One quarter of the way into my five-mile walk, a sensation prickled along my shoulders and back: Something was following me. I peered around. On the curvy pavement between leafy trees, with birds chittering and two chipmunks leaping amidst the roadside rocks and ferns, no one and nothing was there.
Strange.
Throughout this section of my route, no dwellings broke up the woods. On one side, tacked head-high on an oak, behind a tumble-down stone wall, a faded placard announced the boundary of a state wildlife management area. On the other side, behind a boulder where I sometimes crouched to pee, a roundish depression marked the cellar some pioneer family had dug 200 years ago for their since-abandoned log cabin.
As I walked, the sensation persisted, below and behind my thoughts. I swiveled my head around again, cautiously. What was following me? Nothing. When I reached a stretch of road with a driveway and a house way back, then a cottage where occasionally one old car or another parked, the eerie feeling began to fade.
In spy novels and mysteries, the hero creeping toward danger in the dark, picks up a raw animal message of something else around the bend, some unexpected something lurking and ready to ambush. Human evil menaces in those books, of course, not anything wild or phantasmal. Evolutionarily, it makes sense we’d retain a protective skill in today’s world of bank accounts, cell phones and drones. Spidey-sense, some call it. Intuition. Survival instinct. Peripheral awareness. Subconscious pattern recognition. A sixth mode of perception that can be deviously off or devilishly prescient.
*
Soon after we moved from Boston to our western Massachusetts town with less than a thousand residents, my husband and I discovered this road. It had a street sign, but its asphalt segued into dirt, which we timorously explored in our car. The road’s margins narrowed under a canopy of waving branches, the pebbly surface winding down, down, down without signs of humanity besides telephone poles and their wires. Did this even lead anywhere? We jiggered the car into a six-point turnaround before wild animals, a dead-end bog or ghosts nabbed us.
The Spooky Road, we dubbed it.
More than 20 years later, we understood exactly where it led. Its two-mile length, now paved, still held just a handful of families, most of whom raised chickens, horses, ducks, multiple dogs, a donkey or goats. Though deer, moose and black bears sometimes wandered through this neighborhood, more commonly seen were squirrels, rabbits, porcupines and foxes.
The Spooky Road formed one leg of a circuit from our house that I now regularly walked or ran without fear, either deep in half-aware thinking or soaking in the sights, sounds and smells of the season. A truck or car might rumble past, but ninety-nine out of a hundred times I met no one else on foot.
*
Something was following me. The sensation recurred on my next walk when I reached the unpopulated section of The Spooky Road. When I looked behind, again there was nothing. And suddenly I remembered a neighbor telling me about the sighting of a mountain lion in this vicinity. A confirmed sighting of a mountain lion, according to our town’s chief of police. I straightened up into an alert state of uh-oh.
I’d read a book about these creatures’ reactions to encroachment on their habitat in Colorado. Solitary, stealthy animals, these seven-foot-long cats with bone-crushing jaws liked to jump onto prey from outcroppings or rock walls. They roamed in a range of 60 to 100 miles. Out west, hikers had died from their attacks.
Bears I’d come face-to-face with a couple of times, and they no longer frightened me. I just had to lift my arms as if they were condor wings, intone “Go away, bear” in a low, commanding voice, and they’d lumber away or scoot off. But a mountain lion. A mountain lion. A mountain lion: a slinking, moccasin-soft beast at the pinnacle of the food chain. I wouldn’t necessarily know if one was trailing me. Preparing to pounce.
*
The next time I ran along that most uninhabited stretch of my route, I again felt something following me. Behind my shoulders, not even a shadow trailed me, though. Was there a subtle echo of my footfalls? A microscopic shift of air pressure? My brain fooling me, as for thirsty travelers in a desert? Some kind of energetic doubling? Or the mountain lion, whom my mind had made real and sneaky? I stuck to the center of the road at a quicker pace, as far as possible from any pouncing platform. I made it through the tricky part, intact.
And the way a weather pattern suddenly shifts out of existence, the troublesome feeling vanished to a memory. Week after week, I walked or ran The Spooky Road in peace, without the shivery, being-followed sensation.
What in blazes caused that crinkle behind my back?
*
At the post office I saw a neighbor who posted photos of animals caught, often at night, on a webcam he had set up in his woods. Had a mountain lion ever wandered into the range of his camera? No, but when I described my quivery feeling of something behind me, he said mountaineers struggling against their limits sometimes described a real-not real presence, not quite a person, accompanying them. “Look it up,” Sam suggested.
Indeed, numerous explorers and mountain climbers have reported a version of my experience. In harsh conditions where stamina flagged and survival flickered, they felt a nebulous extra joining their group, a silent figure of comfort and support. Most famously, after the near-debacle of a 1916 Antarctica expedition, Ernest Shackleton and his companions in extremis independently confided to others that they’d sensed a helpful being slogging with them toward safety.
Whether interpreted as a guardian angel, a delusion or a stress-fueled projection of the self, this so-called “Third Man” scenario didn’t fit my case. I wasn’t trudging with death hovering around the bend. I’d felt something over my shoulders in a familiar spot, relaxed in an everyday mindset, not exhausted or even stressed.
*
While I was trying to figure this out, I went out to the road that runs past my house. After dawn but before sunlight beamed from over the eastern hills, the quiet sizzled. Cool air enveloped my bare arms, but the only movement I saw anywhere was one tall blade of grass wavering a tiny bit. An unseen bird cheeped once, and otherwise just the baseline sound of my neighborhood pulsated, comprised of insects humming, small creatures breathing, plants growing and for all I knew, the sound of the North American plate scrunching infinitesimally farther away from Europe. The previous year, I used a cell phone app to measure my neighborhood’s early-morning background noise at 24 decibels, much more hushed than the 42 decibels of a typical library.
A shiny pickup truck whooshed into view and grew louder until it passed me, followed by a diminuendo into nothing. I closed my eyes to feel whether I could perceive anything around me other than air. At that spot, no. Nada.
*
Further research told me neurologists catalog the phenomenon as “felt presence.” Someone senses someone else nearby, alongsde or behind, without visual, auditory or tactual evidence. It crops up with Parkinson’s disease, brain tumors, epilepsy, schizophrenia, psychedelic trips, sleep paralysis, religious intensity, near-death comebacks and grief. Investigators hypothesize disturbances in how people map where their body extends and doesn’t. Some claim they’ve localized a section of the brain that produces such illusions.
Yet again, these fascinating parallels didn’t apply. If my brain had gone haywire, why only in three closely spaced incidents, in one particular place? I likewise dismissed psychologists’ theories about a role for past trauma, present loneliness, unprocessed losses, hypervigilance or voids in the self. I wasn’t upset those days, tangled up or emotionally scarred in general.
*
Once, a hiking buddy and I were bushwhacking through the forested miles between her house and mine. Amidst scraggly hemlocks, oaks and beeches, from time to time an old logging track, grown over with weeds and waist-high trees, emerged from hiding. We passed a jumble of long bones in a clearing, maybe from a deer or moose that had died. Amelia wondered if it had been “jacked” – hunted out of season. We reached a hollow where the ground sank in a natural depression. There the air hung, colder, heavy, goose-bumpy and threatening.
We stood silent for several moments, exchanged a wordless shudder and hotfooted on as if sheriffs were closing in. Then Amelia slowed and broke the spell. “Something bad happened there,” she said. I nodded, and we continued weaving toward a brook where we’d need to hop across on the rocks.
Scientists probably wouldn’t endorse what both Amelia and I took as telltale at that down pock. In my world, though, I’ve decided, sensitivities count. Something was following me on The Spooky Road, yes. And now it’s stalking somewhere else.
–
The author of essays in the New York Times Magazine, Ms., Next Avenue and NPR, Marcia Yudkin advocates for introverts through her newsletter, Introvert UpThink (https://www.introvertupthink.com/). Her fiction has appeared in Yankee, Writers Forum, Flash Fiction and New Stories from New England. She lives in Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960).
© 2025, Marcia Yudkin
Halfway Down the Stairs 