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: Before we get rolling tonight, I want to let you
Speaker 1: know upfront that we're doing something a little different. The
Speaker 1: Backwoods Cryptid road Trip is taking a short break. Don't worry.
Speaker 1: The truck's still running, the map's still on the dashboard,
Speaker 1: and we'll be back on the highway soon enough. But
Speaker 1: over the last several months, you've been writing to me
Speaker 1: every week. Emails come into the inbox at Paranormal World Productions.
Speaker 1: Some are short a paragraph, maybe two. Somebody saw something
Speaker 1: on a logging road in nineteen seventy something and they've
Speaker 1: been sitting on it ever since. Others run for pages
Speaker 1: written by people who clearly typed them late at night,
Speaker 1: got halfway through, deleted the whole thing, and started over.
Speaker 1: You can tell there's a rhythm to a story that
Speaker 1: somebody has been carrying around for twenty or thirty years,
Speaker 1: and when it finally comes out, it comes out in
Speaker 1: one long breath. I read all of them, every single one,
Speaker 1: and some of them stick with me in a way
Speaker 1: I have trouble explaining to people who don't do this
Speaker 1: for a living. I spent sixteen years in law enforcement,
Speaker 1: a good chunk of that with the Atlanta Police Department,
Speaker 1: and one thing that job teaches you is how to
Speaker 1: listen to a person tell you about the worst night
Speaker 1: of their life. You learn what embellishment sounds like, you
Speaker 1: learn what rehearsed sounds like, and you learn what it
Speaker 1: sounds like when somebody is telling you the truth and
Speaker 1: they're a little embarrassed about it. The five stories I'm
Speaker 1: sharing tonight all have that last quality. These came to
Speaker 1: me by email from five different people in five different states,
Speaker 1: describing events spread across more than two decades. None of
Speaker 1: these witnesses know each other. None of them asked for anything.
Speaker 1: A couple of them specifically asked me not to use
Speaker 1: their full names, and I won't. What I will do
Speaker 1: is tell you their stories the way they told them
Speaker 1: to me. A quick note before we start. I haven't
Speaker 1: been to these locations. I haven't sat across a table
Speaker 1: from these witnesses. All I have is what they sent
Speaker 1: me and my own judgment about what rings true. After
Speaker 1: almost four decades of doing this, you'll have to apply
Speaker 1: your own judgment too. That's how this works. Our first
Speaker 1: story comes from a man named Dale, and it takes
Speaker 1: us to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in November of
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety four. If you've never been to the up
Speaker 1: and deer season, it's hard to describe how empty that
Speaker 1: country gets once you walk away from the road. The
Speaker 1: Upper Peninsula has more land than several Eastern states put together,
Speaker 1: and fewer people than a mid sized suburb. Between Tranary
Speaker 1: and the Whitefish River where Dale hunted, you've got cedar swamps,
Speaker 1: hardwood ridges, old logging cuts grown back up in popple
Speaker 1: and tag Alder and miles of two track roads that
Speaker 1: haven't seen a greater since the Eisenhower administration. In November,
Speaker 1: the tourists are gone, the bugs are dead, and the
Speaker 1: snow comes early. It's the kind of place where a
Speaker 1: man can hunt all day and the only human sound
Speaker 1: he hears is his own. Zipper Dale was thirty one
Speaker 1: that fall. He'd been hunting that same forty acre since
Speaker 1: he was a kid. On land his uncle owned a
Speaker 1: long rectangle of hardwoods that ran downhill into a cedar
Speaker 1: swamp on its north end. He wrote me that he
Speaker 1: could walk it blindfolded, and I believe him because the
Speaker 1: way he described it had the kind of detail you
Speaker 1: only get from years of repetition. The leaning yellow birch
Speaker 1: where he hung his drag rope, the rusted fence wire
Speaker 1: grown into a maple along the east line, the dead
Speaker 1: fall he used as a halfway bench when he was
Speaker 1: dragging a buck out. Opening day that year was November fifteenth,
Speaker 1: a tuesday. Dale had taken the whole week off from
Speaker 1: his job at a parts store in Escanaba. He drove
Speaker 1: up the night before, slept in his uncle's camp, and
Speaker 1: was in his blind well before light The blind was
Speaker 1: a homemade plywood box on the edge of the swamp,
Speaker 1: facing a runway where the deer moved between the cedars
Speaker 1: and the hardwoods. He had a Remington pump in thirty
Speaker 1: ought six, a thermos of coffee, and a paperback he
Speaker 1: never opened. The morning was normal. That's a detail, he
Speaker 1: repeated twice in his email, and I want you to
Speaker 1: hold on to it, because witnesses do that. They anchored
Speaker 1: themselves to the normal part before they tell you about
Speaker 1: the other part. He saw two dos and a spike
Speaker 1: around eight in the morning. He passed on the spike.
Speaker 1: Around ten, a porcupine waddled past his blind, close enough
Speaker 1: to hit with the thermos. Red squirrels worked the whole morning.
Speaker 1: Chickadees came and went, and a piliated woodpecker hammered somewhere
Speaker 1: off to the west. The swamp was loud, in the
Speaker 1: way a healthy swamp is loud. The afternoon was different.
Speaker 1: Dale wrote that somewhere around three o'clock the woods went quiet,
Speaker 1: and not the gradual quiet of animals betting down for
Speaker 1: the midday lull. He'd hunted enough years to know that rhythm.
Speaker 1: This was abrupt. The squirrel stopped. The bird stopped, he wrote,
Speaker 1: and I'm quoting him here. It was like somebody lifted
Speaker 1: the needle off a record. He noticed it the way
Speaker 1: you notice a sound, which tells you something about how
Speaker 1: complete it was. Then he smelled it. He described it
Speaker 1: as a wet dog rolled in a deer carcass, with
Speaker 1: something sharp under it, like ammonia. It came to him
Speaker 1: on the breeze out of the swamp, faded and came
Speaker 1: back stronger. His first thought was a bear on a
Speaker 1: gut pile, because other hunters worked the country around his
Speaker 1: uncle's land, and somebody might have killed a deer that morning.
Speaker 1: But the wind was steady out of the north, out
Speaker 1: of the cedars, and the smell kept getting stronger, which
Speaker 1: meant whatever was making it was getting closer. Then he
Speaker 1: heard it walking. Dale was very careful in his email
Speaker 1: about this part, and the care is one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I trust him. He didn't say he heard a monster.
Speaker 1: He said he heard footsteps and standing water evenly spaced
Speaker 1: two beats, like a man waiting, slosh, slosh. He said.
Speaker 1: A deer in water is distinctive four feet a lighter
Speaker 1: and busier sound, and a bear is heavier, but also
Speaker 1: four beat and tends to pause and root around. This
Speaker 1: didn't pause. It came on at a steady walk, somewhere
Speaker 1: back in the cedars where he couldn't see more than
Speaker 1: fifteen or twenty yards, and it was paralleling the edge
Speaker 1: of the swamp, moving east to west across his front.
Speaker 1: He sat with his rifle across his knees and his
Speaker 1: thumb on the hammer of his own heart beat, and
Speaker 1: he listened to it passed within what he estimated was
Speaker 1: forty yards of his blind. He never saw it, the
Speaker 1: cedars were too thick, but at the closest point he
Speaker 1: heard it stop, and then he heard a single exhale.
Speaker 1: He wrote that it was like a horse blowing a
Speaker 1: big chest pushing air out through its nose, except deeper,
Speaker 1: and it only happened once. Then the footsteps started again
Speaker 1: and faded off to the west until the swamp swallowed them.
Speaker 1: Dale stayed in his blind until the end of legal light,
Speaker 1: which up there in mid November is around five point fifteen.
Speaker 1: He told me he stayed partly because he didn't want
Speaker 1: to walk past whatever that was, and partly because some
Speaker 1: stubborn part of him refused to get run off his
Speaker 1: own family's land by a smell and a sound. I
Speaker 1: understand that part of him. I've met a lot of
Speaker 1: men like Dale. Pride keeps them in the blind, and
Speaker 1: pride is also what keeps them from telling anyone afterward.
Speaker 1: The walkout is where this story earns its place in
Speaker 1: tonight's episode from the Blind to the two Track. Where
Speaker 1: he parked was about six hundred yards uphill through open hardwoods,
Speaker 1: a walk he'd made hundreds of times in the dark
Speaker 1: without a second thought. He had a small flashlight, one
Speaker 1: of those plastic jobs from the eighties that threw a
Speaker 1: beam about as strong as a birthday candle. He unloaded
Speaker 1: his rifle because that's how he was raised, slung it
Speaker 1: and started up the hill. He made it maybe one
Speaker 1: hundred yards before he heard the footsteps again, not in water,
Speaker 1: this time in leaves off to his left, downhill between
Speaker 1: him and the swamp. When he walked, it walked. When
Speaker 1: he stopped, it stopped. And he wrote that the gap
Speaker 1: between his last step and its last step got shorter
Speaker 1: every time he tested it, like it was getting better
Speaker 1: at the game. Now, I want to put my old
Speaker 1: cop hat on for a second, because this is the
Speaker 1: point in any account where I start asking the boring questions.
Speaker 1: Deer will absolutely shadow a hunter in the dark, and
Speaker 1: a curious deer, and dry leaves can sound enormous. Coyotes
Speaker 1: will pace a man. Even a fisher or a raccoon
Speaker 1: can sound bigger than it is when it's close and
Speaker 1: you're scared. Dale knew all that too. He's the one
Speaker 1: who raised those possibilities in his own email, and he
Speaker 1: knocked them down one at a time with the same answer.
Speaker 1: The footsteps were two beat heel strikes in rhythm with
Speaker 1: his own in long strides, he said. At one point
Speaker 1: he deliberately broke his pace, took three quick steps and stopped,
Speaker 1: and the thing in the dark did the same, and
Speaker 1: then added one more step, one like a That extra
Speaker 1: step is the detail that got me. It's small, it's specific,
Speaker 1: and it's not the kind of thing people invent. People
Speaker 1: who make stories up give you glowing eyes and roars.
Speaker 1: They don't give you one extra footstep in the leaves.
Speaker 1: Dale stopped pretending he wasn't scared. At that point, he
Speaker 1: loaded the rifle back up, which he admitted with some shame.
Speaker 1: Walking with a loaded firearm in the dark being a
Speaker 1: thing his father would have whipped him for. He kept
Speaker 1: moving faster now, the flashlight beam bouncing off tree trunks,
Speaker 1: and the thing on his left flank kept station with
Speaker 1: him the whole way, never closer than maybe thirty yards,
Speaker 1: never farther than fifty all the way up the hill.
Speaker 1: When he broke out of the timber onto the two track,
Speaker 1: he could see his pick up about eighty yards down
Speaker 1: the road, a pale shape in the dark. He wrote
Speaker 1: that the moment his boots hit the road, the footsteps
Speaker 1: behind him stopped, and the silence was worse than the
Speaker 1: sound had been, because now he had no idea where
Speaker 1: it was. He covered those eighty yards at a dead run.
Speaker 1: He got the door open, got in, got the key
Speaker 1: in on the second try, and as the engine caught
Speaker 1: something hit the side of the truck bed, one impact
Speaker 1: hard enough to rock the vehicle on its springs. He
Speaker 1: dropped it into gear and left fishtailing in the snow.
Speaker 1: And he did not look in the mirror because, in
Speaker 1: his words, I had decided I didn't want to know.
Speaker 1: The next morning, in daylight, with his uncle and his
Speaker 1: uncle's dog along, Dale went back. There was a dent
Speaker 1: in the driver's side of the truck bed above the
Speaker 1: wheel well, about the size of a dinner plate. They
Speaker 1: found his blind undisturbed, and in the swamp. In the
Speaker 1: muck along the runway the deer used. They found a
Speaker 1: line of impressions heading west. The dog wouldn't go near them.
Speaker 1: His uncle, a man in his sixties who had logged
Speaker 1: and hunted that country his whole life, looked at them
Speaker 1: for a long time and then said they should head
Speaker 1: back to camp. And the two of them never spoke
Speaker 1: about it again, not once, Dale wrote in the eleven
Speaker 1: years before his uncle passed. The impressions themselves deserve a minute,
Speaker 1: because Dale's description of them is the kind of thing
Speaker 1: you only get from a man who is tracked deer
Speaker 1: his whole life. There were nine of them visible before
Speaker 1: the line went into standing water, in a nearly straight walk,
Speaker 1: none of the straddle you see in a bear's trail.
Speaker 1: His uncle paced the distance between them, healed a heel,
Speaker 1: and Dale watched the old man stretch his stride to
Speaker 1: match it and come up short, and then watched him
Speaker 1: do it again, like the first time had been a mistake.
Speaker 1: The prints were pressed down through the muck into the
Speaker 1: firm clay underneath. Dale stepped beside one and bounced his
Speaker 1: full weight, and his boot didn't reach clay. He waghed
Speaker 1: about one ninety that fall. He's done that arithmetic in
Speaker 1: his head for thirty years, and he doesn't like the
Speaker 1: answer any better now than he did. Then. One more
Speaker 1: thing came out later that week, and Dale only learned
Speaker 1: it second hand. A camp two miles east of his
Speaker 1: uncle's play on the same swamp system packed up and
Speaker 1: left three days early that season. The story that filtered
Speaker 1: back through the gas station in Tranary was that something
Speaker 1: had screamed near their camp two nights running, and one
Speaker 1: of the men, a retired meal right nobody described as imaginative,
Speaker 1: refused to take his turn walking out to the woodpile
Speaker 1: after dark. Dale never talked to those men. He just
Speaker 1: stopped being surprised by the story when he heard it.
Speaker 1: Dale measured one of the clearest impressions against his own
Speaker 1: boot before they left. His boot was a size ten.
Speaker 1: The impression ran past it by the length of his hand,
Speaker 1: and it was pressed into muck that his own boots
Speaker 1: barely marked. He still hunts. He told me that almost
Speaker 1: defiantly at the end of the email. He still hunts
Speaker 1: the up every November, but he sold his interest in
Speaker 1: his uncle's forty to a cousin in two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: and he hunts state land near gwyn Now. And when
Speaker 1: somebody at deer camp asked why he gave up a
Speaker 1: family property with a proven and a perfectly good blind,
Speaker 1: he tells them the swamp got too wet to drag
Speaker 1: a deer out of thirty years and that dent never
Speaker 1: did come out of the truck. Before he sold it.
Speaker 1: He said he used to see it every time he
Speaker 1: loaded firewood, and he'd think about that one extra footstep
Speaker 1: in the dark, the correction, the thing in the leaves
Speaker 1: matching him, and then showing him just barely that it
Speaker 1: could do better. That's Michigan, nineteen ninety four. Our second
Speaker 1: story comes from the other side of the country, and
Speaker 1: unlike Dale, the woman who sent it to me wasn't
Speaker 1: out looking for deer or anything else. She was home,
Speaker 1: and that's exactly what makes her story worse. Our second
Speaker 1: story comes from a woman I'll call Karen, and it
Speaker 1: takes us to the coast range of Oregon in the
Speaker 1: fall of two thousand and eight, the Oregon coast range
Speaker 1: doesn't get the attention the Cascades do. It's lower, wetter,
Speaker 1: and closer to people, which fools folks into thinking it's tame.
Speaker 1: It isn't stay tuned for more back woods. It's big
Speaker 1: foot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Between Highway
Speaker 1: twenty six and Highway six west of Portland, you've got
Speaker 1: the Tillamook State Forest, hundreds of square miles of second
Speaker 1: growth Douglas fir growing out of the scar of the
Speaker 1: Tillamook Burn, cut through with logging roads, salmon creeks, and
Speaker 1: canyons so choked with sword fern and Devil's Club that
Speaker 1: a search party can walk past a downed aircraft at
Speaker 1: fifty feet. People go missing in that country. Elk herds
Speaker 1: live whole lives in it without being seen. It rains
Speaker 1: about ninety inches a year, and from October to May
Speaker 1: the clouds sit down on the ridgetops like they pay rent.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and eight, Cairn was forty three, recently divorced,
Speaker 1: and renting a cabin off a gravel spur near the
Speaker 1: Wilson River, a few miles from the nearest paved road.
Speaker 1: She described the place as the kind of rental you
Speaker 1: find on a cork board at a feed store, eight
Speaker 1: hundred square feet, a wood stove, a propane range, a
Speaker 1: covered port, and a landlord who lived in Forest Grove
Speaker 1: and came out twice a year. Her nearest neighbor was
Speaker 1: an older couple about three quarters of a mile back
Speaker 1: toward the highway. She had a dog, a sixty pound
Speaker 1: Shepherd mix named Guss, and she had taken the place
Speaker 1: specifically because it was remote. After the divorce. She wrote
Speaker 1: she wanted somewhere nobody could just drop by. I want
Speaker 1: to point out something about Karen's email before we go further.
Speaker 1: It ran almost four pages, and the first page and
Speaker 1: a half was her trying to talk me out of
Speaker 1: believing her. She gave me every alternative explanation before she
Speaker 1: gave me the events. Elk bear, a transient camping in
Speaker 1: the timber, a neighbor kid messing with her. She'd spent
Speaker 1: fifteen years arguing with herself, and the email read like
Speaker 1: the closing statement of a trial she'd been holding in
Speaker 1: her own head. In my experience, liars don't do that.
Speaker 1: Liars want you to believe them. Karen seemed to want
Speaker 1: me to give her a way out, and I'll be
Speaker 1: honest with you. By the end end of her account,
Speaker 1: I couldn't. It started with Gus in late September. Gus
Speaker 1: was an outside at bedtime dog. Last thing every night,
Speaker 1: Karen opened the door, Gus did his business off the
Speaker 1: end of the porch, nosed around the woodpile, and came
Speaker 1: back in. That was the routine for the year and
Speaker 1: a half she'd lived there. Then one night toward the
Speaker 1: end of September, she opened the door and Gus wouldn't go.
Speaker 1: He stood on the threshold with his head low, looking
Speaker 1: out at the dark, and the hair stood up in
Speaker 1: a ridge from his collar to his tail. She pushed
Speaker 1: him gently with her knee. He braced all four legs
Speaker 1: and growled, not at her passed her. She wrote that
Speaker 1: she stood there in the doorway in her socks, feeling
Speaker 1: the cold air come in, listening, and the night was silent.
Speaker 1: And then she made herself notice what kind of silent.
Speaker 1: No frogs from the creek, no owls, nothing moving in
Speaker 1: the brush, just the creek itself, and even that seemed
Speaker 1: lower than usual, the way sound it's muffled before snow.
Speaker 1: Gus didn't go out that night, He did his business
Speaker 1: at six the next morning, in daylight, about four feet
Speaker 1: from the porch, watching the tree line the whole time.
Speaker 1: Over the next three weeks, the routine fell apart. Some
Speaker 1: nights Gus went out like nothing was wrong. Other nights
Speaker 1: he refused, and Karen started keeping track because she was
Speaker 1: a bookkeeper by trade, and keeping track is what she did.
Speaker 1: She wrote the dates on the kitchen calendar with a
Speaker 1: little X. When she looked at the calendar at the
Speaker 1: end of October, the exes were clustered, three or four
Speaker 1: nights in a row, then a week of nothing, then
Speaker 1: another cluster. Whatever was bothering the dog, It wasn't living there,
Speaker 1: It was coming through other things, stacked up, the kind
Speaker 1: of things that mean nothing by themselves. A smell on
Speaker 1: the trail to the creek, skunky and sour. There one
Speaker 1: walk and gone the next. Her garbage cans, which were
Speaker 1: in a latched wooden bin her landlord had built bear proof,
Speaker 1: found tipped over inside the bin, lid still latched like
Speaker 1: the whole ben had been picked up and shaken. A whistle.
Speaker 1: Two notes that she heard twice in one week from
Speaker 1: up the slope behind the cabin. That she told herself
Speaker 1: was a varied thrush, even though she knew thrushes go
Speaker 1: quiet in the fall, And once in early October, every
Speaker 1: coyote in the valley going off at two in the morning,
Speaker 1: a full chorus that cut off all at once mid howl,
Speaker 1: like a door slamming on it. Then came the night
Speaker 1: of November eighth. She was sure of the date because
Speaker 1: it was a Saturday, and she'd driven into Tillamook that
Speaker 1: day for groceries, and her receipt was still on the
Speaker 1: counter for weeks after, and she couldn't bring herself to
Speaker 1: throw it away because it was proof of the last
Speaker 1: normal day. That evening was hard rain. She'd had the
Speaker 1: wood stove going since afternoon, made dinner, and was watching
Speaker 1: a movie on the couch with Gus. When the dog
Speaker 1: sat up, she muted the television. Underneath the rain on
Speaker 1: the metal roof, she heard footsteps on the gravel outside, heavy, unhurried,
Speaker 1: coming up the side of the cabin from the direction
Speaker 1: of the creek. Her first thought was a person, and
Speaker 1: her second thought was that the first thought was terrifying
Speaker 1: all by itself, because nobody walks three quarters of a
Speaker 1: mile up a gravel spur in hard rain at ten
Speaker 1: o'clock at night, with good intentions. She had no gun
Speaker 1: in the house. The divorce had cost her that too,
Speaker 1: in a roundabout way she didn't explain. She took the
Speaker 1: fireplace poker off the stand, which she admitted felt ridiculous
Speaker 1: even at the time, and she stood in the middle
Speaker 1: of her living room and listened to the footsteps come
Speaker 1: level with the cabin and stop. The window over her
Speaker 1: kitchen sink faced that side. She had a curtain on
Speaker 1: a wire across it, one of those cafe style curtains
Speaker 1: that covered the bottom two thirds of the glass. The
Speaker 1: top third was bare. Karen wrote that she'd measured that
Speaker 1: window after the fact more than once, because she had to.
Speaker 1: The sill sat fifty inches off the ground outside. The
Speaker 1: top of the glass was just under seven feet. The
Speaker 1: kitchen light was off. The only light in the room
Speaker 1: came from the television frozen on the menu screen, and
Speaker 1: from the little bulb over the stove. And in the
Speaker 1: bare top third of that window above the curtain, she
Speaker 1: saw the rain on the glass change. That's how she
Speaker 1: described it, and I've thought about that sentence a lot.
Speaker 1: She didn't say she saw a face. She said the
Speaker 1: streaks of rain running down the glass went dark, the
Speaker 1: way they would if something large moved close to the
Speaker 1: other side and blocked the gray of the night sky.
Speaker 1: A shape filled the top of the window, and then
Speaker 1: it leaned in, and there was an eye. One eye.
Speaker 1: The angle only allowed one. She described it as bigger
Speaker 1: than a human eye, dark, with a wet shine from
Speaker 1: the stove light, set in skin that looked like wet leather.
Speaker 1: It was looking into her kitchen, and then it moved
Speaker 1: and it was looking at her. And she stood in
Speaker 1: her living room holding a fireplace poker in her pajamas,
Speaker 1: while something tall enough to look through the top of
Speaker 1: a seven foot window looked back at her through the rain.
Speaker 1: Gus broke first. He'd been frozen next to the couch,
Speaker 1: and he came apart all at once, barking with a
Speaker 1: violence she'd never heard from him in nine years, lunging
Speaker 1: at the kitchen but not entering it, holding the doorway
Speaker 1: between the rooms like a line he was assigned to.
Speaker 1: The eye withdrew. The shape slid off the window, and
Speaker 1: the footsteps on the gravel didn't run. That detail mattered
Speaker 1: to her, and it matters to me. They walked away
Speaker 1: the same unhurried pace they'd arrived with, down toward the
Speaker 1: creek until the rain covered them. Karen sat up the
Speaker 1: rest of that night with the lights on, the poker
Speaker 1: across her lap and Gus pressed against her leg, and
Speaker 1: at some point near dawn, it occurred to her that
Speaker 1: she had not heard it cross the gravel toward the
Speaker 1: creek for as long as it should have taken, which
Speaker 1: meant either it had stepped off into the moss and
Speaker 1: timber where something that size should not be able to
Speaker 1: move quietly, or it had stopped somewhere out there in
Speaker 1: the dark and stood again in the morning. The rain
Speaker 1: had hammed the gravel clean, no tracks there, but at
Speaker 1: the corner of the cabin, where the gravel met the
Speaker 1: mud at the start of the creek trail, there was
Speaker 1: a single impression, half flooded, pressed deep. She didn't measure
Speaker 1: it with a tape because she didn't own one that
Speaker 1: she could find that morning, and I loved that detail,
Speaker 1: the small domestic failure of it. She measured it with
Speaker 1: the only thing at hand, which was a magazine off
Speaker 1: the porch. The footprint was longer than the magazine. A
Speaker 1: standard magazine is about eleven inches. She put the magazine
Speaker 1: down inside the print and there was mud showing past
Speaker 1: both ends. She photographed it with a flip phone, and yes,
Speaker 1: I asked, and no, the photos didn't survive two phone
Speaker 1: upgrades and a flooded purse in twenty eleven. I know
Speaker 1: how that sounds. She knows how it sounds. It's the
Speaker 1: most common heartbreak in this field. And if I threw
Speaker 1: out every account that lost its photographs, this show would
Speaker 1: be ten minutes long. There was one conversation Karen had
Speaker 1: during those weeks that she almost left out of her email,
Speaker 1: and I'm glad she didn't. Sometime in mid October, she
Speaker 1: ran into the older couple from down the spur at
Speaker 1: their mailboxes, and she mentioned keeping it light that something
Speaker 1: had been getting into her garbage and spooking her dog,
Speaker 1: probably elk, she said. The wife stopped sorting her mail,
Speaker 1: the husband looked off up the road for a second
Speaker 1: and then said, we keep ours in after dark October on.
Speaker 1: That was the whole exchange. Nobody named anything. Karen drove
Speaker 1: the rest of the way home with the radio off,
Speaker 1: and the couple never raised the subject again, and neither
Speaker 1: did she, And she's wondered ever since what exes were
Speaker 1: on their calendar. Karen gave her notice on December first
Speaker 1: and was out by January. She told the landlord the
Speaker 1: winters were too much, and the landlord, she said, didn't argue,
Speaker 1: didn't ask a single question, and refunded her deposit by
Speaker 1: return mail faster than any landlord in recorded history. Make
Speaker 1: of that what you will. She lives in Beaverton now,
Speaker 1: in a townhouse with street lights, and she wrote me
Speaker 1: that for years she couldn't have a curtain that didn't
Speaker 1: cover a window all the way to the top. Her husband,
Speaker 1: she remarried in twenty fourteen, thinks it's a quirk. She's
Speaker 1: never told him why. She told me a podcast host
Speaker 1: she's never met, because, in her words, you can say
Speaker 1: things to a stranger that you can't say across your
Speaker 1: own kitchen table. The part of her story I keep
Speaker 1: coming back to, isn't the eye in the window as
Speaker 1: bad as that is. It's the calendar, those little exes
Speaker 1: clustered and then absent, and then clustered again. Something was
Speaker 1: moving through that drainage on a schedule, the way a
Speaker 1: bear works a circuit of food sources, the way a
Speaker 1: trapper runs a line. Karen's cabin was a stop on
Speaker 1: a route. She just happened to live there. Our third
Speaker 1: story goes back in time and down into the river
Speaker 1: bottoms to southeastern Oklahoma in the summer of nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: where two brothers were about to learn that the catfish
Speaker 1: weren't the only thing working that river at night. Southeastern
Speaker 1: Oklahoma is not the Oklahoma most people picture. Forget the
Speaker 1: wheat and the wind farms. Down in the corner where
Speaker 1: the state leans against Arkansas and Texas, you've got the
Speaker 1: Kayamichi Mountains, the Washataw National Forest, and river bottoms thick
Speaker 1: with oak, hickory, and pine. The locals call it Little Dixie.
Speaker 1: It's logging country and chicken house country, dirt roads and
Speaker 1: low water crossings, and it has carried stories about something
Speaker 1: big and hair covered in those mountains going back well
Speaker 1: over a century, long before anybody up there had heard
Speaker 1: the word bigfoot. Old timers in Lafleur and Pushmataha Counties
Speaker 1: were telling stories about what they just called the wild man,
Speaker 1: or worse names I won't repeat that they swore lived
Speaker 1: back in the mountains. The man who emailed me I'll
Speaker 1: call him. Roy grew up outside of Tallaheena. In the
Speaker 1: summer of nineteen eighty seven, Roy was seventeen and his
Speaker 1: brother Charlie was twenty. Their family wasn't poor exactly, but
Speaker 1: they weren't far from it, and the brothers ran trot
Speaker 1: lines on the river in the summer the way some
Speaker 1: kids mow lawns. Flathead and channel cat went into the
Speaker 1: family freezer and onto the table, and the extra got
Speaker 1: sold to neighbors. If you don't know trot lining, it's
Speaker 1: a heavy main line stretched across a stretch of river,
Speaker 1: anchored on both ends, with baited hooks hanging off it
Speaker 1: on droppers every few feet. You set it in the evening,
Speaker 1: you run it once or twice during the night to
Speaker 1: take fish off and rebait, and you pull it in
Speaker 1: the morning. It's night work by nature. The big flatheads
Speaker 1: feed in the dark. The brothers had a fourteen foot
Speaker 1: flat bottomed John boat with a nine and a half
Speaker 1: horse Evinrude that ran when it felt like it, and
Speaker 1: they had a stretch of river they considered theirs a
Speaker 1: series of deep holes below a long gravel bar a
Speaker 1: few miles from the nearest bridge. Roy asked me not
Speaker 1: to name the river, and I'm going to respect that
Speaker 1: because his family still lives in that county and he
Speaker 1: still has to buy a fee at the same store
Speaker 1: as everybody else. The night he wrote me about was
Speaker 1: in late July. He remembered it was late July because
Speaker 1: two a day football practice started the first week of August,
Speaker 1: and this was the last stretch of full summer freedom.
Speaker 1: The brothers put in at a low water crossing around sunset,
Speaker 1: ran down river to their lines, and rebaited with cutshad
Speaker 1: and live perch. The plan was the usual plan. Tie
Speaker 1: up on the gravel bar, build a little fire, eat
Speaker 1: the sandwiches their mother made, doze in the boat, and
Speaker 1: run the lines around midnight and again at first light.
Speaker 1: The early part of the night was ordinary and roy like.
Speaker 1: Dale in our first story made a point of saying,
Speaker 1: so bullfrogs in the slack water, a barred owl pair
Speaker 1: calling back and forth across the river that eight note
Speaker 1: rhythm carp rolling a beaver that slapped its tail somewhere
Speaker 1: upstream every twenty minutes or so, like it was on
Speaker 1: shift work. He said, you could have recorded that night
Speaker 1: and sold it as one of those relaxation tapes. Right
Speaker 1: up until about eleven thirty. At eleven thirty, give or take,
Speaker 1: the bottom dropped out of the sound. The frogs quit,
Speaker 1: The owls quit mid exchange, one of them cutting off
Speaker 1: part way through a phrase. Charlie noticed it first and
Speaker 1: sat up in the boat and said listen, and Roy said,
Speaker 1: I don't hear nothing, and Charlie said, that's what I mean.
Speaker 1: Then from downstream, around the bend below their lowest set,
Speaker 1: came a scream. I get a lot of mileage out
Speaker 1: of describing vocalizations on this show, and I always run
Speaker 1: into the same wall, which is that the people who
Speaker 1: hear these things run out of comparisons. Roy did what
Speaker 1: they all do. He stacked up everything he knew and
Speaker 1: threw it out, one piece at a time. He'd heard
Speaker 1: mountain lions on his grandfather's place as a kid. He'd
Speaker 1: heard bobcats fighting. He'd heard a horse die in a barnfire,
Speaker 1: which he said was the worst sound he knew. And
Speaker 1: he said this was none of them, and bigger than
Speaker 1: and all of them. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. It started low, like
Speaker 1: a man yelling down a culvert and then climbed into
Speaker 1: a scream and held it. He said it held the
Speaker 1: scream longer than he could have held a note. And
Speaker 1: his brother was the kind of fool who would test that.
Speaker 1: And Charlie tried it the next day and went red
Speaker 1: in the face and quit. And the scream that night
Speaker 1: had still been going lungs. That's what that detail tells you.
Speaker 1: Whatever made that sound had a chest like a fifty
Speaker 1: five gallon drum. The brothers sat in the dark on
Speaker 1: that gravel bar with their little fire burned down to coals,
Speaker 1: and they had the conversation that teenage brothers have, which
Speaker 1: is each one waiting for the other one to admit
Speaker 1: he wants to leave, so the leaving can be the
Speaker 1: other one's fault. Neither one cracked. Charlie said it was
Speaker 1: a panther. Roy said panthers had been gone from that
Speaker 1: county for fifty years. And Charlie said, well, nobody told
Speaker 1: that one. And they laughed the way you laugh when
Speaker 1: nothing is funny. And they decided they'd run the lines
Speaker 1: now early, take what was on the hooks, and go home.
Speaker 1: They told each other it was because the bait was
Speaker 1: probably getting picked clean. Roy told me the truth in
Speaker 1: his email, which is that no power on Earth was
Speaker 1: going to keep them on that river until first light.
Speaker 1: They kicked the coals apart, pushed the John boat off
Speaker 1: the bar, and the Evan Rude, which ran when it
Speaker 1: felt like it didn't feel like it. Charlie pulled the
Speaker 1: rope until he was swearing in a whisper, which Roy
Speaker 1: said was somehow scarier than swearing out loud, and they
Speaker 1: gave up and took the paddles. The current would carry
Speaker 1: them down to the lines. They'd work them by paddle
Speaker 1: and flashlight, and then they'd line the boat back up
Speaker 1: along the shallows to the crossing, dragging it up the
Speaker 1: gravel where they had to hard work. But they were
Speaker 1: seventeen and twenty and built out of cutshad and stubbornness.
Speaker 1: They took eleven fish off the first two lines, working quick,
Speaker 1: one paddling to hold the boat and one running the hooks,
Speaker 1: trading off the flashlight in Roy's teeth. Half the time,
Speaker 1: the night stayed silent around them except for their own noise,
Speaker 1: and their own noise sounded enormous, fish slapping the boat floor,
Speaker 1: hooks ticking on the gunnel. Roy said he kept sweeping
Speaker 1: the flashlight along the banks between hooks, and the banks
Speaker 1: were just banks, willow cutbank, root wads. Nothing. The third line,
Speaker 1: the lowest one, was set across the tail of a
Speaker 1: deep hole just above the bend the scream had come from.
Speaker 1: They almost left it. Charlie said leave it, and Roy said,
Speaker 1: there's a flathead on it. I can see the main
Speaker 1: line jerking from here. The line was sawing the surface
Speaker 1: the way it does when something heavy is hooked. And
Speaker 1: money was money and food was food, so they went
Speaker 1: down to it. The flathead was real. Roy guessed it
Speaker 1: at twenty five pounds, a good fish, and he was
Speaker 1: wrestling it over the gunnel with both hands in its mouth.
Speaker 1: The flashlight lying in the bottom of the boat pointed
Speaker 1: at nothing. When Charlie grabbed his shoulder hard enough to
Speaker 1: leave Marx and said, don't move. Across the river maybe
Speaker 1: sixty feet on the gravel point at the inside of
Speaker 1: the bend, something was standing in the water. There was
Speaker 1: a moon that night, about three quarters and the gravel
Speaker 1: bar was pale, and against that pale gravel and the
Speaker 1: moon gray water. There was a shape upright that Roy
Speaker 1: first took for a man, and the next thought arrived
Speaker 1: a half second later and ruined everything, which was that
Speaker 1: a man standing in that spot where the brothers had
Speaker 1: waited one hundred times dragging the boat would have been
Speaker 1: in water to his waist. This thing was in it
Speaker 1: to the knees, knees Roy said that were above the
Speaker 1: waterline of a hole he knew like he knew his
Speaker 1: own driveway. And the shoulders above those knees, he said,
Speaker 1: were as wide as the John boat's sterned seat, and
Speaker 1: the head sat on the shoulders with almost no neck,
Speaker 1: and it was looking at them. Nobody moved. The flathead
Speaker 1: flopped in the bottom of the boat, banging the aluminum,
Speaker 1: the loudest sound in the world, and the figure across
Speaker 1: the river turned its head, and Roy used a phrase
Speaker 1: in his email that I want to read you exactly
Speaker 1: because I couldn't write it better. He said. It turned
Speaker 1: its head the way a man turns toward a noise
Speaker 1: he already knew about, not surprised, just rood of us
Speaker 1: to make it. Then it moved, and the moving was
Speaker 1: the worst part. It didn't lunge, and it didn't flee.
Speaker 1: It walked upstream against a current that pushed those boys
Speaker 1: around when they waited it, and it walked through that
Speaker 1: water without lifting its knees high, plowing it, and the
Speaker 1: sound of it reached them across the river, a heavy
Speaker 1: shoving sound like a horse waiting, and the weight came
Speaker 1: off it in a v It walked up the edge
Speaker 1: of the gravel bar out of the water, and Roy
Speaker 1: said when it came out of the river, it went
Speaker 1: from big to something out of a nightmare. On the
Speaker 1: bar in full moonlight, with nothing around it but flat
Speaker 1: gravel for scale, it stood taller than the willow saplings
Speaker 1: at the head of the bar, and the brothers had
Speaker 1: cut limbs off those willows for bank poles, and those
Speaker 1: willows ran eight or nine feet. It crossed the bar
Speaker 1: and maybe six strides, unhurried arms swinging long and low,
Speaker 1: and went up the cutbank on the far side, a
Speaker 1: bank the boys would have needed hands and a running
Speaker 1: start to climb, and it took it like a porch step.
Speaker 1: The brush at the top closed behind it, and about
Speaker 1: ten seconds later, from up the ridge in the direction
Speaker 1: it had gone, that scream came again, and this time
Speaker 1: another one answered it from the other side of the river,
Speaker 1: from the boy's side, from behind them, somewhere up the
Speaker 1: slope above the bank. They were drifting along two of them.
Speaker 1: They'd been sitting between two of them. Charlie didn't try
Speaker 1: the motor again. The brothers paddled, and Roy said they
Speaker 1: paddled like the boat was on fire. Downstream, passed their
Speaker 1: own lines, leaving the last hooks baited, leaving a stringer,
Speaker 1: leaving the lid of the bait bucket spinning on the
Speaker 1: water behind them, and they didn't stop until they reached
Speaker 1: the next bridge three miles down, where they dragged the
Speaker 1: boat up a rip wrap bank in the dark, tearing
Speaker 1: their hands up on the rocks, and walked a mile
Speaker 1: and a half to the house of a man their
Speaker 1: father knew, and woke him up at two in the morning.
Speaker 1: They told him the motor died. That part was even true.
Speaker 1: Their father went back with them the next afternoon in
Speaker 1: daylight to pick up the lines. And this is the
Speaker 1: part of Roy's email that moves it for me from
Speaker 1: a good story into something I genuinely don't know what
Speaker 1: to do with. The lines were gone, not cut, not
Speaker 1: snapped by a gar or fouled on a log, conditions
Speaker 1: Roy knew and described and ruled out the lines were gone,
Speaker 1: and the anchor points were what was left. Trot lines
Speaker 1: get tied off to something solid on each bank, a route,
Speaker 1: a stake, a tree base. On the third line, the
Speaker 1: low one, the line by the bend the tie off tree.
Speaker 1: On the gravel bar side was a green willow about
Speaker 1: as thick as a man's forearm, and it was broken
Speaker 1: off at about the seven foot mark, snapped over the break,
Speaker 1: fresh and white, the top of the tree lying on
Speaker 1: the gravel, with their line still nodded to it. Their
Speaker 1: father stood and looked at that broken willow for a while.
Speaker 1: Then he looked at the gravel around it, and Roy
Speaker 1: looked too. And the gravel doesn't take a track. Gravel
Speaker 1: never does. But in one patch of damp sand at
Speaker 1: the waterline, there was a depression the length of two
Speaker 1: of his father's boot prints, laid heel to toe. His
Speaker 1: father was quiet on the ride home, and at the
Speaker 1: supper table that night he told the boys the river
Speaker 1: was fished out and they'd be hauling hay for the
Speaker 1: rest of the summer, and the price of catfish at
Speaker 1: that house was never spoken of again. Roy is in
Speaker 1: his mid fifties now. Charlie passed in twenty nineteen, and
Speaker 1: Roy said part of why he finally wrote me was
Speaker 1: that with his brother gone, he's the last witness. And
Speaker 1: a story that two people carry is a memory, but
Speaker 1: a story one person carry starts to feel like a lie,
Speaker 1: even when it isn't. He wanted it on the record,
Speaker 1: so here it is on the record. Our fourth story
Speaker 1: brings us forward to twenty fifteen, into the hollows of
Speaker 1: West Virginia, where a man was getting paid to walk
Speaker 1: a straight line through country where he came to believe
Speaker 1: something didn't want a line walked at all. The man
Speaker 1: who sent me our fourth story signed his email Matt,
Speaker 1: and he was very clear that Matt is not his
Speaker 1: real name, because in twenty fifteen he was working for
Speaker 1: a survey contractor on a natural gas pipeline project in
Speaker 1: central West Virginia, and the industry up there is a
Speaker 1: small world, and a man who tells stories like this
Speaker 1: one stops getting hired. If you've never been to central
Speaker 1: West Virginia, the word mountains gives you the wrong picture.
Speaker 1: These aren't peaks. It's a plateau that water has been
Speaker 1: tearing apart for a few million years. So what you
Speaker 1: get is an endless series of steep ridges and tight hollows,
Speaker 1: one after another like a rumpled blanket. The slopes run hard,
Speaker 1: the hollows are dark by late afternoon, and the whole
Speaker 1: landscape is covered in hardwood forest and rhododendron and greenbriar,
Speaker 1: so dense that you can stand thirty feet from a
Speaker 1: man and locate him only by his swearing. Pipeline work
Speaker 1: in that country means cutting a corridor straight across the
Speaker 1: grain of it, up one slope and down the next,
Speaker 1: and before the dozers come, somebody has to walk the
Speaker 1: route with stakes and flagging tape and a GPS unit.
Speaker 1: In the fall of twenty fifteen, that somebody was Matt.
Speaker 1: Normally that's two man work or better, but the contractor
Speaker 1: was stretched across three jobs, and on the section in question,
Speaker 1: a stretch crossing a series of hollows north of a
Speaker 1: little community I agreed not to name, Matt was working alone.
Speaker 1: He was thirty eight, twelve years in the trade, a
Speaker 1: deer hunter and former wrestler, and he wanted me to
Speaker 1: know he was not a man who spooped. He wrote,
Speaker 1: I've stepped over copperheads, I've been bluff charged by a
Speaker 1: bear with cubs. I've had a landowner meet me at
Speaker 1: his fence line with a shotgun. None of that ever
Speaker 1: followed me home. The first a week on that section
Speaker 1: was ordinary work and beautiful country. October, the leaves turning,
Speaker 1: the morning's cold enough to see your breath in the
Speaker 1: hollow bottoms. He'd park his truck on a gas well
Speaker 1: access road, hike into the route, and spend the day
Speaker 1: leap frogging along the center line, shooting points, driving lath
Speaker 1: tying orange and black flagging, eating lunch on whatever log
Speaker 1: presented itself. He saw deer every day, turkey most days,
Speaker 1: one bobcat that he watched for a full minute before
Speaker 1: it dissolved into the brush. The first odd thing he
Speaker 1: found was on the Thursday of that first week, in
Speaker 1: the bottom of the deepest hollow on his section, where
Speaker 1: a creek about four feet wide ran through stands of
Speaker 1: big hemlock that had never been worth logging. Just off
Speaker 1: his center line, in a flat spot among the hemlocks,
Speaker 1: there was a structure. Four saplings, each one thicker than
Speaker 1: his thumb, bent over and woven together at the top
Speaker 1: into a rough arch, with broken limbs stacked and leaned
Speaker 1: against it. He'd seen plenty of dead fall and plenty
Speaker 1: of storm damage, and he'd built brush blinds himself as
Speaker 1: a hunter, and he stood there and worked the problem.
Speaker 1: Storm damage doesn't weave Hunters don't build a blind a
Speaker 1: mile and a half from the nearest road in a
Speaker 1: hollow with no food plot and no field of view
Speaker 1: and kids. His last and favorite explanation, don't haul themselves
Speaker 1: through that much greenbrier for a fort. The detail that
Speaker 1: stuck with him was the saplings themselves. They were greenwood, alive,
Speaker 1: bent over and held. He grabbed one of the loose
Speaker 1: woven limbs and tried to pull it free, and he
Speaker 1: wrote that it was set in there so tight he
Speaker 1: gave up, and the trying made him feel like he
Speaker 1: was being watched, the specific way that picking up something
Speaker 1: that isn't yours makes you check over your shoulder. He
Speaker 1: flagged around the structure rather than through it, which wasn't procedure,
Speaker 1: and he didn't put it in his field notes, and
Speaker 1: at the time he couldn't have told you why. On
Speaker 1: either count, Friday was quiet. The following Monday was not
Speaker 1: Monday morning. Hiking in he came to the hollow with
Speaker 1: the hemlocks and found his work undone, not all of it.
Speaker 1: That's the part that bothered him. Vandals, in his experience
Speaker 1: and right of way work draws. Vandals when landowners are unhappy,
Speaker 1: rip out everything they can reach and usually leave a
Speaker 1: beer can. This was selective. The lath stakes in the
Speaker 1: hollow bottom, maybe a dozen of them, along three hundred
Speaker 1: feet of center line, were gone, not knocked over, extracted,
Speaker 1: and he found most of them as he worked up
Speaker 1: the far slope, scattered uphill in the leaves, and two
Speaker 1: of them were broken into pieces, and one of those,
Speaker 1: an inch and a half thick piece of hardwood lath,
Speaker 1: was twisted. He put that one in his truck. He
Speaker 1: said it looked like a rag somebody had wrung out.
Speaker 1: The fiber spiraled, and he sat in the cab that evening,
Speaker 1: turning it over in his hands, trying to imagine the
Speaker 1: grip required. And then he put it behind the seat
Speaker 1: and stopped trying to imagine it. The flagging in that
Speaker 1: hollow was gone too. Found one piece a strip of
Speaker 1: orange and black tape, about forty feet up in a hemlock,
Speaker 1: tied to a limb. He stood under it for a
Speaker 1: long time. He wrote, I didn't see anything tie it
Speaker 1: up there. Wind can do strange things, but it was tied.
Speaker 1: There was a knot in it. He restaked the section
Speaker 1: Tuesday it was intact. Wednesday it was intact, and he
Speaker 1: let himself relax. And Wednesday was the day it stopped
Speaker 1: being about steaks. He was eating lunch on the slope
Speaker 1: above the hemlock hollow, sitting against an oak, when something
Speaker 1: hit the leaves about twenty feet downhill from him, then
Speaker 1: another one closer, and that one bounced and rolled to
Speaker 1: a stop where he could see it. And it was
Speaker 1: a rock about the size of a soft ball, mud
Speaker 1: still on one side of it, like it had just
Speaker 1: been pulled out of a creek bed. The creek was
Speaker 1: four hundred feet below him. He stood up and the
Speaker 1: hollow below him was the same wall of hemlock, dark
Speaker 1: and rhododendron it always was. And he did what a
Speaker 1: big stubborn man does, which was hollowed down into it.
Speaker 1: He yelled that whoever was down there needed to knock
Speaker 1: it off, that he was working, that he'd call the sheriff,
Speaker 1: And from down in that hollow, something knocked three hits
Speaker 1: on wood evenly spaced hard enough that he felt the
Speaker 1: third one in his chest more than his ears. He'd
Speaker 1: heard about wood knocks. Every hunter in West Virginia has
Speaker 1: heard about wood knocks the same way everyone's cousin saw
Speaker 1: a black panther once. He wrote that hearing one is different,
Speaker 1: and what's different is the weight. He said, You instantly
Speaker 1: understand that the sound you just heard required a swing,
Speaker 1: and the swing required arms, and your whole body does
Speaker 1: the math on the arms before your brain has a vote.
Speaker 1: Matt did not go down into the hollow. He worked
Speaker 1: uphill the rest of the day, fast and sloppy, and
Speaker 1: he kept finding reasons to turn around, and at four o'clock,
Speaker 1: an hour early, he hiked out a route that avoided
Speaker 1: the hemlocks, which added a mile, which he was more
Speaker 1: than fine with. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. That night, he called
Speaker 1: his crew chief and asked when he was getting a
Speaker 1: second man. The crew chief said two weeks maybe, and
Speaker 1: asked if there was a problem, and Matt heard himself
Speaker 1: say no. He explained that in the email better than
Speaker 1: I could. He said, you have to understand in that work,
Speaker 1: in that country, there's no version of that phone call
Speaker 1: that ends well for me. There's no box on the
Speaker 1: safety form for it. Thursday, he almost didn't go in,
Speaker 1: but he eventually dragged himself in pride again. I told
Speaker 1: you about the men like Dale and Matt is the
Speaker 1: same breed. The day was dead quiet, no deer, no turkey,
Speaker 1: no squirrels, And by now you know what that means.
Speaker 1: And so did Matt. And he worked anyway, one eye
Speaker 1: on his instrument and one eye on the timber. At
Speaker 1: around two in the afternoon, working the center line down
Speaker 1: toward the hemlock hollow from the north, he stopped to
Speaker 1: shoot a point and while he stood still at the tripod,
Speaker 1: the brush at the edge of the rhododendron thicket below
Speaker 1: him moved against the breeze. He turned his head and
Speaker 1: didn't move anything else, and he looked at the spot.
Speaker 1: He said, it was like one of those optical illusion
Speaker 1: pictures where the image snaps into place and afterward you
Speaker 1: can't not see it. Inside the edge of the thicket,
Speaker 1: in the shadow, maybe sixty yards down slope, there was
Speaker 1: a face, dark, wide, flat with heavy brows, and below
Speaker 1: it a shoulder and part of a chest, and the
Speaker 1: whole figure was crouched, hunkered down on its haunches the
Speaker 1: way a catcher crouches, and even folded up like that.
Speaker 1: The top of its head reached the height of the rhododendron.
Speaker 1: And that rhododendron, he said, was over his own head
Speaker 1: when he'd walked past it. It was watching him work.
Speaker 1: He understood that immediately, not stalking, not hiding from him exactly,
Speaker 1: because when his eyes found it, it didn't flinch and
Speaker 1: it didn't melt back. It stayed in its crouch and
Speaker 1: looked at him. And Matt stood at his tripod with
Speaker 1: one hand on the GPS rod and looked back, and
Speaker 1: he told me the standoff lasted somewhere between ten seconds
Speaker 1: and a year. What broke it was the thing standing up.
Speaker 1: It rose out of the crouch slowly, and Matt's eyes
Speaker 1: went up with it and up, and he said the
Speaker 1: rising was the moment his nerve went because a face
Speaker 1: in a thicket is a thing you're seeing, but a
Speaker 1: body that keeps unfolding past the height of the brush
Speaker 1: is a thing that's happening. It stood, it turned deliberate
Speaker 1: as a man stepping back from a counter, and it
Speaker 1: walked into the thicket down slope, and the rhododendron, a
Speaker 1: wall of growth that Matt would have needed a machete
Speaker 1: and an hour to push sixty yards through, swallowed it whole.
Speaker 1: He could track its progress by the tops of the
Speaker 1: bushes moving. The movement went down the hollow steady, maybe
Speaker 1: thirty seconds of it, and quit. Matt left his tripod standing.
Speaker 1: He left a tripod and a unit worth more than
Speaker 1: his truck payment standing on the center line, walked out
Speaker 1: the long way, and came back for the gear the
Speaker 1: next morning with the only coworker he ever told, a
Speaker 1: chain hand from his church, who owed him nothing and
Speaker 1: came anyway. The gear was untouched. The hollow was loud
Speaker 1: that morning, squirrels and jays everywhere, and somehow, he wrote,
Speaker 1: the woods being normal again was its own kind of insult.
Speaker 1: Matt finished the section. It took him eight more working days,
Speaker 1: and he did them all in that other man's company,
Speaker 1: off the clock arrangement paid out of Matt's own pocket
Speaker 1: in venison and gas money. Nothing else happened. The stake
Speaker 1: stayed in. Whatever had been contesting that hollow either lost
Speaker 1: interest or made its point. The dozers came the next spring,
Speaker 1: and the corridor went through, and there's gas moving under
Speaker 1: that hollow today, and the hemlocks where the woven structure
Speaker 1: stood are gone. He ended his email with something I
Speaker 1: want to read you. He wrote, I've thought a lot
Speaker 1: about why it did what it did, the stakes, the
Speaker 1: rock and showing itself, and I keep landing in the
Speaker 1: same place. It went exactly as far as it had to,
Speaker 1: and not one inch further. It never touched me, It
Speaker 1: never even bluffed at me. It ran a trespasser off
Speaker 1: its creek the cheapest way available. I was the animal
Speaker 1: in that story, Brian, I just didn't know it till
Speaker 1: I was back in the truck. Our fifth and final story, Tonight,
Speaker 1: takes us into the cold to the north woods of
Speaker 1: Maine in February of two thousand and one, and it's
Speaker 1: the only story Tonight with two witnesses who are both
Speaker 1: still living, a father and a son, and the son
Speaker 1: is the one who wrote me. The young man who
Speaker 1: sent it, I'll call him Eric, was eleven years old
Speaker 1: in February of two thousand and one, which makes him
Speaker 1: in his mid thirties now, and his email had a
Speaker 1: quality I want to mention before we start because it
Speaker 1: shaped how I read it. He wrote the whole thing
Speaker 1: in two voices. He'd tell a piece of it the
Speaker 1: way he remembers it, the eleven year old's version, and
Speaker 1: then he'd stop and add what his father says about
Speaker 1: that same because before writing me, he sat down with
Speaker 1: his father, who's in his seventies now, and went through
Speaker 1: the whole night, detail by detail for the first time
Speaker 1: in their lives twenty five years, and they'd never once
Speaker 1: walked through it together. The email was the two of
Speaker 1: them finally comparing notes and where their memories disagreed. Eric
Speaker 1: told me, so, I cannot tell you how rare that
Speaker 1: is and how much weight it carries with me. Fabricators
Speaker 1: don't volunteer their inconsistencies. The setting is the north Woods
Speaker 1: of Maine, in the country around Moosehead Lake, and again
Speaker 1: I'm keeping it loose at the family's request, but I'll
Speaker 1: tell you what you need. This is commercial timberland, millions
Speaker 1: of acres of spruce, fir and hardwood, laced with private
Speaker 1: logging roads, and scattered through it are leased camps little
Speaker 1: cabin's families have held for generations on ponds you've never
Speaker 1: heard of. In February. That country is locked down under
Speaker 1: three or four feet of snow. The logging roads are
Speaker 1: plowed only where the cut is active. And to get
Speaker 1: to a camp like the one in this story, you
Speaker 1: go in by snowmobile miles past the last plowed road,
Speaker 1: hauling your gear in a toe sled. The cold is
Speaker 1: not a mood up there, it's a fact. You organize
Speaker 1: your whole day around, Eric said. The thermometer nailed to
Speaker 1: the camp porch read eleven below when they arrived and
Speaker 1: never got above zero the whole weekend. The camp had
Speaker 1: been in the family since Eric's great grandfather. One room,
Speaker 1: a sleeping loft, a wood stove, gas lights, an outhouse,
Speaker 1: and a porch facing the pond. The pond was the
Speaker 1: point of the trip. Eric's father was a serious ice fisherman.
Speaker 1: In February meant togue, which is what maners call lake trout,
Speaker 1: and the weekend was a tradition just the two of them.
Speaker 1: The first year Eric was deemed old enough for the
Speaker 1: dead of winter rather than the soft trips in March,
Speaker 1: a snowmobiled in on a Friday afternoon, got the stove going,
Speaker 1: drilled their holes before dark, and set tip up traps
Speaker 1: for then. Eric remembers that first night as perfect. He
Speaker 1: listed the details of boy keeps beans and hot dogs
Speaker 1: cooked on the wood stove, his father letting him have
Speaker 1: coffee half milk, the gas lights, hissing, playing cribbage and
Speaker 1: getting skunked, the cold in the loft so sharp that
Speaker 1: getting into the sleeping bag was an event. And his
Speaker 1: father's voice telling him the pond would boom and crack
Speaker 1: all night as the ice grew, and that it would
Speaker 1: sound like the end of the world and mean nothing.
Speaker 1: The pond did boom and crack all night. That part
Speaker 1: was true. The other sound came Saturday. Saturday was the
Speaker 1: fishing day, and the fishing was good. And I'll spare
Speaker 1: you the fish stories except one detail that matters later.
Speaker 1: They kept their catch in a snowbank locker. You packed
Speaker 1: the clean togue and snow in a wooden box on
Speaker 1: the porch, and the cold does the rest. By Saturday
Speaker 1: evening there were six good fish in that box, and
Speaker 1: the lid had a cinder block on it because of
Speaker 1: pine martins and foxes and the occasional early rising raccoon.
Speaker 1: Eric's father had been waiting that lid his whole life.
Speaker 1: Saturday night, the wind died. Eric's father confirms this and
Speaker 1: says it's the detail he always starts with, because the
Speaker 1: north Woods in winter are never silent unless the wind
Speaker 1: quits entirely, and that night they got the rare dead calm,
Speaker 1: the kind where you can hear a snowmobile ten miles off,
Speaker 1: except there were no snowmobiles, and what they could hear instead,
Speaker 1: starting around nine o'clock was something walking. Eric heard it
Speaker 1: first from the loft, and being eleven, he cataloged it
Speaker 1: as a moose because his father had taught him moose
Speaker 1: moved through deep snow with the sound nothing else makes
Speaker 1: a plunge and drag, the animal, punching through the crust
Speaker 1: and hauling each leg back out. He lay in his bag,
Speaker 1: feeling proud of himself for the identification. Then he noticed
Speaker 1: the rhythm was wrong, and his pride curdled. Moose is
Speaker 1: four legs. This was two, a walker and snow that
Speaker 1: Eric had sunk into to his waist that afternoon, two
Speaker 1: steps off the pack trail, and the walker was moving
Speaker 1: through it at a pace, circling somewhere out past the woodshed,
Speaker 1: and it did not sound bothered by the snow at all.
Speaker 1: He called down to his father soft and his father
Speaker 1: said from below, I hear it. Stay up there. His
Speaker 1: father got up, and Eric watched from the loft edge,
Speaker 1: and this is one of the places where their two
Speaker 1: accounts brayed together. Eric remembers his father lighting the lantern.
Speaker 1: His father says, no, he specifically did not light the lantern.
Speaker 1: He didn't want to be lit up inside a window.
Speaker 1: What he did was open the stove door for light.
Speaker 1: And when they compared notes, Eric conceded the loft view
Speaker 1: of the stove door's orange glow is probably what his
Speaker 1: memory turned into a lantern. I'm including that because it's
Speaker 1: exactly how honest memory behaves, and his father not wanting
Speaker 1: to be back lit. A woodsman's instinct arriving before any
Speaker 1: conscious thought about what was outside tells you what the
Speaker 1: older man's body had all already concluded. The steps circled
Speaker 1: the camp twice, both of them agree on twice, out
Speaker 1: past the woodshed, around behind the outhouse, along the tree
Speaker 1: line at the edge of the pond, and the circuit
Speaker 1: took minutes unhurried, and at one point on the second
Speaker 1: circuit it stopped, and the elder man standing in the
Speaker 1: dark of his own camp, holding a fish priest, which
Speaker 1: is the little club you used to dispatch a big trout,
Speaker 1: because his rifle was, in his words, uselessly in the
Speaker 1: truck at the plowed road seven miles away. Heard it
Speaker 1: do something he still can't explain mechanically. It exhaled the
Speaker 1: same single great horse blow Dale described in Michigan, two
Speaker 1: states and seven years apart, two men who have never met,
Speaker 1: and then it sniffed in long pulls, three or four
Speaker 1: of them. The fish box was on the porch. What
Speaker 1: it did next is the reason Eric finally wrote me.
Speaker 1: The steps came up to the camp, not past it,
Speaker 1: to it, plunge, plunge, lunge, and then the different sound
Speaker 1: of weight on the packed snow of the shoveled path,
Speaker 1: and then a tread on the porch step and the
Speaker 1: porch boards old dry spruce that announced every visitor of
Speaker 1: the camp had ever had took a load. That Eric's
Speaker 1: father says he heard the boards, except he was standing
Speaker 1: six feet from the door. There was no lock. There
Speaker 1: had never in eighty years been a lock. He put
Speaker 1: his free hand flat against the door, not to hold it,
Speaker 1: he says, because he understood that as a joke even
Speaker 1: in the moment, but because he wanted to know first,
Speaker 1: what came through the door was nothing. They heard it
Speaker 1: lifted off the fish box lid and set down on
Speaker 1: the porch boards, set down. Eric's father repeats that word
Speaker 1: when he tells it, not shoved off, not dropped, picked
Speaker 1: up and placed with a little grinding knock of concrete
Speaker 1: on wood, the way you'd set down a coffee mug.
Speaker 1: Then the lid. Then the unmistakable sounds of their six
Speaker 1: togue leaving the box one at a time, and unhurried inventory,
Speaker 1: while a man and a boy stood and lay frozen
Speaker 1: inside one inch of spruce planking, close enough to hear
Speaker 1: the thing breathing as it worked. Eric in the loft
Speaker 1: had the only window angle on the porch, a small
Speaker 1: four pane gable window, and he got his face to
Speaker 1: the corner of it, and he wrote me a long,
Speaker 1: careful paragraph about what he could and couldn't see, And
Speaker 1: the honest answer is mostly couldn't. No moon, starlight on snow.
Speaker 1: What he saw was a back a surface broad blocking
Speaker 1: the snow light, moving slightly with the work at a
Speaker 1: height on the porch that nothing in his life before
Speaker 1: or since has stood at He watched the back of
Speaker 1: it for maybe thirty seconds, and then his nerve quit
Speaker 1: and he got back in the bag. Ten years of
Speaker 1: bravery spent in one withdrawal. The porch step took the
Speaker 1: weight again, and the plunge went away down the shore
Speaker 1: of the pond north and faded. And the last thing
Speaker 1: they heard from it, far up the pond was a
Speaker 1: faint whistle two notes. Eric's father whistled it for him
Speaker 1: this past Christmas when they compared notes, the first time
Speaker 1: he'd ever reproduced it. And Eric said the sound of
Speaker 1: his seventy three year old father whistling that little falling
Speaker 1: interval in a warm kitchen raised the hair on his arms.
Speaker 1: If you remember Karen in Oregon, you remember her two
Speaker 1: note whistle on the slope behind the cabin. They didn't
Speaker 1: sleep at gray light. The father went out first, and
Speaker 1: the boy was not permitted out until the father had
Speaker 1: walked the porch and the path. And here's what daylight
Speaker 1: showed them. The cinder block sitting on the porch boards,
Speaker 1: eighteen inches from the box, square and tidy. The lid
Speaker 1: leaned against the camp wall, the box empty except for
Speaker 1: snow and not ransacked, no claw gouges, no tue marks
Speaker 1: on the wood, none of the vandalism of bear leaves,
Speaker 1: even when a bear is being polite and going north
Speaker 1: up the pond shore in snow. Nobody could fake a
Speaker 1: track in a single line of holes, each one punched
Speaker 1: thigh deep, spaced so far apart that Eric's father six
Speaker 1: foot one, tried to step from one into the next
Speaker 1: and couldn't, and then tried to jump it and managed
Speaker 1: it twice and stopped because his son was watching him fail.
Speaker 1: They measured nothing. They had no camera and no tape,
Speaker 1: and the father wanted openly and immediately to be gone,
Speaker 1: and they were packed and on the snowmobile by nine.
Speaker 1: The one piece of physical evidence rode out with them
Speaker 1: without their knowing it, and Eric only mentioned it at
Speaker 1: the very end of his email, almost as an afterthought.
Speaker 1: And it's my favorite kind of evidence because it's so
Speaker 1: useless and so human. The fish priest. His father had
Speaker 1: set it on the porch rail at some point that
Speaker 1: morning while he worked, and when they unpacked at home,
Speaker 1: his mother found it in the gear and asked why
Speaker 1: the handle was sticky, and it was sap spruce sap,
Speaker 1: and nobody had an answer, and the family still has
Speaker 1: that little club hanging on a nail at the camp,
Speaker 1: and Eric's father still won't winter camp there alone never
Speaker 1: once said why out loud, and at this point everyone
Speaker 1: has stopped asking. The detail I keep returning to is
Speaker 1: the cinder block set down gently in the dark. Strength
Speaker 1: is one thing. Every story tonight has strength in it.
Speaker 1: Snapped willows and twisted lath in a dented truck. Care
Speaker 1: is another thing. Entirely whatever stood on that porch in
Speaker 1: February of two thousand and one was strong enough to
Speaker 1: tear the box apart and chose instead to open it.
Speaker 1: It moved the obstacle, took what it wanted, and put
Speaker 1: nothing to waste, including effort. I've been at this for
Speaker 1: almost forty years, since I was a boy in North Georgia,
Speaker 1: and the encounters that stay with me have stopped being
Speaker 1: the ones with the screaming and the running. They're the
Speaker 1: ones like this, the quiet ones where something on the
Speaker 1: other side of one inch of spruce demonstrates patience. And
Speaker 1: that brings us to the end of our five stories.
Speaker 1: Five states Michigan, Oregon, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Maine, a span
Speaker 1: of more than twenty five years, from two brothers on
Speaker 1: a river in nineteen eighty seven to a survey hand
Speaker 1: in a hollow in twenty fifteen. Five people who don't
Speaker 1: know each other, who have nothing to gain, who mostly
Speaker 1: asked me to hide their names, and who held onto
Speaker 1: these accounts for years or decades before typing them out
Speaker 1: to a stranger because a stranger was the only person
Speaker 1: they could afford to tell. I'm not going to stand
Speaker 1: here and certify any of it. You know me better
Speaker 1: than that by now. I wasn't on that gravel bar,
Speaker 1: or in that loft or at that kitchen window, and
Speaker 1: neither were you. Every one of these accounts lives or
Speaker 1: dies on the credibility of one or two human beings,
Speaker 1: and human beings misremember and misidentify, and once in a
Speaker 1: while they lie. I've spent a career on both sides
Speaker 1: of that problem. But I'll tell you what I told
Speaker 1: you at the top. There's a sound of story makes
Speaker 1: when somebody's been carrying it a long time and they're
Speaker 1: a little embarrassed to set it down. All five of
Speaker 1: these made that sound. If you've got one of your own,
Speaker 1: you know where to find me, Brian, that's a n
Speaker 1: at Paranormalworldproductions dot com. I read every email. Take your
Speaker 1: time writing it. Tell me what you can explain, and
Speaker 1: tell me what you can because the parts you can
Speaker 1: explain are the parts that make me trust you. Use
Speaker 1: your name or don't. The Backwoods Cryptid road Trip rolls
Speaker 1: again soon. Until then, stay on the trail, keep your
Speaker 1: fire built up, and if the woods go quiet around you,
Speaker 1: pay attention. Di