night_son
Diamond Member
**Extremely long post ahead . . .
My wife and I very recently purchased a new home in the far north mountains. For the holidays—in order to gather our families in one place and hole up until our new home was move-in ready—we rented a lodge in the mountains several hours to the north, through a popular online booking service. The rental home was a massive cedar shingle roof lodge set on the side of a mountain and very remote with a 3/4 mile long dirt (mud, as it turned out) driveway, located amid over 1,000 acres of forest. Great, right? Well . . . not so much as it turned out. Read on (please) to find out why.
So the wife and I caravan up to the lodge with several family members in several other vehicles with other family guests set to come up at various later dates. This was around December 10th. According to the lodge owner a key was to be placed under a doormat on the side of the garages for us to find and use to get inside. We ended up arriving much later than anticipated that day (night, really) due to my wife's frequent restroom breaks and stopping off to eat at a Denny's whose manager we had to convince, at length, to admit our service dog.
Right, so we get up to the lodge around 20:30 hours. It's freezing cold on the mountainside and pitch black; no lights were left on inside the lodge and the driveway behind the garage parking pad is a tunnel of darkness. I get this feeling, call it my old "Spidey" sense, that something is "off". I get out of the Jeep, draw my .45 Glock, and flick on its rechargeable flashlight. Keep in mind there are several young children in the other vehicles and we're deep in bear (and Russian boar) country.
I check for a key under the doormat to the right of the garage, which is under a wooden awning; no key to be found. So I tell my wife to text the lodge owner to see what's up. Meanwhile, I climb the long, steep set of (frozen) stairs leading up to a deck which runs the length of the house, which is over 140 feet long end to end (more on that later). When I get to the main entrance door I notice that the closest set of sliding glass doors is OPEN and there's a pack of empty Marlboro Lights cigarettes on the deck railing with a freshly smoked butt on the deck itself. My wife texts me to tell me that the owner replied: there's no key under the mat . . . they let the garage side door open for us.
Now red flags are popping up one after the other. I pull the slide, chamber a round, and decide to mean business. This lodge is like a really expensive structure with a ton of unique furniture and such inside it, according to the pictures we viewed online. So I head inside, sweep the place room by room, floor by floor. About fifteen minutes later, I call the place clear and safe and turn on all the lights. I get everyone safely inside and we throw several prime rib burger patties on the deck grill.
A note about the layout of this lodge. The first/main floor is over twenty feet above ground. One end is a massive three story A-Frame style structure with a large living room and loft master bedroom above, while the other side is a lower structure with high vaulted pine ceilings. The center of the place is divided by two parallel hallways, one running along the front (lots of bay windows) and the other the back, containing a laundry room, restroom and various coat and other closets. The low end of the house contains a large kitchen, dining room the size of a ballroom floor, another living room and a few more bedrooms. There are skylights everywhere. The entire underneath, or ground level of the place, is a three part garage/rec room with the owner's two fishing boats, work benches, a pool table, ping pong, table and air hockey table. Finally, there are two stairways up from the garage, one at either end.
A second note. The owner's father was supposed to live on the property in another cabin approximately one mile or so farther up the dirt road. She repeatedly offered to have him stop by to "make sure we got settled in" but both my wife and I declined as we just wanted to be left in peace to enjoy family time.
Okay. So we got settled in and went about having a great time with family—who continued to arrive over the next few days. However, all the while and in the back of my mind, I couldn't shake the feeling that someone had been squatting in the lodge or even waiting for us to arrive—smoking cigarettes on the deck like a chimney. That and the side sliding glass door had obviously been pried at with a screwdriver. But we decided not to tell the lodge owner as we did not want to have to sit for hours filling out police reports. We figured we'd tell her when we left.
So days go by, we're having a great time and all, but I continue to notice little things that are out of place. I decided to pick up all the cigarette butts beneath the deck so we would not get blamed for dropping them there. I am a smoker but always a respectful one. My sister, who was always up late, constantly felt as though someone was watching her from the night mountain darkness . . . there were very few curtains on any of the large bay windows throughout the place.
Even after picking up like eighty-some cigarette butts more of them "magically" appeared each morning. Obviously someone was watching us from the woods, as I also found beer cans and other trash around the property. We sought and received permission to hike the mountain wilderness, although the owner cautioned us that her family would be hunting farther up the mountainside. Now, I had brought a hunting rifle, a carbine, in hopes of going on a boar hunt, but the owner's father apparently told her had not seen any boar lately and she did not feel comfortable with me and my brother out there, armed, while her family was hunting whitetails. Fair enough. She then told me perhaps I could go hunting when deer season ended in a few days.
But wait . . . it gets even weirder. One of my family members on or around our third night there discovered a long crawlspace at the back of the lodge behind a towel rack in the laundry room. Inside it we found sneakers (wet) and a laundry basket with blankets, almost like our mysterious squatter had been sleeping there. Creepy, huh?
So we get permission to fish in a pond on the property stocked with brown and rainbow trout which was located by the owner's father's cabin. We head over one morning to be greeted by two men loading a work van from what was supposed to be the father's home. They act normal enough, telling us they are friends of the owner and were renting the father's cabin during deer season. And then it gets weird. We had our dog in the Jeep with us (as always) and the two men advise us to never allow him to run free as there are coyote traps set all over the mountain. Our dog seemed to scare them. So we fish, catch some really nice trout, and my young nieces and nephews get extremely muddy. Me? I want to head to the local store and buy smokes so I was not really thinking about any threats. My wife and I leave my sister to clean up the kids' shoes before getting in their vehicle. Later that night she tells me about how those two mystery men approached her after I left and asked her all kinds of questions, such as where we were from and sort of flirted with her. She is married, wears a ring. The owner had said nothing about those two dudes being around.
Eventually, my family members all depart, leaving my wife, our dog and me all alone at the lodge and still expecting other family members to show up in a few days. But that never happens due to a forecasted major blizzard set to hit in a day or so. From the moment we were alone at the lodge lots of weird shit started going down. I found more fresh cigarette butts. More trash in the woods. Our dog started freaking out, sniffing the front door and all around the game room in the garage at night. One morning, from the master bedroom up in the loft, I watched someone shine a flashlight beam into the A-Frame side of the place just before dawn. Of course I was armed and ready . . . but still.
On the night of the big snowstorm the motion lights on the side of the lodge along the deck kept going off/on. They had only activated previously when I went out there to smoke. My wife thought it was the snow coming down doing it, but it wasn't. We also heard lots of noises at all hours of the day/night . . . sounds like people walking around downstairs and up and toilets flushing.
We texted the owner to offer to pay her for a couple of more nights in order to wait out the storm and to see if someone was going to plow the long driveway. She offered us two more nights at the lodge for free and indicated her father, who owned a tractor with a bucket, would have us plowed out after the snow stopped. Actually, it was quite romantic—being snowed in with my wife under 31" of powdery winter fun.
The day the storm ended the owner's father tried to get down to us but made little progress. I was out of cigarettes so I hiked through the deep snow over a mile to a convenience store which turned out to be closed anyway. All the while I was certain someone was watching me and I did not make it back to the lodge until after dark. I wasn't too worried about my wife being alone. She had the dog, was well armed and is quite a good shot.
Finally, the next morning, the owner's father showed up on his little John Deere tractor. I went down to the garage to talk to him. He looked over my shoulder, saw only the one car in the garage and said something like he thought he was coming to "rescue" a bunch of small children. He also said with a laugh that he didn't think he'd get us out until Christmas. He then received a phone call on his cell, talked to someone for a few minutes, hung up and explained to me that his brother-in-law, who lived on a nearby farm, owned a much larger tractor with a plow and would have us out by noon that day. Several times shortly thereafter I explained to him that his daughter had given us a couple more days there in order to wait for the roads to be clear for our return home . . . a drive of something like 437 miles. But he insisted we leave that day until I flat out told him we were staying two more nights. This made my wife feel very uncomfortable, combined with all the weird stuff going on as well.
So our last night at the lodge finally arrived. We made a great dinner and played some chess and set in to enjoy our final evening on the mountain. Around sunset I opened one of the garage doors to let our dog out to go (the snow drifts made it impossible for him to run off). Our dog, a Blue Heeler, rarely barks and if he is about to go after someone he doesn't like he makes NO noise, just bolts at them. As soon as I opened the garage door he bolted off in attack mode but I called him back, fearing there was a bear or boar out there close.
I return upstairs—the hairs standing up on the back of my neck—and decide to take a peek out the front windows with my FLIR scope (night vision). Meanwhile our dog is going nuts, whimpering at the doors and windows and scaring the heck out of my wife. So I look out the front window with the heavy curtains drawn. What do I see? Several men standing about seventy feet down the driveway beside a large farm truck—a number of them wearing Halloween masks that look like dragon or devil faces. I can see their heat signatures clearly in the eerie black and white field of view. One of them is smoking a cigarette. You guessed it . . . Marlboro Lights.
I turn to my wife and as calmly as possible inform her of the situation and that we have two choices: try to wait out the night in the lodge where there's more defilade (cover) or pack quickly and take our chances in the Jeep—hoping the long muddy/snowy driveway is still open. Much to her credit she remains calm, decides to pack and I get geared up with my rifle, pistol and yes—assault vest—which I just happened to bring along. While she's packing I open the few curtains and parade around, clearly heavily armed, in front of the windows, occasionally watching the men outside through my night vision scope.
Around 45 minutes later we're ready to load the Jeep and go. And then the Jeep's car alarm goes off. My poor wife, she was so terrified. I head down into the garage a few minutes later figuring it was a diversion to get us separated. No one is down there. I cover my wife while she loads the Jeep and our dog runs around the garage sniffing and whimpering. Just as we're about to get into the Jeep we hear people walking around right above us upstairs. We get into the Jeep, open a garage door; I toss the garage door opener and we zoom off down the driveway and into the -6 degree night. To hell with closing the damn garage door behind us.
Alright. So I've left out a few details. Right after the Jeep alarm went off, while my wife was finishing up packing, someone tried to open the door leading from the garage up to the kitchen where we were located at that moment. With one hand and foot I held the door shut (I'm a big dude) and with the other I aimed my carbine at the door and tried to talk calmly with whoever was on the other side. Nothing but heavy breathing.
And finally, as we were pulling out of the garage I saw, very clearly, that several of the masked men had entered the house and were looking out the front windows. Whew! We just made it.
If you've bothered to read this massive post I'd like your input on a question or two. What do you think was the intention of the masked men toward my wife and I? Did they just want to scare us out of there? Or did they actually want to harm us? Keep in mind the next party scheduled to rent the lodge cancelled their week's stay due to the blizzard. And who were the masked men? The owner's father and/or those two mysterious dudes we encountered at the trout pond? My writer's imagination half thinks we were about to be sacrificed by some kind of hillbilly cult for the winter solstice. Crazy, I know . . . but it all happened . . . to us.
End of the day . . . thank God no one was hurt, because I nearly opened fire through that door leading down into the garage. A last thought: we're still debating whether or not to tell the owner about any of this.
**Edit: the day after the last of our family departed the lodge I found the key under the deck.
Thanks for reading.
Afterthought: I believe what "saved" us was twofold: my being visibly armed and the presence of our dog.
My wife and I very recently purchased a new home in the far north mountains. For the holidays—in order to gather our families in one place and hole up until our new home was move-in ready—we rented a lodge in the mountains several hours to the north, through a popular online booking service. The rental home was a massive cedar shingle roof lodge set on the side of a mountain and very remote with a 3/4 mile long dirt (mud, as it turned out) driveway, located amid over 1,000 acres of forest. Great, right? Well . . . not so much as it turned out. Read on (please) to find out why.
So the wife and I caravan up to the lodge with several family members in several other vehicles with other family guests set to come up at various later dates. This was around December 10th. According to the lodge owner a key was to be placed under a doormat on the side of the garages for us to find and use to get inside. We ended up arriving much later than anticipated that day (night, really) due to my wife's frequent restroom breaks and stopping off to eat at a Denny's whose manager we had to convince, at length, to admit our service dog.
Right, so we get up to the lodge around 20:30 hours. It's freezing cold on the mountainside and pitch black; no lights were left on inside the lodge and the driveway behind the garage parking pad is a tunnel of darkness. I get this feeling, call it my old "Spidey" sense, that something is "off". I get out of the Jeep, draw my .45 Glock, and flick on its rechargeable flashlight. Keep in mind there are several young children in the other vehicles and we're deep in bear (and Russian boar) country.
I check for a key under the doormat to the right of the garage, which is under a wooden awning; no key to be found. So I tell my wife to text the lodge owner to see what's up. Meanwhile, I climb the long, steep set of (frozen) stairs leading up to a deck which runs the length of the house, which is over 140 feet long end to end (more on that later). When I get to the main entrance door I notice that the closest set of sliding glass doors is OPEN and there's a pack of empty Marlboro Lights cigarettes on the deck railing with a freshly smoked butt on the deck itself. My wife texts me to tell me that the owner replied: there's no key under the mat . . . they let the garage side door open for us.
Now red flags are popping up one after the other. I pull the slide, chamber a round, and decide to mean business. This lodge is like a really expensive structure with a ton of unique furniture and such inside it, according to the pictures we viewed online. So I head inside, sweep the place room by room, floor by floor. About fifteen minutes later, I call the place clear and safe and turn on all the lights. I get everyone safely inside and we throw several prime rib burger patties on the deck grill.
A note about the layout of this lodge. The first/main floor is over twenty feet above ground. One end is a massive three story A-Frame style structure with a large living room and loft master bedroom above, while the other side is a lower structure with high vaulted pine ceilings. The center of the place is divided by two parallel hallways, one running along the front (lots of bay windows) and the other the back, containing a laundry room, restroom and various coat and other closets. The low end of the house contains a large kitchen, dining room the size of a ballroom floor, another living room and a few more bedrooms. There are skylights everywhere. The entire underneath, or ground level of the place, is a three part garage/rec room with the owner's two fishing boats, work benches, a pool table, ping pong, table and air hockey table. Finally, there are two stairways up from the garage, one at either end.
A second note. The owner's father was supposed to live on the property in another cabin approximately one mile or so farther up the dirt road. She repeatedly offered to have him stop by to "make sure we got settled in" but both my wife and I declined as we just wanted to be left in peace to enjoy family time.
Okay. So we got settled in and went about having a great time with family—who continued to arrive over the next few days. However, all the while and in the back of my mind, I couldn't shake the feeling that someone had been squatting in the lodge or even waiting for us to arrive—smoking cigarettes on the deck like a chimney. That and the side sliding glass door had obviously been pried at with a screwdriver. But we decided not to tell the lodge owner as we did not want to have to sit for hours filling out police reports. We figured we'd tell her when we left.
So days go by, we're having a great time and all, but I continue to notice little things that are out of place. I decided to pick up all the cigarette butts beneath the deck so we would not get blamed for dropping them there. I am a smoker but always a respectful one. My sister, who was always up late, constantly felt as though someone was watching her from the night mountain darkness . . . there were very few curtains on any of the large bay windows throughout the place.
Even after picking up like eighty-some cigarette butts more of them "magically" appeared each morning. Obviously someone was watching us from the woods, as I also found beer cans and other trash around the property. We sought and received permission to hike the mountain wilderness, although the owner cautioned us that her family would be hunting farther up the mountainside. Now, I had brought a hunting rifle, a carbine, in hopes of going on a boar hunt, but the owner's father apparently told her had not seen any boar lately and she did not feel comfortable with me and my brother out there, armed, while her family was hunting whitetails. Fair enough. She then told me perhaps I could go hunting when deer season ended in a few days.
But wait . . . it gets even weirder. One of my family members on or around our third night there discovered a long crawlspace at the back of the lodge behind a towel rack in the laundry room. Inside it we found sneakers (wet) and a laundry basket with blankets, almost like our mysterious squatter had been sleeping there. Creepy, huh?
So we get permission to fish in a pond on the property stocked with brown and rainbow trout which was located by the owner's father's cabin. We head over one morning to be greeted by two men loading a work van from what was supposed to be the father's home. They act normal enough, telling us they are friends of the owner and were renting the father's cabin during deer season. And then it gets weird. We had our dog in the Jeep with us (as always) and the two men advise us to never allow him to run free as there are coyote traps set all over the mountain. Our dog seemed to scare them. So we fish, catch some really nice trout, and my young nieces and nephews get extremely muddy. Me? I want to head to the local store and buy smokes so I was not really thinking about any threats. My wife and I leave my sister to clean up the kids' shoes before getting in their vehicle. Later that night she tells me about how those two mystery men approached her after I left and asked her all kinds of questions, such as where we were from and sort of flirted with her. She is married, wears a ring. The owner had said nothing about those two dudes being around.
Eventually, my family members all depart, leaving my wife, our dog and me all alone at the lodge and still expecting other family members to show up in a few days. But that never happens due to a forecasted major blizzard set to hit in a day or so. From the moment we were alone at the lodge lots of weird shit started going down. I found more fresh cigarette butts. More trash in the woods. Our dog started freaking out, sniffing the front door and all around the game room in the garage at night. One morning, from the master bedroom up in the loft, I watched someone shine a flashlight beam into the A-Frame side of the place just before dawn. Of course I was armed and ready . . . but still.
On the night of the big snowstorm the motion lights on the side of the lodge along the deck kept going off/on. They had only activated previously when I went out there to smoke. My wife thought it was the snow coming down doing it, but it wasn't. We also heard lots of noises at all hours of the day/night . . . sounds like people walking around downstairs and up and toilets flushing.
We texted the owner to offer to pay her for a couple of more nights in order to wait out the storm and to see if someone was going to plow the long driveway. She offered us two more nights at the lodge for free and indicated her father, who owned a tractor with a bucket, would have us plowed out after the snow stopped. Actually, it was quite romantic—being snowed in with my wife under 31" of powdery winter fun.
The day the storm ended the owner's father tried to get down to us but made little progress. I was out of cigarettes so I hiked through the deep snow over a mile to a convenience store which turned out to be closed anyway. All the while I was certain someone was watching me and I did not make it back to the lodge until after dark. I wasn't too worried about my wife being alone. She had the dog, was well armed and is quite a good shot.
Finally, the next morning, the owner's father showed up on his little John Deere tractor. I went down to the garage to talk to him. He looked over my shoulder, saw only the one car in the garage and said something like he thought he was coming to "rescue" a bunch of small children. He also said with a laugh that he didn't think he'd get us out until Christmas. He then received a phone call on his cell, talked to someone for a few minutes, hung up and explained to me that his brother-in-law, who lived on a nearby farm, owned a much larger tractor with a plow and would have us out by noon that day. Several times shortly thereafter I explained to him that his daughter had given us a couple more days there in order to wait for the roads to be clear for our return home . . . a drive of something like 437 miles. But he insisted we leave that day until I flat out told him we were staying two more nights. This made my wife feel very uncomfortable, combined with all the weird stuff going on as well.
So our last night at the lodge finally arrived. We made a great dinner and played some chess and set in to enjoy our final evening on the mountain. Around sunset I opened one of the garage doors to let our dog out to go (the snow drifts made it impossible for him to run off). Our dog, a Blue Heeler, rarely barks and if he is about to go after someone he doesn't like he makes NO noise, just bolts at them. As soon as I opened the garage door he bolted off in attack mode but I called him back, fearing there was a bear or boar out there close.
I return upstairs—the hairs standing up on the back of my neck—and decide to take a peek out the front windows with my FLIR scope (night vision). Meanwhile our dog is going nuts, whimpering at the doors and windows and scaring the heck out of my wife. So I look out the front window with the heavy curtains drawn. What do I see? Several men standing about seventy feet down the driveway beside a large farm truck—a number of them wearing Halloween masks that look like dragon or devil faces. I can see their heat signatures clearly in the eerie black and white field of view. One of them is smoking a cigarette. You guessed it . . . Marlboro Lights.
I turn to my wife and as calmly as possible inform her of the situation and that we have two choices: try to wait out the night in the lodge where there's more defilade (cover) or pack quickly and take our chances in the Jeep—hoping the long muddy/snowy driveway is still open. Much to her credit she remains calm, decides to pack and I get geared up with my rifle, pistol and yes—assault vest—which I just happened to bring along. While she's packing I open the few curtains and parade around, clearly heavily armed, in front of the windows, occasionally watching the men outside through my night vision scope.
Around 45 minutes later we're ready to load the Jeep and go. And then the Jeep's car alarm goes off. My poor wife, she was so terrified. I head down into the garage a few minutes later figuring it was a diversion to get us separated. No one is down there. I cover my wife while she loads the Jeep and our dog runs around the garage sniffing and whimpering. Just as we're about to get into the Jeep we hear people walking around right above us upstairs. We get into the Jeep, open a garage door; I toss the garage door opener and we zoom off down the driveway and into the -6 degree night. To hell with closing the damn garage door behind us.
Alright. So I've left out a few details. Right after the Jeep alarm went off, while my wife was finishing up packing, someone tried to open the door leading from the garage up to the kitchen where we were located at that moment. With one hand and foot I held the door shut (I'm a big dude) and with the other I aimed my carbine at the door and tried to talk calmly with whoever was on the other side. Nothing but heavy breathing.
And finally, as we were pulling out of the garage I saw, very clearly, that several of the masked men had entered the house and were looking out the front windows. Whew! We just made it.
If you've bothered to read this massive post I'd like your input on a question or two. What do you think was the intention of the masked men toward my wife and I? Did they just want to scare us out of there? Or did they actually want to harm us? Keep in mind the next party scheduled to rent the lodge cancelled their week's stay due to the blizzard. And who were the masked men? The owner's father and/or those two mysterious dudes we encountered at the trout pond? My writer's imagination half thinks we were about to be sacrificed by some kind of hillbilly cult for the winter solstice. Crazy, I know . . . but it all happened . . . to us.
End of the day . . . thank God no one was hurt, because I nearly opened fire through that door leading down into the garage. A last thought: we're still debating whether or not to tell the owner about any of this.
**Edit: the day after the last of our family departed the lodge I found the key under the deck.
Thanks for reading.
Afterthought: I believe what "saved" us was twofold: my being visibly armed and the presence of our dog.
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