Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods.
Speaker 2: If you dare. This is it the last one.
Speaker 1: If you've been with me through all four parts of
Speaker 1: this series, you know what we've been building toward. And
Speaker 1: if you haven't, if you jumped straight to part five
Speaker 1: because someone told you about the ending, I need you
Speaker 1: to stop, go back start with part one because what
Speaker 1: I'm about to tell you tonight only hits the way
Speaker 1: it's supposed to. If you've heard the other four stories first,
Speaker 1: this one doesn't work as a standalone. It's the last
Speaker 1: piece of something, and the pieces before it matter. But
Speaker 1: for those of you who've been here since Herschel's deer camp,
Speaker 1: let me take you through where we've been, because I
Speaker 1: want all of it fresh in your mind. Nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 1: Herschel and three hunting buddies on a least parcel in
Speaker 1: the Kahudah Wilderness. Something came into their camp over the
Speaker 1: course of five nights and made itself known in stages.
Speaker 1: Coolers moved without damage, a deer carcass placed in the
Speaker 1: fire ring, coordinated knocking between the valley and the ridge,
Speaker 1: bipedal footsteps heavy enough to feel through the ground, and
Speaker 1: on the last night, reddish eye shine at eight feet
Speaker 1: in the hemlocks. When they broke camp, Herschel found a
Speaker 1: line of creek stones at the edge of the bench,
Speaker 1: evenly spaced, pointing north. Nineteen ninety four, Karen a seasonal
Speaker 1: Forest Service worker maintaining a fire road along the ridge
Speaker 1: line in Polk County, Tennessee, twelve miles north of Herschel's camp.
Speaker 1: Over three weeks, she documented tree breaks, a recurring smell
Speaker 1: on a schedule nineteen inch tracks in creek mud, and
Speaker 1: handprints with an opposing thumb on a clay bank, then
Speaker 1: the flat tire at night, the footsteps on the gravel,
Speaker 1: the pacing, and that breath, one long exhale from above
Speaker 1: her head height, close enough to hear the rasp of it.
Speaker 1: Two thousand and three, Marcus, a competitive bow hunter, on
Speaker 1: her ridge saddle in the Cherokee National Forest a few
Speaker 1: more miles north, he watched something step off a stump
Speaker 1: and walk upright through a cli cut for nearly four
Speaker 1: and a half minutes through a Swarowsky spotting scope, dark brown,
Speaker 1: seven and a half feet, arms to mid thigh. When
Speaker 1: he went back three days later with the trail camera,
Speaker 1: the SD card came back with nighttime images of an
Speaker 1: upright figure with infrared eyeshine. His brother, a state wildlife biologist,
Speaker 1: looked at the photos and said, I can't tell you
Speaker 1: what that is. Twenty eleven, David, a youth pastor, driving
Speaker 1: a van full of teenagers through the valley on a
Speaker 1: two lane highway. Something walked into the road, tall enough
Speaker 1: that the headlights caught it at the chest. The van
Speaker 1: hit it hard enough to spin into a ditch. When
Speaker 1: David got out, it was standing at the tree line
Speaker 1: watching two of the teenagers now adults, corroborated every detail.
Speaker 1: The tow truck driver who responded mentioned he'd pulled three
Speaker 1: other vehicles out of that same quarter mile stretch in
Speaker 1: the past year. Four stories, four decades. Four people who've
Speaker 1: never spoken to each other, same ridgeline, same valley, same corridor,
Speaker 1: same behavioral patterns, patience, deliberation, control, something that doesn't stumble
Speaker 1: into encounters by accident, something that manages them. And now
Speaker 1: we're here part five. This story is different from the
Speaker 1: other four, and I need to explain why before we
Speaker 1: get into it. The first four submissions came to me independently,
Speaker 1: different months, different formats, no awareness of each other. I
Speaker 1: noticed the geographic pattern myself after the third one came
Speaker 1: in when I happened to pull up a map. This
Speaker 1: one came in because of the series. A man named
Speaker 1: Jean listened to the first four episodes as they aired.
Speaker 1: He told me he started casually. His daughter had sent
Speaker 1: him a link, which I think says something about how
Speaker 1: stories travel through families. He listened to part one while
Speaker 1: he was doing dishes. By part two, he was sitting
Speaker 1: at the kitchen table with the volume up. By part three.
Speaker 1: He wasn't doing anything else. He was just listening. And
Speaker 1: somewhere around the middle of part three, when Marcus describes
Speaker 1: the clear cut in the Cherokee, Jeene paused the audio.
Speaker 1: He got up from his kitchen table. He walked down
Speaker 1: the hallway to a closet, and he pulled out a
Speaker 1: cardboard box he hadn't opened in over thirty years. The
Speaker 1: box was dusty, the tape holding it shut was yellowed
Speaker 1: and brittle. He told me he stood there in the
Speaker 1: hallway holding it and his hands were trembling, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't from the weight. When he wrote to me, his
Speaker 1: email was one paragraph long. It said, I've been listening
Speaker 1: to your series and I need to talk to you.
Speaker 1: I surveyed the property boundary that runs through every location
Speaker 1: your people are describing. I did it in nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: seven for a timber company. I have field notes, plat maps,
Speaker 1: and a cassette tape I recorded on site. I also
Speaker 1: have information about the geography of that ridge line that
Speaker 1: none of your other guests mentioned, and I think it
Speaker 1: might explain why this corridor exists. Please call me. I
Speaker 1: called him within the hour. Jeane is seventy one retired,
Speaker 1: lives in a small town in North Georgia about forty
Speaker 1: minutes from Dalton, which, if you've been paying attention, puts
Speaker 1: him in the same general orbit as Herschel, though the
Speaker 1: two men have never met and didn't know each other
Speaker 1: existed until this series aired. He worked as a land
Speaker 1: surveyor for thirty four years. Started as a rodman that's
Speaker 1: the entry level position, the person who holds the rod
Speaker 1: while the instrument operator takes the readings. In nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 1: right out of high school. His father had been in construction,
Speaker 1: and Jean grew up around job sites. He took to
Speaker 1: surveying naturally. The precision of it appealed to him. The
Speaker 1: outdoor work appealed to him.
Speaker 2: The fact that.
Speaker 1: When you finished a survey, you had something definitive, a map,
Speaker 1: a set of measurements, a legal document that said this
Speaker 1: is the shape of this piece of ground and here
Speaker 1: are its boundaries.
Speaker 2: That appealed to him.
Speaker 1: Most of all, Jane likes things that are settled, things
Speaker 1: that are known. He got his license in eighty two.
Speaker 1: By eighty five he was running his own two man
Speaker 1: crew for a regional surveying firm that handled contracts all
Speaker 1: over the North Georgia and East Tennessee Mountains, boundary surveys, subdivisions,
Speaker 1: timber tracks, highway projects.
Speaker 2: He did them all.
Speaker 1: He retired in twenty ten, which means he spent his
Speaker 1: entire adult working life from eighteen to sixty four, forty
Speaker 1: six years if you count the Rodman years before he
Speaker 1: got his license, walking property lines through the Southern Appalachians.
Speaker 1: He knows those mountains the way a river pilot knows
Speaker 1: a channel, every drainage, every ridge, every rock formation. He's
Speaker 1: read the ground the way most people.
Speaker 2: Read a page.
Speaker 1: I want you to hold on to that because it's
Speaker 1: important for understanding why Jane's contribution to this series is
Speaker 1: different from the others. He wasn't passing through that corridor.
Speaker 1: He wasn't hunting or working a seasonal job, or driving
Speaker 1: a highway at night. He was mapping it. He was
Speaker 1: creating the legal record of its shape and features. He
Speaker 1: was doing, in a very literal sense, what this whole
Speaker 1: series has been trying to do, drawing the boundaries of
Speaker 1: the corridor and documenting what's inside them. If you don't
Speaker 1: know what land surveyors actually do day to day, let
Speaker 1: me give you the short version because it matters. Surveyors
Speaker 1: establish property boundaries using precision instruments transit theodolite GPS in
Speaker 1: later years to measure angles and distances between fixed points
Speaker 1: on the ground. They set monuments, which are permanent markers
Speaker 1: iron pins driven into the earth, concrete posts, sometimes just
Speaker 1: a nail in a tree. At corners, and a long
Speaker 1: boundary lines. They create plat maps, which are scale drawing
Speaker 1: showing the shape of a property, the distances between monuments,
Speaker 1: the bearings of each line, and any significant features that
Speaker 1: fall within or along the boundary. Roads, creeks, rockout crops, structures, easements.
Speaker 1: All of it goes on the map. Here's the thing
Speaker 1: about surveyors that most people don't appreciate. They walk the ground,
Speaker 1: every foot of it. They don't look at satellite images
Speaker 1: or fly over in a helicopter.
Speaker 2: They physically walk.
Speaker 1: Every boundary line through whatever terrain that line crosses, ridge lines,
Speaker 1: creek bottoms, laurel thickets, rock faces, swamps. If the property
Speaker 1: line goes through it, the surveyor goes through it. Jeane
Speaker 1: told me he estimates he walked over ten thousand miles
Speaker 1: of boundary line during his career. Most of it through
Speaker 1: rough country that nobody else had any reason to visit.
Speaker 1: He saw parts of those mountains that hunters never reach
Speaker 1: and hikers never find.
Speaker 2: He was, in many ways the.
Speaker 1: Last person to physically walk certain pieces of ground before
Speaker 1: they disappeared back into the forest, and in the spring
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty seven, one of those boundary lines took
Speaker 1: him straight.
Speaker 2: Through the heart of the corridor.
Speaker 1: The job came from a timber company, not the same
Speaker 1: one Herschel's group had least from, but a successor. The
Speaker 1: original company had gone under in the early eighties, and
Speaker 1: its holdings had been acquired by a larger outfit based
Speaker 1: out of Chattanooga. The new company wanted a fresh survey
Speaker 1: of a large tract it had purchased, roughly eight thousand acres,
Speaker 1: spanning both sides of the state line from the Upper
Speaker 1: Kohutta region and Georgia north into Polk County, Tennessee. They
Speaker 1: needed updated plat maps, boundary verification, and a timber cruise,
Speaker 1: which is an inventory of the standing timber species and
Speaker 1: volume to determine what was worth cutting and what wasn't.
Speaker 1: Jane's firm got the contract. Jean and his partner, a
Speaker 1: man named Bill, who he'd worked with for about six
Speaker 1: years at that point, were assigned the boundary survey. The
Speaker 1: timber crews would be done separately by a forestry crew.
Speaker 1: The job was big. Eight thousand acres is a lot
Speaker 1: of ground. To put it in perspective, that's about twelve
Speaker 1: and a half square miles. The perimeter of the track
Speaker 1: was roughly twenty two miles, plus internal divisions between parcels
Speaker 1: that had been subdivided over the years by different owners.
Speaker 1: Gene and Bill estimated it would take three to four
Speaker 1: weeks in the field to walk the entire boundary, set
Speaker 1: monuments at every corner and angle point, and gather all
Speaker 1: the data they needed for the plat maps. They couldn't commute.
Speaker 1: The property was too remote, too far from any paved
Speaker 1: road to drive in and out every day, so they'd
Speaker 1: camp on site, the way Gene had done on dozens
Speaker 1: of jobs before this one. The timber company gave them
Speaker 1: a contact name, a set of old plat maps from
Speaker 1: the previous survey, which were from the early seventies and
Speaker 1: weren't reliable, and a general directive walk the boundary, verify
Speaker 1: or replace all existing monuments, set new ones where needed,
Speaker 1: and produce an updated set of plat maps that could
Speaker 1: be used for the timber crews and for any future
Speaker 1: transactions involving the property. Standard scope of work. Nothing unusual
Speaker 1: about the job on paper.
Speaker 2: Jeane told me.
Speaker 1: He remembers the first morning they drove in March of
Speaker 1: eighty seven, cold, overcast, the mountains still wearing winter, even
Speaker 1: though the calendar said spring. The dogwoods hadn't bloomed yet.
Speaker 2: The hardwoods were bare.
Speaker 1: You could see through the forest and away you can't
Speaker 1: once the leaves come in, long sight lines through the trunks,
Speaker 1: the ridge lines visible as sharp gray lines against the sky.
Speaker 1: They took the company truck up an old logging road,
Speaker 1: rough washed out in places barely passable, to a flat
Speaker 1: spot near the southern end of the tract, unloaded their gear,
Speaker 1: set up a base camp, two canvas tents, a cook
Speaker 1: set up with a propane stove, their instruments in hard cases,
Speaker 1: a five gallon water jug, and a cooler with enough
Speaker 1: food for a week. They'd resupply on weekends when they
Speaker 1: drove home. And then they started walking the lines. Here's
Speaker 1: what I want you to understand about what Gene found
Speaker 1: over the next three and a half weeks and whyat
Speaker 1: mattered for this series. Jane wasn't looking for anything unusual.
Speaker 1: He wasn't a researcher. He wasn't interested in the paranormal.
Speaker 2: He was a surveyor.
Speaker 1: He was there to walk lines, set pins, and make maps.
Speaker 2: That's it.
Speaker 1: And the thing about surveyors is that they noticed terrain
Speaker 1: features the way most people notice furniture in a room.
Speaker 1: It's automatic. You're walking a line, you're recording what you see,
Speaker 1: and you're noting anything that might affect the boundary or
Speaker 1: the use.
Speaker 2: Of the property.
Speaker 1: Creeks, rock out crops, old roads, fence lines, structures, changes
Speaker 1: in vegetation, all of it goes in the field notes.
Speaker 1: Jean's field notes from the eighty seven survey filled two
Speaker 1: composition notebooks College ruled black and white marbled covers. He
Speaker 1: still has them. He pulled them out of that cardboard
Speaker 1: box the night he listened to Part three, and they're
Speaker 1: sitting on his kitchen table as I'm telling you this.
Speaker 1: He read me sections of them over the phone, and
Speaker 1: I could hear him turning the pages. The paper is yellowed,
Speaker 1: the ink is faded in places, but the entries are legible,
Speaker 1: and they're detailed. In the first week, working the southern
Speaker 1: boundary near the Georgia Tennessee line, Jane and Bill encountered
Speaker 1: terrain that Jene described as the quietest ground I've ever
Speaker 1: worked on. He didn't mean that in a poetic way.
Speaker 1: He meant it literally. The southern portion of the tract
Speaker 1: includes the upper end of the valley, the same valley
Speaker 1: Herschel described the same one Karen's fire Road overlooked, the
Speaker 1: same gap between ridges that all five stories in this
Speaker 1: series keep coming back to. And Jean said, when they
Speaker 1: dropped into that valley to survey a boundary line that
Speaker 1: crossed it, the sound changed. The birds stopped, the wind,
Speaker 1: noise dropped. Even their own footsteps sounded muffled, like the
Speaker 1: ground was absorbing the sound instead of reflecting it. I
Speaker 1: made a note about it, Jean said, March nineteenth, eighty seven.
Speaker 1: I wrote, valley floor between ridges unusual, ually quiet, sound
Speaker 1: dampening effect. Bill noticed it too. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. That's
Speaker 1: word for word from the notebook. Bill noticed it.
Speaker 2: That matters.
Speaker 1: This wasn't one person's subjective impression. Both men independently registered
Speaker 1: that something about the acoustics in that valley was off.
Speaker 1: I want you to think about that in the context.
Speaker 2: Of this series.
Speaker 1: Herschel described the valley as feeling like being inside a church.
Speaker 1: Karen described a density to the silence on the ridge
Speaker 1: above it. Marcus noted that the clearcut went dead quiet
Speaker 1: when the dos reacted to whatever was on that stump.
Speaker 1: And now Gene nine years before Karen and sixteen years
Speaker 1: before Marcus is writing in his field notes that the
Speaker 1: valley floor has an unusual sound dampening quality. Four different people,
Speaker 1: four different decades, all independently describing the same acoustic phenomenon
Speaker 1: in the same location. That's not anecdotal anymore. That's a
Speaker 1: pattern with physical characteristics. Jane told me the quiet bothered
Speaker 1: Bill more than it bothered him. Bill was a talker,
Speaker 1: similar to Jimbo and Herschel's crew, the kind of guy
Speaker 1: who filled silence with conversation because silence made him uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: When they were working in that valley, Bill talked more, louder, faster,
Speaker 1: like he was trying to compensate for the missing sound.
Speaker 1: Jane noticed it, but didn't say anything. They had work
Speaker 1: to do, But I asked Jane about it. Did Bill
Speaker 1: ever say anything directly about the valley? Did he ever
Speaker 1: name what he was feeling? Once, Jeene said, we were
Speaker 1: running a line along the valley floor, and Bill stopped
Speaker 1: and said, this place doesn't want us here, just like
Speaker 1: that flat not joking. I looked at him and he
Speaker 1: looked at me, and neither of us said anything else.
Speaker 1: We just went back to work. I want to sit
Speaker 1: on that for a second. This place does want us here.
Speaker 1: A professional land surveyor, a man who's walked through every
Speaker 1: kind of terrain in the Southern Appalachians stops in the
Speaker 1: middle of a job and says that not this place
Speaker 1: is creepy or I don't like it here. He said,
Speaker 1: it doesn't want them there, like the land itself had
Speaker 1: an opinion. And here's something else. I asked Jane about
Speaker 1: the nights, because they were camping on the track for
Speaker 1: three and a half weeks, sleeping out there, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to know what the knights were like. He told
Speaker 1: me most nights were fine, quiet, they'd eat, clean up,
Speaker 1: turn in early because the days started at dawn. He'd
Speaker 1: read by flashlight for a little while and fall asleep.
Speaker 1: Nothing unusual. Bill snored the fire would die down normal
Speaker 1: camp nights, but there were two or three nights. Gene
Speaker 1: couldn't pin down exactly which ones because he didn't log
Speaker 1: them the way he logged his daytime observations, where he
Speaker 1: woke up and the woods were silent, not quiet, silent,
Speaker 1: the kind of silence where you noticed the absence of sound,
Speaker 1: the way you'd notice a light going out. No insects,
Speaker 1: no owls, no creak, noise, nothing. He'd lie in his
Speaker 1: tent and listen and feel his heart rate climb and
Speaker 1: not know why. Nothing happened on those nights. Nothing he
Speaker 1: could point to. No sounds, no movement, no footsteps, just
Speaker 1: the silence and the feeling, the same feeling he'd had
Speaker 1: on the valley floor during the day that something was
Speaker 1: out there close paying attention. He never got up to look,
Speaker 1: he told me he didn't want to see whatever it was.
Speaker 1: I wasn't a brave.
Speaker 2: Man about it, he said.
Speaker 1: I just lay there and waited for it to pass,
Speaker 1: and it always did. By morning, the birds were back
Speaker 1: and the creek was running, and everything sounded normal, like
Speaker 1: the night had been wiped clean. I asked him if
Speaker 1: Bill ever mentioned waking up to the silence. No, Jean said,
Speaker 1: and I never asked him. Two men on a ridge
Speaker 1: line for three and a half weeks, both of them
Speaker 1: sensing something they couldn't name, neither of them willing to
Speaker 1: say it out loud. That's the weight of this subject.
Speaker 1: That's what it does to people. It isolates them inside
Speaker 1: their own experience, because the experience doesn't have a category,
Speaker 1: and you can't share something you can't categorize. Over the
Speaker 1: first two weeks, as they worked their way north along
Speaker 1: the property boundary, Gene logged several things in his field
Speaker 1: notes that he filed under terrain observations at the time,
Speaker 1: just standard field documentation stuff that went into the notebook,
Speaker 1: because that's what surveyors do. You write down what you see,
Speaker 1: whether you understand it or not. He didn't attach any
Speaker 1: special significance to these observations in eighty seven. They were
Speaker 1: just entries in a composition notebook data without context. Thirty
Speaker 1: seven years later, the context arrived. Tree breaks. He found
Speaker 1: them along the ridge line on the western boundary, small
Speaker 1: diameter hardwood, sour wood, dogwood, young hickory, snapped between six
Speaker 1: and nine feet above the ground, some with tops propped
Speaker 1: against adjacent trees in ways that didn't look like natural windfall,
Speaker 1: a few with what he described in his notes as
Speaker 1: spiral fractures, though at the time he attributed them to
Speaker 1: ice loading from the previous winter. He logged the locations
Speaker 1: and estimated the ages of the breaks where he could,
Speaker 1: based on how weather the exposed wood was. He told
Speaker 1: me he counted at least fifteen along a two mile
Speaker 1: stretch of the ridge. He didn't think it was unusual
Speaker 1: at the time. He'd seen ice damage before, but he'd
Speaker 1: never seen it concentrated along a ridge line and a
Speaker 1: line like that, and he'd never seen spiral fractures in
Speaker 1: sourwood from ice. He made a note of it and
Speaker 1: kept moving. When he heard Karen and Marcus described the
Speaker 1: same thing, same species, same height range, same spiral fractures,
Speaker 1: same linear pattern along the ridge, he said, the hair
Speaker 1: on his arms stood up. He was sitting at his
Speaker 1: kitchen table listening on his phone, and he looked down
Speaker 1: at his own arms and the hair was standing straight up.
Speaker 1: That's when I got up and went to the closet,
Speaker 1: he told me. That's when I.
Speaker 2: Pulled out the box.
Speaker 1: He also found tracks once March twenty third, about ten
Speaker 1: days into the survey, they were running a line along
Speaker 1: a creek crossing on the eastern side of the property,
Speaker 1: near the valley floor. The creek had cut a channel
Speaker 1: through clay and silt, and the banks on both sides
Speaker 1: were soft, good tracking surface, the kind that holds an
Speaker 1: impression cleanly. Jeanne was walking ahead of Bill, cutting line
Speaker 1: with a machete, and he stopped when he saw impressions
Speaker 1: in the mud. They were big, shaped roughly like a
Speaker 1: human foot heel ball toes, but much larger than any
Speaker 1: human foot he'd ever seen. He didn't have a tape
Speaker 1: measure on his hip at that moment. His chain and
Speaker 1: pins were in Bill's hands, so he eyeballed the length
Speaker 1: against his own boot, which was a size of level
Speaker 1: about twelve inches. The prints were significantly longer. He estimated
Speaker 1: sixteen to seventeen inches in his notes. There were four
Speaker 1: of them, two on each side, walking pattern coming down
Speaker 1: from the uphill side of the creek, crossing the mud,
Speaker 1: and continuing into the timber on the far bank. The
Speaker 1: stride was long, longer than his own by a wide margin.
Speaker 1: He and Bill looked at them. Bill said, somebody's been
Speaker 1: walking the creek. Gene nodded. They discussed it for maybe
Speaker 1: a minute. Who would be out here barefoot? Probably a local,
Speaker 1: maybe someone from a property to.
Speaker 2: The east, and moved on. That was it.
Speaker 1: They didn't photograph the prints, they didn't measure them with
Speaker 1: their chain. They noted them and kept working. Sixteen to
Speaker 1: seventeen inches in the same creek system, on the same
Speaker 1: valley floor where Karen would find nineteen inch prints seven
Speaker 1: years later, in essentially the same mud. Here's a detail
Speaker 1: I want you to catch. Jean's prince measured sixteen to
Speaker 1: seventeen inches, Karen's measured nineteen. Those aren't the same individual.
Speaker 1: The foot grew or they belonged to different individuals, But
Speaker 1: they're in the same location, the same creek drainage, separated
Speaker 1: by seven years. Whatever was leaving those prints in eighty
Speaker 1: seven was still leaving them in ninety four, or something
Speaker 1: like it was. I asked Gene if it occurred to
Speaker 1: him at the time that the prince might not be human. No,
Speaker 1: he said, now for a second, why would it. I
Speaker 1: was a twenty seven year old surveyor walking a property
Speaker 1: line in the mountains. I didn't know anything about this subject.
Speaker 1: I'd never thought about it. I wrote it down, because
Speaker 1: that's what you do when you see something out of
Speaker 1: the ordinary, you note it, and then I went back
Speaker 1: to work. That's what surveyors do. You note everything, even
Speaker 1: the stuff you don't understand. And that's one of the
Speaker 1: things I find most compelling about Jean's account. He wasn't
Speaker 1: filtering any of this through a big foot lens. He
Speaker 1: had no framework for that. He was just a guy
Speaker 1: with a notebook and a transit, documenting what he found
Speaker 1: on the ground as he walked through it. The observations
Speaker 1: are clean. They're not shaped by expectation or belief or hope.
Speaker 1: They're just data points sitting in a composition notebook for
Speaker 1: thirty seven years, waiting for someone to come along and
Speaker 1: provide the context that makes them mean something. Jeene was
Speaker 1: that someone. He just didn't know it yet. Here's where
Speaker 1: Gene's story goes from interesting to something else entirely. About
Speaker 1: halfway through the survey, roughly the end of the second week,
Speaker 1: Jeane and Bill reached a section of the western boundary
Speaker 1: that climbed to the ridge crest and followed it north
Speaker 1: for about a mile and a half. This was the
Speaker 1: spine of the corridor, the high ground between the two valleys,
Speaker 1: the same ridge line that every story in this series references.
Speaker 1: The boundary line ran right along the top of it.
Speaker 1: They were working their way north, setting monuments, recording bearings
Speaker 1: and distances when they came to a feature Gene described
Speaker 1: as a rock outcrop on the western face of the ridge,
Speaker 1: limestone exposed by erosion, sticking out of the slope like
Speaker 1: a shelf. Below the outcrop, partially concealed by rhododendron and
Speaker 1: a tangle of fallen timber, there was an opening, a
Speaker 1: hole in the rock.
Speaker 2: Not huge.
Speaker 1: Jene estimated the opening at about four feet wide and
Speaker 1: maybe three feet tall, big enough to crawl into. He
Speaker 1: could feel air moving out of it, which told him
Speaker 1: it went somewhere. It wasn't just a shallow overhang. It
Speaker 1: was an entrance a cave. Gene noted it in.
Speaker 2: His field book.
Speaker 1: He recorded the approximate location relative to the nearest monument
Speaker 1: he'd set, about three hundred and forty feet north of
Speaker 1: a pen he'd driven that morning. He and Bill walked
Speaker 1: over and looked at it from about twenty feet away.
Speaker 1: Jeane said the opening was partially screened by vegetation, You
Speaker 1: wouldn't see it from the road above or from the
Speaker 1: valley below. You'd only find it if you were walking
Speaker 1: the ridge at that elevation, which almost nobody would have
Speaker 1: reason to do. It was tucked into the rock face
Speaker 1: like a pocket. Bill wanted to go closer. Jeane told
Speaker 1: him to leave it. They weren't there to explore caves.
Speaker 1: They were there to set a boundary line, and the
Speaker 1: line was uphill from the opening. But Jean did something
Speaker 1: that turned out to matter a great deal. He pulled
Speaker 1: out his compass and took a bearing from the cave
Speaker 1: entrance to his nearest monument. He measured the approximate distance
Speaker 1: by pacing it, and he wrote a description in his notebook.
Speaker 1: Cave opening approximately four feet wide by three feet tall
Speaker 1: in limestone outcrop, air movement from interior opening faces west southwest,
Speaker 1: concealed by rhododendron and deadfall. That entry sat in a
Speaker 1: composition notebook for thirty seven years. They kept working over
Speaker 1: the next two days as they continued north along the
Speaker 1: ridge crest, they found two more openings, and this is
Speaker 1: where Jeane's story started to feel different to him, even
Speaker 1: in eighty seven. Not alarming, just notable. One opening might
Speaker 1: be an anomaly. Two you start thinking about geology. Three
Speaker 1: in a mile and a half, all in limestone, all
Speaker 1: on the same face of the same ridge, all producing airflow.
Speaker 1: That's not random, that's a system. The second opening was
Speaker 1: larger than the first, maybe five feet across, roughly oval,
Speaker 1: with a clear draft of cool air flowing from the interior.
Speaker 1: Jeanne said he stood about ten feet from it and
Speaker 1: could feel the air on his face. It was noticeably
Speaker 1: colder than the ambient temperature, which told him the passage
Speaker 1: behind it was significant. The deeper a cave goes, the
Speaker 1: cooler and more consistent the air temperature, and a strong
Speaker 1: draft usually means there's another opening somewhere creating airflow through
Speaker 1: the system. The third was smaller, partially collapsed. It looked
Speaker 1: like the roof of the entrance had caved in at
Speaker 1: some point. Broken limestone blocks were piled in front of
Speaker 1: the opening, but you could still see space behind the rubble,
Speaker 1: and Jane could hear a faint echo when he spoke
Speaker 1: near it. Something was back there.
Speaker 2: He told me.
Speaker 1: He remembers standing near that third opening and looking back
Speaker 1: south along the ridge, mentally connecting the three locations. They
Speaker 1: formed a rough line north south following the ridge crest
Speaker 1: following the limestone formation. He said, even at the time,
Speaker 1: without knowing anything about the larger story, he had a thought,
Speaker 1: there's more of this underground than what I'm seeing on
Speaker 1: the surface. That's just good geological intuition from a man
Speaker 1: who spent decades reading terrain. But the implication of it,
Speaker 1: the idea that there might be a continuous underground passage
Speaker 1: system running the length of that ridge line, that implication
Speaker 1: would take on a completely different meaning. Thirty seven years later,
Speaker 1: Gene marked all three on his working plat map. He
Speaker 1: recorded their positions in his notes, and when he got
Speaker 1: back to camp that evening, he radioed the timber company's
Speaker 1: field coordinator, a guy whose name Gene remembers but asked
Speaker 1: me not to use on the show. Gene told him
Speaker 1: about the caves and asked a straightforward question, how do
Speaker 1: you want these handled on the survey? Were they to
Speaker 1: be included in the timber inventory? Were their mineral rights
Speaker 1: or easements he needed to know about. Did the company
Speaker 1: want the openings mapped in detail or just noted on
Speaker 1: the plat. What happened next is something Gene has been
Speaker 1: turning over in his head ever since. The coordinator didn't hesitate,
Speaker 1: he didn't ask questions, he didn't say, let me check
Speaker 1: and get back to you. He responded immediately, like he'd
Speaker 1: been waiting for this call, or like he'd had this
Speaker 1: conversation before. He told Gene to mark the cave locations
Speaker 1: as excluded on the plat maps. He said the company
Speaker 1: was aware of them, that they predated the current ownership,
Speaker 1: and that they were to be excluded from the survey,
Speaker 1: from the timber inventory, and from any future development plans.
Speaker 1: He told Gene not to enter the caves, not to
Speaker 1: send anyone else into the caves, and not to include
Speaker 1: any detail about them in his field notes beyond a
Speaker 1: simple notation that the areas were excluded per company direction.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. Gene asked why liability. The coordinator said,
Speaker 1: we don't want anyone going in there and getting hurt.
Speaker 1: Mark them excluded and move on. Gene told me that
Speaker 1: explanation made sense on the surface. Cave liability is a
Speaker 1: real thing. Property owners can be held responsible if someone
Speaker 1: enters a cave on their land and gets injured or dies.
Speaker 1: Plenty of landowners fence off for gate cave entrances on
Speaker 1: their property for exactly that reason. Excluding them from the
Speaker 1: survey and flagging them as off limits was a reasonable
Speaker 1: legal precaution. But here's what didn't add up, and this
Speaker 1: is the part Jane kept circling back to in our conversations.
Speaker 1: The coordinator already knew about the caves. Gene hadn't told
Speaker 1: him how many there were. He hadn't given locations. He
Speaker 1: just said he'd found cave openings along the western face
Speaker 1: of the ridge. The coordinator didn't ask how many, didn't
Speaker 1: ask where exactly, didn't ask for coordinates or descriptions. He
Speaker 1: just said to mark them excluded, which means either someone
Speaker 1: had already documented them or the coordinator had been brief
Speaker 1: to expect this call and had his instructions ready, and
Speaker 1: the directive wasn't just note them, it was exclude them.
Speaker 1: That's a specific legal term in land surveying, and I
Speaker 1: want to make sure you understand what it means. When
Speaker 1: you exclude an area from a survey, You're drawing the
Speaker 1: property boundary around it. You're carving out a piece of
Speaker 1: ground and saying, legally, this area is not part of
Speaker 1: this tract. It doesn't belong to the surveyed property. It's
Speaker 1: a hole in the map. Jane told me he'd done
Speaker 1: exclusions before, cemeteries, public road rights of way, utility easements
Speaker 1: where a power company or pipeline has a legal claim
Speaker 1: to a strip of ground owned government reservations. Every exclusion
Speaker 1: he'd ever done had a clear, documented legal basis, a
Speaker 1: recorded easement, a deed restriction, a government claim. You could
Speaker 1: look it up in the county records and find the paperwork.
Speaker 1: He looked up the paperwork on these caves. There was
Speaker 1: no mineral rights reservation on the deed, no government easement
Speaker 1: filed on those parcels, no recorded claim of any kind
Speaker 1: that would legally justify excluding those areas from the survey.
Speaker 1: They were just excluded, no documented reason, just a phone
Speaker 1: call from a field coordinator who already knew about them
Speaker 1: and didn't want to discuss it. He wasn't rude about it,
Speaker 1: Jeane told me, wasn't hostile, but there was a wall there.
Speaker 1: I could feel it. The conversation had reached a boundary,
Speaker 1: and I was not going to be allowed past it.
Speaker 1: So I marked the exclusions and I moved on that
Speaker 1: was my job. The client says, exclude, I exclude. I
Speaker 1: don't need to know why, but I've wanted to know
Speaker 1: why for thirty seven years. He marked the exclusions on
Speaker 1: the plat, drew the boundary lines around them, three little
Speaker 1: voids on an eight thousand acre map, and he moved
Speaker 1: on to the next section of the survey. But here's
Speaker 1: the detail that connects everything. And I need you to
Speaker 1: hear this clearly, because this is the moment when the
Speaker 1: whole series snaps into focus. When Gene went home after
Speaker 1: the eighty seven survey and drafted the final plat maps,
Speaker 1: the clean, finished versions, drawn to scale, with all measurements, bearings, monuments,
Speaker 1: and exclusions marked. Those maps became the legal record of
Speaker 1: the property. They show the shape of the tract, the
Speaker 1: boundary lines, the internal parcel divisions, and the three excluded
Speaker 1: areas where the caves are. Those maps sat in a
Speaker 1: filing cabinet at Jean's office for years, then went into
Speaker 1: the box when he retired. He hadn't looked at them
Speaker 1: since he closed the files. The night he listened to
Speaker 1: part three The bow Hunter, he pulled out the plat
Speaker 1: maps along with his field notes. He unfolded them on
Speaker 1: his kitchen table. They're large format sheets, about twenty four
Speaker 1: by thirty six inches, drawn in pencil and ink on vellum.
Speaker 2: He told me.
Speaker 1: They still smelled like the vellum paper and the ink
Speaker 1: he used, even after all these years. The lines are sharp,
Speaker 1: the lettering is precise. Gene was trained in drafting, and
Speaker 1: his plat maps look like they belong in a textbook.
Speaker 1: He laid the plat maps on the table and then
Speaker 1: pulled up a modern topographic map of the same area
Speaker 1: on his laptop, one of the free USGS topo maps
Speaker 1: you can access online. He set the laptop next to
Speaker 1: the plat maps and started comparing. Then he started marking,
Speaker 1: based on the terrain descriptions, the elevation references, and the
Speaker 1: geographic details mentioned in the first three episodes of the
Speaker 1: Corridor series. He marked the approximate locations of Herschel's camp,
Speaker 1: Karen's fire road, and Marcus's clear cut on the topo map.
Speaker 1: He used a red pen three dots. He told me
Speaker 1: it took him about twenty minutes to place each one,
Speaker 1: cross referencing what the witnesses had described with the contour
Speaker 1: lines and drainage features on the tapo. Then he looked
Speaker 1: at the plat maps. All three dots fell within the
Speaker 1: survey boundary of the tract he'd walked in nineteen eighty seven.
Speaker 1: Herschel's camp was on the southern end, Karen's fire road
Speaker 1: was along the midsection of the western boundary. Marcus's clearcut
Speaker 1: was near the northern end. Three encounters spanning twenty five years,
Speaker 1: and every one of them was inside the property line
Speaker 1: Jeane had surveyed. After Part four aired the church van,
Speaker 1: he marked that location too. The highway where David's van
Speaker 1: was hit crosses through the valley at a point that
Speaker 1: falls within the eastern boundary of the tract.
Speaker 2: Four for four, and.
Speaker 1: Here's the part that made Gene write me that email.
Speaker 1: The three excluded cave areas, the three voids on his
Speaker 1: plat map, the openings the timber company told him to exclude,
Speaker 1: without explanation, sit along the ridge line between the encounter locations.
Speaker 1: They're spaced roughly evenly along the spine of the ridge,
Speaker 1: one near the southern end, one in the middle, one
Speaker 1: toward the north, like stations on a line, like entrances
Speaker 1: along a corridor. When he showed me this, when he
Speaker 1: described the overlay, the encounter locations inside the boundary, the
Speaker 1: caves along the ridge between them. I asked him the
Speaker 1: question I'd been building toward the whole conversation, Gene, what
Speaker 1: do you think those caves are? He didn't hesitate. He said,
Speaker 1: I think they're connected. I think there's a passage system
Speaker 1: running under that ridge, a network north south following the
Speaker 1: limestone formation. That's how Kars geology works. Where you find
Speaker 1: one solution cave, you find more, and they connect underground
Speaker 1: through passages carved by water over millions of years. Some
Speaker 1: of those systems run for miles, some of them are huge,
Speaker 1: and most of them have never been mapped because nobody
Speaker 1: knows the entrances are there. I hear him thinking, I
Speaker 1: think whatever your people have been seeing in that corridor,
Speaker 1: whatever's been seen there for the last forty some years,
Speaker 1: lives there underground in the cave system. I think the
Speaker 1: valley is the surface corridor and the caves are the
Speaker 1: subsurface corridor. Same route, same direction, two levels. The thing
Speaker 1: moves underground when it wants to disappear, It surfaces when
Speaker 1: it wants to be seen, or when it needs to
Speaker 1: move through the valley for whatever reason food water territory.
Speaker 1: The caves are the home base, the valley is the range.
Speaker 2: I sat with that for a while.
Speaker 1: When he said it, I didn't respond right away because
Speaker 1: what Gene was describing wasn't speculation, not really, It was
Speaker 1: geology applied to a behavioral pattern. Karst limestone formations in
Speaker 1: the Southern Appalachians are well documented. They produce extensive cave
Speaker 1: systems Lookout Mountain, the Tag region, the caves around Monteagle
Speaker 1: and Swanee. Some of those systems have miles of surveyed passage.
Speaker 1: Many more have never been entered. The idea that a
Speaker 1: ridge line with exposed limestone on its western face might
Speaker 1: contain a continuous underground network isn't far fetched. It's expected
Speaker 1: that's what limestone does when groundwater works through it over
Speaker 1: geologic time. And the idea that something large and intelligent
Speaker 1: might use such a system as shelter moving underground along
Speaker 1: the ridge, invisible, protected, thermally regulated, and surfacing at different
Speaker 1: points through different entrances as needed. That would explain things
Speaker 1: about this series that I haven't been able to explain
Speaker 1: any other way. It would explain why encounters happen at
Speaker 1: different locations along the same line, but never at the
Speaker 1: same location twice. The thing isn't walking the surface for
Speaker 1: forty miles, it's popping up at different exits. It would
Speaker 1: explain why the thing seems to appear and disappear without
Speaker 1: leaving a consistent surface trail. It's going underground. It would
Speaker 1: explain the biological silence. Animals near the cave openings would
Speaker 1: know what's in them. They would avoid those areas the
Speaker 1: way prey animals avoid the mouth of a predator's den.
Speaker 1: It would explain why no one has ever found a
Speaker 1: permanent shelter, a bedding site, a food cash, or a
Speaker 1: den on the surface, because the shelter isn't on the surface.
Speaker 1: And it would explain the corridor itself, not as a
Speaker 1: migration route, which is what I initially assumed when I
Speaker 1: started mapping these encounters, but as a territory, a home
Speaker 1: range organized around a geological feature that provides concealment, temperature stability,
Speaker 1: protection from weather, and a way to move unseen across
Speaker 1: miles of ridgeline without ever breaking the surface. I want
Speaker 1: to be careful here. I'm not saying that's definitively what's happening.
Speaker 1: I don't have proof.
Speaker 2: Nobody does.
Speaker 1: You'd need to enter those caves and survey the passages
Speaker 1: and document what's inside, and nobody has done that. The
Speaker 1: Timber Company made sure of that in eighty seven, and
Speaker 1: as far as Gene knows, nobody has been back to
Speaker 1: those opening since. But I'm telling you that a retired
Speaker 1: land surveyor with thirty four years of experience, a man
Speaker 1: who walked that ground with a transit and a chain
Speaker 1: and a pair of composition notebooks, found physical features on
Speaker 1: that ridge line that align with every encounter in this series.
Speaker 1: And when he overlaid his nineteen eighty seven plat maps
Speaker 1: with the locations from five independent witness accounts spanning four decades,
Speaker 1: everything lined up. The encounters, the caves, the ridge line,
Speaker 1: the corridor. That's not nothing. That might be the most
Speaker 1: significant thing any witness in this series has contributed. Not
Speaker 1: because Jean saw a creature.
Speaker 2: He didn't. He saw the architecture, he mapped the house.
Speaker 1: There's one more piece to Gene's story, and I saved
Speaker 1: it for last because it's the part that, when he
Speaker 1: told it to me, made me put my phone down
Speaker 1: and just sit there for a while.
Speaker 2: The cassette tape Jane.
Speaker 1: Told me he used to carry a small, all handheld
Speaker 1: recorder in the field, a Sony micro cassette, the little
Speaker 1: ones about the size of a matchbox that people used
Speaker 1: for dictation back in the eighties and nineties. He used
Speaker 1: it primarily for field notes. If his hands were full,
Speaker 1: or if the weather was bad and he couldn't write,
Speaker 1: he'd record his observations verbally and transcribe them later.
Speaker 2: At the office.
Speaker 1: It was a practical tool, nothing fancy. But he also
Speaker 1: had a habit, a personal one, not a professional one,
Speaker 1: of recording ambient sound at night when they were camped
Speaker 1: on a job. He'd set the recorder on a flat
Speaker 1: rock or a stump near camp, hit the button and
Speaker 1: let it run for an hour, sometimes two. Then he'd
Speaker 1: listen back.
Speaker 2: In the morning or on the drive home.
Speaker 1: He told me he started doing it early in his career,
Speaker 1: partly out of curiosity and partly because he liked having
Speaker 1: an audio record of the places he worked. Some surveyors
Speaker 1: take photographs gene collected sound. He's got dozens of these
Speaker 1: tapes from jobs all over North Georgia and e Tennessee.
Speaker 1: Frogs in a river bottom near Highawassee thunderstorms on a
Speaker 1: ridge in Fannin County, Coyotes in a clear cut outside
Speaker 1: of Cleveland. He kept them all. Most of them are
Speaker 1: in shoe boxes in his workshop. On the night of
Speaker 1: March twenty fifth, nineteen eighty seven, about twelve days into
Speaker 1: the survey, Jean set the recorder on a flat rock
Speaker 1: about thirty feet from their camp. The camp was on
Speaker 1: the eastern side of the ridge at roughly twenty eight
Speaker 1: hundred feet, on a small shelf of level ground, similar
Speaker 1: to the bench Herschel's group had used nine years earlier.
Speaker 1: Whether it was the same spot, Jeane doesn't know, but
Speaker 1: the elevation and terrain description matched closely. It was a
Speaker 1: clear night, cold, probably low thirties.
Speaker 2: No wind.
Speaker 1: Jeane turned on the recorder around nine o'clock and went
Speaker 1: to his tent. He and Bill had been working since
Speaker 1: sun up, walking about three miles of boundary through rough terrain,
Speaker 1: and he was tired. He fell asleep fast. The next morning,
Speaker 1: he rewound the tape and listened to it over coffee.
Speaker 1: This was his routine. Pop the tape in, hit play,
Speaker 1: drink his coffee, listen to the night. Most of it
Speaker 1: was exactly what you'd expect about ten minutes of fire noise,
Speaker 1: pops and cracks as the last logs burned down, Then
Speaker 1: quiet wind in the canopy, very light. A few minutes later,
Speaker 1: an owl somewhere to the south, then more quiet, some
Speaker 1: faint insect noise, which surprised him because it was March,
Speaker 1: but the early spring species come out on warm evenings
Speaker 1: even when it's still cold at night. Crickets very faint,
Speaker 1: normal mountain sounds, nothing interesting, And then at about the
Speaker 1: forty minute mark something else. Jeene described it to me carefully.
Speaker 1: He's a careful man. He chooses words the way he
Speaker 1: choose a monument location, deliberately and with precision.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 1: At first he thought it was a coyote. The sound
Speaker 1: started low, rose and pitch, and had a way quality
Speaker 1: to it, that oscillating rising and falling pattern that coyotes
Speaker 1: produce when they howl. If you've spent time in the
Speaker 1: southern mountains, you know the sound. Coyotes are everywhere, and
Speaker 1: they're vocal, and you hear them most nights if you're
Speaker 1: camped above two thousand feet. But as he listened, things
Speaker 1: about the sound started to not add up. The pitch
Speaker 1: was too low, way too low. Coyotes are high pitched.
Speaker 1: Their howls sit in the upper register, almost yipping. This
Speaker 1: sound was in the basement deep chest register, the kind
Speaker 1: of sound that comes from something with a large thoracic
Speaker 1: cavity and a long vocal tract. And it was loud,
Speaker 1: not ear splitting, but big like. The volume was a
Speaker 1: function of the size of the thing producing it, not
Speaker 1: the effort it was putting into it. And it was long.
Speaker 1: Gene estimated eight to ten seconds of sustained vocalization, one
Speaker 1: continuous sound, rising and falling, tapering off at the end.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. That's a long time for any animal vocalization.
Speaker 1: Coyote howls are typically two to four seconds. Wolf howls
Speaker 1: can go longer, but wolves weren't in that part of Tennessee.
Speaker 1: In eighty seven, he played it for Bill at breakfast.
Speaker 1: Bill said, coyote. Jeane said, yeah, probably. They looked at
Speaker 1: each other over their coffee, and neither of them said
Speaker 1: anything else about it. Jeane kept the tape, he didn't
Speaker 1: erase it, he didn't.
Speaker 2: Record over it.
Speaker 1: It went into the box with the field notes. And
Speaker 1: the plat maps and the other records from the eighty
Speaker 1: seven survey into the closet, into the dark for thirty
Speaker 1: seven years, and then the corridor started airing. In part one,
Speaker 1: Herschel described a vocalization from the ridge above his camp,
Speaker 1: deep resonant, sustained for about three seconds, rising slightly in
Speaker 1: pitch at the end. He said it vibrated through the
Speaker 1: ground and up through his boots and into his chest.
Speaker 1: In part two, Karen described the breath she heard in
Speaker 1: the timber next to the road, not a vocalization exactly,
Speaker 1: but a sound produced by something with a large airway, low, deep,
Speaker 1: close enough that the volume and tone told her the
Speaker 1: source was big. When Jeane heard those descriptions, when he
Speaker 1: heard Herschel say deep and resonant and felt it in
Speaker 1: my chest, something in the back of his mind clicked
Speaker 1: a connection he hadn't made in thirty seven years. He
Speaker 1: paused the episode. He got up from his kitchen table.
Speaker 1: He walked down the hallway to the closet, pulled out
Speaker 1: the cardboard box, dug through the field notes and the
Speaker 1: plat maps until he found the tape. A Sony micro
Speaker 1: cassette labeled in his handwriting ambient camp. March twenty five,
Speaker 1: eighty seven. He went to his workshop, opened drawers until
Speaker 1: he found an old micro cassette player, one he'd kept
Speaker 1: for no particular reason, the way people keep old electronics
Speaker 1: they never quite throw away. He put in fresh batteries,
Speaker 1: snapped the tape in, rewound, it hit play.
Speaker 2: He fast forwarded.
Speaker 1: Through the fire noise and the owl and the crickets.
Speaker 1: He'd listened to this tape once in eighty seven and
Speaker 1: never again, but he remembered roughly where the sound was.
Speaker 1: Forty minutes in, he watched the little counter on the
Speaker 1: player and let the tape run, and there it was,
Speaker 1: he told me. He sat in his workshop with the
Speaker 1: tiny speaker held up to his ear, and for the
Speaker 1: first time in thirty seven years, he heard that sound again,
Speaker 1: and this time with Herschel's description and Karen's description, and
Speaker 1: Marcus's and David's accounts fresh in his mind, with his
Speaker 1: own field notes spread out on the kitchen table, with
Speaker 1: the cave locations and the tree breaks and the tracks
Speaker 1: in the creek all lined up in his head. For
Speaker 1: the first time, this time, it wasn't a coyote. He
Speaker 1: knew it wasn't a coyote. He'd been telling himself it
Speaker 1: was a coyote since nineteen eighty seven because that was
Speaker 1: the only category available to him. But now he had
Speaker 1: other categories. Now he had context, and in context, the
Speaker 1: sound on that tape was something else entirely. He played
Speaker 1: it for me over the phone, held the micro cassette
Speaker 1: player up to his cell phone and let it run.
Speaker 1: I want to be honest with you about the audio quality.
Speaker 1: It's rough. We're talking about a thirty seven year old
Speaker 1: microcassette recorded on a consumer grade device, played through a
Speaker 1: tiny built in speaker, and transmitted over a cellular connection.
Speaker 1: It's not studio quality. It's not even good quality. But
Speaker 1: I could hear it. A low sound, wavering rising and falling,
Speaker 1: sustained deep enough that it registered more as a vibration
Speaker 1: than a tone in the lower frequencies. It didn't sound
Speaker 1: like any coyote I've ever heard, and I've heard a
Speaker 1: lot of coyotes. I've heard them in person, I've heard
Speaker 1: them on recordings. I've heard them in every part of
Speaker 1: the Southern Appalachians over nearly four decades of field work.
Speaker 1: What was on Jean's tape sounded more like what Herschel described,
Speaker 1: something with volume and chest cavity behind it, something big.
Speaker 1: I can't play it for you on this episode, not yet.
Speaker 1: Jeene and I are talking about the best way to
Speaker 1: handle the tape, whether to have it professionally digitized and
Speaker 1: cleaned up, whether to have the audio spectrally analyzed by
Speaker 1: someone who knows what they're doing, how to release it
Speaker 1: in a way that preserves the chain of custody and
Speaker 1: the integrity of the recording. That's a conversation that's still happening,
Speaker 1: But the tape exists. I've heard it, and what's on
Speaker 1: it is consistent with what multiple witnesses in this series
Speaker 1: described independently. I asked Jane why he called his email
Speaker 1: the surveyor's confession, that word confession. I wanted to know
Speaker 1: why he chose it. He was quiet for a long time,
Speaker 1: longer than he'd been quiet at any other point in
Speaker 1: our conversations. I could hear him breathing on the line,
Speaker 1: not upset, just gathering something. Then he said, because I
Speaker 1: walked that ground. I walked every foot of that boundary line.
Speaker 1: I spent three and a half weeks on that ridge
Speaker 1: with my boots on the dirt and my eyes on
Speaker 1: the terrain. I found things, tracks in the creek mud
Speaker 1: that I wrote off as somebody walking barefoot, tree breaks
Speaker 1: that I blamed on ice, caves that a company wanted
Speaker 1: hidden for reasons they wouldn't explain. I recorded a sound
Speaker 1: on tape that I told myself was a coyote for
Speaker 1: thirty seven years, because that was easier than asking what
Speaker 1: else it might be. He stopped, took a breath, and
Speaker 1: I put it all in a box. I closed the lid,
Speaker 1: I put the box in a closet, and I walked
Speaker 1: away from it. I went to the next job, and
Speaker 1: the next job, and the next job, and I didn't
Speaker 1: look back for thirty seven years. I had data, physical, documented,
Speaker 1: dated data that might have mattered to someone, that might
Speaker 1: have helped someone else understand what they were going through.
Speaker 1: And I kept it in a cardboard box because I
Speaker 1: didn't know what it meant, and I was too practical,
Speaker 1: or too busy, or too scared to try to figure
Speaker 1: it out. I want to pause here because I think
Speaker 1: what Jane said next is the most important thing anyone
Speaker 1: has said in this entire series. Then I heard your show,
Speaker 1: I heard herschel describe that valley, and I thought, I
Speaker 1: know that valley. I've been in that valley. I can
Speaker 1: close my eyes right now and feel what it felt
Speaker 1: like standing on that valley floor. I heard Karen talk
Speaker 1: about tree breaks at six to nine feet, and I thought,
Speaker 1: I logged those brakes. I wrote them down in a
Speaker 1: notebook that's sitting in my closet right now. I heard
Speaker 1: Marcus describe a clear cut in the Cherokee, and I
Speaker 1: pulled up my maps, and that clearcut sits right on
Speaker 1: the northern boundary of the tract I surveyed. And when
Speaker 1: I heard about the church van on that highway, I thought,
Speaker 1: that road crosses my survey. That intersection is on my
Speaker 1: plat map. His voice got quieter. I had the map, Brian,
Speaker 1: I had the map the whole time, the map that
Speaker 1: ties all of these stories to one pece of ground,
Speaker 1: one tract, one ridge, one set of caves that somebody
Speaker 1: didn't want anyone to know about. I've had it since
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty seven, and I never showed it to a soul.
Speaker 1: He told me he felt responsible, not for what happened
Speaker 1: to these people. He knows he didn't cause any of that,
Speaker 1: but for the silence for the fact that information existed,
Speaker 1: real physical, documented, professional grade survey data that could have
Speaker 1: provided context for experiences that five separate people have been
Speaker 1: carrying alone, some of them for decades, and that information
Speaker 1: sat in a box in a closet because the man
Speaker 1: who created it didn't think it mattered. That's the confession,
Speaker 1: he said. I knew something was different about that place,
Speaker 1: not what was there, but that the place itself was different.
Speaker 1: I felt it. Bill felt it the whole time we
Speaker 1: worked that tract. There was something off about the ridge,
Speaker 1: and we both knew it. We never said it to
Speaker 1: each other because that's not the kind of thing you
Speaker 1: say out loud on a job. You just do the
Speaker 1: work and move on. He paused one more time. But
Speaker 1: I should have said something to somebody at some point
Speaker 1: in thirty seven years. I should have opened that box
Speaker 1: and looked at what was inside it and tried to
Speaker 1: figure out what it meant. And I didn't. That's what
Speaker 1: I'm confessing. I told Jane he had nothing to apologize for.
Speaker 1: I told him that honestly, and I meant it. He
Speaker 1: was twenty seven years old in eighty seven. He was
Speaker 1: doing his job. There were no podcasts no online forms,
Speaker 1: no easy way to share information about this subject without
Speaker 1: being laughed at or dismissed. He did what any reasonable
Speaker 1: person would do with observations that didn't make sense. He
Speaker 1: recorded them accurately, he filed them properly, and he moved
Speaker 1: on to the next assignment. That's not a failure. That's professionalism.
Speaker 1: The fact that he pulled the box back out, that
Speaker 1: he heard five strangers describe a place he recognized, and decided,
Speaker 1: at seventy one years old, to pick up the phone
Speaker 1: and share what he nen new, that's not a confession.
Speaker 2: That's courage.
Speaker 1: And what Gene brought to this series isn't just another
Speaker 1: encounter story. It's the framework. It's the map he gave us,
Speaker 1: the shape of the land, the geology underneath it, the
Speaker 1: legal history of who owned it and how they handled
Speaker 1: what was on it, and a physical recording of a
Speaker 1: sound that was made in that corridor thirty seven years
Speaker 1: ago and still exists on magnetic tape. None of the
Speaker 1: other four witnesses could have provided that they experienced the
Speaker 1: corridor from inside it. Gene experienced it from above, from
Speaker 1: the surveyor's perspective, literally mapping its boundaries and recording its features.
Speaker 1: He gave us the container that all the other stories
Speaker 1: fit inside. So let me tell you where we are,
Speaker 1: because I think you deserve to hear it laid out plainly,
Speaker 1: without dramatics, without hype, just the facts as I understand them.
Speaker 1: After eight months of conversations and a lot of time
Speaker 1: with maps and field notes and phone calls, some people
Speaker 1: contacted me independently over a period of about eight months.
Speaker 1: None of them know each other, none of them had
Speaker 1: any prior connection. Each of them described an experience that
Speaker 1: took place in a different decade seventy eight, eighty seven,
Speaker 1: ninety four, three, and twenty eleven. Four of them described
Speaker 1: direct encounters with something large, bipedal, and unidentifiable. The fifth
Speaker 1: documented physical evidence and geological features that provide possible context
Speaker 1: for all four encounters. Every one of their stories takes
Speaker 1: place along the same north South ridge line, within the
Speaker 1: boundaries of a single eight thousand acre tract of land
Speaker 1: that was professionally surveyed in nineteen eighty seven. The ridge
Speaker 1: line runs for roughly forty miles through some of the
Speaker 1: most remote terrain in the southern Appalachians. A narrow valley
Speaker 1: cuts between two parallel ridges through the heart of it,
Speaker 1: and along the western face of the ridge. In exposed limestone,
Speaker 1: there are at least three cave openings producing airflow consistent
Speaker 1: with significant underground passages. A timber company that owned the
Speaker 1: land ordered those caves excluded from the survey without legal justification.
Speaker 1: The same surveyor who found those caves also documented tree
Speaker 1: breaks at six to nine feet along the ridge line,
Speaker 1: some with spiral fractures. He found large barefoot impressions in
Speaker 1: creek mud measuring sixteen to seventeen inches. He recorded an
Speaker 1: unidentified vocalization on cassette tape that he attributed to a
Speaker 1: coyote for thirty seven years until he heard similar sounds
Speaker 1: described by witnesses in this series, and his plat maps
Speaker 1: went Overlaid with the encounterlocations from the other four stories
Speaker 1: show that every encounter took place within the track boundary,
Speaker 1: every single one. I'm not going to tell you what
Speaker 1: all of this means. I'm not going to wrap it
Speaker 1: up in a bow and hand you a conclusion. That's
Speaker 1: not what this series was designed to do. I've said
Speaker 1: from part one that I'm not pushing a theory. I'm
Speaker 1: laying out stories in order with details and letting you
Speaker 1: sit with them.
Speaker 2: But I will tell you what.
Speaker 1: I think, and then I'll let you go. I think
Speaker 1: something lives in those mountains. I think it's been there
Speaker 1: for a very long time, longer than any of the
Speaker 1: stories in this series, longer than the timber companies and
Speaker 1: the fire roads and the two lane highways and the
Speaker 1: forest Service.
Speaker 2: And the hunting leases.
Speaker 1: I think it uses the ridgeline the way a river
Speaker 1: uses a channel. I think it moves underground through a
Speaker 1: cave system that nobody has explored or mapped, and it
Speaker 1: surfaces when it chooses to where it chooses to on
Speaker 1: terms it controls. I think it's aware of people, deeply aware.
Speaker 1: I think it watches them and evaluates them and makes
Speaker 1: decisions about how much of itself to reveal. I think
Speaker 1: the patience and the deliberation that every witness in this
Speaker 1: series described isn't random behavior. It's intelligence. It's the behavior
Speaker 1: of something that understands risk and manages it. And I
Speaker 1: think there are more stories out there, more people who've
Speaker 1: walked that ridge or driven that highway, or camped in
Speaker 1: that valley and experienced something they couldn't explain. People who
Speaker 1: did what Gene did put it in a box and
Speaker 1: close the lid because they didn't have anyone to tell.
Speaker 1: People who are listening right now and recognizing something in
Speaker 1: what I'm describing, because it happened to them in those
Speaker 1: mountains or in mountains like them, and they've never said.
Speaker 2: It out loud.
Speaker 1: If that's you, if you've got a story from that
Speaker 1: corridor or from anywhere else, I want to hear from you.
Speaker 1: You can reach me at Brian at Paranormalworldproductions dot com.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to judge what you tell me. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to ask you to prove it. I just
Speaker 1: want to hear what happened, because every story adds a
Speaker 1: data point, and every data point sharpens the picture, and
Speaker 1: the picture forming along that corridor is something I believe matters.
Speaker 1: Five people, five decades, one corridor. Something's there, It's been
Speaker 1: there a long time, and now you know about it too.
Speaker 1: I want to thank the five people who trusted me
Speaker 1: with their stories for this series. Herschel, Karen, Marcus, David
Speaker 1: and Jane. You carried these experiences for years, some of
Speaker 1: you for decades, and you decided to share them. That
Speaker 1: takes real courage, more than most people understand, and it
Speaker 1: matters more than you probably realize, because somewhere right now,
Speaker 1: somebody is hearing this who's been carrying the same kind
Speaker 1: of weight, and they just heard five other people say
Speaker 1: the thing out loud that they've never been able to say.
Speaker 2: That's what this was for.
Speaker 1: You can find more at Paranormalworldproductions dot com, where I've
Speaker 1: also got a free newsletter you can sign up for,
Speaker 1: and if you've got something to share, you know where
Speaker 1: to find me. Thank you for listening all five parts.
Speaker 1: I know that was a commitment. I hope it was
Speaker 1: worth it. I'll see you on the next one. Didn't
Speaker 1: Pa