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: We're going to do something a little different today. We've
Speaker 1: spent a lot of time together out there in the
Speaker 1: deep woods, trudging through old growth timber, following game trails
Speaker 1: into places most people would never set foot, chasing down
Speaker 1: encounters with things that shouldn't exist in the shadows between
Speaker 1: the trees. And I love that, you know I do.
Speaker 1: That's my world and it always will be. But tonight
Speaker 1: we're stepping away from the tree line. We're leaving the
Speaker 1: forest behind, at least for now, because I've been sitting
Speaker 1: on a collection of accounts that have genuinely rattled me
Speaker 1: in ways I wasn't expecting. And if you followed this
Speaker 1: show for any length of time, you know it takes
Speaker 1: quite a bit to get under my skin. What we're
Speaker 1: diving into tonight deals with something called the hitchhiker effect. Now,
Speaker 1: some of you have probably heard this term thrown around,
Speaker 1: maybe in connection with Skinwalker Ranch or some of the
Speaker 1: research that's come out of the Old NIDS program, the
Speaker 1: National Institute for Discovery Science, Robert Bigelow's outfit that studied
Speaker 1: that property in the Uenta Basin back in the nineties.
Speaker 1: But here's the thing. Most people don't realize. The hitchhiker
Speaker 1: effect isn't limited to one ranch in northeastern Utah. It's
Speaker 1: not even limited to one type of location. What we're
Speaker 1: talking about is a phenomenon where someone visits a place
Speaker 1: of high strangeness, a place where the veil between what
Speaker 1: we understand and what we don't seems dangerously thin, and
Speaker 1: something follows them home. I'm not talking about a feeling.
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about the hebegbis or an over active
Speaker 1: imagination fueled by one too many campfire stories. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about tangible, measurable, terrifying manifestations that begin occurring in people's homes,
Speaker 1: in their vehicles, around their families after they visited these locations.
Speaker 1: Shadow figures standing at the foot of the bed, objects
Speaker 1: moving on their own, electronics going haywire in ways that
Speaker 1: defy every rational explanation, Animals behaving as though something invisible
Speaker 1: has entered the room, and in the worst cases, the
Speaker 1: cases that keep me up at night. Whatever follows these
Speaker 1: people home doesn't just make its presence known, it escalates.
Speaker 1: Doctor Colm Kelleher, who spent years as the lead scientist
Speaker 1: on the Skinwalker Ranch project, coined the term, and he's
Speaker 1: been very clear about what he observed. It wasn't just
Speaker 1: the people who worked on the ranch who experienced these things.
Speaker 1: It was their families, their neighbors, people who had no
Speaker 1: idea what their loved one had been investigating, who suddenly
Speaker 1: found themselves living in what can only be described as
Speaker 1: a haunted house, except it hadn't been haunted before. Whatever
Speaker 1: was happening at these sites of high strangeness had the
Speaker 1: ability the intelligence and apparently the desire to attach itself
Speaker 1: to human beings and follow them wherever they went. Now
Speaker 1: I've spent the better part of two years tracking down
Speaker 1: accounts from people all across this country who believe, who
Speaker 1: are absolutely convinced that something latched onto them after visiting
Speaker 1: a location they never should have gone to.
Speaker 2: Some of these folks visited well.
Speaker 1: Known paranormal hotspots. Others stumbled onto places they didn't even
Speaker 1: realize were significant until everything in their lives started coming
Speaker 1: apart at the seams. The stories spanned decades, from the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies all the wait to just a couple years ago.
Speaker 1: They come from Utah and Oregon and West Virginia and
Speaker 1: Massachusetts and Georgia and Colorado. The witnesses are ranchers and
Speaker 1: investigators and documentary filmmakers and ordinary people who were just
Speaker 1: in the wrong place at the wrong time. What ties
Speaker 1: every single one of these accounts together is a pattern
Speaker 1: so consistent it'll make the hair stand up on the
Speaker 1: back of your neck. They visited a place, they experienced
Speaker 1: something strange while they were there, and then they went
Speaker 1: home thinking it was over. It wasn't over. It was
Speaker 1: just beginning. So settle in. Turn down the lights if
Speaker 1: you're feeling brave, and let's get into it. These are
Speaker 1: six true accounts of the hitchhiker effect, stories of what
Speaker 1: happens when something from the other side decides you're too
Speaker 1: interesting to let go. And I got to be honest
Speaker 1: with you, some of these kept me up at night.
Speaker 1: I think they'll do the same for you. Let's start
Speaker 1: this thing where it arguably all began, or at least
Speaker 1: where we first started paying serious attention. The U went
Speaker 1: to Basin in northeastern Utah. Now long before Robert Bigelow
Speaker 1: purchased what we'd all come to know as Skinwalker Ranch
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety six, That entire basin had a reputation
Speaker 1: among the locals. The Ute people had spoken about it
Speaker 1: for generations. They'd called the area a place where the
Speaker 1: spirits walk, and they didn't go there after dark. Period,
Speaker 1: no debate about it. Their elders had made it very
Speaker 1: clear that land belonged to something else. In the fall
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy eight, a cattle rancher named Dale Meyerhoff
Speaker 1: and I'm using a pseudonym here because his family specifically
Speaker 1: requested it, owned about four hundred acres of grazing land
Speaker 1: roughly fourteen miles southeast of what would later become the
Speaker 1: Skinwalker Ranch property. Dale was a no nonsense kind of guy,
Speaker 1: third generation rancher, the kind of man who got up
Speaker 1: before dawn, worked until his body told him to stop,
Speaker 1: and didn't have much patience for what he called campfire nonsense.
Speaker 1: His wife, Carol, was cut from the same cloth, practical, grounded,
Speaker 1: not the type of people who went looking for things
Speaker 1: that go bump in the night. But something had been
Speaker 1: happening to Dale's cattle over the course of about six
Speaker 1: weeks that September. In October, he'd lost forehead under circumstances
Speaker 1: he couldn't explain. Two of them he'd found with incisions
Speaker 1: so clean and precise they looked surgical. There was no
Speaker 1: blood at the scene none, And if you know anything
Speaker 1: about cattle ranching, you know that doesn't happen. A predator
Speaker 1: kill is messy, it's violent. What Dale was finding looked
Speaker 1: like something out of a science fiction movie.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: A neighbor of his, a man named Hank, who ran
Speaker 1: sheep about three miles north, told Dale he'd been seeing
Speaker 1: lights at night, not headlights, not aircraft. Hank described them
Speaker 1: as orange orbs about the size of a basketball, drifting
Speaker 1: silently over the Mesa to the east of their properties.
Speaker 1: He'd watch them on three separate occasions, always between midnight
Speaker 1: and two in the morning, and each time they'd hover
Speaker 1: for a while before shooting straight up and vanishing. Hank
Speaker 1: was spooked, but Dale figured there had to be a
Speaker 1: rational explanation, military testing, ball lightning something, so Dale decided
Speaker 1: he'd go have a look for himself. One night in
Speaker 1: late October, he drove his truck out to the Mesa
Speaker 1: and parked near an old access road that ran along
Speaker 1: the base of a sandstone ridge. He brought a thermos
Speaker 1: of coffee, a rifle, and a spotlight. He was going
Speaker 1: to sit there all night if he had to. Here's
Speaker 1: what Dale told a muphonn investigator in a recorded interview
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty and I tracked down the transcript of
Speaker 1: this through a researcher in Salt Lake City who'd been
Speaker 1: archiving basin cases for decades. According to Dale, he sat
Speaker 1: in that truck for about three hours, seeing nothing but
Speaker 1: stars and darkness. He was starting to feel foolish, and
Speaker 1: then right around one fifteen in the morning, something changed.
Speaker 1: He said the air got heavy. That was the word
Speaker 1: he kept using, heavy, like the atmospheric pressure had shifted.
Speaker 1: In an instant, his ears popped. The truck's radio, which
Speaker 1: had been playing a country station out of Vernal, dissolved
Speaker 1: into static and then went dead entirely. Then he saw it.
Speaker 1: A light appeared on the ridge above him, maybe two
Speaker 1: hundred yards out. It was orange, just like Hank had described.
Speaker 1: But what Hank hadn't mentioned, or maybe hadn't seen up
Speaker 1: close enough to notice, was that it pulsated. Dale said,
Speaker 1: it looked almost like it was breathing. It hovered there
Speaker 1: for a solid minute, and he sat frozen, the rifle
Speaker 1: across his lap, the spotlight forgotten on the seat beside him,
Speaker 1: and then it moved toward him. Not fast, not aggressive,
Speaker 1: just a slow, deliberate drift down the face of the ridge.
Speaker 1: And as it got closer, Dale said he could see
Speaker 1: that it wasn't just light, there was something inside it.
Speaker 1: He described it as a shape, a dark mass at
Speaker 1: the center of the glow, roughly humanoid, but wrong in
Speaker 1: its proportions. The arms were too long, the head was
Speaker 1: too narrow, and.
Speaker 2: It was watching him.
Speaker 1: He couldn't explain how he knew that, but he was
Speaker 1: certain of it. Dale started the truck and left. He
Speaker 1: drove home doing seventy on dirt roads and didn't look
Speaker 1: in the rear view mirror once. He told Carol what happened,
Speaker 1: and she told him to stay away from that mesa,
Speaker 1: and he intended to. He fully intended to put the
Speaker 1: whole experience behind him, But three nights later it started.
Speaker 1: Carol woke up at two in the morning to a
Speaker 1: sound she described as something heavy dragging across the roof
Speaker 1: of the house, not footsteps, a dragging, scraping sound, like
Speaker 1: someone pulling a log across the shingles. She woke Dale,
Speaker 1: and by the time he got outside with the rifle,
Speaker 1: the sound had stopped. But their dogs, two blue heelers,
Speaker 1: who were afraid of absolutely nothing, were cowering under the
Speaker 1: porch whimpering. They wouldn't come out. Dale had to physically
Speaker 1: pull them from under there the next morning, and even
Speaker 1: then they wouldn't go near the east side of the house.
Speaker 1: Over the following weeks, the Meyerhoff household descended into what
Speaker 1: I can only describe as a siege. Objects moved on
Speaker 1: their own. Carol would set her coffee cup on the
Speaker 1: kitchen counter and find it on the living room floor.
Speaker 1: Doors that Dale had locked would be standing wide open
Speaker 1: in the morning.
Speaker 2: One night, they.
Speaker 1: Both watched as a kitchen chair slid approximately three feet
Speaker 1: across the linoleum floor with no one near it, just slid,
Speaker 1: smooth and deliberate, as if someone invisible had pulled it
Speaker 1: out from the table. But the shadow was the worst part.
Speaker 1: Well first saw it standing in the hallway outside their
Speaker 1: bedroom about two weeks after his night on the MESA.
Speaker 1: He'd gotten up to use the bathroom and there it was,
Speaker 1: a figure, solid black, standing perfectly still at the end
Speaker 1: of the hall.
Speaker 2: It was tall, too tall.
Speaker 1: It nearly touched the ceiling, and their hallway ceiling was
Speaker 1: a good eight feet. Dale said he couldn't see features,
Speaker 1: couldn't see eyes, but he could feel it looking at
Speaker 1: him with something he described as curiosity mixed with malice.
Speaker 1: He stood there, staring at it for probably thirty seconds,
Speaker 1: and then it simply wasn't there anymore. It didn't walk away,
Speaker 1: it didn't dissolve. One moment it existed and the next
Speaker 1: it didn't. Carol saw it too, multiple times in the hallway,
Speaker 1: in the kitchen, once standing beside their bed at three
Speaker 1: in the morning, leaning over her She woke up feeling
Speaker 1: what she called a pressure on her chest and opened
Speaker 1: her eyes to find this towering black shape inches from
Speaker 1: her face. It screamed so loud the neighbors a half
Speaker 1: mile away heard it. Dale contacted a pastor from their church.
Speaker 1: The pastor came out, prayed over the house, blessed every room.
Speaker 1: The activity stopped for exactly forty eight hours, and then
Speaker 1: came back worse. Now there were sounds, not just the
Speaker 1: dragging on the roof, but knocking, three deliberate knocks on walls,
Speaker 1: on windows, on the bedroom door at night, always in
Speaker 1: sets of three. The final straw came in December of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight. Dale walked into his barn one morning
Speaker 1: and found one of his horses dead in its stall.
Speaker 1: There was no visible cause of death, no wounds, no
Speaker 1: signs of colic, no indication the animal had been distressed.
Speaker 1: But the horse's eyes were wide open, and Dale said
Speaker 1: its face was frozen in an expression of absolute terror.
Speaker 1: The veterinarian who examined it could find no cause of death.
Speaker 1: The heart had simply stopped. The Meyerhoff sold that property
Speaker 1: in the spring of nineteen seventy nine and moved to Provo.
Speaker 1: According to the Moufon file, the activity followed them for
Speaker 1: approximately three more months in the new location before gradually
Speaker 1: tapering off. Dale never went back to the basin. He
Speaker 1: passed away in two thousand and four, and to the
Speaker 1: end of his life he maintained that something had followed
Speaker 1: him home from that mesa, something that had been waiting
Speaker 1: out there in the dark long before he showed up,
Speaker 1: and something that, for reasons he'd never understand, had decided
Speaker 1: to come home with him. And here's what gets me
Speaker 1: about Dale's story. Here's the detail that really ties it
Speaker 1: to the hitchhiker effect as we'd come to understand it
Speaker 1: decades later. The activity didn't stay confined to Dale. His
Speaker 1: nearest neighbor on the new property in Provo, a woman
Speaker 1: named Linda, reported seeing a tall shadow figure in her
Speaker 1: backyard twice in the weeks after the Meyerhoffs moved in.
Speaker 1: She'd never experienced anything like it before. Whatever had attached
Speaker 1: itself to Dale, it wasn't just following him. It was
Speaker 1: radiating out word affecting everyone in proximity. That's the signature.
Speaker 1: That's what makes this thing different from your standard haunting,
Speaker 1: and that's what makes it so terrifying. Now, let's head
Speaker 1: southeast to a place I know well, being from Georgia myself,
Speaker 1: and I've got to tell you this one hits a
Speaker 1: little closer to home in more ways than one. Chickamauga
Speaker 1: Battlefield sits in the northwest corner of Georgia, right there
Speaker 1: along the Tennessee border, and it's one of the bloodiest
Speaker 1: pieces of ground in American history. September of eighteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: over thirty four thousand men were killed, wounded, or went
Speaker 1: missing in a two day battle that remains the second
Speaker 1: bloodiest engagement of the entire Civil War, right behind Gettysburg.
Speaker 1: The land there carries a weight. You can feel it
Speaker 1: when you walk those fields. I've been there myself, and
Speaker 1: I don't mind telling you that, even in broad daylight,
Speaker 1: there are spots on that battlefield where the air feels different, thicker, older,
Speaker 1: like the ground itself is holding on to some something
Speaker 1: it can't let go of. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
Speaker 1: Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. The park
Speaker 1: rangers and locals have reported strange occurrences there for over
Speaker 1: a century. Apparitions of soldiers, unexplained sounds of gunfire and screaming,
Speaker 1: a phantom figure known as Old Green Eyes that's been
Speaker 1: spotted near the monument area for decades. But what most
Speaker 1: people don't know is that Chickamauga has its own version
Speaker 1: of the hitchhiker effect, and the case I'm about to
Speaker 1: tell you is one of the most well documented examples
Speaker 1: outside the Uenta Basin. In the spring of nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 1: a paranormal investigator named Gerald Whitfield organized an overnight investigation
Speaker 1: of the battlefield. Gerald was a serious researcher, former high
Speaker 1: school history teacher, amateur historian, and founding member of a
Speaker 1: small paranormal investigation group based out of Chattanooga called the
Speaker 1: Tennessee Valley Paranormal Society. He'd been investigating alleged hauntings for
Speaker 1: about twelve years at the point, and he'd never experienced
Speaker 1: anything he couldn't explain away with a rational cause. Gerald was,
Speaker 1: by his own admission, a skeptic who desperately wanted to believe,
Speaker 1: but hadn't found his proof yet. He brought three other
Speaker 1: investigators with him that April night, his wife Donna, a
Speaker 1: man named Ray Castillo, who handled their electronic equipment, and
Speaker 1: a woman named Patricia Bowman, who served as the group's
Speaker 1: historian and researcher. They set up near the Brotherton cabin
Speaker 1: area around nine in the evening, equipped with audio recorders,
Speaker 1: a couple of early model video cameras, and electromagnetic field
Speaker 1: detectors that Ray had built himself from a kit he'd
Speaker 1: ordered out of a magazine. For the first few hours,
Speaker 1: nothing happened. They recorded audio and various locations, took baseline
Speaker 1: EMF readings, and walked the fields in the dark with flashlights.
Speaker 1: Gerald was starting to think it'd be another uneventful night.
Speaker 1: Then around midnight, Patricia called the group over to an
Speaker 1: area near the tree line at the other edge of.
Speaker 2: The Brotherton field.
Speaker 1: She said she'd heard something, not gunfire, not screaming, but
Speaker 1: what she described as breathing, heavy, labored breathing, as though
Speaker 1: someone very close to her was struggling to draw air.
Speaker 1: She said it sounded wet, like there was fluid in
Speaker 1: the lungs now. For those of you who know your
Speaker 1: Civil War history, you know that many of the soldiers
Speaker 1: who died at Chickamauga succumbed to chest wounds. The mini
Speaker 1: balls used in that era caused catastrophic internal damage, and
Speaker 1: a man shot through the chest would have spent his
Speaker 1: final minutes doing exactly what Patricia described, struggling to breathe
Speaker 1: through lungs filling with blood. Gerald moved to Patricia's location
Speaker 1: and confirmed he could hear it too. He said it
Speaker 1: seemed to be coming from a point in the air,
Speaker 1: about three feet off the ground and maybe six feet
Speaker 1: in front of them. Ray started getting emf readings that were,
Speaker 1: in his words, off the charts. The needle on his
Speaker 1: homemade meter was buried in the red Donna began rolling video,
Speaker 1: though it was too dark to capture much visually, and
Speaker 1: then something happened that changed everything for Gerald Whitfield. He
Speaker 1: turned on his flashlight and swept the beam across the
Speaker 1: tree line, and for just a moment, he estimated less
Speaker 1: than two seconds, the beam illuminated a figure standing among
Speaker 1: the trees. It wasn't a Civil War soldier, it wasn't
Speaker 1: a ghost in period clothing. Gerald described it as a
Speaker 1: mass of darkness in a vaguely human shape, standing motionless,
Speaker 1: approximately twenty feet from where they stood.
Speaker 2: But what disturbed him, what.
Speaker 1: He'd emphasized every time he retold this story for the
Speaker 1: rest of his life. Was that the flashlight beam didn't
Speaker 1: illuminate it the way it should have. The light hit
Speaker 1: this thing and seemed to be absorbed. It didn't reflect,
Speaker 1: It didn't cast a shadow behind the figure. The darkness
Speaker 1: that composed this shape was somehow deeper and more absolute
Speaker 1: than the darkness surrounding it. Gerald's flashlight died. Brand new
Speaker 1: batteries installed that evening dead raise EMF meter stopped functioning.
Speaker 1: Donna's video camera powered itself off and wouldn't restart. Every
Speaker 1: piece of electronic equipment they'd brought went dark simultaneously.
Speaker 2: They left.
Speaker 1: Gerald made the call, and they packed up and drove
Speaker 1: back to Chattanooga, arriving at Gerald and Donna's home around
Speaker 1: two thirty in the morning. They debriefed in the living
Speaker 1: room for about an hour and everyone went to bed,
Speaker 1: and for about forty eight hours, everything seemed fine. Then
Speaker 1: Donna noticed the smell. It started in the guest bedroom
Speaker 1: but spread through the house over the course of a day,
Speaker 1: A thick, sweet, rotten smell that Jerald said was unmistakable
Speaker 1: if you'd ever encountered it decomposition. It smelled like something
Speaker 1: had died inside their walls. Jerald tore open drywall in
Speaker 1: two rooms looking for a dead animal. He checked the
Speaker 1: crawl space, the attic, the duct work.
Speaker 2: Nothing.
Speaker 1: The smell would intensify at night and seemed to fade
Speaker 1: during the day, but it never fully went away. Then
Speaker 1: came the footsteps, heavy deliberate footsteps, crossing the second floor
Speaker 1: of their home in the middle of the night. Gerald
Speaker 1: and Donna's bedroom was on the first floor, and the
Speaker 1: second floor was used only for storage. Night after night,
Speaker 1: they'd lie in bed listening to something paced back and
Speaker 1: forth above them, the old hardwood floor creaking under what
Speaker 1: sounded like considerable weight. Jerald set up audio recording equipment
Speaker 1: on the second floor. When he played the tapes back,
Speaker 1: the footsteps were clearly audible, But there was something else
Speaker 1: on the recordings too. Underneath the footsteps, barely perceptible, was
Speaker 1: a sound that Gerald described as moaning, low, continuous, agonized moaning,
Speaker 1: like a man in tremendous pain, trying not.
Speaker 2: To cry out.
Speaker 1: Ray Castillo started experiencing things at his own home, lights
Speaker 1: turning on and off, his television changing channels on its own.
Speaker 1: One morning, he walked into his kitchen to find every
Speaker 1: cabinet door standing wide open.
Speaker 2: Lived alone.
Speaker 1: Patricia Bowman reported persistent nightmares, always the same dream, always
Speaker 1: the same scenario. She was lying on the ground, unable
Speaker 1: to move while a figure made of shadow leaned over
Speaker 1: her and she could feel it pulling something out of
Speaker 1: her chest. She'd wake up gasping, unable to breathe, with
Speaker 1: what felt like bruises on her sternum. She went to
Speaker 1: a doctor who found nothing wrong, but Gerald and Donna
Speaker 1: bore the brunt of it. Over the next three months,
Speaker 1: their home became what Jerald documented in painstaking detail in
Speaker 1: a journal that was later shared with researchers at the
Speaker 1: Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina. The footsteps continued nightly,
Speaker 1: the smell persisted. New phenomena appeared, cold spots that would
Speaker 1: materialize in the middle of rooms, dropping the temperature by
Speaker 1: what Gerald measured as fifteen to twenty degrees in a
Speaker 1: localized area no more than three feet in diameter, scratching
Speaker 1: sounds inside the walls that would follow them from room
Speaker 1: to room, and the shadow feels. Gerald saw it first
Speaker 1: in the hallway, the same configuration Dale Meyerhoff had described
Speaker 1: eight years earlier and one thousand miles away. Though neither
Speaker 1: man would ever know about the other. A tall, dark form, featureless,
Speaker 1: standing motionless, and radiating what Gerald could only describe as attention.
Speaker 1: It appeared three more times in the hallway, once in
Speaker 1: the living room, and once the incident that nearly broke
Speaker 1: Jerald's resolve, standing over Donna's side of the bed. At
Speaker 1: four in the morning, Donna woke up screaming. She said
Speaker 1: she'd felt a hand on her throat, not squeezing, not choking,
Speaker 1: but resting there, cold, heavy, possessive. When she opened her eyes,
Speaker 1: the figure was leaning over her, and she could feel
Speaker 1: its breath, not warm like a living thing's breath, but cold,
Speaker 1: a stream of frigid air on her face that smelled
Speaker 1: like turned earth and copper. Gerald contacted every resource he
Speaker 1: could think of. He brought in a Baptist minister who
Speaker 1: performed a blessing. He brought in a Catholic deacon who
Speaker 1: conducted what amounted to an informal exorcism. He even consulted
Speaker 1: a Cherokee medicine woman from the reservation in North Carolina,
Speaker 1: based on a recommendation from a colleague. Each intervention provided
Speaker 1: temporary relief, a few days, maybe a week, of reduced
Speaker 1: activity before it came roaring back. The activity finally began
Speaker 1: to diminish in the late summer of nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 1: roughly five months after the investigation at Chickamauga. It didn't
Speaker 1: stop all at once.
Speaker 2: It tapered.
Speaker 1: The footsteps became less frequent, the smell faded, The shadow
Speaker 1: figure appeared less often, and seemed, in Gerald's words, less
Speaker 1: solid each time, more like a stain in the air
Speaker 1: than a presence with form and weight. By October it
Speaker 1: was essentially gone. But Gerald Whitfield was never the same.
Speaker 1: He continued investigating for another decade, but he told colleagues
Speaker 1: he never again visited a battlefield at night. Whatever they'd
Speaker 1: encountered at Chickamauga, whatever had followed them home from those
Speaker 1: blood soaked fields, had stripped away his comfortable skepticism and
Speaker 1: replaced it with something he struggled to name, not quite faith,
Speaker 1: not quite fear, something in between that sat in his
Speaker 1: chest like a stone and never fully dissolved. He said
Speaker 1: something in his final interview before he passed in twenty
Speaker 1: eleven that stuck with me. I spent twelve years looking
Speaker 1: for proof that the paranormal was real. I found it,
Speaker 1: and I've spent every year since wishing I hadn't that.
Speaker 1: Right there, folks, is the hitchhiker effect distilled to its essence.
Speaker 1: Be careful what you go looking for, because it might
Speaker 1: just come looking for you. Right back, Let's jump ahead
Speaker 1: to the mid nineties and head out to the Pacific
Speaker 1: Northwest to a case that came to my attention through
Speaker 1: a researcher named Dennis Balthaser, who spent decades investigating anomalist
Speaker 1: phenomena across the Western United States. In June of nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety four, a couple named Scott and Michelle Alderman were
Speaker 1: on their honeymoon. They'd gotten married in Portland and decided
Speaker 1: to spend a week in central Oregon near Bend, renting
Speaker 1: a cabin and doing some hiking and exploring. Both of
Speaker 1: them were in their late twenties, both were outdoors enthusiasts,
Speaker 1: and neither one of them had the slightest interest in
Speaker 1: the paranormal. They didn't watch horror movies, they didn't read
Speaker 1: ghost stories. The closest they'd come to anything in our
Speaker 1: world was Scott's childhood fascination with Bigfoot, which he'd largely
Speaker 1: outgrown by the time he finished college. These were not
Speaker 1: people primed for a paranormal experience, and I think that's
Speaker 1: what makes their account so compelling. There was no framework
Speaker 1: of expectation for what happened to them. About three days
Speaker 1: into their trip, they decided to hike a trail system
Speaker 1: in the Dashuot's National Forest that led up to a
Speaker 1: ridgeline overlooking the Cascades. It was a gorgeous day, clear skies,
Speaker 1: temperatures in the low seventies, perfect hiking conditions. He gott
Speaker 1: in trail information from the cabin's owner, an older gentleman
Speaker 1: named Walt, who'd lived in the area his whole life.
Speaker 1: And here's a detail that becomes important later. When Scott
Speaker 1: mentioned which ridge line they were planning to hike, Walt paused.
Speaker 1: Scott said it was a noticeable pause, long enough to
Speaker 1: be strange, and Walt's expression shifted. He told them the
Speaker 1: trail was fine, but suggested they not linger on the
Speaker 1: ridge line pass sundown. When Scott asked why, Walt just
Speaker 1: said the ridge could be disorienting after dark and lift
Speaker 1: it at that. They started the hike around ten in
Speaker 1: the morning and reached the ridge line by early afternoon.
Speaker 1: The views were spectacular, and they spent a couple of
Speaker 1: hours exploring, taking photos, eating lunch on a rocky outcropping
Speaker 1: with a panoramic view of the mountains. Everything was perfect,
Speaker 1: everything was normal. Around four in the afternoon, they started
Speaker 1: noticing something odd. The forest, which had been full of
Speaker 1: bird calls and insects sounds all day, went quiet, completely,
Speaker 1: utterly silent. Michelle commented on it first, and once Scott
Speaker 1: noticed it, he couldn't unnotice it. They were standing on
Speaker 1: a ridge line surrounded by hundreds of thousands of acres
Speaker 1: of dense forest, and there was not a single sound,
Speaker 1: no wind in the trees, no birds, nothing. Then Michelle
Speaker 1: grabbed Scott's arm and pointed down the slope to their left,
Speaker 1: about one hundred yards below them, just inside the tree line,
Speaker 1: something was moving. Scott described it as a shimmer, not
Speaker 1: a figure, not an animal, but a distortion in the air,
Speaker 1: like heat rising off pavement, except it was a cool
Speaker 1: day and it was happening in a specific, localized area
Speaker 1: that appeared to be moving horizontally.
Speaker 2: Through the trees.
Speaker 1: He said it was roughly the size and shape of
Speaker 1: a person, but there was nothing solid about it, just
Speaker 1: a ripple in the air, like looking through warped glass.
Speaker 1: They watched it for maybe thirty seconds before it stopped
Speaker 1: moving and seemed to face them again. There was nothing
Speaker 1: to see, no face, no eyes, but both Scott and
Speaker 1: Michelle reported the same sensation that whatever this distortion was,
Speaker 1: it was now aware of them, and it was observing
Speaker 1: them with intent. Michelle said she wanted to leave immediately.
Speaker 1: She described a feeling of dread that she said was
Speaker 1: unlike anything she'd experienced before or since. Not the kind
Speaker 1: of fear you'd feel from a bear sighting or a
Speaker 1: near miss in traffic, but something primal, something that seemed
Speaker 1: to originate not from her mind, but from somewhere deeper,
Speaker 1: as if her body itself was screaming at her to run.
Speaker 1: Scott felt it too. They grabbed their packs and hiked
Speaker 1: down the trail faster than was probably safe, practically jogging
Speaker 1: over loose rock and exposed roots. They made it back
Speaker 1: to the cabin before dark, and that first night nothing happened.
Speaker 1: They chalked the experience up to some kind of optical illusion,
Speaker 1: maybe a temperature inversion creating a mirage effect, maybe just
Speaker 1: trail for fatigue playing tricks on their eyes. They laughed
Speaker 1: about it over dinner. They went to bed, feeling silly
Speaker 1: for getting so spooked. The second night is when it started.
Speaker 1: Scott woke up at two forty seven in the morning.
Speaker 1: He remembered the exact time because he looked at the
Speaker 1: clock to a sound outside the cabin, tapping rhythmic, deliberate
Speaker 1: tapping on the exterior wall, right behind the headboard of
Speaker 1: their bed, tap, tap, tap, like someone standing outside in
Speaker 1: the dark, pressing a finger against the siding at measured intervals.
Speaker 1: He got up, looked out the window and saw nothing.
Speaker 1: He went to the front door, turned on the porch light,
Speaker 1: and stepped outside. The tapping stop the instant the light
Speaker 1: came on. The night was still and clear, and there
Speaker 1: was absolutely nothing near the wall. No animal tracks in
Speaker 1: the soft dirt around the cabin's foundation, no branches close
Speaker 1: enough to brush the siding. He went back to bed.
Speaker 1: Twenty minutes later, the tap resumed, same pattern, same wall.
Speaker 1: He didn't get up again. He lay there listening to
Speaker 1: it until it stopped on its own around four in
Speaker 1: the morning. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll
Speaker 1: be back after these messages. The next day, they cut
Speaker 1: the trip short something about that cabin, that ridgeline, that
Speaker 1: whole area had gotten under their skin in a way
Speaker 1: neither of them could articulate. They drove back to Portland
Speaker 1: four days early. And here's where I need you to
Speaker 1: really buckle in, because what happened over the next several
Speaker 1: months to Scott and Michelle Alderman is one of the
Speaker 1: most detailed and consistently documented hitchhiker cases I've come across.
Speaker 1: Within a week of returning to their apartment in Portland,
Speaker 1: Michelle began seeing something in her peripheral vision. She described
Speaker 1: it as a dark shape roughly five feet tall, that
Speaker 1: would appear at the edge of her field of vision
Speaker 1: and vanish the instant she turned to look at it directly.
Speaker 1: It happened at home, It happened at work, It happened
Speaker 1: in the grocery store, at the gym, in parking lots,
Speaker 1: always just at the edge of sight, always gone before
Speaker 1: she could get a clear look. Scott started experiencing something different.
Speaker 1: Electronics around him began malfunctioning in bizarre ways. His computer
Speaker 1: at work would crash repeatedly, always at the same time,
Speaker 1: two forty seven in the afternoon, the same time he'd
Speaker 1: woken up to the tapping. His watch stopped. He replaced
Speaker 1: the battery, it stopped again. He bought a new watch,
Speaker 1: that one stopped too. The television in their apartment would
Speaker 1: turn itself on at night, always to static, always at
Speaker 1: a volume that was just barely audible, a low hiss
Speaker 1: that you'd almost mistake for white noise if you didn't
Speaker 1: notice the faint blue glow of the screen illuminating the room.
Speaker 1: Michelle's peripheral sightings escalated. She started seeing the shape in
Speaker 1: the apartment, and it wasn't just at the edges anymore.
Speaker 1: She'd catch it standing in doorways, in the hallway, in
Speaker 1: the corner of the bedroom, still never when she looked directly,
Speaker 1: but lasting longer, lingering, as if testing how close it
Speaker 1: could get before she turned. Then came the night she
Speaker 1: saw it straight on. She'd gotten up to get a
Speaker 1: glass of water and walked into the kitchen without turning
Speaker 1: on the light. Street light coming through the window provided
Speaker 1: enough illumination to navigate, and as she reached for a glass,
Speaker 1: she glanced toward the living room. Something was standing in
Speaker 1: the middle of the room, not at the edge of
Speaker 1: her vision, not in a doorway, dead center of the
Speaker 1: living room, motionless facing her.
Speaker 2: Michelle froze.
Speaker 1: She said it was the same height she'd been estimating,
Speaker 1: about five feet, but it wasn't human shaped. It was
Speaker 1: too thin, the limbs too elongated, and it appeared to
Speaker 1: have no defined edges. It was as if someone had
Speaker 1: taken a three dimensional shadow and stood it upright, and
Speaker 1: the borders of its form wavered slightly, like smoke. Trying
Speaker 1: to hold a shape. She dropped the glass. It shattered
Speaker 1: on the kitchen floor, and the sound seemed to break
Speaker 1: whatever held the moment in place. The figure didn't vanish
Speaker 1: like it had before. It moved quickly, fluidly, without any sound,
Speaker 1: toward the corner of the room and into the wall,
Speaker 1: not through the wall, into it, as if the wall
Speaker 1: had absorbed it. Michelle screamed, Scott came running. They turned
Speaker 1: on every light in the apartment and sat in the
Speaker 1: living room until dawn. They moved out of that apartment
Speaker 1: within the month. The activity continued in the new place,
Speaker 1: but at a reduced intensity, fewer sightings, less frequent electronic disturbances.
Speaker 1: Michelle started seeing a therapist, and when she described what
Speaker 1: was happening, the therapist referred her to a parapsychologist at
Speaker 1: Portland State University who was collecting accounts of anomalous experiences.
Speaker 1: That researcher is the one who connected their case to
Speaker 1: the broader pattern of hitchhiker effect phenomena. The activity finally
Speaker 1: seen east in early nineteen ninety five, roughly eight months
Speaker 1: after the Ridgeline experience, but it.
Speaker 2: Left its mark.
Speaker 1: Scott told the researcher something that echoes what so many
Speaker 1: of these witnesses say. I don't know what we saw
Speaker 1: up there, and I don't know what followed us home,
Speaker 1: but I know this, we were noticed. Whatever it was,
Speaker 1: it noticed us, and for a while it didn't want
Speaker 1: to let go. Years later, Scott tracked down Walt, the
Speaker 1: cabin owner, and asked him directly what he knew about
Speaker 1: that ridge line. Walt was quiet for a long time,
Speaker 1: then said the local Native American community had considered that
Speaker 1: ridge line a spirit road, a path used by entities
Speaker 1: moving between worlds. He said he'd had other guests come
Speaker 1: back from hikes up there looking shaken, though most of
Speaker 1: them never said why, and he said that his own
Speaker 1: wife had refused to go near that ridge for the
Speaker 1: last fifteen years of her life. After an experience, she
Speaker 1: would never discuss a spirit road between worlds, and Scott
Speaker 1: and Michelle had stood right in the middle of it,
Speaker 1: taking photos and eating sandwiches, completely unaware that they just
Speaker 1: made themselves visible to something that could reach across any
Speaker 1: distance to find them again. I want to pause here
Speaker 1: for a second because I think Scott and Michelle's case
Speaker 1: illustrates something crucial about the hitchhiker effect that separates it
Speaker 1: from traditional hauntings or Poultrygeist activity. With a haunting, the
Speaker 1: phenomena is tied to a location. The house is haunted,
Speaker 1: the building is haunted, the land is haunted. You leave
Speaker 1: and it stays. With Poultergeist activity, the phenomena is typically
Speaker 1: tied to a person, usually an adolescent, going through emotional turbulence,
Speaker 1: and it manifests wherever that person goes. The hitchhiker effect
Speaker 1: is something else entirely. It's not tied to a location
Speaker 1: because it follows you home. But it's also not quite
Speaker 1: the same as a poultergeist because the person isn't generating it.
Speaker 1: Something external, something with its own intelligence and its own agenda,
Speaker 1: makes a conscious decision to attach itself to a specific individual.
Speaker 1: It's predatory in a way that traditional paranormal classification systems
Speaker 1: don't account for. And the fact that two completely ordinary
Speaker 1: people newlyweds on their honeymoon could stumble into this simply
Speaker 1: by walking a trail at the wrong time tells you
Speaker 1: everything you need to know about how indiscriminate this phenomenon
Speaker 1: can be. You don't have to go looking for it,
Speaker 1: you don't have to provoke it. You just have to
Speaker 1: be visible. You just have to be there. Let me
Speaker 1: take you to West Virginia now, to a place that's
Speaker 1: become synonymous with high strangeness, Point Pleasant, home of the
Speaker 1: Mothman legend and one of the most concentrated hot spots
Speaker 1: of unexplained phenomena in North American history. And I'm going
Speaker 1: to tell you about a case that never made it
Speaker 1: into any of the Mothman books, that was dug out
Speaker 1: of a county Sheriff's department's unofficial files. In the fall
Speaker 1: of two thousand and three, a Mason County Sheriff's deputy
Speaker 1: named Kyle Harmon was assigned to investigate a series of
Speaker 1: trespassing complaints near the Old TNT area, the decommissioned World
Speaker 1: War II munition storage facility north of town where the
Speaker 1: original Mothman sightings occurred in nineteen sixty six and sixty seven.
Speaker 1: The TNT area had been drawing curiosity seekers and paranormal
Speaker 1: tourists for decades, and the local property owners were sick
Speaker 1: of it, people trampling their land, leaving trash, shining lights
Speaker 1: around at all hours. Kyle's job was to increase patrols
Speaker 1: and hopefully discourage the foot traffic. Kyle was thirty one
Speaker 1: years old, eight years on the force, decorated respected. He'd
Speaker 1: grown up in Mason County and was well aware of
Speaker 1: the Mothman lore, but he didn't put much stock in it.
Speaker 1: To him, the Mothman was a local legend that brought
Speaker 1: tourist dollars into a town that could use them, and
Speaker 1: the TNT area was just a bunch of old concrete
Speaker 1: bunkers slowly being reclaimed by the forest. Nothing spooky about it,
Speaker 1: just history and code zu. For the first couple of weeks,
Speaker 1: his patrols were uneventful. He drived the perimeter roads, occasionally
Speaker 1: roused a car load of teenagers or a paranormal investigation
Speaker 1: group from out of state, write a few warnings and
Speaker 1: move on.
Speaker 2: Routine work.
Speaker 1: On the night of October seventeenth, two thousand and three,
Speaker 1: Kyle was making a late patrol around eleven pm when
Speaker 1: he noticed a light coming from inside one of the
Speaker 1: old bunkers, Igloo number seven, which was supposed to be sealed.
Speaker 1: He figured it was trespassers and pulled his cruiser over
Speaker 1: to investigate on foot. As he approached the bunker, his
Speaker 1: radio went dead, not static dead. The display went dark,
Speaker 1: no power. His flashlight flickered twice and then stabilized, but
Speaker 1: at a noticeably dimmer output, as if something was draining
Speaker 1: the battery. Kyle was annoyed, but not alarmed equipment malfunctions happened.
Speaker 1: He reached the bunker entrance and found the old door ajar,
Speaker 1: which shouldn't have been possible because it had been welded
Speaker 1: shut by the county years earlier. The welds were intact,
Speaker 1: but the metal of the door itself had warped, creating
Speaker 1: a gap about eighteen inches wide. The light he'd seen
Speaker 1: from the road was coming from inside, a pale, bluish
Speaker 1: white luminance with no apparent source. Kyle squeezed through the
Speaker 1: gap and into the bunker. It was a concrete dome
Speaker 1: about thirty feet in diameter, empty except for debris and
Speaker 1: decades of accumulated dirt. But the light was there, hovering
Speaker 1: approximately four feet off the ground in the center of
Speaker 1: the space. It was roughly the size of a softball,
Speaker 1: and it was moving slowly, rotating in place, pulsing gently,
Speaker 1: casting that cold blue light on the curved concrete walls.
Speaker 1: Kyle stood there watching it for what he estimated was
Speaker 1: about two minutes. He said later that he felt completely calm,
Speaker 1: which in retrospect struck him as weird. He should have
Speaker 1: been afraid or at least confused. Instead, he felt a strange, surendery,
Speaker 1: almost as if something was deliberately suppressing his alarm response.
Speaker 1: And then the orb began to expand. It grew from
Speaker 1: softball size to roughly the diameter of a beach ball
Speaker 1: over the course of about ten seconds, and as it expanded,
Speaker 1: Kyle began to see something inside it.
Speaker 2: Not clearly.
Speaker 1: It was like looking through frosted glass, but there were
Speaker 1: shapes moving within the light, dark shapes humanoid but not human.
Speaker 1: He counted three of them, and they appeared to be
Speaker 1: looking outward, looking at him, pressing against the interior surface
Speaker 1: of the light.
Speaker 2: As if trying to push through.
Speaker 1: That's when the calm shattered and the fear hit him
Speaker 1: like a freight train. He turned and ran. He squeezed
Speaker 1: back through the gap in the door, sprinted to his cruiser,
Speaker 1: and drove straight back to the station. His radio came
Speaker 1: back to life the moment he started the engine, as
Speaker 1: if it had never been off. Kyle filed a report
Speaker 1: about the trespassing complaint, but did not include what he'd
Speaker 1: seen inside the bunker. He was a law in enforcement officer,
Speaker 1: he knew how that would read. He told his wife
Speaker 1: Sarah that night, and she could see he was shaken.
Speaker 1: Kyle Harmon was not a man who shook easily. Four
Speaker 1: days later, Sarah called Kyle at work in the middle
Speaker 1: of the afternoon, audibly distressed. She said she'd been in
Speaker 1: the kitchen making lunch when she heard the front door
Speaker 1: open and close. She assumed it was Kyle coming home early,
Speaker 1: but when she called out, no one answered. She walked
Speaker 1: into the living room and found it empty. The front
Speaker 1: door was locked. It was a dead bolt, you couldn't
Speaker 1: lock it from the outside without a key, and it
Speaker 1: had been locked from the inside. No one had come
Speaker 1: in but Sarah said the room felt occupied. She could
Speaker 1: sense a presence the way you can sense someone standing
Speaker 1: behind you in a dark room, even when you can't
Speaker 1: see or hear them. That night, their six year old daughter, Emma,
Speaker 1: woke up screaming. When Kyle and Sarah rushed to her room,
Speaker 1: Emma was sitting up in bed, pointing at the closet, sobbing.
Speaker 1: She said the blue man was in her closet. Kyle
Speaker 1: opened the door. It was empty, but the interior of
Speaker 1: the closet and this detail has never left me, was
Speaker 1: noticeably colder than the rest of the room. Not slightly cooler,
Speaker 1: significantly colder. Kyle said it felt like opening a refrigerator.
Speaker 1: The activity accelerated over the following weeks, with a consistency
Speaker 1: that made Kyle feel like he was losing his mind.
Speaker 1: Every night, at approximately eleven pm, the same time he
Speaker 1: discovered the light in the bunker, the television in the
Speaker 1: living room would turn on, always to a dead channel,
Speaker 1: always displaying static. If Kyle turned it off, it would
Speaker 1: turn back on within minutes. He unplugged it one night
Speaker 1: it turned on anyway. He stood there staring at a
Speaker 1: television that was displaying static, with no power source, and
Speaker 1: something inside his understanding of how the world worked quietly broke.
Speaker 1: Emma continued seeing the blue man. She described it in
Speaker 1: the way only a six year old can, matter of factly,
Speaker 1: without embellishment, as if she was describing something as real
Speaker 1: and mundane as the family dog. She said, it was tall,
Speaker 1: it was blue like the sky, but darker, and it
Speaker 1: watched her. It didn't talk, it didn't move. It just
Speaker 1: stood in places, her room, the hallway, the backyard and watched.
Speaker 1: When Kyle asked if it scared her, she thought about
Speaker 1: it and said, it's not mean, it's just hungry. That
Speaker 1: answer is the one that still gives me chills when
Speaker 1: I think about it, coming from a six year old.
Speaker 1: It's just hungry. Kyle, to his credit, started documenting everything.
Speaker 1: He kept a detailed log, timestamped noting every incident. He
Speaker 1: photographed the television turning on while unplugged. He recorded audio
Speaker 1: of the footsteps that had started occurring on the second floor,
Speaker 1: heavy measured, always pacing the same path from the spare
Speaker 1: bedroom to the top of the stairs and back. He
Speaker 1: also started talking to people in point pleasant quietly, carefully
Speaker 1: feeling out who might have had similar experiences, and he
Speaker 1: found them. A lot of them locals who'd spent time
Speaker 1: in the TNT area and come home to disturbances they
Speaker 1: couldn't explain. People who'd reported shadow figures orbsidings in their homes,
Speaker 1: electronic malfunctions, animals behaving strangely. The phenomenon was far more
Speaker 1: widespread than anyone publicly acknowledged. People just didn't talk about it, because, well,
Speaker 1: who'd believe them. Kyle eventually connected with a researcher named
Speaker 1: Frank Ficino, who'd been investigating mothman and related phenomena in.
Speaker 2: The area for years.
Speaker 1: Facino told Kyle that what he was experiencing was consistent
Speaker 1: with what other witnesses had reported, and that the TNT
Speaker 1: area seemed to function as a gateway, a location where
Speaker 1: something was capable of latching onto individuals and following them.
Speaker 1: The activity in the Harmon household persisted for approximately seven
Speaker 1: months before gradually diminishing. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. It never fully stopped.
Speaker 1: While they lived in Mason County. Small things continued. The
Speaker 1: occasional electronic glitch, the rare cold spot, the feeling of
Speaker 1: being watched in certain rooms at certain hours. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and six, Kyle transferred to a department in Charleston,
Speaker 1: West Virginia, and after the move, the phenomena ceased entirely. Emma,
Speaker 1: by then nine years old, stopped seeing the blue man.
Speaker 1: She told her mother one day, casually that he stayed behind.
Speaker 1: Kyle Harmon retired from law enforcement in twenty eighteen, and
Speaker 1: in his retirement he's become one of the more candid
Speaker 1: former officers I've spoken with about anomaloust experiences. He doesn't
Speaker 1: try to explain what happened. He doesn't theorize about interdimensional
Speaker 1: portals or government experiments or anything else. He just says
Speaker 1: what he saw, what his family experienced, and leaves it
Speaker 1: at that. But he did say one thing that I
Speaker 1: think sums up the hitchhiker effect better than anything I've
Speaker 1: ever read in a research paper. I walked into that
Speaker 1: bunker as one person and walked out as another. Not
Speaker 1: because I changed, because something came out with me. And
Speaker 1: for a while it lived in my house and ate
Speaker 1: whatever it eats, fear maybe, or attention or something we
Speaker 1: don't even have a word for yet. And when it
Speaker 1: was done, it left like we were a rest stop.
Speaker 1: A rest stop. Think about that. We'd like to believe
Speaker 1: we're at the top of the food chain, wouldn't we.
Speaker 1: We'd like to believe we're the most significant thing in
Speaker 1: any room we walk into. But what if we're not?
Speaker 1: What if to whatever these things are, we're just a
Speaker 1: place to stop for a while. That thought keeps me
Speaker 1: up at night. All right, let's move to New England
Speaker 1: in a case that's practically tailor made for what we've
Speaker 1: been discussing tonight. If you're a student of American paranormal history,
Speaker 1: you've heard of the Bridgewater Triangle, a roughly two hundred
Speaker 1: square mile area in southeastern Massachusetts that's been a hot
Speaker 1: bed of unexplained activity for as long as anyone can remember.
Speaker 1: We're talking UFO sightings, bigfoot encounters, ghost lights, phantom animals,
Speaker 1: reports of cult activity, and a general atmosphere of wrongness
Speaker 1: that locals have been noting since the colonial era. The
Speaker 1: Hackomock Swamp, which sits at the heart of the triangle,
Speaker 1: was named by the Wampanoague people. The word roughly translates
Speaker 1: to place where spirits dwell. In the summer of twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: a small documentary crew from Boston set out to film
Speaker 1: a low budget feature about the Bridgewater Triangle. The director
Speaker 1: was a woman named Carla Simmons, a thirty six year
Speaker 1: old independent filmmaker who'd made a couple of well received
Speaker 1: short documentaries about local history and was looking for a
Speaker 1: project with broader appeal. She brought along a cameraman named
Speaker 1: James Navarro, a sound engineer named Pria Desai, and a
Speaker 1: production assistant named Tyler Beck, who was fresh out a
Speaker 1: film school and hungry for experience. None of them had
Speaker 1: any background in paranormal research. They were filmmakers first, and
Speaker 1: their approach to the subject was more cultural than investigative.
Speaker 1: Carla wanted to explore why these legends persisted, what they
Speaker 1: meant to the communities that lived within the triangle, and
Speaker 1: how folklore shapes a region's identity. She wasn't setting out
Speaker 1: to prove anything supernatural. She was making a film about
Speaker 1: people and stories. They spent three weeks filming throughout the
Speaker 1: triangle in July and August. They interviewed locals, historians, paranormal researchers,
Speaker 1: and skeptics. They shot atmospheric footage at Hacamock Swamp. Profile Rock,
Speaker 1: the Freetown Fall River State Forest, and a handful of
Speaker 1: other locations with reported activity, and for most of those
Speaker 1: three weeks it was exactly the straightforward documentary shoot Carla
Speaker 1: had planned. The problem started during their last night of
Speaker 1: filming at Hackamock Swamp. They'd gotten special permission from the
Speaker 1: local conservation Commission to be in the swamp after dark,
Speaker 1: and they'd set up at a boardwalk area near the
Speaker 1: southern edge around nine in the evening. The plan was
Speaker 1: to get nighttime footage the swamp by moonlight, ambient sounds,
Speaker 1: maybe some atmospheric shots with fog if they got lucky.
Speaker 1: Simple stuff. The first thing they noticed was the silence. Priya,
Speaker 1: who was monitoring audio through her headphones, pulled them off
Speaker 1: and looked at James with an expression he later described
Speaker 1: as bewildered. The swamp, which should have been a symphony
Speaker 1: of frogs, crickets and night birds, was completely silent. She
Speaker 1: held up her audio levels for Carla to see. The
Speaker 1: meters showed absolutely nothing. They were standing in one of
Speaker 1: the most biodiverse wetlands in New England and there was
Speaker 1: not a single sound. Then the lights appeared. James saw
Speaker 1: them first through his viewfinder. Three pale orange orbs rising
Speaker 1: out of the swamp approximately three hundred yards to the northeast.
Speaker 1: They moved in a triangular formation, drifting slowly from left
Speaker 1: to right, Hovering about ten feet above the water. They
Speaker 1: pulsated in a rhythm that Priya would later describe when
Speaker 1: she found her words again as synchronized, all three brightening
Speaker 1: and dimming in perfect unison, like they were connected, like
Speaker 1: they were one organism with three visible points. James filmed
Speaker 1: them for approximately ninety seconds before his camera died.
Speaker 2: Battery showed full charge one moment zero.
Speaker 1: The next Pria's recording equipment shut down. Simultaneously, Tyler's phone,
Speaker 1: which he'd pulled out to snap photos, froze on a
Speaker 1: black screen and wouldn't respond to any input.
Speaker 2: The only light.
Speaker 1: Source they had left was Carla's flashlight, and it was flickering.
Speaker 1: The orbs drifted closer. Carla made the call to leave.
Speaker 1: They gathered their dead equipment and moved quickly back along
Speaker 1: the boardwalk toward the parking area. As they walked, Tyler,
Speaker 1: who was bringing up the rear, said he felt something
Speaker 1: touch the back of his neck, not a branch, not
Speaker 1: a bug, a hand five distinct points of pressure, cold
Speaker 1: gripping just firmly enough to make him stumble forward. He
Speaker 1: spun around nothing there. The boardwalk behind him was empty.
Speaker 1: They drove back to Boston that night, and by the
Speaker 1: time they reached Carla's apartment where they'd been editing, the
Speaker 1: mood in the car had shifted from fear to a
Speaker 1: kind of nervous excitement. They were filmmakers. They just experienced
Speaker 1: something genuinely strange. This was going to make their documentary incredible.
Speaker 1: They didn't realize yet that the documentary was over. Everything
Speaker 1: that mattered was about to happen off camera. Priya was
Speaker 1: the first to notice changes. Within three days of the swampshoot,
Speaker 1: she began hearing sounds in her apartment that she couldn't source. Knocking,
Speaker 1: not from the door, or the walls or the pipes,
Speaker 1: but from inside her closet, Always from the closet in
Speaker 1: her bedroom, always in the middle of the night, always
Speaker 1: exactly three knocks. She'd open the closet and find nothing.
Speaker 1: The knocking would resume minutes later. James started experiencing visual disturbances,
Speaker 1: shadows that moved independently of any light source, sliding across
Speaker 1: walls and ceilings. In his peripheral vision. He'd be editing
Speaker 1: footage and see something dark pass behind him reflected in
Speaker 1: his monitor. He set up a GoPro in his apartment
Speaker 1: to try to catch it. When he reviewed the footage,
Speaker 1: there was nothing visible, but the audio picked up something
Speaker 1: a low frequency hum, well below what the human ear
Speaker 1: typically registers, that would spike in intensity at the exact
Speaker 1: moments James had reported seeing the shadows. Tyler, the youngest
Speaker 1: of the group, had the most dramatic experience. He woke
Speaker 1: up one morning to find every piece of furniture in
Speaker 1: his studio apartment had been rearranged, not subtly. His bed
Speaker 1: was in the kitchen, his desk was in the bathroom doorway.
Speaker 1: His couch was flipped upside down. He lived on the
Speaker 1: third floor of a walk up with no elevator. Of
Speaker 1: his neighbors reported hearing anything during the night. Tyler called
Speaker 1: Carla at seven in the morning, hyperventilating. Carla's own experience
Speaker 1: was more subtle, but in some ways more disturbing. She
Speaker 1: began having intrusive thoughts, not her own thoughts, she insisted,
Speaker 1: but thoughts that felt implanted, foreign, like someone else's voice
Speaker 1: speaking inside her head. They were always the same message,
Speaker 1: repeated at random intervals throughout the day.
Speaker 2: Come back.
Speaker 1: That's it, two words, come back.
Speaker 2: She said.
Speaker 1: It didn't feel like a command. It felt like an
Speaker 1: invitation from something that missed her, something that wanted her
Speaker 1: to return to the swamp so it could be closer
Speaker 1: to her. The crew stopped production on the documentary. The
Speaker 1: footage they'd captured, including what should have been ninety seconds of.
Speaker 2: The ORBS, was corrupted.
Speaker 1: Every file from that final night was unreadable. Their IT
Speaker 1: consultant couldn't recover any of it. Three weeks of filming
Speaker 1: on other nights was fine. Only the swamp footage was destroyed.
Speaker 1: Carla reached out to a paranormal research organization in Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: one connected with the long history of Bridgewater Triangle investigation,
Speaker 1: and was told in no uncertain terms that what they
Speaker 1: were experiencing was a known phenomenon. The researcher she spoke
Speaker 1: with used a term she'd never heard, the hitchhiker effect.
Speaker 1: He told her that the Hackamock Swamp was one of
Speaker 1: the most active locations in the Triangle for this type
Speaker 1: of attachment, and that multiple people had reported similar experiences
Speaker 1: after spending time there after dark. The researcher recommended a
Speaker 1: specific protocol. Individually and collectively, the crew needed to firmly
Speaker 1: and verbally state that they did not give permission for
Speaker 1: anything to follow them, to be in their homes, or
Speaker 1: to interact with them in any way. He said this
Speaker 1: worked for some people and not others, and he couldn't
Speaker 1: explain why, but he said the phenomenon typically ran its
Speaker 1: course in three to six month, regardless of intervention. Carla
Speaker 1: gathered her crew and they went through the protocol together.
Speaker 1: They each stated out loud that they revoked any permission
Speaker 1: they might have inadvertently granted, and demanded that whatever was
Speaker 1: affecting them leave. The results were mixed. For Priya and James,
Speaker 1: the activity decreased noticeably within a week and was gone
Speaker 1: within a month. For Tyler, it took longer, nearly four months,
Speaker 1: but eventually the disturbances ceased. For Carla, the intrusive thoughts
Speaker 1: persisted for almost exactly six months, growing gradually quieter like
Speaker 1: a radio signal, losing strength, until one morning she realized
Speaker 1: she hadn't heard come back in days. She never returned
Speaker 1: to the swamp. She never finished the documentary. She switched
Speaker 1: to filming food content for a streaming platform and hasn't
Speaker 1: worked on anything paranormal related since, but she still dreams
Speaker 1: about the swamp. Every few months, she has the same dream.
Speaker 1: She's standing on the board walk in the dark, and
Speaker 1: the three orange lights are hovering in the distance, and
Speaker 1: she can feel them calling to her, and in the
Speaker 1: dream she takes a step forward. She always takes a
Speaker 1: step forward. She wakes up before she reaches them, but
Speaker 1: each time she has the dream, she's a little bit closer.
Speaker 1: I think whatever we stumbled into that night is patient,
Speaker 1: she said. I think it's just waiting for me to
Speaker 1: come back. And I'm afraid that eventually, in one of
Speaker 1: those dreams, I'm going to reach those lights and I
Speaker 1: don't know what happens.
Speaker 2: Then.
Speaker 1: For our final account, tonight, we're going to bring this
Speaker 1: thing right up to the present day. And I got
Speaker 1: to tell you this one shook me partly because of
Speaker 1: the intensity of what was reported, partly because of how
Speaker 1: recently it happened, but mostly because the person at the
Speaker 1: center of it is a podcaster like me, someone who
Speaker 1: makes their living exploring these kinds of topics, who figured
Speaker 1: that understanding these phenomena from an intellectual distance somehow made
Speaker 1: them safe. It doesn't make you safe. Nothing makes you safe.
Speaker 1: If there's one lesson these six stories have taught us,
Speaker 1: it's that In the late summer of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: a podcaster and paranormal researcher who I'll call Marcus. He
Speaker 1: asked me not to use his real name, which I'm respecting,
Speaker 1: traveled to the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado to
Speaker 1: research a series of episodes about cattle mutilations and UFO
Speaker 1: activity in the region. If you're not familiar with the
Speaker 1: San Luis Valley, let me give you the quick version.
Speaker 1: It's a high altitude basin roughly the size of Connecticut,
Speaker 1: surrounded by mountains, sparsely populated, and it's been the epicenter
Speaker 1: of some of the most persistent anomalous activity in the
Speaker 1: American West for decades. Cattle mutilations, black helicopter sidings, UFO encounters,
Speaker 1: bigfoot reports, you name it, the San Luis Valley has
Speaker 1: it all. Christopher O'Brien spent years documenting the phenomena there
Speaker 1: and wrote multiple books about what he called the Mysterious Valley.
Speaker 1: Marcus had been podcasting for about four years primarily covering
Speaker 1: UFO topics and government disclosure. He had a decent sized
Speaker 1: audience and prided himself on a skeptical but open minded approach.
Speaker 1: He'd visited plenty of locations associated with anomalous activity Roswell
Speaker 1: Area fifty one perimeter, various alleged UFO crash sites without incident.
Speaker 1: He figured the San Luis Valley would be the same.
Speaker 1: Great material for content, nothing that would follow him home.
Speaker 1: He set up base in Gunnison, about an hour north
Speaker 1: of the valley, and spent eight days driving down each
Speaker 1: morning to interview ranchers, visit mutilation sites, and explore the
Speaker 1: areas where sightings had been concentrated. On his fifth day,
Speaker 1: a rancher named and I'm changing this name too, Tom Gallegos,
Speaker 1: took Marcus to a spot on his property where three
Speaker 1: cattle had been found mutilated over the past two years.
Speaker 1: It was an unremarkable piece of pasture at the base
Speaker 1: of a low hill, bordered by scrub, oak and sage.
Speaker 1: Nothing about it suggested anything unusual, but Tom was visibly
Speaker 1: nervous being there. He told Marcus he avoided this part
Speaker 1: of his property whenever possible, and that his cattle had
Speaker 1: started refusing to graze there after the last mutilation. The
Speaker 1: animals would get close and then veer off, finding their
Speaker 1: way around the area rather than through it. Tom said
Speaker 1: his dogs wouldn't go near it at all. Marcus set
Speaker 1: up recording equipment, microphone camera, a portable EMF detector he'd
Speaker 1: borrowed from a researcher friend. The EMF readings were unremarkable,
Speaker 1: The audio was clean. There was nothing to suggest anything
Speaker 1: anomalous about the location, except for the feeling. Marcus described
Speaker 1: it later as a pressure, not physical, but psychological, a
Speaker 1: feeling of being scrutinized by something he couldn't see, assessed, measured, weighed.
Speaker 2: He said it.
Speaker 1: Felt like standing in a room where you know someone
Speaker 1: is hiding, that prickling awareness of unseen eyes. Except it
Speaker 1: was daylight and they were in an open field with
Speaker 1: a clear line of sight in every direction. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: There was nowhere for anything to hide, but something was there.
Speaker 1: He was certain of it, and more unsettling, he was
Speaker 1: certain it was certain of him. Tom wanted to leave,
Speaker 1: so they did. Marcus felt fine driving back to Gunnison
Speaker 1: that evening, he had dinner, reviewed his recordings, went to
Speaker 1: bed normal night. He woke up at three twelve am
Speaker 1: to the sound of his rental car's horn blaring in
Speaker 1: the parking lot outside his motel room. He stumbled outside
Speaker 1: to find the car silent, no horn, no alarm, nothing,
Speaker 1: The car was locked. He checked it, went back inside,
Speaker 1: lay down. The horn went off again. He went outside again, silence.
Speaker 1: This repeated three more times before dawn. Each time he
Speaker 1: went outside, the horn stopped. Each time he lay back down,
Speaker 1: it started again. The front desk clerk told him the
Speaker 1: next morning that no one else had reported hearing a
Speaker 1: car horn. Marcus was in room fourteen. The clerk was
Speaker 1: in the office directly adjacent to the parking lot. She'd
Speaker 1: heard nothing. Marcus stayed three more days to finish his research,
Speaker 1: and during those three days small things happened. His phone
Speaker 1: would die at full charge, his recordings would have gaps
Speaker 1: five to ten minute sections of dead silence in the
Speaker 1: middle of otherwise continuous audio. His motel room television turned
Speaker 1: on by itself twice, both times to static, both times
Speaker 1: at three twelve in the morning. Then he drove home
Speaker 1: to Denver and it escalated. The first week back was
Speaker 1: subtle electronics acting up, lights flickering, his computer crashing during
Speaker 1: editing sessions, his smart home devices activating at random. His
Speaker 1: Alexa started responding to questions no one had asked, offering
Speaker 1: answers to queries that were, in Marcus's words, uncomfortably relevant
Speaker 1: to his research. One night, while he was editing audio
Speaker 1: from a Rancher interview in his home office, his Alexa, unprompted, unqueried, said,
Speaker 1: the valley misses you. Marcus disconnected the Alexa. He unplugged
Speaker 1: every smart device in his apartment. The next morning, he
Speaker 1: found his laptop open on the kitchen table, displaying a
Speaker 1: Google Map satellite view of the exact pasture where Tom
Speaker 1: had taken him. He lived alone, no one else had
Speaker 1: access to his apartment. The laptop had been closed and
Speaker 1: in his office bag. The night before week two brought
Speaker 1: the shadow. Marcus saw it first in the bathroom mirror,
Speaker 1: standing behind him while he was brushing his teeth, A
Speaker 1: figure roughly his height, composed of what he described as
Speaker 1: living darkness, not an absence of light, but an active, dense,
Speaker 1: three dimensional mass of blackness that seemed to absorb the
Speaker 1: light around it. He spun around nothing there, looked back
Speaker 1: at the mirror, gone. He saw it again two nights later,
Speaker 1: standing in the hallway outside his bedroom. He turned on
Speaker 1: the light and it vanished. He turned the light off,
Speaker 1: and it was there again, exactly where it had been,
Speaker 1: as if the darkness had simply reassembled around a form
Speaker 1: that had been there all along and was merely hidden
Speaker 1: by the light, not dispersed by it. Then came the sounds.
Speaker 1: Not knocking, not footsteps, voice, a low, guttural murmuring that
Speaker 1: seemed to come from inside the walls of his apartment.
Speaker 1: Not words, at least, not words in any language Marcus recognized,
Speaker 1: but clearly vocalization, clearly intentional, clearly directed at him. It
Speaker 1: happened nightly, between three and four in the morning.
Speaker 2: He recorded it.
Speaker 1: When he played the recordings for a linguist contact, the
Speaker 1: linguist said the phone patterns were structured. There was syntax, repetition,
Speaker 1: what appeared to be grammar. It sounded like language, but
Speaker 1: it wasn't any known language. Marcus reached out to Christopher O'Brien,
Speaker 1: the San Luis Valley researcher. O'Brien wasn't surprised, he told
Speaker 1: Marcus that what he was experiencing was consistent with reports
Speaker 1: from other researchers and visitors to the valley. He called
Speaker 1: it the hitchhiker effect, and explained that whatever intelligence operated
Speaker 1: in the valley seemed to have the ability to attach
Speaker 1: itself to individuals and follow them to their homes, sometimes
Speaker 1: across hundreds of miles. O'Brien had documented dozens of similar
Speaker 1: cases over the years. The situation deteriorated, Marcus's apartment building
Speaker 1: started experiencing anomalies that affected his neighbors. The couple in
Speaker 1: the unit below him reported hearing heavy footsteps above them
Speaker 1: at all hours, footsteps Marcus insisted he wasn't making because
Speaker 1: he was lying in bed, motionless, listening to the same
Speaker 1: footsteps in his own apartment. The woman across the hall
Speaker 1: told Marcus her cat had started staring at his door
Speaker 1: and hissing, arching its back, refu using to walk past
Speaker 1: his unit in the hallway. Marcus's mental health declined. He
Speaker 1: stopped sleeping well, he lost weight, He became jumpy and irritable.
Speaker 1: He said that he'd always been a rational person, someone
Speaker 1: who investigated these things from a safe distance, and that
Speaker 1: having the distance collapse, having the phenomenon move into his life,
Speaker 1: his home, his body was the most disorienting experience.
Speaker 2: Of his life.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just the fear, it was the loss of
Speaker 1: the boundary between observer and observed. He'd spent years studying
Speaker 1: these phenomena as if they were specimens under glass, and
Speaker 1: now the glass had shattered and the specimen was studying him.
Speaker 1: In November of twenty twenty three, Marcus conducted what he
Speaker 1: called a scorched Earth protocol. He'd talked to researchers, psychics,
Speaker 1: religious figures, and indigenous elders. He compiled every recommended approach
Speaker 1: to ending a hitchhiker attachment and did all of them.
Speaker 1: He had his apartment blessed by a priest. He smudged
Speaker 1: the white sage. He performed a banishing ritual he'd gotten
Speaker 1: from a ceremonial magician in Boulder. He stood in the
Speaker 1: center of his apartment and stated loudly and firmly that
Speaker 1: he revoked any and all permission for any entity to
Speaker 1: be present in his space, that he did not consent
Speaker 1: to contact, and that whatever had followed him from the
Speaker 1: San Luis Valley needed to return to where it came from.
Speaker 1: Whether it was one specific intervention, or the cumulative weight
Speaker 1: of all of them, or simply that the phenomenon had
Speaker 1: run its natural course. The activity began to decrease that
Speaker 1: same week. By December, the shadow was gone, the voices stopped,
Speaker 1: the electronics normalized, His neighbour's cat stopped hissing at his door.
Speaker 1: But Marcus said, and this is the part of his
Speaker 1: story that keeps circling back in my mind, that something
Speaker 1: fundamental changed in him during those three months. He said,
Speaker 1: it felt like something had been taken from him, some
Speaker 1: essential quality of self that he couldn't name or quantify,
Speaker 1: but could absolutely feel the absence of of like a
Speaker 1: color had been removed from his vision that he didn't
Speaker 1: know existed until it was gone. He said, he felt
Speaker 1: lighter in a way that should have been a relief,
Speaker 1: but instead felt like a loss. I think it fed
Speaker 1: on something, whatever it was. It took something from me
Speaker 1: when it left, some piece of energy or spirit or
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call it, and I don't think
Speaker 1: I'm going to get it back. Marcus hasn't traveled to
Speaker 1: investigate a site in person since he conducts interviews remotely. Now,
Speaker 1: he hasn't been back to the San Luis Valley. He
Speaker 1: says he never will, and he stopped podcasting about the
Speaker 1: paranormal three months ago. He didn't make an announcement, he
Speaker 1: just stopped. He said it was because he finally understood
Speaker 1: that these things aren't stories. They're not content, they're not episodes.
Speaker 1: They're alive and they're aware and they know when you're
Speaker 1: talking about them. That last sentence has been living in
Speaker 1: my head rent free since he said it. And you
Speaker 1: know what, I think Marcus is right. I think that's
Speaker 1: the piece of the puzzle we keep missing when we
Speaker 1: try to analyze these things from a distance. We treat
Speaker 1: the hitchhiker effect like a scientific phenomenon to be studied, categorized,
Speaker 1: and filed away. We give it a name, we document
Speaker 1: the patterns, we note the commonalities between cases, and we
Speaker 1: feel like we've accomplished something. But naming a thing isn't
Speaker 1: the same as understanding it, and understanding it isn't the
Speaker 1: same as being safe from it. What Marcus learned, what
Speaker 1: all six of these witnesses learned, is that the boundary
Speaker 1: between researcher and subject doesn't exist in these spaces. You
Speaker 1: can't observe from a safe distance when the thing you're
Speaker 1: observing can close that distance at will. And the worst part,
Speaker 1: the part that should keep every one of us up
Speaker 1: at night, is that we still don't know the rules.
Speaker 1: We don't know what attracts these things. We don't know
Speaker 1: why they choose certain people and not others. We don't
Speaker 1: know if the protocols and the blessings and the banishing
Speaker 1: rituals actually work, or if the phenomenon simply runs its
Speaker 1: course on its own timeline regardless of what we do.
Speaker 1: We're operating blind and the thing on the other side
Speaker 1: of the equation is not so. There you have it, folks.
Speaker 1: Six accounts, six decades, six locations, spread across this country,
Speaker 1: from Utah to Georgia, Oregon to West Virginia, Massachusetts to Colorado.
Speaker 1: Different witnesses, different backgrounds, different belief systems. A rancher, an
Speaker 1: investigator newlyweds, a deputy, filmmakers, and a podcaster, people with
Speaker 1: nothing in common except that they all went to a
Speaker 1: place where something was waiting, and they all brought it
Speaker 1: home with them. And now here's the part where I'm
Speaker 1: supposed to wrap this up with a neat little bow,
Speaker 1: maybe offer some theory about what these things are, where
Speaker 1: they come from, why they attach to certain people and
Speaker 1: not others. But I'm not going to do that because
Speaker 1: I don't have those answers. Nobody does, not the scientists,
Speaker 1: not the researchers, not the indigenous elders who've known about
Speaker 1: these places for centuries. We've got observations, we've got patterns,
Speaker 1: We've got a name, the hitchhiker effect that gives us
Speaker 1: the illusion of understanding without actually explaining a thing. What
Speaker 1: I can tell you is what the evidence suggests, and
Speaker 1: what it suggests is this, there are places on this
Speaker 1: earth where the rules we think we understand do not apply.
Speaker 1: Places where something exists that is intelligent, aware, and capable
Speaker 1: of interacting with human beings in ways that transcend our
Speaker 1: understanding of physics, consciousness, and the nature of reality itself.
Speaker 1: These things, whatever they are, can sense us, they can
Speaker 1: follow us, and they can enter our lives in ways
Speaker 1: that are tangible, measurable, and profoundly disturbing. If you're the
Speaker 1: type of person who seeks out these places, and I
Speaker 1: know a lot of you listening are because you're curious,
Speaker 1: because you're brave, because you need to know, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to tell you to stop. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: tell you to stay home and lock your doors and
Speaker 1: never explore the unknown. That's not who we are, that's
Speaker 1: not who I am. But I am going to tell
Speaker 1: you to be aware. Be aware that when you stand
Speaker 1: in a place of high strangeness, you're not just observing,
Speaker 1: You're participating. You're announcing your presence to something that may
Speaker 1: decide you're worth following. And if it does, if something
Speaker 1: latches on, know that you're not crazy and you're not alone.
Speaker 1: Thousands of people have experienced this. The phenomenon is real,
Speaker 1: it's documented, and eventually, in most.
Speaker 2: Cases, it lets go.
Speaker 1: I'll leave you with this thought because it's the one
Speaker 1: I keep coming back to when I lie awake at
Speaker 1: night thinking about these accounts. Every single one of these
Speaker 1: witnesses told us, in one way or another that the
Speaker 1: experience changed the way they understand reality. Not their beliefs
Speaker 1: about ghosts or spirits or the paranormal, their fundamental understanding
Speaker 1: of what reality is. Because once you've watched a television
Speaker 1: turn on with no power source, once you've seen in
Speaker 1: a shadow that thinks and watches and chooses, once you've
Speaker 1: heard a voice speaking a language that doesn't exist from
Speaker 1: inside the walls of your home, the comfortable assumptions that
Speaker 1: hold your world together start to crack, and they don't
Speaker 1: crack quietly, they shatter. These aren't ghost stories. These aren't
Speaker 1: creepy pasta tales written to give you goosebumps before bed.
Speaker 1: These are real people. A rancher, an investigator newlyweds, a
Speaker 1: law enforcement officer, filmmakers, and a podcaster whose lives were
Speaker 1: turned inside out by something that science can't explain and
Speaker 1: most of society refuses to acknowledge. They didn't go looking
Speaker 1: for trouble. They went to a place, and something at
Speaker 1: that place decided they were interesting enough to follow home,
Speaker 1: And for weeks, for months, sometimes longer, they lived with
Speaker 1: something in their homes that had no business being there,
Speaker 1: something intelligent, something hungry, something patient. Stay safe out there, folks,
Speaker 1: and maybe think twice before you follow that trail into
Speaker 1: the dark, because you might not be the only one
Speaker 1: walking that trail, and whatever's walking beside you might decide
Speaker 1: to follow you all the way home. And if you
Speaker 1: hear something knocking in sets of three, don't answer. Di
Speaker 1: La