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The original was posted on /r/twoxchromosomes by /u/IndianaBlack on 2023-08-05 00:17:22.
TLDR: terrifying experience in Joshua Tree.
This happened last night and I’m still in shock. I’m writing this to, I dunno, recommend that people listen to their gut. Be vigilant. I don’t know. To get it out there.
My friend (27f) and I (32f) decided to go on an overnight day trip through the Mojave desert to visit the Salton Sea, Slab City, East Jesus, and then camp in Joshua Tree. We’re working on a feature and we’re sourcing locations and just talking artistically about the locations and taking some photos etc.
If you’ve never been out there or want to spare yourself the quick Google, the Salton Sea is a massive ecological disaster where in the 50s they ran off parts of the Colorado River into a salt basin that caused the water to become acidic filled with Algee, and started killing all wildlife, irritating swimmers skin, rusting and sinking boats, and now creates toxic dust that is giving the local residents cancer. It’s sitting on a shit ton of lithium, smells fucking awful, and you have all these resort beach towns that were supposedly going to be the next greatest vacation location in the 50s/60s that then got packed up and abandoned.
These are roads that don’t have power lines along them because there’s nothing out here.
People still live out there but it is truly the middle of nowhere. Cinder block houses and mobile homes boarded up with sheet metal. Bombed out windows and just very unsettling. Slab City was supposed to be an air force base that never came to fruition so they tore it all down except for the concrete slabs and left.
Well people came to get away from civilization and build a makeshift town off the grid and some amazing art installations but it’s still very much an outlaw town. You do not come after dark.
On that side of Joshua Tree National Park is Eagle Rock and that’s where we planned on camping out to watch the stars, smoke a blunt, and just discuss what we wanted from the film and what we thought about what we saw that day.
We enter the park and head for the visitors center and find no one around. We take a map from the box, and decide to head to the camp grounds nearby - cottonwood camp grounds, I believe.
As we pull into the grounds it’s separated into two loops: A & B. A giant “road closed” gate is secure, blocking one of the loops but luckily we find the other one open and so drive inside. Every camp site on this loop is posted with “reserved. No walk-ins” sign but we figure there’s literally no one around, visitors center was empty, so if the park rangers need us to move we will.
We hop out and begin setting up our campsite and are just laughing and talking about our day and everything we saw, trying to beat the setting sun.
The only other soul around was a white SUV parked up on the shoulder, diagonally from our campsite location, (maybe a football field or less away) facing the bathrooms. When we’d entered the loop and took a left, we could see this lonely car on the right. There were no camping equipment or bikes or anything to indicate travel loaded on the vehicle. It wasn’t even pulled into the little parking enclave for each campsite, it was pulled on the shoulder of the loop, pointing at the bathrooms which were a long cinder block enclosed structure.
The white car was running when we initially got in, which makes sense because it was 114 degrees at its hottest and probably had the AC running, but what was weird is that the lights were on as if someone was sitting on the brake and about to pull off and drive away. As the sun was going down and the temperature was rapidly dropping, the white SUV kept turning their vehicle on and off, not moving the car, but we’d see the lights go every once in a while as we are setting up and relaxing.
To better see the sunset, we take our collapsible chairs and place them on the stone picnic tables at each designated site - not on the benches, on the table top. So we were lifted up by an extra four feet and facing the direction of the white SUV with our car behind us. We have a little soft lantern light behind us on the ground so bugs and bats would leave us alone but give us enough light to not die getting off the table.
As it really starts to get quite dark, what I thought were maybe golden low lights on the bathroom structure so that campers could find it were actually that white SUV’s lowlights on the structure. I only discovered this as it was getting darker that he turned them off, thus really extinguishing the area towards darkness.
My friend remarked that if they were waiting for hikers to comeback (a trail head was near us) that the window for their safety was starting to close. We couldn’t figure out what he was doing - why wasn’t he in a designated parking spot? Why was he parked pointed directly at the bathroom, but not near it in a convenient sort of way? Why did he keep turning his lights on and off? Why wouldn’t he crack his windows now that it was cooler? Why was there no camping gear?
There’s no cell service in the entire park and the area that we came in isn’t just off the interstate, so it’s unlikely that if you’re driving and need a place to rest that you pull off to nap there. You’d A. Stay somewhere with cell service or B. Stay in front of the visitors center where they have water and bathrooms - there’s no water at campgrounds. We wouldn’t drive this deep into the park just to sleep some before going again.
It just felt so weird and we kept making jokes about it and even checked our map earlier to see if there were trail heads nearby. Like it clearly bothered us, but we didn’t want to panic or freak out.
Well it’s proper black now and we’re looking at the milky way as it’s starting to become visible when suddenly, we see the interior light of his vehicle go off. We see him exiting the vehicle, clearly outside the car and standing, and reach back in to quickly turn off all the lights.
It wasn’t a slow get out and slow reach to turn off the lights. It was a sudden movement of him standing outside and then scrambling to reach back inside to turn off the interior light and then pulling the keys from the ignition to make the brake lights also go out quickly. Black.
We hear his door close. We never see him or hear him get back in the car.
At this point my friend and I are on high alert. The jokes are over and the visceral instant terror that I felt I cannot explain or articulate.
I’ve read the book The Gift of Fear and I just keep thinking about the story of the woman who knew the man was about to kill her because he shut the window. Even if she didn’t rationalize in the moment that it was so no one would hear her scream, it was just an instant reaction that she knew and her body took over. How I felt in that moment seeing that interior light go out is how I imagine she felt when the window was shut.
I said to my friend very quietly to get in the car. She also saw everything and without a word we got off the picnic table and into our car and locked the doors.
Inside we tried to calm down and think rationally: he’s just going to the bathroom, right? In the pitch blackness? He didn’t even bring his cellphone light with him? It didn’t sit right.
Meanwhile we’re scanning the darkness outside our little light ring to see if we can spot anyone coming near us. We can’t call anyone, there’s no cell service and even if there was, both our cellphones are in our bags inside our tent. We decide that even if we’re being completely irrational that we won’t be able to sleep because we’re too afraid, so we should pack up.
We silently and as quickly as possible pack up the campsite with our headlights on. I’m literally terrified, taking this tent down on the edge of the light ring with my head on a swivel and preparing myself that someone might attack from the darkness at any moment. And it’s deathly quiet because it’s the desert - there’s nothing for the sound to bounce off and the sand/dirt absorbs so much noise. You hear things really clearly, but only when they’re really close.
We don’t bother doing shit like folding the tent away nicely, I literally bundle it up and chuck it in the trunk. As we get into the vehicle and lock the doors, we realize that to exit we have to go around the loop and we’ll pass the white SUV.
There’s a moment where when you’re packing everything up and you’re basically scolding yourself and trying to talk yourself down that you’re being ridiculous. Why was I ruining a perfectly good vacation being scared? This was probably all nothing?
Driving by his car was kinda the calm to laugh at ourselves and then scold each other. Well as we roll by, we see that both the front seats are upright and completely empty. If he’s sleeping in his car, he would have to be curled up in the back, which i just don’t think a tall man would do. They would recline their front or passenger seat.
As soon as we see the car is empty and there’s, again, no camping gear around it we fucking floor it out of there. The fear came rushing back as we raced out of Joshua Tree and back to Los Angeles.
Once back at her place we explain to her boyfriend what happened and he immediately says: “oh, he was absolutely waiting in the bathroom for you” and my heart just sank. We both knew it. I don’t know how we knew - but I felt the danger.
Googling that area and suprise suprise, it’s a human trafficking hot spot due to its seclusion and access to borders. It’s…
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