Now I must confess that I get scared to death at the mere mention of the word "Ghost". At any get-together, when the topic of discussion turns invariably to ghosts and ghouls as the evening turns to night, I try my best to turn the conversation back to some benign topic. And as a rule I do not watch any horror movie unless there are at least three more people in the room with me.

So I really felt my heart beating faster as I stared at the apparition that had suddenly sprung in front of our car. But after a while our eyes got accustomed to the darkness and we could make out that there were horns at the top of the bright circles. When my friend turned on the high beam we all saw that it was some animal like deer that had chanced upon the road and its eyes had startled us so badly.

We then had to break it to our parents that we had got lost on our way to the hotel. To our immense surprise, they all took it lightly. I don't know about my friend but at least as far as I am concerned, how peaceful my childhood would have been had my parents taken a similar lenient view at all the disasters in my academic career!!!

"Let's move on … maybe the other end of the park is not very far off. I think it's better to drive slowly so as not to bump off any of these animals." suggested my dad.

"If you look at the size of the animal Dad, I would rather worry about it bumping us off the road" I said nervously.

"We are better off locking all the doors" my friend said to me and I heard a reassuring click after that.

We drove for another fifteen minutes or so without any end of the park in sight. It was a dense forest - at least it seemed so in the darkness that surrounded us from all around. There was no light except for our car's headlights and the moon shining high up in the sky. In a way it was beautiful - with nothing but the stars and the moon for company all along. The only thing that was weighing on our minds was that there were no signposts at any point on the road to give us an idea of how far we were from the other end of the park. The deer like animals kept appearing by the roadside at regular intervals. Though we had got accustomed to them by now and were not scared anymore, their glowing eyes were a strange sight in that darkness.

A look at the fuel indicator showed us that we were in for a fresh disaster. It hovered dangerously close to the empty indicator. We were not sure of how far that rented car would have gone on the last few drops of gas remaining in its tank.

Fortunately we saw lights ahead and on getting at that spot found that it was a small shop cum ranger station. Of course, it was closed at that hour. But we saw a public phone at a distance.

"Let me go and call 911 from there" my friend suggested.

"I am coming with you" I put on a brave face though I had noticed that thick woods faced the public phone on one side.

"What if there are any other kind of animals out there?" asked my mom. My nervousness seems to have been inherited from this branch of the family tree!!

"We will find out when we go there" I said aloud and then added "or rather you will" in a decibel level which my friend alone must have heard.

"If there were any other kind of animals here, they would not have left the gates open at night." I was glad to have found one logical argument at last.

When we implored our parents to remain in the car, we met with an instant unanimous protest from all of them. The fact that my friend and myself alone knew the route traveled so far was all that we had to keep them from trouping to the phone instead of us. Some diplomatic skill on my friend's part ensured a truce which found our parents outside the car but in close proximity of it - ready for God-alone-knows what kind of emergency as myself and my friend proceeded to the phone.

I would have liked to give an account of my friend's conversation on the phone but the fact is that I was too scared and nervous to pay any attention to it. I kept darting short quick glances at the woods on all sides of us but I had my eyes glued particularly to the clump of trees that were closest to the phone. I confess however that it was so pitch dark on that side that I would have been simply unable to notice anything bounding out of it until it was almost upon us.

"911 does not know where we are. I called at the hotel to ask them to keep our rooms till morning. Even at the hotel, they could not give any information" my friend threw her hands in helpless gesture upwards.

"What do you mean by they don't know?" I asked in total surprise momentarily forgetting the dark clump of trees.

"I wish I knew what they meant. I described to them the entire route that we took since we left the airport but they said that they don't know what this park is or how we came upon it"

"We seem to have chanced upon Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World!! " I remarked as I scanned the woods again for a sign of some prehistoric Stegosaurus.

"Or maybe some other weird dimension through a hole in the sky. Watch out for that three eyed alien!!" chuckled my friend.

"By the way exactly what did you expect to appear out of those woods as you watched them intently all the while I was talking on the phone?" she asked me tongue-in-cheek as we headed back towards the car.

"I would rather not talk about it now but would gladly discuss my theories tomorrow morning at the breakfast" I said as I made my way back to the safety of the car.

And so it was these circumstances that led us to spending our first night on the West Coast trip in our car - parked in the only lit area fenced in by tall dark trees in an unknown forest.

Maybe some of you who are reading this from the comfort of your homes (or maybe offices!!) might suspect this experience to be fabricated but I can assure you that I have described the whole situation exactly the way it was. It was really weird to try to get to sleep in the car when darkness seemed to be pressing in upon us from all directions except for one where the ranger station was situated.

Ears develop an extra-ordinary acute alertness and pick up even the slightest rustle in the leaves or the softest sway in the trees that could be totally meaningless or might well have some sinister and dangerous meaning. When I look back upon it, I am surprised that we could treat the car as a safe place at all. All said and done, it is just a lot of metal with its own limits of endurance that can be no match for the beastly strength of a wild animal. I have seen the proof of it in the photos of cars crushed by bears in the Yosemite Park.

Fortunately, nothing of that sort happened with us and the first rays of the sun found us all in one piece in the car. We discovered that a mobile home was parked some distance away from us and the couple sitting next to it assured us that the other end of the park was not more than ten minutes away from where we stood. We also found some maps in the back portion of the ranger station that confirmed this.

So we were out of the woods in ten minutes flat and a drive of ten more minutes brought us to our hotel. "Funny how they did not know about the woods which are so close" I could not help expressing a surprise.

"Losing our way, finding the cell phone useless, running out of gas and finally getting stranded in an unknown forest!! Seems like a scene straight from Urban Legends!!" my friend said over breakfast.

"Except for a Prince Charming to get us out of it all!!" I said with a straight face.