Some places don't want to be found.

You won't see them on postcards.

You won't hear about them in travel blogs.

But if you ask the locals quietly and at the right time of night, they might tell you where not to go.

Welcome to Nocturnal Novels.

I'm Clay, and this is Spooky Shorts, a series of brief, unsettling stories that don't ask for your attention, they take it.

These tales are short enough to slip past your defenses, but sharp enough to leave a mark.

They're the kind of stories that feel like warnings but arrive too late.

Each one is a quiet trap set in places you've heard of but never dared to visit.

In the first installment of this miniseries, we visit two such places.

One echoes with cries that shouldn't exist.

The other refuses to grow but never stops watching.

THE SENSABAUGH Tunnel Kingsport, Tennessee the Sensabaugh Tunnel is short, just a few hundred feet, but long enough to make you question what's real.

Built in the early 1900s, it was named after Edward Sensabaugh, a man whose legacy is tangled in tragedy.

And Edward was a respected businessman in Kingsport.

He lived with his wife, Ruth, and their children in a modest home not far from the tunnel.

By all accounts, they were a quiet family, churchgoing, polite, well liked.

But something changed.

Some say Edward caught a thief trying to rob his home and chased him into the tunnel, where the man drowned.

Others whisper that Edward himself went mad, murdering his wife and child, then hiding their bodies in the tunnel's dark recesses.

There's even a version where Ruth had grown distant, cold, and that she was the one who snapped first.

In the 1920s, local papers ran vague stories about disturbances near the tunnel.

One article mentioned unexplained cries heard by railroad workers.

Another described a rash of car trouble in the area chalked up to bad wiring, though no cause was ever found.

By the 1940s, the tunnel had become a teenage dare spot.

Kids would drive through with their lights off, windows down, hoping to hear the baby cry.

Some claim they did.

Others came back pale, silent and and unwilling to talk.

In the 1960s, a local high school teacher took her class on a field trip to explore regional folklore.

She brought them to the tunnel in broad daylight, thinking it would be a harmless lesson in storytelling.

But one student, quiet and withdrawn, refused to enter.

He said he'd been there before with his older brother and that something had followed them home.

The teacher laughed it off, but later that week she found her classroom door open every morning, even though she locked it Each night on the final day of the semester, she arrived early and found the word stay out scratched into her chalkboard.

No one ever confessed.

Some say the tunnel doesn't just trap sound.

It remembers you.

And if you go in with fear, it keeps a piece of you.

Drivers report hearing a baby crying, engines stall and headlights flicker.

One woman saw a man standing in the middle of the tunnel.

She rolled down her window to ask if he needed help.

He didn't speak.

He just smiled.

Her car wouldn't start again until he vanished.

Locals avoid the tunnel after dark, and if you ask them why, they'll say that's not the kind of place you want to be alone.

The Devil's Tramping Ground Bear Creek, North Carolina Deep in the woods of North Carolina, there's a barren circle of earth where nothing grows.

Not grass, not weeds, not even mushrooms.

It's called the Devil's Tramping Ground.

The circle is about 40ft wide, perfectly round and untouched by time.

Scientists have tested the soil.

Nothing unusual, but still nothing grows.

Legend says that the devil comes here to pace in circles, plotting his next move against humanity.

The earliest written mentioned dates back to the late 1800s, when a local newspaper described the site as a cursed patch of land where no beast stairs tread.

Even before that, Cherokee oral traditions warned of a place in the woods where the earth rejects life.

In the 1930s, a traveling preacher claimed he saw hoof prints in the circle.

Deep, scorched impressions that vanished by morning.

He left the town the next day and was never heard from again.

Campers report footsteps circling their tents, whispers in languages they don't understand.

One man woke up outside the circle, and even though he'd zipped himself into his sleeping bag, his gear was scattered and his dog was gone.

Another group left a chair in the center overnight.

By morning, it was gone.

No tracks, no drag marks, just gone.

A college group from Chapel Hill once tried to spend the night there as a part of a paranormal research project.

They set up cameras, motion sensors, and audio recorders around 2:13am every device shut off simultaneously.

When they checked the footage later, the first frame showed a shadow stretching across the circle, long, thin, and unmistakably humanoid.

A couple celebrating their anniversary camp there in the early 2000s.

They woke up to find their tent unzipped, their belongings arranged in a perfect ring around the circle's edge.

Neither of them remembered hearing a sound.

One teenager claimed he saw a figure pacing the circle at dawn.

Tall, thin, with glowing red eyes, he ran.

His friends didn't believe him.

But when they returned to the site.

Later that day, they found his flashlight melted into the ground.

In 2015, a podcast crew visited the site to record an episode.

They arrived at dusk, set up microphones, and began telling the legend.

As they spoke, the audio picked up faint static in a low growl.

They paused, thinking it was an animal.

But when they played the tape back later, the growl was followed by a voice.

It whispered, you shouldn't have come here.

The crew never released the episode.

One member quit the show entirely, another moved out of state, and the third?

He returned to the circle alone.

A year later, his car was found parked nearby.

His gear was untouched, but he was never seen again.

Locals say animals won't enter the circle, birds won't fly overhead, and if you stand in it long enough, you'll feel something watching you.

Not from the woods, from below.

Some places don't want to be remembered.

They wait in silence, feeding on stories growing stronger with every retelling, whether it's a tunnel echoing with cries that shouldn't be there, or a circle of earth untouched by life.

Some places just don't hold stories.

They hold something else.

Something that listens.

Something that follows.

I'm your host, Clay Jones, and this was the first installment of Spooky Shorts, right here on Nocturnal Novels.

If you heard something tonight that didn't come from me, you are not alone.