SOUDAN—It was a stormy December evening several years ago when Victoria Ranua and her family arrived at their Soudan residence. Snow had been falling for hours and there was nearly a foot of new accumulation on the in-town roads. But after unloading the car, Victoria decided she wanted to take a walk in the snow and headed up the back way to the state park figuring she’d head down to Stuntz Bay as she often did in all kinds of weather in the evening.
The depth of the snow made the travel difficult, having to high-step in order to move forward. Her older son had started the walk with her, but quickly turned around once he realized his high-top tennis shoes were filling with snow.
But V.R. continued on down the road, illuminated only by the fading reflected light from the streetlamps in Soudan. She had always enjoyed walking during snowstorms and her mood was excited as she reached the top of the hill near the park entrance and began the long descent to Stuntz Bay. Moments later, she reached the portion of the road where guard rails protect travelers from the steep cliffs on both sides of the road. It’s a land bridge, of sorts, that threads the needle between two of the early former mine pits, dug in the late 1800s. Work in the pits was extremely dangerous and many men had died from falling rocks in the early years before the work shifted underground.
But none of that was on V.R.’s mind, at least not at first. “But as I reached the guard rail, I started to feel an immense sense of dread,” she recalls. Every cell of her body was telling her to “Turn Back!” It was so odd and so sudden that she at first tried to ignore it. “But with each step, it got worse,” she remembers. And so began a brief but intense battle between her rational brain, which told her there was nothing to fear, and her body that was telling her to run.
But as a trained scientist, her mind kept resisting. “I told myself that there was nothing out here to fear. There were no bears, wolves, or even people ahead, just a bunch of deep newly fallen snow. There was no apparent reason for the strong warning my body was giving my mind,” she said as she soon reached the middle of land bridge. There were no tracks in the snow ahead. “For some reason, to show my body that there was nothing to be afraid of, I turned around to prove that nothing was following me, either.” That’s when she saw the flash of a bright green light in the bottom of the pit to her left.
“That’s when my body took over,” she said. “I bolted straight back the way I had come through the deep snow, and once I got back to the other side of the bridge, my sense of dread disappeared but my heart was still racing.” She could not figure out what had just happened. “What was that green light at the bottom of the pit? What had the body sensed that caused such fear before I saw the green light?” She arrived home earlier than her family expected and she couldn’t find the words to explain why she did not go all the way to Stuntz Bay. That night she mulled over the experience trying to make sense of it and find a way to put it into words that others could understand.
She has since traversed that land bridge during other snowstorms and has never again experienced the fear and dread that permeated her to the core on that strange evening. “I felt whatever it was, didn’t want me to cross the bridge.” She said she still has no idea what it was she encountered during that December snowstorm but wonders if something terrible had happened in that mine pit on that same evening more than a century ago. “I wonder if I was seeing some sort of portal that was opening at that moment,” she said. “All I know for sure is that I never experienced anything like that ever again. “I was literally scared to my core.”