My grandma owns a cabin on a lake in Northern Michigan that I visit every year with all my cousins. There are eight other houses in our community and each one has been in that family for generations. Long story short, the other kids from the other eight hoses have been my best friends since I was born. During the summers, at night, we all meet at the crossroads to play flashlight games. The summer I was fourteen, the strangest thing happened.
I'm around the older side of the group. There's a girl who is a year older than me, but the majority of the kids are younger, the youngest that specific summer was eight. Sometimes the younger kids would get scared so pretty early on, we made an emergency code word in case one of them got too scared, they'd call it out and we'd stop the game no matter what and find them. It was 11:23pm (I vividly remember looking at my watch), nearly pitch black, and we were playing Sardines. We had just started a new game so there was only one person hiding and the rest of us were wandering around searching for them when we heard ice cream truck music.
It stands to say that our community is seven miles from the nearest town. We know all the other kids in about a two mile radius and all of them were definitely not out and about (they were all very young at the time, like, five and under) and we know that no one owns an ice cream truck anywhere near us. Why would they? Our community is private and it has a mile long driveway so there would be no point in selling to us and there are hardly any other families around for a few miles. There's no reason why a person would be driving an ice cream truck around in the middle of the day, let alone in the middle of the night.
Anyway, we heard the ice cream truck music floating over the trees and the oldest girl and I looked at each other and instantly used our emergency word, calling all the kids back to the crossroads. We did a head count and everyone was there. We listened to the music gradually get closer and louder and truth be told, we were all terrified. It went on for about a minute, but it seemed a lot longer. Suddenly, it stopped, and the woods around us were dead silent. Usually, you can hear animals or crickets in the trees but there was nothing.
We called it quits after that. The oldest girl and I walked all of our friends home, just to make sure because we were pretty freaked. The next night we heard it again at the exact same time: 11:23pm. We called everyone in again and it got louder and stopped about a minute after it started.
We haven't heard it since. It's been about six years since then, but it still freaks me out to this day and the kids who we were playing with still remember it. One of them (she's fifteen now) brought it up last summer and it still scares her too.
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