It's following me : A true ghost story

This is a true story that happened to me a good number of years ago. Back when I was 18, I was asked to join a national youth training program. The program will take us away and stay in the jungle for three months and teach us life skills. At the camp, they gave us three important rules:

i) Never go around destroying plants.
ii) Never respond if your name is called by an unknown source.
iii) Never walk in the direction of a sweet/foul smelling scent.

Two of the three rules were broken.

Being in a camp of 18 year olds, we thought that I was a bucket load of superstition. So two out of the three things happened to us. I was paired up in the same squad as Jay. Jay was the alpha male type, the one who leads the team and is extremely confident with himself. On the first day itself, Jay decided that he was going to cut down some trees with a machete, just for fun. He started chopping away at some of the trees in the jungle and that night, things got... interesting.

At 11pm sharp, while we were all in a tent, we heard loud simultaneous shrieking. The kind of shout when you drop a rat in the middle of the class. we exited the camp to find that 30 different people had dropped face down on the ground wailing. Some were twisting and turning, some were starting at the sky shouting. The camp warden called it a mass hysteria and dismissed it after all 30 campers 'calmed down'.

This happened periodically, some people were still affected by the hysteria, some were not. Life went on in the camp and Jay acted the way he did. Until one night, we were supposed to go on a hike. Apparently, the camp warden thought that it was a great idea to hike through the jungle at 10 pm. Jay decided to prank as many people as he could throughout the entire hike.

I was ignoring him when I noticed something rushed past me. It was Jay he started panicking asking,

"Was it you? Did you call my name?"
"It's not funny, ok?"
"Haha, you win, now tell me who called my name?"

He kept doing this despite one of the camp facilitators asking him to calm down but he wouldn't. It was his turn to be hysterical and he ran off. We tried following him as he ran through the jungle until we came to a clearing. Jay was just standing there, staring at something in the distance. One of the members of the squad asked,

"Are you ok? What's wrong?"

Jay lifted a finger and pointed at something. He turned back with tears in his eyes and sweat pouring down his forehead. He asked,

"Can't you see her? She's asking me to come."

We told him he was delusional and he won't have it, and insisted, shouted that 'she' was real. He began pacing and shouted that if we did not believe him, he's going to go to her and prove that she was real. He turned to face the direction of the 'thing'.

And he disappeared.

He had fell into a trap laid for catching small animals. There were no spikes in there and he had fallen face down. We woke him up and asked if he was alright. He immediately climbed out of the hole and claimed that the voice had stopped and that 'thing' had disappeared.

We got onto the bus to return to camp. I sat beside Jay to keep him calm. Halfway through the journey Jay started shivering. He pointed out of the moving bus and whispered in my ear, shivering...

"It's following me..."

I thought it was a prank. I laughed it off but Jay changed. Some said he was possessed. He started changing from an alpha male to someone soft spoken, almost demure. Small changes were seen.

He started wearing make-up. We were in a communal bathroom, he started wearing his towel differently.

I can't tell you for sure if he hit his head hard or if he was really possessed, but ever since we left camp, we have never seen him again.

This was written for the following contest