The Whistler in the Pines.

Deep in Asheville, North Carolina, there is a half-mile forest that people avoid at night. There is no warning on the trails or fencing, but the empty people know better. They say that something that passes through those pines does so, something that whistles as it goes.

Lori was no rural faith healer. She was an environmental science major at UNC Asheville and a junior, and she'd heard it all. When an infestation of fungus in Pisgah National Forest provided her a chance to do an internship, she offered after gruff park ranger Clem advised her to forget about it.

"Leave the east ridge at dark," he'd told her, no smiling. "There's something up there that ain't human. You hear whistling. Don't whistle back."

She dismissed it and told it to Sam, her boyfriend, and they actually laughed. Sam, big grinning hind end that he was, would whistle them creepy little tunes when they were going hiking. Lori would scowl and say stupidass.

The real internship only lasted for three weeks, and the first half week was okay. Lori tasted, mapped out the fungus, and measured the ground. And she went alone on the east ridge at dusk—for curiosity, nothing else. She thought that it was science. She was recording reality and not listening to ghost stories.

The wind grew strangely quiet as she ascended the ridge. The sun dipped below the trees, and shadows beneath them lengthened. The forest itself was unnatural there, too quiet, as though all the animals had abandoned it. She went down to take a sample when a whistle softly blew among the trees.

It wasn't a bird.

A whistling human being was scared. Three notes. Up, down, up. She froze, heart pounding. A joke? A camper? Another employee in the district?

She jumped up and yelled, but nothing. Whistling stopped.

The woods were small all of a sudden. Wind seared. Lori crawled and ran down the hill, scraping step by step on pine needles. Then, behind her, and closer this time, the same whistle. Three notes.

She did not look back.

She came back late that night, cold but unhurt. She spoke no word of the whistling when Sam walked to meet her the following night, but something was wrong, he could tell.

"Quiet. Everything okay?"

"Yeah. Just tired."

She never slept, though. At midnight, it happened once more. Not in the woods—outside the tent.

Whistling.

Three notes. Up. Down. Up.

She breathed deeply. Whistling surrounded the tent, muffled pine needles covering the sound of a stealthy footfall. She fumbled for her flashlight but did not want to turn it on. Hours, or she suspected so.

No footprints in the morning. No broken twigs. Only a small, swaying trinket from the branch of an overhanging pine. A wooden toy, roughly whittled, stitched mouth and hollowed-out eyes.

She departed the same day.

She informed Clem in town. The old, worn-out ranger snorted. "There are some things you don't tempt. The Whistler's been in there longer than any of us. He runs down the nosy-parkers. If you're lucky, he tires of it."

Lori never returned to the ridge. She quit the internship. Returned to Raleigh. But sometimes she still hears it, when she's alone, especially in forest parks or walking among lines of trees.

Three notes.

Up.

Down.

Up.

If you ever stroll down Asheville, and you might have heard a whistle through the pines, don't respond. Don't glance where. And whatever.

Don't respond with a whistle.