Speaker 1: You're listening to Bigfoot's Wilderness, Part four, The Missing Hunter,
the story people chose to keep. The truth didn't disappear
after Wade Harlan's bones were buried. It didn't sink into
the ground with him, or washed downstream with the flood
water that had uncovered what the woods had kept hidden
for so long. Truth almost never vanishes completely. What it
does what it did here is thin, out spread itself
so wide that no single person feels responsible for holding
on to it. And in that thinner something else takes
its place. A story, not a lie exactly, not at first,
more like a convenient arrangement of facts, omissions, and assumptions
that fit together neatly enough to stop people from digging further.
A story that allowed everyone to return to their routines
without feeling like they'd failed. A man who vanished within
shouting distance of their lives. That story began forming the
moment the sheriff chose his words carefully, no definitive cause
of death. Those four words did more work than any
investigation ever could. They left room, They left doubt, They
left silence where questions should have lived. In a county
like this one, where people knew one another's trucks and habits,
where grudges and favors stretched back decades. Silence had value.
Silence kept peace. Silence kept neighbors from looking sideways at
one another in the grocery store aisle, and silence had
always lived comfortably alongside stories about the woods. Within weeks
of the burial, Slate Ridge became something people talked about again,
instead of something they avoided without comment. The shift was subtle.
It showed up in the way men leaned back in
their chairs at the diner and lowered their voices, in
the way parents told children not to wander too far
up there. In the way, hunters began to speak of
the ridge with a kind of resigned respect. That's where
Wade went missing. That's where they found those bones. That's
where that thing lives. The word thing did a lot
of heavy lifting. Bigfoot had always existed here in the margins,
long before Wade had vanished. There were stories, old ones,
inherited ones. A grandfather who saw something cross a logging
road in the nineteen fifties, a scream heard during a
winter hunt that didn't sound like any animal anyone recognized,
footprints found after snowstorms that were quietly ignored. Those stories
had never been urgent. Now they were useful. The local
paper ran a follow up piece two weeks after the burial.
It wasn't sensational. It didn't use the word sasquatch in
the headline, but it didn't avoid it either. Local lore
surrounds ridge where Hunter disappeared. The article quoted an unnamed
resident who spoke of old stories that were passed down
through generations. It mentioned unusual tracks found during the original search.
It referenced reports of strange sounds. It did not mention
the cuts on the bones. It did not mention the
placement of the remains. It did not mention how the
tracks faced away from the ravine. No one called the
editor to complain that silence mattered. Over the past year,
Slate Ridge changed without physically changing at all. No fence
went up, no signs were posted, but fewer people went there.
Camps shifted to other drainages, hunters chose easier ground. Those
who did venture near the ridge came back with stories.
A man said he'd felt watched the entire time he
sat in his stand, as if his thoughts weren't private anymore.
Another claimed he'd smelled something foul near the creek, and
left without finishing his hunt. A pair of teenagers camping
illegally reported hearing heavy footsteps circle their tent all night,
stopping whenever they spoke. Each story fed the next Bigfoot
wasn't just a possibility now he was an explanation, and explanations,
once accepted, have a way of defending themselves. Cal Morrison
stopped correcting people. That surprised some folks. Cal had never
been shy about dismissing nonsense. He'd argued men into silence
over bare behavior, weather patterns, even the best way to
read sign in mud. But when the bigfoot talk grew louder,
Col simply listened. One evening, a younger hunter asked him, outright,
you believe that thing killed Wade. Cal stared into his
coffee for a long time before answering no, He said.
The hunter waited, but I believe it saw what did? Cal?
Had it? The hunter laughed nervously, unsure how to respond.
Cal didn't elaborate he understood something most of them didn't yet.
The story had already chosen its path. Pushing against it
would only draw attention to the wrong questions, and attention
once misdirected, rarely circles back on its own. The sheriff
understood this too. He wasn't a coward, he wasn't corrupt.
He was tired. He'd worn the badge long enough to
know what happened when you tugged at certain threads in
a small community. He knew which men hunted together, which
family lees intermarried, which grudges lay just under the surface,
dormant but not gone. And he knew what he didn't
have no witness willing to go on record, no clear timeline,
no weapon, no confession. What he did have was a
story that satisfied the public and kept the peace. So
when people came to him with new reports tracks near
the ridge, knocks heard after dark, a silhouette scene against
the evening sky, he listened, nodded, and filed them under unsubstantiated.
He let the legend grow, because legends don't point fingers,
They point outward into the trees. Years passed. The cemetery
marker for Wade Harlan was eventually replaced with a simple headstone,
no epitaph, just a name and dates that didn't quite
make sense. People visited less often as time wore on,
grief dulled into memory, Memory softened into story, and the
story took on a life of its own. Local kids
dared one another to hike the lower spur At dusk,
Couples parked near the trailhead to drink beer and scare themselves.
Someone carved a crude wooden figure and nailed it to
a fence post before it was quietly removed. Slate Ridge
became a place where fear was safe, contained external inhuman.
That was the point. What people didn't talk about any
more were the men who'd been there the season Wade vanished,
the arguments that had flared and died, the quiet rivalries
over hunting grounds, the way certain people avoided one another afterward.
Those details faded, not because they weren't important, but because
they were inconvenient. Once a story becomes useful, inconvenient facts
tend to disappear on their own. Cow watched this happen
with a growing sense of dread. Every new Bigfoot story
reinforced the same idea that whatever happened to Wade was
beyond human control, an act of nature, an act of
the wild. That idea settled into the community like sediment.
Col knew better, not because he had proof, not because
he'd seen the act itself, but because he'd seen the witness,
and he understood, in that quiet moment on the ridge
that the thing standing there hadn't been confused, It hadn't
been enraged, it hadn't been predatory. It had been attentive,
which meant it knew the difference. Once a year, usually
around the anniversary of Wade's disappearance, some one would push back.
A man would have too much to drink and say
something reckless. A woman would ask why no one ever
followed up on certain details. A newcomer would wonder aloud
why a missing person case with human remains was allowed
to die so easily. Those conversations never lasted long. Some
one would mention the tracks, some one else would mention
the knox, some one would say, you know how those
woods are, and the push would end. Even Deputy Finch,
long gone from the county, felt the weight of the
story settling in behind him. When he returned years later
for a visit, he stopped by the diner. Out of habit,
Wade's name came up. Shame Finch said, carefully, never got closure.
A man at the counter snorted, oh, we got closure,
he said, just not the kind you write reports about.
Finch didn't argue. He finished his coffee and left. The
woods continued to do what they had always done. Sometimes
they offered a glimpse, a shadow on the ridge at dusk,
too tall to be a man, too upright to be
an animal. Sometimes they offered sound, knocks that echoed across drainages,
always measured, never frantic. Sometimes they offered smell, drifting on
cold air, like a reminder. And sometimes they offered nothing
at all. That was the worst part, because silence in
the end is the most persuasive story there is. By
the late nineteen eighties, Slate Ridge had become something people
referenced with familiarity instead of fear. The legend had softened.
Bigfoot was no longer a lurking threat. He was a presence,
an explanation, a boundary marker. Don't go there, don't push it,
don't ask. The story had done its job. But stories
have a flaw. They rely on everyone agreeing to keep
telling them the same way, and every so often, rarely quietly,
something happened that threatened to bend them out of shape.
In the fall of nineteen eighty nine, a man walking
alone near the ridge, returned pale and shaken. He told
his wife he'd seen something standing where the ravine opened out,
something watching the trail as if waiting. What What did
it do? She asked nothing, He said, that's what scared me.
He never went back, col heard about it a week later.
He sat on his porch that evening, watching the tree
line darken, and felt the old weight settle in his chest.
The story had been chosen, but the witness was still there,
and witnesses, no matter how patient, don't watch forever without reason.
Slate Ridge is quieter now, not because its story is finished,
but because it is still unfolding. The woods remain, the
creek still bends through the ravine, and some truths stay buried,
not to be hidden, but to be revealed in their
own time. What was found there was only part of
the story. The rest is still waiting. Thank you for
listening to Bigfoot's Wilderness. If you've been following the story
with us, listening closely, letting the silence speak as much
as the words, we truly appreciate you being here. If
you'd like to support this show, there's a supporter's club
where you can join for about two bucks a month,
absolutely no pressure. It just helps keep the podcast going
and the stories coming. And if you're not ready for that,
your time and attention mean just as much. Stay tuned
for Part five, where what was witnessed, what was allowed,
and what was left behind finally comes into focus. Have
a great night, and remember some things don't hunt, some
things don't save, some things only watch.