Whispers of Chaos The Siege, The Hermit, and Hidden Perils

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Welcome to another episode of the Nighttime Scary Tales Podcast, where we explore the dark side of storytelling. Tonight, prepare for spine-chilling tales featuring original horror stories, eerie supernatural encounters, and real-life crime that reveals the darker aspects of human nature. Each story is designed to keep you on the edge of your seat long after it ends. We’d love to hear your thoughts! Share your most chilling moments by leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform. More haunting stories are coming, so keep your lights on and your doors locked. Sweet dreams… if you can find them!

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:12):
For the state of Utah. The winter of eighty seven
or eighty eight was a relatively mild one. The Wasatch
Mountains still got their usual dusting of snow, but for
us lowlanders, I remember there being a lot less snow
that winter. We got some snow here in Marion around
the holidays, which was nice because it wouldn't have felt
quite the same without it, But other than that, it

(00:35):
was one of the mildest I can remember. I was
a deputy in the Sheriff's office at the time, so
we all welcomed the less hazardous driving conditions, and I
remember thinking that we might have just gotten off easy
that winter. But boy was I wrong about that. The
first sign of trouble came in January, when early on
the morning of the sixteenth, a bomb ripped through Marion's

(00:57):
LDS Mormon chapel and caused over a million dollars in damages.
Since the bomb was rigged to explode at three a m.
No one was around when it went off, but it
shocked everyone in town. Only about six hundred people lived
there by the way, because who the hell would want
to blow up a church like that. Well, it wasn't
long before detectives started to form a pretty solid picture

(01:19):
of who was to blame, and strangely, it involved a
man who had been dead for the last nine years.
And to tell the story of why the Mormon chapel
got blown up, you got to tell the story of
a guy named John Singer. He was born in New
York City, but since his parents were from Dresden, they
returned to World War II Germany when he was still

(01:41):
a baby so his dad could join the SS. Singer
himself was said to have been in the Hitler Youth
when he was a kid, and then after the war,
his mom divorced his dad and she brought little Johnny
back to the States to be raised as Mormon. They
moved to Utah. He got married in his late twenties,
and he and his wife ended up settling on a

(02:01):
farm in Marian. He was an active member of the
church until the early seventies when he was suddenly excommunicated,
but the church never explained exactly why they'd had him removed,
and neither did Singer. A few years later, he's openly
practicing polygamy, removing his kids from the public school system,
then saying a bunch of racist crap to reporters when

(02:23):
they went to ask him why. As you can imagine,
this makes him a national hate figure. And when his
wife decides that she wants to leave him, he decides
he's going to hold his kid's hostage and the cops
show up. A stand off begins, and then when Singer
points a gun at one of them, a sniper watching
from a nearby roof decided to compromise Singer to a

(02:46):
more permanent degree. As they say, Singer was dead, but
he wasn't some lone cook. He was an influential man
in certain more extreme Mormon circles, and when that police
sniper shot him down, his followers were pissed, and none
more so than a guy named Adam Swap. Swap was

(03:07):
seventeen when he first heard about John Singer's fight against
the Feds and made him a huge fan, and a
few months after he turned eighteen, Swap decided that he
wanted to meet Singer, but his idol was killed before
he had the chance. He ended up hanging around the
Singer family until he was introduced to John's daughter, Heidi,
who he married not long after, but only after gaining

(03:29):
the approval of Heidi's mom, Vicki, who he got very
close with. Over the years, the whole family ended up
moving into some isolated, off the grid compound out near Hurricane,
where they lived as something of a local curiosity. But
then in early eighty eight, some real strange stuff started
happening down there near the Virgin River. The story goes

(03:51):
that in early January, Adam Swap approached Vicky Singer, who
was still very much the head of the family, and
told her God had been talking to him. He said
he'd been instructed to place a spear with nine feathers
tied to it, representing the nine years since Singer's death,
into the ground near the LDS Church. Then if he
blew it up, the act would actually resurrect the late

(04:14):
John Singer. Since the bomb went off on the ninth
anniversary of John shooting and supposedly at a similar time too,
law enforcement was quick to suspect that the occupants of
the Singer Swap compound were to blame. Vicki, Singer's son
in law, was then sent into the compound basically to
ask if they had any involvement, and when he returned,

(04:35):
he had bad news. Not only did Swap and Singer
admit to planting the bomb, but they had no intention
of surrendering peacefully, and that is where we came in.
When we arrived at the Singer compound, we knew that
we were facing something big. The property was a collection
of trailers and makeshift buildings, surrounded on all sides by

(04:57):
snow covered fields, meaning we had to keep our distance
and stay behind our vehicles to keep ourselves from being exposed.
Word was that the Singers were heavily armed and that
they hated anyone with a badge and a gun, so
we were very careful not to put ourselves in the
firing line. We weren't deputies to them. We were the

(05:18):
hand of the oppressor, and they called us modern day pharisees,
pretenders and tyrants, agents of a corrupt system they had
long since rejected. We knew Swap had told followers to
never surrender, and based on the info we gotten, we
figured that they were fanatical enough to die trying to
defend him. Our first goal was to establish a line

(05:40):
of communication with the folks in the compound. Negotiators were
brought in to try to de escalate the situation, and
over the next few days we used every tool at
our disposal to talk with them. We gave them a
cell phone, nothing like you got to day, but that
worked for a while until it didn't. We don't know
if it ran out of or someone got mad broke

(06:02):
it and then lied about breaking it. But we were
forced to use bull horns and even hand written, hand
delivered messages at one point. And because no one had
died in the LDS Chapel bombing, no one was looking
at any serious jail time for just blowing up a building.
So to us that meant some one would eventually cease sense,
come out with their hands up and not risk getting

(06:23):
shot when a good enough attorney could whittle down their
sentence to just maybe two or three years. We were apprehensive,
but optimistic, and that all changed when we started talking
to them. Like I said, they were fanatical, and every
communication the negotiators got was filled with all this grand
religious talk. They said that they were carrying out God's will,

(06:46):
that the U. S. Government was on its knees, and
that when John Singer rose from his grave it would
signal the coming rapture. In reply, the negotiators asked them
to consider the safety of their children, but that only
prompted more of that crazy tinfoil hat talk about the
end of days, and that was truly scary, because if

(07:08):
they were willing to use their own kids as human shields,
what else were they prepared to do. The standoff stretched
on each day, colder and more tense than the last.
Surveillance showed little movement outside of the compound, though we
occasionally saw children's faces pressed against the frosted windows, and
at some points the snow was relentless and the temperatures

(07:31):
dropped way below freezing come nightfall. We took shifts a
mix of local deputies and state cops, all huddling behind
vehicles and makeshift barricades, divided by agency, but were united
in our attempts to keep from freezing our asses off.
And at times the compound was eerily quiet, and every
shadow in a window or rustle, and the snow put

(07:53):
us on edge. And like I said earlier, the singers
were heavily armed, and at the time we had no
idea how many folks were actually in there, so our
biggest fear was them rushing us during the night, or
having some wannabe snipers start taking pot shots at us.
We still had hope, but by day four that hope
was starting to dwindle. Day four was when they called

(08:16):
the negotiators back and cut off the power to the compound.
It didn't do much at first, because they had all
kinds of generators in supplies stockpiled for an event such
as that one, but it meant a shift from a
negotiation mentality to a siege mentality. It also meant that
it was only a matter of time before the singers
were forced to do something, be that surrender or come

(08:38):
out fighting. Word of the stand off spread quickly, and
soon the area was swarming with reporters. Helicopters buzzed overhead,
and TV trucks lined the nearby roads. Everyone wanted to
ask us questions whenever we walked past the tape, and
we'd been instructed not to say anything to anybody whenever

(08:58):
I caught the news when I was off do duty.
It was crazy to see how divided the public was
over the issue. Some saw the singers as extremists and criminals,
while others saw them as victims of government overreach. It
added another layer of pressure to an already volatile situation.
The eyes of the nation were on us and any
misstep could turn the stand off into a goddamn blood bath, which,

(09:21):
as you can imagine, was hell on our nerves. Negotiations
continued on enough for more than a week, and by
the tenth day we were exhausted. Nights were sleepless, and
the tension weighed heavy on all of us. Then, on
January twenty eighth, after nearly two weeks of watching and waiting,
the situation came to a head. Adam Swap finally agreed

(09:44):
to a surrender, but apparently as fanatical followers didn't get
the message. Then, as officers moved in Sagem into custody,
some of them opened fire. Shots were fired from inside
the compound, and in the gunfight that followed, Lieutenant House,
a veteran officer and close personal friend to many of us,

(10:04):
was wounded and killed. The loss hit us like a
punch to the gut. Swap was eventually subdued and arrested,
along with Vicky Singer and others. The children were removed
from the compound. They were terrified, but thankfully unharmed. The
stand off was over, but it cost us dearly. Looking back,

(10:24):
it felt more like a clash between law enforcement and
a rogue group of survivalists. The Singers wanted to live
off the grid, free from what they saw as government interference,
but their actions, bombing a church and killing an officer
brought them squarely into the spotlight. They could have lived
the life they wanted, but they chose not to. And

(10:45):
when they kicked out at the world, the world kicked back.
And for me, that's what it's all about. Bad choices
leading to bad outcomes, not just for the person making them,
but for the people around them, the ones who'd never
have been dragged into things otherwise. The children huddled inside
that compound didn't choose that life, and fred House didn't

(11:07):
deserve to die like that neither. Yet here we are
running around in the bitter cold of a Utah winner,
all because some dumbass lost as goddamned mine. I'll never
forget the faces, the tension, and the weight of the
decisions we had to make. And as much as I'd
like to leave that stand off behind, I know that
it'll stay with me till the day that I meet

(11:30):
my own maker. During the spring of nineteen eighty seven,
I had myself a job working in the forests of
northern California, real middle of nowhere, off the grid, kind

(11:50):
of place where we stayed on site instead of driving
home every night. I've been working as a sawmill operator
for a few years by then, proud to be providing
for my family and proud to be doing my part
in an industry that kept the local economy alive. The
days were long, the air smelled of fresh pine and
saw dust, and when we were done, we'd sink some

(12:12):
cold ones and then hit the hay, and then do
it all again the next day. But then came one
morning when everything changed, not just for me, but for
everyone who worked in those woods. I showed up at
the mill at dawn, just as the morning sun was
beginning to peek over the hills. The air was cool,
the mill was quiet, and I drank a cup of

(12:33):
coffee with my coworkers before heading out to my head rig.
My machine, a head rig was a massive saw designed
to cut through logs like butter, and I knew that
thing inside and out. I checked everything over as I
always did, making sure the blades were sharp and the
mechanisms were running smoothly, and then when the first log
started to roll in, it was business as usual. My

(12:56):
job required a lot of focus, a heavy amount of precision,
and a healthy respect for the power of the large machinery.
It wasn't uncommon for a piece of wood to jump
or splinter if something was off, but generally speaking, we
knew the wrists and trusted our equipment. The log looked ordinary,
a straight Douglas fir, no different from the hundreds of

(13:17):
others I'd cut that month. But as I fed it
into the saw, something happened that will be with me
for as long as I live. There was a deafening sound,
a metallic screech that set my teeth on edge, and
before I knew what was happening, the saw blade exploded

(13:37):
shards of metal when flying, and the force of the
impact knocked me off my feet. It felt like an
earthquake had hit the mill. I didn't realize that I
was injured at first, and adrenaline has a way of
masking the pain. But I looked down and I saw
the blood. My face, arms and chests were covered in it.
The jagged pieces of the saw blade had torn into

(13:59):
me like sh trapnel. My right hand, the hand I'd
used to guide those logs every day, was mangled beyond recognition.
I felt a sharp, burning pain in my eye, and
then realized that I couldn't see out of it. And
after the bang, the mill erupted into shouts and yells.
My coworkers tried to help, but their voices sounded distant,

(14:21):
like they were coming from under water. Someone called for
an air ambulance while another coworker tried to stop the bleeding.
I remember staring at the log, now split open to
reveal a gleaming metal spike embedded deep within the wood,
and that's when it hit me. This wasn't an accident.
Someone had deliberately put that spike there to try and

(14:44):
kill me. The hospital stay was a blur of surgeries
and bandages, and I'd later learned that my right hand
couldn't be saved and the damage to my eye was permanent.
But the physical injuries were only part of the story.
The mental scars were just as bad. I trusted them.
My workplace was safe, that the only dangers were the

(15:05):
ones that we were trained to handle. But this, this
was something altogether different. This was sabotage. For those unfamiliar
with the practice, tree spiking is a tactic used by
nutjob environmental groups to try and prevent logging by driving
long metal spikes into trees. They present a huge danger

(15:28):
to loggers because if their blades come into contact with
the metal spikes, and as we've already covered here, the
frickin blades can explode. But the consequences of their actions
aren't just mechanical, they're very human. That spike could have
killed me, I could have killed some one else, and
that doesn't win me over to their cause, not one bit.

(15:51):
The weeks that followed were a whirlwind of pain and confusion,
but primarily anger. The media got a hold of this
story and reporters swarm the mill, eager to paint me
as a victim of an environmental war. I wasn't interested
in their narratives. I just wanted to understand why someone
would risk my life to make some statement, and did

(16:12):
they even one stop to think about the consequences. My
co workers were pretty badly shaken up by what had
happened to me, and the incident cast a very strong
shadow over the entire mill. Every log that came in
was inspected with more scrutiny than ever before, and I
heard every one was very jumpy for a long time.
After the company installed metal detectors at great expense, but

(16:35):
that didn't do much for people's peace of mind. It
wasn't even like everyone was just scared. They were angry, hateful,
even they wanted to hang whoever spiked that tree and
recovery it was a long road. I had to learn
how to navigate the world with one hand, how to
adjust the loss of vision in one eye. My wife

(16:58):
and kids were my rock. But I'd be lying if
I said it was easy. I struggled with depression, with
the weight of feeling targeted. Even if I wasn't personally
the reason for the spike. It was a weird feeling,
and it took a long time before I could even
think about putting it behind me. In the years since,
I have thought a lot about the people who spike

(17:20):
that tree. I've wondered if they ever thought about me
and about the damage they caused to my life. I
understand their anger at the logging industry. I've seen firsthand
the impact of clear cutting on the environment, but there
has to be a better way to make a point
than putting lives at risk. Protests should bring actual change,
not cause harm to innocent people and turn them off

(17:42):
to the cause. To day, I'm no longer in the
logging industry. I've moved on to other work, something much safer.
But the office isn't nearly as exciting or satisfying the
work environment as the forests up in Norcow. But every
now and then, whenever I hear the hum of machinery,
I feel like I'm transported all the way back to

(18:02):
that day in May nineteen eighty seven. It still makes
me angry sometimes, because no cause, no matter how righteous,
it is, is worth the cost of a single human life.

(18:25):
What feels like many many years ago, I was enjoying
a short vacation in my family's cabin up in Maine.
The cabin was tucked away on the edge of North Pond,
and while it was only a few rooms, it was
very homely, in no neighbors for miles in all directions.
My parents would take me and my sister's back when
I was just a little boy, and although I didn't

(18:48):
much enjoy it at the time, it was a place
that I gravitated back towards later on in life. At first,
I'd drive up there just to clear my head, but
after a while I started heading out on solo hikes
and reliving some of those childhood vacations. So I was
up at the cabin. I've been hiking all day, and

(19:08):
after dinner, I was just about ready to sleep. It
had been a quiet night, save for the occasional creak
of the wooden beams as they settled into the cool
Maine air, and I'd fallen asleep early. But then around
midnight I woke up startled, my senses prickling with the
unmistakable feeling that something was very wrong. And at first

(19:29):
I thought that it might have just been the wind
blowing through the trees outside, but what I heard next
didn't quite match the rhythm of the swaying trees. I
listened harder, hearing my own heart beat in my ears,
as the noise shifted to something more distinct, the unmistakable
creek of a floorboard. Someone was inside the cabin with me.

(19:53):
I remember just freezing and lying totally motionless in the
bed while I listened and tried to figure out what
to do. The thought of another person inside sent a
chill down my spine, and I knew that I had
to do something, so I slowly slipped out of bed,
careful to keep the mattress from squeaking, and after putting
on my pants and boots, I reached for the flashlight

(20:15):
that I kept on the bedside table, and I remember
seeing my own hand shaking as I went to grab it.
Clicking on it felt like too great of a risk,
so I kept it off, grabbing it tightly as I
moved toward the door. I'd use it if I really
needed it, but until then I needed to not be seen.

(20:36):
The sound of rummaging came from the kitchen. Pots clinked
together softly, Drawers opened and closed, and whoever it was,
they weren't in a hurry, but they also didn't sound
like they were afraid of being caught either. My car
was outside, so it's not like they could have made
a mistake and assumed the place was empty, in which
case were they crazy? Was I safe? Or what were

(21:00):
are they looking for? My pulse pounded in my ears
as I crept down that hall, each step louder in
my head than the last, as it seemed to go
on and on forever. When I reached the corner where
the hall opened into the kitchen, I paused and took
a deep breath. I then leaned forward just enough to
peek around the edge of the wall, and then I

(21:22):
saw him. A man stood in the dark kitchen, and
his back was to me. He moved quickly but carefully,
inspecting the contents of my cabinets and setting aside items
that he probably deemed worthy of taking. It was dark,
but there was enough moonlight coming through the window for
me to see that he wore layers of these tattered clothes,

(21:45):
and that his hair was very unkempt and his beard
was wild. He was also very skinny, like he was
sick or didn't eat much, and his movements were eerily
calm for someone shifting through a stranger's home. I wanted
to see something, to demand that he leave, but the
words just got caught in my throat. There was something

(22:06):
about him, this overwhelming sense that he wasn't normal, that
made him feel less like a person and more like
I dunno a creature. If there's a black bear eating
chicken bones out of your trash, he can't just ask
it to leave, and if you approach it, it might
just eat your damn face off. And that's exactly what

(22:27):
it felt like looking at this guy in my kitchen.
I tightened my grip around this heavy flashlight until my
knuckles ached from the force. I'm not even joking, and
I told myself, if he comes for me when I
yell at him, I'm going to hit him with this.
And I was just in the process of coming up
with something very scary to yell at him when he
turned and for a brief, terrifying moment, we made eye contact.

(22:53):
His eyes were piercing, but he didn't seem angry or scared.
He just looked tired, like he didn't have a single
f left to give. He didn't speak, he didn't try
and attack me. He didn't even seem startled to see
me standing there. Instead, he just looked at me in
a way that I found completely unreadable, and I froze again.

(23:15):
My heart was absolutely hammering against my ribs by then,
and I braced myself for him to do something, anything
aggressive or threatening, but he didn't. He just turned back
to his task and selected a few more items, stuff
like a jar of peanut butter, a loaf of bread,
and a half eaten pack of crackers. And then when

(23:36):
he was finished, he kind of scooped everything into a
bag that he had with him and walked towards the
back door. Of the cabin, which I guess was how
he got in there in the first place. He opened
the door and slipped silently into the night, disappearing into
the dark as if though I had never even seen
him in the first place. I stood there for what
felt like hours, the flashlight feeling heavy in my hand

(23:59):
as my breathing and heart rate returned to normal. The
house was creepily still, and the only evidence that he'd
even been there was the disarray in my kitchen and
the open door swinging gently in the breeze. The next morning,
after a sleepless night spent securing the cabin and wondering
if he'd returned, I learned his name, or rather the

(24:21):
name he'd been given by the locals, the North Pond Hermit.
I only found out later that his real name was
Christopher Thomas Knight, and for nearly three decades he'd lived
in the woods around North Pond, surviving off what he
could scavenge and steal. He disappeared into the main wilderness
in the mid eighties, sometime turning his back on society entirely,

(24:43):
I guess, but no one really ever knew why. Some
people talked about him trying to escape, something like a
traumatic event or something of that nature. Others believed that
he just wanted to be left alone so he could
live out his days in peace, away from a society
he never understood and who never really understood him either.

(25:04):
Over the years, he became something of a local legend.
He'd slip into cabins and campsites, taking only what he'd
needed food, clothing, tools, and stuff. But he never caused harm,
and he never left a trace beyond what he'd taken.
People spoke of him with a mix of fear and fascination,
unable to figure him out, but somehow understanding of him,

(25:26):
and he kept on living that life of raiding cabins
and homes until he finally got caught sometime in twenty thirteen.
I heard he told the cops that he'd managed to
survive twenty seven years without lighting a single fire and
did all his cooking on stolen propane tanks. His arrest
made headlines and everyone was talking about him. But all
I could think when I saw his picture was, holy crap,

(25:50):
it's you. When I think back to that night, I'm
haunted not by what he did, but what he looked like.
I saw what I think was a great emptiness in
his eyes, like all the humanity was drained out of him.
But at the same time, he wasn't there to hurt me.
He was simply trying to survive. And even now years later,

(26:12):
I sometimes wake in the middle of the night convinced
that I've heard the creak of a floorboard or the
rustle of a cabinet door. I'll get up, check the locks,
and peer out into the night, wondering if he's still
out there, moving silently through the trees like a ghost
in the darkness. I used to do a lot of

(26:42):
wilderness hiking in real, remote, inaccessible locations, and this is
the story of the weirdest, most unsettling thing I'd ever
come across. The woods have been quiet that day. I've
been hiking alone for three days, and the sense of
isolation was starting to feel heavy. The trail was overgrown
with trees pressing in close, and the further I went,

(27:04):
the less it felt like a trail at all. I
liked the feeling, though. It was the reason I visited
places like that in the first place, to feel like
I was stepping into a world untouched by anyone else.
Around mid afternoon, I came across what looked like a clearing,
and then as the trees started to thin out, I
saw it. It stood in a small clearing, perfectly centered,

(27:26):
as if someone had placed it there with care. Maybe
eight feet tall and made of dark, weathered wood. It
wasn't just a piece of wood, though, it was carved
roughly but with purpose. Faces were etched into its surface,
crude and uneven, some long and narrow, and others wide
and round. They stacked on top of one another, staring

(27:49):
out into all directions, and as I stared at them,
I figured out what it was. It was a totem pole.
But what caught my attention most were the teeth. The
totem was covered in them, jammed into the wood like
little pieces of decoration. At first I thought that they

(28:10):
were all animal teeth. There were long, curved ones like
from a deer, and sharp ones that might have been
from a dog or a wolf. But then I saw others,
smaller and straighter ones that looked almost human. They were
yellowed and cracked, and some still rooted in fragments of jawbone,
and my stomach turned and I stepped back on instinct.

(28:34):
I didn't stay long. The thing felt wrong, like all
those carved eyes were watching me, and I wanted to
forget what I'd seen, but it stayed in my mind
with me as I walked. The forest didn't seem the
same after that, though the air was heavier, the shadows
felt longer and darker, and I decided to cut the
day short and set up camp further from the clearing,

(28:56):
maybe a mile away. But even then I couldn't shake
the feeling that something was wrong. That night, I couldn't sleep.
Every sound made me sit up, and as much as
I told myself it was just animals moving through the
underbrush or the wind stirring the trees, I couldn't help
feeling like something was out there watching me. I didn't

(29:17):
light a fire. It felt safer to stay in the dark,
even though I was freezing, and I thought that I
might not sleep a wink that night. But eventually exhaustion
took over and I drifted off and I dreamed about teeth,
and in the morning, I packed up and left as
quickly as I could. I didn't go near the clearing again.
I didn't even look back. I've done a lot of

(29:39):
solo hikes, but that was the first time that I
felt like I wasn't alone, and I didn't like it,
And a year later, curiosity got the better of me.
The memory of that totem had stuck with me, but
I started feeling like maybe I'd been overthinking the whole thing,
and started to wonder if I'd imagined parts of it
or blown them out of proportion, And so I went

(30:01):
back that time. I brought a disposable camera with me,
one of those cheap ones that you'd wind up by hand,
and I wasn't expecting to find the totem again, but
I figured if I did, i'd want proof to send
to you. And the forest felt different on the second trip.
The overgrowth wasn't as dense as I remembered, and the
trail was easier to follow, less wild, and I reached

(30:24):
the clearing by late afternoon, but the totem wasn't there.
The spot was empty, just a patch of dirt and
grass where it should have been, and I walked in
circles around the area looking for signs that it had
been moved, but there was nothing, no drag marks, no
holes where it might have been anchored, and it was
as if it had never been there at all. But

(30:47):
I know what I saw, the teeth, the carvings, the faces.
It wasn't something you'd forget, but there was no trace
of it. I took pictures of the clearing anyway, just
to prove myself that I gone back, and when I
got the photos developed, they showed really nothing but trees
and grass, no shadows or odd shapes in the background,

(31:08):
just an ordinary patch of forest. And I stopped telling
people about it after that, And the few times I tried,
I could see it in their faces, but disbelief, the
very polite nods, the way their eyes shifted as they
looked for a way to change the subject. And I
get it. If someone told me a crazy story like that,
I'd probably think that they were making it up, too.

(31:29):
But I know what I saw. I know how it
felt to stand in front of that thing, and how
the air seemed to just sort of hum with something
I couldn't explain. And I know the fear that kept
me awake that night, the sense that something was out
there in the dark. And even now I can't think
about it for too long without feeling a chill run
down my spine. I haven't been back to that part

(31:51):
of the forest since then, I still hike, but I
stick to trails that I know, places where other people go,
and I don't like to be too far from civilized anymore.
It's not the wilderness that scares me. It's the things
that you can't explain, the things that shouldn't be there
but are. On a freezing December morning in the year

(32:21):
two thousand and one, three men climbed into a Soviet
made pickup truck in a rural Georgian village named Leah.
It had been a bitter winter in the cost of
keeping warm and skyrocketed, so instead of paying exorbitant prices
for coal or gas cylinders, the three men came up
with a very shrewd but very illegal method of heating

(32:43):
their homes. They would drive off the grid and to
a huge patch of untamed woodland and gather firewood. And
their plan was simple. Departing at dawn, they'd drive thirty
miles east to a secluded and heavily forth on the
banks of the Inguri River. There they'd fell trees and

(33:06):
chopped them in the firewood until they were exhausted. But then,
instead of driving home along rough and unlit roads in
the pitch darkness, the men made the decision to camp
out by the river and then dry back home at dawn.
Their decision was a practical one. Driving home at night
meant running the risk of a police traffic stop, and
at the officer found a metric ton of firewood in

(33:28):
their truckbed, they'd have some serious explaining to do. The
for southeast of Laya constitutes an area known as the
Kolquetti National Park. Coquetti National Park is known for its
vibrant wetlands along with its diverse flora and fauna, and
is considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The oldest trees

(33:50):
in the park are typically horn beams and oak species,
and due to the region's favorable climate and stable ecosystem,
some of them are believed to be more than a
thousand years old. Its status as a World Heritage Site
meant logging in the forest was very much illegal and
if caught, the men could expect heavy fines or maybe

(34:11):
even jail time if a judge decided an example should
be made, and this is what motivated them to camp
over night and forego the risk of a perilous nocturnal journey.
After spending all days sowing down trees and chopping them
into logs. The men were exhausted and ready to make camp.
With clear skies and no promise of additional snow, the

(34:32):
men hadn't bothered to bring any kind of tent with them. Instead,
they were content to melt a patch of snow by
lighting a camp fire before sleeping on a series of thin,
waterproof ground sheets. However, despite having enough logs to make
an entire winter's worth of firewood, it was no good
to them to light a camp fire. They need to

(34:52):
head out into the forest again to find tinder, kindling,
and enough dried dead fall of a suitable enough size
to feed the flames once they had been summoned. But
in the snowy Coltic rainforests of northern Georgia it was
slim pickens. The men searched for more than an hour,
walking back and forth in all directions, gathering as much
usable firewood as they possibly could, and by six in

(35:16):
the evening they gathered a respectable amount, but just to
be safe, they decided to head out on one last
run before getting to work on the camp fire. As
the three men walked side by side through the trees,
the ground before them appeared carpeted by the bright ethereal
white of frost and fresh snow. They talked back and forth,

(35:36):
their laughter turning to steam in the evening winter's air,
when suddenly they spotted something strange ahead of them. A
patch of the forest floor, around one meter in diameter
and forming an almost perfect circle, was completely devoid of snow,
almost as if something had covered that patch of earth
for the entirety of the recent snowfalls. With their attention

(35:59):
transfixed by the solitary blemish on an otherwise untouched snowscape,
the three men started to approach, and that's when they
noticed that not only was the meter wide circle free
of frost and snow, but there appeared to be steam
rising from the forest floor. As the men crept closer.

(36:20):
The cause of the strange anomaly seemed obvious, lying in
the center of the frostless patch of earth, where a
pair of small metal cylinders. One of the men leaned
on the pick one up with his bare hand, but
no sooner than he did, he dropped it, letting out
a laugh of surprise. As he did so. His companions

(36:40):
asked him what it was. It's heavy, he replied, and
it's warm. The three men couldn't agree on what the
two small objects were, but what they could agree on
was that they most likely had some value to them.
For example, if they were batteries so powerful that they
got warm and fully choked arched, they most likely came

(37:01):
from some expensive and highly specialized piece of equipment. Whoever
left them there might pay handsomely for their return, and
if not, they'd find someone who would. And what's more,
if the charge in the small but curiously heavy metal
cylinders held, they would help keep them warm throughout the night.
The first of the two cylinders was stashed in the

(37:23):
woods behind a large rock, the second was brought back
to camp with them. The men made dinner, drank some vodka,
then settled down to catch a few hours of sleep
under a canopy of twinkling stars. Yet before long they
began to feel nauseous. They tossed and turned, unable to
drift off to sleep, and then shortly afterward, each man

(37:44):
realized that his companions were suffering from the exact same affliction,
and at first they suspected that it might have been
the vodka they consumed. When improperly filtered, cheap vodka may
contain excess fuel oils used during the distillation process. Such
oils can cause headaches, nausea, and other symptoms if they

(38:06):
remain high enough quantities. Cheap vodka can also be contaminated
with methanol, a substance which can either cause blindness or
death depending on the amount consumed. At the time, this
was considered the main culprit. It hadn't been the first
time cheap vodka had had such an effect on them,
and doubtless it would not be the last. But even

(38:27):
after repeated bounts of vomiting emptied their stomachs, the men
continued to wretch and heave until bials stained the snow
as sickly yellow. The nausea, headaches, and vomiting continued for
around three to four hours, until finally the men decided
it was time to drive home. They began loading up
their pick up truck with the logs they'd felled, but

(38:48):
around half way through the job, they began to feel
unusually and excessively exhausted. The men made the decision to
return at a later date to load up their remaining firewood,
and then began the thirty mile drive back to Layah.
When they arrived back at their home village. The men
were greeted warmly by those they had sought to provide for.

(39:10):
They were pleased that the firewood would offset some of
their winter costs, but the three men were subjected to
a somewhat playful scolding for returning after a night of
heavy drinking. However, the three men insisted they had not
been drinking heavily, but their claim was waved away and
laughed off by their fellow villagers. If they hadn't drank
themselves into a stupor would explain their sickly condition, but

(39:34):
what they'd eventually discover would horrify them. Following their return
from Corlheti Forest, the three men retired to their beds
to catch up on some well deserved rest. They slept
all day, then in the early evening, one of the
men woke up and began rushing to the bathroom. He
suffered from prolonged bouts of diarrhea and noticed with some

(39:57):
alarm that there appeared to be blood in a stool.
At the insistence of his wife, he visited the village
doctor the following morning, but when he did so, the
man completely failed to mention his encounter with the heavy
metallic cylinders as well as the eld rich warmth they exuded.
Describing exactly what happened would no doubt reveal his illegal activities, and,

(40:20):
fearing he might also lose out on his strange but
valuable find, the man chose to keep the strange objects
a secret. Lacking a complete picture on what could have
caused the man's symptoms, the village doctor assumed that he
was suffering some kind of severe allergic reaction. He administered
a shot a powerful antihistamine designed to counteract the man's

(40:41):
unpleasant symptoms. Within just a few hours, the man's condition
had improved dramatically, but so had those of his companions,
who received no such antihistamine shot. Choosing not to question
an improvement to their health, the men went about their
business as usual for the next week or so, until
one day when they began exhibiting a host of new

(41:04):
and painful symptoms. At work, one man complained of a
soreness on the skin of his back. He asked a
coworker to take a look for him, then pulled up
his shirt, revealing a series of painful blisters that ran
parallel with his spine. The blisters were surrounded by patches
of swollen tender flesh, as if caused by some kind

(41:25):
of intense surface burned. Fearing their illegal logging activities would
be uncovered, it took the men three whole weeks to
report to the hospital in the nearby city of Zugdidi,
and when they did, their conditions were dire. They could
barely stand up straight by the time they walked through
the doors, and initially, despite doctors being unable to determine

(41:47):
what was wrong with them, they remained tight lipped about
the small metal cylinders. Only when medical staff explained that
their transparency might mean the difference between life and unimaginably
painful death did the men relent and explain what they'd found.
After that, their diagnosis was relatively simple. Each man was

(42:09):
quite clearly suffering from extreme and highly advanced cases of
radiation poisoning. With Zoldidy General Hospital being woefully under equipped
to deal with such an emergency, the men were transferred
via helicopter to the Emergency Medical Center and the country's capital, Tblisi.

(42:30):
The EMC set to work making the men more comfortable
while establishing strict quarantine procedures in order to prevent potential contamination.
Assuming they were contaminated, their clothes were removed before nurses
carefully washed their exposed skin with soap and water. After that,
the three men were transferred to Tblisi's Institute of Fematology

(42:51):
and Transfusion, where they were isolated and assessed while being
given heavy doses of pain killers to dull their intolerable agony.
Seeing as radiation weakens the immune system, the open sores
on the men's backs had started to become dangerously infected,
and upon examination, doctors noticed the tell tale, inky black

(43:12):
of rotten necrotic tissue. The men were quickly given doses
of powerful anti virals and antibiotics, and then staff set
about organizing blood transfusions to replace the white blood cells
killed by the radiation. And then, lastly, nurses began to
treat the surface burns on the skin of their backs
and hands, cleaning them carefully before applying a plethora of lotions, creams,

(43:36):
and balms. Once their pain had somewhat subsided, the men
were able to talk and they were interviewed by members
of Georgian State security services. It was then that they
gave a much more detailed account of their seemingly innocuous misadventure,
including the exact locations of the mysterious metal cylinders. Soldiers

(43:58):
from the Georgian Army were dispatched a Colquetti forests, and
thanks to the detailed description given by the afflicted men,
they were able to quickly track the cylinders down. Equipped
with highly protective clothing and using robots to handle the cylinders,
the soldiers transferred them into two specifically built containers which
limited the direction in which they could emit radiation. They

(44:22):
were then transported to a secure facility for analysis by
officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency. It took less
than twenty four hours for scientists to determine that the
two heavy cylinders were made of a substance known as
strontium ninety. They'd been part of a radioisotope thermoelectric generator

(44:43):
or RTG, a kind of electrical generator which converts heat
released by radioactive decay into electricity. They're often used to
power things in remote locations, such as satellites, space probes,
or a secluded radio relay in rural Georgia. Many years earlier,
the construction of the Houdini hydro Electric Station began. Its

(45:06):
engineers had hoped that while it was being built, they
could co ordinate with the distant and gurry hydro electric
station in order to seek their advice and ensure a
smooth construction process. There was just one problem. The distance
between the two stations was so vast that not one
before radio relays would have to be constructed in order

(45:27):
for them to communicate, And since this area consisted of vast,
untouched woodland, it was considered unethical and impractical to carve
out a long strip of it to erect nothing but
power lines. There was, however, an alternative solution. Hook the
radio relays up with a couple of artigis and safe

(45:48):
and secure containers, of course, and they could power the
radio relays for the next twenty eight years without chopping
down a single tree. And once the construction of the
Houdini hydro Electric Station was finished, the strawti empowered relay
systems became redundant. Then by the end of the nineteen nineties,
the generators were disassembled and the radioactive materials were safely

(46:10):
disposed of, at least that's what people were led to believe.
Of the eight radioactive sources originally installed, only six were found.
Two of them were missing. Shockingly, the small atomic faux
pas was kept secret from the wider nuclear community, with
the officials who swept it under the carpet simply hoping

(46:32):
the missing stratium would show up again that just a
few years later, three friends out looking for firewood would
suffer the incalculable misfortune of simply stumbling across them. The
first man, referred to in the i a e A
Inquest document as Patient three m B, was the most

(46:53):
fortunate of the three. He received radiation burns to his
hands and isolated patches of his legs, but since he
didn't hold or touch the strontium cylinders for any prolonged
amount of time, he was discharged from the hospital just
a few weeks after presenting himself. The second man, patient
two m G, was not so fortunate. The large rotting

(47:16):
sores on his back from where he'd lain on the
strontium cylinder to keep warm, had become dangerously infected, and
in early two thousand two he was transferred to a
French hospital to receive more advanced forms of treatment. His
ordeal was agonizing, and he received multiple skin grafts, but
ultimately he made a full recovery. And was able to

(47:37):
leave the hospital on April eighteenth of two thousand three. However,
the third man, known by the inquest as Patient one
d N, was indisputably the most unfortunate of the three men.
He too had used the strontium cylinders to keep warm,
but after leaning on it much more heavily than Patient
to m G, he received much more concentrated doses of

(48:00):
its deadly radiation. While the blisters and ulcers on the
back of two MG were relatively spread out, those in
the back of one d N were much more concentrated
and were located on his left shoulder blade. This meant
that a series of dangerous infections took hold directly behind
the patient's heart and left lung. The patient underwent numerous

(48:20):
operations and skin grafts to try and prevent additional necrosis
and reverse that which had already occurred. Yet in April
of two thousand four, his condition began to rapidly deteriorate.
On the surface of his open wound, there was a
large amount of puss secretion, and then, following a more
thorough inspection, doctors discovered a great deal of secondary necrosis

(48:42):
in his muscles, ribs, shoulder bones and vertebrae. Repeated samples
taken from the wound identified poly resistant microbes such as
blue puss Bacillus as being present among the decaying flesh.
Poly Resistant microbes are named such because they developed resistance
to commonly used antibiotics, and as you can imagine, this

(49:04):
presented a dangerous challenge to those charged with Patient one
Dn's care. Hospital staffed at all they could to fight
the infection, but despite a large amount of antibiotic therapy,
multi organ failure loomed large on the metaphorical horizon. On
May twelfth of two thousand four, his temperature increased to
thirty nine degrees celsius, and then the following days arterial

(49:27):
pressure decreased dramatically on account of severe septic shock, and
just hours later, Patient ie Dn suffered a cardiac arrest
and was pronounced dead at ten fifty five p m.
On May thirteenth of two thousand four, eight hundred and
ninety three days after his initial exposure to strontium ninety.

(49:49):
Patient ie Dn's death marked a tragic end to a
brutal but wholly avoidable ordeal, and his loved ones mourned
his loss bitterly, Yet the question remained, how could such
a horrible thing happen in the first place. Following an
inquest into the events, the International Atomic Energy Association claimed
that the disintegration of the Soviet Union in nineteen ninety

(50:12):
one led to a loss of oversight and maintenance for
many radioactive devices and installations in the region. Then, without
adequate records, security, or a transfer of responsibilities, these devices
were left to deteriorate. Seeing as the sources in question
were located in a forested mountainous area in Georgia, their

(50:33):
remote placement made them difficult to monitor, and given the
secrecy surrounding Soviet manufactured atomics, it's possible that the newly
independent Georgians simply didn't know it was there. Yet, perhaps
the most concerning aspect is the fact that the strontium
ninety cylinders had already been removed from the radio relay.

(50:54):
The commonly agreed upon scenarios that after happening across the
radio relays and the chaos of post Soviet Georgia, a
scavenger believed that they were a high tech variety of battery,
quite possibly with a high resale value. He broke into
the relay removed the cylinders, then at some point on
his journey home, realized that they were killing him. It's

(51:16):
quite possible the man expired before giving a full, frank
account of what he'd found, leaving those cylinders simply lying
there on the forest floor waiting to seal the doom
of their next unfortunate victim. Hey, friends, thanks for listening.
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(51:39):
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(52:00):
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(52:20):
and remember what do you call a cow with a
nervous twitch. I don't know. Somebody tell me