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I guess the best way to explain “The Night” that changed my entire life is to first describe the morning of that day.

I live on Padre Island, Texas. Twice a year during the autumn, as the relentless summer finally starts to cool off and again in the spring, the island undergoes some of the most magical renditions of ground fog of anywhere I’ve ever seen.

The fog will hang about 8 feet above the ground, erasing the sand dunes and grass that grows below.

I’d never seen anything in real life like it until we moved here decades ago. The only thing comparable is Hollywood’s special effects.

Old timers call it a clag. You know the kind I’m talking about. The Halloween-style spook movie where the fog rolling in over the graveyard lets you only make out vague shapes and silhouettes of the trees and gravestones behind it.

It’s like that for us on Padre Island, maybe a dozen times a year. Magical. Creepy.

This morning was that kind.

Taking my kids to school, it was just… I don’t know how to explain it. Impressive.

The sun was just rising over the dunes, and the fog was so thick and reflective. My kids and I could only see three or four cars before us.  Even the gas station at the corner of Whitecap was barely visible, even with its neon lights ablaze.

My drive to work was the same. The fog was so thick that upon arrival at the bridge, I couldn’t even see the top. It was just a Highway going to the heavens.

It’s not entirely uncommon.  As I’ve said, it happens a couple times per year.  Today, it was pretty spectacular. “Spooktacular,” my daughter said, “because of all the Halloween decorations” we could occasionally make out.  

Truthfully, it was spooky, even scary, and I had that Deja Vu feeling the entire drive.   We all felt something was “off” and even Bruce, our yellow lab pup was acting weird, with his shackled Mohawk up and a low guttural belly growl at times.   

Aside from the ominous nature of the drive and the forced chuckles from our car that morning, nothing strange or out of the ordinary really happened during the day. 

It was work as usual, lunch as usual, and I planned for, or instead didn’t even think about, a typical drive home that night.  Work was “Business as usual.” Typical to every other day, routine and forgettable.  

I had my mind on that night. An exciting homecoming football game was to take place. Hopefully, my son, a wide receiver on the team, would shine! 

Nothing that day would stand out until that drive home. That’s when things went so far off course, I don’t have anything to compare it to. It was something I’d never experienced.

It’s not unusual for the ground fog to come back at night; in fact, I think that’s when most people would expect it, and as the sun started to set, it was apparent. This was going to be one of those evenings. As I drove into Padre Island, the fog was exceptionally thick, even more so than in the morning, which says a lot.

What I noticed the most was that the fog itself, was different.  

Fog is nearly always blanketed in layers horizontally where the layers of moisture lie stack upon stack.  It’s what makes the trees and vague shapes stand out and gives it that creepy feel, like the ocean waves we’re used to, living on an Island. 

Tonight’s fog wasn’t anything like that at all. I’m sure everybody else driving home that night also noticed it- something was way off!  

The fog that night was in “riffs” that were going straight vertical, maybe 8 to 12 feet up in the air. The only thing I can compare it to is one of those movies from the 1980s like Ghostbusters or “Night of the Living Dead” or how someone would describe “a soul leaving the body.”

There were thousands of these! Straight vertical and spaced out randomly. The visual I have, coming down the back side of the bridge will never leave me. They were everywhere! Around Starbucks, into the dunes, and surrounding all the houses on that first canal.

I saw it and instinctively knew something was inconsistent, but I don’t think it fully hit my consciousness until later, as I was trying to rethink what might’ve happened. It was enough to give me a little chill, though, and I’m sure I murmured something like, “That’s weird; I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.”

By the time I got home and poured myself a rum and Coke in anticipation of tonight‘s homecoming game, I noticed it was exceptionally dark out. Too dark for supper time. I felt “socked in.”

Soon after, we all got the alarm beeps on our phones. All of our family phones chiming for our attention just seconds apart.   “Beep, Beep, Beep.” The emergency system. I’m guessing you did as well.

The alarms slammed the “strange” into reality. This amplified the situation, notifying us that things were progressing into the realm of “code orange – anomaly presented, pay attention.”

Apparently, the fog in Flour Bluff was so thick that the football game would be canceled.  Even the gigantic lights at the football stadium were not enough to penetrate the intense fog.

 Yet, who uses the emergency system to notify a city about a football game? Damn I love Texas!

I got a text from one of my coach friends stating:

“U wouldn’t believe what it looks like over here/Stadium lights reflecting directly off fog/ Can’t see 3 feet! /Not sure how kids are getting home/BE CAREFUL!”

50 minutes later, my son came walking in. You could tell he was kind of shaken. He rode home with “Hooks” one of his Hornet’s teammates. From Flour Bluff to the Island, he told me they didn’t go over 15 miles an hour. A train of cars came back from the high school and they just followed the tail lights from the car in front of them. “Even like that,” he said, “we could barely see!”

He was visibly agitated, and I could tell he was kind of shaken. I had been in Blizzards and driven home similar to that while growing up in South Dakota. I knew the nerves and fatigue he felt. I asked him what he thought was going on?

He replied, “I don’t know, and I didn’t say anything to Hooks on the way home Dad, but I swear, when we were going over the ocean, I could almost make out “Things” moving just out of my periphery.”   He continued, “You might think I’m just freaked out, but something was rising straight up out of the water. When I tried to focus on it, I couldn’t.   I thought it was weird fog, like going up and down. But that’s what my brain said. What I felt was that it was more…complete.    I don’t know.”    His eyes welled up.  “He pulled into his driveway and I didn’t even want to walk home. I made him drive me here, 6 houses away!”

What the hell? 

That night continued to be unlike any I’ve ever experienced before.

At about 9:30, the electricity and the lights with it, went out. No more Internet, no more iPhones, text and all communication, gone.  No news- no nothing.    And dark unlike anything I’ve seen before.

We’re not a really a prepper family, but I have basic provisions and often joked with my wife through the years that I’m more like a Boy Scout. “Always be prepared.”

 I had all sorts of candles, and we sat around via candlelight that night.

I kept looking out the window, seeing if I could see any of the neighbors with candles in their windows.

Not only could I not see the neighbors’ houses, I couldn’t even see the cars parked in my driveway a dozen feet away. My wife and Casen, my 11-year-old, kept telling me to go outside, check things out, and see what it was like.   

Nikki asked me, “Why don’t you just run over to the Wilsons and see what they think?” but I didn’t.

I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t terrified. I don’t know precisely why; I’m not scared of the dark and a family night by candlelight seemed like something I’d find kind of adventurous any other night.   I think the fact that the homecoming game was canceled and we had no contact with anyone just kind of put the willies in me. I couldn’t see the pool just a few steps out my backyard. The Wilson’s house, in that kind of dark, felt like it would be a quest!

I ventured outside only once that night if you could call it that. I stayed about 2 feet outside my door. My cats come in almost every night at 10pm but tonight, no matter how much we called and yelled, the cats never returned. When I opened my front door to shake the treats and call them in, it was like a wall in front of me. And it wasn’t like any fog I’ve ever seen before. No vapors were rolling into my house; instead it was almost like a glass window with smoke behind it.  It just sat there, frozen, 18 inches in front of me.   The sound I made calling for Skittles and Butterball seemed to go nowhere, simply…absorbed.

I’m a pretty big guy, and I feel very secure in my manhood and toughness, but there was no way I was sticking my hand out into that fog. I held those cat treats next to my chest like a poker player at the final table. I love my cats, but I was quick to go back inside.

Eventually, we all fell asleep but slept in the same room, tribal style, something we hadn’t done for a decade. Nobody really said anything other than “It’s strange,” but we all felt it. There was nothing even remotely familiar about that night.

There was no noises from outside. Nothing. No echoes either.

You know how you can just hear sounds in “thick” fog? Maybe one of the neighbors talking outside, or a motorcycle gets started in the garage and it echoes around. How you can hear stuff but can’t tell what direction it is coming from? No direction, yet somehow, amplified?

Yeah? Well, this was nothing like that. All night long was a muffled silence so thick that we could feel it.

Throughout the night, I woke up multiple times. But I couldn’t tell you how many times and I couldn’t tell you what time of the night it was. My phone, heck, all of our phones showed 0:00 every time I looked – that’s not even a time!

I never once spoke to anyone else in my family, but I’m guessing they also woke up. I couldn’t tell you if that night lasted 10 hours for three or four days. But if pressed, I’d lean toward the latter. It certainly felt longer than expected.

As if “unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before” wasn’t enough, waking up to a day like this only made our confusion and, at this point, our ability to hold off PANIC -much worse.

I was starving when we finally came to. The family woke up all saying the same thing. We were “all incredibly hungry,” and the “night was long to the point of unusual.” The phones, ipads, and everything battery charged, had all completely died.

Our first thought was for food, but the stuff in the refrigerator had pretty much all gone bad. The freezer as well. It had to be more than one night that we were out, but there was no way to judge because the sun never appeared. How does stuff in the freezer go bad in one night?

We had no electricity, so we got by with what we could find in the pantry. Halloween themed Twinkies, Cupcakes and a couple lunch sized packages of nuts. There’s all kinds of stuff in the pantry. We would be good for at least a week and I had one of those “survival containers” of freeze dried foods. Modern style MREs if we needed them.

The fruit on our kitchen counter was all rotten. It looked like it had been there for weeks. No flies, no smell, just -Expired.

Outside, finally, a little bit of light. Not morning. I walk out every morning and watch the sunrise with a cup of coffee. It hadn’t returned to that sort of normal. Today, it looked like late dusk. Light enough that we could see and with some visibility in the house, but it was still pretty dark. The fog must have receded at least, and combined with my night vision from the longest night of my life, I could see around well enough.

When I went to throw out the putrid fruit, well, that’s when we really knew stuff was wrong. We had advanced well beyond a spooky October night and into the to realm of science fiction. The garbage bag I held dropped to the ground, startling my wife. My twins, just a few steps behind me, braked hard and asked, “What’s wrong, Dad?”

I didn’t have an answer them.

Not that I didn’t have an answer. Things were indeed wrong, but simply, I couldn’t speak. I just sat there looking. My eyes peeled wide-open, my brain could not comprehend what I was seeing.

There was nothing left.

Nothing that I recognized.

It was almost as if something picked up our house and transported it back in time. The Wizard of Oz meets Jurassic Park.

The grasses in my front yard were probably 6 feet high. There was nothing recognizable across the street. No neighbor’s houses, fences, or signs of my cars or any other cars.

The giant driveway just yards out of my front door was in small pieces. Like a river rocks spotted throughout a creek. I could make out little pieces of concrete here and there, but for the most, it was overrun by grass, trees, and wild vegetation.

I think, looking back, part of the shock was that I have a lot of banana trees around my house. During the time I’ll call, “the longest night of my life” took place, the bananas had basically taken over. There were thousands of 15-foot banana trees everywhere I looked all up and down what used to be my neighborhood.

Probably in seconds, but what felt like half an hour, my brain caught up to my eyes. I did start to recognize more pieces of what used to be my neighborhood.

Although no roofs were left on the houses, I did make out a few square areas that must’ve once been the corner of my neighbor’s foundations. It was just poking out through the grass maybe 8 feet tall but that’s the only recognizable thing I saw. Here and there, throughout my street, I could see remnants of houses, but it looked as if I had been transported into the dystopian future from The Terminator. Just bits and pieces of humanity were all that was left. Rusty rims with no tires, a chimney stack a few “houses” down, lower vegetation, like a golf course rough, where there used to be asphalt streets.

The canals that zig-zag through our neighborhood had changed as well. Across the street, what used to be my neighbor’s house was now a canal that can only be described as a river, probably 5x wider than it had been the day before and with huge queen palm trees and cat tails scattered along the banks. I hadn’t yet thought to be apprehensive about what might be swimming in that water.

But I would.

The kids were awe-struck as well, and all together, even as a family, we didn’t journey more than a few steps out of our house that first time out. Even our two dogs did their business at the end of our doorway, and they were in a hurry to get back inside.

I won’t bore you with more details other than to say something significant happened that night and upended what we always thought of as our busy everyday life.

It’s been a week now; it’s time to do something. We’re all hungry, thirsty and tired. Our home feels safe, but I don’t think we can stay here much longer. I’ve scouted our neighborhood but only went as far as the next street over. I brought binoculars and could make out what used to be the big bridge by Doc’s and Snoopy’s that was our connection to the mainland. There’s not much left. Much like the morning on that first day, I can make out a track of road going up, but it’s look as it’s been in disrepair for a century, and the entire top half of the bridge is gone. Rotted and fallen into the Laguna,

At night, the new “quiet” is instantly noticeable. There is NO background air conditioners or sprinklers, no transformers buzzing. Nothing. It’s remarkable!

There are sounds we had been used to “before.” Cranes, storks, whistler ducks, dog barks (they seem to be fighting), but there are also other sounds. BIG sounds. Crashes, Booms, what sounds like an animal walking. Only if it’s animals, they must be the size of elephants! We’ve all taken turns looking outside a window, but there’s nothing to see with the vegetation so grown over.

We’re scared but human. And humans adapt.

Tomorrow, we’re heading out. We’ve packed enough for a camping adventure with each kid carrying what they can, and I have a pretty good tent. (God, let’s hope we dont have to stay in a tent!)

The plan we came up with is to move out toward the other end of the island. We’ll try to get to the school and grocery store area today and from there try to find another place to spend the night. Surely our house can’t be all that’s left. We hope to find supplies. That’s what we say, but we’d like to find other people. The “alone feeling” has set in a way I hadn’t ever understood or felt before. I’m leaving this note behind as a sort of journal, a record for someone out there that may come by our house. I’m sure your story is similar.

Hopefully we’ll be back by here in a few days.

signed – CP