The Circle

I used to work for the United States government assisting farms and farm workers around the country. I often worked in very remote areas of the country and had some strange encounters. There is one however that really stands out:

The first one occurred while I was working in the southeastern United States. A coworker and I were winding our way through the Appalachian Mountains, checking in on various tobacco and tomato farms deep in the mountains. While trying to find our way to an especially remote farm, we turned down the wrong dirt road and got lost. We were miles from the nearest city, and we found ourselves surrounded by a dense forest, and mountains towering above us blocking any cell service. We tried to turn around, but the road was too narrow. We had to keep driving until the road widened a bit more and we could turn the car around.

After a few minutes of driving into the woods, we stumbled upon a clearing wide enough to let us turn the car around. As we approached, we noticed the ruins of an old house in the middle of the clearing. The house had burned down and looked like it could barely stand. The ground around the house was still charred from the fire, but the surrounding trees and forest were fine. We parked the car on the edge of the clearing and got out to have a closer look.

As we approached, my coworker and I stopped simultaneously in our tracks. We both realized at that moment that the ground around the house had been burned in a perfect circle, with the house in the exact center. Something didn't feel right. My coworker and I looked at each other as if we were looking for the other person to acknowledge how strange the situation was, but we kept walking toward the house.

The moment we stepped foot into the burned circle, all of the ambient noise of the forest stopped and went dead silent. All the bugs, the birds chirping, the wind whipping through the trees, the sound of the grass swaying back and forth, all of it stopped. It was as if someone had secretly slipped noise-canceling headphones onto my coworker and me. We again stopped walking to check to see if we were hearing things right and that's when the noise began. It was a booming rumbling noise echoing in the sky. It sounded like the loudest, deepest trumpet you could ever hear. It was so loud it hurt our ears. I could feel the noise rattling in my eardrums. It was constant. It didn't change pitch. It didn't stop or take a break. A cold chill ran down my spine, and every part of me felt like something was very very wrong. We looked at the sky and looked around to try to see what could be making the noise, but there was nothing. There were no clouds in the sky, and we were all alone. Meanwhile, the noise kept going, and the feeling that something was wrong only grew stronger.

My coworker and I both turned around and ran back to our car as fast as we could. The moment we stepped outside of the burn circle on the ground, the booming noise stopped, and the normal sounds of the forest returned. We could hear the birds again. We could hear the wind and the leaves on the trees. We jumped into the car and drove out of the woods in silence. We didn't turn the radio on or say a word until we returned to our hotel. When we parked, my coworker just looked at me and asked, "That happened right?"

To this day I can't explain that house, what the noise we heard was, or why we could only hear it when we stepped into the circle.