We Kept Ending Up Back at the Bridge

My husband and I visited Poinsett Bridge while we were spending a few days in the area. Neither of us had been there before. We weren’t there for anything paranormal. We like hiking and historic places, and someone had recommended it to us.

We walked around the bridge for a while and then followed one of the trails into the woods. It was still afternoon and there were other people around, although once we got farther from the bridge we didn’t see anyone for a while.

We probably walked for twenty or thirty minutes before deciding to head back.

On the way back we came to a fork in the trail that neither of us remembered seeing before.

We stood there debating it for a minute, but we were both pretty sure we knew which way we’d come, so we took that trail.

A few minutes later we could see the bridge through the trees.

The strange thing was that we were approaching it from a direction that didn’t make sense to either of us.

We laughed about it at first. Obviously we’d gotten turned around somewhere. We decided to retrace our steps because we wanted to figure out where we’d gone wrong.

We found the fork again and this time deliberately went the other way.

A few minutes later we were back near the bridge again.

That’s when it stopped being funny.

My husband pulled out his phone and opened the map. According to the GPS, the parking area wasn’t far away, but when we started walking, the little dot on the screen didn’t seem to match the direction we were actually going. It would move and then stop, then suddenly jump to another spot.

We assumed the trees were interfering with the signal.

We went back toward the trail and eventually ran into another couple. I asked them which way they had come from because we were trying to get back to the parking area.

They pointed down the same trail we’d already taken.

We followed them.

We were back at the parking area in just a few minutes.

My husband and I spent most of the drive laughing about how two adults had somehow managed to get completely turned around that close to where we’d parked.

Later that night he remembered that he’d had a hiking app running on his phone.

We opened it because we wanted to see what ridiculous route we’d taken.

There weren’t any loops.

According to the app, we’d walked away from the bridge, stopped in roughly the same area for several minutes and then walked almost directly back.

We both remembered walking those trails. We remembered finding the fork twice. We remembered coming back to the bridge twice.

Maybe the GPS was just as confused as we were. That’s probably the most reasonable explanation.

But we’ve never been able to figure out how we managed to get lost in the same place twice when, according to his phone, we apparently never went anywhere at all.