Straight out of a horror movie: A remote cabin, a monsoon and two missing friends

Journalist and humanitarian aid worker Arndell LeBlanc will never forget one particular dark and stormy night in 2010. After a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, he flew there with a group of other young Canadians to set up a mobile clinic.

After three weeks of working non-stop they decided to take a weekend break, and drove to a mountain cabin just outside Port-Au-Prince. 

"The cabin was really remote," he recalled. "And as we're driving up, it's slowly getting darker and darker and darker. We realized there was a huge monsoon coming in." 

LeBlanc and his friends settled in and ate dinner by candlelight while listening to rain fall on the tin roof.

After dinner, they suddenly realized two members of their party had gone missing. They had started with eight, but only six remained. 

"Instantly, since we're in a cabin in the woods in the dark, we think, 'Oh my God, a monster's gotten them,'" he said.  

Young twenty-somethings in a cabin and two go missing? This is the beginning of a horror movie.- Arndell LeBlanc

They split into teams of two and set off to search for their missing friends. LeBlanc paired up with a young woman he liked. 

"It's the perfect opportunity to show her how manly and how tough I am, right?" 

Unfortunately, things didn't go quite as he had planned. LeBlanc and his teammate did find their friends in a field. They were very much alive... and intimate.

"I turned beet red, saying 'we don't need to search for them any more."

While LeBlanc was embarrassed at the time, he gets a kick out of telling the story now. "There's something about that dark and stormy night that just instantly brings you into the story and instantly makes you want to know what the rest of the story is."