The Night of My Disappearance

This happened about four years ago. You may have read about some of these events in the news, but you wouldn’t have seen my story.

I was working graveyard at a gas station out on the highway between my college town and the interstate.  It was a pretty sweet gig; we got ten customers an hour at most.  I spent most of the time studying for the LSAT.  

The station was like any gas station in America: four pumps out front, covered by a canopy that connected to the little-box convenience store at the back.  There were big panel windows along the front of the store.  The register was situated perpendicular to one of those windows so I could easily monitor the pumps.  It was floodlit for maximum visibility, but that created this eerie effect where I couldn’t see anything beyond the fueling bay.  It seemed like cars emerged from out of the void when they pulled into the station.  This was western North Carolina, so everything around the station was pretty much woods.

Around the time this happened, two women from my college had gone missing.  The whole town was on edge, but I still had that invincible feeling at twenty-two.  Plus, I never saw myself as a target for predators because I had a deep voice and dressed pretty frumpy.  Yeah, I was really young.  

That night’s shift was especially slow.  It had gone down into the twenties, there was thick fog, and nobody was out on the road. 

I was struggling with some questions on a practice exam when my head jerked up.  I hadn’t seen headlights, so I’m not sure why I sensed someone had entered the fueling bay.  I scanned out the window but didn’t see a car.  I glanced back down at the practice exam but yanked my head back up again a second later.  I still didn’t see a car but I was sure I’d sensed movement.  I decided it must have been a bird or something.  I got back into the practice problems until I instinctively looked up again because I was sure I’d seen motion right outside my window.  Again, there was nothing there, but I had this unshakable feeling that someone had been watching me.  

I needed a break, but I was a little nervous to go outside and smoke.  Instead, I went to fix myself a wine-coke.  Free fountain sodas are a standard perk for gas station workers.  Free red wine is a perk of working at a gas station with a busted security camera by the wine aisle. 

I almost dropped the cup on my way back to the register: there was a woman standing there. Why didn’t I hear the motion-sensor bell? She didn’t turn to face me as I approached.  She was at least a head taller than me, with really messy long hair.  She was wearing a vintage-looking dress that hadn’t been well-preserved.  It was pretty dirty with fraying edges and loose threads all over the place.  Halloween had been over a month ago.

“Sorry, ma’am.  Didn’t hear you come in.”  I scrambled around her to get behind the register.  She didn’t move an inch. I hoped she couldn’t smell the wine. I looked down at the counter; there wasn’t any merchandise.  I glanced up toward her face, which was shadowed by some loose hair.  “How can I help you?”  She didn’t say anything.  “The scratch card machine is right behind you….”  Just then, she reached up a bony hand to move the hair off of her face, and I looked up into her eyes for the first time.  I’d never seen eyes like that before.  Her pupils looked like fat black slabs of shiny obsidian.  They were mesmerizing.

“Ma’am?  Ma’am!  You can’t stay here unless you order something else.”  A woman in a waitress uniform was leaning over the table to rouse me.  She looked equally alarmed and impatient.  

“Oh, uh.  Sorry, sorry.  I’ll get going,” I responded automatically.  I was in a diner, apparently, and it was daylight out.   How long had I been here?  How many wine-cokes had I had last night? I didn’t feel hungover; just…fuzzy.  The waitress pulled back from me.   

“You want me to call someone for you?”  Her face softened a little.  

“No…uh, no.  That’s OK.  How much do I owe you?”  

“You know what?  Coffee’s on the house this time.  Just get home safe.”

“OK, thank you…so much.”  I gathered myself up and headed for the door.  There were Route 66 signs on the walls and a jukebox playing some George Jones song.  This wasn’t the diner by my college.  Was I in Waynesville?  What the hell happened last night?  

I was just starting to worry about whether I'd locked up the store when I opened the door and got punched in the eyes by sunshine.  The daylight was wrong.  There was too much of it. 

I stepped out of the way of some people entering the diner and gazed out at the parking lot and beyond.  There were no trees to block the view.  It was scrubby desert for miles with some brown mountains in the distance.  A little bit further than Waynesville was my last thought before I started retching and had to crouch down on my hands and knees.  A young family gave me dirty looks as they exited the diner.  Nothing came up but coffee.  When had I last eaten?  

After determining that my Civic wasn’t in the parking lot and that I had neither my phone nor my wallet on me, I realized I had no choice but to bother that poor waitress again.  I took a deep breath and headed back inside.  She looked up from the counter and was immediately wary.  

“I’m so sorry to bother you again, and I promise I’m not drunk or high, but where am I and what day is it?”  

I spent the next three months trying to piece together what the hell happened to me during those 30 hours.  I deferred my final semester of undergrad and moved back in with my mom.  She was convinced I’d had some kind of psychotic break and begged me to pick a less stressful career than law.  

The gas station hadn’t filed a missing person’s report on me. My mom had contacted the cops in a panic after I called her from that diner (in Van Horn, Texas, it turned out). However, they weren’t interested in investigating once they confirmed I hadn't been kidnapped. So I had to gather information on my own.

I contacted the owner of the diner.  She was super helpful and managed to get the license plate and company of the trucker who dropped me off from parking lot security footage.  I got ahold of him through his company. He said he was glad I was OK and told me he’d picked me up at a rest stop outside of Texarkana.  I hadn’t seemed drunk or psychotic; just very distant and quiet.  I’d responded to all his questions with one-word answers and just seemed kind of out of it.  I hadn't told him where I was going or why.

He put the word out in the trucker community and got me in touch with the trucker who’d brought me from Memphis to Texarkana.  She described me almost exactly the same way.  Unfortunately, the trail went cold there.  A few other truckers said they’d seen someone who matched my description at the West Memphis truck stop, but none of them saw me getting dropped off.   

It took some doing to convince my former manager to let me see the security footage from that night.  She’d found the unlocked store abandoned and my untouched wine-coke by the register at seven that next morning.  Naturally, she’d termed me on the spot in absentia.  She'd been "gracious enough" (her words) not to have my car towed, at least. I owe both of those truckers a solid for calling her and swearing that I’d not been in my right mind.  Finally, she agreed to email me the video files.  

I’ve watched the footage of my final shift from three different cameras more times than I watched the porno I found in my dad’s closet when I was seven.  

The camera behind the register glitches out from 3:02 to 3:05 – the exact time the woman was at the counter.  When it comes back online at 3:06, she’s gone. I shouted so loud the first time I saw that, my mom thought I was having another “episode”.  

The camera by the wine aisle was of course broken, but it wouldn’t have caught anything other than my thieving ass.  

Most baffling, the camera from the fueling bay doesn’t show a woman approaching the store at that time.  I have no idea how she got in.  The camera by the back door only shows it opening once, at 3:06, when I exit and head off into the woods without a jacket.  My face is hard to make out, but my body language doesn’t convey any distress or urgency.  I just march right off like I’ve been summoned by my General.  I always have to fight the urge to look away or fast-forward through that part.  

The footage from the fueling bay reveals something else, though.  At 2:59, a stocky, hooded figure slides into the northwest corner of the frame.  He’s on foot – extremely strange for a highway without any sidewalks in the middle of a frigid night.  He immediately darts behind one of the pumps, pops his head up to look in my direction, and then rushes over to crouch under my window.  At 3:07, he hunches up and peers inside, but I’ve already embarked on my grand tour by then.  Does he see the woman?  He waits there, staring, for about a minute.  Then he just heads back in the same direction he came from and quickly disappears from the corner of the frame.  No matter how many times I watch those eight minutes, I always get a feeling similar to the first time I pressed play on that porno and suddenly realized what it was.  

There’s only one frame where you can clearly see the guy’s face: when he pops up from behind the pump to stare at me through the window. You can zoom in and make out his features: Caucasian, around my age, light-colored eyes (hard to tell exactly what color).  I sent out the image to everyone I knew from school who hadn’t dropped me after the incident.  A few of them said he looked kind of familiar, but they couldn’t place him.  It wasn’t a big school, so he probably wasn’t a student.  

Were he and the woman working together?  Did she, like, hypnotize me and make me leave the store so they could rob it?  If that was the plan, they had to abort for some reason or another.  My ex-manager let me know none of the cash or merchandise was missing when she arrived for her shift.  

With no additional clues to go on, I dove into an internet wormhole of ghost stories and urban legends around my college town. I spent all day researching and barely left my room. (This was about the time when my mom suddenly decided law school was in fact a fabulous idea, and I should start studying for the LSAT again ASAP.)   Most of the stories I found were pretty standard and unimaginative.  Indian burial grounds, Bigfoot, ethereal ladies in white. 

I finally found one that piqued my interest on an old Geocities site called Jeanine’s Haunted Appalachia.  Deep in Jeanine’s archives was a story her great-uncle had told her about the Maiden-Elk of Sylva.  Sometime in the 1910s, this young lady from a poor farming family was being forced to marry the son of the local magistrate, a real brute.  You know how those old-timey arranged marriages went: dowries, statutory rape, subjugation, “it was a different time”, etc.

Anyway, they held the engagement dinner at the bride-to-be’s family farmhouse, and during dessert, she just up and bolted out the back door.  The groom and her dad gave chase, but her footprints just ended in a clearing about a half-mile behind the house.  Right where they left off, a set of hoofprints started.  They were huge – larger than any deer prints the groom had ever seen on his hunting trips.  

In the following weeks, several residents swore they saw an elk on their property.  The only problem was that there hadn’t been any elk in North Carolina for 100 years.  There hadn’t even been any east of the Mississippi since the 1880s.  

The story basically ended there.  I don’t know why it interested me so much, but I ended up Googling “Elk in the Eastern U.S.”  Something immediately grabbed my attention: there was a close-up of an elk’s head right at the top of the page.  I stared at it for ten seconds and then opened a new tab to Google “elk eye close-up”.  Several slabs of shiny obsidian stared back at me. 

I searched the internet for anything else about the Elk-Maiden, but I only found a couple other pages that basically reiterated the same story with some slight inconsistencies in the details.  The story always ended with the elk sightings.  There were no mentions of the elk doing anything malicious or heroic.  It didn’t punish children or serve as some kind of warning.  There were just sightings of what may or may not have been an elk around the same time a young woman ran away from home.

I got the idea that maybe the Elk-Maiden’s family farm had been where the gas station was today, and I became obsessed with proving it. I was so desperate to construct any context to shove my fugue episode into.  I now have a lot more empathy for conspiracy-theory nuts.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the farm address without a family name.  

I finally thought to see if my college had a Folklore department – we did! – and emailed the department chair.  She emailed back within a day: she vaguely remembered reading about the story somewhere, but could I give one of her graduate T.A.s a couple days to do some research and then meet up with me to go over what he’d found?  I replied that I’d be happy to rearrange my schedule since they were doing me such a nice favor.  

The T.A. emailed me two days later and asked if I was available to meet at nine p.m. at a coffee shop off campus.  I managed to wait an hour before replying, from my car, halfway into the trip from my mom’s house in Charlotte.  

I got into town at about six p.m.  I wanted to kill time by surprising some of my friends, but it turned out that everybody was gone for spring break.  I felt so strange to be out of sync with the school calendar. I ended up sitting in my car and crying.  I couldn’t decide if I missed school desperately or if I never wanted to come back here again.  

I managed to collect myself by 8:45 and then walked the fifteen minutes to the coffee shop, which turned out to be closed like everything else downtown.  Fucking spring break.  I waited for a couple minutes under the streetlight until someone turned down the street and approached me.

“Hi!  Are you Layla?  Sorry I’m late.  I’m Austin from the Folklore department. Oh, shoot!  Is the coffee shop closed?”  

I froze for a fraction of a second, but instinct kicked in fast: I smiled  at him and breathed through my nose.  It didn’t seem like he recognized me; he’d only gotten a quick glance at me from ten feet away, after all.  He hadn’t been staring at a zoomed-in still frame of my face for months.  

“Yeah – uh – hi, I’m so sorry too, but my, y’know, my boyfriend – he just messaged me, and he’s having a family emergency.  So I’ve gotta go.  So sorry for you to, have, y’know, gone out of your way like this.” 

I was positive it was him.  He looked a lot less like a creep without the hoody, but you could still see it in his eyes.  They were blue.  That was one mystery solved.  The blood hammered through my circulatory system.  I was already angling myself away. 

“Oh, oh, no!  I’m so sorry to hear that.  But OK.  Let me know when you’re available to meet up again.”  He looked quizzical, but not suspicious.  

“Great – great.  Thanks so much.  Bye!”  I took off at a brisk pace – family emergency, you know.  I continued breathing through my nose.  

I’d turned the corner and was halfway down the next block before I heard footsteps behind me.  There wasn’t a single other person downtown.  Fuck it: I broke into a full sprint.  Even through the adrenaline, I could hear the footsteps behind me accelerating.  The gap was closing.  My lungs were burning.  I prayed for headlights at the next intersection.  

The footsteps couldn’t have been more than five feet behind me when I heard something else. It sounded big, like a horse galloping.  I didn’t look back and I didn’t stop running.

“WHAAAAT THE FUUUUUUUUUU” his exclamation transitioned into a blood-curdling shriek accompanied by a sickening crunching noise, then more galloping that quickly grew more distant.  I didn’t look back and I didn’t stop running.  

I didn’t hear anything but the pounding in my ears till I made it back to the campus lot and peeled off into the night.  I shot down the highway past my old gas station.  I didn’t call 911 (hands-free, of course) until I was safely back on the interstate.  

I ended up doing my final semester of undergrad online that fall.  After two traumatic incidents and having to go back and forth all spring and summer to visit the police station, I never wanted to return to that little college town.  

The cops were suddenly very interested in my December walkabout.  They asked me over and over again what I remembered from that night.  I mentioned a “vague” memory of a woman right before I blacked out, but I tossed it out as a casual detail that I might have misremembered.  I had a feeling if I was too definite about it, they’d decide I was hysterical.  Other than that, I repeated the story exactly as I remembered it.  One of the younger investigators made a face when I mentioned the wine-coke, but he told me later he’d tried it and thought it was delicious.  

They believe I must have seen Austin Franklin Pullman when he was out in the fueling bay. That's why I decided to sneak out the back.  When he saw that I wasn’t in the store anymore, he went further up the highway, cut back into the woods, and found and attacked me there.  I somehow managed to escape and went into a fugue state from the trauma.  

It makes sense.  I'm sure I could’ve invented the strange woman with obsidian eyes to supplant unpleasant memories.  I guess it’s possible that I would’ve gone into the woods instead of just getting into my car and driving away.  Panic makes people irrational.  

If that was what happened, then I may have been the only victim to survive an attack from Pullman.  They matched the DNA from his corpse to the bodies of the two missing – ultimately murdered – women from my school that fall, and two more between then and spring break.  

I should’ve had defensive wounds, though.  My clothes should’ve been torn instead of just dirty and disheveled.  

In July, they found security footage taken that night from a used car lot about a mile down the highway.  A hooded man they believe is Pullman enters the frame at 3:22 AM.  He doesn’t appear to be winded, and his clothes don’t look disheveled either.  I don’t know how he would’ve had time to find and attack me in the woods and still make it a mile down the highway in fifteen minutes without sprinting the whole way.

The manner of Pullman’s death was a touchy subject with the coroner’s office.  They really wanted to say a big deer wandered downtown and trampled him.  The feces kept getting in their way, though.  They found "such a large volume of fecal matter on the decedent that it almost seems pointed," per the final report.  No matter how many times they sent it off for testing, the results were always the same.

We actually do have elk herds in North Carolina again.  They were reintroduced in the early aughts.  The problem is that their known range is a tiny square right on the Tennessee border.  My college is a good seventy miles from there.  Anything’s possible, though.  Animals are found way outside of their range all the time.  Humans are animals too, of course. 

I still don’t understand why she sent me on that wild journey.  All she had to do was get me to my car and have me drive somewhere safe.  Maybe she knew something that I still don’t.  Maybe running far away was the only way she knew. Maybe this was her very convoluted way of getting me to identify Pullman.  Then again, could she not have just trampled him at any time if she wanted to? Why help me, but not the others?  I’m not any more special or worthy than they were.  One of them volunteered for Meals on Wheels every weekend. 

I decided to get my master’s in library science with a minor in folklore and storytelling.  Preserving and sharing stories is the only way I can think to justify getting to continue my own.  My mom’s done a really admirable job of pretending she’s not disappointed. 

Part II of the Unexpected Ungulates! Series