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13 Appalachian Village Encounters Locals Still Refuse to Explain | Horror… · Appalachian Horror | Horror Stories

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Speaker 1: Welcome back to Park Ranger Files. I'm glad you're here.
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Speaker 2: Tonight we're spending the whole video in one part of
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Speaker 2: the country, and that's the Appalachian region.
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Speaker 1: West Virginia. Eastern Kentucky. Western North Carolina.
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Speaker 2: The parts of Virginia and Tennessee that the interstates skip
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Speaker 2: right over. These small village and holler communities have stories
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Speaker 2: that don't make the news, and that's exactly why people
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Speaker 2: send them to us.
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Speaker 1: Let's read.
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Speaker 2: Story 1. I grew up in a place that barely
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Speaker 2: qualifies as a town. Canaan Ridge sits in the northeastern
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Speaker 2: corner of West Virginia, up in Tucker County. When I
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Speaker 2: was a kid, the whole community numbered maybe 200 people,
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Speaker 2: if you counted the farms scattered across the surrounding hills.
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Speaker 2: We had a post office, a volunteer fire department, a church,
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Speaker 2: and a general store that also served as the de
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Speaker 2: facto community meeting place, doctor's waiting room, and gossip exchange.
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Speaker 2: Everything else you drove 45 minutes to get. It was
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Speaker 2: isolated the way those Ridge communities tend to be. Not
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Speaker 2: just geographically, but culturally, like it existed slightly outside of
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Speaker 2: normal time. My grandmother used to say that Canaan Ridge
1:13
Speaker 2: had been quietly eating its secrets since before the Civil
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Speaker 2: War and would go right on eating them long after
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Speaker 2: everyone living there was in the ground. My grandmother was
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Speaker 2: not a superstitious woman. I want to be clear about
1:26
Speaker 2: that because it affects how I received the things she
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Speaker 2: said She was a practical mountain woman who had raised
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Speaker 2: four children in that house, worked the kitchen garden every
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Speaker 2: year until she was 79, and attended the same church
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Speaker 2: for 62 consecutive years without, as far as I could tell,
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Speaker 2: uncritically accepting everything she was told there. She had a
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Speaker 2: very clear sorting mechanism for what was real and what wasn't,
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Speaker 2: and the things she put in the real category the
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Speaker 2: things she discussed with the same matter-of-fact directness, she'd use
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Speaker 2: to tell you the garden needed rain. Those are the
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Speaker 2: things I've thought about most in my adult life. She
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Speaker 2: told me once, when I was probably 12 or 13,
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Speaker 2: that the ridge above the community had always had something
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Speaker 2: living on it that wasn't an animal you could name.
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Speaker 2: She didn't say it to frighten me, and she didn't
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Speaker 2: say it dramatically. She said it in the context of
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Speaker 2: telling me to come in before dark when I was
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Speaker 2: out on the hills And when I pressed her on
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Speaker 2: why she looked at me with the expression she had,
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Speaker 2: when she was deciding how much to explain versus how
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Speaker 2: much to simply state, she said, There's something on that
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Speaker 2: ridge that's been there longer than any family in this community,
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Speaker 2: and it does its business, and we do ours. And
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Speaker 2: as long as we remember to do our business inside
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Speaker 2: before dark, those two things stay separate. That was the
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Speaker 2: complete explanation. I didn't get more than that from her.
3:00
Speaker 2: but I've thought about the structure of it many times since.
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Speaker 2: The acknowledgement, the long presence, the coexistence, the boundary that
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Speaker 2: keeps the two businesses separate, and the practical behavior coming
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Speaker 2: before dark that maintains the boundary.
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Speaker 1: I was 26 when the thing with the porch light happened.
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Speaker 2: I had come back from a two-year stint working in
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Speaker 2: Pittsburgh for reasons I won't get into. Suffice to say
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Speaker 2: it didn't work out, and I needed to go home
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Speaker 2: and regroup. My parents were still living in the same
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Speaker 2: house I grew up in at the end of Kettle
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Speaker 2: Creek Road, which dead-ended at a wooden bridge that flooded
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Speaker 2: every spring without fail. The nearest neighbor was a woman
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Speaker 2: named Darlene Mutters, who was in her late 60s and
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Speaker 2: had lived alone on her property for as long as
3:50
Speaker 2: I could remember. Her husband Carl had died maybe 15
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Speaker 2: years prior.
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Speaker 1: A tractor accident.
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Speaker 2: And she never remarried. She was perfectly pleasant in that way.
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Speaker 2: Mountain people are where they're very kind to your face,
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Speaker 2: and you never quite know what they think of you
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Speaker 2: in private. The thing about Darlene's house was the porch light.
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Speaker 1: She kept a.
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Speaker 2: Single yellow bulb burning in the fixture over her front door,
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Speaker 2: and it ran from dusk to dawn every single night
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Speaker 2: without exception. My mother always said Darlene kept it on.
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Speaker 1: For Carl, which... I thought was a little heartbreaking and
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Speaker 1: a little strange.
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Speaker 2: In equal measure, but it had been on for 15 years,
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Speaker 2: and nobody thought much about it anymore. It was just
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Speaker 2: a feature of the landscape, like the shape of the
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Speaker 2: hill behind her barn, or the way her mailbox leaned
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Speaker 2: slightly to the left. I had been home for about
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Speaker 2: three weeks when my mother mentioned at dinner one night
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Speaker 2: that Darlene's porch light had been off. Not just off
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Speaker 2: that evening, but off for three nights running, My mother
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Speaker 2: seemed more concerned about this than I would have expected.
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Speaker 2: And when I asked why it mattered that much, she
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Speaker 2: set down her fork and said that if Darlene Mutters
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Speaker 2: had turned that light off, it meant something was wrong.
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Speaker 2: I figured she was reading too much into it, but
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Speaker 2: I also knew better than to say that out loud
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Speaker 2: to my mother. The next morning, I walked up the
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Speaker 2: gravel path to Darlene's front door and knocked.
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Speaker 1: No answer. I knocked again. Nothing. I went around to
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Speaker 1: the back and knocked on the storm door there. Her
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Speaker 1: car was in the drive.
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Speaker 2: And her chickens were out, which told me she had
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Speaker 2: at least been there that morning. Eventually I tried the
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Speaker 2: front one more time and she answered, looking perfectly fine physically,
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Speaker 2: dressed for the day, coffee mug in hand. She seemed
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Speaker 2: surprised to see me and I explained that my mother
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Speaker 2: had noticed the porch light and asked me to check in.
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Speaker 2: Darlene smiled in a polite but closed off way and
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Speaker 2: told me she had simply decided to stop leaving it on.
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Speaker 1: Said it was time.
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Speaker 2: I told her that was fine, and we said our goodbyes,
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Speaker 2: and I went home and relayed the conversation to my mother,
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Speaker 2: who did not appear reassured in the least. That night
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Speaker 2: I was out on our own porch around 10 o'clock
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Speaker 2: having a cigarette. I was trying to quit and mostly
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Speaker 2: failing when I noticed a light moving on the hillside
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Speaker 2: above Darlene's property. This wasn't unusual in itself because deer
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Speaker 2: hunters and coyote callers It would sometimes be out on
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Speaker 2: the ridge at night with flashlights or headlamps. But what
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Speaker 2: struck me was the way it was moving, not in
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Speaker 2: the sweeping back-and-forth pattern of someone looking for an animal
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Speaker 2: or scanning terrain. It was moving in a slow, deliberate circuit,
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Speaker 2: almost like it was tracing the perimeter of something, a
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Speaker 2: fence line maybe, or a property edge. I watched it
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Speaker 2: for maybe 15 minutes before it stopped moving entirely and
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Speaker 2: just sat still up on the ridge. After another few minutes,
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Speaker 2: it went out. I stubbed out my cigarette and went
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Speaker 2: inside and didn't think too much of it. Two mornings later,
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Speaker 2: my mother told me Darlene's car was gone and had
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Speaker 2: been since the day before. She had walked up the
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Speaker 2: road to check in person and nobody came to the door.
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Speaker 2: The chickens were unfed and one of them had gotten
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Speaker 2: out and was wandering the ditch alongside the road. My
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Speaker 2: mother fed them herself and left a note tucked in
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Speaker 2: the storm door. We called the county sheriff's non-emergency line
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Speaker 2: that afternoon, and a deputy came out the following morning.
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Speaker 2: He did a welfare check, found no sign of forced entry,
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Speaker 2: no sign of a struggle, vehicle gone.
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Speaker 1: Personal effects all apparently in place.
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Speaker 2: He took our information and told us they'd look into
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Speaker 2: it and that she had probably gone to visit family.
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Speaker 2: My mother told him Darlene had no living family that
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Speaker 2: she knew of, and the deputy wrote something in his
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Speaker 2: notepad and thanked us for our time. Darlene came back
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Speaker 2: 11 days later. I was outside splitting wood when her
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Speaker 2: car rolled up the gravel drive and she got out
8:03
Speaker 2: looking thin and drawn, like she had been sick or
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Speaker 2: hadn't been sleeping. I called over to her and asked
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Speaker 2: if she was all right, and she waved at me
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Speaker 2: with a tight little smile and went inside without a word.
8:15
Speaker 2: The porch light came on that evening. It has been
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Speaker 2: on every night since. My mother went to see her
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Speaker 2: a week after she got back. She wouldn't say much
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Speaker 2: about what Darlene told her, and my mother is not
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Speaker 2: a woman who keeps information to herself unless she thinks
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Speaker 2: it needs to be kept, so whatever it was, it
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Speaker 2: was something. The only thing my mother told me was this.
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Speaker 2: Darlene had said that she'd turned the porch light off
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Speaker 2: because something on the hill above her property had started
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Speaker 2: coming toward it at night, and that when she stopped
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Speaker 2: leaving the light on, it stopped coming close to the house.
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Speaker 2: So she went and stayed with a friend in Parsons
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Speaker 2: for a week and a half, and only came back
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Speaker 2: when she felt like enough time had passed. I asked
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Speaker 2: my mother what was coming toward the light, and my
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Speaker 2: mother shook her head and said Darlene didn't know, had
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Speaker 2: never gotten close enough to see it, and had no
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Speaker 2: desire to. She just knew it was attracted to the light,
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Speaker 2: and so she took the light away, and then she
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Speaker 2: took herself away too. And now she was back, and
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Speaker 2: the light was back on, and I asked my mother
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Speaker 2: why she turned the light back on if it attracted
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Speaker 2: whatever it was, My mother thought about that for a
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Speaker 2: second and said she thought Darlene felt safer with it on.
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Speaker 2: That she would rather have the light burning and know
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Speaker 2: what was out there circling the edge of her yard
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Speaker 2: than have the light off and not know where it
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Speaker 2: was at all. I kept thinking about it in the
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Speaker 2: months that followed. I'm the kind of person who needs
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Speaker 2: things to resolve, who needs the ends tied. And this
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Speaker 2: was an end that refused to tie. I tried a
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Speaker 2: few times to bring it up with my mother again.
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Speaker 2: Not in a pressing way, more in the way you
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Speaker 2: circle something that's sitting at the edge of your thinking
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Speaker 2: and wants to be addressed. She was consistent in not
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Speaker 2: wanting to discuss it further. That alone told me something, because,
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Speaker 2: as I said, my mother is not a woman who
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Speaker 2: avoids things without a reason. The night I remember most
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Speaker 2: from those eight months was a Tuesday in January, maybe
10:15
Speaker 2: five months into my stay. A hard winter night with
10:18
Speaker 2: the temperature down into the single digits and ice on
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Speaker 2: every surface. And the silence that comes with serious cold.
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Speaker 2: That muffled winter silence where even the house sounds seemed dampened.
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Speaker 2: I couldn't sleep and I was sitting in the dark
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Speaker 2: of the front room looking out the window down the road.
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Speaker 2: The way you look at things in the middle of
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Speaker 2: the night when there's nothing specific you're looking at. Darlene's
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Speaker 2: porch light was on. That yellow light in the fixture
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Speaker 2: over her door. throwing its small circle onto the snow
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Speaker 2: of her front steps. And on the edge of that circle,
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Speaker 2: just at the point where the light died away into
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Speaker 2: the dark, something was standing. I couldn't see it clearly.
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Speaker 2: The distance was too great and the night too dark
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Speaker 2: outside the lit portion. But there was a shape at
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Speaker 2: the edge of Darlene's porch light that was not a
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Speaker 2: tree and not a fence post and not a car.
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Speaker 2: It was a shape with the rough outline of something upright,
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Speaker 2: I watched it for a long time, maybe 20 minutes.
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Speaker 2: It did not move into the light. It did not
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Speaker 2: move away from it either. It just remained at the
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Speaker 2: very perimeter, exactly at the transition point between light and dark,
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Speaker 2: as if the light were a boundary it would come
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Speaker 2: up to but not cross. Eventually I went to bed.
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Speaker 2: In the morning the snow was unmarked in front of
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Speaker 2: Darlene's house as far as I could see from the road,
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Speaker 2: clean and undisturbed. Either whatever had been at the edge
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Speaker 2: of that light had never touched the ground, or the
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Speaker 2: snow had covered whatever marks it left during the remaining
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Speaker 2: hours of the night. I did not tell my mother
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Speaker 2: about this. I did not tell anyone. What would be
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Speaker 2: the use of it? I had seen a shape at
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Speaker 2: the edge of a light in the middle of a
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Speaker 2: winter night, which is exactly the kind of thing sleep
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Speaker 2: deprivation and an overactive.
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Speaker 1: Mind can generate. I know that.
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Speaker 2: But I also know what my mother told me about Darlene.
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Speaker 2: about the thing on the hill that was attracted to
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Speaker 2: the light, about the weeks Darlene spent away from her
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Speaker 2: own home, because she couldn't be in it with the
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Speaker 2: light off, and couldn't be in it with the light on.
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Speaker 2: And I know that whatever I had decided to call
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Speaker 2: the shape at the edge of that porch light trick
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Speaker 2: of the dark tree branch fence post, imagination. Darlene Mutters
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Speaker 2: had been keeping a light burning for 15 years, and
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Speaker 2: whatever was drawn to it, had not in all that
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Speaker 2: time crossed the boundary of the light itself.
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Speaker 1: It came to the edge. It didn't come in.
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Speaker 2: Maybe that's the agreement. Maybe that's what the light is for.
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Speaker 2: Not to keep the dark away, but to mark where
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Speaker 2: the dark is permitted to be. A boundary light. A
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Speaker 2: line of negotiation. I moved back to the city eight
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Speaker 2: months later. The porch light was on when I left.
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Speaker 2: It's probably on right now in a house in a
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Speaker 2: small community in Tucker County, West Virginia. throwing its small
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Speaker 2: yellow circle onto the snow or the mud or the
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Speaker 2: summer grass, while something on the hill above it considers
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Speaker 2: the distance. If you've had a strange experience in your
13:22
Speaker 2: own small town or mountain community, we want to hear
13:25
Speaker 2: from you. Submit your story through the link in the
13:28
Speaker 2: description below. Every account is read personally, and yours might
13:33
Speaker 2: be featured in a future video, right here on Park
13:35
Speaker 2: Ranger Files.
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Speaker 1: Story 2 This.
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Speaker 2: Story is going to sound like every other small-town ghost
13:42
Speaker 2: story you've ever heard, and I understand that going in.
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Speaker 2: I grew up hearing stories about Cutters Ford, and I
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Speaker 2: dismissed all of them for most of my life. The
13:52
Speaker 2: difference is that I'm 34 years old now, and I
13:55
Speaker 2: know what I saw out there, and I'm not interested
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Speaker 2: in anyone telling me I imagined it. Cutters Ford is
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Speaker 2: an unincorporated community in southeastern Kentucky, Harlan County. In the
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Speaker 2: valley between two ridgelines, that run roughly parallel before splitting
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Speaker 2: off toward different ends of the county. The community sits
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Speaker 2: along the banks of a creek that dries to a
14:16
Speaker 2: trickle by August most years and runs high and brown
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Speaker 2: and fast every spring. There's a handful of houses and
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Speaker 2: a church that holds services twice a month because the
14:26
Speaker 2: congregation is too small to justify weekly ones, and a
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Speaker 2: bridge that was last replaced in the 1970s and sounds
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Speaker 2: like it wants to give up every time a loaded
14:36
Speaker 2: coal truck rolls across it. There used to be a
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Speaker 2: small store, but it closed when I was in elementary school,
14:43
Speaker 2: and the building has been slowly collapsing into itself ever since.
14:49
Speaker 2: I want to paint the picture of the place accurately,
14:52
Speaker 2: because the geography matters to the story. The main road
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Speaker 2: through Cutters Ford follows a creek on the north bank.
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Speaker 2: and between the road and the creek, there is a
15:03
Speaker 2: narrow margin of flat ground, maybe 20 or 30 feet,
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Speaker 2: and then the water. On the south bank, the ground
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Speaker 2: rises immediately into dense second-growth hardwood that climbs steeply to
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Speaker 2: the ridgeline.
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Speaker 1: In daylight, Cutters Ford is a narrow valley.
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Speaker 2: With a narrow community in it, and nothing especially remarkable
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Speaker 2: about it. In the evening, as the shadow of the
15:27
Speaker 2: south ridge comes over early and the bottom loses light
15:30
Speaker 2: before the hilltops, There's a character to the place that
15:33
Speaker 2: is harder to characterize, but unmistakable if you've felt it.
15:37
Speaker 2: The narrowness becomes different at dusk. The creek sound changes,
15:41
Speaker 2: register somehow. The hills press in. It's the kind of
15:46
Speaker 2: place that is fully different at night from what it
15:48
Speaker 2: is in the day. Not in any specific identifiable way,
15:53
Speaker 2: but in total, holistically. The way some places just are
15:57
Speaker 2: different when the light goes. My family has connections to
16:01
Speaker 2: Harlan County going back generations, though I was born in
16:04
Speaker 2: Lexington and.
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Speaker 1: Grew up there.
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Speaker 2: I came back to Cutter's Ford for family events and
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Speaker 2: funerals and holidays, and I knew the community the way
16:13
Speaker 2: second-generation people know the place their family came from. Well
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Speaker 2: enough to navigate it, not well enough to understand it
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Speaker 2: in the way people who've lived it their whole lives
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Speaker 2: understand it. Terrell is the one who understands it that way.
16:27
Speaker 2: and Terrell is the one who told me what I'm
16:29
Speaker 2: about to tell you. I moved away at 18 and
16:32
Speaker 2: came back to visit my aunt and uncle during summers
16:34
Speaker 2: for a few years after that. And then life got
16:37
Speaker 2: busy and the visits dropped off, and then my uncle
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Speaker 2: passed away, and I came back for the funeral and
16:42
Speaker 2: realized I hadn't set foot in Harlan County.
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Speaker 1: In almost seven years. That was two years ago.
16:49
Speaker 2: My cousin Terrell is four years older than me and
16:51
Speaker 2: has lived in Cutters Ford his whole life. We grew
16:54
Speaker 2: up close, and even after I moved away, we stayed
16:57
Speaker 2: in touch the way cousins who grew up like brothers
16:59
Speaker 2: tend to. So after the funeral, after everything was done
17:03
Speaker 2: and the family was filtering home, Terrell and I ended
17:06
Speaker 2: up sitting on my aunt's back porch drinking sweet tea
17:09
Speaker 2: and just talking. The kind of talking that happens after
17:12
Speaker 2: a funeral where you cycle through the grief and then
17:15
Speaker 2: start catching up on everything else because you both know
17:18
Speaker 2: you went too long between visits and you want to
17:21
Speaker 2: make the most of.
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Speaker 1: The time you have now.
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Speaker 2: At some point, It was probably 11 at night, maybe later.
17:29
Speaker 2: Terrell mentioned that he'd had what he called a situation
17:32
Speaker 2: out near the old crossing. That was what locals called
17:36
Speaker 2: the spot, about three-quarters of a mile downstream from the
17:39
Speaker 2: main bridge, where the creek ran through a natural stone chute,
17:43
Speaker 2: and you could ford it on foot if the water
17:46
Speaker 2: was low enough. There used to be a road there,
17:49
Speaker 2: just a dirt track really, before the county rerouted things
17:53
Speaker 2: decades ago. The track is still visible if you know
17:56
Speaker 2: where to look, overgrown and sinking back into the hill.
18:01
Speaker 2: Terrell is not a man who scares easily. He spent
18:04
Speaker 2: eight years working in the mines before his back gave out,
18:07
Speaker 2: and is the kind of person who processes everything calmly
18:10
Speaker 2: and practically. So when he said he'd had a situation,
18:13
Speaker 2: I took it seriously. He told me it had happened twice,
18:17
Speaker 2: both times at night and both times when he had
18:19
Speaker 2: been out checking on a piece of property he leases
18:21
Speaker 2: for hunting on the far side of the creek. The
18:24
Speaker 2: first time he said he was coming back across the
18:26
Speaker 2: ford on foot, water maybe ankle deep that time of year,
18:30
Speaker 2: and he heard something upstream that he initially took to
18:32
Speaker 2: be another person. Footsteps in the water, heavy and deliberate,
18:37
Speaker 2: coming toward him from around the upstream bend where you
18:40
Speaker 2: couldn't see more than 20 feet before the creek curved
18:44
Speaker 2: into the dark. He called out, figuring it was maybe
18:47
Speaker 2: a neighbor or a kid messing around. Nothing answered, but
18:51
Speaker 2: the footsteps stopped.
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Speaker 1: He crossed the rest of the way and kept moving
18:55
Speaker 1: and didn't think too much more about it that night.
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Speaker 2: The second time, he said it was maybe three weeks later.
19:02
Speaker 2: He was crossing the same ford, going the other direction
19:05
Speaker 2: this time, heading out to check his trail.
19:08
Speaker 1: Cameras before first light.
19:10
Speaker 2: The water had come up a little from rain earlier
19:12
Speaker 2: that week, but it was still crossable. He was halfway
19:15
Speaker 2: across when whatever was upstream came around the bend. He
19:19
Speaker 2: stopped talking at this point. and looked off toward the
19:22
Speaker 2: tree line at the bottom of my aunt's yard, and
19:25
Speaker 2: I let him sit with it for a moment, before
19:27
Speaker 2: asking what it was. He shook his head slowly, and
19:30
Speaker 2: said he didn't know exactly. It was on the far
19:34
Speaker 2: bank upstream, moving along the water's edge in a way
19:37
Speaker 2: that didn't track right, not walking. He was specific about that.
19:43
Speaker 2: More like a loping movement, body low to the ground,
19:46
Speaker 2: but upright, not on all fours.
19:49
Speaker 1: He said the Beska he could make was something moving
19:52
Speaker 1: the way a person moves when they're very badly injured
19:55
Speaker 1: and trying to stay quiet about it. Lurching, compensating. He
20:00
Speaker 1: said it was big.
20:02
Speaker 2: Not bear big, because he'd seen bears at the creek
20:05
Speaker 2: before and knew what that looked like.
20:07
Speaker 1: This was tall and thin.
20:09
Speaker 2: In a way that didn't fit anything he had a
20:11
Speaker 2: name for. It hadn't come into the water. It just
20:16
Speaker 2: moved along the bank, upstream parallel to him, and then
20:21
Speaker 2: stopped and he said it just looked at him. He
20:24
Speaker 2: couldn't see a face. It was too dark and too far.
20:28
Speaker 2: But he had the absolute certainty of being watched in
20:30
Speaker 2: the way you sometimes do in the dark. And you
20:33
Speaker 2: can't confirm it, but, you know, He got across the
20:36
Speaker 2: creek and onto the far bank and moved quickly toward
20:39
Speaker 2: the property, and eventually whatever it was didn't follow, or
20:42
Speaker 2: at least he didn't hear it follow. And he did
20:44
Speaker 2: his checking and came back by the bridge road instead
20:47
Speaker 2: of the ford.
20:48
Speaker 1: Since then, he's been using the bridge.
20:51
Speaker 2: He said he doesn't talk about it to many people
20:53
Speaker 2: because it sounds like exactly the kind of story everyone
20:56
Speaker 2: in Cutter's Ford has been telling since before he was born.
21:00
Speaker 2: And he doesn't want to add fuel to something that
21:02
Speaker 2: probably gets exaggerated enough already.
21:06
Speaker 1: But here's the part that gets me.
21:09
Speaker 2: After Terrell told me his story, he mentioned, almost as
21:12
Speaker 2: an aside, that he'd talked to an older man in
21:15
Speaker 2: the community named Burl Craze, who was in his 80s
21:20
Speaker 2: and had lived on the creek his whole life and
21:23
Speaker 2: was one of those people who retained everything, every story,
21:27
Speaker 2: every name, every piece of local history. And Burl had
21:31
Speaker 2: told Terrell that the old crossing had a reputation going
21:35
Speaker 2: back generations That people in the community had always been
21:39
Speaker 2: careful about that particular stretch of creek. That there was
21:43
Speaker 2: an old local understanding. Not a rule, exactly. More of
21:47
Speaker 2: a piece of inherited wisdom. That you didn't cross at
21:51
Speaker 2: the ford after dark. You went the long way around
21:54
Speaker 2: on the road. You didn't cross at the ford? Terrell
21:58
Speaker 2: hadn't known that before his own experiences. He'd grown up
22:02
Speaker 2: in Cutter's Ford his whole life.
22:03
Speaker 1: And somehow.
22:04
Speaker 2: Never heard that particular piece of inherited wisdom until after
22:08
Speaker 2: he'd gone and learned it the hard way on his own.
22:12
Speaker 2: He went quiet again after telling me that and we
22:14
Speaker 2: finished our tea and I went back inside and I
22:17
Speaker 2: lay awake for a while in my aunt's spare room
22:20
Speaker 2: listening to the creak sound carry through the window screen
22:23
Speaker 2: in the dark. It runs a couple hundred yards from
22:26
Speaker 2: the back of the property. And I lay there and
22:29
Speaker 2: thought about what my cousin said and I thought about
22:31
Speaker 2: the generations of people in that little community, who knew
22:36
Speaker 2: without being told formally that you didn't cross certain water
22:40
Speaker 2: after dark. And I thought about how knowledge like that
22:43
Speaker 2: doesn't just appear, how it comes from somewhere, how something
22:48
Speaker 2: has to happen more than once, before enough people know
22:51
Speaker 2: about it that it becomes part of the unspoken rules
22:54
Speaker 2: of a place. I drove out of Harlan County the
22:57
Speaker 2: next morning. I didn't go near the forge. I've thought
23:01
Speaker 2: about Terrell's story and the time since then, specifically about
23:04
Speaker 2: the aspect of it that I find most compelling and
23:07
Speaker 2: most unsettling, which is the intergenerational peace. The old understanding
23:12
Speaker 2: that Burl Crace described, the piece of inherited wisdom that said,
23:17
Speaker 2: you didn't cross at the fort after dark and you
23:19
Speaker 2: went the long way around on the road. That kind
23:22
Speaker 2: of local knowledge doesn't arrive fully formed. Something generates it.
23:28
Speaker 2: Something happens once or multiple times, to enough people that
23:32
Speaker 2: the community develops a collective response to it, and that
23:35
Speaker 2: response gets encoded as informal rule and passed along with
23:40
Speaker 2: just enough fidelity to survive into the next generation. The
23:44
Speaker 2: specific experience loses its edges over time and becomes an instinct,
23:49
Speaker 2: a piece of understood local behavior.
23:52
Speaker 1: Don't cross the fort after dark. Don't ask why. Just don't.
23:57
Speaker 2: The question I find myself sitting with is, How many
24:00
Speaker 2: places have knowledge like that which has either been forgotten
24:04
Speaker 2: or was never transmitted clearly enough to survive? Communities that
24:08
Speaker 2: were disrupted by the decline of the coal industry, by out-migration,
24:14
Speaker 2: by the economic pressures that broke up so many of
24:17
Speaker 2: these hollow communities over the last century. Maybe the people
24:21
Speaker 2: who carried the specific old understandings moved away and the understandings.
24:25
Speaker 1: Moved with them or didn't move with them.
24:29
Speaker 2: Got left behind in the hollow with everything else that
24:32
Speaker 2: couldn't be packed and transported. And then somebody comes back,
24:36
Speaker 2: or somebody new settles there, and they don't have the
24:39
Speaker 2: understanding because nobody was left to give it to them.
24:43
Speaker 2: They don't know not to cross at the fort after dark,
24:46
Speaker 2: and they find out the way Terrell found out, on
24:49
Speaker 2: their own, in the water, was something loping.
24:52
Speaker 1: Parallel to them on the far bank.
24:55
Speaker 2: Terrell told me something else before I left Harlan County,
24:58
Speaker 2: that I almost forgot to include. He said that after
25:01
Speaker 2: the second time at the Ford, after he'd talked to
25:03
Speaker 2: Burl Crace and gotten the con, text for what had
25:07
Speaker 2: been reported there over generations, he'd driven out to the
25:10
Speaker 2: Ford in daylight and just stood on the bank and looked.
25:15
Speaker 2: Not going in, just standing there on the gravel margin
25:19
Speaker 2: where the water was shallow and clear and perfectly ordinary
25:23
Speaker 2: looking in the afternoon sun. He said he stood there
25:27
Speaker 2: for a while, just looking at the creek and the
25:30
Speaker 2: trees and the bend upstream where the thing had come around.
25:35
Speaker 1: And after a while, he said something out loud. Not
25:38
Speaker 1: anything specific.
25:39
Speaker 2: He couldn't remember the exact words. Something like an acknowledgement.
25:43
Speaker 2: Something along the lines of, I know this is your
25:46
Speaker 2: place and I'll respect that from now on. He said
25:49
Speaker 2: it felt ridiculous the moment he did it. Standing on
25:53
Speaker 2: a gravel creek bank in southeastern Kentucky... talking to nothing
25:57
Speaker 2: visible in broad daylight.
26:00
Speaker 1: He felt like a fool.
26:02
Speaker 2: But he also said it felt, in some way, he
26:05
Speaker 2: couldn't articulate, like the right thing to do, like the
26:09
Speaker 2: appropriate response to having crossed into someone else's terms without
26:14
Speaker 2: permission and having been clearly communicated to about it. You
26:18
Speaker 2: acknowledge the terms, you commit to respecting them, and you
26:22
Speaker 2: mean it. He's used the bridge road since then every time,
26:26
Speaker 2: as he said.
26:28
Speaker 1: No exceptions.
26:30
Speaker 2: And he said the feeling that he'd been carrying around
26:33
Speaker 2: since those two nights at the Ford, that low, constant
26:36
Speaker 2: background unease, had lifted after he stood on the bank
26:39
Speaker 2: and said what he said. Not completely, but enough to
26:43
Speaker 2: know that something had registered. I don't know what to
26:47
Speaker 2: make of that.
26:47
Speaker 1: I really don't.
26:49
Speaker 2: But I think Terrell is one of the most clear-headed
26:52
Speaker 2: people I know. And if he felt the terms had
26:54
Speaker 2: been acknowledged, I'm not in a position.
26:56
Speaker 1: To argue with him about it. Story three.
27:01
Speaker 2: I want to be upfront that I'm not a superstitious person.
27:05
Speaker 2: I have a degree in civil engineering. I've spent 15
27:07
Speaker 2: years building bridges and retaining walls in some of the
27:10
Speaker 2: most remote parts of the eastern United States. And I
27:14
Speaker 2: deal in measurements and load tolerances and what I can
27:17
Speaker 2: verify and confirm. I say this not because it makes
27:20
Speaker 2: my story more credible. I understand it doesn't work that way,
27:25
Speaker 2: but because I want you to understand the kind of
27:27
Speaker 2: person who is telling it. I was doing a site
27:30
Speaker 2: assessment in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, working on a small
27:35
Speaker 2: bridge replacement project for a county roads department. The work
27:39
Speaker 2: was in a hollow. They call them hollers there. Called
27:44
Speaker 2: Mill Holler, which I'm told takes its name from a
27:47
Speaker 2: grist mill that burned down in the 1930s. The community
27:51
Speaker 2: that surrounds it is small enough that I hesitate to
27:53
Speaker 2: call it a community. There's a cluster of about six
27:57
Speaker 2: houses within a mile of each other, and then scattered
28:00
Speaker 2: properties beyond that.
28:02
Speaker 1: My company was putting me up in a.
28:03
Speaker 2: Rental property that was owned by a man named Glenn,
28:06
Speaker 2: who I dealt with only by phone and email. The
28:10
Speaker 2: house was old, but had been reasonably updated inside. Sat
28:14
Speaker 2: back from the gravel road on a flat bench cut
28:16
Speaker 2: into the hillside, and overlooked a small field. that ran
28:21
Speaker 2: down to the tree line, about 100 yards away. There
28:25
Speaker 2: was a newer house on the property as well, about
28:28
Speaker 2: 50 yards up the hill, and that was where the
28:30
Speaker 2: owners lived when they were in residence, though Glenn told
28:34
Speaker 2: me they were in Florida for the fall and winter,
28:36
Speaker 2: and I'd have the place to myself. I was out
28:39
Speaker 2: there for nine days total, and for the first six,
28:42
Speaker 2: everything was normal. Early mornings on site, evenings eating takeout
28:46
Speaker 2: from a gas station 20 minutes down the valley, because
28:50
Speaker 2: that was the closest thing to a restaurant, reading and sleeping.
28:54
Speaker 2: Quiet and unremarkable. On the seventh night, I woke up
28:58
Speaker 2: at what my phone said was 2.18 in the morning
29:01
Speaker 2: to the sound of the front door.
29:04
Speaker 1: Not opening.
29:05
Speaker 2: I want to be precise about this. But the sound
29:08
Speaker 2: of the knob being tried. A quiet working of the mechanism.
29:12
Speaker 2: A slight rattle. I lay still for a moment, thinking
29:16
Speaker 2: I might have dreamed it, and then it happened again.
29:19
Speaker 2: Two or three attempts, not forceful, almost exploratory. I got
29:25
Speaker 2: up and checked the door.
29:26
Speaker 1: It was locked.
29:27
Speaker 2: I stood there and listened, and I could hear, very faintly,
29:31
Speaker 2: what sounded like footsteps on the porch boards. I have
29:35
Speaker 2: a very practical mind when I'm stressed, so I went
29:38
Speaker 2: and got my work flashlight. a heavy mag light I'd
29:41
Speaker 2: had for years, and checked every window and both doors
29:46
Speaker 2: to make sure they were secured. Everything was locked. I
29:50
Speaker 2: went back to bed, but I wasn't going to sleep.
29:53
Speaker 2: I lay there and listened, and after maybe ten minutes,
29:57
Speaker 2: I heard what I can only describe There's a presence
29:59
Speaker 2: moving around the exterior of the house. Not dramatic. Not
30:04
Speaker 2: crashing through the shrubbery. Just a subtle, systematic movement. A
30:09
Speaker 2: creak of porch board here. The soft compression of gravel there.
30:14
Speaker 2: The occasional brush of something against the siding. It made
30:18
Speaker 2: one full circuit of the house, and then, as far
30:21
Speaker 2: as I could tell, it stopped. I stayed awake until
30:25
Speaker 2: first light, and then I went outside and looked around
30:27
Speaker 2: the perimeter of the house. The ground at the base
30:30
Speaker 2: of the siding was soft enough in a few places,
30:33
Speaker 2: and I found what looked like shoe prints. Not boot prints,
30:37
Speaker 2: not barefoot prints. Regular shoe prints, like from a sneaker
30:41
Speaker 2: or casual shoe. Whoever was out there was not out
30:44
Speaker 2: there for any of the usual rural nighttime reasons. Hunting, farming,
30:49
Speaker 2: anything like that. I called Glenn that morning and described
30:53
Speaker 2: what had happened, His response was measured, but there was
30:56
Speaker 2: something careful about it, something where I could tell he
31:00
Speaker 2: was choosing his words. He apologized and asked me if
31:04
Speaker 2: everything was intact, if anything had been disturbed or taken.
31:07
Speaker 1: I told him no.
31:09
Speaker 2: He said that was good, and he was sorry for
31:11
Speaker 2: the disturbance, and he'd make some calls. I pressed him
31:15
Speaker 2: and asked if this had happened before, and there was
31:17
Speaker 2: a pause, and he said there was a fellow in
31:19
Speaker 2: the holler who had some issues and that he'd take
31:22
Speaker 2: care of it and it wouldn't happen again. That satisfied
31:26
Speaker 2: me enough to let it go in the moment. But
31:29
Speaker 2: that night as I was eating my gas station dinner
31:31
Speaker 2: and thinking about it, I became more and more bothered
31:35
Speaker 2: by the specifics. Because what kind of fellow with some
31:38
Speaker 2: issues circles a house in the middle of the night? Silently, systematically,
31:44
Speaker 2: without forcing entry or breaking anything? That's not someone in
31:48
Speaker 2: a mental health crisis wandering around. That's someone who is
31:52
Speaker 2: completely in control of what they're doing and fully aware
31:56
Speaker 2: that they're walking around someone's house.
31:58
Speaker 1: At two in the morning. The control of it was
32:00
Speaker 1: the thing that bothered me. The silence, the patience. Nothing
32:05
Speaker 1: happened on night eight.
32:08
Speaker 2: On night nine, my last night, I woke up at 3.40
32:12
Speaker 2: in the morning for no reason I could identify.
32:15
Speaker 1: No sound, no specific disturbance.
32:18
Speaker 2: I just came fully awake the way you sometimes do
32:20
Speaker 2: and lay there in the dark. And then very gradually,
32:23
Speaker 2: I became aware of a sound outside the window nearest
32:27
Speaker 2: my bed. A quiet, rhythmic sound that I couldn't place immediately.
32:33
Speaker 2: It took me almost a full minute of listening before
32:36
Speaker 2: I identified it.
32:38
Speaker 1: It was humming.
32:40
Speaker 2: Someone outside my window was humming a song. Very quiet,
32:43
Speaker 2: not performing, not trying to be heard. More like someone
32:47
Speaker 2: walking and humming absently to themselves. Except they weren't walking,
32:52
Speaker 2: they were just standing there outside my window, middle of
32:55
Speaker 2: the night in Mill Holler, West Virginia, humming something I
32:59
Speaker 2: didn't recognize. It stopped after maybe two minutes, and I
33:03
Speaker 2: didn't hear anything else that night. I packed up my
33:06
Speaker 2: things the next morning, finished my last few hours of
33:09
Speaker 2: site work, and drove back to my home state without stopping.
33:13
Speaker 2: I filed my project report from home and emailed Glenn
33:16
Speaker 2: to let him know I'd vacated. He replied thanking me
33:19
Speaker 2: and saying he hoped I'd had a comfortable stay.
33:22
Speaker 1: I did not.
33:24
Speaker 2: I've told this story to a few people since it happened,
33:26
Speaker 2: and the response is usually some version of it. It
33:29
Speaker 2: was probably a local person with mental health issues who
33:32
Speaker 2: wanders at night, which is not an unreasonable suggestion and
33:36
Speaker 2: one I've considered seriously. But here's the problem with that explanation,
33:40
Speaker 2: or rather the thing about it, that I find insufficient
33:44
Speaker 2: when I apply my professional training and analysis to it.
33:48
Speaker 1: The behavior I observed was not disorganized. It was systematic.
33:52
Speaker 2: The full circuit of the house, every exterior wall, checked
33:57
Speaker 2: in order with what appeared to be methodical attention paid
34:00
Speaker 2: to each window and door, is not the behavior of
34:03
Speaker 2: someone wandering in a confused mental state. It is the
34:07
Speaker 2: behavior of someone conducting an inspection.
34:10
Speaker 1: And the humming.
34:11
Speaker 2: I keep coming back to the humming. What I heard
34:14
Speaker 2: on my last night was not a person in crisis
34:16
Speaker 2: making noise. It was someone standing outside a window in
34:21
Speaker 2: the early morning hours. humming something quietly to themselves, in
34:25
Speaker 2: the specific cadence of someone doing something familiar that requires
34:29
Speaker 2: enough attention to make them want music, but not so
34:33
Speaker 2: much that the music interferes. The way a person hums
34:36
Speaker 2: while doing a household task?
34:38
Speaker 1: Comfortable. Self-contained.
34:41
Speaker 2: As if standing outside someone's bedroom.
34:43
Speaker 1: Window at four in the morning in Mill Holler.
34:46
Speaker 2: West Virginia was simply a thing they did and they
34:48
Speaker 2: were settled in the doing of it. That self-containment is
34:52
Speaker 2: what I can't rationalize away. A person in a mental
34:55
Speaker 2: health crisis who wanders at night has a certain quality
34:59
Speaker 2: to their movement and their behavior. A quality of disorientation,
35:04
Speaker 2: of not quite rightness relative to the situation. Of someone
35:08
Speaker 2: who is operating outside the normal terms. What I heard
35:12
Speaker 2: through my window was someone operating comfortably within their own terms.
35:17
Speaker 2: Someone for whom standing outside that specific window And humming
35:21
Speaker 2: at that specific hour was as ordinary as anything they did.
35:26
Speaker 1: I don't know whose terms those are.
35:27
Speaker 2: I don't know what kind of person or what kind
35:30
Speaker 2: of thing operates under terms like that. But I know
35:34
Speaker 2: the difference, professionally and personally, between behavior that is disorganized
35:39
Speaker 2: and behavior that is organized around a logic I don't
35:42
Speaker 2: have access to. What I encountered in Mill Haller was
35:45
Speaker 2: the second kind. Glenn had said there was a fellow
35:48
Speaker 2: in the Haller who had some issues and that he'd
35:51
Speaker 2: take care of it. I never followed up with Glenn
35:54
Speaker 2: after the rental to ask what he meant by taking
35:56
Speaker 2: care of it or whether the fellow in question had
35:59
Speaker 2: been the source of my disturbances. Something about the way
36:03
Speaker 2: Glenn had said it, measured, careful, choosing his words, made
36:09
Speaker 2: me think that following up would not produce a straightforward answer.
36:14
Speaker 2: I think Glenn knew something about Mill Holler that he
36:17
Speaker 2: had decided it was in his interests not to fully
36:19
Speaker 2: disclose to a project rental tenant. Whatever he knew, I
36:23
Speaker 2: didn't stay long enough to learn it from him, and
36:25
Speaker 2: I find that I'm not particularly motivated to go back
36:29
Speaker 2: and ask. Some things are better left as professional mysteries,
36:33
Speaker 2: better cataloged and filed and referenced only in the context
36:37
Speaker 2: of making sure you stay in well-lit accommodations with good
36:40
Speaker 2: locks and with the kind of sleep you wake up from,
36:44
Speaker 2: not from a sound in the wall. I still use
36:47
Speaker 2: the maglite, though. I take it on every site trip now.
36:51
Speaker 2: Old professional habits adapted to new professional knowledge. That's all
36:55
Speaker 2: this story is. I want to be responsible.
36:58
Speaker 1: About how I characterize it.
37:01
Speaker 2: I do not know what was outside my rental accommodation
37:04
Speaker 2: in Mill Holler of West Virginia on those three nights.
37:08
Speaker 2: I know what I heard and what I found in
37:09
Speaker 2: the morning and what Glenn said when I told him
37:12
Speaker 2: about it. The rest is inference and professional judgment applied
37:16
Speaker 2: to an incomplete data set. What I will say, with
37:20
Speaker 2: the confidence of a man who deals in measurements and
37:23
Speaker 2: load tolerances in verified conditions, is that the weight of
37:27
Speaker 2: the evidence suggests something deliberate and organized was operating near
37:31
Speaker 2: that house, and that it was doing so according to
37:34
Speaker 2: terms I did not have access to, and that I
37:37
Speaker 2: am sincerely glad I was going home the next morning
37:40
Speaker 2: either way.
37:42
Speaker 1: Story four.
37:44
Speaker 2: My daddy was a man who talked about everything, politics, religion,
37:48
Speaker 2: other people's business, the price of cattle, the quality of
37:51
Speaker 2: the county road crews work, the theology of baptism versus sprinkling.
37:56
Speaker 2: There was nothing he wouldn't weigh in on and nothing
37:58
Speaker 2: he wouldn't discuss at length. If you gave him the opening,
38:02
Speaker 2: he had opinions about everything and he shared them freely.
38:06
Speaker 2: There was exactly one subject he would not discuss and
38:09
Speaker 2: that was sawmill branch.
38:11
Speaker 1: Sawmill branch is a small.
38:13
Speaker 2: Community in McDowell County, West Virginia, My family has deep
38:16
Speaker 2: roots there, going back four or five generations. My great-grandparents
38:21
Speaker 2: are buried in the Hillside Cemetery, above the old company church.
38:26
Speaker 2: My grandfather was born in a house that is now
38:29
Speaker 2: just a foundation hole.
38:32
Speaker 1: In the weeds.
38:33
Speaker 2: My daddy grew up there, before the mines slowed down
38:36
Speaker 2: and people started leaving. And he moved our family over
38:40
Speaker 2: to Raleigh County when I was three. Though we drove
38:43
Speaker 2: back several times a year to visit relatives and tend
38:46
Speaker 2: the graves and all the other things people do, when
38:48
Speaker 2: they can't quite sever the connection to a place even
38:51
Speaker 2: when they've left it. McDowell County is one of those
38:54
Speaker 2: places that carries its history visibly in ways that other
38:59
Speaker 2: counties in the region don't always. The built environment of
39:02
Speaker 2: the old coal boom, company houses, tipples, the ghost footprints
39:08
Speaker 2: of things that aren't there anymore. is still present in
39:11
Speaker 2: a way that tells you the history without requiring anyone
39:16
Speaker 2: to explain it. The population has fallen dramatically from its
39:19
Speaker 2: peak and the infrastructure shows it, but the bones of
39:24
Speaker 2: what was there are still visible and still tell the
39:27
Speaker 2: story of what the land and the people who worked
39:30
Speaker 2: it went through. I always felt that when we drove
39:34
Speaker 2: back to Sawmill Branch. The weight of it, the specific
39:38
Speaker 2: texture of a place that has been worked very hard
39:40
Speaker 2: for a very long time and is now resting, or
39:44
Speaker 2: as close to resting as places like that ever get,
39:47
Speaker 2: Every time we went back to Sawmill Branch, without exception,
39:51
Speaker 2: my daddy would at some point go quiet in a
39:54
Speaker 2: specific way.
39:56
Speaker 1: Not sad quiet.
39:57
Speaker 2: The way you get when you're visiting a cemetery or
39:59
Speaker 2: thinking about people who have passed.
40:01
Speaker 1: A different kind of quiet. Watchful. Like he was checking something,
40:06
Speaker 1: making sure something was still in place or still absent.
40:10
Speaker 2: Whichever it was that he was looking for. I noticed
40:13
Speaker 2: this as a kid, but kids don't always have the
40:15
Speaker 2: vocabulary or the right moments to ask about what they observe,
40:19
Speaker 2: and so it stayed unasked for a long time. When
40:23
Speaker 2: I was a teenager and had enough of both those things,
40:26
Speaker 2: I tried a few times to bring it up, but
40:28
Speaker 2: he would change the subject or answer with something that
40:31
Speaker 2: was technically a response but contained no actual information. He
40:37
Speaker 2: was good at that, good at talking a lot while
40:40
Speaker 2: saying very little. I had one real conversation with him
40:45
Speaker 2: about Sawmill Branch And it happened when I was 22
40:48
Speaker 2: and we were driving back from a funeral up there.
40:52
Speaker 2: A great uncle of mine. And we were the last
40:54
Speaker 2: ones to leave and it was getting on toward dark.
40:58
Speaker 2: And my daddy drove a little faster getting down off
41:00
Speaker 2: the mountain than he usually drove anywhere. I pointed that
41:04
Speaker 2: out and he slowed down and didn't say anything for
41:06
Speaker 2: a minute. And then he said, we'd had a long day.
41:10
Speaker 2: I told him I'd noticed how he always got when
41:13
Speaker 2: we were up there. I said it in a careful way.
41:16
Speaker 2: not accusing, just observing. He kept his eyes on the
41:19
Speaker 2: road for a long time, and then he said there
41:21
Speaker 2: were things in that holler that he didn't like to
41:24
Speaker 2: think about. I told him I knew that, and I
41:28
Speaker 2: asked him what things.
41:30
Speaker 1: He took a.
41:31
Speaker 2: Long breath and said that when he was 12 years old,
41:34
Speaker 2: he and two other boys from the community had gone
41:36
Speaker 2: up the north fork of the branch to a place
41:39
Speaker 2: where there was a series of old mine openings from
41:41
Speaker 2: the early century, portals into a slope mine, that had
41:45
Speaker 2: played out and been abandoned before his daddy was born.
41:49
Speaker 2: They used to go up there, sometimes, because boys find
41:52
Speaker 2: abandoned mines magnetic, regardless of how many times adults tell
41:56
Speaker 2: them to stay away from them. The portals had mostly collapsed,
42:00
Speaker 2: except for one that you could still get into maybe
42:02
Speaker 2: 10 or 15 feet, before the roof got too low.
42:07
Speaker 2: He said that on this particular occasion, they went up
42:09
Speaker 2: there and found that something had been living in the
42:11
Speaker 2: open portal.
42:12
Speaker 1: He described this carefully.
42:15
Speaker 2: Nesting materials, food remains, what he recognized even at 12
42:19
Speaker 2: as bones from animals, and scratched into the rock face
42:22
Speaker 2: on the inside of the opening, scratched deeply and with
42:25
Speaker 2: some force, were marks that he said were not letters
42:29
Speaker 2: and not any kind of symbol he ever identified, but
42:32
Speaker 2: that were clearly made deliberately, carefully, the way a person
42:36
Speaker 2: marks something with intention and not by accident. They left immediately,
42:42
Speaker 2: and he never told his parents what they had found,
42:45
Speaker 2: and as far as he knew, the other two boys
42:47
Speaker 2: never told anyone either. He said he went back there
42:50
Speaker 2: exactly once, the following summer, out of the particular stubbornness
42:55
Speaker 2: of 12-year-old boys who are scared of things and hate
42:58
Speaker 2: that they're scared of things. The nesting was gone.
43:02
Speaker 1: The bones were gone.
43:04
Speaker 2: The marks in the rock were still there. He said
43:06
Speaker 2: he never went into those woods again after that, not
43:09
Speaker 2: in 40 years of going back to Sawmill Branch.
43:12
Speaker 1: Not for any reason. He stayed on the road and in.
43:15
Speaker 2: The yards and in the church and in the cemetery
43:19
Speaker 2: and he let whatever was up there in those old
43:20
Speaker 2: mine openings do whatever it did and he gave it
43:24
Speaker 2: its space. I asked him what he thought it was
43:27
Speaker 2: and he shook his head and said he didn't know,
43:29
Speaker 2: had never found out and hadn't tried to find out.
43:33
Speaker 2: He said some things in those old mountains, had been
43:35
Speaker 2: there a long time before any of the families who
43:37
Speaker 2: settled the hollows came and put up their houses and
43:40
Speaker 2: sank their mines and planted their gardens, and had their children.
43:45
Speaker 2: And that those things didn't generally bother anybody, as long
43:49
Speaker 2: as nobody bothered them first. Then he turned the radio on,
43:53
Speaker 2: and we drove the rest of the way home in
43:55
Speaker 2: the sound of an AM station playing old country music,
43:58
Speaker 2: and he never mentioned Sawmill Branch that way again, not
44:01
Speaker 2: in the years he had left before he passed. But
44:04
Speaker 2: I want to add something from my own experience that
44:07
Speaker 2: I've never told anyone in the family. Two summers ago,
44:11
Speaker 2: I went back to Sawmill Branch by myself. I visited
44:14
Speaker 2: the graves and walked the road and stood in front
44:17
Speaker 2: of the foundation hole, where my grandfather's childhood house used
44:20
Speaker 2: to be. I did the things you do when you
44:23
Speaker 2: return to the place your family came from. And you're
44:26
Speaker 2: the generation that knows this story, but wasn't there for
44:29
Speaker 2: any of it. I was there a few hours, total,
44:33
Speaker 2: and mostly it was quiet and still and had the
44:35
Speaker 2: melancholy quality those depopulated mining communities always have. all that
44:40
Speaker 2: energy and life that once filled a place and then
44:42
Speaker 2: drained out over decades, until what's left is landscape. When
44:47
Speaker 2: I was ready to leave, I drove back out on
44:49
Speaker 2: the hollow road toward the county road, and on impulse
44:52
Speaker 2: I turned up a track to the north that I
44:55
Speaker 2: thought might be the one my daddy had described.
44:57
Speaker 1: The track was.
44:58
Speaker 2: Barely there, just two faint ruts in the vegetation on
45:02
Speaker 2: a slope that got steep quickly. I drove up maybe
45:06
Speaker 2: a quarter mile, to where the track ended in a
45:09
Speaker 2: wide spot. And then I got out and looked up
45:12
Speaker 2: the hill. The mine portals were gone, or more precisely,
45:16
Speaker 2: they'd collapsed fully since my daddy's time. Nothing visible now
45:20
Speaker 2: but a slight depression in the hillside that you'd have
45:23
Speaker 2: to know to look for. The forest up there was
45:26
Speaker 2: second or third growth, dense with the particular density of
45:31
Speaker 2: Appalachian hardwood in summer. And the light that filtered through
45:34
Speaker 2: it had that green underwater quality. that mountain forests get
45:39
Speaker 2: on overcast days. I stood in my car and looked
45:43
Speaker 2: up the hill for a while. I wasn't going to
45:46
Speaker 2: go up there. I want to be clear about that.
45:49
Speaker 2: I had made that decision before I turned up the track.
45:53
Speaker 2: I just wanted to see the hill. I wanted to
45:56
Speaker 2: know what my daddy had been looking away from all
45:59
Speaker 2: those years. I stood there for maybe five minutes. The
46:04
Speaker 2: forest was quiet. Not the active quiet of a place
46:07
Speaker 2: where wildlife is going about its business, but the specific
46:11
Speaker 2: loaded quiet of a place that is aware of you.
46:15
Speaker 2: I know that sounds like an invented distinction, but if
46:19
Speaker 2: you spend time in wild country, you know the difference
46:22
Speaker 2: between those two kinds of quiet, and you feel it physically,
46:26
Speaker 2: in the chest, in the back of the neck.
46:29
Speaker 1: After about five minutes, I heard something in the trees
46:32
Speaker 1: up the hill. Not close. maybe a hundred yards up
46:36
Speaker 1: the slope. Not loud. A slow, deliberate.
46:41
Speaker 2: Sound of something moving through the undergrowth, not crashing through
46:44
Speaker 2: it the way a deer does when startled, but steady
46:47
Speaker 2: and purposeful. Moving laterally across the slope above me, parallel
46:53
Speaker 2: to where I was standing.
46:54
Speaker 1: Not coming toward me, but also not moving away. Just moving.
47:00
Speaker 1: Letting me hear it moving. I got back in my
47:03
Speaker 1: car and drove down off that hill, and out of
47:06
Speaker 1: Sawmill Branch, and didn't stop until I hit the county road.
47:11
Speaker 1: My daddy was right.
47:13
Speaker 2: Some things in those old mountains have been there since
47:16
Speaker 2: before the families came, and they don't need you to
47:19
Speaker 2: understand them. They just need you to recognize that they're there,
47:23
Speaker 2: to make the calculation my daddy made, and the one
47:26
Speaker 2: I made at the bottom of that hill, and to
47:28
Speaker 2: respect the distance. I went up to Sawmill Branch by
47:32
Speaker 2: myself two summers ago. I visited the graves and I
47:36
Speaker 2: walked the road and I looked up the North Fork
47:39
Speaker 2: toward the ridge where those old portals are supposed to be.
47:42
Speaker 2: And I made the same calculation my daddy made when
47:45
Speaker 2: he was 12 years old. And then I got back
47:47
Speaker 2: in my truck and drove down off the mountain before dark.
47:52
Speaker 2: Some things in those old mountains have been there a
47:54
Speaker 2: long time.
47:55
Speaker 1: My daddy was right about that. Story five.
47:59
Speaker 2: I want to start by saying that the people in
48:01
Speaker 2: this story are good people. and I have changed every
48:04
Speaker 2: identifying detail I can think of, except the general geography,
48:09
Speaker 2: which I can't really avoid since the geography is part
48:11
Speaker 2: of the story. I lived for two and a half
48:14
Speaker 2: years in a small community in Scott County, Virginia, in
48:18
Speaker 2: the Folded Mountain country up near the Kentucky and Tennessee lines.
48:22
Speaker 1: I had relocated there for work. I'm a speech-language pathologist.
48:27
Speaker 2: And there is chronic shortage of qualified practitioners in rural
48:31
Speaker 2: Appalachian communities. and I had a caseload that covered two
48:34
Speaker 2: counties and kept me on mountain roads more hours a
48:38
Speaker 2: week than I want to think about. I rented a
48:41
Speaker 2: house from a family named Hensley, Earl and Doris Hensley,
48:46
Speaker 2: probably in their early 70s, who owned a modest amount
48:49
Speaker 2: of land on the east face of Clinch Mountain and
48:52
Speaker 2: had been there their entire lives. Their son and his
48:55
Speaker 2: wife lived in a newer house on the lower part
48:58
Speaker 2: of the property, and their grandson Wyatt, who was about
49:01
Speaker 2: 19 when I moved.
49:02
Speaker 1: In, helped Earl with the property.
49:04
Speaker 2: Work, and checked in on me during winter to make
49:06
Speaker 2: sure my pipes hadn't frozen, and my driveway was passable.
49:11
Speaker 1: Why, I was one of those.
49:12
Speaker 2: Young people who seems ancient in the way that people
49:14
Speaker 2: raised in rural mountain communities sometimes do. Not naive about
49:19
Speaker 2: the world, but accustomed to a different.
49:21
Speaker 1: Version of it.
49:23
Speaker 2: He knew the land the way people who have worked
49:25
Speaker 2: it for generations know it. Its moods, its seasonal patterns.
49:30
Speaker 2: Which parts of the property drained poorly. Where the spring
49:33
Speaker 2: seep was that ran dry in August. Which of the
49:36
Speaker 2: old logging roads were still passable. and which had grown
49:39
Speaker 2: over to the point of being impassable. He was also
49:43
Speaker 2: perceptive in the way that quiet people often are, and
49:46
Speaker 2: he didn't say things he didn't mean.
49:49
Speaker 1: In my first winter there, I.
49:50
Speaker 2: Started noticing that the deer on the property were behaving strangely.
49:54
Speaker 2: I realize that sounds like a very minor observation, but
49:58
Speaker 2: I had been watching deer in rural settings long enough
50:00
Speaker 2: to know that their behavior is usually consistent. They move
50:04
Speaker 2: in predictable patterns, feed at predictable times, bolt in predictable
50:10
Speaker 2: directions when startled. What I started seeing that winter was
50:14
Speaker 2: deer that weren't feeding, that would stand in the field
50:18
Speaker 2: below my house and face uphill toward the ridge and
50:23
Speaker 2: stand motionless for long periods. Not the frozen alertness of
50:27
Speaker 2: a deer that has scented something and is deciding whether
50:31
Speaker 2: to run. This was something more sustained, a directed attentiveness
50:36
Speaker 2: towards a specific area. maintained past the point where you'd
50:40
Speaker 2: expect the animal to either flee or relax. I mentioned
50:44
Speaker 2: this to Wyatt, and he nodded slowly and asked me
50:47
Speaker 2: when I'd started seeing that. I told him, November, early November.
50:52
Speaker 2: He nodded again. He told me there was something on
50:55
Speaker 2: the upper part of the mountain that came down some winters,
50:58
Speaker 2: and not others, and that when it did come down,
51:01
Speaker 2: the deer always knew about it before anything else did.
51:04
Speaker 2: He said his grandfather had told him about it. and
51:07
Speaker 2: his grandfather had learned it from his own father, and
51:10
Speaker 2: the pattern went back as far as anyone in the
51:13
Speaker 2: family had knowledge of. He said it wasn't anything that
51:16
Speaker 2: had ever hurt anybody, but that it was also something
51:19
Speaker 2: they'd tried to keep some distance from, and he asked me,
51:22
Speaker 2: in a very matter-of-fact way, not to hike the upper
51:25
Speaker 2: trail that ran along the ridge from November through to March.
51:30
Speaker 2: I asked him what it was, and he said he
51:32
Speaker 2: didn't know exactly, that nobody in his family had ever
51:36
Speaker 2: gotten close enough to know and that getting close enough
51:39
Speaker 2: to know was not something any of them had been
51:41
Speaker 2: interested in pursuing. He said his grandfather always said it
51:45
Speaker 2: wasn't meant to be understood, just known about.
51:48
Speaker 1: That knowing it.
51:49
Speaker 2: Was there was enough. That the respect was in the distance.
51:54
Speaker 2: I asked him if it was dangerous, and he paused
51:57
Speaker 2: in that way he had of pausing before he said
51:59
Speaker 2: something he'd considered carefully.
52:01
Speaker 1: He said his family had.
52:02
Speaker 2: Been on that mountain for over a hundred years without
52:05
Speaker 2: a bad encounter, and he attributed that to the distance policy.
52:10
Speaker 2: He said he couldn't speak to what would happen if
52:12
Speaker 2: the distance policy weren't maintained, because nobody in his family
52:16
Speaker 2: had ever been foolish enough to test it. I didn't
52:20
Speaker 2: hike the upper trail that winter, or the next one.
52:23
Speaker 2: I spent two and a half years on that mountain,
52:25
Speaker 2: and I never saw anything on my own that I
52:28
Speaker 2: couldn't explain. The deer still did their thing in November.
52:32
Speaker 2: That collective uphill stare from the lower fields and I
52:36
Speaker 2: noticed it both subsequent winters with the same reliable timing
52:40
Speaker 2: early November, as consistent as any seasonal marker. When I
52:45
Speaker 2: moved away the following spring, Wyatt helped me load my truck.
52:48
Speaker 2: Before I left, he shook my hand and said he
52:50
Speaker 2: was glad I'd been a good renter, and I thanked
52:53
Speaker 2: him and told him his family's land was one of
52:56
Speaker 2: the most beautiful places I'd ever lived. He nodded and
52:59
Speaker 2: said it was, and that they were lucky to have it.
53:02
Speaker 2: And then as I was getting in the truck, He
53:04
Speaker 2: said without any particular drama that he appreciated me staying
53:08
Speaker 2: off the upper trail. When I moved away the following spring,
53:12
Speaker 2: Wyatt helped me load my truck. Before I left, he
53:14
Speaker 2: shook my hand and said he was glad I'd.
53:16
Speaker 1: Been a good renter, and I thanked him and told
53:19
Speaker 1: him his family's land was one of the.
53:21
Speaker 2: Most beautiful places I'd ever lived. He nodded and said
53:25
Speaker 2: it was and that they were lucky to have it.
53:28
Speaker 2: And then as I was getting in the truck, he
53:30
Speaker 2: said without any particular drama, that he appreciated me staying
53:35
Speaker 2: off the upper trail. I told him it was no trouble,
53:38
Speaker 2: and I meant it. Some things cost you nothing to respect.
53:43
Speaker 2: But there's a postscript to this that I left out
53:46
Speaker 2: of the original version because I wasn't sure how to
53:49
Speaker 2: write it. I'm going to try now. In my last
53:53
Speaker 2: winter on the property, February, I was driving home late
53:57
Speaker 2: from a client visit. One of my clients lived far
54:00
Speaker 2: down in the valley, and the winter road back was
54:03
Speaker 2: slow and careful. I got home around nine and sat
54:06
Speaker 2: in my car for a moment before going in, the
54:09
Speaker 2: way you do after a long day, just decompressing in
54:12
Speaker 2: the dark before stepping back into your own life. I
54:15
Speaker 2: had my headlights off and the car engine off, and
54:18
Speaker 2: I was sitting in the dark looking at the field
54:20
Speaker 2: below the house.
54:21
Speaker 1: Just nothing, just sitting. The deer were in the field.
54:26
Speaker 2: A group of them, six or eight, standing in the
54:29
Speaker 2: frozen grass in the dark. I could see them as
54:32
Speaker 2: dark shapes against the slightly less dark field, the way
54:36
Speaker 2: you can.
54:36
Speaker 1: When your eyes have adjusted.
54:38
Speaker 2: They were all facing uphill, all of them oriented in
54:42
Speaker 2: the same direction toward the upper part of the mountain,
54:46
Speaker 2: standing perfectly still with that specific directed attention.
54:49
Speaker 1: I had noticed in November and come to recognize.
54:55
Speaker 2: I watched them for a few minutes, and then I
54:56
Speaker 2: looked up the slope above the field toward the treeline
55:00
Speaker 2: Toward the upper trail, I'd promised not to walk. There
55:04
Speaker 2: was something at the tree line. I can't tell you
55:07
Speaker 2: what it was in any satisfying detail because the dark
55:10
Speaker 2: and the distance defeated any specificity. What I can tell
55:14
Speaker 2: you is that there was a shape at the upper
55:16
Speaker 2: edge of the field where the grass met the trees.
55:19
Speaker 2: It was not a tree and was not a deer.
55:22
Speaker 1: It was upright. It was tall. It was still in
55:25
Speaker 1: the way.
55:25
Speaker 2: Things are still when they are observing rather than resting.
55:30
Speaker 2: And then, after I'd been looking at it for a
55:32
Speaker 2: long enough time to be certain it was there, it
55:35
Speaker 2: moved backward into the tree line and was gone, just
55:38
Speaker 2: absorbed into the dark of the upper forest. The deer
55:43
Speaker 2: stood in the field for another few minutes and then dispersed, calmly,
55:47
Speaker 2: back toward the lower part of the property. No alarm,
55:51
Speaker 2: no flight response. More like whatever they'd been watching had
55:55
Speaker 2: finished doing whatever it was doing, and they could go
55:58
Speaker 2: back to there even. I went inside and made dinner
56:02
Speaker 2: and didn't go back out until morning. I didn't tell
56:05
Speaker 2: Wyatt about this.
56:07
Speaker 1: It felt like.
56:07
Speaker 2: Telling him would have been asking something of him that
56:09
Speaker 2: wasn't mine to ask. He'd given me the information I needed.
56:14
Speaker 2: The rest was between me and whatever I chose to
56:17
Speaker 2: do with it. And what I chose to do was
56:20
Speaker 2: stay off the upper trail for the remainder of my
56:22
Speaker 2: tenancy and feel grateful every morning that there was an
56:26
Speaker 2: inherited understanding in that family, clear enough and strong enough
56:31
Speaker 2: that it had made its way to me. I told
56:34
Speaker 2: him it was no trouble, and I meant it. I
56:38
Speaker 2: told him it was no trouble, and I meant it.
56:42
Speaker 2: But there is a postscript to this that I left
56:45
Speaker 2: out of the original version because I wasn't sure how
56:47
Speaker 2: to write it. I'm going to try now. In my
56:51
Speaker 2: last winter on the property, February, I was driving home
56:54
Speaker 2: late from a client visit. One of my clients lived
56:57
Speaker 2: far down in the valley, and the winter road back
57:00
Speaker 2: was slow and careful. I got home around nine and
57:03
Speaker 2: sat in my car for a moment before going in,
57:06
Speaker 2: the way you do after a long day, just decompressing
57:08
Speaker 2: in the dark, before.
57:10
Speaker 1: Stepping back into your own life.
57:13
Speaker 2: I had my headlights off and the car engine off,
57:15
Speaker 2: and I was sitting in the dark, looking at.
57:18
Speaker 1: The field below the house. Just nothing, just sitting.
57:23
Speaker 2: The deer were in the field, a group of them,
57:26
Speaker 2: six or eight, standing in the frozen grass in the dark,
57:30
Speaker 2: I could see them as dark shapes against the slightly
57:32
Speaker 2: less dark field, the way you can when your eyes
57:35
Speaker 2: have adjusted. They were all facing uphill, all of them
57:40
Speaker 2: oriented in the same direction toward the upper part of
57:44
Speaker 2: the mountain. Standing perfectly still with that specific directed attention,
57:49
Speaker 2: I had noticed in November and come to recognize. I
57:54
Speaker 2: watched them for a few minutes, and then I looked
57:56
Speaker 2: up the slope above the field toward the tree line,
58:00
Speaker 2: Toward the upper trail, I'd promised not to walk.
58:03
Speaker 1: There was something at the tree line.
58:06
Speaker 2: I can't tell you what it was in any satisfying
58:08
Speaker 2: detail because the dark and the distance defeated any specificity.
58:14
Speaker 1: What I can tell you is that there was a
58:16
Speaker 1: shape at the upper edge of the field where the
58:18
Speaker 1: grass met the trees. That was not a tree and
58:20
Speaker 1: was not a deer. It was upright. It was tall.
58:24
Speaker 2: It was still in the way things are still when
58:26
Speaker 2: they are observing rather than resting. and then, after I'd
58:30
Speaker 2: been looking at it for a long enough time to
58:32
Speaker 2: be certain it was there, it moved backward into the
58:35
Speaker 2: tree line and.
58:36
Speaker 1: Was gone, just absorbed into the dark of the upper forest.
58:42
Speaker 2: The deer stood in the field for another few minutes,
58:45
Speaker 2: and then dispersed, calmly back toward.
58:47
Speaker 1: The lower part of the property. No alarm, no flight response.
58:53
Speaker 1: More like whatever they'd.
58:54
Speaker 2: Been watching had finished doing whatever it was doing, and
58:56
Speaker 2: they could go back to their evening. I went inside
59:00
Speaker 2: and made dinner and didn't go back out until morning.
59:04
Speaker 2: I didn't tell Wyatt about this. It felt like telling
59:07
Speaker 2: him would have been asking something of him that wasn't
59:09
Speaker 2: mine to ask. He'd given me the information I needed.
59:13
Speaker 2: The rest was between me and whatever I chose to
59:16
Speaker 2: do with it. And what I chose to do was
59:18
Speaker 2: stay off the upper trail for the remainder of my
59:20
Speaker 2: tenancy and feel grateful every morning that there was an
59:23
Speaker 2: inherited understanding in that family, clear enough and strong enough
59:28
Speaker 2: that it had made its way to me. I think
59:32
Speaker 2: often about the population I served in Scott County and
59:35
Speaker 2: the surrounding counties over those two and a half years.
59:39
Speaker 2: People with communication disorders, children with language delays, adults recovering
59:45
Speaker 2: from strokes, elderly individuals losing the language they'd had for
59:50
Speaker 2: eight decades. The work of a speech-language pathologist is, at
59:55
Speaker 2: its core, the work of maintaining someone's connection to expression,
1:00:00
Speaker 2: making sure the channel stays open making sure what needs to.
1:00:03
Speaker 1: Be communicated can be communicated.
1:00:06
Speaker 2: I think about Wyatt's family and what they had maintained
1:00:09
Speaker 2: across how many generations on that mountain. The channel of
1:00:13
Speaker 2: understanding that said the upper trail is not ours after November.
1:00:18
Speaker 2: The transmission of that understanding year by year, parent to child,
1:00:23
Speaker 2: specific enough to be actionable. That is also a kind
1:00:27
Speaker 2: of speech-language work, keeping the channel open. Making sure what
1:00:32
Speaker 2: needs to be communicated across time gets communicated clearly enough
1:00:37
Speaker 2: to function. The Hensley family had kept that channel open
1:00:41
Speaker 2: for over a hundred years. I was the beneficiary of
1:00:45
Speaker 2: it for two and a half years. I don't take
1:00:47
Speaker 2: that lightly. Story six. I am from a small community
1:00:53
Speaker 2: in Mingo County, West Virginia, and I want to share
1:00:55
Speaker 2: something that happened when I was in high school because
1:00:57
Speaker 2: it's It's been 18 years, and I've never written it
1:01:00
Speaker 2: down for anyone, and I think it should be written
1:01:02
Speaker 2: down somewhere. There was a property at the end of
1:01:06
Speaker 2: Slate Lick Road that had been empty for as long
1:01:09
Speaker 2: as anyone I knew could remember. The house was a
1:01:12
Speaker 2: farmhouse style, two stories, white paint that had long since
1:01:17
Speaker 2: given up any pretense of being white, and it sat
1:01:20
Speaker 2: behind a rusted gate at the end of a lane
1:01:22
Speaker 2: that was barely visible from the main road if you
1:01:25
Speaker 2: didn't know it was there. The property had belonged to
1:01:28
Speaker 2: a family named Brewer, and it had been in that
1:01:31
Speaker 2: family for generations. But the last Brewer who lived there
1:01:35
Speaker 2: had been a man named Clem Brewer, who died sometime
1:01:39
Speaker 2: in the 1980s, by which time he was apparently the
1:01:42
Speaker 2: only one left of the immediate family locally. After Clem,
1:01:46
Speaker 2: the property passed through some legal complications and ended up
1:01:50
Speaker 2: in a kind of limbo that I was never fully
1:01:52
Speaker 2: able to understand, the kind of thing that happens with
1:01:56
Speaker 2: rural property. when there's no clear air and nobody with
1:02:00
Speaker 2: any money or motivation to sort it out properly. When
1:02:04
Speaker 2: I was 16 during the summer between my sophomore and
1:02:07
Speaker 2: junior year of high school, four of us decided to
1:02:10
Speaker 2: go out to the old.
1:02:11
Speaker 1: Brewer place at night. Standard teenage reasoning. It was there.
1:02:16
Speaker 2: It was supposedly haunted. It was something to do on
1:02:19
Speaker 2: a July night when you had nothing to do. The
1:02:22
Speaker 2: four of us were me, my best friend Cassie, a
1:02:25
Speaker 2: boy named Dylan, who had a truck, and a girl
1:02:28
Speaker 2: named Renee, who was dating Dylan.
1:02:31
Speaker 1: At the time.
1:02:32
Speaker 2: We drove out Slate Lick Road at about 9.30, with
1:02:36
Speaker 2: a plan to poke around the exterior and possibly go
1:02:38
Speaker 2: inside if the structure looked sound enough. The gate at
1:02:43
Speaker 2: the end of the lane was not locked, just latched,
1:02:46
Speaker 2: and we pushed it open and walked up to the house.
1:02:50
Speaker 2: The outbuildings on the property were in worse shape than
1:02:53
Speaker 2: the house itself, and one of them had partially collapsed,
1:02:57
Speaker 2: The house was standing, albeit barely straight, and someone had
1:03:02
Speaker 2: at some point boarded up the ground floor windows with
1:03:04
Speaker 2: plywood that had since warped and split in places. One
1:03:09
Speaker 2: of the front porch boards gave under Dylan's weight but
1:03:12
Speaker 2: didn't break through, and we tested each one after that
1:03:15
Speaker 2: before putting our weight on it. None of us actually
1:03:17
Speaker 2: wanted to go inside. We looked at the front door,
1:03:20
Speaker 2: which was slightly ajar, and then looked at each other
1:03:24
Speaker 2: and all tacitly agreed that The outside was enough for
1:03:27
Speaker 2: the purposes of being able to say we'd been there.
1:03:30
Speaker 2: We walked around the perimeter of the house, which didn't
1:03:32
Speaker 2: take long, and Cassie was taking pictures with the disposable
1:03:36
Speaker 2: camera she'd brought. She thought she was being funny. In retrospect,
1:03:41
Speaker 2: I'm glad she had it. We were on the backside
1:03:44
Speaker 2: of the house when Renee grabbed Dylan's arm and pointed
1:03:47
Speaker 2: at one of the second floor windows. The window still
1:03:50
Speaker 2: had its glass, which was unusual given the condition of
1:03:53
Speaker 2: everything else. and in the window there was a shape
1:03:56
Speaker 2: that I initially tried to process as a piece.
1:03:58
Speaker 1: Of furniture left behind. A chair, something like that.
1:04:03
Speaker 2: It was too far away and too dark to make
1:04:05
Speaker 2: out clearly, and I was halfway through the mental process
1:04:08
Speaker 2: of rationalizing it as furniture when it moved. What I
1:04:12
Speaker 2: can tell you is that it was clearly upright, and
1:04:15
Speaker 2: clearly looking down at us. I cannot tell you with
1:04:19
Speaker 2: any more specificity than that because it was a dark
1:04:23
Speaker 2: window on a dark house on a dark night, and
1:04:26
Speaker 2: the shape was consistent only with something standing in the
1:04:28
Speaker 2: window looking out. It was there and it was watching us,
1:04:33
Speaker 2: and when it moved, it was a step back into
1:04:35
Speaker 2: the interior darkness of the room and disappear from the window.
1:04:41
Speaker 2: We left immediately, not running because we were teenagers, trying
1:04:46
Speaker 2: to maintain some dignity in front of each other, but
1:04:48
Speaker 2: walking very fast and not speaking until... We were back
1:04:52
Speaker 2: through the gate and on the gravel road and then
1:04:55
Speaker 2: we got in Dylan's truck and drove and Renee asked
1:04:58
Speaker 2: what that was and nobody answered her because nobody had
1:05:02
Speaker 2: an answer. The pictures Cassie took with the disposable camera
1:05:07
Speaker 2: came back from the drugstore development service ten days later.
1:05:11
Speaker 2: There were clear pictures of the house exterior, the collapsed outbuilding,
1:05:15
Speaker 2: the warped porch boards and there was one picture Cassie
1:05:19
Speaker 2: had taken of the back of the house. timed almost
1:05:22
Speaker 2: exactly when we saw the shape in the window which
1:05:25
Speaker 2: showed the window in question and showed very clearly that
1:05:28
Speaker 2: there was something standing in it. The image quality of
1:05:33
Speaker 2: a disposable camera at night from that distance is not
1:05:36
Speaker 2: high and you cannot make out what it is with
1:05:38
Speaker 2: any detail but it's there. Something is there in that
1:05:44
Speaker 2: window and it is upright and whatever it is it
1:05:47
Speaker 2: isn't furniture.
1:05:49
Speaker 1: Cassie still has that photo.
1:05:51
Speaker 2: She keeps it in an envelope in a box in
1:05:53
Speaker 2: her closet, and she has shown it to approximately four people,
1:05:57
Speaker 2: including me, and does.
1:05:58
Speaker 1: Not particularly like to look at it.
1:06:01
Speaker 2: I asked her a few years ago if she'd ever
1:06:03
Speaker 2: thought of reporting what we saw to anyone, and she
1:06:05
Speaker 2: said no, because even if someone believed us and went
1:06:09
Speaker 2: to look, the property had been empty for 40 years
1:06:12
Speaker 2: at that point, and anything that had been standing in
1:06:15
Speaker 2: that window for any part of that time clearly knew
1:06:19
Speaker 2: how to avoid being found. I thought about that answer
1:06:22
Speaker 2: for a long time. I think she's right. I want
1:06:26
Speaker 2: to add something that I omitted from the version I've
1:06:28
Speaker 2: told before because I wasn't sure it was relevant. When
1:06:33
Speaker 2: we were on the backside of the house, the four
1:06:35
Speaker 2: of us, standing in the weeds below the second floor window,
1:06:38
Speaker 2: in the few seconds before Renee grabbed Dylan's arm and
1:06:42
Speaker 2: pointed before any of us had seen anything, I heard something.
1:06:47
Speaker 2: A sound from inside the house. Not dramatic, Not a
1:06:51
Speaker 2: scream or a crash or anything that would clock.
1:06:54
Speaker 1: As obviously alarming. Just a sound.
1:06:58
Speaker 2: A quiet, specific sound like a footstep on a wooden floor.
1:07:02
Speaker 2: One footstep, then another, then silence. I didn't say anything
1:07:07
Speaker 2: about it in the moment because I told myself it
1:07:10
Speaker 2: was the house settling. Old houses do that. And I
1:07:14
Speaker 2: didn't want to be the person who started the panic.
1:07:17
Speaker 2: And then everything happened fast after that. Renee pointing, all
1:07:21
Speaker 2: of us looking up. The shape in the window, the movement.
1:07:25
Speaker 2: We left, and we talked about what we'd seen in
1:07:27
Speaker 2: the window, and I completely forgot to mention what I'd
1:07:30
Speaker 2: heard before we saw it. The reason it matters is this.
1:07:35
Speaker 2: The shape moved back from the window in a specific direction.
1:07:39
Speaker 2: It stepped back and to its left, which from outside
1:07:42
Speaker 2: meant it moved toward the interior of the house, and
1:07:45
Speaker 2: to the right if you were facing out. And if
1:07:48
Speaker 2: it was on a wooden floor and it was moving
1:07:50
Speaker 2: from that window toward the interior of the room. And
1:07:53
Speaker 2: if the footstep sound I had heard was it approaching
1:07:56
Speaker 2: the window from inside the room before we saw it.
1:08:00
Speaker 1: Then there is a sequence. It crossed the floor. It
1:08:04
Speaker 1: came to the window. It looked down at us. We
1:08:07
Speaker 1: saw it. It moved back into the room. That sequence
1:08:11
Speaker 1: implies awareness of us before we were aware of it.
1:08:15
Speaker 1: It came to the window because we were there. And
1:08:18
Speaker 1: then it moved back when the situation didn't resolve the way... What?
1:08:23
Speaker 1: Whatever way it might have preferred. I don't know what
1:08:26
Speaker 1: it preferred.
1:08:27
Speaker 2: I don't know what it wanted from four teenagers poking
1:08:30
Speaker 2: around the exterior of an empty house on a July
1:08:32
Speaker 2: night in Mingo County, West Virginia.
1:08:35
Speaker 1: Maybe nothing.
1:08:37
Speaker 2: Maybe we just constituted a thing to look at and
1:08:39
Speaker 2: it looked at us the same way we were looking
1:08:41
Speaker 2: at it. For whatever reason, things look at things. But
1:08:44
Speaker 2: the awareness of us... That piece, the fact that it
1:08:47
Speaker 2: came to the window because it knew we were below it,
1:08:51
Speaker 2: is the part that has stayed with me. The shape
1:08:54
Speaker 2: in the window would be a story I'd have half
1:08:57
Speaker 2: dismissed by now if I'd come to it from outside.
1:09:01
Speaker 2: The footstep is what keeps me from dismissing it. The
1:09:04
Speaker 2: footstep is what makes it something that was actively engaging
1:09:08
Speaker 2: with us rather than something we simply observed.
1:09:11
Speaker 1: Cassie still has the photo. I haven't asked to see
1:09:14
Speaker 1: it again. I know what's in it. Story seven. This
1:09:18
Speaker 1: one is short, because the facts of it are short,
1:09:21
Speaker 1: but it stayed with.
1:09:22
Speaker 2: Me in a way that longer experiences sometimes don't, and
1:09:25
Speaker 2: I think it deserves to be in writing somewhere.
1:09:29
Speaker 1: My great-aunt Patty Colley.
1:09:31
Speaker 2: Lived alone in a house in the community of Dry
1:09:33
Speaker 2: Fork in Randolph County, West Virginia. She was my grandmother's
1:09:38
Speaker 2: older sister, had never married, and was one of those
1:09:41
Speaker 2: women who takes up a small amount of space in
1:09:43
Speaker 2: a room, but notices everything that happens in it. She
1:09:47
Speaker 2: was sharp and funny and practical, and not given to
1:09:50
Speaker 2: embellishment or dramatics. She lived alone in that house for
1:09:54
Speaker 2: decades after her parents died, and she stayed there until
1:09:58
Speaker 2: she was in her 80s and couldn't manage the stairs anymore,
1:10:01
Speaker 2: at which point my grandmother's family moved her to a
1:10:04
Speaker 2: retirement home in Elkins, where she lived out the rest
1:10:07
Speaker 2: of her days. I visited Aunt Patty a few times
1:10:11
Speaker 2: as a child, and a few more times as a
1:10:13
Speaker 2: young adult. The house was old, genuinely old, built sometime
1:10:18
Speaker 2: in the late 1800s by her grandfather, and it had
1:10:22
Speaker 2: all the characteristics of a house that age. Narrow hallways,
1:10:26
Speaker 2: low ceilings in the upper story, windows that no longer
1:10:29
Speaker 2: sat square in their frames, cold spots in winter that
1:10:32
Speaker 2: no amount of heating fully addressed. When I was about 25,
1:10:36
Speaker 2: I drove up to visit her on a long weekend
1:10:38
Speaker 2: in October.
1:10:39
Speaker 1: It was just me.
1:10:41
Speaker 2: I was between significant relationships at the time and traveling alone,
1:10:45
Speaker 2: and I stayed for two nights. The first night passed
1:10:49
Speaker 2: without anything of note. The second night, I woke up
1:10:52
Speaker 2: at some point in the early morning, probably around three
1:10:55
Speaker 2: or four, to a sound coming from inside the wall
1:10:58
Speaker 2: of the guest room.
1:11:00
Speaker 1: I had heard the usual.
1:11:00
Speaker 2: Settling sounds of old houses, and this was not that.
1:11:04
Speaker 2: This was a rhythmic sound, quiet but distinct, coming from
1:11:08
Speaker 2: inside the wall between the guest room and what Aunt
1:11:11
Speaker 2: Patty called the middle room. a room that didn't really
1:11:15
Speaker 2: have any other purpose than to connect the front of
1:11:17
Speaker 2: the house to the back. The sound was regular, about
1:11:21
Speaker 2: one beat every two seconds, and not knocking exactly. More
1:11:25
Speaker 2: like something pressing against the inside surface of the wall,
1:11:29
Speaker 2: soft and persistent. I lay there for a while, waiting
1:11:32
Speaker 2: for it to stop, the way sounds sometimes do. It
1:11:36
Speaker 2: didn't stop. I got up and pressed my ear to
1:11:39
Speaker 2: the wall, and it was clearer with my ear against
1:11:42
Speaker 2: the plastered, Definitely inside the wall. Definitely moving. And not
1:11:48
Speaker 2: a mouse or a rat or any animal I had
1:11:50
Speaker 2: a ready name for. The rhythm was too even.
1:11:54
Speaker 1: Too deliberate.
1:11:56
Speaker 2: Animals don't make noise like that. People make noise like that.
1:12:01
Speaker 2: Or things that are aware of themselves in the way
1:12:03
Speaker 2: that generates rhythm. I moved to the door of the
1:12:08
Speaker 2: middle room and opened it and turned on the light.
1:12:11
Speaker 2: The sound stopped the moment I opened the door. I
1:12:14
Speaker 2: went over the room thoroughly.
1:12:16
Speaker 1: Didn't take long.
1:12:17
Speaker 2: It was a small room with minimal furniture and found nothing.
1:12:22
Speaker 2: I went back to bed and the sound did not resume.
1:12:26
Speaker 2: At breakfast the next morning, I asked Aunt Patty if
1:12:28
Speaker 2: she'd ever heard anything unusual in the walls. And she
1:12:32
Speaker 2: looked at me with that level look she had that
1:12:34
Speaker 2: meant she was deciding how much to tell me. Then
1:12:37
Speaker 2: she said that the middle room and the wall that
1:12:39
Speaker 2: shared with the guest room was the oldest part of
1:12:42
Speaker 2: the original structure. the part that had been built first,
1:12:46
Speaker 2: and that she had heard things in that part of
1:12:48
Speaker 2: the house her whole life, from the time she was
1:12:51
Speaker 2: a little girl in that house with her parents, and
1:12:54
Speaker 2: that she'd never found any explanation for it that satisfied her.
1:12:58
Speaker 2: She said she'd learned to leave the light on in
1:13:00
Speaker 2: the middle room at night, and.
1:13:02
Speaker 1: That kept it quieter.
1:13:04
Speaker 2: She said she hadn't mentioned it before my visit because
1:13:07
Speaker 2: she hadn't wanted to worry me. I asked her what
1:13:10
Speaker 2: she thought it was. She poured herself more coffee and
1:13:13
Speaker 2: looked out the kitchen window toward the hillside behind the
1:13:16
Speaker 2: house and said she thought the house had been built
1:13:19
Speaker 2: over something that was already there. The way she said
1:13:22
Speaker 2: it was matter-of-fact, not ominous. The way you might say
1:13:26
Speaker 2: the house was built on a slope or the house
1:13:28
Speaker 2: was built near the creek. Just a statement of conditions.
1:13:33
Speaker 2: She'd made her peace with the conditions a long time
1:13:36
Speaker 2: ago and lived in that house for the better part
1:13:38
Speaker 2: of eight decades anyway. Some people's peace is braver than others.
1:13:44
Speaker 2: I've visited Dry Fork a couple more times since Aunt
1:13:47
Speaker 2: Patty moved to Elkins. The house is still in the family,
1:13:50
Speaker 2: managed by a cousin of mine, who rents it out
1:13:53
Speaker 2: seasonally as a vacation property. I stayed there once, about
1:13:57
Speaker 2: three years ago, with my husband, who had never been
1:13:59
Speaker 2: to that part of the state and was curious about
1:14:02
Speaker 2: the family history. I told him about the house, its age,
1:14:06
Speaker 2: the general details of Aunt Patty's tenancies, and when he
1:14:10
Speaker 2: asked if there was anything unusual about the place, I
1:14:13
Speaker 2: found myself in the position of deciding how much to
1:14:15
Speaker 2: tell him. I told him about the middle room and
1:14:19
Speaker 2: the wall and the sounds. I told him what Aunt
1:14:22
Speaker 2: Patty had said about the house being built over something older.
1:14:26
Speaker 2: He listened seriously, the way he does when he's deciding
1:14:29
Speaker 2: whether to take something at face value or file it
1:14:32
Speaker 2: under folklore. Then he said he was interested in going
1:14:36
Speaker 2: to sleep in that room if it was available, which
1:14:38
Speaker 2: it was. and that's what we did. He woke up
1:14:41
Speaker 2: before I did on the second morning. I was in
1:14:44
Speaker 2: the main guest room, the one I'd occupied before, and
1:14:48
Speaker 2: when I came downstairs, he was already at the kitchen
1:14:50
Speaker 2: table with coffee and a notebook, and he was writing something.
1:14:55
Speaker 1: He does that sometimes.
1:14:56
Speaker 2: He's a writer by profession, and when I asked what
1:14:58
Speaker 2: he was working on, he showed me what he'd written.
1:15:01
Speaker 1: He had been awake at about three.
1:15:02
Speaker 2: In the morning and had heard the sound in the wall.
1:15:06
Speaker 2: He described it exactly as I'd described it to him, rhythmic, deliberate,
1:15:11
Speaker 2: coming from inside the wall near the floor. He wrote
1:15:14
Speaker 2: that his immediate instinct had been to get up and
1:15:17
Speaker 2: bang on the wall, the way I'd done years before,
1:15:21
Speaker 2: but instead he'd lain still and just listened, and tried
1:15:25
Speaker 2: to document what he was hearing as precisely as possible.
1:15:30
Speaker 1: He wrote about the rhythm of it.
1:15:32
Speaker 2: He counted it out and got approximately one contact every
1:15:36
Speaker 2: two seconds. Consistent over the eleven minutes, he lay listening
1:15:40
Speaker 2: to it.
1:15:41
Speaker 1: Before it stopped.
1:15:43
Speaker 2: He wrote about the quality of the sound, which he
1:15:45
Speaker 2: described as soft but with a slight resonance, like something
1:15:50
Speaker 2: with mass pressing against a hollow surface. He wrote that
1:15:54
Speaker 2: there was nothing mechanical about it, nothing that read as
1:15:58
Speaker 2: pipe noise or settling timber. He wrote that whatever was
1:16:02
Speaker 2: making the sound was doing so consistently enough that he
1:16:06
Speaker 2: found himself thinking of it as patient. He said it
1:16:11
Speaker 2: stopped at 3.34 by his phone and did not resume.
1:16:14
Speaker 2: He showed me the notebook, and I sat and read
1:16:16
Speaker 2: what he had written, and when I looked up, I
1:16:18
Speaker 2: said that matched exactly what I remembered, and he nodded
1:16:22
Speaker 2: and said that was what he thought. He wasn't scared.
1:16:25
Speaker 2: He wasn't spooked in any way that derailed the visit.
1:16:28
Speaker 2: He was simply interested in the way he gets interested
1:16:31
Speaker 2: in things that don't have ready explanations. He asked me
1:16:35
Speaker 2: if Aunt Patty had ever tried to find out what
1:16:38
Speaker 2: was underneath the house and I said, not as far
1:16:41
Speaker 2: as I knew. He said he thought about that a
1:16:43
Speaker 2: lot in the following months. What it means to live
1:16:46
Speaker 2: 80 years in a house and know that you're living
1:16:48
Speaker 2: over something that does not have a name in any
1:16:51
Speaker 2: vocabulary you possess and to carry on living there anyway
1:16:55
Speaker 2: and to find a practical accommodation with it. Keep the
1:16:58
Speaker 2: light on in the middle room. Don't pry at what
1:17:01
Speaker 2: doesn't need to be pried at. Make your peace and
1:17:04
Speaker 2: go about your life. He said he found that more
1:17:07
Speaker 2: admirable than he expected to. Aunt Patty died at 91.
1:17:12
Speaker 2: She was sound to the very end, sharp as she'd
1:17:14
Speaker 2: always been, funny and observant and unruffled. She spent 80-some
1:17:19
Speaker 2: years in a house with something inside its walls that
1:17:22
Speaker 2: pressed against the plaster in the small hours of the morning,
1:17:25
Speaker 2: and she never let it define her or diminish her,
1:17:29
Speaker 2: and she lived her full life in full possession of herself.
1:17:33
Speaker 2: That's the kind of courage that doesn't get named as.
1:17:36
Speaker 1: Often as it should. Story 8.
1:17:39
Speaker 2: I grew up in Ashe County, North Carolina, right up
1:17:42
Speaker 2: near the Virginia state line in the Blue Ridge country,
1:17:45
Speaker 2: and I have spent most of my adult life not
1:17:47
Speaker 2: far from where I was born. I know the roads
1:17:50
Speaker 2: in my county the way most people know the rooms
1:17:53
Speaker 2: of their own house. I have driven them in every
1:17:56
Speaker 2: kind of weather at every hour of the day and
1:17:58
Speaker 2: night for 30-some years. Ashe County is the kind of
1:18:03
Speaker 2: place that people from the outside tend to characterize in
1:18:06
Speaker 2: one of two ways. Either as simply beautiful mountain country,
1:18:10
Speaker 2: which it is, or as remote and backward, which it isn't,
1:18:14
Speaker 2: but which certain people decide to think when they encounter
1:18:18
Speaker 2: a place with no Starbucks and a population that can
1:18:21
Speaker 2: be counted in the tens of thousands.
1:18:24
Speaker 1: What Ashe County actually is, is old.
1:18:27
Speaker 2: Not old in the way that a historic district is old,
1:18:31
Speaker 2: or a well-preserved downtown is old. Old in the way
1:18:34
Speaker 2: that Land gets old, layered, accumulated, carrying things that predate
1:18:41
Speaker 2: all the names on all the deeds and all the
1:18:43
Speaker 2: gravestones and all the churchyards. The Cherokee were in these
1:18:47
Speaker 2: mountains for far longer than European settlers have been.
1:18:50
Speaker 1: Been. And before the Cherokee, there were others. And before them,
1:18:53
Speaker 1: the land was.
1:18:54
Speaker 2: Whatever land is before people arrived to name the ridges
1:18:57
Speaker 2: and mark the property lines and start having opinions about
1:19:00
Speaker 2: each other. Whatever accrues in a place over that much time,
1:19:05
Speaker 2: over that many layers of human and pre-human presence. I
1:19:08
Speaker 2: don't have a word for it exactly, but I've grown
1:19:11
Speaker 2: up feeling it in the way that people who grow
1:19:13
Speaker 2: up in old places sometimes do, as a kind of
1:19:16
Speaker 2: weight or depth to the landscape that is invisible in
1:19:20
Speaker 2: any specific feature, but is present in the whole of it.
1:19:24
Speaker 2: I say all of this to frame what I'm about
1:19:26
Speaker 2: to tell you, not to make it more dramatic or
1:19:29
Speaker 2: to set an ominous atmosphere for its own sake, but
1:19:34
Speaker 2: because what happened to me on that county road on
1:19:37
Speaker 2: an ordinary fall night in 2019. Happened in a landscape
1:19:41
Speaker 2: with that particular character, and I think the character of
1:19:44
Speaker 2: the landscape is relevant context. In the fall of 2019,
1:19:48
Speaker 2: I was driving home from a neighbor's property at about
1:19:52
Speaker 2: 11 at night. I'd been over there helping him pull
1:19:55
Speaker 2: a tractor that had gotten stuck in wet ground at
1:19:58
Speaker 2: the edge of his lower field. We got it out finally,
1:20:01
Speaker 2: and I had a beer and a piece of his
1:20:02
Speaker 2: wife's apple cake, and then headed for home. The road
1:20:06
Speaker 2: was a county road I had driven more times than
1:20:08
Speaker 2: I could count, a roughly ten-mile stretch that wound through
1:20:12
Speaker 2: three or four small communities before reaching my driveway. About
1:20:17
Speaker 2: four miles into the drive, in a stretch I knew well,
1:20:20
Speaker 2: there was a road on my right that I had
1:20:22
Speaker 2: never seen before. I registered this as strange, but my
1:20:26
Speaker 2: immediate thought was that I was simply not remembering a
1:20:29
Speaker 2: road that was there that I'd driven past it so
1:20:32
Speaker 2: many times without turning down it that my brain had
1:20:35
Speaker 2: simply stopped cataloging it. It had a gravel surface and
1:20:39
Speaker 2: appeared to go up into the hill behind a stand
1:20:41
Speaker 2: of hardwoods, and there was a light visible some ways
1:20:45
Speaker 2: up it. Dim, yellowish, the kind of light from a
1:20:49
Speaker 2: house or an outbuilding. I drove past it and got
1:20:52
Speaker 2: home without incident, and went to bed thinking nothing more
1:20:56
Speaker 2: of it. The next morning I drove back over that
1:20:59
Speaker 2: stretch of road in daylight on my way to a
1:21:02
Speaker 2: job site.
1:21:03
Speaker 1: The road was not there.
1:21:05
Speaker 2: I slowed down when I reached the approximate location, which
1:21:08
Speaker 2: I knew because of a specific tree.
1:21:11
Speaker 1: An old lightning-struck oak I had used as a landmark
1:21:14
Speaker 1: all my life, and there was no gravel road on
1:21:17
Speaker 1: the right. Just the tree line. Just the hill.
1:21:21
Speaker 2: Just the unbroken vegetation line that I knew from every
1:21:24
Speaker 2: other time I had driven that stretch. I turned around
1:21:28
Speaker 2: and drove it again, slowly.
1:21:29
Speaker 1: Still nothing.
1:21:31
Speaker 2: I pulled off on the shoulder and got out. and
1:21:33
Speaker 2: walked that section of the roadside. The vegetation was continuous
1:21:38
Speaker 2: and undisturbed. No evidence of a gravel surface, no tire
1:21:41
Speaker 2: marks turning off the pavement, no gap in the trees.
1:21:45
Speaker 2: If a road had been there the night before, it
1:21:48
Speaker 2: had left absolutely no trace of itself in the daylight hours.
1:21:52
Speaker 2: I have asked around discreetly about whether anyone in that
1:21:56
Speaker 2: area knows of a property accessed by a gravel road
1:21:59
Speaker 2: in that approximate location.
1:22:02
Speaker 1: Nobody does.
1:22:03
Speaker 2: The county GIS mapping system shows no roads or easements
1:22:07
Speaker 2: in that section of hillside. A county roads employee I
1:22:11
Speaker 2: know tells me there are no permitted driveways or road
1:22:14
Speaker 2: intersections at that location. I don't have a satisfying explanation
1:22:19
Speaker 2: for this. I know I wasn't drunk. One beer hours
1:22:23
Speaker 2: before doesn't account for what I saw. I know I
1:22:26
Speaker 2: wasn't tired in any way that would produce hallucination. I
1:22:30
Speaker 2: had been up since six that morning doing normal physical
1:22:32
Speaker 2: work and was alert and clear-headed.
1:22:35
Speaker 1: I know what I saw. A road, gravel, a light
1:22:39
Speaker 1: at the far end of it. I drive past that
1:22:42
Speaker 1: spot regularly, and I have not seen it again.
1:22:44
Speaker 2: I have taken to looking carefully each time I pass it,
1:22:48
Speaker 2: particularly at night. I don't know what I'm expecting to find.
1:22:52
Speaker 2: I think I'm just looking because not looking feels like
1:22:55
Speaker 2: ignoring something, and ignoring things in my experience.
1:22:59
Speaker 1: Is rarely the wisest approach.
1:23:02
Speaker 2: If you live in Ashe County and you know what's
1:23:04
Speaker 2: on that hillside, I would sincerely appreciate a message. There
1:23:09
Speaker 2: is one other thing I should add because I've sat
1:23:12
Speaker 2: on it long enough and I'd rather it be on
1:23:13
Speaker 2: record somewhere. About six weeks after the night I saw
1:23:17
Speaker 2: the road, I was talking to an older man in
1:23:19
Speaker 2: the county, a retired farmer who has lived in that
1:23:22
Speaker 2: area his whole life and knows the land the way
1:23:25
Speaker 2: people who've worked it for 70 years know it. I
1:23:28
Speaker 2: wasn't asking him about the road specifically. I hadn't told
1:23:32
Speaker 2: anyone the specific story because I wasn't sure.
1:23:35
Speaker 1: How it would land.
1:23:37
Speaker 2: But we were talking about the county roads in general
1:23:39
Speaker 2: and about the old track routes that used to crisscross
1:23:42
Speaker 2: the region before the county built up the maintained road network.
1:23:46
Speaker 2: I knew there were old traces of roads all over
1:23:49
Speaker 2: the county. Logging roads and farm tracks and old routes
1:23:53
Speaker 2: that predated anything the county road department had jurisdiction over.
1:23:58
Speaker 2: and I asked him in a general way if he
1:24:00
Speaker 2: ever came across ones he didn't recognize. He said sure
1:24:04
Speaker 2: all the time. The land was full of them. Every
1:24:06
Speaker 2: property in the county had two or three old ways
1:24:09
Speaker 2: through it that nobody used anymore. I asked if he'd
1:24:13
Speaker 2: ever found a road at night that he couldn't find
1:24:16
Speaker 2: in daylight. He was quiet for a moment, and then
1:24:20
Speaker 2: said he'd.
1:24:20
Speaker 1: Heard of that.
1:24:22
Speaker 2: I asked what he'd heard, and he said there was
1:24:24
Speaker 2: an old local understanding in that part of the county He.
1:24:29
Speaker 1: Didn't use the word understanding.
1:24:31
Speaker 2: He said people used to know that certain old roots
1:24:35
Speaker 2: in the hills only opened up under certain conditions. He
1:24:38
Speaker 2: was vague about what the conditions were, and I didn't
1:24:41
Speaker 2: push him on it because I could tell it was
1:24:43
Speaker 2: something he wasn't sure how much to say about. He
1:24:46
Speaker 2: said the old-timers would have been able to say more
1:24:49
Speaker 2: about it than he could. He said some of the
1:24:51
Speaker 2: old road roots in those hills had been there longer
1:24:54
Speaker 2: than any deed in the county and that whatever governed them.
1:24:59
Speaker 2: wasn't the county roads department. I asked him if he
1:25:03
Speaker 2: knew which road I might have seen, and I gave
1:25:05
Speaker 2: him the approximate location by reference to the lightning-struck oak.
1:25:10
Speaker 2: He thought about it and said he didn't know that
1:25:12
Speaker 2: specific spot, but that the hillside behind it had some
1:25:15
Speaker 2: old reputation he couldn't put specifics to. He said his
1:25:19
Speaker 2: father had mentioned something about that slope once when he
1:25:22
Speaker 2: was a boy, and had told him to keep to
1:25:24
Speaker 2: the main road through that stretch, especially after dark. I
1:25:28
Speaker 2: asked if his father had said why, and he shook
1:25:31
Speaker 2: his head. Said it was one of those things people
1:25:33
Speaker 2: said without full explanation because the full explanation had gotten lost,
1:25:38
Speaker 2: and what was left was just the practical directive. Keep
1:25:42
Speaker 2: to the road. Don't turn off into the hill. Simple
1:25:46
Speaker 2: enough to follow without needing to know everything behind it.
1:25:50
Speaker 1: I keep to the road.
1:25:52
Speaker 2: I do what the old directive says, and I look
1:25:54
Speaker 2: at the hillside every time I pass it in case
1:25:57
Speaker 2: the conditions are right again and the road shows itself,
1:26:00
Speaker 2: and I get to see whatever is at the end
1:26:02
Speaker 2: of it, glowing with that dim yellow light in the dark,
1:26:07
Speaker 2: part of me wants to see it again. I know
1:26:10
Speaker 2: that's not sensible, but there's something about a door that
1:26:14
Speaker 2: appears and then doesn't appear that makes you want to
1:26:17
Speaker 2: understand what's on the other side of it. Even knowing
1:26:20
Speaker 2: that the door appearing only under certain conditions you can't
1:26:24
Speaker 2: control or predict is probably information in itself probably the
1:26:30
Speaker 2: most important information in the whole thing. We post news
1:26:34
Speaker 2: stories three times a week right here on Park Ranger Files.
1:26:37
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1:26:45
Speaker 1: New videos every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. Story 9.
1:26:50
Speaker 2: This story was submitted by a listener in Clay County,
1:26:53
Speaker 2: West Virginia, and I'm reading it exactly as it was
1:26:56
Speaker 2: sent to me. My name doesn't matter for the purposes
1:26:58
Speaker 2: of this story, and I'd prefer to leave it out.
1:27:01
Speaker 2: I own a small property in the rural part of
1:27:03
Speaker 2: Clay County, about seven acres, which I use primarily for
1:27:06
Speaker 2: a large garden and some small-scale chickens and a few goats.
1:27:10
Speaker 2: It has been in my family for two generations, and
1:27:12
Speaker 2: I have lived there full-time for the past six years since.
1:27:16
Speaker 1: I retired from 30 years working for the state.
1:27:19
Speaker 2: I want to say something about Clay County before I
1:27:21
Speaker 2: get into the story itself because I think it's relevant context.
1:27:26
Speaker 1: Clay County is small, very small.
1:27:30
Speaker 2: It's one of the smallest counties in West Virginia by population.
1:27:33
Speaker 2: And the county seat, the town of Clay, has a
1:27:36
Speaker 2: few thousand people in it. And then the rest of
1:27:39
Speaker 2: the county is scattered rural community, small farms, properties that
1:27:44
Speaker 2: have been in the same families for generations. I grew
1:27:47
Speaker 2: up in another county and moved to Clay County when
1:27:50
Speaker 2: my wife and I bought the property from her uncle
1:27:53
Speaker 2: who had farmed it for 40 years. before his health
1:27:56
Speaker 2: made it impossible to continue. We were not insiders, not
1:28:00
Speaker 2: in the way people who have been in a place
1:28:02
Speaker 2: for generations are insiders. And after six years, I'm still
1:28:07
Speaker 2: not entirely an insider. That's not a criticism of the community.
1:28:12
Speaker 2: It's just the nature of a place, with that kind
1:28:15
Speaker 2: of depth of social fabric.
1:28:18
Speaker 1: You earn your place slowly, or you don't earn it
1:28:20
Speaker 1: at all.
1:28:22
Speaker 2: The community immediately around my property includes families that have
1:28:25
Speaker 2: been in that particular hollow for four and five generations.
1:28:30
Speaker 2: Some of them are warm to us, and some of
1:28:32
Speaker 2: them are polite in that way that maintains its distance
1:28:36
Speaker 2: while being impeccably courteous. My nearest neighbor to the north
1:28:40
Speaker 2: is in the second category. He was born on the
1:28:43
Speaker 2: property his father was born on, which his grandfather homesteaded,
1:28:47
Speaker 2: and his family's roots in that part of Clay County
1:28:49
Speaker 2: go back further than that. He knows things about the
1:28:52
Speaker 2: land and about the community that no amount of newcomer
1:28:55
Speaker 2: attention can replicate.
1:28:57
Speaker 1: The things he knows... He holds closely, and I respect that.
1:29:01
Speaker 2: When he does share information, it is specific, and it
1:29:04
Speaker 2: is actionable, and he does not embellish or dramatize. He
1:29:08
Speaker 2: is exactly the kind of source you want if you've
1:29:11
Speaker 2: encountered something you need context for. The property borders a
1:29:15
Speaker 2: stretch of county road, and then on the other three sides,
1:29:18
Speaker 2: it adjoins other private land. The boundary on the north
1:29:22
Speaker 2: side follows an old fence line, that is a mix
1:29:25
Speaker 2: of original barbed wire strung on cedar posts decades ago
1:29:30
Speaker 2: and newer wire I've replaced as sections rotted out. Beyond
1:29:34
Speaker 2: that fence on the north is a narrow band of
1:29:37
Speaker 2: woods and then another property that has changed hands a
1:29:40
Speaker 2: few times and is currently owned by a family I
1:29:44
Speaker 2: have no regular interaction with, though we exchange waves on
1:29:47
Speaker 2: the road and have had no disputes or difficulties. In
1:29:53
Speaker 2: March of last year, a Thursday evening, I was out
1:29:56
Speaker 2: checking on the goats before full dark when I noticed
1:29:59
Speaker 2: two children standing at the fence on the north side
1:30:02
Speaker 2: of my property. They were standing outside the fence on
1:30:06
Speaker 2: the far side, in the narrow margin between the fence
1:30:09
Speaker 2: line and the trees. My first assumption was that they
1:30:12
Speaker 2: were children from the neighboring property, perhaps grandchildren visiting, who
1:30:17
Speaker 2: had wandered toward the property line out of curiosity. I
1:30:21
Speaker 2: walked over to the fence to say hello and ask
1:30:22
Speaker 2: if they were alright. As I got closer, I could
1:30:25
Speaker 2: see they were young, maybe 8 and 10 years old approximately,
1:30:30
Speaker 2: a boy and a girl. And they were dressed in
1:30:32
Speaker 2: plain clothing that struck me as unusual. Not costumes, not
1:30:37
Speaker 2: anything theatrical, just simple plain colored clothing that seemed slightly
1:30:41
Speaker 2: out of season for a cool March evening. They were
1:30:45
Speaker 2: not wearing coats. They were not doing anything specific, just
1:30:49
Speaker 2: standing there. side by side, looking toward my property. Looking
1:30:53
Speaker 2: toward me, I suppose, as I approached. I got to
1:30:57
Speaker 2: the fence and spoke to them. Asked if they belonged
1:31:00
Speaker 2: to the neighbors and were they alright.
1:31:02
Speaker 1: They didn't answer. I asked again. Nothing.
1:31:07
Speaker 2: They just looked at me with an expression I have
1:31:09
Speaker 2: tried to describe to a few people and found it
1:31:13
Speaker 2: difficult to put into words.
1:31:15
Speaker 1: Not blank, exactly.
1:31:17
Speaker 2: More like attentive in a way that felt disproportionate to
1:31:21
Speaker 2: the situation, like they were studying something. I asked them
1:31:25
Speaker 2: where their parents were. The boy pointed, without speaking, toward
1:31:29
Speaker 2: the trees behind them. I looked and there was nothing
1:31:32
Speaker 2: visible in the trees except the trees themselves at the
1:31:36
Speaker 2: edge of the darkening evening. I looked back at the
1:31:39
Speaker 2: children and asked if their parents were back in the woods.
1:31:43
Speaker 2: Neither of them responded. The girl's gaze didn't waver from
1:31:47
Speaker 2: my face, and it struck me then, standing at that fence,
1:31:52
Speaker 2: that I was more unsettled by two children standing at
1:31:55
Speaker 2: a fence line than I had any rational reason to be.
1:32:00
Speaker 2: But unease doesn't always come with a rational reason attached,
1:32:04
Speaker 2: and what I was feeling standing there was a clear
1:32:06
Speaker 2: and growing urge to go back toward my house.
1:32:10
Speaker 1: And away from that fence line.
1:32:13
Speaker 2: I told them it was getting cold and dark and
1:32:15
Speaker 2: they ought to head home, that their parents would be
1:32:18
Speaker 2: looking for them. I turned and walked back toward my house.
1:32:22
Speaker 1: I did not run.
1:32:24
Speaker 2: I did not look back until I was at my
1:32:27
Speaker 2: porch steps. When I looked back, the children were gone.
1:32:33
Speaker 2: I went inside and I waited a reasonable amount of time,
1:32:36
Speaker 2: maybe 40 minutes, and then I walked down the road
1:32:39
Speaker 2: to my.
1:32:39
Speaker 1: Neighbor's house and knocked on the door.
1:32:42
Speaker 2: I explained that I'd seen what I thought were children
1:32:44
Speaker 2: near my north fence and wanted to make sure everyone
1:32:47
Speaker 2: was accounted for. My neighbor looked confused and told me
1:32:51
Speaker 2: they had no guests and their grandchildren were all in
1:32:54
Speaker 2: school in Charleston. He asked me what the children looked
1:32:58
Speaker 2: like and I described them as best I could. He
1:33:01
Speaker 2: went quiet for a moment and then said he'd look
1:33:03
Speaker 2: around and make sure everything was alright on his end.
1:33:07
Speaker 2: I thanked him and went home. He called me the
1:33:10
Speaker 2: next morning to say everything was fine on his property.
1:33:14
Speaker 2: He paused toward the end of the call and then said,
1:33:17
Speaker 2: not quite casually, that his grandfather had stories about children
1:33:21
Speaker 2: being seen along that fence line over the years, and
1:33:26
Speaker 2: that his grandfather's advice had always been not to invite
1:33:29
Speaker 2: them to come closer and not to follow when they
1:33:32
Speaker 2: pointed at something. I told him that was not something
1:33:36
Speaker 2: I had done. He said good and he hoped I
1:33:38
Speaker 2: had a good rest of my week. I have not
1:33:41
Speaker 2: seen them again. I still check the north fence line
1:33:44
Speaker 2: when I'm out at dusk. I'm not sure if I'm
1:33:47
Speaker 2: checking to make sure they aren't there or to make
1:33:49
Speaker 2: sure I'd know if they were.
1:33:51
Speaker 1: Maybe both. I want to add a few things.
1:33:54
Speaker 2: That I left out of my initial account because I
1:33:57
Speaker 2: wasn't sure how to include them without sounding like I
1:33:59
Speaker 2: was embellishing.
1:34:01
Speaker 1: The first is about the clothes. I mentioned that the
1:34:04
Speaker 1: children were wearing plain clothing that seemed out of season.
1:34:08
Speaker 2: I've thought about this more carefully since, and what struck
1:34:11
Speaker 2: me specifically was that the clothing was clean. Not just clean,
1:34:16
Speaker 2: but pristine in the way that clothing looks when it
1:34:19
Speaker 2: has never been worn outside before. There was no dirt,
1:34:24
Speaker 2: no mud, no grass stain, nowhere. They had been standing
1:34:28
Speaker 2: at the edge of a fence line in a wet
1:34:30
Speaker 2: March evening in a rural county in West Virginia, and
1:34:33
Speaker 2: their clothing was immaculate. Children who have been playing outside,
1:34:39
Speaker 2: who have been wandering through a neighbor's woodlot in early spring,
1:34:42
Speaker 2: do not look like that. They look like children have
1:34:46
Speaker 2: always looked outside, muddy at the knees and cuffs at minimum.
1:34:51
Speaker 1: The second thing is about the pointing.
1:34:53
Speaker 2: When I asked the boy where his parents were and
1:34:55
Speaker 2: he pointed toward the trees, I said in my account
1:34:58
Speaker 2: that I looked and saw nothing that is accurate. What
1:35:01
Speaker 2: I didn't say is how he pointed. He didn't gesture
1:35:04
Speaker 2: with his whole arm the way children usually do, He
1:35:07
Speaker 2: extended one finger and pointed with a very specific, very
1:35:10
Speaker 2: deliberate movement. And he held it for longer than was
1:35:13
Speaker 2: necessary for the purpose of indicating a direction. He held
1:35:16
Speaker 2: it the way someone holds something when they want you
1:35:18
Speaker 2: to follow the direction.
1:35:20
Speaker 1: When they want you to go where they're pointing.
1:35:23
Speaker 2: I looked at the trees and then I looked back
1:35:26
Speaker 2: at them and the finger was still extended.
1:35:28
Speaker 1: Still pointing.
1:35:30
Speaker 2: I had the strong impression that they wanted me to
1:35:32
Speaker 2: go toward the trees and look for what he was
1:35:35
Speaker 2: pointing at. That the exchange was not a child trying
1:35:39
Speaker 2: to tell me where his parents were, but something structured differently.
1:35:42
Speaker 1: A direction. An invitation. Come here. Look here. Come toward
1:35:50
Speaker 1: the trees. I did not. I turned around and walked
1:35:55
Speaker 1: back to the house. The third thing is this.
1:36:00
Speaker 2: When I was walking back to the house and I
1:36:02
Speaker 2: told myself not to run, not to show whatever alarm
1:36:06
Speaker 2: I felt, I was acutely aware of the sound of
1:36:09
Speaker 2: my own footsteps on the frozen ground. And in the
1:36:13
Speaker 2: course of listening to my own footsteps, I became aware
1:36:16
Speaker 2: that behind me, from the direction of the fence line,
1:36:20
Speaker 2: I could hear nothing. No footsteps on frozen ground. No
1:36:25
Speaker 2: footsteps on anything. If two children had been standing at
1:36:28
Speaker 2: that fence and then moved, walked away, turned back toward
1:36:33
Speaker 2: the trees, done anything, there would have been sound Eight-year-old
1:36:38
Speaker 2: children don't move silently on frozen ground in March.
1:36:41
Speaker 1: Nobody does.
1:36:43
Speaker 2: When I looked back from the porch steps, the fence
1:36:45
Speaker 2: line was empty and there had been no sound of
1:36:47
Speaker 2: their leaving. My neighbor's comment about his grandfather's advice stays
1:36:52
Speaker 2: with me. Don't invite them closer. Don't follow when they point.
1:36:57
Speaker 2: Both of those are things I didn't do instinctively. Before
1:37:01
Speaker 2: I had any context for why those were the right choices.
1:37:05
Speaker 2: I wonder if that instinct is learned at some level,
1:37:08
Speaker 2: not consciously, not from any specific teaching, but absorbed from
1:37:13
Speaker 2: the general cultural atmosphere of a community that has known
1:37:17
Speaker 2: enough about what it was dealing with to develop a
1:37:20
Speaker 2: response to it.
1:37:23
Speaker 1: I grew up in Clay County.
1:37:25
Speaker 2: Whatever my neighbors knew, maybe some part of me absorbed it.
1:37:29
Speaker 2: Or maybe common sense and self-preservation don't require specific teachings
1:37:36
Speaker 2: Maybe when something that looks like a child, but doesn't
1:37:39
Speaker 2: feel like a child, points toward a dark stand of
1:37:42
Speaker 2: trees and waits for you to follow. You don't have
1:37:45
Speaker 2: to be from that county or any county to know
1:37:48
Speaker 2: that following is not the correct response. Story 10. I
1:37:54
Speaker 2: have to give some background here because without it, the
1:37:57
Speaker 2: story doesn't make sense. I spent two summers in Pocahontas County,
1:38:01
Speaker 2: West Virginia, doing oral history work for University Project focused
1:38:06
Speaker 2: on traditional Appalachian religious practices. If you're not familiar, Pocahontas
1:38:11
Speaker 2: County is one of the more remote counties in the state.
1:38:14
Speaker 2: Large land area, very small population, no cell signal and
1:38:18
Speaker 2: probably 80% of it, and a culture that has retained
1:38:22
Speaker 2: characteristics that have largely disappeared from more connected parts of
1:38:26
Speaker 2: the region.
1:38:28
Speaker 1: It was exactly what our project needed.
1:38:31
Speaker 2: I need to describe Pocahontas County for people who haven't
1:38:34
Speaker 2: been there because the geography is part of why the
1:38:37
Speaker 2: culture is the way it is. The county covers almost 1,000
1:38:41
Speaker 2: square miles but has fewer than 9,000 people. It contains
1:38:46
Speaker 2: the Monongahela National Forest, the Greenbrier River, and some of
1:38:51
Speaker 2: the highest terrain in West Virginia. The roads are narrow
1:38:54
Speaker 2: and many of them are unpaved, and the cell signal
1:38:57
Speaker 2: situation I mentioned is not exaggerated. There are communities in
1:39:01
Speaker 2: Pocahontas County where the nearest reliable cell service.
1:39:05
Speaker 1: Is 30 miles away.
1:39:07
Speaker 2: This is not a county that has been normalized, culturally speaking,
1:39:11
Speaker 2: by the usual pressures of connectivity and outside influence. The
1:39:15
Speaker 2: people there have had the space to remain themselves in
1:39:19
Speaker 2: ways that people in more connected communities haven't. And the
1:39:23
Speaker 2: practices and beliefs and community knowledge that have persisted there
1:39:27
Speaker 2: reflect that space. The oral history project I was part
1:39:31
Speaker 2: of was specifically interested in the religious landscape. The small
1:39:36
Speaker 2: independent congregations, the old style Baptist practices, the faith healing traditions,
1:39:42
Speaker 2: the camp meeting culture that had largely vanished elsewhere but
1:39:46
Speaker 2: was still functioning in pockets of this part of the region.
1:39:50
Speaker 2: My fieldwork involved traveling to these communities, establishing relationships with
1:39:55
Speaker 2: congregation members, and conducting recorded interviews about their faith lives,
1:40:01
Speaker 2: their family religious histories, and the practices they'd experienced or observed.
1:40:06
Speaker 2: It was rich and careful work, and I took it seriously.
1:40:10
Speaker 2: I conducted somewhere in the range of 60 interviews over
1:40:14
Speaker 2: those two summers. with various members of different congregations. Most
1:40:19
Speaker 2: of the interviews were fascinating from a research perspective and
1:40:23
Speaker 2: entirely unremarkable from any other perspective. Elderly people talking about
1:40:27
Speaker 2: the faith traditions they'd grown up in, the old hymns
1:40:30
Speaker 2: they remembered, the preachers and revivals and prayer meetings of
1:40:34
Speaker 2: their childhoods.
1:40:35
Speaker 1: Rich material.
1:40:37
Speaker 2: One interview stands apart from all of them, and it's
1:40:40
Speaker 2: the one I'm going to tell you about now. Harmon
1:40:43
Speaker 2: Chapel is a small, independent congregation about as far off
1:40:47
Speaker 2: the county road as you can get without leaving the county,
1:40:51
Speaker 2: the man who had led it for decades. I'll call
1:40:54
Speaker 2: him Preacher H, as he has since passed, and I
1:40:58
Speaker 2: respect his family's privacy. It was in his late 70s
1:41:02
Speaker 2: when I interviewed him. He had a reputation, which I'd
1:41:05
Speaker 2: heard from multiple people before meeting him, for being what
1:41:09
Speaker 2: one of my interviewees called an unusual kind of minister.
1:41:13
Speaker 2: Someone with knowledge and practices that went back further than
1:41:17
Speaker 2: most modern congregations were comfortable acknowledging. We met at the chapel,
1:41:22
Speaker 2: which was a small frame building that could seat maybe
1:41:25
Speaker 2: 60 people, and we talked for nearly four hours. Most
1:41:29
Speaker 2: of it was conventional interview material. But toward the end
1:41:32
Speaker 2: of the afternoon, as we were sitting on the front
1:41:35
Speaker 2: steps of the chapel and the shadows were getting long,
1:41:38
Speaker 2: he asked me, unprompted, whether I had encountered anything strange
1:41:43
Speaker 2: in my travels around the county. I had by that
1:41:47
Speaker 2: point been asking variations of this question to everyone I interviewed,
1:41:51
Speaker 2: and most people either had nothing to report or had
1:41:54
Speaker 2: the kinds of stories that oral historians classify under supernatural
1:41:59
Speaker 2: folk belief, interesting culturally but not something the teller personally
1:42:04
Speaker 2: claims to have experienced. I told Preacher H honestly that
1:42:08
Speaker 2: I hadn't encountered anything that I couldn't explain, He nodded
1:42:12
Speaker 2: slowly and said that was probably because I wasn't staying
1:42:15
Speaker 2: in the right places, or rather, the wrong places. He
1:42:20
Speaker 2: said there were certain locations in that county where what
1:42:23
Speaker 2: he called the old presences were still active. He used
1:42:26
Speaker 2: that phrase, old presences, the way you'd use the word weather, factually, descriptively,
1:42:35
Speaker 2: not dramatically. He said he'd been aware of them for
1:42:38
Speaker 2: 60 years. and that his ministry had, in ways he
1:42:41
Speaker 2: didn't elaborate on, involved managing the relationship between his community
1:42:46
Speaker 2: and those presences. I asked him what that management looked like,
1:42:50
Speaker 2: and he said it looked like a preacher doing what
1:42:52
Speaker 2: preachers do, setting the terms of what his community would
1:42:55
Speaker 2: engage with and what it wouldn't, reinforcing those terms regularly, and.
1:43:00
Speaker 1: Responding when things went outside those terms.
1:43:03
Speaker 2: He said it wasn't as dramatic as it sounded, and
1:43:06
Speaker 2: Most of the time it amounted to nothing more unusual
1:43:09
Speaker 2: than his regular ministry. I asked him about the times
1:43:12
Speaker 2: it amounted to more than that. He looked at me
1:43:15
Speaker 2: for a long moment and then said that over 60
1:43:18
Speaker 2: years of ministry in that county, he had dealt with
1:43:22
Speaker 2: six situations that went significantly outside the normal terms.
1:43:27
Speaker 1: He would not describe them to me in any detail.
1:43:31
Speaker 2: He said only that in each case, the situation involved
1:43:34
Speaker 2: a person from the community who had either deliberately or
1:43:38
Speaker 2: accidentally broken the local understanding of what you engaged with
1:43:43
Speaker 2: and what you left alone, and that his role in
1:43:46
Speaker 2: each case had been to help restore the boundary that
1:43:50
Speaker 2: had been crossed. I asked him how you restore a
1:43:53
Speaker 2: boundary like that. He said with the same tools you
1:43:56
Speaker 2: used to establish one in the first place, prayer, fasting, presence.
1:44:01
Speaker 2: He said the presences responded to these things as consistently,
1:44:05
Speaker 2: as they responded to anything else, that they had a
1:44:08
Speaker 2: kind of grammar rules of engagement that went back longer
1:44:12
Speaker 2: than anyone living had a record of, and that if
1:44:15
Speaker 2: you knew the grammar, you could communicate in it. I
1:44:18
Speaker 2: asked him who taught him the grammar. He said a
1:44:22
Speaker 2: woman in the community had taught him who had learned
1:44:25
Speaker 2: it from a woman before her, and that the lineage
1:44:28
Speaker 2: went back as far as anyone had memory of it going.
1:44:32
Speaker 1: He said it was an unbroken transmission, that.
1:44:34
Speaker 2: He suspected it was one of the oldest things still
1:44:36
Speaker 2: functioning in that county. Older by far than the congregations
1:44:40
Speaker 2: and the deeds and the family names. I asked him
1:44:44
Speaker 2: what would happen when he was gone. He said he'd
1:44:46
Speaker 2: taught it to someone. That was all he said. He'd
1:44:50
Speaker 2: taught it to someone. And that was the part of
1:44:52
Speaker 2: his ministry he was most certain of. He passed away
1:44:56
Speaker 2: about 14 months after I interviewed him. I went back
1:44:59
Speaker 2: for the memorial service and spoke briefly to his daughter
1:45:02
Speaker 2: and didn't ask her any questions she wasn't prepared to answer.
1:45:06
Speaker 2: I still have the recording of the interview. I've listened
1:45:09
Speaker 2: to it many times.
1:45:11
Speaker 1: Sixty-year career of ministry in a remote mountain county, and
1:45:15
Speaker 1: the part he seemed most settled about was not any
1:45:18
Speaker 1: sermon he'd preached or any soul he felt he'd reached.
1:45:22
Speaker 1: It was having taught.
1:45:23
Speaker 2: Someone how to manage the relationship with things that don't
1:45:26
Speaker 2: have names in any modern vocabulary. Whatever he knew, somebody
1:45:31
Speaker 2: knows it now. In Pocahontas County in West Virginia, somebody
1:45:36
Speaker 2: is still maintaining that boundary. And if the old presences
1:45:39
Speaker 2: are still active in those hills, then that matters more
1:45:42
Speaker 2: than I can properly put into words. I've returned to
1:45:45
Speaker 2: Pocahontas County twice since those two fieldwork summers. Once to
1:45:50
Speaker 2: present a portion of my research at a regional conference,
1:45:53
Speaker 2: and once for personal reasons.
1:45:56
Speaker 1: I simply wanted to go back.
1:45:58
Speaker 2: Both times I drove through the area around Harmon Chapel,
1:46:01
Speaker 2: and both times I stopped the car for a moment
1:46:03
Speaker 2: at the end of the lane and looked down toward
1:46:05
Speaker 2: the building. I don't know exactly what I expected. The
1:46:10
Speaker 2: chapel was the same as I'd left it, small and
1:46:13
Speaker 2: white-painted and sitting quietly at the end of its lane,
1:46:16
Speaker 2: with the hillside rising behind it. On my second return
1:46:20
Speaker 2: visit in the late afternoon, there was a truck parked
1:46:22
Speaker 2: in front of it that I didn't recognize.
1:46:26
Speaker 1: Not unusual.
1:46:27
Speaker 2: The congregation still met twice monthly, and the truck could
1:46:30
Speaker 2: have belonged to any member. But I sat there for
1:46:33
Speaker 2: a moment, looking at the truck, and at the chapel,
1:46:36
Speaker 2: and thinking about the interview, and about Preacher H's certainty
1:46:40
Speaker 2: about having passed the knowledge on. And I thought about
1:46:43
Speaker 2: how that knowledge would transfer.
1:46:45
Speaker 1: Not like a document. Not in any medium I know
1:46:49
Speaker 1: how to classify or access as a researcher. Oral, certainly,
1:46:53
Speaker 1: but more than oral. Demonstrated, probably.
1:46:57
Speaker 2: Experiential in some component, almost certainly, because a grammar of
1:47:01
Speaker 2: engagement with things that don't operate on human terms can't
1:47:05
Speaker 2: be entirely theoretical. At some point in the transmission, you
1:47:09
Speaker 2: have to show the person what you're talking about, which
1:47:12
Speaker 2: means at some point in the transmission, the person learning
1:47:17
Speaker 2: has to be in the presence of what they're learning about.
1:47:20
Speaker 2: I thought about who Preacher H had chosen and what
1:47:23
Speaker 2: that selection had been based on and what the training
1:47:26
Speaker 2: had looked like and how you know when the transmission
1:47:29
Speaker 2: is complete.
1:47:31
Speaker 1: Whether there is a moment.
1:47:32
Speaker 2: Of completion, a point at which the knowledge has passed
1:47:35
Speaker 2: fully enough, that the teacher can let go of the responsibility.
1:47:39
Speaker 2: Whether that was a relief or a loss, or both.
1:47:44
Speaker 2: I did not get out of the car, I drove on.
1:47:47
Speaker 2: The recording of the interview is 4 hours and 12
1:47:50
Speaker 2: minutes long. I have listened to it probably 15 times
1:47:53
Speaker 2: in full. The quality is clear. I had a good
1:47:57
Speaker 2: recorder and the chapel interior had good acoustics and Preacher
1:48:01
Speaker 2: H had a voice that carried well. The first three
1:48:04
Speaker 2: hours and 40-some minutes are standard oral history material. It's
1:48:09
Speaker 2: valuable and detailed and interesting in the ways that decades
1:48:12
Speaker 2: of ministry in an isolated community can produce interesting material.
1:48:17
Speaker 2: The last 25 minutes are different. I know when they start.
1:48:20
Speaker 2: because I can hear in the recording the change in
1:48:22
Speaker 2: the quality of the silence between us.
1:48:25
Speaker 1: The shift that.
1:48:26
Speaker 2: Happened when he asked me whether I'd encountered anything strange,
1:48:30
Speaker 2: and the conversation became what it became. I have those
1:48:33
Speaker 2: 25 minutes nearly memorized at this point. not from any intention,
1:48:38
Speaker 2: but from the simple repetition of listening. There is one
1:48:41
Speaker 2: moment in those 25 minutes that I have not been
1:48:44
Speaker 2: able to make myself transcribe and include in my research materials.
1:48:49
Speaker 2: It comes about 14 minutes into that section, after he's
1:48:52
Speaker 2: described the six significant situations and what his role in
1:48:56
Speaker 2: them was, but before he talks about having passed the
1:48:59
Speaker 2: knowledge on. He is speaking about one of the situations specifically,
1:49:04
Speaker 2: the most recent one, which he dates to about three
1:49:07
Speaker 2: years before the interview. And he stops mid-sentence and looks
1:49:11
Speaker 2: toward the window on the left side of the chapel.
1:49:15
Speaker 2: I know this from the slight shift in the direction
1:49:17
Speaker 2: of his voice on the recording. He looks at the
1:49:19
Speaker 2: window for five or six seconds, and then he says, Quietly.
1:49:23
Speaker 1: Not to me. I see you.
1:49:25
Speaker 2: You don't need to come in. And then he turns
1:49:28
Speaker 2: back to me and continues his sentence, as if nothing
1:49:31
Speaker 2: has interrupted it. I've listened to those five or six
1:49:35
Speaker 2: seconds of the recording many times. There is nothing audible.
1:49:40
Speaker 2: No sound from outside the window.
1:49:41
Speaker 1: No movement. No wind. Just silence. And then his voice again.
1:49:49
Speaker 1: I see you.
1:49:50
Speaker 2: You don't need to come in. And then the conversation continuing.
1:49:55
Speaker 2: I don't include this in my research materials because I
1:49:58
Speaker 2: don't know how to classify it. And because I don't
1:50:01
Speaker 2: want to damage the credibility of what is otherwise a
1:50:04
Speaker 2: careful and meticulously documented oral history project. But I include
1:50:09
Speaker 2: it here because leaving it out would be dishonest, and
1:50:12
Speaker 2: because I think it is, in its small specific way,
1:50:16
Speaker 2: more demonstrative than anything else in those 25 minutes. It
1:50:20
Speaker 2: is a man at the end of a 60-year ministry,
1:50:23
Speaker 2: in the place where he conducted that ministry, in conversation
1:50:26
Speaker 2: with someone he'd just told about the old presences in
1:50:29
Speaker 2: his county, pausing mid-sentence to acknowledge something in his window
1:50:33
Speaker 2: and to tell it, matter-of-factly, that it didn't need to
1:50:36
Speaker 2: come in. The complete ease of it is the thing
1:50:40
Speaker 2: I can't get past. There is no alarm in his voice,
1:50:44
Speaker 2: no prayer response, no reaching for any particular spiritual armor.
1:50:50
Speaker 2: He says it the way you'd say to a dog
1:50:52
Speaker 2: that's followed you to your door.
1:50:54
Speaker 1: I see you.
1:50:56
Speaker 2: You don't need to come in. And then he goes
1:50:58
Speaker 2: back to his sentence. 60 years of ministry, six significant situations.
1:51:05
Speaker 2: And whatever came to his window during our interview was
1:51:08
Speaker 2: addressed and managed in six words before the conversation resumed.
1:51:13
Speaker 2: That is a man who has fully internalized a grammar
1:51:16
Speaker 2: of engagement with something that operates outside every category I
1:51:21
Speaker 2: have professional training in. And that grammar is now in
1:51:25
Speaker 2: someone else's head in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. doing the
1:51:30
Speaker 2: work it was designed to do. I find that profoundly reassuring.
1:51:35
Speaker 2: I don't know why exactly, but I do. Story 11.
1:51:40
Speaker 2: I'm a home health aide, and I work in a
1:51:42
Speaker 2: rural part of McCreary County, Kentucky. I drive a lot
1:51:46
Speaker 2: of back roads in the course of my work, visiting
1:51:49
Speaker 2: clients who live on properties that are sometimes miles from
1:51:53
Speaker 2: the nearest community. And over the years, I have become
1:51:56
Speaker 2: very familiar with the roads and the people on them.
1:51:59
Speaker 2: McCreary County is in the southern part of Kentucky, close
1:52:02
Speaker 2: to the Tennessee line and the edge of the Daniel
1:52:05
Speaker 2: Boone National Forest. It is one of the poorer counties
1:52:08
Speaker 2: in one of the poorer states in the country, and
1:52:11
Speaker 2: the work I do there, visiting elderly and disabled individuals
1:52:15
Speaker 2: in their homes to help with daily needs, puts me
1:52:18
Speaker 2: in direct contact with the reality of what that means.
1:52:22
Speaker 2: I have clients who heat their houses with wood because
1:52:25
Speaker 2: they can't afford propane. I have clients who have gone
1:52:28
Speaker 2: to town twice in the last year. I have clients
1:52:31
Speaker 2: who live in hollers that the mail carrier can only
1:52:34
Speaker 2: reach in dry weather because the track gets too.
1:52:37
Speaker 1: Muddy for the vehicle otherwise.
1:52:40
Speaker 2: It is genuine isolation of a kind that people who
1:52:42
Speaker 2: have grown up in connected places find difficult to conceptualize.
1:52:47
Speaker 2: The hollows and the back roads of McCreary County are
1:52:50
Speaker 2: not scenic rural backdrop.
1:52:53
Speaker 1: They are the.
1:52:53
Speaker 2: Actual daily territory of people who live entirely within them
1:52:59
Speaker 2: I tell you this because it matters for my credibility
1:53:01
Speaker 2: on the subject of those roads. I am not a
1:53:04
Speaker 2: person who drives through that area occasionally and gets turned
1:53:08
Speaker 2: around in the dark and sees things that confused topography
1:53:12
Speaker 2: can explain. I drive those roads four and five days
1:53:15
Speaker 2: a week in every season. I know which ones flood,
1:53:19
Speaker 2: which ones are impassable in ice, which ones have the
1:53:22
Speaker 2: potholes the county has been ignoring for three years. I
1:53:25
Speaker 2: know where the cell signal dies and where it briefly
1:53:28
Speaker 2: comes back and where it dies again. I am not
1:53:31
Speaker 2: a tourist in McCreary County. It is my professional territory.
1:53:36
Speaker 2: In late October two years ago, I was driving back
1:53:39
Speaker 2: from my last client visit of the day at about 6.30
1:53:42
Speaker 2: in the evening. Full dark comes early in October in
1:53:45
Speaker 2: those hills, and I was on a county road that
1:53:48
Speaker 2: ran along the bottom of a hollow, following the creek
1:53:51
Speaker 2: bed for about four miles before intersecting with the main road.
1:53:55
Speaker 2: I'd driven that road many times, usually in daylight, though
1:53:58
Speaker 2: not always. There was a man standing on the road,
1:54:02
Speaker 2: not on the shoulder, on the road itself, in the
1:54:05
Speaker 2: middle of my lane, maybe 200 yards ahead of my headlights.
1:54:09
Speaker 2: I registered him immediately and slowed down well before I
1:54:12
Speaker 2: needed to, the way you automatically do when you see
1:54:14
Speaker 2: a person on a road at night.
1:54:16
Speaker 1: He was standing still with his back to me, facing
1:54:19
Speaker 1: down the road in the direction I was traveling.
1:54:22
Speaker 2: He was wearing dark clothing and I could not see
1:54:24
Speaker 2: anything about him other than his shape, which was a
1:54:27
Speaker 2: man's shape, upright and still. My immediate thought was that
1:54:31
Speaker 2: someone had car trouble and had gotten out of their
1:54:34
Speaker 2: vehicle and was either disoriented or waiting for help.
1:54:38
Speaker 1: I slowed to a crawl and looked for a vehicle.
1:54:40
Speaker 1: There was none. No car pulled off the road.
1:54:43
Speaker 2: No hazard lights, no vehicle of any kind in either
1:54:46
Speaker 2: direction as far as my headlights reached. I stopped my
1:54:50
Speaker 2: car about 30 feet from him and lowered my window
1:54:54
Speaker 2: and asked.
1:54:54
Speaker 1: If he was all right. He didn't respond.
1:54:58
Speaker 2: I could see he was standing completely still. I called
1:55:01
Speaker 2: out again louder, asking if he needed help.
1:55:04
Speaker 1: Nothing.
1:55:05
Speaker 2: I sat there for a moment running through my options,
1:55:07
Speaker 2: which in a hollow with no cell service and nowhere
1:55:10
Speaker 2: to turn around quickly felt limited. The road was narrow
1:55:14
Speaker 2: enough that going around him would have put my passenger
1:55:17
Speaker 2: side tires into the ditch. I honked my horn once,
1:55:21
Speaker 2: short and polite, not aggressive.
1:55:23
Speaker 1: He turned his head.
1:55:24
Speaker 2: Slightly to the right, toward the creek side of the road,
1:55:27
Speaker 2: as if he were listening to something. Then he turned
1:55:30
Speaker 2: back to face forward, still not acknowledging me in any way,
1:55:34
Speaker 2: not moving out of the road. I sat there for
1:55:36
Speaker 2: probably three minutes, which felt much longer. The creek was
1:55:41
Speaker 2: audible through my open window. Nothing else moved.
1:55:45
Speaker 1: And then the man began to walk forward on the road.
1:55:48
Speaker 2: Slowly in the direction I was traveling, and never moved
1:55:51
Speaker 2: out of the center of my lane or indicated in
1:55:53
Speaker 2: any way that he was aware of my vehicle behind him.
1:55:58
Speaker 2: I inched forward behind him for about 100 yards, and
1:56:01
Speaker 2: then he simply turned left and walked into the creek
1:56:04
Speaker 2: without slowing or hesitating and was gone. I pulled to
1:56:09
Speaker 2: the shoulder and sat there with my hazards on for
1:56:11
Speaker 2: a moment. There was no splash, or if there was,
1:56:15
Speaker 2: it was below my hearing over the engine. When I
1:56:18
Speaker 2: got out and looked toward the creek with my phone flashlight,
1:56:22
Speaker 2: there was no one in the water and no one
1:56:24
Speaker 2: on the far bank that I could see. I got
1:56:27
Speaker 2: back in my car and drove out of the hollow.
1:56:29
Speaker 1: At a speed I will not specify.
1:56:31
Speaker 2: I told my supervisor the following day in the most
1:56:34
Speaker 2: factual terms I could manage. She listened to me without
1:56:37
Speaker 2: changing her expression, and when I was done she asked
1:56:40
Speaker 2: me which road it was, and I told her, and
1:56:43
Speaker 2: she made a note, and said she'd flag it as
1:56:45
Speaker 2: a nighttime caution route for our staff. not because of
1:56:49
Speaker 2: anything she thought I had necessarily seen, but as a
1:56:52
Speaker 2: general precaution for solo night driving on remote roads, which
1:56:57
Speaker 2: is a legitimate workplace safety issue. I appreciated that she
1:57:01
Speaker 2: didn't question whether I had seen what I said I saw.
1:57:05
Speaker 1: I have not driven that road at night since.
1:57:08
Speaker 2: I still drive it in daylight, and it is an
1:57:11
Speaker 2: ordinary creek bottom road in an ordinary hollow, and there
1:57:15
Speaker 2: is nothing about it in daylight that would give you
1:57:18
Speaker 2: any reason to be cautious of it. But the daytime
1:57:22
Speaker 2: and the nighttime in those hollers are not the same place.
1:57:26
Speaker 2: I want to say something more about the walking man
1:57:29
Speaker 2: on the Lower Creek Road because I've told this story
1:57:32
Speaker 2: a handful of times since it happened. And each time
1:57:35
Speaker 2: I tell it, the question I get asked most often
1:57:38
Speaker 2: is whether I thought the man was human or something else.
1:57:42
Speaker 2: And every time I'm asked that, I find it's the
1:57:43
Speaker 2: wrong question, or at least not the right question to
1:57:46
Speaker 2: lead with. The question I keep coming back to myself is.
1:57:50
Speaker 1: What he was doing. Not what he was, but what
1:57:53
Speaker 1: he was doing and what the purpose of it was.
1:57:56
Speaker 2: Because the behavior, standing in the road with his back
1:58:00
Speaker 2: to an approaching vehicle, not responding to a horn or
1:58:03
Speaker 2: a voice, moving when he finally moved in a direction
1:58:07
Speaker 2: that had nothing to do with getting out of the road.
1:58:10
Speaker 2: walking into the creek without hesitation or sound disappearing from
1:58:14
Speaker 2: a space he should have been visible in all of
1:58:18
Speaker 2: that behavior has a character to it it is not
1:58:23
Speaker 2: random it is not panicked it is deliberate something that
1:58:28
Speaker 2: deliberate Has an intention behind it. Whether the intention belongs
1:58:33
Speaker 2: to a person. A disturbed person. A person doing something
1:58:37
Speaker 2: I don't have a framework for. Or whether the intention
1:58:41
Speaker 2: belongs to something else entirely. There was a logic to
1:58:45
Speaker 2: what I witnessed.
1:58:46
Speaker 1: A coherence. Whatever that thing was doing on the lower
1:58:50
Speaker 1: creek road that night. It was doing it on purpose.
1:58:55
Speaker 2: The going into the creek part is what I think
1:58:57
Speaker 2: about most. The walk from the road to the creek
1:59:00
Speaker 2: bank was maybe 30 feet.
1:59:03
Speaker 1: And then it went in.
1:59:05
Speaker 2: Not hurriedly, not stumbling, not the way someone goes into cold,
1:59:09
Speaker 2: dark creek water in October.
1:59:11
Speaker 1: Who didn't mean to go into it.
1:59:13
Speaker 2: The way you walk into something you meant to walk into, purposefully,
1:59:17
Speaker 2: with complete equanimity.
1:59:20
Speaker 1: I did not follow it to the creek edge. I
1:59:23
Speaker 1: stayed in my.
1:59:24
Speaker 2: Car on the shoulder and looked with my phone flashlight
1:59:26
Speaker 2: from 50 feet away And what I saw was dark
1:59:29
Speaker 2: water moving in the shapes of the far bank and
1:59:32
Speaker 2: nothing else. No figure standing in the creek. No figure
1:59:37
Speaker 2: on the far bank. Nothing in the water where there
1:59:40
Speaker 2: should have been visible disruption if something had just walked
1:59:44
Speaker 2: into it. I've been doing home health work in McCreary
1:59:48
Speaker 2: County for 11 years. Before that night, I'd have told
1:59:52
Speaker 2: you I knew those hollers and those roads as well
1:59:54
Speaker 2: as I knew anything. Since that night, I understand that
1:59:57
Speaker 2: knowing a road in daylight and knowing what uses it
2:00:00
Speaker 2: at night are two different things, and that my 11
2:00:03
Speaker 2: years of daytime knowledge said nothing reliable about the second category.
2:00:08
Speaker 1: I still do my client visits. I still drive those roads.
2:00:12
Speaker 2: I adjusted my schedule on that particular route so that
2:00:15
Speaker 2: I'm not on the Lower Creek Road past 5 in
2:00:18
Speaker 2: the afternoon when the days are short. My supervisor thinks
2:00:22
Speaker 2: this is about road conditions in the dark. which is
2:00:25
Speaker 2: a legitimate concern on narrow gravel roads.
2:00:28
Speaker 1: And I've never corrected her.
2:00:30
Speaker 2: The real reason and the legitimate concern happen to produce
2:00:34
Speaker 2: the same practical outcome so it works out. But the
2:00:37
Speaker 2: daytime and the nighttime in those hollers are not the
2:00:40
Speaker 2: same place. I want to be very clear about that
2:00:43
Speaker 2: for anyone planning to drive through rural southeastern Kentucky after dark.
2:00:48
Speaker 2: Respect the hollows. Go home before dark when you can.
2:00:53
Speaker 2: And if you see a man standing in the road
2:00:54
Speaker 2: ahead of you who doesn't move and doesn't answer and
2:00:57
Speaker 2: eventually walks into the creek, don't follow him to the
2:01:00
Speaker 2: water's edge. I think that's very important. Don't follow him
2:01:05
Speaker 2: to the water's edge. Story 12. My grandfather grew up
2:01:10
Speaker 2: in a mining community in Logan County, West Virginia. And
2:01:14
Speaker 2: his grandfather before him had been one of the original
2:01:16
Speaker 2: settlers in that particular hollow, coming down from Virginia in
2:01:20
Speaker 2: the 1870s. when the land was being opened up. Four
2:01:24
Speaker 2: generations of my family in the same county, some of
2:01:28
Speaker 2: them in the same hollow for decades, until my parents
2:01:31
Speaker 2: moved us to Charleston when I was seven, and the
2:01:34
Speaker 2: old connection got diluted the way it does. Logan County
2:01:38
Speaker 2: is coal country, which means it has that particular character
2:01:41
Speaker 2: of Appalachian places, where the landscape has been both the
2:01:45
Speaker 2: source of the family's livelihood and the thing that took
2:01:49
Speaker 2: members of the family away, in accidents, in illness, in
2:01:54
Speaker 2: the grinding physical attrition of mining work. My grandfather's generation
2:01:59
Speaker 2: grew up with that character fully present in their daily lives.
2:02:03
Speaker 2: The men went into the mountain, and the mountain did
2:02:06
Speaker 2: not always return them in the same condition it received them.
2:02:10
Speaker 2: That creates a relationship with the land that I don't
2:02:13
Speaker 2: think people who haven't grown up with it can fully feel.
2:02:17
Speaker 2: Though they can certainly understand it intellectually, it is not abstract.
2:02:22
Speaker 1: It is as immediate as.
2:02:23
Speaker 2: The company house you live in, and the script you
2:02:25
Speaker 2: spend at the company store, and the commissary on the
2:02:28
Speaker 2: hillside in the cemetery above the church where the men
2:02:32
Speaker 2: who didn't come back out of the mountain are laid.
2:02:36
Speaker 2: My grandfather, who I called Papao, was born in 1928
2:02:40
Speaker 2: and lived in 93. He was one of the sharper
2:02:44
Speaker 2: people I've ever known, not educated in the formal sense,
2:02:48
Speaker 2: but possessed of the kind of intelligence that develops in
2:02:51
Speaker 2: people who have paid close attention to the world around
2:02:54
Speaker 2: them for nine decades, without the filter of a lot
2:02:58
Speaker 2: of theoretical frameworks getting between them and what they observe.
2:03:03
Speaker 2: He remembered everything, not just family history, but community history,
2:03:09
Speaker 2: county history, the kind of detailed local knowledge that gets
2:03:14
Speaker 2: lost when the people who carry it die without passing
2:03:16
Speaker 2: it on. I spent a lot of time with him
2:03:19
Speaker 2: in his last years deliberately, because I understood what was
2:03:23
Speaker 2: going to be lost, and I wanted to get as
2:03:25
Speaker 2: much of it as I could. He told me a
2:03:27
Speaker 2: lot of things in those last years. This is the
2:03:30
Speaker 2: one that has stayed with me most. My grandfather grew
2:03:33
Speaker 2: up in a mining community in Logan County, West Virginia,
2:03:37
Speaker 2: and among the things he told me was something he
2:03:39
Speaker 2: called Granddad's Rule.
2:03:42
Speaker 1: The rule was this.
2:03:44
Speaker 2: You did not go on to the second ridge without
2:03:46
Speaker 2: telling someone where you were going and when.
2:03:49
Speaker 1: You planned to come back.
2:03:50
Speaker 2: And you did not go onto the second ridge after midday,
2:03:53
Speaker 2: and you did not go onto the second ridge alone.
2:03:57
Speaker 2: The second ridge was the east-facing ridge behind the main hollow,
2:04:01
Speaker 2: the one that ran roughly north to south and formed
2:04:04
Speaker 2: the back wall of the property. It was wooded and
2:04:08
Speaker 2: had been wooded for as long as the family had
2:04:10
Speaker 2: been there. The first ridge, the one between the hollow
2:04:13
Speaker 2: and the county, was different, had been logged and re-logged
2:04:18
Speaker 2: over the decades, and was less dense and more familiar.
2:04:23
Speaker 2: The second ridge, nobody farmed and nobody logged because the
2:04:26
Speaker 2: terrain was too steep and the timber too remote to
2:04:29
Speaker 2: be worth the effort. And as a result, it was
2:04:32
Speaker 2: older and denser. In Papa's memory, it always had a
2:04:36
Speaker 2: specific quality that he said was hard to describe, except
2:04:41
Speaker 2: to say that it was heavier in there, denser in
2:04:44
Speaker 2: a way that wasn't just the trees. I asked him
2:04:48
Speaker 2: what Granddad's reasoning was for the rule, and he told
2:04:51
Speaker 2: me Granddad didn't explain rules.
2:04:53
Speaker 1: He established them.
2:04:55
Speaker 2: And the one time Papa, as a boy, had pressed
2:04:58
Speaker 2: him for an explanation, Granddad had said only that the
2:05:01
Speaker 2: second ridge had been the second ridge since long before
2:05:05
Speaker 2: they came, and that whatever relationship the ridge had with
2:05:08
Speaker 2: the world wasn't theirs to renegotiate. I asked Papa if
2:05:13
Speaker 2: anyone had ever broken the rule, and he said yes.
2:05:17
Speaker 2: He said his Uncle Roy had gone into the second
2:05:19
Speaker 2: ridge alone one afternoon in the early 1930s, looking for
2:05:22
Speaker 2: a cow that had gotten through a fence. He was
2:05:25
Speaker 2: gone for three hours, which was two and a half
2:05:28
Speaker 2: hours longer than it should have taken to search the
2:05:30
Speaker 2: terrain involved. When he came back, he wouldn't say where
2:05:34
Speaker 2: he'd been or what had happened, but he was pale
2:05:37
Speaker 2: and shaking, and he sat on the porch the rest
2:05:39
Speaker 2: of the day and went to bed without eating. In
2:05:42
Speaker 2: the following weeks, he became very withdrawn. and had what
2:05:46
Speaker 2: would today probably be called a depressive episode of significant severity.
2:05:51
Speaker 2: He recovered eventually. He never went back to the second ridge.
2:05:56
Speaker 2: I asked Papa if he himself had ever gone onto
2:05:59
Speaker 2: the second ridge, and he said yes, many times, always
2:06:03
Speaker 2: before midday, and always with at least one other person,
2:06:06
Speaker 2: and always with.
2:06:07
Speaker 1: Someone back at the house who knew where they were.
2:06:10
Speaker 1: He said that with those conditions observed, he'd never had
2:06:13
Speaker 1: anything he would describe as an experience on the second ridge.
2:06:17
Speaker 1: It was just heavy woods on steep ground and nothing
2:06:20
Speaker 1: specific to point at. He said the feeling of the
2:06:23
Speaker 1: place was always more than the woods themselves, that it
2:06:26
Speaker 1: was like being somewhere that tolerated your presence without welcoming it,
2:06:30
Speaker 1: and that this feeling was consistent every time he went
2:06:33
Speaker 1: in there.
2:06:34
Speaker 2: I asked him if he believed in the rule, and
2:06:36
Speaker 2: he said belief didn't come into it. He said Granddad's
2:06:40
Speaker 2: rule predated any individual belief about it. It was older
2:06:44
Speaker 2: than any one person's assessment of whether it was rational,
2:06:48
Speaker 2: and that in his 93 years, he had seen no
2:06:52
Speaker 2: reason sufficient to test it, and plenty of reason to
2:06:55
Speaker 2: carry it forward. The family property in Logan County was
2:06:59
Speaker 2: sold years ago by a cousin.
2:07:01
Speaker 1: Who inherited it and had no use for it. I
2:07:04
Speaker 1: don't know who owns it now.
2:07:06
Speaker 2: I don't know if whoever is on that land now
2:07:09
Speaker 2: knows about the second ridge or observes granddad's rule. or
2:07:14
Speaker 2: even knows there was a rule to observe. I think
2:07:18
Speaker 2: about that sometimes. Some things don't transfer with the deed.
2:07:23
Speaker 2: I think about this more than I probably should, but
2:07:26
Speaker 2: I think about it genuinely, and not just anxiously, because
2:07:30
Speaker 2: what Granddad's rule represented was a piece of locally specific
2:07:34
Speaker 2: knowledge about a particular piece of land that required transmission
2:07:38
Speaker 2: to remain functional. It wasn't a general principle about mountains
2:07:42
Speaker 2: or wilderness, It was specific to that ridge, that hollow,
2:07:47
Speaker 2: that property. And it was specific enough that it had
2:07:50
Speaker 2: been maintained accurately enough to be functional across four generations
2:07:55
Speaker 2: of a family, which is not a small thing. Maintaining
2:07:59
Speaker 2: any piece of specificity knowledge accurately across four generations, in
2:08:03
Speaker 2: a community without written records for most of it, is
2:08:06
Speaker 2: genuinely difficult. The fact that it survived intact from granddad
2:08:11
Speaker 2: to his son to papa to me suggests it was
2:08:14
Speaker 2: considered important enough to transmit carefully, not just mentioned in passing.
2:08:20
Speaker 2: When my cousin sold that property, Granddad's rule went out
2:08:23
Speaker 2: of the chain. My cousin didn't know it. His branch
2:08:27
Speaker 2: of the family hadn't had it passed to them, or
2:08:30
Speaker 2: they'd received it in a diluted form without the specifics,
2:08:34
Speaker 2: which is how this kind of knowledge dies. The new owners,
2:08:37
Speaker 2: whoever they are now, don't know it because nobody told them,
2:08:41
Speaker 2: and nobody who told it to me has any connection
2:08:44
Speaker 2: to them. I looked up the property records out of
2:08:48
Speaker 2: curiosity a couple of years ago. It's sold twice since
2:08:52
Speaker 2: my cousin sold it. The current owners have a different
2:08:55
Speaker 2: last name, and they live in another state. And the
2:08:58
Speaker 2: property is listed as undeveloped rural acreage. Whether they visit it,
2:09:03
Speaker 2: whether they've walked the second ridge, whether they've had an
2:09:06
Speaker 2: experience there that they've told anyone about, I have no
2:09:10
Speaker 2: way of knowing any of that. I could try to
2:09:12
Speaker 2: reach them, but I don't know what I'd say. You
2:09:15
Speaker 2: don't know me, and I know this sounds like something
2:09:18
Speaker 2: a crazy person would say. But there's a ridge on
2:09:20
Speaker 2: your property that your family shouldn't go on after midday
2:09:23
Speaker 2: or alone.
2:09:24
Speaker 1: And here's why.
2:09:25
Speaker 2: Isn't really a communication I can deliver credibly in a
2:09:29
Speaker 2: letter to a stranger. Papa said granddad's rule predated any
2:09:33
Speaker 2: individual belief about it. That it was older than any
2:09:37
Speaker 2: one person's assessment of whether it was rational. That's the
2:09:41
Speaker 2: part I keep coming back to. Because if you accept
2:09:45
Speaker 2: that assessment, if you accept that the rule had been
2:09:48
Speaker 2: operating effectively for longer than anyone had memory of its origin,
2:09:53
Speaker 2: then the rule wasn't about belief. It was about accommodation,
2:09:58
Speaker 2: a practical arrangement between people using a piece of land
2:10:02
Speaker 2: and something else that was also present on that land,
2:10:05
Speaker 2: something that had been present there longer, something that had
2:10:09
Speaker 2: learned to tolerate the human use of the hollow in
2:10:13
Speaker 2: the way that large territorial animals sometimes learn to tolerate
2:10:17
Speaker 2: activity in their territory as long as certain conditions are observed.
2:10:22
Speaker 1: Conditions, that's the word. Granddad's rule was a set of conditions.
2:10:28
Speaker 2: Be back before midday. Don't go alone. Tell someone where
2:10:32
Speaker 2: you're going. Not arbitrary superstition. A negotiated set of behaviors
2:10:38
Speaker 2: that allowed the human use of the property to coexist
2:10:41
Speaker 2: with whatever else was using the second ridge. under terms
2:10:45
Speaker 2: that both parties, if parties is even the right word,
2:10:49
Speaker 2: could manage. When the property changed hands, the conditions changed.
2:10:55
Speaker 2: Nobody on that land is observing the terms anymore, because
2:10:59
Speaker 2: nobody on that land knows there were terms to observe.
2:11:02
Speaker 2: I don't know what to do about that. I genuinely
2:11:05
Speaker 2: don't know. But I wanted to say it out loud somewhere,
2:11:08
Speaker 2: because it's the part of this whole thing that sits
2:11:11
Speaker 2: uneasily with me. in a way that the existence of
2:11:14
Speaker 2: whatever is on that ridge doesn't. The thing on the
2:11:17
Speaker 2: ridge is old, and.
2:11:19
Speaker 1: It's going to go on doing whatever it does, regardless
2:11:21
Speaker 1: of what I think about it.
2:11:23
Speaker 2: What worries me is the terms. The terms that kept
2:11:26
Speaker 2: things workable for over a hundred years in that hollow.
2:11:30
Speaker 2: The terms that ended with a real estate transaction. If
2:11:33
Speaker 2: these stories have stirred up something you've been holding onto
2:11:36
Speaker 2: from your own life in the mountains or small-town Appalachia,
2:11:40
Speaker 2: we want you to send it in. Every submission is read.
2:11:44
Speaker 2: You don't have to be a writer. Just tell it
2:11:47
Speaker 2: the way you'd tell it to someone sitting across from you.
2:11:50
Speaker 2: The submission link is in the description. We'll take it
2:11:53
Speaker 2: from there.
2:11:55
Speaker 1: Story 13.
2:11:55
Speaker 2: This is the last story in this video, and it's
2:12:00
Speaker 2: the one that was hardest to write up and the
2:12:02
Speaker 2: one I keep thinking about the most after reading it,
2:12:04
Speaker 2: so I want to make sure I do it justice.
2:12:07
Speaker 2: The person who sent it in asked to remain completely
2:12:10
Speaker 2: anonymous and asked that I not specify the exact county
2:12:14
Speaker 2: beyond saying it's in southwestern North Carolina, which I'm going
2:12:18
Speaker 2: to respect. I'll call them Lee, which is not their name.
2:12:22
Speaker 2: Lee grew up in a small community. A real small community,
2:12:26
Speaker 2: the kind where the population is measured in dozens rather
2:12:29
Speaker 2: than hundreds. In the mountains of southwestern North Carolina. The
2:12:33
Speaker 2: community sat in a gap between two mountain ranges and
2:12:36
Speaker 2: the nearest town with a grocery store was 45 minutes
2:12:39
Speaker 2: on a road that got seriously unpleasant in winter. The
2:12:43
Speaker 2: people who stayed there stayed because the land was theirs,
2:12:46
Speaker 2: and the land held them the way some land does,
2:12:49
Speaker 2: with roots that went down further than economics or practicality
2:12:52
Speaker 2: could reach. Lee's family had been in that gap for
2:12:56
Speaker 2: five generations. Their last name, which I'm not including, appears
2:13:00
Speaker 2: in the records of the original land grant in the
2:13:03
Speaker 2: late 1700s. and has been on tax rolls and deeds
2:13:07
Speaker 2: and cemetery stones in that county every decade since.
2:13:11
Speaker 1: That kind of deep.
2:13:12
Speaker 2: Residency creates a specific relationship with the place that Lee
2:13:16
Speaker 2: tried to describe in their submission, and that I think
2:13:19
Speaker 2: they described as well as it can be described. They
2:13:23
Speaker 2: said it was like being inside a story rather than
2:13:25
Speaker 2: reading one, that the land wasn't background.
2:13:29
Speaker 1: It was a participant.
2:13:31
Speaker 2: The thing Lee wanted to tell me about happened when
2:13:34
Speaker 2: they were 38 This was four years ago. They were
2:13:38
Speaker 2: visiting the family home. Their parents had both passed, and
2:13:42
Speaker 2: an older sibling had inherited the property and was managing it.
2:13:46
Speaker 2: And they were there for a long weekend in early autumn.
2:13:49
Speaker 2: The leaves were just starting to turn, and the weather
2:13:51
Speaker 2: was the kind of clear, cool mountain weather that makes
2:13:55
Speaker 2: you understand why people stayed in those gaps, even when
2:13:59
Speaker 2: everything about modern life told them it would be easier
2:14:02
Speaker 2: not to. On the second evening, Lee decided to take
2:14:06
Speaker 2: an early morning walk the next day, the kind of
2:14:09
Speaker 2: walk you can only really take in a place you
2:14:11
Speaker 2: know deeply, where you're not navigating, you're just moving through
2:14:15
Speaker 2: familiar country with.
2:14:17
Speaker 1: No particular destination.
2:14:20
Speaker 2: They planned to walk up through the lower pasture and
2:14:22
Speaker 2: into the tree line and follow a path that their
2:14:25
Speaker 2: grandfather had worn into the hillside over decades of early
2:14:29
Speaker 2: morning walks, a path that Lee had walked many times
2:14:33
Speaker 2: as a child with him They set out just before six.
2:14:37
Speaker 2: First light, not full daylight. The sky pale, and the
2:14:40
Speaker 2: tree shapes just resolving out of the dark. The lower
2:14:44
Speaker 2: pasture was familiar and easy. The tree line opened onto
2:14:47
Speaker 2: the old path, the way it always had.
2:14:50
Speaker 1: Lee walked it the way you.
2:14:51
Speaker 2: Walk something you've walked a hundred times, not quite on autopilot,
2:14:56
Speaker 2: but with the deep.
2:14:57
Speaker 1: Easy attention of someone moving through known country.
2:15:01
Speaker 2: About twenty minutes up the path, There was a place
2:15:04
Speaker 2: where the trail widened slightly, around the base of a
2:15:07
Speaker 2: large boulder that had always been there, a landmark Lee
2:15:11
Speaker 2: had known their whole life. Their grandfather used to sit
2:15:15
Speaker 2: on top of it on his morning walks. As Lee
2:15:18
Speaker 2: came around the boulder, the path opened up slightly, and
2:15:21
Speaker 2: Lee stopped. There was something standing in the path. Lee
2:15:26
Speaker 2: spent a significant portion of their submission trying to describe this.
2:15:31
Speaker 2: and I'm going to try to convey what they wrote.
2:15:33
Speaker 1: As accurately as I can.
2:15:35
Speaker 2: They said it was tall, taller than a person, and
2:15:38
Speaker 2: thin in a way that read as wrong, rather than
2:15:41
Speaker 2: as a feature of any natural animal they knew. It
2:15:45
Speaker 2: was facing away from them, toward the uphill portion of
2:15:49
Speaker 2: the path, and it was completely still. The light was
2:15:53
Speaker 2: still dim, and the shape was not fully resolved, but
2:15:56
Speaker 2: Lee said it was clearly present, and clearly upright, and
2:16:00
Speaker 2: clearly not an animal they had a name for. They
2:16:04
Speaker 2: said the wrongness of it was not just the shape,
2:16:07
Speaker 2: but the quality of its stillness.
2:16:09
Speaker 1: They said it was still the.
2:16:10
Speaker 2: Way something is still, when it knows you're there. Not
2:16:14
Speaker 2: the stillness of something unaware of you, but the active
2:16:17
Speaker 2: stillness of something that has chosen not to move.
2:16:21
Speaker 1: Lee stood there.
2:16:21
Speaker 2: For a moment that they said lasted probably five seconds,
2:16:24
Speaker 2: but felt much longer. And then, slowly and deliberately, they
2:16:28
Speaker 2: took a step back, Then another. They backed away from
2:16:32
Speaker 2: the boulder, and when they had enough space, they turned
2:16:35
Speaker 2: and walked back down the path at a pace they
2:16:37
Speaker 2: described as controlled.
2:16:40
Speaker 1: Not running. Walking.
2:16:43
Speaker 2: The way you walk when you understand that running is
2:16:45
Speaker 2: not the right answer. They didn't hear anything following them.
2:16:50
Speaker 2: They got to the pasture and crossed it and got
2:16:52
Speaker 2: back to the house and went inside and made coffee
2:16:56
Speaker 2: and sat at the kitchen table. Their sibling came downstairs
2:17:00
Speaker 2: around 7, and Lee was still sitting there. The sibling
2:17:04
Speaker 2: asked if they'd had a good walk, and Lee said yes.
2:17:07
Speaker 2: And then Lee said, choosing their words, that they'd gone
2:17:11
Speaker 2: up the grandfather path and seen something at the boulder
2:17:14
Speaker 2: that they didn't have a name for. Their sibling sat
2:17:18
Speaker 2: down at the table and poured coffee and was quiet
2:17:22
Speaker 2: for a moment. Then their sibling said, the boulder or
2:17:26
Speaker 2: past it? Lee said they hadn't gotten past it. Their
2:17:30
Speaker 2: sibling nodded and said that was good. Lee asked what
2:17:33
Speaker 2: was past it, and the sibling said they didn't know exactly,
2:17:37
Speaker 2: had never gone past it themselves. Since the morning about
2:17:41
Speaker 2: ten years ago, when they'd gotten as far as the boulder,
2:17:44
Speaker 2: and had a similar experience to what Lee described, and had.
2:17:48
Speaker 1: Come back down the hill and asked their mother about it.
2:17:51
Speaker 1: And their mother had told them that the upper part
2:17:53
Speaker 1: of that hill, past the boulder, was.
2:17:56
Speaker 2: Not somewhere the family went. That it had been understood
2:18:00
Speaker 2: that way for as long as anyone had memory of
2:18:02
Speaker 2: an understanding. That the path ended at the boulder and
2:18:06
Speaker 2: the family's relationship with the hill ended there too. and
2:18:10
Speaker 2: that whatever was on the upper part of that hill
2:18:12
Speaker 2: had its own relationship with the land that predated the
2:18:15
Speaker 2: families by a length of time nobody in the family
2:18:18
Speaker 2: could put a number to. Lee asked the sibling why
2:18:22
Speaker 2: nobody had ever told them this. The sibling said their
2:18:26
Speaker 2: mother had told them when they were young, the same
2:18:29
Speaker 2: way her mother had told her when she was young,
2:18:32
Speaker 2: that it was one of those things that.
2:18:33
Speaker 1: Got passed on. They had assumed Lee knew.
2:18:37
Speaker 2: Lee said they did not remember being told The siblings
2:18:40
Speaker 2: said maybe it was one of those things you're told
2:18:42
Speaker 2: so young you don't carry it as a memory, just
2:18:45
Speaker 2: as an instinct.
2:18:47
Speaker 1: That maybe Lee.
2:18:48
Speaker 2: Had known it all along and just forgotten it was knowledge.
2:18:52
Speaker 2: And now you've remembered it, the siblings said. Lee finished
2:18:55
Speaker 2: their submission by saying that they have been back to
2:18:58
Speaker 2: the family property twice since that morning. That they walk
2:19:02
Speaker 2: in the lower pasture and go into the tree line
2:19:05
Speaker 2: only as far as the path is familiar. That they
2:19:08
Speaker 2: have not gone back to the boulders. that they don't
2:19:10
Speaker 2: intend to. They said they understood now, having felt it firsthand,
2:19:16
Speaker 2: what the understanding was for. Not a superstition. Not a
2:19:21
Speaker 2: story to keep children manageable. A genuine inherited knowledge about
2:19:26
Speaker 2: the particular piece of land their family occupied and where
2:19:29
Speaker 2: the terms of that occupation ended. They said the mountain
2:19:33
Speaker 2: doesn't belong to the family. The family belongs to the mountain.
2:19:37
Speaker 2: And the mountain on the upper portion of that hill
2:19:39
Speaker 2: past the boulder where the path ends belongs to something
2:19:42
Speaker 2: else entirely. That's where Lee left it, and I think
2:19:46
Speaker 2: that's the right place to leave it. But I want
2:19:50
Speaker 2: to say one thing from my own perspective. As the
2:19:53
Speaker 2: person who read this submission and thought about it for
2:19:56
Speaker 2: several days before sitting down to write it up, what
2:20:00
Speaker 2: strikes me about Lee's story, and about most of the
2:20:03
Speaker 2: stories in this video, is the consistency.
2:20:06
Speaker 1: Of the inherited response.
2:20:09
Speaker 2: Across multiple counties, multiple states, multiple family names and religious
2:20:14
Speaker 2: traditions and economic backgrounds, the response to the old presences
2:20:18
Speaker 2: in these mountain communities.
2:20:20
Speaker 1: Takes the same shape. You learn the boundary. You observe
2:20:23
Speaker 1: the boundary.
2:20:25
Speaker 2: You pass the knowledge of the boundary to the next
2:20:27
Speaker 2: person who needs it. And you don't test what's on
2:20:29
Speaker 2: the other side. That consistency isn't coincidence. These communities didn't
2:20:35
Speaker 2: compare notes A family in Logan County, West Virginia, and
2:20:38
Speaker 2: a family in Clay County, Kentucky, and a family in
2:20:40
Speaker 2: Scott County, Virginia, and a family in a gap in
2:20:43
Speaker 2: the mountains of southwestern North Carolina are not coordinating their
2:20:48
Speaker 2: responses to whatever it is they share their land with.
2:20:51
Speaker 2: They arrived at the same practical accommodation independently. They all
2:20:55
Speaker 2: learned through whatever process communities learn things through experience, through transmission.
2:21:02
Speaker 2: Through the slow accumulation of knowledge that proves itself over generations.
2:21:07
Speaker 2: That the boundary was the thing. That maintaining it was
2:21:11
Speaker 2: the work. That the distance was the respect. Something in
2:21:16
Speaker 2: those old mountains generates that response consistently enough that it
2:21:20
Speaker 2: shows up across a wide geography in communities with no
2:21:24
Speaker 2: direct connection.
2:21:25
Speaker 1: To each other. That tells you something about the thing
2:21:28
Speaker 1: generating the response. Not what it is.
2:21:32
Speaker 2: I can't tell you that, and the people in these
2:21:34
Speaker 2: stories couldn't tell you either. And neither could their grandparents
2:21:38
Speaker 2: or their grandparents' grandparents. But it tells you something about
2:21:42
Speaker 2: its character, about the consistency of its presence and the
2:21:47
Speaker 2: nature of its relationship with the people who have been
2:21:50
Speaker 2: sharing this part of the world with it for as
2:21:53
Speaker 2: long as anyone has been keeping track. These 13 stories
2:21:58
Speaker 2: came out of one corner of one part of this
2:22:01
Speaker 2: country And there are thousands more in those hills that
2:22:05
Speaker 2: haven't been written down, or sent in, or told to
2:22:08
Speaker 2: anyone outside the family or community.
2:22:11
Speaker 1: Where they happened.
2:22:13
Speaker 2: Some of those stories will stay private, and they should.
2:22:16
Speaker 2: But if you have one you want to share, we're here.
2:22:19
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to Park Ranger Files.