I was in a scout group and my troop was camping in a very green, hot, humid area, 8 hours from home. We were fishing in a creek until sunset. We packed our things and started to walk toward the base camp. It was supposed to be a fifteen minute walk, but somehow we got lost. The group of people were 2 boys (Rovers Scouts), ages between 18-21, and 5 girls (12-16 years old), including me as one of the youngest. The boys knew the area very well and they were great explorers, so the idea of getting lost was ridiculous. But we did anyway. We left the creek and went up a small hill that would lead us directly to a horse road, we would follow the road for 2 kilometers, turn to the right till we faced a gate, would open the gate and our base camp will be 20 meters away. Easy, right? Well, not exactly.

When we were following the horse road telling jokes and laughing, one of the boys realized that we were walking for quite a long time and still didn't face the gate yet. We all felt confused. The road ended at the gate, so we shouldn't have missed it. We kept walking, but nothing was familiar; tree after tree, the night was now pitch black and we had only one flashlight. One of the boys up ahead had it. The other one was closing the line of scared girls. I was the last girl in the line. The guy behind me had no light with him. Not even matches. But, on the ground, beside my feet there was a ray of light. I turned around to ask him where he got the lamp, but he pushed me and told me not to look behind at him. He was pale. I didn't want to say a word. I was afraid that if I spoke aloud mentioning the light behind us, I could get somebody else's attention (if you know what I mean).

We kept walking in silence for a while. The light kept going on and off several times. Then, one of the girls ahead started to sing and we all joined her. Our voices sounded kind of funny because we were scared, so we laughed at each other. Suddenly we heard this other laugh, a very creepy one. It was very high and it came from the right side of the road, almost behind us. We stopped and saw a very slim person dressed in white clothes, it was throwing its head back and the eyes were closed as he or she was laughing at us, pointing a skinny finger at us. It was behind the nearest tree like 4 meters from me and seemed to dance joyfully, hiding and showing, hiding and showing. It seemed to be bald. The thing scared the hell out of us when it stopped the laugh, got serious and opened the eyes. There were no eyes. Only two black holes in its luminiscent face.We screamed and ran back the road. Even the brave boys. We ran until I couldn't keep doing it. So everybody stopped to catch some breath. We were far from him or her (couldn't define the gender, the figure or whatever, was like a creepy, demented, bald, androgynous 70's David Bowie) and we took a look around; the road was familiar again. It was 1 km from the creek.

The boys wanted to go back that way, but the girls didn't want to. The thing might be waiting for us or something, so we didn't move. They couldn't convince us and neither could leave us, so we all stayed there. Sitting in a circle, back to back, in the middle of the road, talking about every subject, except what had happened or other scary stuff. A couple of hours later, an old truck met us and gave us a ride to the gate. It was a cowboy and as soon as we got there, one of the boys told him what we saw, to see if the man knew what it was. He said that maybe it was a nahual or a ghoul. A corpse-eater. We couldn't sleep for the rest of the night. We made a fire, stayed outside the tents (didn't want to be surprised) and left at sunrise.

None of us came back to that area again. The boy who was behind me, the one that saw the light before any of us, later said that he heard steps behind him, but nobody was there when he turned around, not even the light. That guy died six years later, he fell from a tree in another camp, two hours from the palce we saw that thing. Now I return to the Scouts group as a leader and never go out without the Magnificat Prayer (a Catholic one) in my pocket. I told this story to another cowboy in another area, and he told me to carry it with me, just in case. It seems to work.