Something in My Gut Tells Me I Need to Stay as Far Away From the Isle of Skye as Possible, and This Time, I'm Going to Listen.

You know that feeling you get when something just isn’t right? The hairs on the back of neck stand up and you get a cold chill down your spine… you should always listen to that intuitive voice inside your head that warns you of the unknown because you’ll find that often-times, without explanation, that voice is on to something.

A few days ago a friend and I ventured north to see my all-time favorite Scottish castle: Eilean Donan Castle. Because the journey was four hours long, we thought it might be nice to make the most of being so far north, so we ventured just north-west to the infamous Isle of Skye. The whole story of our time on the island seems a bit far-fetched, but nonetheless I wanted to tell it. Maybe we made it up in our heads, but we weren’t even on the island 9 hours before we were packing our bags and driving all through the night, headed as far away from that evil place as our wheels could possibly get.

We crossed over the bridge into a little village called Kyleleakin - cute, quite, and quaint to the naked eye, but I assure you from our experience it’s anything but. We got our first warning that things just weren’t what they seemed when we had to walk down two back alleys and through the dingiest restaurant we’d ever seen just to check into our (rather pricey and highly rated) hotel. The owner of the hotel was unkempt and disheveled in his grey sweat suit with his grimy hair and teeth. He was verbally abusive to his employees and as unorganized as I’d ever seen a business owner to be. He gave us our keys and proceeded to lie to us about being the only place for miles that was going to be open for dinner that night (who really knows why). But the theme of not wanting us to leave comes back up later when we try to leave the hotel for good and the people, and the circumstances, make it very difficult for us to run.

After dropping our bags in the room we ventured to a local town for what ended up being one of the best meals we’d had in a long time, but the air was heavy everywhere on the island and the people were strange - there was just something about the way they looked at us that made us feel like unwelcome outsiders. My friend had only one description of the island as we were driving through it - he noted that the island was darker than any piece of land should ever be (and he was uncomfortably and undeniably correct). We later found that his word choice had more of a double meaning than we thought.

Everywhere we went people watched our every move. We pulled into a local hotel parking lot, lost and looking for the co-op to do some late-night shopping, when four blackened silhouetted people walked to the window and looked out on us like something from a terrifying movie. People watched us shop and stood beside our car and peered in on us when we returned to the hotel. It was the most eerie feeling. It's bad enough when you simply feel like you're being watched, but it's unfortunately heightened when you're correct.

But being watched was tame compared to what we encountered in our hotel room that night. Just as we were settling in for bed that night and closing our eyes, he rolled over and nudged me asking if I was alright because he had heard a woman (who he had logically assumed was me since I was the only other person in the room) moan as if she was having a nightmare or in pain, but the thing is, I never made a sound - I wasn’t even asleep. After that moment, the goosebumps came out and we were on high-alert from then on. It took a good half hour or so before either of us had calmed down enough to try sleeping again. But before we went back to sleep, My friend checked the window and saw a man stumbling by a fence one minute, and by the time he had looked back at me to check and see if I was alright, he was gone. By then the strange clamoring on the floor above us, coupled with our fears, had prompted us to turn the lights on and seriously debate staying in that room for the night. We decided to give sleep one more chance, but just as soon as I closed my eyes I heard a conversation of whispers in my ear and I couldn’t take it anymore. We had both had enough - we packed our bags and ran from that hotel room as fast as our feet could take us.

We returned to find a closed, dark, and unmanned hotel check-in desk (which in my opinion is strange in and of itself). There wasn’t another soul to be found in the area at 1am apart from the drunkies at the bar next door and our hotel maid standing in the window of the restaurant looking blankly out the window. After a messy conversation between her, us, and one of the locals outside the bar, we gave her our key and left without any explanation.

We returned to our car and put the pedal to the metal for the next four hours to get home. As we drove over the bridge back onto the main land, my friend told me perhaps the scariest thing of all. We left our room in a hurry leaving the blinds closed, the lights off and the window open on our way out, but when he looked up to our room as we left the building, the lights were on in our room, the window was closed and the blinds were pulled as if someone was watching us leave! Hearing that, we had no doubts that we made the right choice getting away from that place. That island didn't want us there as much as we didn't want to be there - we could feel it. From the moment we first arrived it felt wrong. We later noted that we never even took any photos while on Skye - we only had the ones I'd taken from the road while still on the mainland - which to us was a major red flag considering how #snaphappy we usually are on our adventures together.

As we drove home and discussed the night’s events we both felt like the island was chasing us all throughout the highlands. We couldn’t get it out of our sight fast enough. About half way home I did some research to find out that we weren’t the first people to have similar experiences in the village we were in. Others had said the hotels there had “a bad vibe” about them. And when you look further into the history of the island, legend has it that Skye is supposedly an evil island inhabited by evil faeries and other creatures that cause terrible things to happen. Seriously, #Googleit if you don’t believe me. There was something not right about that island and I could feel it from the moment that it appeared in our sights in the highlands. Evil faeries or not, I won't ever cross that bridge back onto that Isle. Something in my gut tells me I need to stay as far away from that place as possible, and this time, I'm going to listen.