Bogleech.com's 2013 Horror Write-off:

" Deer Head "

Submitted by Miranda Johansson

I've seen an early aerial photograph of the woods outside my hometown. It's interesting, because the area was much less densely forested back then, so you can really make out what the land looks like underneath the vegetation.

The photo was grainy, but I thought I saw... well, like an indentation in the ground, I guess. I want to say "crater," but it wasn't dramatic enough to be called a crater. A kind of bowl in the ground, I guess.

The reason I mention this is because it's pretty much at the exact center of that bowl that the hunting cabin appeared. That's not a weird choice of words on my part, by the way. It really did appear overnight without warning.

It sounds made-up, I know. I swear it's true, though – it's become this huge popular mystery in my hometown, and the cabin has actually kind of become an attraction. People come from neighboring towns to look at it, and buy novelty T-shirts and so on. It's a racket.

It's not just that the cabin appeared out in the woods without any sort of reasonable explanation, either. It's that there was dust everywhere when it was found, and the windows looked like they hadn't been washed in a long time. Like, it looked like the cabin had already stood there for years.

Whoever or whatever it was that put it there, they really went for the cliché image of a hunting cabin, right down to the deer head on a plate up above the fireplace.

I was one of the first people there. I happened to be out camping in the woods together with my best friend Neil, and we just came out of the tent that morning and there it was. What? No, I had nothing to do with it, I swear. Look, it was just the two of us. How exactly do you suggest we went about building it in a single night? Where would we even get the materials to begin with?

Well, you can either believe me or not. I'm just telling you my experience with the cabin.

It's something we talk a lot about where I'm from, I guess. It's sort of our Flatwoods monster.

There's skeptics who write it off as an elaborate prank, but personally I believe there might not actually be any logical explanation to the cabin's origins. This is mostly because of one detail, something that Neil and I saw when we went inside the cabin that morning, something that had changed when others started showing up.

We've never told anyone else. It's not that we've agreed to keep it a secret. It's just that neither of us feels especially inclined to tell anyone.

It eats at me, though:

How was the deer head still alive?