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 if you dare.
Speaker 1: This is story eight of ten. We're in the back
Speaker 1: half of this series now, and if you've been following
Speaker 1: garrett'sccount from the beginning, you've watched a man's relationship with
Speaker 1: his own property change in ways that most of us
Speaker 1: can't imagine. In seven stories, Garrett has gone from hearing
Speaker 1: unexplained knocks on a summer evening to receiving three decades
Speaker 1: of documentation from a neighbor who'd been watching the same
Speaker 1: creatures from across the creek since the nineteen sixties. That
Speaker 1: documentation changed things for Garrett. Opel's visit and Vernon's files
Speaker 1: gave him a framework he'd been missing, a context. The
Speaker 1: knocking wasn't random, the garden raids weren't opportunistic. The tracks,
Speaker 1: the mimicry, the bluff sighting, the cabin visits, the dogs
Speaker 1: in the forest. None of it was chaos. It was
Speaker 1: a pattern, a fifty year behavioral pattern maintained by a
Speaker 1: small group of creatures that orbited a four thousand acre
Speaker 1: circuit along Bishop Creek and assessed every human who moved
Speaker 1: onto their corridor through a series of escalating tests. But
Speaker 1: knowing the pattern doesn't make it less terrifying when the
Speaker 1: pattern brings something to your front door. Story eight takes
Speaker 1: place on a night in November of twenty eighteen, about
Speaker 1: seven months after Opal crossed Bishop Creek and handed Garrett
Speaker 1: the keys to a half century of secrets. A storm
Speaker 1: rolls in, the power goes out, and something comes to
Speaker 1: the cabin that's been coming for decades, Except this time
Speaker 1: Garrett is awake for it. This time he hears every footstep,
Speaker 1: every breath, every second of its visit. From beginning to end,
Speaker 1: here's Garrett. I need to tell you about November ninth,
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, a Saturday night. I've put it off because
Speaker 1: it's the encounter that's hardest to talk about, and not
Speaker 1: because it was the most dramatic or the most physically dangerous.
Speaker 1: It wasn't. Nothing that happened that night involved a bluff
Speaker 1: charge or a tree strike or a vocalization that shook
Speaker 1: the snow off the branches. The creature that came to
Speaker 1: my cabin on November ninth didn't do any of those things.
Speaker 1: It didn't need to. What it did was worse. It
Speaker 1: stood outside my walls for over four hours. It touched
Speaker 1: my windows, it turned my doorknob, and it breathed. That's it.
Speaker 1: That's the whole summary. And if you're thinking that doesn't
Speaker 1: sound very scary, you've never been alone in a cabin
Speaker 1: during a power outage while something eight feet tall leans
Speaker 1: against the other side of a wall and breathes at
Speaker 1: a rhythm you can feel in the wood. But I'm
Speaker 1: getting ahead of myself. Let me start with the storm.
Speaker 1: The weather had been building all week. The first week
Speaker 1: of November had been unseasonably warm mid sixties during the day,
Speaker 1: the kind of false summer that North Carolina sometimes gives
Speaker 1: you right before the cold moves in for good. By Wednesday,
Speaker 1: the sixth, the forecast was calling for a major system
Speaker 1: coming down from Tennessee cold front with a trailing low
Speaker 1: pressure trough that was expected to stall over the mountains
Speaker 1: and dump sustained heavy rain starting Friday evening and continuing
Speaker 1: through Saturday night two to four inches, with higher amounts
Speaker 1: in the terrain Enhanced zones above three thousand feet. My
Speaker 1: property sat at twenty eight hundred feet, close enough. I'd
Speaker 1: been through mountain storms before five years on the property.
Speaker 1: By then, I knew the routine. Fill the water jugs
Speaker 1: in case the well pumped lost power, Bring in extra
Speaker 1: firewood and stack it on the porch where it had
Speaker 1: stay dry. Top off the generator's gas tank, check the
Speaker 1: flashlight batteries, make sure the dogs had food for three
Speaker 1: days in case the road washed out, which it had
Speaker 1: done twice before when Bishop Creek overflowed its banks and
Speaker 1: covered the gravel in two feet of fast moving water
Speaker 1: that took the mailbox with it both times. I also
Speaker 1: knew that storms changed things on the mountain in ways
Speaker 1: that went beyond the weather. Vernon's notes had documented increased
Speaker 1: creature activity during and after major storm events. He theorized
Speaker 1: that the rain suppressed sund in the forest, which gave
Speaker 1: the creatures cover to move more freely at lower elevations.
Speaker 1: The knocking always stopped during heavy rain because the rain
Speaker 1: noise masked everything but the physical activity. The tracking, the
Speaker 1: cabin approaches, the corridor movement, those increased. The creatures used
Speaker 1: storms the way a military unit uses covering fire. The
Speaker 1: noise gave them freedom to maneuver without being heard. I'd
Speaker 1: noticed it myself. Some of my best track finds had
Speaker 1: come after heavy rain, when the soft, saturated ground recorded
Speaker 1: everything with high fidelity, and the creatures had apparently been
Speaker 1: moving through the property at a level of activity that
Speaker 1: dry weather conditions didn't show. Storm nights were busy nights
Speaker 1: on the corridor. I just usually slept through them. Not tonight.
Speaker 1: By Friday afternoon, the sky had gone the color of
Speaker 1: wet concrete, Low cloud sitting on the ridge line like
Speaker 1: a lid being placed on a pot. The barometric pressure
Speaker 1: had been falling since Wednesday. If dogs were acting the
Speaker 1: way they act when a front moves in Bowie had
Speaker 1: parked himself on his blanket and refused to go outside
Speaker 1: for his evening walk. His hips always stiffened when the
Speaker 1: pressure dropped, and he'd learned that the smart play was
Speaker 1: to stay on the blanket near the fire and wait
Speaker 1: it out. He'd look at me when I called him,
Speaker 1: give me the slow blink that meant I know what
Speaker 1: you're asking, and the answer is no, and put his
Speaker 1: head back down. Ruby was a different story. She was
Speaker 1: more agitated than I'd seen her since the night the
Speaker 1: dogs went into the forest the previous fall, pacing the
Speaker 1: cabin in a tight pattern, window, door and back again,
Speaker 1: standing at the back door for thirty seconds, her ears
Speaker 1: working independently, the good one pointing toward the ridge, the
Speaker 1: folded one tracking something I couldn't hear. Then she turned
Speaker 1: and walked to the front window and stand there, her
Speaker 1: nose against the glass, her breath fogging the pane in
Speaker 1: quick bursts. Then back to the door, over and over,
Speaker 1: and animal running a patrol route inside the house because
Speaker 1: something was telling her not to run it outside. I'd
Speaker 1: learned to pay attention to Ruby's behavior the way you'd
Speaker 1: pay attention to a weather vein. She wasn't wrong very often.
Speaker 1: When she paced, something was usually happening on the property
Speaker 1: that I'd find evidence of the next morning, tracks in
Speaker 1: the garden, impressions near the well pump, mud smears on
Speaker 1: the workshop door. Ruby's internal alarm system was calibrated to
Speaker 1: whatever was on the corridor, and when it went off,
Speaker 1: the corridor was active. It was active now and the
Speaker 1: storm hadn't even started. The rain came in around eight
Speaker 1: on Friday night, not a build up, not a gradual
Speaker 1: increase from mist to drizzle to steady. It started as
Speaker 1: a downpour and stayed there, the kind of rain where
Speaker 1: individual drops lose their identity and merge into a single,
Speaker 1: continuous roar, a wall of water falling from a sky
Speaker 1: that had been holding it for three days and finally
Speaker 1: let go. The cabin roof was green metal, and in
Speaker 1: the heavy rain, the noise on that roof was something
Speaker 1: you had to experience to believe. Loud enough to drown
Speaker 1: out conversation, loud enough to drown out the television, which
Speaker 1: I'd been watching before the signal died. I couldn't hear
Speaker 1: the radio. I could barely hear Bowie snoring three feet
Speaker 1: from me on his blanket. The rain continued through the
Speaker 1: night and all the next day. I slept in fits
Speaker 1: on Friday night, not just the noise, the barometric pressure,
Speaker 1: which does something to my sinuses during major drops that
Speaker 1: makes deep sleep impossible. I doze for twenty minutes, wake
Speaker 1: up with a headache, Listen to the rain, check on
Speaker 1: the dogs, check the windows for leaks, doze again. By
Speaker 1: Saturday morning, the meadow had standing water in every low spot,
Speaker 1: and Bishop Creek was running high and fast and brown,
Speaker 1: carrying branches and leaf debris and the occasional full sized
Speaker 1: log from the upper drainage. The water moving with a
Speaker 1: speed and a violence that I could hear from the
Speaker 1: cabin porch, even over the rain. The power went out
Speaker 1: at four seventeen on Saturday afternoon. I know the exact
Speaker 1: time because I was looking at the microwave clock when
Speaker 1: it happened. The green numbers were there, then they weren't.
Speaker 1: The refrigerator compressor shuddered and went silent. The overhead light
Speaker 1: in the kitchen died, the hum of the water heater element,
Speaker 1: which I hadn't consciously noticed until it stopped, and the
Speaker 1: cabin which had been producing the baseline electrical noise that
Speaker 1: every modern house produces constantly, and that you tune out
Speaker 1: the way you tune out your own heartbeat. Went quiet,
Speaker 1: not fully quiet. The rain was still hammering the roof,
Speaker 1: but the electronic quiet, the absence of every mechanical vibration,
Speaker 1: an electrical hum and motorcycle that a house generates when
Speaker 1: it's connected to the grid, that was gone, And in
Speaker 1: its absence, the cabin changed character. It felt older, raw,
Speaker 1: more like what it had been when Earl built it
Speaker 1: in seventy one, before the wiring and the fixtures and
Speaker 1: the appliances that modern life drapes over a building, like
Speaker 1: wallpaper over plaster, Just a log structure on a mountain side,
Speaker 1: wood and stone, fire inside, storm outside, nothing between them
Speaker 1: except the walls. I lit the oil lamps, three of them,
Speaker 1: glass chimney kerosene lamps I'd bought at a hardware store
Speaker 1: the first winter on the property, back when I'd assumed
Speaker 1: power outages would be rare and temporary. They were neither.
Speaker 1: The power on this section of the mountain went out
Speaker 1: during every major storm, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days.
Speaker 1: The lamps were essential equipment. One went on the kitchen table,
Speaker 1: one on the mantle above the fireplace, one on a
Speaker 1: shelf near the bedroom door. The light they gave was
Speaker 1: amber and inconsistent, throwing shadows that moved when the draft moved,
Speaker 1: making the corners of the cabin feel deeper and less
Speaker 1: defined than they did under bulbs. Oil lamp light has
Speaker 1: a quality that electric light doesn't. It's alive. It flickers,
Speaker 1: It responds to movement in the room, to doors opening
Speaker 1: and closing, to the rise and fall of the fire.
Speaker 1: It makes a house feel inhabited by the light itself,
Speaker 1: as if the flame is a third presence in the room,
Speaker 1: watching everything the way you are. I fed the dogs
Speaker 1: around five point thirty. Bowie ate on the blanket, which
Speaker 1: I allowed during storms because forcing him up and over
Speaker 1: to his bowl when his hips were at their worst
Speaker 1: felt cruel for no good reason. Ruby ated her bowl
Speaker 1: in the kitchen fast and focused, and went straight back
Speaker 1: to her pacing the window root, the door root. Whatever
Speaker 1: the storm had stirred up in her internal alarm system.
Speaker 1: A bowl of kibble hadn't settled it. I tried the
Speaker 1: generator around six, went out to the porch in the rain,
Speaker 1: pulled the starter cord and got nothing. Tried again, nothing.
Speaker 1: The rain was so heavy that by the time I'd
Speaker 1: pulled the cord four times, my jacket was soaked through
Speaker 1: and water was running down my back and pulling in
Speaker 1: my boots. I checked the fuel line, checked the spark
Speaker 1: plug wire, pulled the cord twice more with the kind
Speaker 1: of frustrated, full body yanks that accomplish nothing except making
Speaker 1: you wetter and angrier. Dead moisture in the magneto probably
Speaker 1: a known failure mode on that generator in wet conditions.
Speaker 1: I could spend an hour troubleshooting it in a downpour,
Speaker 1: or I could accept that tonight was going to be
Speaker 1: lamps and firelight and whatever the cabin could give me
Speaker 1: without the grid. I went inside, stripped off the wet jacket,
Speaker 1: dried my hair with a kitchen towel, put on a
Speaker 1: flannel shirt that was hanging on the chair by the fire,
Speaker 1: and settled in for a long night that I assumed
Speaker 1: would be boring. By six o'clock, it was full dark.
Speaker 1: Not the gradual dimming that happens on clear evenings where
Speaker 1: the light fades from gold to orange to purple to
Speaker 1: blue and you can track the transition minute by minute.
Speaker 1: This was overcast, dark storm dark, the kind of dark
Speaker 1: where there's no twilight at all, no transition light, draining
Speaker 1: out of the sky like water out of a sink
Speaker 1: and leaving nothing behind. The clouds were so thick and
Speaker 1: so low that they'd absorbed every photon the setting sun
Speaker 1: tried to push through, and by six point fifteen the
Speaker 1: darkness outside the cabin windows was absolute. I couldn't see
Speaker 1: the meadow. I couldn't see the porch railing, which was
Speaker 1: three feet from the nearest window. I couldn't see anything
Speaker 1: except the reflection of the cabin interior in the glass,
Speaker 1: the amber glow of the lamps, and the fire bouncing
Speaker 1: back at me from a surface that had become a mirror,
Speaker 1: hiding whatever was beyond it in a wall of reflected
Speaker 1: light that bothered me. On a clear night, I could
Speaker 1: at least see shapes, the tree line as a dark
Speaker 1: mass against a lighter sky, the meadow as an open
Speaker 1: space between the cabin and the forest, the ridge as
Speaker 1: a black line overhead. On a night like this, the
Speaker 1: windows were useless. They showed me myself and nothing else.
Speaker 1: I was blind to whatever was outside. While whatever was outside,
Speaker 1: if it was close enough and at the right angle
Speaker 1: could see into the cabin through the gaps between the
Speaker 1: reflected light the lamps and the fire. That made the
Speaker 1: interior visible to me also made me visible to anything
Speaker 1: looking in from the dark. I thought about turning off
Speaker 1: the lamps, going dark matching the outside, but that would
Speaker 1: have left me with only the fire, and the fire
Speaker 1: was behind me, which would have put my silhouette against
Speaker 1: the window in a way that was worse than having
Speaker 1: the room lit evenly. There's no winning the light game
Speaker 1: in a cabin during a power outage. You're either visible
Speaker 1: from outside or you're blind from inside, and the only
Speaker 1: way to be neither is to sit in the dark
Speaker 1: with no fire, which on a forty degree November night
Speaker 1: with two dogs and a stone fireplace built by a
Speaker 1: dead man's brother wasn't something I was willing to do.
Speaker 1: So I sat in the light, visible, readable, my movements,
Speaker 1: trackable through every window on the cabin's perimeter by anything
Speaker 1: with eyes and the patience to walk much. And I
Speaker 1: read my book and pretended that the storm was the
Speaker 1: only thing outside. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. I built the fire
Speaker 1: up big flames, I wanted heat and I wanted light,
Speaker 1: and the fireplace was the only source of both. The
Speaker 1: chimney drew well even in high wind, one of the
Speaker 1: benefits of the stone construction Frank had used, and within
Speaker 1: twenty minutes the fire was roaring, and the main room
Speaker 1: of the cabin was warm and bright enough to read by.
Speaker 1: The poplar logs in the wall seemed to absorb the
Speaker 1: firelight and glow with it, giving the room a warm
Speaker 1: amber tone that electric bulbs never quite matched. Earl's cabin
Speaker 1: was built for firelight. The proportions were right. The ceiling
Speaker 1: was low enough that the heat stayed close, the windows
Speaker 1: were small enough that the fire was the dominant light
Speaker 1: source rather than the weakest one in this room. With
Speaker 1: this fire, you could forget the storm outside. You could
Speaker 1: forget the mountain. You could forget that anything existed beyond
Speaker 1: the walls, which was I'd learned later exactly the kind
Speaker 1: of forgetting that got you in trouble on this property.
Speaker 1: I settled into the chair beside the hearth with a
Speaker 1: book i'd been working through, a history of the Civilian
Speaker 1: Conservation Corps that I'd picked up at the library in Hendersonville.
Speaker 1: Good book, the kind of dense, factual reading that keeps
Speaker 1: your mind occupied without demanding emotional investment. I wasn't in
Speaker 1: the mood for fiction. Fiction would have required me to
Speaker 1: care about characters who didn't exist, and on a night
Speaker 1: like this, in a cabin like this, my capacity for
Speaker 1: caring about imaginary people was fully consumed by the task
Speaker 1: of not thinking about real things that might be somewhere
Speaker 1: on the mountain in the rain Bowie was on his blanket,
Speaker 1: three feet from the hearth, close enough that the fire
Speaker 1: warmed his bad hips. He was lying on his side
Speaker 1: with his legs extended, which was the position that gave
Speaker 1: his joints the most relief, and his breathing was deep
Speaker 1: and steady. Ruby was on the floor between me and
Speaker 1: the front door, lying down finally, her chin on her paws,
Speaker 1: her eyes half closed. The pacing had stopped. Whatever had
Speaker 1: been driving her back and forth between the windows and
Speaker 1: the door since midday seemed to have resolved, or she'd
Speaker 1: run out of energy for it, and she'd settled into
Speaker 1: a position that was as close to relaxed as Ruby
Speaker 1: ever got. She wasn't a dog who slept deeply. In
Speaker 1: the best of times, she dozed, She monitored. Even at rest,
Speaker 1: one ear was always cocked toward the nearest sound source,
Speaker 1: processing ambient noise the way a radar dish processes signals,
Speaker 1: sorting the familiar from the unfamiliar, and filing each one accordingly.
Speaker 1: I read for about an hour. The rain was steady
Speaker 1: on the metal roof, a white noise wall of sound
Speaker 1: that had become so constant and so uniform that my
Speaker 1: brain had started treating it as silence. The fire popped
Speaker 1: and shifted as the log settled. One of the oil
Speaker 1: lamps guttered when a draft caught the chimney, and then
Speaker 1: steadied itself. The warmth was making me drowsy. The book
Speaker 1: was getting into a section about camp construction techniques that
Speaker 1: was detailed enough to be interesting and repetitive enough to
Speaker 1: be soporific, and I was considering whether to put another
Speaker 1: log on the fire or let it burn down and
Speaker 1: go to bed. It was, despite the power outage, one
Speaker 1: of the more peaceful evenings I'd had on the mountain
Speaker 1: in months. The storm had an insulating quality. It sealed
Speaker 1: the world at the walls, made everything beyond them irrelevant.
Speaker 1: I couldn't hear the ridge, I couldn't hear the creek.
Speaker 1: The mountain felt far away, and the cabin felt close.
Speaker 1: And for the first time since Opal's visit seven months earlier,
Speaker 1: I wasn't thinking about the corridor, or the creatures, or
Speaker 1: the fifty years of documentation stacked in boxes on my
Speaker 1: kitchen table. I was just a guy in a chair
Speaker 1: with a book and a fire and two sleeping dogs
Speaker 1: and a storm that was somebody else's problem. That's the
Speaker 1: thing about those nights. They feel safest right before they
Speaker 1: stopped being safe. It changed at nine fourteen. I know
Speaker 1: the time because I checked my watch about two minutes earlier,
Speaker 1: thinking about whether to put another log on the fire
Speaker 1: or let it burn down for the night. I was
Speaker 1: leaning toward bed, The book was getting slow, the warmth
Speaker 1: was making it hard for me to keep my eyes open.
Speaker 1: And then Ruby's head came up off her paws. Not
Speaker 1: a casual lift, a snap, like someone had pulled a
Speaker 1: string attached to her skull. One second she was lying
Speaker 1: down with her eyes half shut. The next second her
Speaker 1: head was up, her ears were forward, and every muscle
Speaker 1: in her body had gone rigid. She was facing the
Speaker 1: front wall of the cabin, not the door, the wall
Speaker 1: to the left of the door, where there was a
Speaker 1: window that looked out onto the porch and beyond the
Speaker 1: porch the meadow. The window was dark, the lamp on
Speaker 1: the kitchen table didn't reach that far, and the fire
Speaker 1: was behind me casting its light in the other direction.
Speaker 1: The window was a black rectang set into the log wall,
Speaker 1: reflecting nothing, showing nothing. Ruby wasn't looking at the window.
Speaker 1: She was looking through the wall beside it, at something
Speaker 1: on the other side that she could hear or smell
Speaker 1: or sense through the logs. Bowie's head came up about
Speaker 1: three seconds later, slower stiffer the old dog's version of
Speaker 1: the same alert. His ears rotated toward the front wall
Speaker 1: and held, his nostrils widened. His tail, which had been
Speaker 1: resting on the blanket, went flat against the floor. Neither
Speaker 1: dog made a sound, and that was the thing that
Speaker 1: told me more than any bark or growl could have
Speaker 1: both dogs facing the same wall in full alert posture,
Speaker 1: in absolute silence. Bowie had barked at the window before.
Speaker 1: In every previous cabin encounter, the dogs had vocalized growls
Speaker 1: at the hand against the wall, barking at the approaching
Speaker 1: figure in the meadow Bowie's alarm barked the night the
Speaker 1: knocking descended from the ridge, this time nothing, complete silence,
Speaker 1: as if making noise was something they decided independently and
Speaker 1: simultaneously not to do, as if the thing on the
Speaker 1: other side of the wall had earned a category of
Speaker 1: response that went beyond alarm and into something else, entirely,
Speaker 1: something closer to deference. I set the book down slowly,
Speaker 1: put it on the arm of the chair without looking
Speaker 1: at it, my eyes fixed on the front wall, my
Speaker 1: ears straining past the sound of the rain and the fire,
Speaker 1: and my own pulse, which was picking up speed the
Speaker 1: way a car picks up speed on a downhill grade,
Speaker 1: not because you've hit the gas, but because gravity has
Speaker 1: taken over. For about thirty seconds, nothing happened. The dogs
Speaker 1: held their alert, The rain pounded, the roof, the fire
Speaker 1: crackled behind me, and I sat in my chair and
Speaker 1: stared at a log wall and waited for something to
Speaker 1: confirm what the dogs were telling me. Then I heard it,
Speaker 1: a creak from the porch, the pacific, identifiable creak of
Speaker 1: the third plank from the left side, the one that
Speaker 1: I'd been meaning to replace since my second year on
Speaker 1: the property. Every plank on that porch had its own voice.
Speaker 1: I knew them the way you know the sounds of
Speaker 1: your own house, the specific groan of each stair, the
Speaker 1: particular rattle of each window. The third plank from the
Speaker 1: left creaked when you stepped on its center. A rising
Speaker 1: pitch grown that lasted about half a second, and it
Speaker 1: took at least one hundred and fifty pounds to produce it.
Speaker 1: I was one hundred and eighty. I produced it every
Speaker 1: time I walked to the railing. Something had stepped on
Speaker 1: that plank in the rain, in the dark on my porch.
Speaker 1: A second creek, different pitch, the plank beside the first one,
Speaker 1: closer to the door. Something was walking across the porch,
Speaker 1: and I could track its position by the sequence of
Speaker 1: sounds under its feet. A third creak, and this one
Speaker 1: was accompanied by something else. A vibration in the front wall, faint,
Speaker 1: the kind of tremory you feel when someone leans against
Speaker 1: the other side of a partition wall in an office building.
Speaker 1: Not enough to move anything, just enough to tell you
Speaker 1: that weight has been applied to the structure from the outside.
Speaker 1: Something had reached the front wall of the cabin and
Speaker 1: leaned against it. The vibration held steady, continuous. Whatever was
Speaker 1: out there had settled its weight against the logs and
Speaker 1: was staying I sat very still. The lamp on the
Speaker 1: kitchen table was behind me and to the right, which
Speaker 1: meant the window in the front wall was reflecting my
Speaker 1: side of the room. If something was looking in through
Speaker 1: that window, it could see the interior of the cabin,
Speaker 1: the firelight, the lamps, the chair I was sitting in me,
Speaker 1: but I couldn't see out. The window was a mirror
Speaker 1: from my angle, showing me a dim amber reflection of
Speaker 1: my own living room. Whatever was on the other side
Speaker 1: of it was invisible, hidden behind the glare of the
Speaker 1: fire and the lamps on the glass. I had two options.
Speaker 1: I could stay where I was in the light, visible
Speaker 1: to whatever was looking in. Or I could move to
Speaker 1: a position where the light was behind the window instead
Speaker 1: of behind me, which would let me see out at
Speaker 1: the cost of putting me closer to the wall and
Speaker 1: whatever was leaning against it. I chose to stay. Moving
Speaker 1: felt wrong, not dangerous, exactly rude, like getting up from
Speaker 1: a table while someone was trying to talk to you.
Speaker 1: The creature, if that's what it was, had come to
Speaker 1: the cabin during a storm. It had walked across the
Speaker 1: porch in the rain. It had leaned against the wall.
Speaker 1: It wasn't hiding, It wasn't trying to be stealthy. The
Speaker 1: porch planks had announced it as clearly as a doorbell.
Speaker 1: Whatever this was, it wasn't a sneak visit. It was
Speaker 1: an arrival. The vibration in the wall shifted, the weight
Speaker 1: distribution changed, as if the thing had adjusted its lean
Speaker 1: and it had settled deeper into the logs. And then
Speaker 1: I heard the breathing, low, deep, slow of them that
Speaker 1: was too heavy and too regular to be wind or
Speaker 1: rain or any ambient sound. The pause between breaths was
Speaker 1: about two seconds, which is longer than any human breathes
Speaker 1: at rest. The sound itself was coming through the wall,
Speaker 1: conducted by the logs, the way sound travels through a
Speaker 1: railroad track, and it had a resonance to it, a
Speaker 1: chest cavity depth that placed the source at a size
Speaker 1: category well beyond human. The creature was breathing against my wall,
Speaker 1: its back or its side pressed against the outside of
Speaker 1: the logs, close enough that the expansion of its rib
Speaker 1: cage was transmitting through the wood and into the room.
Speaker 1: I could feel it, not just hear it, feel it,
Speaker 1: a faint rhythmic pulse in the chair arm where my
Speaker 1: hand was resting, in the floor, under my feet, in
Speaker 1: the air itself, which seemed to thicken and thin in
Speaker 1: time with the breathing, as if the cabin was expanding
Speaker 1: and contracting by a millimeter with each respiration, as if
Speaker 1: the whole structure had become a lung. Ruby hadn't moved.
Speaker 1: She was still on the floor, still facing the wall,
Speaker 1: her body flat and rigid, her ears locked forward. Bowie
Speaker 1: was the same. Neither dog had made a sound. They
Speaker 1: were listening to the breathing the way I was, and
Speaker 1: their silence told me that this wasn't the first time
Speaker 1: they'd heard it. Dogs don't stay silent in the presence
Speaker 1: of something new. They bark it new, They growl at new.
Speaker 1: Silence means familiarity, means they've heard this before, and whatever
Speaker 1: they've learned from hearing it has taught them that the
Speaker 1: correct response is to stay quiet and stay still. They'd
Speaker 1: been hearing this their whole lives on this property, and
Speaker 1: they'd never told me about it, because they're dogs, and
Speaker 1: dogs don't file reports. All those nights when Bowie had
Speaker 1: alerted at the window and I'd looked out and seen
Speaker 1: nothing and gone back to bed. All those mornings when
Speaker 1: Ruby was waiting at the door with attention in her
Speaker 1: body that didn't match the peaceful morning outside, they'd been
Speaker 1: hearing this, the breathing, the weight against the wall, the slow,
Speaker 1: patient presence of something that came to the cabin in
Speaker 1: the dark and stayed. The breathing continued for about forty minutes.
Speaker 1: I know because I checked my watch obsessively, the way
Speaker 1: you check the clock when you're in a doctor's waiting room,
Speaker 1: and every minute feels like five nine fourteen to nine
Speaker 1: fifty six, forty two minutes. And during those forty two minutes,
Speaker 1: I sat in my chair and the creature leaned against
Speaker 1: my wall, and we breathed on opposite sides of a
Speaker 1: barrier made of poplar logs that Earle had cut and
Speaker 1: notched and stacked fifty years ago. I want to try
Speaker 1: to describe what those forty two minutes felt like, because
Speaker 1: the timeline doesn't communicate the experience. Forty two minutes sounds manageable.
Speaker 1: It's less than an hour of television. It's a commute
Speaker 1: It's a lunch in the context of a normal life.
Speaker 1: Forty two minutes is nothing in the context of sitting
Speaker 1: alone in a cabin during a power outage while something
Speaker 1: you can't see leans against the other side of your
Speaker 1: wall and breathes, Forty two minutes is geologic time. It's
Speaker 1: the longest unbroken stretch of fear I've ever experienced. And
Speaker 1: the fear wasn't the sharp, flash point kind that comes
Speaker 1: with a sudden scare and then subsides. It was sustained, constant,
Speaker 1: a low, unbroken hum of adrenaline that never spiked high
Speaker 1: enough to trigger a fight or flight decision and never
Speaker 1: dropped low enough to let my body stand down. I
Speaker 1: was stuck in the middle zone, alert, aware, terrified, and
Speaker 1: completely unable to do anything about any of it except
Speaker 1: sit there and listen. The rain helped, paradoxically. The constant
Speaker 1: hammering on the roof gave me something to anchor my
Speaker 1: attention to. When the breathing threatened to overwhelm my ability
Speaker 1: to think, I'd focus on the rain for ten seconds,
Speaker 1: then the breathing would pull me back, then the rain,
Speaker 1: then the breathing. Oscillating between the two sound sources, the
Speaker 1: way your eyes oscillate between two objects in a dark room,
Speaker 1: each one demanding attention, neither one yielding. At one point,
Speaker 1: about twenty minutes in the creature shifted its weight against
Speaker 1: the wall, and the vibration changed. The steady even pressure
Speaker 1: became uneven heavier on one side, as if it had
Speaker 1: turned or leaned differently. And I heard something new, A
Speaker 1: scraping sound, not loud, not aggressive, the sound of hair
Speaker 1: or skin moving across the exterior surface of the logs
Speaker 1: as the creature adjusted its position, A dry, rasping whisper
Speaker 1: that traveled across the wall from left to right, maybe
Speaker 1: three feet of contact, and then stopped. Something had dragged
Speaker 1: part of its body along my wall, the way a
Speaker 1: cat drags itself along a door frame. A comfort gesture,
Speaker 1: a settling in the kind of thing you do if
Speaker 1: you were leaning against a post on someone's porch and
Speaker 1: shifted to get more comfortable, and your shoulder brushed the wood.
Speaker 1: Except the shoulder in question belonged to something that could
Speaker 1: have torn the wall down, and the porch it was
Speaker 1: getting comfortable on was mine. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
Speaker 1: Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. The fire
Speaker 1: burned lower. During those forty two minutes, I watched the
Speaker 1: flame shrink from the corners of my eyes, unwilling to
Speaker 1: take my focus off the wall, but unable to ignore
Speaker 1: the gradual darkening of the room as the fire died.
Speaker 1: The lamp on the kitchen table was still burning, its
Speaker 1: circle of amber light steady on the wall behind me,
Speaker 1: but the room was getting dimmer. The shadows in the
Speaker 1: corners were growing. The warm glow that had filled the
Speaker 1: cabin an hour earlier was retreating toward the hearth, and
Speaker 1: the edges of the room were going cold and dark.
Speaker 1: I didn't add a log. Getting up meant moving, and
Speaker 1: moving meant changing the dynamic, and some part of me
Speaker 1: that I can't fully explain understood that the dynamic as
Speaker 1: it existed was stable. The creature was leaning against my wall,
Speaker 1: I was sitting in my chair. The dogs were on
Speaker 1: the floor. Nobody was moving, nobody was making sudden sounds,
Speaker 1: nobody was escalating. And if I stood up and crossed
Speaker 1: the room and reached for the firewood and knocked the
Speaker 1: poker against the stone hearth, the sound of it would
Speaker 1: register through the wall, and whatever equilibrium we'd found would
Speaker 1: break and I didn't know what came after the equilibrium broke,
Speaker 1: So I sat there and I listened to something breathe
Speaker 1: for forty two minutes in the dark, in the rain,
Speaker 1: with two dogs on the floor. Who'd known about this
Speaker 1: and never found a way to tell me. At nine
Speaker 1: p fifty six, the breathing stopped, the vibration ceased, the
Speaker 1: weight lifted off the wall, the way a shadow lifts
Speaker 1: when the light changes, a gradual lightning of the pressure
Speaker 1: that I felt in the chair and in the floor
Speaker 1: and in the air itself. And I heard the porch
Speaker 1: planks creak again, in reverse order, the one near the
Speaker 1: door first, then the next one, then the third plank
Speaker 1: from the left, with its signature rising groan. Something was
Speaker 1: walking back across the porch, step by step, away from
Speaker 1: the wall, toward the edge, toward the steps, a pause
Speaker 1: about five seconds, long enough for something to stand at
Speaker 1: the top of the porch steps and look back at
Speaker 1: the cabin one more time. Or maybe I imagined that
Speaker 1: maybe the pause was nothing, But in the state I
Speaker 1: was in, every silence had a shape, and every shape
Speaker 1: had a meaning. Then the creak of the porch steps,
Speaker 1: two of them, not three. Something that tall didn't need
Speaker 1: all three steps. Then nothing. The rain filled the gap
Speaker 1: where the sounds had been, The fire shifted in the hearth,
Speaker 1: and I sat in the chair and exhaled for what
Speaker 1: felt like the first time in an hour, and thought
Speaker 1: it was over. It wasn't over. At ten twenty two,
Speaker 1: twenty six minutes after the porch creaking had stopped, I
Speaker 1: heard something at the back of the cabin. Twenty six minutes,
Speaker 1: long enough that my pulse had started to come down,
Speaker 1: long enough that the dogs had shifted from full alert
Speaker 1: to watchful rest. Bowie's head lowered but his ears still forward,
Speaker 1: Ruby still facing the front wall, but with her body
Speaker 1: less rigid, long enough that I'd started to believe the
Speaker 1: visit was over, and that whatever had been leaning against
Speaker 1: my wall for forty two minutes had gone back to
Speaker 1: the ridge or the creek, or wherever it went when
Speaker 1: it wasn't here. Twenty six minutes is exactly the amount
Speaker 1: of time it takes for your body to believe the
Speaker 1: danger has passed, which makes it exactly the right amount
Speaker 1: of time for the danger to reappear from a different direction.
Speaker 1: The back wall faced northeast toward the ridge. There was
Speaker 1: one window on the back wall in the bedroom a
Speaker 1: single pane glass unit that Earl had installed when he'd
Speaker 1: added the bedroom as a separate room sometime in the
Speaker 1: late seventies, and there was a back door that opened
Speaker 1: onto a small wooden landing with three steps down to
Speaker 1: the ground. I didn't use the back door much. It
Speaker 1: faced the slope in the forest, and the ground behind
Speaker 1: the cabin was steep and rocky and not useful for
Speaker 1: much except reaching the firewood stack, which sat under a
Speaker 1: tarp leaned to about fifteen feet from the door. The
Speaker 1: back of the cabin was also the side closest to
Speaker 1: the ridge, the side that faced the corridor, the side
Speaker 1: that in Vernon's topo map annotations sat directly on one
Speaker 1: of the primary travel routes the creatures used between the
Speaker 1: high ground and the lower elevations. If the front porch
Speaker 1: faced the meadow and the human world of open ground
Speaker 1: in daylight, the back wall faced the forest and the
Speaker 1: creature's world of corridors and drainages and the invisible paths
Speaker 1: they'd been walking for fifty years. The sound I heard
Speaker 1: was footsteps, not on wood, this time on ground, the soft,
Speaker 1: heavy wet compression of something moving across saturated earth behind
Speaker 1: the cabin, slow, deliberate, the same unhurried pace as the
Speaker 1: porch approach, but the sound signature was different on this surface, wetter, thicker,
Speaker 1: each footfall, reducing a distinct squelch as something heavy pressed
Speaker 1: into mud that had been absorbing rain for thirty hours.
Speaker 1: I could hear the suction release between steps, the sound
Speaker 1: of a foot being pulled from soft ground, which told
Speaker 1: me the feet were bare. Boots don't make that sound.
Speaker 1: Bare skin on wet clay does. The footsteps moved from
Speaker 1: right to left across the back of the cabin, from
Speaker 1: the direction of the slope where the forest began, toward
Speaker 1: the firewood stack on the far side, about ten steps, steady,
Speaker 1: and even then they stopped. The dogs were on their feet,
Speaker 1: both of them. I don't know when they'd gotten up.
Speaker 1: I'd been so focused on the sounds from the back
Speaker 1: wall that I hadn't noticed the move. Bowie was standing
Speaker 1: on his blanket, his bad hips be damned, his whole
Speaker 1: body oriented toward the bedroom doorway. Ruby was already at
Speaker 1: the doorway, standing at the threshold, looking into the bedroom
Speaker 1: the way she'd look into a room that had a
Speaker 1: rattlesnake in it alert, still absolutely not going in. Then
Speaker 1: the back wall vibrated. The same sensation waight applied to
Speaker 1: the outside of the structure. Something leaning against the logs
Speaker 1: behind my bedroom, on the northeast side, the side that
Speaker 1: faced the ridge and the forest and the corridor. The
Speaker 1: breathing started again, same rhythm, same depth, same slow, patient cadence,
Speaker 1: the sound coming through the logs like a pulse through
Speaker 1: a stethoscope. It had moved, It had walked off the porch,
Speaker 1: circled the cabin and taken up a new position on
Speaker 1: the back wall, a different wall, a different angle, a
Speaker 1: different window to look through the bedroom window. I was
Speaker 1: in the main room. The bedroom was through a doorway
Speaker 1: to my right, separated by a wall that didn't go
Speaker 1: all the way to the ceiling, because Earl had built
Speaker 1: the cabin with an open loft plan that let the
Speaker 1: fireplace heat circulate through the whole structure. From my chair,
Speaker 1: I could see through the bedroom doorway to the far wall,
Speaker 1: and on that far our wall was the window, and
Speaker 1: the window was dark, and something was on the other
Speaker 1: side of it. Ruby got up slowly, without any of
Speaker 1: her usual energy. She walked to the bedroom doorway and
Speaker 1: stood there facing the window and stopped. She didn't go in.
Speaker 1: She stood at the threshold, the way a dog stands
Speaker 1: at the edge of a room it's not sure it
Speaker 1: wants to enter. Boie didn't move. He was watching Ruby
Speaker 1: from his blanket with his ears still forward and his
Speaker 1: body still flat. His eyes tracked her to the bedroom
Speaker 1: doorway and then returned to the front wall, as if
Speaker 1: he was maintaining surveillance on the original position while Ruby
Speaker 1: covered the new one division of labor, the old dog
Speaker 1: holding the first contact point while the younger one investigated
Speaker 1: the second. They'd worked it out between themselves without a sound.
Speaker 1: I got up. I had to The bedroom window was
Speaker 1: the thing I needed to see, and sitting in the
Speaker 1: chair pretending I couldn't hear what was happening ten feet
Speaker 1: from my bed wasn't an option my brain was offering
Speaker 1: me anymore. I picked up the oil lamp from the
Speaker 1: kitchen table, not the night stand one, because the night
Speaker 1: stand was in the bedroom and I wasn't going in
Speaker 1: there without light. My hand was shaking badly enough that
Speaker 1: the flame jittered and the shadows on the walls went
Speaker 1: wild for a few seconds. The whole room lurching and
Speaker 1: tilting around me before I steadied the lamp against my
Speaker 1: chest with my other hand and got the flame under control.
Speaker 1: I walked to the bedroom doorway. Ruby pressed against my
Speaker 1: left leg trembling. Not the excited trembling she did when
Speaker 1: I was about to throw a ball. This was fine,
Speaker 1: rapid vibration running through her entire body, the kind of
Speaker 1: trembling that comes from sustained, low grade terror, the kind
Speaker 1: you can't stop with willpower because it's not being generated
Speaker 1: by the conscious brain. Her autonomic nervous system was running
Speaker 1: the show, and it was telling every muscle in her
Speaker 1: body to prepare for something she couldn't predict and couldn't prevent.
Speaker 1: Bowie stayed on the blanket. His eyes were on me.
Speaker 1: I could feel them tracking me across the room, the
Speaker 1: way a searchlight tracks a figure crossing a field. He
Speaker 1: wanted to come. His body was telling him to come,
Speaker 1: but his hip said no, and for once in his stubborn, dignified,
Speaker 1: opinionated life, he listened to them. The bedroom was cold,
Speaker 1: significantly colder than the main room. The fire didn't reach
Speaker 1: as well back here, and the storm had dropped the
Speaker 1: outside temperature into the low forties, and the single pane
Speaker 1: window on the back wall was conducting that cold directly
Speaker 1: into the room. I could feel it on my face
Speaker 1: from the doorway, a sheet of chilled air flowing off
Speaker 1: the glass and pulling on the floor the way cold
Speaker 1: water pools in a basin. The bed was directly below
Speaker 1: the window. My pillow was eighteen inches from the glass.
Speaker 1: The blankets were still rumpled from the previous night. Everything
Speaker 1: in the room was exactly as I'd left it that morning,
Speaker 1: which made the fact that something was on the other
Speaker 1: side of the window feel even more invasive. This was
Speaker 1: my bedroom, private space, the room where I slept and
Speaker 1: dreamed and was most vulnerable, and something was leaning against
Speaker 1: the wall beside the window, breathing while the chuffing sound
Speaker 1: filled the dark like a low electrical hum. I took
Speaker 1: two steps into the bedroom. The lamp light reached the
Speaker 1: window glass and I could see the handprints on the
Speaker 1: outside of the glass, pressed against the window from the
Speaker 1: other side. Two handprints, fingers spread palms flat against the pane.
Speaker 1: They were wet. The rain had soaked whatever had placed
Speaker 1: them there, and the moisture had transferred to the glass
Speaker 1: in a pattern that the lamp light caught and illuminated
Speaker 1: with terrible clarity. Each handprint was roughly twice the size
Speaker 1: of mine, five fingers, five digits, with visible pad impressions,
Speaker 1: each pad the size of a half dollar. The thumb
Speaker 1: was set low and wide, separated from the index finger
Speaker 1: by a gap that was significantly larger than any human
Speaker 1: hand would produce. The palm was broad and deep, the
Speaker 1: kind of palm that belongs to a hand that can
Speaker 1: grip a tree trunk the way I'd grip a baseball bat.
Speaker 1: The handprints weren't smeared. They were clean, pressed flat, and
Speaker 1: removed flat, placed there by something that had put its
Speaker 1: hands on the window deliberately, not by accident, not while
Speaker 1: sliding along the wall, but with the controlled, intentional placement
Speaker 1: of someone pressing their palms against glass to look through it,
Speaker 1: to look in. The breathing on the other side of
Speaker 1: the wall was still going. I could hear it from
Speaker 1: where I stood five feet from the window, and at
Speaker 1: this range the sound was more detailed than it had
Speaker 1: been from the chair. I could hear the wetness in it,
Speaker 1: the slight catch at the top of each inhalation, a
Speaker 1: soft click in the back of the throat like a
Speaker 1: valve opening, and on the exhalation a sound I hadn't
Speaker 1: heard before in any encounter, A low vibrating hum, not
Speaker 1: quite a vocalization, more like the purring of a very
Speaker 1: large cat, if the cat weighed four hundred pounds and
Speaker 1: the purring was produced by vocal cords the size of
Speaker 1: my fingers. A chuffing sound, steady rhythmic, layered over the breathing,
Speaker 1: like a secondary channel. The chuffing was coming through the
Speaker 1: wall and the window simultaneously, and the two sources created
Speaker 1: a slight phase difference that made the sound seem to move,
Speaker 1: to shimmer, to come from everywhere and nowhere. It filled
Speaker 1: the bedroom, It filled my head. It was not an
Speaker 1: aggressive sound, I want to be clear about that. It
Speaker 1: didn't carry threat the way the screams and the tree
Speaker 1: strikes did. It carried something else, something I'd describe as attention, focused, sustained,
Speaker 1: patient attention, the sound of something that was paying very
Speaker 1: close attention to what was on the other side of
Speaker 1: the glass and expressing that attention through the only vocal
Speaker 1: mechanism it had available. It was watching me through the
Speaker 1: window in the dark during a storm and it was
Speaker 1: humming while it did it. I backed out of the
Speaker 1: bedroom slowly, the lamp in my hand ruby at my leg,
Speaker 1: back through the doorway, back to the main room, back
Speaker 1: to the chair. I sat down, I set the lamp
Speaker 1: on the side table, and I waited. The chuffing continued
Speaker 1: from the back wall for another hour and twelve minutes.
Speaker 1: I timed it from ten twenty two to eleven thirty four,
Speaker 1: an hour and twelve minutes of a four hundred pound
Speaker 1: creature leaning against the back of my cabin, its hands
Speaker 1: on my bedroom window, breathing and humming in the dark,
Speaker 1: while the rain came down and the fire burned low,
Speaker 1: and the dogs lay on the floor in silence. During
Speaker 1: that time, three things happened that I need to describe.
Speaker 1: Three things that individually would have been enough to define
Speaker 1: any single encounter on this property. Stacked together in the
Speaker 1: same hour, they make up the most concentrated period of
Speaker 1: close range activity I experienced in eight years on the mountain.
Speaker 1: The first was the doorknob. At ten forty one, about
Speaker 1: twenty minutes into the back wall visit, I heard a
Speaker 1: sound from the front of the cabin, not the back
Speaker 1: where the creature was leaning and breathing and chuffing against
Speaker 1: the bedroom wall. The front the opposite side of the building,
Speaker 1: the side with the porch and the door that I'd
Speaker 1: been staring at for the past hour. The front door
Speaker 1: knob rattled. It was a small sound, a click of
Speaker 1: metal against metal, the sound a doorknob makes when something
Speaker 1: touches it from the outside. Then a longer sound, a
Speaker 1: turning sound, slow controlled, the kind of rotation you'd use
Speaker 1: if you were trying to be quiet about it, if
Speaker 1: you were turning a knob you'd turned before and wanted
Speaker 1: to see if the mechanism had changed since the last time.
Speaker 1: I was facing the front door from my chair, maybe
Speaker 1: twelve feet away, and I watched the knob move in
Speaker 1: the firelight and the lamp glow. The brass caught the
Speaker 1: warm light and flashed as it rotated about fifty eighteen
Speaker 1: degrees of travel clockwise. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. The bolt housing clicked
Speaker 1: softly as the internal mechanism engaged with the latch, and
Speaker 1: I could see the latch plate start to retract into
Speaker 1: the door edge, moving maybe an eighth of an inch
Speaker 1: before the dead bolt above. It stopped everything. The dead
Speaker 1: bolt was thrown had been since I'd locked up after
Speaker 1: the generator attempt. The knob could turn all day, and
Speaker 1: the door wasn't going anywhere, but the knob was turning.
Speaker 1: It held at fifteen degrees for about two seconds, two
Speaker 1: seconds that lasted a month. I could see the tension
Speaker 1: in the mechanism, the slight compression of the spring inside
Speaker 1: the knob housing, the way the brass was held at
Speaker 1: an angle that human physics doesn't produce accidentally. Wind doesn't
Speaker 1: turn doorknobs, Rain doesn't turn door knobs. Raccoons, which were
Speaker 1: the usual suspects for every unexplained sound on the property,
Speaker 1: don't turn doorknobs. With controlled, even clockwise pressure that holds
Speaker 1: at a specific position and then releases slowly, the knob
Speaker 1: returned to its original position gradually, the way it would
Speaker 1: return if the hand that had turned it was easing
Speaker 1: off rather than letting go a controlled deceleration, as if
Speaker 1: whatever was on the other side wanted to feel the
Speaker 1: mechanism work in both directions, turn and release, Test and observe,
Speaker 1: not trying to get in, trying to understand how the
Speaker 1: lock worked. And here's the part that kept me staring
Speaker 1: at the ceiling for weeks afterward. If the creature at
Speaker 1: the back wall was still there, still breathing, still chuffing,
Speaker 1: still leaning against the bedroom logs, which it was, because
Speaker 1: I could feel the vibration and hear the sounds from
Speaker 1: the back of the cabin without interruption, then the thing
Speaker 1: that turned the front door knob was a second individual,
Speaker 1: something else, standing on the front porch in the rain,
Speaker 1: trying my door while its companion studied me through the
Speaker 1: bedroom window, two of them on different sides of the
Speaker 1: cabin at the same time. The coordination wasn't lost on me.
Speaker 1: One at the observation post watching through the window, maintaining
Speaker 1: the breathing pattern that had become the background rhythm of
Speaker 1: the entire encounter. One at the entrance, testing the access point,
Speaker 1: evaluating the barrier. It was the same kind of two
Speaker 1: point coordination I'd heard in the knocking patterns from the beginning.
Speaker 1: Two positions, two individuals working in concert, covering different angles
Speaker 1: of the same target. The target was my cabin, and
Speaker 1: I was inside it. The second thing was the smell.
Speaker 1: Around eleven, maybe ten minutes after the doorknob the cabin
Speaker 1: began to fill with the scent I'd encountered before, but
Speaker 1: never at this concentration, The heavy musky organic odor that
Speaker 1: Earl had described in his journal, that Opel had mentioned
Speaker 1: during her visit, that Vernon had documented dozens of times
Speaker 1: across thirty years of field notes, always in association with
Speaker 1: close range activity. It's hard to describe a smell to
Speaker 1: someone who hasn't experienced it. The closest I can get
Speaker 1: is this. Take the smell of a wet dog, Concentrate
Speaker 1: it by a factor of ten. Add something sour and
Speaker 1: fermented underneath it, like fruit that's gone well passed ripe
Speaker 1: into the first stages of decomposition. Layer over that a
Speaker 1: warm animal body scent that's not exactly unpleasant in isolation
Speaker 1: but becomes overwhelming at volume. The smell of fur and skin,
Speaker 1: and the oils that a living creature produces to waterproof itself.
Speaker 1: Mix all of that together and push it through four
Speaker 1: inches of wet poplar log, and you've got an approximation
Speaker 1: of what my cabin smelled like at eleven o'clock on
Speaker 1: a Saturday night in November of twenty eighteen. The smell
Speaker 1: was coming through the walls, not through the windows, which
Speaker 1: were sealed, not through the door, which was closed and locked,
Speaker 1: and weather stripped through the logs themselves. The rain had
Speaker 1: been driving moisture into the wood for thirty hours, and
Speaker 1: the creature's scent had saturated the exterior surface of the
Speaker 1: cabin where it was leaning, and the moisture was carrying
Speaker 1: the scent molecules through the wood the way water carries
Speaker 1: died through fabric. The outside was bleeding into the inside.
Speaker 1: The creature's presence was no longer limited to the other
Speaker 1: side of the wall. It was in my air, in
Speaker 1: my lungs, in the cabin itself. Bowie sneezed once, a sharp,
Speaker 1: explosive sneeze that broke the silence like a gunshot, and
Speaker 1: made Ruby's ears snap toward him and then immediately back
Speaker 1: toward the bedroom wall. It was the only sound either
Speaker 1: dog had made in over two hours, and Bowie's face
Speaker 1: after the sneeze, the slightly offended, slightly bewildered expression of
Speaker 1: an old dog who'd just been ambushed by his own sinuses,
Speaker 1: was so normal and so doglike that it almost made
Speaker 1: me laugh. Almost, But the situation was too far past
Speaker 1: humor for laughter, and the sneeze just hung in the
Speaker 1: air for a second, and then the silence closed back
Speaker 1: around it, and the breathing from the back wall continued
Speaker 1: as if nothing had happened. The third thing was the stone,
Speaker 1: but I didn't know about that until morning. At eleven twenty,
Speaker 1: I heard something small hit the front porch. Not a
Speaker 1: branch blown by the wind, not a piece of debris
Speaker 1: from the roof edge, a specific discrete contained impact, A tap,
Speaker 1: like someone dropping a marble on a wooden floor from
Speaker 1: a height of about two feet. A single tap, brief,
Speaker 1: almost polite, and then the rain swallowed the silence after it,
Speaker 1: and the sound was gone. I didn't see anything. I
Speaker 1: was in the chair facing the front wall, the fire
Speaker 1: behind me nearly down to coals. The tap came and went,
Speaker 1: and I filed it with one hundred other unexplained sounds
Speaker 1: I'd heard during storms on this mountain and moved on.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't understand that sound until morning, when I found
Speaker 1: what it had left behind. The chuffing stopped at eleven
Speaker 1: thirty four. The vibration in the back wall ceased. The
Speaker 1: weight lifted off the logs, the way a shadow lifts
Speaker 1: when the light source moves a gradual lightning of the
Speaker 1: pressure that I felt in the chair and in the
Speaker 1: floor and in the air. And I heard footsteps on
Speaker 1: the wet ground behind the cabin, moving away toward the slope,
Speaker 1: toward the ridge, toward the corridor. The footsteps were slow, unhurried,
Speaker 1: the same steady, patient pace the creature had used on
Speaker 1: every approach that night, not fleeing, not retreating in response
Speaker 1: to a threat, leaving on its own schedule, because whatever
Speaker 1: it had come to do was done. The visit had
Speaker 1: a beginning in a middle, and now it had an end,
Speaker 1: and the end was chosen by the visitor, not by me,
Speaker 1: the same way every other aspect of the encounter had
Speaker 1: been chosen by the visitor. I'd had no control over
Speaker 1: any of it, not the timing, not the duration, not
Speaker 1: the scope. The creature had come when it wanted to come.
Speaker 1: It had leaned against the wall it wanted to lean against.
Speaker 1: It had moved to the back when it was ready
Speaker 1: to move. It had looked through the window it wanted
Speaker 1: to look through. It had turned the doorknob it wanted
Speaker 1: to test, and it had left when it was done.
Speaker 1: My role in the entire encounter had been to sit
Speaker 1: in a chair and be observed. That was it, the
Speaker 1: whole of my contribution, sitting still and being looked at.
Speaker 1: The footsteps faded into the rain. The last one I
Speaker 1: could distinguish was about thirty yards from the cabin, where
Speaker 1: the grade of the slope steepened and the leaf litter thinned,
Speaker 1: and the sound of feet on earth blended into the
Speaker 1: general percussion of rain on saturated ground. After that nothing,
Speaker 1: The creature was gone, absorbed into the forest, moving up
Speaker 1: slope toward the ridge, back to whatever section of the
Speaker 1: corridor it used as a travel route between the lowlands
Speaker 1: and the high ground, and the cabin was mine again. Technically,
Speaker 1: the walls were still standing, the door was still long,
Speaker 1: The fire was still burning, barely a pile of coals
Speaker 1: that threw enough heat to keep the main room above freezing,
Speaker 1: but not enough to reach the bedroom. The lamps were
Speaker 1: still lit. Ruby was still at my feet, Bowie was
Speaker 1: still on his blanket. Everything was where it had been
Speaker 1: three hours ago, when I'd been reading about the Civilian
Speaker 1: Conservation Corps and thinking about going to bed. But the
Speaker 1: cabin didn't feel like mine anymore. The smell was still
Speaker 1: in the air, thick and organic, coming off the walls,
Speaker 1: the way heat comes off a stove that's been turned
Speaker 1: off but hasn't cooled. The handprints were still on the
Speaker 1: bedroom window, slowly drying, the moisture evaporating, but the shape
Speaker 1: holding and the knowledge of what had happened. The four
Speaker 1: hours of sustained close range contact, the breathing through the walls,
Speaker 1: the chuffing the doorknob, the two point approach. All of
Speaker 1: it was in the room, now hanging in the air
Speaker 1: alongside the musk. Impossible to ventilate, impossible to ignore. I
Speaker 1: sat in the chair for another forty five minutes after
Speaker 1: the footsteps faded, unable to move, unable to sleep, unable
Speaker 1: to do anything except sit there and breathe and listen
Speaker 1: to the rain and try to reassemble a version of
Speaker 1: reality that included what had just happened. The thing about
Speaker 1: fear is that it has a shelf life. Your body
Speaker 1: can only sustain a stress response for so long before
Speaker 1: the system crashes. The adrenal glands empty, the cortisol peaks
Speaker 1: and starts to drop. The muscles that have been clenched
Speaker 1: for hours begin to unlock, one by one without your permission,
Speaker 1: The tension draining out of them, the way water drains
Speaker 1: from a bathtub, and then the exhaustion hits, not sleepiness,
Speaker 1: something deeper, a full system shut down that starts in
Speaker 1: the legs and moves upward through the torso and the
Speaker 1: arms and the neck, until your head is too heavy
Speaker 1: for your spine and your eyelids are too heavy for
Speaker 1: your face, and the last conscious thought you have before
Speaker 1: the dark takes you is I should stay awake, followed
Speaker 1: immediately by the dark taking you. Bowie fell asleep first.
Speaker 1: His head dropped onto his paws around twelve fifteen. His
Speaker 1: breathing went deep and rhythmic, and his body softened into
Speaker 1: the blanket with the boneless ease of a dog who's
Speaker 1: decided that the vigil is over and the pack is safe.
Speaker 1: He'd held his post for three hours, an old dog
Speaker 1: with bad hips who couldn't stand without help, had stayed
Speaker 1: awake and alert for three hours because something was at
Speaker 1: the cabin and his people needed him on duty. Now
Speaker 1: the something was gone, and his body was done, and
Speaker 1: he let go with the completeness that dogs achieve and
Speaker 1: humans envy. Ruby held twenty minutes longer. She stayed on
Speaker 1: the floor, ears forward, body rigid, her breathing shallow and fast,
Speaker 1: still monitoring, still running the threat assessment, still checking and
Speaker 1: rechecking the front wall, the bedroom doorway, the back wall,
Speaker 1: the front door, running the circuit she'd been running all
Speaker 1: night inside her head, patrol route that corresponded to the
Speaker 1: physical one she'd been pacing all day. Then she sighed
Speaker 1: a full body exhalation that started in her chest and
Speaker 1: traveled outward through her whole frame, emptying every ounce of tension,
Speaker 1: every molecule of vigilance in a single sustained breath that
Speaker 1: lasted about three seconds and sounded like surrender. She stood up,
Speaker 1: walked to where I sat in the chair, put her
Speaker 1: head in my lap, and closed her eyes. The dogs
Speaker 1: knew it was gone. They knew before I did. They
Speaker 1: knew the way they always knew, through senses that operated
Speaker 1: on a different bandwidth than mine, reading the air and
Speaker 1: the ground and the walls for traces of the thing
Speaker 1: that had been there, confirming its absence the same way
Speaker 1: they'd confirmed its presence and finding the all clear before
Speaker 1: my human hardware could catch up. When they let go,
Speaker 1: I let go. I fell asleep in the chair. Didn't
Speaker 1: mean to, didn't decide to the adrenaline crash just took
Speaker 1: me a wave takes a swimmer. And one second I
Speaker 1: was sitting upright with Ruby's warm head in my lap,
Speaker 1: and the lamp burning on the kitchen table and the
Speaker 1: fire down to a faint orange glow. And the next
Speaker 1: second it was four point thirty in the morning, and
Speaker 1: the fire was dead, and the rain had stopped, and
Speaker 1: the first gray light of Sunday morning was seeping through
Speaker 1: the windows that something else had been looking through five
Speaker 1: hours earlier. I got up. Everything hurt my back, my neck,
Speaker 1: my hips, my knees, the deep tissue ache of a
Speaker 1: body that's been locked in a stress response for three hours,
Speaker 1: and then collapsed into a wooden chair and stayed there.
Speaker 1: My mouth was dry, my eyes were gritty. My hands,
Speaker 1: when I looked at them, had a fine tremor that
Speaker 1: wouldn't stop the residual vibration of adrenaline that had been
Speaker 1: circulating in my blood all night and hadn't fully metabolized.
Speaker 1: I let the dogs out. Ruby went first, cautious, her
Speaker 1: nose working the porch planks the way a crime scene
Speaker 1: investigator works a floor. She stopped at each spot where
Speaker 1: the creaking had come from, the night before, each plank,
Speaker 1: each railpost, each section of wall where something had leaned.
Speaker 1: She was reading the porch with a thoroughness and a
Speaker 1: focus that told me the scent was still strong and
Speaker 1: that whatever had left it was interesting enough to justify
Speaker 1: the full investigation protocol. Bowie followed at his own pace,
Speaker 1: limping badly from the cold and the hard floor, and
Speaker 1: went straight to his usual spot at the edge of
Speaker 1: the porch to relieve himself. He wasn't interested in the investigation.
Speaker 1: He already knew who'd been there, He'd known all along.
Speaker 1: I followed Ruby out. The morning was gray and raw
Speaker 1: and still. The rain had stopped sometime around three or four,
Speaker 1: and the clouds were starting to thin on the western horizon,
Speaker 1: letting through a pale, watery light that didn't warm anything,
Speaker 1: but at least let me see. The meadow was saturated,
Speaker 1: the grass flattened and dark, standing water in every depression.
Speaker 1: Bishop Creek was roaring in the distance, swollen to twice
Speaker 1: its width, carrying the mountain's excess down to the valley.
Speaker 1: I looked at the porch. The planks were dark with moisture,
Speaker 1: and the standing water on the surfaces had washed most
Speaker 1: of the visible evidence away, but along the front wall,
Speaker 1: below the window, to the left of the door, there
Speaker 1: were compression marks in the wet wood. Scuff marks, the
Speaker 1: kind of impressions that bare skin leaves on a wet
Speaker 1: surface when it bears significant weight. I couldn't make out
Speaker 1: individual toes. The rain had blurred the detail, but the
Speaker 1: marks were there, large, broader than my boot, asymmetric, spaced
Speaker 1: about three feet apart. I walked around to the back
Speaker 1: of the cabin. The ground was destroyed, saturated clay and
Speaker 1: leaf litter churned to a consistency somewhere between pudding and
Speaker 1: quicksand by thirty hours of continuous rain, and in that ground,
Speaker 1: leading from the tree line to the base of the
Speaker 1: back wall and then back to the tree line was
Speaker 1: a track line, clear fresh. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
Speaker 1: Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. The impressions
Speaker 1: were crisp edged, which meant they'd been made late in
Speaker 1: the storm, after midnight, when the rain was tapering off
Speaker 1: and the mud had enough surface tension to hold a print.
Speaker 1: Anything made earlier would have been washed smooth. I crouched
Speaker 1: beside the clearest print and studied it. The way Vernon's
Speaker 1: notes had taught me to study tracks, measuring with my handspan,
Speaker 1: noting the proportions sixteen to seventeen inches long, about seven
Speaker 1: inches wide at the ball five toes, the impressions deep
Speaker 1: and distinct in the soft clay, big toes set medially
Speaker 1: offset from the other four, the same configuration I'd been
Speaker 1: documenting on this property since twenty fourteen. The stride between
Speaker 1: prints was about four feet, consistent with Vernon's corridor data
Speaker 1: and the depth of the impressions, given what I knew
Speaker 1: about the soil moisture content and the density of the clay,
Speaker 1: suggested a weight someha between three hundred and fifty and
Speaker 1: four hundred and fifty pounds. The track line told a
Speaker 1: simple story. Something had walked from the forest to my
Speaker 1: cabin in a straight line. It had stood below the
Speaker 1: bedroom window for a long time, the prints there clustered
Speaker 1: and overlapping in a tight area about three feet wide,
Speaker 1: the clay pressed to a smooth, compressed surface by the
Speaker 1: repeated shifting of massive weight over an hour of standing
Speaker 1: in one spot. Then it had walked back to the
Speaker 1: tree line, same straight course, same steady stride, no deviation,
Speaker 1: no circling, no hesitation. It had come to my bedroom window,
Speaker 1: watched me for an hour, and left. I went back
Speaker 1: to the front porch and checked the window beside the door.
Speaker 1: The handprints on the glass were still visible, though the
Speaker 1: morning air was starting to dry the glass. I took
Speaker 1: six photographs from different angles before the prince faded. The
Speaker 1: best one showed the full right hand, all five digits
Speaker 1: clear the palm impression and still holding enough moisture to
Speaker 1: catch the flat morning light. I'd later compare it to
Speaker 1: the hand Prince Cliff had measured on the cabin walls
Speaker 1: two winters ago. The proportions were identical. And then I
Speaker 1: found the stone on the porch near the front door,
Speaker 1: sitting on the plank directly in front of the threshold,
Speaker 1: in a spot where no stone had been when I'd
Speaker 1: gone out to fight with the generator the previous afternoon.
Speaker 1: A small, smooth, creek polished stone, about the size of
Speaker 1: a hen's egg, round, gray, wet from the rain, but
Speaker 1: not a piece of storm debris, not gravel from the driveway,
Speaker 1: not a chip off the foundation. A creek stone, the
Speaker 1: kind you'd find in Bishop Creek if you waded in
Speaker 1: and turned the bottom. Gravel with your hands, smooth all
Speaker 1: the way around, polished by years of water, the kind
Speaker 1: of stone you'd pick up and put in your pocket
Speaker 1: if you were the type of person who picks up stones,
Speaker 1: which I was beginning to understand describe the creatures on
Speaker 1: this corridor very well. Had carried it up from the creek,
Speaker 1: through the forest, across the meadow, up the porch steps,
Speaker 1: and set it on the plank in front of my
Speaker 1: door during a thunderstorm in the middle of the night,
Speaker 1: while something else, or the same something was leaning against
Speaker 1: my bedroom wall and looking through my window. It was
Speaker 1: a gift left at my door, the way you'd leave
Speaker 1: a bottle of wine on a neighbor's porch, the way
Speaker 1: Riba left sweet potatoes on a stump at the tree line.
Speaker 1: The same gesture reversed, a creature offering something to a
Speaker 1: human instead of a human offering something to a creature,
Speaker 1: a transaction going both directions for the first time in
Speaker 1: fifty years of recorded history on this corridor. I picked
Speaker 1: the stone up. It was cold. I stood on the
Speaker 1: porch in the gray morning light and held it and
Speaker 1: looked at the handprints drying on the window glass and
Speaker 1: the track line in the mud behind the cabin, and
Speaker 1: the meadow stretching out toward Bishop Creek and the ridge
Speaker 1: above it, dark and quiet against a sky that was
Speaker 1: finally starting to clear. I went inside put the stone
Speaker 1: on the nightstand, beside the riverstone from the bluff that
Speaker 1: I'd found two years earlier. Two stones, now, two gifts
Speaker 1: from the same source. One from the bluff where I
Speaker 1: sat and watched the mountain, one from my own front porch,
Speaker 1: where something sat and watched me. I fed the dogs,
Speaker 1: made coffee on the camp stove, sat at the kitchen
Speaker 1: table with the cup warming my hands and the steam rising,
Speaker 1: and the spiral notebook open in front of me, and
Speaker 1: I wrote everything down, the times, the sounds, the breathing,
Speaker 1: the handprints, the tracks, the doorknob, the chuffing, the smell,
Speaker 1: the stone, every detail I could remember, in the order
Speaker 1: it happened, with the time stamps I'd been checking compulsively
Speaker 1: all night. It took me an hour to write it all.
Speaker 1: By the time I finished, the sun had broken through
Speaker 1: the clouds, and the meadow was steaming in the warmth,
Speaker 1: and the warning birds were singing in the oaks along
Speaker 1: the creek, and the mountain looked once again, like the
Speaker 1: postcard version of itself, beautiful, peaceful, ordinary, except I knew
Speaker 1: what ordinary meant on this mountain. Ordinary meant they were
Speaker 1: up there watching the same way they'd been watching for
Speaker 1: fifty years, the same way they'd be watching tomorrow night,
Speaker 1: and the night after, and every night until the last
Speaker 1: one of them was gone or the last human left
Speaker 1: the corridor. Ordinary meant a four hundred pound creature could
Speaker 1: lean against your bedroom wall for an hour and you'd
Speaker 1: never know unless you happened to be awake. Ordinary meant
Speaker 1: the doorknob could turn fifteen degrees in the night and
Speaker 1: settle back, and nobody would ever hear it, because everybody
Speaker 1: was asleep and the dogs had learned not to bark.
Speaker 1: And ordinary meant that sometimes, when the visit was over
Speaker 1: and the creature walked back to the tree line, it
Speaker 1: left a stone. I think about that night more than
Speaker 1: any other encounter. After that night, I never sat in
Speaker 1: the cabin the same way every evening after dark, when
Speaker 1: the fire was going and the lamps were lit, and
Speaker 1: the dogs were settled and the mountain was doing its
Speaker 1: quiet thing outside, some part of my brain was listening
Speaker 1: to the walls, waiting for the vibration, waiting for the breathing,
Speaker 1: waiting for the planks on the porch to start their sequence.
Speaker 1: It didn't happen again, not like that, not with that
Speaker 1: duration or that intensity, but the possibility of it was
Speaker 1: always there every night for the remaining four years I
Speaker 1: lived on the property, and the possibility was enough. The
Speaker 1: possibility was the point they wanted me to know. They
Speaker 1: were there, not once, not occasionally, always every night, whether
Speaker 1: I heard them or not, whether the dogs alerted or not,
Speaker 1: whether the porch creaked or the doorknob turned or the
Speaker 1: handprints appeared on the glass, they were there. They'd always
Speaker 1: been there, and the storm had simply stripped away the
Speaker 1: noise that usually hid their presence, the way a power
Speaker 1: outage strips away the electronic hum and let me hear
Speaker 1: what had been happening on the other side of my
Speaker 1: walls since the day I moved in. Garrett. I want
Speaker 1: to sit with what Garrett just described for a moment,
Speaker 1: because it's easy to hear a story about a doorknob
Speaker 1: turning and a figure outside a window and classify it
Speaker 1: as horror. The locked cabin in the storm, the power outage,
Speaker 1: the thing on the porch, we've all seen that movie,
Speaker 1: we know how it ends. But what Garrett experienced isn't
Speaker 1: a horror story. It's a contact story. And the difference
Speaker 1: between those two things matters enormously. A horror creature tries
Speaker 1: the doorknob because it wants to get in what Garrett
Speaker 1: described tried the doorknob because it wanted to understand how
Speaker 1: the lock worked. There's a world of difference between those
Speaker 1: two intentions. One is predatory, the other is investigative. And
Speaker 1: the behavior that followed the controlled release of the knob,
Speaker 1: the return to the observation post at the bedroom window,
Speaker 1: the hours of patient breathing, the gift left on the porch,
Speaker 1: none of that fits a predation model. All of it
Speaker 1: fits a research model, a study, a long term, systematic
Speaker 1: evaluation conducted by something that had been running the same
Speaker 1: kind of observations on the same corridor for fifty years.
Speaker 1: The creatures on Bishop Creek aren't trying to get into
Speaker 1: the cabin. They're trying to understand the people inside it
Speaker 1: and the tools they use for that understanding. The window observation,
Speaker 1: the wall proximity, the doorknob test, the scent transfer, the
Speaker 1: gift offering are the tools of a species conducting behavioral
Speaker 1: research on its neighbors. We do the same thing. Field
Speaker 1: researchers spend years in hides and blinds, watching animals through glass,
Speaker 1: recording their movements, cataloging their habits, building behavioral profiles from
Speaker 1: years of accumulated data. Vernon did it for thirty years.
Speaker 1: Garrett's been doing it for eight. The difference is that
Speaker 1: on this corridor, both sides are doing the research, and
Speaker 1: neither side has published its findings. Story nine is next
Speaker 1: the ridge that answered back, And this time Garrett isn't
Speaker 1: going to sit in his chair and wait for them
Speaker 1: to come to him. He's going to go to them
Speaker 1: with a baseball bat and a Bluetooth speaker and his
Speaker 1: best friend, and a plan that Vernon never would have approved,
Speaker 1: and that Earl would have forbidden if he'd been alive
Speaker 1: to do it. It doesn't go the way they'd hoped,
Speaker 1: but we'll get into that next time. Did