Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: This is story seven of ten. We're past the midpoint now,
Speaker 1: and if you've been following Garrett's accounts from the beginning,
Speaker 1: you know that each encounter has built on the last
Speaker 1: in a way that's moved from curiosity to fear to
Speaker 1: something harder to name, acceptance maybe, or resignation, or the
Speaker 1: uneasy truce that forms when two parties occupy the same
Speaker 1: territory and neither one is willing to leave. Here's where
Speaker 1: we are. Over nearly four years on his remote mountain
Speaker 1: property in western North Carolina, Garrett has documented wood knocking,
Speaker 1: bipedal tracks, a visual encounter at his meadow's edge, the
Speaker 1: systematic harvesting of his garden, his brother's voice replicated in
Speaker 1: a ravine, snow tracks revealing nightly visits to his cabin,
Speaker 1: three creatures on a talus slope below a bluff, and
Speaker 1: the night his two dogs chase something into the forest
Speaker 1: and had to be retrieved from a sight of deliberately
Speaker 1: constructed stick structures, while unseen creatures close to circle around them.
Speaker 1: Through all of this, one thing has remained consistent. The
Speaker 1: creatures have never heard him. They've scared him, they followed him.
Speaker 1: They've circled him and his dogs. They've stood at his
Speaker 1: windows and leaned against his walls and called his name
Speaker 1: in a voice that wasn't theirs. But in four years
Speaker 1: of contact, across dozens of incidents, they have not once
Speaker 1: made an aggressive move. No bluff charges, no thrown rocks,
Speaker 1: no direct confrontation. Garrett has wondered about that, so have I,
Speaker 1: And in story seven, someone finally offers an explanation, not
Speaker 1: a complete one, but the closest thing to an answer
Speaker 1: that Garrett has received in a decade on that mountain.
Speaker 1: Here's Garrett. The spring of twenty eighteen came in slow.
Speaker 1: March was cold and wet, the kind of lingering winter
Speaker 1: that makes you doubt April is ever going to show up.
Speaker 1: The trees were late to bud, the creek ran high
Speaker 1: and muddy from weeks of rain. The meadow stayed brown
Speaker 1: well into the middle of the month, and I'd catch
Speaker 1: myself standing at the kitchen window watching for the first green,
Speaker 1: the way you'd watch for a ship on the horizon,
Speaker 1: something to signal that the world was turning again. The
Speaker 1: winter had been a long one, and not just because
Speaker 1: of the weather. The dog incident in October had left
Speaker 1: a mark on me that the cold months hadn't erased.
Speaker 1: I'd spent November through February in a state I'd describe
Speaker 1: as functional withdrawal. I went to work, I came home,
Speaker 1: I fed the dogs and sat on the porch and
Speaker 1: went to bed. But the spark that had been driving
Speaker 1: me to document, to observe, to engage with what was
Speaker 1: happening on the mountain had dimmed to almost nothing. The
Speaker 1: notebook sat in the kitchen drawer, unopened for weeks at
Speaker 1: a time. I didn't hike to the bluff, I didn't
Speaker 1: walk the property line. I didn't even sit on the
Speaker 1: porch after dark anymore, which had been my nightly ritual
Speaker 1: for nearly four years. The encounter with the dogs had
Speaker 1: crossed a line I hadn't known existed. Every previous incident
Speaker 1: had involved me, my garden, my cabin, my name, in
Speaker 1: my brother's voice. Those were my risks to take. But
Speaker 1: the dogs hadn't chosen to be on that mountain. I'd
Speaker 1: brought them here, I'd promised them wordlessly and absolutely that
Speaker 1: I would keep them safe, And on October fourteenth, I'd
Speaker 1: watched them sprint into the forest after something I couldn't see,
Speaker 1: and I'd been too slow to stop it. The guilt
Speaker 1: was corrosive. It ate at the edges of everything else.
Speaker 1: The wonder, the curiosity, the strange privilege of living alongside
Speaker 1: something extraordinary. All of it was shadowed by the memory
Speaker 1: of Bowie, wedged under a log, with the whites of
Speaker 1: his eyes showing and ruby trembling in front of structures
Speaker 1: that her brain couldn't process. Cliff noticed. He called one
Speaker 1: Sunday in February, and I gave him my usual everything's fine,
Speaker 1: and he said, you've been saying that for four months,
Speaker 1: and you sound worse every time. He told me to
Speaker 1: come down to Gastonia for a weekend, get off the mountain,
Speaker 1: eat something he cooked, be around people who didn't have
Speaker 1: four legs. I told him I'd think about it. I
Speaker 1: didn't go, not because I didn't want to, because leaving
Speaker 1: the mountain, even for a weekend, felt like breaking a
Speaker 1: vigil I couldn't name, like if I turned my back
Speaker 1: on the property for two days, something would shift in
Speaker 1: my absence that I'd never get back. What pulled me
Speaker 1: out of it eventually wasn't a decision. It was the
Speaker 1: mountain itself, the way it always is. In mid April,
Speaker 1: the whipper Wheels came back, the wood thrushes, set up
Speaker 1: in the oaks near Bishop Creek, and filled the evenings
Speaker 1: with that fluted song that sounds like a question and
Speaker 1: an answer. At the same time, Reba's zenias pushed through
Speaker 1: the soil along the south wall of the cabin, right
Speaker 1: on schedule, as if fifty years of returning had given
Speaker 1: them a kind of permanence that didn't require anyone to
Speaker 1: plant them. And one morning I walked onto the porch
Speaker 1: with my coffee, and the meadow was green, and the
Speaker 1: ridge was soft with a new leaves, and the air
Speaker 1: smelled like warm earth and creek water and the sweet
Speaker 1: green scent of things growing. And I stood there and
Speaker 1: felt something loosen in my chest that had been clenched
Speaker 1: since October. Not all the way, but enough to take
Speaker 1: a full breath for the first time in months. I
Speaker 1: started sitting on the porch again. In the evenings, I
Speaker 1: opened the notebook and made a few entries. I walked
Speaker 1: the property line, just the lower sections, the meadow perimeter
Speaker 1: and the creek bank. Small steps re entry, the kind
Speaker 1: of gradual return that happens when you've been pulled away
Speaker 1: from yourself and have to feel your way back. Bowie
Speaker 1: was nine. His muzzle was almost entirely gray now, and
Speaker 1: the stiffness in his hips that I'd first noticed two
Speaker 1: years earlier had settled into a permanent limp on cold mornings.
Speaker 1: He'd warm up by midday and move fine for the
Speaker 1: rest of the afternoon, but those first few steps off
Speaker 1: his blanket every morning were hard to watch. The vet
Speaker 1: in Hendersonville said it was arthritis common in deelers his age,
Speaker 1: and gave me some anti inflammatory pills that helped but
Speaker 1: didn't fix anything. Bowie took them wrapped in cheese and
Speaker 1: seemed to know they were medicine, accepting them with the
Speaker 1: stoic patience of an old dog who understands that aging
Speaker 1: is a negotiation you don't win. Ruby was about four
Speaker 1: by now fully grown, forty five pounds of muscle and instinct,
Speaker 1: wrapped in a black and tan coat that gleamed in
Speaker 1: the sun. She'd become the operational dog of the pair,
Speaker 1: the one who patrolled the meadow with purpose, the one
Speaker 1: whose ears swiveled at every sound. She'd absorbed Bowie's roll
Speaker 1: without replacing him. He was still the senior presence. She
Speaker 1: was the working leg. The knocking had been quiet since December,
Speaker 1: following the same seasonal pattern I'd observed for four years,
Speaker 1: running quiet in winter, returning in spring, building through summer.
Speaker 1: That pattern had become as reliable as the weather. I
Speaker 1: didn't dread it anymore. I noted it. I was on
Speaker 1: the porch on a Saturday afternoon in late April, sanding
Speaker 1: a piece of cherry I'd been turning into a cutting
Speaker 1: board on Earl's lathe. When Bowie lifted his head from
Speaker 1: his blanket and oriented toward Bishop Creek, not toward the ridge,
Speaker 1: not toward the tree line behind the cabin, toward the
Speaker 1: creek west. Bowie didn't do that. In four years, every
Speaker 1: alert he'd ever given had been directed northeast, toward the
Speaker 1: ridge and the forest and the bluff corridor. The creatures
Speaker 1: came from that direction, The knocking came from that direction.
Speaker 1: Every track, every approach, every piece of evidence pointed northeast.
Speaker 1: West was the creek and the meadow, and beyond the
Speaker 1: creek a stretch of forest I'd never explored because it
Speaker 1: wasn't my property. But Bowie was staring west. His ears
Speaker 1: were forward but not pinned, His body was alert, but
Speaker 1: not tense. It wasn't his threat posture. It was his
Speaker 1: someone's coming posture, the one he used for Cliff's truck
Speaker 1: or the propane delivery guy, recognition without alarm. Ruby picked
Speaker 1: up on it a few seconds later and stood beside him,
Speaker 1: her tail making slow, uncertain wags, not fear, not excitement, curiosity.
Speaker 1: I set down the sandpaper and looked toward the creek.
Speaker 1: Someone was walking up the slope from Bishop Creek toward
Speaker 1: the cabin. A person, a woman, moving slowly but steadily
Speaker 1: through the tall grass on the far side of the meadow.
Speaker 1: She was old. That was the first thing I registered.
Speaker 1: Not elderly, but active, old, truly old. Then stooped, moving
Speaker 1: with the careful deliberation of someone whose bones had been
Speaker 1: making decisions for her joints for a long time. She
Speaker 1: wore a dark green quilted barn coat and a knit
Speaker 1: cap pulled down over her ears. Despite the mild afternoon.
Speaker 1: She carried a walking stick, a piece of natural wood
Speaker 1: with the bark still on it, and she used it
Speaker 1: with every step, planting it ahead of her and leaning
Speaker 1: into it before committing her weight. She crossed the meadow
Speaker 1: and about five minutes angling toward the cabin on a
Speaker 1: line that suggested she knew exactly where she was going,
Speaker 1: not wandering, not lost, navigating, and the path she followed
Speaker 1: through the grass across the low spot where the meadow
Speaker 1: dipped toward the creek, up the gentle slope to the
Speaker 1: porch was worn. I could see it now that I
Speaker 1: was looking for it. A faint track through the grass,
Speaker 1: tamped down by foot traffic that predated my arrival. Someone
Speaker 1: had walked this route before many times. She reached the
Speaker 1: foot of the porch steps and stopped looked up at me.
Speaker 1: Her face was weathered in a way that reminded me
Speaker 1: of earls, deep lines and sun darkened skin, and eyes
Speaker 1: that had been looking at mountains for a very long time.
Speaker 1: She was probably in her late seventies, maybe older. It
Speaker 1: was hard to tell. Some mountain women age like rock
Speaker 1: slowly and all at once, and Opal had the look
Speaker 1: of someone who'd been the same version of old for
Speaker 1: twenty years. Her eyes as were sharp, alert, the kind
Speaker 1: of eyes that inventory a room before they settle on
Speaker 1: a face. Your Garrett, she said, not a question, a confirmation,
Speaker 1: the way you'd say someone's name when you've been hearing
Speaker 1: about them from a distance and are finally matching the
Speaker 1: description to the person. I said, yes, ma'am, I'm Opal.
Speaker 1: I live across the creek. She pointed her walking stick
Speaker 1: back the way she'd come toward the tree line on
Speaker 1: the far side of Bishop Creek. Been meaning to come
Speaker 1: see you for a while now. Should have done it sooner.
Speaker 1: Vernon would have come the first week you moved in.
Speaker 1: He was the sociable one. There was something about the
Speaker 1: way she said Vernon's name, not with grief, exactly, with
Speaker 1: the specific gravity of a word that carries forty years
Speaker 1: of shared life behind it. I invited her onto the porch.
Speaker 1: She climbed the steps one at a time, gripping the
Speaker 1: railing with her free hand. The walking stick wedged under
Speaker 1: her arm. She settled into the chair beside mine with
Speaker 1: a sigh that came from somewhere deep in her frame.
Speaker 1: Bowie walked over and sniffed her hand. She rubbed his
Speaker 1: ears with the practiced ease of someone who'd been around
Speaker 1: dogs her whole life, finding the spot behind the left
Speaker 1: ear that he liked best on the first try. Ruby
Speaker 1: hung back at the other end of the porch, tail
Speaker 1: doing that uncertain wag red heeler mix. Opel said, looking
Speaker 1: at Bowie, Vernon's favorite breed. We had three of them
Speaker 1: over the years. He said. They were the only dog
Speaker 1: smart enough to live on a mountain without getting killed.
Speaker 1: I offered her coffee. She said she'd take water. I
Speaker 1: went inside, filled a glass and brought it back out.
Speaker 1: She drank half of it in a single long pull,
Speaker 1: wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and
Speaker 1: looked out at the view, the meadow, the ridge, the
Speaker 1: tree line, the bluff just visible above the canopy. Earl
Speaker 1: told me about you, she said, before he passed. He
Speaker 1: said you were a good man, said you'd take care
Speaker 1: of the place. She looked out at the meadow, at
Speaker 1: the ridge beyond it. Said you'd figure things out eventually.
Speaker 1: My stomach tightened. I gave her my full attention. Figure
Speaker 1: what out, I said. She looked at me with those
Speaker 1: sharp eyes and smiled, just barely. Don't insult me, honey,
Speaker 1: you know what. I didn't say anything. I waited, opal
Speaker 1: took another sip of water and settled deeper into the chair.
Speaker 1: I've lived on the other side of that creek for
Speaker 1: fifty one years, she said. My husband, Vernon, and I
Speaker 1: bought twenty acres over there in nineteen sixty seven, built
Speaker 1: a house, raised two boys. Vernon worked for the Forest
Speaker 1: Service his whole career. Knew these mountains better than anybody alive.
Speaker 1: Knew every hollow, every drainage, every game trail from here
Speaker 1: to the parkway. She adjusted the walking stick where it
Speaker 1: leaned against the porch rail. Vernon knew about them. He
Speaker 1: didn't call them Sasquatch. Didn't call them bigfoot. He called
Speaker 1: them the residence, like they were just another family on
Speaker 1: the road. The residents are active this week, he'd say,
Speaker 1: or the residence moved south for the winter casual the
Speaker 1: way you talk about deer or turkey part of the landscape.
Speaker 1: I asked how long Vernon had known from the beginning,
Speaker 1: from before we bought the place. He'd been working these
Speaker 1: ridges since fifty nine, and by the time we moved in,
Speaker 1: he'd been seeing signs for almost a decade. Tracks, structures,
Speaker 1: the knocking. He heard the knocking before Earle did, because
Speaker 1: Vernon was up on the ridges during the day when
Speaker 1: most people weren't. She looked at me. Earl and Vernon
Speaker 1: were friends. You know that, I didn't. Earl had never
Speaker 1: mentioned a neighbor across the creek, never mentioned to Vernon,
Speaker 1: never mentioned anyone living within walking distance of the property.
Speaker 1: Opal nodded as if she'd expected that Earl kept things close.
Speaker 1: That was his way. But him and Vernon talked about
Speaker 1: the residents for years, compared notes, figured out the patterns
Speaker 1: to get the creek corridor, the seasonal movement, the way
Speaker 1: they'd come down from the high ridges, and fall and
Speaker 1: worked the drainages through winter and spring. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: Earl and Vernon mapped it out on a forest service
Speaker 1: toppo that Vernon kept in his office. I've still got
Speaker 1: that map, she said, this the way you'd mention a
Speaker 1: grocery list. I tried to keep my face neutral. Vernon
Speaker 1: passed in two thousand and four, she said, heart trouble,
Speaker 1: same as everybody in his family. He was sixty eight.
Speaker 1: She said it with the flatness of someone who's had
Speaker 1: fourteen years to make peace with the loss that will
Speaker 1: never fully heal. After he died, I kept the house,
Speaker 1: kept the land, kept an eye on things the way
Speaker 1: he would have wanted. And I kept watching the residents.
Speaker 1: She turned to face me more directly, Garrett, I've been
Speaker 1: watching you for four years, not in a creepy way.
Speaker 1: Don't look at me like that. I've been aware that
Speaker 1: you moved on to Earl's place, and I've been paying
Speaker 1: attention to what's been happening over here because it's the
Speaker 1: same thing that's been happening on my side for fifty years.
Speaker 1: The knocking comes from the same ridge, The tracks follow
Speaker 1: the same creek corridor. The route they used to get
Speaker 1: down to this valley runs right through the gap between
Speaker 1: your property and mind a long Bishop Creek, the same
Speaker 1: way it's run since Vernon first documented it in sixty three.
Speaker 1: I asked her what she knew about what had been
Speaker 1: happening on my property, Specifically, I know your garden got
Speaker 1: hit in the summer of fifteen. I could hear your
Speaker 1: floodlights clicking on from across the creek. Those motion sensors
Speaker 1: aren't as quiet as people think, she paused. I know
Speaker 1: something visited your cabin that August. I heard the knocking
Speaker 1: change pitch that week. It went from the ridge pattern
Speaker 1: to something closer, something around the cabin. Vernon used to
Speaker 1: call that the inspection knock. Different from the distance communication,
Speaker 1: shorter range, more focused. My skin was prickling. She was
Speaker 1: describing events I'd never told anyone about except Cliff. I
Speaker 1: know about the mimicry, she said, quietly, looking at her hands,
Speaker 1: because it happened to me too. I stopped breathing for
Speaker 1: about three seconds. She looked up. Nineteen seventy four, Vernon
Speaker 1: was away on a forest service trip three days in
Speaker 1: the Shining Rock wilderness doing a trail survey. I was
Speaker 1: alone in the house with the boys. Tommy was six,
Speaker 1: Dale was four. It was October, late in the month,
Speaker 1: and I was bringing the boys inside after supper because
Speaker 1: the dark was coming early. I heard Vernon call my
Speaker 1: name from the tree line behind the house, his voice
Speaker 1: exactly his voice, Opal, come here. I almost walked toward it.
Speaker 1: I had one foot off the porch. My hand was
Speaker 1: on the rail, and my weight was shifting forward. And
Speaker 1: every part of me that knew Vernon's voice, that had
Speaker 1: heard it say my name ten thousand times across eight
Speaker 1: years of marriage, was responding to it the way you
Speaker 1: respond to gravity, automatically, without thought. Then Tommy grabbed my hand.
Speaker 1: He was standing beside me on the porch, six years old,
Speaker 1: bare feet, pajamas with cowboys on them, and he grabbed
Speaker 1: my hand and said, Mama, Daddy's not here. Just like that,
Speaker 1: a child's logic, simple and inarguable. Daddy isn't here. That
Speaker 1: voice can't be daddy. And it broke the spell. Whatever
Speaker 1: the voice was doing to my brain, whatever override it
Speaker 1: was running on my instincts, Tommy's hand in mind shut
Speaker 1: it off. I stepped back onto the porch. She went
Speaker 1: quiet for a moment. The porch creaked in the wind,
Speaker 1: bishop creek murmured in the distance. A wren was singing
Speaker 1: somewhere in the eves of the workshop, its song absurdly
Speaker 1: cheerful in the context of what Opel was telling me.
Speaker 1: The voice called again, Opal over here, same direction, same tambre,
Speaker 1: same everything. And then from the other side of the house,
Speaker 1: from the east, from the creek, a second voice, not Vernon's,
Speaker 1: this time mine, my voice calling the boy's names, Tommy Dale,
Speaker 1: come here. She looked at me, my own voice calling
Speaker 1: my children from the woods. I sat there and felt
Speaker 1: the ground shift under me, the way it had shifted
Speaker 1: in the ravine when Wade's voice came from two directions,
Speaker 1: the exact same mechanism, the exact same intent, forty four
Speaker 1: years apart, on properties half a mile from each other,
Speaker 1: separated by a creek that the creatures used as a highway.
Speaker 1: But Ople's experience had a dimensioned mind, didn't The second
Speaker 1: voice hadn't just replicated a family member. It had replicated
Speaker 1: Opal herself, her own voice directed at her children. The
Speaker 1: creature hadn't just learned Vernon's voice from listening to him
Speaker 1: call from the yard. It had learned oples from listening
Speaker 1: to her call the boys in for supper, from hearing
Speaker 1: her say their names through the kitchen window, from close
Speaker 1: enough and often enough to capture the exact maternal inflection
Speaker 1: she used when she said Tommy and Dale, and it
Speaker 1: had deployed both voices simultaneously from two directions, creating a
Speaker 1: situation designed to split the family. Vernon's voice pulling Opal
Speaker 1: toward the trees, Opal's voice pulling the boys toward the creek.
Speaker 1: If ople had followed Vernon's voice and the boys had
Speaker 1: followed hers, the family would have been separated into three
Speaker 1: groups in the dark, each moving toward a different point
Speaker 1: in the forest. The sophistication of that terrified me more
Speaker 1: than anything I'd experienced personally. My mimicry had been one voice,
Speaker 1: one name, one direction. That became two. Ople's had been
Speaker 1: two distinct voices, three names, two directions, with apparent awareness
Speaker 1: of the family structure and who would respond to which voice.
Speaker 1: That level of planting required not just vocal mimicry, but
Speaker 1: social intelligence. The creature had to understand that Opel would
Speaker 1: respond to Vernon's voice, but the boys would respond to
Speaker 1: their mothers. It had to understand the relationship hierarchy. It
Speaker 1: had to model what each individual would do when presented
Speaker 1: with a specific stimulus. That's theory of mind applied to
Speaker 1: a human family by something that isn't human. I picked
Speaker 1: up both boys, one in each arm, and went inside
Speaker 1: and locked the door and pushed the couch against it,
Speaker 1: and sat in the dark living room with my children
Speaker 1: in my lap until morning, Opel said. Dale fell asleep
Speaker 1: around nine. He was four. He didn't really understand what
Speaker 1: was happening. He thought it was a game, Mama holding
Speaker 1: him in the dark, and he dozed off with his
Speaker 1: thumb in his mouth. Tommy stayed awake with me all night.
Speaker 1: He didn't ask questions, he didn't cry, He didn't ask
Speaker 1: to go to his room or get a snack, or
Speaker 1: any of the things a six year old normally asks for.
Speaker 1: He just sat there holding my hand, watching the windows.
Speaker 1: Something in him understood, at an age where understanding shouldn't
Speaker 1: be possible, that the house was the only safe space,
Speaker 1: and that his job was to stay in it. I've
Speaker 1: never been more proud of anyone in my life than
Speaker 1: I was of that boy that night. She was quiet
Speaker 1: for a few seconds, her hand tightened on the walking stick.
Speaker 1: Tommy doesn't remember it. I've asked him carefully over the years.
Speaker 1: He's forty nine, now works for the power company in Ashville,
Speaker 1: good Man, good Father, but he doesn't remember that night.
Speaker 1: Dale doesn't either. Whatever the experience imprinted on them, it
Speaker 1: went somewhere below conscious memory. I think that's a mercy.
Speaker 1: She took another sip of water. When Vernon got home
Speaker 1: two days later, I told him everything. He sat at
Speaker 1: the kitchen table and listened without interrupting, the way Vernon
Speaker 1: always listened. When I finished, he was quiet for about
Speaker 1: a minute. Then he said, they used your voice, not
Speaker 1: a question like that was the detail that mattered most.
Speaker 1: I said, yes, they used my voice to call the boys.
Speaker 1: He nodded, and I could see him recalculating something, updating
Speaker 1: his model. Vernon always had a model in his head,
Speaker 1: a working theory of what the residents were and what
Speaker 1: they wanted, and every new piece of information either confirmed
Speaker 1: it or forced a revision. The use of my voice
Speaker 1: was a revision. It told him they were closer than
Speaker 1: he'd thought. Listening more carefully, learning faster, Vernon drove to
Speaker 1: Earl's place that evening, and the two of them sat
Speaker 1: on that porch right where we're sitting now and talked
Speaker 1: for three hours. I know because I timed it. I
Speaker 1: sat in our kitchen, watching the clock and waiting for
Speaker 1: his headlights to come back up the forest service road,
Speaker 1: three hours and twelve minutes before I saw them. When
Speaker 1: Vernon came home, he told me two things. First, the
Speaker 1: residents had been visiting Earl's cabinet night for years, walking
Speaker 1: the perimeter, stopping at the windows. Earl had found tracks
Speaker 1: in the garden and handprints on the walls, and he'd
Speaker 1: been keeping all of it to himself because he didn't
Speaker 1: want ree but to worry. He just absorbed it the
Speaker 1: way mountain men do. You don't complain about it, you
Speaker 1: don't talk about it. You add it to the list.
Speaker 1: Check the fences, split the firewood, don't think too hard
Speaker 1: about the handprints on the cabin wall. Vernon and Earl
Speaker 1: both came to the same conclusion that night. The residents
Speaker 1: weren't trying to hurt anybody. They were studying us, learning
Speaker 1: how we moved, what we did when we did it,
Speaker 1: mapping our routines the same way Vernon was mapping theirs.
Speaker 1: And the mimicry fit into that. It wasn't a lure,
Speaker 1: It wasn't a trap. It was a test. They wanted
Speaker 1: to see how we'd react. Would we walk toward the voice,
Speaker 1: would we freeze? Would we run? What would it take
Speaker 1: to get us moving and in which direction? I asked
Speaker 1: her what the difference was between a lure and a test.
Speaker 1: She turned the walking stick in her hands for a second,
Speaker 1: thinking about it. A lure wants to catch you, A
Speaker 1: test just wants to know you. Vernon thought the residents
Speaker 1: were trying to figure us out the same way we
Speaker 1: were trying to figure them out, and the mimicry was
Speaker 1: the sharpest tool they had for doing it. It showed
Speaker 1: them how much we trusted our own ears, how we
Speaker 1: handled fear, whether we'd follow our curiosity or listen to
Speaker 1: the voice in the back of our head telling us
Speaker 1: something was off. It was basically a personality test. Then
Speaker 1: she looked at me. You failed yours. You walked toward
Speaker 1: it in the ravine. I told her I'd turned around
Speaker 1: before I got very far because your dog stopped you,
Speaker 1: not because you worked it out on your own. She
Speaker 1: wasn't being mean about it, she was just stating what happened.
Speaker 1: Vernon said Earl did the same thing seventy one, the
Speaker 1: first year on the property. He heard Reba's voice calling
Speaker 1: from the ridge and followed it at about fifty yards
Speaker 1: into the timber before something cracked a tree so hard
Speaker 1: right next to the trail that bark flew off and
Speaker 1: hit him in the face. He turned around after that,
Speaker 1: never followed the voice again. That one landed hard. Earle
Speaker 1: walking toward Reba's voice in the dark, the same thing
Speaker 1: I'd done with Wades decades apart, same exact trap, same
Speaker 1: exact response. I'd walked into a test that had been
Speaker 1: running on this mountain since before I was born. Opel
Speaker 1: told me about the Violin encounter next nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 1: She said, February, Vernon was doing a solo patrol up
Speaker 1: above the property in the National Forest, deep snow two
Speaker 1: feet at least. He was on snow shoes checking storm
Speaker 1: damage on one of the Forest Service trails they maintained
Speaker 1: up there. Bitterly cold, single digits, the kind of morning
Speaker 1: where your breath freezes solid on your scarf, and the
Speaker 1: trees cracked from the frost like somebody shooting at them.
Speaker 1: Vernon said the whole forest sounded like a gun range.
Speaker 1: Every few minutes, another hardwood would go off somewhere on
Speaker 1: the slope, and the sound would roll through the hollow.
Speaker 1: She shifted the walking stick against the porch rail and
Speaker 1: took a slow breath. He'd been out about three hours,
Speaker 1: covered maybe four miles. He was up in one of
Speaker 1: those sections where the creek gets narrow and the bank's
Speaker 1: close in, and the rhododendron grows so thick overhead it's
Speaker 1: like walking through a green tunnel. Vernon loved those stretches.
Speaker 1: He said they were about as close to real wilderness
Speaker 1: as you could get within twenty miles of pavement. The
Speaker 1: snow barely got through the canopy in spots, and you
Speaker 1: could hear the creek still running under the ice, this
Speaker 1: muffled gurgle that sounded like the mountain muttering to itself.
Speaker 1: He came around a bend where a big hemlock had
Speaker 1: fallen across the creek, and below the log there was
Speaker 1: a pool where the current was moving too fast to
Speaker 1: freeze over, and crouched at the edge of that pool
Speaker 1: back turned to him was one of the residents. She said,
Speaker 1: this the way Vernon apparently said everything about the creatures
Speaker 1: like it was nothing remarkable, like she was telling me
Speaker 1: he'd spotted a deer a salt lick. That was Vernon.
Speaker 1: Three decades of watching these things had worn all the
Speaker 1: drama out of his descriptions. It was either drinking or fishing.
Speaker 1: Vernon couldn't tell which. One hand was in the water
Speaker 1: up to the wrist, and the thing was bent forward
Speaker 1: at the waist, hunched deep, head close to the surface.
Speaker 1: Vernon told me the first thing that hit him wasn't
Speaker 1: the size. It was how still it was, completely frozen
Speaker 1: in place except for that hand in the water, not
Speaker 1: shifting its weight, not breathing. That he could see, locked
Speaker 1: in like a hare and waiting on a fish, just
Speaker 1: this absolute focused stillness. Then the size caught up with him.
Speaker 1: He said. The thing's back was whiter than the log
Speaker 1: beside it, and that log was a good two feet
Speaker 1: across from behind. Crouched over like that, it looked like
Speaker 1: a boulder somebody had thrown a hide over. The hair
Speaker 1: was dark brown, almost chocolate, matted into thick ropes in
Speaker 1: some spots and hanging loose in others, lighter across the
Speaker 1: sho shoulders where the sun would have hit during warmer months.
Speaker 1: He could see the clumps of hair moving a little
Speaker 1: as the vapor came up off the pool around it.
Speaker 1: He was twenty feet away, frozen stiff. The snow shoes
Speaker 1: were on hard packed crust in that section, and he
Speaker 1: hadn't made a sound coming in. Wind was in his face,
Speaker 1: so his scent was blowing away from the thing. He
Speaker 1: had maybe three seconds where he was watching it, and
Speaker 1: it had no idea. He was there three seconds of
Speaker 1: looking at something he'd been tracking from a distance for
Speaker 1: thirteen years, and now it was right there, close enough
Speaker 1: to hit with a rock. The light on the porch
Speaker 1: had shifted while she'd been talking, shadows getting longer, sun
Speaker 1: dropping toward the western ridge. Then one of his snowshoe
Speaker 1: bindings creaked, the leather flexing in the cold. Vernon said
Speaker 1: it was quieter than a whisper, but the thing's head
Speaker 1: whipped around so fast he couldn't even follow the motion.
Speaker 1: One second it was facing the water, the next second
Speaker 1: it was facing him. No in between, just this instant
Speaker 1: rotation ninety degrees, like flipping a switch. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages,
Speaker 1: she stopped again. This was the part she'd been working toward,
Speaker 1: and she wanted to get it exactly right. He said.
Speaker 1: The face was flat, much whiter than a human face,
Speaker 1: heavy brow, ridge that threw a shadow over the eyes
Speaker 1: even in the overcast. Nose pushed flat against the face
Speaker 1: instead of sticking out, mouth closed, big jaw set forward,
Speaker 1: kind of like a gorilla's, but broader. The skin on
Speaker 1: the face what he could see of it through. The
Speaker 1: hair was dark gray, not brown like the body, gray
Speaker 1: like wet rock, and the eyes were almost black, deep
Speaker 1: set under that brow. Vernon said they found his immediately
Speaker 1: and just held. No looking around, no checking exits, just
Speaker 1: a straight, locked on stair that told him the thing
Speaker 1: knew exactly what it was looking at and wasn't the
Speaker 1: least bit rattled by it. The creature stood up all
Speaker 1: the way up, passed the rhododendron, passed anything Vernon had
Speaker 1: a frame of reference for Opel said he'd figured somewhere
Speaker 1: between eight and eight and a half feet based on
Speaker 1: the height of the laurel it stood above, which he'd
Speaker 1: gone back and measured the following year. And it screamed,
Speaker 1: not a howl, not a roar, a ragged, high pitched,
Speaker 1: tearing sound that started somewhere in the thing's chest and
Speaker 1: climbed through pitches that shouldn't have been possible from one throat,
Speaker 1: loud enough and long enough that no human being could
Speaker 1: have produced it. Three four seconds of it, which is
Speaker 1: an eternity when you're standing twenty feet from the source.
Speaker 1: It bounced off the snow covered slopes and came back,
Speaker 1: layered on top of itself, and Vernon told her it
Speaker 1: sounded like several voices at once, like the scream had
Speaker 1: splintered in the terrain and turned into a chorus. Vernon
Speaker 1: set his knees almost buckled, not because of the sound,
Speaker 1: although the sound was awful, because of what the sound
Speaker 1: did to his body. He felt it in his breastbone,
Speaker 1: in his teeth, in his sinuses. He said it was
Speaker 1: like standing beside a speaker the size of a truck.
Speaker 1: The snow on the branches around him slid off the
Speaker 1: surface of the pool, rippled. He could feel the air pulsing.
Speaker 1: He dropped his pack and started backing up, slow, palms out,
Speaker 1: eyes down. Every de escalation trick Vernon knew from seventeen
Speaker 1: years of dealing with wildlife he was using. But the
Speaker 1: thing didn't back off. It came forward two steps, three
Speaker 1: barefoot and two feet of snow. Vernon could see the
Speaker 1: toes fanning out with each step, gripping the crust, the
Speaker 1: snow just crushing under a weight that his snow shoes
Speaker 1: were designed to spread, but this thing apparently didn't need to.
Speaker 1: And then it hit a tree. She showed me with
Speaker 1: her hands, a big sweeping motion, one arm starting from
Speaker 1: behind the body and swinging through an eight inch hemlock
Speaker 1: chest height. It broke the thing clean in half, not cracked,
Speaker 1: not bent, broke the way you'd break a pencil between
Speaker 1: your hands. The top half dropped across the trail, right
Speaker 1: in front of Vernon. He told me. The sound of
Speaker 1: it snapping was louder than the scream. Sounded like a
Speaker 1: rifle going off. And the tree didn't fall on him.
Speaker 1: It fell in front of him, across his path, almost
Speaker 1: too neatly to be an accident, like somebody dropping a gate,
Speaker 1: drawing a line in the snow and daring him to
Speaker 1: cross it. Vernon ran snowshoes through two feet of snow
Speaker 1: for about a quarter mile before he stopped and turned around.
Speaker 1: The creature was still back at the bend, standing upright,
Speaker 1: dark shape against all that white, not moving, just watching
Speaker 1: him leave. He stayed away from that section of creek
Speaker 1: for close to a year, Opel said. When he finally
Speaker 1: went back, the hemlock was still lying there, broken at
Speaker 1: chest height. The exposed wood had weathered by then on gray,
Speaker 1: but the break was clean and obvious. No natural force
Speaker 1: does that to a standing tree. He measured it, photographed it,
Speaker 1: wrote everything down. She looked at me. Vernon told me
Speaker 1: later that the tree was the most important thing that
Speaker 1: happened that day, not the creature, not the face or
Speaker 1: the scream, or how tall it was, the tree, because
Speaker 1: the tree was a message. It said I could do
Speaker 1: this to you. I'm choosing not to, but you need
Speaker 1: to understand that I could. I asked if she still
Speaker 1: had the photographs, all of them. She said, Vernon's field notes,
Speaker 1: the topo map he marked up with the corridor roots,
Speaker 1: thirty years of records, organized by year in boxes in
Speaker 1: the back room of the house. I've kept them since
Speaker 1: he died, the way you'd keep somebody's service medals or
Speaker 1: their letters home, because that's what they are, the record
Speaker 1: of what he spent his life doing, even if the
Speaker 1: rest of the world will never hear about it. She
Speaker 1: looked at me a long moment. I want you to
Speaker 1: have them. I told her I'd be honored. She waved
Speaker 1: that off. It's not an honor, it's a job. Vernon
Speaker 1: watched them his whole life and never told a soul
Speaker 1: outside this ridge. Earl did the same. I did the same.
Speaker 1: But when you keep something that quiet for that long,
Speaker 1: it gets fragile. It only exists in a few heads,
Speaker 1: and when those heads are gone, it's gone. I don't
Speaker 1: want that to happen. She set her empty glass on
Speaker 1: the porch rail. One more thing, And this is the
Speaker 1: part that explains why Earle never just came out and
Speaker 1: told you what was going on. I waited. Earle believed
Speaker 1: the residents paid attention to how we behaved, not in
Speaker 1: some mystical way, in a practical way. If you left
Speaker 1: them alone, they left you alone. If you didn't threaten them,
Speaker 1: they didn't threaten you. If you grew food, they'd help
Speaker 1: themselves to some of it, but they wouldn't clean you out,
Speaker 1: give and take. She leaned forward in the chair, but
Speaker 1: Earle was events they could hear us our conversations on
Speaker 1: the porch through the cabin walls on the phone. He
Speaker 1: thought they were close enough and often enough to pick
Speaker 1: up on what we said about them, And he believed
Speaker 1: that talking about them out loud, describing them, speculating, giving
Speaker 1: them a name, somehow changed the deal. He thought keeping
Speaker 1: quiet was the price of staying safe, that the silence
Speaker 1: itself was what held everything together. She settled back. That's
Speaker 1: why he never just sat you down and said it straight.
Speaker 1: He wasn't being cagy for the fun of it. He
Speaker 1: was afraid that saying the words out loud within range
Speaker 1: of the tree line would break something he'd spent forty
Speaker 1: years holding in place. It clicked, all of it, Earl's
Speaker 1: half finished sentences, the warnings that didn't quite warn you,
Speaker 1: the way he'd glanced toward the ridge before he answered
Speaker 1: a question about the property, as if he was checking
Speaker 1: who might be listening. Opal, I said, I've been talking
Speaker 1: about them openly on the phone, with Cliff sitting right
Speaker 1: here on this porch for four years. She nodded. I
Speaker 1: know you have, and they know it too, and nothing's happened. No,
Speaker 1: it hasn't. And I've spent some time thinking about why.
Speaker 1: She picked up the walking stick and turned it slowly
Speaker 1: in her hands. Vernon figured the arrangement was tied to
Speaker 1: specific individuals, the ones who were around when Earl moved
Speaker 1: in back in seventy one. Those were the ones Earl
Speaker 1: built the understanding with. They knew the deal, they'd been
Speaker 1: part of making it. She looked straight at me. But
Speaker 1: those individuals aren't around forever. The ones on your ridge
Speaker 1: right now might be their kids, their grandkids, and the
Speaker 1: younger ones might not honor the same terms. They might
Speaker 1: be pushier than the older generation, was more curious, less
Speaker 1: willing to keep their distance. She let that sit for
Speaker 1: a second, and that might explain why what's been happening
Speaker 1: to you is so much more intense than anything Earle
Speaker 1: dealt with. Earl was on this mountain for forty three
Speaker 1: years and never once woke up to find tracks circling
Speaker 1: his cabin in the snow. He never saw three of
Speaker 1: them together on the bluff. What you're describing as a
Speaker 1: different level of contact, closer, more personal, more deliberate. I
Speaker 1: think that's because the generation turned over and the new
Speaker 1: ones are making their own rules. Opel pushed herself up
Speaker 1: from the chair took two tries and the walking stick
Speaker 1: to get there. I need to head back before it
Speaker 1: gets dark, she said. My knees can't handle that creek
Speaker 1: bank without light anymore. She got to the top of
Speaker 1: the porch steps and then turned around. One more thing.
Speaker 1: Garrett Vernon used to say. The residents weren't good and
Speaker 1: they weren't evil. He said they were old, and he
Speaker 1: meant that every way you can mean it. Old as
Speaker 1: a species, old as a presence on this land, old
Speaker 1: enough that our ideas about right and wrong don't really
Speaker 1: map onto the way they operate. What drives them is territory,
Speaker 1: reciprocity and a very very long memory. They remember who
Speaker 1: leaves them be, and they remember who doesn't. She tapped
Speaker 1: the porch rail once with the walking stick. They remember Earl.
Speaker 1: That's why you've been safe. Forty three years of Earl
Speaker 1: keeping his mouth shut bought you a grace period. But
Speaker 1: grace periods end, and when this one runs out, you're
Speaker 1: going to need something of your own to stand on
Speaker 1: a relationship you've built with them yourself, on whatever terms
Speaker 1: you can manage. She turned and started across the meadow
Speaker 1: toward Bishop Creek. I watched her the whole way. She
Speaker 1: moved slowly, the walking stick, testing the ground ahead of her,
Speaker 1: and when she got to the creek bank, she picked
Speaker 1: her way across the rocks like somebody who'd done it
Speaker 1: so many times. The root was built into her feet.
Speaker 1: She crossed the shallow stretch without getting her boots wet,
Speaker 1: pulled herself up the far bank, and disappeared into the trees.
Speaker 1: I stood on the porch for a long time after that.
Speaker 1: Opel came back about two weeks later so she could
Speaker 1: show me the forest service road that connect to her driveway.
Speaker 1: That way I could bring the truck around to pick
Speaker 1: up Vernon's boxes without hauling them across the creek. We
Speaker 1: sat on her porch that afternoon for over an hour
Speaker 1: and just talked. She told me about the Christmases when
Speaker 1: the kids were small, and the two families would get together,
Speaker 1: about Vernon and Earl arguing over the best way to
Speaker 1: cure a ham. About the time Riba and Opel went
Speaker 1: picking huckleberries on the lower ridge and heard something heavy
Speaker 1: crashing through the laurel above them. Riba just looked at me,
Speaker 1: Opal said laughing quietly, and said, I believe the huckleberries
Speaker 1: can wait. That woman more composure than any three people
Speaker 1: I've ever known. She understood what was out here, she
Speaker 1: always did. She just never felt the need to make
Speaker 1: a production out of it. I asked whether Riba had
Speaker 1: ever had her own encounters. Opel nodded. She used to
Speaker 1: leave food out for them, not in the garden, on
Speaker 1: a stump out by the tree line. Apples, sweet potatoes,
Speaker 1: whatever she had extra. She'd set it out after supper,
Speaker 1: and it'd be gone by morning. Earl had no idea
Speaker 1: she was doing it for years. She told me about
Speaker 1: it one evening, when the four of us were eating
Speaker 1: together and the men had gone outside to argue about something.
Speaker 1: She said she'd started in seventy three, two years after
Speaker 1: they'd moved in. She said, if they were going to
Speaker 1: take from the garden anyway, she'd rather just offer it
Speaker 1: out right. Said it felt more honest that way. That
Speaker 1: sounded exactly like Reba, the woman who could name a
Speaker 1: bird by its song from across the house, the woman
Speaker 1: whose headstone read she heard every song. She'd been paying
Speaker 1: attention to the mountain the same way she paid attention
Speaker 1: to the birds, not with fear, with care. The following Saturday,
Speaker 1: I drove around to Ople's place and loaded up the
Speaker 1: seven bankers boxes and the map tube and thanked her.
Speaker 1: I spent the next three weeks working through Vernon's files.
Speaker 1: Every night after I got home from whatever job I
Speaker 1: was running in Hendersonville, I'd sit at the kitchen table
Speaker 1: and open a box. Bowie would park himself under the
Speaker 1: table with his on my boot. Ruby would be curled
Speaker 1: up on her blanket near the hearth, and I'd read,
Speaker 1: page by page, year by year, the record of a
Speaker 1: man who'd spent his working life watching the same things
Speaker 1: I'd been watching on the same mountain, through the same
Speaker 1: seasons for three decades before I ever set foot on
Speaker 1: the property. The amount of material was staggering. Thirty years
Speaker 1: of careful, systematic fieldwork from a man trained by the
Speaker 1: federal government to document land and wildlife. Every entry had
Speaker 1: a date, a weather note, and a specific location. He
Speaker 1: recorded compass bearings and creek mile markers, and elevation, temperature,
Speaker 1: wind direction, moon phase precipitation. He noted what he'd been
Speaker 1: doing at the time, how long the observation lasted, and
Speaker 1: how confident he was in the identification. If Vernon had
Speaker 1: been working in any other branch of biology, he'd have
Speaker 1: been published a dozen times over. Instead, he was a
Speaker 1: Forest Service land surveyor who spent his evenings writing about
Speaker 1: something he could never put in an official report. His
Speaker 1: first entries were from nineteen sixty three. Spare almost cold
Speaker 1: bipedal tracks observed along Bishop Creek at mile mark or
Speaker 1: two point four stride forty eight inches, track length fifteen inches,
Speaker 1: five digits, asymmetric, no known regional wildlife match, No opinion,
Speaker 1: no guessing, just measurement. A man who'd found something he
Speaker 1: couldn't explain and decided the right response was to get
Speaker 1: out a tape measure. By the late sixties, he'd started
Speaker 1: documenting the knocking. He'd figured out there were two kinds,
Speaker 1: what he called distance knocking, the ridge to ridge stuff
Speaker 1: I'd been hearing since twenty fourteen, and proximity knocking, a shorter, range,
Speaker 1: more focused kind of strike that Opel had mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: as the inspection knock. He noticed that the proximity knocking
Speaker 1: always came before something happened up close, before a cabin visit,
Speaker 1: before a trailer encounter, before the garden got hit. The
Speaker 1: distance knocking was conversation, the proximity knocking was more like
Speaker 1: someone clearing their throat before they come through a door.
Speaker 1: He'd pinned down two main knock zones on the topo map,
Speaker 1: one on the ridge above my property, one further south
Speaker 1: above the confluence, right where I'd been hearing them for
Speaker 1: four years. The bluff was dead center of the northern zone.
Speaker 1: The seventies entries got longer and more personal. You could
Speaker 1: feel Vernon's clinical distance starting to slip. They were active
Speaker 1: last night. Three knocks at twenty two fifteen from the
Speaker 1: north zone answered from the south at twenty two seventeen.
Speaker 1: Oh heard something outside the bedroom window around oh one hundred,
Speaker 1: but didn't wake me. Tracks in the garden this morning,
Speaker 1: tomatoes taken only the ripe ones as usual, as usual.
Speaker 1: Two words that tell you the whole story of how
Speaker 1: normal this had become for them. By the mid seventies,
Speaker 1: ten years in, the shock was gone, the fear was managed,
Speaker 1: The whole thing had become just another part of living
Speaker 1: on that mountain. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. I recognized the feeling
Speaker 1: I was on the same road the mimicry incident from
Speaker 1: seventy four was in the files written up in Vernon's
Speaker 1: careful flat style, and a few pages after it, there
Speaker 1: was an entry that stopped me in my tracks. Discussed
Speaker 1: mimicry incident with EJ. At his property, October twenty second,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy four. E confirms similar experience approximately nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 1: first year on the property. Subject mimicked R's voice calling
Speaker 1: from ridge northeast of cabin. E followed voice approximately fifty
Speaker 1: yards into timber before a percussive strike on a tree
Speaker 1: at close range, accompanied by bark fragmentation deterred further approach
Speaker 1: working theory. Mimicry is used as an initial assessment of
Speaker 1: new residents on the corridor. If subject fails to respond
Speaker 1: to deterrent, escalation may follow. If subject responds appropriately, assessment
Speaker 1: is complete and mimicry is not repeated for that individual. EJ.
Speaker 1: Earle Right there in Vernon's handwriting proof that Earle had
Speaker 1: been going through this since the very beginning and had
Speaker 1: been comparing notes with Vernon for years, and the mimicry
Speaker 1: wasn't some random scare tactic. It was a procedure, a
Speaker 1: standard test they ran on new people. Earl got his
Speaker 1: in seventy one, his first year, I got mine in fifteen.
Speaker 1: Opal got hers in seventy four, the first time she
Speaker 1: was alone on the property overnight, same test, same playbook,
Speaker 1: fifty years apart. They developed a way of sizing up
Speaker 1: every new human who showed up on their corridor, and
Speaker 1: they'd been running it the same way for at least
Speaker 1: half a century. The eighties and nineties files went deep
Speaker 1: into the seasonal cycles. Vernon had kept a hand drawn
Speaker 1: spreadsheet on graph paper tracking the first and last knocking
Speaker 1: dates every year, how often he found tracks along the creek,
Speaker 1: and when the close range stuff tended to happen. The
Speaker 1: patterns were remarkably steady. Knocking would start in a two
Speaker 1: week window somewhere in March or April and quit around
Speaker 1: November or December. Tracks along the creek peaked in October
Speaker 1: and November as the creatures moved downhill for winter. The
Speaker 1: close encounters, the garden visits and cabin approaches, and visual
Speaker 1: sightings bunched up in summer, when the creatures were on
Speaker 1: the high ridges and the corridor was busiest. One entry
Speaker 1: from ninety one jumped out at me two individuals observed
Speaker 1: at six point fifteen, moving south along corridor at mile
Speaker 1: three point two. Larger individual approximately seven to eight feet
Speaker 1: estimated height, Smaller individual approximately five feet smaller maybe juvenile
Speaker 1: based on proportional differences in limb length and gait, both bipedal,
Speaker 1: steady pace, no vocalizations, no reaction to observer at approximately
Speaker 1: two hundred yards A juvenile in ninety one, which meant
Speaker 1: by the time I moved on to the property in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen, that juvenile would have been well into its twenties,
Speaker 1: at minimum, old enough to be one of the ones
Speaker 1: I'd been dealing with, maybe old enough to have young
Speaker 1: of its own, maybe part of the newer generation Opal
Speaker 1: was talking about. The topo map was in the bottom
Speaker 1: of the last box, a nineteen sixty two usgs quadrangle,
Speaker 1: big enough to cover my whole kitchen table. The paper
Speaker 1: was soft at the folds from years of being opened
Speaker 1: and closed. The printed colors faded to tan, but Vernon's
Speaker 1: pencil marks were everywhere. He'd used different colors for different things,
Speaker 1: building up layers of information over thirty years until the
Speaker 1: map looked almost alive. Red pencil traced the creek corridor
Speaker 1: four miles of Bishop Creek headwater spring to valley confluence.
Speaker 1: Every band marked little exes for track fines, dozens of
Speaker 1: them clustered along the creek banks, asterisks for the nock zones,
Speaker 1: circle dots for the three times and thirty years. He'd
Speaker 1: actually seen one green triangles for structure sites, sixteen of
Speaker 1: them along the corridor, including two below the bluff and
Speaker 1: one right where I'd found the stick structures the night
Speaker 1: the dogs went into the forest, and at two spots
Speaker 1: he'd drawn yellow circles with den area written beside them,
Speaker 1: both in terrain his notes described as essentially impossible for
Speaker 1: a human to reach without hacking through solid laurel. One
Speaker 1: of those yellow circles sat right on top of the
Speaker 1: stick structure site. But the thing that really got me
Speaker 1: was the dotted lines. Vernon had drawn faint connections between
Speaker 1: the major observation points, and when you stepped back and
Speaker 1: looked at the whole map, the lines formed a loop,
Speaker 1: a big, rough oval that ran from the high ridge
Speaker 1: down through the corridor, past my cabin, past Opal's place,
Speaker 1: down to the lower elevations, and then back up through
Speaker 1: a different drainage on the other side. About four thousand
Speaker 1: acres inside the circle, and the creatures were running that
Speaker 1: loop on a schedule, down in fall and winter, up
Speaker 1: in spring and summer. The bluff for warm weather observation,
Speaker 1: the creek for travel between the seasonal ranges, year after year,
Speaker 1: decade after decade. Vernon had been tracking the pattern for
Speaker 1: thirty years, and it hadn't changed. Once that map rearranged
Speaker 1: something in my head. Standing in my kitchen, looking down
Speaker 1: at Vernon's careful annotations, I finally understood where I fit.
Speaker 1: I wasn't on the edge of their range. I was
Speaker 1: sitting right in the middle of it. My cabin was
Speaker 1: planted on the corridor itself, at the spot where two
Speaker 1: of their main travel routes crossed. They hadn't come to
Speaker 1: find me. I'd moved into their road, and for four
Speaker 1: years they'd been routing around me instead of the other
Speaker 1: way around. Every encounter I'd thought of as them invading
Speaker 1: my space, the garden, the cabin walls, the window visits,
Speaker 1: the nightly circuits. That was an invasion. That was just
Speaker 1: them doing what they'd always done, walking the same paths,
Speaker 1: checking the same spots. I was just the newest thing,
Speaker 1: sitting on a route that had been worn into the
Speaker 1: landscape long before Earl nailed the first log into place.
Speaker 1: Vernon's sharpest observation was about how smart they were. A
Speaker 1: ninety seven entry read the residents demonstrate problem solving, anticipatory behavior,
Speaker 1: vocal learning, structural construction, long term memory of individual humans,
Speaker 1: and coordinated group tactics. Taken together, these suggest cognitive ability
Speaker 1: that rivals our own, expressed through a completely different relationship
Speaker 1: with their environment. No permanent structures, no fire, no cultivation,
Speaker 1: but they navigate, communicate, plan, teach, and remember at a
Speaker 1: level that instinct can't account for. The last entry was
Speaker 1: from November of two thousand and three, about ten months
Speaker 1: before or Vernon dyed. He'd written it in blue ink
Speaker 1: instead of his usual black, and the handwriting was shakier
Speaker 1: than the earlier entries. His heart was already failing by then.
Speaker 1: Fifty one years on this ridge, I've heard them, seen
Speaker 1: their tracks, found their structures, smelled their musk, and once
Speaker 1: in seventy six stood twenty feet from one and watched
Speaker 1: it snap a hemlock in half. In all that time,
Speaker 1: they have not harmed me, oh or the boys. They
Speaker 1: have not harmed E or R. They have taken food,
Speaker 1: they have approached the houses, they have made their presence
Speaker 1: known in ways that cannot be misinterpreted, but they have
Speaker 1: not attacked. I believe this is not accidental. I believe
Speaker 1: they are capable of harm and choose not to inflict it.
Speaker 1: I believe the choice is based on an assessment of
Speaker 1: us as individuals, not as a species. They know who
Speaker 1: lives on this corridor. They have watched us for decades,
Speaker 1: and they have decided, for their own reasons, that we
Speaker 1: are acceptable neighbors. I do not take this for granted.
Speaker 1: I do not assume it will continue. But I am
Speaker 1: grateful for it, and I will honor it with my silence.
Speaker 1: I read that three times before I could put the
Speaker 1: folder down November two thousand and three. He died the
Speaker 1: following October. Ten months between those words and his last breath,
Speaker 1: I kept wondering if he'd known he was running short
Speaker 1: on time when he wrote them, whether the blue ink
Speaker 1: was deliberate, a different pen for a different kind of writing,
Speaker 1: not field notes anymore, not measurements and dates and compass headings.
Speaker 1: This was Vernon stepping out from behind the clipboard and
Speaker 1: saying what he actually felt. Maybe for the first time
Speaker 1: in thirty years of documenting, not observing, witnessing, putting on
Speaker 1: record a relationship that had shaped his entire adult life
Speaker 1: and that he'd never be able to share with anyone
Speaker 1: outside this ridge, fifty one years watching something that watched
Speaker 1: him right back, and in all that time, neither side
Speaker 1: had crossed the line. They'd taken food and pressed their
Speaker 1: hands to walls, and mimicked voices and walked the corridor
Speaker 1: in the dark, but they'd never attacked, and Vernon, for
Speaker 1: his part, had never shot at them, or called anyone
Speaker 1: in or turned their existence into a spectacle. Both sides
Speaker 1: just kept to the deal, an arrangement that was never
Speaker 1: discussed and never written down, that only existed in what
Speaker 1: people did and didn't do in the daily ordinary choice
Speaker 1: to leave each other b That's what Opal was handing me,
Speaker 1: not just paperwork. She was giving me a place in something,
Speaker 1: a line of people who'd held this knowledge and kept
Speaker 1: it quiet and passed it along. When the time came
Speaker 1: Vernon to Earl, Earl to Opal, Opal to me, the
Speaker 1: weight of it settled on me that night, sitting at
Speaker 1: the kitchen table, eleven o'clock, fire burned down to coals,
Speaker 1: dogs asleep, the mountain dark and quiet outside the windows,
Speaker 1: the same mountain Vernon had watched from across the creek
Speaker 1: for half his life, the same mountain that was right
Speaker 1: then watching me. I tried to visit Opal two more
Speaker 1: times after I picked up the boxes. First time, mid May,
Speaker 1: she was there. We sat on her porch and talked.
Speaker 1: That's when she told me the Huckleberry story and about
Speaker 1: rebelieving food on the stump. Second time was early June.
Speaker 1: Nobody home, house, locked up, garden, going to seed. Her
Speaker 1: subaru wasn't in the driveway. I sat on the porch
Speaker 1: for twenty minutes and waited nothing. I figured she'd already
Speaker 1: gone to her son's place in Morganton, she'd said June,
Speaker 1: looked like she'd gone early. It bothered me more than
Speaker 1: I expected, not just losing somebody to talk to, although
Speaker 1: that was part of it. It was the way she'd
Speaker 1: arrived and departed. She'd shown up on my porch one
Speaker 1: Saturday afternoon, given me fifty years worth of secrets, put
Speaker 1: Vernon's whole life's work in my hands, and then just
Speaker 1: left the mountain without so much as a wave goodbye.
Speaker 1: I know why she was old. The move was happening.
Speaker 1: The creek crossing was getting harder every spring. But still,
Speaker 1: two conversations with that woman had done more for my
Speaker 1: understanding of this place than four years of living on it.
Speaker 1: I went back one more time in July, hoping she'd
Speaker 1: left a note somewhere, an address, a phone number, something.
Speaker 1: The house was shut up, tight, garden completely overrun, porch
Speaker 1: covered in pollen and dead leaves. The windows had that
Speaker 1: look that empty buildings get, not just dark, finished. But
Speaker 1: the property wasn't empty, not the way it should have been.
Speaker 1: I spotted it on the walk in from Bishop Creek.
Speaker 1: The trail that Opal and I had been using back
Speaker 1: and forth from the creek to her clearing was more
Speaker 1: beaten down than it should have been, not a little more,
Speaker 1: a lot more wide, patches of flattened grass, and a
Speaker 1: pattern that didn't match how a person walks, spacing too broad,
Speaker 1: impressions too heavy, something that weighed a lot more than
Speaker 1: Opal had been using that trail on a regular basis.
Speaker 1: I checked the house the way I'd checked my own cabin,
Speaker 1: walking the perimeter, looking at the walls and the ground.
Speaker 1: The front was fine, the sides were fine. The back
Speaker 1: was different. Opal's chicken wire garden fence had been pushed
Speaker 1: aside at one corner, not ripped, not torn off. The
Speaker 1: stakes folded bent outward in a smooth, clean arc. The
Speaker 1: bottom section lifted and pressed away from the garden to
Speaker 1: make an opening about three feet wide. Whoever did it
Speaker 1: had grip and patience, No jagged wire ends, no damage
Speaker 1: to the stakes, just a neat, controlled fold, the same
Speaker 1: kind of deliberate handling I'd seen in the bent sapling
Speaker 1: at the stick structure site months earlier. Inside the garden,
Speaker 1: most of the roads had gone wild under the weeds.
Speaker 1: The bolted lettuce was untouched. The herb patch had seated
Speaker 1: itself out without anybody bothering it. But the tomato row,
Speaker 1: the one Opal had shown me back in May, with
Speaker 1: that quiet pride of hers, telling me she always started
Speaker 1: tomatoes first because Vernon loved them, was bare. The plants
Speaker 1: were gone, not dead, not eaten down to stubs, gone,
Speaker 1: pulled out of the ground hole, leaving clean round holes
Speaker 1: in the dirt at the exact spacing Opal had used
Speaker 1: when she'd planted them. The steaks she'd set were still standing.
Speaker 1: The string she'd tied around them was hanging loose in
Speaker 1: the air, same method, same precision, same invisible hand, Only
Speaker 1: this time the whole plant had been taken, not just
Speaker 1: the fruit, before anything had even grown, which meant whatever
Speaker 1: had come through the garden knew what those plants were,
Speaker 1: what they'd eventually produce, and decided to take them at
Speaker 1: the source. That kind of knowledge doesn't come from stumbling
Speaker 1: across a garden in the dark. That comes from watching
Speaker 1: someone plant it. On the back wall, near the kitchen window,
Speaker 1: about five feet up, there were two smooth spots in
Speaker 1: the grime on the window ledge, each one about the
Speaker 1: size of a spread hand, clean outlines pressed into the
Speaker 1: accumulated dust, the same thing I'd been finding on my
Speaker 1: own cabin walls for years, Hands flat weight, leaning forward,
Speaker 1: head close to the glass, listening to the inside of
Speaker 1: an empty house. They were still coming. That was the
Speaker 1: part that settled the heaviest. Opal was gone, The house
Speaker 1: was dark, the garden was halfway back to wild, and
Speaker 1: they were still walking up from the creek, still following
Speaker 1: the trail, still checking the windows, still leaning against the walls.
Speaker 1: Not because of Opal, because of the property itself, the house,
Speaker 1: the garden, the window, the door, landmarks on a route
Speaker 1: that was older than anything any of us had built.
Speaker 1: The corridor didn't belong to Opal, It didn't belong to me,
Speaker 1: It didn't belong to Earle. It belonged to them, always had.
Speaker 1: We were just renting space along the road, and they
Speaker 1: came by to check on things, whether the renters were
Speaker 1: home or not. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. I crossed the creek
Speaker 1: and walked back to the cabin and sat on the porch.
Speaker 1: I thought about the agreement Ople had described, the silence
Speaker 1: that Earle had believed was the price of safety, Vernon's
Speaker 1: final words about being grateful for a piece he never
Speaker 1: took for granted, Ople's warning that the credit Earl had
Speaker 1: built was running down and that the new generation might
Speaker 1: not care about the old terms. And then I thought
Speaker 1: about Opel herself, about what she'd actually done by coming
Speaker 1: to see me. She'd walked across that creek in broad daylight,
Speaker 1: climbed onto my porch, and spent two hours speaking out
Speaker 1: loud about things that Earl had spent forty years keeping
Speaker 1: silent about. She'd named them, She described what they did.
Speaker 1: She'd quoted Vernon's notes from memory. She'd laid out the
Speaker 1: whole history of the corridor in a voice that carried
Speaker 1: across an open meadow on a calm spring afternoon, well
Speaker 1: within range of whatever was sei on the ridge, or
Speaker 1: in the tree line, or anywhere along the creek. She'd
Speaker 1: broken every rule Earl lived by, deliberately, knowingly. Maybe she
Speaker 1: didn't believe the silence mattered the way Earle did. Maybe
Speaker 1: she decided getting me the information was worth whatever the
Speaker 1: cost might be. Or maybe she understood something about the
Speaker 1: current residence that told her the old rules weren't working anymore,
Speaker 1: and the silence wasn't buying anything it used to. I'll
Speaker 1: never know which one it was. I called her son
Speaker 1: Dale and Morganton through a number I found in the
Speaker 1: phone book. He told me she'd moved in with his
Speaker 1: family in June, had her own room, sat on the
Speaker 1: back porch mornings and looked out at the Cataba Valley,
Speaker 1: and drank the same instant coffee she'd been drinking for
Speaker 1: forty years. He said. She mentioned the mountain sometimes, the house,
Speaker 1: the garden, how Bishop Creek sounded at night, and how
Speaker 1: nothing in Morganton came close. He said. She seemed settled,
Speaker 1: but smaller somehow, the way people from the mountains always
Speaker 1: seem when you moved them to flat ground, like they
Speaker 1: left something behind that doesn't fit in a moving truck.
Speaker 1: He said. She never talked about anything unusual, not to him,
Speaker 1: not to his wife, not to the grandkids. I didn't push.
Speaker 1: I thanked him and hung up, and sat in the
Speaker 1: cabin with seven boxes on the kitchen table and a
Speaker 1: topo map tube leaning against the wall, and I tried
Speaker 1: to get my head around what I was holding. Fifty
Speaker 1: five years of accumulated knowledge about this corridor, Vernon's meticulous records,
Speaker 1: Earl's coated warnings, which finally made sense now that Opel
Speaker 1: had given me the key to them. Opel's stories. Her
Speaker 1: voice still freshened my memory, the matter of fact way
Speaker 1: she said the residence, the same way Vernon had said it,
Speaker 1: like calling something impossible by a plain name was the
Speaker 1: only decent way to deal with it. Three families, two properties,
Speaker 1: at least three generations of creatures, and now all of
Speaker 1: it had funneled down to me, one guy in a
Speaker 1: handbuilt cabin, sitting on somebody else's highway, holding the collected
Speaker 1: evidence of a fifty year coexistence that the rest of
Speaker 1: the world would call impossible. I still don't entirely know
Speaker 1: what to do with it. Some weeks I'll spread Vernon's
Speaker 1: notes out across the table and go through them, looking
Speaker 1: for something I missed. Other weeks, I'll push the boxes
Speaker 1: into the corner and try to pretend they're not there.
Speaker 1: And some evenings I'll sit on the porch at dusk
Speaker 1: and listen to the knocking startup from the ridge and
Speaker 1: feel something up there paying attention. And I wonder whether
Speaker 1: it knows about the boxes, whether it watched Opel carry
Speaker 1: them across the meadow, whether it understands, in whatever way
Speaker 1: it understands things that the knowledge is being handed down.
Speaker 1: I think it does. I think they keep track of everything.
Speaker 1: I think they've been watching us past this information along
Speaker 1: for fifty years, from Vernon to Earle to Opel to me,
Speaker 1: and I think on some level they get what it means.
Speaker 1: Not the specifics, not the measurements or the map or
Speaker 1: the words, but the act itself, one generation showing the
Speaker 1: next what lives here. They do the same thing, after all,
Speaker 1: The older ones teach the younger ones where to walk,
Speaker 1: which roots are safe, where the gardens are which windows
Speaker 1: to lean against. Knowledge passed from parent to child through
Speaker 1: repetition and proximity, decade after decade on a mountain that
Speaker 1: neither side seems willing to give up. We have more
Speaker 1: in common with them than I'd like to think about
Speaker 1: too hard. Next, I'll tell you about when Cliff finally
Speaker 1: came up to the mountain and the two of us
Speaker 1: decide to do what the researchers do. We knocked, we called,
Speaker 1: We went looking for them on purpose for the first time,
Speaker 1: and what happened that night is the reason Cliff hasn't
Speaker 1: come back. That's coming next, Garrett. That was story seven.
Speaker 1: I want to take a minute with this one before
Speaker 1: we move on, because what Opal brought into this series
Speaker 1: changes the whole picture. Up through story six, everything Garrett
Speaker 1: described came from one man on one property. It was strong, detailed,
Speaker 1: consistent across years, but it was still one perspective, one
Speaker 1: set of eyes. When someone tells you they've been hearing
Speaker 1: knocks and finding tracks for four years, you can believe
Speaker 1: them or not, but either way, it's one person's word.
Speaker 1: Opel blows that open. She brings a second property, a
Speaker 1: second family. More witnesses in Vernon, Reba and Earl, and
Speaker 1: fifty years of independent documentation that lines up with Garrett's
Speaker 1: observations from a completely different angle, the same creek corridor,
Speaker 1: the same seasonal timing, the same mimicry, the same nightly visits.
Speaker 1: Vernon was tracking it all on paper with the training
Speaker 1: of a federal land surveyor, decades before Garrett bought the cabin.
Speaker 1: Those files matter a trained observer, systematic methodology, thirty consecutive
Speaker 1: years on one corridor. I don't know of another body
Speaker 1: of private documentation on this subject that comes close. If
Speaker 1: Vernon's records ever make it into a research context, they
Speaker 1: could change how people think about what's happening in the
Speaker 1: Southern Appalachians. But the part of Opal's story that I
Speaker 1: keep circling back to is her framework for understanding why
Speaker 1: the creatures haven't hurt anyone on the corridor. The idea
Speaker 1: that they evaluate people individually, that they extend a kind
Speaker 1: of tolerance based on what they observe over time, That
Speaker 1: Earl's forty three years of silence built up a reserve
Speaker 1: of goodwill that Garrett has been drawing on without knowing it.
Speaker 1: That's not supernatural thinking. That's just how intelligent social animals
Speaker 1: with long memories work. Elephants do it, Orcas do it.
Speaker 1: Certain primate populations remember individual researchers years after a single encounter.
Speaker 1: If the creatures on that ridge operate the same way,
Speaker 1: then Garrett's whole experience starts to make a different kind
Speaker 1: of sense. The escalation from knocking to mimicry, to window
Speaker 1: visits to the bluff encounter isn't chaos. It's a process,
Speaker 1: a new generation far figuring out a new human, running tests,
Speaker 1: watching the results, building a file not to hurt him,
Speaker 1: to understand him. The question now is what they decide
Speaker 1: once they've got enough information. Story eight is next the
Speaker 1: ridge that answered back, and this time Garrett won't be
Speaker 1: out there alone. Stay safe, stay curious. I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you next time. Di the b