Art Bernstein is the author of 13 nature and hiking guides, including Falcon's Hiking Oregon's Southern Cascades and Siskiyous, and is an avid hiker and naturalist with a M.S. in Natural Resource Management from the University of Michigan. He has lived in Grants Pass, Oregon, since 1970 and he claims that weird things have only happened to him on 13 of his hundreds of hikes over the years.

The only woods I knew of near the campus was Glen Helen, the thousand-acre nature preserve owned by the college. I couldn't imagine how I'd ended up in the Glen while walking across campus from one dormitory to another. The entrance to the Glen was a block out of my way.
Now you have to understand that I was not a nature person in those days. The Glen Helen Ecological Preserve, shining jewel of the Antioch campus, left me totally cold. I'd never been there before and I regarded it as a place for sissies and ethereal types. I was not a person who communed with nature. I was a big-city kid from the teeming streets of Detroit. Art Bernstein in the woods was like Art Bernstein on the moon. Or Art Bernstein with a beautiful female.
I did not spend much time pondering my situation, however, because the one thing I knew for certain was that somebody or something was chasing me. Or at least I believed that somebody or something was chasing me. Why else would I be running? Since I couldn't recall who or what was chasing me, I just kept going. The main thing I remember is falling down a lot. In fact, I fell down every few steps, which made my flight pretty ineffectual. I wasn't a very good runner even when sober.
It occurred to me afterward that whoever or whatever was or was not chasing me had to have been pretty slow not to catch me.
I did have the presence of mind to realize that the trail was heading downhill, which meant I was going into the Glen, not out. Once at the bottom, a maze of pathways supposedly led to the park's interior. The only way back to campus, as far as I knew, was to backtrack on the route I was on; the very same trail on which somebody or something was chasing me into the dark, into the unknown, into the woods, with all its ghost trees, shadows, and unfamiliar terrain.
After a while, the path came to the bottom of the hill, leveled off, and began following a little creek. I couldn't actually see the creek but I knew that a creek ran along the bottom of the gorge into which the trail led. I'd seen the creek from the deck in front of the Nature Center, at the trailhead. I'd been on the deck exactly once, during a guided tour of campus my first day, with my parents.
In addition to a terror of getting beaten up, mauled, killed, or eaten by my pursuer, I was panicked that if I continued too much farther, I'd never find my way out. At least not in the dark. Among other things, that would mean standing up poor Lisa.
That was when I bumped into somebody. At first I thought it was a tree. Then, I concluded that the jig was up, that my pursuer had caught me. Except whoever or whatever I'd bumped into was in front of me, not behind me. The impact was pretty violent, knocking the wind out of me and sending me sprawling into the dirt for the hundredth time. I did catch a brief glimpse of the person I'd bumped into. It was a tall, dark-haired, pleasant looking woman in jeans and a flannel shirt.
I didn't know it then, but I later found out that she was the Lady in the Woods.