I tried using one of those geocaching apps and now I don’t know where I am and I’m scared…

My name is Mateus. I’m from Brazil, and I’ve always been obsessed with Geocaching. I love the thrill of the hunt, the hidden containers… I even found R$500 once! Believe it? But let’s get to the point.

I recently took a trip to Germany. It was expensive, and I wasn’t about to waste my money being bored, so I decided to check Geocaching for local caches. I did about 19 successful hunts, finding all sorts of trinkets. But the 20th time… that’s when everything went south.

I picked a spot that looked normal enough: “Thuringian Forest Hill.” The difficulty was rated near maximum, which only made me more determined. I traveled for a week to reach the location. When I finally arrived, I was breathless. It was a hill—not too high, not too low—nestled in a dense forest of pines. It was hauntingly silent. No animals, no insects, no birds. No people. It was miles away from any village, yet it was beautiful. The grass was a vibrant green, dotted with flowers as if it were eternal spring. I started searching at 4:50 AM. I hunted everywhere, but found nothing. By 6:00 PM, after fourteen hours of searching, I was beyond frustrated.

Then, around 8:00 PM, something impossible happened. I found a small cave—it looked like an animal’s den—but the inside was eerily clean and empty. Stranger still, it was louder inside than outside. How was that even possible? I found nothing and crawled back out, only to find something that wasn’t there before.

— HOLY SHIT! — I screamed, jumping back.

A rustic wooden cabin had appeared at the top of the hill. I thought maybe I had just missed it, but looking back, that sounds idiotic. I’m a distracted guy—once, at sixteen, I was being robbed and only realized there was a loaded gun pointed at me five minutes into the encounter—so I convinced myself I just hadn’t noticed a whole house.

I went inside. It looked abandoned for years, yet it was spotless. Too clean. It felt lived-in, which terrified me. Was I trespassing? But the worst part was the smell. It reeked of mold and rot, like something… or someone… had died and was decomposing behind the walls. I searched every room.

Living room? Nothing. Bedroom? Nothing. Kitchen, dining room, bathroom? Empty.

I realized the smell was coming from the only place I hadn’t checked: the basement. I didn’t want to go down there, but I had to. I grabbed a glove from the kitchen, a knife for defense, and used my phone’s flashlight. The stairs were massive and pitch black. I figured it would be ten, maybe fifteen steps. But my flashlight was useless. The darkness was so thick it seemed to swallow the light. I started counting.

8… 9… 10 steps. No floor. 15… 20… 40! It didn’t end. 50… 100… 300… 900. I was exhausted, but I remember the final count: 978 steps. 978! What kind of basement was this? Finally, I saw light. I hit the floor.

When my feet touched the ground, I felt no relief. The silence of the stairs was replaced by a high-pitched electrical hum coming from the ceiling—a sound so constant I could hear my own blood pulsing in my temples. The place was a labyrinth of perfect 90-degree angles. No curves, only T-junctions and crossroads, as if someone had designed a city based on road signs but forgot the streets. The concrete ceiling was low, making me feel crushed, yet the air pressure was identical to the surface. I was nearly 600 feet underground—equivalent to a 60-story building buried in the earth—and my ears didn’t even pop.

The floor was covered in a dull red gray carpet. I couldn’t tell if it was the original color or decades of compacted dust and cobwebs. The smell was a sickening mix of “new house” scent and the suffocating air of a closed room that triggered my allergies instantly. It was a comfortable cold, like a room after a rainstorm, but the comfort was what scared me most.

The wooden doors led to rooms that looked… normal. Bedrooms, bathrooms, living rooms. Some were empty; others had a single chair in the corner, facing the wall. It felt like being a child again, waking up from a nightmare and realizing you’re home alone. Everything is familiar, but your gut tells you something is fundamentally wrong.

I thought about going back, but the thought of 978 steps again was paralyzing. Besides, the darkness of the staircase looked different from here. It looked solid—like the only point in the universe that absorbs 101% of all light. I backed away.

— There has to be another exit — I whispered to myself.

I checked my phone. It was 8:01 PM. How? How had all of that only taken one minute? I had a sliver of battery and a tiny bit of signal left. I opened my GPS. I froze. Black. Just black. There was nothing. The pin marking my location was floating in a total void. I zoomed in, I zoomed out, but the vastness of the black remained.

I tried calling a friend I met in Germany. He actually answered.

— Otto, bist du da? (Otto, are you there? )

— Mateus? Bist du’s, Mann?! (Mateus? is that you, man?!)

— Hast du dich noch an das Restaurant erinnert, in das wir heute gehen wollten? Ich habe auf dich gewartet! (did you still remembed that restaurant we were supposed to go to today? i was waiting for you!)

— Ich weiß, ich weiß, aber das ist jetzt egal, Otto! (I know, I know, but that’s irrelevant now, Otto!)

— Dein Empfang ist schlecht, such dir einen Ort mit besserem Empfang. (Your signal is cutting out, find a place with better signal)

— Verdammt, Otto! ( Goddammit, Otto!)

— Hör mir zu, ich meine es ernst! (Listen to me, I’m serious! )

—SCHNELL, OTTO! ICH BRAUCHE — ( FAST OTTO! I NEED— )

The signal died…. My battery hit 0%. And then, the stairs… they DISAPPEARED right in front of my eyes. It wasn’t a fade-out. They vanished in a shockwave of energy that threw me against the wall.

I scrambled up, but I couldn’t even process what happened because further down the hallway, I saw it. It looked human, but it wasn’t. Its skin didn’t fit its body. Its teeth were a mess; its eyes were fundamentally wrong. It was naked, and its mouth was open in an impossible way—the jaw hung straight down as if held by invisible wires. It moved like an empty costume, jerky and unnatural.

When its drifting eyes finally locked onto me, I ran. I have never run so fast in my life. The thing was incredibly quick, but its speed was its weakness; it couldn’t handle the 90-degree turns and kept slamming into the walls. I dove into a room and barricaded the door. Through the gap at the bottom, I saw its shadow linger. It didn’t knock. It just stood there. Finally, it left.

As I sat on the floor to catch my breath, my hand touched something… viscous. Slimy. Fleshy. It was a human corpse. I wasn’t the only one here. I looked at the body. It was wearing a brown Hazmat suit, almost the same color as the wood of the walls. I searched him with a mix of disgust and desperation.

He had a flashlight, a power bank, and a modified phone with a miniature signal tower attached to it. I used his Face ID to unlock it—I had to pull the mask off his face to do it. Bingo. There was nothing on the phone, but I turned on the hotspot to charge and connect my own phone.

I found his ID card. His name was “Richard.” He was 23. No family. He was a “B.W.E.” for somebody called Lea.

I managed to move to a kitchen area and barricaded the door with a cabinet. There’s plenty of food here. I checked my cellphone. It’s 8:03 PM. Only three minutes have passed since I entered the basement. None of my contacts are answering. Reddit is my last hope. i don’t know when the post will be published becouse of the signal don’t one of the bests

What do I do? Who is Lea? If anyone knows anything, please… I’m scared