The Strangest Night of My Life

Shack by erikogan

It was 1994. I went on an weekend camping trip with my writing professor and a few other students. The university owned an old mining cabin in an obscure corner of Death Valley, which they allowed professors and students to use free for research. Usually, it was geology students using the place (infrequently, at that). Our professor taught a class called Advanced Narrative Writing. We were going up there to write.

It was difficult to get up to the cabin. The dirt road was severely washboarded and studded with big rocks. Our economy model cars couldn't climb it faster than about five miles per hour, and I think it took us at least an hour to get up to the cabin from the valley floor.

We arrived at sunset. The one-room cabin was rickety and quite creepy. Supposedly, it was home to miners around the turn of the century. The adjacent Borax mine closed probably 80 years before. We all decided to sleep out under the stars, but we did use the cabin for writing.

Someone in the group had collected long-dead sticks so baked by the sun they looked like pieces of driftwood and arranged them on the table into a basket-like sculpture. We set about to making dinner when Tom called me out to the porch. "Do you see that? Those two lights?" he asked.

I did, maybe about 50 yards away, maybe about three feet off the ground, two little red lights a few inches apart. They glowed steadily, so it couldn't have been reflected animal eyes. We called the others out to look and they, too, saw the lights. I pointed my heavy flashlight toward it, but could only see brush. We continued watching it. The lights seemed to be slowly pivoting away from us. "Do you want to go check it out?" Tom asked me.

Of the eight of us, Tom and I were the only males. It became clear that if anyone was going to go check it out, it was going to be us, and Tom wasn't going to go alone. "No," I said, "I would rather live to wonder what it was than to die finding out."

I didn't sleep well that night. I figured that it was either some sort of government or alien technology and our proximity would get us abducted or killed. After hours of waiting for the shoe to drop, I finally fell asleep.

Tom and I went looking for it the next morning, but found nothing, not even tracks or footprints. When we returned, we were called inside to see what had happened during the night. On the table, in the center of the ring of sticks, was a neatly placed animal turd. We couldn't imagine how it could have been placed there without knocking over the sticks, unless it was dropped while perching on the rafter above.