A coal mine can be a creepy place, especially at night. When I'm on water truck, filling up the tank, I always have to remember to do a quick scan for bears, wolves or cougars before I get down. And usually I forget. So I've gotten a good scare more than once from being down on the ground in the pitch dark when a sudden movement not ten feet away startles me- it's always just a deer, but for a split second you don't know and it raises your hackles.
So I'm pretty sure I would have been freaked right out if I had been there last night (this week I'm on dayshift) when everyone heard the garbled but terrified voice of a little girl on the two-way radio screaming for help, saying something about a brown bear and possibly her dad being on the ground. Then a bloodcurdling scream, and nothing.
When we got on shift this morning various versions of this story started going around, and my first reaction was a little shiver, and, "Cool Hallowe'en ghost story!" and then, well, I don't know what to think. There's been no reports of missing little girls, no evidence of a mauling, nothing. They searched around and called the police last night, but what more can you do at night when you have no idea where even to begin looking?
And why is a little girl out at night in the wild? How did she happen to have a radio tuned to the mine's frequency? Is it a hoax? A tape? A ghost? If not, what? I talked to some of the guys who were working and they didn't think it was a fake- they were all freaked right out- enough to call the cops (who said there was nothing they could do without a missing persons report). I didn't even know if I should blog about it until there was more info. If you hear or know anything (like you can identify the horror movie the soundbite was taken from) let me know. There's been quite a few poachers hanging out, so maybe they were screwing around to get revenge for us calling the cops on them. Who knows? One thing's for sure- I'd way rather it was a poacher, or hell, even a ghost, than a real little girl.
Creepy.