Was it a dead body? Maybe I'll never know.
Back in 2015, I had the opportunity to live in a rural area of Caracas known as El Junquito.
It’s a mountainous region, traditionally popular with tourists, where people go to enjoy horseback riding, the cool weather, strawberries and cream, inns, and camping trips.
I ended up there thanks to a coworker at the call center where I was working at the time. I lived in La Guaira, and the daily commute to Caracas was exhausting for me. She noticed how desperate I was and offered me a room in her house, located at Kilometer 33 on the Carayaca-El Junquito national highway. There, I lived with her two young children (ages 6 and 4) and her mother, an elderly woman over eighty with Alzheimer’s.
Without giving it much thought, I accepted.
As time went on, I fell in love with the climate, the area’s agricultural potential, and the kindness of its people. I took the idea of buying a plot of land, building a house, and moving there permanently very seriously. With that goal in mind, I began looking into plots for sale.
There was a plot with a good location and easy access that caught my attention. Around that time, my father came to visit; he stayed with me for a week and accompanied me to inspect the site.
We walked deeper into the lot and came to a spot where we noticed the ruins of an old, demolished building; there was barely any debris left, and it was hard to make out what it had been. As we were looking around, we found a very old, half-buried pipe that, I assumed, must have supplied water when the place was still inhabited.
Intrigued, my father and I decided to follow the trail of the pipe, which was visible on the surface and led deep into a dense forest.
We walked uphill for about ten minutes, enveloped in the area’s chilly air. At one point, as I glanced around, my attention was drawn to a clearing amid the damp vegetation. The pipe continued to climb, but that open space stood in stark contrast to the surrounding forest.
As we approached, we saw that the area had been deliberately cleared. The low-hanging branches and bushes showed fresh machete cuts.
But what made the scene chilling was the center of the clearing: a mound of earth about two meters long by half a meter high, hastily covered with fresh leaves and branches.
There was no one there. Just the forest… solitude… and a deeply unsettling silence.
My father, always cautious, reacted instinctively:
“Let’s get out of here.”
But I’m curious by nature—sometimes too much so.
The branches covering the mound looked fresh, no more than three days old. The soil was loose, freshly turned, intentionally piled up to hide something.
We could hear the rustling of the treetops and the dripping of moisture falling onto the carpet of dry leaves. That shouldn’t have been there.
A reckless idea took hold of me. My father insisted that something didn’t feel right and that we should turn back.
“Coward…,” I thought to myself.
On impulse, I climbed onto the branches covering the mound. At that moment, I felt beneath my feet the firmness of something solid buried beneath the loose soil. It wasn’t just a rock or a random log.
Perched on “it,” I crouched down to brush aside the leaf litter. My father, standing a short distance away, sensed a tension in the air, as if it had suddenly grown thick. I remember feeling as though the surroundings had subtly darkened.
My feet dislodged a bit of soil, and that’s when I took in the shape of the mound: it had human-like dimensions. My blood ran cold.
“It’s… it’s…” I muttered in a choked whisper.
My father noticed my face contorting. As if he’d read my mind, he was terrified. He sternly ordered me to get out of there while he scanned his surroundings in terror, fearing that someone or something might emerge from the thicket.
“It’s a corpse…” I stammered.
I immediately jumped off the mound. I saw my father turn as white as a sheet, and we began a frantic race down the mountain, retracing our steps at full speed.
Although I didn’t see or hear anything behind us, the feeling of being chased was overwhelming. In a matter of minutes, we emerged from the thicket and reached the highway. The gloom of the forest was behind us, along with that clearing where someone had buried a secret.
I must confess that I never dug up the ground to see the body. My reaction was the result of terror and the texture of the mass I felt beneath my feet. Fear prevented us from reporting the discovery to the authorities or our neighbors.
However, a few days later, I heard sinister rumors among the local residents about forced disappearances in that same area of the forest.
Posted using Paranormal Hive