Podcast

My uncle has a small ranch in the Sonoran desert. Whenever there’s a family member’s birthday, or some other event, we always assume that it will take place there. It’s about a mile from the main dirt road, and has amazing views of natural desert scenery.

This must have happened six or seven years ago, when we were celebrating another event and my uncle was hosting a barbecue with all of the family. I don’t remember exactly what event it was. I forgot many things about that day, but I still vividly recall one event. The most inexplicable, chilling experience of my life.

Before everyone arrived at the ranch and we were getting ready, I offered to go buy ice down the road at the house of some lady who had made a shop out of her property, which was also her home.

I’ve always liked technology stuff, like iPods, games, and things like that. This time around, I was really into two-way radios that let you scan around for others who were also using them.

Every once in a while, we would mess around with other conversations we would catch on our walkie talkies and make them change channels. I don’t know why we thought this was so funny. I had a pair of them with me, so I left one of them with my cousin and left on my own, updating him with my location and other random stuff just to have something to say. He would always respond with 10-4.

I knew where the lady’s shop was and worked my way there, looking straight ahead. Maybe a 5 minute walk away, I assumed.

I walked up to the front window of the house, where apparently you would “order” from, and I asked for two bags of ice. She grabbed them, I gave her my money, and she gave me the change. I started making my way back with one bag in each hand.

“10-4” my cousin said over the radio.

I hadn’t said anything, though. I couldn’t reply since I had no free hands, so I ignored it.

As I saw the ranch coming into view, the wind started blowing. Those desert winds are terrible on the eyes, with dirt and sand blowing everywhere, so I shut my eyes but kept walking straight ahead for a few seconds.

That’s when I felt the push behind me. It was no longer the wind, but some type of bubble of… a strange force. Like the kind you feel when you put two magnets together with the same poles facing each other. I turned around but still couldn’t open my eyes fully, so I kept walking. I remember feeling strange, like nausea, or nervousness.

The wind now completely cleared up and the ranch came into view, through the fence from a distance. The windows to the main house were shut, and the music was off. Up ahead I could see that the four cars that were parked outside, across the field, were missing.

It was very weird, but my mind didn’t really process the event until I walked to the fence and found it with the chain and huge lock attached to it, holding it together. I rattled it, expecting to hear the dogs come barking, but no dogs ever came.

At first I thought that I had walked to back to the wrong place, to a ranch that looked similar to my uncle’s. But I’ve been there many times and I knew what it looked like. This is the same place we would visit in the evenings when I would come with my uncle to feed his dogs; except the dogs would be here every single time.

I began to panic a little, I started feeling very confused and my head was spinning. I walked around the property, with the ice beginning to melt and leaking next to my footsteps. I put the ice down, and grabbed the radio from my pocket.

I pressed the button to talk, but the talkie didn’t make that little hiccup it does when you pressed it. Do you know what I’m talking about? It wasn’t really a beep, it was just like a… faint static sound that let you know to start talking. I noticed it wasn’t on, so I pressed and held the power button until I started hearing loud static.

Like, too loud. I immediately change the channel, but the sound wouldn’t go away. I lost track of what channel my cousin was on, but I knew what to do: normally I’d just scan all the channels asking for him and waited a few seconds for a response.

Ten minutes must have passed before I decided to just head back to the lady’s store and maybe even head straight toward the main dirt road. I knew the way back to the city, so even if I had to walk for three hours, I knew I would eventually make it. But with all the static, I doubt my signal would break through to anyone.

I picked up the bags of ice once more, put the radio in my pocket, and I figured I would walk back to the lady’s shop. I was a little shaken up.

As soon as the shop came into view, I heard the radio buzz. I put the ice down, took the radio out again. I heard a familiar voice: “10-4”

I didn’t even reply. I just started almost running back to the ranch. When it came into view, everything seemed normal and the music was on. I walked back to the front gate, which was wide open and my uncle’s dogs came running up to greet me. I went straight to the freezer, lifted the ice bags to place them inside, and noticed that the ice was still frozen solid. No signs of water dripping out.

I looked at my faint footsteps in the dirt, and checked for signs of drops of water next to them. I could swear I was following the trail of water when I was hurrying back to the ranch.

But this time, there was nothing

It was a desert, after all. Water evaporates fairly quickly. The heat may have played a trick on me.

Here I go again, trying to convince myself that this is normal. That this happens to everybody.

I was walking with two friends, Nelly and Amy, along a type of lake formation in the sacred valley of the Incas in Peru. I had already been in Peru for several months as a solo traveler, so having company to go see the sights away from the normal touristy stuff was pretty exciting.

This time, however, it was particularly creepy since we truly had no connection to the civilized world and we were all foreigners, another girl from the U.S. and a girl from France.

For those of you who may not know, Peru has several towns along the huge valley that runs along the country. This has mainly small towns with small shops, poorly lit roads with many potholes, and the traditional farmers who travel to sell their own produce to the larger towns and cities almost every day.

We had gotten dropped off in Chinchero, and planned to go back later that evening. We decided to go exploring. Google Maps has this cool thing that lets you download maps on an iPhone so you don’t need a connection to see it, and when I checked mine, I saw that there was a lake nearby. We decided right away that we wanted to go and got on a taxi to take us there.

The guy seemed confused at first and didn’t know where we were going to go, or how to find an entrance to the lake. We later found out that the lake wasn’t made for tourists and it had a lot of mud and dry grass all around it, so getting up to the shore was almost impossible. Once we got to the entrance by a little boathouse type of thing, we told the taxi that we would find our way back and he left us. It was a peaceful type of silence, knowing that you’re so far away from all noises and city activity.

We walked around until we realized that there wasn’t much we could do there. We started messing around taking pictures and making fun of Amy, since she was the daredevil of the group and would jump between the ditches and would get scared after every sound we heard. There may have been snakes all around there, but there the dry grass was so tall that we would never be able to tell.

The sun was setting and we got distracted with our photos. Since we were in a deep valley, the sun sets earlier. Well, not really sets, but the mountains block the sun earlier than if you were in an area with a flat horizon.

We wanted to go back to the town, but we had two ways to do it. Either we went back along where the driver dropped us off, or we could get some more exploration done if we worked our way back to town away from the road and along what seemed to be dirt roads that led into the hills.

We chose the dirt roads, since we had about an hour until we would be in complete darkness. We figured we would be able to make it.

It was a nice walk, but we really didn’t know where we were going since the map only showed a general direction on where the town was, but the dirt roads weren’t labeled and sometimes they would curve out away from the town. We only hoped that they would eventually wind the right away gain.

Reaching the top of the hills was always nice because you would be able to get a clearer view on where you were. But when I reached the top first, I noticed a man coming toward us from the side of the road.

I asked him, in Spanish, how to get back to the town. He was surprisingly nice, but very curious. He didn’t raise suspicion, and he actually turned out to be very nice.

We followed him toward his house, where we met his wife and children. It may sound fake at this point, but people in Peru are very hospitable and it isn’t weird at all to invite people over. We didn’t go inside, though. We stayed outside, took a couple of pictures, and agreed to come back for a type of meal that gets cooked underground, in a pit, traditional of Peruvian people. I forgot the name of it now, but we were all very excited and agreed to it.

It had already gotten dark outside, but Eddy (the farmer we had just met) mentioned that we should be careful of the little people. The word in Spanish for it is “duende”, which means goblin. He said it with an odd seriousness that made me question what he was talking about. He wasn’t the first person to mention the goblins in South America.

I asked him who they were, and he said that they are little people that live in tiny caves deep in the mountains. He said that sometimes they come by and steal animals, though they have been known to kidnap kids. Someone else had told me that they come from deformed fetuses that women leave to die out in the hills. I was expecting the farmer to laugh or something to relieve the tension, since we were all a bit freaked out by his seriousness.

But his expression never changed.

He was genuinely concerned about the goblins and I think he really wanted us to be careful.

We started walking back, with not much to say. We just wanted to get back to the road, which we eventually found by following the lights and sounds of the occasional truck passing by. We wanted to hop on a taxi, but he was trying to rip us off, so we decided to walk back and try to find a hostel on our own. We knocked around some doors, but not many people would answer.

In the dark streets, I would sometimes look out to the hills and find some figure moving. Maybe my mind was beginning to play tricks on me.

We eventually found a hostel and spent the night there. It was nothing great, and we had very crappy wifi, but at least we were able to send a message out to the rest of our friends to let them know where we were.

The whole night I kept thinking about the goblins. Ever since then, I’ve asked many farmers and old people about goblins. They all have told me the same thing: that they do exist and that they live in the mountains. They have very compelling videos and pictures. Those who have seen the goblins and want to remember them, have actually drawn them out with pen and paper. They all seem to have a type of straw hat, and they have short, stubby, legs.

My girlfriend’s family swears to have had encounters with goblins in the past. They described the thing as a small, old-looking man, with sinister laughter who can scatter like a cockroach when you turn on the light.

I still don’t know if I believe that they exist, but I know that there is a lot of land in the hills in the valleys of Peru, some undisturbed for centuries… the famous tourist attraction, Macchu Picchu, was discovered recently, anyway. Who knows what happens in the darkness of the hills… in the lands that haven’t yet been explored.