“It was late summer, years ago, when a young man named Clay decided to spend a night inside the Devil’s Pounding Ground. Folks say he was stubborn, always the one who’d take a dare just to prove a point. His friends bet him twenty bucks he wouldn’t last ‘til morning in a tent, right there in the middle of the barren earth.
Clay laughed, pitched his tent in the dead center, and waved goodnight to the rest of them as they drove off.
Now, his friends parked a mile down the road, swearing they’d sneak back at dawn to see if he’d chicken out. But sometime after midnight, one of them swore he heard music drifting through the trees — faint, low, almost like a woman humming an old wedding hymn. He said it wasn’t Clay’s voice. It was too sweet. Too sad.
When they came back at first light, the circle was empty. The tent was gone. Not collapsed, not torn, not burned — gone. No tracks leading out, no sign of Clay anywhere. Just bare dirt.
