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12 Nights Camping in Appalachia That No One Should Sleep Through | Horror… · Appalachian Horror | Horror Stories

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Story one. My name is Dalton Query, and I have
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: hauled furniture deliveries through West Virginia and Western Virginia for
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: 11 years now. Mostly for a small outfit that services
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: the kind of addresses GPS just refuses to load properly.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: Bedroom sets, dining tables, the occasional piano. Delivered to houses
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: tucked so far back in the hollows that the paved
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: road runs out a mile before you get there. And
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: you are trusting a mailbox number and a prayer the
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: rest of the way. I have seen a lot of
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: strange things doing this job over the years. Dogs that
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: will not come near certain fence lines. Families who ask
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: you to finish unloading before dark no matter what time
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: you arrive. Old timers who tell you not to whistle
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: after sundown on their property. And I used to write
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: all of it off as mountain superstition. The kind of
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: thing people say to keep outsiders on their toes. I
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: do not write things off like that anymore. The night
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: this happened, I was hauling a full trailer meant for
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: a farmhouse outside a town so small it does not
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: have a single stoplight. And the directions the customer gave
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: me over the phone that morning turned out to be
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: wrong in at least two places, which is not unusual
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: out here, but is never convenient when you're driving something
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: the size of a house down roads built for pickup trucks.
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: That particular hollow had a reputation among a few of
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: the older drivers on my road. Nothing anyone ever said outright.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Just small things and a certain hesitation in the voice
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: when the delivery sheet listed an address out that way.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: A habit some of the guys had of fueling up
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: fully before heading in, so they never had to stop
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: twice on that stretch of road. I had heard the
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: name of the hollow mentioned once or twice at the
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: yard with a kind of laugh attached to it that
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: did not quite reach anybody's eyes. and I had always
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: assumed it was just an old joke passed down between drivers,
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: the way every trade has its own inside stories nobody
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: outside the job really understands. I did not think about
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: any of that while I was actually driving in, focused
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: as I was on the bad directions and the fading light,
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: but I have thought about it plenty since. I missed
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: the turn twice before the light started dying behind the ridgelines.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: And by the time I finally found the right gravel road,
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: it was full dark, and the customer had stopped answering
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: her phone entirely, which meant her voicemail greeting was now
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: the only proof I had that this delivery was even real.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: I made the call every long-haul driver eventually has to
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: make out here, sooner or later. I was not taking
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: an 18-wheeler with a loaded trailer down an unfamiliar switchback
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: road at night with no working directions, so I pulled
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: off onto a wide gravel turnout that looked like it
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: got used for camping sometimes. Judging by a fire ring
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: somebody had built years back out of creek stones, and
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: decided I would sleep in the cab and finish the
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: delivery once the sun came back up. I have slept
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: in that cab more nights than I could ever count
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: on my hands. It is not glamorous. The sleeper is
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: barely big enough for someone my height. But it has
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: never once felt dangerous to me. Not until that night.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: My dinner was a gas station sandwich I did not
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: really want. My coffee had gone cold in the thermos
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: hours earlier, and I cracked the windows an inch each
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: because the cab gets stuffy fast once the engine is off.
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: Before I even settled in, something small happened that I
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: brushed off at the time, but think about differently now.
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: I heard a single hard knock against the trailer, way
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: back near the rear doors, just one knock, like someone
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: testing whether the metal was hollow. I figured it was
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: the trailer cooling and contracting the way metal does after
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: a long hot drive, and I did not get out
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: to check, mostly because I did not want to. I
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: remember checking my phone right after that knock, and it
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: was 1140, and I remember thinking I would probably be
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: asleep within the hour. I was not. Somewhere close to midnight,
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: I heard something walking across the gravel outside that was
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: not an animal gate. deer move in a skip and
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: pause rhythm, quick little bursts of motion followed by long
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: stillness while they listened for danger. This was not that.
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: This was a slow, deliberate, heel-first step over and over,
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: evenly spaced, circling the truck at a distance that never
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: seemed to change no matter how long it went on.
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: I sat up slow in the sleeper, careful not to
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: let the springs creak under me, and looked out through
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: the small back window, at the dark shape of the
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: trees against a slightly less dark sky. I could not
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: see whatever was making the noise, only hear it, and
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: the steps kept going, unhurried, patient, the way something moves
• 5:00
  Speaker 1: when it already knows it has the whole night ahead
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: of it and nowhere else to be. A full circle
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: around an 18-wheeler and a loaded trailer is not a
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: short walk, easily 80 feet of ground to cover just
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: to make one lap. Whatever it was took its time
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: doing several of them, and each pass it seemed to
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: slow down slightly more as it neared the driver's side door,
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: like it was studying that particular section of the truck
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: more closely than the rest. On what I counted as
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: the third pass, it stopped completely, right outside my door,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: close enough that I could hear breathing that did not
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: sound like it came through a nose the way ours does.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: It sounded wet, and it sounded big, the kind of
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: sound you would expect from something with a chest cavity
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: the size of a horse rather than a person. a slow,
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: deep pull of air followed by an even slower release.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: I did not move. I have delivered furniture to some
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: genuinely isolated places in these mountains over 11 years, and
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: I have learned, mostly the hard way, that the safest
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: thing you can do on a strange night out here
• 6:09
  Speaker 1: is absolutely nothing at all. I kept still, and I
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: kept my breathing as shallow as I could manage, and
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: I watched the inside door handle. because in trucks like mine,
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: the interior handle will visibly twitch if someone outside is
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: testing the exterior one. It moved slow, careful, deliberate, like
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: whatever was testing it understood exactly what a handle was
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: for and wanted to be sure I understood that too.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: It held there a beat, released, then tried again a
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: second time, harder, enough that the whole door frame gave
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: a soft metallic groan under the pressure. The temperature inside
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: the cab had dropped noticeably in the minutes leading up
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: to that moment, enough that I could see my own
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: breath fog faintly even with the heater having run not
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: long before, a kind of cold that did not match
• 7:01
  Speaker 1: the mild fall night outside at all, more like the
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: air itself had been pulled thin somehow right around the truck.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: I put my hand flat against the door from the
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: inside without even deciding to, some instinct telling me to
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: brace it. and I swear on everything I have that
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: the pressure on the other side seemed to pause the
• 7:21
  Speaker 1: exact moment I did, like it had felt my hand
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: through six inches of steel and insulation and paint, and
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: was considering what that meant. It let go after that.
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: I heard it step back, and then the same heel-first
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: gait carried it away from the truck, off toward the
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: tree line on the far side of the turnout, unhurried
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: the entire way. the way something moves when it is
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: not fleeing anything at all, just relocating to somewhere it
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: preferred better. I told myself it was gone, and I
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: almost believed it for about 20 minutes, until I heard
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: it again, farther off this time, but not alone. There
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: was a second set of footsteps now, different in weight, lighter,
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: moving alongside the first, and the two of them together
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: made a low back and forth sound. that I can
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: only describe as a kind of conversation, though nothing about
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: it resembled any language I have ever heard. I did
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: not sleep again that night. I ran the engine for
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: the light and the noise, and I sat there with
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: a tire iron across my knees, back against the sleeper wall,
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: watching that door until the sky finally started turning gray
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: around 5.30. When it was light enough to see clearly,
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: I climbed down slow and checked the running board in
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: the lower part of the driver's door, and in the
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: gravel dust that had settled there overnight, I found tracks. Bare,
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: easily 16 inches long, toes splayed wide like whatever made
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: them needed the extra surface area just to move quietly
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: across loose ground. There were no claw marks anywhere in
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: the print, and there were two distinct sets overlapping in
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: places like whoever they belonged to had stood close together
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: at some point during the night. Whatever they were, they
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: walked upright on two feet, and they walked like they
• 9:12
  Speaker 1: had been doing exactly that their entire lives. I took
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: a photo of the clearer of the two prints on
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: my phone before I left, mostly on instinct, and I
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: still have it saved in a folder I do not
• 9:24
  Speaker 1: look at often. And a few months later, half out
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: of curiosity and half because I could not let the
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: whole thing go, I showed it to a retired wildlife
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: biologist who does occasional consulting work for one of the
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: state agencies, without telling him where or how I had
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: gotten it. He studied it for a long moment, turned
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: my phone sideways once, and told me honestly that he
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: could not match the print to any documented species native
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: to this region, and that whatever produced it would need
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: to weigh considerably more than any bear on record here,
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: while somehow distributing that weight in a way no bear
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: track ever does. He asked, carefully, if I would be
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: willing to share the location, and I told him I
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: did not remember exactly where, which was not entirely true,
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: but felt like the safer answer to give at the time.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: Before I put my phone away that morning, I also
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: noticed something I had missed the night before in the dark,
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: a faint smear along the lower edge of my driver's
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: side window, greasy and slightly discolored, like something had pressed
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: its face close enough to the glass to leave an
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: oil residue behind, positioned at a height that would have
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: put whatever left at eye level with someone standing well
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: over seven feet tall. I wiped it off with my
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: sleeve before I really thought about what I was doing,
• 10:42
  Speaker 1: some instinct telling me I did not want that mark
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: sitting there a moment longer than necessary. and I have
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: regretted not taking a picture of that particular detail every
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: single time I have told this story since. I still
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: think sometimes about that second set of footsteps that night,
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: the lighter ones that arrived alongside the first, and about
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: that strange back and forth sound between them that never
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: resolved into anything I could call language, and I find
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: myself wondering less about what they were and more about
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: what they might have been discussing, standing there in the
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: dark on either side of my trailer, close enough to
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: touch the truck I was sleeping inside of, patient enough
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: to wait me out for hours without ever once losing interest.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: About three weeks after that night, I was parked at
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: a truck stop off the interstate getting coffee before a run,
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: and I mentioned the story, half-joking, to another driver I
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: recognized from the same delivery circuit, a heavyset guy named Dwayne.
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: who has hauled that same region for almost 20 years.
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: I expected him to laugh it off the way most
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: people do. Instead, he set his coffee down slow and
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: asked me exactly which turnout it was. And when I
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: described it, he nodded like I had just confirmed something
• 12:01
  Speaker 1: he already suspected. He told me he had stopped using
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: that turnout entirely about four years back, after a night
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: where his CB radio picked up a voice on an
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: open channel that repeated his own call sign back to him.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: in a tone that was not quite right, over and
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: over for almost 20 minutes, coming from somewhere close enough
• 12:21
  Speaker 1: that the signal strength never dropped. He said he pulled
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: out that same night without sleeping and has driven an
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: extra 40 minutes out of his route every single trip
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: since just to avoid parking anywhere near that stretch of gravel,
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: even in broad daylight. Hearing that from someone who had
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: no reason to make it up, someone who had been
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: doing this job twice as long as me, settled something
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: cold into my chest that has not fully left since,
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: because it meant whatever circled my truck that night was
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: not a one-time thing, and it meant other drivers out
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: there already knew to avoid that spot, long before I
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: ever pulled off the road there myself. For weeks after
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: that night, I found myself checking my mirrors more than
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: usual on every late run, especially anywhere. The road ran
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: close along a tree line with no houses in sight,
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: And more than one of the other drivers at the
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: yard asked me, half-joking, why I looked like I had
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: not slept right in a month. I never gave anyone
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: the full story, just a vague line about a rough
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: night parked out past the county line. And most of
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: them let it go the way people out here tend
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: to when they sense a subject is not meant to
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: be pushed. It has been almost two years since that
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: night now, and I still take that same regional route
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: regularly since the company has not seen fit to reassign
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: me often. and dispatch has kept her word about never
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: sending me through that particular turnout again. I have, however,
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: ended up parked within sight of it twice since, close
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: enough on the main road to see the gravel pull
• 13:54
  Speaker 1: off in my headlights as I passed, and both times
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: without any real explanation for why, every hair on my
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: arms stood straight up the moment my headlights swept across
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: that fire ring, a full quarter mile before I ever
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: got close enough to have consciously recognized the spot. I
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: do not know what that reaction means exactly, whether it
• 14:16
  Speaker 1: is memory or something closer to actual warning, but I
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: trust it completely now. And I keep my foot steady
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: on the gas both times until that turnout is well
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: behind me in the mirror. About eight months after the
• 14:29
  Speaker 1: original incident, I picked up a delivery route swab for
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: a co-worker who was out sick, hauling into a different
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: hollow entirely, maybe 40 miles from where all this started.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: And while I was unloading at the customer's porch, An
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: older man sitting on a rocking chair nearby, who I
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: later learned was the homeowner's father, asked me out of
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: nowhere whether our company still routed drivers through the old
• 14:53
  Speaker 1: turnout by the creek crossing on the county road I
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: had started from that morning. I told him I did
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: not know that particular spot by name, and he described
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: it well enough that I realized it was a different
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: location from mine entirely, a full county over. yet he
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: described almost the exact same experience. Footsteps circling a parked
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: vehicle overnight, a handle being tested slow and deliberate, two
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: sets of tracks in the morning dust. He told me
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: it happened to his nephew, also a driver, a few
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: years back, and that the family had simply accepted it
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: as one of several places in that stretch of mountains
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: you learn early on never to sleep. Hearing the same
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: story from a stranger in a completely different location told
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: me something I had already started to suspect, but had
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: not wanted to fully accept. That whatever this was, it
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: was not tied to one turnout or one hollow, but
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: was simply part of these mountains in a way that
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: predates any of the roads we drive on now. I
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: finished the delivery late that morning, hands still a little
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: unsteady on the hand truck, and I did not explain
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: to the customer why I looked the way I looked.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: I did call dispatch on my way back down the
• 16:09
  Speaker 1: mountain that morning, mostly to log the delayed delivery time
• 16:13
  Speaker 1: so it would not count against me on my route report.
• 16:17
  Speaker 1: And the dispatcher, an older woman named Cheryl, who has
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: worked that desk longer than I have been driving, asked
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: casually where exactly I had ended up parking overnight. When
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: I told her the name of the turnout, she went
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: quiet on the line for a second, then told me
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: in a tone that was trying hard to sound unbothered
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: that she would make a note on my file not
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: to route me through that stretch again if she could
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: help it. And when I pushed her a little on why,
• 16:42
  Speaker 1: she just said some spots on the map have a
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: way of getting a reputation over the years, and left
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: it at that. The same careful non-answer I was starting
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: to recognize as the standard response out here. Whenever a
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: question got too close to something, people preferred not to
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: say directly. She mentioned almost in passing while I set
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: up her dining table, that the turnout I had parked
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: in used to be called something by the old timers
• 17:07
  Speaker 1: in the area, a name that roughly translated to a
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: warning about walking there after dark, though she could not
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: remember the exact words her grandmother used. Some things out
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: here you just keep to yourself after that, because nobody
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: standing in their kitchen signing a delivery slip wants to
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: hear that their dining set almost arrived a few hours later,
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: because something the size of a doorway spent half the
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: night testing the handle on the truck it was riding in,
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: and brought company while it did it. If that story
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: put a chill down your back, the way it still
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: puts one down mine every time I think about it,
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: hit that like button right now before you keep going,
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: because it genuinely helps this channel reach more people. And
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: if you have not subscribed yet, do it now, because
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: we have six more encounters waiting tonight. And this is
• 17:55
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• 18:00
  Speaker 1: Story two. I am Rene Falk, and I photograph weddings
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: for a living, mostly across the Blue Ridge stretch of
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: Virginia and North Carolina. And part of that job that
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: people do not think about is the scouting trips, the
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: months ahead of the actual event, where I go find
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: the exact spot the light will hit at golden hour.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: So I'm not guessing on the day that matters most
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: to somebody. A bride that year had her heart completely
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: set on an overlook near a ridge trail, that required
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: about a two-mile hike in from the nearest parking area.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: And since I was not about to hike two miles
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: with 60 pounds of camera gear on the actual wedding
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: day without knowing the terrain first, I decided to camp
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: overnight near the trailhead so I could catch the sunrise
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: light exactly as it would fall during the ceremony window
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: months later. The hike in itself was uneventful in the
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: way most good scouting hikes are. Steady elevation gain, a
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: couple of nice creek crossings I made note of as
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: potential secondary photo spots, and one strange moment about halfway
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: up where I passed a tree with a section of
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: bark stripped away in long, even vertical lines, too high
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: up for anything I could explain by a bear reaching
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: up on its hind legs and too clean and deliberate
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: to be storm-damaged. I took a photo of it purely
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: out of professional habit, the way I document interesting textures
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: for future projects. and did not think much more about
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: it at the time, beyond a passing thought that it
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: looked almost like claw marks scaled up to twice the
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: size they should have been. I set up my tent
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: in a small clearing that other hikers had clearly used before,
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: judging by the flattened grass and an old blackened fire
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: pit ringed with stones, and I spent the evening testing
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: explosives settings against the tree line as the light dropped
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: through orange into that deep blue that photographers chase and
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: everyone else just calls dusk. I remember feeling genuinely good
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: about the spot, taking a few test shots of the
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: ridge silhouette that I actually planned to show the bride later,
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: and thinking this whole overnight trip had been a smart,
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: professional call on my part. That feeling did not last
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: past sundown. Everything about that evening felt completely normal, even peaceful,
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: until I noticed sometime around 8.30 that the birds had
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: gone entirely silent. I have camped enough for work over
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: the years to know that kind of silence is never nothing.
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: Woods are never actually quiet unless something out there has
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: made them that way on purpose. I zipped my tent
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: shut and told myself it was fine, and I was
• 20:43
  Speaker 1: almost convinced until I heard, from somewhere in the trees,
• 20:46
  Speaker 1: a sound like a woman crying, except pitched wrong, too even,
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: rising and falling in a pattern that felt rehearsed rather
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: than felt, like something practicing the shape of grief without
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: understanding what it was actually for. It would build and
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: then cut off sharp, like someone had hit pause on
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: a recording mid-breath, only to start again a few seconds
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: later from a slightly different direction. I have two young
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: nieces and something old in me, some caretaking instinct, genuinely
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: wanted to go check on whoever was making that sound,
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: and I actually had my fingers on the tent zipper
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: before I stopped myself cold because the sound moved. It
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: went from directly behind my tent to somewhere off to
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: my left in under two seconds, and no person crying
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: moves like that, not even close. not even someone running.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: My hands were shaking hard enough by that point that
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: I actually dropped my phone once trying to check the time,
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: fumbling it against the tent floor loud enough that I froze,
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: certain the sound outside would react to the noise, and
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: for a few long seconds everything outside my tent went
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: completely silent, as if it too were listening for what
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: had made that clatter, before the crying started back up
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: again a moment later, slightly closer than before. I have
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: thought a lot since about that brief silence after I
• 22:10
  Speaker 1: dropped my phone because it was the one moment that
• 22:13
  Speaker 1: whole night where I felt certain beyond any doubt that
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: whatever was out there was actually reacting to me specifically
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: rather than simply performing some rehearsed routine on a loop
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: regardless of my presence. And that certainty has stayed with
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: me longer than almost any other detail from that night
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: because it meant the entire time I thought I was
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: hidden and quiet inside my tent It already knew exactly
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: how closely I was listening back. I stayed inside. I
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: turned my camera flash toward the mesh window and just
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: started firing frame after frame into the dark, more to
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: steady my own nerves than for any useful reason at
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: first and on maybe the ninth or tenth flash. When
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: I checked the little preview screen with shaking hands, I
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: caught something at the very edge of the frame. It
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: was pale, tall, taller than any person had any business
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: being and it had no visible eyes reflecting the flash
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: the way an animal's would, just two dark hollows where
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: the light seemed to be swallowed rather than bounced back.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: It was standing at the precise edge of where my
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: flash could reach, like it knew exactly how far that
• 23:24
  Speaker 1: light traveled and had positioned itself one careful foot beyond it,
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: close enough to be caught in a frame, but not
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: close enough to be seen clearly, and something about that
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: precision scared me more than the shape itself did. I
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: kept the camera aimed at that same spot and fired
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: again a minute later, and this time the frame was empty,
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: which somehow felt worse than seeing it, because it meant
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: it had moved that distance in complete silence while I
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: was staring directly at the screen. The crying sound stopped
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: for a long stretch after that, long enough that I
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: started to hope it had lost interest or moved on entirely,
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: and then it started again, much closer this time, close
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: enough that I could hear something under the crying now.
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: A low clicking sound like a tongue against teeth, steady
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: and patient. Timed almost like a metronome underneath the fake sobbing.
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: I did not sleep. I sat with my back against
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: my rolled sleeping bag and my hand wrapped tight around
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: my car keys. Doing math in my head the entire
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: night about whether running from my car, a 15 minute
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: walk down a dark trail, was smarter than staying exactly
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: where I was. Weeks later, after the wedding had come
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: and gone, and I was going through my full archive
• 24:42
  Speaker 1: of images to prepare an album for the couple, I
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: pulled up the full set of test shots I had
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: taken that evening before things went wrong, the ordinary golden
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: hour frames of the ridge, and the tree line that
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: I had taken purely for lighting reference. In the very
• 24:59
  Speaker 1: last frame before dusk, one I had barely glanced at originally,
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: because the light was already too flat to be useful,
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: There was a shape standing at the tree line in
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: the far background that I had completely missed the first
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: time through. Small in the frame, but unmistakable once I
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: zoomed in, tall and pale, and facing directly toward my
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: camera position from a distance, hours before the crying ever
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: started that night. It had been watching me set up
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: my equipment the entire time, long before dark, long before
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: I ever felt afraid, and I had walked past that
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: exact spot twice. while scouting angles without noticing a single
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: thing wrong. I have not deleted that photograph, and I
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: have not shown it to anyone, but I look at
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: it sometimes late at night when I cannot sleep, trying
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: to understand how something that size stood in open daylight,
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: however distant, without me ever once sensing it was there.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: The crying and the clicking continued off and on until
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: almost four in the morning, moving in a slow, wide
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: loop around the edge of my clearing, never once approaching directly,
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: like it was waiting for me to be the one
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: who broke first and ran out into the open. I
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: never gave it the chance. At one point, near three,
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: I heard it try something different, a voice that almost
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: sounded like it was attempting to say a word, shaping
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: something close to a name, though not any name I recognized,
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: and I pressed my hands over my ears and counted
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: my own breaths until it stopped trying. While I was
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: breaking down my tent in the gray pre-dawn light, moving
• 26:36
  Speaker 1: faster than I normally would out of pure nerves. I
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: noticed three long parallel scratches across the top of my
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: camera bag, deep enough to have gone through the outer
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: nylon shell and into the padded lining beneath, positioned exactly
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: where the bag had been sitting just outside my tent's
• 26:52
  Speaker 1: vestibule overnight, close enough to where I had been sleeping
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: that the placement alone made my stomach turn. I did
• 26:59
  Speaker 1: not remember hearing anything close enough to my tent to
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: explain marks like that. which meant whatever left them had
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: gotten near enough to touch my gear at some point
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: during a stretch of the night, when I genuinely believed,
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: based on the sound, that it was still circling at
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: a distance. When the sky finally lightened toward gray, I
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: packed up so fast I left a lens cap behind
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: in the grass, and I still got the sunrise shots
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: the bride wanted, the exact angle, the exact light. but
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: when she asked why I looked so tired in the
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: behind-the-scenes photos, I told her the overlooked trail technically closes
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: at dusk for wildlife reasons, which is not exactly a lie.
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: It is just not the whole truth either, and some
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: truths are better left folded up small and put away.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: During the actual ceremony, standing off to the side with
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: my longest lens ready for the exchange of vows, I
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: noticed the bride's elderly grandmother, seated in the front row,
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: glanced toward that same tree line more than once during
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: the service with an expression that had nothing to do
• 28:06
  Speaker 1: with sentimental tears, something closer to wariness. And afterward at
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: the reception, she pulled me aside without any real introduction
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: and asked, very directly, whether I had camped overnight to
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: get those sunrise shots. When I admitted that I had,
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: she patted my hand and told me she used to
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: hike that same overlook as a young woman decades earlier,
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: and it stopped going after dark sometime in the 1960s,
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: back when a few people from town went missing over
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: a couple of bad summers, and nobody ever got a
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: straight answer about what happened to them. And she told
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: me with a small, tired smile that did not reach
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: her eyes that she was glad I had made it
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: back down in one piece before excusing herself to go
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: find her granddaughter for photos. Since that wedding, I have
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: changed the way I approach every remote scouting trip for
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: this kind of work. Always telling someone my exact location
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: and expected return time. Always paying closer attention to the
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: way locals react when I mention a specific trail or
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: overlook by name. And always packing up well before dark
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: unless a client's schedule genuinely leaves no other option. It
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: has made me a slightly more cautious photographer than I
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: used to be. Maybe a little less spontaneous about chasing
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: the perfect shot. But I have decided that is a
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: fair trade for not spending another night the way I
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: spent that one along the ridge. I have gone back
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: to that general region of the Blue Ridge several times
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: since for other clients. Always for daytime work. always finished
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: well before dusk, and I have noticed something I did
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: not expect, which is that a handful of local guides
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: and outfitters in that area, people who run guided hikes
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: and lead overnight backpacking trips professionally, have a very specific
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: way of talking about certain ridgelines that I now recognize instantly.
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: a kind of polite redirection whenever a client asks about
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: camping in a particular spot, always steering toward a different overlook,
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: a mile or two away, without ever quite explaining why
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: the first one is not recommended. I asked one of
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: these guys directly once after we had worked together on
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: a shoot and built up a little trust, and she admitted, quietly,
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: that she had lost two separate clients to sudden panic
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: attacks on that same ridge over the years. grown adults
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: with no prior history of anxiety, both of whom described
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: the same vague sense of being watched from a spot
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: in the trees that never actually revealed anything when they
• 30:39
  Speaker 1: looked directly at it. I booked a second wedding on
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: that same ridge system the following autumn, a different overlook
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: about a mile from the first, and out of pure
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: caution I arranged to camp with a fellow photographer that
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: time instead of alone, splitting the work of monitoring the
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: light through the evening. That second trip passed without any
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: real incident. No crying, no shapes at the edge of
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: the flash, nothing beyond an unusually persistent feeling shared by
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: both of us independently. Before we compared notes the next
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: morning that we were being watched from somewhere just beyond
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: where our headlamps could reach, a feeling neither of us
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: could shake the entire night despite nothing ever actually happening
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: to justify it. I do not know if that overlook
• 31:27
  Speaker 1: carries the same history as the first, or if some
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: feelings simply travel with a person once they have lived
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: through something like what happened to me. But I have
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: not camped alone in that region since, and I do
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: not plan to start again. That fellow photographer I camped
• 31:43
  Speaker 1: with on the second trip, a woman named Kayla, who
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: has been shooting weddings around that region even longer than
• 31:49
  Speaker 1: I have, told me on the drive back down that
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: she had heard secondhand stories for years about that ridge
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: system from other vendors in the area, caterers and florists
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: who had worked outdoor events nearby and mentioned equipment behaving
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: strangely after dark, radios cutting out, batteries draining far faster
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: than they should, always around the same general stretch of trail.
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: None of it had ever been enough to stop the
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: venues from booking there, since none of it happens during
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: actual daylight ceremonies. but hearing it laid out all at
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: once from someone with no reason to make it up
• 32:27
  Speaker 1: confirmed for me that whatever I experienced was simply one
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: small piece of a much larger pattern that plenty of
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: other people in that industry have quietly noticed and quietly
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: chosen not to talk about very loudly. Story 3 My
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: name is Odell Pruitt, and I work as a septic
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: technician out of rural Kentucky. which means my days are
• 32:50
  Speaker 1: spent pumping tanks and running camera lines through pipe systems
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: for people who live far enough out that regular plumbers
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: do not exactly rush to answer the phone when they call.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: It is not glamorous work, but it pays steady. And
• 33:05
  Speaker 1: after a while, you get used to seeing the backside
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: of properties that most visitors never see. Old barns falling
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: in on themselves, family cemeteries fenced off in the middle
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: of a field, root cellars. Nobody has opened in decades.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: You learn to stop asking questions about things that are
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: none of your business, and mostly that policy has served
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: me well. One job ran way past dark, a system
• 33:32
  Speaker 1: backup at a farmhouse near the Tennessee line that turned
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: into a six-hour ordeal once we figured out the previous
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: owner had installed the tank wrong 20 years earlier, and
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: nobody had known it until that exact night. Partway through
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: that job, while I had the camera line run about
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: 60 feet down the main pipe run toward the field,
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: I caught something on the small monitor screen that made
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: me stop dead for a second. A section of root
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: intrusion in the pipe wall that looked less like roots
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: and more like something had been pressing against the pipe
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: from outside hard enough to crack the clay casing in
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: a neat, almost intentional line. running parallel to the pipe
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: for several feet before stopping. I remember thinking at the
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: time that it was a strange thing for tree roots
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: to do, and I made a note to mention it
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: to the homeowner, but the backup itself took priority, and
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: I never actually brought it up before I left, something
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: I have regretted a little since, mostly out of curiosity
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: about what she might have said. By the time I
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: finally finished, it was almost eleven, and I was too
• 34:42
  Speaker 1: worn out to trust myself driving those mountain switchbacks safely.
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: So I told the homeowner I would just sleep in
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: my truck bed under the topper, which I keep stocked
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: with a sleeping bag for exactly this kind of situation.
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: She offered me the couch inside, but I've learned over
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: the years that showing up unannounced in someone's living room
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: at midnight, covered in the smell of a long job,
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: is not a great way to keep a good customer relationship,
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: so I told her the truck was fine and meant it.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: I parked in their side field, well away from the house,
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: so my running lights would not bother anybody trying to sleep.
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: Close to a tree line that bordered a long stretch
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: of national forest land. Before I climbed in, I noticed
• 35:25
  Speaker 1: the family dog, normally a friendly thing that had wagged
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: its tail at me all evening while I worked, would
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: not come anywhere near that side of the field. Sitting
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: instead by the back porch steps and watching me with
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: its ears pinned flat the whole time I set up.
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: I thought about that a little, but I was too
• 35:44
  Speaker 1: tired to think about it hard, and I fell asleep
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: fast that night. Dead tired the way honest physical work
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: makes you? I woke sometime after two in the morning
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: to the sound of something dragging itself along the ground
• 35:57
  Speaker 1: near my tailgate. Not walking, dragging, slow and heavy, like
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: a full feed sack being pulled across grass and packed
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: dirt one careful foot at a time. I looked out
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: through the small back window of the topper and In
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: the thin moonlight, I could just make out something long
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: and low moving parallel to my truck, maybe 30 feet
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: out at most, bigger than a bear laid out on
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: its side, but moving with a strange rippling motion through
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: its body, like whatever was under that shape did not
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: have a spine built the normal way, more like it
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: moved in sections that did not all agree with each
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: other about which direction to go. I stayed still and quiet,
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: the way you learn to out here when you are
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: alone at night, and the dragging sound stopped completely. Then
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: I heard breathing right up against my tailgate, close enough
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: that the metal actually vibrated a little with each breath,
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: deep and slow and deliberate. And whatever it was, it
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: covered 30 feet of open ground and complete silence between
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: one moment and the next, which is a fact my
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: brain has never fully made peace with since that night.
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: At one point, against every bit of better judgment I had,
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: I let myself lean forward just enough to look through
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: the thin gap where the topper window did not seal
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: perfectly flush against the frame. And in that narrow sliver
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: of moonlight, I caught a partial glimpse of something pale
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: and hairless pressed close against the side of my truck,
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: skin stretched tight over what looked like too many ribs.
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: And I pulled back so fast I nearly knocked my
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: head against the toolbox behind me. deciding right then that
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: whatever I had just seen was not something I needed
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: a second look at to understand. I did not open
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: that back window after that. I did not check again.
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: I laid there flat, with my hand resting on my phone,
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: flashlight ready but never turned on, and I felt the
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: whole truck shift very slightly on its suspension, like something
• 38:02
  Speaker 1: had leaned its weight against the tailgate to get a
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: better angle at whatever it was trying to smell or
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: hear inside. It stayed like that for what felt like
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: a long time. Long enough that my arm went numb
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: from holding still in one position and then, without any warning,
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: it made a sound directly against the metal. Not a
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: growl and not a bark, something closer to a long exhale.
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: Through something too big to be a throat, low and
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: resonant enough that I felt it in my chest more
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: than I heard it in my ears. I nearly lost
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: control of my breathing right then, but some part of
• 38:37
  Speaker 1: me held on, and eventually the weight lifted off the
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: truck and the breathing moved off. Then I heard that
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: same dragging sound retreat toward the tree line and slowly
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: fade out into nothing at all. I checked my watch
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: once it was gone, hands shaking too badly to read
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: the numbers clearly at first. And it was just past
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: three in the morning, which meant close to an hour
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: had passed since I first heard that dragging sound begin,
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: an hour I could account for almost minute by minute
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: even now. each one distinct and awful in its own way,
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: the kind of hour that stretches out so far past
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: its actual sixty minutes, the time itself seems to bend
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: a little around it. I did not tell my own
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: wife the full details of that night for almost a
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: year afterward, partly out of a strange embarrassment about how
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: bad it had rattled someone who spends his working life
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: around septic tanks and crawl spaces without much complaint, and
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: partly because I was not sure how to explain the
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: specific fear of it in a way that did not
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: sound exaggerated once removed from the actual dark of that field.
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: When I finally did tell her the whole thing, She
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: did not laugh at all. She just asked, very quietly,
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: whether I still parked overnight for jobs like that, and
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: when I told her I tried not to anymore, unless
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: there was truly no other option. She seemed satisfied with
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: that answer in a way that told me she had
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: been quietly worried about exactly this kind of night for
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: longer than I realized. In the morning, the homeowner asked
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: why I looked like I had not slept a wink,
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: and I told her the truth. that something big had
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: circled my truck most of the night and had leaned
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: its weight against it at one point. Instead of looking surprised,
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: she just nodded slow, the way people do when they
• 40:30
  Speaker 1: already know. Instead, her husband had lost two goats to
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: something out of those woods a few years back, and
• 40:35
  Speaker 1: they had quietly stopped keeping livestock in that field ever since,
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: without ever calling anyone official about it. She mentioned almost
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: as an afterthought while walking me to my truck, that
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: the dog had refused to sleep in the house that
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: whole week, and had been sleeping instead in the shed
• 40:53
  Speaker 1: closest to the road, as far from that tree line
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: as it could get inside the property. She did not
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: offer any more detail past that, and I did not
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: push for it, because I have learned some conversations end
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: better when you let them in right where they are.
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: About two months after that job, I got called out
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: to a different property maybe six miles down the same road,
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: a small cabin owned by an older man named Earl
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: who lived alone with a couple of hunting dogs. And
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: while I was running my camera line through his system,
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: I mentioned carefully that I had done a job nearby
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: recently that ran late, and I had ended up camping
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: in a field near the tree line overnight. Earl went
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: quiet for a second and then asked if I had
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: heard anything strange, not in a teasing way, but in
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: the flat, direct way, People ask when they already suspect
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: the answer. When I told him what happened, the dragging,
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: the breathing against the tailgate, he nodded and told me
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: his own dogs would not go past a certain line
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: in his own property after dark, a boundary neither of
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: them had ever crossed in the six years he had
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: owned them, no matter what he tried to coax them
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: toward it with. He said his grandfather used to call
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: whatever was back in those particular woods by a name
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: I will not repeat here. mostly because I never learned
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: exactly how to pronounce it right. And Earl told me
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: the old advice passed down in his family was simple.
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: You do not camp within sight of that tree line.
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: You do not leave meat or bones out overnight anywhere
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: near it. And if you hear something dragging after dark,
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: you do not open anything. Not a door, not a window,
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: not even a curtain, until the sun is fully up.
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: I've followed that advice on every job in that county since.
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: whether or not I fully understand why. Out of my
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: own curiosity, a few weeks after talking with Earl, I
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: spent an evening looking through old county records at the
• 42:51
  Speaker 1: library in town, the kind of thing I never would
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: have bothered doing before that job, and found a handful
• 42:57
  Speaker 1: of land surveys from the early part of the last
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: century that marked a section of that same forest with
• 43:04
  Speaker 1: a notation I did not recognize, something closer to a
• 43:08
  Speaker 1: boundary warning than a normal property line description. along with
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: a newspaper clipping from decades back, mentioning livestock losses across
• 43:17
  Speaker 1: three different farms in that same general area within one
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: bad season, described only in the clipped, careful language local
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: papers use when they do not want to speculate too
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: openly about a cause. None of it told me anything definitive,
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: and I did not expect it to, but it was
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: enough to confirm that whatever I ran into that night
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: was not new, and was not confined to just the
• 43:42
  Speaker 1: one field where I happened to park my truck. About
• 43:46
  Speaker 1: a year later, I got called back out to a
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: property maybe two miles further down the same road for
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: an entirely unrelated inspection. And while I was setting up
• 43:54
  Speaker 1: my equipment, the new homeowner, who had only lived there
• 43:57
  Speaker 1: a short while, mentioned unprompted that her dog refused to
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: go near a specific corner of her own back property
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: after dark. Describing the exact same flat, resigned tone Earl,
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: and the first homeowner had both used, like this was
• 44:13
  Speaker 1: simply a known and accepted feature of living out in
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: that stretch of county rather than anything worth calling someone about.
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: I did not ask her any follow-up questions, and I
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: did not need to, because by that point, I already
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: understood the shape of the answer before she ever gave it.
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: Not long after that second job, I started keeping a private,
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: informal log of every property I serviced. where the homeowner
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: mentions something similar without any prompting for me. Nothing official,
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: just a small notebook I keep in my truck. And
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: in the two years since that first night, I have
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: accumulated 11 separate entries across four different counties, each one
• 44:55
  Speaker 1: describing some version of the same basic pattern. A boundary
• 44:59
  Speaker 1: the animals will not cross. A field nobody grazes anymore.
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: A sound at night nobody investigates. I have no idea
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: what to do with that notebook long term and I'm
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: not sure I want to know. But something in me
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: needed to start writing it down once I understood I
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: was not the only one this had happened to. I
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: showed that notebook to my wife for the first time
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: about a year after I started keeping it, mostly because
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: I felt strange hiding something from her that had clearly
• 45:27
  Speaker 1: been weighing on me some nights. And instead of the
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: reaction I braced for, she told me her own grandmother,
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: who had grown up not far from where I do
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: this work. used to talk about certain hollows the same
• 45:40
  Speaker 1: exact way, never with fear exactly, more with a kind
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: of practical respect, the way you might talk about a
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: river that floods every so often or a stretch of
• 45:51
  Speaker 1: road that ices over before anywhere else does. Hearing that
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: from someone I have known my whole adult life, someone
• 45:58
  Speaker 1: whose family has been in these mountains for generations longer
• 46:01
  Speaker 1: than mine, made the whole thing feel less like something
• 46:05
  Speaker 1: strange that happened only to me and more like something
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: ordinary enough that an entire family line had simply learned
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: to build their lives quietly around it. I have thought
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: a lot since then about how many properties out here
• 46:20
  Speaker 1: probably carry some version of that same unspoken boundary. A
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: corner of a field, a stretch of treeline, a spot
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: along a fence row that everyone in the household simply
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: learns to avoid without ever discussing it directly. Passed down
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: the same way you learn which stair creaks, or which
• 46:40
  Speaker 1: door needs to be lifted slightly to close right. It
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: is not the kind of thing that shows up on
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: any inspection report I've ever filed, and it never will.
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: But I notice it now everywhere I go for work.
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: The small tells in how people talk about their own land,
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: and I've stopped assuming any of it is superstition. I
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: also started without really planning to, paying closer attention to
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: how customers describe the history of their own properties. Whenever
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: I show up for a job, casual little comments about
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: a barn nobody uses anymore, or a corner of a
• 47:16
  Speaker 1: pasture the cattle never graze. And I have come to
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: believe that if you actually listen for it, most long-term
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: rural households out here are carrying some version of the
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: same quiet arrangement, an unofficial treaty with something they cannot
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: explain and have simply decided not to argue And once
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: you start noticing that pattern, you cannot stop noticing it.
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: Story four. I go by Wendell Ashcraft and I collect
• 47:44
  Speaker 1: and sell scrap metal for a living, which means I
• 47:47
  Speaker 1: spend a lot of my time poking around old abandoned
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: rail lines and shut down mining sites across the Tennessee
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: and Virginia mountains looking for anything still worth hauling to
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: the yard for weight. It is dirty work, and it
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: does not pay what people think it should for the
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: effort involved. but I like being outside and I like
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: the hunt of it. Never quite knowing what you are
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: going to find until you are standing right in front
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: of it. There is an old coal spur line outside
• 48:17
  Speaker 1: a small town that used to run cars decades ago,
• 48:20
  Speaker 1: mostly swallowed back up by forest now, and another scrapper
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: I know had mentioned an old rail maintenance shed still
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: sitting back in there, half full of iron fittings nobody
• 48:29
  Speaker 1: had ever bothered to strip out. It was a full
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: day hike in and back out, so I packed a
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: small tent and planned to camp one night near the
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: shed and haul out a full pack the next morning
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: before the drive home. The scrapper who told me about
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: that shed, a guy named Shane I have known for
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: years through the yard, had actually gone quiet for a
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: second when I asked him if he wanted to split
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: the haul and come with me. And he told me
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: flatly that he had been in there once, years back,
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: and would not go back a second time for any
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: amount of scrap. though he would not say exactly why,
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: beyond mentioning that the whole spur line felt wrong to
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: him in a way he could not put into words,
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: the kind of thing you either understand or you do not,
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: and I did not understand it at the time. I
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: still don't fully understand it now, but I understand it
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: a lot better than I did when I was a kid.
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: before that night. I found the shed just before dusk,
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: roof half-collapsed on one side, full of rusted brackets and
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: coupling hardware exactly like I had been told. Enough weight
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: in there to make the hike worth it several times
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: over if I could get it all out. I set
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: my tent up maybe a hundred feet away in the spot,
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: clear of the worst brush, close enough to keep an
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: eye on my hall, but far enough that I was
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: not sleeping directly under a half-collapsed roof. I want to
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: be clear, I have camped alone in remote spots more
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: times than I could count doing this line of work,
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: sometimes right next to active bear country, and nothing had
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: ever bothered me before that particular night in any way
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: that stuck with me afterwards. Around what must have been
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: 10 o'clock, I heard metal groaning, slow and deliberate, inside
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: the shed, like someone testing the weight of a beam
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: before deciding to move it, careful and unhurried in a
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: way that no animal moves through debris. Then I heard
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: footsteps circling the outside of the structure on gravel, heavy
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: and completely unhurried, pausing every so often like whatever it
• 50:28
  Speaker 1: was was reading something written on the ground that only
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: it could see. I unzipped my tent just enough to
• 50:36
  Speaker 1: look and in the thin moonlight leaking through the canopy,
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: I could make out a shape standing in the shed doorway,
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: tall enough it had to duck slightly under the frame,
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: holding something long, one of the iron coupling bars from inside,
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: holding it the way a person holds a walking stick,
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: testing its balance against the ground almost thoughtfully, turning it
• 50:57
  Speaker 1: over once in what I can only describe as a hand.
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: I do not know what convinced me faster it was
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: not a bear or a lost hiker, The height of
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: it or the way it tilted its head almost all
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: the way sideways, studying that bar. Like it was actually
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: considering something about it. But I zipped my tent shut
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: fast and stopped breathing loud right after. It dropped the bar.
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: The sound of iron hitting gravel cracked so loud through
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: that silence that I flinched hard enough to shake the
• 51:26
  Speaker 1: whole tent frame. And the footsteps outside went dead still instantly.
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: For almost a full minute, nothing moved at all. I
• 51:35
  Speaker 1: understood somehow in the pit of my stomach that it
• 51:38
  Speaker 1: now knew exactly where I was hiding, that the sound
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: of my own tent shaking had given away more than
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: the drop bar ever could have. Then, instead of coming
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: toward me the way every part of me expected, it
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: turned and walked back into the shed. And I heard
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: that metal groaning start up again for a long while,
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: this time with a rhythm to it, almost like sorting,
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: piece after piece, being lifted and set back down, before
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: it finally went quiet for good sometime well past midnight.
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: I did not sleep again that night, sitting up with
• 52:13
  Speaker 1: my back against my pack, listening to every small sound
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: the force made, and trying to decide which ones were normal.
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: At first light I checked the doorway and the drop
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: bar was gone entirely, moved somewhere I could not find
• 52:26
  Speaker 1: in a short search, and there were fresh drag marks
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: cut into the dirt showing something heavy had been pulled
• 52:32
  Speaker 1: back inside the structure and Sometime before dawn, along with
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: the second smaller set of marks, I had not noticed
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: the evening before, running from the tree line straight to
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: the shed door. I crouched down and studied that second
• 52:45
  Speaker 1: set of marks for longer than I probably should have,
• 52:49
  Speaker 1: given how exposed I felt standing there in the open,
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: with the shed door hanging open in front of me.
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: And they were smaller than I expected, narrower, spaced closer
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: together than the drag marks left by whatever had taken
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: the bar. which meant at some point during the night,
• 53:05
  Speaker 1: a second, smaller presence had also approached that same doorway,
• 53:09
  Speaker 1: moving independently of the first. I never heard a second
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: set of footsteps directly, not once, which meant whatever it
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: was had either moved in complete silence the entire time,
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: or had arrived sometime during the long stretch, when the
• 53:24
  Speaker 1: metal groaning inside the shed had covered any smaller sound
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: I might otherwise have caught. I have wondered since whether
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: that smaller set of tracks belong to something young, some
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: smaller version of whatever the first set belonged to. And
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: if so, what that might mean about how many of
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: them are actually moving through these old mining and rail
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: sites at any given time. Not as some rare singular creature,
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: but as something with its own family structure, its own
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: generations passing knowledge of these old structures, down the same
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: way the scrapper community passes down which sheds are worth
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: the trip. It is not a thought I particularly enjoy
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: sitting with, but once it occurred to me, I have
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: not been able to fully set it back down. Before
• 54:10
  Speaker 1: I left, I made myself walk the full perimeter of
• 54:12
  Speaker 1: the shed one time in the daylight, mostly to prove
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: to myself that I could, and on the far side,
• 54:18
  Speaker 1: the side I had not been able to see from
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: my tent the night before, I found something that made
• 54:22
  Speaker 1: the whole night make a lot more sense and a
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: lot less sense at the same time. Someone a long
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: time ago, by the look of the rust building up
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: in the grooves, had carved a series of marks into
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: the wooden support beam nearest the door. Evenly spaced, deliberate,
• 54:39
  Speaker 1: not random damage from weather or animals, but something closer
• 54:43
  Speaker 1: to counting marks, the kind you scratch into a wall
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: to track days. Except there were far too many of
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: them for any reasonable stretch of time, and they stopped
• 54:53
  Speaker 1: abruptly about a foot from the ground like Whoever or
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: whatever had been making them either lost the ability to
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: reach any higher or simply stopped needing to count for
• 55:03
  Speaker 1: a reason I did not want to think about too hard.
• 55:07
  Speaker 1: I did not examine the marks closely enough to guess
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: how old they were, and I did not touch them,
• 55:13
  Speaker 1: and I have thought about that beam more times since
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: than I would like to admit, usually late at night
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: when I am trying to fall asleep and the image
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: comes back on its own without any invitation from me.
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: When I got back to the yard, I mentioned the
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: marks to Shane, describing them as best I could, and
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: his face changed in a way I had not seen
• 55:34
  Speaker 1: from him before. And he told me that when he
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: had gone in there years earlier, he had found the
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: same beam, the same marks, and had counted them out
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: of nervous curiosity while he waited out a rainstorm inside
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: the shed doorway, and had come up with a number
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: well over 400 before he lost his place and gave up.
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: deciding he did not actually want to know the answer
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: badly enough to start over from the beginning. Curious to
• 55:58
  Speaker 1: spite myself, I later spent an afternoon digging through old
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: county employment records tied to the rail company that had
• 56:05
  Speaker 1: originally run that spur line, and found a brief, dry
• 56:09
  Speaker 1: notation from a company ledger dated decades back listing two
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: maintenance workers who had been reported as failing to return
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: from an overnight repair shift at that exact section of
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: line with no further explanation recorded beyond a short line
• 56:25
  Speaker 1: about the positions being filled the following month, the kind
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: of clinical bureaucratic phrasing that tells you a company moved
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: on from a problem far faster than any family involved
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: likely ever did. I tried, out of a curiosity I
• 56:39
  Speaker 1: could not quite let go of, to find any living
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: relatives of those two workers through old newspaper archives and
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: a couple of local genealogy forums. mostly just to understand
• 56:51
  Speaker 1: whether their families had ever gotten more of an explanation
• 56:55
  Speaker 1: than that single ledger line offered. But decades is a
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: long time, and the trail went cold fast. Town directories
• 57:03
  Speaker 1: that no longer matched any current listings, family names that
• 57:07
  Speaker 1: had either moved on or died out entirely in that
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: particular county. I eventually let it go, telling myself that
• 57:15
  Speaker 1: whatever answers existed probably never going to surface after this
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: much time. But I still think about those two names
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: on quiet nights, wondering if they ever got the chance
• 57:27
  Speaker 1: to understand what was happening to them before it was
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: too late, or whether it came for them the same patient,
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: unhurried way it's circled, that shed the night I spent
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: camped nearby. I've also noticed, now that I pay attention
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: to it, that the topographic maps I use for planning
• 57:43
  Speaker 1: routes into old rail and mining sites occasionally mark certain
• 57:48
  Speaker 1: sections with old surveyor notations that do not match anything
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: in the current legend, faded abbreviations that predate the current
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: mapping standards by decades. And more than once since that night,
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: I have cross-referenced one of those odd notations against the
• 58:05
  Speaker 1: site before deciding whether it was worth the hike in
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: at all. I cannot say for certain those old marks
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: mean anything close to what I suspect, but I have
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: stopped ignoring them, and a few sights that once looked
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: promising on paper have quietly dropped off my list entirely
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: because of nothing more than an unfamiliar symbol tucked into
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: the corner of an old survey. I left that morning
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: without my full intended haul, taking only what I could
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: grab quickly near the entrance without stepping fully back inside.
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: Some scrap out here genuinely is not worth going back for,
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: no matter what it would fetch at the yard, and
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: I have told the other scrapper who tipped me off
• 58:47
  Speaker 1: about that shed exactly why I am never going back,
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: and he has stopped mentioning that stretch of rail line
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: to me since. I still work scrap most weeks, still
• 58:57
  Speaker 1: hike into plenty of remote sites nobody else wants to
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: bother with, but I have started keeping a much shorter
• 59:03
  Speaker 1: list of places I am willing to camp overnight rather
• 59:06
  Speaker 1: than day trip, and any site with a structure like
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: that shed, something enclosed, something with a roof and walls
• 59:14
  Speaker 1: where a person or anything else could wait quietly out
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: of the weather, goes straight to the bottom of that
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: list now, no matter how much scrap is supposedly sitting
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: inside it. Some halls simply are not worth what they
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: might cost you, and I have made my peace with
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: leaving a little money on the table if it means
• 59:31
  Speaker 1: never spending another night listening to iron being sorted by
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: something on the other side of a wall I could
• 59:36
  Speaker 1: not see through. Every so often at the yard, when
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: the subject of that spur line comes up among the
• 59:43
  Speaker 1: other regulars who scrap that region, I notice the same
• 59:47
  Speaker 1: pattern repeat itself. Someone new to the crew will mention
• 59:51
  Speaker 1: wanting to check out that old shed for the hardware
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: everyone knows is sitting in there. and someone older will
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: quietly steer the conversation elsewhere without ever fully explaining why.
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: The same redirection I have watched happened in plenty of
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: other contexts since that night, and I have started to
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: wonder just how many of these small unofficial warnings are
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: passed around in trades like mine across these mountains without
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: ever once being written down anywhere a person could look
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: them up in advance. If you have made it this far,
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: you already know these are not campfire jokes made up
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: for views. This channel exists because real people lived through
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: these nights. So take 30 seconds right now and drop
• 1:00:34
  Speaker 1: a comment with the story number that got under your
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: skin the most because it genuinely helps other people find
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: this channel when you do that. And if this is
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: your first time watching, subscribe now because you do not
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: want to miss what is still coming tonight. Story 5.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: My name is Marlene Tice, and I work as a
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: hospice caregiver. And if you know anything about that particular
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: kind of work, you already understand that my days run
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: long and heavy in ways that are hard to explain
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 1: to people standing outside of it. You learn to sit
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: with silence differently than most people do. You learn to
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: read a room by the sound of breathing alone. And
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: you learn, whether you want to or not, to recognize
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: the particular quiet that settles over a place right before
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: something changes. After a stretch of especially difficult weeks at work,
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: back-to-back losses that stack up on a person, no matter
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 1: how prepared you think you are for the job, I
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: decided I needed one weekend completely alone with no phone
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 1: service and no obligations to anyone. So I drove out
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: to a quiet stretch of the Smokies where I had
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: camped with my family as a kid and found a
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: spot along a creek I remembered fondly from those trips.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 1: A wide, flat bank shaded by old growth trees that
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: had not changed at all in the twenty-some years since
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: I had last stood there. The first night was genuinely peaceful,
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: exactly the reset I'd gone looking for, and I fell
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: asleep to the sound of running water without a single
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: worry in my head for the first time in weeks.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: I remember waking once briefly around two in the morning
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: to relieve myself and standing outside my tent for a
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: minute just looking up at more stars than I ever
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: see back home. Feeling something in my chest loosen, for
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: the first time in a long while. The only thing
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: that first night that struck me as even slightly odd
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: and only in hindsight was that sometime before I fell asleep,
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 1: I noticed every single frog and insect along that stretch
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: of creek had been going strong in a steady chorus
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 1: for hours. The kind of background noise you stop consciously
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 1: hearing after a while. And at one specific point for
• 1:02:50
  Speaker 1: maybe 30 seconds, All of it stopped at once, completely,
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: before starting back up again, gradually like nothing had happened.
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: I remember noting it in a vague, sleepy way and
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: deciding it was probably nothing, maybe a passing owl or
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: a deer moving through, and I did not think about
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 1: it again until the following night made me reconsider everything
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: I had dismissed so easily on the first one. I
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: climbed back into my sleeping bag that first night, feeling
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: like the trip had already done what I needed it
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: to do. The second night was different from the very
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: first hour after dark. And looking back now, I think
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: something had simply been waiting to see if I would
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 1: stay a second night before it decided I was worth
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: the effort. I woke to the sound of someone speaking,
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: very quietly, right outside my tent wall. And at first,
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: my sleep-addled brain assumed it was another camper who had
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: wandered too close in the dark. So I called out
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 1: and asked if everything was okay over there, my voice
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: still thick with sleep. The voice stopped instantly, and then,
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: after a pause that felt several seconds too long, it
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: answered back in a tone that mimicked my own almost exactly.
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: The same cadence, the same rise at the end of
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: a question, except the actual words did not connect to
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: one another, just fragments strung together in the shape of
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: speech without any of the meaning underneath, the way a
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: very young child will babble in the rhythm of a
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: sentence before they actually know what any of the words mean.
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 1: I have sat with dying people enough times in my
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: career to recognize when something is deeply wrong with the
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: human voice. Some old instinct built out of thousands of
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: quiet hours in hospital rooms and hospice suites. The kind
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: of instinct that tells you a patient is failing before
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: any monitor does. And every part of me went cold
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: at once hearing that voice answer me back. I did
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 1: not respond a second time. I lay perfectly still, listening
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: to my own heartbeat pound in my ears, and the
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 1: voice kept talking just outside my tent for what felt
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: like a solid twenty minutes, drifting slowly from one side
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 1: of the tent to the other in a wide arc,
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 1: never once coming close enough to touch the fabric, like
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: it understood exactly where the boundary of the tent was
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: and had decided, for reasons of its own, not to
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: cross it yet. At one point it started repeating small
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: phrases I had muttered out loud to myself earlier that
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: day while hiking alone along the creek. Private little thoughts
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: about my sister. About a patient I had lost the
• 1:05:28
  Speaker 1: week before. Things I never said in front of anyone
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: and had no reason to think anyone had heard. Which
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: meant whatever this was had been following behind me and
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: listening for hours, maybe the entire day, before it ever
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: made a single sound to let me know it was there.
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: Hearing my own private grief repeated back to me in
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: that flat, mimicking tone was somehow worse than anything openly
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 1: threatening could have been, because it told me this thing
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: was not just hunting, it was studying, collecting pieces of
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 1: me to use later. Eventually it went quiet, and I
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: heard something large shift its full weight through the dry
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 1: leaves and move slowly off toward the creek, and I
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: allowed myself to believe for maybe half an hour. that
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: it had lost interest and left for good. Then I
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: heard splashing, deliberate and rhythmic, like something waiting slowly across
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 1: the shallow part of the creek, not far from my tent.
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 1: Back and forth, back and forth, three full crossings that
• 1:06:30
  Speaker 1: I counted with my eyes squeezed shut before it finally
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: stopped and the night went properly silent again, the kind
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 1: of silence that feels earned rather than natural. At one
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: point during that long stretch of sitting up in the dark,
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 1: sometime close to 4.30, I heard a new sound entirely,
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: coming from a good distance further up the creek. A low,
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: sustained tone that rose and fell slowly like something breathing
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: through a space far too large to belong to any
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: single throat. And the first voice, the one that had
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: been mimicking me earlier, went completely silent the instant that
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: new sound started. as if even it understood that whatever
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: was making that deep tone outranked it in some way,
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: I could not begin to guess at. The mimicking voice
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: did not return again that night after that, and I
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: have never decided whether that should have made me feel
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: safer or considerably less safe, because it meant there was
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 1: more than one thing moving through those woods that night,
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 1: and whatever the second one was, it was clearly larger
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: or older, or simply mattered more than the first. I
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 1: did not sleep again after that, not even for a minute,
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: sitting up with my knees pulled to my chest, until
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: the birds finally started again sometime near five. And I
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: have never in my life been more grateful to hear
• 1:07:54
  Speaker 1: something as simple as birdsong. I packed everything up at
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: first light and drove straight home without stopping for the
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: second overlook I had originally planned to photograph for myself.
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: Driving faster than I should have down those switchback roads,
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: with my hands shaking on the wheel the entire way.
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 1: I still work hospice today, and I still believe deeply
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: in that work. But I have not camped alone since
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: that weekend. And when people ask why, I just tell
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: them the mountains got a little too crowded for my
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: taste these days. Which is not the truth at all,
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: but it is an easier answer to give than the
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: real one. And it lets the conversation move on to
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 1: something lighter than what actually happened to me along that creek.
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 1: Out of a need to understand... something about what I
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: had experienced. I looked up the name of that particular
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: creek once I had cell signal back near town, and
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: found a short regional folklore page mentioning it by a
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: local nickname that translated roughly to the Weeping Water, with
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: a brief unsourced note claiming that early settlers in the
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: area avoided camping along its banks for reasons the page
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 1: did not elaborate on beyond a single vague line about
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: voices that borrow the shapes of the living. Just before
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: I finally broke camp that morning, packing with hands that
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 1: would not quite stop shaking, I allowed myself one look
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: back toward the creek and and in the thin gray
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: light of dawn I caught for only a moment a
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: pale shape crouched low at the waterline, exactly where I
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 1: had counted the three crossings hours earlier, motionless, angled away
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: from me in a way that felt deliberate rather than accidental,
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 1: as though it had positioned itself to be glimpsed rather
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 1: than fully seen, and by the time I blinked it
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 1: was simply gone, no sound of movement, no disturbance in
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: the waters, Nothing to prove it had been real at
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: all except the fact that I have never once doubted
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: what I saw in that half second. That image has
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: stayed with me longer than almost anything from my professional life.
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: Longer even than some of the hardest losses I have
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: sat through at work. And I have found myself, more
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: than once since, sitting with a dying patient in the
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: quiet hours of a night shift and thinking about that
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: pale shape at the waterline. wondering in some strange way
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: if whatever it was understood grief the same patient, careful
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: way I have learned to, or whether it simply wears
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: the shape of it, the way it wore the shape
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: of my voice that night, without any of the meaning underneath.
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: I do not know how much stock to put in
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 1: a page like that, poorly sourced and clearly written by
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: an amateur local historian decades ago, but it matched enough
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: of what I had personally lived through that I have
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: not been able to fully dismiss it, and I have
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: not once considered going back to that creek since, not
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: even for the kind of quiet I used to think
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: only that spot could give me. I even called the
• 1:10:59
  Speaker 1: small local historical society in the nearest town once, a
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 1: few months after everything, asking under a vague pretense about
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 1: early settler accounts near that creek, and the volunteer who
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 1: answered the phone, an older woman who clearly knew far
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: more than the official archive probably contained, told me quietly
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: that she personally would not camp along that water after
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: dark for any reason, family history or otherwise, before politely
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: ending the call before I could ask anything further. I
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: sat with the phone in my hand for a long
• 1:11:31
  Speaker 1: while after that call ended, turning her words over in
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: my mind, family history or otherwise, and wondering exactly how
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: many generations of families near that creek had quietly agreed
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 1: among themselves to simply leave that water alone after dark,
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 1: without ever needing to write the reason down anywhere, an
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: outsider like me could easily find it. It is a
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: strange kind of comfort, knowing an entire community has already
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: built its rules around something the rest of the world
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 1: has no framework for, and a strange kind of loneliness too,
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: realizing I will likely never get a clearer answer than
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: the one that volunteer was willing to give me over
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: the phone that day. These days when I need to
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 1: decompress from a hard stretch at work, I choose established
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 1: campgrounds with other people nearby, sites with a check-in station,
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: and a camp host who walks the loop after dark.
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 1: Small conveniences I used to think of as an unnecessary
• 1:12:31
  Speaker 1: buffer between me and the actual experience of being out
• 1:12:35
  Speaker 1: in nature, and I no longer think of them that
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: way at all. There is a version of quiet you
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: can only get completely alone in the deep woods, and
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: I understand now, in a way I never did before
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 1: that weekend, that some of that quiet exists precisely because
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 1: whatever else is out there prefers it that way, and
• 1:12:55
  Speaker 1: I no longer feel any need to go looking for
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: it on those particular terms. I did eventually mention what
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: happened to a co-worker at the hospice agency, a nurse
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 1: named Faye, who has worked in this field even longer
• 1:13:07
  Speaker 1: than I have. expecting her to gently suggest I had
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: been overtired and let my imagination run away with me
• 1:13:15
  Speaker 1: after a stressful stretch at work. Instead, she told me
• 1:13:18
  Speaker 1: quietly over coffee in the break room that her late
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: husband used to hunt regularly in a different section of
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: the Smokies decades earlier and had come home early from
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: a trip more than once describing almost exactly what I
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: had described, a voice mimicking his own from just outside
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: his tent, repeating phrases back to him that he had
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: only ever said to himself, under his breath while alone.
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: She said he eventually stopped hunting overnight entirely, and never
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: gave her a full explanation why, only that he had
• 1:13:51
  Speaker 1: decided some places simply were not meant to be slept
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: in by people, no matter how good the hunting was.
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: That conversation with Faye changed something in how I think
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 1: about my own work now, too. Hospice care already teaches
• 1:14:05
  Speaker 1: you that the line between what we understand... And what
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: we do not is a lot thinner than most people
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 1: are comfortable admitting. And after that weekend, I find myself
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: a little more patient with the handful of patients over
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: the years who have described strange presences or voices near
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 1: the end of their own lives. Things I might have
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: once quietly attributed only to medication or the natural confusion
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 1: that can come with a body shutting down. I still
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: do my job the same careful evidence-based way I always have.
• 1:14:36
  Speaker 1: But I hold a little more room now for the
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: possibility that some of what people describe in those final
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 1: quiet hours might not be entirely explainable, in the same
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: way that what happened to me along that creek has
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 1: never once been explainable to my own satisfaction. Hearing that
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: from someone I trust completely, someone with absolutely nothing to
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 1: gain by making up a story like that, has done
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: more to settle my own experience in my mind than
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 1: almost anything else since that weekend. Story six. I am
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 1: Grady Sizemore, and I fly a crop duster during harvest
• 1:15:12
  Speaker 1: season for a handful of farms across western North Carolina.
• 1:15:17
  Speaker 1: In most years, I rent a room from a farmer
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: whose airstrip I use for the season. But one particularly
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: busy year, the room fell through at the last minute,
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: and I ended up camping near the edge of his hayfield,
• 1:15:30
  Speaker 1: close to the tree line for about a week, while
• 1:15:32
  Speaker 1: I worked the harvest roots for him and two neighboring properties.
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: Flying low and slow over farmland at dawn is its
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 1: own kind of strange beauty, watching mists sit in the
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 1: low spots of a field before the sun burns it off.
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 1: In most seasons, that is the strangest thing I ever
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: have to deal with out there. That particular week gave
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: me something else entirely to think about. The farmer had
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: warned me, almost as a joke at the time, I thought,
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: not to leave feed or trash out near my tent
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: because something had been getting into his henhouse for weeks.
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: tearing the wire fencing apart with what looked more like
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 1: bare hands than any kind of claw, and he had
• 1:16:12
  Speaker 1: lost more birds that season than any year he could remember.
• 1:16:16
  Speaker 1: I laughed it off at the time, packed everything away
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: tight each evening exactly like he asked, and for the
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 1: first few nights nothing happened at all, beyond the usual
• 1:16:26
  Speaker 1: sounds of insects and wind moving low through the hay.
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: and I genuinely started to think the farmer had just
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: had an unlucky run with a fox or a bobcat
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: and was letting his imagination run a little wild, the
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: way people out this far sometimes do. On the third night, though,
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: I did wake briefly to what I thought at the
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: time was distant thunder, a low rolling sound that never
• 1:16:49
  Speaker 1: resolved into an actual storm. No lightning, no rain, no
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: wind picking up the way it does before real weather
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: rolls through, just that same deep rolling sound two or
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: three more times over the course of maybe an hour
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 1: before it stopped entirely, and the sky stayed perfectly clear
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: the whole rest of the night. I did not connect
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: that sound to anything at the time. I went right
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: back to sleep afterward without much thought, chalking it up
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: to some far-off storm system that never actually reached us.
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 1: But I have wondered since whether that rolling sound was
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: thunder at all, or something else entirely announcing itself from
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: a distance before it ever got close enough to climb
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 1: onto my plane two nights later. On the fourth night,
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: the night before everything came to a head, I woke
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: briefly to the sound of the hay rustling in a long,
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: slow line moving through the field. Not the scattered rustle
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 1: wind makes, but a single, continuous path of movement. Like
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 1: something heavy was walking a straight line through the crop
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 1: from the tree line toward the edge of my camp,
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: before stopping abruptly maybe 50 feet short of my tent.
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 1: I sat up and listened hard for several minutes, heart pounding,
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 1: but nothing else happened. No footsteps, no breathing, nothing. And
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 1: eventually I convinced myself it had been a deer or
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 1: a stray dog and forced myself back to sleep, a
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: decision I look back on now as either lucky or foolish,
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: depending on the night I happened to catch. On the
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: fifth night I woke, because my plane, parked a couple
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: hundred feet away out on the grass strip, had its
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: wing flaps creaking under weight, like something had actually climbed
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: up onto the wing itself. And my first thought, still
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 1: half asleep, was pure panic about damage to a plane
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: that costs more than most people's houses. I lay frozen
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 1: listening to metal groan under a shifting weight for almost
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: a full minute before whatever it was jumped down. and
• 1:18:50
  Speaker 1: the thud that followed shook the ground hard enough that
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: I felt it through my sleeping pad from 200 feet
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 1: away which told me more about its size than I
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: wanted to know then it walked slow and heavy straight
• 1:19:02
  Speaker 1: toward my tent and stopped close enough that I could
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: hear it breathing through what sounded like a mouth held
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 1: slightly open Wet and rhythmic and far too loud for
• 1:19:13
  Speaker 1: how still the rest of the night had gone. I
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 1: did not move. I have flown through storms low enough
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: to watch individual trees whip past my windshield inches from
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: the wingtip. Moments where a wrong decision means I do
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: not walk away from the plane. And I have genuinely
• 1:19:29
  Speaker 1: never been more still in my entire life than I
• 1:19:32
  Speaker 1: was inside that tent listening to that breathing. It circled
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 1: twice around me. Slow and on the second pass. It
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 1: dragged something, maybe a claw or a long finger, deliberately
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: along the outside of my tent fabric. One single scrape
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: from end to end, curious almost, like it was testing
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 1: what exactly I was made of before deciding anything further
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: about what to do with me. I felt the fabric
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 1: dimple slightly under the pressure of that drag, close enough
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: to my shoulder that I could have reached out and
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: touched whatever was on the other side. and I have
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: never in my life kept my hands as still as
• 1:20:08
  Speaker 1: I kept them in that moment. It paused at the
• 1:20:11
  Speaker 1: foot of my tent for a long stretch after that,
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 1: long enough that I started counting my own heartbeats just
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 1: to have something to focus on besides the fear. And
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: then it made a low sound, almost curious, almost questioning,
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 1: like it was asking something of the tent itself rather
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: than of me, before finally turning and walking off toward
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 1: the henhouse. A few minutes later, I heard the wire
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: fencing scream under sudden pressure, metal twisting and snapping in
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: a way that sounded almost effortless, followed by frantic clucking
• 1:20:43
  Speaker 1: that cut off far too fast and far too completely.
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: In the morning, three hens were gone entirely, and the
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: coop wire looked peeled back by hand, rather than chewed
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: or clawed through the way an animal normally would, curled
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 1: outward in a shape that almost looked deliberate, almost decorative.
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: and how neatly it had been done. The farmer just
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 1: sighed heavy when I told him what happened, and said
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 1: that this happened some years and not others, and he
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: never explained it any further than that, and something in
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: the flat, tired way he said it, told me he
• 1:21:17
  Speaker 1: had made his peace with not knowing a long, long
• 1:21:20
  Speaker 1: time before I ever showed up on his land. The
• 1:21:23
  Speaker 1: same way a person makes peace with weather they cannot control.
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 1: Two days after that, flying my early morning route low
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 1: over the far end of the property before the wind
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 1: picked up, I looked down at a stretch of tree
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 1: line bordering the neighbor's land, a section I normally do
• 1:21:40
  Speaker 1: not pay much attention to since it is not part
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: of any field I spray, and I saw something standing
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: perfectly still at the very edge of the trees, upright,
• 1:21:50
  Speaker 1: watching the plane pass overhead without any of the startled
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 1: reaction wildlife normally shows. when a low-flying aircraft goes over.
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 1: I only had it in view for two or three
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 1: seconds before the angle of my bank turn took it
• 1:22:03
  Speaker 1: out of sight. But in that short window, I could
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 1: tell it was tall, easily taller than the fence posts
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: running along that same tree line. And it did not flinch,
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: did not run, did not do anything except track the
• 1:22:16
  Speaker 1: plane's path with what I can only describe as patient interest,
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 1: the same unhurried attention a person gives something moving slowly
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 1: across a large open space. That sighting lasted only a
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 1: couple seconds, but I have replayed it in my mind
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 1: more times than I could count since, especially the detail
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 1: that stuck with me most, which was the shape of
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: its arms, hanging noticeably longer than they should relative to
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 1: the rest of its body, past where a knee would
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: be on a person standing that same height and swaying
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: very slightly with a kind of loose, deliberate motion that
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: did not match the stillness of the rest of it.
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: I did not tell the farmer about that particular sighting,
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 1: mostly because I was not sure how to explain seeing
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: something like that clearly from the air, without sounding like
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 1: I had finally lost my nerve out there entirely. But
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 1: I have avoided flying that low over that particular stretch
• 1:23:11
  Speaker 1: of treeline ever since, adding a few extra seconds to
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 1: my route every single pass, rather than risk seeing it
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 1: standing there a second time. I finished out the harvest
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 1: season sleeping in my truck with the doors locked for
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: the rest of that week instead of my tent. And
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: I've asked that farmer every year since whether the room
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: is available before I agree to fly his fields. And
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 1: every year I make sure he says yes before I
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: pack a single bag. A couple of seasons later, over beers,
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: after the harvest wrapped, the farmer finally opened up a
• 1:23:42
  Speaker 1: little more than he ever had before and told me
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: his own father used to say that whatever moved through
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 1: those tree lines every so often had been there long
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 1: before the farm was ever cleared, going back to when
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 1: the whole valley was still standing timber, and that the
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 1: smart thing to do was never to act surprised by it,
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 1: never to shoot at it, and never to talk about
• 1:24:02
  Speaker 1: it more than you had to because his father always
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: believed that giving it too much attention, good or bad,
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 1: was the surest way to get it to come back
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 1: around more often than it otherwise would. He also mentioned,
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: almost as an aside while we finished our beers, that
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 1: his father had once told him, The hens themselves seemed
• 1:24:20
  Speaker 1: to know something the rest of the farm did not,
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: going quiet and clustering tight in the far corner of
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 1: the coop on certain nights weeks before anything ever actually happened,
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 1: as though they could sense it coming from much further
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: off than any of us ever could. I've started watching
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: those hens myself on quiet evenings since he told me that,
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: and more than once I have gone and checked my
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: own tent setup a little more carefully on nights when
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: they seemed unusually restless. for no reason I could otherwise explain.
• 1:24:51
  Speaker 1: I do not know if I believe that theory in
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: any real sense, but I have not brought the subject
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 1: up with him again since, and neither has he, and
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 1: the hens have not had a bad season since that year,
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 1: for whatever that is worth. I mentioned a stripped-down version
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: of that week once to another crop-duster pilot I met
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: at an agricultural conference the following winter, a woman who
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: flies roots over in eastern Tennessee, and rather than laughing
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 1: it off the way I half expected, she told me
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 1: almost the same story back, a night camping near her
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: own rented airstrip years earlier where something had left deep
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 1: dents in her plane's fuselage overnight, dents the mechanic could
• 1:25:31
  Speaker 1: never fully explain given the shape and spacing of them,
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: too wide and too evenly spaced to match any tool
• 1:25:38
  Speaker 1: or animal claw he had ever seen in 20 years
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 1: of aircraft repair work. We ended up exchanging numbers that
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 1: day at the conference. mostly to talk shop about flying routes,
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 1: but every so often, one of us will send the
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: other a short message after a strange night out on
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 1: a job. Nothing detailed, usually just a line like rough
• 1:25:59
  Speaker 1: one last night or, you know, the feeling, and the
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 1: other will send back something short and understanding in return.
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: No explanation needed between us anymore. It is a strange
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 1: kind of friendship to have built around something neither of
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 1: us fully understands, but It has made those nights easier
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 1: to carry, knowing there is at least one other person
• 1:26:20
  Speaker 1: out there who does not need the whole story explained
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: to believe me. I have also started paying much closer
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 1: attention during my actual flying routes to how the crops
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 1: themselves behave along certain tree lines, noticing patterns of lodging
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 1: and unusual growth that I never used to think twice
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 1: about before that season, faint curved paths through otherwise healthy
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: fields that do not match any equipment track or weather
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 1: damage I can identify from the air. I do not
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: report these things to the farmers I work for unless
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 1: they ask directly, mostly because I do not have any
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: useful explanation to offer them, but I mark those coordinates
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: privately on my own flight log now, the same way
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: I mark mechanical issues or fuel stops. Just another detail
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: of the job I did not expect to be tracking
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: when I first started flying these routes years ago. Hearing
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: that from someone hundreds of miles away, working in an
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: entirely different stretch of mountains, made the whole thing feel
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 1: a lot less like a strange one-time event and a
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 1: lot more like something that simply exists out here in
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 1: these hills, tolerated quietly by anyone who spends enough time
• 1:27:31
  Speaker 1: working close to the tree line after dark. I still
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: fly that same farmer's fields every harvest season, and I
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: still camp out there when the room falls through, though
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: these days I keep a set of motion-activated lights rigged
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: around my tent, and I never under any circumstances leave
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: the plane parked more than a hundred feet from where
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 1: I sleep, close enough that I would hear anything climbing
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: onto it, long before it ever got the chance to
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 1: reach the ground quietly. It is not a perfect system,
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 1: and I do not pretend it would stop anything determined
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 1: enough to try again, but it lets me sleep a
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: little easier out there than I otherwise would. Story 7
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: My name is Tobias Renfro, and I work as a
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: late-night radio DJ for a small station out of Virginia
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: that runs a Halloween-season remote broadcast every year from a
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 1: different spooky location, mostly as a ratings gimmick to boost
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: listener numbers during the slow season before the holidays. Most years,
• 1:28:32
  Speaker 1: this means driving out to an old cemetery or a
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: supposedly haunted bed and breakfast and doing a few hours
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: of atmospheric radio with some local ghost story guest on
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: the line. Harmless stuff that gets people to call in
• 1:28:45
  Speaker 1: with their own stories while I play spooky music between segments.
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: That particular year, the station manager decided we should go bigger,
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: broadcasting live from a primitive campsite deep in a stretch
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: of national forest known locally for old ghost stories that
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 1: predate most of the families still living nearby, stories about
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 1: lights moving through the trees and voices calling hikers by name.
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 1: I did a little digging before the trip, mostly to
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: have background material ready for the broadcast itself, and found
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: a handful of old local newspaper mentions going back decades
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: of hunters reporting strange calls in that same section of forest,
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 1: never anything conclusive. always written in that careful small town
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: way that stops just short of taking a real position
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 1: on what happened, along with one unresolved missing persons case
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: from the early 1980s involving a hiker who was never
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 1: found despite a search that covered the area for almost
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: two weeks. I remember thinking that material would make for
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 1: great on-air content, a nice spooky hook for the broadcast,
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 1: without really letting myself sit with what it might actually
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: mean that the case had never been closed. I drove
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 1: out alone the day before to set up camp and
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 1: test our remote equipment ahead of the actual live broadcast
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 1: since I usually handle the technical side of these events
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 1: myself and like to have everything running clean before the
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 1: crew shows up and starts asking why something is not working.
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: The first few hours of testing went completely fine and
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: I even joked into my recorder at one point about
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 1: how quiet and ordinary everything felt for a supposedly haunted
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 1: stretch of woods, laughing a little at how our whole
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: broadcast concept was probably going to fall flat if nothing
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 1: even remotely spooky happened out there. I regret that joke
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: more than almost anything I've ever said on air, recorded
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 1: or not. Around midnight, my equipment started picking up interference,
• 1:30:48
  Speaker 1: a low, static hum that would not clear no matter
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 1: how I adjusted the gain or swapped out cables. And
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: underneath that static, Faint but unmistakable, once I isolated the frequency,
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: I started hearing what sounded like a voice speaking backward,
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 1: slow and deliberate, as if something was talking directly into
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: my recording gear from somewhere close by in the dark.
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: I have worked with audio equipment my entire career, and
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 1: I know the difference between actual interference and something that
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: behaves like a signal with intent behind it. And this
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: behaved like the second thing. responding in small ways to
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: the adjustments I made, almost like it was toying with
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: my settings right alongside me. I checked every cable and
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: every setting twice and found absolutely nothing wrong on my end,
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: which meant whatever was causing that sound had to be
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: coming from somewhere outside the equipment entirely, physically close enough
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: to be picked up by a directional microphone I had
• 1:31:50
  Speaker 1: set up near my gear case. I stepped out of
• 1:31:53
  Speaker 1: my tent with a flashlight, more out of stubborn professional
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: habit than any real bravery, telling myself I just needed
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: to rule out a technical explanation, before I let my
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: imagination run further, and swept the beam slowly across the
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: tree line, and for one full second the light caught
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 1: something crouched low near my equipment case, pale and hunched over,
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: its head turned completely away from me, like it refused
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: to be seen head on no matter what. its shoulders
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: rising and falling slow with what I can only describe
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: as patient breathing. I froze in place and it did
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: not run. It simply stood up, slowly, unfolding to a
• 1:32:34
  Speaker 1: height well past anything a person could reach, still turned
• 1:32:38
  Speaker 1: away from me the entire time, and walked backward into
• 1:32:41
  Speaker 1: the tree line, one deliberate step at a time, never
• 1:32:44
  Speaker 1: once turning to face me, until the dark finally swallowed
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: it whole. I stood there long after it was gone,
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: flashlight beams shaking across empty trees, before I finally made
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: myself move back toward my tent. I did not sleep
• 1:33:00
  Speaker 1: at all after that. Sitting up cross-legged in the middle
• 1:33:04
  Speaker 1: of my tent with every light I had brought turned
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 1: on around me, running battery packs dry one after another
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: just to keep the space fully lit until dawn, jumping
• 1:33:13
  Speaker 1: at every settling branch and every gust of wind moving
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: through the canopy overhead. I remember doing the math at
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: one point, calculating how many hours were left until sunrise
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: the same nervous way. I imagine people count contractions, and
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 1: every single one of those hours felt like it lasted
• 1:33:31
  Speaker 1: twice as long as it should have. When I checked
• 1:33:34
  Speaker 1: my recording equipment afterward, the directional microphone had captured nearly
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 1: ten minutes of that backward speech pattern layered underneath my
• 1:33:43
  Speaker 1: own recorded laughter from earlier in the evening. My joke
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 1: about nothing spooky happening playing back underneath a voice I
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 1: still cannot bring myself to listen to in full. I
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: did send a short clip of it, maybe 15 seconds,
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: to a sound engineer friend of mine back at the
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: station a few days later without telling him where it
• 1:34:03
  Speaker 1: came from. Just asking if he could clean up the
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: audio and tell me what he thought was causing the
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: backward pattern layered under the static. He called me back
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: within the hour, sounding a lot less casual than when
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: I had sent the file, and told me that when
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: he reversed the clip to hear it forward, the voice
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: was repeating a short phrase over and over, clear as
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: anything once played the right direction, and he asked me
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 1: twice as seriously whether I was messing with him, because
• 1:34:32
  Speaker 1: the phrase it kept repeating was my own full name
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: first and last, spoken in a voice that was not
• 1:34:38
  Speaker 1: mine and... did not belong to anyone on our crew,
• 1:34:44
  Speaker 1: recorded hours before any of them had even left the
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 1: station to drive out and join me. I deleted my
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 1: copy of that file not long after, and I asked
• 1:34:54
  Speaker 1: him to delete his as well, which he did without
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 1: much argument. Once I explained the full context of where
• 1:35:01
  Speaker 1: the recording had actually come from, and neither of us
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: has brought it up directly since, though I know from
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 1: the way he sometimes goes quiet, whenever that stretch of
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: forest comes up in conversation, that he thinks about it
• 1:35:14
  Speaker 1: just as often as I do. I called the station
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 1: manager that same night and told him we needed to
• 1:35:19
  Speaker 1: change locations for the broadcast. And when he asked why
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: over a bad connection, I just told him the site
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: had integrity issues with our equipment, which again is not
• 1:35:29
  Speaker 1: exactly a lie, just not the whole truth either, and
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 1: easier to explain at one in the morning than the
• 1:35:35
  Speaker 1: actual reason. We broadcast from a state park visitor lot
• 1:35:39
  Speaker 1: the following year instead. And our ratings were fine either way,
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 1: better even. And I have never gone back to that
• 1:35:45
  Speaker 1: particular stretch of forest since. Not even once. Not even
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: in the middle of the day with a full crew
• 1:35:51
  Speaker 1: standing next to me. And I have quietly made sure
• 1:35:54
  Speaker 1: every remote broadcast location since then gets checked against local
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: ghost story maps well in advance. No matter how much
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 1: extra work that adds to my week. when the crew
• 1:36:05
  Speaker 1: did eventually show up that evening before I had a
• 1:36:07
  Speaker 1: chance to fully explain why we were relocating. Our regular
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 1: ghost story guest for the segment, an older gentleman who
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 1: has lived in that county his whole life and usually
• 1:36:17
  Speaker 1: treats these broadcasts as harmless fun, took one look at
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: the coordinates I had marked on the map for our
• 1:36:23
  Speaker 1: original site and went noticeably quiet, asking me directly, without
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 1: any of his usual joking tone, whether I had heard
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: anything strange out there overnight. When I described the backward
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: voice and the shape near my equipment, he did not
• 1:36:38
  Speaker 1: seem surprised in the slightest, only tired in a way
• 1:36:43
  Speaker 1: that told me this was not the first time he
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: had heard a story like mine connected to that particular
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: stretch of forest. And he suggested firmly that we never
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: schedule a broadcast anywhere near those coordinates again, advice the
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: station has followed without exception ever since. Going back through
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: the still photographs I had taken earlier that same evening,
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 1: for our promotional materials, ordinary shots of the campsite, and
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 1: the equipment setup meant for our social media posts. I
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: found that every single frame taken after roughly 11.30 had
• 1:37:18
  Speaker 1: a strange, narrow streak of light running vertically through it.
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: Not lens flare and not a sensor error, according to
• 1:37:25
  Speaker 1: the two other people I showed them to. a thin,
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: bright line that appeared in the exact same position relative
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: to the tree line in each frame despite the camera
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: having been moved and repositioned several times between shots, as
• 1:37:39
  Speaker 1: though whatever was causing it existed at a fixed point
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 1: in space, rather than being any kind of flaw in
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: my equipment. I still work in radio, and I still
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 1: help produce the Halloween remote broadcasts every year, but I
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 1: have taken on a much more active role in vetting
• 1:37:56
  Speaker 1: locations ahead of time. cross-referencing old newspaper archives, and talking
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 1: to longtime residents before I ever commit the station to
• 1:38:05
  Speaker 1: a site, treating that research the same way I would
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: treat checking weather conditions before a broadcast, a basic professional
• 1:38:12
  Speaker 1: precaution rather than any optional extra step. Some of the
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: crew still teases me a little about how seriously I
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 1: take that part of the job now, but none of
• 1:38:22
  Speaker 1: them were standing outside that tent with me when the
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 1: light caught whatever it was crouched by my equipment case
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 1: and I have decided I am fine letting them tease
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: me if it means none of us ever has a
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: night like that one again. I did eventually let our
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: regular ghost story guest listen to a short clip of
• 1:38:40
  Speaker 1: that backward recording, the one my engineer friend had cleaned up,
• 1:38:45
  Speaker 1: without telling him in advance what it said when reversed.
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 1: and he sat with it for a long moment afterward
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 1: before telling me, in a much more serious tone than
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 1: I had ever heard him use on air, that the
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 1: pattern of speech reminded him strongly of something his own
• 1:38:59
  Speaker 1: grandmother used to describe from stories passed down in her family.
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 1: An old belief that certain things in these mountains learn
• 1:39:07
  Speaker 1: a person's name specifically, so they can call it back
• 1:39:10
  Speaker 1: to them later. And that once something has spoken your
• 1:39:14
  Speaker 1: name in that particular way, the old belief held that
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: you were better off never returning to wherever you first
• 1:39:20
  Speaker 1: heard it, no matter how much time had passed. I
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: have not gone back to that stretch of forest since
• 1:39:27
  Speaker 1: he told me that, and at this point, I do
• 1:39:30
  Speaker 1: not think I ever will, broadcast ratings or not. These days,
• 1:39:35
  Speaker 1: whenever a new intern or younger staff member joins the
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 1: station excited about doing a scary, remote broadcast idea of
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 1: their own, I make a point of sitting them down
• 1:39:45
  Speaker 1: first and walking them through exactly what happened that night.
• 1:39:49
  Speaker 1: Not to scare them off the idea entirely, but because
• 1:39:52
  Speaker 1: I believe strongly now that anyone heading out into these
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: mountains for work, whatever the reason, deserves to know that
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 1: some of the old stories locals tell are not just
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: good radio content. They are warnings passed down for reasons
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: that go back a lot further than any of our
• 1:40:08
  Speaker 1: broadcast schedules ever will. Story 8. My name is Corey
• 1:40:14
  Speaker 1: Wexler and I work as a locksmith. which means my
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: phone rings at every hour of the night for people
• 1:40:19
  Speaker 1: locked out of their own homes, their cars, their businesses,
• 1:40:22
  Speaker 1: and out here in the mountains, that often means driving
• 1:40:25
  Speaker 1: well past town limits to reach somebody stranded far from
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 1: any other help. One call came in close to 11
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 1: at night from a family whose truck key had snapped
• 1:40:35
  Speaker 1: off clean inside the ignition at their hunting cabin. A
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: good hour and a half drive up into the hills
• 1:40:41
  Speaker 1: on roads that get worse the higher you climb. By
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 1: the time I finally cut them a new key and
• 1:40:47
  Speaker 1: got their truck running again, it was almost two in
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 1: the morning, and the drive back down felt too risky
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 1: with how tired I was. So I pulled my van
• 1:40:56
  Speaker 1: into a wide gravel clearing I remembered passing on the
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 1: way up and decided to sleep a few hours before
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 1: finishing the trip home. I've worked emergency calls in strange
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 1: places plenty of times, and normally the hardest part of
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 1: the job is just staying awake on the drive, not
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 1: anything that happens once I actually stop. That night was
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 1: different from the first ten minutes I had the engine off.
• 1:41:20
  Speaker 1: I heard something testing the driver's side door of my van,
• 1:41:23
  Speaker 1: slow at first, a single soft click like a hand
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 1: checking whether the door was actually locked. And then when
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: it found that it was, the sound changed into something
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: far more precise, a series of small, careful clicks working
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: their way along the door seam, exactly where a person
• 1:41:39
  Speaker 1: trained in the trade would probe for weakness in a
• 1:41:42
  Speaker 1: lock mechanism. I do this work for a living, and
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 1: I know the sound of someone who understands how a
• 1:41:50
  Speaker 1: lock resists pressure. And I lay perfectly still in the
• 1:41:54
  Speaker 1: back of my van, listening to something outside methodically test
• 1:41:58
  Speaker 1: every seam of that door, the same careful way I
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 1: would if I were the one trying to get in
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 1: rather than out. It moved to the passenger door next,
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: then the rear doors, working its way completely around the
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: vehicle with the patient thoroughness of a professional mechanic. rather
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 1: than the frantic scratching of any animal, and at the
• 1:42:18
  Speaker 1: very end it returned to the driver's door and simply
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 1: held there, motionless, breathing slow and even against the glass,
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: as if giving up on picking the mechanism and deciding
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: instead to wait for me to open it myself. I
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 1: did not open it. I sat with my back against
• 1:42:37
  Speaker 1: the far wall of the van, gripping my own set
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 1: of picks, like they might actually help me if it
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: came to that, and after what felt like an hour,
• 1:42:46
  Speaker 1: it finally moved off, unhurried, the gravel barely crunching under
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 1: whatever weight it carried. In the morning, I found faint
• 1:42:54
  Speaker 1: scratches clustered exactly at every seam and keyhole on that van,
• 1:42:58
  Speaker 1: tool marks so precise and so evenly spaced that a
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 1: fellow locksmith I later showed photos to, without telling him
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 1: the full story, asked me flat out what kind of
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 1: pickset left marks like that. because he did not recognize
• 1:43:14
  Speaker 1: the pattern from anything on the market. I told him
• 1:43:17
  Speaker 1: I did not know either, and I have kept that
• 1:43:20
  Speaker 1: story to myself since, mostly because nobody in my trade
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 1: wants to hear that something out there in the mountains
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 1: might understand locks better than we do. Story 9. My
• 1:43:32
  Speaker 1: name is Denise Coulter, and I work as a home
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 1: inspector across several counties in the mountains, which means I
• 1:43:39
  Speaker 1: spend my days climbing into crawl spaces and attics that
• 1:43:43
  Speaker 1: most homeowners have never seen themselves, looking for the kind
• 1:43:46
  Speaker 1: of structural problems that do not show up until it
• 1:43:49
  Speaker 1: is too late to fix them cheaply. A job out
• 1:43:53
  Speaker 1: on a remote property ran long because the seller had
• 1:43:55
  Speaker 1: failed to disclose serious foundation issues that took hours to
• 1:43:59
  Speaker 1: fully document with photos and measurements. And by the time
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 1: I finished, it was already dark, with a two-hour drive
• 1:44:05
  Speaker 1: home ahead of me on roads. I did not trust
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: myself to drive safely while exhausted. The current owner, an
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: elderly man moving out to be closer to family, offered
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: to let me park in his driveway and sleep in
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: my car until morning, and I took him up on
• 1:44:21
  Speaker 1: it gratefully. I fell asleep quickly, more tired than I
• 1:44:25
  Speaker 1: had realized, and woke sometime after midnight to a slow,
• 1:44:30
  Speaker 1: rhythmic tapping against my car window. Three taps, a pause,
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: then three taps again, over and over, in a pattern
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: too deliberate to be a branch or an insect. I
• 1:44:43
  Speaker 1: have spent my entire career learning to read the small
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: signs a house gives off before something bigger goes wrong.
• 1:44:50
  Speaker 1: A certain creak, a certain smell, a certain give underfoot,
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 1: and something in my gut told me immediately that this
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 1: tapping was not random either. I looked toward the window
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: slowly and saw fingers pressed flat against the glass, far
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 1: too long for any human hand. each one bending at
• 1:45:09
  Speaker 1: a joint positioned wrong, tapping out that same three-beat pattern
• 1:45:13
  Speaker 1: with unsettling precision. I did not scream. I have handled
• 1:45:19
  Speaker 1: enough tense situations on the job, confronting angry sellers over
• 1:45:23
  Speaker 1: bad news, standing my ground in unstable structures, that some
• 1:45:28
  Speaker 1: part of me simply locked down instead of panicking, and
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: I stayed frozen, watching those fingers tap that same rhythm
• 1:45:36
  Speaker 1: for what felt like several minutes. before they finally curled
• 1:45:40
  Speaker 1: back away from the glass and disappeared from view. I
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: heard something circle the car slowly after that, and at
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: one point felt the entire vehicle rock gently on its suspension,
• 1:45:52
  Speaker 1: like something had leaned its weight against the frame to
• 1:45:55
  Speaker 1: test how sturdy it was. The exact same kind of
• 1:45:58
  Speaker 1: structural assessment I perform myself every single day for a living,
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 1: except in reverse. By the time the sky started lightning,
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: I had not slept another minute, and when I finally
• 1:46:08
  Speaker 1: worked up the nerve to step out and look, I
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 1: found a spiderweb pattern of hairline cracks radiating out from
• 1:46:15
  Speaker 1: a single point on my windshield, cracks with no visible
• 1:46:19
  Speaker 1: impact mark at their center, as though something had simply
• 1:46:22
  Speaker 1: pressed until the glass gave slightly without ever striking it.
• 1:46:27
  Speaker 1: The elderly homeowner, when I mentioned it over coffee before
• 1:46:29
  Speaker 1: I left, just nodded slowly and told me his late
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 1: wife used to hear the same tapping some nights. and
• 1:46:36
  Speaker 1: would never let him go outside to check, saying only
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 1: that some things in these hills like to know exactly
• 1:46:43
  Speaker 1: how strong a thing is built before they decide whether
• 1:46:46
  Speaker 1: it is worth the trouble of breaking it. Story 10.
• 1:46:51
  Speaker 1: My name is Travis Hollis, and I'm an ultramarathon runner,
• 1:46:55
  Speaker 1: which means I spend an enormous amount of my free
• 1:46:58
  Speaker 1: time training on remote mountain trails. For races that can
• 1:47:01
  Speaker 1: run 50 or 100 miles through terrain, most people would
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 1: never willingly Training for a race that fall, I set
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 1: out on a long overnight run meant to simulate race conditions,
• 1:47:13
  Speaker 1: planning to cover close to 40 miles through a stretch
• 1:47:16
  Speaker 1: of back country trail and camp partway through to rest
• 1:47:20
  Speaker 1: before finishing the second half at dawn. Everything went according
• 1:47:24
  Speaker 1: to plan for most of the run. And I made
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 1: camp in a small clearing just off the trail as
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 1: the light started fading, satisfied with my pace and looking
• 1:47:32
  Speaker 1: forward to a short rest before pushing through the night.
• 1:47:36
  Speaker 1: Somewhere around midnight, half asleep in my lightweight bivvy sack,
• 1:47:41
  Speaker 1: I became aware of footsteps on the trail nearby, moving
• 1:47:44
  Speaker 1: at a pace that matched my own training rhythm almost exactly,
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 1: the same cadence I use for long, steady climbs, foot
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 1: strike after foot strike, falling in an unnervingly precise pattern
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 1: that no casual hiker would ever naturally hold for more
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: than a few strides. I lay still, listening as the
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 1: footsteps passed close to my camp, and then, instead of
• 1:48:08
  Speaker 1: continuing on down the trail, stopped and reversed, coming back
• 1:48:12
  Speaker 1: the same way at that same matched pace, back and
• 1:48:16
  Speaker 1: forth several times, like something was pacing up the exact
• 1:48:19
  Speaker 1: same pace. distance of my camp over and over, measuring
• 1:48:23
  Speaker 1: it against its own stride. I've run through genuine physical
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 1: pain more times than I can count, the kind of
• 1:48:30
  Speaker 1: exhaustion that convinces your brain to quit long before your
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 1: body actually has to. And I know the difference between
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 1: imagined threats born of fatigue and something that is actually
• 1:48:41
  Speaker 1: physically present, and this was the second kind. I finally
• 1:48:45
  Speaker 1: worked up the nerve to unzip my bivy just enough
• 1:48:48
  Speaker 1: to look, and in the thin beam of my headlamp,
• 1:48:52
  Speaker 1: I caught a shape standing at the exact edge of
• 1:48:54
  Speaker 1: the trail, tall and impossibly narrow through the torso, its
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 1: legs bent at an angle that no runner's knee could
• 1:49:01
  Speaker 1: ever survive, and it was breathing hard, the same controlled,
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 1: rhythmic breathing patterns serious runners used to manage pace over
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 1: long distances, as though it had been running that trail
• 1:49:15
  Speaker 1: as long and as seriously as I had. It did
• 1:49:18
  Speaker 1: not approach. It simply stood there, matching my own breathing
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 1: rate for a long, terrible minute, before turning and moving
• 1:49:27
  Speaker 1: off down the trail at a full sprint, faster than
• 1:49:30
  Speaker 1: any person could manage on that terrain, gone in seconds.
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 1: I did not sleep again, and I finished the rest
• 1:49:37
  Speaker 1: of my simulated race that night running harder and faster
• 1:49:41
  Speaker 1: than I had in any actual competition, adrenaline carrying me
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 1: the last 20 miles. In a personal best time, I
• 1:49:49
  Speaker 1: have never told my coach the real reason behind. I
• 1:49:53
  Speaker 1: still train on remote trails regularly, but I have never
• 1:49:57
  Speaker 1: again scheduled an overnight stop on that particular stretch, no
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 1: matter how well it fits the elevation profile I am
• 1:50:05
  Speaker 1: trying to simulate. Story 11. My name is Lonnie Barrick,
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 1: and I restore antique furniture for a living, which means
• 1:50:13
  Speaker 1: I spend a lot of time driving out to remote
• 1:50:16
  Speaker 1: estate sales deep in the mountains, where old families have
• 1:50:19
  Speaker 1: lived on the same land for generations, looking for pieces
• 1:50:23
  Speaker 1: worth the trouble of hauling back to my workshop. One
• 1:50:27
  Speaker 1: particular estate, a farmhouse that had belonged to the same
• 1:50:30
  Speaker 1: family since before anyone could remember exactly when, had a
• 1:50:35
  Speaker 1: full attic of furniture the family wanted cleared out before
• 1:50:38
  Speaker 1: the property sold, and the drive out and back in
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 1: one day was not realistic given how much I needed
• 1:50:44
  Speaker 1: to load. So I arranged with the family to camp
• 1:50:47
  Speaker 1: in their yard overnight and finished loading at first light.
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: The pieces themselves were remarkable. Heavy old wardrobes and a
• 1:50:55
  Speaker 1: beautiful cheval mirror with its original beveled glass, still mostly intact.
• 1:51:00
  Speaker 1: and I spent the evening carefully wrapping and securing everything
• 1:51:03
  Speaker 1: in my trailer before settling in for the night. I
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: want to say the evening felt normal right up until
• 1:51:09
  Speaker 1: it did not. Somewhere close to one in the morning,
• 1:51:12
  Speaker 1: when I woke to the sound of my trailer door
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: rattling gently on its latch. Not the wind, which had
• 1:51:19
  Speaker 1: gone completely still by then, but a slow, testing pressure,
• 1:51:24
  Speaker 1: applied and released, applied and released. Exactly the kind of
• 1:51:29
  Speaker 1: pressure someone uses when checking whether a lock will hold,
• 1:51:33
  Speaker 1: before deciding how much force to actually use. I looked
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: out toward the trailer, and in the moonlight I saw
• 1:51:41
  Speaker 1: a tall, thin shape standing directly in front of that
• 1:51:44
  Speaker 1: mirror I had loaded, its reflection completely absent from the glass,
• 1:51:49
  Speaker 1: despite standing close enough that any actual person would have
• 1:51:52
  Speaker 1: shown clearly, and it seemed to be studying its own
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: missing reflection with what I can only describe as quiet,
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: impatient curiosity, tilting its head one way and then the other,
• 1:52:03
  Speaker 1: as though testing whether the mirror would eventually show it
• 1:52:06
  Speaker 1: something it was looking for. I did not move, and
• 1:52:09
  Speaker 1: I did not make a sound, because some old instinct
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 1: told me that whatever was standing there had not yet
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 1: noticed me watching, and I intended to keep it that
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 1: way for as long as possible. After a long while,
• 1:52:21
  Speaker 1: it turned from the mirror and walked, unhurried, toward my tent,
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 1: stopping just outside the thin fabric walls. and I heard
• 1:52:28
  Speaker 1: it exhale slow once, close enough that the tent fabric
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 1: actually shivered slightly from the force of it, before it
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 1: finally moved off toward the tree line at the edge
• 1:52:39
  Speaker 1: of the property and did not return. In the morning,
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 1: I asked the family carefully whether anything strange had ever
• 1:52:46
  Speaker 1: happened around that mirror, and the oldest daughter, without much hesitation,
• 1:52:51
  Speaker 1: told me her grandmother always kept it covered with a sheet,
• 1:52:54
  Speaker 1: except when she was actually using and had never once
• 1:52:57
  Speaker 1: explained why, beyond saying some things in a house like
• 1:53:00
  Speaker 1: to look at themselves, and some things look at you instead.
• 1:53:05
  Speaker 1: I sold that mirror separately from the rest of the lot,
• 1:53:08
  Speaker 1: to a buyer three states away, and I have not
• 1:53:11
  Speaker 1: thought about where it ended up since, mostly on purpose.
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 1: Story 12. My name is Brent Ashworth, and I drive
• 1:53:18
  Speaker 1: a tow truck for a small operation that covers a
• 1:53:21
  Speaker 1: wide stretch of mountain highway, which means most of my
• 1:53:25
  Speaker 1: calls come in at odd hours from people broken down
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 1: in places well outside cell coverage, waiting anywhere from 20
• 1:53:32
  Speaker 1: minutes to two hours for me to reach them, depending
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 1: on how far back into the hills their trouble happens
• 1:53:38
  Speaker 1: to be. One call came in close to midnight from
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 1: a driver whose transmission had failed completely on a steep
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 1: grade a good 40 minutes from the nearest town. By
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 1: the time I got him hooked up and towed back
• 1:53:51
  Speaker 1: to a shop that could actually handle the repair... It
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 1: was well past two in the morning, and I still
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 1: had paperwork and an empty return trip ahead of me
• 1:54:00
  Speaker 1: before I could call it a night. Rather than make
• 1:54:03
  Speaker 1: that drive back exhausted, I pulled my truck into a
• 1:54:06
  Speaker 1: wide pull-off near where I had done the tow, planning
• 1:54:10
  Speaker 1: to nap an hour before finishing my shift properly. I
• 1:54:13
  Speaker 1: woke to the sound of my winch cable playing out
• 1:54:16
  Speaker 1: slowly on its own, the motor engaging in short bursts
• 1:54:20
  Speaker 1: exactly the way it does when I operate it manually
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 1: from the control panel. except my hands were nowhere near
• 1:54:26
  Speaker 1: that panel, and the cable was extending steadily out into
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 1: the dark toward the tree line under its own power.
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 1: I sat up fast and grabbed my flashlight, and in
• 1:54:36
  Speaker 1: the beam I saw the hook end of that cable
• 1:54:39
  Speaker 1: resting on the ground and standing over it. Examining the
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 1: hook with the same careful attention, a mechanic gives an
• 1:54:46
  Speaker 1: unfamiliar part with something tall and heavily built, running its
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 1: fingers along the metal like it was trying to understand
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 1: exactly what the hook was designed to do. I hit
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 1: the cutoff switch on my control panel immediately, and the
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: winch motor died mid-pull, and the shape went completely still,
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 1: lifting its head slowly toward my truck like it had
• 1:55:08
  Speaker 1: only just now registered that someone was watching. I did
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: not wait to see what it did next. I threw
• 1:55:15
  Speaker 1: the truck into gear and pulled out onto the highway,
• 1:55:18
  Speaker 1: faster than I probably should have on that grade. watching
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 1: in my mirror as it simply stood there in the pull-off, unmoving,
• 1:55:27
  Speaker 1: growing smaller behind me until the curve of the road
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 1: finally took it out of sight. When I got back
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 1: to the shop and checked my equipment the next day,
• 1:55:37
  Speaker 1: the winch cable had several feet of new scoring along
• 1:55:40
  Speaker 1: its length, deep parallel grooves like something had gripped it
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: hard enough to leave permanent marks in the steel. And
• 1:55:48
  Speaker 1: my boss, when I showed him without much explanation... just
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 1: told me flatly that pull-off has had equipment issues reported
• 1:55:55
  Speaker 1: by other drivers for years, and that company policy now
• 1:55:58
  Speaker 1: is simply not to nap there anymore. No explanation needed
• 1:56:02
  Speaker 1: beyond that on the paperwork. That is all 12 encounters
• 1:56:06
  Speaker 1: for tonight, and if any part of these stories made
• 1:56:09
  Speaker 1: the hair on your arm stand up the way it
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 1: should have, that is exactly the reaction this channel is
• 1:56:15
  Speaker 1: built for. Every single person you heard from tonight went
• 1:56:19
  Speaker 1: back to their normal life afterward. Back to driving routes,
• 1:56:23
  Speaker 1: shooting weddings, running camera lines, flying fields, hosting broadcasts, caring
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 1: for patients, cutting keys, inspecting homes, training for races, restoring furniture,
• 1:56:37
  Speaker 1: and towing cars off dark mountain roads. But every one
• 1:56:40
  Speaker 1: of them changed something small about how they moved through
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: these mountains after dark. And maybe that is the most
• 1:56:47
  Speaker 1: honest takeaway from any of this. That the people who
• 1:56:50
  Speaker 1: spend the most time actually out here, working, living, passing through,
• 1:56:55
  Speaker 1: are the ones who take these stories the most seriously,
• 1:56:58
  Speaker 1: not the least. So, before you close this out, hit
• 1:57:03
  Speaker 1: that like button. Drop a comment telling us which encounter
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 1: you personally would never want to live through. And subscribe
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 1: with notifications turned on so you never miss the next
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 1: batch of true encounters coming out of these mountains. Because
• 1:57:16
  Speaker 1: there are a lot more of these stories waiting. And
• 1:57:19
  Speaker 1: some of them are worse than anything you just heard tonight.