. I just kept going. When the wheels hit pavement, I spun the truck around and peeled out like my life depended on it. Maybe it did.
We didn’t stop. Not at the McDonald's. Not at a gas station. We didn’t even speak. The hotel lights never looked so good. But neither of us slept.
My friend sat still, staring at the wall. I stood at the window, waiting to see that blue light again. We didn’t talk about it until the trip ended. Because what still haunts me isn't what we saw. It's what we nearly found behind that gate.