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: There's something you need to understand before I take you
Speaker 1: into these hills, before I walk you down into the deep,
Speaker 1: cathedral quiet of these forests. You need to understand what
Speaker 1: the Appalachians actually are. These are not young mountains. They're
Speaker 1: not dramatic, jagged things like the Rockies, thrust up out
Speaker 1: of the earth in some violent geological tantrum. The Appalachians
Speaker 1: are old, ancient in a way that defies easy comprehension.
Speaker 1: They were already worn and rounded and moss covered when
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs were walking the earth. When the first human
Speaker 1: beings set foot on this continent and looked out at
Speaker 1: this long green spine of ridgeline stretching from Alabama all
Speaker 1: the way up to Maine, these mountains were already old.
Speaker 1: The Cherokee called them home for thousands of years, the Shawnee,
Speaker 1: the Creek, the Cataba. Generation after generation of people who understood,
Speaker 1: in a way, we've largely forgotten that these mountains were alive,
Speaker 1: that the land itself had a memory, that the forests
Speaker 1: held things, and they were right. I've spent the better
Speaker 1: part of my life collecting stories, listening, driving back roads
Speaker 1: and sitting on porches and leaning across diner tables in
Speaker 1: small towns from Georgia to Pennsylvania, letting people tell me
Speaker 1: what they've seen out there in the trees, what they've heard,
Speaker 1: what followed them home. Most of those people weren't looking
Speaker 1: for trouble. They weren't thrill seekers. They were loggers and
Speaker 1: farmers and school teachers and veterans and grandmothers, ordinary people
Speaker 1: who encountered something in the Appalachian forests that changed them
Speaker 1: something that reminded them the hard way that we are
Speaker 1: not the apex of anything out here. We are guests,
Speaker 1: and sometimes the host reminds you of that fact. The
Speaker 1: stories I'm going to share with you tonight are rooted
Speaker 1: in real places, real traditions, and real accounts that have
Speaker 1: been passed down through the communities of the Appalachian region
Speaker 1: for generations. Some of them go back centuries, some are
Speaker 1: more recent. All of them have one thing in common,
Speaker 1: the forest. Because in the Appalachians, the forest is where
Speaker 1: it happens. The trees are so old and so dense
Speaker 1: in places that the canopy closes overhead like a cathedral ceiling,
Speaker 1: and the light that filters down to the ground is
Speaker 1: green and dim and ancient feeling. And you can walk
Speaker 1: one hundred yards off a trail and feel like the
Speaker 1: twenty first century simply doesn't exist. There's no cell service,
Speaker 1: no ambient hum of traffic, just the creek sounds, the
Speaker 1: bird sounds, and the wind moving through leaves that have
Speaker 1: been rustling in the same holler for ten thousand years.
Speaker 1: That's where these stories live out there, in what the
Speaker 1: old timers called the old green dark. So get comfortable,
Speaker 1: turn up the volume and try to remember as we
Speaker 1: go that every person who told me one of these
Speaker 1: stories swore it was true. Let's go into the mountains.
Speaker 1: I want to start in Tennessee in a place that
Speaker 1: most people have never heard of, and that the people
Speaker 1: who live there are generally okay with keeping that way.
Speaker 1: Hancock County, up in the northeastern corner of the state,
Speaker 1: sits hard against the Virginia Line, tucked up into a
Speaker 1: fold of the Clinch Mountain Range, where the hollers run
Speaker 1: deep and the communities are tight knit in the way
Speaker 1: that only comes from generations of families living in the
Speaker 1: same few square miles, going back to before the Revolutionary War.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty three, a man named Elias Combs was
Speaker 1: living on a small farm at the head of one
Speaker 1: of those hollers, farming tobacco and running a trap line
Speaker 1: through the Laurel thickets above his property. He was sixty
Speaker 1: one years old, had lived his entire life in that holler,
Speaker 1: and he was not, by any account his neighbors gave
Speaker 1: a man given to exaggeration or fancy. When Elias Combs
Speaker 1: told you something, you believed it. What he told them.
Speaker 1: In the autumn of nineteen twenty three was that he'd
Speaker 1: seen the wampus cat. Now, before I go any further,
Speaker 1: I need to give you some context, because the wampus
Speaker 1: cat is one of those pieces of Appalachian lore that
Speaker 1: gets dismissed too quickly as a regional tall tale, a
Speaker 1: campfire story to scare children. But the Cherokee had a
Speaker 1: name for this creature long before European settlers ever arrived
Speaker 1: in these mountains. They called it Oa, and the story
Speaker 1: attached to that name is one of the darkest and
Speaker 1: most haunting origin stories in the Cherokee tradition. The way
Speaker 1: the story goes, and there are variations, as there always
Speaker 1: are with oral traditions, a young Cherokee woman followed her
Speaker 1: husband into the sacred hunting grounds one night to spy
Speaker 1: on a ritual that women were forbidden to witness. The
Speaker 1: medicine men discovered her hiding there beneath an animal skin,
Speaker 1: watching what she should never have seen. As punishment, they
Speaker 1: bound her to that animal skin forever, transforming her into
Speaker 1: something caught between worlds, neither fully woman nor fully beast,
Speaker 1: but something worse than either, something that was both something
Speaker 1: that could not rest, could not die, and could not
Speaker 1: be consoled, and she's been walking these mountains ever since.
Speaker 1: European settlers added their own layers to the legend over
Speaker 1: the two centuries of their presence in these hills. By
Speaker 1: the time the Scots Irish had been in Clinch Mountain
Speaker 1: Country for a few generations, the Wampa's cat had absorbed
Speaker 1: their fears and their superstitions too. The mountain people gave
Speaker 1: her new details and new fears, and made her part
Speaker 1: of their own tradition, the way mountain people have always done,
Speaker 1: by grafting new growth onto old roots. They said she
Speaker 1: smelled like death and sulfur. They set Her eyes were
Speaker 1: the yellow green of a lantern seen through fog. They said.
Speaker 1: She moved through the laurel hell, those dense, chest high
Speaker 1: thickets of mountain laurel and rhododendron that grow in the
Speaker 1: drainages of the Clinch Mountain country, and that are so
Speaker 1: thick and twisted you genuinely can't see through them more
Speaker 1: than a few feet in any direction, so fast and
Speaker 1: so silent that you'd hear her scream from one ridge,
Speaker 1: and then hear it again from a ridge half a
Speaker 1: mile away. Before the echo of the first scream had
Speaker 1: even died, and they said, this is the part that
Speaker 1: always gets me. They said that if you locked eyes
Speaker 1: with the wampus cat, you would lose your mind, not
Speaker 1: your life, your mind. You'd be left wandering and muttering,
Speaker 1: unable to form sentences or remember your own name, like
Speaker 1: whatever was behind those yellow green eyes had reached right
Speaker 1: in through your pupils and pulled something essential out of you.
Speaker 1: There are accounts from the late eighteen hundreds documented by
Speaker 1: folkloris working in Hancock County of men found wandering on
Speaker 1: mountain trails in a state of complete dissociation, couldn't say
Speaker 1: their own name, couldn't recognize their families, just walking and
Speaker 1: muttering with their eyes fixed on something that wasn't there.
Speaker 1: In almost every case, the family eventually put those men
Speaker 1: in the category of having had the encounter of having
Speaker 1: looked at the wrong thing and the wrong laurel thicket
Speaker 1: at the wrong hour. Elias Combs had his encounter on
Speaker 1: a Tuesday morning in late October. He'd gone up to
Speaker 1: check his trap sets before dawn, the way he always did,
Speaker 1: with a lantern and his old winchester. The traps were
Speaker 1: set along a creek drainage about half a mile above
Speaker 1: his farm, in a stretch of mixed hardwoods that his
Speaker 1: family had been working for decades. He knew every rock
Speaker 1: and route along that path. He could have walked it blindfolded.
Speaker 1: He'd walked it in all conditions, in all seasons for
Speaker 1: more than twenty years. He was about as comfortable in
Speaker 1: that piece of forest as a man can be comfortable anywhere.
Speaker 1: He told his neighbors, and later told his son, who
Speaker 1: told his grandson, who told the man, who eventually told
Speaker 1: me that the trouble started before he even got to
Speaker 1: the first trap. He said, the woods went wrong. That's
Speaker 1: the phrase that got used across every retelling of this
Speaker 1: story I've encountered, and I've heard it told maybe a
Speaker 1: dozen times over the years, the woods went wrong. What
Speaker 1: he meant by that was that everything got quiet in
Speaker 1: the wrong way. Not the quiet of early morning, which
Speaker 1: is a living quiet, full of small sounds and subtle movements,
Speaker 1: the rustle of a squirrel in the leaves, the drip
Speaker 1: of dew off branches, the soft, irregular percussion of a
Speaker 1: woodpecker somewhere in the middle distance. This was the quiet
Speaker 1: of something large and patient, holding its breath. The creek
Speaker 1: still made it sound, because water doesn't defer to anything
Speaker 1: but everything else. Every bird, every rustling leaf, every distant
Speaker 1: coyote went silent, all at once, like a switch had
Speaker 1: been thrown. And the silence wasn't empty. That's the thing
Speaker 1: he kept coming back to when he tried to describe
Speaker 1: it afterward. The silence was full, occupied, the way a
Speaker 1: room is full when someone is standing in it in
Speaker 1: the dark, even if you can't see or hear them.
Speaker 1: Elias stopped walking. He held up his lantern. The light
Speaker 1: pushed back the dark maybe twenty feet in every direction,
Speaker 1: and beyond that edge was solid black, the way the
Speaker 1: forest gets in the mountains before any hint of dawn.
Speaker 1: He stood perfectly still and listened with everything he had,
Speaker 1: the way a man listens when he knows something is
Speaker 1: listening back. And then he smelled it. He described it
Speaker 1: as the smell of something long dead, not fresh dead,
Speaker 1: but long dead, the deep organic rot of something that
Speaker 1: had been lying in the wet leaves for weeks, mixed
Speaker 1: with something musky and animal and alive, and underneath all
Speaker 1: of that something else. He said he couldn't name something
Speaker 1: wrong at a chemical level, the way the air smells
Speaker 1: before a lightning strike, metallic and sharp and charged. He said.
Speaker 1: The hair on his arm stood up inside his coat sleeves.
Speaker 1: He said, his mouth went dry so fast it was
Speaker 1: like someone had reached in and pulled every drop of
Speaker 1: moisture out of it in an instant. He didn't run,
Speaker 1: which I certainly give the old man credit for. He
Speaker 1: stood there with his winchester in one hand and his
Speaker 1: lantern in the other, and he turned in a slow
Speaker 1: circle because whatever this was, it was moving around him.
Speaker 1: He could feel it moving, even though he couldn't see
Speaker 1: it or hear it. He could feel it the way
Speaker 1: you can feel someone standing behind you in a dark room,
Speaker 1: that certainty that is not based on any of the
Speaker 1: usual five senses, that pre rational alarm that fires somewhere
Speaker 1: deep below conscious thought. Something was circling him, slowly, methodically,
Speaker 1: the way a predator circles when it's still deciding. He
Speaker 1: saw the eyes first. They were up on the slope
Speaker 1: above him, about thirty yards away, in the laurel thickets,
Speaker 1: and they were the color of a gas light flame,
Speaker 1: that particular yellow green that doesn't occur naturally in the
Speaker 1: eye shine of any creature. He'd ever encountered in forty
Speaker 1: plus years of hunting these mountains, not the reflective eye
Speaker 1: shine of a deer or a cat, not the red
Speaker 1: glow of a bear, something that generated its own light
Speaker 1: rather than reflecting his. They were set wide apart, high
Speaker 1: off the ground, higher than a mountain lion's eyes would
Speaker 1: sit higher than a standing bears even. He said, they
Speaker 1: were as big around as silver dollars, and they didn't blink,
Speaker 1: just held steady and watched him burning with that cold, terrible,
Speaker 1: self generated light. He raised the winchester. He was a
Speaker 1: good shot, and he knew it, had been hunting these
Speaker 1: mountains since he was old enough to carry a gun.
Speaker 1: He said he had a clear sight picture in the
Speaker 1: lantern light, that he could see the shape of the
Speaker 1: thing in the laurel. Low slung and massive, bigger than
Speaker 1: any mountain lion, bigger than any bear he'd ever set
Speaker 1: eyes on, moving with a fluid, slow patience that he
Speaker 1: said reminded him of water finding its way through stones.
Speaker 1: He had the front sight on the center of mass
Speaker 1: between those eyes. He pulled the trigger. The shot echoed
Speaker 1: off the ridge line, rolled down the holler and faded
Speaker 1: into the dark, and the eyes didn't move, didn't blink,
Speaker 1: didn't drop to the ground the way a struck animal dropps,
Speaker 1: didn't bolt into the brush the way a misted animal bolts.
Speaker 1: They just stayed there, fixed on him, unwavering. After the
Speaker 1: muzzle flash had died and the powder smoke had drifted
Speaker 1: away on the still morning air, like he'd thrown a
Speaker 1: pebble at a stone wall, like the bullet had passed
Speaker 1: through something that wasn't concerned with bullets, he said. He
Speaker 1: fired twice more, same result each time. Three shots, three
Speaker 1: clear sight pictures, three muzzle blasts that lit up the
Speaker 1: laurel for a fraction of a second, and the eyes
Speaker 1: stayed exactly where they'd been, burning with that cold light,
Speaker 1: and the thing behind them didn't move so much as
Speaker 1: a hair. And then, and this is the part that
Speaker 1: kept Elias Combs from sleeping soundly for the remaining fourteen
Speaker 1: years of his life, the thing stood up. It rose
Speaker 1: out of the laurel on its hind legs, the way
Speaker 1: a bear will sometimes do, and it kept rising, taller
Speaker 1: than a man by a significant margin, tall enough that
Speaker 1: the top of its silhouette disappeared into the canopy above
Speaker 1: the low thicket, and when it rose, Elias said, the
Speaker 1: smell that had already been almost more than he could stand,
Speaker 1: intensified into something practically physical, something that hit the back
Speaker 1: of the throat and the eyes simultaneously. And it made
Speaker 1: a sound that, he said he had no word for.
Speaker 1: Not a scream exactly, though there was screaming in it,
Speaker 1: not a growl, though there was rumbling in it too.
Speaker 1: He said, it was most like a woman crying, but
Speaker 1: the way a woman might cry, if crying had been
Speaker 1: invented by something that had never, in its existence possessed
Speaker 1: any capacity for comfort or mercy. Raw and ragged, and
Speaker 1: somehow knowing, like the sound was directed at him in
Speaker 1: a personal way, like whatever was producing it understood something
Speaker 1: about him specifically, and was communicating something he did not
Speaker 1: want to understand. He ran, He's not ashamed to admit
Speaker 1: it in any version of this story I've heard. He
Speaker 1: ran back down that trail in the dark, without the lantern,
Speaker 1: which he dropped somewhere in the first fifty yards, and
Speaker 1: never recovered a tune. For more backwoods bigfoot stories, We'll
Speaker 1: be back after these messages. He ran by feel and
Speaker 1: memory through the black forest, crashing through brush and stumbling
Speaker 1: on roots, and he didn't stop running until he hit
Speaker 1: his own farmyard and got the door of his house
Speaker 1: shut and latched behind him. He sat at his kitchen
Speaker 1: table until his wife got up at sunrise and found
Speaker 1: him there, still in his coat, still holding the empty Winchester,
Speaker 1: staring at the kitchen wall, with the expression she later
Speaker 1: described to her children as the face a man makes
Speaker 1: when he's seen the edge of something he can't unsee.
Speaker 1: He never ran that trap line again. He sold the
Speaker 1: traps to a neighbor within the week, and didn't set
Speaker 1: foot in those woods above the farm for the remaining
Speaker 1: fourteen years of his life. What I find most interesting
Speaker 1: about Elias Combs, what makes this story stick with me
Speaker 1: all these years after I first heard it, is what
Speaker 1: happened to the neighbor who bought the traps. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to share his name out of respect for the family,
Speaker 1: but I'll tell you that he wan up into those
Speaker 1: same Laurel thickets about two weeks after Elias's encounter running
Speaker 1: those very same trap sets. He came back down before
Speaker 1: noon on the first day white as Chalk, and he
Speaker 1: told his wife that he'd found all of Elias's traps
Speaker 1: sprung and turned upside down, every single one of them
Speaker 1: down the whole line, not tripped by an animal, and
Speaker 1: left where they fell, turned upside down and placed back
Speaker 1: on the ground, neatly, methodically, one after another, like something
Speaker 1: had walked the line ahead of him, examined each trap,
Speaker 1: understood what it was, and deliberately flipped it over and
Speaker 1: set it back down a message, a demonstration of comprehension.
Speaker 1: Neither man ever went back, neither man ever publicly speculated
Speaker 1: about what had walked that trap line. But the people
Speaker 1: of that holler understood, and they passed the understanding down,
Speaker 1: and the drainage above the old Combs Farm still is
Speaker 1: in a place where sensible people run trap sets after
Speaker 1: dark some doors the old time the Clinch Mountain Country
Speaker 1: will tell you you don't open twice. Hold on to
Speaker 1: what I just told you about things that can't be
Speaker 1: explained with the tools we usually reach for, because we're
Speaker 1: going to need that mindset for this next one. We're
Speaker 1: moving east and a little south now, crossing over into
Speaker 1: the North Carolina Mountains into Burke County, where the Lynnville
Speaker 1: Gorge cuts its way through the earth like a wound
Speaker 1: that never fully healed and up on the ridge line.
Speaker 1: Above that gorge sits Brown Mountain, a long, low forested
Speaker 1: ridge that has been making people uncomfortable for a very,
Speaker 1: very long time. Most people who've heard of Brown Mountain
Speaker 1: have heard of the lights. The Brown Mountain lights are
Speaker 1: one of the most thoroughly documented and persistently inexplicable phenomena
Speaker 1: in the entire country. They've been officially observed, studied, and
Speaker 1: reported since at least nineteen thirteen, when the United States
Speaker 1: Geological Survey sent a man named George Rogers Ashley to
Speaker 1: investigate after widespread accounts of mysterious lights appearing above the
Speaker 1: mountain ridge line. The lights are typically described as orbs, round, glowing,
Speaker 1: sometimes red, sometimes white, sometimes orange or yellow, ranging in
Speaker 1: apparent size from that of a basketball to something considerably larger.
Speaker 1: They appear above the tree line on Brown Mountain and
Speaker 1: the surrounding ridges, sometimes singly, sometimes in clusters. They move
Speaker 1: in ways that don't correspond to aircraft or headlights. They
Speaker 1: change color, they appear and disappear without any identifiable source,
Speaker 1: and they've been doing this for as long as anyone
Speaker 1: has kept records of them. What makes the lights scientifically
Speaker 1: maddening is that the convenient explanations keep getting eliminated. The
Speaker 1: geological survey initially attributed the lights to locomotive headlights reflected
Speaker 1: off the mountain, and was forced to walk back that
Speaker 1: explanation when it was established that the lights had been
Speaker 1: reported long before the railroad in question was built. When
Speaker 1: a massive flood in nineteen sixteen knocked out electrical power
Speaker 1: to the entire region, the lights continue to appear. Multiple
Speaker 1: formal federal investigations over the following decades have failed to
Speaker 1: produce a satisfactory explanation. The lights predate every convenient answer,
Speaker 1: and they keep showing up, and the best minds who've
Speaker 1: been applied to the question have ultimately come away with
Speaker 1: nothing definitive. But here's what the geological surveys don't talk about.
Speaker 1: Here's what the official reports leave out entirely. Here's what
Speaker 1: the people who live in the communities around the Lynville Gorge,
Speaker 1: the families who've been in Burke County since before there
Speaker 1: was a Burke County, will tell you, if you sit
Speaker 1: with them long enough and earn some measure of trust,
Speaker 1: they'll tell you that the lights aren't the thing to
Speaker 1: be afraid of. The lights are just the sign, the marker,
Speaker 1: the warning that something else is moving on that mountain,
Speaker 1: something that walks below the lights in the deep old
Speaker 1: timber of the gorge, on paths that don't appear on
Speaker 1: any map, and creak drainages that drop down into darkness
Speaker 1: so complete it's it swallows a flashlight beam before it
Speaker 1: travels ten feet. The Cherokee have known about the Brown
Speaker 1: Mountain lights longer than anyone. Their tradition holds that the
Speaker 1: lights are the spirits of Cherokee women carrying torches through
Speaker 1: the dark, searching for their husbands and sons who died
Speaker 1: in an ancient battle fought on those ridges against a
Speaker 1: Cataba war party. It's a story of grief so enormous
Speaker 1: and so enduring that it became a permanent feature of
Speaker 1: the landscape, a sorrow so deep it lit itself on
Speaker 1: fire and refused to stop burning across the centuries. I
Speaker 1: find that account extraordinarily moving, and I believe it contains
Speaker 1: a truth about this place, even if the specifics belong
Speaker 1: to a tradition that isn't mine. There's something correct emotionally
Speaker 1: and perhaps literally about the idea that this kind of
Speaker 1: grief leaves a permanent mark on the land that love
Speaker 1: and loss of that magnitude doesn't just evaporate, that it stays.
Speaker 1: But the European settlers who moved into the Lynnville Gorge
Speaker 1: country in the early eighteen hundreds brought their own encounters
Speaker 1: with the mountain, and those encounters had a quality that
Speaker 1: was darker and more immediately threatening than ancestral grief. What
Speaker 1: they described encountering in the forest below the lights was
Speaker 1: something that used the lights as a distraction, something that
Speaker 1: had learned or perhaps had always known that the lights
Speaker 1: would pull a person's eyes upward and hold them there,
Speaker 1: staring at the ridge line with their attention fixed on
Speaker 1: the spectacle above, while something moved in close behind them
Speaker 1: in the timber below. There was a family, the Perkins family.
Speaker 1: This was roughly eighteen fifty and their account has been
Speaker 1: preserved in Burke County oral tradition ever since, who were
Speaker 1: driving a small cattle herd through the Lynnville Gorge in
Speaker 1: late September, moving the animals down from summer pasture before
Speaker 1: the first hard freeze. Thomas Perkins, his teenage son William,
Speaker 1: and a hired hand whose name varies across the different
Speaker 1: versions of the account, which is itself interesting that the
Speaker 1: tradition ever quite settled on his name, as if some
Speaker 1: part of the community telling this story over generations understood
Speaker 1: that he was about to become someone who needed protecting,
Speaker 1: even in memory. They were making camp on the east
Speaker 1: side of the gorge when the lights appeared above the
Speaker 1: far Ridge line. Thomas had seen the lights before. Most
Speaker 1: people who'd lived in that country any length of time
Speaker 1: had seen them, and had learned to regard them as
Speaker 1: a strange but essentially harmless feature of the landscape, like
Speaker 1: an unusual rock formation or a particularly loud waterfall. He
Speaker 1: told William and the hired man that they were nothing
Speaker 1: to worry about, electrical, maybe atmospheric. He preferred a practical explanation,
Speaker 1: even when the practical explanation didn't quite hold together. What
Speaker 1: he could not explain was the cattle. The animals were
Speaker 1: agitated in the specific, unmistakable way that tells any experienced
Speaker 1: stockman that a predator is nearby, pressing together into a tight,
Speaker 1: miserable mass, rolling their eyes to show the white lowing
Speaker 1: in that low and hopeless register that sounds like an
Speaker 1: animal reporting to anything that might listen that it has
Speaker 1: run out of options, Thomas and the hired man took
Speaker 1: turns walking the perimeter of the camp with lanterns held high,
Speaker 1: listening to the gorge. They heard nothing unusual. The lights
Speaker 1: moved and pulsed above the far ridge. The cattle kept
Speaker 1: pressing together. William sat by the fire and worked at
Speaker 1: not looking as frightened as he felt. Sometime past midnight,
Speaker 1: the hired man didn't come back from his perimeter walk.
Speaker 1: Thomas waited twenty minutes. Then he took a lantern and
Speaker 1: went looking. He found the man's hat on the trail
Speaker 1: about fifty yards from camp, sitting upright in the middle
Speaker 1: of the path, not knocked off and fallen, not dropped
Speaker 1: in a hurry, but placed sat down in the middle
Speaker 1: of the trail, crown up as if someone had deliberately
Speaker 1: placed it there as a marker. He found the man's
Speaker 1: lantern ten yards further on, set carefully on the uphill
Speaker 1: side the trail, still burning. That detail, the lantern still burning,
Speaker 1: placed neatly rather than dropped, traveled through every retelling of
Speaker 1: this account without variation. The hired man had set his
Speaker 1: lantern down gently on the side of the trail, and
Speaker 1: then had simply ceased to be there. Thomas searched, He
Speaker 1: called the man's name into the gorge for hours. He
Speaker 1: moved through the laurel and the hardwood timber, and expanding
Speaker 1: circles from the point of the hat, taking the gorge, drainage,
Speaker 1: and the ridgeline above camp, covering every reasonable area and
Speaker 1: some unreasonable ones. He found nothing. Not that night, not
Speaker 1: the next day, when he and William searched from first
Speaker 1: light until dark. Not ever, in any final accounting, the
Speaker 1: gorge kept whatever it had taken. What William Perkins told
Speaker 1: people later, and he told the story for the rest
Speaker 1: of his long life, without the essential details ever changing,
Speaker 1: was that while his father was out searching, he was
Speaker 1: sitting by the fire alone, and he heard breathing from
Speaker 1: the direction Thomas had gone, from the tree line on
Speaker 1: the uphill side of camp, from the heavy timber, where
Speaker 1: nobody had any reason to be and where no trail went.
Speaker 1: It was louder than any human breathing he'd ever heard,
Speaker 1: slow and rhythmic and deep, the breathing of something enormous,
Speaker 1: patient and perfectly at ease, not labored or agitated, calm,
Speaker 1: the calm of something that knew exactly where it was
Speaker 1: and exactly what it was doing, and felt no need
Speaker 1: to rush any of it. He said he could see
Speaker 1: the firelight catching something in the tree line at the
Speaker 1: edge of the darkness. Not eyes, not the eyeshine he'd
Speaker 1: have expected from an animal, a surface, something smooth and
Speaker 1: curved and large, just barely at the threshold of the firelight,
Speaker 1: present enough to know it was there, and too far
Speaker 1: into the dark to see it clearly. Something that was
Speaker 1: standing in the tree line and breathing slowly and waiting
Speaker 1: with all the patients of the gorge itself for something
Speaker 1: he couldn't name. He didn't move, he didn't call out.
Speaker 1: He sat with his knees to his chest and breathed
Speaker 1: as quietly as he could, and he waited for his father.
Speaker 1: And when Thomas came back, empty handed and shaken, William
Speaker 1: told him what he'd heard. And Thomas Perkins did something
Speaker 1: that William said he'd never seen his father do in
Speaker 1: all the years of his life. He didn't question the account,
Speaker 1: he didn't investigate. He smothered the fire with dirt and silence,
Speaker 1: caught the cattle, and started them down the trail in
Speaker 1: the dark. They walked all night by the light of
Speaker 1: one lantern. Thomas never went back into the Lynnville Gorge, again,
Speaker 1: not once, not for any reason, for the rest of
Speaker 1: his life. I've been to the Lynnville Gorge many times.
Speaker 1: I've stood on the overlooks in the dark and watched
Speaker 1: for the lights, and I've seen them, or something that
Speaker 1: looks very much like what every account for two centuries describes,
Speaker 1: glowing orbs above the far ridge line, moving in ways
Speaker 1: that don't correspond to any human light source, pulsing and
Speaker 1: changing color and winking out and reappearing in different positions.
Speaker 1: And standing there watching them, I've had that feeling, that specific,
Speaker 1: bone deep feeling of being watched from behind of something
Speaker 1: in the tree line at my back while my eyes
Speaker 1: are fixed on the spectacle above. That feeling that the
Speaker 1: lights are exactly what the people who know this mountain
Speaker 1: best have always said. They are a distraction. Whatever those
Speaker 1: lights are, Brown Mountain holds its secrets in the old
Speaker 1: timber of the gorge below the ridge line, and the
Speaker 1: gorge does not give up what it takes. We're going
Speaker 1: deeper now, deeper in time, and deeper into the forest.
Speaker 1: I want to take you into the Cherokee Homeland the
Speaker 1: mountains of far western North Carolina, the Smoky Mountain Country,
Speaker 1: And I want to tell you about the most feared
Speaker 1: being in all of Cherokee supernatural tradition. Not the most
Speaker 1: visually dramatic, not the most obviously monstrous, the most feared
Speaker 1: because the thing about the raven man that makes it
Speaker 1: uniquely terrifying is that it doesn't look like a monster.
Speaker 1: It looks like a person, usually an old person, usually
Speaker 1: someone you'd have no reason to be afraid of, and
Speaker 1: it wants to eat your years. The raven Mocker in
Speaker 1: Cherokee kalanu Akieliski, which translates roughly as the raven that
Speaker 1: steals is a witch or something that was once a
Speaker 1: person and has become something else through the accumulation of
Speaker 1: stolen life over a very long time. I want to
Speaker 1: be clear that this is living tradition, not museum piece.
Speaker 1: The Eastern Band Cherokee Nation exists today and the raven
Speaker 1: Mocker remains part of their cultural and spiritual understanding of
Speaker 1: the world. I share this with the respect that deserves
Speaker 1: and with full acknowledgment of the limits of my outsider's knowledge.
Speaker 1: The raven Mocker travels at night, often appearing first as
Speaker 1: a fiery light moving through the sky in the erratic,
Speaker 1: purposeful way of no natural thing, trailing a sound like
Speaker 1: the beating of enormous wings. It's drawn specifically to places
Speaker 1: where people are sick and dying. Something in the raven
Speaker 1: mocker can detect the approach of death the way a
Speaker 1: predator can detect weakness from far away, and with great precision.
Speaker 1: It enters those places, either invisibly or wearing the appearance
Speaker 1: of someone known to the family, a neighbor, an elder,
Speaker 1: a relative, someone whose arrival wouldn't raise alarm, And it
Speaker 1: sits beside the dying person, and it reaches into their chest,
Speaker 1: and it extracts their remaining time, not their life force
Speaker 1: in the immediate sense of killing them, their remaining unlived days,
Speaker 1: their future. It swallows those stolen years, and the person
Speaker 1: dies earlier than they would have, and the raven mocker
Speaker 1: grows stronger and older and harder to destroy, because stolen
Speaker 1: life extends the thief's own life proportionally. A raven mocker
Speaker 1: that's been at this for centuries is ancient, beyond imagining,
Speaker 1: and ancient things in the these mountains are powerful things
Speaker 1: stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. The only protection was a medicine person
Speaker 1: with the right knowledge and the courage to hold it
Speaker 1: in the presence of something that would prefer you didn't
Speaker 1: the confirmation of what had happened. The terrible confirmation after
Speaker 1: the fact was finding when you prepared the body that
Speaker 1: the heart was gone, not damaged, gone as if it
Speaker 1: had never been there. I want to tell you about
Speaker 1: a woman from a Cherokee settlement in the o'conna Lufty
Speaker 1: River drainage in the mountains of far western North Carolina
Speaker 1: in the winter of seventeen eighty. I'll call her Ayida,
Speaker 1: a Cherokee woman's name, though the account I received used
Speaker 1: her clan designation. She was a healer, as her grandmother
Speaker 1: had been and her grandmother's grandmother before that. A lineage
Speaker 1: of medicine knowledge passed through the female line, going further
Speaker 1: back than any single person's memory could reach. She knew
Speaker 1: the plants and the ceremonies and the words. She knew
Speaker 1: what to do for fever and wound rot, and the
Speaker 1: sicknesses that grief produces in a body. And in seventeen eighty,
Speaker 1: in the mountains of western North Carolina, there was no
Speaker 1: shortage of grief to work with. This was the year
Speaker 1: of some of the most savage American militia raids against
Speaker 1: Cherokee towns in the entire Revolutionary War period. Raids that
Speaker 1: burned communities to the ground, that killed the very old
Speaker 1: and the very young without distinction, that left the survivor
Speaker 1: scattered and hungry and sick. The settlement on the O'connallufty
Speaker 1: was dealing with all of this, and then the illness
Speaker 1: arrived on top of it, a respiratory sickness, possibly influenza.
Speaker 1: Working through a community that was already weakened and had
Speaker 1: nowhere to go, Ayida moved from house to house and
Speaker 1: did everything she knew, and the dying were happening faster
Speaker 1: than they should have been. People who should have had
Speaker 1: days were going in hours. People who had stabilized would
Speaker 1: collapse again in the deep of the night and be
Speaker 1: gone before she could reach them. And then she found
Speaker 1: the first missing heart, and then the second, and she
Speaker 1: knew what was moving through her community on top of
Speaker 1: everything else that was already carrying. She began sitting vigil
Speaker 1: at night. She burned tobacco and cedar, and sang the
Speaker 1: detection and protection medicines her grandmother had taught her, and
Speaker 1: she watched. She did this for four nights without seeing anything.
Speaker 1: On the fifth night, deep in the cold hours after midnight,
Speaker 1: she heard the wings, not from outside, from inside, from
Speaker 1: within the walls of the structure, as if something enormous
Speaker 1: was beating enormous wings in a space that couldn't possibly
Speaker 1: contain them, the sound filling the interior the way sound
Speaker 1: fills the inside of a drum bone, deep, rhythmic, and
Speaker 1: underneath it barely audible, breathing, old and slow and deeply.
Speaker 1: Terribly satisfied, she began the detection song, the medicine she'd
Speaker 1: been taught precisely for this moment, for making visible what
Speaker 1: uses invisibility as a weapon. And what she saw she
Speaker 1: declined to describe in detail. For the rest of her life.
Speaker 1: She would say only that it was wearing the form
Speaker 1: of an old man from the settlement who died the
Speaker 1: previous winter, a man she'd known, a man she'd sat
Speaker 1: with in his passing. That the wrongness of the wearing
Speaker 1: was visible once the detection song was working, the way
Speaker 1: a coat worn by someone it wasn't made for pulls
Speaker 1: and gaps in all the wrong places, That the proportions
Speaker 1: weren't right, That the way the firelight moved across the
Speaker 1: surface of it wasn't right. That whatever was inside the
Speaker 1: shape she recognized was not the person she'd known. She
Speaker 1: would say that when it became aware of her seeing it,
Speaker 1: the face of the dead man pulled into an expression
Speaker 1: she could not find language for, and spent years afterward
Speaker 1: trying to forget. She said it was not anger, though
Speaker 1: anger was in it. She said it was something older
Speaker 1: than anger, the way a mountain is older than the
Speaker 1: weather that moves across it, the way something that has
Speaker 1: been doing the same terrible thing for centuries regards a
Speaker 1: single person who's standing in its way. She held the song.
Speaker 1: She stood in that room with the sick person in
Speaker 1: the corner, and the fire burning low, and this ancient
Speaker 1: thing wearing a dead man's face staring at her with
Speaker 1: eyes that processed light wrong, and she held every word
Speaker 1: of the medicine. She didn't flinch. She didn't break the
Speaker 1: song to scream or run. She held it, word by word,
Speaker 1: note by note, for however long it took, and the
Speaker 1: thing left it unraveled the way fog unravels when the
Speaker 1: wind finds it, and the sound of wings subsided gradually,
Speaker 1: and the cold she hadn't consciously noticed building in the room,
Speaker 1: the specific dense cold the raven Mocker brings with it,
Speaker 1: colder than the air has any right to be receded.
Speaker 1: Slowly the fire found its strength again. The sick person
Speaker 1: in the corner was still breathing. When she was sure
Speaker 1: it was gone, Ayda sat alone in that room for
Speaker 1: a long time, and then she noticed her hair, the
Speaker 1: white streaks, wide, brilliant, unmistakable, running back from her temples
Speaker 1: through the black. She was thirty two years old. She
Speaker 1: carried those streaks to her grave. She told her apprentices
Speaker 1: years later about the hardest part of that night, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't the fear, though the fear had been real
Speaker 1: and physical in a way she hadn't anticipated, even with
Speaker 1: a lifetime of preparation. The hardest part was being able
Speaker 1: to see through the detection medicine what the thing was
Speaker 1: doing to the sick person in the corner. While it worked,
Speaker 1: she could see the years leaving. She described it as
Speaker 1: a visible demi, the particular light that a living person
Speaker 1: carries that makes a living body different from a dead one,
Speaker 1: even before the final breath, That light pulling away in threads,
Speaker 1: drawn toward the thing in the corner, and the thing
Speaker 1: growing brighter as the person grew dim and the person
Speaker 1: showing no sign of distress, just quietly, slowly, gently running out.
Speaker 1: She said it looked peaceful. She said that was the
Speaker 1: worst part. That the raven Mocker had learned over centuries
Speaker 1: of practice, how to be gentle when it served it,
Speaker 1: how to take what it wanted from a dying person
Speaker 1: without causing them any additional suffering in the taking. That
Speaker 1: the gentleness wasn't mercy, It was refinement, the refinement of
Speaker 1: something ancient that has had a very long time to
Speaker 1: perfect its work. The Raven Macker is not a story
Speaker 1: the Eastern Band Cherokee tell to frightened tourists. It's part
Speaker 1: of living, spiritual and cultural practice in the community. The
Speaker 1: protections exist because the thing they protect against exists. I've
Speaker 1: been in the Smoky Mountain country at night in the
Speaker 1: old hemlock stands above the O'Connell left, and I've heard
Speaker 1: sounds there that I keep stored in the category of
Speaker 1: things I can't account for. A sound like wings. That's
Speaker 1: too loud and too purposeful for any bird. I know
Speaker 1: of a cold that arrives without any change in the wind.
Speaker 1: I believe the woman with the white streaked haear. I
Speaker 1: believe she held the song when most of us would
Speaker 1: not have. And I believe whatever she held it against
Speaker 1: is still out there in the old hemlock hollows, still
Speaker 1: doing its ancient, patient, gentle work. We're moving north and
Speaker 1: east now, up through the mountains into West Virginia to
Speaker 1: one of the most historically layered and genuinely haunted places
Speaker 1: in the entire Appalachian chain. Harper's Ferry sits at the
Speaker 1: confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers, at the eastern
Speaker 1: tip of the state, where the Blue Ridge Mountains crowd
Speaker 1: and close to the river gaps, and the water runs
Speaker 1: cold and fast between walls of sheer Rock. Most people
Speaker 1: know Harper's Ferry from the history books John Brown's raid
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty nine, the attempt to ignite a slave
Speaker 1: rebellion that ended with Brown hanged and the country measurably
Speaker 1: closer to tearing itself apart in the Civil War. The
Speaker 1: town carries history the way the rivers carry silt visibly
Speaker 1: in layers, always in motion. The ghost I want to
Speaker 1: tell you about pre dates John Brown by a full generation.
Speaker 1: She doesn't have an official name, a grave marker, or
Speaker 1: a documented history. The railroaders gave her a name eventually,
Speaker 1: the way working people name things that exist beyond their
Speaker 1: power to explain, and they called her Screaming Jenny. Whatever
Speaker 1: her real name was, nobody wrote it down. She was
Speaker 1: nobody in the brutal accounting of nineteenth century America, and
Speaker 1: the cruelty of that fact only deepens what she became.
Speaker 1: In the early eighteen thirties, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
Speaker 1: was pushing its main line through the Harper's Ferry area,
Speaker 1: bringing with it all the chaos that major construction drags
Speaker 1: into a landscape, work camps, transient laborers, tool yards, men
Speaker 1: and machinery cutting into hillsides and laying stone. And with
Speaker 1: that population of workers came the people who inhabit the
Speaker 1: margins of such things everywhere and in every era. Among
Speaker 1: them was a woman middle aged by the counts, though
Speaker 1: how much of the age on her was years and
Speaker 1: how much was the life she'd been living as impossible
Speaker 1: to know now she had no visible family, no apparent community.
Speaker 1: She sheltered in one of the stone archways along the
Speaker 1: rail right of way, and she kept herself warm the
Speaker 1: way people with nothing kept themselves warm in that century,
Speaker 1: with small fires, rags burning in a tin basin, scraps
Speaker 1: of wood in a ring of stones, whatever the world
Speaker 1: left at the margin for someone like her to use.
Speaker 1: On a night in October of eighteen thirty three, her
Speaker 1: fire got away from her, whether she'd fallen asleep too
Speaker 1: close to it, or whether the constant funneling wind that
Speaker 1: comes through the gap at Harper's Ferry caught a burning
Speaker 1: piece of cloth and carried it into her bedding. Nobody
Speaker 1: ever established the specifics, and nobody in any position of
Speaker 1: authority cared enough to investigate. What the railroad workers on
Speaker 1: the night shift knew was that they heard a sound
Speaker 1: they could never afterwards fully forget or describe. A woman's
Speaker 1: voice screaming, one continuous scream, unwavering in pitch and intensity,
Speaker 1: and moving, not staying in one place the way a
Speaker 1: sound from a fixed source stays, but moving toward them
Speaker 1: along the track at a speed that wasn't possible for
Speaker 1: a person on foot When they lifted their lanterns and
Speaker 1: looked down the rail line, they saw her, running, every
Speaker 1: stitch of clothing from her waist upward, on fire, her
Speaker 1: arms extended, her hair burning, running in a straight line
Speaker 1: down the center of the track toward them, and the
Speaker 1: scream coming from her, without any pause for breath, without
Speaker 1: any change in pitch, one continuous, raw sound. She was
Speaker 1: in the river before anyone could reach her, and the
Speaker 1: river kept her, and when morning came there was nothing
Speaker 1: to find. One week later, the screaming started again. The
Speaker 1: first engineer to encounter it was a man named Caleb Walsh,
Speaker 1: running a freight consists through the Harper's Ferry yard on
Speaker 1: a moonless October night, seven days after the woman died.
Speaker 1: He heard the scream above the noise of his engine,
Speaker 1: above the steam and the steel grinding and the general
Speaker 1: mechanical violence of a working locomotive. Heard it clearly enough
Speaker 1: above all of that to make him look ahead down
Speaker 1: the track, and something was coming. Not a woman on
Speaker 1: fire in the literal sense, not a burning body, something
Speaker 1: composed of light, orange red light in the specific color
Speaker 1: of burning, human in its rough geometry, moving toward him
Speaker 1: on the track at a sprint, and the scream was
Speaker 1: coming from it, that same sustained, breathless, human female sound.
Speaker 1: He kept going because a man at the throttle of
Speaker 1: a freight train cannot simply stop. And the engine passed
Speaker 1: through the shape, and the cab went cold, in an instant,
Speaker 1: specific intense cold, as if the cab had been plunged
Speaker 1: into ice water, lasting about three seconds, and then gone.
Speaker 1: And the scream was behind him and fading, And when
Speaker 1: he looked back, the track was empty. He reported the encounter.
Speaker 1: He wasn't disciplined, which suggests he wasn't the first. He wasn't.
Speaker 1: The accounts came in steadily over the decades following railroad workers,
Speaker 1: bridge tenders, night watchmen, and the rail yard a female
Speaker 1: shape made of fire colored light moving along the rail
Speaker 1: right of way near the river, accompanied by that scream,
Speaker 1: sometimes appearing to pursue vehicles, sometimes simply crossing the track
Speaker 1: and dissolving into the hillside. Always that color, always that sound,
Speaker 1: always the cold when you pass through or near it.
Speaker 1: By the eighteen seventies, screaming Jenny was an established part
Speaker 1: of the oral tradition of Harper's Ferry. By the turn
Speaker 1: of the century, newspaper accounts had documented the sightings in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century. When the National Park Service took over
Speaker 1: the Harper's Ferry site, the reports didn't stop. They changed character,
Speaker 1: shifting from railroad workers to hikers and park staff and
Speaker 1: tourists who pressed their faces to the glass of the
Speaker 1: tour bus windows and then couldn't see. A park ranger
Speaker 1: who spent more than a decade at the Harper's Ferry site,
Speaker 1: I'll call her Margaret, shared her own account with me
Speaker 1: several years ago. She'd been working at the site for
Speaker 1: nearly a year when she had her encounter. It was November,
Speaker 1: late in the afternoon shift, near closing time, and she
Speaker 1: was alone, doing a final walk through of the lower
Speaker 1: Town area near the old railroad infrastructure. Standard routine. She'd
Speaker 1: done it dozens of times. The sound started before she
Speaker 1: saw anything. She described it carefully, choosing her words with
Speaker 1: the precision of someone who'd spent years trying to find
Speaker 1: accurate language for an imprecise experience. It started as something
Speaker 1: she almost could have attributed to wind, almost but not quite,
Speaker 1: in the same way that you can almost convince yourself
Speaker 1: a footstep in an empty house was the house settling,
Speaker 1: except that you know it wasn't. And then it focused,
Speaker 1: sharpened into clarity, the way a radio signal locks in
Speaker 1: when you hit the right frequency. And it was a scream,
Speaker 1: a woman's scream, sustained beyond what any human respiratory system
Speaker 1: should be able to sustain, without any variation that would
Speaker 1: indicate the need for air, as if the thing producing
Speaker 1: it had no use for breath, as if the sound
Speaker 1: was what it was made of. And it was moving,
Speaker 1: coming from the direction of the river along what used
Speaker 1: to be the rail corridor, moving toward her at a
Speaker 1: pace that was wrong for a person on foot. She
Speaker 1: stood still for several seconds, long enough for rational explanations
Speaker 1: to generate and fail. Then she left. She walked, then
Speaker 1: jogged back the way she'd come until she could see
Speaker 1: the visitor center lights ahead. She didn't look back until
Speaker 1: she was in the light. She told me that the
Speaker 1: fear of the moment had been real and immediate, but
Speaker 1: what she returned to in the years afterward wasn't the fear.
Speaker 1: It was the quality of the sound, the grief in it.
Speaker 1: She said, it communicated something beyond simple terror, something more calm, complex,
Speaker 1: and more sustained, something that felt less like a scream
Speaker 1: of pain and more like a scream of permanent loss.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages, like something that had been screaming for
Speaker 1: one hundred and seventy years and understood it would be
Speaker 1: screaming for another one hundred and seventy after that, and
Speaker 1: wasn't going to stop, because stopping would mean accepting what
Speaker 1: couldn't be accepted. That woman in the Stone Archway never
Speaker 1: had a name that anyone recorded. She was nobody. But
Speaker 1: the mountains remember her, and the gap between the rivers
Speaker 1: carries her voice and the cold that passes through you
Speaker 1: when her light goes by. That's as close as she
Speaker 1: can come now to being held by anyone from one
Speaker 1: mountain to another. But we're jumping forward now, forward across
Speaker 1: one hundred and forty years from the Civil War era
Speaker 1: into the age of the muscle car and the college campus.
Speaker 1: We're staying in North Carolina, moving west to the high
Speaker 1: country of Avery County, to the mountain the Cherokee called Tanahwa,
Speaker 1: which means something close to great hawk or fabulous eagle,
Speaker 1: and that later settlers renamed Grandfather Mountain because the ridgeline
Speaker 1: profile seen from certain angles along what is now the
Speaker 1: Blue Ridge Parkway suggests the weathered face of an old
Speaker 1: man looking up at the sky. Grandfather Mountain is the
Speaker 1: highest peak in the Blue Ridge section of the Appalachians,
Speaker 1: and even in full daylight, it has a quality I
Speaker 1: can only describe as deliberately occupied. The summit is exposed
Speaker 1: and wind scraped and ancient, and the forest near the
Speaker 1: top is subalpine, more like the boreal forests of northern
Speaker 1: Canada than anything you'd expect in the American South. In autumn,
Speaker 1: it has a spare, severe beauty that hits you hard
Speaker 1: at night. In any season, the upper forest of Grandfather
Speaker 1: Mountain feels watched, feels attended, like something up there in
Speaker 1: the dark is paying careful attention to what comes and goes.
Speaker 1: In October of nineteen seventy one, four young men from
Speaker 1: booth un drove up to the Grandfather Mountain area for
Speaker 1: a weekend camping trip. They were students at Appalachian State University, David, Michael, Paul,
Speaker 1: and Robert. To use names that approximate theirs without identifying them.
Speaker 1: Robert is the one who eventually shared the account years
Speaker 1: after the fact with a researcher collecting first hand experiences
Speaker 1: of unusual events in the Southern Appalachians. By the time
Speaker 1: the account reached me through that chain, Robert was in
Speaker 1: his mid fifties, working as an engineer in a mid
Speaker 1: sized city well outside the mountains. He was measured, careful
Speaker 1: with his language, and notably uneager to tell the story
Speaker 1: for dramatic effect. He told it because he believed it
Speaker 1: was true, and because he thought the truth of it mattered.
Speaker 1: They set up camp on Friday afternoon below the main
Speaker 1: Ridge line, off a trail that sees moderate traffic even today,
Speaker 1: and that in the fall of nineteen seventy one, was
Speaker 1: remote enough that they spent the entire first day without
Speaker 1: encountering another person. The weather was the perfection that October
Speaker 1: per deuces in the Southern Appalachians, sharp, clear blue sky, cold,
Speaker 1: the hardwood slopes lit up in orange and red and yellow.
Speaker 1: They had a fire going by mid afternoon, and everything
Speaker 1: was as comfortable and ordinary as a camping trip is
Speaker 1: supposed to be, right up until the moment it wasn't.
Speaker 1: What Robert said first changed was the light, not dramatically,
Speaker 1: not a sudden dimming or a cloud crossing the sun,
Speaker 1: a subtle shift in the quality of the afternoon light,
Speaker 1: the kind of change you register before you consciously understand
Speaker 1: you've registered it, a slight flattening, a slight loss of
Speaker 1: warmth in the color of the light through the canopy.
Speaker 1: And at the same moment, all four of them stopped
Speaker 1: what they were doing, without any communication, without any signal,
Speaker 1: they went still simultaneously, as if something had reached into
Speaker 1: each of them, and pressed pause at the same instant,
Speaker 1: and looked up the slope. There was a figure on
Speaker 1: the trail above their camp, standing completely still, sixty yards
Speaker 1: up slope, in the section of trail that ran along
Speaker 1: the edge of a rocky outcrop before disappearing over the
Speaker 1: ridge line. It was upright bipedal, roughly bilateral human in
Speaker 1: its basic geometry, but the scale was wrong. All four
Speaker 1: of them agreed on this immediately, and without any of
Speaker 1: them needing to say so. It was too large. Robert's
Speaker 1: estimate was seven and a half to eight feet. The
Speaker 1: others in later fragmentary accounts gave similar numbers, and it
Speaker 1: was still in the total absolute way that very large
Speaker 1: wild animals can be still, the stillness of something that
Speaker 1: doesn't feel threatened by being seen, and doesn't feel any
Speaker 1: need to move. Not one of the four spoke. Robert
Speaker 1: returned to this detail every time he told the story,
Speaker 1: and I think it's the most important detail in the
Speaker 1: whole account. Four young men in their late teens and
Speaker 1: early twenties, the age at which performing fearlessness is essentially
Speaker 1: a full time job, the age at whitch seeing something
Speaker 1: startling on almost always produces an immediate verbal reaction. Looked
Speaker 1: up at something they couldn't account for on the trail
Speaker 1: above their camp, and not one of them said a
Speaker 1: single word, not what is that? Or do you see that?
Speaker 1: Or hey? Nothing. The figure seemed to produce silence, the
Speaker 1: way certain sounds seemed to do, by filling the space
Speaker 1: so completely that ordinary human reflexes simply didn't fire. The
Speaker 1: figure stood for what Robert estimates as two to three minutes,
Speaker 1: knowing that time perception in that state isn't reliable. Then
Speaker 1: it moved toward them down the slope along the trail
Speaker 1: at a steady and unhurried walking pace, and completely without sound.
Speaker 1: On a trail of gravel and exposed rock. Moving at
Speaker 1: a normal walking pace, it produced no sound at all.
Speaker 1: No footfall, no displacement of loose stone, nothing, just a large,
Speaker 1: silent shape descending the trail toward their camp in the
Speaker 1: late afternoon light. It stopped at the edge of camp,
Speaker 1: ten feet from where they were sitting, and close enough
Speaker 1: now for Robert to see the face, or what occupied
Speaker 1: the space where a face should be. He was always
Speaker 1: very careful with this part of the account. He didn't
Speaker 1: want to overclaim. He said there were features in the
Speaker 1: facial region, but that they didn't correspond to human facial
Speaker 1: anatomy in any mapping he could make. The proportions were wrong,
Speaker 1: the relationships between the elements were off in ways he
Speaker 1: could detect but not specifically name, and the light moved
Speaker 1: across the surface of the face differently than it moves
Speaker 1: across human skin, as if the surface was processing the
Speaker 1: light rather than simply reflecting it. Then something happened that
Speaker 1: Robert spent years trying to find language for the best
Speaker 1: he ever managed was this language was placed in him,
Speaker 1: not spoken aloud, not conveyed through any mechanism he could
Speaker 1: identify as auditory or visual. Ideas, sequential, specific, meaningful ideas,
Speaker 1: what he could only call communication, were simply present in
Speaker 1: his understanding in a way they hadn't been a moment before,
Speaker 1: Like a door in his mind had been opened from
Speaker 1: the outside, something set through it, and the door closed again.
Speaker 1: He declined, across every retelling of this account over many years,
Speaker 1: to share the content of what was communicated. He said
Speaker 1: only that it was a warning, that it concerned decisions
Speaker 1: he and the others had not yet made, that some
Speaker 1: of what it warned against came to pass in the
Speaker 1: years that followed, and that one of the four not Robert,
Speaker 1: returned from that camping trip, and within two weeks underwent
Speaker 1: what could only be described as a complete fracturing of
Speaker 1: his ability to maintain the basic structure of his daily reality,
Speaker 1: a clinical level dissolution. He recovered over the better part
Speaker 1: of a year. He never discussed that weekend, not once
Speaker 1: for the rest of his life. The figure turned and
Speaker 1: walked back up the trail, without hurry, without sound, and
Speaker 1: over the ridgeline. As it disappeared, the light quality came
Speaker 1: back to normal, the birds started again, the fire crackled.
Speaker 1: The four of them sat without speaking for a long time.
Speaker 1: I've asked everyone I know with deep knowledge of Cherokee
Speaker 1: tradition and Appalachian supernatural history. What this might have been
Speaker 1: the most consistent answer I get points toward a category
Speaker 1: of being in Cherokee cosmology that doesn't translate cleanly into
Speaker 1: any single English word, something that exists in the space
Speaker 1: between human and spirit without being reducible to either. Something
Speaker 1: that appears at specific moments in specific places for specific purposes,
Speaker 1: that the people who encounter it aren't necessarily meant to
Speaker 1: understand fully. Messenger is the English word that comes up
Speaker 1: most often, and it's probably the least wrong word available,
Speaker 1: even though it misses dimensions of the Cherokee conceptualization. I
Speaker 1: want to add one more piece of this account because
Speaker 1: Robert shared it with the researcher as a kind of
Speaker 1: coda to the main story, and I think it deserves
Speaker 1: to be included. About three weeks after the camping trip,
Speaker 1: Robert went back to Grandfather Mountain alone. He didn't tell
Speaker 1: any of the others he was going. He drove up
Speaker 1: to the trailhead on a weekday morning in November, when
Speaker 1: the crowds were thin and the air had turned sharply cold,
Speaker 1: and he hiked up to the section of trail where
Speaker 1: the figure had stood. He wanted to see it in daylight.
Speaker 1: He wanted to do what people often want to do
Speaker 1: after an experience like that, to return to the physical
Speaker 1: location and find something ordinary in it, to let the
Speaker 1: daylight and the familiar mechanics of hiking reduce the thing
Speaker 1: to something manageable. He found the rocky outcrop. He found
Speaker 1: the section of trail that ran along its edge. He
Speaker 1: stood there and looked back down the slope toward where
Speaker 1: their camp had been, and he understood in full daylight
Speaker 1: that whoever or whatever had been standing on that trail
Speaker 1: above them had a complete, unobstructed view of their entire camp.
Speaker 1: Could have watched them for a long time before they noticed. It,
Speaker 1: could have been standing there on any number of a
Speaker 1: ca before the afternoon they finally looked up. He stood
Speaker 1: there for a long time, looking down at the campsite,
Speaker 1: and he thought about that, about how long it might
Speaker 1: have been watching before it decided to approach. He hiked
Speaker 1: back down and drove home and told nobody about the
Speaker 1: return visit for fifteen years. Grandfather Mountain still restricts overnight
Speaker 1: camping in certain zones near the upper Ridge line. The
Speaker 1: official rationale is ecological preservation and the ecology of that
Speaker 1: mountain genuinely is fragile and deserving of protection. But I've
Speaker 1: spent enough time in that subalpine forest and had enough
Speaker 1: conversations with people who know the mountain well to know
Speaker 1: that the ecological explanation is the comfortable one. Grandfather Mountain
Speaker 1: has always known. The difference between being watched at and
Speaker 1: being watched from, and the watching up there above the
Speaker 1: clouds on that ancient wind scraped ridge runs in both directions.
Speaker 1: Our last story takes us to the very top of
Speaker 1: the chain. I know what some of you are thinking
Speaker 1: when I say New Jersey, and I need you to
Speaker 1: set that image aside entirely. The New Jersey I'm talking
Speaker 1: about has nothing to do with the shore, or the
Speaker 1: Turnpike corridor or the skyline of the northeastern megalopolis. Northwestern
Speaker 1: New Jersey Warren in Sussex Counties, pressed up against the
Speaker 1: Delaware Water Gap on the Pennsylvania border, is mountain country, rural,
Speaker 1: densely forested, and old in the specifically Appalachian way, where
Speaker 1: the age of the land is something you feel in
Speaker 1: your body before you understand it in your mind. The
Speaker 1: Kittatinny Ridge runs through there, part of the same continuous
Speaker 1: ridge system that connects back through Pennsylvania to the Blue
Speaker 1: Ridge in Virginia. The same geological bones, the same deep forest,
Speaker 1: the same quality of stillness in the hollows that you'll
Speaker 1: find five hundred miles further south, and in Warren County,
Speaker 1: New Jersey, there is a road with the name I
Speaker 1: need you to hear with fresh ears. Its legal name
Speaker 1: on every county map and every road sign and every
Speaker 1: GPS system and exists is Shades of Death. Road that
Speaker 1: is not me embellishing for effect. Seven miles long, winding
Speaker 1: through the Kittatinny Ridge Country, passed a body of water
Speaker 1: called Ghost Lake, also its real name, and along the
Speaker 1: forested edge of Jenny Jump State Forest, which is itself
Speaker 1: named for a colonial era story about a girl named
Speaker 1: Jenny who allegedly jumped from a cliff to escape and attack.
Speaker 1: The naming conventions in this particular corner of New Jersey
Speaker 1: suggest a landscape that has been honest about its nature
Speaker 1: for a very long time. The road carries genuinely grim
Speaker 1: documented history. The name itself likely accumulated from several sources.
Speaker 1: Malaria epidemics in the early nineteenth century, fed by the
Speaker 1: wetlands adjacent to the road that killed people in the
Speaker 1: surrounding communities before anyone understood what malaria was or where
Speaker 1: it came from. A series of documented murders along the
Speaker 1: road in the nineteenth century, the specifics of which are
Speaker 1: well establish county historical records, multiple unexplained deaths over the
Speaker 1: years since, and persistent accounts of supernatural activity going back
Speaker 1: into the early eighteen hundreds. Strange lights in the wetland areas,
Speaker 1: sounds without identifiable sources, encounters on the road itself at
Speaker 1: night that don't resolve into any satisfactory conventional explanation. The
Speaker 1: specific phenomenon I want to tell you about has come
Speaker 1: to be called the walking Man, And unlike the Cherokee
Speaker 1: traditions I've shared tonight, traditions with deep roots, long histories,
Speaker 1: and living communities who maintain them, the Walking Man is
Speaker 1: more recent and harder to categorize. He's an accumulation, a
Speaker 1: pattern that emerges from separate accounts gathered across roughly seven decades,
Speaker 1: submitted by people who had no knowledge of each other
Speaker 1: and no shared context beyond one specific stretch of road
Speaker 1: that described the same encounter in enough consistent detail to
Speaker 1: constitute something that deserves attention. The accounts start appearing reliably
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties, with possible earlier references in county
Speaker 1: newspapers that may or may not be describing the same thing.
Speaker 1: They continue through the nineteen sixties, the nineteen seventies and beyond.
Speaker 1: People driving Shades of Death Road at night, particularly in
Speaker 1: the section nearest to Ghost Lake, a mile and a
Speaker 1: half of dense forest with no ambient light and no
Speaker 1: visible habitation, report seeing a man walking along the road.
Speaker 1: Just a man walking, not inherently remarkable, but the details
Speaker 1: that make it remarkable are These held consistent across dozens
Speaker 1: of accounts from people who didn't know each other. He
Speaker 1: is always alone, always moving in the same direction, always
Speaker 1: wearing what witnesses describe as dark or old fashioned clothing.
Speaker 1: And he is visible only in the vehicle's mirrors, rear view, mirror,
Speaker 1: side mirror. Never when you turn your head and look
Speaker 1: directly at where he should be, only in the reflected you,
Speaker 1: only in the mirror. Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. Always and exclusively there
Speaker 1: and gone the moment direct sight is brought to bear
Speaker 1: on him, in nineteen eighty seven, Carol Hutchinson was driving
Speaker 1: home from a late hospital shift through Warren County at
Speaker 1: approximately two thirty in the morning, taking Shades of Death
Speaker 1: Road because it was genuinely faster than the highway alternatives
Speaker 1: at that hour. She knew the road well and had
Speaker 1: no particular anxiety about it. She was tired and thinking
Speaker 1: about getting home. She was roughly in the middle of
Speaker 1: the Ghost Lake Stretch, the densest and darkest section of
Speaker 1: the road, hemmed in by forest on both sides, with
Speaker 1: no break in the tree line. When she saw him
Speaker 1: in her rearview mirror, she registered him the way you
Speaker 1: register anything in a rearview mirror at two in the morning, peripherally, automatically,
Speaker 1: the brain logging information before the conscious mind catches up.
Speaker 1: A man on the road behind her walking, She thought
Speaker 1: odd at this hour, but people walked strange hours. She
Speaker 1: watched the mirror. He was keeping pace with the car.
Speaker 1: She was going fifteen miles an hour on that stretch.
Speaker 1: It's narrow and winding, and fifteen is genuinely a comfortable
Speaker 1: speed through there in the dark. She watched the mirror,
Speaker 1: and the man behind her was keeping pace, not falling behind.
Speaker 1: The distance between them was holding constant. He was walking
Speaker 1: ordinary walking stride, no obvious exertion, and he was keeping
Speaker 1: pace with a car going fifteen miles an hour. She
Speaker 1: sped up twenty twenty five, faster than she was comfortable
Speaker 1: going on that road in the dark. She watched the mirror,
Speaker 1: He kept pace, The gap held. She went to thirty.
Speaker 1: Same result. Whatever physics was in operation on that road
Speaker 1: on that night, it was not the physics that applies
Speaker 1: to a man on foot and a car on a
Speaker 1: paved road. She looked directly behind her neck, turned her head,
Speaker 1: looked through the rear windshield at the lit road surface
Speaker 1: behind her, empty tail lights, illuminating nothing but road and
Speaker 1: the dark tree line beyond. She faced forward and checked
Speaker 1: the rear view mirror. He was there, same distance, same
Speaker 1: walking pace, looking ahead, not at the mirror, not at
Speaker 1: her walking. She made a sound. She described it afterward
Speaker 1: as not quite a word and not quite a scream,
Speaker 1: the sound a person makes when the conscious mind has
Speaker 1: been entirely overridden by something below it. She floored the
Speaker 1: accelerator and held it for the remaining mile and a
Speaker 1: half of the Ghost Lake stretch until the forest opened,
Speaker 1: and the glow of the junction with the County Road
Speaker 1: was visible ahead. She checked the rear view. At that
Speaker 1: point the road behind her was empty, just dark pavement
Speaker 1: and the tail end of the tree line. Whatever had
Speaker 1: been there was gone, not left behind by the increase
Speaker 1: in speed, just gone absent, as if it had never
Speaker 1: been there except in the silver of the mirror. Carol
Speaker 1: Hutchinson put her name to this account publicly, and I've
Speaker 1: been grateful for that because her willingness to do so
Speaker 1: gave other people the permission to share similar experiences without
Speaker 1: the fear of being dismissed as unstable or attention seeking.
Speaker 1: In the years since, I've collected a substantial number of
Speaker 1: corroborating accounts from that specific section of road, with that
Speaker 1: specific characteristic visible in the mirror, gone on direct inspection.
Speaker 1: I've spent a great deal of time thinking about that characteristic,
Speaker 1: because I think it's the key to understanding what this
Speaker 1: thing is and why it's frightening in a way that
Speaker 1: goes well beyond the ordinary fright of a strange figure
Speaker 1: on a dark road. In the folk traditions of many cultures,
Speaker 1: not just Appalachian tradition, but European folk tradition, African tradition,
Speaker 1: East Asian tradition, mirrors have always occupied a special and
Speaker 1: somewhat suspect category. The old understanding of reflective surfaces was
Speaker 1: that they showed you a different angle on reality, not
Speaker 1: simply a reversed image of what was in front of you,
Speaker 1: but a view from a slightly different register, a perspective
Speaker 1: that sees things the direct look cannot see, that catches
Speaker 1: things that look away when you look at them directly.
Speaker 1: In certain European folk traditions, mirrors are covered when someone
Speaker 1: dies in a house because the mirror might show you
Speaker 1: the departing soul. In Haitian voodoo tradition, certain spirits are
Speaker 1: visible only in reflective surfaces. In Old Appalachian folk practice,
Speaker 1: there are specific instructions about how mirrors should be positioned
Speaker 1: and covered in certain circumstances that suggest a belief in
Speaker 1: the mirror as a threshold rather than just glass. The
Speaker 1: walking man of Shades of Death Road chooses the mirror.
Speaker 1: He's visible there and not directly, something that can keep
Speaker 1: pace with a car at thirty miles an hour, is
Speaker 1: not limited by much. He chooses to be seen in
Speaker 1: the reflected view. He knows the difference between the mirror
Speaker 1: and the direct life look. He knows that the mirror
Speaker 1: sees differently. He permits you to catch him in that
Speaker 1: peripheral silver glimpse, and he's gone the moment you try
Speaker 1: to look straight at him. And what that suggests, if
Speaker 1: you take the old understanding seriously, is that he understands
Speaker 1: the nature of the mirror. That he's making a choice
Speaker 1: about how much of himself to reveal and to whom,
Speaker 1: and how that he's not simply being seen. He's allowing
Speaker 1: himself to be seen from a specific angle for reasons
Speaker 1: that haven't been established yet. I've driven that road several times.
Speaker 1: I always slow through the Ghost Lake stretch. I always
Speaker 1: watch the mirrors. I want to tell you about one
Speaker 1: of those drives, because I've been honest with you all
Speaker 1: night about other people's encounters, and I think it's only
Speaker 1: fair to be honest about my own. It was a
Speaker 1: November night, no moon. I was alone in the car,
Speaker 1: and I took the road slowly through the dense section
Speaker 1: near the lake the way I always do. I watch
Speaker 1: the rear view mirror. I watched the side mirrors the
Speaker 1: road behind me, was empty for most of that stretch,
Speaker 1: just dark pavement and the illuminated edge of the tree
Speaker 1: line in my tail lights. About halfway through the stretch,
Speaker 1: I saw something. I want to be precise about this.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to overclaim and I'm not going to
Speaker 1: dismiss it either, because I've heard too many accounts to
Speaker 1: dismiss it, and I value honesty too much to overclaim.
Speaker 1: I saw something in the rearview mirror that was not
Speaker 1: a reflective post or a road sign or the outline
Speaker 1: of a tree branch. Something with a vertical dimension that
Speaker 1: was wrong for the natural elements of that road. Something
Speaker 1: that was there for one clear moment in the mirror
Speaker 1: and not there when I checked again two seconds later.
Speaker 1: I didn't stop the car, I didn't go back. I
Speaker 1: don't know what I saw. I know what the people
Speaker 1: who've driven that road for the better part of a
Speaker 1: century describe seeing, and I know my experience in the
Speaker 1: mirror that November night was consistent with what they describe.
Speaker 1: Whether that means anything, I'll leave to you. But I
Speaker 1: always check if there's a thread running through all six
Speaker 1: of these stories. The wampus cat in her Laurel Thickets,
Speaker 1: the lights above Brown Mountain and what walks below them.
Speaker 1: The raven mocker and her terrible gentle work, the burning
Speaker 1: woman on the Harper's Ferry rail line, the silent messenger
Speaker 1: on Grandfather's high trail, the walking man who exists only
Speaker 1: in the mirror on that long, dark Jersey road. I
Speaker 1: think the thread is this the Appalachian Mountains. Remember, They've
Speaker 1: been here longer than human memory, longer than human language,
Speaker 1: longer than the first human ancestor who ever stood at
Speaker 1: a tree line and wondered what was watching from the
Speaker 1: other side. They've absorbed every joy and grief and act
Speaker 1: of violence and moment of transcendence that has ever played
Speaker 1: out in their hollers and on their ridge lines and
Speaker 1: in their old cathedral timber. The land keeps memory and
Speaker 1: away we barely understand, and mostly don't try to, because
Speaker 1: taking it seriously would require us to accept that we
Speaker 1: are not the primary authors of our own experience in
Speaker 1: places like these, that we are visitors in a space
Speaker 1: with its own consciousness and its own concerns. That the forest,
Speaker 1: when it's deep enough and old enough, has opinions about us.
Speaker 1: And here's what I've come to believe after decades of
Speaker 1: listening to these accounts, and walking in these places, and
Speaker 1: sitting in the dark of these hollers, and listening to
Speaker 1: what the dark says back. The mountains don't mean us
Speaker 1: harm exactly. They're not malevolent. They're indifferent in the way
Speaker 1: that anything truly ancient is indifferent, the way a river
Speaker 1: is indifferent to whether you swim in it or drown
Speaker 1: in it. What they are is honest. They show you
Speaker 1: what's there. They don't dress it up or soften it
Speaker 1: or present it in a form designed to be comfortable
Speaker 1: for you. They show you the wampus cat and the
Speaker 1: raven mocker, and the burning woman and the walking figure
Speaker 1: in the mirror, and they let you make of it
Speaker 1: what you will. They've been doing that for ten thousand years,
Speaker 1: and they'll keep doing it long after every road we've
Speaker 1: built through them has been followed back by the trees.
Speaker 1: I'm not asking you to believe in any specific thing.
Speaker 1: I'm asking you to consider the possibility that these mountains
Speaker 1: are not empty, That the people who lived here for
Speaker 1: thousands of years before any European set foot on this
Speaker 1: continent were telling the truth when they said the land
Speaker 1: was alive and paying attention, that the generations of loggers
Speaker 1: and farmers and railroad men and homesteaders who built their
Speaker 1: lives in these hills were telling the truth when they said,
Speaker 1: holler by holler and generation by generation, that the forest
Speaker 1: held things that the nurse driving home from a late shift,
Speaker 1: and the park ranger doing her final walkthrough, and the
Speaker 1: sixty one year old farmer who ran his trap line
Speaker 1: in the dark for twenty years without incident until the
Speaker 1: morning everything changed. That all of those ordinary people encountering
Speaker 1: something they couldn't account for in places they thought they knew,
Speaker 1: were telling the truth because they weren't crazy, they weren't liars.
Speaker 1: They were people doing ordinary things in extraordinary places, and
Speaker 1: the mountains showed them something real, something that reminded them
Speaker 1: in the specific and personal way the Appellachians have been
Speaker 1: reminding people since people first arrived here that the forest
Speaker 1: is older than we are, and that it has its
Speaker 1: own residence, and that the courtesy it shows us in
Speaker 1: letting us pass through it is not the same thing
Speaker 1: as indifference to our passing the old green dark is
Speaker 1: paying attention. It always has been, thank you for coming
Speaker 1: into these woods with me. Tonight, drive safe, getting home
Speaker 1: and check your mirrors. Di