The Hollow Hour

The first we knew of it was the silence. Not the gentle hush of a forest settling in for the night, but a suffocating blanket that seemed to press down on our tents in that state campground outside the town of Blackwood. We’d arrived late, after a long drive, and the lady at the office had given us a map with a smile that didn’t touch her eyes. ‘Site 14,’ she’d said, ‘quietest one we’ve got.’ We took it. Quiet was what we wanted.

Our names were Marco, Dana, Jeff, and Sam. We were old friends who’d recently fallen in love with the outdoors, and this was our maiden voyage into the ‘real’ wilderness—this was supposed to be a step up from our usual backyard campouts. But from the moment we stepped out, there was a wrongness in the air, a smell like wet ash and something else, something sweet and sour we couldn’t place. Sam, our resident joker, tried to laugh it off. ‘Probably just some rotten tree stump,’ he said, and we tried to believe him.

We set up camp as the sun bled orange and purple behind the pines. Dinner was canned chili and burnt hotdogs, and we laughed like we always did, but the sound seemed to get swallowed by the trees. The fire was meager, sputtering, as if the wood itself was reluctant to burn. We took turns on watch, each of us an hour, to keep the fire going and watch for bears. Sam took the first, from midnight to one, but when his hour was up, he came to wake Marco with a face pale in the flashlight beam. ‘I kept hearing something,’ he said, his voice tight. ‘Like a woman humming, or a song, far away. And when I went to check, the sound… it moved. Surrounding me. I thought it was a trick, but it stopped as soon as I aimed my light.’ We dismissed it as night noises and a vivid imagination. Marco took the watch.

At two, Marco woke Dana. He was shaking. ‘I felt something breathe on my neck,’ he said, ‘And I saw a figure between the trees, tall and thin, just standing there. I called out, but it didn’t move. I blinked, and it was gone. I didn’t sleep, I just stared at the spot.’ Dana tried to reassure him, blamed the shadows and the long drive. But as she sat by the fire, she noticed something odd—the fire had burned down to a few glowing coals, but it wasn’t the cold that made her skin prickle. It was the hum. It started as a vibration in the ground, so low she felt it in her teeth, and then it rose to a throaty, pulsating drone that seemed to come from all directions. She grabbed the flashlight, sweeping the perimeter, and caught a glimpse of something—a pale shape—ducking behind a tree. Then a rustling in the underbrush, like multiple somethings moving in unison. She rattled the camp bell, and the sound cut off abruptly, leaving a ringing in her ears.

At three, Dana woke me, Liam. I was a heavy sleeper, but her face was white in the flashlight. ‘I’m not kidding, Liam, there’s something out there. It’s not animals.’ I took the watch, my heart hammering. The fire was down to embers. I stoked it, added more wood from our pile, and sat, scanning the trees. For a long while, there was nothing. I thought maybe they’d been spooked by a stray deer or bear. But then I saw it—a perfect silhouette of a man, but too tall, its arms too long, standing just at the edge of the firelight. It didn’t move, but I could feel its gaze. I called out, ‘Hey! You lost?’ No answer. I took a step forward, and it took a step back, always staying at the same distance. This continued for what felt like an hour, until my watch ended. I didn’t want to wake Sam but I did, and I told him, my voice shaking, ‘Don’t leave the fire. Don’t go near the trees.’

Sam took his watch with a joke, but we could see he was scared too. We all pretended to sleep, but no one did. At 4:45, the hum returned, louder, and with it, a sensation of being watched by a thousand eyes. Sam screamed. We rushed out of our tents to find him frozen, pointing at a ring of figures—tall, skeletal, with gaping mouths, all humming in unison. As we stood there, they began to advance, not fast, but with a purpose. We grabbed our gear, threw it in the car, and sped off without bothering to break down camp.

We drove for what seemed like hours, the hum fading behind us, but the silence that followed felt even worse. When we finally stopped at a gas station, we looked at each other. We were all scratched, with mud on our clothes, but we didn’t remember running. On the car’s dashboard, we found a piece of bark, etched with a symbol—a circle within a circle, with a vertical line through the center. And on the back, scratched in what looked like old blood, were the words: ‘The Hollow Hour.’ The attendant didn’t see the mark, but when we asked where we were, he said, ‘You’re in Blackwood. How’d you get here? There’s nothing past the camp for miles.’ We haven’t spoken about it since. But sometimes, at night, I hear that hum—and I know they’ve come back for the missing hour.