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: If you've been with us since the beginning, you know
Speaker 1: what's been building here. If you're just tuning in, I'd
Speaker 1: ask you to go back and start with part one,
Speaker 1: because what Garrett's about to describe only carries its full
Speaker 1: weight if you've walked the road that got him here.
Speaker 1: The short version is this. Over five years on a
Speaker 1: remote mountain property in western North Carolina, Garrett has gone
Speaker 1: from hearing unexplained wood knocks to standing on a cliff
Speaker 1: above three creatures that looked up at him without a
Speaker 1: trace of fear. Along the way, he's had his brother's
Speaker 1: voice stolen and played back to him in a ravine.
Speaker 1: He's found tracks circling his cabin in the snow while
Speaker 1: he slept, His dogs chased something into the forest and
Speaker 1: came back broken, And a woman who'd been living across
Speaker 1: the creek for fifty years handed him three decades of
Speaker 1: documentation that confirmed everything he'd experienced and extended the timeline
Speaker 1: back to nineteen sixty three. Through all of it, one
Speaker 1: person has been on the other end of the phone. Cliff,
Speaker 1: Garrett's best friend since high school. The guy who drove
Speaker 1: four hours in a snowstorm to measure handprints on a
Speaker 1: cabin wall.
Speaker 2: The guy who said he believed.
Speaker 1: Him while standing in seventeen inch footprints. The guy who'd
Speaker 1: been hearing about the ridge for five years without ever
Speaker 1: being on it after dark. That changed on a Saturday
Speaker 1: night in September of twenty nineteen, and what happened up
Speaker 1: there is the reason Cliff hasn't set foot on Garrett's
Speaker 1: property since Here's Garrett. I need to talk about why
Speaker 1: we did it before I talk about what happened when
Speaker 1: we did. By the fall of twenty nineteen, i'd been
Speaker 1: on the mountain for five and a half years. I'd
Speaker 1: been through every phase a person goes through when they're
Speaker 1: living alongside something like this. The denial phase, where you
Speaker 1: explain away every sound and every track and every feeling
Speaker 1: as something ordinary. The fear phase, where you stop explaining
Speaker 1: and start locking doors. The obsessive documentation phase, where you
Speaker 1: fill notebooks and photograph footprints and cross reference dates like
Speaker 1: a man building a legal case against something that will
Speaker 1: never stand trial.
Speaker 2: The withdrawal after the dogs.
Speaker 1: When the guilt got heavier than the curiosity and I
Speaker 1: spent a winter barely going outside, And the slow rebuilding
Speaker 1: after Opal's visit, when Vernon's files gave me fifty years
Speaker 1: of context and the mountain started to feel less like
Speaker 1: a haunted house and more like a shared address. By
Speaker 1: September of nineteen, I'd arrived at something I'd describe as
Speaker 1: settled awareness. I knew what was out there, I knew
Speaker 1: what it did. I had Vernon's records to back up
Speaker 1: my own observations and extend the timeline back half a century.
Speaker 1: The mystery hadn't been solved exactly, but it had been mapped.
Speaker 1: The terrain was familiar, even if the thing moving through
Speaker 1: it wasn't, and that familiarity had bred something dangerous. Confidence.
Speaker 1: I don't mean confidence in the good sense. I mean
Speaker 1: the kind that creeps in when you've been scared for
Speaker 1: a long time and nothing bad has actually happened to you.
Speaker 1: The kind that whispers see, it's fine. They've had a
Speaker 1: thousand chances to hurt you and they haven't. Maybe they won't.
Speaker 1: Maybe you can push a little further. I'd been listening
Speaker 1: to a lot of research content by that point, your shows,
Speaker 1: other podcasts, some of the longer form interviews with field
Speaker 1: researchers who'd spent years doing active engagement in known activity
Speaker 1: areas wood knocks, call blasts, thermal cameras, parabolic microphones, the
Speaker 1: whole toolkit, and some of those researchers had gotten results, responses,
Speaker 1: close range interactions that they documented and built theories around.
Speaker 1: I'd been absorbing all of that, and a part of me,
Speaker 1: the part that had been passively observing for five years,
Speaker 1: wanted to try it. I'd never initiated contact since the
Speaker 1: call and response experiment in my first summer. That one
Speaker 1: evening in July of twenty fourteen, when I'd knocked on
Speaker 1: a hickory tree and gotten matching patterns from the ridge,
Speaker 1: that had shaken me enough that I hadn't tried again.
Speaker 1: But five years of accumulated experience had dulled the edge
Speaker 1: of that fear, and the researcher in me, the part
Speaker 1: that kept the spiral notebook and studied Vernon's topo map
Speaker 1: and cross referenced seasonal patterns, wanted more data. Cliff was
Speaker 1: the one who actually brought it up. He called on
Speaker 1: a Sunday evening in early September, and after the usual
Speaker 1: twenty minutes of Panther's talk and job updates and whether
Speaker 1: his oldest was going to make varsity basketball, he floated
Speaker 1: the idea. He said, we should go up to the
Speaker 1: ridge at night, knock, play some calls, set up, and
Speaker 1: see what happened. He said, I'd been sitting on that
Speaker 1: mountain for five years listening to them come to me,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to know what would happen if we
Speaker 1: went to them.
Speaker 2: I should have told him no.
Speaker 1: Everything Opal had shared with me about Earl's philosophy about
Speaker 1: the silence being the currency that bought safety about the
Speaker 1: agreement being fragile and generational and not guaranteed to hold.
Speaker 1: All of that should have been ringing in my ears
Speaker 1: like a fire alarm. Going to the ridge to knock
Speaker 1: was the opposite of silence. It was provocation, walking into
Speaker 1: their territory and making noise on purpose and saying in
Speaker 1: whatever language the knocking constituted, we're here, We know you're here.
Speaker 1: Come talk to us. But I didn't say no. I
Speaker 1: told him Saturday worked, bring warm clothes. He arrived at
Speaker 1: the cabin around two in the afternoon on September twenty first.
Speaker 1: His truck was loaded with more gear than I'd expected,
Speaker 1: a cooler, a backpack, a camera bag, a folding chair
Speaker 1: he thought he'd carry to the ridge, which I talked
Speaker 1: him out of immediately, and a pair of binoculars he'd
Speaker 1: bought at a sporting goods store on the drive up.
Speaker 1: He'd also brought a baseball bat. He said it was
Speaker 1: for knocking that I'd mentioned using firewood the first time,
Speaker 1: and a bat would have better swing weight. Neither of
Speaker 1: us acknowledged out loud that the bat also doubled as
Speaker 1: a weapon. We both knew, we just didn't say it.
Speaker 1: There are certain things two men don't discuss when they're
Speaker 1: about to do. Something that both of them suspect is
Speaker 1: a bad eye idea. The unspoken agreement to not name
Speaker 1: the danger is its own kind of courage or stupidity.
Speaker 1: The line between those two is thinner than most people think.
Speaker 1: We spent the afternoon getting ready. I showed him Vernon's
Speaker 1: topo map, which I'd pinned to the wall of the workshop,
Speaker 1: and traced the corridor for him, the red pencil line
Speaker 1: running from the headwater spring to the confluence, the no
Speaker 1: zones Vernon had identified marked with asterisks, the sixteen green
Speaker 1: triangles of the structure sites, the two yellow circles of
Speaker 1: the suspected den areas, and the bluff marked with a
Speaker 1: circle dot from Vernon's eighty three siding. Sitting at the
Speaker 1: top of the corridor like a watch tower over everything below,
Speaker 1: Cliff studied the map the way he studies mechanical drawings,
Speaker 1: with his whole body, leaning in, tracing lines with his finger,
Speaker 1: asking questions about distance and elevation and terrain type. He
Speaker 1: wanted to understand the space the way he understood a
Speaker 1: building systems as a network of connected pathways, with predictable
Speaker 1: behaviors and identifiable failure points. The map gave him that,
Speaker 1: or seemed to. What it couldn't give him was the
Speaker 1: feeling of standing inside the network after dark, which was
Speaker 1: something no map can prepare you for. I showed him
Speaker 1: where I planned to set up a wide shoulder on
Speaker 1: the ridge line, about two hundred yards south of the bluff,
Speaker 1: not the bluff itself. I wasn't going back there in
Speaker 1: the dark, not after what I'd seen on the Talus
Speaker 1: slope in sixteen. The shoulder had decent sight lines through
Speaker 1: the bare upper canopy trees, and more importantly, it had
Speaker 1: two clear exit roots, one leading southwest back toward the
Speaker 1: cabin via the game trail I knew, and one leading
Speaker 1: south along the ridge toward a secondary trail that dropped
Speaker 1: into the Bishop Creek drainage. If things went sideways, we'd
Speaker 1: have options.
Speaker 2: That was the theory. Theories are cheap.
Speaker 1: Options are what you actually use when the theory fails.
Speaker 1: I also told him the rules. We'd knock in sets
Speaker 1: of three, with the bat spaced about two minutes apart.
Speaker 1: Five sets, then fifteen minutes of silence. If we got
Speaker 1: a response, we'd document it timestamp, direction count, estimated distance.
Speaker 1: We wouldn't knock back immediately, at least three minutes between
Speaker 1: their response and our next knock. I'd brought a call
Speaker 1: blast recording, a Sierra Sounds clip that's widely used in research,
Speaker 1: and we'd play it through a portable bluetooth speaker at
Speaker 1: moderate volume. One blast, then five minutes of silence, and
Speaker 1: if anything got within one hundred yards of our position,
Speaker 1: we'd stop knocking and start paying serious attention to our exits.
Speaker 1: Cliff took all of this in the way he takes
Speaker 1: in a wiring diagram, methodically, without argument. He asked about
Speaker 1: the dogs, and I told him Bowie and Ruby were
Speaker 1: staying at the cabin. Bowie was ten and a half.
Speaker 1: His hips wouldn't make the climb, and even if they could,
Speaker 1: I wasn't putting either dog in a situation like this again,
Speaker 1: Not after October of seventeen. The memory of Bowie wedged
Speaker 1: under that log was still sharp enough to cut, and
Speaker 1: I'd sworn to myself after that night that I'd never
Speaker 1: again bring my dogs into a scenario where the creatures
Speaker 1: had any advantage, which, on their ridge after dark was
Speaker 1: every advantage. We ate An early dinner on the porch,
Speaker 1: sandwiches and coffee. The afternoon was warm for late September
Speaker 1: mid seventies, with a light breeze from the south and
Speaker 1: a sky that was mostly clear. The ridge was sharp
Speaker 1: against the blue, every tree visible, the canopy just starting
Speaker 1: to show the first hints of color change.
Speaker 2: A few sour woods.
Speaker 1: Had turned early, A couple of red maples along Bishop
Speaker 1: Creek were going orange at the edges. The mountain was
Speaker 1: in that brief pause between full summer green and the
Speaker 1: riot of October that held breath before the change. If
Speaker 1: you didn't know what lived up there, you'd call it paradise.
Speaker 1: I told Cliff about Opal. He'd heard bits and pieces
Speaker 1: on the phone over the past year, but I gave
Speaker 1: him the full version that afternoon. Vernon's files, the thirty
Speaker 1: years of documentation, the topo map and the creek corridor,
Speaker 1: and the generational theory, rebelieving food on the stump, earle,
Speaker 1: believing the silence was what kept them safe, Ople's warning
Speaker 1: that the credit was running out and the new generation
Speaker 1: was writing its own rules. He listened to all of
Speaker 1: it without interrupting, which was unusual for Cliff. Normally, he'd
Speaker 1: cut in with a question or a joke, or some
Speaker 1: piece of commentary that was half helpful and half irritating.
Speaker 1: But that afternoon he just sat and took it in
Speaker 1: his coffee, going cold in his hands, his eyes moving
Speaker 1: between me and the ridge behind me, as if he
Speaker 1: was watching the story play out against the tree line
Speaker 1: while I told it.
Speaker 2: When I finished, he was quiet for a while. Then
Speaker 2: he pointed out, with the.
Speaker 1: Dry honesty that's always been his best and most aggravating quality,
Speaker 1: that Vernon had kept quiet for thirty years, an Earl
Speaker 1: had kept quiet for forty three, and here we were
Speaker 1: about to hike up there with a baseball bat and
Speaker 1: a bluetooth speaker. He wasn't wrong. He was never wrong
Speaker 1: about things like that. He was just wrong about what
Speaker 1: to do with the information. We left the cabin at
Speaker 1: six point fifteen. Sunset was around seven twenty, and I
Speaker 1: wanted to be on the ridge and set up before
Speaker 1: the light went Bowie and Ruby watched us from the
Speaker 1: front window as we crossed the meadow.
Speaker 2: I'd given them.
Speaker 1: Each a biscuit before we left, the way you'd give
Speaker 1: a kid a treat before leaving them with a sitter.
Speaker 1: It didn't make me feel less guilty about going. Bowie
Speaker 1: was standing on the couch with his paws on the seal,
Speaker 1: and even from across the meadow, I could see his
Speaker 1: ears tracking us. Ruby was beside him, her one good
Speaker 1: ear pointing in our direction, her body tense with that
Speaker 1: particular frustration dog show when the humans are doing something
Speaker 1: without them and they can't figure out why. The hike
Speaker 1: started on the game trail behind the cabin, the same
Speaker 1: route I'd taken to the bluff.
Speaker 2: Two years earlier.
Speaker 1: The trail was well worn from deer traffic and my
Speaker 1: own trips up the slope, a narrow groove in the
Speaker 1: leaf litter that switched back.
Speaker 2: Through the hardwoods.
Speaker 1: The trees were tall here, mature oaks and hickories, their
Speaker 1: canopy interlocking overhead so tight that the evening light came
Speaker 1: through in coins and fragments. The air was still warm
Speaker 1: at ground level, but you could feel the cooler layer
Speaker 1: above it, the first sign of the temperature inversion that
Speaker 1: would settle into the hollows after dark and make the
Speaker 1: lowlands ten degrees colder than the ridge. Cliff was in
Speaker 1: decent shape for a guy in his mid forties who
Speaker 1: spent most of his working life crawling through attics and basements.
Speaker 1: He kept up without complaint, though his breathing got heavy
Speaker 1: on the steeper sections, and he stopped once to adjust
Speaker 1: his pack straps where they were cutting into his shoulders.
Speaker 1: He'd loaded too much, the camera, the binoculars, a jacket
Speaker 1: he didn't need yet, a water bottle, an emergency blanket
Speaker 1: he'd apparently thrown in at the last minute. I told
Speaker 1: him to pack light. He'd packed cliff, which is a
Speaker 1: different thing entirely. He'd never hiked this slope before, and
Speaker 1: I could see him taking it in the way a
Speaker 1: contractor takes in a building, assessing load paths, filing away
Speaker 1: the grade and the footing and the canopy density. He
Speaker 1: was figuring out how fast he could move through this terrain,
Speaker 1: if he had to move fast, how much the leaf
Speaker 1: litter would slow him down, Where the rock out crops
Speaker 1: were that could trip you in the dark, Which trees
Speaker 1: were big enough to get behind if you needed something
Speaker 1: at your back. He'd never admit that's what he was doing,
Speaker 1: but I'd known him thirty years, and I could read
Speaker 1: his body language the way he could read a compressor.
Speaker 1: About halfway up, he stopped and turned around to look
Speaker 1: back down the slope. Through the trees, you could just
Speaker 1: make out the cabin roof and a slice of the
Speaker 1: meadow below glowing gold in the lateral light. The view
Speaker 1: was beautiful, peaceful, the kind of scene that makes real
Speaker 1: estate agents reach for words like paradise and haven. If
Speaker 1: you didn't know what used this slope as a highway
Speaker 1: after dark, you'd never want to leave. He mentioned the
Speaker 1: nice view. I told him it was nicer from the top.
Speaker 1: He turned back uphill and started climbing again. And then
Speaker 1: he brought up Vernon, whether the forest serviceman had ever
Speaker 1: gone to them, whether he'd ever hiked up to the
Speaker 1: ridge on purpose to initiate contact in the thirty years
Speaker 1: he'd been watching. I thought about it carefully. I'd been
Speaker 1: through every page of Vernon's files, hundreds of entries, thousands
Speaker 1: of individual observations, and every single one was passive. Vernon
Speaker 1: had documented what came to him, what crossed his path,
Speaker 1: what he encountered during the course of his daily work.
Speaker 1: He'd never gone looking, he'd never knocked, he'd never played calls.
Speaker 1: He'd never set up a microphone on a ridge shoulder
Speaker 1: at dusk and sent a recording of something that sounded
Speaker 1: like his subjects into the forest. In thirty years of
Speaker 1: watching the creatures, Vernon had never once done what.
Speaker 2: We were about to do.
Speaker 1: I told Cliff that no, Vernon hadn't, and Cliff absorbed
Speaker 1: that and pointed out that Vernon had lived to be
Speaker 1: sixty eight. Heart trouble killed him. I said, not the ridge,
Speaker 1: and Cliff observed, with the kind of fairness that makes
Speaker 1: him both a great friend and an annoying one, that
Speaker 1: Vernon hadn't given the Ridge a chance to try. I
Speaker 1: didn't have a response for that. I should have had one.
Speaker 1: I should have heard it as the warning it was,
Speaker 1: and said, you're right. Let's go back to the porch
Speaker 1: and open a couple beers and listen from a safe distance,
Speaker 1: the way Vernon did for three decades. But I didn't
Speaker 1: say that. I kept climbing, and Cliff kept climbing behind me,
Speaker 1: two men walking uphill into a bad idea, each one
Speaker 1: aware it was bad, neither one willing to be the
Speaker 1: first to say so. We didn't talk much after that.
Speaker 1: The slope took most of our wind, and the forest
Speaker 1: had shifted into that evening mode where every sound you
Speaker 1: make feels amplified, and every silence feels like someone listening.
Speaker 1: The birds had quit, the insects were winding down. About
Speaker 1: three quarters of the way up, a barred owl called
Speaker 1: from somewhere to the south, and Cliff flinched at it.
Speaker 1: He caught himself and shook his head, and I could
Speaker 1: see him filing that reaction away as a preview of
Speaker 1: how the rest.
Speaker 2: Of the night was going to go.
Speaker 1: We reached the ridge shoulder at six point fifty. The
Speaker 1: spot was as I remembered it, about thirty feet across,
Speaker 1: bounded by hard woods on the north and south sides,
Speaker 1: and dropping away steeply to the east and west. The
Speaker 1: canopy was thinner up here, and I could see patches
Speaker 1: of sky still light, the first star not yet visible
Speaker 1: to the north. About two hundred yards through the trees,
Speaker 1: the ridge rose toward the bluff. I couldn't see it
Speaker 1: from where we stood, but I knew it was there.
Speaker 1: I set up the audio recorder on a small tripod
Speaker 1: positioned on a flat rock near the center of the shoulder.
Speaker 1: Cliff unloaded his camera, checked the battery, hung the binoculars
Speaker 1: around his neck. I paired the speaker to my phone.
Speaker 1: We'd agreed to start with knocks and moved to the
Speaker 1: call blast light later if the knox produced nothing. The
Speaker 1: sun was sitting on the western ridge, maybe ten minutes
Speaker 1: of direct light left. The shadows in the hollows below
Speaker 1: us were already deep. Cliff walked to a dead oak
Speaker 1: about fifteen feet from where I stood, set his feet,
Speaker 1: and swung the bat. The sound was enormous, not like
Speaker 1: the wood knocking I'd been hearing for five years, which
Speaker 1: was relatively contained and focused. This was louder, broader, amplified
Speaker 1: by the dead wood of the oak acting as a
Speaker 1: resonating chamber. The crack rolled out across the ridge in
Speaker 1: every direction, echoing off the slopes, bouncing through the hollows,
Speaker 1: carrying further than I'd anticipated. It sounded like someone had
Speaker 1: fired a cannon. Cliff flinched at his own noise. He
Speaker 1: hit the tree twice more. The second and third strikes
Speaker 1: were slightly less explosive, either because the trunk had absorbed
Speaker 1: some energy or because he was unconsciously pulling his swing.
Speaker 1: Three strikes our opening statement sent out across every square
Speaker 1: foot of terrain within a half mile. Then we stood
Speaker 1: there and we waited. The silence that followed was the
Speaker 1: most complete I'd ever experienced on the mountain. Not the
Speaker 1: pressurized silence of the encounters, where the air feels thick
Speaker 1: and the absence of sound becomes its own kind of noise.
Speaker 1: This was the silence of a forest that had just
Speaker 1: heard something unexpected and was deciding what to do about it.
Speaker 1: An intake of breath across an entire landscape. Two minutes
Speaker 1: I watched the second hand on my watch, Cliff stood
Speaker 1: with the bat at his side, facing north, scanning the
Speaker 1: tree line. The light was dropping fast. At two minutes
Speaker 1: and about fifteen seconds, something answered from the north, from
Speaker 1: the direction of the bluff, maybe one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: yards away, A single strike, heavy resonant. Not the same
Speaker 1: sound we'd made. Ours had been a bat on a
Speaker 1: dead hollow oak. This was denser, fuller, the deep, solid
Speaker 1: impact of some something hitting the living tree with enough
Speaker 1: force to make the sound carry across the ridge and
Speaker 1: down into the hollows on both sides. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: I knew this sound. I'd been hearing it from my
Speaker 1: porch for five years, but hearing it from one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty yards while standing on a ridge at dusk
Speaker 1: is a fundamentally different thing than hearing it from a
Speaker 1: quarter mile away while sitting in a chair with a beer.
Speaker 1: The distance changes everything. From the porch, the knocking was
Speaker 1: a data point from one hundred and fifty yards. It
Speaker 1: was a voice, and it was talking to us. One
Speaker 1: strike and then silence, the kind that has texture. You
Speaker 1: could feel the forest holding still around the fading echo,
Speaker 1: Everything suspended, waiting for whatever came next.
Speaker 2: Cliff went rigid.
Speaker 1: Every muscle in his upper body engaged, His knuckles went
Speaker 1: white on the bad handle. He turned to me and
Speaker 1: I could see it in his face, the moment where
Speaker 1: it stopped being a theory he'd been entertaining from a
Speaker 1: safe distance, and became something real that was one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty yards away in the dark. I told him
Speaker 1: to knock again, three more. He swung three clean strikes.
Speaker 1: The sound went out. This set felt different. The first
Speaker 1: had been a question thrown into the void. This was
Speaker 1: a continuation. We'd knocked, they'd answered. Now we were knocking again,
Speaker 1: and everybody involved knew it. The response came faster this time,
Speaker 1: maybe forty five seconds, two strikes from the north, same direction,
Speaker 1: same quality, measured, unhurried, not matching our three for three
Speaker 1: two strikes. Only whatever was responding had its own count,
Speaker 1: its own rhythm, its own ideas about how this exchange
Speaker 1: was supposed to go. And then, before the echo of
Speaker 1: the second northern strike had finished decaying, a third strike
Speaker 1: from a different direction, entirely east below us, down the
Speaker 1: slope toward the Bishop Creek drainage, maybe two hundred yards,
Speaker 1: A single sharp crack that cut through the dusk from
Speaker 1: a completely different angle, higher pitched, thinner, a different striking surface,
Speaker 1: or a different force behind the blow. Two sources, two directions,
Speaker 1: the same call and response pattern I documented from my
Speaker 1: porch during the first summer when the ridge knocking was
Speaker 1: answered from the creek. Except now I was standing on
Speaker 1: the ridge between the sources, at the intersection of two
Speaker 1: lines of communication that had just triangulated my position. Cliff
Speaker 1: heard the eastern strike and his whole body reoriented, head
Speaker 1: swiveling north to east, his brain trying to process two
Speaker 1: threat vectors simultaneously. He picked up on something I hadn't
Speaker 1: consciously registered, the pitch difference between the two responses. The
Speaker 1: northern strike was lower, heavier wood, or more force. The
Speaker 1: eastern was sharper, brighter. Different acoustic signatures, different sources, different individuals.
Speaker 1: Cliff's ears were good, honed by decades of diagnosing mechanical
Speaker 1: problems by sound and HVAC system clicking or rattling told
Speaker 1: him things most people couldn't hear. He was applying the
Speaker 1: same skill here, and he'd confirmed what I suspected, at
Speaker 1: least two of them, positioned on different sides of our location.
Speaker 1: I checked the recorder. The levels had spiked during the responses.
Speaker 1: The directional mike had captured both strikes with good clarity.
Speaker 1: We'd gotten what we came for in under five minutes.
Speaker 1: The smart play was to pack up and go home
Speaker 1: with the recordings and call it the most productive forty
Speaker 1: five minutes of field work I'd ever done. But the
Speaker 1: researcher in me wasn't finished. I wanted to hear what
Speaker 1: happened when you spoke their language at close range, not
Speaker 1: from a porch a quarter mile away from the ridge itself,
Speaker 1: in their territory, at their elevation. I turned on the speaker,
Speaker 1: brought up the Sierra Sounds clip on my phone, and
Speaker 1: pressed play. The vocalization came out of the bluetooth speaker
Speaker 1: and filled the ridge shoulder the way water fills a bowl.
Speaker 1: If you've never heard the Sierra Sounds recordings, they're hard
Speaker 1: to describe. Multiple tones at once, frequencies that overlap and
Speaker 1: interfere with each other, A sustained modulating call that lasts
Speaker 1: about fifteen seconds and seems to come from a chest
Speaker 1: cavity much larger than any person's played at volume on
Speaker 1: a darkening ridge in the Southern Appalachians, surrounded by five
Speaker 1: years of documented activity and two fresh responses from one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty yards away. It was one of the
Speaker 1: most unsettling sounds I've ever been responsible for producing. It
Speaker 1: rolled out across the ridge and down both slopes and
Speaker 1: into every fold of terrain within a quarter mile. An announcement,
Speaker 1: a challenge, a greeting I didn't know which we were speaking,
Speaker 1: a language we didn't understand, at a volume that guaranteed
Speaker 1: we'd be heard by everything within earshot. When the clip ended,
Speaker 1: the silence at left behind was different from any silence
Speaker 1: I'd experienced on the mountain. It wasn't the held breath
Speaker 1: silence of the forest pausing. It was the silence of
Speaker 1: attention of something that has heard something unexpected and is deciding.
Speaker 2: What to do about it. I shut off the speaker.
Speaker 1: Cliff was looking at me with an expression I could read,
Speaker 1: even in the failing light, somewhere between what did you
Speaker 1: just do? And what have I gotten myself into? We
Speaker 1: waited one minute two three. The dust had crossed into
Speaker 1: early dark. I could still make out the tree trunks
Speaker 1: around us, but the spaces between them had filled with shadow,
Speaker 1: the individual trees merging into a continuous dark wall on
Speaker 1: every side. The sky still held a faint glow to
Speaker 1: the west, but at ground level the world had gone
Speaker 1: to shapes and outlines, and the kind of half visibility
Speaker 1: where your brain starts inventing details to fill the gaps.
Speaker 1: At three minutes and about forty seconds, the ridge came
Speaker 1: alive from the north. A vocalization, not a knock, something alive,
Speaker 1: something produced by a throat and a chest cavity and
Speaker 1: vocal anatomy operating on a scale I've never encountered in
Speaker 1: any other context. It started low below the range where
Speaker 1: you'd normally register a sound as a voice, more of
Speaker 1: a pressure change, a thickening in the air, and then
Speaker 1: it climbed into audibility, rising through maybe two octaves in
Speaker 1: about two seconds, the note modulating as it rose, wavering slightly,
Speaker 1: with a grain to it that sounded organic, the sound
Speaker 1: of tissue vibrating against tissue inside a body much larger
Speaker 1: than mine. It held at the top of its range
Speaker 1: for maybe three seconds, and during those seconds, standing on
Speaker 1: that ridge with the dark closing in, I heard details
Speaker 1: that distance had always stripped away during the five years
Speaker 1: I'd been listening from the porch of vibrato. At the peak,
Speaker 1: a slight, rapid oscillation that sounded intentional, not a tremor,
Speaker 1: but a technique. And the cutoff at the end wasn't
Speaker 1: a fade. It was a snap, a wet muscular closure
Speaker 1: that terminated the note with a finality that suggested absolute
Speaker 1: control over the instrument producing it. This wasn't a random
Speaker 1: animal cry. This was a produced sound, shaped, controlled, delivered
Speaker 1: with the precision of something that had been making this
Speaker 1: exact noise for a very long time. The vocalization was
Speaker 1: still echoing when a second sound answered from the east,
Speaker 1: different pitch, higher, more staccato.
Speaker 2: A rapid series of.
Speaker 1: Tonal bursts, almost barking, punched out in quick succession, four, five,
Speaker 1: six of them. It came from the same general area
Speaker 1: where the eastern knock had originated, but closer, now noticeably closer.
Speaker 1: Whatever was down there had been moving uphill toward us
Speaker 1: during the intervening time, cutting the distance by fifty or
Speaker 1: sixty yards. While we'd been standing on the ridge trading
Speaker 1: knocks and playing recordings. It had been approaching quietly while
Speaker 1: we were focused on the north. And then the third
Speaker 1: sound from the south, behind us along the ridge, the
Speaker 1: direction of our primary exit route. This one wasn't a vocalization.
Speaker 1: It was wood, a single massive tree strike, the deep
Speaker 1: concussive boom that you feel in your chest before your
Speaker 1: ears have finished processing the sound, the kind of impact
Speaker 1: i'd heard only three times in five years. Each one
Speaker 1: seared into memory. The same category of force that had
Speaker 1: shattered bark on the oak near my cabin during the
Speaker 1: descending knocks in January of sixteen, the same force that
Speaker 1: had snapped Vernon's hemlock in half in seventy six from
Speaker 1: the south behind us on our exit route, close enough
Speaker 1: that the concussion wave arrived with a physical push, a
Speaker 1: puff of compressed air that I felt on the exposed
Speaker 1: skin of my face and hands, three sounds, three directions north,
Speaker 1: east south. The only quadrant that hadn't produced a sound
Speaker 1: was west downhill toward the meadow in the cabin. I
Speaker 1: didn't know if that gap was accidental or deliberate, a
Speaker 1: door left ajar, an exit offered, or simply a direction
Speaker 1: they hadn't staffed yet. Because three points were enough to
Speaker 1: make their point, I ran the geometry in my head
Speaker 1: while the adrenaline was still building. The northern vocalization was
Speaker 1: ahead of us, between us and the bluff at roughly
Speaker 1: one hundred yards, close, much closer than the initial knocking
Speaker 1: response had been. It had moved toward us in the
Speaker 1: twenty minutes since the first exchange, covering fifty yards of
Speaker 1: ridgeline without a sound. The eastern barking was below and
Speaker 1: to our right on the slope toward Bishop Creek, and
Speaker 1: it too had closed distance since the earlier knock from
Speaker 1: that direction. Whatever was down there had been walking uphill
Speaker 1: toward us for the past twenty minutes quietly while we
Speaker 1: were focused on the north and our call blast and
Speaker 1: our recorder levels. And the southern tree strike was behind
Speaker 1: us on or near the ridge line. Trail, the one
Speaker 1: we'd planned to use to get home. In Vernon's terminology,
Speaker 1: the earlier distance knocking had been conversational, two parties acknowledging
Speaker 1: each other across the terrain. What was happening now was operational.
Speaker 1: The shift had occurred in the four minutes between our
Speaker 1: call blast and their coordinated response. We'd escalated with the
Speaker 1: Sierra Sounds clip, speaking in a frequency and a format
Speaker 1: that was closer to their own communication than anything we'd
Speaker 1: done with the bat, and they'd escalated back, not with violence,
Speaker 1: with positioning. They deployed the same three point formation I'd
Speaker 1: seen on the bluff, the same coordinated bracket they'd used
Speaker 1: in the forest the night the dogs went in, and
Speaker 1: they'd assembled it around us in under four minutes on
Speaker 1: terrain that was steep, dark and choked with underbrush. That speed,
Speaker 1: that coordination, the ability to go from scattered positions across
Speaker 1: the ridge to triangulated containment around a specific location in
Speaker 1: the time it took me to play a fifteen second
Speaker 1: recording and wait four minutes in silence. That's not instinct,
Speaker 1: that's not coincidence. That's a rehearsed, tactical response. Something they'd
Speaker 1: done before, probably many times against situations that required them
Speaker 1: to contain a disturbance without physical engagement. Show the perimeter,
Speaker 1: let the contained party figure out the implications, and then
Speaker 1: see what they do. The contained party was us, and
Speaker 1: I was figuring out the implications very fast. The adrenaline
Speaker 1: hit like a wall, not a gradual build, all at once,
Speaker 1: flooding my system so fast that my vision went sharp
Speaker 1: and narrow, and the edges of the world dimmed. My
Speaker 1: heart rate spiked to a level where I could feel
Speaker 1: individual beats in my fingertips. My legs went from relaxed
Speaker 1: to spring loaded. Every muscle shifted from observation mode to
Speaker 1: escape mode in about two seconds, without any conscious decision
Speaker 1: on my part. Art Cliff's body did the same thing.
Speaker 1: I could see it happening. His shoulders came up, his
Speaker 1: weight dropped into his legs. The bat came off his
Speaker 1: side and into a two handed grip across his chest.
Speaker 1: His head was swiveling north east south, trying to track
Speaker 1: the sources, trying to build a geometry of where they
Speaker 1: were and how close. He locked eyes with me, and
Speaker 1: I could see the math happening behind them. Three known
Speaker 1: positions are position the southern strike between us and the
Speaker 1: trail home. He didn't need me to spell it out.
Speaker 1: He'd done the same calculation I had and arrived at
Speaker 1: the same answer. We needed to move and west, the
Speaker 1: trail less downslope toward the meadow was the only direction
Speaker 1: that hadn't announced itself. I pointed west down the slope,
Speaker 1: no trail but clear ground, and it dropped straight to
Speaker 1: the meadow. Cliff didn't argue, didn't discuss, didn't ask for alternatives.
Speaker 1: He cinched his pack straps and looked at me with
Speaker 1: an expression that said lead. I left, the recorder, left
Speaker 1: the tripod, left the speaker, all of it sitting on
Speaker 1: the flat rock where I'd set it up forty five
Speaker 1: minutes and a lifetime earlier. It crossed my mind for
Speaker 1: half a second to grab the recorder, and then the
Speaker 1: half second passed and I didn't care. We hit the
Speaker 1: western edge and started down. The first fifty yards were bad.
Speaker 1: The slope dropped at an angle steeper than I'd remembered,
Speaker 1: or maybe it just felt steeper when you're moving fast
Speaker 1: in the dark and every footstep is a guess. The
Speaker 1: leaf litter was thick and damp, and my boots slid
Speaker 1: on every surface that wasn't solid rock. I went to
Speaker 1: a knee once, caught myself on a sapling, kept moving.
Speaker 1: Cliff stumbled behind me, and I heard him swear under
Speaker 1: his breath, one word, short and sharp and deeply felt.
Speaker 1: I had the flashlight out, using it in short bursts,
Speaker 1: a second or two of light to check the ground ahead,
Speaker 1: pick a root past the next obstacle than dark, then
Speaker 1: another burst. I didn't want a continuous beam, because a
Speaker 1: continuous beam is a trail marker. Short bursts gave us
Speaker 1: enough to navigate without broadcasting our descent to everything on
Speaker 1: the ridge. We'd gone about seventy or eighty yards when
Speaker 1: Cliff grabbed the back of my jacket.
Speaker 2: I stopped.
Speaker 1: He was looking north, toward the right side of our
Speaker 1: descent line. I'd heard it too, but hadn't said anything
Speaker 1: because I was hoping I was wrong. A soft rhythmic
Speaker 1: compression in the leaves, the sound of something heavy placing
Speaker 1: one foot after another at a pace that matched hours offset,
Speaker 1: maybe sixty yards to the north, not close enough to see,
Speaker 1: not far enough to ignore. I knew he knew something
Speaker 1: was keeping pace with us on a parallel course. He
Speaker 1: told me without words, just a grip on my jacket
Speaker 1: and a tilt of his head that whatever was out
Speaker 1: there was tracking us. I nodded. We kept moving. I
Speaker 1: told him quietly not to run, cause running on the
Speaker 1: slope in the dark meant falling, and falling meant not
Speaker 1: getting up fast enough. The paralleling continued as we descended.
Speaker 1: The thing to our right had started tapping, not the
Speaker 1: big booming knocks from earlier, light quick strikes every ten
Speaker 1: or fifteen seconds, functional rather than dramatic, and from behind
Speaker 1: us up on the ridge, faint answering taps two sound
Speaker 1: sources coordinating, exchanging positions, running a real time tracking system
Speaker 1: with us at the center. I'd heard researchers describe this
Speaker 1: behavior in recorded interviews, paralleling position, knocking, herding. The terminology vary,
Speaker 1: but the mechanics were consistent across accounts from every corner
Speaker 1: of the continent. Multiple individuals bracketing a moving target, communicating
Speaker 1: with each other through acoustic signals, maintaining a formation that
Speaker 1: could contract or expand depending on what the target did.
Speaker 1: It's how wolves hunt, it's how dolphins corral fish. It's
Speaker 1: how anything with group intelligence manages coordinated movement around a
Speaker 1: moving object, and we were that moving object. About two
Speaker 1: hundred yards into the descent, roughly halfway to the meadow,
Speaker 1: Cliff stopped me again. He was looking north, but this
Speaker 1: time he wasn't tracking a sound. He was feeling something.
Speaker 2: I felt it too.
Speaker 1: The tapping had stopped, the leaves were quiet, But something
Speaker 1: else was there. Not a sound your ears register in
Speaker 1: any normal sense. A vibration, a pressure, the same low
Speaker 1: frequency weight I'd felt on the night the creature breathed
Speaker 1: against my cabin wall, the same subsonic hume from the bluff.
Speaker 1: When the third creature vocalized, a bass note pitched below
Speaker 1: the floor of human hearing that you register in your
Speaker 1: chest and your sinuses, and your teeth and the soft
Speaker 1: tissue behind your eyes. It was close, strong enough that
Speaker 1: I could feel it modulating in my sternum, pulsing at
Speaker 1: a slow, steady rhythm, maybe one cycle percon second. Not
Speaker 1: my heart beat. Something else's too slow for a human heart,
Speaker 1: too regular for wind or water. It was being produced
Speaker 1: generated broadcast. Cliff was gripping my arm hard enough that
Speaker 1: I could feel his individual fingers through my jacket. His
Speaker 1: breathing had gone shallow and rapid. The involuntary response of
Speaker 1: a nervous system encountering a stimulus it can't categorize and
Speaker 1: defaulting to the oldest response in the book threat, Prepare
Speaker 1: to Move. I told him it was in for sound
Speaker 1: below twenty hurtz, below hearing range, but within perception range.
Speaker 1: Some researchers had theorized the creatures could produce it either
Speaker 1: vocally or through some chest resonance mechanism, and that it
Speaker 1: affected the human vestibular system. That the disorientation I'd felt
Speaker 1: in the ravine, the spatial confusion, the formless dread that
Speaker 1: accompanied the close encounters, might be a physiological response to
Speaker 1: frequencies I couldn't consciously hear, but that my boy was
Speaker 1: absorbing and reacting to. His grip tightened. He didn't need
Speaker 1: the science lesson, he needed it to stop. My legs
Speaker 1: felt unreliable, My balance was off, a faint tilt in
Speaker 1: my inner ear that hadn't been there thirty seconds ago.
Speaker 1: The anxiety was intense and directionless. Not fear of something specific,
Speaker 1: just dread, A heavy, formless certainty that something was wrong,
Speaker 1: that we were in danger, that we needed to move
Speaker 1: but might not be able to the kind of feeling
Speaker 1: that if you didn't know its source, you'd attribute to
Speaker 1: a panic attack or a cardiac event. We stood there
Speaker 1: for maybe fifteen seconds, feeling the vibration pulse through us.
Speaker 1: Cliff was trembling, not the way cold makes you tremble, vibrating,
Speaker 1: as if the infrasound had gotten into his muscles and
Speaker 1: was making them resonate at its frequency. Then from the north,
Speaker 1: about forty yards away, a branch snapped, a big one,
Speaker 1: the kind of crack that comes from something the thickness
Speaker 1: of your arm being stepped on and broken by weight
Speaker 1: it can't support. Cliff's head whipped toward the sound. The
Speaker 1: bat came off his shoulder and into both hands. His
Speaker 1: feet spread into a wider stance. Every instinct in his
Speaker 1: body was telling him to swing at whatever came next,
Speaker 1: and I put my hand on his arm and told
Speaker 1: him not to, not to swing, not to challenge. That's
Speaker 1: not what we wanted. Whatever was forty yards away in
Speaker 1: the dark was not something a baseball bat was going
Speaker 1: to discourage, and swinging at it would change the nature
Speaker 1: of the encounter from escort to confrontation. I told him
Speaker 1: what I believed was happening, that they were pacing us,
Speaker 1: not blocking us. The strikes had been lateral, not intercepting.
Speaker 1: The branch. Snap was close, but it wasn't in our path.
Speaker 1: Nothing had stepped in front of us, nothing had cut
Speaker 1: us off. They were walking us out the same way
Speaker 1: they'd walked me and the dogs out in seventeen. The
Speaker 1: circle that closes and then opens. That says we know
Speaker 1: exactly where you are, and we're going to make sure
Speaker 1: you know that we know, and then we're going to
Speaker 1: let you leave. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. Cliff took that in
Speaker 1: without visible comfort. He asked me, without looking at me,
Speaker 1: just staring into the dark where the snap had come from?
Speaker 1: What would happen if I was wrong about that? I
Speaker 1: didn't answer, because I didn't have one If I was wrong.
Speaker 1: We were on a mountain side in the dark, with
Speaker 1: multiple creatures between us and every exit except the one
Speaker 1: we were using, and the only weapons we had were
Speaker 1: a flashlight and a Lieusville slugger. We started moving again downhill.
Speaker 1: The paralleling resumed, but the tapping had stopped. Instead, we
Speaker 1: could hear displacement, the soft, heavy compression of something large
Speaker 1: moving through the leaf litter at our pace, offset to
Speaker 1: the north, steady and unhurried. It wasn't trying to be quiet.
Speaker 1: It wasn't trying to be loud. It was simply there
Speaker 1: moving when we moved, stopping when we stopped, maintaining a
Speaker 1: distance that said I know where you are at all times,
Speaker 1: and I'm choosing to stay right here. At about three
Speaker 1: hundred yards from the ridge, the slope started to flatten.
Speaker 1: We were approaching the transitional zone between the steep hard
Speaker 1: woods and the meadow. I could feel the grade easing
Speaker 1: under my boots, the leaf litter giving way to grass
Speaker 1: and low ground cover, and then the displacement sound stopped.
Speaker 1: Between one step and the next. Whatever had been paralleling
Speaker 1: us went silent. No gradual fade, no recession, a clean
Speaker 1: cut off, as if it had stopped moving the moment
Speaker 1: the terrain changed. I swung the flashlight in a short
Speaker 1: burst to the north. Trees, shadows, nothing visible, But the
Speaker 1: vibration was gone too. The infrasound had ceased at the
Speaker 1: same instant the displacement stopped. Both channels, audible and subsonic,
Speaker 1: switched off simultaneously, like someone pulling a plug. We were
Speaker 1: alone I knew it the way you know when someone
Speaker 1: leaves a room, the air changes, the space feels different,
Speaker 1: not because you heard them go, but because the quality
Speaker 1: of the silence shifts from occupied to empty. The forest
Speaker 1: around us was no longer holding anything. The pressure was gone,
Speaker 1: the attention was gone. Cliff felt it too. He said
Speaker 1: they'd stopped. I said yeah. He wanted to know why.
Speaker 1: I pointed through the last of the trees, maybe fifty
Speaker 1: yards ahead, to the meadow, open ground, starlight on grass,
Speaker 1: the dark shape of the cabin beyond it, the porch
Speaker 1: light glowing in the window, the tree line. They'd stopped at,
Speaker 1: the tree line, the same boundary Bowie and Ruby had
Speaker 1: been observing for years, the same invisible border that the
Speaker 1: dogs honored as consistently as any fence or wall. The
Speaker 1: meadow was human ground, the forest was theirs. And they'd
Speaker 1: walked us to the property line and stopped. The significance
Speaker 1: of that landed on me as we stood at the
Speaker 1: edge of the trees, even after everything we'd done, even
Speaker 1: after we'd marched up to their ridge and banged on
Speaker 1: trees and blasted a recording of one of their own
Speaker 1: through a bluetooth speaker, even after we'd basically done everything
Speaker 1: short of putting up a neon sign that said we
Speaker 1: know you're here, Come say hello, they'd responded with a
Speaker 1: demonstration that shaved years off both our lives, and then
Speaker 1: they'd escorted us to the boundary and quit. The arrangement
Speaker 1: was bending, but it hadn't broken the same qualities Vernon
Speaker 1: had documented for thirty years. Restraint, proportionality, discipline, a response
Speaker 1: calibrated to deliver a message without inflicting harm. Not kindness,
Speaker 1: that's not the right word, something more pragmatic, something closer
Speaker 1: to policy.
Speaker 2: A species that.
Speaker 1: Had decided individually or collectively that coexistence was preferable to
Speaker 1: conflict on this corridor, and that every response to human
Speaker 1: provocation should be the minimum necessary to correct the behavior
Speaker 1: without destroying the relationship. We tested that policy tonight, harder
Speaker 1: than anyone had tested it in fifty years, and it
Speaker 1: had held for now. But standing at the tree line,
Speaker 1: feeling the absence of their attention in the air around me,
Speaker 1: I understood something that I hadn't fully grasped before. The
Speaker 1: arrangement wasn't a wall. It was a bridge, and bridges
Speaker 1: have load limits push too much weight across them. And
Speaker 1: they don't bend, they collapse. Cliff was ready to move.
Speaker 1: The urgency coming off him was almost physical. He'd gotten
Speaker 1: the message from the ridge, received it in every bone
Speaker 1: and nerve ending he had, and the message was leave.
Speaker 1: He wanted to honor it immediately, completely, and at the
Speaker 1: fastest speed his legs could produce on open ground. We
Speaker 1: crossed the meadow at a pace somewhere between a fast
Speaker 1: walk and a jog, neither of us running, both of
Speaker 1: us wanting to. The grass was wet with dew that
Speaker 1: hadn't been there when we'd crossed in the other direction
Speaker 1: ninety minutes earlier. Our boots made a soft, tearing sound
Speaker 1: with each step, the grass releasing from the moisture, and
Speaker 1: the sound was so ordinary, so mundane, so different from
Speaker 1: everything we'd heard on the ridge, that it almost made
Speaker 1: me laugh, almost, but not quite, because my legs were
Speaker 1: still shaking and my hands were still trembling, and some
Speaker 1: part of my brain was still running the geometry of
Speaker 1: three sound sources on a dark ridge and finding no
Speaker 1: humor in it. The cabin got bigger with each step,
Speaker 1: the porch light got brighter, the green metal roof materialized
Speaker 1: against the dark sky, the stone, chimney, the porch columns,
Speaker 1: the rocking chairs, every familiar element assembling itself out of
Speaker 1: the darkness as we approached, like a photograph developing in
Speaker 1: real time. And each element that appeared was a peace
Speaker 1: of the world I knew sliding back into place. By
Speaker 1: the time I climbed the steps and fumble with the keys,
Speaker 1: my hands were shaking so badly. It took me three
Speaker 1: tries to get the lock open, three tries on a
Speaker 1: lock I'd been turning for five and a half years.
Speaker 1: That's what adrenaline does. It gives you speed and takes
Speaker 1: away precision. We went inside. Bowie was on his blanket,
Speaker 1: lifting his head with the measured economy of an old
Speaker 1: dog who'd hurt us, coming a full minute.
Speaker 2: Before we reached the porch.
Speaker 1: Ruby was at my legs before I'd taken two steps,
Speaker 1: pressing against me, tail going, her nose working overtime.
Speaker 2: On my jeans.
Speaker 1: She was reading the whole story off my clothes, the slope,
Speaker 1: the leaves, the sweat, and whatever else we'd been near
Speaker 1: that her nose could identify and mine never would. Cliff
Speaker 1: dropped onto the couch, not sat, dropped the back clattered
Speaker 1: to the floor, and he didn't pick it up. He
Speaker 1: put his face in his hands and stayed like that
Speaker 1: for about a minute, bent forward, elbows on knees, shoulders
Speaker 1: rising and falling, with the kind of deliberate breathing you
Speaker 1: use to bring yourself back from a place your system
Speaker 1: shouldn't have been. I went to the kitchen, ran the tap, cold,
Speaker 1: filled two glasses, brought them back. He drank his in
Speaker 1: one pool, water running down the sides of his mouth
Speaker 1: because he didn't slow down enough to swallow cleanly. Then
Speaker 1: he set the glass on the coffee table and stared
Speaker 1: at it for a while, the way you stare at
Speaker 1: something when you're really looking at something else entirely. When
Speaker 1: he finally looked up, his eyes were different, not the
Speaker 1: wide eyed fear from the ridge, something quieter, something that
Speaker 1: had moved past the fear and arrived at the flat,
Speaker 1: clear place on the other side, where the facts are
Speaker 1: laid out and the implications are settling in and you
Speaker 1: can't unknow any of it.
Speaker 2: He told me.
Speaker 1: He owed me an apology for every phone call where
Speaker 1: he'd made a joke, every time he'd suggested it was
Speaker 1: probably a bear. Every Sunday night where I'd told him
Speaker 1: something real, and he nodded along and then hung up
Speaker 1: and gone back to his regular life without it costing
Speaker 1: him a minute of sleep. He said he'd seen the
Speaker 1: tracks and measured the hand prints and told me he
Speaker 1: believed me, and he'd meant it, but that believing and
Speaker 1: knowing are different things. You can believe something from across
Speaker 1: the room. Knowing means you've been close enough to touch it.
Speaker 1: He told me he wasn't coming back. He said he
Speaker 1: loved me, thirty years of friendship, and there was nobody
Speaker 1: he trusted more. But he couldn't be on this mountain
Speaker 1: after dark anymore, not carrying what he was now carrying.
Speaker 1: The vocalization from the north, the one that answered our call,
Speaker 1: blast from one hundred yards. That was the sound he
Speaker 1: was going to hear every night before he fell asleep,
Speaker 1: for the rest of his life, and every time it
Speaker 1: found him in the dark of his own bedroom in Gastonia,
Speaker 1: two hundred miles from the ridge. He'd be standing on
Speaker 1: that shoulder again in the last light, realizing that something
Speaker 1: had answered from close range, and that there were two
Speaker 1: more of them on the other sides, and that the
Speaker 1: only reason he was going to sleep in a bed
Speaker 1: tonight instead of lying on a mountain side. Was because
Speaker 1: they decided to walk him home. Last part was what
Speaker 1: got to him, Not the sounds, not the positioning, not
Speaker 1: the infrasound, or the branch snap or the paralleling, the decision,
Speaker 1: the fact that everything that happened on the ridge was
Speaker 1: a choice made by something other than us. We chosen
Speaker 1: to go up there. Yes, we chosen to knock and
Speaker 1: play the call blast and stand on the ridge at
Speaker 1: dusk like we had any business being there. But from
Speaker 1: the moment the first response came back from the bluff,
Speaker 1: every subsequent event was their choice, not ours. They chose
Speaker 1: to answer, they chose to reposition, They chose to vocalize,
Speaker 1: to strike the tree on our exit route, to parallel
Speaker 1: our descent, to broadcast infrasound that made our legs weak
Speaker 1: and our balance unreliable, to snap a branch at forty
Speaker 1: yards to let us know exactly how close they were.
Speaker 1: And then they chose to stop at the tree line
Speaker 1: and let us cross the meadow and go inside. Every
Speaker 1: one of those was a decision made by something we
Speaker 1: couldn't see, couldn't negotiate with, couldn't predict, and couldn't control.
Speaker 1: And the cumulative effect of experiencing that many decisions being
Speaker 1: made about your safety by something that isn't you in
Speaker 1: a space where you have no leverage and no recourse
Speaker 1: is a kind of helplessness that stays with you. It
Speaker 1: doesn't wash off, it doesn't fade with distance. It sits
Speaker 1: in your chest and reminds you at inconvenient moments that
Speaker 1: the world contains things that are bigger and older and
Speaker 1: smarter than you, and that the only thing between you
Speaker 1: and whatever they're capable of is their own restraint. Cliff
Speaker 1: had felt that for the first time, and once was enough.
Speaker 1: I told him I understood, and I did. Not everybody's
Speaker 1: built for this, Not everybody should be. Vernon watched for
Speaker 1: thirty years and never went to them. Earl lived with
Speaker 1: it for four decades and never told a soul. Riba
Speaker 1: left sweet potatoes on a stump and went to bed.
Speaker 1: Each of them found a way to carry the knowledge
Speaker 1: that fit who they were.
Speaker 2: Cliff vf way was to carry.
Speaker 1: It from a distance from Gastonia, from the other end
Speaker 1: of a Sunday phone call, from a life where the
Speaker 1: biggest thing in the woods was a whitetail, and the
Speaker 1: scariest sound at night was a neighbor's dog barking at
Speaker 1: a possum. I didn't begrudge him that. I'd never begrudge
Speaker 1: anyone the right to choose normal over this. I didn't
Speaker 1: try to talk him out of it. What we'd done
Speaker 1: on the ridge wasn't research, It wasn't scientific engagement. It
Speaker 1: was two guys hiking into someone else's territory after dark
Speaker 1: and banging on things and playing recordings at high volume,
Speaker 1: because curiosity had finally outweighed everything. Opal and Vernon and
Speaker 1: Earl had spent a combined one hundred and thirty years
Speaker 1: learning if a stranger showed up at your house at
Speaker 1: dusk and started pounding on the siding and blasting recordings
Speaker 1: through a speaker, you wouldn't call that research. You'd call
Speaker 1: it something else entirely, And the Mountain had let us
Speaker 1: know how it felt about it. The thing I kept
Speaker 1: coming back to, sitting in the warm cabin with my
Speaker 1: dogs and my shaking hands and my best friend's back
Speaker 1: visible through the spare bedroom door, was the restraint everything
Speaker 1: that had happened on the ridge, the vocalization, the barking,
Speaker 1: the tree strike, the paralleling the infrasound the branch snap
Speaker 1: at forty yards. All of it was communication. Not one
Speaker 1: second of it was aggression. They'd answered our knocks, they'd
Speaker 1: responded to our call blast, they'd positioned themselves around us
Speaker 1: and demonstrated their numbers and their proximity and their physical capabilities.
Speaker 1: And then they'd walked us off the ridge and stopped
Speaker 1: at the tree line and let us go. They could
Speaker 1: have done anything. They could have closed the circle the
Speaker 1: way they'd closed it around my dogs in seventeen, except.
Speaker 2: Without the opening.
Speaker 1: They could have struck a tree beside us instead of
Speaker 1: behind us. They could have vocalized from ten yards instead
Speaker 1: of one hundred. They could have stepped out of the
Speaker 1: shadows and let us see them the way the Big
Speaker 1: One had let me see it on the bluff, except
Speaker 1: this time at arm's length, on a dark slope, with
Speaker 1: no cliff between us and them. They didn't do any
Speaker 1: of that. They did the minimum necessary to make their point,
Speaker 1: and then they let us leave. And the minimum had
Speaker 1: been more than enough to change Cliff's life and to
Speaker 1: change mine. Though I'd stay on the mountain to live
Speaker 1: with it, and he wouldn't.
Speaker 2: Opel had said the.
Speaker 1: Arrangement was based on territory and reciprocity and very long
Speaker 1: memory that they remembered who respected them and who didn't.
Speaker 1: We hadn't respected them tonight. We treated their home like
Speaker 1: a laboratory and their presence like a research question. And
Speaker 1: their response had been proportional, not kind, not violent, proportional,
Speaker 1: exactly enough force to deliver a message that neither Cliff
Speaker 1: nor I would ever forget, and not one ounce more.
Speaker 1: Vernon would have called it a demonstration, Earl would have
Speaker 1: called it a warning. Riba probably would have baked them
Speaker 1: a pie and left it on the porch and gone
Speaker 1: to bed, and she'd have been closer to the right
Speaker 1: response than any of us. Cliff asked me how I
Speaker 1: could stay here, could go to sleep, knowing they were
Speaker 1: out there, knowing they walked around my cabin, knowing they
Speaker 1: could do what they'd just done to us anytime they chose,
Speaker 1: and the only thing preventing it was their own decision
Speaker 1: not to. It was a real question, not rhetorical. He
Speaker 1: genuinely wanted to understand. I told him the truth, the
Speaker 1: full truth, which I'd never laid out for anyone before,
Speaker 1: not even myself. In the quiet of my own head.
Speaker 1: I stayed because this mountain was the only place I'd
Speaker 1: ever felt like I was part of something bigger than
Speaker 1: my own, small, ordinary life.
Speaker 2: My parents were.
Speaker 1: Gone, my marriage was gone. My career paid the bills,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't a calling. I was a forty one
Speaker 1: year old contractor with a dog and a truck and
Speaker 1: a cabin i'd bought with my dead parents' money, and
Speaker 1: none of that by itself added up to anything that
Speaker 1: would matter.
Speaker 2: After I was gone.
Speaker 1: But on this mountain, in the presence of something ancient
Speaker 1: and intelligent and utterly unconcerned with my opinion of it,
Speaker 1: I'd stumbled into a con text that made the rest
Speaker 1: of it make sense. The creatures were terrifying, yes, dangerous,
Speaker 1: almost certainly, beyond my understanding, absolutely, But they were also real, present,
Speaker 1: aware of me in a way that nothing else on
Speaker 1: earth was, except maybe these two dogs on the floor.
Speaker 1: They watched me, they tested me, They walked past my
Speaker 1: windows and stood at my doors and knocked on the
Speaker 1: ridge every night. And all of that, however, frightening, constituted
Speaker 1: a relationship, an ongoing, reciprocal, evolving relationship between my species
Speaker 1: and theirs, playing out on forty seven acres of mountain forest,
Speaker 1: and I was the only human participant still standing on
Speaker 1: the corridor. Vernon had called it a privilege. He'd written
Speaker 1: that word in his last entry a year before he died, grateful.
Speaker 1: He'd been grateful for forty one years of watching something
Speaker 1: that watched him back, not for the fear or the
Speaker 1: sleepless nights, for the relationship. Earl had felt it too.
Speaker 1: He'd built a cabin and grown old on the corridor
Speaker 1: and never once talked about leaving. Not because he didn't
Speaker 1: know what was in the trees, because he did, and
Speaker 1: knowing it had given his life on the mountain a
Speaker 1: dimension that no one who didn't know could ever access.
Speaker 1: Reba had understood it best of all. She'd left food
Speaker 1: on a stump. That was her entire response to sharing
Speaker 1: a mountain with something that could snap a tree in half.
Speaker 1: She fed them because she'd decided that generosity was a
Speaker 1: better foundation for coexistence than fear, and that giving freely
Speaker 1: was more honest than having things taken. And she'd been
Speaker 1: right for over thirty years. She'd been right. I told Cliff,
Speaker 1: I wasn't brave. I was stubborn and curious and alone
Speaker 1: in a way that the mountain had filled with something
Speaker 1: I couldn't find anywhere else. And I'd rather live with
Speaker 1: the fear and the wonder and the weight of it
Speaker 1: than go back to a life where the most interesting
Speaker 1: thing that happened to me was a bathroom remodel in Hendersonville.
Speaker 1: He didn't say anything to that for a long time.
Speaker 1: He walked to the window that faced the ridge and
Speaker 1: looked out at the dark The glass reflected his face
Speaker 1: back at him, superimposed over the black nothing outside. He
Speaker 1: stood there for about a minute. Then he said he
Speaker 1: was going to bed, and that he'd drive home in
Speaker 1: the morning, and that he was going to do all
Speaker 1: the normal things that normal people do in places where
Speaker 1: nothing answers when you knock, and that he was going
Speaker 1: to try very hard not to think about tonight. I
Speaker 1: told him he wouldn't manage that. He almost laughed. He
Speaker 1: knew I was right. He slept in the spare bedroom.
Speaker 1: I slept on the couch. Neither of us slept much.
Speaker 1: I could hear him shifting in there, the bedsprings creaking
Speaker 1: every few minutes, a man trying to find a position
Speaker 1: where his brain would shut off and failing. Around four
Speaker 1: in the morning. The knocking came, two strikes from the ridge,
Speaker 1: measured familiar, the same cadence I'd been hearing for five years,
Speaker 1: the nightly check in the territorial marker, the sound that
Speaker 1: said here, We've always been here, and tonight doesn't change anything.
Speaker 1: From the spare bedroom, I heard Cliff react to it,
Speaker 1: just a single word, spoken quietly into the dark, the
Speaker 1: kind of word you say when you've just realized that
Speaker 1: the thing you experienced four hours ago isn't going to
Speaker 1: stop happening just because you came inside. He drove home
Speaker 1: at eight the next morning. We'd been up since before dawn,
Speaker 1: neither of us having slept more than forty five minutes
Speaker 1: at a stretch. I'd heard him moving around in the
Speaker 1: spare bedroom at five, the bedsprings creaking as he gave
Speaker 1: up trying. When I came out, he was already on
Speaker 1: the porch, sitting in the chair he'd sat in the
Speaker 1: afternoon before. Same view, same ridge, same coffee mug, but
Speaker 1: a different man holding it. The ridge wasn't a backdrop
Speaker 1: to a plan anymore. It was the place that had answered,
Speaker 1: and the coffee wasn't fuel for an adventure. It was
Speaker 1: something warm to hold while a cold morning put itself
Speaker 1: back together around someone who'd been awake most of the night,
Speaker 1: listening to the cabin creek and wondering every time whether
Speaker 1: the creek was the cabin or something leaning against it.
Speaker 1: We sat together in the gray early light and watched
Speaker 1: the mist burn off the meadow and didn't talk. The
Speaker 1: silence wasn't awkward. It was the silence of two men
Speaker 1: who'd been through something together and didn't need to narrate it.
Speaker 1: We'd both been there, we'd both heard it, we'd both
Speaker 1: felt the infra sound in our teeth and the displacement
Speaker 1: sound behind us, and the branch snap at forty yards.
Speaker 1: Rehashing it over coffee would have added nothing except the
Speaker 1: sound of our own voices trying to make language do
Speaker 1: something language isn't built for. He loaded his gear into
Speaker 1: the truck with the mechanical efficiency of a man who
Speaker 1: wanted to be on the road. Camera bag, binoculars, cooler, backpack,
Speaker 1: everything he'd brought up the mountain twenty hours earlier, with
Speaker 1: the energy of a man embarking on something exciting. He
Speaker 1: loaded it now like a man checking out of a
Speaker 1: hotel where he'd had a bad night.
Speaker 2: He picked up the baseball bat.
Speaker 1: From where it was leaning against the porch rail, held
Speaker 1: it by the barrel for a second, looked at it
Speaker 1: the way you look at a tool that failed at
Speaker 1: its primary purpose. Then set it back down and told
Speaker 1: me to keep it. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. For knocking on trees,
Speaker 1: he said, with a flicker of the old humor. I
Speaker 1: told him I was done knocking on trees. And when
Speaker 1: he said good, his voice carried a weight that closed
Speaker 1: a door I'd never hear him try to open again.
Speaker 1: We stood in the driveway morning dew on the grass
Speaker 1: birds starting up in the oaks. The ridge was a
Speaker 1: dark line against a pale sky, every bit as peaceful
Speaker 1: and empty and ordinary as it had looked every other
Speaker 1: morning for five and a half years. A wood thrush
Speaker 1: was singing near the creek. A cardinal was calling from
Speaker 1: the workshop eves. The mountain was putting on its daytime face,
Speaker 1: being the postcard version of itself, and you'd never know
Speaker 1: from looking at it that anything lived up there beside
Speaker 1: songbirds and squirrels. That's the trick of this mountain. It
Speaker 1: looks like every other mountain in the Blue Ridge, the
Speaker 1: kind of place that makes people pull over on the
Speaker 1: parkway and take photographs. And underneath the surface, in the
Speaker 1: corridors and the drainages and the bluff overlooks, something moves
Speaker 1: that the postcards don't show and the photographs don't capture.
Speaker 1: He hugged me, which Cliff didn't do in thirty years.
Speaker 1: I could count his hugs on one hand, and most
Speaker 1: of those had been at funerals. This one lasted about
Speaker 1: five seconds, and I could feel the residual tension still
Speaker 1: in his shoulders, the leftover adrenaline that hadn't metabolized, the
Speaker 1: physical record of a knight that had rewritten his understanding
Speaker 1: of the world. He told me to be careful. I
Speaker 1: told him I always was. And he told me, without
Speaker 1: any meanness, but without any softness either, that I was
Speaker 1: the opposite of careful, that I was the most recklessly
Speaker 1: curious person he'd ever known, and that I lived alone
Speaker 1: on a mountain with things that could break trees in half.
Speaker 1: But to be careful anyway. Then he got in his
Speaker 1: truck and drove down the gravel road, and I stood
Speaker 1: in the driveway and watched the tail lights until they
Speaker 1: disappeared around the first curve, and the sound of his
Speaker 1: engine faded into the general murmur of the morning, and
Speaker 1: the mountain settled back into its quiet, the same quiet
Speaker 1: it had been settling into every morning for however many
Speaker 1: thousand years it had been standing there, patient, unimpressed by
Speaker 1: the noise two men had made on its ridge the
Speaker 1: night before, already absorbing the disruption back into the rhythm
Speaker 1: the way a lake absorbs a stone. The splash is dramatic,
Speaker 1: the ripples fade, and the surface goes smooth again. I
Speaker 1: went inside. Bowie was on his blanket. Ruby was at
Speaker 1: the door. I scratched behind her ears and told her
Speaker 1: everything was fine. She looked up at me with those
Speaker 1: amber eyes and held the look for about three seconds,
Speaker 1: longer than usual, and I got the distinct impression she
Speaker 1: knew I was lying. Dogs always know, they just don't
Speaker 1: always say so. I went back to the ridge the
Speaker 1: next day in daylight to retrieve the recorder and the
Speaker 1: tripod and the speaker. They were exactly where I'd left them, untouched.
Speaker 1: The recorder was still running on its last battery, the
Speaker 1: red indicator light barely blinking. I packed everything up and
Speaker 1: spent that afternoon at the kitchen table with headphones on,
Speaker 1: listening to seven hours of post encounter audio. Most of
Speaker 1: it was what you'd expect, crickets, wind, the occasional barred owl,
Speaker 1: tree frogs in the drainage, the ambient soundtrack of a
Speaker 1: mountain at night. But at three separate points the microphone
Speaker 1: picked up sounds that weren't ambient. At eleven forty two,
Speaker 1: a series of knocks four strikes, spaced about thirty seconds
Speaker 1: apart from the north, the same direction the responses had
Speaker 1: come from during our experiment. The knocking continued after we left,
Speaker 1: as if our departure hadn't ended the conversation. At one
Speaker 1: fifteen in the morning, a sustained vocalization lower in pitch
Speaker 1: than anything I'd heard in person. The recorder's frequency display
Speaker 1: showed it bottoming out around seventy hertz, and the actual
Speaker 1: fundamental might have been lower than the microphone could capture.
Speaker 1: It lasted about eight seconds and had a modulating quality,
Speaker 1: rising and falling in slow waves, like something breathing through
Speaker 1: its voice. And at three twenty seven footsteps heavy rhythmic
Speaker 1: captured by the directional microphone from what the volume level
Speaker 1: suggested was very close range, maybe ten feet from the recorder,
Speaker 1: maybe less twelve seconds of individual foot placements, the compression
Speaker 1: of leaves, the slight scrape of weight shifting, the exhale
Speaker 1: of ground being pressed under several hundred pounds steady unhurried,
Speaker 1: the pace of something walking past a point of interest
Speaker 1: without stopping checking it, noting it moving on. Something had
Speaker 1: walked past the record order in the middle of the night,
Speaker 1: on the ridge shoulder where Cliff and I had stood
Speaker 1: five hours earlier, close enough that if I'd been lying
Speaker 1: beside the recorder, I could have reached out and touched it.
Speaker 1: I played that twelve second clip about forty times each pass.
Speaker 1: The hair on my arms stood up at the same moment,
Speaker 1: about three seconds in when the closest footfall lands and
Speaker 1: you can hear the leaves shift and settle under the weight.
Speaker 1: And then the next step comes a little further away,
Speaker 1: and the next, each one slightly quieter, receding in a
Speaker 1: line that tells you the thing was headed northeast toward
Speaker 1: the bluff, toward home. The recorder is in the kitchen
Speaker 1: drawer now, next to the spiral notebook and the riverstone
Speaker 1: from the bluff The files are backed up on my
Speaker 1: laptop and on a thumb drive in the truck. I
Speaker 1: offered to play the footstep clip for Cliff once and
Speaker 1: he told me never to play it for him again,
Speaker 1: so I haven't. He hasn't been back. We talk on
Speaker 1: the phone every Sunday, the way we always have, if
Speaker 1: anything's new, and I give him the update, which is
Speaker 1: usually short and factual. He listens, He tells me to
Speaker 1: be careful, and we talk about football or his kids
Speaker 1: or whatever job he's running that week. He doesn't joke
Speaker 1: about it anymore. He doesn't say it's probably a bear.
Speaker 1: He doesn't suggest I sell the place, or get a girlfriend,
Speaker 1: or find a hobby that doesn't involve things that can
Speaker 1: break trees in half. That one night burned the humor
Speaker 1: out of the subject permanently and replaced it with something
Speaker 1: I recognize because I've been carrying my own version of
Speaker 1: it for years, A quiet, permanent awareness that doesn't fade
Speaker 1: with distance or time or the comforts of ordinary life.
Speaker 1: The knowledge that the world has rooms in it that
Speaker 1: most people will never enter, and that once you've been
Speaker 1: inside one, you can't unsee the floor plan. You can
Speaker 1: leave the room, you can drive two hundred miles south
Speaker 1: and sleep in a house with central air and a
Speaker 1: fenced backyard and neighbors who weigh from their driveways. But
Speaker 1: the room is still there, and you'll know it every
Speaker 1: night when you close your eyes and the house gets
Speaker 1: quiet and the dark gets deep, and something in the
Speaker 1: back of your brain says, remember. The only difference between
Speaker 1: Cliff and me is that he got to drive away.
Speaker 1: He gets to live in Gastonia. He gets to go
Speaker 1: to bed without a flashlight on the nightstand, he gets
Speaker 1: to be normal. I don't begrudge him that I chose
Speaker 1: something different.
Speaker 2: He didn't.
Speaker 1: I'm still here on the mountain, in the cabin earl
Speaker 1: built on the corridor. Vernon mapped, sleeping down the hall
Speaker 1: from where Bowie used to keep watch before his hips
Speaker 1: got too stiff and Ruby took over the post, listening
Speaker 1: to the knocking that comes every night from the ridge
Speaker 1: where Cliff and I stood and made noise and got
Speaker 1: an answer. We spent five years asking for and thirty
Speaker 1: seconds wishing we hadn't. I think about that night a lot,
Speaker 1: not with regret, exactly. We got data. We confirmed multiple
Speaker 1: individuals responding in coordination. We experienced infrasound firsthand. We documented
Speaker 1: the escort behavior, and we got the recorder audio, seven
Speaker 1: hours of post encounter sound that includes the clearest footstep
Speaker 1: recording I've ever heard from any source. But the data
Speaker 1: came with a price. Cliff's absence is that price, and
Speaker 1: my own understanding of where the line is, the line
Speaker 1: between observing and provoking, between documenting and intruding. That understanding
Speaker 1: came sharper and later than it should have. Vernon never
Speaker 1: crossed that line in thirty years, Earl never crossed it
Speaker 1: in forty three. Riba never crossed it at all. She
Speaker 1: just left sweet potatoes on a stump and went inside.
Speaker 1: I crossed it on a Saturday night in September with
Speaker 1: a baseball bat and a Bluetooth speaker and the mountain.
Speaker 1: Let me know, Garrett, I want to talk directly to
Speaker 1: anyone listening who's thinking about trying what Garrett and Cliff tried,
Speaker 1: going into a known activity area and initiating contact through knocking,
Speaker 1: call blasts or any other form of active engagement.
Speaker 2: Don't.
Speaker 1: I'm saying that as someone with nearly four decades in
Speaker 1: this field, I've spoken to hundreds of witnesses and dozens
Speaker 1: of researchers, and the accounts that worry me most always
Speaker 1: begin with we decided to go up there and see
Speaker 1: what would happen. Because what happens is what happened to
Speaker 1: Garrett and Cliff. You get an answer from multiple directions
Speaker 1: closer than you expected, and suddenly you're not the researcher anymore.
Speaker 2: You're the subject.
Speaker 1: And the creatures you called have every advantage the terrain,
Speaker 1: the darkness, the numbers, and the only reason you walk
Speaker 1: out is because they let you. Garrett and Cliff got
Speaker 1: walked off the ridge. They were lucky. The creatures on
Speaker 1: that corridor have a fifty year history of restraint. A
Speaker 1: different group in a different location, with a different history
Speaker 1: might not be as patient. Respect the distance, honor the silence,
Speaker 1: and if you hear the knocking, listen, don't knock back.
Speaker 1: Story ten is next, the final chapter, and from what
Speaker 1: Garrett's told me, it ties everything together.
Speaker 2: Earl vernon a door, the.
Speaker 1: Creatures, and the thing that was buried that nobody was
Speaker 1: supposed to find. Stay safe, stay curious, and I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you next time. The ma