Scream in the hills of Afghanistan – True Horror Story

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Scream in the hills of Afghanistan

I deployed to Afghanistan in 2009 with the 82nd Airborne. Most of our work was small patrols through valleys and villages, building relationships with locals, keeping an eye on the routes insurgents favored, and making sure no one was planting bombs where they shouldn’t. I’d already spent months adjusting to the rhythm of life there—the dry air, the constant scanning of rooftops and ridgelines, the long stretches of boredom cut through with bursts of fear. But there’s one mission that sits heavier than the rest, not because of combat but because of something else, something I can’t explain even to myself. It started with reports from villagers about sounds in the hills east of our outpost. They said people were hearing cries at night, sometimes like women wailing, sometimes like animals screaming. A few swore they’d seen figures moving along the ridges, tall and thin, but not Taliban. The Afghan National Army guys who worked with us laughed it off, but they refused to patrol near those hills after dark. Our captain didn’t believe in ghost stories, but he wanted to know if insurgents were staging up there, so he ordered a reconnaissance sweep.

There were eight of us on that patrol. We set out late afternoon, planning to cross the hills before nightfall, check for caves or weapons caches, and loop back to base by morning. The terrain was rough—rocky paths climbing into jagged ridges that cut sharp against the sky. As the sun dropped, shadows stretched long and deep, filling the gullies like pools of ink. By the time we reached the first ridgeline, the valley below was already sinking into darkness. We paused to scan with optics. Nothing moved, no heat signatures, no signs of campfires or people. It should’ve felt reassuring, but it didn’t. The silence pressed against us, thicker than usual, as if the mountains themselves were holding their breath. We pushed on, headlamps dimmed to red. The path narrowed along a cliff face, forcing us into single file. That’s when I first noticed the sound. At first it was faint, like wind carrying a note too low to identify. Then it swelled, rising and falling in strange rhythms, not quite human, not quite animal. It seemed to drift from all directions, bouncing off the rock.

“Echoes,” one of the guys muttered. But it wasn’t. Echoes repeat what you put out. This was something else, like voices calling across a distance we couldn’t measure. Donnelly—different Donnelly than the one from Iraq, just bad coincidence—was on point. He froze, holding up a fist. We all crouched low, scanning. Through my NVGs, I caught movement up the slope. A figure, standing still among the rocks, too far to identify but shaped like a man. We trained rifles on it. Donnelly called out in Pashto, ordering them to step forward. No response. The figure didn’t move. Then, in the blink of an eye, it was gone—not ducking behind cover, not running, just not there anymore. Nobody said much. We’d all seen something, but no two descriptions matched. One guy swore it was tall as a tree. Another said it was hunched and short. I just knew it had been there and then it wasn’t.

We continued on, more tense than before. The sounds followed us—sometimes faint, sometimes so close I wanted to tear my headset off. A couple of the guys whispered about djinn, but Donnelly shut that talk down fast. “Keep your heads. It’s insurgents screwing with us.” He sounded confident, but I saw the way his jaw clenched. Near midnight, we reached a plateau dotted with old stone walls, maybe ruins of an ancient settlement. We decided to rest there before making the loop back. The air was cold, biting through our uniforms, and the sky was clear enough to see every star. For a moment it felt almost peaceful. Then Green—different guy than the one from Iraq, though I almost laughed at the coincidence—said he heard footsteps behind one of the walls. We formed a half-circle and swept the ruins with lights. Nothing. The walls were low, maybe three feet high, nothing to hide behind. Still, the footsteps came again, clear as day, crunching gravel, circling us. Then they stopped. We huddled tighter, nerves fraying. Moreno, who always cracked jokes to keep fear away, muttered, “This place is wrong, man.” No one argued.

That’s when the screaming started. It came from the valley below, echoing upward, high-pitched and desperate. At first I thought it was a woman or a child, but the pitch shifted in ways no human voice should. It warped mid-note, stretching long and ragged, then cutting off suddenly. We all froze, rifles raised.

“Could be a recording,” Donnelly said, his voice shaking. But if it was, whoever was playing it had to be in the valley—and our optics still showed nothing. The screaming started again, this time closer. It didn’t echo right; the sound seemed to come from inside our circle of ruins. We spun in place, lights sweeping, rifles trembling. There was nothing there, just cold rock and dust. No one slept that night. We held our perimeter until dawn, nerves wound so tight every pebble shift made us flinch. When the first light hit the mountains, the sounds stopped, as if someone had cut a switch. We moved fast on the return route, too rattled to linger. But the hills weren’t done with us. Halfway back, Clark tripped and slid down a slope, tumbling into a shallow ravine. When we scrambled to help him, he was on his knees, shaking and pointing at the dirt.

There, pressed into the dry earth, were footprints. Not his—these were longer, narrower, almost skeletal, leading into a narrow crack between rocks. The trail ended at the shadows of that crack, no sign of entry or exit. Clark swore he felt hands grabbing at him when he fell. We pulled him up and didn’t argue. Back at base, we filed our report: no insurgents, no caches, no activity. Officially, that was the truth. Unofficially, we didn’t say much. What could we say—that the mountains themselves whispered and screamed at us? That figures appeared and vanished like smoke? That footprints led into cracks too small for a child, let alone something human? The ANA guys refused to even look at the hills after that. A few weeks later, word spread that another unit sent the same direction never checked in. The brass said they hit an ambush. But no bodies were recovered, no equipment, nothing. Just silence, like the hills had swallowed them whole.

Even now, years later, I dream about those sounds. Sometimes I’ll wake in the night, certain I hear them just outside my window—the high, warping screams, the whispers rising and falling like a tide. And when I do, I don’t breathe, I don’t move, because I’m afraid that if I answer, whatever was in those hills will remember me and come calling again.