Latest / INSPIRE STORY / The Stairs In The Woods

Transcript

The Stairs In The Woods · INSPIRE STORY

• 0:18
  Speaker 1: Oh baby, old baby, I'm excited.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: I'm pumped. I'm so ready for it.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: Is this is a good first episode to start with.
• 0:25
  I'm glad you suggested this. Yeah.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like it's it's foundational to a ton of internet horror.
• 0:32
  And also like it's it's just a cool story to analyze, right,
• 0:35
  like the because it's known for one specific thing, but
• 0:39
  the story does a lot more than just that one
• 0:41
  specific thing as well.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we're here, we can get into it. But Windy,
• 0:46
  why don't you go ahead and tell the audience what
• 0:48
  we're even starting with here?
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: By starting with you mean the story or like this podcast.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Either or I mean, I'm just excited all around.
• 0:57
  Speaker 2: I'm pumped.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: Everybody amped up.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: Welcome to Creepcat. I'm so excited for it. Me, me
• 1:03
  and my man here. Can I call you by your
• 1:05
  like real human name or Meat Canyon?
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, cool, I can call me by real name, Nathaniel.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, yeah Hunter here. Hunter and I have been
• 1:16
  talking about this podcast for like over a year now. Yes,
• 1:20
  it's it's been like in the back of my head constantly,
• 1:23
  like as soon as I get settled, we got to
• 1:24
  do this, And now I'm settled and now we're doing
• 1:27
  this and I'm so oh, I'm so ready, I'm so I.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: Am too, I am too. It's given me a nice,
• 1:32
  a nice way to just it's an excuse just to
• 1:35
  consume stuff. That's like it's almost like listening to nice
• 1:39
  albums or something, right like consuming these horror stories. It's
• 1:42
  always like, oh yeah, I heard that one's good, but
• 1:44
  you never really take time to do it. So this
• 1:46
  is just like my little excuse to always have time.
• 1:49
  Now I get to make time to do it. And
• 1:51
  that's and that to me is exciting. And today it
• 1:54
  you know, this is a story that I've heard of,
• 1:56
  but I've never like dived into. And I was really
• 1:59
  happy that I did, very very excited about today's first
• 2:02
  first subject of our first episode.
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: The first episode of creep Cast. Ah'm so ready. It's
• 2:09
  so weird that it's tangible now that it was something
• 2:12
  like we've talked about for everything else. Here it's real,
• 2:15
  you can touch it. It feels good, so excited.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: It's settling people because today we're talking about an extremely
• 2:23
  scary uh like not even old, but in terms of Internet,
• 2:27
  I would say it's it's it has some age on
• 2:29
  it now almost a decade old now in terms of Internet,
• 2:33
  that's prehistoric.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a way, it's actually over a decade. It's twenty ten,
• 2:37
  so it's been twenty ten.
• 2:39
  Speaker 1: My sighting here says twenty fifteen. First, the first.
• 2:43
  Speaker 2: Part came out in twenty tenies.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: Okay and icee, I see okay, Which for people wondering
• 2:50
  what do we talk what are they talking about today?
• 2:52
  What are we diving into, We're talking about the search
• 2:55
  and rescue series.
• 2:57
  Speaker 2: Yes, from our slash No Sleep a classic, a classic
• 3:01
  that I spawned a lot of like modern internet horror.
• 3:04
  But some people don't even realize, Like sure they they're
• 3:07
  probably familiar with the story, but they don't realize it
• 3:09
  created a ton of stuff that's really popular now.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that you can you can tell
• 3:15
  in how not only is it presented, but also it's like, uh,
• 3:21
  it's it's almost like a not I don't want to
• 3:24
  say juvenile, but it's written in a way that feels
• 3:27
  like a Reddit post almost, or it feels like very personal,
• 3:30
  which I think translates really well into like a lot
• 3:33
  of the narratives that happen with like even video formats
• 3:36
  of like found footage stuff or like even some like
• 3:38
  Mandela catalog type stuff too like it. It has like
• 3:41
  that personality that those little characteristics that I love, and
• 3:44
  it's fun seeing it here. Before really this thing was
• 3:47
  like conceptualized before other things. Sure, you had your you know,
• 3:51
  some found footage stuff or some other kind of like
• 3:53
  at like little little aspects of horror. But this seeing
• 3:57
  in text form like this and seeing the response even
• 3:59
  in the post is really fun. Like it's such as
• 4:02
  it was such an enjoyable find. So it's cool. And
• 4:06
  it's a series of stories broken up into seven parts,
• 4:10
  seven delicious parts or eight parts.
• 4:13
  Speaker 2: It's it's eight parts counting these, it's eight parts finale,
• 4:16
  and then there's been some other stuff that the creator
• 4:19
  has done later on as like some final updates in
• 4:21
  the past few years. We'll get into all that when
• 4:24
  we get to it. But yeah, the main bulk of
• 4:26
  the story is eight parts.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: Which I guess do you want to give a rundown of,
• 4:31
  like what is the general synopsis of the story.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: Absolutely so. The original post was made to r Slash
• 4:38
  and No Sleep, simply titled I'm a Search and Rescue
• 4:41
  officer for the US FOURST Service. I have some stories
• 4:44
  to tell and from there, it is exactly what the
• 4:46
  title describes. It is someone who has worked in National
• 4:49
  parks describing some of the weird things that they've come
• 4:52
  across in those parks. As the series goes on, the
• 4:54
  person who is documenting these stories begins to speak to
• 4:58
  other Park Service rangers about stories that they've had, and
• 5:02
  then that kind of compounds into a greater conspiracy happening
• 5:05
  at this park, and the story like naturally unfolds from
• 5:08
  that starting point. But basically, the eight parts of the
• 5:10
  series are a recounting of strange things that go bump
• 5:13
  in the night in the United States National parks, which
• 5:17
  is a great format for like a horror story to
• 5:21
  this degree because not only is there are already so
• 5:25
  many like supernatural stories or conspiratorial stories around the National
• 5:29
  Park Service, but it's these, you know, for the most part,
• 5:34
  undocumented gaps of forest in the United States that we're
• 5:41
  supposed to like have a good handle on, know what
• 5:43
  goes on out there, but there's still so many, like
• 5:46
  in the real world, there's so many stories of people
• 5:48
  going missing, unexplainable disappearances and deaths and what have you.
• 5:53
  And the story I'm a search and rescue officer really
• 5:56
  capitalizes on a lot of that fear people seem to
• 5:59
  have around National parks in the Park Service as a whole.
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: To me, this is the number one manifesto of why
• 6:05
  you should never work in the US forces. That read
• 6:09
  to me because as we'll see in this document too,
• 6:11
  it's like not only is it coming from her perspective,
• 6:14
  but it's also coming from her like second storytelling of
• 6:17
  her being like you know, oh, I asked like a
• 6:20
  colleague of mine about stuff they've seen, or like her
• 6:24
  like basically recounting of other people who also work in
• 6:27
  the Forest Service, which also makes this kind of I
• 6:29
  wouldn't say even being working in a US Force service
• 6:32
  is it a mundane job? But when I first saw it,
• 6:35
  I was like, yeah, you think of like the stereotypical
• 6:37
  like almost like park ranger or something like that. Yeah, right,
• 6:40
  But it takes on like weird almost like government kind
• 6:43
  of conspiracy stuff or like things that are that are hidden,
• 6:46
  And there's a lot of like little fun entries that
• 6:49
  are that I think are just really fun that play
• 6:52
  into it being such a just kind of like a
• 6:54
  real person reciting real events, which is fun, which is
• 6:59
  the stuff of her, like seeing crazy monsters and being like,
• 7:02
  I probably shouldn't talk about this or I'd lose my job,
• 7:05
  and it's like fuck the job, just like run away,
• 7:11
  go to safety, you know what I mean.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: It's it reaches midway through where you're like, bro, just
• 7:16
  just Quinn, what are you doing?
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: Get the hell out of here, which which we were
• 7:21
  talking about this earlier, and it was funny because I
• 7:23
  was like I was I was kind of telling you
• 7:24
  about some of the parts that I thought were like
• 7:26
  really amusing and stuff, and then you're right, You're like, yeah,
• 7:29
  it starts off really plausible, and it gets like just
• 7:31
  nose dives in the sep. But at the same time
• 7:34
  that's fun. I really enjoy that.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, it's fun because like the way the story
• 7:39
  starts is you're in this position of like, oh, this
• 7:44
  could really happen. There's a bunch of people I know
• 7:47
  who like just heard the part one and thinks that
• 7:49
  The Stairs in the Woods are like a real story.
• 7:52
  Like this started like as a completely nonfiction thing, and
• 7:57
  that's kind of the tone it maintains in the beginning
• 7:59
  of like could really happen, And then once you're lured
• 8:02
  into that setting, then it becomes there's something going on here.
• 8:06
  Stuff keeps happening that's more frequent now and like I said,
• 8:09
  like I made the joke to you, it kind of
• 8:11
  gets an SEP foundation territory there, but it really does
• 8:14
  almost hit the degree of like we're part of agents
• 8:17
  who are meant to keep secret. There's things that are
• 8:19
  covering there. Yeah, and it makes me really excited to
• 8:23
  where the series might go in the future. But we'll
• 8:26
  talk about that stuff when we get to the end
• 8:27
  of this.
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I was gonna say, if anything, let's start diving
• 8:31
  into the actual first part here, which, like we said,
• 8:34
  which like we said, they're like almost it's like a
• 8:36
  collection of just like memories, but it's just like tiny,
• 8:40
  extremely condensed short stories of just retelling events, which starts
• 8:45
  off with the Barry picking children, which is which is
• 8:49
  an interesting one to start with. But then what I
• 8:52
  like to which also before we get into this too,
• 8:54
  is that there's some in the in the beginning at
• 8:56
  least where she'll tell you some like very creepy, weird
• 8:59
  stuff and then she'll kind of mix it in with
• 9:01
  some stuff like the guy who is hiding up in
• 9:04
  a tree because of a moose and it's just like
• 9:06
  little funny moments where it's like ha ha, yeah, we
• 9:08
  always talk about that because that's a funny time. Which
• 9:11
  is the blending of like horror and like kind of comical,
• 9:15
  like weird experiences you would have at your job. Give
• 9:18
  this a lot more authenticity, which I think adds to
• 9:21
  what you were saying about, like the staircase thing about
• 9:23
  people thinking that it's real, the staircases are actually out there.
• 9:27
  And I think that these little human moments really tie
• 9:30
  in all of these these things in just these little
• 9:32
  text blurbs.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and also like I don't know if I can't
• 9:37
  remember if this is set in the story or I've
• 9:39
  been in contact with the author for those watching, and
• 9:43
  she's very cool, she's very nice. But I can't remember
• 9:46
  if he was in conversation with her or an interview
• 9:49
  I saw of her, or if it's said in the story.
• 9:50
  But the character of this story is a man named Russell.
• 9:54
  He is the search and rescue officer that the fictional
• 9:57
  character of the story's focused around. It's typically if we
• 10:01
  say she were referring to the author, if we say
• 10:02
  he will refer to the character. Because the author didn't suffer.
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: As no, no, no, no.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: But Russell is having a hard go of it in
• 10:11
  the story.
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: So yes, very hard go of it. And there for
• 10:15
  a bit too. After like researching about the author as well,
• 10:19
  I almost just put her as the archetype in the
• 10:23
  story as well. Like I almost not to say that
• 10:25
  he did, not to say that Russell doesn't come up,
• 10:26
  but I started just reading myself almost as if it's
• 10:29
  her personal entries or something. I just if I got
• 10:33
  that level of immersion from it. So yeah, if so,
• 10:36
  if I slip up, that's the reason why.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, And also so we can go ahead and start
• 10:41
  in the beginning of it. So yeah, as you mentioned,
• 10:44
  it begins with the barry picking story right again. This
• 10:46
  is just from the premise of a search and rescue
• 10:48
  officer describing some of the cases he's been on. And
• 10:50
  it starts with these two kids who are out berry
• 10:52
  picking and then one of them or both of them
• 10:56
  go missing. They find one of the kids who says
• 10:58
  that they're sibling was taken away by the quote bear man,
• 11:03
  which the sister already coming out of the gates swinging
• 11:06
  like first story.
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: I'll how you know you're getting into some fun crypto
• 11:10
  territory where it's quote animal and the followed with man.
• 11:15
  It could be it could be any kind of animal, giraffe, man,
• 11:18
  and you're like a fuck immediately, it's very nice and yeah,
• 11:23
  it is the sister who's found quickly, and yeah, I
• 11:25
  love that that, she says, the rescues find her, and
• 11:27
  she's just yeah, he was taken by the bear man,
• 11:32
  so creepy, which she describes it as being a tall,
• 11:35
  hairy type man with a weird face resembling a bear, which,
• 11:40
  in my mind, I love these kind of things when
• 11:43
  it's a child saying it, because to me, I almost
• 11:45
  read that as like because also to also clarify too,
• 11:50
  she or the the the author or the russell never
• 11:55
  tells you which forced it is. He's just like, I'm
• 11:57
  gonna lose my job, you know, I don't want to
• 11:59
  say where it's at. So to me, I thought Appalachian mountains,
• 12:03
  and I just assumed like inbred hills have eyes kind
• 12:06
  of you know, wrong turn hillbilly. When I read the
• 12:09
  description or whenever she says the description of tall, hairy
• 12:12
  and weird face, this is horrifying, and especially call like
• 12:17
  an inbred redneck guy a bear man, to me was frightening,
• 12:20
  which I'm sure it's an actual bear Man, but for
• 12:23
  when I was reading it, I was like, oh God, so.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: Like I was reading this and the whole way through
• 12:29
  I was thinking like Appalachia up until she described a
• 12:32
  moose and I was like, oh, sure, okay, yep, all right, fair,
• 12:35
  but yeah, I had the same thought like bear Man,
• 12:37
  that's clearly West Virginia.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: Question, Yeah, like kind of like West Virginia. And it's
• 12:42
  kind of cool. I think this is the one too
• 12:44
  where there's a couple search and rescue type beats in
• 12:47
  these stories, but they talk about like the grid system
• 12:49
  of like going out and trying to find people, and
• 12:51
  you like really like the search and rescue people. It
• 12:55
  isn't like they were like, oh, Okay, well he's gone.
• 12:56
  It's like no, she or the author really goes into
• 12:59
  describing like how extensive the search is. It puts a
• 13:02
  lot of like humanity into the character and then only
• 13:05
  to find no traces of the boy at all, and
• 13:08
  it's still just gone, no trace of them or an abduction,
• 13:12
  no struggle, it's just like simply disappeared, which is an
• 13:16
  extremely haunting way to start it, but also in a
• 13:19
  weird way too. These blurbs, which I don't know if
• 13:22
  the author meant to do this, but a lot of
• 13:23
  these blurbs tie in with like the way that they
• 13:27
  present information. You're like, oh shit, I wonder if you know,
• 13:29
  did the kid go up the stairs? Later on? Yeah,
• 13:32
  like how do they leave? You know, it's tie in
• 13:34
  are really fun, but you know, starting off with bear Man,
• 13:38
  it's pretty solid.
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: What's also like cool about it? How you mentioned stuff
• 13:42
  ties in. There's stuff that you don't realize ties in
• 13:44
  until later on in it, like, for example, in this
• 13:49
  next section and still the part one, right after the
• 13:52
  author's done describing how the bear Man like that whole story,
• 13:57
  it then moves in and starts talking about how sometimes
• 14:01
  they'll be out on search expeditions and the canines will
• 14:05
  try to get them to go up a straight up cliff,
• 14:08
  like they'll be walking and it's like the dog doesn't
• 14:10
  process or the scent they're following doesn't register with the
• 14:14
  cliff face in front of them. Is related to the
• 14:17
  greater stuff going on your dripbed information in a way
• 14:20
  that you don't really realize you are until the story
• 14:22
  starts to come together. And that's a really cool move.
• 14:24
  From an author to pull.
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: Off, yeah, or even just setting up the idea of
• 14:28
  like introducing how they do search patterns, because I know
• 14:32
  with the canines, the canines leading to Cliff's kind of
• 14:35
  section of this first part, whenever the dogs are leading
• 14:41
  them to these like insanely steep and sheer cliffs. The
• 14:45
  entire thing that baffles the person is that it just
• 14:47
  defies every aspect of logic of like how somebody could
• 14:50
  have gotten there, or how you know this person, like
• 14:53
  how these bodies are so like the missing persons are
• 14:57
  found in just completely different locations like miles and miles
• 15:00
  and miles away, which leads into some just like fun
• 15:03
  thought experimenting of like you know what what exactly is
• 15:08
  going on and how these stories kind of tie into
• 15:10
  each other. I think it does a really good job
• 15:12
  about like leading the reader into being, you know, coming
• 15:15
  up with their own kind of conclusions or theories or something,
• 15:18
  which I think especially for for like SEP or like
• 15:23
  these horror like letting letting our reader's imagination run wild
• 15:26
  and also try to come up with conclusions that are
• 15:28
  fun and not annoying is the most satisfying thing because
• 15:33
  when if you if you ever are in a situation
• 15:35
  where you were reading something you're like, oh God, that's stupid.
• 15:37
  You know that you're in the wrong, but whenever you're
• 15:39
  like being like, oh shit, I bet this is like
• 15:42
  I don't know, weird dimensional traveling things or something. Without
• 15:45
  getting into like layers of like sasquatch teleportation, you know
• 15:48
  that you're you know, you're doing something pretty fun. Yeah,
• 15:54
  the there's a I mean, the other one that comes
• 15:56
  to mind just in terms of part one is all
• 16:00
  also the section with the young woman in the tree
• 16:02
  where it's uh, the young like a young woman climbs
• 16:05
  a tree to get a better view while hiking with
• 16:08
  her uh with I think mother and grandpa, and she
• 16:11
  like never comes down from the tree, which is.
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: That that's a kind of terrifying one too, because it's
• 16:17
  like exactly because they they mentioned that they lose sight
• 16:20
  of her as she goes up into the branches, so
• 16:23
  they're like, oh, she's still up there. They just never
• 16:25
  see her again, just never see her, doesn't come down.
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the whole time too, I was just thinking like, Oh,
• 16:30
  something's gonna happen and she's gonna like plummet down and
• 16:32
  they're gonna see her die. But that's like nowhere near
• 16:36
  as horrifying is climbing up extremely tall tree to get
• 16:38
  a better view and just simply never coming down. And
• 16:42
  I know that whenever I was watching this too. I
• 16:43
  don't know why, but like when I or when I
• 16:46
  was reading this, I just started getting imagery in my
• 16:49
  head of like just like a really thick, fogged forest
• 16:54
  kind of thing, like I don't know if I don't
• 16:55
  know if your mind's eye kind of started like picturing
• 16:59
  the forest too, but just thinking about this like almost
• 17:02
  hauntingly like deceptive labyrinth of a forest was Yeah, just
• 17:08
  kind of kept what flood like kept flooding my mind
• 17:11
  and just the idea of climbing up because then I started,
• 17:14
  you start like picturing yourself climbing up it. And to me,
• 17:17
  when I was reading it, I almost thought like that
• 17:19
  you'd never see the top of the tree either. So
• 17:21
  she's just like continuously climbing and climbing and climbing, being
• 17:25
  like where the where the fun?
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: The story? The story like later touches on like dimensional
• 17:30
  shifts like what you're talking about, and it's it's more
• 17:32
  of you know what we were saying, that you're given
• 17:35
  stuff that later turns out to be part of a
• 17:38
  bigger picture. So yeah, maybe this woman just kept climbing forever. Right,
• 17:42
  there's no flue. Uh. There's a couple other stuff in
• 17:45
  part one that I think is worth pointing out. One
• 17:47
  thing I really like that the story does is it
• 17:49
  doesn't just hang on the supernatural elements a lot. At
• 17:53
  the time. Russell will give us stories about unrelated to
• 17:58
  supernatural events, Like in Part one he mentions the story
• 18:01
  of there was one time that a nine year old
• 18:04
  girl fell down an embankment and died, and he talks
• 18:07
  about how awful that was going and retrieving her body.
• 18:10
  That's not supernatural, it's just a tragedy that took place.
• 18:13
  So stuff coming in like that really helps to keep
• 18:16
  the story feeling valid as it continues. In kind of
• 18:19
  the more subtle parts of it.
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: Very macabre, very like it kind of it made me
• 18:25
  think of like other almost like Japanese folk tales or
• 18:28
  something like that, especially with the following of that, you know,
• 18:31
  they the the accident of the girl. It leads the mother,
• 18:35
  her mother to commit suicide after that incident, and it's
• 18:38
  just like horribly bleak and tragic. But that within itself
• 18:42
  is just like its own horror of Like you're right,
• 18:44
  it isn't leaning on the supernatural, but in a way
• 18:47
  it does feel like some kind of like I don't know,
• 18:51
  just the dark the dark force of circumstances or like
• 18:57
  what's the word I'm looking for, like accidents, just like
• 18:59
  the dark force of like what like a tragic slip
• 19:03
  can cause and stuff and the kind of like horrors
• 19:06
  of that. So and I do think that also grounds
• 19:09
  a bit more in reality too, because I can only
• 19:12
  imagine how many people which coincidentally, after reading this too,
• 19:16
  I have a friend who works in the like kind
• 19:18
  of a forestry or as a forester and up in
• 19:23
  the Pacific Northwest, and they say that they find it's
• 19:26
  insane what people find, like a lot of dead bodies
• 19:30
  from just like random hikers and stuff, because especially like
• 19:33
  if somebody's going missing, they usually don't send cops out
• 19:37
  into the woods. They just wouldn't know how to you know, travel,
• 19:40
  They have to send foresters, state park officials all that stuff.
• 19:43
  But I mean the amount of stuff that you find
• 19:45
  out there, including that or like just crazy shit like
• 19:48
  bags of like piss and feces, which it's like, dude,
• 19:50
  you're out in the forest. You can just piss and
• 19:52
  shit on the ground if you wanted to, but they're
• 19:54
  in bags, and like weird sex colts and all kinds
• 19:56
  of weird stuff happens out in this forest. And I
• 19:59
  think that like little instances like this grounded a bit
• 20:02
  more in reality to where if you ever did look
• 20:04
  that up, you're like, oh God, this like this, this
• 20:06
  kind of stuff does happen, which I think just gives
• 20:09
  it a sense of authenticity that's fun. And then you
• 20:11
  lead yourself into stuff like you know, the faceless man
• 20:15
  yeah part, and you're like, Okay, well, I hope that's
• 20:19
  not fucking real. My Horde, which a climber during a
• 20:23
  solo trip encounters a man with no face wearing a
• 20:26
  parka and ski pants on a mountain, which I don't
• 20:28
  know why, but I kind of I giggled whenever I
• 20:30
  heard about the parka and the ski pants. I don't
• 20:32
  know why. It's just a big fluffy It's like a
• 20:34
  Michelin Man outfit, you know what I mean. But he's
• 20:38
  disturbed by the encounter and he rushes down the mountain,
• 20:40
  resulting in a fall in a broken leg. While trapped,
• 20:43
  he hears the faceless man muffled screams throughout the night.
• 20:46
  The climber eventually is rescued, but is deeply traumatized by
• 20:49
  the experience, which I always love. A lot of these
• 20:53
  stories end with like people that have escaped the forest,
• 20:57
  and it gives the forest like almost like a it's
• 20:59
  like it's own entity, you know what I mean. So
• 21:02
  many people are like they escape and they'll probably never
• 21:04
  return kind of thing. Very opposite of Ted the caver.
• 21:07
  You know, these people are probably a little smarter than Ted,
• 21:10
  is what I would say.
• 21:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like something else about the way the faceless
• 21:15
  Man's described to It's like he's climbing up a cliff
• 21:18
  and then he comes across someone with no face. Obviously terrifying, right.
• 21:22
  He tries to get down the cliff, falls, breaks his leg,
• 21:25
  can't go any further, and then all night he hears
• 21:28
  the quote muffled screams. It's like this thing has a
• 21:32
  face behind its skin, and you can hear it trying
• 21:36
  to scream through it, and it kept trying to climb
• 21:39
  down to get to him, like.
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: Bro, yeah, climbing down. Yeah, that is that. It's such
• 21:46
  a true statement though, like skin stretched over someone's face.
• 21:51
  It almost makes him like it's like he's he's screaming
• 21:54
  in the night, but it's like it's it took on
• 21:57
  like a perception of like is he like suffocating? Is
• 21:59
  he just like in this forever hell torture? You know?
• 22:03
  And then but then the maliciousness of him trying to
• 22:06
  always find him, find the man with a broken leg.
• 22:09
  So freaky, so freaky, out of which then I guess,
• 22:13
  let me see, we have a couple more from part one,
• 22:15
  and of course it ends with the staircase one, but
• 22:17
  I want to save that one for last, which is
• 22:18
  there's another another search for a young woman who's separated
• 22:22
  from her hiking group and she's found under a log
• 22:25
  in a state of shock. She repeatedly mentions being followed
• 22:28
  by a big man with black eyes. As rescuers near
• 22:31
  their base, she becomes increasingly agitated, claiming the man is
• 22:35
  making faces and wants to take her and the rescuers.
• 22:38
  The woman also references a scar on a rescuer's neck
• 22:42
  that she shouldn't have known about. So weird, like almost
• 22:46
  like just a weird paranormal almost like telepathic thing, almost
• 22:51
  like fortune or not fortune, but like mind reader or something,
• 22:54
  lot of weird mental stuff there.
• 22:56
  Speaker 2: It's like the creature she's imagining was just like, oh, well,
• 23:00
  this woman's clearly insane until she says the thing says
• 23:04
  she the monster says he doesn't like the scar on
• 23:07
  the back of your neck, which was a covered up
• 23:09
  scar that the woman couldn't have seen. So it gives
• 23:11
  like validity to this. The scariest part, and this is
• 23:14
  something else I really like about, like all eight parts
• 23:16
  of the story, The scariest part about this insert to
• 23:21
  me is when Randall is described Russell, not Randall, Yeah, Russell,
• 23:26
  That's what I said. When Russell is describing the noise
• 23:31
  that he's hearing because he doesn't see anything while this
• 23:33
  woman's talking about he just hears something. And the way
• 23:36
  it's worded is he says, we finally got her to
• 23:41
  keep moving, but we started hearing these weird noises coming
• 23:44
  from all around us. It was almost like coughing, but
• 23:48
  more rhythmic, rhythmic and deeper. It was almost insect like,
• 23:53
  like what I love that an insect coughing noise that.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: Was written in super yeah inset coughing, which I wonder.
• 24:03
  I wonder if the parallel there was supposed to be
• 24:05
  with the black Eyes to make you think that maybe
• 24:07
  it was like kind of an insect kind of monster.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: Oh, I didn't even you know what I mean to
• 24:12
  black eyes.
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: Almost like a giant grasshopper kind of thing. Because it's
• 24:17
  funny that you it's funny say that too, because when
• 24:19
  I read that too, I was like, oh fuck, because
• 24:21
  I was perceiving it as like, oh, okay, we're getting
• 24:23
  into like alien territory almost, is what I was thinking. Yeah,
• 24:26
  maybe big black Eyes. Sure, you know, all the tropes
• 24:29
  are there for that. But whenever I heard the rhythmic coughing,
• 24:32
  which while I was reading it, I don't know if
• 24:33
  you did too, But whenever I read this kind of stuff,
• 24:36
  I almost you almost try to like mimic the kind
• 24:39
  of cough to kind of like yeah, And I was
• 24:42
  doing it until I heard insect, and I was like,
• 24:43
  what the fuck? And I like kept and I'm like, oh, well, no,
• 24:45
  wonder I can't think of it is because like an
• 24:47
  insect coughing. So I sat there and I kept doing
• 24:50
  like these weird like grass like trying to do like
• 24:52
  a grasshopper cop or something. I couldn't I couldn't think
• 24:57
  of what it would sound like. And I was gonna
• 25:00
  ask you what you thought that that what an insect
• 25:02
  cough would like.
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: I would think, uh, I get well, if you did
• 25:09
  it on the podcast, like I said, well too, it's
• 25:11
  probably like a correctly hold on. I guess I don't know.
• 25:23
  To me in my head, it sounds kind of like
• 25:27
  to me in my head, it sounds like a cicada almost,
• 25:31
  like oh yeah, like the little like gutt a little
• 25:34
  noises they make.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but there's like a million of them. Yeah.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, So it's like, this is the cicada man who's
• 25:41
  out here in the woods, like following.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: Cicada man sounds. That's that's more haunting than I got
• 25:47
  I got.
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: To it's like that thing.
• 25:48
  Speaker 1: I would not want to see a cicada man over
• 25:51
  the bear man.
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: No, no, nothing.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I wouldn't like that. I wouldn't. I wouldn't like that.
• 25:57
  Speaker 2: You know what I'm talking about right in the movie
• 25:59
  Man in Black? Yeah, Ok, yes, yes, yes, that's of
• 26:03
  course that's what I mean.
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: I would like that. Still, last, but certainly not least
• 26:11
  to end the part one is the staircase in the Wilderness,
• 26:14
  which is this. I think this is pretty much have we.
• 26:17
  As we've said before, this is like the quintessential reason
• 26:21
  that I think these stories are so popular is the
• 26:23
  staircase in the wilderness kind of I think that's kind
• 26:26
  of what grab people, which for good reason. I think
• 26:28
  that there's it's like a perfect sandbox situation of you
• 26:31
  present an idea and you're able to like easily add
• 26:34
  on to it, as are other people, which makes it
• 26:36
  super fun just to kind of like see that community grow.
• 26:40
  But essentially, the SAR officers UH frequently encounter unexplained staircases
• 26:45
  in remote forest areas. These staircases resemble typical house stairs
• 26:49
  but are found isolated in the wilderness. Officers are advised
• 26:52
  not to investigate or approach them or or approach these staircases,
• 26:55
  which this section was relatively small. It was like they
• 27:01
  had just kind of seen some Russell just kind of
• 27:04
  seen some staircases. But you can the tone of it
• 27:08
  completely shifts when his superiors are like, yeah, don't even
• 27:11
  go near him, don't even like look at him, just
• 27:14
  like if you see one, just don't even go near
• 27:16
  it at all, which I really really enjoy because it's
• 27:23
  it sets up perfectly the idea of like, well, you're
• 27:25
  definitely gonna have to explore it at one time. Yeah,
• 27:27
  you know what I mean, it's just planting that seed.
• 27:30
  It's it's the childish nature of a character being told, well,
• 27:32
  don't go do that, and you're like, what the fuck, dude,
• 27:34
  It's that's a nice staircase.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: It plays beautiful well. I think one of the reasons
• 27:39
  that got so popular is like a lot of the
• 27:43
  horror mentioned in part one is I mean, there's some
• 27:46
  subtle stuff, you know, but most of it's more over right,
• 27:49
  it's like there's a faceless man on top of the mountain,
• 27:52
  or there's like the cicada man or whatever, like in
• 27:54
  the trees, like scary stuff, but you know, it's it's horror.
• 27:58
  But when I first read that like little paragraph about oh,
• 28:02
  every now and then, when you're thirty four forty miles
• 28:05
  away from civilization, you'll find a staircase in the middle
• 28:08
  of the woods, it immediately gave me a chill because
• 28:12
  it's like, I think a lot of people can almost
• 28:15
  remember what she's talking about here, like, oh, dude, yeah,
• 28:19
  I remember being the kid and like running around the
• 28:21
  woods of Appalachia. I remember coming across a door one time,
• 28:25
  there's just a door out in the middle of the woods,
• 28:27
  like no explosion, just standing there. Oh yeah, Like it's
• 28:31
  it speaks to a memory, a dream you've had, almost
• 28:36
  because outwardly, there's nothing explicitly violent about it. It's just
• 28:40
  staircase middle of the woods. And that combined with the
• 28:43
  fact that you will run if you're in the woods
• 28:45
  long enough, you will run into staircases because there was
• 28:48
  either you know, old trailers that were parks there that
• 28:50
  they left the stairs behind when they pulled the trailers out.
• 28:53
  Maybe there was an old like firewatch tower that they
• 28:56
  tore down, but part of the stairs are still there.
• 28:58
  It's like there's parts of it that are so familiar
• 29:02
  to people even though it's such an alien setting. And
• 29:05
  I think that's the reason the stairs in the woods
• 29:07
  is what so many people took away from this part.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean, like just kind of what you're
• 29:11
  saying about finding the door in the woods. To me,
• 29:13
  it's like even on like a cattle farm, like I
• 29:16
  used to We used to live on this, uh like
• 29:18
  seven hundred acre cattle farm. My mom rented a house
• 29:22
  behind this guy like the farmer's house or the cattle
• 29:25
  farmer's house, and even back there some of his family
• 29:28
  used to like live back way back in the pastures
• 29:32
  and stuff. So now there's just all of these like
• 29:34
  dilapidated homes even just like old homes that just you know,
• 29:38
  people just don't live in anymore, but they're broken down,
• 29:40
  there's holes in them and stuff. And as even as
• 29:44
  a kid, to me, my whole thing was every time
• 29:46
  was there it you were saying that, like these violent outcomes,
• 29:51
  I always just thought about, like why did they leave?
• 29:53
  You know, who broke in here and did this? Like
• 29:55
  you kind of think about the worst, you know. See,
• 29:57
  I don't think anybody ever thinks naturally like, oh, people
• 29:59
  just don't live here anymore. To me, it always it
• 30:01
  sets in motion, like you know, what happened here, and
• 30:04
  even going inside and seeing stuff and like seeing remnants
• 30:07
  of someone's past life is just something that is so uneasy.
• 30:11
  But that immediately led me to believe because when I
• 30:14
  saw that when I heard the staircases the first time,
• 30:16
  which my perception changed as the as these entries went on,
• 30:19
  but the first time I kind of pictured what you
• 30:21
  were saying, where yeah, it's it's a staircase, but there's
• 30:24
  like maybe other remnants of the house around them.
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: M hm.
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: Is how I first perceived it, which it's like it
• 30:30
  is just a standing staircase, but maybe there's like a
• 30:32
  door laying down by it, maybe maybe like bits of
• 30:36
  rebbel or something. But still that would be odd that
• 30:38
  the staircase was there. But that's because of just these
• 30:41
  core memories. That's where my mind went. But obviously as
• 30:44
  the stories go on, it becomes a lot I mean,
• 30:47
  like I think that picture becomes a lot more clear.
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: One common thing too, and one of the reasons the
• 30:52
  stairs is a bit more like a bit more ominous
• 30:55
  than other stuff. Like where I'm from an Appalachia like
• 30:58
  East Tennessee, Kentucky are you'll be back in the mountains
• 31:01
  sometimes and you'll just come across old chimneys. Because what
• 31:05
  would happen is these old houses built in the eighteen hundreds,
• 31:08
  the chimney would be made out of like stone, stone
• 31:11
  and like hard materials, but the rest of the house
• 31:13
  was like wood. So as the house to tier rates,
• 31:15
  everything else is destroyed, but the chimney's still standing. So
• 31:19
  when you see a chimney out in the woods like it,
• 31:22
  sure it could be creepy, it could be kind of weird,
• 31:24
  but your brain can also be like, Okay, I get
• 31:26
  why it makes sense that the chimney's what remained intact,
• 31:30
  because like you know, you'll come across like cemeteries out
• 31:33
  in the woods. It makes sense why the headstones are
• 31:35
  sure they're stone, right, But a staircase is just strange enough,
• 31:39
  like all right, frontiersmen did not have multi storied houses.
• 31:44
  If for whatever reason, there was a two story house
• 31:47
  out here, that staircase would not be in pristine condition,
• 31:50
  it would not still be standing. It has just enough
• 31:52
  gaps in reasoning to make it so strange. It works
• 31:56
  from a horror perspective really well exactly.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: It's just the unsettlingnature of whenever you actually think about
• 32:01
  it and it doesn't make sense. That's whenever I think
• 32:03
  it really sets in, because like you said, it's it's like, yeah,
• 32:06
  it's mundane, it's just a staircase. But when you actually
• 32:08
  start to like give it a little more thought, it's
• 32:11
  almost like whenever you walk away, you're like huh, you
• 32:13
  kind of shrug your shoulders, and then when you walk away,
• 32:14
  you're like, wait, what the fuck? And then you turn around.
• 32:16
  That's what kind of horror this is to me of
• 32:19
  like wait what and then you kind of turn around
• 32:21
  and that's when you witness it. But that that kind
• 32:24
  of encapsulates the first part missing story or missing people's stories.
• 32:29
  We do get some kind of like weird monster stuff,
• 32:31
  some very like you know, standard not standard, but you
• 32:35
  know peep at like general accidents happening. But uh, everything
• 32:40
  I think is explored a little more in part two,
• 32:43
  which between these, what was the release schedule? Like, did
• 32:46
  you look into that at all? Because I had Audust
• 32:48
  to December.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: So the first the first one came out March March
• 32:52
  of twenty ten. Okay, the second part came out on
• 32:59
  I think I'm reading our slash No Sleeps. I'm on Reddit, right,
• 33:05
  I don't know how to operate reddit. I see where
• 33:07
  it says created March of twenty ten. I think that's
• 33:09
  the subreddit that is my bad. So yeah, that's what
• 33:14
  I get, all right. First one, you were probably right
• 33:17
  in the beginning when you were like, oh, it's nearly
• 33:19
  ten years old.
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I say, I could have swore it was twenty fifteen.
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's twenty fifteen.
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: I'm just okay, all right, all right. I was like,
• 33:29
  holy shit, did I totally fucked it out there.
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: There's some there's some like people who really love this story,
• 33:34
  freaking out right now at me. Okay, yeah, they're like no,
• 33:39
  yuh okay. So from what I.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: Read, it was August. It was from August twenty fifteen,
• 33:43
  and then the last part was December twenty fifteen. But
• 33:47
  I didn't know, and it's eight parts. I just didn't
• 33:49
  know if it was like frequently, like however many couple like,
• 33:53
  because essentially, what is that that's four months? So maybe
• 33:56
  two and now that I.
• 33:57
  Speaker 2: Know what I'm doing. Now that I know what I'm doing,
• 34:00
  the first three the first three parts came out in
• 34:04
  a span of three days August fifth, August twenty seventh, of.
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: Man, people were eating good right there, okay, good?
• 34:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and then part four was September of twenty fifteen,
• 34:16
  so like a week later. Yeah, so yeah, I guess,
• 34:20
  I guess the first few parts are very frequently. As
• 34:21
  we get to them, I'll check the times down in
• 34:23
  order to look. Man, someone is yelling at me in
• 34:26
  the comments about it.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: It's our first episode, come on ten years old.
• 34:33
  Speaker 2: First about first piece of information, Windagoon states objectively wrong, incorrect,
• 34:40
  so far from the Mark, drop the ball, dude, drop
• 34:45
  the da president early on. Perfect.
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: It's fun though, because I like because I think the
• 34:49
  response to this too was pretty I think people like,
• 34:52
  we're falling in love with it pretty quick from if
• 34:55
  memory serves correctly, So to have the person kind of
• 34:58
  also respond because then the second part, the author of
• 35:03
  these also respond to what is it David Paul leads?
• 35:06
  Is I het you pronounce it Davids Politis Paul Leads
• 35:11
  Jesus Christ David Politis's work, And there's similar similarities there
• 35:16
  and kind of just immediately responding to some of the comments,
• 35:19
  which once again I kind of like how quick the
• 35:22
  author did that, because once once again it does feel
• 35:25
  it feels like social media, which that's what I think
• 35:27
  is fun. It's like utilizing the Internet and the social
• 35:31
  media to also like be transparent with your audience and
• 35:35
  then provide more stories is just really fun. I like
• 35:39
  that because I think some people could be like, you know, oh,
• 35:41
  I'm going to just upload and not interact, like I'm
• 35:44
  just going to you know, it's it's the art of it.
• 35:47
  But I think that the art of the storytelling here
• 35:50
  is the interaction with people and that trying to build
• 35:53
  that authenticity with them again. So I just I enjoyed that.
• 35:58
  I enjoyed that they they didn't just stick to this thing.
• 36:01
  They were interactive with the comments. And to be on
• 36:04
  the side round that time when these were when these
• 36:06
  are being uploaded must have been so fun, so fun.
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: And David Politis, who Wressell talks about it in the
• 36:14
  beginning or the often, but Wressell talks about in the beginning,
• 36:19
  is the guy who coined the whole missing four one
• 36:22
  one thing. Which are you familiar with that at all?
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: I just briefly from researching this, but I honestly I
• 36:28
  haven't really gotten too much into it.
• 36:29
  Speaker 2: So missing four one one is a bit of my
• 36:33
  my I wouldn't say my forte, but I am. I
• 36:35
  do dabble. One of my only in person videos I've
• 36:40
  ever done, where actually went on location for a video,
• 36:42
  was about a missing four one one case. So missing
• 36:45
  four one one is the term started again by David Politis.
• 36:48
  It basically is referring to people that go missing in
• 36:51
  the wilderness or more specifically national parks without much of
• 36:55
  an explanation. Missing for one one is just the police
• 37:00
  code for information. So the phrase missing four one one
• 37:02
  just means missing information.
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: So yeah, that's cool.
• 37:05
  Speaker 2: What Russell's doing here at the beginning is explaining that
• 37:09
  David Politis has already talked about a lot of the
• 37:11
  stuff Russell's going to get into, kind of these inexplicable
• 37:14
  disappearances that happened in national.
• 37:16
  Speaker 1: Parks with David Politis's work. Two does it does it
• 37:20
  tend to be because I know that it was missing
• 37:23
  stories from basically wilderness or like forest, but I didn't
• 37:28
  know does it go into like cryptid stuff too or
• 37:30
  is it just like.
• 37:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah, missing four one one is real missing person cases?
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: Okay, so this is just like based in actual reality hit.
• 37:39
  Speaker 2: David Politis was basically a journalist who was looking into
• 37:44
  otherwise unreported disappearing cases that happened to national parks. Part
• 37:50
  of I mean, like people can check out his work
• 37:52
  for himself, out the foot words in his mouth, But
• 37:54
  part of what Politis was doing was kind of uncovering
• 37:59
  that the parks weren't advertising a lot of the dangers
• 38:03
  that exist in them. And most of his stories revolve
• 38:07
  around like completely inexplicable disappearances, like the one that I
• 38:12
  made a video about in person was about this boy
• 38:14
  named Dennis Martin, who was just near his parents, like
• 38:17
  a few feet away, and then they turned their back
• 38:19
  for a second and he's gone. And they had like
• 38:22
  hundreds and hundreds of search crew covered the area for
• 38:24
  weeks and weeks and then.
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: Like his stories, haunting, dude, haunting, he was right there
• 38:32
  five years, looking up, looking up some of these though too.
• 38:36
  For my boy David Politis here. He is a bigfoot guy.
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: He's a huge bigfoot guy.
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: He's a big bigfoot guy. So I just want to
• 38:45
  put that out there.
• 38:46
  Speaker 2: I want to clarify not that he never brings up cryptids,
• 38:49
  but the disappearances he covers are real disappearances.
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: Okay, because I know is going to be like that
• 38:58
  bigfoot son of a bitch. Yeah, I know who David
• 39:00
  Politis is. Whatever, So I just want to put that
• 39:02
  out there that, okay, so yes, they are a missing
• 39:05
  real person. But you know, he likes to dabble.
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: That's what I'm doing. I dabble.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: The turning around. Which also that as I get older,
• 39:14
  which maybe some of like younger people who might be
• 39:16
  listening to this too, what if you're a little older
• 39:18
  and the perception of losing a child becomes more and
• 39:21
  more real that like haunting, just absolutely haunting, especially just
• 39:26
  to turn around and someone's gone inexplicable. Like I don't
• 39:29
  even know how you would wrap your mind around that,
• 39:31
  just even the logistics of that. What does that look like?
• 39:34
  You know, it's insane, But.
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: Like I've heard some personal accounts and it's like it's
• 39:40
  it's hard to, like you said, wrap your brain around
• 39:42
  like a person's there, you're perceiving them, and then they
• 39:46
  don't exist seconds later. It's it's weird. It's so strange.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: You said, you said that you've had You've talked with
• 39:52
  people about.
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: It, Like no, like I've listened to interviews like oh okay,
• 39:56
  stuff like that with individuals. No, thankfully, I don't know
• 39:59
  anyone that's happened to personally. Yeah.
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: I was gonna be like, how how could you have
• 40:04
  possibly never told me this?
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. I was a part
• 40:08
  of a big missing person case.
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: I was a part of an alien abduction case. Back
• 40:12
  I did.
• 40:13
  Speaker 2: I did go looking for a dead body one time.
• 40:17
  But that what kid?
• 40:18
  Speaker 1: How old were you were? We nine? Nine or ten?
• 40:20
  Speaker 2: I was no, no, no, not like that, like it
• 40:22
  was no, it was an actual police investigation for a
• 40:28
  someone who was believed to be murdered. And when I
• 40:34
  was like, I probably shouldn't talked about this, but I
• 40:37
  it's like now, when I was like ten or eleven,
• 40:40
  my Dad's like, it'll be good for you. Come on,
• 40:43
  you on this search through the woods. And I remember
• 40:49
  being like ten years old and I was like, what
• 40:52
  what do I need to be on the lookout for.
• 40:54
  My dad was like, oh, you'll probably smell him first.
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: You'll know when you see it, so you'll know when
• 40:59
  you see this fucked up? Would that be? Though? If
• 41:01
  you if if young Windygoon was walking through the dealer
• 41:03
  and he's like, Daddy, why is this woman with a
• 41:06
  red dress? Why is she faced down? And her limbs
• 41:08
  are all weird? Who found it? Like, I feel like
• 41:12
  that would fundamentally.
• 41:15
  Speaker 2: And what's funny is too, I didn't think anything of
• 41:17
  it when I was a kid. I'm like, I'm gonna
• 41:19
  go look for someone. Yeah it was it was a
• 41:23
  family friend of ours, which is why we were out there.
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: I can't wait to oh, the missing person was a
• 41:29
  friend of.
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: Yours, family friend. I didn't know personally. It was like
• 41:32
  my dad's friends kid. I mean like and they found him.
• 41:36
  They found him not alive, so that was nice. Not
• 41:40
  far from where we.
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: Were searching, that is nice.
• 41:43
  Speaker 2: Found him dead, So there was a there was like
• 41:45
  a chance that young Windagoon would have been like, oh.
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: You look at that, Oh this is nice. Yeah, I
• 41:52
  feel like the entire time you were looking through I
• 41:54
  feel like to me, I don't know why, I just
• 41:56
  I picture you as the poudy kid who's like just
• 41:58
  wanting to be home playing Dragon Ball z boo.
• 42:03
  Speaker 2: At one point, I was thinking about going home to
• 42:05
  play video games.
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: I just want to go home, but play this game.
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: What's also like to give you more of a visual,
• 42:11
  I was a child and there was like a lot
• 42:13
  of brush in the woods. So I had a golf
• 42:15
  club and I was swinging it got down like the
• 42:19
  tree branches, So.
• 42:21
  Speaker 1: You just end up mauling a dead body with a
• 42:23
  golf club. This is a tall brush. This is a
• 42:27
  this is a dead body. Dad. Can I go home now?
• 42:36
  Speaker 2: Against stupid kid swinging the golf club like I wish it?
• 42:41
  Who's playing Star Wars right now? Yeah?
• 42:45
  Speaker 1: Families crying, people are just like do you see anything
• 42:48
  and stuff? You're just like God supposed to be play
• 42:51
  a Revenge of the Sith on PS two Right now.
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: Sucks, Bros. So far off like that.
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: The thing about it, too, is everybody goes through that, dude,
• 43:05
  everybody does. When you're a kid. You go through that,
• 43:08
  even like like like a funeral or something when you're young.
• 43:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, like not caring about the gravity of what.
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: So it's just like, yeah, children have no business. Just
• 43:19
  got to leave them at home, lock them in a room.
• 43:21
  They'll be fine. Still, they'll be fine.
• 43:25
  Speaker 2: I wonder what would have happened to me if I
• 43:27
  found the body, Like, I wonder if that would have
• 43:30
  changed the course of anything.
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: I don't know, because it's very interesting you say that
• 43:36
  because to me, because you didn't see it. I feel
• 43:40
  like now that I psychologically think that you has started
• 43:44
  these in depth horror research videos because you're you're trying
• 43:49
  to find that connection that you missed a long time ago.
• 43:51
  I feel like you might be a car salesman.
• 43:53
  Speaker 2: Wait a minute, wait, hold on, explain both of those
• 43:57
  things you just said. Are you saying I'm making YouTube
• 44:01
  videos because I'm chasing the high I never caught finding
• 44:05
  a dead body?
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, And what do you mean my car salesman? I
• 44:09
  think that I think that you would have gotten your fix,
• 44:11
  like you would have been like you would have seen
• 44:13
  some things. So I think it would have corrupted you
• 44:15
  in some weird way to where you would your life
• 44:18
  would have taken a more normal approach to maybe you
• 44:20
  would be like enterprise cars, renting cars, and that would
• 44:23
  be like a copy.
• 44:24
  Speaker 2: Hold on you're talking about, like the high glories of
• 44:27
  being a car salesman.
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: What do you mean, Like, I think it's a pretty
• 44:31
  good gig. It's a market that's never gonna die. I
• 44:34
  just think that's it's a more traditional take. It's a
• 44:36
  more traditional take versus now, I feel like you're desperately
• 44:39
  trying to cling on to wanting to find a dead body,
• 44:41
  which bit you find one, because I think if you
• 44:44
  did find one once again, I think that you would
• 44:46
  take on a very normal job. I feel like you're.
• 44:49
  Speaker 2: Saying if I didn't, if I did find the dead body,
• 44:52
  I would be a car salesman right now.
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: Yes, Okay, I see yeah, some because you would have
• 44:56
  gotten your fix, and that would have been water cooler
• 44:59
  talk forever. You can talk about that forever.
• 45:02
  Speaker 2: I would just like a you're saying that me being
• 45:07
  a couple hundred feet feet over in the search party.
• 45:10
  Is the difference between windagoon and an accountant.
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: Yes, literally, yes, like I would.
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: Have if you're just like and I'm done now, I'm
• 45:21
  good exactly.
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: If your golf club would have smacked into the side
• 45:25
  of a dead body, you would be at H and
• 45:28
  R Block right now, and that would be that would
• 45:30
  be water cooler talk that you could use forever forever.
• 45:34
  But now now you're chasing the high and now the
• 45:37
  problem is now too you know too much. So God
• 45:40
  forbid you find what you're looking for. I don't know
• 45:42
  what it is, but God forbid is what I say.
• 45:46
  Speaker 2: You see, you're evaluating my entire channel, the career, even
• 45:49
  those podcast is all just a symptom of me not
• 45:52
  getting my birth right of finding a body.
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: To me, it feels like divine intervention. It feels like
• 45:58
  it feels like you were you weren't supposed to find
• 46:00
  it because you this was your quest, this was your goal,
• 46:04
  you know, to have the thirst, the want to find that.
• 46:11
  Speaker 2: Can we go back to the search and rescue officer.
• 46:15
  I'm too introspective right now.
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: It's fine, it's fine, it's fine, which I want to say.
• 46:21
  I'm part two, it gets interesting and we're gonna I'm
• 46:23
  just gonna dive right back into this because we went
• 46:25
  to the David thing, we found out that you are
• 46:27
  definitely searching for a dead body. It doesn't matter. But
• 46:29
  in the second part of this is that we get
• 46:32
  to see the stairs again. It's another entry of the stairs,
• 46:34
  except this time it's different shapes, sizes, you know, conditions,
• 46:39
  more broken down, different kinds of things, because before it
• 46:42
  was just a standard house stair case. But now in
• 46:45
  this one there's like other dilapidated ones, other brand new,
• 46:48
  brand new looking stairs, and even some like resembling lighthouses,
• 46:52
  which is kind of interesting. But the storyteller or Russell
• 46:56
  avoids photographing or interacting with the stairs to not risk
• 47:00
  their job, which, as we said earlier, I was just
• 47:03
  like I would take a picture. I take a few
• 47:06
  pictures or two if I'm.
• 47:07
  Speaker 2: Being honesty of the stairs.
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: You're saying, absolutely, yeah, absolutely yeah, who's gonna believe you?
• 47:17
  Imagine going up to somebody at like a bar, or
• 47:19
  like a red Robin. You've had a long day working
• 47:21
  for the forest, right, Gotta go to a Red Robin,
• 47:24
  get a nice gourmet burger and you tried telling somebody
• 47:28
  that you found a lighthouse staircase in the middle of
• 47:31
  the woods, and you don't snap a pic. How that's.
• 47:38
  Speaker 2: Especially in the modern age because the person writing this
• 47:40
  story is like that, It's not like these are found,
• 47:43
  you know, notes from the eighties like this is someone
• 47:45
  actively upload into the internet so they have access.
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: Exactly exactly which which Again once it makes me want
• 47:54
  to say that, like it was probably so much funner
• 47:57
  to be in a horror vacuum in like eighties when
• 48:01
  it's just like technology wasn't there yet. Because now a
• 48:04
  smartphone ruins everything. It really does. It ruins, it ruins
• 48:07
  just about everything. You have to like work around it
• 48:10
  and it's so boring. But at the same time too,
• 48:14
  you have to have you have to have the stakes
• 48:15
  in your story or in your story, you have to
• 48:18
  have circumstances to your stakes. I, e, well, I can't
• 48:21
  take a photo because I'll lose my job. But at
• 48:24
  the end of the day, whenever you're finding goat people
• 48:28
  dying children, I feel like the losing of my job
• 48:32
  wouldn't be that much that I feel like I would
• 48:35
  snap a bit due it would probably be on Snapchat
• 48:38
  or something if it's twenty fifteen, it'd be on vine
• 48:40
  I would take there would be a fucking vine of
• 48:42
  a staircase.
• 48:44
  Speaker 2: The story, it's like, I don't want to lose my
• 48:47
  job anyway, So we lost twelve more hikers to the flesh.
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: I really don't want to lose my job. But there
• 48:53
  are seventy five missing people. We have no idea either,
• 49:00
  but we did just see a toothless goat running around
• 49:04
  yelling like a baby or whatever, which we'll get to that.
• 49:06
  We'll get to that.
• 49:07
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, let's continue into it. So you talk about
• 49:10
  the stairs, clarify it. Stairs in the woods all very
• 49:13
  familiar at this point.
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a couple of clarifications. They clarified the faceless
• 49:16
  man too, Yep, yep. They did clarify the climber and county.
• 49:21
  A man with no face on a peak, wearing park
• 49:24
  and ski match just kinds of does like a little
• 49:26
  you know, just clarify that guy. And then they go
• 49:29
  into the story of the missing older man. If you
• 49:32
  want to talk about that one.
• 49:33
  Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, So they mentioned that there was an old
• 49:36
  man who goes missing out on a trail. The wife
• 49:40
  call says that he's very experienced hiker, but recently he
• 49:44
  has been taking seizure medication hasn't come home in a while,
• 49:47
  so he's missing the time he's supposed to take his prescription.
• 49:50
  She's getting worried about him, so the team goes out
• 49:53
  to look for him, and they can't find him anywhere
• 49:56
  until one of the search crew tells everyone to come over,
• 49:59
  and about thirty feet up in the trees, just hanging
• 50:03
  on a tree limb is his walking stick, just hanging
• 50:07
  in a limb. Not too high for him to have
• 50:10
  thrown it up there. The tree itself was too wide
• 50:14
  and too you know, dramatic of an angle for him
• 50:17
  to have climbed up there. But for whatever reason, there
• 50:20
  is his walking cane up in the tree and they
• 50:22
  never find another clue of him.
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: I love that, Yeah, just a little touch. And what
• 50:26
  I like about that too is that it's once again
• 50:29
  calling back to the part one of the girl who
• 50:31
  climbed up the tree to never be seen again. So
• 50:34
  now it's just now we're getting multiple cases and it
• 50:36
  becomes something that you can't avoid. And it also makes
• 50:39
  you think, you know, you're talking about not taking pictures
• 50:41
  of these staircases. I mean I'm like, we have these
• 50:43
  goddamn death trees all around us. Dude, I'm freaking out.
• 50:48
  All right, you're telling me we can't take pictures of staircases,
• 50:50
  and there's staircases in the woods, but God forbid you
• 50:52
  climb a tree. I mean, like, my lord. So I
• 50:56
  don't know, but I do love these little tians and
• 50:59
  a lot of these stores es to it's I wouldn't
• 51:01
  say that it's all the same, but I mean it
• 51:04
  is all like it is missing persons, you know, so
• 51:07
  a lot of the stories are gonna be and they
• 51:09
  never found them again, which whenever reciting it back and
• 51:15
  like whenever it's like just little blurbs of us talking,
• 51:17
  it might sound kind of samesy, but in the actual
• 51:22
  thick of it, whenever you're like reading this, like from
• 51:26
  beginning to end, it all just feels like a conceptualized,
• 51:29
  like like rolodex of thoughts and like memories of this person.
• 51:35
  So take that as you will. I guess I didn't know.
• 51:38
  I didn't know. I didn't know if people are gonna
• 51:39
  be like, oh God, all of these are just them
• 51:41
  ending in, you know, and they were never found again.
• 51:44
  But that is kind of essentially what this is is
• 51:47
  a park ranger talking about missing cases.
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: And I mean it's also, like I said, indicative of
• 51:52
  a lot of real like missing four warh one cases,
• 51:54
  not the supernatural elements, but the idea of just like, yeah,
• 51:57
  they were never found again, nothing came of it.
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And I mean, but sometimes they do. Like this
• 52:02
  next one I love too is the one about the
• 52:04
  missing five year old boy who he disappears during a
• 52:08
  family picnic and his siblings mention a quote big man
• 52:13
  with scary face leading him into the woods, which is
• 52:17
  very fun, and they find the boy's body fifteen miles
• 52:21
  away in a place inaccessible to a child, with no
• 52:24
  signs of injury or struggle, which is it's like bordering
• 52:29
  on almost like I don't know, like slender Man levels
• 52:32
  of territories here, you know what I mean, Like children
• 52:36
  going into the woods trying to find his mansion kind
• 52:39
  of thing to be fifteen miles away, and just the
• 52:44
  Russell's description of just like it makes no sense how
• 52:48
  this could have happened is the most haunting. Well, I
• 52:51
  guess that being fifteen miles away too.
• 52:54
  Speaker 2: Is this is actually based off an actual Missing four
• 52:56
  one one case that myself and Aiden Maddison covered in
• 53:00
  one of my videos. But there was a case of
• 53:02
  a boy I think he was he was three or four,
• 53:06
  who just disappeared from his family and they found him
• 53:10
  in a tree in the middle of the swamp. Like
• 53:13
  it was like twelve or fifteen miles away a few
• 53:16
  days later or no, it's like forty eight hours. It
• 53:19
  was like super low amount of time, and survivor man
• 53:24
  tried to recreate the trip in the amount of time
• 53:26
  he couldn't. It was like a very weird case. Yes,
• 53:30
  weird stuff like that happens. Not the details about the
• 53:32
  man with the scary face and whatnot. Again, this is
• 53:35
  kind of baked into this sort of terrifying reality.
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: How do they What does the conclusion look like then? Too?
• 53:42
  You know what I mean? Like when when people are
• 53:44
  reporting on that, is it just like it's an accident
• 53:46
  or like what did they come across? Like how did they?
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: If I recall this story correctly, this is the child
• 53:53
  that actually survived, I've covered so many missing formal when
• 53:56
  I forget the exact details. If I remember that child
• 53:58
  lived and he was like three or four. When asked
• 54:02
  to recount it, the only thing he mentioned was that
• 54:08
  it was like a he saw a cat or something
• 54:11
  like that, so that the only some people think maybe
• 54:14
  a mount lion carried him that far and then didn't
• 54:16
  eat him for some reason, carried him up a tree,
• 54:19
  which would be weird. But there's like, if I recall correctly,
• 54:25
  that kid lived and then told rescuers that he saw
• 54:28
  a cat. Uh, and there was no other explanation he
• 54:31
  could give. He was too young to understand what happened
• 54:33
  to him.
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: Stupid fucking kids. Dude, Damn, I wish a kid had
• 54:39
  that's all you saw.
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: My God, there's a lot. There's a lot of those
• 54:44
  where like they find them dead days later in like
• 54:47
  impossible locations. There's like one story. Again, not to get
• 54:52
  sidetracked from this, but I remember one show or like
• 54:56
  this dude who was like this expert hiker went missing
• 55:00
  and then his body got found at the bottom of
• 55:01
  a ravine after all the snow melted. But there was
• 55:04
  this stage where like they found his backpack with like
• 55:07
  snacks laid out and like a red bull opened up
• 55:10
  twenty miles in the other direction from between where he
• 55:13
  went missing and where his body was found. Like the
• 55:15
  guy got lost, we had a meal left all his
• 55:17
  stuff behind, just walked into the woods and died.
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: Like it's weird. It's weird too because I wonder how
• 55:22
  much of like whenever people are studying this, do they
• 55:24
  think like, oh, like, I wonder how much of that
• 55:27
  they look into, Like I mean, I don't like suicidal
• 55:29
  tendencies or something, right like, yeah, you know, is the
• 55:33
  person going was he had struggling in his own life,
• 55:35
  because that is almost what I think when I see
• 55:38
  that kind of stuff, is they just like abandoned his
• 55:40
  stuff like it's like almost like a wake up realization
• 55:42
  moment or something and they left cause any other event
• 55:46
  makes it feel so inexplicable.
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: Sometimes I do think that is the case this specific one.
• 55:50
  If again, assuming I'm not getting the details mixed up,
• 55:53
  he was hiking the Crazies, which is in like the
• 55:55
  Rocky Mountains. He was hiking the Crazies with a couple
• 55:58
  of friends. He went back to get oh, I remember
• 56:03
  what was he had? They had these waypois set up
• 56:05
  on the mountain and the mule that was carrying his
• 56:09
  gear bucked knocked it over the mountain. So he goes
• 56:11
  back to a waypoint to resupply, and they never see
• 56:14
  him again, and then that's when they find him, like
• 56:16
  you know, when the spring comes. But it was just
• 56:20
  like he was out with his guys, like hold on,
• 56:21
  I'm gonna head back and grab something, and then just
• 56:24
  off the face of.
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: The earth, just tragically.
• 56:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it makes you ask a lot of questions, which
• 56:29
  is again one of the reasons that I find the
• 56:30
  story so compelling, because I find myself asking questions similar
• 56:33
  to what oh yeah.
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: Especially the more that you actually research the realities of
• 56:38
  these situations, the more creepy it becomes, and also the funner,
• 56:42
  I think, even the more eccentric stuff like in this one,
• 56:45
  which you know. In part two, we get a lot
• 56:46
  of stuff once again, like there's the the guy who
• 56:50
  died in a tree well and it's just kind of
• 56:52
  another accident, but one of just the horrors of like
• 56:55
  natural disasters and like human human error, I guess. And
• 56:59
  then we we get more staircase stuff and people being like,
• 57:02
  for the love of God, do not take a picture
• 57:04
  of those, don't even go near him. Keep reciting that.
• 57:08
  But then my favorite part of part two definitely is
• 57:10
  the meowing man love so creepy might be might be
• 57:16
  the highlight of the whole thing for me, if I'm
• 57:17
  being completely honest.
• 57:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, would you like to explain.
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: It, yeah, Which is an older woman faints after hearing
• 57:24
  a man making a meow sound in a strange, buzzy
• 57:27
  tone in the woods, the narrator. The narrator investigates, but
• 57:30
  only hears the sound without finding its source. So essentially
• 57:33
  a woman is I mean, like she sees the man,
• 57:37
  if I remember correctly, she even sees him, and it's
• 57:40
  just a man out in the woods meowing, Like essentially
• 57:46
  it's it's it's it's them trying to find this meowing
• 57:49
  man and not being able to see him. But the
• 57:51
  person's like I saw this guy. He was standing out
• 57:53
  in the middle of essentially nowhere, meowing at me. Which
• 57:57
  to me, that was the most invasive of one that
• 58:01
  this This was the one that was because it touches
• 58:04
  on several things where it felt ethereal, but it also
• 58:07
  felt like the idea of just a man standing in
• 58:10
  the woods meowing at me is horrifying. It's so simple
• 58:15
  and so effective. I mean even just like putting yourself
• 58:18
  in a situation of camping and like you're in your
• 58:20
  your tent right and like maybe it's like a light
• 58:23
  mist tapping on your your tent and you just hear.
• 58:26
  Now it's it's it sounds funny, but at the end
• 58:31
  of the day that I mean, I would shit myself.
• 58:33
  I would probably cry. I would I would probably I
• 58:36
  would legitimately cry. Especially the idea of like it's on
• 58:39
  different levels because one it could be an insane person,
• 58:42
  which is horrifying, or another horrifying thing is the reality
• 58:46
  that someone is fucking with you and they're like they're
• 58:49
  trying to like they're trying to like mess with your mind,
• 58:52
  they're trying to like scare you. And I hate that
• 58:54
  as well, because it's like a weird game of chess
• 58:57
  and it it's god, yeah, man, well.
• 59:02
  Speaker 2: I like it too because like initially the person hears
• 59:05
  it and thinks it's a it is an actual cat,
• 59:10
  and then they listen closer and they're like, oh, that's
• 59:13
  someone trying to sound like a cat, which, oh my gosh,
• 59:16
  that's yeah.
• 59:17
  Speaker 1: Fun especially especially then like the woman saying like, oh,
• 59:22
  that's when I realized that, no, this is a guy
• 59:24
  doing a cat impression, which is funny. It's funny. It's
• 59:29
  funny to think about like coming into that across that realization,
• 59:31
  you're like, oh, God, is the right is a house cat?
• 59:33
  I hear now, and you're like, Okay, that's definitely that's
• 59:37
  definitely a guy doing which also makes it sound like
• 59:42
  it's like at first it was kind of compelling, and
• 59:45
  then over time he like kind of stopped trying to
• 59:47
  make it so cat like. It's like, you know, at
• 59:50
  first at the end he's just like, oh, doing a
• 59:54
  fucking like marketiplier. Me out, Oh, just market player in
• 1:00:02
  the woods doing that? What if it was just a
• 1:00:04
  guy on his iPhone he was lost and he was
• 1:00:06
  watching market player videos to make himself. I like, you
• 1:00:08
  never know, you never know. Moving into part three, we
• 1:00:13
  get the this is whenever they talk about Russell's kind
• 1:00:18
  of talking about starts off by confidentiality. Can't talk about
• 1:00:22
  where the work location is for security job security reasons.
• 1:00:26
  He can't lose this job. Dude, can't lose it.
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 2: Clearly the most important thing happening.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: This job pays one point seven million dollars a year.
• 1:00:34
  It has to, which sadly, I think I looked it
• 1:00:38
  up and it was like it was something like it's
• 1:00:41
  a very like there's so many jobs that probably make
• 1:00:43
  you get similar pay, which I know it's probably too, like,
• 1:00:46
  well you get to work out side and stuff. But
• 1:00:47
  I'm like, bro, with what you've seen, it's just it's
• 1:00:50
  just not worth it benefits worth, It's not worth it
• 1:00:54
  at all.
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: I don't cared. I'm not having none of it. Absolutely not.
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: But in part three two, this is where Russell talks
• 1:01:02
  to one of his former superiors about the stairs. Right,
• 1:01:06
  this is when he's we get the staircase. But this
• 1:01:08
  is when he's talking to like a past coworker or
• 1:01:12
  like manager or whatever however the system for Forrester's work.
• 1:01:16
  But they they like indulge more information into him.
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 2: Right, Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about. In
• 1:01:23
  the beginning, he says, however, on one of my one
• 1:01:25
  of my former superiors no longer works as a star officer,
• 1:01:28
  and I'm gonna talk to him about it, so I'll
• 1:01:30
  talk to him later this week. So it's basically saying
• 1:01:32
  that there will be more stairs stories coming later in
• 1:01:35
  the series.
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 1: Oh, I see, I see. I see. That's kind of
• 1:01:38
  a fun way too, to like you can tell that
• 1:01:41
  that's definitely the author is just like let me think
• 1:01:43
  you know, just so it's fun to be like, well,
• 1:01:46
  I'm gonna speak with the other officers, so just get me.
• 1:01:49
  I'll let you know how that conversation goes.
• 1:01:51
  Speaker 2: Especially because this is the first time there's a gap
• 1:01:54
  between part three and part four, so it's like uh, yeah, yeah, sure,
• 1:01:58
  well we'll talk about those.
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: Which in this one too, there's a lot of like
• 1:02:02
  child stuff, like there's there's a couple of different child ones,
• 1:02:05
  which there's the uh there's the incidents with the young
• 1:02:08
  couple and their baby where you come across or they
• 1:02:11
  come across and it's like the baby died from like
• 1:02:13
  a fall, which is just kind of a freak accident tragedy.
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that one.
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: But then there's the personal experience that Russell has where
• 1:02:20
  it's they say it's their scariest incident in their career
• 1:02:24
  involving a lost child, and it's bizarre because it was
• 1:02:27
  like a deafening sound and looped recording of a child crying.
• 1:02:30
  It was like the same yeah, so weird.
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 2: Yeah, because he describes it as like he's out there
• 1:02:36
  with another search and rescue officer and they hear what
• 1:02:40
  sounds like a train like right next to them, so
• 1:02:43
  their immediate thought is, oh, it's an avalanche or something, right, Yeah,
• 1:02:48
  so they start to freak out and they're in each
• 1:02:50
  other's ears screaming, but neither one can hear the other.
• 1:02:54
  And then the sound just stops and nothing's happened, like
• 1:02:58
  you're just you're in the woods. You hear the rapture,
• 1:03:02
  and then nothing, nothing changed.
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: That was a definitive moment where this is like my
• 1:03:06
  walk away situation, you know.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 2: What I mean, and we're done.
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: That's like, that's that's like a personal because the thing
• 1:03:15
  about that, that's that's like Russell's personal story. That's not hearsay,
• 1:03:19
  that's not them talking to a suspect or like, you know,
• 1:03:23
  somebody involved in a story. That's Russell's own experience to
• 1:03:27
  where it's like, after everything you've heard and that happens
• 1:03:29
  to you, how do you stay? How do you stay?
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah?
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: It would be insane, and it's weird because they mix
• 1:03:37
  in some stuff where it's like eh. And then one
• 1:03:39
  of the entries to in part three is uh so
• 1:03:42
  you have the deafening crying baby thing they can't hear.
• 1:03:44
  It's like basically Jacob's ladder. It kind of reminds me.
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 2: Of like, yeah, yeah, that's that's pretty similar.
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's like a weird Jacob's Ladder experience, which
• 1:03:53
  if you guys haven't seen that movie, it's a tim Uh.
• 1:03:56
  I almost said Robinson. That's the guy from I think
• 1:03:58
  you should leave. What's let's see actor's.
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 2: It's something Robinson, right, is it Robbins?
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: Tim Robins, Tim and rob whatever? It's the guy from
• 1:04:07
  Shaw Shank Redemption. It doesn't matter, but the uh, you
• 1:04:10
  should watch the movie. But then they have those like
• 1:04:12
  horrifying things. They have all this child death and then
• 1:04:15
  and then all of a sudden they throw in like, yeah,
• 1:04:16
  a guy was afraid of a moose. I just thought
• 1:04:18
  it was cute. I thought. I remember reading that being like,
• 1:04:23
  I hate that you did this because at the same
• 1:04:26
  time too, it also to me what was fun about
• 1:04:30
  this narratively was that you're introducing a thing of like
• 1:04:33
  maybe the author is or maybe like Russell still isn't
• 1:04:36
  taking this seriously, Like they could Russell understands the consequences
• 1:04:42
  and the weight of what's going on, but I don't
• 1:04:45
  think because that he's only had one thing happened to him,
• 1:04:49
  I think that he still hasn't really grasped how crazy
• 1:04:53
  this is. You know.
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, I mean, like in that same story, to
• 1:04:58
  further push what you were saying about the loud noise,
• 1:05:00
  that's the one where they hear the cry, so like
• 1:05:03
  he's out there with his boy. That happens, and then
• 1:05:06
  they they're searching into the night because it's a young
• 1:05:08
  kid who went missing, and they hear what sounds like
• 1:05:11
  a little girl crying, and they're getting closer to it,
• 1:05:14
  and then they eventually realize it is not the sound
• 1:05:17
  of a girl naturally crying. It is a loop like
• 1:05:21
  it's being played on the recording of a kid, like
• 1:05:24
  the same sniff breath. Yeah, it's it's in a circle,
• 1:05:29
  like something mimicking a few seconds of a kid crying.
• 1:05:32
  And then they run out there. So the train noise
• 1:05:35
  and the loop recording of a crying happened at the
• 1:05:37
  same time. And they're like, all right, i'll clock in tomorrow.
• 1:05:41
  I'll see you then.
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. Damn man, Well are we still going to
• 1:05:46
  Long John Silver's after that? I just like to think
• 1:05:47
  that Russell goes to nothing but like extremely popular, like
• 1:05:51
  like commercial. All right, so we went to Red Robin
• 1:05:54
  last week, but I guess I'll meet you at a
• 1:05:56
  blonde John Silver tonight, so I'll see you. I'll clock
• 1:05:58
  in early tomorrow.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 2: Man, she has never been inside of a fine dyeing establishment.
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 1: No, absolutely, absolutely not. Which in this story still we
• 1:06:08
  get we get other, we get one more staircase one,
• 1:06:12
  but it's them actually this time they break protocol and
• 1:06:16
  actually go and investigate the staircase. And this time we're
• 1:06:19
  doing so friend ye yes or yes sorry. This is
• 1:06:23
  them telling them what was going on? Right, And he
• 1:06:27
  basically talks about like how like eerie it was, how
• 1:06:31
  silent it was, but then also like the overwhelming sense
• 1:06:35
  of like, as they say, like wrongdoing, like they felt
• 1:06:38
  like they were doing something wrong or being watched potentially,
• 1:06:40
  like it's kind of like when you do something you're like,
• 1:06:42
  this feels bad, Like I have a bad feeling, but
• 1:06:46
  this is like also you've been to you begin to
• 1:06:48
  discover the potential links between his actions and the failure
• 1:06:53
  to find a missing person, if that makes sense, Like.
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he's so like the the buddy describes. He
• 1:06:58
  goes to the stairs and he walks up him, which
• 1:07:01
  you're not supposed to do, and when he's I really
• 1:07:04
  like this moment when he's standing at the top of
• 1:07:06
  the stairs, he realizes all the noises have disappeared, like
• 1:07:10
  the sound of the birds, sound of the leaves, stuff
• 1:07:13
  like that just quit and it's completely silent. So he
• 1:07:16
  starts to make noises to himself and he can't hear,
• 1:07:20
  like he can't hear anything up there, so he freaks out,
• 1:07:22
  runs down the stairs, leaves, and then when they get
• 1:07:25
  back to because the reason he was out there in
• 1:07:27
  the first place is they were looking for a missing kid.
• 1:07:30
  They get back to the ranger station and one of
• 1:07:34
  the older rangers starts yelling at him and says, you
• 1:07:36
  went up them, didn't you. And Russell's friends like, what
• 1:07:40
  are you talking about? And the older guy says, I
• 1:07:42
  know you went up them because we didn't find the kid.
• 1:07:45
  They're nowhere to be found. You went up them. And
• 1:07:48
  that adds an interesting layer to it, right, like there's
• 1:07:51
  even if it doesn't happen to you, consequences will happen
• 1:07:54
  somewhere if you go with the stairs.
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, almost like a weird butterfly effect kind of thing
• 1:08:01
  of like it's repercussions of doing something. And also the
• 1:08:04
  text that they use are like the verb, like the
• 1:08:06
  way that it's written to is that it's not inquisitively
• 1:08:08
  of like question mark, you went up them, didn't Did
• 1:08:11
  you go up them? It's them just point blake being
• 1:08:13
  like you went up the stairs. Yeah, you went up them,
• 1:08:15
  didn't you? You did it so And I think that
• 1:08:19
  like it also goes to show that like this isn't
• 1:08:21
  the first time that someone's done that, Like they have
• 1:08:23
  records of it, but no one is just talking about it.
• 1:08:26
  It's so weird that the hierarchy of people aren't just like, yeah,
• 1:08:29
  if you go up them, X will happen. They're just
• 1:08:31
  like not giving any information, which to me starts to
• 1:08:34
  lead into like weird conspiracy stuff of like who is
• 1:08:37
  at the top of this that doesn't want anybody to
• 1:08:39
  talk about any of these things, especially if you work
• 1:08:42
  for the place it's that damn pay dude.
• 1:08:45
  Speaker 2: There's part they cover dental man, what word do you want.
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: Oh, Dania, Yeah, we do dental and eyes right man,
• 1:08:55
  Oh my god, sign me up. Oh my god.
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 2: There is this part, this part later in the story
• 1:09:00
  where one of the older guys is describing it and says, yeah,
• 1:09:03
  the part service used to make you like sign an
• 1:09:05
  nda around it. But then they realize they don't have
• 1:09:07
  to because no one wants to talk about what's happening anyway,
• 1:09:10
  which like leads into like, gosh, what is what do
• 1:09:13
  some of these people know about that they're not willing
• 1:09:14
  to talk about.
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, very love craftiing with that line, especially, like very like, uh,
• 1:09:19
  just the horrors of what you find, like of the
• 1:09:22
  unimaginable or the unseen, which is really fine. It's like
• 1:09:25
  which also what a flex Well, we don't need NDAs
• 1:09:28
  because people don't even want to talk about it.
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 2: People don't want to talk about the giant stare things.
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: I was like, really even just the legality of that,
• 1:09:34
  you don't want one person to sign that very serious.
• 1:09:38
  But the rest of the stories in this are it's
• 1:09:40
  the disabled boy who goes missing and they find his
• 1:09:43
  body kind of in a different location too.
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 2: Yep. Yeah, they find him wrapped around an ice figure
• 1:09:49
  of a man like he's he's dead in the ground.
• 1:09:52
  For one he's been missing three months, but he looks
• 1:09:54
  like he's been dead for three days in the snow. Yeah,
• 1:09:56
  extremely holding like a little ice sculptu sure of what
• 1:10:00
  looks like a person. That's just like, yep, that's that's it.
• 1:10:05
  That's how they found him.
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 1: The ice sculpture I thought was interesting. And it's just
• 1:10:10
  the justificate. It's like the funny thing. And I know
• 1:10:12
  I keep saying this, it's just the idea that you
• 1:10:13
  hear these stories and you've had things that happened to
• 1:10:15
  you as well. You're just like, yeah, and they found
• 1:10:18
  the disabled boy and uh, yep, he had an ice sculpture.
• 1:10:21
  So that was kind of a that was kind of
• 1:10:23
  a weird one. What's another. Let me let me look
• 1:10:25
  at my role at that. It's like, how you have
• 1:10:27
  so many stories, run for your life for the love
• 1:10:29
  of God. And the last one was the screaming figure.
• 1:10:33
  The Encounter with the Screaming Figure. Guy Uh describes a
• 1:10:36
  colleague encounter and a colleagues encounter with a screaming figure
• 1:10:40
  in the woods, initially thought to be a mountain lion.
• 1:10:42
  The figure takes an impossibly long step towards the colleague,
• 1:10:44
  who then flees, which I love that.
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 2: Visual impossibly long step.
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: Impossibly long step. It made me think of like a
• 1:10:51
  Senior paloa cartoon or something. It's exactly like a cartoonishly
• 1:10:58
  like leg extending it. Just it gave me like, especially
• 1:11:01
  when Senior Palo when he did the Mad Della catalog cartoon.
• 1:11:05
  It gave me that kind of vibe. But also for
• 1:11:08
  people who haven't like grown up near like rural or
• 1:11:13
  like farming land, a mountain lion sounds like a like
• 1:11:17
  a crying woman, and then vice versa with like coyotes
• 1:11:20
  and foxes sound like crying children. So it's uh it
• 1:11:27
  to me. This brought me back to a place when
• 1:11:28
  I grew up more on more on that cattle farm property,
• 1:11:31
  and it just it actually scared the ship out of
• 1:11:33
  me because that crying sound is so indistinguishable, Like when
• 1:11:37
  you hear it, you're like, oh my god, they're really
• 1:11:38
  out tonight. But the idea that this that the figure
• 1:11:41
  who's making this like mountain lion coop like you know,
• 1:11:45
  fairal cat crying sound takes that impossibly long step. It's
• 1:11:50
  just really fun. It also like it also plays into
• 1:11:53
  the idea of like how delirious are these people? Like
• 1:11:56
  is the Is the forest doing something to them? It
• 1:11:59
  kind of that's what kind of made me think too,
• 1:12:01
  like is the forest That's a.
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 2: Good point I hadn't thought about before.
• 1:12:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, is the forest? Once again? As I remember, I
• 1:12:08
  brought this up a little earlier was like, is the
• 1:12:10
  forest and entity that is playing games with its victims?
• 1:12:13
  Which I thought was kind of cool, just like a
• 1:12:16
  really weird way of like almost giving them like hallucinations
• 1:12:21
  and doing this stuff. Which the reason I thought that
• 1:12:24
  too was that if the forest is like its own
• 1:12:26
  entity and doing this thing, that would explain people being
• 1:12:29
  like how do they travel so far? And it's probably
• 1:12:31
  like the people didn't think that they were traveling as
• 1:12:34
  far as they really were, and it's leading them in
• 1:12:37
  straight lines just like miles and miles in perception of
• 1:12:40
  time gets changed. But it's just like all because they're
• 1:12:43
  like almost hypnotized, or they're like controlled by something that
• 1:12:47
  the forest is putting out into the air or something
• 1:12:50
  like who knows what.
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 2: I haven't thought about that, But maybe everything they're seeing
• 1:12:53
  isn't literal. Maybe part of it is the implication the
• 1:12:56
  woods is putting on them.
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean, like everything that we've heard so
• 1:13:00
  far is all either hearsay. And also even.
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 2: You looking at this for different directions, different assumptions, I.
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: Found out not only did I find out your backstory,
• 1:13:10
  but I'm finding out the backstory of all these people
• 1:13:14
  as well. I am I'm I'm like, it's like l
• 1:13:18
  A Noir, especially you, I would have you know, I
• 1:13:20
  have loved if we were in person is I would
• 1:13:23
  have loved to see that, you know, you know l
• 1:13:25
  A Noir, the game I'm familiar if I would have
• 1:13:28
  given you that question about the dead body to see
• 1:13:30
  your face, to see like how it would have been
• 1:13:31
  the reaction, you know, how you can tell if somebody
• 1:13:33
  is lying in that game where that they like their
• 1:13:36
  face gets all scrunched up or it's like, yeah, definitely,
• 1:13:39
  I would have loved to see. Well, do your videos
• 1:13:42
  because you're trying to body. No, of course someone's going
• 1:13:50
  to make a rock star three D model of your
• 1:13:52
  body and do that animation. It's going to be so good.
• 1:13:55
  But no, check everything that we've seen so far though,
• 1:13:59
  has been here say, and even Russell's experience was so
• 1:14:03
  like abstract, like it's so like it's so like like
• 1:14:08
  ethereal in nature even just like the train sound. They
• 1:14:11
  hear these things, but they can't hear each other. To me,
• 1:14:14
  it seems like like something is fucking with people's perception,
• 1:14:19
  like it's fucking with the reality. Not saying that it's
• 1:14:22
  like maybe interdimensional travel, but to me, it feels like
• 1:14:24
  something is happening to the individual, Like the landscape isn't changing,
• 1:14:29
  but the individual is under some kind of hypnosis, is
• 1:14:31
  how I see it.
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 2: That's an interesting point in.
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 1: De part four, which is all of I'm pretty sure
• 1:14:36
  this one's all of Katie's story or these are just
• 1:14:38
  different k Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 2: So he mentions that he went to a training weekend
• 1:14:42
  where there's a bunch of like other expert you know,
• 1:14:46
  search and rescue people stuff like that, and they each
• 1:14:48
  have their own weird stories of stuff's.
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 1: Happened, which this is a real uh, this is a
• 1:14:53
  real sea shanty kind of roundtable of horrible things to.
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 2: All we're doing right now exactly.
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 1: It feels like it feels like all of the stories
• 1:15:02
  it's just like, Yep, this happened, and they kind of
• 1:15:05
  like take a swig from their you know, like the
• 1:15:06
  boat is just rocking and they're just like remember that
• 1:15:08
  that climber's gruesome death. Do you remember that one? It's like,
• 1:15:11
  oh yeah, it just feels like it feels like a
• 1:15:13
  story circle. I don't want to be a part of it,
• 1:15:16
  but I mean, Katie's stories are all like the tragic,
• 1:15:19
  like the family accident on the mountain, which is the
• 1:15:22
  that's the snow. Yeah, a family snowshoeing goes off mapped,
• 1:15:27
  causing a fatal accident. They fall three hundred feet down
• 1:15:29
  a slope, resulting in the immediate death of the parents
• 1:15:32
  and one child. You know, real lighthearted fun stuff. Surviving
• 1:15:35
  children endure horrific ordeals. One freezes to death seeking help,
• 1:15:38
  the other found injured. It's only one person survives there.
• 1:15:41
  Horribly tragic, horrible, horrible.
• 1:15:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and again it's it's nothing explicitly supernatural. It's just
• 1:15:47
  no horrorfying story of what could happen.
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 1: It's just once again giving reality, giving real stories put in,
• 1:15:55
  and then it just blindsided you. That becomes the fun
• 1:15:57
  thing is when you read something that's so undane or normal,
• 1:16:01
  you almost expect you start at least for me when
• 1:16:04
  I was reading, which is as interesting I know if
• 1:16:06
  it happened to you, is that even whenever they do
• 1:16:09
  these things where it's like, oh, yeah, it was a
• 1:16:10
  tragic accident, Almost every time I'm like, hm, I don't
• 1:16:13
  know what caused them to go over You know, I
• 1:16:16
  start to conspirit I could start to conspiracize with myself
• 1:16:19
  of like, with all this bits of information, it almost
• 1:16:22
  feels like there could be no human error. Like it
• 1:16:25
  feels like there is something controlling every aspect of people's
• 1:16:28
  actions because we.
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 2: Know so much right about like what's going on in
• 1:16:32
  the woods, that we know that there's some malicious force happenings.
• 1:16:35
  So yeah, any of these otherwise inconspicuous stories could be
• 1:16:38
  something more.
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: I think my favorite one of Katie's stories was the
• 1:16:41
  climber who disembowed, Like the disembowed climber, but he was
• 1:16:46
  disembowed by his own acts. And the team discovers the
• 1:16:49
  mutilated body under a cliff and testines all spilled out.
• 1:16:53
  The horfix seem deeply disturbs even an experienced SAR officer,
• 1:16:57
  which I was like, really, this is the thing it,
• 1:17:00
  you know, well, this this person with their testine is spilt out.
• 1:17:04
  It's like you've seen all these other things, and it's like,
• 1:17:06
  well I got to see his gutty works. It's freaked
• 1:17:10
  me out.
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 2: Even if you're like on the job, you see a
• 1:17:14
  guy gored to death.
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: How many good bodies have I seen?
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 2: Yes, the people on this job have seen some stuff
• 1:17:24
  more so than like is expected for a normal workforce.
• 1:17:27
  If you saw someone gored to death, like and Testin's
• 1:17:31
  ripped out by a pickaxe on top of the mountain,
• 1:17:34
  you might be like, that's kind of upsetting.
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 1: I'm saying that it is upsetting. I'm just saying that
• 1:17:40
  they put a real emphasis on like he's like, oh
• 1:17:43
  this one really got to me, And I'm like, and
• 1:17:45
  if all the things I heard, I've seen people take
• 1:17:47
  cartoonishly long steps.
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 2: Oh oh, you're saying people character, You're saying cassols shouldn't
• 1:17:52
  have any Okay, all right.
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 1: I'm saying that every office, like every SAR or SAAR
• 1:17:57
  like sor officer in this story, so kat here should
• 1:18:01
  not be affected because they've seen.
• 1:18:03
  Speaker 2: You're talking about our s c P foundation.
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yeah, yes, the reader obviously can.
• 1:18:09
  But I'm just saying when they take moments to be
• 1:18:11
  like Katie's like, yeah, this one really messed me up,
• 1:18:14
  I'm like, oh, really, this is the one that got you.
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 2: YEA follows it up with like talking to the devil.
• 1:18:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, exactly, even though what's the next one, the
• 1:18:26
  young boy? Yeah, with the fuzzy man whatever.
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, all right, all right, point made.
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So it's just weird. It's like it's like, oh
• 1:18:35
  that you know that that was that that one got
• 1:18:38
  to me. It's like, KD, shut the funk up, shut up.
• 1:18:43
  I've been in hell listening to these stories and now
• 1:18:45
  you're like, well, seriously the pick cks. That one got
• 1:18:48
  to me. If I'm being honest.
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 2: That okay, you win on Yeah, the next one they
• 1:18:52
  talk that Katie talks about the fuzzy Man. That boy
• 1:18:58
  goes missing. Uh, they find the boy months later, still alive, right,
• 1:19:03
  is that what it? Or?
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: No? No, they find the same boy reappears in good condition,
• 1:19:09
  but his brother disappears in mere seconds. Is the is the.
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 2: Let me look out? So I get this. I think
• 1:19:15
  this is the one where one kid went missing. Then
• 1:19:18
  the parents go back to like honor the site their
• 1:19:22
  child went missing, and then that kid also goes missing.
• 1:19:25
  Yes it's this one.
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, because they're out berry picking. And the whole
• 1:19:29
  thing was that the kid goes missing, but the kid
• 1:19:31
  that was missing before comes back and he's in perfect condition.
• 1:19:35
  But the kid that they came there with is now
• 1:19:37
  lost or he does. He disappears, and the boy who
• 1:19:41
  comes back recounts the fuzzy Man, which is a blurry
• 1:19:45
  eyelis figure in the woods who cared for him and
• 1:19:48
  said he wasn't the right kid.
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, which is how terrifying. It implies that this fuzzy
• 1:19:54
  man that kept this kid alive for a while even
• 1:19:56
  remarks that whenever it got dark out that the fuzzy
• 1:19:59
  man made it brighter whatever that means. So like just
• 1:20:02
  so fuzzy man also mentioned said he doesn't have eyes
• 1:20:06
  at one point.
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, he says, a blurring eyeless and imagine this man
• 1:20:14
  which the kid. Once again, he's not freaking out, he's
• 1:20:17
  just like he tell me I wasn't the right kind,
• 1:20:20
  which he doesn't say kid, he says the right kind.
• 1:20:23
  What does it mean?
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right, that's right, But it also sound like, well,
• 1:20:29
  what's really creepy about it is they're like Katie's like, oh,
• 1:20:33
  by fuzzy, do you mean hairless? Do you mean like bigfoot?
• 1:20:35
  And he's like, no, he kind of looked like when
• 1:20:37
  you blur your eyes and everything looks fuzzy. He looked like.
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 1: That, yeah, but without weird yeah, almost like formless like
• 1:20:46
  he it's like a not like a not like what
• 1:20:51
  is it like completely formed? Like basically like static or
• 1:20:55
  something like or.
• 1:20:57
  Speaker 2: Something made of the essence of blurry whatever that means. Yeah,
• 1:21:01
  and so he he go. That kid comes back, but
• 1:21:04
  then his brother disappears, implying that his brother was the
• 1:21:07
  right kind because they never see that kid again.
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 1: Uh yeah, that's the I think that's the that's the assumption,
• 1:21:14
  but you never know. I mean, that kid could come
• 1:21:16
  back as well. I feel like, uh, I'm not gonna
• 1:21:19
  lie if I was. If I was that kid, I'd
• 1:21:22
  be fucked me up. That this weird static man didn't
• 1:21:26
  think I was the right kind.
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 2: That that would be your problem with him.
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: That would well, as a kid, I would.
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 2: Rejected by the statics.
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: Getting rejected by the eyeless man who can't see me
• 1:21:37
  mind you, he's just this is just him, just kind
• 1:21:40
  of like he pokes my fat stomach and he's like,
• 1:21:43
  not the right card and not my skinny ass. Cute
• 1:21:47
  brother gets missed, and I'm like, okay, dude, fuck that guy.
• 1:21:51
  You know like that. I was like, it's like, yeah,
• 1:21:54
  that's bullshit. That would suck me up if I was
• 1:21:56
  a kid. Body dysmorphia dude for real. And then the
• 1:22:01
  last one with Katie's two. Katie's story basically, it's just
• 1:22:05
  like she gets lost or Katie gets lost and uh,
• 1:22:10
  which is weird because obviously an expert of the woods,
• 1:22:14
  and it's like a lost where it's like I don't
• 1:22:15
  know where I'm at. I think that the way that
• 1:22:17
  they describe it as more like I had no idea
• 1:22:20
  where I was at, like on Earth kind of thing.
• 1:22:23
  It's like totally disoriented, like I don't even know where
• 1:22:27
  I'm at in the world kind of thing, like it
• 1:22:29
  doesn't even feel familiar whatsoever. But they Katie hears a
• 1:22:32
  croaky internal voice urging her to eat, leading to near
• 1:22:35
  self harm with a hunting life, so basically like almost
• 1:22:39
  cannibalizing herself. And she's found days later, having travels, having
• 1:22:44
  traveled dangerously far, with no memory of a lapsed time,
• 1:22:48
  which basically she had. I think, what's two days, two
• 1:22:51
  or three days?
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 2: Right, so she thinks it's been like an hour and
• 1:22:54
  then yeah, but it's been days. It's been two days.
• 1:22:57
  And also when she sees him, she's so hungry she
• 1:23:00
  a knife on him. It's like she has, yeah, cannibalism,
• 1:23:02
  said in to herself.
• 1:23:04
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she didn't know either. She was like, I don't
• 1:23:06
  know what came over me. But it was just like her,
• 1:23:08
  and it was like her gut instinct just to be like,
• 1:23:10
  I'm gonna cut this dude up and eat him. Which
• 1:23:12
  who hasn't been there, dude?
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 2: Just keep who is still?
• 1:23:20
  Speaker 1: We cut the EW's story, which is a mysterious death
• 1:23:22
  of a boy near the stairs, which I I think
• 1:23:25
  this is our first time ever hearing about a dead
• 1:23:27
  body near the stairs.
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 2: This is the first time the stairs directly cause a death.
• 1:23:31
  I mean, it's implied a guy who walked up him,
• 1:23:33
  but this is the first times like a body there.
• 1:23:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, sure, which is an eleven. You're a boy named
• 1:23:39
  Joey vanishes near a river, leading to a puzzling search.
• 1:23:42
  The star finds his body by a set of stairs
• 1:23:44
  in a remote area, curled up and dead. Post mortem
• 1:23:47
  examination reveals inexplicable whole punch like holes in his organs
• 1:23:51
  with no external wounds, which I love how they described that.
• 1:23:54
  They say his organs are like Swiss cheese, so gross,
• 1:23:57
  so gross, and so good. I love that.
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 2: I mean, like, what's interesting about that whole story is
• 1:24:03
  they describe a kid goes missing and they do a
• 1:24:06
  search for him, and as they're doing the search operation.
• 1:24:10
  They like, the dogs will pick up a scent and
• 1:24:14
  then lose it, then pick it up, then lose it.
• 1:24:15
  And when they look at the map to see how
• 1:24:18
  what order they're doing it, it's in a checkerboard segment,
• 1:24:21
  as it describes. So if you imagine a checkerboard with
• 1:24:24
  like the red and black spaces. In the red spaces,
• 1:24:27
  the dogs smell. When they pass into the black spaces,
• 1:24:30
  they lose the scent and they get into red and
• 1:24:33
  they pick it up again. Like it further leads into
• 1:24:35
  the idea that there's some kind of dimensional rift happening
• 1:24:39
  in this woods. It's very cool. It's a very cool idea.
• 1:24:42
  And then when they find the kid himself dead at
• 1:24:44
  the bottom of the stairs, his holes, i mean, his
• 1:24:47
  organs are almost full of these checkerboarded holes. It looks
• 1:24:50
  like a whole punch something stabbed him across his organs.
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 1: It's it's like, but no punctures to the skin though,
• 1:24:56
  mind you, yeah.
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, his skin externally totally fine, but in his
• 1:25:00
  organs have been shredded. It's like he got pulled through
• 1:25:03
  some kind of dimensional rift.
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: It's very creepy with all these conspiracy things too, I'm
• 1:25:07
  surprised that in this level of the story so far,
• 1:25:10
  because even the mortician sees it, right, and the mortician's
• 1:25:13
  just like, yeah, I've never seen anything like this before
• 1:25:15
  in my life, right, Yeah, I'm surprised there isn't more
• 1:25:18
  things about people like teams taking the body like almost
• 1:25:22
  like because it, like, like we said before, it feels
• 1:25:24
  like there's people that are trying to stop this information.
• 1:25:28
  So I'm surprised so far in the story here there
• 1:25:31
  isn't something where it's just like, oh, we have to
• 1:25:33
  have call this these people to pick it up or
• 1:25:35
  something like almost somebody interfering with that information to the
• 1:25:38
  outside world, which maybe it's supposed to be elluded that
• 1:25:41
  you know, the mortician maybe cuts into it, but maybe
• 1:25:44
  like no one else really sees it. But I don't
• 1:25:46
  know something especially with that that distinguished of an injury,
• 1:25:51
  because so far, you know, people are like missing or
• 1:25:53
  it's accidents, but this is like just on a whole
• 1:25:56
  different level. I mean, this is like our first extremely
• 1:25:59
  paranormal kind of like surreal kill that's confirmed by someone
• 1:26:03
  else outside of the forest, which is kind of interesting. Then, last,
• 1:26:09
  but not least, we have peb PB warnings you know more,
• 1:26:14
  this is another staircase one PB shares disturbing incidents related
• 1:26:19
  to the mysterious stairs in the woods. Describes a man's
• 1:26:21
  hand being sliced off and a woman's brain vessel bursting
• 1:26:25
  upon interacting with the stairs. Talks about the unpredictable but
• 1:26:30
  invariable tragic consequences of engaging with these stairs, and emphasizes
• 1:26:34
  the impossibility of finding the same stair twice and the
• 1:26:37
  eerie phenomena phenomena surrounding them. So we do get into
• 1:26:42
  back we're getting into like back rooms kind of like parallel,
• 1:26:46
  you know, like you're saying dimension parallel dimension type stuff.
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 2: You never see the same stairs twice, right that It
• 1:26:52
  mentions that you walk up them in your hand can
• 1:26:55
  just disappear, maybe your brain explodes. They're clearly not like
• 1:26:59
  not only are the stair is not supposed to be
• 1:27:00
  there visually in the sense of the reality that they're
• 1:27:04
  currently in, they shouldn't be there. They cause glitches almost
• 1:27:07
  when they come into contact.
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: Which I'm telling you man, once again, when I was
• 1:27:11
  reading this, I was thinking, I think that the stairs
• 1:27:15
  are just like it feels like it is what the
• 1:27:19
  forest is like presenting to you as something like it's
• 1:27:23
  masking it as something, you know what I mean, Like
• 1:27:25
  almost like it's resemble like a staircase that maybe you've
• 1:27:28
  seen before in your life or something. It's like taking
• 1:27:29
  into your memories and it's like a staircase that maybe
• 1:27:31
  you've seen before, but it's disguising some of the contraption
• 1:27:34
  that you're walking on or like entering or something along
• 1:27:37
  those lines. I just I think that I think that
• 1:27:40
  there's something more to play than just like having it
• 1:27:43
  be interdimensional travel or something. I feel like it's, uh,
• 1:27:48
  it's like masking. It's like some kind of masking situation
• 1:27:52
  in reality or whatever. I don't know. Interesting, interesting, interesting.
• 1:27:58
  And then part five, we're getting more. We're closing in, dude,
• 1:28:01
  We're closed. We're over halfway.
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 2: We're getting through it.
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: We're chugging along. Which is the firefighter's horrific discovery and
• 1:28:07
  a tree which a firefighter previously experienced in tree trimming,
• 1:28:11
  is called for rescue operation to retrieve a child from
• 1:28:13
  a massive tree. Upon retrieving the child, he discovers a
• 1:28:16
  macob scene. The child's body is entangled in the branches
• 1:28:20
  and testines gruesomely hanging from his mouth and the other
• 1:28:23
  end draped over the branches like twisted decorations. The child's
• 1:28:28
  eyes are missing, indicating a violent end, and his swollen
• 1:28:31
  tongue is infested with flies. Shocked and unable to physically
• 1:28:34
  handle the body, the firefire dislodges it from the tree
• 1:28:37
  with a stick, disturbed by the thought of carrying it down.
• 1:28:40
  This is definitely the most brutal body hoole.
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 2: It's like the most violent description series.
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: Sure, it's almost like a very tragic They described as.
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 2: Like if a vacuum was like if the kid got
• 1:28:53
  sucked into a vacuum and everything got ripped out of
• 1:28:55
  him at once, And that's just like draped across the
• 1:28:58
  top of the trees. Like there's again, no explanation, no
• 1:29:02
  stuff given. It's it's left up to the reader's imagination
• 1:29:04
  what could have caused this scene?
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 1: The infested with flies part is pretty pretty fucking disgusting,
• 1:29:11
  Like that's pretty horrid, I think that. Like, what's what's
• 1:29:14
  interesting about this one is that they've included so many
• 1:29:16
  like accidents that when I read it at first, the
• 1:29:19
  infested fly thing is probably a bit hard to sell,
• 1:29:21
  but it almost reads like a murder in a way
• 1:29:24
  like I really fucked up murder. It's how I kind
• 1:29:27
  of read it at first, which is just like a
• 1:29:31
  violent circumstance in these woods. But I don't know, did
• 1:29:34
  you read this one as paranormal? Did you read this
• 1:29:36
  one more as like like some kind.
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 2: Of because of everything that's happened so far, I read
• 1:29:42
  it as paranormal. I understand why you could just read
• 1:29:45
  it as like a sick, messed up serial killer kind
• 1:29:47
  of thing. But given given the past of everything that's happened,
• 1:29:51
  I did, in fact for sure.
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: I mean it could be even be something too where
• 1:29:55
  it's like it could even be something where someone is,
• 1:29:58
  you know, some kind of one of these monsters did
• 1:30:01
  it as well. Once again, though, I read it in
• 1:30:05
  a way where it's like a murderer affected by whatever
• 1:30:08
  he was affected with in this forest or like led
• 1:30:10
  to do this kind of thing in a craze or something,
• 1:30:13
  and we just haven't found that body yet. But it's
• 1:30:15
  hard to say too, because, like I said, at this
• 1:30:17
  point the story too, I'm still hoping that they introduce
• 1:30:20
  some more real elements because we are getting more fantastical.
• 1:30:24
  We're introducing a lot of new things, so it'd be
• 1:30:26
  kind of cool to have still bits of realism this
• 1:30:30
  far in to really make sure that the story is grounded,
• 1:30:34
  that the things that we're doing now aren't going so
• 1:30:36
  over the top, because you know, as you're writing these
• 1:30:38
  things continuously, you have to evolve and you have to
• 1:30:42
  showcase bigger and crazier things as you crescendo to your finale.
• 1:30:47
  But I think that you do need to still ground
• 1:30:49
  yourself in the reality that this is a job that
• 1:30:51
  someone would show up to and that there are still
• 1:30:53
  real things that can happen. So I think maybe it's
• 1:30:55
  even me just like almost, I mean, this is fucked
• 1:30:57
  up to say, but wanting it to be a murder,
• 1:30:59
  to be like, it's a horrible reality of something that
• 1:31:01
  could happen in uh, in the real world, just taking
• 1:31:06
  set the setting in the forest. But uh. The next
• 1:31:08
  one is the veterans observation of the stairs and the
• 1:31:11
  faceless man encounter. We get to we get we get
• 1:31:13
  a nice combination here, dude.
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so a veteran. A veteran discusses encountering stairs in
• 1:31:20
  the wilderness, including a particularly unsettling type that appear upside
• 1:31:26
  down like a surreal remnant of a tornado's aftermath. This
• 1:31:29
  one's double weird because like you can almost quantify a
• 1:31:32
  staircase left behind, you cannot quantify an upside down staircase
• 1:31:37
  in the middle of the woods. And he mentions that
• 1:31:39
  they're like more rare than the than the regular staircases.
• 1:31:42
  But if the if the normal ones caused the damage
• 1:31:44
  that we've heard so far, what would an upside down
• 1:31:47
  one do? It's, uh, yeah, I don't.
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: It makes me think that like even if you if
• 1:31:53
  it's that surreal and that like manipulated in our own reality,
• 1:31:58
  it makes me think that even if you like look
• 1:32:00
  at it, that you would be affected or something, you
• 1:32:03
  know what I mean. Like it feels like, yeah, like
• 1:32:06
  it's reach or its effect is has to be greater
• 1:32:10
  somehow because its presentation is so absurd and so distorted. Yeah,
• 1:32:16
  I really like that.
• 1:32:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah. There's another one where the veteran recounts a personal
• 1:32:22
  encounter with a figure lacking of face. The entity moves
• 1:32:25
  with unnatural speed and silence, approaching him by a river.
• 1:32:28
  This is similar to the other the tails that we've
• 1:32:31
  heard so far in the story of like these people
• 1:32:33
  appearing without a face.
• 1:32:35
  Speaker 1: And I think that what was interesting about this one too,
• 1:32:37
  is that the entity displays a ghastly feature where its
• 1:32:39
  throat opens up like a mouth, smiling grotesquely, and it
• 1:32:41
  speaks in a disturbing and an unnatural manner, which I
• 1:32:45
  like to tie in with this one because it kind
• 1:32:47
  of gave because you know, before we said like, it's
• 1:32:50
  like a muffled scream, and it was. It was basically
• 1:32:53
  like skin draped over a face. I'm wondering now whenever
• 1:32:56
  we got to this part where I was like, oh,
• 1:32:57
  I wonder if this is the same thing and the
• 1:32:59
  scream coming from its throat and if it just sounded
• 1:33:02
  you know, unnatural just because it was must maybe like
• 1:33:04
  a what is it? What is it called? Whenever like
• 1:33:06
  somebody's the smoking thing and you put the hole in
• 1:33:08
  their neck, the fun is that called?
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's from the the ectomy or whatever. But
• 1:33:16
  I forget what the name of the actual.
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: I want to say, it's act positive.
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's the procedure. Is that also what the oka afterwards?
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 2: I I I know what you're talking about, the voice spot,
• 1:33:27
  but it's.
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: It's that voice box saying So I'm wondering because he
• 1:33:30
  says it's in an unnatural manner. So I'm wondering if
• 1:33:32
  it's the same thing, or is it like a series
• 1:33:34
  of things. I don't know what I mean. Whenever I
• 1:33:37
  read it, I think that it's uh. I think it's
• 1:33:40
  probably the same entity, is what I is. What I'm thinking,
• 1:33:43
  the same kind of faceless ghoul walking around. But you know.
• 1:33:48
  And Part five ends with the woman's childhood encounter with
• 1:33:51
  the mutilated man, and I do I do like this
• 1:33:55
  one too. I also like that it's uh, it's like
• 1:33:58
  a childhood memory. I don't know why. There's always something
• 1:34:01
  about introducing like your child, like the real the recollections
• 1:34:05
  of when you're a kid, if it translates to reality,
• 1:34:08
  because usually that stuff is always distorted. But if it's
• 1:34:11
  something as traumatic as this, you almost want to believe
• 1:34:14
  that it's true. Which the woman shares a childhood memory
• 1:34:17
  of exploring a recently burnt forest with her friend. That's
• 1:34:21
  a fun that's a fun friend activity. Yeah you know
• 1:34:24
  that beautiful forest. Yeah it's burnt, let's go look at it.
• 1:34:28
  Where they encounter a man with parts of his face
• 1:34:30
  horrific horrifically removed. The man bleeding profusely and dressed in
• 1:34:34
  strangely outdated clothing, is disoriented and terrified, warning against being
• 1:34:39
  touched lest he be taken back to an unknown, frightful place.
• 1:34:43
  The incident leaves a lasting scar on the woman and
• 1:34:46
  her friend, leading them to forever avoid the woods and
• 1:34:48
  never speak of the encounter again. Which also the guy,
• 1:34:51
  whenever he says don't touch me, or I'll be like,
• 1:34:54
  you know, it'll happen to me again, he like runs off,
• 1:34:57
  just sprints, he just gets the hell out of there,
• 1:35:01
  which once again, I'm telling you, man, I feel like
• 1:35:06
  I just feel like this forest is doing something. I
• 1:35:09
  feel like it's like with outdated clothes, which is it,
• 1:35:14
  which I think the author is trying to basically say
• 1:35:18
  that like time, I mean time travel, right.
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, she describes it as a great They're wearing a
• 1:35:26
  gray coat that has red trimming on it, which is
• 1:35:30
  I think that was some Initially I thought Confederate because
• 1:35:34
  gray coat, but that doesn't make sense because they describe
• 1:35:36
  the story as taking place in Maine, so maybe I
• 1:35:43
  mean Also, the forest displaced the stuff, so it could
• 1:35:45
  have been a Confederate. It could have been like a
• 1:35:47
  revolutionary war garb or something like that. Basically a soldier
• 1:35:51
  from some previous American war who she mentions it that
• 1:35:57
  there is blood on his kneecaps, on his warhead, and
• 1:36:00
  on his nose, like they're cut off, implying that either
• 1:36:04
  he was walking and like something cut off the front
• 1:36:07
  of his face and his knees, or maybe he fell
• 1:36:11
  down and like his knees and face got like cut
• 1:36:14
  by something. What my theory with that is maybe back
• 1:36:17
  in like because he says that, or she says the
• 1:36:20
  character the character I believe. Here's a woman recounting the
• 1:36:23
  story when she was a child that this soldier ran
• 1:36:27
  up to her and started shaking her and asked where
• 1:36:29
  his company is, like what's happening? And when she pulled
• 1:36:32
  out her phone or some some mechanical device, he started
• 1:36:35
  freaking out and ran away. So I think what happened
• 1:36:38
  is this soldier was in like you know, civil war,
• 1:36:42
  revolutionary war, something like that, and he came across the
• 1:36:45
  staircase in the woods. He walks to the top of
• 1:36:48
  the stairs and similar to how it was described earlier,
• 1:36:52
  your hand can just get cut clean off if you
• 1:36:54
  reach too far out of the stairs. He was standing
• 1:36:57
  near the top and then this imaginary like the blade
• 1:37:00
  effectively of it. It's like I imagine it almost as like
• 1:37:03
  a piano wire shooting up from the stairs itself. Yeah,
• 1:37:07
  sliced it, sliced his nose, sliced his forehead, sliced his knees,
• 1:37:11
  and all of a sudden he was in the modern age.
• 1:37:14
  And then he runs, He finds this girl freaks out
• 1:37:16
  because of technology, runs off, and who knows what happens
• 1:37:18
  to him. I think it was a time transportation because
• 1:37:22
  of his own encounter with the stairs.
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 1: What led you to believe it is? So do you
• 1:37:26
  think that it shows the army just because of his
• 1:37:28
  get up?
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah. She describes it as hold on I can.
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 1: Find because well, you're right, it's like the it's like
• 1:37:36
  a gray outfit with the red trim. But to me,
• 1:37:39
  whenever I read that, I almost read that as like
• 1:37:40
  an older sorry uniform.
• 1:37:43
  Speaker 2: Oh you might be you might be right about that.
• 1:37:46
  Speaker 1: Actually, I think I thought that it might have been
• 1:37:48
  like I think, because I was right right there with
• 1:37:51
  you too.
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 2: Though.
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: I do think that he traveled up a staircase, got sliced,
• 1:37:54
  and he went way too far, and instead of just
• 1:37:56
  his arm and stuff, his whole body got transported out
• 1:37:59
  into a different time and now it's this guy who
• 1:38:02
  is like who knows. I mean, I remember why.
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 2: I think it was a milkon because he kept asking
• 1:38:06
  about his unit.
• 1:38:08
  Speaker 1: Well, even when I read even when I read unit,
• 1:38:10
  it still made me think of like like the SAR,
• 1:38:13
  like his that's his his not I mean, not platoon.
• 1:38:17
  It's like his unit, you know, his unit number in.
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 2: The search and rescue. Yeah, sure he had, So here's
• 1:38:23
  the phrasing. He had some kind of weird gray cloth
• 1:38:26
  jacket and almost formal pants on, and the jacket had
• 1:38:29
  these weird buttons and red borders on it.
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I want. I mean, it's it's very ambiguous. I
• 1:38:35
  mean I think that like it could it could very
• 1:38:38
  well be something as old as like eighteen hundreds or
• 1:38:42
  even seventeen hundreds or something like that.
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:38:44
  Speaker 1: To me, whenever I read it, yeah, I just I
• 1:38:46
  just imagine like away or like sixties, like sixties sar.
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's true, that's true.
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 1: It kill or something like that, you know what I mean,
• 1:38:53
  just kind of like an older material, but it's still
• 1:38:55
  formal in that way. But yeah, I just thought it
• 1:38:57
  was like, oh, this is a dude from a different time.
• 1:38:59
  Now it was, and I was.
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 2: Trying to go back out of time either way.
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I was trying to read back through, but
• 1:39:04
  there was no other stories because I was hoping that
• 1:39:06
  when I when I was going back through, that it
• 1:39:10
  would be like, oh, this is about like an older
• 1:39:14
  SAR person talks about like one of their colleagues going missing,
• 1:39:17
  and I'm like, oh, that would have been a tie in,
• 1:39:19
  but who knows. I mean, it's just some guy out
• 1:39:22
  of time showing up traumatizing these people. And then now
• 1:39:26
  they never have never stepped anywhere near the woods again
• 1:39:30
  at all, which smart I say, finally, thank god, someone
• 1:39:35
  has one crazy thing happened, and they're like that's enough.
• 1:39:38
  I'm good. Yeah, but they they haven't been tempted by
• 1:39:40
  the pay yet, the pay.
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 2: By the massive pay.
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 1: That the part the massive massive pay. You'll figure it
• 1:39:50
  out one day. That leads us into parts six, six
• 1:39:55
  of eight. We're rounding. We're rounding the final turn here,
• 1:39:58
  which is the part six is the rookie conversation revealing
• 1:40:03
  disturbing SAR incidences, because you know, what we've had so
• 1:40:06
  far isn't disturbing enough. But a friend shares an inn
• 1:40:09
  settling search and rescue case including rapid, unexplainable deaths and
• 1:40:13
  bizarre circumstances, describes finding a man with a family crushed
• 1:40:18
  with a fatally crushed skull in an area devoid of
• 1:40:21
  rocks are hard objects, and recalls discovering a woman in
• 1:40:25
  a desert who died of drowning with her lungs full
• 1:40:28
  of water and no nearby water resources. Really, by this point,
• 1:40:32
  I think in part six, it's really ramping up the
• 1:40:35
  dimensional travel stuff. A lot of people that shouldn't be
• 1:40:37
  this area are in this area, i e. You know,
• 1:40:42
  like head crushed by presumably rocks, no rocks or any
• 1:40:46
  hard like basically like in a pasture of grass. And
• 1:40:50
  then even a person drowning in a desert and their
• 1:40:52
  body is full of water. So once again we're just
• 1:40:55
  getting more teleportation stuff. We get the tragic case of
• 1:40:59
  a young man with down syndrome goes missing under mysterious circumstances,
• 1:41:04
  as well found severely injured in a canyon. Mentions a
• 1:41:08
  little sad boy wanting to play and trade quote unquote
• 1:41:11
  trade and dies after sharing haunted last words about being
• 1:41:15
  cold and longing for his mother. Just horribly, horribly tragic,
• 1:41:18
  which I wonder too. Coincidentally, I wonder if just from
• 1:41:24
  generally reading this, there's a couple there's there's more than one.
• 1:41:27
  I think there's like maybe four or five, maybe even
• 1:41:30
  six people with like mental mental illness of some kind
• 1:41:35
  being affected and being perpetrated there. I know there's been
• 1:41:39
  some movies that that has been Like in Stephen King's DreamCatcher,
• 1:41:43
  the person who can like inter dimensionally talk to people
• 1:41:47
  is a DOWN syndrome child. And I don't know if
• 1:41:49
  that if they're trying to link that as well, that
• 1:41:51
  like because of this mental illness that they're able to
• 1:41:55
  communicate or do something with these people. I don't know
• 1:41:58
  if there's some kind of narrative there, but just food
• 1:42:03
  for thought. Another one is a Senior Rangers disturbing story
• 1:42:06
  of a severed hand. A portion of the.
• 1:42:08
  Speaker 2: I like, how I come back and you're talking about
• 1:42:10
  Down syndrome.
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 1: Well, there's it happens a lot. It happened, It happens
• 1:42:14
  a lot, did you, Yeah, don't worry. I was actually
• 1:42:19
  just talking about the entire movie synopsis of Radio. I
• 1:42:21
  hope that was fine. I figured, did you did you
• 1:42:25
  hear what I had to say?
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 2: Though?
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: About the the down syndrome. Uh. This this entire reddits threat.
• 1:42:32
  I think there's five or six different cases of maybe
• 1:42:35
  four or five mentally ill uh children or people.
• 1:42:40
  Speaker 2: Having some There is a through line of there is.
• 1:42:43
  Speaker 1: And I was trying to compare it. Did you ever
• 1:42:45
  watch The Read or watch Stephen King's DreamCatcher?
• 1:42:50
  Speaker 2: Yes?
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 1: So in that movie, the whole correlation with that is
• 1:42:53
  that because of his mental illness, he's able to talk
• 1:42:56
  with this like out like other worldly monster that's been
• 1:43:00
  plaguing these people's dreams. So I didn't know if this
• 1:43:03
  was trying to do something similar where it's like because
• 1:43:06
  of their circumstance and they don't have similar you know,
• 1:43:10
  like because of their abnormalities with their you know, mental illnesses.
• 1:43:17
  Are they connected in some different way? Do they get
• 1:43:20
  some kind of different perception of this thing? Are they
• 1:43:23
  able to communicate with whatever they're doing more? I mean
• 1:43:26
  with this one, it's tragic about the little boy wanting
• 1:43:28
  to play in trade. It's more peaceful, which I'd have
• 1:43:32
  to go we'd have to go back through and check again.
• 1:43:34
  But I don't think. I don't think any of the
• 1:43:35
  other ones are also super deranged. If anything, I think
• 1:43:38
  that they're all somewhat kind of like peaceful by nature,
• 1:43:44
  I guess, But of course he dies with his haunting
• 1:43:48
  last words logging for his mom. It's a very sad,
• 1:43:53
  very sad one. But I just thought that was an interest.
• 1:43:55
  Like thinking about it now this far in the story,
• 1:43:58
  it's just a lot of different quinn there. I don't
• 1:44:01
  know if it's true.
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 2: And there was that part if I recover, you may
• 1:44:04
  have just talked about this while was replacing the battery.
• 1:44:06
  But wasn't there a section where it kind of implies
• 1:44:08
  that he kind of gave his life for someone else?
• 1:44:13
  Speaker 1: I believe.
• 1:44:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there's something about urgency. He was unable to
• 1:44:20
  function alone. It's it's when the search and rescue officer
• 1:44:26
  is talking to him, he says, hold up where it is? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:44:32
  He was crying and he said something about how the
• 1:44:35
  little sad boy had wanted him to come play. He
• 1:44:39
  said the little boy wanted to trade so he could
• 1:44:42
  go home, and then he closed his eyes and he
• 1:44:44
  woke up again. He was in the canyon. So it's
• 1:44:46
  like this this man like went with this child. And
• 1:44:50
  it also implies there's some entity in the forest collecting children,
• 1:44:53
  collecting people for whatever reason. Yeah, because there was also
• 1:44:56
  the story earlier with the two brothers in the right
• 1:44:58
  kind and one wasn't yeah, the right crime, and the
• 1:45:01
  other one was different. And here we have a story
• 1:45:03
  of a little boy taking this man away and wanting
• 1:45:05
  to trade so he can go home. So, for whatever reason,
• 1:45:09
  something in the woods is kind of collecting people.
• 1:45:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So one of the entities which is interesting because
• 1:45:14
  there's several. I wonder how much of these, which I
• 1:45:16
  guess whenever we're done talking about it, because we're almost
• 1:45:19
  done talking about all the parts we can talk about.
• 1:45:21
  I have a couple through lines that I want to
• 1:45:23
  talk about, but just to wrap up part six, there's
• 1:45:25
  also the encounter with the back flipping man, which I
• 1:45:28
  just I thought this one was kind of funny.
• 1:45:30
  Speaker 2: One's pretty good.
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 1: Searching for the Mountain Lion, an officer encounters a man
• 1:45:33
  performing unnatural backflips or the forest. The ban approaches rapidly,
• 1:45:38
  ignoring warnings and warning shots, then flees after the shot
• 1:45:41
  is fired. The bizarre behavior and agility of the man
• 1:45:45
  leave the officers deeply unsettled, which I agree. Can you
• 1:45:49
  imagine seeing a guy doing profusely fast back flips to
• 1:45:53
  the forest and he only runs away until you fire pistol.
• 1:45:55
  He's like, oh shit, he runs off. I thought that
• 1:45:59
  one was really funny. I like that lit a lot.
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 2: It's pretty good. Did you do the part about the
• 1:46:05
  severed hand in the tree?
• 1:46:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah?
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 2: Okay, cool, all right, yeah, mm hmm. It's interesting too,
• 1:46:35
  where it's described by says it's like growing out of
• 1:46:37
  the middle of a tree. It's there's something about this
• 1:46:41
  park where it feels like they are collecting thatsh almost right,
• 1:46:45
  collecting data in a sense for these faceless people that
• 1:46:48
  walk around. It's like they're trying to kind of almost
• 1:46:52
  copy paste human features into different parts of the park
• 1:46:55
  to either put on these faceless figures or whatnot. And
• 1:46:58
  they keep getting stuff wrong. A hand popping out of
• 1:47:01
  a tree. It describes later that one of the park
• 1:47:04
  rangers encountered someone whose face looked too big for their head,
• 1:47:08
  Like it's like they're learning what people are like. That
• 1:47:11
  also winds up with a lot of the noises they make,
• 1:47:13
  the crying on loop stuff like that. It's like it's
• 1:47:16
  like skin Walker's almost trying to learn how to be
• 1:47:19
  human or the entity of the park itself, trying to
• 1:47:22
  learn to be human, but they keep making mistakes.
• 1:47:25
  Speaker 1: Trying to mimic things that they hear and responses of,
• 1:47:28
  like an entity that is learning a new species, almost
• 1:47:32
  trying to catch it. An there's also species.
• 1:47:35
  Speaker 2: Similar to that. In that same story where the girl
• 1:47:38
  is talking about going to the burnout forest and encountering
• 1:47:40
  the old soldier search and rescue work or whatever, she
• 1:47:44
  mentions that they saw the skeleton of a deer, but
• 1:47:47
  they didn't go near it because the deer's antlers didn't
• 1:47:50
  look right. I don't know if that's implying that this
• 1:47:53
  deer was some kind of supernatural entity or if it
• 1:47:55
  was again another example of the woods creating something abnormal
• 1:47:59
  on Act.
• 1:48:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I always wondered. I wish that we got more
• 1:48:02
  description of what the antlers, what the antlers looked like,
• 1:48:05
  like almost like yeah, if I don't know, like I
• 1:48:09
  almost think that it's like instead of like regular antler bones,
• 1:48:13
  like is it like is it pieces of human skill?
• 1:48:17
  Like another pieces of the deer's bone structure that manifested
• 1:48:21
  into the antlers, like I almost thought it Like when
• 1:48:24
  I initially thought of it too, it was like you know,
• 1:48:26
  almost thinking of like maybe like someone's rib cage replaced
• 1:48:29
  on top of like the deer's head or something like
• 1:48:31
  the way the curvature of that just something odd, you know,
• 1:48:34
  where it's like, well, that looks right, but it's not.
• 1:48:37
  So it's uncanny and it has that you know people,
• 1:48:39
  but obviously people wouldn't also just be like, oh that
• 1:48:42
  it's a rib cage or who knows what it is.
• 1:48:44
  You know, it's it's just something a little more interesting.
• 1:48:47
  I wish we had a little more visual information there,
• 1:48:49
  even if it wasn't like fully descriptive, but just enough
• 1:48:52
  to kind of like titillate the senses. I think going
• 1:48:56
  into uh part seven, we have some more cryptids here,
• 1:49:02
  and the rake and the windigo, which is funny, which is.
• 1:49:07
  Speaker 2: The yeah he he.
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 1: The narrator touches On frequently asked topics about cryptids, such
• 1:49:14
  as the rake and a creature described in the folklore
• 1:49:16
  as a humanoid figure with grotesque features, and the windigo,
• 1:49:19
  a mythical creature a Native American folklore often associated with
• 1:49:22
  cannibalism and satiable greed and cultural taboos. So once again
• 1:49:27
  the rustle here kind of talking about you know, talking
• 1:49:32
  directly to the audience, just kind of describing some of
• 1:49:34
  the stuff and admits to limited knowledge, but acknowledges stories
• 1:49:37
  that seem loose to the rates related to these legends,
• 1:49:40
  emphasizes the need for practical approach in the wilderness to
• 1:49:43
  maintain a sense of normalcy and avoids of coming to
• 1:49:46
  fear and paranoia. So basically them being like, well, I'm
• 1:49:49
  not going to read in all this stuff and just
• 1:49:51
  assume that these sayings that I'm seeing are associated with
• 1:49:54
  these legends, et cetera, but can admit to like, yeah,
• 1:49:58
  I mean some of them might be similar, but I'm
• 1:50:00
  not going to like dive into it, which I don't know.
• 1:50:03
  Do you agree with that sentiment? Do you agree that, like, like,
• 1:50:07
  by not researching yourself into that, that that brings like
• 1:50:12
  normality to your job if you see all that crazy stuff?
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 2: So hold up phrase that question again. Do I think
• 1:50:19
  it so like rings normality to see that weird stuff?
• 1:50:22
  Speaker 1: Is that what you're saying or Russell is saying that
• 1:50:24
  I'm not going to investigate into these cryptids that you
• 1:50:28
  guys are saying that I'm not that that Russell is
• 1:50:31
  not knowledge knowledgeable of and he's not going to resource
• 1:50:33
  research it because he wants to keep a sense of
• 1:50:37
  normality and not cause paranoia and fear.
• 1:50:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I think that is true to agree. They
• 1:50:43
  even discuss that at the point when they're I think
• 1:50:46
  it was the old service ranger talking about like all
• 1:50:48
  the stuff that can go wrong with the stairs in
• 1:50:50
  the woods. He kind of alludes to the idea that
• 1:50:52
  maybe people won't talk about it because once they acknowledge it,
• 1:50:56
  they have to deal with the fact that it's real.
• 1:50:58
  So in a sense, maybe it's the same way with
• 1:51:01
  like these wind to Go creatures and things like that.
• 1:51:03
  Maybe it's just something that you don't want to look.
• 1:51:05
  Speaker 1: At directly, almost like a weird kind of like parallels
• 1:51:08
  too with like, uh, just for viewers to maybe comprehend
• 1:51:10
  a bit better too, like kind of like demons in
• 1:51:13
  movies or something like that, or like demons, it's like
• 1:51:15
  acknowledging it gives it more power in the physical world
• 1:51:19
  or something something along those lines. I think that like
• 1:51:22
  by acknowledging it and by like giving more of your
• 1:51:24
  attention to it, it feeds off that paranoia or feeds
• 1:51:28
  off your attention, and it kind of like is like
• 1:51:31
  reeling you in in some kind of way. So yeah, yeah,
• 1:51:35
  but the KD comes back for this one and talks
• 1:51:37
  about it's their wind to Go entity that they came across.
• 1:51:41
  Actually in this thing too, we actually get a we
• 1:51:43
  get our first, I don't. I think this might be
• 1:51:44
  our first time that they ever talked about actual location,
• 1:51:46
  which kat shares a story from her friend h about
• 1:51:49
  a camping trip near the Warm Springs Reservation in central Organ.
• 1:51:52
  I think that's the first time we ever get like
• 1:51:53
  an actual it.
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 2: It like we get hints about stuff about like, oh, well,
• 1:52:01
  it's in an area with a lot of mountains and terrain.
• 1:52:04
  There's moose there, so we know it's kind of like
• 1:52:06
  P and W region, but here it's actually described. Earlier,
• 1:52:10
  there was the friend's story in Maine that was said,
• 1:52:13
  but that's not described to share this area. Katie's friends
• 1:52:16
  story is kind of with the idea that it's related
• 1:52:18
  to this area and it's in Organ, so it kind
• 1:52:20
  of confirmed suspicions of this being somewhere in the Rockies
• 1:52:24
  or like Yellowstone ish area.
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 1: And I mean this one is just them encountering a
• 1:52:29
  creature resembling a deer but walking on two legs with
• 1:52:31
  cloudy milky eye, similar to Windigo's description. But they ignored
• 1:52:36
  the creature and avoid interacting with it, adhering to his
• 1:52:39
  grandfather's warnings about mysterious entities in the wilderness. So basically,
• 1:52:43
  this one felt like it was just like them seeing
• 1:52:45
  a wind to Go kind of entry, but them not
• 1:52:48
  really paying much attention to it and just hoping that
• 1:52:51
  it wouldn't fuck with them per their you know, grandfather
• 1:52:55
  being like, you don't want to mess with deer that
• 1:52:59
  stands on legs. It'll fuck you up, for real. I
• 1:53:02
  just don't even look at it. That sounds really scary, Grandpa.
• 1:53:07
  I don't care. It is scary. Scary as ship. Just
• 1:53:12
  I don't know, twddle with your thumbs. Okay, thanks.
• 1:53:17
  Speaker 2: Turns out he was right.
• 1:53:19
  Speaker 1: He was right.
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 2: He was ignored it, and it doesn't happen.
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 1: He was right. It would be very hard not to
• 1:53:24
  be like, hey, you know, like that's what well.
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 2: I mean that she describes it, and the kid who's
• 1:53:32
  like facing away from it, it's standing right behind him
• 1:53:35
  whispering to him, oh yeah, and the kids like, so
• 1:53:37
  have you seen that? You see that cool new ed
• 1:53:40
  ed an Eddie episode? That was pretty cool? So that's
• 1:53:42
  pretty so.
• 1:53:42
  Speaker 1: Funny because like you're like shaking in fear and things
• 1:53:45
  like that, whispering behind you. It's like so then Ed
• 1:53:52
  slaps his belly, pink belly. And then there was his
• 1:53:57
  other part where he says, buttertoast. It was the funniest
• 1:54:01
  fucking thing I've ever seen in my life.
• 1:54:05
  Speaker 2: I imagine that's how your childhood went though.
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 1: Literally. I remember the episode of Eda Eddie scared me
• 1:54:11
  when Ed eats his mattress. I remember, I remember, I
• 1:54:14
  do remember that time.
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 2: Do you remember that I was revolted?
• 1:54:18
  Speaker 1: It revolted me as a child.
• 1:54:21
  Speaker 2: Do you remember that episode where I forget what the
• 1:54:24
  context was, but Ed's parents takes away his stairs. Do
• 1:54:31
  you remember that?
• 1:54:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah? Because he lives in the basement, right, Yeah, he.
• 1:54:34
  Speaker 2: Lives in the basements. Always like, oh, I'm grounded. So
• 1:54:36
  my parents took the stairs. That's some liminal horror. That's
• 1:54:42
  where the stairs.
• 1:54:43
  Speaker 1: Horror, especially because you never see the parents in that show.
• 1:54:46
  I know that there's so many fun experiences of like
• 1:54:49
  who the fun took the stairs at?
• 1:54:51
  Speaker 2: His parents are just an entity that eats stairs. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:54:57
  we're gonna okay, we're getting to Almos.
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 1: We're almost that, I know. Thank you guys, we're so close. Wait,
• 1:55:03
  having a lot of fun with this, but just to
• 1:55:05
  rattle these these last ones off, we get another encounter
• 1:55:07
  with the faceless man, which is like a friend of
• 1:55:10
  Russell uh. While repainting an information booth, is approached by
• 1:55:15
  a man asking for directions. Initially perceives the man as normal,
• 1:55:18
  but upon looking directly at him, sees that the man
• 1:55:20
  has a smooth, faceless surface, creating a moment of intense
• 1:55:23
  fear and confusion. The man disappears into the woods after
• 1:55:27
  the encounter, leaving.
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 2: That appear an understatement.
• 1:55:30
  Speaker 1: That was, yeah, leaving an eerie impression, which it's like,
• 1:55:36
  I mean, I really imagine that for a second. Excuse me,
• 1:55:39
  do you know where the local red Robin is? Oh? Yeah, man,
• 1:55:43
  he's like has the face. He's like he like just
• 1:55:45
  dead sprints into the woods. How would you even process that?
• 1:55:50
  A smooth a smooth faceless surface the way.
• 1:55:52
  Speaker 2: He describes pretty good too, because they're like on top
• 1:55:55
  of the staircase painting. Yeah, and then it's like they
• 1:55:57
  look over their shoulder. They're faceless. They blink and he
• 1:56:00
  has a face all of a sudden, and it's like, huh,
• 1:56:02
  was that my bad? But then the guy's acting so
• 1:56:05
  weird that you're like, uh, maybe that wasn't my bad.
• 1:56:08
  Like it is. It is a very well played moment
• 1:56:10
  of tension.
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 1: It's a well played moment at tension, and I think
• 1:56:13
  that like it escalates it perfectly by exactly you're asking yourself,
• 1:56:16
  it's this situation weird until the guy literally disappears into
• 1:56:20
  the woods. You know, I had every right to be
• 1:56:23
  weird to that by that. Okay.
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 2: That imagine you're talking to a guy and he's like, Hey,
• 1:56:27
  could you give me a ride down the street, and
• 1:56:28
  you're like no, and he's like okay and just walks
• 1:56:30
  off into the like into the tree line.
• 1:56:34
  Speaker 1: I'd be like that man's on his own journey. Man's
• 1:56:37
  taking shortcuts left and right.
• 1:56:41
  Speaker 2: He's going to a place I cannot follow.
• 1:56:44
  Speaker 1: The trail scout meeting with a disproportionately faced man, which
• 1:56:48
  is another individual recounts meeting an older man while scouting
• 1:56:51
  trails whose facial features were unnaturally large compared to his head,
• 1:56:55
  creating disturbed and surreal visual which you've talked to you,
• 1:56:58
  you were talking about that earlier, But yeah, I mean that.
• 1:57:00
  That one's fun. I like, how simple this one is
• 1:57:03
  because it's it's just the idea, like picturing my head.
• 1:57:07
  It was very comical, But that made it more scary
• 1:57:10
  to me, is how funny his face would have been. Hello,
• 1:57:13
  like scouting for these trailers and just would it's just
• 1:57:18
  a giant man with like spaghetti strand hair. Could I
• 1:57:22
  offer you a peppermint?
• 1:57:25
  Speaker 2: It honestly would look like one of your cartoons. It
• 1:57:27
  was face is too big for his head, like one
• 1:57:29
  of your one, if your purposely scary cartoon, it would
• 1:57:32
  be one of the ones.
• 1:57:32
  Speaker 1: Too too much gum in his smile, extremely tiny teeth. Yeah,
• 1:57:36
  oh yeah, yeah, definitely.
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 2: Like it's interesting too how it's described with like the
• 1:57:43
  way it's phrase too, like his face was just too
• 1:57:45
  big for his head, not that his head was big,
• 1:57:47
  his face was too big for it. And you sat
• 1:57:49
  there and you're thinking to yourself, like what would that
• 1:57:51
  look like? You know, like the eyes, the mouth, It
• 1:57:54
  creates a very uncanny picture in your head. I like
• 1:57:58
  it very well. It's it's very yeah. I mean, obviously
• 1:58:01
  the face isn't subtle, but it's not like his face
• 1:58:03
  exploded and beginning no something.
• 1:58:05
  Speaker 1: It's just like it's not like some kind of jump scare.
• 1:58:07
  It's just the uncanny nature of the situation. Even I mean,
• 1:58:11
  like I imagine the disportionate of his face. It isn't
• 1:58:14
  so cartoonish. It's probably just awkward enough, you know.
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, And also he goes back to that thing I
• 1:58:21
  talked about earlier, the idea that this that these monsters,
• 1:58:28
  these faceless creatures wherever there, are trying to learn humans. Yeah,
• 1:58:32
  trying to learn what they like, how they act it all.
• 1:58:35
  It Actually, since they're going from faceless to like just
• 1:58:38
  too big of a face, it almost implies they're getting
• 1:58:40
  better at it, which is scary.
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's learning. It's it's learning, and it's adapting.
• 1:58:46
  It's just the it's the simplicities, like if each one
• 1:58:48
  of these people are asking for a ride to Red Robin,
• 1:58:51
  you know that it hasn't learned that core aspect of
• 1:58:54
  like normal human conversation, but visually it's getting better. And
• 1:58:58
  that's what's crazy too, is that then you're gonna start
• 1:59:01
  seeing like normal people that are just acting slightly off,
• 1:59:04
  and that's gonna be way way harder to comprehend, you know.
• 1:59:07
  I'm like, or to even delineate between an actual person.
• 1:59:10
  So even if they don't get it perfectly right like
• 1:59:15
  and eighty percent perfect like, Replica is going to feel like, Yeah,
• 1:59:19
  this is just a fucking weirdo that I've met one
• 1:59:21
  hundred times before at Walmart or something. Which the last
• 1:59:26
  two little parts of seven are the girls sleepwalking to
• 1:59:30
  the stairs mysteriously. She kind of talks about, you know,
• 1:59:34
  speaks cryptically about needing to leave, and mentions quote unquote
• 1:59:38
  it being there. Doesn't really describe what it is, it's
• 1:59:41
  just it is there before waking up with no memory
• 1:59:44
  of the event. And then the last one is the
• 1:59:46
  child with a cognitive condition talks of communicating or communicating Stairs,
• 1:59:52
  which is a child with a cognitive condition disappears and
• 1:59:54
  is later found describing an encounter with mysterious Stairs that
• 1:59:58
  communicated with him. The child account suggests a supernatural aspect
• 2:00:01
  to the stairs and he felt he had never left
• 2:00:04
  his original spot and mentions the stairs wanting him to stay,
• 2:00:08
  which once again, cognitive thing now having another kind of
• 2:00:12
  interaction or I would say, almost peaceful interaction with this thing,
• 2:00:17
  and now the stairs this time are instead of wanting
• 2:00:19
  to trade, they're like, I want you to stay. I
• 2:00:22
  really wonder what that what that correlation is with like
• 2:00:25
  the weird.
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 2: So that one that encounters specifically is interesting because it's
• 2:00:29
  a young boy and he says that the stairs came
• 2:00:32
  up to him. Yea, so for one, like, what does
• 2:00:35
  that mean he walked away and he just thought that
• 2:00:39
  he was kind of floating or did the stairs physically
• 2:00:41
  like float through the woods to.
• 2:00:43
  Speaker 1: Get Oh no, no, I don't like to say float.
• 2:00:44
  I like to think it's like like dragging it on
• 2:00:47
  the ground. Wouldn't that be so much dreamier though, it's
• 2:00:53
  like breaking of branches and leaves. Yes, yes, yes, yes, exactly. Yeah,
• 2:01:01
  just a nice Victorian staircase beautiful.
• 2:01:05
  Speaker 2: Used to ride these babies for a mile?
• 2:01:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Pat, Yeah, it's it's a fun little thing. But
• 2:01:13
  the idea of like the desperation.
• 2:01:15
  Speaker 2: Of the staircase running like you said, Victorian, I'm imaginally
• 2:01:20
  like a marble staircase twenty feet high. It's playing like
• 2:01:23
  the British Royal theme as it's going to just taking
• 2:01:27
  out trees.
• 2:01:28
  Speaker 1: As it sad's breaking it and it's.
• 2:01:31
  Speaker 2: Like please, the point describes as calmly like it's.
• 2:01:38
  Speaker 1: Like now I'm not going to pose and like nice music.
• 2:01:44
  It's just like toppling over these four hundred year old trees.
• 2:01:48
  I'm not going to I'm leaving, just like a snooty
• 2:01:52
  ass kid.
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 2: And then to try to maintain what little bit of
• 2:02:00
  the power we have flap, he says, because it's about
• 2:02:03
  to devolve. I can feel it. He says that he
• 2:02:07
  kept saying that the stairs were like the campfire, over
• 2:02:11
  and over. Maybe he's referring to the way the fire
• 2:02:15
  started slow and got bigger, like the stairs kind of
• 2:02:18
  manifested in front of him, but they appeared. Maybe he
• 2:02:21
  means like with the fire came. I don't know, but
• 2:02:23
  that's a very that's a very haunting idea. And then
• 2:02:26
  he says that he heard a sound so loud that
• 2:02:30
  he had to cover his ears, which reminds me of
• 2:02:33
  the story that Russell told earlier about the train noise.
• 2:02:38
  Speaker 1: That he heard. Yeah, once again, it's just unless you
• 2:02:42
  read it, obviously it doesn't. But the way that, like
• 2:02:46
  when you read this, the way that these things kind
• 2:02:47
  of circle back and tie in are really fun. And
• 2:02:50
  it's not so much that we're getting more information, but
• 2:02:53
  it's just different experiences and you get little hints of
• 2:02:56
  like just how other people experience these things, which I
• 2:02:59
  find really rewarding. It's just yeah, it's it's a subtle thing,
• 2:03:03
  but it's nice. It's it's cool to not just this
• 2:03:06
  crazy thing happened and we never hear about it again.
• 2:03:08
  It's like, no people have had experiences similar to other people,
• 2:03:12
  Like it's not just a one off crazy thing. It's
• 2:03:14
  like these things are existing in this forest. So but
• 2:03:19
  this leads us to the final part, part eight, which
• 2:03:23
  is uh it starts off yeah, let's go, which which
• 2:03:28
  Russell or the narrator, acknowledges the unexpected level of attention
• 2:03:31
  their stories have received. By this point. It's probably extremely
• 2:03:34
  popular on our slash No Sleep and mentions. Being questioned
• 2:03:37
  about the mysterious stairs in the woods, faces reprimand from superiors,
• 2:03:41
  and is warned against speaking further about the stairs, indicating
• 2:03:45
  the sensitivity and secrecy surrounding the topic. So once again
• 2:03:49
  kind of like stifling, like we're not going to get
• 2:03:51
  any more of these. This is going to be probably
• 2:03:53
  my last post because my job that I just cannot
• 2:03:56
  seem to fathom leaving is saying well, which also too
• 2:04:00
  by this time, with the amount of secrecy behind it,
• 2:04:03
  it kind of almost seems like they can't really leave,
• 2:04:05
  Like I imagine it's probably like something where it's like,
• 2:04:07
  how does a person quit Area fifty one?
• 2:04:10
  Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, yeah, like once you've been in for that long,
• 2:04:13
  you're stuck.
• 2:04:15
  Speaker 1: Which yeah, I mean it's like there's no way people
• 2:04:19
  are just gonna let you leave with that information. So
• 2:04:21
  maybe it's something where it's like I have to stay.
• 2:04:23
  But it starts off with disturbing tails circulating among among rangers,
• 2:04:28
  which as many stories are being shared among ragers, some
• 2:04:31
  too unsettling to forget. One story involves a young woman
• 2:04:35
  who disappeared with only part of her tongue and lower jaw,
• 2:04:38
  later found cut with precision, which makes you think of
• 2:04:42
  another staircase thing. Makes you think that like some kind
• 2:04:44
  of interdimensional traveling, like you're saying with like the the
• 2:04:47
  piano wire like just got cut right as soon as
• 2:04:50
  like maybe a dimension shift or something like that, kind
• 2:04:53
  of like Cube, the movie Cube makes you think of
• 2:04:55
  that a little bit.
• 2:04:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:04:58
  Speaker 1: Encounters flounter encounters with more black eyed entities, which is
• 2:05:05
  the story circulated of black eyed individuals in the woods
• 2:05:08
  imitating natural sounds. One specific tale from a deer hunter
• 2:05:12
  details a terrifying encounter with a human like figure composed
• 2:05:16
  of raw meat and hair, capable of mimicking sounds, including hunters.
• 2:05:20
  Speaker 2: That's one of my favorites.
• 2:05:21
  Speaker 1: That is my face.
• 2:05:22
  Speaker 2: That's one of my favorites.
• 2:05:23
  Speaker 1: That's my family good, so good, And I love that
• 2:05:26
  it's mimicking sounds, which like the hunter's a gunshot. I
• 2:05:30
  love that, love love, he says it.
• 2:05:32
  Speaker 2: He says, he's in his tent and then he sees
• 2:05:35
  what looks like a human face pressing to the side
• 2:05:37
  of the tent. So Good jumps out and he fires
• 2:05:40
  two shots in the air. He looks behind him and
• 2:05:43
  it's something made. He describes it as roadkill shoved in
• 2:05:46
  the shape of a person, and it kind of has
• 2:05:49
  the form of a face, and it looks at him
• 2:05:51
  and makes the noise of the two gunshots he just did,
• 2:05:55
  and then takes off into the woods. I bro it's
• 2:05:58
  like it's again like the woods are collecting flesh and
• 2:06:02
  trying to put together people.
• 2:06:03
  Speaker 1: They're collecting flesh. And I think with this one too,
• 2:06:05
  with the way that they talked about the hair, it
• 2:06:07
  almost made me think that it was like a deer,
• 2:06:09
  like a deer meat like forcely formed into the shape
• 2:06:13
  of a human. The way that they describe the hair
• 2:06:15
  being in there, it made me think it's almost like
• 2:06:17
  an inverse deer, except like without diabers and stuff. It's
• 2:06:21
  just like contorted and crushed into this like form, totally unnatural.
• 2:06:26
  And also the reason too with the gunshots and the hunter.
• 2:06:29
  It just made me think that that's another thing with
• 2:06:30
  like the hunter and the deer, et cetera, except the
• 2:06:33
  deer becomes the predator this time around. Kind of made
• 2:06:36
  me think that was the vibe. But it, I would say,
• 2:06:40
  without a doubt, it's probably my favorite visual, and especially
• 2:06:43
  the way they describe it. Just such a fun, fun
• 2:06:46
  collection and it does once you, like you said, it
• 2:06:48
  goes to show that like the forest itself or something
• 2:06:51
  in the forest is collecting people. Is it made of
• 2:06:54
  some of these missing people? Who knows? It's so fun?
• 2:06:58
  I love it.
• 2:06:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's great. It's great.
• 2:07:01
  Speaker 1: The last the last two or the Unnerving Sightings and Phenomena,
• 2:07:05
  which is a couple reports seeing a climber without gear
• 2:07:08
  scaling a steep cliff and then bizarrely snapping in half
• 2:07:11
  and leaping off the peak.
• 2:07:12
  Speaker 2: This climber net that one so wild is very looking
• 2:07:17
  through binoculars and they see a climber go to the top,
• 2:07:21
  do an exaggerated wave at them, snap in half, and
• 2:07:24
  jump off the cliff. And then Russell's like, I can't
• 2:07:28
  do anything about it because ten other people have seen
• 2:07:30
  the same thing.
• 2:07:31
  Speaker 1: Like what, Yeah, it's like the most intense free fall documentary,
• 2:07:36
  whatever the fuck that movie was, or free climbing documentary
• 2:07:39
  whatever that we see, Like, just just to see that
• 2:07:42
  and the cartoonish wave is so good. But then to
• 2:07:45
  have ten other people report that it's almost is it
• 2:07:50
  the same person they're seeing too?
• 2:07:51
  Speaker 2: Yeah, ten other people have seen that exact person to
• 2:07:54
  the top wave at them. And keep in mind, this
• 2:07:57
  person's watching through binoculars, so they're hundreds of hundreds of
• 2:08:00
  yards away, and he could see his climb er, knows
• 2:08:02
  immediately where they're at, looks at him, waves, cracks in half,
• 2:08:05
  jumps off the cliff. That's happened. Several people have seen
• 2:08:08
  the same thing.
• 2:08:08
  Speaker 1: What's weird too, is at the end of this they
• 2:08:10
  decide to not document it and to not investigate it
• 2:08:13
  any further, even though there's been ten people that have.
• 2:08:16
  Speaker 2: I don't man at this point, Like, at that point
• 2:08:18
  in the story, I don't think that not only are
• 2:08:21
  they not capable of it, I don't think that the
• 2:08:25
  individual like Russell wants to know more about it. He's
• 2:08:29
  just like, that's unexplainable. That's terrifying. I don't want to
• 2:08:31
  look any further into it.
• 2:08:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I wondered how much of it, too, is
• 2:08:35
  just like even if I wrote this down, no one's
• 2:08:36
  going to see it. Like, I think that he knows
• 2:08:38
  that the higher ups aren't letting any of the shit
• 2:08:40
  going out, So why what's the point of even documenting
• 2:08:43
  it down? Uh? But the idea of the person also
• 2:08:49
  continuously climbing up it almost reads like a Prometheus kind
• 2:08:53
  of level of torture, except with him waving it seems
• 2:08:56
  like it's almost jolly, which feels weird. So it almost
• 2:09:00
  feels like he's in this perpetual loop of getting tortured
• 2:09:03
  every day, like almost like Sisyphis rolling the ball up
• 2:09:06
  the hill or Prometheus getting his inrds eaten out by vultures.
• 2:09:09
  It's just like this weird ritual that he does every day,
• 2:09:13
  maybe at the same time pretty fun.
• 2:09:16
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I like how much weird stuff's happening in the park.
• 2:09:19
  I think it's all connected because the park itself is
• 2:09:21
  some kind of entity. But it's terrifying how diverse it
• 2:09:24
  can be, the horrors that it can put out.
• 2:09:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and especially with them not documenting this down. It
• 2:09:30
  leads really well into the final passage, which Russell expresses
• 2:09:34
  their inability to comprehend fully the mysteries associated with their job,
• 2:09:38
  plans to seize updates for the time being due to
• 2:09:40
  job jeopardy, but expresses a desire to return in a
• 2:09:43
  different format when possible, And it ends with advice for
• 2:09:46
  safe wilder and exploration and cryptic warning about the stairs
• 2:09:50
  to avoid interacting with them in any manner. And that's
• 2:09:52
  the last entry we get.
• 2:09:54
  Speaker 2: Now. The last words of it are so good because
• 2:09:57
  he says, like in the last lines, if you go
• 2:10:00
  out into the woods, I encourage you to be safe,
• 2:10:02
  Bring water, food, survival equipment, let people know where you're
• 2:10:05
  going when you'll be back. Don't go on uncharted paths
• 2:10:08
  unless you know exactly what you're doing. And above all,
• 2:10:11
  don't touch them, don't look at them, don't go up them.
• 2:10:15
  Speaker 1: I love that.
• 2:10:16
  Speaker 2: It's great. It's fantastic.
• 2:10:17
  Speaker 1: It's it's just like it's a it's a it's a
• 2:10:20
  perfect little pinpoint for the end of every kind of
• 2:10:23
  horror that we've seen, you know what I mean. Yeah,
• 2:10:25
  it's just it touches on everything without having to say it,
• 2:10:28
  and it's it's brilliant. And with that, I mean, you
• 2:10:30
  know that's this is the search and rescue What a story?
• 2:10:35
  Speaker 2: Did it?
• 2:10:35
  Speaker 1: We covered?
• 2:10:35
  Speaker 2: We covered it. I'm a search and rescue officer. It's
• 2:10:37
  a great, great story, great story. I love. I love
• 2:10:41
  so much too. How Like, sure, it's not a it's
• 2:10:44
  not a standard like linear narrative in the sense of
• 2:10:48
  all these events happening in the same person in order.
• 2:10:50
  It is kind of a narrator's like, oh, this happened
• 2:10:53
  to this person, This happened to this person. But they're
• 2:10:55
  each so well done. They tie together with like the lore,
• 2:10:58
  they interconnect to each other's. Well, it's a classic for
• 2:11:02
  a reason for sure.
• 2:11:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah. It perfectly encapsulates someone's start, like the starting of
• 2:11:09
  like it encapulates encampulates the the job that someone has, right,
• 2:11:15
  Like it seems like the perfect amount of weird scenarios
• 2:11:18
  with enough cryptic messaging to see Like I can't really
• 2:11:20
  talk about it any further, but it's just so fun
• 2:11:23
  and I love when people can play with social media
• 2:11:25
  in this regard. It's the same reason why I love
• 2:11:27
  Ted the Cab so much, in like his weird blog
• 2:11:30
  post entry for people to read that feels like something
• 2:11:33
  that can exist. It's from the perspective of somebody who
• 2:11:36
  is trying to be like this is a real, superate
• 2:11:38
  like this is a real thing that happened. And I
• 2:11:40
  think the author, which I think we should definitely give
• 2:11:42
  a shout out to carry Hammond's just killed. It's it's
• 2:11:47
  such an amazing, amazing story. Especially I see a lot
• 2:11:51
  of people in comment sections because you know, even people
• 2:11:54
  have like read this whole thing on YouTube, which if
• 2:11:57
  you're looking for even like a nice morning drive kind
• 2:12:00
  of thing, you can listen to people read it on
• 2:12:03
  YouTube and stuff. It's like a two and a half
• 2:12:04
  hour long usually two and a half hour long audio listen.
• 2:12:11
  But I see a lot of people cite the twenty
• 2:12:14
  like twenty fifteen like these kind of times on Reddit
• 2:12:16
  for sleep, like for scary stories. Is like a golden
• 2:12:19
  era of like really really fun stuff. So I'm excited
• 2:12:23
  to dive more into like other stuff from the twenty
• 2:12:25
  fifteen twenty sixteen era because I hear. That's like where
• 2:12:28
  a lot of this beautiful, beautiful work really originated from
• 2:12:32
  and where a lot of people were, especially on our
• 2:12:34
  slash No Sleep We're going ham So yeah.
• 2:12:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, Like, Carrie did a fantastic job. And I've
• 2:12:41
  also been in contact with Carrie since we started playing
• 2:12:44
  out this episode. She is a lovely, lovely person to
• 2:12:46
  talk to, very kind. She is a fan of both
• 2:12:50
  of our channels, which is very sweet.
• 2:12:51
  Speaker 1: Hi, Carrie did.
• 2:12:53
  Speaker 2: A fantastic job here. We love your stuff. So I
• 2:12:56
  talked to Carrie a bit about like the plans for
• 2:12:58
  the series and whatnot, and what it happened is after
• 2:13:01
  the first eight parts came out, the plan was to
• 2:13:04
  make it into a book like this was basically her
• 2:13:08
  her test drive of sorts for the series. Oh really,
• 2:13:11
  she was, Yeah. So the idea was this was eventually
• 2:13:13
  going to be like a novel of sorts, pourting all
• 2:13:15
  this together. And then over the course of making that novel,
• 2:13:19
  she was reached out to. Now that this isn't coming
• 2:13:22
  from Carrie, this is coming from like research I've got
• 2:13:25
  around it. She was reached out to by the TV
• 2:13:29
  show Channel zero because they wanted to adapt it into
• 2:13:32
  one of their episodes, which Channel zero has a habit
• 2:13:34
  of doing that. They did that with Candle Cove, different
• 2:13:37
  Internet horror stories making it into it. So they were
• 2:13:39
  going to use the stairs. They're going to use the
• 2:13:41
  whole story of I'm Search Rescue Officer for a season
• 2:13:46
  called Butcher's Creek I believe was the name of it,
• 2:13:48
  or Butcher's something like that. Pretty sure, I'm pretty sure
• 2:13:51
  it's Butcher's Creek anyway, So they get the rights from
• 2:13:55
  her to do that season and then carried its any
• 2:14:00
  of this, Carrie said that everyone she worked with was
• 2:14:02
  very nice. She said nothing negative. I am saying this
• 2:14:05
  as my own opinion from looking at the story if
• 2:14:08
  I'm a Search and Rescue Officer and then looking at
• 2:14:11
  what Channel zero did with the show. They did not
• 2:14:14
  do a good job adapting it. In my own opinion,
• 2:14:17
  they pretty much just took the element of the stairs
• 2:14:20
  in the woods. They kind of left the rest of
• 2:14:22
  the low behind. But in the process for that, she
• 2:14:25
  basically had to give them rights to the story for
• 2:14:28
  a while. So she it seems that she was unable
• 2:14:31
  to continue her book for a bit and kind of
• 2:14:34
  stepped back from the story. So for a while, for
• 2:14:36
  a few years there, the story was kind of in limbo,
• 2:14:38
  like we have the test version for it on No Sleep.
• 2:14:41
  She started to put a novel together and then the
• 2:14:44
  Channel zero thing slowed that down. But I'm very happy
• 2:14:47
  to announce this after talking to Carrie. She is actively
• 2:14:52
  working to continue the story, to add more entries to it,
• 2:14:55
  to expand on the lore, and she knows the whole
• 2:14:58
  story she wants to tell from start to end. And
• 2:15:01
  Carrie has been so so gracious enough to allow me
• 2:15:04
  to see some of her work in progress stuff for
• 2:15:07
  what this is going to turn into, and I have
• 2:15:09
  to say, it's really really cool. She builds out on
• 2:15:13
  a lot of the lore involving the staircases, she builds
• 2:15:15
  out on a lot of the lore involving what's secretly
• 2:15:18
  happening in the park. It is very awesome. So I
• 2:15:20
  encourage everyone. I will put a link to it in
• 2:15:22
  the description. Hell yes, if you go to Reddit at
• 2:15:25
  her name, it's user forward slash search and rescue Woods.
• 2:15:29
  It is the same name she used to tell this story.
• 2:15:31
  So if you just look up the original story itself.
• 2:15:33
  Speaker 1: On Reddit, you will put it up on the screen.
• 2:15:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll put it up on the screen as well.
• 2:15:38
  She is using that account to post updates regarding the
• 2:15:42
  story and whatnot. So the story has been picked back
• 2:15:44
  up and she is planning to move forward with it
• 2:15:46
  in the future. So go follow there to get announcements.
• 2:15:49
  I'm so excited to see where this is going, and
• 2:15:51
  from what I have seen, it's really cool. Y'all are
• 2:15:54
  going to like it.
• 2:15:54
  Speaker 1: I love that almost a decade later and still coming back.
• 2:15:57
  It's gonna be I can't wait to even read into myself.
• 2:16:00
  That's also just a good warning sign too for Hollywood shit,
• 2:16:03
  where it's like, if we have any readers who are
• 2:16:05
  writing their own stuff, be very wary of how you
• 2:16:09
  give your rights a way to these people making stuff,
• 2:16:12
  because they will literally, I mean, like especially with the
• 2:16:17
  Channel zero thing, they'll use one aspect, remove all of
• 2:16:20
  the subtlety and like things that made something great, just
• 2:16:23
  for the aesthetics and just for like I mean essentially
• 2:16:26
  the clout of of what you made. Yeah, So just
• 2:16:29
  be very weary of that because they will literally you
• 2:16:32
  think they will pray on anybody. Dude, you gotta watch out.
• 2:16:35
  So just keep that warning. But I will say, Carrie,
• 2:16:38
  that's fucking amazing I'm so stoked to see.
• 2:16:41
  Speaker 2: Oh, I'm so excited for where it's going from here.
• 2:16:43
  And all the stuff I said about like Channel zero
• 2:16:46
  is not that Carrie hasn't said any of that to me.
• 2:16:48
  She's only described good things about it. I am just
• 2:16:50
  I am abscribing the bad. Yeah, because like I want
• 2:16:54
  to get into writing, I want to work with more
• 2:16:56
  people in the industry and stuff like that, and a
• 2:16:58
  lot of the time, yeah, there are people there who
• 2:17:00
  can be sort of scavengers, kind of predatory to authors
• 2:17:03
  works and whatnot. And I'm not saying that explicitly applies here,
• 2:17:06
  but that's what it looks like from the outside. Look,
• 2:17:08
  it's specifically how pleased. I'm so pumped that the series
• 2:17:14
  is continually If you actually go to the there's now
• 2:17:19
  a subreddit for Stairs in the Woods. There is a
• 2:17:21
  master document where she has kind of wrote some auxiliary
• 2:17:25
  stories to it, so different stories that take place in
• 2:17:28
  the same universe from people outside of Russell's perspective and
• 2:17:31
  stuff like that. And it's very cool she's putting together
• 2:17:33
  lore for an entire world here that builds off of this.
• 2:17:36
  I think you all are gonna love it, So check
• 2:17:38
  her out. Follow her and be ready for whenever more
• 2:17:41
  of this comes out, because like, if you liked where
• 2:17:43
  it's been so far, you're definitely gonna like where it's
• 2:17:45
  going exactly.
• 2:17:46
  Speaker 1: And I think that it's one of those things too,
• 2:17:49
  where if you I think just as a general rule
• 2:17:52
  of some too, because I'm very curious. I mean, this
• 2:17:53
  is our first episode, right, this is the first thing
• 2:17:56
  we've ever covered. I think that if you've if you're
• 2:17:58
  a big horror person and you haven't dived into actually
• 2:18:01
  reading horror works, please start with this one. I mean, like,
• 2:18:05
  this is like a great way. It can it can
• 2:18:09
  denses itself down into these like micro short stories, and
• 2:18:13
  I think it'll make you appreciate the art form a lot.
• 2:18:16
  That is just like short stories, I mean, like reading something.
• 2:18:20
  Reading something can be such a fun way to get
• 2:18:23
  yourself in the mood to like get fucking spooked, enjoy
• 2:18:26
  the vibes of it, you know. I mean, it's such
• 2:18:29
  a great way for your own imagination to scare yourself.
• 2:18:32
  So use this as an opportunity. If you have never
• 2:18:35
  read something scary before, use this opportunity to go and
• 2:18:38
  read this. It's a great piece of literature. It's a
• 2:18:40
  great story. I'm so stoked that we covered, we chose this,
• 2:18:44
  this is a great one. This is also all this
• 2:18:46
  is all of Windy's doing for having this be our
• 2:18:48
  first episode. So very very stoked and I'm so so
• 2:18:52
  curious to see how people respond this first episode and
• 2:18:55
  also maybe what we're doing next, who knows which I'm
• 2:18:58
  not gonna say here.
• 2:18:59
  Speaker 2: I'm excited for the show. I'm so pumped. I think
• 2:19:01
  this was a great first episode. I enjoyed it as always.
• 2:19:04
  My man had a great time, and yeah, I'm excited
• 2:19:07
  to see where we go from here. Like great first
• 2:19:09
  story to cover, I can't wait to see what we
• 2:19:11
  do in the future. This was a lot of fun.
• 2:19:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think based off of the comments and stuff,
• 2:19:15
  I think that we'll use that as maybe where we'll
• 2:19:17
  go with next. But I know we have a bunch
• 2:19:18
  of ideas brewing right now. But until next time, this
• 2:19:22
  has been creep Cast Episode one. Thank you guys for listening,
• 2:19:25
  and we will see you in the next one.
• 2:19:27
  Speaker 2: Creep Cast. Thank you all so much for watching. It
• 2:19:30
  means the world. Thank you all.
• 2:19:32
  Speaker 1: Push for real peace