It was a sunny afternoon on Saturday. All schools in Chandler, Arizona were out for an extended weekend because of the current teacher strike. The teachers wanted a break and a well deserved raise. Anyway, we got time off from school and that's all that mattered to me and my 11th grade friends.

    I was just following my usual saturday routine of playing Destiny and eating food. We had no homework because of the whole no school fiasco. Me and my friends also had a hobby of ours, where we’d try to find a supposed haunted mineshaft hidden away in the mountains. Later that day, at about 2pm my friend John called me and asked me when we were leaving on our usual weekend search.

“I was thinking we could go in around 30 minutes,” I said.

“Sounds good to me. I’ll tell Todd,” He replied.

“I’ll pack the normal camping gear for the night.”

“And I’ll pack the excessive candy and food.”

“Alright see you in a few.”

I could picture his grin through the phone. I packed up a backpack with some granola bars and two bottles of water, along with some other necessities like my phone charger and an extra battery. I wrote a note saying where I was going and left it on the counter for my parents to see, in the unlikely event that they got home before me. They’re out on business trips most of the time, so I basically live by myself. We sort of have an understanding, where as long as I don’t bring home the cops, we’re on good terms.

I dashed out back and lifted open the garage door. I fired up the Jeep, and checked the fuel gage. There was about half a tank, so I made a mental note to stop at the gas station on the way to John’s house. I decided to climb back out and unzip the roof so that the roll cage was exposed. It was 2:00PM on a Saturday, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The weather was phenomenal. I made sure the spare tire was bolted to the back, and I tore out of the driveway.

My life up until that point was pretty uneventful. I just lived a normal life. I went to highschool and wanted to go to college at Arizona State. I had straight As and just did normal things like any other teenager. My parents were both pretty busy with my dad running a major corporation and my mom being a principal. The Jeep was a gift for my 17th birthday. I think they bought it for me because they got tired of me driving the BMW… Regardless, I ended up with a cobalt blue 2014 Jeep Wrangler, so you can decide who won that one.

Since my parents were always gone, me and my friends made a hobby out of trying to find old legends. Our first project was finding a mineshaft and today was the day to make or break it.

I slowed down on Aster Place as I rounded the corner to John’s house. His mom hates it when she thinks people drive too fast. I pulled up outside of his house and I honked the horn. He came running out the front door with his camping pack and his beloved walking stick.

    Next we pulled up to Todd’s house where he was waiting on the lawn. He threw a tent and a cooler of food in the back and climbed into the Jeep. We exchanged some words and then headed to the gas station. After the Jeep was full, we turned out and headed to the desert.

    John opened his phone map to show where to go, and we clipped it to the dashboard. We turned onto the highway, and as soon as we knew there wouldn’t be any cops, I gunned it.

    The place we were going was the Superstition mountain range out in the Arizona desert. You had to do some serious off-roading to get there but supposedly it was worth the drive. There was also a legend. The legend talked about an old deserted mine shaft hidden deep in the mountains. We'd been searching for its location for months now and we thought that we had finally found where it really was

    We drove for about three and a half hours before finally finding the turn off. As soon as we hit the dirt path I turned on four-wheel-drive. We flew down the rocky stretch at speeds that would make most people scared, but we thought we were young and invincible.

    We drove into a valley and entered the mountains. Before we left we had printed some google maps and drawn over the images on the path we had to follow. So we followed the trail deeper into the mountains.

    The legend of the mine was that some miners had found a ton of gold, but they disappeared soon after finding it. The last known record was of them heading back into the mountains, but then they were gone. Supposedly they covered their tracks and blocked the entrance to the mine. That was about 150 years ago. So in pursuit of getting rich, we made it our weekend hobby to try and find it. That is if it existed in the first place.

    We followed our map into a new valley. We knew it had to be here, because this was the last place to go. The mine was either here or it didn’t exist. As we drove into the valley we all noticed some buildings up on the hills. The three of us looked at each other with excitement. We’d found the mineshaft in the legends!

    We coasted to a stop in front of the tunnel and stopped. The area around the tunnel was muddy and we couldn’t tell how deep it was, so we skirted around it. The shack was pretty dilapidated, and it looked like it was about to fall over, but we didn’t care. The three of us circled the shack until we found a door. It was locked from the inside, but John kicked it in. As the door flew open a blast of cold air came out of the tunnel.

    The inside was pretty boring. There were some shelves with jars on the wall, and there was an old bed in the corner.  I turned all the way around until i saw it. There was a hole in the mountain. We had found the mineshaft. After months of searching.

    The shafts of light that filtered through the planks lit up the entrance of the tunnel. It was just carved out of rock from the mountain. There was a lot of timbering to support the tunnel, and there was a very cold breeze coming out of the tunnel. John ran back to the Jeep and came back a few minutes later with his camera and a flashlight for each of us.

    “We found it guys,” Todd said.

    “Yea we did!” I replied.

    “As great as standing here is, are we gonna explore it or what?” John asked.

    “Yea let's get going.”

I entered the tunnel first. As I was walking along I felt my anxiety kicking in, and my hands started visibly shaking. I remember Todd asked me if I was okay. Fear of the unknown I guess. As we were walking I had to make sure that I stayed calm. I took deep breaths. In and out. In and out.

    Once my mind was cleared I studied the tunnel all around me. It was rock with some timbering to hold it up, and some shafts went straight up into the mountain. There were a few branches in the mine, but it generally went pretty straight, directly into the mountain. After about 10 minutes of walking we saw some form of light shining in from the end of the mineshaft. As we walked out of the opening in the tunnel we were shocked.

    The tunnel opened up into a huge cavern, instead of the outside. It was probably 30 meters tall and a hundred across. The light we had seen was coming through an opening in the roof. The entire space glittered with some veins of gold running along the sides and the top of the cave. John yelled “ECHO,” and it bounced back for a few minutes. It looked like there were more mine shafts at the back of the cave.

We all flooded into the cave and breathed in the fresh air. We were sitting there coughing up dust when we noticed, lo and behold, there was a cluster of buildings sitting in the center of the cave. A ghost town, but a town nonetheless. Excited, our trio walked toward the town. It was styled like an old western village where everything was built on the main road. Most of the buildings were too dilapidated to make anything out. They were all the same drab shade of brown wood. There were also a set of cart tracks running to the tunnel we’d come through and the tunnels on the other side of the cave.

    We all huddled as a group as we walked through the cave. Everyone was too scared to split up. I remember that I couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen. My hands were still shaking and I was feeling pretty nervous, but I figured that this was a pretty cool thing to see, and I should enjoy it. Of course that's when everything started going wrong. After a few minutes I told Todd about the feeling I was having and he said that he was feeling the same way. We grabbed John and started walking back to the entrance when we all heard screaming. All three of us stopped dead in our tracks and turned around. Whatever had made that noise was behind us.

    The screaming continued but it wasn’t moving anywhere. It sounded like it was coming from one place. We all crept through the shadows of the buildings, as the screaming got louder. We followed the noise to another tunnel on the other side of the cave. There was a faint red glow coming from the other side of the tunnel. About 20 meters in there was another smaller cave, but there wasn’t a roof. A bunch of men dressed in overalls with bags over their heads were chanting and dancing around a bonfire. It took me awhile but my eyes finally settled on the source of the screaming. In the center of the fire there was an upside down cross with a person tied to it.

We all crouched in the entrance to the tunnel and watched in horror. We were all frozen with fear. Todd shifted his weight, and sent some rocks tumbling out of the tunnel. We all cringed and hoped nothing would happen, but the closest one turned around and saw us. The person stared at us for a few seconds, then let out a blood curdling screech, and they all turned towards us.

“Oh you've gotta be…” and the rest of Todd’s sentence was drowned out by the miners screeching as one. They all brandished rusty pickaxes and saws and started slowly walking towards us. That’s when we decided to leave.

The three of us ran down the tunnel trying to find the right way out. We turned and twisted and started arguing. As we argued about whether we should go right or left, John heard a mysterious noise. We all shut up, and I listened to the sound.

There was a loud rhythmic thudding. It dawned on me that it was drums. Echoing through the tunnel. Coming from the way we were going to turn.

“Guess we aren’t going that way…” John said.

“What are we waiting for?! Let’s go!” Todd shouted.

    The three of us turned and ran down the agreed right path. We ran along until we saw light. I silently hoped that it would be the way out.

    For the third time we all poured out of the mine into the clearing where all of our car was. The drums got louder and louder. Echoing out of the tunnel. We could see shadows dancing on the wall like they couldn’t wait to catch us. We all jumped into the Jeep and fastened our seatbelts.

    “It’s time to leave,” I yelled and turned the key.

   Nothing. I tried it again. The engine sputtered a little and stopped.

    “No not now, not now off all times,” I muttered, “Work. Just work.”

    The miners, now out of the mineshaft, slowly advanced toward my car. I figured I had to slow them down. I flipped on the headlights and lit up the night for the second time. The hooded men  hissed and stopped in their tracks. They must not have been around modern technology, because they seemed very confused by the light. It was pretty short lived though, because as soon as they realized It didn’t hurt them, they started advancing again and resumed their chant.

    The jeep kept sputtering and I looked to see that there wasn’t any gas left in the tank. I tapped the fuel gage a few times, thinking it must be broken. Meanwhile the miners got closer and closer.

    “We don’t have any gas!” I yelled to the guys.

    “Where did it all go then?” John yelled back.

    “How would I know? But we gotta go NOW!”

    “Uhh guys,” stammered Todd, “Look down.”

    Pooled around the Jeep was the gas. We were sitting in a puddle of it. They must’ve cut the fuel line! The three of scrambled to get out of the Jeep. When I looked up my heart stopped. The miners were only a few feet away. They encircled the Jeep, with us in it. One with some decorative ornaments, that looked like the leader, stepped forward. He raised a torch and dropped it into the fuel, and all of the miners stepped back.

    The fire caught and burned up all the fuel around it. I turned towards John and Todd. They both said something to each other but I couldn’t here what it was. The fire went underneath the jeep and I heard an explosion and everything went white.

A few months later.

    Billy and his friends were Just having a normal day driving around on their ATV’s when he saw something caught on a bush. He drove over and grabbed it. The item he grabbed was a map, with a big red circle on a spot fairly close to where they were. He and his friends talked it over and went off towards the circle, not knowing what they would find.