A very scary story is told about a large wildfire that happened in 2002 on South Mount Hawkins in the San Gabriel mountain range of California.
The fire broke out suddenly on September 1 and quickly began to creep up the slopes, destroying the lush local vegetation. He reached the canyon and recreation area, including damaging a highway passing by.
The fire supposedly started from an old wooden fire tower (ironically) built in 1935 on top of a mountain, which completely burned down.
And soon rumors spread that the fire was deliberately caused by the activities of a strange dark cult.
It was said that members of the cult performed some kind of ritual on the tower, as a result of which many animals were killed. Because of these sacrifices, something fiery and evil appeared, which created the fire. Of course, everything can be attributed to a rich imagination, but people have seen something else.
When the fire had already flared up and engulfed the mountain, locals and tourists one after another began to report eerie screams coming from the fire. These were not screams of pain, but something special. And then in the burning forests they began to notice wandering dark silhouettes of animals - foxes, birds, cats, rabbits.
Looking at these silhouettes, people froze in horror. The animals seemed almost ethereal, moved with an uneven gait like zombies, their fur was burnt, and instead of eyes there were empty black charred eye sockets. Some tourists reported that these dark creatures even tried to pursue people with incomprehensible goals.
After a lot of such messages accumulated, rumors began to circulate that these were the spirits of animals killed in a dark ritual. That their dead bodies were awakened by some primordial evil. Moreover, similar silhouettes of people were also seen in the fire.
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Whether this is just an urban legend or there is a real basis in all this, it is unknown.
The next story about a strange forest fire was told by an eyewitness Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the summer of 1976, he worked as a US Forest Service officer in the Salmon River area of central Idaho.
Ludwig spent most of his time in the observation tower at the top of Pilot Peak in Payette National Fores Park. It was such a distant area that it could only be reached by helicopter. One evening he slept there, and when he woke up at 2 am he could not sleep.
When he looked out the window, he saw a bright orange glow near the ridge of the mountain, about 6 miles from the observation tower:
“Stunned by what I saw, I jumped out of bed, put on trousers, a coat, boots, pulled out a flashlight from a drawer, and all this time looked back at the window behind which this phenomenon was visible. It looked like a fire broke out there. I hit myself in the face, splashed cold water in my eyes and cheeks, and then walked out onto the ledge with my binoculars.
Through binoculars, I could clearly see a patch of flame and a couple of huge trees engulfed in flames. Breathing heavily, I went back inside and wrote a report on the fire I saw. Then, while continuing to observe the fire, I transmitted the data on the coordinates of the place of the fire by radio to the nearest fire station, which was fifteen miles away.
After informing everything, and knowing that the firefighters would arrive here around dawn, I continued to watch the fire, which had already covered about two to four acres of the area.
I watched for about twenty-five minutes, maintaining radio contact with the other lookouts upriver in the same area to whom I described the fire. Soon, I contacted the firefighters again to inform them that the fire seemed to be dying out.
And after 40 minutes from the moment I first saw the fire, everything there suddenly disappeared. The fire disappeared as if it had never existed. But a big fire that has engulfed 1-2 acres cannot go out so quickly on its own.
As it turned out by morning, the arriving fire-fighting helicopters did not find any traces of fire or fire damage. No smoke, no burnt trees. Nothing. They circled the area for several days, but they did not find anything.
Wittgenstein was the only one who saw the fire with his own eyes and he assured that it was completely real. He spent a lot of energy, assuring that he did not have hallucinations and did not sleep, but the truth was he saw everything.
At one time he was ready to accept that he had a strange dream and an attack of sleepwalking, but then he stubbornly insisted that he was awake and did not sleep and saw everything with his own eyes. This incident unsettled the man for several months, but the mystery of Pilot Peak's phantom forest fire remained unsolved.