Voice 'Like a Drill Instructor' Ordered Teen From Woods, Reddit Poster Recalls

A WOODED PARK, NIGHT — A Reddit user posting to r/HighStrangeness has described an experience from age 17 in which, the author says, a loud male voice sounded inside the head and ordered a hasty retreat from a nighttime woodland trail.

According to the post, the writer and a friend had walked the park after dark many times and were not unnerved by it. On this occasion, however, the friend repeatedly believed he heard something behind them, a notion the author says was dismissed as paranoia.

The trouble came, the post states, at the end of the trail, where the path opened onto a large field. The author reports a sense of time slowing, a surge of adrenaline, a roaring in the ears and a tilting of the world. Then came the voice. The writer insists it was not an imagined or remembered voice but a sound broadcast inside the skull, shouting in the manner of a drill instructor: "GO! GO! NOW! THAT WAY! GO! NOW!!"

The writer asked the friend whether he felt it. He replied, according to the post, that they should leave at once. The pair followed the direction the voice had indicated, which was not the short route. The car was about five minutes away, but the detour around the whole park took roughly 45 minutes.

The friend, the author says, heard no voice but felt that something was badly wrong, and was alarmed by the horrified and confused look on the writer's face. The author states that nothing of the kind had happened before or since.

What, if anything, lay behind them in the woods remains unknown. "We'll never know what would've happened if we had stayed," the writer says, wondering whether someone was following. The post was prompted by another account of a similar voice and asks whether other readers have had comparable experiences.