THE DARK BENEATH: The Thing in the Pine Curtain (Case File #13)

The Dark Beneath: Scary Folklore & Whispers in Texas

CASE FILE #13

If you drive Highway 59 long enough past Nacogdoches, the pine trees start forming walls — tall, silent, judgmental. East Texans call it the Pine Curtain, a name that sounds adorable until you’re out there at dusk, wondering why every shadow looks like it’s sizing you up.

Locals don’t talk much about what’s in those woods.

Not because they don’t know.

Because they do.

This is the story they won’t tell you until you’ve lived there long enough for the trees to notice you.

The Girl Who Came Out of the Woods

In 1987, a teenage girl staggered out of the Pine Curtain barefoot, scratched to hell, and covered in a thin layer of red clay like she’d been dug up instead of lost.

Name: Hannah Cole

Age: 16

Missing for: 3 days

Memory: Swiss cheese

All she remembered was a voice in the dark whispering,

“You don’t run from the woods. The woods run from you.”

Doctors chalked it up to dehydration and trauma.

Locals? They weren’t so optimistic.

Hannah wasn’t the first kid to come out like that.

Just the only one still breathing.

What People Saw But Pretended They Didn’t

For weeks after Hannah’s return, deputies logged a rash of “wild animal” sightings — except these sightings shared one detail:

No animal tracks.

Only footprints.

Bare ones.

Small ones.

And every time someone spotted those prints, they were pointed toward town…then back toward the Pine Curtain…like something pacing the tree line, deciding whether it was invited in.

Old-timers swore the woods had been restless since the logging companies carved out half the forest decades earlier.

Not angry.

Just hungry.

The Night Things Went Sideways

Three weeks after she returned, Hannah sleepwalked out of her house.

Her mama woke up to the front door standing open, pine needles on the welcome mat, and the sound of something dragging across the gravel driveway — slow, rhythmic, like feet that didn’t fully know how to be feet anymore.

They found Hannah standing at the edge of the woods, eyes open, body rigid, like she was listening to something her bones recognized before her brain did.

When her mother called her name, Hannah whispered:

“It wants the rest of me back.”

The Part No One Wanted Published

Two days later, Hannah vanished again.

No struggle.

No trail.

Just her footprints leading into the Pine Curtain…and two sets leading beside them.

One set small.

The other… wrong.

Toes too long.

Heel too narrow.

Like something had learned how to mimic a human,

but not well.

Search parties combed the woods but found nothing except claw marks on trees — not deep ones, but deliberate, almost tidy, stacked like someone keeping tally marks.

Final count: three vertical scratches.

Three days missing.

Three visits to the woods.

Three sets of footprints.

After that?

The sheriff shut the case.

Not solved.

Just closed.

East Texas style.

What Locals Still Believe

People living near the Pine Curtain leave offerings at the tree line now:

Sweets.

Hair ribbons.

Little dolls made of twine.

Not because they think Hannah will come back.

But because they know something did —just not in the shape they expected.

To this day, drivers swear that at dusk, when the sunlight hits the pine trunks just right, they see a small barefoot figure standing between the trees…

…and something taller bending down behind her,

learning her posture,

tilting its head the same way,

trying to perfect the shape it borrowed.

**FINAL WORD

“Some Roots Don’t Want to Stay Buried”**

The Pine Curtain isn’t haunted.

It isn’t cursed.

It isn’t even angry.

It’s alive —and everything alive wants something.

Some want food.

Some want space.

And some…want company.

If CASE FILE #13 is the first you're reading, make sure to go back and check out "The Dark Beneath" series of posts! The Dark Beneath: Scary Folklore & Whispers in Texas

Until the next body drops,

Loretta & David Allseitz

"Unmasking Evil, one body at a time"

*The Dark Beneath is fiction—lore, not evidence. If you take it as fact, that’s between you, your lying uncle, and whatever’s creeping around your woods at 2 a.m.