Speaker 1: Now one of your pudding. I got a string going
Speaker 1: on here, something just because my dog. Something killed your dog,
Speaker 1: my dog. We're flying through the air over the tree.
Speaker 1: I don't know how it did it, Okay, Damn, I'm
Speaker 1: really confused. All I saw was my dog coming over
Speaker 1: the fence and he was dead. And once you hit
Speaker 1: the ground like, I didn't see any cars. All I
Speaker 1: saw was my dog coming over the fence. Sat, what
Speaker 1: are you putting? We got some wonder or something crawling
Speaker 1: around out here? Did you see what it was?
Speaker 2: Or was it was?
Speaker 1: Standing enough? I'm out here looking through the window now
Speaker 1: and I don't see anything. I don't want to go outside,
Speaker 1: Jesus Quice, you better Hellohet thebody out here? What quin?
Speaker 1: I'm out there? I thought of a bit about tech
Speaker 1: forty nine.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Easy ann ount there, Yeah, I'm walking right.
Speaker 4: Hey.
Speaker 5: You ever notice how the really strange stories never start
Speaker 5: with you're not going to believe this. The people who've
Speaker 5: seen something genuinely inexplicable, they tell it straight, no embellishment,
Speaker 5: no dramatic build up. They just lay out what happened
Speaker 5: and let you decide what to make of it. That's
Speaker 5: what struck me about the accounts you're about to hear.
Speaker 5: These aren't campfire tales or internet creepy pastas. They're told
Speaker 5: with the kind of matter of fact clarity that comes
Speaker 5: from people still trying to make sense of their own experiences.
Speaker 5: Construction workers, truck drivers, government employees, regular people who stumbled
Speaker 5: into something extraordinary and came out the other side changed.
Speaker 5: I've been collecting these stories for years now. Not the
Speaker 5: sensational ones that make the rounds on paranormal podcasts, The
Speaker 5: quiet ones, the ones people only share after a few
Speaker 5: drinks or late at night when they're tired of carrying
Speaker 5: it alone. The ones that don't fit the standard Bigfoot
Speaker 5: narrative we've all heard a hundred times. No whooping calls
Speaker 5: echoing through the forest, No mysterious equipment failures at convenient moments,
Speaker 5: no spiritual awakenings or telepathic communications. Just encounters with something
Speaker 5: that shouldn't exist, something that moves through our world with
Speaker 5: an intelligence we don't quite understand. What interests me most
Speaker 5: about these accounts isn't just what people saw, it's how
Speaker 5: they process it afterward, how they integrate the impossible into
Speaker 5: their ordinary lives. Some quit their jobs, some never go
Speaker 5: back to certain places. Some spend years trying to rationalize
Speaker 5: what they experienced, but they all carry it with them,
Speaker 5: this knowledge that the world is stranger than we pretend
Speaker 5: it is. The Pacific Northwest keeps its secrets well. Millions
Speaker 5: of acres of forest, most of it never seen by
Speaker 5: human eyes, deep canyons, remote ridges, places where you could
Speaker 5: disappear and never be found. If something wanted to stay
Speaker 5: hidden out there, it could. Maybe it does. So listen
Speaker 5: to these stories with an open mind. Consider the details
Speaker 5: that don't fit the usual narrative. The bent trees that
Speaker 5: straighten themselves, the voices learning human speech, the deliberate intelligence
Speaker 5: behind seemingly random acts. These aren't stories about monsters. There's
Speaker 5: stories about boundaries, the ones between the known and unknown,
Speaker 5: between our world and something else's. Sometimes those boundaries get crossed,
Speaker 5: and when they do, the people who witness it are
Speaker 5: never quite the same. Let's start in Oregon, in the
Speaker 5: timberlands of Coos County, where a harvester operator encountered something
Speaker 5: that changed his understanding of what might be sharing the
Speaker 5: forest with us. I've been working timber and Oregon for
Speaker 5: twenty three years, started when I was nineteen, right out
Speaker 5: of high school. The thing that happened in Coos County
Speaker 5: back in twenty eighteen still bothers me. Not in the
Speaker 5: way you'd think. It's more like when you can't remember
Speaker 5: if you locked your front door, that nagging feeling that
Speaker 5: something's off. We were cutting a section about forty miles
Speaker 5: inland from bandon private land, old growth that had somehow
Speaker 5: escaped the saw for one hundred years. The company had
Speaker 5: finally gotten permits to take it down. Beautiful trees Douglas
Speaker 5: firs that four men couldn't wrap their arms around. Part
Speaker 5: of me hated cutting them, but work is work. It
Speaker 5: was late September. The mornings were getting cold, that wet
Speaker 5: Oregon cold that gets into your bones. I was running
Speaker 5: a harvester that day, one of those big tracked machines
Speaker 5: with the head that grabs the tree, cuts it and
Speaker 5: strips the branches all in one go. Loud as hell.
Speaker 5: You wear ear protection, but you still feel the vibration
Speaker 5: in your chest. I'd been working the line along a
Speaker 5: ridge since dawn. The fog had burned off around ten
Speaker 5: and I could finally see more than fifty feet ahead.
Speaker 5: The other guys were working different sections. We stayed in
Speaker 5: radio contact, but mostly we were alone out there. Around
Speaker 5: two in the afternoon, I shut down the harvester to
Speaker 5: eat lunch. The sudden quiet always gets to you. Your
Speaker 5: ears ring for a minute, then you start hearing the
Speaker 5: forest again, birds, wind in the trees, all of it.
Speaker 5: I grabbed my sandwich in thermous and climbed down from
Speaker 5: the cab. That's when I noticed the trees were wrong.
Speaker 5: I don't mean damaged or diseased. They were bent About
Speaker 5: thirty feet up. A line of firs were all bent
Speaker 5: at the same angle, pointing uphill, not broken, just curved
Speaker 5: like they'd grown that way. But trees don't grow sideways
Speaker 5: for ten feet then straighten back up. These did. I
Speaker 5: walked closer to get a better look. The bend was smooth,
Speaker 5: like someone had heated the wood and shaped it. But
Speaker 5: these were living trees, thick as telephone poles. At that height.
Speaker 5: The force needed to do that would be incredible. I
Speaker 5: was standing there neck crane back, trying to make sense
Speaker 5: of it when I heard breathing, not mine. This was deeper,
Speaker 5: slower like a horse after a long run, but bigger.
Speaker 5: The sound came from uphill, maybe sixty feet away in
Speaker 5: thick salal and rhododendron. I stood very still. Black bears
Speaker 5: were common here, but they don't breathe that loud unless
Speaker 5: they're right on top of you. This was different. The
Speaker 5: rhythm was wrong, too slow, too deliberate. The breathing stopped.
Speaker 5: I waited, hand on the radio clip to my vest.
Speaker 5: Then I heard movement, not footsteps exactly, more like something
Speaker 5: shifting its weight. The salal rustled, but I couldn't see
Speaker 5: through it. I backed toward the harvester, keeping my eyes
Speaker 5: on the spot where the sound came from. The Movement
Speaker 5: stopped when I moved, moved started again when I stopped,
Speaker 5: like it was matching me. I made it to the
Speaker 5: harvester and climbed up into the cab. From that height,
Speaker 5: I could see over most of the brush. There was
Speaker 5: a gap in the salaw where something had pushed through.
Speaker 5: Not a trail, just a space where the bushes were
Speaker 5: mashed down. I started the machine back up. The engine
Speaker 5: roared to life, and I went back to work, but
Speaker 5: I kept glancing at that spot. About an hour later,
Speaker 5: I saw motion, just a glimpse of something dark, moving
Speaker 5: parallel to me along the ridge. It stayed in the
Speaker 5: thick stuff never coming into the open. I radioed Jake,
Speaker 5: who was working the next section over, told him I
Speaker 5: might have a bear hanging around to keep an eye out.
Speaker 5: He said he'd had a weird feeling all day too,
Speaker 5: like something was watching him. But that's not unusual in
Speaker 5: the woods. You get that feeling sometimes. The thing is,
Speaker 5: I went back the next day to look at those
Speaker 5: bent trees and better light. They were straight, every single
Speaker 5: no bend, no curve, nothing, same trees, same location. I
Speaker 5: knew exactly where they were because I'd marked the spot
Speaker 5: with flagging tape. I asked the other guys if they'd
Speaker 5: noticed any bent trees. They looked at me like I
Speaker 5: was losing it. I didn't push it. But here's what
Speaker 5: really gets me. About a week later, I was servicing
Speaker 5: the harvester's head, cleaning out the feed rollers. Wrapped around
Speaker 5: one of them was hair long, dark brown hair, almost black,
Speaker 5: too coarse to be human, too long to be bare.
Speaker 5: It was wrap tight, like it had been pulled through
Speaker 5: during operation. I never ran anything through the head that
Speaker 5: day except trees. I'm sure of that. The hair was
Speaker 5: wound in their good like it had been caught while
Speaker 5: the rollers were spinning, but caught from what the head
Speaker 5: was twenty feet in the air when it was operating.
Speaker 5: I kept that hair for a while, had it in
Speaker 5: a zip lock bag in my truck. Then one day
Speaker 5: it was gone, lost, not misplaced. The bag was there,
Speaker 5: sealed but empty, like the hare had just disappeared. I
Speaker 5: still worked timber, but not in Coos County anymore. The
Speaker 5: company moved me to a different sector at my request.
Speaker 5: Told them I wanted to be closer to home, and
Speaker 5: that was partly true, but mostly I just didn't want
Speaker 5: to go back to that ridge. Sometimes I dream about
Speaker 5: those bent trees. In the dreams, they're not trees at all.
Speaker 5: They're markers, warnings, maybe boundaries that aren't meant to be crossed.
Speaker 5: And in the dreams I can still hear that breathing,
Speaker 5: patient and steady, waiting for something I don't understand. Bent
Speaker 5: trees that straighten themselves, hair that disappears from sealed bags,
Speaker 5: physical evidence that exists one day and vanishes the next.
Speaker 5: It's a pattern you'll hear again and again in these accounts,
Speaker 5: the frustrating inability to prove what you know you saw.
Speaker 5: Our next story comes from a truck driver who had
Speaker 5: his own encounter with something that shouldn't exist. Unlike our
Speaker 5: timber worker, who could at least return to the site later.
Speaker 5: This trucker's experience happened in the fleeting space of a
Speaker 5: highway at night, where evidence is left behind in the
Speaker 5: rear view mirror at sixty miles per hour. But some
Speaker 5: images burn themselves into your memory regardless of proof, and
Speaker 5: some things follow you longer than they should be able to.
Speaker 5: I drove truck for fifteen years before I retired, mostly
Speaker 5: Pacific Northwest routes Seattle down to Sacramento, over to Boise,
Speaker 5: back up through Portland. You see a lot of empty
Speaker 5: highway at three in the morning. You learn which rest
Speaker 5: stops have good coffee, which stretches of road the deer
Speaker 5: like to cross. You get to know the roads like
Speaker 5: the lines on your own hands. Highway ninety seven through
Speaker 5: central Oregon is one of those roads that feels longer
Speaker 5: than it is, miles of nothing but pine forest and
Speaker 5: lava rock. Cell service comes and goes, Radio stations fade
Speaker 5: in and out, just you and the yellow lines for hours.
Speaker 5: This was November twenty sixteen. I was hauling a load
Speaker 5: of lumber from Bend down to Redding. Nothing special, just
Speaker 5: another run. I'd left Bend around midnight to beat the
Speaker 5: morning traffic in California. The weather was clear, cold, no
Speaker 5: snow yet, but you could smell it. Coming south of Shemalt,
Speaker 5: there's a stretch where the forest presses right up against
Speaker 5: the highway. No shoulder to speak of, just asphalt and
Speaker 5: then trees. I was making good time, had the cruise
Speaker 5: control set at sixty. The truck was running smooth. I
Speaker 5: came around to curve and had to break hard. There
Speaker 5: was something in the road. My head lights lit it up,
Speaker 5: but I couldn't process what I was seeing. At first,
Speaker 5: it was hair, a massive pile of brown hair in
Speaker 5: the middle of my lane, like someone had emptied a
Speaker 5: barber shop in the road. But as I got closer,
Speaker 5: slowing to a crawl, I realized it wasn't just hair.
Speaker 5: It was attached to something. The pile was moving, rippling
Speaker 5: like water. Then it stood up. I'm six foot three.
Speaker 5: I've been in plenty of fights in my younger days.
Speaker 5: I've seen bears, elk, all kinds of wildlife. This was different.
Speaker 5: It stood maybe eight feet tall, covered in that brown
Speaker 5: hair that had looked like a pile in the road.
Speaker 5: But it didn't stand like a bear. It stood like
Speaker 5: a man, but wrong somehow. The proportions were off arms,
Speaker 5: too long, torso too thick. It turned to look at
Speaker 5: my truck. The headlights caught its eyes, and they reflected
Speaker 5: green like a deer's. But the face around those eyes
Speaker 5: wasn't quite animal, wasn't quite human either. It was something
Speaker 5: in between that made my hands go cold on the
Speaker 5: steering wheel. The thing didn't run. It walked to the
Speaker 5: side of the road, casual as could be, like it
Speaker 5: was stepping aside to let me pass, But it watched
Speaker 5: me the whole time. I could see its head turned
Speaker 5: to track the truck as I rolled by, a floored
Speaker 5: It should have put miles between me and whatever that was,
Speaker 5: but I did something stupid instead. I stopped about fifty
Speaker 5: yards past it and looked in my mirrors. It was
Speaker 5: following the truck, not running, just walking, with these long,
Speaker 5: measured strides, eating up ground without seeming to hurry. I
Speaker 5: put the truck in gear and started rolling again, watching
Speaker 5: my mirrors, it kept following. I picked up speed ten
Speaker 5: miles an hour twenty thirty. It kept pace for longer
Speaker 5: than should have been possible, then finally fell back and
Speaker 5: disappeared into the dark. I didn't stop again until I
Speaker 5: hit a truck stop in Klamath Falls. I sat in
Speaker 5: that well lit parking lot for an hour, drinking coffee
Speaker 5: with hands that wouldn't quite stay steady. I thought about
Speaker 5: calling someone, but who the cops and tell them what
Speaker 5: The drive back three days later was worse. Coming through
Speaker 5: that same stretch, I was tense as a wire. Nothing
Speaker 5: happened to empty road and dark trees. But about a
Speaker 5: mile from where I'd seen it, there was a dead
Speaker 5: elk on the shoulder. Big bull must have weighed eight
Speaker 5: hundred pounds. It was torn in half, not hit by
Speaker 5: a car, not taken down by wolves, torn like something
Speaker 5: had grabbed the front legs and back legs and pulled
Speaker 5: until the animal came apart. The strength required to do
Speaker 5: that is insane, and the weird part. No scavengers, no birds,
Speaker 5: no coyotes, nothing would touch it. I reported the elk
Speaker 5: to O DOT said it was a road hazard. They
Speaker 5: said they'd send someone to clean it up. I drove
Speaker 5: that route six more times over the next two months.
Speaker 5: The elk was never moved. It just slowly disappeared piece
Speaker 5: by piece, but I never saw what was taking it.
Speaker 5: I started timing my runs different after that, made sure
Speaker 5: I hit that stretch during daylight. Told myself it was
Speaker 5: because of ice conditions, but that was a lie. I
Speaker 5: was scared. Still am. If I'm on honest and stay
Speaker 5: tuned for more sasquatch ot to see, we'll be right back.
Speaker 5: After these messages, I retired early just last year. My
Speaker 5: wife thinks it's because of my back, and I let
Speaker 5: her believe that, but really I just couldn't do those
Speaker 5: night drives anymore. Couldn't shake the feeling that something was
Speaker 5: out there walking along the highway in the dark, waiting
Speaker 5: for trucks to slow down. The thing that really bothers
Speaker 5: me is how it acted. It wasn't aggressive, it wasn't afraid.
Speaker 5: It just moved aside, like it understood what a truck was,
Speaker 5: what a road was for, like it was choosing to
Speaker 5: let me pass. That kind of intelligence and something that
Speaker 5: shouldn't exist, makes you question a lot of things. I
Speaker 5: still have dreams about it. Sometimes. In the dreams, I
Speaker 5: stopped the truck and get out. I walk back to
Speaker 5: where it's standing by the side of the road. It
Speaker 5: says something to me, but I can never remember what.
Speaker 5: I wake up feeling like I've forgotten something important, something
Speaker 5: I was supposed to do. I don't drive at night anymore,
Speaker 5: not Ever. The intelligence behind these encounters is what unsettles
Speaker 5: people most. Not the size or strength, but the awareness.
Speaker 5: The way something watched that truck and chose to follow it,
Speaker 5: the way it understood what a road was for. This
Speaker 5: next account comes from someone whose job was to monitor
Speaker 5: the forest itself, to collect data, watch for patterns, predict dangers.
Speaker 5: But what do you do when the forest starts examining
Speaker 5: your equipment with the same curiosity you use to study it?
Speaker 5: And what do you do when the evidence of that
Speaker 5: curiosity is so impossible that even documenting it feels like fiction.
Speaker 5: I worked for the Forest Service for six years, mostly
Speaker 5: fire prevention stuff, manning lookout towers during the dry season,
Speaker 5: checking monitoring equipment. It was good work if you didn't
Speaker 5: mind being alone. I never minded, actually preferred it. In
Speaker 5: twenty nineteen, they had me stationed at a monitoring site
Speaker 5: in the cast Sca Range, about sixty miles east of Eugene.
Speaker 5: It wasn't a regular lookout tower, just a small equipment
Speaker 5: station that tracked weather patterns, air quality, seismic activity, boring
Speaker 5: data collection that helped predict fire conditions. The station was
Speaker 5: a metal shed about the size of a shipping container,
Speaker 5: solar panels on top, bunch of antennas and sensors. It
Speaker 5: sat on a cleared patch at the end of a
Speaker 5: forest service road. I'd drive up every two weeks to
Speaker 5: download data, check the equipment, swap out batteries if needed.
Speaker 5: It was July when things got strange. I'd driven up
Speaker 5: on a Tuesday morning early to beat the heat. The
Speaker 5: road was rough, barely more than a dirt track. The
Speaker 5: last five miles my truck could handle it, but you
Speaker 5: had to go slow. I noticed the smell first, not
Speaker 5: a dead animal smell, but something organic and wrong, like
Speaker 5: wet dog, mixed with crushed pine needles and something else
Speaker 5: I couldn't place. It got stronger as I got closer
Speaker 5: to this. When I came around the last bend, I
Speaker 5: saw the station had been moved, not damaged, not knocked over, moved.
Speaker 5: The whole thing had been dragged about thirty feet from
Speaker 5: its concrete pad. The cables connecting it to the solar
Speaker 5: panels were stretched tight. Some of them snapped. I got
Speaker 5: out of the truck and walked around it. The metal
Speaker 5: skids on the bottom had gouged deep tracks in the dirt.
Speaker 5: Whatever moved it had dragged it in one straight pull.
Speaker 5: But here's the thing. That station weighed about three thousand pounds.
Speaker 5: The amount of force needed to drag it that far
Speaker 5: would be enormous. There were marks on the metal sides,
Speaker 5: not claw marks, not exactly, more like something had gripped it.
Speaker 5: The metal was actually dimpled inward in spots, like giant
Speaker 5: fingers had pressed into it. But to dent quarter inch
Speaker 5: steel like that, you'd need hydraulic pressure. Nothing does that
Speaker 5: with just muscle. I called it in on the satellite phone,
Speaker 5: told my supervisor someone had vandalized the station. He asked
Speaker 5: if I could see tire tracks from a vehicle. I couldn't.
Speaker 5: No tire tracks, no cable marks, nothing to indicate machinery
Speaker 5: had been used. He told me to document everything and
Speaker 5: get the station operational if possible. So I did. Took photos,
Speaker 5: measurements the whole deal. Then I tried to get inside
Speaker 5: to check the equipment. The door was bent, not kicked in,
Speaker 5: but bent outward, like something inside had pushed against it.
Speaker 5: The lock was still engaged, but the frame around it
Speaker 5: had buckled. I had to use a prie bar to
Speaker 5: get it open enough to squeeze through. Inside was chaos.
Speaker 5: The monitoring equipment was mostly intact, but everything else was destroyed.
Speaker 5: The emergency cot was shredded. The supply cabinet had been
Speaker 5: pulled off the wall. Boxes of MRIs were torn open
Speaker 5: and scattered, but nothing was eaten. It was like something
Speaker 5: had been searching for something specific. The computer was still
Speaker 5: running on battery backup. I downloaded the data onto a
Speaker 5: thumb drive. Routine stuff mostly, but when I checked the
Speaker 5: motion sensor logs, there were dozens of triggers over the
Speaker 5: past three nights, all between midnight and four am. The
Speaker 5: sensors only saved still images, not video, and most of
Speaker 5: them just showed darkness or blurry shadows. But one image
Speaker 5: made me stop breathing for a second. It was from
Speaker 5: two nights before two forty seven am. According to the timestamp,
Speaker 5: the infrared camera had caught something standing right outside the window.
Speaker 5: The image was grainy, but you could make out a shape, tall, bipedal,
Speaker 5: one hand pressed against the glass. The hand was huge,
Speaker 5: fingers spread wide, human like, but too long, too thick.
Speaker 5: I copied everything and got out of there. Didn't even
Speaker 5: try to fix the station, just drove back down the
Speaker 5: mountain and told my supervisor the damage was too extensive
Speaker 5: for field repairs. They sent a crew up the next
Speaker 5: week to retrieve the station, brought it back on a
Speaker 5: flat bed. I heard later that they couldn't explain the damage.
Speaker 5: The official report blamed it on vandals, maybe eco terrorists
Speaker 5: or something, but they never explained how vandals moved three
Speaker 5: thousand pounds of steel without machinery. I went back once
Speaker 5: more about a month later, had to retrieve some sensors
Speaker 5: they'd left behind. The concrete pad was still there, and
Speaker 5: so were the drag marks, but there were new marks too, footprints,
Speaker 5: kind of depressions in the hard packed dirt. They led
Speaker 5: from the forest to where the station had been, then
Speaker 5: back into the trees. The prints were maybe eighteen inches long,
Speaker 5: humanoid in shape, but wider with what looked like tow impressions.
Speaker 5: The stride length was about six feet. I'm tall, and
Speaker 5: my stride is maybe three feet at a normal walk.
Speaker 5: Whatever made those prints was moving in huge, easy steps.
Speaker 5: I took photos of those two, but when I got
Speaker 5: home and checked my phone, those specific photos were corrupted.
Speaker 5: Every other picture was fine, just not those footprints. Technical
Speaker 5: glitch probably, but it felt deliberate somehow.
Speaker 1: I quit the.
Speaker 5: Forest Service a year later, told people I wanted to
Speaker 5: try something new, and that was partly true, but mostly
Speaker 5: I couldn't stop thinking about that hand pressed against the window,
Speaker 5: The deliberate way the station had been moved, the way
Speaker 5: the damage inside seemed almost curious rather than destructive. Whatever
Speaker 5: was out there, it was studying us as much as
Speaker 5: we were studying the forest, and it was strong enough
Speaker 5: to toss around our equipment like toys. That knowledge changes
Speaker 5: how you see the woods, makes you realize how small
Speaker 5: and fragile our little monitoring stations really are. I work
Speaker 5: in an office now, climate controlled, well lit, lots of
Speaker 5: people around. It's boring, but I sleep better. No more
Speaker 5: dreams about things standing outside windows in the dark, trying
Speaker 5: to understand what we are. Three thousand pounds of steel
Speaker 5: dragged thirty feet without out machinery, a hand pressed against glass,
Speaker 5: studying our technology. These encounters suggest something that goes beyond
Speaker 5: animal behavior into genuine curiosity about human artifacts. But not
Speaker 5: all encounters involve our structures and machines. Sometimes they involve
Speaker 5: communication attempts that are harder to dismiss. Patterns left behind,
Speaker 5: like messages, deliberate arrangements that suggest meaning. This next story
Speaker 5: takes us to the Klamath River, where a fisherman found
Speaker 5: himself at the center of something that seemed less like
Speaker 5: an encounter and more like a test. I was twenty
Speaker 5: six when it happened. This was back in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 5: I'd just gotten divorced. Needed to clear my head, so
Speaker 5: I decided to go steelhead fishing on the Klamath River.
Speaker 5: There's a spot about thirty miles up river from Happy
Speaker 5: Camp that not many people know about. You have to
Speaker 5: hike in about three miles from the road, perfect place
Speaker 5: to be alone. I went in October, right when the
Speaker 5: steelhead start running. Packed light, just a small tent, sleeping bag,
Speaker 5: and enough food for four days. The hike in was beautiful,
Speaker 5: old growth, cedar and pine, the sound of the river
Speaker 5: getting louder as you descend into the canyon. I set
Speaker 5: up camp on a gravel bar about fifty feet from
Speaker 5: the water. Good spot, flat, protected from wind by a
Speaker 5: stand of alders. I spent the first day fishing, caught
Speaker 5: two nice steelhead released them both. That night, I cooked freeze,
Speaker 5: dried pasta, watched the stars come out peaceful. The second
Speaker 5: night was different. I woke up around two in the morning.
Speaker 5: Wasn't sure what woke me at first. Then I heard
Speaker 5: rocks moving outside. Not little rocks, big ones. The gravel
Speaker 5: bar was mostly river rocks the size of basketballs. Something
Speaker 5: was moving them around. I lay there listening. The sound
Speaker 5: would stop for a minute, then start again, scraping, grinding,
Speaker 5: like something was rearranging the rocks. I thought maybe a
Speaker 5: bear was looking for fishcrkses, but bears don't usually mess
Speaker 5: with rocks that size. I unzipped the tent window and
Speaker 5: looked out. Moon was almost full, so I could see
Speaker 5: pretty well. The rocks near my tent had been stacked,
Speaker 5: not randomly, but deliberately, balanced on top of each other,
Speaker 5: little towers, three or four rocks high. There were maybe
Speaker 5: a dozen of them in a rough circle around my camp.
Speaker 5: While I was looking, a rock flew past my tent,
Speaker 5: didn't roll, didn't bounce, flew, It landed in the river
Speaker 5: with a huge splash. Then another one from the opposite direction.
Speaker 5: Something was throwing rocks from both sides of the river,
Speaker 5: big rocks that must have weighed forty fifty pounds. I
Speaker 5: zipped the window shut and grabbed my knife, not that
Speaker 5: it would help much, but holding it made me feel better.
Speaker 5: The rock throwing continued for maybe twenty minutes. Some landed
Speaker 5: in the water, some on the gravel bar. One hit
Speaker 5: a tree with a crack that echoed off the canyon walls.
Speaker 5: Then it stopped. Everything went quiet except for the river.
Speaker 5: I didn't sleep the rest of the night, just lay
Speaker 5: there listening, waiting. At first light, I packed up my
Speaker 5: gear in record time, but before I left, I looked
Speaker 5: at those rock stacks. They were arranged in a pattern,
Speaker 5: not random at all. They formed a spiral, starting small
Speaker 5: near my tent and getting bigger as they curved outward.
Speaker 5: The biggest stack was seven rocks high. Perfectly balanced. Engineering
Speaker 5: students would have trouble making something that stable. I started
Speaker 5: hiking out, moving fast. About a mile from camp, I
Speaker 5: found something that stopped me cold. A tree across the trail,
Speaker 5: not fallen placed. It was a pine maybe sixty feet long,
Speaker 5: and it had been laid perfectly perpendicular across the path.
Speaker 5: The root ball was on one side the top. On
Speaker 5: the other, that tree hadn't been there when I hiked in.
Speaker 5: To move it into that position, something would have had
Speaker 5: to carry it from wherever it fell and set it
Speaker 5: down just so. The trunk was probably two feet thick,
Speaker 5: the weight would be enormous. I climbed over it and
Speaker 5: kept going. Found two more trees like that before I
Speaker 5: reached the road, each one placed across the trail deliberate
Speaker 5: as could be, like something was trying to slow me
Speaker 5: down or mark the path, or maybe both. When I
Speaker 5: got to my car, I sat there for a long
Speaker 5: time before driving away. I kept thinking about those rock stacks,
Speaker 5: the perfect spiral they made, the thrown rocks that came
Speaker 5: from both sides of the river at once. Either there
Speaker 5: were two of whatever it was, or one that could
Speaker 5: move incredibly fast. I went back to that spot once
Speaker 5: five years later, brought a friend. That time, the rock
Speaker 5: stacks were gone, scattered by spring floods, probably, but the
Speaker 5: trees were still there, right where they'd been placed, across
Speaker 5: the trail, gray and weathered now but unmoved. My friend
Speaker 5: asked how they got there. I told him deadfall from
Speaker 5: a storm. He accepted that, but I could see him
Speaker 5: trying to figure out how three trees fell in exactly
Speaker 5: the same direction, exactly across the trail, exactly the same
Speaker 5: distance apart. We fished for a day and left. Nothing
Speaker 5: happened that time, but I kept feeling like we were
Speaker 5: being watched, that prickly sensation on the back of your neck.
Speaker 5: My friend felt it too. We didn't talk about it,
Speaker 5: but we both kept looking over our shoulders, scanning the
Speaker 5: tree line. I don't fish the Klamath anymore, plenty of
Speaker 5: other rivers in northern California, But sometimes I think about
Speaker 5: those rock stacks, the time and effort it would take
Speaker 5: to build them in the dark, the intelligence required to
Speaker 5: create that spiral pattern. Whatever made them was trying to
Speaker 5: communicate something. I just don't know what. The rocks getting
Speaker 5: thrown from both sides still bothers me. The physics of it.
Speaker 5: To throw a fifty pound rock across a river that's
Speaker 5: sixty feet wide, you'd need incredible strength, and to do
Speaker 5: it accurately in the dark from different positions. That suggests
Speaker 5: planning coordination. I've never told anyone the whole story until now.
Speaker 5: People already think I'm a little off since the divorce.
Speaker 5: This wouldn't help, but it happened. Those rocks didn't stack themselves,
Speaker 5: those trees didn't walk across the trail on their own.
Speaker 5: Something out there is a lot smarter and stronger than
Speaker 5: we want to believe. Rock sculptures arranged in perfect spirals,
Speaker 5: trees placed as barriers or markers. The Klamath River encounter
Speaker 5: suggests something capable of abstract thinking, of creating patterns meant
Speaker 5: to convey meaning. These stories challenge our assumptions about what
Speaker 5: we're dealing with. If these things exist, they're not just
Speaker 5: large primates hiding in the woods. There's something more complex,
Speaker 5: something that observes us. As much as we search for
Speaker 5: them and stay tuned for more Sasquatch ot to see,
Speaker 5: we'll be right back after these messages. Our next account
Speaker 5: comes from someone who worked ski patrol, someone whose job
Speaker 5: was knowing every inch of their mountain. But mountains change
Speaker 5: at night, and sometimes tracks appear in places nothing should
Speaker 5: be able to reach. I worked ski patrol at a
Speaker 5: small resort in the Northern Cascades for three seasons. This
Speaker 5: was twenty seventeen through twenty nineteen. Won't say which resort,
Speaker 5: but it's one of those places that locals love, and
Speaker 5: tourists haven't discovered yet. We'd get maybe two hundred people
Speaker 5: on a busy Saturday. The resort closes at four in winter.
Speaker 5: By five the mountain is empty except for patrol doing
Speaker 5: final sweep and the grooming crew preparing the runs for
Speaker 5: the next day. It's peaceful then, just the sound of
Speaker 5: wind and the distant rumble of the snow cats. This
Speaker 5: happened in February twenty eighteen. We'd gotten two feet of
Speaker 5: fresh snow the night before, perfect conditions. I was doing
Speaker 5: sweep on the backside of the mountain, checking the tree
Speaker 5: runs to make sure no one was stuck or injured.
Speaker 5: It's easy to get turned around in the trees when
Speaker 5: everything's covered in fresh powder. I was working my way
Speaker 5: down through a section we called the glades, tight trees,
Speaker 5: steep pitch, definitely expert terrain. The sun was already behind
Speaker 5: the ridge, so it was getting dark under the canopy.
Speaker 5: I had my headlamp on scanning for tracks. That's when
Speaker 5: I found them. Tracks that didn't make sense. They were bipedal,
Speaker 5: like a person walking, but no ski tracks, no snow
Speaker 5: shoe prints, just deep depressions in the snow. Maybe two
Speaker 5: feet deep. The stride was huge, probably seven feet between steps.
Speaker 5: And here's the weird part. They went straight up a
Speaker 5: slope that I could barely climb with my skins on.
Speaker 5: I followed them for a bit. They led to a
Speaker 5: cluster of trees where the snow was all disturbed. Branches
Speaker 5: were broken off ten twelve feet up, fresh breaks, SAPs
Speaker 5: still running. Something had pulled them down, twisted them off.
Speaker 5: The ground around the trees was packed down, like something
Speaker 5: heavy had been walking in circles. I radioed Base, told
Speaker 5: them I might have found evidence of a lost skier.
Speaker 5: They asked if I needed back up. I said no,
Speaker 5: I check it out and report back. Stupid decision. The
Speaker 5: tracks led deeper into the trees, away from any runs.
Speaker 5: I followed them for maybe ten minutes. The forest got thicker, darker.
Speaker 5: My headlamp beam only went so far. Every shadow looked
Speaker 5: like something crouching. Then I smelled it. Not the rotten
Speaker 5: smell people always talk about. This was musky, animal like,
Speaker 5: but with something else like wet cement or minerals cave smell,
Speaker 5: if that makes sense. It was strong enough to cut
Speaker 5: through the cold air. I stopped and listened. Could hear
Speaker 5: my own, breathing, my heart beating. Then from somewhere ahead,
Speaker 5: I heard snow falling off branches, a lot of it,
Speaker 5: like something big had brushed against a tree from a
Speaker 5: different direction. Whatever it was, it was circling me. I
Speaker 5: turned around and started back toward the run, not panicking
Speaker 5: but moving with purpose. The sound followed me, snow falling branches, creaking,
Speaker 5: always staying just outside the range of my headlamp. I
Speaker 5: made it back to the groomed run and radio that
Speaker 5: I was heading down. Told them the tracks were just
Speaker 5: postholing from some idiot hiking without snow shoes. Nobody questioned it,
Speaker 5: but here's what happened next. I had to go back
Speaker 5: up there the next morning to retrieve a boundary sign
Speaker 5: that had blown down. Daylight this time, plenty of people around.
Speaker 5: When I got to the glades, I looked for those tracks.
Speaker 5: They were gone, not covered by new snow. We hadn't
Speaker 5: gotten it, just gone. The snow was smooth, undisturbed, except
Speaker 5: I found one thing, a tuft of dark hair caught
Speaker 5: on a tree branch about eight feet up. Long, coarse hair,
Speaker 5: almost black. I pulled it free, looked at it in
Speaker 5: the sunlight. It wasn't from any animal I knew. Too
Speaker 5: long for elk, wrong color for bear. I pocketed it,
Speaker 5: planned to research it later, but when I got home
Speaker 5: and checked my pocket, it was gone, just a few
Speaker 5: strands left, like it had dissolved or something. The next week,
Speaker 5: one of the groomers quit said he'd seen something running
Speaker 5: alongside his cat one night keeping pace with the machine,
Speaker 5: which goes about twenty miles an hour. Said it ran
Speaker 5: on two legs, stayed just at the edge of his lights.
Speaker 5: Management told him he was seeing things, maybe needed to
Speaker 5: lay off the beer, but he was stone sober. I
Speaker 5: knew the guy. After that, I started paying attention. Found
Speaker 5: more tracks, sometimes, always in the back country, always gone
Speaker 5: by the next day. Other patrol members mentioned seeing them too,
Speaker 5: but nobody wanted to be the one to make it official.
Speaker 5: We all just pretended not to notice. The last season
Speaker 5: I worked there, twenty nineteen, we had an enc sident.
Speaker 5: A snowboarder went missing for six hours. When we found him,
Speaker 5: he was sitting in the middle of a run board,
Speaker 5: nowhere to be seen, just staring at the trees. Hypothermic. Confused,
Speaker 5: he kept saying something had carried him, picked him up
Speaker 5: and carried him through the forest. We rode it off
Speaker 5: as delirium from the cold, but his board turned up
Speaker 5: three days later at the top of a cliff, band
Speaker 5: placed carefully against a tree, no tracks leading to it,
Speaker 5: No way he could have climbed up there. Someone would
Speaker 5: have had to carry it. I don't work ski patrol anymore.
Speaker 5: Got a job as an electrician. Steady work, good pay.
Speaker 5: But sometimes I missed the mountain. Then I remember that smell,
Speaker 5: that circle of disturbed snow, those tracks that disappeared, and
Speaker 5: I'm glad to be working somewhere with walls and locks
Speaker 5: and lights that stay on all night. The mountains are beautiful,
Speaker 5: but there's something up there that doesn't want us around
Speaker 5: after dark. Something that can move through deep snow like
Speaker 5: it's nothing, climb vertical slopes and carry a grown man
Speaker 5: through the forest. Something that's smart enough to hide its
Speaker 5: tracks and strong enough to place a snowboard on top
Speaker 5: of a cliff as some kind of message. I still
Speaker 5: ski sometimes, but only on busy weekends, only on the
Speaker 5: main runs, and I'm always in the parking lot before
Speaker 5: the lifts close. Some boundaries you don't cross twice the
Speaker 5: mountains at night. Empty ski runs, tracks that appear and disappear,
Speaker 5: evidence that vanishes as if it was never there. Each
Speaker 5: of these stories shares that frustrating element, the inability to
Speaker 5: prove what you experienced. But what if proof isn't the point?
Speaker 5: What if these things reveal themselves only to certain people
Speaker 5: at certain times, for reasons we don't understand. This final
Speaker 5: story is different. It's about a long term relationship between
Speaker 5: a man and whatever was living near his cabin. Forty
Speaker 5: years of coexistence, forty years of gradual communication, and a
Speaker 5: suggestion that maybe, just maybe we're not the only ones
Speaker 5: trying to make contact. My grandfather left me his cabin
Speaker 5: when he died in twenty twenty. It sits on Devil's
Speaker 5: Creek up in the Siskiou Mountains, about forty miles from
Speaker 5: the nearest town. He built it himself in the sixties,
Speaker 5: lived there alone for the last thirty years of his life,
Speaker 5: off grid, no neighbors for miles, just how he liked it.
Speaker 5: I went up there in August to clean it out,
Speaker 5: figure out what to do with the place. The road
Speaker 5: end was overgrown, barely passable. Took me three hours to
Speaker 5: drive the last ten miles. When I finally got there.
Speaker 5: The cabin looked exactly like I remembered from childhood visits, small, sturdy,
Speaker 5: surrounded by Douglas firs so thick you could barely see
Speaker 5: the sky. Inside was like stepping back in time. Wood stove,
Speaker 5: oil lamps, shelves of canned goods, everything covered in dust,
Speaker 5: but otherwise intact. I spent the first day just cleaning,
Speaker 5: opening windows, airing the place out. That night, I found
Speaker 5: his journals, forty years worth, stacked in a closet. I
Speaker 5: started reading them, expecting fishing stories and weather reports. That's
Speaker 5: mostly what they were. But starting about ten years ago,
Speaker 5: the entries changed. He wrote about voices in the creek
Speaker 5: at night. Not human voices, but something trying to sound human,
Speaker 5: like something was practicing words, getting them wrong. He'd written
Speaker 5: phrases he'd heard, hello, there, morning, good night, walking, thank you,
Speaker 5: very coming, always just a little off. I thought maybe
Speaker 5: he'd been getting dementia, but the rest of his writing
Speaker 5: was clear, sharp. He still balanced his check book in
Speaker 5: the margins, kept detailed notes about repairs and supplies. Only
Speaker 5: these voice entries seemed crazy. The second night I was there,
Speaker 5: I heard them too. I was lying in bed, windows
Speaker 5: opened to cool the place down The creek was loud,
Speaker 5: running high for August, but underneath the water sound I
Speaker 5: heard talking, low, mumbling, like someone having a conversation, just
Speaker 5: out of earshot. I grabbed a flashlight and went to
Speaker 5: the window. The creek was only thirty feet from the cabin.
Speaker 5: I could see it reflecting moonlight through the trees. The
Speaker 5: voices were coming from upstream, maybe fifty yards away, two
Speaker 5: distinct tones, one higher, one lower. They seemed to be alternating,
Speaker 5: like question and answer. I couldn't make out words at first,
Speaker 5: Then clear as day, I heard window light there looking
Speaker 5: my flashlight. They were talking about my flashlight. I turned
Speaker 5: it off and stood in the dark listening. The voices continued,
Speaker 5: but quieter, now harder to understand. I wanted to go
Speaker 5: outside see what was making those sounds, but something in
Speaker 5: my grandfather's journal stopped me. An entry from just a
Speaker 5: month before he died, don't go to the creek at night.
Speaker 5: They're learning getting better at sounding like us. Sarah's voice
Speaker 5: last night, but Sarah's been dead three years. Almost went
Speaker 5: to her almost Sarah was my grandmother. I went back
Speaker 5: to bed, but didn't sleep. The voices continued until dawn,
Speaker 5: sometimes closer, sometimes farther away. When the sun came up,
Speaker 5: I walked down to the creek. Found prints in the mud,
Speaker 5: like human footprints, but they were too wide, toes, too long,
Speaker 5: and they went into the water but didn't come out
Speaker 5: the other side. I spent that day reading more journals.
Speaker 5: Found entries about things watching from the trees, about finding
Speaker 5: his tools, moved his firewood stacked in strange patterns, about
Speaker 5: waking up to find hand prints on the outside of
Speaker 5: his windows, too high to be human fingers, too long,
Speaker 5: but he never left. Forty years of this, and he stayed.
Speaker 5: I found an entry that explained why they don't mean harm,
Speaker 5: just curious learning. They copy what I do, try to understand.
Speaker 5: Found my words written in the dirt by the creek,
Speaker 5: my exact words from yesterday spelled out in sticks. They're
Speaker 5: studying us like we study everything else. Fair enough. That night,
Speaker 5: the voices were clearer, still not quite right, but better.
Speaker 5: I heard my own name pronounced slowly, carefully, then my
Speaker 5: grandfather's name, then words I'd said that day while talking
Speaker 5: to myself. They were repeating me, practicing. I stayed five
Speaker 5: days total. Each night the voices got clearer, more human like.
Speaker 5: By the last night. If you weren't listening carefully, you
Speaker 5: might think it was people talking down by the creek.
Speaker 5: But the rhythm was still not quite right, the inflection off,
Speaker 5: like an artificial voice trying to sound human but not
Speaker 5: quite getting it. The morning I left, I found something
Speaker 5: on the porch, a bundle of sticks tied with grass,
Speaker 5: arranged in a pattern. It looked deliberate, meaningful, like a
Speaker 5: gift or a message. I left it there, felt wrong
Speaker 5: to take it. I haven't been back to the cabin,
Speaker 5: haven't decided what to do with it. Can't sell it
Speaker 5: without disclosure, and who would buy a place with whatever?
Speaker 5: Those things are living nearby. Can't live there myself, knowing
Speaker 5: they're out there practicing human speech, getting better at it
Speaker 5: every year. But sometimes I think about my grandfather choosing
Speaker 5: to stay, living alongside something impossible, something that shouldn't exist.
Speaker 5: They watched him, copied him, learned from him, and he
Speaker 5: let them, maybe even taught them in his way. The
Speaker 5: last entry in his journal, written the day before he died,
Speaker 5: was just one line. They said goodbye correctly today. I
Speaker 5: don't know what that means, don't know if I want
Speaker 5: to know, But I kept the journals. Sometimes I read
Speaker 5: them looking for patterns, trying to understand what my grandfather understood,
Speaker 5: what made him stay, what made him unafraid. The cabin
Speaker 5: is still there, empty now, the creek still runs past it,
Speaker 5: and at night, if anyone was there to listen, I
Speaker 5: bet you could still hear voices in the water, practicing, learning,
Speaker 5: getting better at being human, or at least sounding like it.
Speaker 5: Maybe someday I'll go back. Maybe I'll sit by the
Speaker 5: creek at night and listen to them talk. Maybe I'll
Speaker 5: talk back. My grandfather did, near the end, whole conversations
Speaker 5: recorded in his journal, his words, and their attempts at responses.
Speaker 5: But not yet. I'm not ready for that, Not ready
Speaker 5: to find out what they want, what they're trying to say,
Speaker 5: Not ready to hear my grandmother's voice coming from the creek,
Speaker 5: calling me down to the water in the dark, some
Speaker 5: knowledge you can't come back from. My grandfather knew that,
Speaker 5: he chose it anyway. I'm not that brave. Not yet.
Speaker 5: They said goodbye correctly. Today, that line haunts me more
Speaker 5: than any other detail in these stories, the possibility that
Speaker 5: these things aren't just observing us, but learning from us,
Speaker 5: developing evolving their understanding of what we are and how
Speaker 5: we communicate. Each of these encounters share certain elements. The
Speaker 5: intelligence displayed, the curious rather than aggressive behavior, the way
Speaker 5: evidence disappears as if something understands the importance of remaining hidden, and,
Speaker 5: most unnervingly, the suggestion that contact isn't random, that their
Speaker 5: selection happening criteria we don't understand. The timber worker with
Speaker 5: his bent trees, the trucker on Highway ninety seven, the
Speaker 5: forest service employee with his damage station, the fishermen with
Speaker 5: his rock spirals, the ski patroller with his vanishing tracks,
Speaker 5: the grandson with his inherited voices. And stay tuned for
Speaker 5: more sasquatch otta see, We'll be right back after these messages.
Speaker 5: Each of them crossed a boundary, witnessed something outside normal experience,
Speaker 5: and came back changed. But here's what keeps me up
Speaker 5: at night. If these things are real, and if they're
Speaker 5: as intelligent as these accounts suggest, then they're choosing to
Speaker 5: remain hidden. They have the strength to overturn our equipment,
Speaker 5: the speed to outrun our vehicles, the intelligence to learn
Speaker 5: our language. Yet they stay in the shadows, revealing themselves
Speaker 5: only in glimpses, leaving behind evidence that conveniently disappears. Why.
Speaker 5: Maybe they're protecting themselves, maybe they're protecting us. Or maybe,
Speaker 5: like the grandfather who spent forty years listening to voices
Speaker 5: by the creek, some boundaries are meant to be approached slowly, carefully,
Speaker 5: over generations. The Pacific Northwest is vast millions of acres
Speaker 5: where something could live undetected if it was smart enough,
Speaker 5: careful enough, And according to these stories, whatever's out there
Speaker 5: is both. I don't know what to make of these accounts.
Speaker 5: I can't verify them, can't fact check them, can't prove
Speaker 5: or disprove what these people experienced. All I can do
Speaker 5: is present them as they were told to me, straightforward, unembellished,
Speaker 5: troubled by their own implications. Whether you believe them or not,
Speaker 5: they raise uncomfortable questions about what might be sharing these
Speaker 5: forests with us, about what might be watching us from
Speaker 5: just beyond the reach of our headlights, our campfires, our understanding.
Speaker 5: The next time you're out there hiking a remote trail,
Speaker 5: driving a dark highway, skiing an empty run, pay attention
Speaker 5: to that feeling of being watched, that sound that doesn't
Speaker 5: quite fit those tracks that shouldn't be there. And if
Speaker 5: you see something, if you experience something that doesn't make sense,
Speaker 5: know that you're not alone. Others have stood where you're standing,
Speaker 5: seen what you're seeing, and carried that knowledge back into
Speaker 5: their everyday lives. The world is stranger than we admit.
Speaker 5: These stories are proof of that, not proof of Bigfoot
Speaker 5: or Sasquatch or whatever name we want to give it,
Speaker 5: but proof that there are still mysteries out there, still
Speaker 5: boundaries we haven't crossed, Still things that watch us from
Speaker 5: the darkness and perhaps wonder about us as much as
Speaker 5: we wonder about them. Some boundaries are there for a reason.
Speaker 5: Some knowledge changes you, and some things, once seen, can
Speaker 5: never be unseen. But that's for you to decide until
Speaker 5: next time. Keep your eyes open out there, and remember
Speaker 5: not all evidence is meant to be found. Not all
Speaker 5: encounters are random, and not all voices in the darkness
Speaker 5: are human, even when they're trying to be.
Speaker 4: They say, you don't gotta go home, but you can't stay.
Speaker 2: Not science steps.
Speaker 4: Step, joy, this child, that chart, everything came in right,
Speaker 4: pry back joy for me, need.
Speaker 3: Joy staying right, Come it right away? Still listen, sass
Speaker 3: ssst SAT, do.
Speaker 2: Not, do not talk about messstsssssssssss