Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: Before we get into tonight's story, I want to give
Speaker 1: a little background on how this came to me. About
Speaker 1: three months ago, I got an email from a listener
Speaker 1: named Garrett. He said he'd been following Sasquatch Odyssey and
Speaker 1: Backwoods Bigfoot Stories for over two years, and that he'd
Speaker 1: also been listening to Disturbing History and The Guilty Files
Speaker 1: during his commutes. He told me he'd been sitting on
Speaker 1: something for a long time a decade actually, and that
Speaker 1: he'd never shared the full scope of what happened to
Speaker 1: him because he didn't think anyone would hear him out
Speaker 1: from beginning to end. He said, my shows made him
Speaker 1: feel like maybe somebody finally would. What Garrett sent me
Speaker 1: wasn't just one story. It was ten, ten encounters spanning
Speaker 1: roughly ten years, all tied to the same property, the
Speaker 1: same stretch of mountain wilderness in the southern Appalachians. He
Speaker 1: asked me to tell them in order, because, in his words,
Speaker 1: none of it makes sense unless you hear how it started.
Speaker 1: So that's what we're going to do. And if this
Speaker 1: goes where I think it's going, you're going to want
Speaker 1: to hear every single one that follows. Here's Garrett in
Speaker 1: his own words. My name's Garrett. I'm fifty four years
Speaker 1: old now and I live in Asheville, North Carolina, though
Speaker 1: that's only been true for the last year or so.
Speaker 1: Before that, I spent the better part of a decade
Speaker 1: splitting my time between a rental apartment near Hendersonville and
Speaker 1: a cabin property about forty minutes east of there, back
Speaker 1: off a state road that doesn't see much traffic past
Speaker 1: the volunteer fire station. I need to explain how I
Speaker 1: ended up at that cabin in the first place, because
Speaker 1: without that, none of the rest of this is going
Speaker 1: to land the way it should. People always want to
Speaker 1: jump straight to the scary part. I get it, but
Speaker 1: what happened to me didn't start with something scary. It
Speaker 1: started with something sad, and I think that matters. I
Speaker 1: grew up in Gastonia. My dad, Warren, worked at a
Speaker 1: textile plan until it closed in ninety four. Then he
Speaker 1: drove a delivery truck for a restaurant supply company until
Speaker 1: his knees gave out. My mom, Diane, worked at a
Speaker 1: veterinarian's office for almost thirty years. They were good people,
Speaker 1: simple people in the best way that word can mean.
Speaker 1: We didn't take big vacations, we didn't eat at fancy restaurants.
Speaker 1: But every fall, without fail, my dad would rent a
Speaker 1: cabin somewhere in the Blue Ridge for a long weekend,
Speaker 1: and the three of us would disappear into the mountains
Speaker 1: with a cooler full of food and a truck bed
Speaker 1: full of firewood. Those weekends shaped me more than anything
Speaker 1: else in my childhood. I can still smell the hickory
Speaker 1: smoke from those fires. I can still hear the way
Speaker 1: the creek behind whatever cabin we'd rented sounded at two
Speaker 1: in the morning, when everything else went quiet. My dad
Speaker 1: would sit on the porch with a cigarette and a
Speaker 1: can of Budweiser and just listen. He never said much
Speaker 1: during those trips. He didn't have to. I think the
Speaker 1: mountain said whatever he needed to hear. I carried that
Speaker 1: with me into adulthood, through a marriage that lasted six
Speaker 1: years and ended without any kids, Through a career in
Speaker 1: residential contracting that kept food on the table but never
Speaker 1: really filled me up inside, and through the slow erosion
Speaker 1: of purpose that hits you when you realize you're in
Speaker 1: your early forties alone and doing the same thing every
Speaker 1: single day without any real direction. By twenty thirteen, I
Speaker 1: was running my own small crew doing decks, additions, bathroom remodels.
Speaker 1: The work was steady, but not exciting. I had a
Speaker 1: dog named Bowie, a red heeler mix I'd picked up
Speaker 1: from a shelter outside Marion. He was about four at
Speaker 1: the time, best dog I've ever had. Loyal in a
Speaker 1: way that made you feel like you didn't deserve it.
Speaker 1: I'd been casually looking at mountain property for about two years,
Speaker 1: nothing serious, just browsing listings on weekends, saving links. I'd
Speaker 1: never follow up on, telling myself that someday I'd find
Speaker 1: the right spot and make an offer. I think part
Speaker 1: of me knew I was never actually going to do it.
Speaker 1: It was easier to dream about it than commit to it.
Speaker 1: Then my mom passed away. It was February of twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: pancreatic cancer. She had only been diagnosed five months earlier,
Speaker 1: and by the time they caught it there wasn't much
Speaker 1: to discuss. She went fast, which the doctor said was
Speaker 1: a mercy, though I'll tell you right now there's nothing
Speaker 1: merciful about watching your mother disappear in front of you
Speaker 1: over the course of.
Speaker 2: A few weeks.
Speaker 1: My dad had already been gone seven years by then,
Speaker 1: heart attack at sixty one, So when Mom died, I
Speaker 1: didn't just lose a parent. I lost the last thread
Speaker 1: connecting me to a version of myself that still made sense.
Speaker 1: I know that sounds dramatic. I don't mean it to be.
Speaker 2: It's just the truth. When both your.
Speaker 1: Parents are gone and you don't have a wife or
Speaker 1: kids to anchor you, you start to float and I
Speaker 1: was floating. After the funeral, after the paperwork, after the
Speaker 1: household and the estate was settled, I had about ninety
Speaker 1: thousand dollars sitting in an account that felt like it
Speaker 1: was burning a hole through my chest. It was my
Speaker 1: parents' money, their whole life, reduce to a number, and
Speaker 1: I didn't want to just absorb it into my rent
Speaker 1: and my grocery bills and my truck payment until it vanished.
Speaker 1: I wanted to do something with it that would have
Speaker 1: made my dad sit back and nod. So I got
Speaker 1: serious about the cabin search. I wasn't looking at real
Speaker 1: estate listings this time. I drove every weekend for about
Speaker 1: two months. I picked a direction and followed back roads
Speaker 1: until I found something interesting. I talked to people at
Speaker 1: gas stations, feed stores, little diners where the coffees burnt
Speaker 1: and the gossip's fresh. I told them I was looking
Speaker 1: for mountain property, something off the beaten path, something with
Speaker 1: land and quiet, and maybe a structure I could fix up.
Speaker 1: Most of the time people shrugged or pointed me toward
Speaker 1: a realtor's office in town. But one afternoon in April,
Speaker 1: at a hardware store outside Chimney Rock, a guy behind
Speaker 1: the counter named Dennis, told me about Earl. Dennis said
Speaker 1: Earl was eighty two years old, lived alone on forty
Speaker 1: seven acres up a gravel road off the state route,
Speaker 1: and had been talking about selling ever since his wife, Riba,
Speaker 1: passed the previous autumn. He said Earl had built the
Speaker 1: cabin himself in nineteen seventy one and had lived there
Speaker 1: with Riba for over four decades. He said the property
Speaker 1: backed up against national forest land, and that you could
Speaker 1: stand on the back porch and not see another house
Speaker 1: in any direction. Then Dennis leaned over the counter and
Speaker 1: said something I'll never forget. He said, Earl don't want
Speaker 1: to sell to a developer or a vacation rental outfit.
Speaker 1: He wants somebody who'll actually live there, somebody who gives
Speaker 1: a damn about quiet. I asked for directions. Dennis drew
Speaker 1: them on the back of a receipt. Then he added,
Speaker 1: almost as an afterthought, don't go up there expecting Earle
Speaker 1: to shake your hand and give you a tour. He's particular.
Speaker 1: He's going to size you up before he says ten words.
Speaker 1: But if he decides you're all right, you'll know. I
Speaker 1: thanked him and bought a box of deck screws I
Speaker 1: didn't need, just to feel like I'd earned the information.
Speaker 1: That Saturday I drove up to see it. The gravel
Speaker 1: road was rough, but not in assable. My truck handled
Speaker 1: it fine, though Bowie slid around in the back seat
Speaker 1: on every curve. It was about a mile and a
Speaker 1: half from the state route to Earl's Gate, which wasn't
Speaker 1: really a gate at all. It was two cedar posts
Speaker 1: with a piece of chain draped between them. No lock,
Speaker 1: no sign, just a quiet suggestion that you shouldn't be
Speaker 1: there unless you had a reason. I unhooked the chain,
Speaker 1: drove through, and followed a rutted dirt track through a
Speaker 1: corridor of white pines and tulip poplars for another quarter
Speaker 1: mile before the trees opened up and I saw the cabin.
Speaker 1: It sat on a gentle rise above a cleared meadow,
Speaker 1: facing west toward a long blue ridge that folded into
Speaker 1: itself like fabric. The cabin was built from hand hewn logs,
Speaker 1: dark with age, topped with a green metal roof that
Speaker 1: had gone chalky from decades of sun. There was a
Speaker 1: covered porch across the full front, a stone chimney on
Speaker 1: the south end, and a small barn or workshop maybe
Speaker 1: sixty yards to the right behind the cabin. The ground
Speaker 1: climbed sharply into hardwood forest, mostly oak and hickory, before disappearing.
Speaker 2: Into the ridge line.
Speaker 1: Earl was sitting on the porch in a metal chair
Speaker 1: when I pulled up. He didn't stand. He just watched
Speaker 1: me get out of the truck with the kind of
Speaker 1: patience that belongs to someone who's been alive long enough
Speaker 1: to know that most things reveal themselves if you wait.
Speaker 1: He had a face like a topographic map, deep lines
Speaker 1: running in every direction, skin tanned to the color of
Speaker 1: old leather, and hands resting on the arms of that
Speaker 1: chair that looked like they'd built everything within sight because
Speaker 1: they had. Bowie jumped out after me and trotted toward
Speaker 1: the porch with his tail going. Earle looked down at
Speaker 1: him and said, dealer mix. I said, yes, sir, good dogs.
Speaker 1: He said, Reba wanted one for years. I always told
Speaker 1: her we had enough animals around this place without adding
Speaker 1: another opinion to the mix. That was the first thing
Speaker 1: he said to me, and it told me everything I
Speaker 1: needed to know about the kind of man he was.
Speaker 1: He led with his wife, not the property, not the
Speaker 1: price his wife. I introduced myself, told him Dennis had
Speaker 1: sent me, told him I was looking for a place
Speaker 1: in the mountains, and that I wasn't interested in flipping
Speaker 1: it or renting it out. I told him about my parents,
Speaker 1: about the weekends in the Blue Ridge, about how I
Speaker 1: was a contractor by trade, and that i'd take care
Speaker 1: of whatever he'd built. Earl studied me for a long time.
Speaker 1: His eyes were pale blue, almost gray, and they didn't
Speaker 1: blink as often as most peoples do. Then he said,
Speaker 1: come sit down. We sat on that porch for almost
Speaker 1: three hours. Earle talked the way old men talk when
Speaker 1: they'd been alone too long and finally found someone willing
Speaker 1: to listen, not rambling, not lost, just thorough like every
Speaker 1: detail mattered because it was the only way to keep
Speaker 1: something alive. He told me about building the cabin with
Speaker 1: his brother Frank, over the course of two summers. Frank
Speaker 1: had been a mason, and he'd done the chimney while
Speaker 1: Earl handled the law, the framing and the roof. They'd
Speaker 1: cut the timber from the property itself, dragged it with
Speaker 1: a mule named Captain, and notched every joint by hand.
Speaker 1: He told me Frank passed in eighty nine from emphysema,
Speaker 1: and that every time he looked at that chimney he
Speaker 1: could still see his brother's hands in the stone work.
Speaker 1: He told me about Riba, who'd been a schoolteacher in
Speaker 1: the valley before she retired in ninety seven. He said
Speaker 1: she was the kind of woman who could walk into
Speaker 1: a room full of misbehaving eight year olds and settle
Speaker 1: them down with nothing but a look and a slight
Speaker 1: tilt of her head. He said she used to plant
Speaker 1: zenias along the south side of the cabin every spring,
Speaker 1: and that she could name every bird that came to
Speaker 1: the feeder by its song alone. She'd be standing at
Speaker 1: the kitchen sink and she'd say, there's the indigo bunting again.
Speaker 1: And I'd go to the window, and sure enough, he
Speaker 1: smiled when he said that, but the smile didn't reach
Speaker 1: his eyes. He told me about the well he dug
Speaker 1: by hand eighteen feet down, hit water so cold it
Speaker 1: made your teethache. About the creek that ran along the
Speaker 1: western boundary, which he called Bishop Creek, though he didn't
Speaker 1: know if that was its official name or just what
Speaker 1: people had always called it. About the spring up on
Speaker 1: the hill that hadn't gone dry in fifty years, even
Speaker 1: during the drought of two thousand and seven, when half
Speaker 1: the wells in the county came up empty. He showed
Speaker 1: me the workshop, which was better equipped than most professional
Speaker 1: shops I'd worked out of table, saw bandsaw drill press,
Speaker 1: a wall of hand tools hanging from peg board. In
Speaker 1: perfect order, everything clean, everything maintained, he said. Reba used
Speaker 1: to call it his other house because he spent so
Speaker 1: much time there during the winter months, turning bowls and
Speaker 1: making furniture they didn't need. We walked the property line together,
Speaker 1: or at least the accessible parts of it. Earl moved
Speaker 1: slowly but surely, pointing out landmarks and boundaries with the
Speaker 1: confidence of a man who'd walked every inch of this
Speaker 1: land a thousand times. He showed me the cemetery plot
Speaker 1: on the nose east corner, a small clearing with a
Speaker 1: wrought iron fence and four headstones shaded by a massive
Speaker 1: red oak. Reeba's stone was the newest. It was simple,
Speaker 1: her name, her dates, and the words she heard every song.
Speaker 1: Standing at that grave, I felt something shift in my
Speaker 1: understanding of what I was buying.
Speaker 2: This wasn't real estate.
Speaker 1: This was someone's entire life, forty three years of marriage,
Speaker 1: children of seasons, a partnership between two people and the
Speaker 1: land they'd built on. Buying this place meant accepting responsibility
Speaker 1: for all of that. Earl must have seen something change
Speaker 1: in my face, because he put his hand on my
Speaker 1: shoulder the first time he touched me and said, don't
Speaker 1: worry about keeping it the same, just keep it honest.
Speaker 1: He also told me something that I didn't think much
Speaker 1: of at the time, but that I've replayed in my
Speaker 1: head more times than I can count. He said, the
Speaker 1: mountains got its own rhythm. You'll hear things up here
Speaker 1: that don't match anything you know. That doesn't mean something's wrong.
Speaker 1: It just means you're not the only one out here.
Speaker 1: I thought he was talking about bears or coyotes, or
Speaker 1: maybe the elk that had been reintroduced further west. I
Speaker 1: nodded like I understood, I didn't. We agreed on a
Speaker 1: price that afternoon, seventy eight thousand for the cabin, the outbuilding,
Speaker 1: and forty seven acres. He kept a small family cemetery
Speaker 1: plot on the northeast corner, about a quarter acre where
Speaker 1: Riba was buried alongside his parents and a brother who
Speaker 1: died young. He asked if I'd let him visit it
Speaker 1: whenever he wanted. I told him, of course. We shook
Speaker 1: hands and that was that. Earle moved into a small
Speaker 1: assisted living facility in Marion about six weeks later. I
Speaker 1: helped him load his truck. He didn't take much. A recliner,
Speaker 1: a box of photographs, Reba's quilts, a shotgun that had
Speaker 1: belonged to his father. He left nearly everything else in
Speaker 1: the cabin, including the furniture, the kitchen table he'd built,
Speaker 1: the bookshelf, even some of Reba's canning jars still lined
Speaker 1: up on the pantry shelf. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
Speaker 1: Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. When he
Speaker 1: pulled away that afternoon, he stopped at the end of
Speaker 1: the dirt track, got out and looked back toward the
Speaker 1: cabin for a long time. Then he got back in
Speaker 1: his truck and drove off. I never saw him do
Speaker 1: that again. Every time he came to visit the cemetery
Speaker 1: after that. He parked, walked straight to RIBA's headstone, sat
Speaker 1: for a while, then left without looking at the cabin.
Speaker 1: Once I think saying goodbye to that place broke something
Speaker 1: in him that never healed. I moved in at the
Speaker 1: end of May twenty fourteen. It took me about two
Speaker 1: weeks to get the place livable.
Speaker 2: By my standards.
Speaker 1: The cabin was solid structurally sound, but it needed updated wiring,
Speaker 1: new plumbing, fixtures, and some patchwork on the porch decking.
Speaker 1: The roof was good, the foundation was good. Earl had
Speaker 1: built something that was meant to last, and it had.
Speaker 1: The interior was one main room with a kitchen along
Speaker 1: the back wall, a living area centered on the stone fireplace,
Speaker 1: and two bedrooms off a short hallway on the east side.
Speaker 1: The bathroom was small but functional, and there was a
Speaker 1: root cellar accessed through a trapdoor in the kitchen floor
Speaker 1: that stayed fifty five degrees year round. RIBA's canning jars
Speaker 1: were still down there, lined up on shelves. Earl had
Speaker 1: built from poplar, tomatoes, green beans, pickled okra, BlackBerry preserves.
Speaker 1: Some of the jars had dates written on the lids
Speaker 1: in her handwriting. The most recent was from twenty twelve.
Speaker 1: I left them exactly where they were. The kitchen still
Speaker 1: smelled faintly of something floral that I eventually traced to
Speaker 1: a sachet of dried lavender Riba had tucked behind the
Speaker 1: spice rack.
Speaker 2: I left that too.
Speaker 1: I replaced the wiring in stages, working room by room,
Speaker 1: pulling out the original knob and tube that Earl had
Speaker 1: installed in seventy one and running new romex through the walls.
Speaker 1: The plumbing was copper, and most of it was fine,
Speaker 1: but the kitchen faucet had a slow drip that had
Speaker 1: stained the porcelain sink with a green mineral streak. I
Speaker 1: swapped the faucet and reseated the shut off valves under
Speaker 1: the sink. The porch boards that needed replacing were on
Speaker 1: the south end, where water had been collecting due to
Speaker 1: a slight dip in the grade. I sistered new joists
Speaker 1: under the worst section, pulled the rotted decking, and laid
Speaker 1: fresh treated pine that i'd sand and stain once it cured.
Speaker 1: It felt good to work on that cabin. Every repair
Speaker 1: was a conversation with Earle. I'd pull a piece of
Speaker 1: trim and find a pencil mark behind it where he'd measured.
Speaker 1: I'd open a wall and see the way he'd framed
Speaker 1: a corner solid and over built the way old timers did,
Speaker 1: and I'd nod with respect. The man hadn't cut corners
Speaker 1: on anything. Bowie took to the property like he'd been
Speaker 1: born there. Within a few days, he had a root.
Speaker 1: He'd run every morning down to the creek, across the
Speaker 1: meadow along the tree line on the south side, then
Speaker 1: back up to the porch, where he'd collapse in a
Speaker 1: patch of sun and sleep until noon. He discovered a
Speaker 1: groundhog den near the workshop and spent entire afternoons lying
Speaker 1: in front of it, waiting with the patience of a
Speaker 1: dog who had nothing but time. He never caught the groundhog.
Speaker 1: I don't think he really wanted to. I think he
Speaker 1: just liked having something to focus on. For the first
Speaker 1: few weeks, I didn't do much besides work on the
Speaker 1: cabin during the day and sit on the porch at night.
Speaker 1: I'd crack a beer, listen to the whipper wheels start
Speaker 1: up around dusk, and watch the ridge go dark. The
Speaker 1: silence was enormous, not empty silence, full silence, the kind
Speaker 1: that has layers, crickets underneath, tree frogs on top, win
Speaker 1: through the canopy, somewhere in the middle and below all
Speaker 1: of it. A hum, not electrical, not mechanical, just the
Speaker 1: sound of a mountain breathing. I called Cliff one evening
Speaker 1: and held the phone up so he could hear it.
Speaker 1: He listened for about ten seconds and said, sounds bored.
Speaker 1: I told him that was exactly the point. I started
Speaker 1: sleeping better than I had in years, eight nine hours deep,
Speaker 1: dreamless sleep. I'd wake up before sunrise feeling like I'd
Speaker 1: been plugged into something restorative for the first time since
Speaker 1: Mom died. I wasn't lying in bed at two in
Speaker 1: the morning running through a list of regrets and what ifs.
Speaker 1: The mountain didn't leave room for that kind of noise.
Speaker 1: It filled up the empty spaces with its own rhythm,
Speaker 1: and the rhythm was slow and steady and ancient. I
Speaker 1: understood during those early weeks why Earl had stayed for
Speaker 1: forty three years, and I understood, in a way I
Speaker 1: couldn't have before living there, what it must have cost
Speaker 1: him to leave. Then, about three weeks after I moved in,
Speaker 1: the knocking started. I need to be specific about this
Speaker 1: because I know how it sounds, and I know what
Speaker 1: you're probably already thinking. But I'm asking you to stay
Speaker 1: with me here because the way this unfolded is the
Speaker 1: reason I'm writing to you in the first place. It
Speaker 1: was a Thursday evening. I remember that because I'd driven
Speaker 1: down to Hendersonville that morning to pick up a load
Speaker 1: of lumber for the porch repair, and I'd grabbed a
Speaker 1: rotisserie chicken from the grocery store on my way back.
Speaker 1: I was sitting on the porch, eating that chicken straight
Speaker 1: out of the container with my fingers, tossing scraps to Bowie,
Speaker 1: and watching the sun drop behind the ridge. Right around
Speaker 1: eight point fifteen, give or take a few minutes, I
Speaker 1: heard a sharp crack from somewhere up the ridge behind
Speaker 1: the cabin. Not a gunshot, not a limb falling. It
Speaker 1: was a single, hard, percussive strike, like someone had taken
Speaker 1: a baseball bat and slammed it against a tree trunk.
Speaker 1: I stopped chewing, Bowie's ears went up. We both sat
Speaker 1: there and listened nothing. About forty five seconds later, it
Speaker 1: happened again, same direction, same quality of sound, a heavy,
Speaker 1: deliberate impact against wood, then silence. I figured it was
Speaker 1: a hunter or maybe someone target shooting. Way back in
Speaker 1: the National Forest, sound carries funny in the mountains. A
Speaker 1: gunshot two ridges over can sound like it's in your backyard,
Speaker 1: and a tree falling fifty yards away can sound like
Speaker 1: it's a mile off. I went back to my chicken,
Speaker 1: but the next evening it happened again, same time, maybe
Speaker 1: ten minutes earlier. Two sharp strikes spaced about a minute apart,
Speaker 1: coming from somewhere on the ridge line northeast of the cabin.
Speaker 1: I was on the porch again, and this time I
Speaker 1: actually stood up and walked to the edge of the
Speaker 1: deck to listen. The strikes were clean, focused. There was
Speaker 1: no echo of a gunshot, no crack and roll that
Speaker 1: you get from a rifle. This was impact wood against wood,
Speaker 1: hard and flat and done. I told myself it was
Speaker 1: someone splitting firewood that made the most sense. Maybe there
Speaker 1: was a hunting camp back up in the national forest
Speaker 1: that I couldn't see from the property. People split wood
Speaker 1: in the evening all the time. My dad used to
Speaker 1: do it at dusk because the air was cooler and
Speaker 1: the bugs weren't as bad. But something about the rhythm
Speaker 1: nagged at me. It wasn't the uneven, labored pace of
Speaker 1: someone working through a pile of rounds. It was measured
Speaker 1: almost metronomic two strikes, then nothing like punctuation at the
Speaker 1: end of a sentence. The third evening, I decided to
Speaker 1: pay closer attention. I brought a notepad out to the porch,
Speaker 1: which I realized sounds ridiculous, but I'd started to get
Speaker 1: curious the way a person gets curious about a dripping faucet.
Speaker 1: Not scared, just mildly annoyed and wanting to identify the
Speaker 1: source so I could stop thinking about it. At eight
Speaker 1: oh seven, the first strike came. I wrote down the time.
Speaker 1: The second strike came about fifty seconds later. I wrote
Speaker 1: that down too. Then I waited five minutes, ten nothing.
Speaker 1: But at eight twenty three something different happened. A third strike,
Speaker 1: but from further away, deeper into the forest, different pitch.
Speaker 1: The first two had been sharp and dry, like the
Speaker 1: wood being hit with solid hardwood, old growth dense. This
Speaker 1: third one was lower, almost hollow, like a dead snag
Speaker 1: or a rotten stump. I stared at my notepad like
Speaker 1: it was going to explain itself. Bowie had moved from
Speaker 1: his spot near my chair to the top of the
Speaker 1: porch steps. He was facing the tree line behind the cabin,
Speaker 1: ears forward, body, tense, but not aggressive. He wasn't growling,
Speaker 1: he wasn't barking. He was just locked in on something
Speaker 1: I couldn't see. I called his name.
Speaker 2: He didn't look at me. That was unusual.
Speaker 1: Bowie was responsive to a fault you said his name.
Speaker 1: He turned every time, but that evening he stayed fixed
Speaker 1: on the trees for a solid three or four minutes
Speaker 1: before he finally shook himself and came back to my side.
Speaker 1: I scratched his ears and told him it was probably
Speaker 1: a woodpecker. He looked up at me with an expression
Speaker 1: that I swear to you communicated something close to disagreement.
Speaker 1: Over the next week, the knocking continued every evening without exception,
Speaker 1: always between eight and eight thirty, always from the ridgeline
Speaker 1: northeast of the cabin, Always two or three strikes, spaced
Speaker 1: with that same deliberate interval. I'd started timing them with
Speaker 1: the stopwatch on my phone. The gap between the first
Speaker 1: and second strike was remarkably consistent, forty five to fifty
Speaker 1: five seconds every time. I mentioned it to my buddy
Speaker 1: Cliff when he called to check in on me. Cliff
Speaker 1: and I had been friends since high school. He ran
Speaker 1: an HVAC business, out of Gastonia and thought I was
Speaker 1: half crazy for moving to the mountain in the first place.
Speaker 1: When I told him about the knocking, he said it
Speaker 1: was probably a rough grouse drumming.
Speaker 2: I looked it up.
Speaker 1: Grouse drumming sounds nothing like what I was hearing. A
Speaker 1: grouse drums and a rapid accelerating series that sounds like
Speaker 1: a small engine trying to turn over. What I was
Speaker 1: hearing was isolated singular impacts, heavy ones. Cliff told me
Speaker 1: to set up a trail camera and stop overthinking it.
Speaker 1: I told him i'd think about it. What I actually
Speaker 1: did was start walking toward the sound. I want to
Speaker 1: explain what was going through my head at this point,
Speaker 1: because I think it matters for understanding the rest of
Speaker 1: the story. I wasn't afraid. I was genuinely not afraid.
Speaker 1: In my mind, there was a perfectly rational explanation for
Speaker 1: the knocking, and all I needed to do was get
Speaker 1: close enough to identify it. That's how my brain works.
Speaker 1: I'm a contractor. I solve problems by getting my hands
Speaker 1: on them. If a floor squeaks, I don't theorize about
Speaker 1: it from the next room. I pull up the subfloor
Speaker 1: and look that same instinct applied here. The knocking was
Speaker 1: a mystery, and the solution was closer inspection. Looking back,
Speaker 1: I realized that attitude was both the best and worst
Speaker 1: thing about me during that first summer. It kept me
Speaker 1: from panicking, which was useful, but it also walked me
Speaker 1: straight into situations I wasn't prepared for, which was considerably
Speaker 1: less useful. The first time I tried walking toward it
Speaker 1: was on a Saturday e evening in late June. I
Speaker 1: left Bowie on the porch, which he was not happy about.
Speaker 1: He stood at the top of the steps and barked
Speaker 1: twice sharp and pointed, like he was trying to tell
Speaker 1: me something specific. I told him to stay and headed
Speaker 1: up the slope behind the cabin into the hardwoods. The
Speaker 1: property line ran along the top of the first ridge,
Speaker 1: maybe three hundred yards from the back of the cabin,
Speaker 1: and from there it was national forest as far as
Speaker 1: you could walk, thousands and thousands of acres of unbroken
Speaker 1: mountain wilderness stretching into Pisga and beyond. I'd looked at
Speaker 1: the topo maps. There were no houses, no camps, no
Speaker 1: developed trails within several miles of that ridge line, just forest.
Speaker 1: And rock and water and whatever lived in it. I'd
Speaker 1: brought a flashlight, even though it was still light enough
Speaker 1: to see. The canopy was thick, mostly oak and hickory,
Speaker 1: with some beech and tulip poplar mixed in. And once
Speaker 1: you got about one hundred yards in, the shadows closed
Speaker 1: up fast. The ground was steep, covered in leaf litter,
Speaker 1: and the further I went, the quieter everything got. Not
Speaker 1: the kind of quiet that feels peaceful, the kind that
Speaker 1: feels like something pressed pause. I noticed it in stages.
Speaker 1: First the bird noise dropped off, then the insects. By
Speaker 1: the time I was two hundred yards up the slope,
Speaker 1: the only sound was my own breathing and the crunch
Speaker 1: of my boots on dry leaves. I've spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time in the woods, and I can tell you
Speaker 1: that kind of silence isn't normal. During a summer evening.
Speaker 1: The forest should have been alive, with noise, tree frogs,
Speaker 1: Katie did cicadas the last of the evening bird song. Instead,
Speaker 1: there was nothing, like someone had turned the volume knob
Speaker 1: all the way down. I made it to the property line,
Speaker 1: which I'd marked with orange flagging tape the week I
Speaker 1: moved in. I stood there and waited. At eight eleven,
Speaker 1: the first strike came. It was loud, much louder than
Speaker 1: it sounded from the porch, and it was close. I'd
Speaker 1: guess it was no more than two hundred yards from
Speaker 1: where I stood, somewhere past the property line, up the
Speaker 1: slope and slightly to the north. The sound was startling
Speaker 1: in a way I hadn't expected from the porch. It
Speaker 1: was a curiosity up here, it was a declaration. The
Speaker 1: second strike came at eight twelve, same distance, same direction,
Speaker 1: But this time, after the sound faded, I heard something else,
Speaker 1: a rustling, not wind, not a squirrel scrambling through leaves,
Speaker 1: something heavier, something moving through the underbrush with a weight
Speaker 1: and cadence that didn't belong to anything small. I stood
Speaker 1: completely still. My heart beat was suddenly very present in
Speaker 1: my ears. Then a third strike, But this one wasn't
Speaker 1: from up the slope. This one came from behind me,
Speaker 1: down the ridge between me and the cabin. I turned
Speaker 1: around so fast I nearly lost.
Speaker 2: My footing on the leaves.
Speaker 1: The flashlight beam swung through the trees and caught nothing
Speaker 1: but bark and shadow. But I could feel it. Something
Speaker 1: had changed in the air around me. The temperature hadn't dropped,
Speaker 1: the wind hadn't shifted, but the space between the trees
Speaker 1: felt different. Occupied. I'm not a guy who spooks easily.
Speaker 1: I spent my whole life in the woods. I've run
Speaker 1: into black bears, copperheads, feral dogs, and one very angry
Speaker 1: wild boar that chased me up a pine tree outside Morganton.
Speaker 1: None of those experiences produced the feeling I had standing
Speaker 1: on that ridge, because with all of those animals, I
Speaker 1: understood what I was dealing with. I knew their behavior,
Speaker 1: I knew their limitations, I knew what they wanted. Standing
Speaker 1: on that ridge, I didn't know any of those things,
Speaker 1: and the not knowing was worse than anything an animal
Speaker 1: had ever made me feel. I walked back to the
Speaker 1: cabin at a pace that was faster than I'd like
Speaker 1: to admit. I didn't run, but I moved with purpose.
Speaker 1: Every few steps, I'd stop and listen behind me. Nothing
Speaker 1: no footsteps, no branch snaps, no knocking. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: Just that heavy, loaded silence that felt less like the
Speaker 1: absence of sound and more like the presence of attention.
Speaker 1: When I broke through the tree line and hit the
Speaker 1: open meadow, I actually felt my shoulders drop. The relief
Speaker 1: of open ground, of being able to see the sky
Speaker 1: in the cabin, and the whole spread of the clearing
Speaker 1: was physical. I hadn't realized how tense I'd been until
Speaker 1: the tension left. Bowie was standing at the top of
Speaker 1: the porch steps, staring past me into the trees, and
Speaker 1: every hair on his back was standing straight up. His
Speaker 1: ears were pinned forward, and his body was rigid. Tail
Speaker 1: low weight shifted onto his back legs. I'd seen him
Speaker 1: do that once before, when a feral dog had come
Speaker 1: through the neighborhood at our old place in Gastonia. It's
Speaker 1: the posture of a dog who's identified a threat in
Speaker 1: his calculating distance. I climbed the steps and sat down
Speaker 1: in my chair. My hands were cold, despite the warm
Speaker 1: even I cracked a beer and held it without drinking,
Speaker 1: staring at the tree line until full dark settled over
Speaker 1: the meadow like a curtain being drawn. Bowie came over
Speaker 1: and put his head in my lap, which he only
Speaker 1: ever did when he sensed I was upset. He pressed
Speaker 1: his weight into my legs and let out a long,
Speaker 1: slow exhale that sounded almost human. I sat there for
Speaker 1: over an hour, turning the experience over and over in
Speaker 1: my mind. The knocking from behind me, the movement in
Speaker 1: the underbrush, the silence of the forest, the feeling of
Speaker 1: being in a space that was already occupied by something
Speaker 1: I couldn't see. None of those things individually were unexplainable,
Speaker 1: but together, stacked on top of each other, they formed
Speaker 1: a picture I didn't have a frame for. I told
Speaker 1: myself I'd walked into the middle of two woodpeckers having
Speaker 1: a territorial dispute, or maybe a couple of bucks rubbing
Speaker 1: antlers on trees, or squirrels dropping hickory nuts. I had
Speaker 1: about twenty explanations lined up, and every single one of
Speaker 1: them fell like a lie. I was telling myself because
Speaker 1: the truth was too uncomfortable to sit with. That night,
Speaker 1: I didn't sleep well. For the first time since moving in.
Speaker 1: I lay in bed with the windows open, listening to
Speaker 1: every sound the mountain made, and flinching at things I
Speaker 1: would have slept through a week earlier. An acorn hitting
Speaker 1: the roof, a branch tapping against the gutter, the creek
Speaker 1: changing pitch when a log shifted, all of it was normal.
Speaker 1: None of it felt normal anymore. Over the next two weeks,
Speaker 1: I fell into a pattern that I recognize now as
Speaker 1: the early stage of obsession. Every evening I'd be on
Speaker 1: the porch by seven point thirty, notepad phone with the
Speaker 1: Stopwatch app open, a beer I'd barely touch because I
Speaker 1: was too focused on listening. I logged every strike, the time,
Speaker 1: the apparent distance, the direction, the pitch, the interval between impacts.
Speaker 2: Here's what the data showed me.
Speaker 1: And I say data loosely because I was a carpenter
Speaker 1: with a notepad, not a scientist with instruments. The knocking
Speaker 1: occurred every evening between June fourteenth and July twenty second,
Speaker 1: without a single gap, not one rain or shine, warm
Speaker 1: or cool, windy or still, the knocking came. The start
Speaker 1: time drifted slightly later as the days got longer, which
Speaker 1: seemed connected to sunset rather than clock time. When I
Speaker 1: cross referenced my log with the sunset times for our
Speaker 1: ZIP code, the first strike consistently fell within a twenty
Speaker 1: minute window after official sunset. The number of strikes varied
Speaker 1: between two and five per evening. The source location appeared
Speaker 1: to shift, sometimes north, sometimes more to the east, but
Speaker 1: always from the ridgeline or just beyond it. I also
Speaker 1: started noticing something about the nights with more strikes. On
Speaker 1: evenings when I heard four or five impacts instead of
Speaker 1: the usual two or three, Bowie's behavior was more pronounced.
Speaker 1: His hackles would go up. Earlier he'd moved to the
Speaker 1: hallway sooner he'd refused to go outside for his last
Speaker 1: bath throom trip of the night, which meant I'd find
Speaker 1: a puddle by the back door in the morning, something
Speaker 1: that hadn't happened since he was a puppy. Whatever was
Speaker 1: happening on those heavier nights, Bowie was reading something I
Speaker 1: wasn't intensity, maybe proximity, some quality of the situation that
Speaker 1: his senses could detect and mine couldn't. And twice during
Speaker 1: that period the knocking was answered. The first time was
Speaker 1: July third. The initial two strikes came from the usual
Speaker 1: spot on the ridge. Then about twenty seconds after the
Speaker 1: second strike, a single heavy crack came from the southwest
Speaker 1: across the meadow down toward the creek. It was fainter
Speaker 1: further away, but unmistakably the same type of sound impact
Speaker 1: on wood deliberate. The second time was July tenth, same pattern,
Speaker 1: strikes from the ridge, then an answer from a different direction,
Speaker 1: this time due west, further down the hollow. That's when
Speaker 1: the word communication first entered my th. Thinking I didn't
Speaker 1: want it there, I pushed it out. I replaced it
Speaker 1: with coincidence and echo and separate woodpeckers and every other
Speaker 1: mundane explanation I could find. But the word kept coming
Speaker 1: back because the timing was too perfect, the rhythm was
Speaker 1: too consistent, and the answering strikes always came from a
Speaker 1: different location, which isn't how echoes work, and echo returns
Speaker 1: from the same direction as the original sound bounced off
Speaker 1: a surface. These responses came from new positions southwest due west,
Speaker 1: as if something down in the lower part of the
Speaker 1: hollow had heard the ridge knocks and replied. I spent
Speaker 1: an evening at the Hendersonville Library using their Internet to
Speaker 1: research the phenomenon. I felt ridiculous sitting there in my
Speaker 1: work clothes, saw dust still in my hair, typing unexplained
Speaker 1: wood knocking sounds in the forest into a search engine.
Speaker 1: But the results were overwhelming. Thousands of reports, decades of accounts,
Speaker 1: people from every state in the Appalachian Chain, and beyond
Speaker 1: describing exactly what I was hearing, the consistency of the
Speaker 1: report startled me. These weren't all coming from the same
Speaker 1: subculture or the same website. They were scattered across forms,
Speaker 1: research databases, state wildlife agency inquiries, and personal blogs written
Speaker 1: by people who sounded exactly like me, confused, skeptical, and
Speaker 1: increasingly unable to pretend that what they were experiencing had
Speaker 1: a simple explanation. Around the middle of July, I started
Speaker 1: noticing changes in Bowie's behavior. He'd always been a relaxed,
Speaker 1: confident dog, not anxious, not neurotic. He chased squirrels, swim
Speaker 1: in the creek, and sprawl on the porch like he
Speaker 1: owned the mountain. But over the course of a few
Speaker 1: weeks he developed habits he'd never had before. He stopped
Speaker 1: going past the tree line on the north side of
Speaker 1: the property. His morning route, which used to include a
Speaker 1: loop through the first stand of oaks past the meadow,
Speaker 1: now stopped at the edge of the grass. He'd stand there,
Speaker 1: nose working, ears rotating, and then turn around and come back.
Speaker 1: No hesitation, no whimpering, just a calm, deliberate decision not
Speaker 1: to go further. He also started sleeping in a different spot.
Speaker 1: He'd always slept on a folded blanket near the front door.
Speaker 1: Starting around July fifteenth, he moved to the hallway between
Speaker 1: my bedroom and the back door, right in the middle,
Speaker 1: like a sentry. And then there was the thing with
Speaker 1: the hackles. Every evening, right around the time the knocking started,
Speaker 1: Bowie's hackles would rise, not in response to the sound itself,
Speaker 1: before it, two sometimes three minutes before the first strike.
Speaker 1: His back would ripple and he'd orient toward the ridge.
Speaker 1: He was reacting to something I couldn't perceive yet, something
Speaker 1: that preceded the sound. I called my buddy Cliff again.
Speaker 1: This time I gave him the whole rundown, the timing,
Speaker 1: the consistency, the answering strikes, Bowie's behavior. Cliff was quiet
Speaker 1: for a long time. Then he said, you think it's
Speaker 1: a sasquatch.
Speaker 2: I told him no.
Speaker 1: I told him I thought it was weird and I
Speaker 1: couldn't explain it. And that was all he said. Dude,
Speaker 1: you moved to the middle of nowhere, You're living alone
Speaker 1: with a dog, and you're keeping a log of mystery
Speaker 1: knocking sounds you think it's a Sasquatch.
Speaker 2: I told him to shut up.
Speaker 1: But after I hung up, I sat in the quiet
Speaker 1: of the cabin and admitted to myself that the thought
Speaker 1: had crossed my mind, not as a serious hypothesis, more
Speaker 1: like a shadow at the edge of my peripheral vision
Speaker 1: that I kept pretending wasn't there. I want to be
Speaker 1: clear about something. I didn't grow up believing in Bigfoot.
Speaker 1: I didn't watch Finding Bigfoot or follow any of the
Speaker 1: online communities. My exposure to the subject was limited to
Speaker 1: the Patterson Gimlin film, which I'd seen as a kid,
Speaker 1: and a few tabloid headlines in grocery store checkout lines.
Speaker 1: I was, for all practical purposes, a blank slate on
Speaker 1: the topic. I didn't have an agenda. I didn't have
Speaker 1: a theory. I had a set of observations that didn't
Speaker 1: fit any conventional explanation, and I was increasingly uncomfortable with that.
Speaker 1: What I did next is probably the thing that changed everything,
Speaker 1: and looking back, I wish i'd just let it alone.
Speaker 1: On July twenty fifth, a Friday evening, I decided to
Speaker 1: test the knocking. I'd been reading a little bit online
Speaker 1: by that point enough to know that wood knocking is
Speaker 1: one of the most commonly reported sounds associated with Sasquatch sightings,
Speaker 1: enough to know that researchers sometimes knock back and receive responses,
Speaker 1: enough to feel stupid and curious in equal measure. I
Speaker 1: want to be honest about where my head was. I
Speaker 1: still didn't believe I was dealing with the sasquatch. What
Speaker 1: I believed was that something was making those sounds, and
Speaker 1: that the most efficient way to learn what it was
Speaker 1: would be to interact with it. If it was a person,
Speaker 1: they'd respond like a person. If it was a natural phenomenon,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't respond at all. If it was something else, well,
Speaker 1: I'd cross that bridge when I got to it. I
Speaker 1: waited until eight o'clock. The sun was sitting just above
Speaker 1: the ridge, throwing long gold light across the meadow. The
Speaker 1: air smelled like warm grass and the faintest trace of
Speaker 1: honeysuckle from a thicket along the creek. It was a
Speaker 1: beautiful evening, the kind of evening where bad things aren't
Speaker 1: supposed to happen. I picked up a piece of oak
Speaker 1: firewood from the pile beside the porch, walked about thirty
Speaker 1: yards into the meadow behind the cabin and struck it
Speaker 1: against a hickory tree hard two times. The impact jolted
Speaker 1: up through my wrist and forearm, and the sound was
Speaker 1: sharper and louder than I'd expected. It rang out across
Speaker 1: the meadow and echoed off the ridge in a way
Speaker 1: that made me suddenly self conscious, like I'd yelled something
Speaker 1: obscene in a library. Then I stood there and waited.
Speaker 1: Nothing happened for about two minutes. The mountain was quiet.
Speaker 1: A crow called from somewhere down the hollow, and then
Speaker 1: went silent. Bowie was on the porch watching me with
Speaker 1: an expression that clearly communicated he thought I'd lost my mind.
Speaker 1: His head was cocked to one side, ears up, and
Speaker 1: if dogs could raise an eyebrow, he was doing it.
Speaker 1: Then at eight oh four, a single strike came from
Speaker 1: the ridge, same spot as always, same sharp, heavy quality,
Speaker 1: But this time there was no second strike, just one,
Speaker 1: and it came within a window of time that felt,
Speaker 1: for lack of a better word, responsive. My hands were shaking,
Speaker 1: not from fear from adrenaline, from the sudden, disorienting sensation
Speaker 1: that something up on that ridge had heard what I
Speaker 1: did and answered my mind raced through the explanations coincidence, echo,
Speaker 1: bouncing in some unusual way, another person who happened to
Speaker 1: be up there at the same time. But none of
Speaker 1: those explanations accounted for the timing. None of them accounted
Speaker 1: for the fact that the knocking had occurred at the
Speaker 1: same time every evening for weeks, and now, on the
Speaker 1: one evening I'd initiated contact, the pattern had changed. I
Speaker 1: knocked twice more. My heart was going so hard I
Speaker 1: could feel my pulse in my throat this time, the
Speaker 1: response came faster, within about forty seconds, two strikes matching mine,
Speaker 1: same count, same rhythm, but the pitch was different from
Speaker 1: what I'd produced. Whatever was striking up there was hitting
Speaker 1: something much larger than the hickory I was using. The
Speaker 1: sound was deeper, more resonant, and it carried a weight
Speaker 1: that suggested not just a bigger striking surface, but a
Speaker 1: stronger force behind it. I stood in that meadow for
Speaker 1: thirty seconds without moving. The implications of what had just
Speaker 1: happened were rolling over me in waves. If this was
Speaker 1: a coincidence, it was an astonishing one. If it wasn't
Speaker 1: a coincidence, then something up on that ridge was listening
Speaker 1: to me, processing what I did, and deliberately matching my pattern.
Speaker 1: I knocked three times. I hit the hickory so hard
Speaker 1: that a piece of bark broke off and fell at
Speaker 1: my feet. The response was three strikes, measured confident, and
Speaker 1: this time, after the third strike faded, I heard something else,
Speaker 1: a cracking of underbrush, distant but discernible, that lasted about
Speaker 1: three seconds and then stopped movement. Whatever had been striking
Speaker 1: was moving, or something near it was. I wish I
Speaker 1: could tell you I handled this moment with composure and
Speaker 1: scientific detachment.
Speaker 2: I didn't.
Speaker 1: I walked back to the porch on legs that felt
Speaker 1: like they belonged to someone else, sat down in my
Speaker 1: chair and stared at the tree line until full dark.
Speaker 1: Bowie came over and put his head in my lap.
Speaker 1: I wasn't upset exactly. I was recalibrating the world I understood,
Speaker 1: the one with clear categories and rational explanations had just
Speaker 1: developed a crack. I didn't knock again that night, but
Speaker 1: the evening strikes continued, three of them, spaced at the
Speaker 1: usual intervals from the usual spot, as if to say,
Speaker 1: we're still here, whether you knock or not. After the
Speaker 1: call and response experiment. I became a different kind of observer,
Speaker 1: less passive, more deliberate. I bought a decent pair of binoculars.
Speaker 1: I started taking walks along the property line during daylight hours,
Speaker 1: looking for anything out of place. I examined trees for markings.
Speaker 1: I scanned game trails for unusual impressions. I spent an
Speaker 1: entire afternoon on my hands and knees along the creek
Speaker 1: bank searching for tracks. I didn't find anything conclusive during
Speaker 1: those first few searches. A couple of broken branches at
Speaker 1: odd Heights, a spot where the bark on a beech
Speaker 1: tree had been rubbed raw, and a pattern I couldn't
Speaker 1: attribute to.
Speaker 2: Deer or bear.
Speaker 1: But nothing I could point to and say there that's evidence.
Speaker 1: The breakthrough, if you want to call it. That came
Speaker 1: on August second. It had rained heavily the night before,
Speaker 1: one of those mountain storms that comes in sideways and
Speaker 1: turns every slope into a stream. The morning after was
Speaker 1: cool and clear and the ground was saturated. Everything was
Speaker 1: oft impressionable. Stay tuned for more Backwoods big Foot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. I took Bowie up
Speaker 1: the slope behind the cabin to check on the flagging
Speaker 1: tape along the property line. A couple of the markers
Speaker 1: had been torn off by the wind, and I wanted
Speaker 1: to retie them before I lost track of the boundary.
Speaker 1: We were about two hundred yards up the hill, working
Speaker 1: our way along a game trail that paralleled the ridge
Speaker 1: when Bowie stopped dead. He didn't bark, he didn't growl.
Speaker 1: He locked up all four legs, planted head, low, eyes
Speaker 1: fixed on something off to our left, about thirty yards downslope,
Speaker 1: near a cluster of rhododendron. I followed his gaze and
Speaker 1: didn't see anything at first, just wet leaves, dripping branches,
Speaker 1: and the gray green tangle of rhododendron. Then I looked
Speaker 1: at the ground. There was a track. I need to
Speaker 1: describe this carefully because I know how easy it is
Speaker 1: to dismiss a print as a bear track, or a
Speaker 1: boot impression or a trick of the mud. I've thought
Speaker 1: about this particular print more than any other single detail
Speaker 1: of the past decade, and I want you to hear
Speaker 1: exactly what I saw. It was pressed into a stretch
Speaker 1: of reddish clay alongside the game trail, in a spot
Speaker 1: where runoff from the storm had swept the leaf litter
Speaker 1: clean and left the surface smooth and exposed. The impression
Speaker 1: was deep, at least two inches, which told me whatever
Speaker 1: made it carried serious weight. We're not talking about a
Speaker 1: deer or a dog or even a bear. Something this
Speaker 1: deep in clay that still had some firmness to it
Speaker 1: despite the rain, suggested several hundred pounds at minimum.
Speaker 2: The shape was.
Speaker 1: Oblong, not round like a bear's rear pad, not tapered
Speaker 1: like a boot. It had a clear heel, slightly rounded,
Speaker 1: with a defined arch that rose noticeably between the heel
Speaker 1: and the ball. Five distinct tow impressions were pressed into
Speaker 1: the front of the track, spaced wider apart than any
Speaker 1: human foot I've ever seen. Each toe had left its
Speaker 1: own separate divot I mashed together the way a boot
Speaker 1: would compress the ground, but individually articulated, like fingers pressing
Speaker 1: into dough. The big toe was offset slightly inward, angled
Speaker 1: away from the others, almost like a thumb that had
Speaker 1: been pushed.
Speaker 2: To the side.
Speaker 1: It was also the deepest of the five, which suggested
Speaker 1: it bore more weight during the stride. The overall length
Speaker 1: and I measured this with a tape measure I had
Speaker 1: in my pocket from retying. The flagging was seventeen and
Speaker 1: a quarter inches. The width of the ball was just
Speaker 1: over seven inches. The depth at the deepest point under
Speaker 1: the ball was two and three eighths inches. I'm a
Speaker 1: size eleven. I set my boot down beside it, not
Speaker 1: in it, but next to it, carefully, like I was
Speaker 1: placing evidence at a crime scene. My boot looked like
Speaker 1: a child's shoe, not just shorter, narrower. The track beside
Speaker 1: mine belonged to a foot that was built on an
Speaker 1: entirely different scale. I crouched there for several minutes just
Speaker 1: looking had captured details I wouldn't have expected. Faint ridge
Speaker 1: patterns in the heel area, a slight crease across the
Speaker 1: arch that might have been a fold in the skin
Speaker 1: of the soul, and at the front edge of the
Speaker 1: big toe impression, a tiny gouge like a toe nail
Speaker 1: had scraped the ground at the end of the step.
Speaker 1: This wasn't a hoax. I know people fake tracks. I've
Speaker 1: seen the videos of guys strapping carved wooden feet to
Speaker 1: their boots and stomping through creek beds, but those fakes
Speaker 1: are uniform. They're flat bottomed. They don't show individual toe
Speaker 1: articulation or skin texture, or the kind of depth variation
Speaker 1: that comes from a living foot flexing against the ground
Speaker 1: during natural locomotion. What I was looking at had been
Speaker 1: made by something alive, something heavy, something bipedal, and something
Speaker 1: that was not human. I stood there for a long time.
Speaker 1: Bowie had moved behind me, which was something he'd never
Speaker 1: done on a walk before. He was always out front,
Speaker 1: always leading, but that morning rust against the back of
Speaker 1: my legs and stayed there. I could feel him trembling
Speaker 1: through my jeanes. I looked up the trail and there
Speaker 1: was a second impression, same size, same depth, same five
Speaker 1: toad pattern. The stride between the two tracks was roughly
Speaker 1: four and a half feet. Whatever made those prints had
Speaker 1: been walking along that game trail sometime during the night
Speaker 1: or early morning, probably while the ground was still saturated
Speaker 1: from the storm.
Speaker 2: It had come from.
Speaker 1: The direction of the ridge and was headed downslope toward
Speaker 1: the back of my property, toward my cabin. I followed
Speaker 1: the tracks as far as I could. They continued down
Speaker 1: the game trail for about sixty yards before the ground
Speaker 1: transitioned from clay to rock, and I lost them. The
Speaker 1: last visible print was pointed in the direction of the
Speaker 1: meadow behind my cabin. I hiked back to the house
Speaker 1: and sat on the back porch for an hour. I
Speaker 1: didn't know what to do with what I'd found. Calling
Speaker 1: Cliff seemed pointless. He'd either laugh or worry, and neither
Speaker 1: of those reactions would help me. Calling the police seemed
Speaker 1: even more pointless. What was I going to say, there
Speaker 1: are big footprints on my property. I could already hear
Speaker 1: the dispatcher trying not to laugh. So I did what
Speaker 1: I've done with every unsettling thing in my life.
Speaker 2: I went back to work.
Speaker 1: I spent the afternoon replacing the porch boards and tried
Speaker 1: not to think about the fact that something with a
Speaker 1: seventeen inch foot had walked past my house in the dark.
Speaker 1: But that evening I was back on the porch, same spot,
Speaker 1: same chair, and for the first time, I wasn't listening
Speaker 1: with curiosity. I was listening with respect. Whatever was making
Speaker 1: those knocking sounds wasn't a curiosity anymore. It was a neighbor,
Speaker 1: a big one one that moved through my property at night,
Speaker 1: left tracks that dwarfed mine and communicated in a pattern
Speaker 1: that suggested intelligence far beyond what I was comfortable admitting.
Speaker 1: The knocks came at eight nineteen that evening, three of them,
Speaker 1: sharp and clean and confident, and when the last one faded,
Speaker 1: I could have sworn I heard something else underneath the silence.
Speaker 1: Not a sound exactly, more like a vibration, a low,
Speaker 1: sustained pressure in my chest that came and went in
Speaker 1: a single pulse, like a bass note, too deep for
Speaker 1: my ears to register, but not too deep for my
Speaker 1: body to feel. Bowie whined, the only time he'd made
Speaker 1: any vocal response to the evening sounds, a single soft whine,
Speaker 1: and then he tucked his nose under my arm and
Speaker 1: pressed close. I didn't knock back that night. I just
Speaker 1: sat there and let the dark come down around me
Speaker 1: and tried to accept that the world was bigger and
Speaker 1: stranger than I'd been willing to believe. August moved on.
Speaker 1: The knocking continued, though the frequency shifted. Instead of every
Speaker 1: single night, it became every other night, then every third night.
Speaker 1: By the end of the month, it was down to
Speaker 1: maybe twice a week. I didn't know if this meant
Speaker 1: whatever was out there had moved on. Or if it
Speaker 1: had simply adjusted its pattern because it knew I was
Speaker 1: paying attention. The tracks I'd found had been washed away
Speaker 1: by subsequent rain within a couple of days. I hadn't
Speaker 1: photographed them, which I know is going to make some
Speaker 1: people throw their hands up in frustration. I get it,
Speaker 1: I should have taken pictures, but standing there in that moment,
Speaker 1: with Bowie pressed against my legs and my heart thudding,
Speaker 1: the idea of pulling out my phone and snapping a
Speaker 1: photo felt almost disrespectful, like I'd be violating something I
Speaker 1: know that doesn't make logical sense. But not everything about
Speaker 1: this experience was logical, and I've stopped apologizing for the
Speaker 1: parts that don't line up with what people think they'd
Speaker 1: do in the same situation. I started doing more research
Speaker 1: in the evenings, listening to podcasts. That's actually how I
Speaker 1: found your shows. I was searching for sasquatching counter stories
Speaker 1: that felt grounded and real, not sensationalized, and your stuff
Speaker 1: kept coming up. I listened to about twenty episodes in
Speaker 1: a row over the course of a week, sitting at
Speaker 1: the kitchen table with my laptop and a pot of coffee,
Speaker 1: and for the first time I heard other people describing
Speaker 1: experiences that mirrored mine. The knocking patterns, the animal behavior changes,
Speaker 1: the feeling of being observed by something that stayed just
Speaker 1: outside of visual range, the gradual escalation from sounds to
Speaker 1: tracks to visual contact. I wasn't alone in this. Other
Speaker 1: people had walked this same path, from skepticism to uncertainty
Speaker 1: to reluctant belief, and hearing them talk about it, Hearing
Speaker 1: the hesitation in their voices and the careful way they
Speaker 1: chose their words, made me feel less like I was
Speaker 1: losing my grip and more like I'd stumbled into a
Speaker 1: reality that a lot of people already knew about but
Speaker 1: didn't discuss in polite company. What struck me most.
Speaker 2: Was your approach.
Speaker 1: You didn't mock the witnesses, You didn't push them toward conclusions.
Speaker 1: You let them tell their stories at their own pace,
Speaker 1: and you treated the details with the kind of seriousness
Speaker 1: that my experience deserved. That's why I'm writing to you now,
Speaker 1: and not to some research with a PhD and a
Speaker 1: theory to protect. September came and the mountains started to change.
Speaker 1: The hardwoods along the ridge began their slow turn from
Speaker 1: green to gold, and the evenings got shorter, the air
Speaker 1: had a bite to it by sundown, and the whipper
Speaker 1: wheels that had been my nightly soundtrack since May went
Speaker 1: quiet one by one. The knocking had tapered off to
Speaker 1: about once a week by this point, but it hadn't
Speaker 1: stopped entirely, and when it came it was different, heavier,
Speaker 1: more resonant, as if whatever was producing the sound had
Speaker 1: moved closer to the property line or was using a
Speaker 1: larger striking surface. The strikes echoed through the hollow in
Speaker 1: a way they hadn't during the summer, partly because the
Speaker 1: air was denser and sound travels differently in cold weather,
Speaker 1: but partly because the force behind them seemed to have increased.
Speaker 1: Bowie's behavior had settled into a new normal. He still
Speaker 1: wouldn't cross the tree line on the north side, he
Speaker 1: still slept in the hallway, but the constant state of
Speaker 1: alertness from July had eased into something more like vigilance.
Speaker 1: He wasn't scared. He was watchful, like a dog who's
Speaker 1: accepted that there's something out there but has decided it's
Speaker 1: not an immediate threat. I respected his judgment. Dogs read
Speaker 1: the world in ways we can't, and Bowie had never
Speaker 1: steered me wrong. On the night of September twenty seventh,
Speaker 1: I had the encounter that turned everything from abstract to concrete.
Speaker 1: I'd been doing some evening work in Earl's old workshop,
Speaker 1: rewiring a light fixture and organizing tools. It was about
Speaker 1: nine point fifteen, full dark, and I was heading back
Speaker 1: to the cabin with a flashlight in one hand and
Speaker 1: a coffee mug in the other. The night was clear,
Speaker 1: no moon yet, but the stars were heavy overhead, and
Speaker 1: the Milky Way stretched across the sky in a way
Speaker 1: you only see when you're truly away from light pollution.
Speaker 1: I was about halfway between the workshop and the cabin,
Speaker 1: maybe forty yards from the back porch, when Bowie started
Speaker 1: barking from inside the house. Not his normal bark, his
Speaker 1: alarm bark, the one he saved for strangers at the door,
Speaker 1: or the one time a black bear had gotten into
Speaker 1: the trash rapid deep urgent.
Speaker 2: I stopped walking.
Speaker 1: I swung the flashlight toward the tree line, which was
Speaker 1: about seventy yards to my north, and I saw it.
Speaker 1: It was standing between two white oaks at the very
Speaker 1: edge of the meadow, right where the grass gave way
Speaker 1: to forest. At first, my brain tried to make it
Speaker 1: into a tree, a stump, a shadow, anything that fit
Speaker 1: inside the world I was familiar with. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: any of those things. It was a figure upright, broad
Speaker 1: and massive. I know those white oaks. I'd walked past
Speaker 1: them one hundred times. The trunks are about fourteen inches
Speaker 1: in diameter, and they stand roughly eight feet apart. Whatever
Speaker 1: was between them filled most of that gap, and it
Speaker 1: was tall. The flashlight beam caught it from roughly the
Speaker 1: chest down because the upper portion extended above where I
Speaker 1: was aiming. When I tilted the beam upward, the light
Speaker 1: lost definition against the canopy shadow, and I couldn't make
Speaker 1: out the top of the figure against the dark leaves
Speaker 1: behind it. But based on the proportions I could see,
Speaker 1: and based on the height of the lower branches on
Speaker 1: those oaks, which I later measured at about nine feet,
Speaker 1: this thing was somewhere between seven and eight feet tall.
Speaker 1: What I could see was a torso that was wider
Speaker 1: than any person I've ever encountered. And I'm not talking
Speaker 1: about an overweight person. I'm talking about structural with the
Speaker 1: kind of breadth that comes from a chest cavity. And
Speaker 1: shoulder girdle that were built on a scale i'd never seen.
Speaker 1: The proportions were wrong for a human. The shoulders, if
Speaker 1: that's what they were, started higher than where a man's
Speaker 1: shoulders would be relative to the rest of the body.
Speaker 1: There was no visible neck. The torso just continued upward
Speaker 1: and merged into the shadow where a head should have been.
Speaker 1: But I couldn't resolve it against the tree canopy behind it.
Speaker 1: What I could see was covered in hair. Fur hair.
Speaker 1: There's a difference, and I've spent a lot of time
Speaker 1: since that night thinking about it. Fur lies flat and
Speaker 1: has a uniform texture, like a dog's coat or a
Speaker 1: bear's pelt. What I was looking at had length to it,
Speaker 1: several inches at least. It hung in a way that
Speaker 1: suggested weight and movement, almost like the longer hair on
Speaker 1: a horse's flank, but coarser. Where the flashlight hit it directly,
Speaker 1: I could see individual strands catching the light. The color
Speaker 1: in the white beam of my flashlight was dark, not black,
Speaker 1: more like the brown black of old walnut bark after
Speaker 1: a rain, that deep saturated color that's almost purple in
Speaker 1: certain light. And it wasn't uniform. There were patches across
Speaker 1: the chest and what I think were the upper arms,
Speaker 1: where the hair was thinner, shorter, and I could see
Speaker 1: darker skin underneath, almost like the way a dog's coat
Speaker 1: thins out on the belly and inner legs. There was
Speaker 1: also a smell. I mentioned it yet, because it didn't
Speaker 1: fully register until after the encounter was over and I
Speaker 1: was sitting on the couch trying to piece together what
Speaker 1: had happened. But there was a smell in the air
Speaker 1: that hadn't been there when I'd left the workshop. It
Speaker 1: was sharp and organic, not like a dead animal, not
Speaker 1: like a skunk. It was closer to the smell of
Speaker 1: a wet dog, mixed with something musky and sour, like
Speaker 1: old sweat that had dried and been rewhetted. It wasn't overpowering,
Speaker 1: It was present, like a signature. The figure wasn't moving,
Speaker 1: it was just standing there facing me. I couldn't see eyes,
Speaker 1: but I could feel them. That probably sounds like something
Speaker 1: people say to make a story scarier.
Speaker 2: It's not.
Speaker 1: It's a physiological response. When something large and alive is
Speaker 1: focused on you, your body knows. It's a feeling in the
Speaker 1: back of your skull, a tightness between your shoulder blades,
Speaker 1: a primal alarm that fires before your conscious mind has
Speaker 1: time to catch up. Every hair on my arms was stained,
Speaker 1: My stomach had dropped, My breathing had gone shallow without
Speaker 1: my choosing it. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. My body was responding
Speaker 1: to a threat that my brain was still trying to categorize.
Speaker 1: I stood frozen for probably fifteen or twenty seconds. The
Speaker 1: flashlight beam wavered because my hand was shaking. My other
Speaker 1: hand was still holding the coffee mug, and I became
Speaker 1: aware of it only because the coffee was sloshing over
Speaker 1: the rim and dripping onto my boots. Inside the cabin,
Speaker 1: Bowie was losing his mind, barking, scratching at the back door,
Speaker 1: throwing himself against it. The sound of his nails on
Speaker 1: the wood was frantic, desperate, and it was the only
Speaker 1: thing besides my own heartbeat, that felt real in that moment.
Speaker 1: Then the figure moved. It didn't lunge, it didn't charge.
Speaker 1: It turned slowly, deliberately, like someone turning away from a
Speaker 1: window when they realized they'd been noticed. One shoulder rotated backward,
Speaker 1: and then the entire mass of it pivoted and stepped
Speaker 1: into the trees. The movement was fluid, unhurried. There was
Speaker 1: no stumbling, no crashing through brush, just a smooth, rolling
Speaker 1: step that covered more ground than it should have for
Speaker 1: a single stride. I heard one footfall, a single heavy
Speaker 1: compression of leaves and forest floor that sounded like a
Speaker 1: sand bag being dropped from waste height.
Speaker 2: And then it was gone.
Speaker 1: The darkness between the trees closed behind it, like water
Speaker 1: filling a space where a stone had been. The whole event,
Speaker 1: from the moment I saw it to the moment it disappeared.
Speaker 1: Lasted maybe thirty seconds, but those thirty seconds demolished ten
Speaker 1: years of casual assumptions about what does and doesn't exist
Speaker 1: in the woods of western North Carolina. I went inside.
Speaker 1: I locked both doors, which I'd never done since moving in.
Speaker 1: I closed every window. I pulled the curtains on the
Speaker 1: backside of the cabin, the ones Riba had hung that
Speaker 1: I never bothered to touch. Then I sat on the
Speaker 1: couch with Bowie pressed against me so hard I could
Speaker 1: feel his heart beat through my leg. He was trembling,
Speaker 1: so was I. The coffee mug was still in my hand.
Speaker 1: I set it on the end table and watched the
Speaker 1: remaining coffee ripple from the shaking. My mind was doing
Speaker 1: that thing it does when you've witnessed something that doesn't
Speaker 1: have a category. It was cycling through the same set
Speaker 1: of questions on repeat, like a computer stuck in a loop.
Speaker 2: What was that?
Speaker 1: And underneath the loop, a quieter voice was answering, you
Speaker 1: know what that was. You've known since the knocking started.
Speaker 2: You just didn't want to admit it. I picked up
Speaker 2: my phone.
Speaker 1: Three times to call Cliff, put it down three times.
Speaker 1: What was I going to say? Hey, I just saw
Speaker 1: something seven feet tall standing at the edge of my meadow,
Speaker 1: covered in hair, and it looked at me and then
Speaker 1: walked into the forest. Cliff would have driven up to
Speaker 1: the mountain, loaded me into his truck, and taken me
Speaker 1: to get my head exam and I wouldn't have blamed him.
Speaker 1: I didn't sleep that night. I sat in the dark
Speaker 1: living room with every light off, listening. I don't know
Speaker 1: why I turned the lights off instinct. Maybe if something
Speaker 1: was out there watching the cabin, I didn't want to
Speaker 1: be backlit against the windows. Or maybe I just wanted
Speaker 1: the darkness inside to match the darkness outside, so there
Speaker 1: wasn't a boundary between me and whatever was out there.
Speaker 1: I don't know. People don't always make rational decisions after
Speaker 1: an experience like that. Around midnight, I heard the knocking,
Speaker 1: two strikes distant from the ridge, same as always, but
Speaker 1: this time there was something after the strikes. A vocalization,
Speaker 1: not a howl, not a scream, A sound I still
Speaker 1: can't properly describe, even now, ten years later. The closest
Speaker 1: I can come is this. Imagine someone with an impossibly
Speaker 1: deep voice trying to hum and moan at the same time,
Speaker 1: sustaining the note for about four seconds, with a slight
Speaker 1: warble at the end that dropped in pitch before cutting
Speaker 1: off abruptly. It wasn't like any animal I've ever heard,
Speaker 1: and I've heard plenty. It wasn't a coyote chorus or
Speaker 1: a bobcat's screech, or a barn owl's rasp or a
Speaker 1: fox's bark. It had a tonal quality to it, a richness,
Speaker 1: like a sound that was being produced by something with
Speaker 1: a chest cavity the size of a barrel and vocal
Speaker 1: cords that could vibrate at frequencies human anatomy can't achieve
Speaker 1: it came from the direction the figure had disappeared into,
Speaker 1: maybe a quarter mile away, maybe less. Distance is hard
Speaker 1: to judge. At night, Bowie lifted his head off my
Speaker 1: lap when the sound reached us. He stared at the
Speaker 1: back wall of the cabin for about ten seconds. Then
Speaker 1: he laid his head back down, pressed his nose into
Speaker 1: my arm, and closed his eyes. I think in that
Speaker 1: moment he made his peace with whatever was out there.
Speaker 1: I envied him for that, because I was a long
Speaker 1: way from peace. That was September twenty seventh, twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: the night I stopped being a skeptic, The night the
Speaker 1: knocking stopped being an abstract puzzle and became the calling
Speaker 1: card of something real, something breathing, something that had been
Speaker 1: watching me settle into its territory for months. The remaining
Speaker 1: days of September and the early weeks of October passed
Speaker 1: in a strange haze. I kept working on the cabin,
Speaker 1: I kept running my contracting jobs down in Hendersonville. I
Speaker 1: kept feeding Bowie and sitting on the porch and living
Speaker 1: my life. But everything had a different texture now. The
Speaker 1: mountain hadn't changed I had. I was seeing the same
Speaker 1: landscape through a different lens, and I couldn't go back
Speaker 1: to the old one. I found myself studying the tree line.
Speaker 1: Every time I walked between the cabin and the workshop.
Speaker 1: I'd scan the shadows for shape and movement, looking for
Speaker 1: the outline of something upright where upright things shouldn't be.
Speaker 1: I never saw it again during those weeks, but the
Speaker 1: feeling of being observed didn't leave. It would come and go,
Speaker 1: sometimes strong, sometimes faint, but it was always somewhere in
Speaker 1: the background, like a radio station you can't quite tune
Speaker 1: in but can't quite ignore. The knocking continued intermittently through
Speaker 1: October and into November, before going quiet around Thanksgiving. I
Speaker 1: assumed the cold had driven whatever was responsible deeper into
Speaker 1: the mountains, into the vast interior of the National Forest,
Speaker 1: where the terrain gets steep and wild and humans rarely go.
Speaker 1: I didn't know yet how wrong that assumption was, but
Speaker 1: that's a story for another time. I'm going to stop
Speaker 1: here for now, because this is where the first chapter
Speaker 1: ends and the second one begins. Everything I've described so
Speaker 1: far was the introduction, the feeling out, the overture, if
Speaker 1: you want to think of it that way. What came
Speaker 1: next and what kept coming for the next nine years
Speaker 1: is the part I've never told anyone. The garden, the voice,
Speaker 1: the tracks in the snow, the night the dogs were
Speaker 1: and come back, the woman across the creek, the thing
Speaker 1: my grandfather buried. Except in my case, it's the thing
Speaker 1: Earl never told me about but should have. I'm trusting
Speaker 1: you with this because your show's made me feel like
Speaker 1: you'd actually listen, not just to the scary parts, but
Speaker 1: to all of it, the boring parts, the confusing parts,
Speaker 1: the parts that made me question everything I thought I knew.
Speaker 1: So if you're willing, I've got nine more of these
Speaker 1: to share, and they only get stranger from here. Garrett Hendersonville,
Speaker 1: North Carolina. That was part one of Garrett's story. And
Speaker 1: I don't know about you all, but when I finished
Speaker 1: reading that email for the first time, I sat back
Speaker 1: in my chair and just stared at the screen. Because
Speaker 1: everything Garrett described, the graduated approach, the knocking patterns, the
Speaker 1: animal behavior changes, the eventual visual confirmation, all of it
Speaker 1: tracks with some of the most credible long term encounter
Speaker 1: reports I've come across in nearly forty years of researching
Speaker 1: this subject. I've talked to hundreds of witnesses over the years,
Speaker 1: people from every background, every state, every walk of life.
Speaker 1: And the ones that stand out, the ones that keep
Speaker 1: me up at night, are the ones like Garrett, the
Speaker 1: ones who didn't go looking for this, the ones who
Speaker 1: bought a piece of property and started hearing things they
Speaker 1: couldn't explain and tried, really tried to find a normal
Speaker 1: answer before the evidence piled up too high to ignore.
Speaker 1: What gets me about Garrett's account isn't the sighting at
Speaker 1: the end, though that's compelling on its own. It's the
Speaker 1: patience of the thing he's describing. Whatever was on that
Speaker 1: ridge didn't announce itself, It didn't try to scare him off.
Speaker 1: It established a pattern, It let him notice it gradually,
Speaker 1: and when he knocked back, it matched him. That's not
Speaker 1: territorial aggression. That's not random animal behavior. That's something testing
Speaker 1: the waters. And the fact that it stood there at
Speaker 1: the edge of his meadow, watching him walk between the
Speaker 1: workshop and the cat and then just turned and walked away,
Speaker 1: that tells me something important. It could have stayed hidden.
Speaker 1: It chose to be seen, but it also chose not
Speaker 1: to approach.
Speaker 2: Why. What's the calculation there?
Speaker 1: We're going to find out because Garrett's second account, the
Speaker 1: one about the garden, goes to a place I wasn't expecting.
Speaker 1: And the further we go into this series, the more
Speaker 1: you're going to understand why he kept quiet for ten years.
Speaker 1: Did the game time
Speaker 2: Bo