The Night the Woods Went Quiet — A True Story

What I’m about to describe really happened to me. I’m not claiming to know what it was, and I’m not asking anyone to believe it. But these are events I personally experienced.

It began in the summer of 1985.

I had just gotten my driver’s license. Anyone who grew up in a small town knows what that feels like—the first real taste of freedom. Around that same time, my parents and I got into a pretty heated argument. I don’t even remember what the argument was about anymore. I just remember being furious.

So I stormed out of the house, jumped into my 1972 Grand Torino Sport, and tore out of our gravel driveway throwing gravel everywhere behind me. I grabbed some camping gear and headed straight for the Ozarks.

My destination was Long Pool near Dover, Arkansas.

Long Pool is a recreation area tucked into the mountains with thick woods, creeks, and ridges that stretch out for miles. I drove up there, parked in the Long Pool recreation area parking lot, grabbed my camping gear out of the trunk, and started hiking up the trail that leads toward Felkins Point.

Somewhere about halfway between the Long Pool parking lot and Felkins Point—around an area known locally as **Wainscott Bottom**—I found a spot near **Big Piney Creek** and decided to set up a little camp.

It was still daylight when I got there. I remember sitting around for a while just farting around and cooling off from the argument. I had my Walkman with me, so I spent some time listening to music while the afternoon slowly faded into evening.

It had been a really hot day, and even after the sun started going down the air still felt thick and warm. When night finally settled in, I built a small campfire.

The moon was out, the sky was clear, and the woods were alive with insects and the steady sound of **Big Piney Creek** running nearby. It was one of those quiet Ozark nights where the forest feels completely still.

Sometime later—my best guess would be around two or three in the morning—I noticed something strange.

Across the creek, up on a ridge several yards away from me, I saw a glow rising from the ground.

At first I thought it might be someone out in the woods with a flashlight. But the light didn’t move like a flashlight beam. It wasn’t sweeping across the trees or shining on anything.

It was just there.

The glow grew brighter, and I realized I couldn’t see any real shape to it. It wasn’t a perfectly round orb. It was simply an extremely bright light, almost blinding, hovering just above the ground on the ridge.

Before I could even really process what I was looking at, the light moved.

In an instant it shot across **Big Piney Creek** and passed directly over my head.

The speed of it was unbelievable.

And that’s where my memory becomes strange.

I don’t remember anything happening after that moment. I don’t remember lying down or falling asleep. There’s simply a gap in my memory.

The next thing I clearly remember is blinking my eyes and realizing the sun was up.

Night had turned into morning.

My whole body was tingling from head to toe, like when your foot falls asleep—but everywhere at once. I stood there trying to understand what had happened, but the only thing I knew was that I wanted to get out of there.

So I ran back to my car.

For years afterward, I didn’t talk about that experience very much. Back then especially, if you told people you saw strange lights in the woods, they would just assume you were crazy.

The strange part is that the area around Dover is already known for something called the **Dover Lights**. For generations, people have reported seeing mysterious glowing lights drifting through the hills and valleys in that region. Some people think they’re natural phenomena. Others believe they’re something else entirely.

I still don’t know if what I saw that night had anything to do with those lights.

But that experience changed something in me.

After that encounter in the woods, I began noticing something unusual that I had never experienced before. Sometimes I would see faint colors around people and other living things. The best way I can describe it is that it looked like a soft, rainbow-like aura surrounding them.

It didn’t happen constantly, but it happened often enough that I became very aware of it—especially during the summer months when everything outside seemed vibrant and alive.

I didn’t understand what I was seeing, and that confusion became one of the reasons I started searching for answers.

That search eventually led me into studying things most people never talk about—occult philosophy, spiritual traditions, and esoteric teachings. I began reading about subjects like Wicca and exploring teachings connected to groups such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

In many of those traditions, the idea of people having energetic fields or auras around them was discussed openly, and those teachings gave me a framework—right or wrong—for understanding what I thought I might be seeing.

At the same time, I’ve always loved science fiction. Star Trek, Stargate, Star Wars—anything that explores the unknown and asks bigger questions about what might exist beyond what we currently understand.

I also spent many nights listening to Art Bell and the Coast to Coast AM radio show from its earliest days. Hearing other people talk about strange experiences and unexplained mysteries made me realize I wasn’t the only one trying to make sense of things that don’t always fit neatly into everyday explanations.

That search for answers quietly became a sideline interest of mine over the years.

Then in 1994, just before my daughter was born, something else happened.

At the time I was working at Arkansas Nuclear One.

One night I stepped outside during a break to have a cigarette. The cooling towers stood nearby, towering over the plant against the night sky.

While I was standing there, I noticed something hovering beside one of them.

The best way I can describe it is that it looked like a floating propane tank—smooth, cylindrical, and suspended in the air next to the cooling tower.

I blinked.

And it was gone.

Whatever it was zipped away so quickly that the sky looked empty again almost immediately.

Just a couple of minutes later, two A-10 Warthogs flew past the plant extremely low to the ground.

But what shocked me was that they were completely silent.

Anyone who has ever heard an A-10 knows they usually make a lot of noise. Yet these two aircraft slipped past the cooling towers without making a sound at all.

Not long after that, my wife and I went with some friends to try to see the Dover Lights for ourselves.

It was one of those local legends everyone talks about, and somehow I had almost forgotten about it until someone suggested going up there one night.

So we drove up to the viewing area where people usually watch for the lights.

Ironically, we didn’t see anything that night.

What didn’t dawn on me at the time was that the valley visible from that viewpoint was the exact same area where I had experienced the strange light in the woods years earlier.

Eventually we all went home.

Later that night we went to bed. My wife was very pregnant with our daughter at the time.

During the early morning hours I experienced one of the most intense sleep paralysis episodes of my life.

I woke up unable to move.

While lying there, I saw what appeared to be three small gray figures walking around our bed. They seemed to be circling it slowly and looking at my wife while she slept.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak.

I couldn’t tell whether they were doing anything to my wife or to our unborn child. All I knew was that they seemed to be focused on her while I lay there completely helpless.

It was one of the most terrifying experiences I’ve ever had.

Eventually the paralysis ended and everything disappeared.

The strange part came the next morning.

Our next-door neighbors were pounding loudly on our door asking if we were okay. They said that earlier that morning they had seen three glowing orbs floating and moving around above our apartment.

The time they described sounded like it lined up almost exactly with when my sleep paralysis episode had occurred.

Now, I’m not claiming those things were connected.

Sleep paralysis is a well-known condition, and the human mind can produce very vivid experiences during those moments between sleep and waking.

But I know what I experienced that night.

Even before all of these experiences, I had always been fascinated with the night sky.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite things to do during the summer was take a blanket outside and lie on the ground staring up at the stars.

I had an old pair of hunting binoculars that belonged to my grandfather. I would spend hours scanning the sky through them.

Sometimes I stayed out so late that my mother would eventually have to come outside and drag me back into the house so I could get some sleep.

Even through those old binoculars, I sometimes saw lights moving across the sky in ways that didn’t quite make sense to my young eyes—things moving in directions or patterns that airplanes or satellites shouldn’t move.

Maybe my curiosity started there.

Or maybe it started the night a blinding light rose from a ridge across **Big Piney Creek at Wainscott Bottom** and shot over my head in the Ozark woods.

Either way, everything I’ve described here really happened to me.

You can believe it or not.

Either way, it’s the truth of what I experienced.

Nathan Scott