It was summer of 2012, and we were on vacation. I was in California at the time with him since I had just graduated high school in L.A., and he (since he was a two years older than me) had just gotten off duty for two weeks from the Marine Corps. Anyways, we decided to head up to Colorado to his parents house, but something very, very chilling happened on his way to his parents' house. As we were driving down the interstate, it was largely uneventful for ~3 hours, but all of that changed when we finally crossed into Colorado. The entire area that the interstate passed through was fairly densely wooded, which was a contrast from the barren landscape of the state of Arizona that we had just passed through.
Anyways, as we were ~90 miles from Denver, my friend decided that he would take a backroute that connected to the Nevada-Utah-Colorado interstate since that would've saved us some time as his parents' house was on the northern edge of Denver. About 15 minutes after he did this, we eventually came across a car that was parked horizontally across the road. It was a beat-up Subaru. Keep in mind that it was fairly dark outside at this point and that this backroute had had no cars for most of the 15 minutes that had passed. It was also densely wooded with old trees, which reduced visibility in both lateral directions. As we got closer, the headlights of the car began to make out two people lying face down on the road. One of the car doors was still open, and there was an open suitcase on the other side of the car.
I was already beginning to feel really uneasy. The two people looked dead, but it didn't look like a car accident. I began to immediately cycle through scenarios, such as a serial killer or worse, but none made sense at at the time. There's no feeling like knowing you're in severe danger, but knowing what you're in danger of, exactly. The adrenaline has you shivering uncontrollably.
Him, being a U.S. Marine who had seen combat in Iraq, reached into the dashboard, and got his .9 mm service standard out like it was no big deal at all. He loaded the chamber, and braced for combat. At this point, I knew that if he was feeling the strangeness of this situation, too, it must've been serious. Something was obviously very, very wrong. The entire scene was looking "too perfect" to be real, which had just set us on edge even more. Well, turns out that our intuitions were correct. We kind of thought thought about getting out of the car, but decided not to since it was too dark and he would be in an unfavorable tactical position. We decided we'd just try to drive around it, and so he managed to finally get around the road block by partially dipping into the ditch on the side of the road.
And that's when it began. We got past the road block, and as soon as we did this, the two figures instantly got up. Furthermore, ~20 other people began to swarm from the woods. When the first person jumped up onto the road from a ditch, I seriously thought it was a Were-wolf. Your rational thinking ability is drowned by the panicked adrenaline that courses through your blood vessels. Some of them were in hooded robes, kind of like the KKK, but without the pointy dunce caps. At this point, he lowered the window, discharged two rounds somewhere to the side of the car and somewhere in front, and then floored the car. We managed to get away from the swarm JUST in time, and drove like hell to the interstate.
We filed a police report, but nothing was found the next day. To this day, we still speculate that it could've been cultists or maybe something even more sinister, but ultimately, we don't know.
Sometimes, real life is scarier than any movie. And this wasn't even the last time this happened to me, since something eerily reminiscent of this happened to my girlfriend and I a year later (although it was a bit less dramatic since we just turned around and drove the hell away.)