ROBERTS CREEK, B.C.

Names in this story have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals.

“It was like some dark fucking entrance.”

That’s how Dustin James best sums up what he and his friend, Kyle Luca, witnessed on a desolate logging road one fall evening in 2021. 

For a lot of young men from small towns, driving is as much a pastime as it is a necessity. With few choices for entertainment offered by big cities, good tunes, conversation, and empty roads can just as easily provide as much fun as their urban counter parts. 

Sometimes, though, that fun can quickly be overshadowed by terror. 

In October 2021, Dustin and Kyle were doing what they often did. Piling into Kyle’s battered Toyota, they headed north from their homes in Gibsons towards Roberts Creek, a ten kilometre drive up Highway 101, which stretches the length of British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast. 

Upon reaching “the creek,”–as it’s called by locals–they made the turn off the highway and headed north towards Lockyear Road, a steep, winding stretch that eventually turns to gravel road. It was a favourite place for the pair, who enjoyed the isolation the unbroken miles of fir and cedar provided. The area is very desolate, primarily used for logging and by locals looking to escape the watchful eye of society. Indeed, it was the friends’ plan that evening to park at a spot towards the end of the stretch and smoke a joint, which was often their routine on such trips. 

Bouncing up the rough terrain, the pair talked and smoked cigarettes, music blasting from the stereo as the little car pulled them further and further up into the forest. 

When they reached their usual spot, a pull out at a dead end, Kyle shut off the engine.

It was then that an ordinary journey took a sharp turn towards the ominous.

Dustin was the first to notice it. As Kyle set about rolling the joint, he looked up from his phone at the wall of trees surrounding them, he noticed something odd–something that most certainly had not been there before. 

“There was an opening in the trees,” he said. “It looked like a clearing.” 

Dustin knew right away that there was something odd about the what he was seeing.

“I looked up and I was like ‘was that always there?’ . . . I [said], ‘do you see that?’” 

Kyle turned his attention from his task and soon both sat staring at the strange opening in the woods. The longer they looked, the more it became apparent that the strange “opening” was not something manmade at all, but otherworldly—what Dustin explained as just sort of “floating there.”

“It was kind of shimmering . . . It looked alive.” 

All at once, the previously jovial atmosphere became overshadowed by a sense of dread, what Dustin describes as “a shivery, heavy feeling.” 

“We both felt it. We [were] like “what the fuck is that?” 

Kyle in particular appeared to be especially disturbed by whatever it was they were witnessing, his reaction bordering on hysteria. Forgetting the joint, he started the car and “floored it out of there.”

“[Kyle] literally had tears in his eyes, he was so scared.”  

Thoroughly disturbed, the two headed back down Lockyear to the highway, doing their best to keep their composure as they hightailed it back towards town.

Looking back, Dustin attributes to what they witnessed as something akin to a portal—an opening between the living and the otherworldly.

In subsequent trips back to the spot, he says there’s never been any trace of whatever it was he and his friend experienced that night. It’s a memory he still looks back on with as much terror as he does confusion. 

“I don’t know how to explain it. I only can picture how it looks in my head.” 

Sadly, just four months later, Kyle ended up passing away under tragic circumstances and Dustin still wonders today if what they’d witnessed that night may have been some sort of forewarning. His friend’s reaction in particular is something he still thinks of, three years later. 

On a recent trip in the area with his mother, who brought up the experience, it’s clear it’s an event that still resonates strongly with the now 27 year old. 

“When she brought it up I got the shivers, straight though my arms to my legs. I hated it,” he said with genuine unease in his voice. 

“It’s giving me the shivers right now.”