18. Rusted Away
When I was 12 years old, my friends and I were riding our bikes through some woods down an old dirt road that wasn’t used much anymore. I decided it would be cool for me to go off-road, so I proceeded to drive into the forest. I got about 50 feet in before I got disoriented and started going towards the creek, which was in a dell down a steep hill from there.
I crashed down the hill and hit this huge boulder collection before coming to a rest. While I was sitting there, off towards the road, I could hear my friends calling to me so I knew which way to go. I started over towards their voices and saw a super old rusted-out car. I was a huge license plate collector back then, and finding rusted-out cars in the woods was not that odd of an occurrence, so I went to see if I could harvest the license plate.
When I got there, what I saw chilled me to the bone. There were bones in the front seat and a pile of rags. It was full-on Raiders of the Lost Ark with a skeleton on a pike kind of thing. I screamed like a little girl and got the heck out of there. I told my parents, who later called 9-1-1. After some investigation, it was determined that the man had disappeared during a blizzard in the late 50s and was never heard from again.
I met his widow and children and won an award from the town. I’ll never forget that feeling. Creepy as heck.