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: I get a lot of emails. Some of them are short,
Speaker 1: a line or two, a name, a state, a thank
Speaker 1: you for the show. A few of them ramble, and
Speaker 1: that's fine, because rambling is sometimes how a person works
Speaker 1: their way around to the thing they actually want to say.
Speaker 1: Once in a while, though, an email comes in that
Speaker 1: I have to sit with for a couple of days
Speaker 1: before I can even answer it. The kind where you
Speaker 1: read it through and then you read it through again,
Speaker 1: and then you stand up and walk around your house
Speaker 1: for a minute, because the air in the room feels
Speaker 1: a little different than it did before you opened it.
Speaker 1: This is one of those. The man who sent it
Speaker 1: asked me to read it on the show. He said,
Speaker 1: his name is Keith. He said he's been a listener
Speaker 1: for a few years now. He said he debated for
Speaker 1: the better part of several months whether to send anything
Speaker 1: at all, and that when he finally did, he wrote
Speaker 1: it in one sitting at his kitchen table at about
Speaker 1: two in the morning, because that's when these things tend
Speaker 1: to come up out of him. He didn't ask for anonymity.
Speaker 1: He gave me his real first name. He told me
Speaker 1: where he lives in general terms, and where this happened
Speaker 1: in general terms, and he asked me not to be
Speaker 1: too specific about either, because there are still two other
Speaker 1: men in this story, and one of them isn't doing well,
Speaker 1: and Keith doesn't want any of this landing on his doorstep.
Speaker 1: I'm going to honor that. I'll tell you up front
Speaker 1: that I cannot verify what Keith experienced. I haven't stood
Speaker 1: at the mouth of the cave he describes. I haven't
Speaker 1: met him in person. I've talked with him over the
Speaker 1: phone twice for about an hour each time, and I'll
Speaker 1: say this, he doesn't sound like a man trying to
Speaker 1: sell me anything. He sounds like a man who is still,
Speaker 1: almost a year later, trying to talk himself into believing
Speaker 1: what his own eyes saw. Keith and his two friends,
Speaker 1: Josh and Caleb are experienced spalunkers. That part matters. They
Speaker 1: aren't kids who watched a video and decided to crawl
Speaker 1: into a hole on a Saturday. They've been doing this
Speaker 1: for the better part of two days decades. They know
Speaker 1: about bad air, about flash floods, about cold water sumps
Speaker 1: and rotten rope, and the slow trick of fatigue. At depth,
Speaker 1: they know what they're doing underground. What happened to them,
Speaker 1: if you take Keith at his word, was something none
Speaker 1: of their experience prepared them for. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: tell you what to make of it. That isn't my
Speaker 1: job tonight. My job tonight is to read his email
Speaker 1: the way he wrote it, with his permission, and to
Speaker 1: let you sit with it the way I've been sitting
Speaker 1: with it. So pour yourself something, turn the lights down
Speaker 1: a little. If that's how you like to listen and
Speaker 1: settle in. This is Keith's email, Brian. I want to
Speaker 1: start by saying I never thought i'd be the guy
Speaker 1: writing one of these. I've heard enough of your shows
Speaker 1: to know what kind of email lands in your inbox
Speaker 1: most weeks, and I always thought, well, those are fine
Speaker 1: for them. Those are other people's stories. I'm a project manager.
Speaker 1: I run a small crew. I have a wife and
Speaker 1: a girl in middle school, and a dog that thinks
Speaker 1: he's people. I do not have a story except now
Speaker 1: I do. I want to tell it the whole way
Speaker 1: through because I think if I tell it once, all
Speaker 1: the way to the end, I might be able to
Speaker 1: put it down for a while and go to sleep
Speaker 1: at a reasonable hour. Again, my wife would appreciate that,
Speaker 1: so would I. So if you'll let me work my
Speaker 1: way into it, I'll get there. I have to tell
Speaker 1: you about Caleb's grandfather first. There's no way around him
Speaker 1: without him. None of this happens without him. The three
Speaker 1: of us don't drive seven hours into the kind of
Speaker 1: country where the gas stations have hand lettered signs and
Speaker 1: the cell service drops out about an hour before you
Speaker 1: mean it too. Without him, we never find that hole
Speaker 1: in the rock at all. Caleb's grandfather was named Hollis.
Speaker 1: Everybody called him Pap. He was a coal man for
Speaker 1: the first half of his life and a carpenter for
Speaker 1: the second half, and somewhere in between. He was a hunter,
Speaker 1: a trapper, a fiddle player, and the kind of man
Speaker 1: you didn't sass twice. He was born in Letcher County, Kentucky,
Speaker 1: and he died there about fourteen months ago, eighty six
Speaker 1: years old, in his own bed, which he had asked for.
Speaker 1: Caleb was the one who found him. He'd driven down
Speaker 1: that morning to bring him groceries. Caleb and Pap were close,
Speaker 1: in the way that grandsons and grandfathers sometimes are when
Speaker 1: the father in between has gone missing. Somewhere along the
Speaker 1: way Caleb's dad left when Caleb was five, Pap stepped
Speaker 1: into the gap. He taught Caleb how to fish, how
Speaker 1: to clean a rifle, how to set a trot line,
Speaker 1: how to shake a man's hand without making it a contest.
Speaker 1: He taught him how to read the weather off the
Speaker 1: way the leaves turned their backs to the wind. He
Speaker 1: taught him one hundred small things that fathers are supposed
Speaker 1: to teach, and once in a great while, when the
Speaker 1: bourbon was out and the porch light was on, and
Speaker 1: the cicadas were doing their slow work in the woods
Speaker 1: behind the house. He taught him about the places in
Speaker 1: those mountains a person should not go. There were a
Speaker 1: few of them, according to Pipe. There was a stretch
Speaker 1: of creek up pass Sergeant that he wouldn't fish because
Speaker 1: some happened to a cousin of his there in the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties that he would not discuss. There was a
Speaker 1: stand of old timber up the ridge from his property
Speaker 1: where he wouldn't hunt, because he said the deer wouldn't
Speaker 1: bed down there, and a man should pay attention when
Speaker 1: the deer tell him something. And there was a hole
Speaker 1: in the rock on the north face of a ridge
Speaker 1: maybe twelve miles from his house, in the middle of
Speaker 1: a piece of national forest land, that he warned Caleb
Speaker 1: about more than once, in a tone that didn't allow
Speaker 1: for follow up questions. Caleb told us more than once
Speaker 1: over the years the things Pap had said about that hole,
Speaker 1: He'd say. Pap told me when I was nine that
Speaker 1: if I ever found myself up that draw by accident,
Speaker 1: I should turn around and walk out the way I
Speaker 1: came in, and I should not go back, not for
Speaker 1: a dropped pack, not for a wounded dog, not for anything,
Speaker 1: he'd say. Pap told me he knew two men who
Speaker 1: went in there before the war, and only one came out,
Speaker 1: and that the one who came out never spoke a
Speaker 1: full sentence again for the rest of his life, he'd say.
Speaker 1: Pap told me once, when I pushed him, that he
Speaker 1: himself stood at the mouth of at one time when
Speaker 1: he was about my age, and that whatever was in
Speaker 1: there made the hair stand up on his neck so
Speaker 1: bad his teeth hurt, and he turned around and went
Speaker 1: home and never went back. That's the kind of thing
Speaker 1: Caleb grew up hearing. You have to understand. The three
Speaker 1: of us have been caving together since we were nineteen
Speaker 1: years old, Caleb, Josh and me. We met our first
Speaker 1: year of college at a little outing club that met
Speaker 1: on Tuesday nights in a basement that smelled like old carpet,
Speaker 1: and we've been at it ever since. Indiana, Tennessee, West Virginia, Alabama.
Speaker 1: All the big systems, plenty of small ones. Caleb's the
Speaker 1: most patient of the three of us. He's the one
Speaker 1: who'll spend twenty minutes finding the right line through a
Speaker 1: breakdown when Josh and I are already trying to muscle
Speaker 1: through it. Josh is the strongest. He was a marine
Speaker 1: for six years before he came back home and went
Speaker 1: into welding, and his shoulders looked like he's been doing
Speaker 1: pull up since the womb. And I'm the cautious one.
Speaker 1: I'm the one who packs the second backup light and
Speaker 1: the third backup and a my lar blanket I have
Speaker 1: never used. I'm the one who annoys the other two
Speaker 1: by reading the survey notes out loud in the truck
Speaker 1: on the drive in. I want you to hold all
Speaker 1: of that in your head as you listen to the
Speaker 1: rest of this Three grown men decades of experience between us.
Speaker 1: None of us drinks underground, none of us take short cuts.
Speaker 1: None of us has ever been the kind of person
Speaker 1: who sees what isn't there. Whatever you make of what
Speaker 1: I'm about to tell you, it didn't happen to a
Speaker 1: couple of weekend warriors. It happened to the three of us.
Speaker 1: I'd put my reputation on Caleb and Josh in any
Speaker 1: cave you want a name. They'd say the same about me.
Speaker 1: Pap died in early September of last year. Caleb went
Speaker 1: down for the funeral. He stayed for two weeks after
Speaker 1: because somebody had to start sorting through eighty six years
Speaker 1: of one man's life, and Caleb's mother wasn't up for it.
Speaker 1: Pap had a workshop behind the house that hadn't been
Speaker 1: touched since the Reagan administration. He had a hall closet
Speaker 1: full of paper, grocery bags full of receipts. He had
Speaker 1: a shoe box full of black and white photographs of
Speaker 1: people whose names had died with him. And in the
Speaker 1: back of a drawer in the kitchen, underneath a stack
Speaker 1: of old utility bills, Caleb found a folded piece of
Speaker 1: graph paper. It was a map, hand drawn in pencil
Speaker 1: on paper that had gone soft. Along the creases, there
Speaker 1: was a stretch of road on it. Caleb recognized there
Speaker 1: was a creek, there was a contour line that meant
Speaker 1: a ridge, and on the north side of that ridge
Speaker 1: there was a small black circle, And next to the circle,
Speaker 1: in perhaps tight square handwriting, there were two words don't go.
Speaker 1: That was it, no date, no name for the place,
Speaker 1: just the map and those two words. Kept in the
Speaker 1: back of a drawer in a man's kitchen for who
Speaker 1: knows how many decades. Caleb didn't tell us about it
Speaker 1: right away. He sat on it for about a month.
Speaker 1: He told me later that he'd found it on a Tuesday,
Speaker 1: and that he'd put it back in the drawer and
Speaker 1: gone outside and sat in his truck and cried for
Speaker 1: the better part of an hour. He said it felt
Speaker 1: like Pap had left him a question, not an answer,
Speaker 1: a question the kind of grandfather leaves a grandson when
Speaker 1: he's run out of time. He brought it up to
Speaker 1: us in October. We were all three at Josh's place
Speaker 1: for one of our Sunday cookouts. Josh's wife had taken
Speaker 1: the kids to her sisters. Caleb went out to his truck,
Speaker 1: came back with the map, and laid it on the
Speaker 1: kitchen table between the bowls of chili. He didn't say
Speaker 1: anything for a long minute. Then he tapped his finger
Speaker 1: on that little black circle, and he told us what
Speaker 1: was on it, PAP's stories, the two men before the war,
Speaker 1: the hair on the neck, the hand drawn warning. And
Speaker 1: then he asked us if we'd go with him. I
Speaker 1: said no, I want to be clear about that. The
Speaker 1: first thing I said sitting at that kitchen table was
Speaker 1: no I said, Caleb, your grandfather was a smart man,
Speaker 1: and he told you not to go, and that ought
Speaker 1: to be the end of it. I said, you'll regret it.
Speaker 1: I said, if it's so bad, he wrote a warning
Speaker 1: on a map and hit it under the gas bill.
Speaker 1: What business have we got there? Josh took the other side.
Speaker 1: Josh said, with respect. Pap was an old countryman. He
Speaker 1: had stories about a lot of places. He had stories
Speaker 1: about that creek where his cousin drowned. And there's nothing
Speaker 1: wrong with that creek now except a little erosion. Those
Speaker 1: old men told a thousand of those stories. Most of
Speaker 1: them are about a moonshine still that somebody didn't want found.
Speaker 1: If there's a real cave up there nobody knows about
Speaker 1: in the middle of a national forest, that's a once
Speaker 1: in a lifetime thing. We owe it to ourselves to
Speaker 1: at least look at the entrance. And Caleb, and this
Speaker 1: is the part I keep coming back to, Caleb said,
Speaker 1: I have to know. He said it quietly. He wasn't
Speaker 1: pushing it. He was asking. My granddad spent his whole
Speaker 1: life trying to keep me from that place, he told us.
Speaker 1: And now he's gone, and I don't have anybody to
Speaker 1: ask anymore, and I have to know what he was
Speaker 1: trying to keep me from. If I don't go look
Speaker 1: at that ridge once with my own eyes, I'm going
Speaker 1: to think about it for the rest of my life.
Speaker 1: I would rather go with the two of you than alone.
Speaker 1: That last sentence was the one that got me, because
Speaker 1: I knew, sitting there at that kitchen table that he
Speaker 1: was going to go either way, and I knew Josh
Speaker 1: was going to go with him either way, and I
Speaker 1: knew that if I didn't go, I'd spend the rest
Speaker 1: of my life trying to live with the version of
Speaker 1: this where they walked out without me and something happened
Speaker 1: and I wasn't there to make it not happen. So
Speaker 1: I said yes. We picked a weekend in early November.
Speaker 1: The leaves would be down by then, which would help
Speaker 1: us see the lay of the land, and the snakes
Speaker 1: would be sleeping, which would help with everything else. We
Speaker 1: told our wives we were going caving in eastern Kentucky
Speaker 1: for three days. That part was true. We didn't tell
Speaker 1: them the rest. I'm not proud of that. I'm just
Speaker 1: telling you the way it was. We took two trucks
Speaker 1: because Josh's place is a couple of hours out of
Speaker 1: the way from mine and Caleb's. We met up at
Speaker 1: a diner outside London, Kentucky, on a Thursday morning. I
Speaker 1: remember Josh ordered biscuits and gravy and ate the whole
Speaker 1: plate in about ninety seconds, because he wanted to be
Speaker 1: done before I started telling him about the survey reports.
Speaker 1: I had not actually been able to find for this
Speaker 1: cave because there were no survey reports for this cave,
Speaker 1: because as far as the official record was concerned, this
Speaker 1: cave did not exist. There's no entry for it in
Speaker 1: any of the Grotto's files, there's nothing in the Federal
Speaker 1: land surveys we could find. It's a hole in the
Speaker 1: rock that, as far as I can tell, only Pap
Speaker 1: and a few other old men ever knew about, and
Speaker 1: most of them are dead. That should have told me something.
Speaker 1: We drove the rest of the way that afternoon. The
Speaker 1: road got narrower, and then it turned to gravel, and
Speaker 1: then it turned to a dirt track that pretended to
Speaker 1: be a road for about a mile before it gave up.
Speaker 1: We pulled the trucks off into a little flat spot
Speaker 1: under some pines. Caleb walked a slow circle around them,
Speaker 1: hands in his pockets, looking at the way the trees grew.
Speaker 1: This is the place, he told us, This is where
Speaker 1: paps map ends. We had the truck set up as
Speaker 1: a base. We'd hike in from there, sleep in tents
Speaker 1: at the foot of the ridge that night, hike up
Speaker 1: to the entrance the next morning, and be in the
Speaker 1: cave by mid morning Friday. The plan was to do
Speaker 1: a long surface day on Friday, get a feel for
Speaker 1: the system, come back out before dark, and decide that
Speaker 1: night whether to push it harder on Saturday. That was
Speaker 1: the plan. We made camp in the last of the light.
Speaker 1: Caleb cooked, Josh got a fire going. I sat against
Speaker 1: my pack and listened to the woods the way I
Speaker 1: always do for the first half hour. I always do that.
Speaker 1: You can learn a lot about a place from the
Speaker 1: way it sounds. In the first half hour. I'll tell
Speaker 1: you what I noticed. I noticed I couldn't hear any birds.
Speaker 1: It was already coming on toward dark, so that wasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily strange. I noticed I couldn't hear any deer moving either.
Speaker 1: That was a little strange. It was November in Kentucky.
Speaker 1: There should have been dear moving. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back. After these messages, I
Speaker 1: noticed I couldn't hear coyotes once it got full dark.
Speaker 1: Not one yip, not one howl the whole night. I
Speaker 1: told myself I was looking for things to be wrong.
Speaker 1: I told myself I'd been spooked by Caleb stories, and
Speaker 1: I needed to get my head right before we went underground.
Speaker 1: I drank some coffee, I went to sleep. I slept fine.
Speaker 1: Friday morning, we hiked up. The ridge was steeper than
Speaker 1: the contour lines made it look they always are. We
Speaker 1: took our time, We gained elevation slow. When we got
Speaker 1: to where the map said the entrance ought to be,
Speaker 1: we spread out and worked the slope in a line.
Speaker 1: Caleb found it. He whistled that low two note whistle
Speaker 1: he does, and Josh and I made our way over
Speaker 1: to him. The entrance wasn't a yawning mouth in the
Speaker 1: side of the mountain. It wasn't dramatic. It was a
Speaker 1: slot in the rock, about four feet high and maybe
Speaker 1: two feet across at the widest point, set behind a
Speaker 1: cluster of mountain laurel that you would walk past if
Speaker 1: you didn't know to look. There was a little bit
Speaker 1: of cool air coming out of it, the way air
Speaker 1: comes out of a cave that's connected to something bigger.
Speaker 1: There was a faint, faint smell on that air. Not bad,
Speaker 1: just earthy, the way a root seller smells. Nothing alarming.
Speaker 1: Caleb stood there for a long minute. He had his
Speaker 1: hand on the rock above the slot. He was looking
Speaker 1: into the dark. I couldn't tell what he was thinking.
Speaker 1: He's not a guy who tells you what he's thinking
Speaker 1: unless you ask, and even then he takes his time
Speaker 1: about it. After a while, Josh said well, Caleb said yeah,
Speaker 1: and we went in. The first hundred feet were a
Speaker 1: stoop walk. Then it opened up into a low room
Speaker 1: maybe thirty feet across, with a sandy floor and a
Speaker 1: smooth ceilinged passage going off the back of it to
Speaker 1: the right standard limestone, clean, dry, a little cool. We
Speaker 1: stopped there to put on our helmets and check our lights.
Speaker 1: I remember Josh laughing about something. I remember Caleb checking
Speaker 1: his watch the way he does, marking the time. We
Speaker 1: entered eight forty seven in the morning. We had told
Speaker 1: ourselves we'd be back out by four. The passage off
Speaker 1: the back of that room ran for about four hundred
Speaker 1: feet more or less straight, with a slight downward grade.
Speaker 1: We walked it in a loose line, Caleb in front,
Speaker 1: Me in the middle, Josh in the back. Caleb was
Speaker 1: reading the cave for us. Watch your step here, this
Speaker 1: rock's loose. The ceiling drops in about ten feet. There's
Speaker 1: an old mud floor here. It's been dry for a
Speaker 1: long time. The kind of running commentary you're glad to
Speaker 1: have when you're in unfamiliar ground. It was good cave.
Speaker 1: I want to say that the first hour, hour and
Speaker 1: a half we were having a good time. The system
Speaker 1: was clean, the formations were beautiful. We came through one
Speaker 1: little chamber that had soda straws hanging from the ceiling
Speaker 1: so thick and so long that Josh said it looked
Speaker 1: like a chandelier somebody had forgotten to turn on. Caleb
Speaker 1: took pictures. We were quiet, the way you get quiet
Speaker 1: in a cave because the air swallows your voice, and
Speaker 1: after a while you stopped trying to fill it. Around
Speaker 1: two hours in we hit the first pitch. It was
Speaker 1: a vertical drop of maybe thirty five feet into what
Speaker 1: looked from the lip like a much larger room. We'd
Speaker 1: brought rope, of course, we'd brought rope. Josh set the anchor.
Speaker 1: Caleb went down first. I was second. Josh came down last.
Speaker 1: The rope ran clean. The room at the bottom was
Speaker 1: a real room. I'd put it at two hundred feet long,
Speaker 1: eighty feet wide, ceiling maybe forty feet at the center.
Speaker 1: There was a stream running through it, and honest to God,
Speaker 1: underground stream three feet across, clear and cold and fast.
Speaker 1: There was a sandy bank along one side of it.
Speaker 1: There were formations on the far wall that looked like
Speaker 1: a frozen waterfall. I have to tell you that room
Speaker 1: was beautiful. It was one of the most beautiful rooms
Speaker 1: I've ever been in in any cave anywhere. We stood
Speaker 1: there for a few minutes with our lights off, all
Speaker 1: three of us, the way you do sometimes in a
Speaker 1: place like that, just to feel the dark. It was
Speaker 1: while we were standing there in the dark that I
Speaker 1: heard the first thing. It was a sound far off
Speaker 1: that I cannot describe to you exactly. The closest I
Speaker 1: can get is to say it was a low, slow exhalation,
Speaker 1: like a man letting out a long breath. But it
Speaker 1: was not a man, and it was not close, and
Speaker 1: it was a long enough breath that no man could
Speaker 1: have made it. I thought I had imagined it. I
Speaker 1: almost asked the other two if they'd heard anything. Then
Speaker 1: I told myself, you're standing in the dark in a
Speaker 1: cave you've never been in. Of course, your brain's making
Speaker 1: up sounds. And I let it go. I didn't say
Speaker 1: a word about it. We turned our lights back on.
Speaker 1: Caleb pointed at the stream. We can follow that. He said,
Speaker 1: streams going somewhere. Let's follow it for an hour and
Speaker 1: then turn around. So we followed the stream. The passage
Speaker 1: downstream from that big room was lower ceiling, but it
Speaker 1: was wide and the floor was good. We walked, We
Speaker 1: kept walking. After about twenty minutes, the passage made a
Speaker 1: sharp turn to the left and the ceiling dropped to
Speaker 1: maybe six feet, and the air changed. This is the
Speaker 1: part that's hard to put into words. The air changed.
Speaker 1: It got warmer, not by a lot, maybe two degrees,
Speaker 1: but in a cave, two degrees is something Caves don't
Speaker 1: change temperature. The temperature in a cave is the average
Speaker 1: annual temperature of the surface above it, and it stays
Speaker 1: there more or less forever. You feel two degrees in
Speaker 1: a cave, you feel it on your skin. The three
Speaker 1: of us all felt it at the same time, because
Speaker 1: all three of us slowed down at the same time,
Speaker 1: and there was a smell on the warm air. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a strong smell. It wasn't a hit you in
Speaker 1: the face smell. It was just present where before there
Speaker 1: had been nothing. It was a wet animal smell, not
Speaker 1: a skunk smell, not a deer smell, not a bear smell.
Speaker 1: And I know what a bear smell's like. I've had
Speaker 1: a black bear come through camp before. It was a sharp, dirty,
Speaker 1: organic smell, the way a wet dog smells if the
Speaker 1: dog has been rolling in something it shouldn't have. There
Speaker 1: was something else under it that I want to call rot,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't quite rot. It was older than rot.
Speaker 1: It was the way the back of a long closed
Speaker 1: barn smells when you finally open the doors in the spring.
Speaker 1: You guys smell that, Josh said, Caleb said, yeah, I said,
Speaker 1: let's stop a minute. We stopped. We stood there in
Speaker 1: that low passage and we listened. I could hear the
Speaker 1: stream behind us. I could hear my own heart. I
Speaker 1: could hear, I thought, very far ahead of us, a
Speaker 1: sound like water dripping, but slower than water drips, and
Speaker 1: at irregular intervals. I wanted to turn around. Right then,
Speaker 1: I wanted to tell the other two, this is enough.
Speaker 1: We found the cave. We walked the cave. Pap was right,
Speaker 1: let's go. I wanted to. I didn't. I didn't, And
Speaker 1: I have asked myself one hundred times since then why
Speaker 1: I didn't. And the only answer I have is that
Speaker 1: I did not want to be the one who called it.
Speaker 1: I did not want to be the man who got
Speaker 1: spooked and made the other two turn around. I think
Speaker 1: Josh felt the same way. I think Caleb did too.
Speaker 1: I think all three of us were standing there in
Speaker 1: that low, warm passage, with our hands on our hips,
Speaker 1: smelling that smell, and all three of us were waiting
Speaker 1: for one of the other two to be the one
Speaker 1: to say that's enough. None of us said it. Ten
Speaker 1: more minutes, Caleb said, then we turn around. We went
Speaker 1: ten more minutes. The passage opened up again, not into
Speaker 1: a big room, this time into a junction. The stream
Speaker 1: bent off to the left and disappeared into a low
Speaker 1: slot straight ahead. The passage came continued, and to the
Speaker 1: right there was a third opening, taller than the others,
Speaker 1: maybe nine feet high, a real arch in the rock,
Speaker 1: smooth edged, like water had worked it for a long time.
Speaker 1: But it didn't have a stream coming out of it.
Speaker 1: It was a dry passage. The smell was coming from
Speaker 1: the dry passage. I want to tell you the next part,
Speaker 1: the way it happened, because the order of it matters.
Speaker 1: Caleb stepped toward the dry passage. He didn't go in,
Speaker 1: He just stepped toward it, and he raised his light
Speaker 1: and he played the beam down into the dark. About
Speaker 1: thirty feet inside that opening, on the floor on the
Speaker 1: right hand side. His light caught something. He held the
Speaker 1: beam steady. We all looked. It was bones. I know
Speaker 1: how that sounds. A pile of bones in a cave
Speaker 1: isn't necessarily anything. Animals fall into caves, animals get washed
Speaker 1: into caves. There are bones in lots of caves. But
Speaker 1: this was a pile maybe four feet across loss an
Speaker 1: eighteen inches high, of bones that had been put there,
Speaker 1: not scattered, not strewn, stacked in the rough, careless way
Speaker 1: a person stacks firewood when they're tired. There were long bones,
Speaker 1: leg bones, what I'm fairly sure was a skull at
Speaker 1: one end of the pile that was too big to
Speaker 1: be a deer and the wrong shape to be a bear.
Speaker 1: There were what looked like rib cages crushed flat. There
Speaker 1: were small bones the size of squirrel bones mixed in.
Speaker 1: The whole pile had a yellowish look, except for a
Speaker 1: few that were white, fresh enough that I could see,
Speaker 1: even from thirty feet away that they still had pieces
Speaker 1: of cartilage on them. Nobody said anything. I want to
Speaker 1: tell you about one other thing in that passage, because
Speaker 1: it was the thing that moved Caleb. The bone pile
Speaker 1: was bad. The bone pile alone. If it had been
Speaker 1: the only thing in there, we might have stood and
Speaker 1: looked at it for another minute. We might have argued
Speaker 1: about whether what we were looking at was old or recent,
Speaker 1: or natural or arranged. We might have done what people do,
Speaker 1: which is talk ourselves out of the thing. Our gut
Speaker 1: is telling us. The thing that didn't let us do
Speaker 1: that was on the wall above the bones, about seven
Speaker 1: feet up. There were marks on the wall. They weren't pictures,
Speaker 1: they weren't letters or anything I could read or recognize.
Speaker 1: They were grooves, four of them, parallel, running down the
Speaker 1: limestone in long, slightly curved lines, the way fingers dragged
Speaker 1: through wet sand. The grooves were maybe three feet long.
Speaker 1: The spacing between them was wider than my hand spread out.
Speaker 1: They went into the rock about half an inch in
Speaker 1: a place where the rock was hard. You don't gouge
Speaker 1: half an inch into limestone with your hands. I'm telling
Speaker 1: you that, as a man who's worked construction for twenty
Speaker 1: years and knows what it takes to scratch a piece
Speaker 1: of stone, you don't do that. Whatever made those grooves
Speaker 1: was very strong, and it had done it many times
Speaker 1: in the same place, the way a bear marks a tree.
Speaker 1: But no bear made those marks because they were too
Speaker 1: high and too wide and too deep, and they were
Speaker 1: inside a cave that no bear had ever been in.
Speaker 1: That was when the three of us moved. What we
Speaker 1: did was very slowly. All three of us take a
Speaker 1: half step backward. Caleb said, very quietly, we're done. He
Speaker 1: said it in a tone I hadn't heard him use before.
Speaker 1: He said it the way a man says the kid's
Speaker 1: choking when he doesn't have time to raise his voice.
Speaker 1: He turned, he started walking back the way we'd come.
Speaker 1: Josh and I followed. We walked, We didn't run, We
Speaker 1: didn't speak. Josh was behind me, Caleb was in front
Speaker 1: of me. The lights were on. The pace was steady.
Speaker 1: The pace was a little quicker than it had been
Speaker 1: on the way in, but it was steady. We were
Speaker 1: going to walk out of there. We were going to
Speaker 1: go back through the low passage, back into the big
Speaker 1: room with the stream, back up the rope, back through
Speaker 1: the four hundred feet of straight passage, back through the
Speaker 1: entrance room, back through the four foot slot, and out
Speaker 1: into the November sun. We were going to do it
Speaker 1: the right way. Forty five minutes an hour at the outside.
Speaker 1: We had headlamps, backups, food, water, rope. We were going
Speaker 1: to be fine. That was when the growl came. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a wolf, it wasn't a coyote, it wasn't a bear.
Speaker 1: I've heard all three. It was deeper than any of those.
Speaker 1: It was lower in pitch than I would have thought
Speaker 1: a living thing could go. It came from behind us,
Speaker 1: from the direction of the dry passage, but it filled
Speaker 1: the cave the way a cord on a pipe organ
Speaker 1: fills a church. It wasn't loud. That's the part nobody believes.
Speaker 1: It wasn't loud, and it wasn't close, and it didn't
Speaker 1: have to be either of those things, because it was
Speaker 1: the kind of sound that goes into your chest before
Speaker 1: it goes into your ears. It said one thing. It said,
Speaker 1: you're in my house. It didn't say it in words,
Speaker 1: I want to be clear. It was a sund not
Speaker 1: a word. But every animal you've ever startled on a hike,
Speaker 1: or in a yard or in a barn has made
Speaker 1: some version of that sound, and you understood it. I
Speaker 1: have a dog. I know what no sounds like. I
Speaker 1: flushed deer, I know what go away sounds like. This
Speaker 1: was that. It was the most articulate growl I've ever heard,
Speaker 1: in the sense that there was no mistaking what it meant.
Speaker 1: Behind me, Josh said, oh, just oh, just that one word.
Speaker 1: He said it the way a man says it when
Speaker 1: he's been hit in the stomach and the air's gone
Speaker 1: out of him. Caleb didn't say anything. Caleb started walking faster,
Speaker 1: not running, walking faster. I matched his pace, Josh matched mine.
Speaker 1: We were maybe two hundred feet back into the low passage,
Speaker 1: headed for the big room when the second growl came
Speaker 1: same direction as the first, but closer. By close, I
Speaker 1: mean it had moved. It had moved fast. It was
Speaker 1: no longer at the dry passage. It was somewhere behind us,
Speaker 1: in the same passage we were walking in, and it
Speaker 1: was coming after us, and it wasn't in any hurry
Speaker 1: because it didn't need to be. That was when I
Speaker 1: started running. I'm not proud of it. I want to
Speaker 1: be clear about that. I'm not proud that I was
Speaker 1: the first one to break. But I started running, and
Speaker 1: the other two started running, and we ran through that
Speaker 1: low passage, ducking where we had to duck headlamps, swinging
Speaker 1: the beams, jumping all over the walls. I could hear
Speaker 1: our boots, I could hear our breath. I could hear
Speaker 1: behind us something that wasn't boots but was hitting the
Speaker 1: floor in the same rhythm a man's feet would hit
Speaker 1: the floor, except faster and heavier and longer between the strikes,
Speaker 1: because whatever it was had a longer stride than a man.
Speaker 1: It was running. We came out of the low passage
Speaker 1: into the big room with the stream. I saw Caleb's
Speaker 1: beams swing across the far wall, looking for the rope.
Speaker 1: The rope was still there against the far wall, and
Speaker 1: we ran for it. Stay tuned from Wore back Woods
Speaker 1: big Foot Stories. We'll be back after these messages. Josh
Speaker 1: got there first. Josh is the strongest. Josh was already
Speaker 1: on the rope by the time Caleb got there. Caleb shouted,
Speaker 1: go go, go the way you say it to a
Speaker 1: kid you're shoving onto a bus. Josh went. He was
Speaker 1: halfway up before I got to the bottom. He's strong.
Speaker 1: I've never seen a man climb a rope that fast.
Speaker 1: Caleb pushed me to the rope. You next, he told me.
Speaker 1: I said, you go. He said, I'm bigger, I'll be slower.
Speaker 1: You go, I went. I want to tell you what
Speaker 1: happened while I was on that rope, because what happened
Speaker 1: on that rope is the part I think about every night.
Speaker 1: I was climbing. I'm decent on a rope. Not Josh fast,
Speaker 1: but decent. I was climbing, and I was looking up
Speaker 1: at Josh's boots above me and behind me and below me.
Speaker 1: The cave got quiet. The growling stopped, the footsteps stopped,
Speaker 1: everything stopped all at once. The way a room goes
Speaker 1: quiet when a person you didn't know was there clears
Speaker 1: their throat. I didn't want to look down, but I
Speaker 1: looked down. Caleb was at the bottom of the rope.
Speaker 1: He was facing away from the rope, facing back the
Speaker 1: way we'd come, the way we'd come in from the
Speaker 1: low passage. His headlamp was on, his beam was pointed
Speaker 1: into the mouth of that passage, and in the beam
Speaker 1: at the far end of it, maybe forty feet from him.
Speaker 1: I saw something step out of the dark. I'm going
Speaker 1: to describe it the way I saw it. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to use the word that everybody wants me to use.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to call it that, because if I
Speaker 1: call it that, you'll hear that word and your brain
Speaker 1: will fill in a picture. And the picture your brain
Speaker 1: fills in isn't the thing I saw. The thing I
Speaker 1: saw was its own thing. I want you to see
Speaker 1: what I saw. It was tall. I want to start there.
Speaker 1: It was tall enough that the top of its head
Speaker 1: when it stepped clear of the passage, wasn't far from
Speaker 1: the ceiling of the big room, and the ceiling of
Speaker 1: that room was i'd guess somewhere between nine and ten
Speaker 1: feet at the edge where it stood. It wasn't a
Speaker 1: man's height. It wasn't close to a man's height. Whatever
Speaker 1: it was, it was a head and shoulders taller than
Speaker 1: a tall man, and it was whiter than two men
Speaker 1: set side by side. At the chest. It was covered
Speaker 1: in hair, But the hair wasn't the thing I noticed first.
Speaker 1: The thing I noticed first was the way it stood.
Speaker 1: It stood the way a big animal stands when it
Speaker 1: hasn't decided yet whether to charge. Its weight was forward,
Speaker 1: Its arms hung long and loose at its sides. Its
Speaker 1: head was tilted slightly, the way a dog tilts its
Speaker 1: head when it's listening to a sound it can't quite place.
Speaker 1: Its eyes were dark. I couldn't see the color. They
Speaker 1: caught the light from Caleb's headlamp, but they didn't throw
Speaker 1: the light back the way an animal's eyes do. They
Speaker 1: absorbed it. The face around the eyes was flat, more
Speaker 1: flat than it should have been, with a brow that
Speaker 1: came down heavy over the eyes, and a jaw that
Speaker 1: was square and wide and closed. It was looking at Caleb.
Speaker 1: I want to tell you, Brian, that what I felt
Speaker 1: in that moment wasn't the thing I would have expected
Speaker 1: to feel. I expected to feel terror. I did feel terror,
Speaker 1: but there was something underneath the terror that was harder
Speaker 1: to name. The closest I can come is to say
Speaker 1: it was the feeling of being seen. It was the
Speaker 1: feeling of being recognized as something specific, not as prey.
Speaker 1: That sounds dramatic, and I want to avoid that, as
Speaker 1: something specific, as an intruder. The way you'd feel if
Speaker 1: you came home in the middle of the night and
Speaker 1: turned on a light and found a stranger sitting in
Speaker 1: your living room, and the stranger looked at you, and
Speaker 1: you understood, with no need for words, that the stranger
Speaker 1: had been waiting for you. That was what was on
Speaker 1: its face. I froze on the rope. I have to
Speaker 1: admit that I just froze. I was probably twelve feet
Speaker 1: up with my legs wrapped, my arms locked in the ascender,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't make myself move. I watched it Watch Caleb.
Speaker 1: I watched Caleb not move. Caleb was a smart man.
Speaker 1: Caleb had grown up with Pap. Caleb knew the way
Speaker 1: Pap had known that you don't run from the thing
Speaker 1: that's deciding whether to chase you. Then the second one
Speaker 1: came out of the passage. This one was smaller. I
Speaker 1: want to say smaller, but smaller is the wrong word,
Speaker 1: because it was still bigger than any man I've ever
Speaker 1: stood next to. It was smaller relative to the first.
Speaker 1: It came up beside the first and stopped, and it
Speaker 1: looked at Caleb too, and they stood there together, and
Speaker 1: they didn't make a sound. Above me on the rope,
Speaker 1: Josh was at the top. I heard him pull himself
Speaker 1: over the lip. I heard him in a voice i'd
Speaker 1: never heard him use, a voice I wouldn't have known.
Speaker 1: Was Josh calling down to me, Keith climb. I climbed.
Speaker 1: I don't remember climbing. I remember the next thing I remember,
Speaker 1: which is being at the top of the rope and
Speaker 1: Josh grabbing the back of my pack and hauling me
Speaker 1: over the lip and onto the floor of the upper
Speaker 1: passage like I weighed nothing. I remember turning around on
Speaker 1: my hands and knees and looking back down into the
Speaker 1: big room. Caleb was on the rope he'd started up.
Speaker 1: He was maybe ten feet off the floor. He was
Speaker 1: climbing fast. He was climbing as fast as Josh had climbed.
Speaker 1: The two things at the mouth of the passage had moved,
Speaker 1: they'd walked or stepped or come ten feet into the room.
Speaker 1: They were watching him climb. And there was a third
Speaker 1: one now behind them in the passage, taller than either
Speaker 1: of the first two. And this one was the one
Speaker 1: that was making a sound. It was making a sound
Speaker 1: I'm going to fail to describe. It was a low,
Speaker 1: chesty rumble. But it had a shape to it, the
Speaker 1: way a word has a shape. It was the same
Speaker 1: shape over and over, three notes, low low, lower, a pattern,
Speaker 1: a repeated pattern. I don't know what the pattern meant.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I'll tell you what I think the
Speaker 1: pattern meant. I think it was a call. I think
Speaker 1: it was a call to the others, the others we'd
Speaker 1: heard further back in the cave, the others that had
Speaker 1: made the bones in that pile, the others that had
Speaker 1: made the dripping sound at the back of the dry passage.
Speaker 1: The others we never saw, and that I'm grateful every
Speaker 1: day that we never saw. I think the third one
Speaker 1: was telling them come. I think it was telling them
Speaker 1: prey is on the wall. I think it was telling
Speaker 1: them to hurry. That's what I think. I can't prove it.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you what it felt like. The first rock
Speaker 1: came in while Caleb was about twenty feet up the rope.
Speaker 1: I don't mean a pebble. I don't mean a hand
Speaker 1: sized stone. I mean a rock that was, by my
Speaker 1: best estimate, after thinking about it for many sleepless nights,
Speaker 1: somewhere between the size of a soft ball and the
Speaker 1: size of a small bowling ball. It came across the
Speaker 1: room flat and fast, and it hit the wall of
Speaker 1: rock about two feet to the left of the rope,
Speaker 1: and it hit hard enough that it cracked. The rock
Speaker 1: cracked when it hit the wall. There was a sound
Speaker 1: like a rifle going off in a small room, and
Speaker 1: then the sound of pieces of the rock hitting the floor.
Speaker 1: The thing that had thrown it was the second one,
Speaker 1: the smaller one. I saw the arm come down, I
Speaker 1: saw the shoulder follow through. The throw wasn't the wild,
Speaker 1: panicked throw of a frightened animal. The throw was deliberate.
Speaker 1: It was aimed. It was aimed at the rope. It
Speaker 1: missed by two feet because Caleb was moving on the rope.
Speaker 1: The thing was leading him the way a hunter leads
Speaker 1: a moving target with a rifle. It was trying to
Speaker 1: knock him off the rope. It was hunting him. The
Speaker 1: second rock came a second after the first. Caleb was moving.
Speaker 1: The rock hit the rope itself. I saw the rope kick.
Speaker 1: I saw Caleb hold on. I don't know how. I
Speaker 1: don't know how he held on. The rock that hit
Speaker 1: the rope was bigger than the first one. It bounced
Speaker 1: off and hit the floor and rolled and stopped against
Speaker 1: the far wall. Josh was screaming at me. He was
Speaker 1: holding the rope above the lip, leaning down, hand out, screaming, climb, climb, climb, climb.
Speaker 1: He wasn't screaming at me. He was screaming at Caleb.
Speaker 1: I was pressed against the lip with my head over
Speaker 1: the edge, watching useless. Caleb climbed. Caleb climbed like a
Speaker 1: man on fire. He cleared the lip. Josh grabbed him
Speaker 1: and pulled him over, and we all three lay on
Speaker 1: the floor of that upper passage in a pile, breathing,
Speaker 1: and below us in the big room, the three things
Speaker 1: stood in the middle of the floor and looked up
Speaker 1: at the lip of the pitch and made no sound
Speaker 1: at all. We didn't pull the rope. That's the next
Speaker 1: thing I want to tell you, because It's the kind
Speaker 1: of detail you only think about later. We didn't pull
Speaker 1: the rope up. We left it there. I've thought about
Speaker 1: that for a year. I think about it because it
Speaker 1: was Josh's rope. It was a good rope. It was
Speaker 1: probably four hundred dollars a climbing rope. And we left
Speaker 1: it hanging in that big room because we couldn't stand
Speaker 1: the idea of leaning out over that lip, even for
Speaker 1: the seconds it would have taken to coil it up
Speaker 1: with those things below us. We got up. We started walking.
Speaker 1: We didn't run, because there was nowhere to run to.
Speaker 1: We walked fast the four hundred feet of straight passage
Speaker 1: back to the entrance room. And we didn't stop, and
Speaker 1: we didn't speak. And behind us, somewhere far behind us,
Speaker 1: I could hear the three notes again, low, low, lower.
Speaker 1: They weren't following. They hadn't climbed up after us, they'd
Speaker 1: stayed in the big room. The Three Notes weren't getting closer.
Speaker 1: They were just there behind us, telling us they knew
Speaker 1: where we were. We came up through the entrance room.
Speaker 1: We came out through the four foot slot. I came
Speaker 1: out last. I crawled out on my hands and knees
Speaker 1: into November sun, into a sky so blue it didn't
Speaker 1: look real, into air that didn't smell like that smell.
Speaker 1: And I lay on my back on the leaves outside
Speaker 1: the entrance, and I cried. I cried like a child.
Speaker 1: I didn't even try not to. Caleb was sitting against
Speaker 1: a tree with his head in his hands and his
Speaker 1: shoulders shaking. Josh was standing about ten feet away, with
Speaker 1: his back to us, his hands on top of his head,
Speaker 1: looking out over the slope below us, and he wasn't
Speaker 1: making any sound at all, but I could see his
Speaker 1: shoulders going up and down. I want to tell you
Speaker 1: something about Josh. Josh is a marine. Josh has been
Speaker 1: in firefights. Josh has, by his own count, had bullets
Speaker 1: passed close enough to his head that he could feel
Speaker 1: the air move. Josh has never, in twenty years, been
Speaker 1: the one to talk about what he saw or did
Speaker 1: over there. The one time I asked him in college,
Speaker 1: after a few beers, his answer was, Keith, there are
Speaker 1: things a man sees that he doesn't get the help
Speaker 1: of words for. That was all he said. He looked
Speaker 1: at me, he drank his beer. We talked about something
Speaker 1: else standing outside that cave with his hands on his head,
Speaker 1: looking down the slope, Josh said, very quietly, I've never
Speaker 1: been that scared, not over there, not anywhere. We didn't
Speaker 1: stay on that ridge another night. We packed the camp
Speaker 1: by headlamp. We hiked out in the dark, which is
Speaker 1: something I would have told you twenty four hours earlier
Speaker 1: that I'd never do, because hiking unfamiliar Appellachian terrain in
Speaker 1: the dark is how people break ankles and die of exposure.
Speaker 1: We hiked it anyway. We made it to the trucks.
Speaker 1: We drove. We drove the two trucks and convoy down
Speaker 1: that dirt track and onto the gravel and onto the road,
Speaker 1: and we didn't stop until we were two counties away
Speaker 1: in the parking lot of a waffle house at one
Speaker 1: in the morning, where we sat in a booth and
Speaker 1: drank coffee and didn't eat the food we ordered and
Speaker 1: didn't say a single word to each other for forty minutes.
Speaker 1: Caleb was the one who broke the silence. Pap knew.
Speaker 1: He said, I want you to hear that the way
Speaker 1: he said it. He didn't say Pap was right, He
Speaker 1: didn't say we should have listened. He said Pap knew,
Speaker 1: as in the man had stood in that cave once
Speaker 1: sixty odd years ago and seen what we'd seen or
Speaker 1: heard what we'd heard, and walked out, and then spent
Speaker 1: the rest of his life trying to make sure his
Speaker 1: only grandson didn't. Josh said, we're not telling anybody. I said,
Speaker 1: we have to tell somebody who, Josh said, Tell me who.
Speaker 1: Tell me who we tell Keith that doesn't think we're crazy.
Speaker 1: Tell me who we tell that goes back in there
Speaker 1: and gets killed and it's our fault. Tell me who
Speaker 1: we tell that doesn't put a damn camera crew in there,
Speaker 1: gets thirty more people killed and turns this into a circus.
Speaker 1: We're not telling anybody. He's right, Caleb said, I sat
Speaker 1: with it. I sat with it for a long time
Speaker 1: in that booth. I sat with my coffee that I
Speaker 1: wasn't drinking, and eventually I said, Okay, that was the
Speaker 1: agreement we made. I'm breaking it now. I'm breaking it
Speaker 1: by telling you. Caleb knows I'm writing this. He's the
Speaker 1: one who finally told me six months in that he
Speaker 1: thought it'd be all right if I told one person
Speaker 1: you've listened to that show for years that man takes
Speaker 1: care with what he gets sent. If it had helped you,
Speaker 1: put it down, write it to him. Josh doesn't know
Speaker 1: I'm writing this. Josh and I are still close and
Speaker 1: I love him. But Josh hasn't been the same since
Speaker 1: we came out of that cave. He works, he goes home,
Speaker 1: he sees his kids. He doesn't laugh the way he
Speaker 1: used to. He drinks more than he used to. His
Speaker 1: wife asked me about three months after we got back
Speaker 1: if anything had happened on that trip, and I lied
Speaker 1: to her. I lied to her face and I told
Speaker 1: her no, the trip was fine. Josh has always been
Speaker 1: quiet after a hard caving trip. She didn't believe me.
Speaker 1: She didn't push, she nodded, and she went back inside
Speaker 1: the house. And that was the end of it. And
Speaker 1: I haven't been able to look at her, really look
Speaker 1: at her since that night. Caleb's doing better than Josh.
Speaker 1: I think Caleb's doing better because Caleb already had a
Speaker 1: way to think about it. Caleb had pap stories. Caleb
Speaker 1: had the warning. Caleb came up out of that cave,
Speaker 1: and he had a frame already in his head that
Speaker 1: he could put what we'd seen into. He had the
Speaker 1: pegs to hang it on. Josh and I didn't. Josh
Speaker 1: and I went into that cave with the worldview of
Speaker 1: two men who believed they understood what was in the woods,
Speaker 1: and we came out of that cave with the worldview
Speaker 1: of two men who don't. I sleep with a light
Speaker 1: on now, not a bright light, a small night light
Speaker 1: in the hallway, the kind you'd put in for a kid.
Speaker 1: My wife asked me about it after the first week,
Speaker 1: and I told her I'd been having trouble getting up
Speaker 1: in the night without stubbing my toes, and she didn't
Speaker 1: push it, but she knows. Wives know. I haven't been
Speaker 1: back into a cave since, not even a tourist cave.
Speaker 1: Caleb suggested about four months in that the three of
Speaker 1: us should do an easy weekend trip somewhere familiar, just
Speaker 1: to put our boots in cave dirt again, just to
Speaker 1: remind ourselves that it isn't all like that. I told
Speaker 1: him i'd think about it. I'm still thinking about it.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I'll ever be ready. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: I do miss it. I miss being underground there's a
Speaker 1: quiet down there, in a good cave that you can't
Speaker 1: get anywhere else on this earth. I came up out
Speaker 1: of that cave and I lost it and I haven't
Speaker 1: gotten it back. And I think about that sometimes when
Speaker 1: I'm driving home from work and I see the light
Speaker 1: going on a hillside in the distance, and I remember
Speaker 1: that there's dark country, real dark country, on the other
Speaker 1: side of it. I jump at sounds I never used
Speaker 1: to jump at the neighbor's gate latch, the ice maker
Speaker 1: in the freezer, anything chesty and low, anything in the
Speaker 1: lowest part of the audible range, anything that sounds for
Speaker 1: half a second, like the start of that growl. My
Speaker 1: daughter slammed a cabinet a few months ago, the way
Speaker 1: kids do, and I came around the corner of the
Speaker 1: kitchen with my hands up like I was going to
Speaker 1: fight somebody, and she looked at me with this face,
Speaker 1: and I had to make a joke of it, and
Speaker 1: I went and sat in the garage afterward for a
Speaker 1: while because I could feel my hand shaking and I
Speaker 1: didn't want her to see it. I went back six
Speaker 1: weeks later to the parking spot, not the ridge. I
Speaker 1: drove down there in the middle of a Wednesday by myself,
Speaker 1: told my wife I had a job site to look at.
Speaker 1: I sat in my truck in that little flat under
Speaker 1: the pines. I didn't get out. I sat there for
Speaker 1: about forty minutes. I wanted to know if I could
Speaker 1: feel them. If you can understand what I mean, I
Speaker 1: wanted to know of standing two miles from that hole
Speaker 1: on the ridge would feel different than standing in any
Speaker 1: other piece of woods. It did. I felt watched. I
Speaker 1: can't prove I was watched. I can't prove the feeling
Speaker 1: wasn't entirely in my head. But I sat in that
Speaker 1: truck for forty minutes and I didn't get out, And
Speaker 1: when I drove home, I felt better the further away
Speaker 1: I got, the way you feel better the further you
Speaker 1: get from a hospital where somebody you love is sick.
Speaker 1: I've been trying since we came back to find anything
Speaker 1: in the historical record about that ridge or that area.
Speaker 1: I'm not a historian, I'm not a researcher. I'm a
Speaker 1: guy with Google. But I've looked. I've spent a lot
Speaker 1: of nights looking. There are stories, if you know where
Speaker 1: to look, stories about that whole part of Eastern Kentucky stories.
Speaker 1: The old families tell stories the Cherokee and the Shawnee
Speaker 1: told about the country up in those hollers, about places
Speaker 1: a person shouldn't go after dark. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: repeat those stories here, because I know what kind of
Speaker 1: show you run, and I know you don't want me
Speaker 1: piling up folklore on top of what I saw to
Speaker 1: make my story sound bigger than it is. But I'll
Speaker 1: tell you the stories are there. They're old, they're consistent,
Speaker 1: and they say in their own ways what Pap said
Speaker 1: in his There are places in those mountains that aren't ours.
Speaker 1: That's what I came out of that cave understanding. There
Speaker 1: are places where something else lives, something that was here
Speaker 1: before us, something that's done a very good job for
Speaker 1: a very long time of not being seen. And every
Speaker 1: once in a while, three idiots with helmets and headlamps
Speaker 1: walk into one of those places by accident, and the
Speaker 1: thing that lives there has to make a decision about
Speaker 1: what to do with them. And we got lucky. The
Speaker 1: thing that came after us in that big room could
Speaker 1: have caught Caleb on that rope, it chose not to.
Speaker 1: I think about what kind of creature draws a line
Speaker 1: in the dark and decides this far, no further. I
Speaker 1: don't have a clean ending for you. I know how
Speaker 1: your shows usually end. I know the way the music
Speaker 1: comes in at the end, and the way you wrap
Speaker 1: a story. I don't have that. What I have is
Speaker 1: my friend Caleb buried his grandfather a year ago, and
Speaker 1: his grandfather left him a question, and we went and
Speaker 1: we answered the question. And the answer is that Pap
Speaker 1: was right. And the answer is that we shouldn't have gone.
Speaker 1: And the answer is that there was a reason, an
Speaker 1: old reason, an older reason than this country has been
Speaker 1: a country that good men in those hills knew to
Speaker 1: stay off that ridge. That's the answer. There's no extra act.
Speaker 1: After that, we came home. We kept our jobs, We
Speaker 1: hugged our wives, and tried to carry on with our lives.
Speaker 1: About a month ago, I had a dream. I don't
Speaker 1: usually remember my dreams, but I remember this one vividly.
Speaker 1: I was standing at the four foot slot in the
Speaker 1: rock the entrance, on a sunny afternoon, with no pack
Speaker 1: and no helmet. I was just standing there. The slot
Speaker 1: was open, the cool air was coming out of it
Speaker 1: the way it had that morning, and I knew in
Speaker 1: the dream that something was standing inside the slot, just
Speaker 1: out of the light, looking at me. I couldn't see it,
Speaker 1: I could feel it, and it wasn't angry, that's the thing.
Speaker 1: It wasn't threatening me. It was just looking at me,
Speaker 1: and it was waiting, the way something waits when it
Speaker 1: has all the time in the world and it knows
Speaker 1: you'll come back. Eventually. I woke up. I lay there
Speaker 1: in bed in the dark, next to my wife. I
Speaker 1: told myself, Keith, you're not going back. I told myself
Speaker 1: out loud. I said it, I'm not going back. I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm not going back. But I dream about it
Speaker 1: about twice a week now. The dream doesn't feel like
Speaker 1: a warning. The dream feels like a reminder. The dream
Speaker 1: feels like something is very patiently on the other side
Speaker 1: of the world from me, remembering my face. I'm going
Speaker 1: to send this before I lose my nerve. Thank you
Speaker 1: for the show, thank you for taking the time to
Speaker 1: read this. I'm sorry it ran so long. I've wanted
Speaker 1: to tell somebody this for a year, and you turned
Speaker 1: out to be the somebody. I hope that's all right.
Speaker 1: Take care, Keith, I wrote Keith back and the two
Speaker 1: of us talked. And now you've heard it the way
Speaker 1: I heard it. As I said at the start, I
Speaker 1: can't tell you what to make of it. I have
Speaker 1: my own thoughts, you'll have yours. Keith mentioned near the
Speaker 1: end that he believes they are places in this country
Speaker 1: that aren't ours. He said it the way a man
Speaker 1: says something he's come to believe slowly against his own preference.
Speaker 1: I've been thinking about that line for a few weeks now.
Speaker 1: I've been thinking about Pap, and about what kind of
Speaker 1: man holds a piece of knowledge like that for sixty
Speaker 1: odd years and never quite lets go of it. And
Speaker 1: I've been thinking about what it costs Pap to write
Speaker 1: those two words on that map and put it in
Speaker 1: the back of the kitchen drawer, knowing that someday his
Speaker 1: grandson would find it. There's a kind of love in that,
Speaker 1: a hard country kind of love, the kind that warns
Speaker 1: you twice and then lets you make your own choice.
Speaker 1: I hope wherever Pap is, he knows the warning got through,
Speaker 1: even if it took a little longer than he meant
Speaker 1: it to. Until next time, take care of each other
Speaker 1: out there, And if your granddad ever told you to
Speaker 1: stay off a particular piece of ground. Friend, do me
Speaker 1: a favor. Stay off it, did, Di