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: Last time I told you about Herschel, a retired mill
Speaker 1: worker from Dalton, Georgia, who wrote me a six page
Speaker 1: letter on yellow legal paper about something that happened to
Speaker 1: him In the fall of nineteen seventy eight. He and
Speaker 1: three of his hunting buddies had leased a parcel deep
Speaker 1: in the Khuda Wilderness. Third night in they woke up
Speaker 1: to find their entire camp rearranged, coolers, moved tent stakes,
Speaker 1: pulled a field dressed dough taken down from the hanging
Speaker 1: pole and placed untouched in the center of their fire ring,
Speaker 1: not torn up, not fed on, placed like a message.
Speaker 1: Over the next four nights, things escalated, slow, deliberate knocking
Speaker 1: from the valley below, answered by knocking from the ridge above.
Speaker 1: Bipedal footsteps passing through camp in the dark, close enough
Speaker 1: that Pete, a Vietnam Vet who didn't rattle, easily felt
Speaker 1: the weight of each step come up through the ground
Speaker 1: and into his boots. And on the last night, Herschel
Speaker 1: aimed his flashlight into the hemlocks at the edge of
Speaker 1: the bench and saw two reddish points of eyeshine staring
Speaker 1: back at him from over seven feet off the ground.
Speaker 1: Something was there, something big, something that had been watching
Speaker 1: them for days, testing them, learning what they'd tolerate before
Speaker 1: it showed itself. They broke camp at first light. On
Speaker 1: the way out, Herschel found a line of creekstones arranged
Speaker 1: at the edge of camp, evenly spaced, pointing north up
Speaker 1: the ridge into the corridor that was forty.
Speaker 2: Eight years ago.
Speaker 1: And I told you at the end of that episode
Speaker 1: that Herschel wasn't the only one who'd written to me
Speaker 1: about that stretch of mountain. That there were four other
Speaker 1: stories from four other people, spanning four other decades, all
Speaker 1: describing encounters along the same ridge line, the same narrow valley,
Speaker 1: the same corridor. Tonight's story comes from sixteen years after Herschel's.
Speaker 1: It's nineteen ninety four, and a woman named Karen is
Speaker 1: about to spend three weeks weeks on a road she'll
Speaker 1: never be able to forget. Karen didn't send me a letter.
Speaker 1: She sent an email, four paragraphs long, clean and straightforward,
Speaker 1: with a subject line that read something on the fire Road,
Speaker 1: Polk County, Tennessee, nineteen ninety four. No preamble, no build up,
Speaker 1: no apology for reaching out. She just started talking. First
Speaker 1: sentence was I worked for the Forest Service for three
Speaker 1: seasons in the early nineties, and something happened on one
Speaker 1: of my assignments that I've never been able to explain.
Speaker 1: That's a good first sentence. It tells you a lot
Speaker 1: about who you're dealing with, a person who knows what
Speaker 1: she wants to say and doesn't waste your time getting there.
Speaker 1: I called her about a week later. She picked up
Speaker 1: on the second ring and said I was wondering when
Speaker 1: you'd call. She has a warm voice, strong Southern Appalachian cadence,
Speaker 1: but not heavy, more like the way people talk when
Speaker 1: they've spent their whole life in the mountains, but also
Speaker 1: read a lot and pay attention to words. She's precise.
Speaker 1: She'll correct herself mid sentence if she uses the wrong
Speaker 1: term for something. She'll say, no, wait, that's not right.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a culvert, it was a water bar. Let
Speaker 1: me say that again. I liked her immediately, and I
Speaker 1: trusted her, which is something I don't say lightly.
Speaker 2: Some people you talk to you.
Speaker 1: Can hear them working the story, shaping it, adjusting.
Speaker 2: It for the audience. Karen doesn't do that.
Speaker 1: She tells it the same way every time, flat delivery
Speaker 1: on the parts that were mundane, a little more weight
Speaker 1: on the parts that scared her. And when she gets
Speaker 1: to the part about the tire, her voice drops about
Speaker 1: half a register and slows down, and you can tell
Speaker 1: she's right back on that road in the dark. She's
Speaker 1: not performing it, she's remembering it. Karen is fifty three now.
Speaker 1: She lives in Cleveland, Tennessee, about twenty minutes from the
Speaker 1: Cherokee National Forest. Born and raised in the area. Her
Speaker 1: father worked for the Tennessee Valley Authority, and her mother
Speaker 1: taught fourth grade at a school in Benton. She grew
Speaker 1: up in the mountains the way a lot of people
Speaker 1: in that part of the state do, fishing, hiking, camping,
Speaker 1: learning the names of trees and birds, the way kids
Speaker 1: in cities learned street names and bus routes. She knows
Speaker 1: the woods. She's comfortable in them, or she was until
Speaker 1: that summer. After high school, she went to ut Knoxville
Speaker 1: for two years, didn't finish, came home and kicked around
Speaker 1: for a while doing different things. Waitressed, worked at a
Speaker 1: hardware store, did some seasonal farm work. In the spring
Speaker 1: of ninety three, she applied for a seasonal position with
Speaker 1: the Forest Service GS three temporary, no benefits, which is
Speaker 1: about as entry level as federal employment gets. She got
Speaker 1: on and spent that first summer doing trail maintenance in
Speaker 1: the Okoe District, clearing blowdowns, repairing tread cleaning, drainage structures.
Speaker 2: Hard work, low pay, long days. She loved it.
Speaker 1: They brought her back in ninety four, same district, but
Speaker 1: this time they assigned her to road maintenance. Specifically, they
Speaker 1: sent her to work a section of decommissioned fire road
Speaker 1: along a ridge line in the eastern part of Polk County.
Speaker 1: The road had been built in the sixties or seventies
Speaker 1: for timber access and fire suppression. By the nineties it
Speaker 1: wasn't being used for anything. The Forest Service hadn't officially
Speaker 1: closed it, but they'd stopped grading it and let it
Speaker 1: go to seed. Karen's job was to keep it from
Speaker 1: disappearing entirely clear the drain so the road didn't wash out,
Speaker 1: cut back the brush that was encroaching from both sides,
Speaker 1: fix whatever needed fixing, basic upkeep on a road nobody drove.
Speaker 1: She told me she didn't mind the assignment. She liked
Speaker 1: working alone, she liked having a section of ground that
Speaker 1: was hers to take care of, and she liked the location.
Speaker 1: The road ran along the top of a ridge at
Speaker 1: about three thousand feet north south, with views down into
Speaker 1: the valley on the east side and steep timber on
Speaker 1: the west. It was beautiful of there, quiet, remote. The
Speaker 1: nearest paved road was about seven miles by dirt track,
Speaker 1: and the nearest house was farther than that. She'd drive
Speaker 1: the Forest Service truck up.
Speaker 2: In the morning.
Speaker 1: An old Chevy pickup white with the Forest Service shield
Speaker 1: on the door. Park wherever she was working that day
Speaker 1: and spend six or eight hours clearing drains, cutting saplings,
Speaker 1: filling ruts. She brought her lunch in a cooler, kept
Speaker 1: a thermos of coffee in the cab, had a handheld
Speaker 1: Motorola radio for emergencies, though the reception up on the
Speaker 1: ridge was spotty at best, most days she was completely alone.
Speaker 1: She'd see a deer now and then a turkey. Once
Speaker 1: in a while, another Forest Service vehicle would come through,
Speaker 1: usually a timber cruiser or a wildlife biologist checking on something,
Speaker 1: but most days it was just her. She started the
Speaker 1: assignment in mid June, and for the first week everything
Speaker 1: was normal. The road was in rough shape, Karen told
Speaker 1: me that was the first thing she noticed. She'd expected
Speaker 1: some deterioration, it had been a few years since anyone
Speaker 1: had done real work on it, but what she found
Speaker 1: was more than just neglect. The drainage structures were almost
Speaker 1: all plugged. Water was running down the road surface instead
Speaker 1: of off it, cutting ruts of foot deep in places.
Speaker 1: Brush was pushing in from both sides, narrowing the road
Speaker 1: to a single lane in some spots and completely closing
Speaker 1: it off in others. There were blowdowns across the road
Speaker 1: every few hundred yards. A couple of them were big,
Speaker 1: mature hardwoods that had come down in storms and just
Speaker 1: stayed where they fell.
Speaker 2: She spent the.
Speaker 1: First three days doing nothing but clearing blowdowns and unplugging
Speaker 1: drains chainsaw work.
Speaker 2: Mostly.
Speaker 1: She'd bucked up trees in her first season, so the
Speaker 1: saw didn't bother her, but it was slow going. She
Speaker 1: told me she could clear maybe a half mile of
Speaker 1: road in a full day's work, and the section she'd
Speaker 1: been assigned was just over four miles. On the fourth day,
Speaker 1: she was working her way north along the ridge. She'd
Speaker 1: cleared a good stretch the day before and was pushing
Speaker 1: into a section she hadn't walked yet.
Speaker 2: The road curved.
Speaker 1: Around the east side of a knob, and as she
Speaker 1: came around the bend, she found something that made her stop.
Speaker 1: A tree had been broken, not fallen broken, a sour
Speaker 1: wood maybe five inches through, snapped off about eight feet
Speaker 1: above the ground. The brake was old at least a
Speaker 1: few months, based on the color of the exposed wood
Speaker 1: and the way the bark had started to curl back
Speaker 1: from the fracture, but the top of the tree hadn't
Speaker 1: fallen to the ground. It was leaning against a larger
Speaker 1: tree about six feet away, propped up at an angle.
Speaker 1: She didn't think much of it at first, wind damage.
Speaker 1: Maybe ice trees breke for all kinds of reasons, and
Speaker 1: she'd seen plenty of storm damage in her time. But
Speaker 1: about two hundred yards farther up the road she found
Speaker 1: another one, same deal, sour wood snapped at roughly the
Speaker 1: same height, top section propped against an adjacent tree, and
Speaker 1: then another about one hundred yards past that. Three broken
Speaker 1: trees and a half mile stretch, all the same species,
Speaker 1: all broken at roughly the same height, all arranged the
Speaker 1: same way. She mentioned it to her supervisor when she
Speaker 1: called in her daily report that afternoon. She said, I've
Speaker 1: got some tree damage up here that looks a little odd.
Speaker 1: Her supervisor, a guy named Dennis, asked her what kind
Speaker 1: of odd she described the brakes. He said it was
Speaker 1: probably bear damage. Black bears will bend saplings to get
Speaker 1: at berries, and they'll snap smaller trees if they're climbing
Speaker 1: and they're too heavy for the trunk. He told her
Speaker 1: not to worry about it. She logged the locations in
Speaker 1: her field notebook and moved on. The rest of that
Speaker 1: first week was work, hard, steady, physical work. She cleared
Speaker 1: almost two miles of road. She unplugged fourteen drains. She
Speaker 1: cut back brush until her arms were scratched raw from
Speaker 1: the briers and her gloves were shredded. At the end
Speaker 1: of each day, she'd drive back down the mountain seven
Speaker 1: mile of dirt road, winding down to the paved highway,
Speaker 1: go home, eat whatever was easy, and fall asleep on
Speaker 1: the couch before the evening news was over. Then she'd
Speaker 1: get up and do it again. She told me those
Speaker 1: first five days were some of the best of her
Speaker 1: time with the Forest Service. The weather was good, the
Speaker 1: work was satisfying. You could see the road opening up
Speaker 1: behind you, getting better, coming.
Speaker 2: Back to life.
Speaker 1: She liked being up there alone, like the quiet, like
Speaker 1: the feeling of having a piece of ground that was
Speaker 1: hers to take care of. She'd eat lunch sitting on
Speaker 1: the tailgate with her feet dangling, looking out over the
Speaker 1: valley to the east, and think about how lucky she
Speaker 1: was to get paid to be in a place like this.
Speaker 1: She slept fine that first week, no trouble at all.
Speaker 1: The work was tiring enough that she was out within
Speaker 1: minutes of sitting down. That changed in week two. On
Speaker 1: Monday of the second week, Karen drove up to where
Speaker 1: she'd left off on Friday and started working north again.
Speaker 2: She was in a section of the road.
Speaker 1: That ran along a narrow shelf cut into the east
Speaker 1: side of the ridge below her.
Speaker 2: To the left, the slope.
Speaker 1: Dropped away into the valley, steep, heavily timbered, thick with
Speaker 1: rhododendron above her. To the right, the ridge climbed another
Speaker 1: few hundred feet to the crest. The road was barely
Speaker 1: wide enough for the truck in this stretch. About mid morning,
Speaker 1: she smelled something. She described it to me carefully, the
Speaker 1: way she describes everything, looking for the right words, not
Speaker 1: the dramatic ones. She said it was organic, like something decaying,
Speaker 1: but not exactly, not the sharp, sweet rot of a
Speaker 1: dead animal, which she'd smelled plenty of times. This was muskier, heavier.
Speaker 1: It had a body odor quality to it, she said,
Speaker 1: but thicker and more pungent, like if you put a
Speaker 1: wet dog and a dead deer in a closet together
Speaker 1: for a week. But worse than that, because there was
Speaker 1: something underneath it. I couldn't identify something that didn't belong
Speaker 1: to any animal I know. The smell was strong enough
Speaker 1: that she stopped working and looked around. She figured something
Speaker 1: had died in the brush nearby, a deer maybe, or
Speaker 1: a coyote.
Speaker 2: She walked the.
Speaker 1: Edges of the road for about fifty yards in both directions,
Speaker 1: looking for a carcass, didn't find one. After about ten minutes,
Speaker 1: the smell faded, just drifted off, like whatever was producing
Speaker 1: it had moved. She went back to work that afternoon.
Speaker 1: Around four o'clock, she smelled it again, same spot. She'd
Speaker 1: been working, about a quarter mile north of where she'd
Speaker 1: been that morning, and she'd walked back to the truck
Speaker 1: to get her water jug. As she passed through the
Speaker 1: area where she'd smelled it earlier. There it was again,
Speaker 1: same smell, same intensity, same location. She stopped and stood
Speaker 1: there for a minute. Looked uphill, looked downhill, looked into
Speaker 1: the timber on both sides. She didn't see anything, no movement,
Speaker 1: no animal, nothing. The woods were quiet, not unusually quiet,
Speaker 1: just afternoon quiet when the birds slow down and the
Speaker 1: bugs take over. But the smell was right there, thick
Speaker 1: and unmistakable and then it was gone again, like a
Speaker 1: switch flipping. One second the air was heavy with it,
Speaker 1: and the next second it was clean mountain air, pine
Speaker 1: and damp earth and nothing else. Karen wrote down the
Speaker 1: time and the location in her field notebook. She told
Speaker 1: me she didn't know why she did that. She said
Speaker 1: it was instinct. When something doesn't make sense, you write
Speaker 1: it down. The next day, Tuesday, she was working in
Speaker 1: a different section, about a half mile farther north. She
Speaker 1: didn't smell anything unusual all morning, but at four fifteen
Speaker 1: in the afternoon, she drove back through the same stretch
Speaker 1: of road where she'd smelled it Monday, and there it was,
Speaker 1: same spot, same smell, same intensity. Four o'clock again, give
Speaker 1: or take fifteen minutes. She wrote it down Wednesday, different
Speaker 1: work area, different section of road. Stay tuned for more backwoods.
Speaker 1: It's big foot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: She made a point of driving through the smell location
Speaker 1: at three forty five before the window nothing clean air.
Speaker 1: She parked the truck and waited. At four h five,
Speaker 1: the smell hit, same place, same everything. She was standing
Speaker 1: outside the truck, this time, leaning against the hood, waiting
Speaker 1: for it, and when it came. She turned in a
Speaker 1: slow circle, trying to figure out where it was coming
Speaker 1: from uphill She thought from the ridge side, but she
Speaker 1: wasn't sure. The air was still no wind at all,
Speaker 1: and the smell seemed to come from everywhere at once.
Speaker 1: She stood in it for about five minutes, then it faded,
Speaker 1: same as before. She got in the truck and drove
Speaker 1: to a spot where she could get radio reception. She
Speaker 1: called Dennis. Dennis, she said, I've got a smell up here,
Speaker 1: and I don't know what's making it. She told him
Speaker 1: the details, the times, the locations, the consistent and see.
Speaker 1: She told him it had happened three days running in
Speaker 1: the exact same spot at approximately the same time of day.
Speaker 1: Dennis asked her if she thought something had died up there.
Speaker 1: She said, Dennis, dead things don't show up at four
Speaker 1: o'clock and leave at four fifteen. He told her to
Speaker 1: keep an eye on it. Thursday, same thing, four ten pm,
Speaker 1: same location. This time, she'd brought a compass and a
Speaker 1: topo map, and she took a bearing on the uphill side,
Speaker 1: trying to narrow down the origin. She marked the GPS
Speaker 1: coordinates in her notebook. She told me the coordinates. Later,
Speaker 1: when I plotted them on a map, they fell on
Speaker 1: the eastern slope of the same ridgeline. Herschel's camp had
Speaker 1: been on twelve miles farther north, but the same ridge,
Speaker 1: the same corridor. I didn't tell Karen that at first.
Speaker 1: I wanted to hear the rest of her story before
Speaker 1: I told her anything about the others. I didn't want
Speaker 1: to influence what she remembered, but I made a note
Speaker 1: of it. Friday, the smell was there again, time time,
Speaker 1: same place, five days in a row. Karen had stopped
Speaker 1: trying to explain it. She just documented it. She told
Speaker 1: me that's how she handled things that confused her. She
Speaker 1: didn't try to solve them. She just wrote down what
Speaker 1: was happening and figured she'd make sense of it later.
Speaker 1: But the smell wasn't the only thing she was tracking
Speaker 1: by then. On Wednesday of that second week, the same
Speaker 1: day she'd waited by the truck for the smell, Karen
Speaker 1: had taken her lunch break at a creek crossing about
Speaker 1: a quarter mile south of the smell location. The road
Speaker 1: crossed a small drainage there. During wet weather, the water
Speaker 1: ran across the road surface, and there was a patch
Speaker 1: of soft clay and silt on the downstream side where
Speaker 1: the water pooled before dropping off the edge of the
Speaker 1: road and continuing downhill. She was sitting on the tailgate
Speaker 1: eating a sandwich when she noticed impressions in the mud.
Speaker 1: She got down and walked over to look. The mud
Speaker 1: was soft, tacky, not soupy, the kind that holds a
Speaker 1: good print. There were deer tracks everywhere.
Speaker 2: That was normal.
Speaker 1: She could see where a raccoon had walked through, a
Speaker 1: couple of turkey prints near the edge, and then there
Speaker 1: were these other ones. They were shaped roughly like a
Speaker 1: human foot heel ball toes, but they were much larger
Speaker 1: than any human foot she'd ever seen. She didn't have
Speaker 1: a tape measure on her that day, so she used
Speaker 1: her boot for reference. Her boot was a women's size nine,
Speaker 1: about ten and a half inches long. She put her
Speaker 1: boot heeled to toe with one of the prints and
Speaker 1: estimated the print was almost twice as long. She told
Speaker 1: me she thought about that for a long time afterward,
Speaker 1: and settled on eighteen or nineteen inches. The prints were deep,
Speaker 1: deeper than her boot prints in the same mud, and
Speaker 1: she weighed about one hundred and forty pounds in her
Speaker 1: work gear. Whatever made these prints was heavy. She counted
Speaker 1: four of them, two on each side, in a walking pattern.
Speaker 1: The stride was long. She paced it off and estimated
Speaker 1: about four and a half feet between steps.
Speaker 2: They came down.
Speaker 1: From the up hill side of the road, crossed the
Speaker 1: mud at the creek, and continued downhill into the timber.
Speaker 1: Karen squatted next to one of them for a while.
Speaker 1: She told me she put her hand down next to
Speaker 1: it and just stared at it. The toes were visible
Speaker 1: round blunt impressions across the front of the print. No
Speaker 1: claw marks. A bear print would show claws, these didn't.
Speaker 1: She didn't have a camera with her. She kicked herself
Speaker 1: for that later, but she drew the prints in her
Speaker 1: notebook with dimensions, and she marked the location. That night,
Speaker 1: she went home and looked through her field guides. She
Speaker 1: told me she already knew what she wasn't looking at.
Speaker 1: She wasn't looking at bear prints, wrong shape, no claws,
Speaker 1: and bears don't walk with a four and a half
Speaker 1: foot stride on two legs for any distance. She wasn't
Speaker 1: looking at human prints. Too big, too deep, and nobody
Speaker 1: was walking that road barefoot. She looked through everything she
Speaker 1: had on her shelf and couldn't find a match. She
Speaker 1: went back to the creek crossing on Thursday. The prints
Speaker 1: were still there, but they dried and cracked a little
Speaker 1: in the sun. She measured them this time. She'd brought
Speaker 1: a folding ruler from the toolbox. The clearest print measured
Speaker 1: nineteen inches from heel to toe and about seven inches
Speaker 1: across the ball. She told me she sat by that
Speaker 1: print for a long time and tried to think of
Speaker 1: what could make it. She went through every animal she knew.
Speaker 1: She went through every explanation she could think of, overlapping prints,
Speaker 1: mud spread, distortion from waterflow. None of it worked. The
Speaker 1: prints were clean, distinct, four of them in a clear
Speaker 1: bipedal walking pattern with consistent depth and consistent spacing. She
Speaker 1: didn't tell Dennis about the prince. She told me she
Speaker 1: wasn't sure why exactly. Part of it was that she
Speaker 1: didn't want to deal with his reaction. Part of it
Speaker 1: was that she wasn't ready to hear someone tell her
Speaker 1: it was nothing. She wanted to keep looking before she
Speaker 1: let someone else's opinion change what she was seeing. By
Speaker 1: the end of week two, Karen had covered almost the
Speaker 1: entire four mile section of road, and she'd been paying
Speaker 1: attention to the tree breaks the whole time. There were
Speaker 1: a lot more of them than she'd initially thought. That
Speaker 1: first day, she'd found three. By the end of the
Speaker 1: second week, she'd logged over twenty, all hard woods, mostly
Speaker 1: sour wood and dogwood, a few young hickory and maple.
Speaker 1: All snapped between six and nine feet above the ground.
Speaker 1: Some had tops that had fallen normally and were lying
Speaker 1: on the ground below the break, but others. At least
Speaker 1: eight of them had tops that were propped, wedged, or
Speaker 1: leaning against adjacent trees in ways that didn't look natural.
Speaker 1: She started photographing them. She'd brought a disposable camera from home,
Speaker 1: one of those yellow Kodak ones, and she burned through
Speaker 1: a whole roll in two days just shooting tree breaks.
Speaker 1: She told me she didn't know what she was documenting
Speaker 1: or why, she just had a feeling that it mattered.
Speaker 1: The brakes followed the road, not exactly on the road.
Speaker 1: In the timber on the uphill side between the road
Speaker 1: surface and the ridge crest, within fifty or sixty feet
Speaker 1: of the road running parallel to it, A line of
Speaker 1: broken trees. Tracking the road north along the ridge line,
Speaker 1: on Friday of the second week, she found one that
Speaker 1: was different from the others, a young maple about four
Speaker 1: inches in diameter. The trunk hadn't been snapped, it had
Speaker 1: been twisted. She told me she recognized the fracture pattern
Speaker 1: because she'd worked with green wood before. She'd helped her
Speaker 1: uncle build fences in high school and had twisted green
Speaker 1: saplings to make them pliable for weaving. She knew what
Speaker 1: it looked like when living wood got torked. This tree
Speaker 1: had been wrung. The bark was stripped in a band
Speaker 1: about two feet wide where something had gripped it, and
Speaker 1: the exposed wood showed fibers separating in a spiral. The
Speaker 1: top of the tree had been twisted off and was
Speaker 1: lying on the ground nearby. She tried to twist a
Speaker 1: similar size sapling herself. She grabbed it at about chest
Speaker 1: height and put everything she had into it. She told
Speaker 1: me the tree flexed a little, but didn't even start
Speaker 1: to separate. She couldn't twist it, not even close. She
Speaker 1: photographed it. She measured the grip area. She wrote it
Speaker 1: all down, and that weekend, for the first time since
Speaker 1: she started the assignment. She had trouble sleeping.
Speaker 2: She told me.
Speaker 1: She lay in bed Saturday night and went over everything
Speaker 1: in her head. The smell that showed up and left
Speaker 1: on a schedule, the prints in the creek mud, the
Speaker 1: line of broken trees following the road like a trail
Speaker 1: of markers, the twisted maple. Each thing by itself she
Speaker 1: could probably explain away, but together lined up occurring along
Speaker 1: the same stretch of ridgeline over the same two week period.
Speaker 1: Together they were something. She didn't know what, but she
Speaker 1: knew it wasn't nothing. Something had shifted by the start
Speaker 1: of week three, and Karen knew it. She told me
Speaker 1: she woke up Monday morning and lay in bed for
Speaker 1: a few minutes, which she didn't normally do. She was
Speaker 1: usually up and moving. Shower caught off he boots on
Speaker 1: out the door. But that morning she lay there and
Speaker 1: thought about the ridge, thought about what was waiting for
Speaker 1: her up there.
Speaker 2: Not with dread exactly.
Speaker 1: More like the feeling you get before a job interview
Speaker 1: or a difficult conversation, a heightened awareness that something was
Speaker 1: going to happen and you couldn't control what it was.
Speaker 1: She drove up to the road and sat in the
Speaker 1: truck for a few minutes before she got out, engine off,
Speaker 1: windows down, just listening. She wanted to hear what the
Speaker 1: wood sounded like when she wasn't running a chainsaw or
Speaker 1: dragging brush. She wanted to calibrate. She wanted her ears
Speaker 1: to tell her whether the ridge felt the same as
Speaker 1: it had the week before, or whether something had changed.
Speaker 1: It was quiet, normal, quiet birds in the canopy, a
Speaker 1: breeze coming up the east side of the ridge, moving
Speaker 1: through the hardwoods with that soft rushing sound. A woodpecker
Speaker 1: somewhere to the north, tapping away at something. Ordinary sounds,
Speaker 1: nothing off, but she noticed she was gripping the steering wheel.
Speaker 1: Her knuckles were white. She looked down at her own
Speaker 1: hands and made herself let go. She got out and
Speaker 1: went to work. That week, she was finishing up the
Speaker 1: last mile of road, the northernmost section of her assignment.
Speaker 1: The terrain up here was different. The ridge widened a
Speaker 1: little and the road ran along the west side instead
Speaker 1: of the east, which meant she was looking down into
Speaker 1: heavier timber on her left, old growth in a drainage
Speaker 1: that hadn't been logged in decades. The trees were big,
Speaker 1: some of the poplars and oaks were three and four
Speaker 1: feet through. The understory was thick with rhododendron and laurel.
Speaker 1: She found more tree breaks, seven on Monday alone, all
Speaker 1: in the timber on the west side of the road,
Speaker 1: all at the usual height. Two of them were twisted.
Speaker 1: On Tuesday she found something new. She was walking ahead
Speaker 1: of the truck, checking the road surface for drainage problems
Speaker 1: when she came to a spot where the road widened
Speaker 1: into a small turnout, just enough room to park a
Speaker 1: vehicle or turn around. There was a bank of exposed
Speaker 1: earth on the uphill side where the road had been
Speaker 1: cut into the slope, and on that bank, in the
Speaker 1: damp clay, there were handprints, not pawprints, handprints. They were large,
Speaker 1: larger than her hand by a wide margin.
Speaker 2: She put her palm down.
Speaker 1: Next to one of them, and the print extended a
Speaker 1: good three inches past her fingertips. The fingers were long
Speaker 1: and thick, there was a clear impression of a palm,
Speaker 1: and there was a thumb offset from the fingers, opposing
Speaker 1: the kind of thumb that grips. She counted three of them,
Speaker 1: all on the same bank, all at about the same height.
Speaker 1: Roughly four feet above the road surface, like something had
Speaker 1: been leaning against the bank, or climbing it, or just
Speaker 1: resting there, bracing itself with its hands against the clay.
Speaker 1: Karen told me she stared at those prints for a
Speaker 1: long time. She said her hands were shaking a little.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't from the coffee. This wasn't ambiguous. This
Speaker 1: wasn't a might be a bear, might be mud distortion,
Speaker 1: or might be nothing. A handprint with an opposing thumb
Speaker 1: and fingers longer than hers is definitely not nothing. Something
Speaker 1: with hands had been here, something with hands big enough
Speaker 1: to make.
Speaker 2: Hers look like a child's.
Speaker 1: She photographed them, she measured them, She wrote everything down,
Speaker 1: and then she did something she told me she still
Speaker 1: thinks about. She looked around, slowly, carefully, the way you
Speaker 1: look around when you feel like you're being watched, and
Speaker 1: she said, out loud, I know you're here. Nobody answered,
Speaker 1: nothing moved, the woods kept doing what woods do. But
Speaker 1: she told me that saying it out loud changed something
Speaker 1: for her.
Speaker 2: It made it real.
Speaker 1: Whatever she was documenting, whatever was leaving prints and breaking
Speaker 1: trees and producing a smell that showed up on a schedule,
Speaker 1: she was acknowledging it. She was admitting to herself and
Speaker 1: to whatever might be listening, that she knew she wasn't
Speaker 1: alone on that road. She went back to work, but
Speaker 1: she told me that from that point forward, the feeling
Speaker 1: on the ridge was different, not threatening, not hostile, but present,
Speaker 1: like there was always something nearby, just out of sight,
Speaker 1: keeping track of where she was and what she was doing.
Speaker 1: She said, it was like working in someone else's house.
Speaker 1: You're allowed to be there, nobody's told you to leave,
Speaker 1: but it isn't yours, and you both know it.
Speaker 2: This is the night.
Speaker 1: This is the part Karen told me about in her
Speaker 1: original email, the four paragraphs that started all of this.
Speaker 1: Everything else, the smell, the prints, the trees.
Speaker 2: That was the setup.
Speaker 1: On Wednesday of week three, Karen was running behind. She
Speaker 1: got in a late start because of a morning meeting
Speaker 1: at the district office, and by the time she made
Speaker 1: it up to the ridge it was almost noon. She
Speaker 1: had a section of road she wanted to finish that day,
Speaker 1: a stretch with three plug drains that needed to be
Speaker 1: dug out by hand. She pushed through lunch to get
Speaker 1: it done. By four point thirty she was wrapping up.
Speaker 1: She'd finished the drains and was loading her tools into
Speaker 1: the bed of the truck. The light was starting to change,
Speaker 1: that warm amber, late afternoon light you get in the
Speaker 1: mountains when the sun drops below the ridge crest and
Speaker 1: everything goes golden for about an hour before it gets dark.
Speaker 1: She walked back to check one last drain she'd cleared earlier,
Speaker 1: about one hundred yards south of where she parked. Took
Speaker 1: her maybe five minutes. When she came back to the truck,
Speaker 1: the right rear tire was flat, sitting on the rim.
Speaker 1: She walked around and looked at it. There was no
Speaker 1: obvious puncture, no nail, no screw, no jagged rock embedded
Speaker 1: in the tread. The tire just looked like it had
Speaker 1: lost all its air at once. She crouched down and
Speaker 1: ran her hand along the sidewalk.
Speaker 2: Nothing.
Speaker 1: She checked the valve stem, it seemed fine. She didn't
Speaker 1: have a phone. This was ninety four. Cell phones existed,
Speaker 1: but she didn't have one, and even if she she had,
Speaker 1: there was no signal on that ridge. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: She'd learned that early in the assignment. Her motorola radio
Speaker 1: was in the cab, but she was in one of
Speaker 1: the dead spots where the signal couldn't reach the repeater.
Speaker 1: She'd tried calling from this stretch before multiple times and
Speaker 1: got nothing back but static. So she was alone, genuinely alone,
Speaker 1: seven miles of dirt road between her and the nearest pavement,
Speaker 1: no way to call anyone, no one expecting her at
Speaker 1: any particular time. She told the office she'd be working
Speaker 1: late and they wouldn't think twice about it if she
Speaker 1: didn't check in until morning. She had a spare tire,
Speaker 1: a jack, and a lug wrench. She'd changed tires before,
Speaker 1: it wasn't complicated. But standing there looking at that flat
Speaker 1: tire with the sun getting low, she told me she
Speaker 1: had a feeling she didn't like. Not fear exactly, more
Speaker 1: like awareness, a sharpening of attention, like something in the
Speaker 1: back of her mind was saying, pay attention to this,
Speaker 1: this matters.
Speaker 2: She shook it off.
Speaker 1: She'd been in the woods alone a hundred times. A
Speaker 1: flat tire was just a flat tire. She got the
Speaker 1: jack out of the bed and set it up under
Speaker 1: the rear axle, got down on the gravel and positioned it.
Speaker 1: She got the lug wrench and started on the nuts.
Speaker 1: The first three came off fine. The fourth one was stuck,
Speaker 1: cross threaded maybe or just seized from rust and rode grime.
Speaker 1: She put her weight on the wrench and leaned into
Speaker 1: it nothing. She repositioned, got both hands on it, braced
Speaker 1: her knee against the fender, and pulled. It broke free
Speaker 1: with a sharp crack that echoed off the trees on
Speaker 1: both sides of the road, and came back a second later, quieter,
Speaker 1: like an answer. She changed the tire. It took her
Speaker 1: about twenty minutes. By the time she had the spear
Speaker 1: on and the lugs tightened, the sun was down, the
Speaker 1: timber on both sides was dark. She lowered the jack
Speaker 1: and pulled it out from under the truck. She was
Speaker 1: kneeling on the road surface right next to the rear wheel,
Speaker 1: sliding the jack back toward the truck bed when she
Speaker 1: heard it footsteps above her on the road north of
Speaker 1: where she was parked, coming from the direction she hadn't
Speaker 1: been working that afternoon.
Speaker 2: She froze.
Speaker 1: The footsteps were clear, distinct, one at a time, left, right, left, right.
Speaker 1: The cadence was slow and steady, like someone walking at
Speaker 1: an easy pace, and they were on the road surface.
Speaker 1: She could hear the grit and loose gravel under each step,
Speaker 1: the same sound her own boots made when she walked
Speaker 1: the road. But these weren't her boots. She was kneeling,
Speaker 1: she wasn't walking anywhere, and the steps were heavy, not
Speaker 1: just the sound of weight on gravel. There was a
Speaker 1: depth to each one, a base thud underneath the grit,
Speaker 1: noise like something with real mass was hitting the ground,
Speaker 1: the kind of sound a large man might make, or
Speaker 1: something larger than a large man. She stayed perfectly still.
Speaker 1: Her headlamp was on, she'd switched it on while she
Speaker 1: was finishing the tire, and the beam was pointed at
Speaker 1: the ground in front of her knees, A small circle
Speaker 1: of light on gravel and dirt. That was all she
Speaker 1: could see. Everything beyond that circle was dark. The footsteps continued,
Speaker 1: getting closer. She tried to gauge the distance by the sound.
Speaker 1: One hundred yards maybe, then less than that, eighty sixty,
Speaker 1: she told me. Her first thought was that it was
Speaker 1: another person, a hiker maybe, or another forest service employee,
Speaker 1: someone who'd come up the road from the north and
Speaker 1: was walking toward her.
Speaker 2: Truck.
Speaker 1: That's what she wanted it to be, a person, someone
Speaker 1: she could talk to, wave at, ask for a hand
Speaker 1: with the flat tire. But she knew it wasn't a person.
Speaker 1: She knew it in the same way you know something
Speaker 1: in a dream, not because you can prove it, but
Speaker 1: because your body has already decided for you. Her heart
Speaker 1: rate was a up, her hands were locked on the
Speaker 1: lug wrench. Her breathing had gone shallow and fast without
Speaker 1: her noticing. Every alarm she had was going off, and
Speaker 1: she hadn't even seen anything yet. The footsteps kept coming, steady, patient, unhurried.
Speaker 2: Then they stopped.
Speaker 1: She couldn't tell exactly how far away, she thought, maybe
Speaker 1: forty feet, maybe fifty, somewhere on the road north of
Speaker 1: her truck in the dark. Whatever was walking had stopped,
Speaker 1: and the woods went silent. She'd been hearing insects all day, crickets, cicadas,
Speaker 1: the background hum that's always there in the southern mountains
Speaker 1: in the summertime. It was gone, all of it, like
Speaker 1: someone had pressed mute. The only sound was her own
Speaker 1: breathing and the blood rushing in her ears. She didn't move.
Speaker 1: She knelt there beside the truck with the lug wrench
Speaker 1: in her hand and the headlamp illuminating a circle of gravel,
Speaker 1: and she listened nothing. Thirty seconds, a minute, two minutes, nothing.
Speaker 1: Then the footsteps started again, but they weren't coming toward
Speaker 1: her anymore. They were moving laterally across the road, from
Speaker 1: the road surface to the timber on the uphill side,
Speaker 1: and then back and then across again, pacing whatever was
Speaker 1: out there was, walking back and forth across the road,
Speaker 1: a few steps one way, then it would stop a
Speaker 1: few steps back, then it would stop again, back and forth,
Speaker 1: like an animal at a fence line, like something trying
Speaker 1: to make a decision, like something measuring the distance between
Speaker 1: where it was and where she was, and going back
Speaker 1: and forth on what to do about it. Karen told
Speaker 1: me this went on for about ten minutes. She didn't
Speaker 1: time it, she didn't have the presence of mind to
Speaker 1: look at her watch, but she estimated ten minutes. That
Speaker 1: might not sound like a long time when you're sitting
Speaker 1: somewhere safe listening to me tell this, but get down
Speaker 1: on your knees in a dark place by yourself, and
Speaker 1: listen to something you can't see, walk back and forth
Speaker 1: forty feet away from you for ten minutes, count it out,
Speaker 1: feel every second of it. Ten minutes is an eternity
Speaker 1: when you don't know what's on the other end of
Speaker 1: those footsteps, she said. The hardest part was not being
Speaker 1: able to see. If she could have seen it, whatever
Speaker 1: it was, she thinks she would have been less afraid.
Speaker 1: The not knowing was worse than any answer could have been.
Speaker 1: Her imagination was filling in the blanks, and her imagination
Speaker 1: was not being kind about it. She tried to think.
Speaker 1: Her mind was going fast and slow at the same time,
Speaker 1: racing through options while each second stretched out like taffy.
Speaker 1: She could get in the truck, start the engine, drive
Speaker 1: out of there on the spare. That was the smart play.
Speaker 1: She could turn off the headlamp and sit absolutely still
Speaker 1: and hope whatever it was would lose interest and move on.
Speaker 1: She could call out, announce herself, try to scare it off,
Speaker 1: act bigger than she felt. She could reach into the
Speaker 1: truck and grabbed the chainsaw, which wasn't a weapon but
Speaker 1: might make enough noise to change the dynamic. She ran
Speaker 1: through all of that in her head, and then she
Speaker 1: did something she still can't fully explain to herself.
Speaker 2: She stood up.
Speaker 1: She stood up slowly, not fast, not sudden, not aggressive.
Speaker 1: She just rose from her knees, one hand on the
Speaker 1: side of the truck bed for balance, and she straightened
Speaker 1: up to her full height five seven, not tall, but
Speaker 1: upright on her feet, facing the dark. The headlamp beam
Speaker 1: swung up from the ground as she rose, and when
Speaker 1: she was fully standing, it was pointing straight ahead north
Speaker 1: into the darkness where the footsteps had been. The footsteps
Speaker 1: stopped instantly mid stride. It sounded like one second there
Speaker 1: was the crunch of gravel underweight, and the next second
Speaker 1: there was nothing. She couldn't see anything. The headlamp threw
Speaker 1: a cone of white light about thirty feet maybe forty
Speaker 1: on a good night, and beyond that the road just
Speaker 1: dissolved into black. The timber on both sides was a
Speaker 1: dark wall. Whatever was out there was beyond her light.
Speaker 1: She couldn't see it, but it could see her. She
Speaker 1: was standing in a pool of light with that lamp
Speaker 1: strapped to her forehead, the only illuminated thing on the
Speaker 1: entire mountain. She told me she felt like a deer
Speaker 1: in headlights, except she was the one providing the headlights.
Speaker 1: She stood there for about thirty seconds, not moving, not breathing,
Speaker 1: just standing with the lug wrench in her right hand
Speaker 1: and the light pointing into nothing, and her whole body
Speaker 1: telling her to get in the truck. And then she
Speaker 1: heard something she didn't expect. A breath, a single, long exhale,
Speaker 1: the kind of breath you let out when you've been
Speaker 1: holding still and you need to release the air, deep, low,
Speaker 1: with a slight rasp to it, like it was passing
Speaker 1: through a large airway, and loud, louder than a human
Speaker 1: breath should be. Loud enough that she heard it clearly
Speaker 1: from forty or fifty feet a way over her own
Speaker 1: heartbeat and the blood noise in her ears. It came
Speaker 1: from the uphill side of the road, from the timber,
Speaker 1: from somewhere just beyond the reach of her light, and
Speaker 1: it came from high up, not ground level, not waste level.
Speaker 2: High, she said.
Speaker 1: The sound originated from roughly the same height as her
Speaker 1: own head, maybe higher. Whatever had been pacing the road
Speaker 1: had stepped into the trees, and it was standing there
Speaker 1: in the dark above the road surface, breathing. She told
Speaker 1: me that breath was what changed her, not the prints,
Speaker 1: not the smell, not the trees the breath, because it
Speaker 1: was close enough and clear enough and unambiguous enough that
Speaker 1: it left her with no room to negotiate. Something was
Speaker 1: standing in the timber, less than fifty feet from her,
Speaker 1: in the dark, breathing, and it was big and it
Speaker 1: was real, and it was watching her. She got in
Speaker 1: the truck. She didn't run, She didn't throw the tools
Speaker 1: in the bed. She just walked to the driver's door,
Speaker 1: opened it, got in, closed it, and locked it. She
Speaker 1: sat there for a few seconds with her hands on
Speaker 1: the steering wheel. Then she started the engine. The headlights
Speaker 1: came on high beams, the road ahead lit up. There
Speaker 1: was nothing on the road. Whatever had been there was gone,
Speaker 1: or it had.
Speaker 2: Moved into the trees.
Speaker 1: Either way, the road ahead was empty, just gravel in
Speaker 1: ruts and the black wall of timber on both sides,
Speaker 1: stretching north into the dark. She put the truck in
Speaker 1: gear and drove out seven miles of dirt road in
Speaker 1: the dark on a spare tire, going as fast as
Speaker 1: she dared. The truck bounced and jarred over ruts she
Speaker 1: couldn't see until her headlights were right on top of them.
Speaker 1: She gripped the wheel hard enough that her forearms ached.
Speaker 1: The next morning, she told me she didn't look in
Speaker 1: the mirrors, not once in seven miles. She didn't want
Speaker 1: to know, she said, there are some things you don't
Speaker 1: want confirmed. She just watched the road ahead and kept
Speaker 1: the truck moving and didn't stop until she hit pavement.
Speaker 1: When she reached the black top, she pulled over and
Speaker 1: sat there for a minute, engine running, headlights on.
Speaker 2: Windows up.
Speaker 1: She could feel her heart still hammering. Her hands were
Speaker 1: tingling from the grip on the wheel. She looked down
Speaker 1: and realized she still had the lug wrench in her lap.
Speaker 1: She carried it from the road to the cab without
Speaker 1: even realizing it. She drove home, took a shower, sat
Speaker 1: on the edge of her bed, and stared at the
Speaker 1: wall for a while. She didn't eat dinner. She told
Speaker 1: me she wasn't hungry, She wasn't anything. She was just
Speaker 1: sitting there, running the whole thing through her head on
Speaker 1: a loop, listening to those footsteps in her memory, and
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what to do with what had
Speaker 1: just happened to her. She didn't sleep that night, not really.
Speaker 1: She'd drift off for twenty minutes and wake up with
Speaker 1: her heart racing, listening for sounds outside her house that
Speaker 1: weren't there. She didn't go back the next day. She
Speaker 1: called Dennis in the morning and told him she needed
Speaker 1: a day off. He didn't ask why. He could probably
Speaker 1: hear something in her voice. She spent Thursday sitting on
Speaker 1: her back porch in Cleveland, drinking coffee, staring at the
Speaker 1: line of mountains in the distance, the same mountains she'd
Speaker 1: grown up, looking at the same ones she'd spent three
Speaker 1: weeks working in. They look different now, not threatening exactly,
Speaker 1: just different, like finding out a room in your house
Speaker 1: has a door you never noticed before. She went through
Speaker 1: her notebook everything she'd documented over the past two and
Speaker 1: a half weeks. The smell logged with times and coordinates,
Speaker 1: the prints at the creek crossing with measurements and a
Speaker 1: hand drawn sketch, twenty plus tree breaks along the road
Speaker 1: with locations and photographs on the disposable camera she hadn't
Speaker 1: developed yet, The handprints on the clay bank with measurements,
Speaker 1: and now the footsteps, the pacing, the breath, she told me.
Speaker 2: She spread it all out.
Speaker 1: On the kitchen table that evening and looked at it
Speaker 1: the way you'd look at a report, organized, sequential, documented,
Speaker 1: and what she saw when she stepped back and looked
Speaker 1: at all of it together scared her more than the
Speaker 1: road had, because it wasn't random. It was a pattern.
Speaker 1: Something was using that ridge line regularly. Something large enough
Speaker 1: to leave nineteen inch prints and snap hardwood trees at
Speaker 1: eight feet and produce a smell strong enough to stop
Speaker 1: you in your tracks. Something that moved through the same
Speaker 1: areas at consistent, predictable times. Something with hands big enough
Speaker 1: to leave palm prints on a clay bank that made
Speaker 1: hers look small, something that breathed, and something that, as
Speaker 1: near as she could tell, had been aware of her
Speaker 1: from the very beginning. That's what shook her most. Sitting
Speaker 1: at that table, looking back at it, with all the
Speaker 1: pieces in front of her, she realized the timeline told
Speaker 1: a story of its own. It was there the whole
Speaker 1: time it watched her work. It moved parallel to her
Speaker 1: along the ridge, staying in the timber, staying out of sight,
Speaker 1: and it didn't show itself until it chose to, until
Speaker 1: it was ready, Until it was dark and she was alone,
Speaker 1: and she was on her knees with a lug wrench
Speaker 1: and nowhere to go. She went back on Friday. I
Speaker 1: asked her why. She said, because I still had work
Speaker 1: to do. I asked her if she was afraid, Yes,
Speaker 1: she said, but I was also angry. That was my road.
Speaker 1: I'd been taking care of it for two and a
Speaker 1: half weeks. I wasn't going to let something run me
Speaker 1: off it without finishing the job. I like that answer.
Speaker 1: That tells you something about who Karen is. Friday was quiet.
Speaker 1: She worked the last stretch of her section, finished the drains,
Speaker 1: cut back the last of the brush. She made a
Speaker 1: point of driving through the smell location right at four o'clock.
Speaker 1: Nothing clean air, no smell at all. That day, she
Speaker 1: stopped at the creek crossing. The prints were dried out
Speaker 1: and cracking. She didn't find any new ones. She worked
Speaker 1: until about three o'clock. She told me she didn't want
Speaker 1: to be up there after dark again. Not yet, maybe
Speaker 1: not ever. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll
Speaker 1: be back after these messages. She loaded the truck and
Speaker 1: drove home with an hour of daylight to spare. That
Speaker 1: was the end of her time on that road. The
Speaker 1: following week, Dennis moved her to a different section of
Speaker 1: the district for trail work. She didn't ask why, she
Speaker 1: didn't argue. Part of her was relieved, and part of
Speaker 1: her was sorry to go. She'd put real work.
Speaker 2: Into that road.
Speaker 1: It was in better shape than it had been in years,
Speaker 1: and she never went back to see it. But she
Speaker 1: took her notebook with her, and she kept the photographs.
Speaker 1: Karen sat on this story for almost thirty years. Think
Speaker 1: about that, thirty years of knowing something about the world
Speaker 1: that you can't say out loud, thirty years of carrying
Speaker 1: it around with you, tucked away in the back of
Speaker 1: your mind while you go about your life like a
Speaker 1: normal person. She didn't tell her family, She didn't tell
Speaker 1: her co workers. She didn't tell her husband when she
Speaker 1: got married in ninety nine, not on their first date,
Speaker 1: not on their honeymoon, not in those late night conversations
Speaker 1: where you tell each other the things you've never told
Speaker 1: anyone else. She kept it out of all of that.
Speaker 1: She told me her husband is a good man, practical
Speaker 1: and kind.
Speaker 2: And she loves him.
Speaker 1: But he's the type who would have gently suggested she'd
Speaker 1: been working too hard in the heat that summer, and
Speaker 1: she didn't want to hear that from someone she loved.
Speaker 1: It would have been worse than hearing it from a stranger.
Speaker 1: She finished out that season with the Forest Service and
Speaker 1: came back for one more in ninety five, trail work again,
Speaker 1: different district, no issues. After that, she moved on. She
Speaker 1: went back to school, finished her degree, became a pairalegal,
Speaker 1: had two kids, built a whole life that had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with the Forest Service or fire roads or
Speaker 1: whatever she'd encountered on that ridgeline. But she kept the notebook.
Speaker 1: She kept it in a box in her closet with
Speaker 1: the developed photographs and her old field guides and the
Speaker 1: marked up topo map. She told me she looked at
Speaker 1: it maybe once every couple of years. She'd pull it
Speaker 1: out late at night, after everyone else was asleep and
Speaker 1: sit on the edge of the bed, flipping through the pages,
Speaker 1: looking at her own handwriting from thirty years ago, reading
Speaker 1: the measurements, the coordinates, the time stamps, remembering. She told
Speaker 1: me something about those years that I think is important,
Speaker 1: and I want to share it because I think a
Speaker 1: lot of people who are listening right now will recognize it.
Speaker 2: She said.
Speaker 1: The hardest part wasn't the experience itself. The hardest part
Speaker 1: was the silence. Going to family gatherings, holiday dinners, neighborhood cookouts,
Speaker 1: listening to people talk about their jobs, their vacations, their problems,
Speaker 1: and sitting there thinking, I know something none of you know.
Speaker 1: I've seen evidence of something that changes what we think
Speaker 1: is out there in the mountains we all grew up
Speaker 1: looking at and I cannot tell you because you would
Speaker 1: look at me differently, you would think less of me,
Speaker 1: you would worry about me, and I'd rather carry this
Speaker 1: alone than deal with that. I know people who've been
Speaker 1: in that exact position, more of them than you'd think. Good, solid,
Speaker 1: credible people who saw something or experienced something that doesn't
Speaker 1: fit inside the normal world, and they've been carrying it
Speaker 1: around like a stone in their.
Speaker 2: Pocket for years, decades.
Speaker 1: The loneliness of an unbelievable story is something I don't
Speaker 1: think most people appreciate until they're living it. Karen found
Speaker 1: our show about a year ago. Her daughter sent her
Speaker 1: a link to an episode she doesn't remember which one,
Speaker 1: and she listened to it on her phone while she
Speaker 1: was making dinner, and then she listened to another one
Speaker 1: and another. She told me she recognized something in the
Speaker 1: voices of the people telling their stories, not the details
Speaker 1: necessarily the way they told them, the hesitation, the careful phrasing,
Speaker 1: the way someone would stop mid sentence and say, I
Speaker 1: know how this sounds. But she recognized it because that's
Speaker 1: how she would have sounded if she'd ever had anyone
Speaker 1: safe to tell it to. She sat down that evening
Speaker 1: and wrote me the email, four paragraphs, subject line, straight
Speaker 1: to the point, no preamble, And when I called her
Speaker 1: a week later, she told me everything I've just told you,
Speaker 1: in more or less the same order, with the same
Speaker 1: level of detail, in the same steady voice. She didn't waver,
Speaker 1: she didn't backtrack, she didn't add anything that felt like embellishment.
Speaker 1: She told it like testimony. The only time her voice
Speaker 1: changed was when she talked about the breath. When she
Speaker 1: got to that part, she slowed down, went quiet for
Speaker 1: a second. Then her voice came back about half a
Speaker 1: register lower, and she said, that's when I knew, not thought,
Speaker 1: not suspected, new, something was standing in those trees. And
Speaker 1: it was close enough that I could hear it exhale,
Speaker 1: and it was taller than me, and it was real,
Speaker 1: and I think it had been watching me the whole time,
Speaker 1: every day, the whole two and a half weeks I
Speaker 1: was up there. I think it was there from the
Speaker 1: first morning. I just didn't know it until it let me.
Speaker 1: That last part stopped me until it let me, not
Speaker 1: until she figured it out, not until she connected the dots,
Speaker 1: until it decided she was ready to know. Like the
Speaker 1: revealing wasn't something she did. It was something it did
Speaker 1: on its terms, on its schedule, same thing I said
Speaker 1: last time. I wasn't there. I don't have the photographs.
Speaker 1: The disposable camera was developed at a one hour place
Speaker 1: in Cleveland, and Karen said the images of the tree
Speaker 1: breaks came out fine, but the ones of the prints
Speaker 1: were too dark. She still has a few of them.
Speaker 1: I haven't seen them. The notebook exists. She's offered to
Speaker 1: mail me copies of the pages, and I may take
Speaker 1: her up on that. But what I've got right now
Speaker 1: is her voice, and her voice is enough to make
Speaker 1: me pay attention. Karen describes things with the precision of
Speaker 1: someone who spent time doing field work. She gives measurements,
Speaker 1: she gives coordinates, she gives times. When she says the
Speaker 1: smell showed up at four o'clock, she doesn't mean late afternoon. Roughly,
Speaker 1: she means four o'clock. She was looking at her watch.
Speaker 1: When she says the prints were nineteen inches, she means
Speaker 1: she laid a folding ruler next to them and read
Speaker 1: the number. When she says the tree breaks were between
Speaker 1: six and nine feet, she means she stood next to
Speaker 1: them and measured against her own height. She's five seven.
Speaker 1: That kind of specificity is hard to fake over the
Speaker 1: course of multiple conversations. Details like that either come from
Speaker 1: notes and memory, or they come from invention, and invention
Speaker 1: tends to round off. Invented details come in round numbers
Speaker 1: and approximate language. Karen's details come with the rough edges
Speaker 1: still on them. Nineteen inches, not twenty four oh five,
Speaker 1: not four o'clock, seven inches across the ball, not about
Speaker 1: the width of my hand. That's the texture of real observation.
Speaker 1: And then there's the overlap. I'm going to be careful
Speaker 1: here because I don't want to draw conclusions that the
Speaker 1: evidence doesn't support. But I need you to hear this.
Speaker 1: Baron's encounter took place twelve miles north of Herschel's camp,
Speaker 1: on the same ridge line, in the same corridor. Sixteen
Speaker 1: years later, she described tree breaks at six to nine
Speaker 1: feet with some twisted. Herschel described tree breaks at six
Speaker 1: to eight feet with some twisted. She described a line
Speaker 1: of breaks following the ridge line. Herschel found a line
Speaker 1: of breaks running up toward the ridge crest. She documented
Speaker 1: biological silence during her encounter on the road. Herschel described
Speaker 1: biological silence lasting over six hours. On his last night
Speaker 1: in camp, she described feeling watched for days before anything
Speaker 1: overt happened, a sense of being observed, of something nearby,
Speaker 1: keeping track of her. Herschel described the same thing in
Speaker 1: the valley below as camp, and the most striking overlap
Speaker 1: of all the behavior. In both cases, whatever was there
Speaker 1: didn't attack, didn't charge, didn't threaten, at least not in
Speaker 1: any conventional sense. It showed itself in stages a sign here,
Speaker 1: a sound there, building slowly escalating gradually over days, not minutes,
Speaker 1: like it was testing the boundary, seeing how close it
Speaker 1: could get before the person reacted, seeing what they would tolerate.
Speaker 1: And in both cases, when the moment finally came, when
Speaker 1: Herschel aimed his flashlight into the hemlocks, when Karen stood
Speaker 1: up on the road with that headlamp, the thing didn't run.
Speaker 1: That's what gets me. In both stories, at the moment
Speaker 1: of closest contact, it held its ground, It stood there,
Speaker 1: it watched, and then it withdrew on its own terms.
Speaker 1: Not because it was scared, not because it was caught.
Speaker 1: It left because it was done. Think about what that means.
Speaker 1: If you're trying to understand the behavior of whatever this is,
Speaker 1: That detail matters enormously. This isn't something that stumbles into
Speaker 1: contact with people by accident and then bolts. This is
Speaker 1: something that chooses the terms of the encounter. It decides
Speaker 1: when to reveal itself, how much to show, and when
Speaker 1: to leave. It controls the interaction from beginning to end.
Speaker 1: That's not random animal behavior. That's something else entirely. That's
Speaker 1: something with a strategy. I'm not telling you what that
Speaker 1: strategy serves. I don't know, But I'm telling you that
Speaker 1: two people separated by sixteen years and twelve miles described
Speaker 1: the same sequence of behaviors from something they encountered in
Speaker 1: the same corridor of mountain, and neither of them had
Speaker 1: ever heard the other's name. Karen didn't know about Herschel.
Speaker 1: Herschel doesn't know about Karen. They've never spoken, never exchanged messages,
Speaker 1: never been in the same room. They just both happened
Speaker 1: to spend time on the same ridge line decades apart,
Speaker 1: and they both came back with stories that when you
Speaker 1: lay them side by side, read like two chapters of
Speaker 1: the same account. That's worth paying attention to. We're two
Speaker 1: stories in now, nineteen seventy eight and nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 1: two people, two decades, one corridor, and the patterns are
Speaker 1: already forming tree breaks at the same height, deliberate escalation
Speaker 1: over days rather than a single sudden encounter, biological silence
Speaker 1: when whatever it is gets close, and that feeling both
Speaker 1: of them described it independently of being watched by something
Speaker 1: patient and intelligent, something that doesn't rush, something that takes
Speaker 1: its time and lets you figure it out when it's
Speaker 1: ready for you to figure it out. Two data points,
Speaker 1: and I've got three more. Next time we move nine
Speaker 1: years forward and a few miles farther north up the corridor.
Speaker 1: Two thousand and three, a man named Marcus a competitive
Speaker 1: bowhunter who takes his sports seriously. He logs his scouting trips,
Speaker 1: he records conditions. He trusts his optics the way a
Speaker 1: surgeon trusts his instruments. He's sitting on a ridge saddle
Speaker 1: in the Cherokee National Forest, alone, glassing a clear cut
Speaker 1: through a Swarowsky spotting scope high end glass, the kind
Speaker 1: that lets you count the times on a buck's rack
Speaker 1: from three hundred yards. He's not looking for anything unusual.
Speaker 1: He's scouting a new section of forest for deer sign,
Speaker 1: trying to figure out if it's worth hanging a stand
Speaker 1: there in the fall. And then he sees something on
Speaker 1: a stump at the far edge of the clear cut,
Speaker 1: dark shape, motionless. His first thought is a bear, a
Speaker 1: black bear standing upright on a stump, the way they
Speaker 1: sometimes do when they're trying to get a better look
Speaker 1: at something. Then it steps down, and it walks on
Speaker 1: two legs through waist high brush for over two hundred yards,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't stop. It doesn't stumble, it doesn't drop
Speaker 1: to all fours. It just walks steady, unhurried, arms swinging slightly,
Speaker 1: like something that's been walking that way its entire life.
Speaker 1: He watches it through his scope for close to four minutes.
Speaker 1: Four minutes is a long time when you're looking at
Speaker 1: something that shouldn't exist, long enough to see detail, long
Speaker 1: enough to notice the proportions are wrong. For a human
Speaker 1: long enough to watch it move through terrain that would
Speaker 1: slow most people down, and it doesn't slow down at all,
Speaker 1: long enough to be absolutely sure that what you're looking
Speaker 1: at is real and that it isn't anything you've ever
Speaker 1: seen before the second half of Marcus's story is about
Speaker 1: what happened three days later when he went back to
Speaker 1: that same ridge saddle with a trail camera. He mounted
Speaker 1: it on a tree facing the clear cut, set the
Speaker 1: motion sensor, and left it for a week. When he
Speaker 1: came back and pulled the memory card, there were images
Speaker 1: on it. I'll meet you back here and tell you
Speaker 1: what he found. Di