I know you’re probably wondering why the hell I’m telling you this. I should have kept my mouth shut, should’ve stayed quiet like everyone else does when they’ve seen something they shouldn’t have. People do it for all sorts of reasons. Some are too scared to talk, afraid that speaking out might invite whatever it is they saw back into their lives. Others stay silent because they can’t put the pieces together, can’t explain what happened, and the fear of not being believed is worse than carrying the memory alone. Then there are those who simply think it’s better to leave the past buried, as if ignoring it will make it go away. The problem is, once you’ve seen something like that, it never truly leaves you, even if you never say a word.
And I need you to know what happened—especially if you’re thinking about hiking alone in the Philippines, in places where the old stories still hold weight. Places like this. You need to understand why it’s a terrible idea to do it alone, especially when the sun starts sinking below the horizon.
The sun was setting when I set off on my hike, somewhere in the mountains of the Visayas. You probably don’t know where that is—hell, most people don’t—but the locals? They know. They know all the old tales, the ones we laugh off as silly superstitions. But when you’re out there, surrounded by thick jungle and nothing but the sound of your own breathing, you start to feel like those stories might not be so far-fetched.
I was stupid, okay? I was doing it for the thrill. The hike, the isolation. I’d read about some remote village hidden in the hills, where no tourists go. The kind of place that would leave you feeling like you’d just stepped back in time. I didn’t think about the warnings. I didn’t think about how many people vanish out there, and I definitely didn’t think about what might be lurking in the dark. It didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time. But I should’ve listened.
Hiking alone at night in the mountains is not just dangerous because of the animals or the terrain. No. It’s dangerous because of what could be out there. What you don’t know is watching you. And trust me, there are things out there, things you never, ever want to meet.
The trail was narrow, winding its way through thick jungle, the kind of place where the trees grow so close together that the sky is barely visible through the gaps. The air was humid, clinging to my skin, and the scent of damp earth filled my lungs with every breath.
I remember the way the sun bled through the trees, staining the leaves gold and crimson. It was beautiful in that eerie, untamed way—like stepping into a world that had never been touched by time. The sounds of the forest were alive around me: the distant trill of birds, the rustling of unseen creatures in the undergrowth, the occasional hum of insects that seemed to grow louder as the light faded.
I don’t remember much from before. Just the feeling of moving forward, step by step, as if the deeper I went, the further I could escape from everything else. I had no real destination—just the vague idea of reaching that forgotten village, of seeing something untouched, something real.
Maybe that was part of the appeal. The idea that I was alone in a place that had existed long before I ever set foot in it.
I wasn’t scared. Not then.
The deeper I went, the more the world seemed to change. The trees were taller, their twisted roots breaking through the earth like veins. The jungle felt denser, the air heavier. There was a strange kind of silence between the usual sounds, a pause in the natural rhythm, but I didn’t think much of it at the time.
I remember stopping for a moment, just to take it in—the way the fading sunlight made the world feel unreal, like something out of an old dream. I was alone, completely and utterly alone, and I thought there was something peaceful about that.
I wish I could say I had noticed something was wrong. That there had been some kind of warning, some sign that told me to turn back.
But there wasn’t.
It was just me, the jungle, and the fading light.
And then, somewhere in the distance, I heard a cry.
It was faint at first—so quiet that I almost convinced myself I was imagining it. Just a thin, distant wail carried by the wind, barely audible beneath the rustling of the trees. I stopped walking. Listened. There it was again. A cry, high-pitched and weak, like a baby left out in the cold.
I felt my stomach clench.
You have to understand—when you hear something like that, you don’t just ignore it. A baby’s cry triggers something deep, something instinctive. It doesn’t matter if you know, logically, that there shouldn’t be a baby out here in the middle of the goddamn jungle. The sound gets under your skin, digs into your bones, makes it impossible to just keep walking.
I turned my head, trying to pinpoint the direction. The sound was slipping between the trees, moving through the dense undergrowth like a thread winding its way through the jungle. It seemed to come from somewhere off the trail, deeper into the forest.
For a second, I hesitated. Every instinct screamed at me that this didn’t make sense. A baby, out here? It wasn’t possible. There were no villages nearby, no campsites. And yet—the cry came again, more urgent this time, cutting through the quiet like a knife.
I took a step forward.
Then another.
Before I even realized it, I was off the trail. The ground was uneven beneath my boots, roots twisting up like skeletal hands trying to grab at my ankles. I moved cautiously at first, ducking under low branches, pushing aside thick vines. The cry kept pulling me forward.
It was strange—no matter how far I walked, the sound never seemed to get closer. It stayed just ahead of me, always out of reach, as if it were leading me somewhere. My pulse was hammering against my ribs, but I wasn’t thinking about danger. I was thinking about that cry. About the tiny, helpless thing that might be lying somewhere in the dark, waiting for someone to find it.
I don’t know how long I kept walking. Time felt strange, slippery. The trees blurred together, the jungle thickening around me, and with every step, I felt like I was being swallowed whole.
And then—
Silence.
It stopped.
I stood there, breathless, straining to hear even the faintest noise.
Nothing. No crying. No rustling. Not even the insects.
Just stillness.
And in that stillness, something shifted.
A creak. A breath of movement.
Behind me.
I turned.
She was standing there.
Not close. Maybe ten meters out, crouched near a banana tree just beyond the curve of the dirt path. An old woman, her frame fragile and too thin, draped in a stained cotton duster that fluttered slightly in the windless dusk. Her hair was thin, brittle white, hanging like cobwebs around her sunken face.
At first, I thought she was a namamalimos, one of the beggars who’d lost their minds after a bad fever or an accident no one could afford to treat. But then she tilted her head—not like a person noticing something, but like a predator measuring distance.
I should’ve said something. Asked who she was, maybe offered help. But the words stuck. Something about her was wrong in a way I didn’t have words for. The way she just stood there. The stillness. The way the dying light didn’t seem to touch her properly. And her eyes—
I didn’t like her eyes.
They were too dark. Not just shadowed, but empty, as if something had hollowed her out from the inside.
Then she spoke.
“Have you seen my baby?”
Her voice was cracked, like dry coconut husk snapping in a fire. It scraped across my skin, made my teeth clench without meaning to.
She took a shuffling step forward, her bare feet dragging against the forest floor. “I heard him crying,” she rasped, tilting her head ever so slightly. “You heard him too, didn’t you?”
I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry.
There was something deeply wrong about this. My brain knew it, my instincts screamed it. But my body—some primal, irrational part of it—clung to the logic that she was just an old woman. A lost grandmother looking for her child.
I forced myself to speak. “I—I heard something, yeah,” I admitted. My voice didn’t sound like my own. “But I don’t think—”
I turned my head slightly, glancing over my shoulder, searching the undergrowth, scanning for any sign of movement. Maybe I’d see a bundle of cloth, a flash of tiny fingers curled in the dirt. Maybe I’d see something, anything to make sense of this.
It wasn’t even a full second. Barely a blink.
But when I turned back, she was right in front of me.
No footfalls. No shifting of leaves. Just suddenly there, a breath away, her face inches from mine.
I stumbled back so fast I nearly lost my footing. A choked gasp escaped me, my heart slamming against my ribs. My brain barely had time to register what had happened, how the hell she could have moved that fast without making a sound.
Her face was closer now. Too close for comfort. The deep wrinkles carved into her skin, the papery texture of it stretched too tight over her sharp cheekbones. And her mouth… She was smiling.
“He’s hungry,” she whispered.
One second, she was too close, her breath like decayed leaves curling against my skin—and the next, my feet were moving on their own, stumbling backward through the tangled undergrowth. My body knew what my mind was still trying to process.
Run.
But I couldn’t.
I was frozen, my breath caught in my throat, watching as her lips stretched further into that awful, too-wide smile. The wrinkles around her mouth deepened, cracked like dry earth, and her teeth—Sharp. Crooked. Too many.
“He’s so hungry,” she said again, her voice rasping like wind through dead branches.
The jungle around me felt like it was leaning in, the trees pressing closer, their twisted roots writhing beneath the soil. The silence was unbearable. Not a single bird, not a single insect. Just the sound of my own heartbeat hammering in my ears.
The cry returned.
Right behind me.
My eyes darted between the trees. The sound was everywhere now, echoing through the jungle, surrounding me. Louder. Angrier. It wasn’t a baby’s cry anymore. It was something else—more like a baby learning to mock human speech.
I didn’t think. I ran.
Branches clawed at my skin as I tore through the undergrowth, my breath coming in ragged gasps. I didn’t know where I was going. The trail was gone, swallowed by the jungle, and the trees all looked the same, shifting in the dim light like they were closing in around me.
The crying never stopped.
It chased me, weaving through the trees, always just behind me. The sound was constantly warping, stretching—like something inside it was laughing.
I forced myself to keep running, even as my legs screamed, even as my lungs burned. The forest blurred around me, the ground uneven and treacherous beneath my feet. I couldn’t tell if I was going in circles or if the jungle itself was shifting, twisting into something unfamiliar.
My foot caught on something. A root, a rock—I didn’t know. But the earth vanished from beneath me, and I went down hard, the impact knocking the breath from my lungs. My head smacked against the damp earth, stars exploding in my vision.
For a moment, I lay there, dazed, the world spinning.
The crying had stopped.
I knew I shouldn’t look.
But I did.
She was standing over me.
No longer an old woman.
Her body had stretched, elongated, her limbs too thin, her fingers tapering into something sharp. Her face—God, her face—was wrong. The bones jutted out at unnatural angles, her mouth stretched too wide, filled with rows of jagged, needle-like teeth.
But her eyes hadn’t changed.
Still black. Still empty.
Still watching me.
She opened her mouth.
Not to speak. To scream.
The sound tore through the air, high and shrill, burrowing into my skull. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t animal. It was something ancient, something starving.
I scrambled backward, every instinct in my body screaming for me to move, to run, but my limbs were slow, heavy, like the air itself had thickened around me.
Her head twitched, jerked to the side, her grin widening. She took a step forward—then another. Her movements were unnatural, a marionette with its strings tangled.
I couldn’t breathe.
She was too close.
Her fingers reached for me.
And then, suddenly, the world snapped back into motion.
Something rustled in the trees. A shadow shifted. A blur of movement, too fast to track.
The woman—that thing—whipped her head toward it.
For the first time, her grin faltered.
Something else was here.
I didn’t wait to see what.
I turned and ran.
But something made me glance back—stupid, reckless curiosity, or maybe just the need to know if I was already too late.
She was changing.
No—splitting.
Right before my eyes, her body tore apart at the waist with a sickening rip. Wet, slopping sounds filled the air as her entrails hung like grotesque vines, pulsing and swaying. Her legs collapsed beneath her, lifeless, while her upper half floated—floated—into the air like it weighed nothing at all.
Wings. Huge, bat-like, leathery wings unfurled from her back, slick with blood and twitching like they were tasting the night air.
Her grin returned.
Wider now. Hungrier.
She twisted in the air with inhuman grace, her eyes locked onto me as her body hung, grotesque and severed, intestines swaying like roots yanked from the earth.
I choked on a sob and forced myself to run faster, even as my vision blurred and my muscles screamed for mercy. Branches whipped at my face. Roots grabbed at my ankles. The jungle didn’t want me to leave.
This time, I didn’t stop. Not when the jungle clawed at me, not when the darkness pressed closer. I ran until my legs gave out, until I collapsed onto the dirt path, my body shaking, my vision swimming.
I had found the trail.
And when I finally forced myself to look back—She was gone.
No old woman. No twisted thing hovering in the trees, no bat-like wings or jagged teeth.
Just the jungle.
Silent.
I must’ve blacked out at some point. Or maybe my mind just shut down to protect itself. Because the next thing I remember is waking up in the dirt, the sky above me no longer black but that eerie pre-dawn gray, the kind that barely hints at morning. My clothes were damp with sweat, my legs stiff and trembling. And my body—Jesus, my body—felt like it had been dragged through hell. Scrapes burned along my arms, my palms were raw, and my ankle throbbed like I’d twisted it at some point.
But I was alive.
The jungle was still there, silent and dense behind me. But the moment I opened my eyes, I knew—I was out. Somehow, I’d stumbled my way back to the main trail. And more than that, I could hear something in the distance.
Water.
It was a stream, not far from the path. I could hear it bubbling over rocks, cutting through the silence like the first real, tangible proof that I was back in the world of the living. I forced myself to stand, to limp my way toward it. When I reached the bank, I collapsed onto my knees, scooping up handfuls of cold water and splashing it over my face, drinking in desperate gulps until my stomach clenched.
I saw my reflection.
I looked like a goddamn ghost.
Pale. Hollow-eyed. There were scratches on my face, a thin trickle of dried blood at my temple. My pupils were blown wide, too much white around the edges, like some part of me hadn’t caught up to the fact that I was safe yet.
I don’t remember much about the rest of the journey back. It felt like I was floating through it, my body moving on autopilot, my brain refusing to think too hard about anything. I just walked. One step after another, through the thinning trees, through the rising dawn, through the exhaustion that settled deep into my bones.
Until, finally, I reached civilization.
Not a village, not some welcoming place with warm fires and open doors. Just a dirt road cutting through the trees. A signpost, weathered and half-rotted. A hint of tire tracks stamped into the mud.
I followed it.
It took hours before I saw another person. A truck rumbled up the road sometime around midday, its engine breaking the silence like a gunshot. I must’ve looked like a lunatic when I stepped into the road, waving my arms, stumbling toward them with my torn-up clothes and wild eyes.
The driver was an older man. Local. He took one look at me and didn’t ask questions—just let me climb into the back of his truck, where I sat in dazed silence as he drove me the rest of the way down the mountain.
He gave me a necklace—an old, worn rosaryo—and told me to keep it with me. Always.
“They’re still out there,” he said. “And some of them never left the trees.”
By the time we reached town, my head was clearer. The real world felt real again—the sound of distant radios playing tinny music, the chatter of people moving through the streets, the way the sunlight felt warm instead of suffocating.
But I couldn’t shake it. That feeling. That knowing.
It would’ve been so easy to turn away, to press my hands over my ears and keep walking. To tell myself, “It’s nothing. It’s just the wind. It’s just the forest playing tricks.”
There’s a reason people say to ignore a baby’s cry when it comes from somewhere you shouldn’t be. There’s a reason they tell you to call the authorities, to let the proper people deal with it.
Because not all things are meant to be found. Not all cries are cries for help. Some are just lures. And sometimes, even if it hurts, the best thing you can do is leave them behind. Let it stay in the shadows, out of reach.
Some things—some things in this world aren’t meant to be questioned. Some things aren’t meant to be followed.
Or else you might end up like me—caught between the world of the living and something else entirely. And trust me, that’s not a place anyone wants to be.
I’ll never make the mistake again.
And if do you ever find yourself alone in the jungle, with the night pressing in around you and a baby’s cry drifting through the trees—Don’t listen.
Don’t look.
And for the love of God—
Don’t follow.