I still think about that night every time I drive through Pennsylvania. Three years have gone by and I can still feel the way my stomach dropped when everything in my car shut off at the same time.
If you think you wanna see something strange out on those roads, trust me. You really don’t.
It started as a summer road trip between two best friends. Me and my buddy Kyle had been into cryptids and UFO stories since high school, and Chestnut Ridge was the place everyone online kept talking about.
Westmoreland, Fayette, Indiana counties. Dozens of sightings. Lights. Figures. Weird creatures. All of it centered on that one long ridge.
We joked that maybe we would get lucky and catch something on camera. Neither of us actually expected anything to happen.
We were about an hour outside Ligonier when it all went bad. The road was narrow and dark, the kind of road where you barely pass another car for miles.
Our windows were down and we were talking about the old Kecksburg UFO crash when my dashboard glitched so hard the screen froze. The radio hissed.
The interior lights pulsed once. Then everything shut off.
I mean everything. The headlights, the dash, the engine. Like someone pulled the plug.
The car rolled to a dead stop in absolute darkness. There were no houses around us. No streetlights. Not even the sound of another car in the distance. It felt like the whole world got swallowed.
Before I could even process it, Kyle threw his door open and jumped out.
“Dude, look. There is something in the sky behind us,” he said.
I yelled at him to stay close, but he ignored me and jogged toward the back of the car with his phone raised. He was pointing it upward and recording something I couldn’t see.
I was still trying to figure out what shut down the entire car, when I heard it. A scraping sound. Soft, slow, dragging. Coming from a few feet in front of the hood.
At that moment, I literally stopped breathing. I reached into the center console, grabbed the flashlight, poked out the driver side window, and raised the light.
I clicked it on.
The beam hit something standing in the middle of the road.
It was tall and thin. Like really thin. Its skin looked smooth and pale, almost metallic under the flashlight. Its arms hung lower than they should have, and its face had no details. Just a blank, reflective surface shaped like a head.
It was standing perfectly centered in front of my dead headlights, like it had been waiting for us.
And the second the beam touched it, the entire car turned back on.
Everything powered up at once. The headlights blasted to full strength. The dash lit up. The radio clicked. The engine came alive like nothing had ever happened.
The creature didn’t move. It didn’t flinch. It didn’t react at all.
It just looked at me, even though it didn’t have any eyes.
“Kyle! Get in the car right now!,” I yelled.
Kyle must’ve heard the panic in my voice because he sprinted from the back of the car and jumped into the passenger seat.
The second he slammed the door shut, I jammed my foot down on the gas.
The tires screeched and the car lurched forward. We clipped the creature with the driver side mirror. The impact made a loud crack, but the thing barely shifted. It stayed on its feet like we had nudged a metal post.
I glanced in the rearview mirror. The creature was still standing in the middle of the road, illuminated perfectly by our taillights. It stayed completely still as we sped away, shrinking in the distance until the road curved and we lost sight of it.
Neither of us spoke for several minutes. In fact, I don’t think either of us even breathed an ounce of air that whole time.
We didn’t stop until we found a 24 hour Sheetz gas station glowing in the distance. It felt safe. Human. Loud. Real.
Inside the car at the pump, Kyle finally showed me the video he recorded. It was only five seconds long. Just a shaky shot of the night sky. A single bright light hovered for a moment, then blinked out.
Right before the screen turned black, there was one more sound. A faint scraping. The same sound I heard at the front of the car.
We never went back to the ridge, after that.
