Black Orbs in the Woods
Sometime around 2014, my daughter and I set out to find an old cemetery hidden deep in the woods — a forgotten burial ground dating back to the mid-1700s. I had visited it once as a teenager with friends.
That day, though, we never found the cemetery.
Instead, I found something I still cannot explain.
We had been driving slowly along old logging trails and overgrown access roads, searching for anything that looked familiar, when I came upon a narrow path cutting up the side of a steep hill. Something about it stirred a memory. The road looked old — not abandoned exactly, but forgotten, swallowed by time and forest. I was convinced this had to be the way to the cemetery.
“Let’s walk up and see what’s at the top,” I told my daughter. “Maybe this is the road.”
We started climbing.
The hill was steeper than it first appeared, the kind that burns your legs after only a few minutes. About halfway up, my daughter — she was around ten years old at the time — stopped. She said she didn’t want to go any farther. To this day I don’t know if she was simply tired or if she felt something she couldn’t explain, but she became unusually uneasy. She decided to head back down to the car and wait for me there.
I told her I’d continue to the top alone, just to see what lay on the other side.
At the crest of the hill, the woods opened slightly, and the old road curved downward ahead of me. I had only walked a short distance when movement caught my eye to the left among the trees.
Two black orbs.
They emerged silently from the woods.
Large. Darker than black itself. Not reflective, not solid-looking — more like absences in the world. Voids. Their edges weren’t clearly defined; they shifted and trembled like smoke suspended in midair. Even now, years later, I struggle to describe them accurately. They looked unreal in the most primal sense of the word, as though they did not belong in the natural world at all.
The orbs moved quickly across the path in front of me.
Not floating aimlessly — moving with purpose.
They descended the hill ahead of me, gliding soundlessly between the trees. Then one passed behind a large trunk and simply vanished. The second followed, disappearing the exact same way. Not fading. Not darting off into the woods. Gone. As if both had slipped through some invisible doorway hidden behind the tree.
One second they were there. The next, they no longer existed.
I stood frozen for maybe a heartbeat, trying to force logic onto what I had just witnessed. Then instinct took over. I turned around and got out of there as fast as I could.
I didn’t tell my daughter what I’d seen. Not that day. Not for years afterward. In all my life, I have never encountered anything remotely like it before or since. I’ve searched endlessly for explanations, stories, anything resembling what I witnessed on that hillside, but I’ve never found an account that truly matched it.
Years later, with the help of AI tools and some Photoshop work of my own, I created an image that comes close to what I remember seeing that day.
And after all this time, I still have the same question:
Has anyone else ever seen anything like it?