You weren’t looking for ghosts.

It started with your cousin Clara. She vanished in late October. One minute she was texting you from a trail near the North Carolina-Tennessee border—something about finding an “unmapped holler” that made her skin crawl—and the next, silence. Her phone pinged from the woods near Old Blood Ridge for three more days, then stopped. Local search teams found no body, no trace—only her bag, lying neatly zipped, with a note tucked inside that read: “She’s still smiling.”

No one else believed there was more to it than a tragic misstep or a mountain lion. But you did. Clara was careful. She knew those woods. And that note wasn’t in her handwriting.

So you drove six hours into the green lung of the Appalachians. You hiked alone past marked trails, into places where the trees lean wrong, where birds stop singing at noon. Locals warned you not to go beyond Widow’s Hollow. They said the land remembers things. And some things remember you back.

Still, you kept going. Until the air turned thick. Until the light changed.

That’s when you saw her.

She wasn’t hiding. Not really. She stood just beyond your firelight, still as a tombstone, face barely lit by the dying coals. You couldn’t make out much—just the shape of a woman, unnaturally tall and narrow, draped in something that looked like hair, or wet bark. Her face… or what mimicked one… was made of too much shadow, stretched into a chalky, permanent grin. Her lips never moved when she spoke.

But you felt the words crawl up your spine.

Her voice was wrong. Not loud, not a whisper—just close. Closer than it should’ve been. She smelled like rain on iron and rotting leaves.

She said: “You saw me… but no, you didn’t.”

And just like that, your memory went soft around the edges. You couldn’t recall how long you’d been staring at her. Your flashlight died. Your limbs felt too cold to run. Something inside you knew: if you told anyone about her, she’d follow you home. Smiling.

Because that’s her rule.

If you see her and live, you didn’t. You can’t.

She feeds on stories—on the breaking of silence. She was once a woman, maybe. Long ago. Lost in the hills like you, swallowed by grief or fire or something older. Now, she waits for the lonely, the curious, the ones who come searching…

Clara was one of them.

And now you are too.