Speaker 1: I record nature sounds for a living. I don't make
them from merging royalty free soundscapes found online. I mean literally,
I haul gear out into the wilderness, set up field recorders,
and capture eight hours of wind through trees or frogs
in a swamp, or whatever someone wants in their ear,
but at two a m. To sleep too. A few
weeks ago, I hiked out to a stretch of forest
in the Pacific Northwest. It was far from any road
or town to avoid sound pollution from passers by. There
wasn't even a foot trail, just trees, ridge lines, and
a stillness that misses with your sense of time. I'd
scouted the spot online. There was minimal wild life and
no nearby power lines to cause interference. Perfect for what
I needed. I set up the rig just before sundown,
a shotgun mic on a carbon tripod, paired with an
unintended recorder tucked into a pelican case, all wired for
battery life and max sensitivity. I set it a run
overnight and hiked back out with my overnight pack. The
next morning, I picked up the gear, packed everything up,
and drove back to the cabin i'd rented for the week.
Standard routine. When I dumped the files onto my laptop,
it sounded clean, real clean. You could hear a soft
wind tugging through the pines, some distant wood creeks, a
lone owl. It sounded like something I'd barely have to
touch in post. No clipping, no signs of animals or interference.
It still needed scraping in case a low hum of
an aircraft ruined a segment, so I slowly scrubbed the
whole thing. But then I hit three forty one a M.
I didn't catch it the first time. I was playing
it at four time speed, but even at high speed,
something about that section jarred, so I went back played
it in real time. That's when I heard it. The
whole atmosphere buckled inward like a vacuum pop, a sharp
in hail, followed by a deep groaning creek, like wood
twisting under strain. Then nothing, All sounds stopped, The wind died,
insect ceased in unison, no underbrush rustling. I've heard forests
go quiet before when a predator moves through or a
storm's on the way, but this wasn't that. This was
dead silence, even in a perfectly quiet night. Your mike
still picks up something ambient hiss, high end drift gear noise.
But here there was nothing for exactly sixty three seconds,
like the world forgot how to make a sound. And then,
just as suddenly it came back. There was a faint
crack like a tree stretching. Then the wind returned, the
chorus of night bugs, a creaking canopy. I marked the
section in my door and cut it out of the
final mix, labeled it three forty one anomaly, and saved
it with the raw files. I figured it was a
bizarre environmental event, maybe a weird pressure drop or a
shifting fault line under the soil. At least that's what
I told myself. I couldn't stop thinking about the three
for one anomaly. The silence wasn't a recording issue. The
wave form didn't flatline, it just dropped into a void.
The environment stopped generating sound, and that inhale it hadn't
come from the mic. So two nights later I went back,
same trailhead, same clearing, but a different set up. This
time I swapped the shotgun mic for a parabolic dish
with a matted stereopair, new recorder, fresh cables, no chance
of interference or hardware glitches if the anomaly happened again,
I wanted to rule out bad gear. I set everything
up before dusk, hiked out, and repeated the routine back
at the cabin. The next morning, I scanned through the
files again. The wave form jumped out at me before
I even press play. At exactly three forty one a
m same shudder, same sucked in static, same sixty three
seconds of total silence, But this time there was more.
The creaking noise was slightly louder, like something massive and
straining was close to the mic. After that, a new noise,
just barely audible, but it was there, something grinding, like
roots twisting on a dry soil, or teeth. I checked
every logical explanation I could think of local seismic activity.
Nothing on the USGS feed whether perfectly still, not even
a pressure dip. And besides, neither of these would repeat
so perfectly like I had seen. I ran it past
an engineer I know. She thought it might brf interference
from military aircraft. Or she said, you recorder caught bigfoot
scratching his back on a cedar tree. I laughed. Then
I uploaded it. Well, I meant to upload the cleaned version,
just the gentle forest ambience with the yard sixty three
seconds cut and cross faded. But when I packaged the files,
I must have left the original by accident, the raw
take with the three forty one segment left intact. I've
got my fair share of weird listener emails over the years,
people claiming to hear voices and waterfalls. Someone once swore
a raccoon whispered Bible verses in their sleep track. Ambient
audio an overactive imaginations go hand in hand. For this
one felt different. The message came from a guy named Nolan,
who was a short email, no pleasantries or emojis, just
this subject your latest upload. Need your opinion. I use
your app to sleep with Tinatus played your new forest loop.
Last night around three point thirty. I woke up gasping,
No nightmare, just this pressure in the room, like something
leaned on my chest. I checked the audiophile to see
if anything caused this and found this screenshot attached. Let
me know if you see it too. He attached the
spectrogram's screen grab from his player. A frequency waterfall of
the three forty one segment right in the center of
the silence was a shape. It wasn't obviously human, but
it was symmetrical, made of low, barely besetable frequencies, hollow
at the center, with long vertical streaks running from top
to bottom, almost like arms or legs, but far too long.
I stared at it for a long time before I
closed the tab. Just audio paraodolia, like seeing faces in
tree bark, I told myself and moved on. But the
following emails were harder to ignore. Someone in Oregon reported
that their power cut out for exactly one minute at
three forty one am, somehow attributing it to my video,
easy to dismiss as bad timing. Another said their dog
bark to the speaker, then refused to enter the room
where the track was playing. One woman saw all four
of her houseplants were dead the next morning. They didn't
just work a bit, they were fully blackened, crispy, like
they'd been flash dried. I still didn't panic, but I
got curious. I reloaded the raw file and reaper, this
time pushing deeper noise reduction, spectral isolation, half speed playback,
then reversed. I tried every witch angle. There was more
under the distortion than I'd realized a single, deep knock
and then wet footsteps, soft spaced, far apart pineedles, crunching
under something that walks like it didn't need to. I
froze the wave form. The pattern was there, a gate,
something with weight. I pulled up Night one's raw file
at the same time stamp the same silence. I overlaid them.
The knock was identical, but on night too, the footsteps
started sooner and they were closer. I didn't go back
to the forest because I'm brave. I went back because
my name was on that file. People had started commenting,
messaging accusing. One user posted a TikTok claiming the track
gave their boyfriend seizures. Another said the sister collapse while
it played and hadn't woke up since. Some said it
was a hoax, others a curse. What even called me
a murderer. So I packed the best gear. I owned
a parabolic mic, a battery recorder, and a preamp with
real time monitoring. I brought my field laptop too, so
I could listen live, not just hope. I called something
after the fact. I also brought a flashlight, three back
of batteries, and a hunting knife I'd never actually used.
I arrived just after two a m. The clearing looked
exactly the same. The pine spirals still there, like the
trees had grown in deliberate, concentric rings. No animals, no
signs of people. I set up the tripod, calibrated the mic,
and began recording. At first, it was peaceful crickets, faint wind,
occasional owl hoots drifting from the canopy, clean audio, nothing strange,
but I kept my eye on the clock. Three forty
fifty nine seconds, three forty one gone, All of it.
Sound just ceased to exist. The ledm I record a
flickered one, then held steady. The wave form of my
laptop froze into a flat bar. I tapped the mic. Nothing,
not even a pop. The only thing I could hear
was my own breath, louder than it should have been, sharp, exposed,
like it didn't belong in this stillness. What the hell?
I muttered? The words felt intrusive, wrong, like I just
shouted during a funeral. Then crunch a twig directly behind
me close. I spun flashlight up and that's when the
noise came back. But it didn't return the same. It
surged in like a recording played through broken speakers, echoing
and unsinked. The trees creaked underlay the wind hiccuped, and
something was moving, not straight toward me, around me, circling fast.
I whipped the flashlight left and right, catching glimpses of
limbs between trunks, slender, too long, moving in bursts, blurring
between shadows. Then I saw it ahead, upside down, hanging
from high in the trees, like it was suspended by
its legs, wide black eyes like oil pool reflections, stringy
hair clinging to a crumpled gray face, skin like soaked paper, wrinkled, smiling.
Its mouth was too wide. Then her hand began to
reach slowly. The hand approached and never stopped. The limbs
stretched slowly, impossibly, the shoulder never moving from the tree,
elbow bending the wrong way, fingers lengthening by the inch.
Despite how high up the thing was. I was in shock.
I couldn't move, stunned by the abnormality of what I
was witnessing. It reached toward my neck and brushed the
leaf beside my collar bone. That was enough. I ran. Branches,
tore up my arms, roots caught my boots. Every few seconds,
I nearly trip, catch myself and push harder. I could
hear it behind me, above me, so fast that I
couldn't pinpoint where it was. It wasn't chasing on the ground.
It was moving through the trees, something heavy, thudding from
branch to branch, like a gorilla made of wood and tendon.
Every impact sent down a shudder, a sound that wasn't
just in my ears, it rang in my teeth. I
didn't scream, I couldn't. My breath was fire in my lungs,
my chest locked tight. I just ran. That was all
I could focus on. I didn't want to be led astray.
I had one goal in mind, locked on, and speed
was my only chance, because trying to outmaneuver this thing
would only push me into unknown territory. The trees started thinning.
I saw the glint of moonlight on glass my car.
I vaulted over a stump, skidd it onto the gravel,
and yanked the door open so hard it cracked the hinge.
Leaving it unlocked was my only saving grace. Knowing there
was no one around for miles. The keys were in
my coat pocket, of course they were. I scrambled, fumbled,
hand shaking, then bang. The hood buckled under the impact.
A single hand slapped down onto the windshield. Long fingers, bone,
white skin, unkempt, black nails, dragging screeching lines across the glass,
like it was trying to peel it open. Its face
leaned in, neck so long it had to twist a
few times. That peer in inverted, grinning eyes like oil,
pulled over bone. The keys hid the ignition. The engine coughed, thin, caught.
I slammed it into drive and hit the gas. Gravel
exploded behind the tires. I clipped a tree. As I
peeled out. The thing blurred past the rear view mirror,
arms trailing like ropes of wet muscle. I didn't lock
in the mirror to see if it followed. I just
drove fast, stupid fast. The trees a blur of black
and silver, the trail nothing but instinct. I didn't breathe
until I saw the welcome sign for the next town.
When I got home, I locked the door behind me,
dead bolt chain, even with a chair under the knob.
Then every window, one by one. I knew it was pointless,
but it felt like doing something like I still had control.
My laptop was still on the kitchen table. I opened
it as I walked past, booting up the file system
before I even kicked my boots off. The plan was simple,
pull the upload, scrub it from the app, maybe even
write a warning, something vague that wouldn't get me laughed
off the platform. But then I saw the notifications, dozens
of email subject lines in bold. Something was in my
hallway last night. I saw her. She watched me sleep.
It knocked until three forty two. Then it started climbing.
My hands went cold. One message had an attachment, a
blurry phone photo, the edge of a blackened head, blurred
from movement too familiar to dismiss. Sixteen floors up. I
sat there, staring at it. This was my fault, not
because I recorded it. That was a fluke, an accident.
But I'd uploaded it, I'd left it public, ignored the
early warnings. I doubted myself because the alternative was accepting
something I couldn't explain. I should have pulled it days ago.
Now I had my chance. I didn't know if delete
it would nundo anything. Maybe the damage was already done,
Maybe whatever this was had already spread. But if I
left it up, more people would hear it, more people
would see it, more people would bring it back. So
I made the call. I pulled the file from the
content manager, sent takedown requests to mirror sites, deleted the
rawer uploads from the appcue everywhere I could find it.
I wiped it. It was over. I sat back in
my chair. My phone lit up in the dark. I
reached for it with shaking hands. New notifications from listeners.
Whatever you did, thank you, it's quiet again. The notifications
kept coming in, all from people who'd messaged before, the
ones who'd said they were being followed, stalked, haunted. Relief
washed over me, feeling like, at at least Selva's something
good from this whole thing. But my night was just
getting started. I didn't sleep, I couldn't. Instead, I stayed
on the hallway floor, legs cramping back, pressed against the wall,
every light in the apartment blazing. I kept the laptop
open on my knees, the inbox still flooding with new messages.
Strangers thanking me, telling me the knocking had stopped, that
they were finally safe. But inside my own apartment, something
was beginning to stir. It started subtly, like a change
in barometric pressure, the temperature dipped, the buzzing from the
fridge stuttered. I heard a soft creak in the ceiling
above me. It was in a pipe or settling joist,
with a deliberate sound of weight shifting across all the wood.
I froze for minutes, nothing, Then a whisper of motion
against the far wall, the sound of something just brushing
the paint with the tips of his fingers. When the
tapping came, it was so faint I almost missed it. Tick,
tick tick. I turned toward the sound, and my stomach sank.
It was coming from the living room window. I stood cautiously, slowly,
just enough to catch a glimpse through the frosty glass,
just a faint impression of movement, like some one had
passed by a moment earlier. I backed away, heart hammering.
The tappings shifted, now coming from the back door, then
from the ceiling hatch. Every surface of the apartment seemed
to carry the sound, like a tuning fork, as if
something were circling inside. The walls, growing bolder by the second.
Testing the house for the weakest point of entry, the
lights dimmed, as if the apartment itself were exhaling. I
couldn't tell if it wanted to come in or if
it was already here. That question answered itself A moment later.
The lights above me dimmed again, not in a flicker,
but in a slow, deliberate pulse, like the apartment was
breathing somewhere deep in the walls. The plaster shifted with
a muffled thud, and then another, each one closer than
the last. Something large was crawling its way toward the
center of the room. I stayed perfectly still. Then the
dry wall to my left bulged outward, just slightly, a
shallow swell, like someone was pressing a hand against it
from the other side. I stared as the bulge drifted
along the wall, dragging down toward the floor. Something ran
his fingers across the baseboard, slow and lingering, tracing the
shape of the apartment. A soft hiss followed the unmistakable
sound of breathing sliding from behind paint. I packed up
until my spine hid the opposite wall. The thing in
my home shifted directions, scuttling up towards the ceiling. The
plaster bowed overhead, dust drifting down in thin gray streams.
Whatever it was, it wasn't bound to flows or gravity.
It moved like a spider through insulation and beams, pushing
against the structure, testing how thin the barriers were. The
ceiling vent rattled, then the metal grill bent outward. Long
fingers had hooked into the slats and was prying them apart.
One slat snapped, another warped. A black knuckle shaped silhouette
pressed through skin, stretched thin over something too sharp to
be bone. I scrambled across the floor, heard timmering so
hard I heard it in my ears. The vents split wider.
A hand slid out, long gray wrinkled nails like splinters
of obsidian. It curled slowly, searching the air, the way
someone might test water before stepping in. It rotated toward me,
knuckles cracking, reaching, and then it stopped, frozen mid motion,
because it was listening the same way it listened to
the silence in the woods. I covered my mouth with
both hands, shaking so hard my teeth clicked. Then a sound.
It wasn't from me or the thing, but from the table,
A sharp ping. My phone, still face up near the door,
lit up with a notification. The sound cut through the
silence like a siren. Instantly something shifted, A blur of
motion too fast, A process shot across the room. The
hand or part of it lashed out from the dark
and struck the phone with surgical precision crack. The screen
shattered inward like it had been struck with a mallet.
The phone skidded across the floor, buzzing once before dying.
I covered my mouth with both hands, paralyzed. Then another
pin from the laptop, an email. It shifted again, a
thing in the walls. I saw the hand jut out
once more, just inches from the keyboard, now fingers twitching,
hovering for this time, it didn't strike. It paused, almost curious.
The same force that crossed the phone in a single
blow now hovered in silence, tense, with restraint. There was
a recognition in the stillness, the hand flat in its
palm on the ground. I didn't dare move, scared to
even just stir the air. Once flat, the arms swept
around in wide arcs around the word room. It was
searching large motions, sometimes far away, with suddenly inches from
my heel. If it were death, I could have jumped
rolled away with good timing, but I was still frozen
to the spot, and soon it bumped into my body.
On contact, it went frantic sweeping motions over me, mapping
me until it figured out who I was, my angle
on the floor, the direction I was locking. It latched
onto my wrists tightly, but didn't crush my limb like
I expected. It pulled a taut motion that gave me
no choice but to follow. Less like a dog on
a leash and more like an escalator. I couldn't leave, unwilling,
leading me to what I was curious about before my laptop.
All the while, thoughts swam in my head, piecing together
context from this absurd situation. It hadn't come when I
uploaded the audio, not when people listened to it, not
even when they started writing to me terrified. It only
came after I took down the video, when I broke
the chain, when I tried to stop it from spreading.
That's when it noticed me. I looked over at the
laptop now glowing in front of me, and for the
first time since this all started, the idea of dying
didn't seem like the worst option. If this thing could
be stopped by ending the transmission, by letting it end
with me, maybe that was the answer. Maybe it was
worth it, but the moment passed. Survival dug its claws in.
I sat down, and the moment it felt that it
released its grip on my wrist, but horverd near my
head in a threat that was easy to read. Upload
or die. Fingers trembling, I opened the app dashboard. The
deleted video was still there, sitting quietly in the recycled bin.
I hovered over the upload button. Then I clicked it
restored all the metadata. The upload bar crawled from the
wall behind me. I heard another creak, louder, now closer.
I didn't turn around. I kept my eyes on the screen.
As the progress bar climbed thirty percent, fifty seventy two.
The air around me felt like it was pressing inward.
It was still here, It knew, it was waiting to
see if I go through with it. Ninety four percent.
A pause, then complete. The video went live, and in
an instant, everything stopped. No more tapping, no more movement,
no more pressure in the walls. The lights brightened, as
if a film had been peeled away from the bulbs.
It was gone, and for the first time in what
felt like days, sound, beautiful, living, sound. I exhaled, really
exhaled like I hadn't in days, and I hated how
relieved I felt. Life went on. People forgot, moved on,
slept again, but I didn't, not really. I still wake
up every day and open my laptop. It's automatic now,
muscle memory. I don't check emails, don't check socials. Just
the view count three eighteen, three twenty two, three thirty eight.
Every number feels heavier than the last. I don't see
them as just numbers. Each one is a person, a victim.
I still record sometimes to keep myself sane, short trips
close to the town, never at night, and I never
upload the raw audio. I listen to every second. I
triple check the wave form. I scrubbed the background for
anything that doesn't belong. And when the clock hits three
forty one a m. I make sure I'm in bed,
ear plugs in lights on, eyes shut tight, because I
know now it's not the silence that gets you, it's
what follows