December 10, 2025 • 59 mins
What would you do if everything you thought you knew about your father turned out to be wrong? What if his silence, his distance, his strange obsession with the mountains wasn't coldness at all, but something else entirely? What if he'd been guarding a secret so profound, so impossible, that it had consumed his entire life? That's the question facing Marcus Stone as he pulls up to a cabin he hasn't entered in twenty-three years. His father is dead. The funeral has already happened, and Marcus wasn't there.
Twenty-three years of silence between them, hardened into something neither could break. And now it's too late.Or is it? Because Robert Stone left something behind. A trunk in the cellar. A note in his father's handwriting that speaks of burdens and secrets and an ancestor named Captain Elijah Stone.
A note that hints at something that's been passed down through generations, waiting for someone brave enough to finally bring it into the light. What Marcus finds in that cellar will change everything he thinks he knows about his family, about history, and about what really walks in the deep places of the American wilderness. Seven leather-bound journals.
Letters tied with twine that's gone black with age. A stone pendant carved with symbols that don't match any language Marcus has ever seen. And the words of a man who died two hundred years ago, preserved in ink that has faded from black to brown but remains perfectly legible.March fifteenth, seventeen ninety-nine.
Captain Elijah Stone. Revolutionary War veteran. A man haunted by stories he heard during the brutal winter at Valley Forge. Stories told by Oneida scouts around dying fires. Stories of the elder brothers. The ones who were here before us. The ones who watch from the shadows of ancient forests.This is the beginning of an expedition into the unknown.
Nine men riding west from Richmond, following legends and whispers toward something that might not exist. A hot-tempered Scottish soldier carrying grief like a loaded weapon. A Kentucky frontiersman who's been waiting twenty years for someone to go looking. A Philadelphia naturalist convinced that science can explain anything. A former minister searching for proof of God in a world that suddenly seems random and cruel.And leading them all, a captain who knows, somehow, that not all of them will return.
The signs begin almost immediately. Footprints eighteen inches long, pressed deep into mud by something that weighs five hundred pounds. Wood knocking in the darkness, three sharp strikes echoing through the trees. Food stolen from bundles hung fifteen feet in the air. Structures built with purpose and intention, a language in the landscape that speaks of intelligence, of planning, of something that thinks. They know we're here, the frontiersman says. They've known since we crossed into the mountains. And then comes the story that changes everything.
A blizzard twenty years ago. A young trapper who thought he was going to die. And something that carried him through the storm, examined him in a dark cave, and made a decision. They were deciding what to do with me.What walks in those mountains? What has been watching humanity since before we learned to walk upright? And what did Robert Stone spend his entire life guarding?
The answers are waiting in the pages of those journals. And Marcus Stone is about to discover that some inheritances come with a price.
This is The Bigfoot Journals, Part One.The expedition has begun.
Twenty-three years of silence between them, hardened into something neither could break. And now it's too late.Or is it? Because Robert Stone left something behind. A trunk in the cellar. A note in his father's handwriting that speaks of burdens and secrets and an ancestor named Captain Elijah Stone.
A note that hints at something that's been passed down through generations, waiting for someone brave enough to finally bring it into the light. What Marcus finds in that cellar will change everything he thinks he knows about his family, about history, and about what really walks in the deep places of the American wilderness. Seven leather-bound journals.
Letters tied with twine that's gone black with age. A stone pendant carved with symbols that don't match any language Marcus has ever seen. And the words of a man who died two hundred years ago, preserved in ink that has faded from black to brown but remains perfectly legible.March fifteenth, seventeen ninety-nine.
Captain Elijah Stone. Revolutionary War veteran. A man haunted by stories he heard during the brutal winter at Valley Forge. Stories told by Oneida scouts around dying fires. Stories of the elder brothers. The ones who were here before us. The ones who watch from the shadows of ancient forests.This is the beginning of an expedition into the unknown.
Nine men riding west from Richmond, following legends and whispers toward something that might not exist. A hot-tempered Scottish soldier carrying grief like a loaded weapon. A Kentucky frontiersman who's been waiting twenty years for someone to go looking. A Philadelphia naturalist convinced that science can explain anything. A former minister searching for proof of God in a world that suddenly seems random and cruel.And leading them all, a captain who knows, somehow, that not all of them will return.
The signs begin almost immediately. Footprints eighteen inches long, pressed deep into mud by something that weighs five hundred pounds. Wood knocking in the darkness, three sharp strikes echoing through the trees. Food stolen from bundles hung fifteen feet in the air. Structures built with purpose and intention, a language in the landscape that speaks of intelligence, of planning, of something that thinks. They know we're here, the frontiersman says. They've known since we crossed into the mountains. And then comes the story that changes everything.
A blizzard twenty years ago. A young trapper who thought he was going to die. And something that carried him through the storm, examined him in a dark cave, and made a decision. They were deciding what to do with me.What walks in those mountains? What has been watching humanity since before we learned to walk upright? And what did Robert Stone spend his entire life guarding?
The answers are waiting in the pages of those journals. And Marcus Stone is about to discover that some inheritances come with a price.
This is The Bigfoot Journals, Part One.The expedition has begun.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
S S S S S.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
The rain had been falling for three days straight when
Marcus Stone finally turned onto the gravel road that led
to his father's cabin. His father's cabin, the words still
felt wrong in his mouth, like speaking a foreign language
he'd once known but had forgotten over the years. Twenty
three years of estrangement didn't vanish just because Robert Stone
had finally done what everyone eventually does. Marcus killed the
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engine and sat in the rental car, listening to the
rain drum against the roof through the water streaked windshield.
The cabin looked smaller than he remembered, smaller and older,
hunched beneath the dripping oaks like a man who'd given
up on standing straight. The Blue Ridge mountains rose behind it,
their peaks lost in the low October clouds. He should
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have come back before now. He knew that his mother
had told him so before she died, and his sister
Sarah had reminded him every Christmas and every Birthday and
every time their father had another spell that sent him
to the house spital. But the silence between Marcus and
his father had calcified into something harder than stubbornness. Harder
than pride. It had become a kind of religion, their estrangement,
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something they both believed in too deeply to question. Now
Robert Stone was dead, and Marcus was forty five years old,
and he was sitting in a rental car in the
Virginia Mountains, trying to work up the courage to walk
into a house he hadn't entered since he was twenty two.
The lawyer's voice echoed in his head, dry and professional.
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Your father left everything to you, doctor Stone, the cabin,
the land, his personal effects, and there was a specific
instruction regarding a trunk in the cellar. Marcus had laughed
at that, a trunk in the cellar, like something out
of a Gothic novel, But the lawyer hadn't laughed. The
lawyer had handed him an envelope with a key inside
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and a note in his father's handwriting the same cramped,
careful script Marcus remembered from childhood. This has been pasted
down since the time of our ancestor, Captain Elijah Stone.
What's inside is your burden now, as it was mine.
I spent my life guarding the secret. Maybe you'll be
braver than I was. Maybe you'll understand why I became
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who I became. Read them all before you decide what
to do. Marcus had read the note six times on
the flight from Chicago. He still didn't know what to
make of it. His father had always been strange, withdrawn, secretive,
prone to long walks in the mountains from which he'd
return muddy and exhausted, and unwilling to explain where he'd been.
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As a boy, Marcus had invented stories to explain his
father's behavior. Secret government work, a hidden second family, a
life of adventure that he couldn't share with his wife
and children. The truth, Marcus had decided long ago, was
probably simpler and sadder. His father was just a difficult
man who preferred his own company to anyone else's, a
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man who'd rather wander the woods alone and sit at
the dinner table with his family. But that note, that
note suggested something else entirely. The drive from Dulles had
taken five hours, five hours through Virginia countryside that grew
wilder with every mile. The interstate gave way to state highways,
which gave way to county roads, which gave way to
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gravel paths that barely deserved to be called roads at all.
The GPS had given up somewhere around Staunton, its polite
computerized voice admitting defeat against terrain that hadn't changed much
since the Revolutionary War. Marcus knew the way, though his
body remembered, even if his conscious mind had tried to forget.
Left at the split oak, right where the old mill
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foundation crumbled, beside the creek, straight through the gap in
the ridge where the road narrowed to a single lane.
The mountains pressed in on either side. Ancient mountains, these Appalachians,
older than the Rockies, older than the Alps, worn down
by time into something that looked but wasn't. People disappeared
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in these hills, Hikers who wandered off trails, hunters who
went too deep. They'd find them, sometimes days or weeks later.
Sometimes they'd never find them at all. His father had
never seemed worried about the wilderness, had walked into it
like he was coming home. Marcus gripped the steering wheel tighter.
The rain intensified, hammering against the roof and waves. Lightning
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flickered somewhere behind the peaks, followed by thunder that rolled
through the valleys like the echo of artillery fire. He
thought about turning around, just driving back to the airport,
catching the first flight to Chicago, and letting Sarah deal
with all of this. She was better suited to it anyway.
She'd stayed in touch with their father, she'd made the
obligatory visits. She'd held his hand at the end, But
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the note was addressed to him. The trunk was left
to him. Whatever burden their father had carried for all
those years, he'd chosen Marcus to bear it next. Why
that was the question that had gnawed at him through
the entire flight, through the rental car process, through every
mile of that long drive. Why him he was the
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one who'd left, the one who'd built a wall of
silence and refused to take it down, the one who'd
missed his own father's funeral because he couldn't face No,
he'd missed the funeral because he'd chosen to miss it,
because some part of him was still angry after all
these years, Angry at the silences, the absences, the way
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his father had retreated into himself after his mother died,
Angry at the man who'd been present in body but
gone in spirit for most of Marcus's teenage years, and
now his father was dead, and Marcus was angry at himself,
and none of it mattered anymore. The cabin materialized through
the rain, a smear of dark wood and stone against
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the gray green blur of the forest. Marcus pulled up
beside the porch and killed the engine again. The wiper stopped,
and water immediately began to sheet across the windshield, obscuring
the view. He sat there for a long time, listening
to the rain, feeling the weight of twenty three years
pressing down on his chest. Then he grabbed his bag,
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threw open the door, and ran for the porch. The
key was under the third flagstone from the left. His
father had kept it there for as long as Marcus
could remember. Anyone could have found it, anyone could have
walked in at any time, but his father had never
worried about that. Nothing in there worth stealing, he'd said once,
and anyone fool enough to come this far into the
(07:34):
mountains for what little I have deserves whatever they can carry.
Marcus turned the key in the lock. The door swung
inward on hinges that didn't creak. His father had always
been meticulous about maintenance, and the smell hit him like
a physical force, pipe tobacco, old books, the particular mustiness
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of a house where a single person has lived alone
for too long, and underneath it all something else, something
almost sweet, like dried flowers or aged paper, or memory itself.
He stood in the doorway, rain dripping from his coat
onto the worn wooden floor, and breathed it all in.
The furniture was exactly as he remembered, heavy oak pieces
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that had probably been in the family for generations. The
stone fireplace that dominated the main room, its hearth swept
clean and waiting for kindling. Bookshelves lining every available wall,
crammed with volumes on history, natural science, and subjects Marcus
couldn't categorize at a glance. His father's reading glasses sat
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on the arm of the leather chair by the fire.
A coffee cup waited on the kitchen counter, still bearing
the ring where liquid had evaporated. Small signs of a
life interrupted, of a man who'd expected to come back
and never did. Marcus set his bag down and walked
through the cabin room by room like a crime scene investigator.
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He thought, and then pushed the thought away because it
felt disrespectful. The bedroom in back was neat and sparse,
a single bed, a dresser, a night stand with a
stack of books. His father had died in the hospital.
Sarah had told him, a stroke that hit fast and hard.
He'd collapsed on the porch, probably coming back from one
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of his walks, and by the time the ambulance arrived
the damage was done. Two days in the ICU, and
then it was over. Marcus hadn't gone to see him,
hadn't even considered it until Sarah called to say it
was too late. And now he was here in his
father's house, surrounded by his father's things, and the guilt
was a physical weight in his chest. He walked to
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his old bedroom. The door was closed. He hesitated with
his hand on the knob, then pushed it open. Nothing
had changed. His high school track trophies still sat on
the shelf. His posters bands he no longer listened to
movies he barely remembered still hung on the wall. His
bed was made with the same blue comforter he'd slept
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under as a teenager, a shrine. His father had preserved
it like a shrine to a son who'd abandoned him.
Marcus closed the door quickly. He couldn't look at that
room right now, couldn't process what it meant that his
father had kept it exactly the same for twenty three years.
He went back to the main room and stood before
the fireplace. The wood was already laid, ready to light.
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His father had been prepared for everything. Marcus found matches
on the mantel and struck one. The kindling caught immediately.
His father had used fat wood, the resinous pine that
burns hot and fast, and within minutes a proper fire
was crackling in the hearth. He found his father's whiskey
in the cabinet. Good stuff too, single mault from Scotland,
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probably saved for occasions that never came. Marcus poured two
fingers into a glass that still sat in the drying rack,
and settled into his father's chair. The leather creaked under
his weight, The fire popped and hissed outside, the rain
continued to fall. He pulled his father's note from his
pocket and read it again. This has been passed down
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since the time of our ancestor, Captain Elijah Stone. Captain
Elijah Stone, Marcus knew the name, of course, every Stone
knew the name. The family patriarch, the Revolutionary War hero,
the man who'd settled this land after the war and
built the original cabin that had eventually become this one.
There was a portrait of him somewhere. Marcus had seen
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it as a child, showing a stern faced man in
Continental Army uniform. What's inside is your burden now as
it was mine? What had his father been guarding all
these years? What secret could possibly be important enough to
explain a lifetime of isolation and silence? Marcus drained his
glass and poured another. The whiskey burned going down, but
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it was a good burn, a warming burn. He felt
something loosening in his chest, though, whether it was the
alcohol or the fire, or just the strangeness of being here,
he couldn't say. I spent my life guarding this secret.
His father had been a professor once history, like Marcus.
That's where Marcus had gotten his love of the past,
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though he'd never admitted it. Robert Stone had taught at
the University of Virginia for twenty years before retiring early,
too early, everyone said, to this cabin in the mountains.
He'd published papers, given lectures, mentored graduate students, and then
one day he'd simply stopped, packed up his office, sold
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his house in Charlottesville, and disappeared into the Blue Ridge.
Marcus had been sixteen when it happened. His mother had
been dead for two years by then, cancer taking her
slowly and painfully while Marcus watched, and his father withdrew
further and further into himself. And then the move to
the mountains, and Marcus being shuttled between the cabin and
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his grandmother's house in Richmond, and finally, mercifully college and
escape and a life of his own. Maybe you'll be
braver than I was. Braver about what what required bravery.
Read them all before you decide what to do. The
trunk and the cellar, whatever was in there. His father
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wanted him to read it, all of it, before deciding
what whether to continue guarding the secret, whether to reveal it.
Marcus finished his second whiskey and set the glass down.
The fire had settled into a steady burn, orange flames
licking at the larger logs. The rain still hammered against
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the roof, but the thunder had moved off to the east.
He thought about waiting until morning, getting some sleep, approaching
whatever waited for him in the cellar, with fresh eyes
and a clear head. That's what a sensible person would do.
A rational person. But he'd driven five hours through a storm.
He'd walked into a house he had an inner in
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over two decades. He'd sat in his father's chair and
drunk his father's whiskey and felt the weight of twenty
three years of silence pressing down on him. He wasn't
going to be able to sleep, not with that trunk waiting.
Marcus stood up and walked to the study. The bookshelf
on the far wall had always been off limits. As
a boy, Marcus had been forbidden to touch it, forbidden
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to move it, forbidden to even speculate about what might
be behind it. His father's one absolute rule in a
house that otherwise had very few There's nothing for you there,
his father had said when Marcus asked, and something in
his voice, a hardness, a finality, had convinced young Marcus
not to ask again. Now Marcus stood before that bookshelf,
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forty five years old, his father dead and buried, and
for the first time in his life, he was going
to see what lay behind it. The mechanism was hidden
in the decorative molding, A small lever disguised as part
of the carved pattern. Day tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
We'll be back after these messages. Marcus found it almost
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by accident, his fingers tracing the woodwork the way they'd
wanted to trace it when he was a boy. Something
clicked and the shelf swung outward on concealed rollers. Behind
it was a door, old wood, reinforced with iron bands
that had gone orange with rust. A lock that looked
as ancient as the house itself, and carved into the wood,
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barely visible in the dim light, symbols that Marcus didn't recognize,
not quite letters, not quite pictures, something in between. He
pulled the key from the envelope. The iron was heavy
in his hand, cold, despite being in his pocket. It
fit the lock perfectly. Of course, The mechanism resisted for
a moment years of disuse, and then gave way with
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a grinding click that seemed too loud in the silence.
The door swung inward on darkness. Marcus found the flashlight
that hung on a hook beside the door. His father
had thought of everything, and clicked it on a beam
of white light cut through the black, illuminating stone steps
that descended into the earth the cellar. He'd imagined this
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moment so many times as a child, elaborate fantasies about
what horrors or treasures might lurk beneath the cabin, pirate gold,
revolutionary war munitions, the skeleton of some long dead enemy,
a child's imagination running wild with the possibilities of a
locked door and a forbidden room. The reality as he
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descended was more mundane and somehow more unsettling. The cellar
was smaller than he'd expected, perhaps fifteen feet square, with
walls of stacked stone and a ceiling low enough that
he had to duck in places. The air was cool
and dry, with the smell of earth and age and
something almost sweet like old paper. And in the center
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of the room, waiting for him as it had waited
for his father, and his father's fe and however many
generations of stones before them, sat the trunk. Marcus's breath
caught in his throat. It was larger than he'd imagined,
nearly four feet long, bound in iron and oak, with
brass fittings that had gone green with verdigris. The patina
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of true age covered every surface, not the manufactured distressing
of antique reproductions, but the deep weathering of something genuinely old,
two hundred years old, if he was to believe his
father's note, maybe older. He approached it slowly, his footsteps
echoing off the stone walls. The flashlight beam played across
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the trunk's surface, revealing more of those strange symbols carved
into the wood, the same ones that adorned the door,
the same ones he'd never seen before in any of
his years studying American history. There was a second lock
on the trunk, smaller than the one on the door,
but just as old. Marcus found another key waiting in
a small box mounted on the wall. His father always
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prepared and fitted it to the mechanism. His hands were shaking,
he told himself it was the cold. The lock opened
with a click that seemed to reverberate through the small space.
Marcus lifted the lid. The hinges groaned in protest, but
held slowly. Carefully. He raised the top of the trunk
and looked inside. The first thing he saw was leather,
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cracked brown leather wrapped in oil cloth that had once
been waterproof but had long since dried to brittleness. He
lifted the bundle and felt the weight of it. Not
heavy exactly, but substantial, meaningful. He set it aside and
kept looking. Seven leather bound journals, their covers cracked but intact.
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A portfolio tied with faded ribbon, A bundle of letters
secured with twine that had gone almost black with age.
A small wooden box carved with more of those strange symbols,
and at the very bottom, folded in cloth, something that
glinted in the flashlight's beam. Marcus reached for it, his
fingers brushing against cool stone. A pendant, rough hewn about
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the size of his palm, hanging from a leather cord
that was still surprisingly supple. The stone was dark granite maybe,
or some kind of volcanic rock, and carved with symbols
that matched the ones on the trunk and door. But
these symbols were different, more intricate, more purposeful, like they
meant something specific. Marcus set the pendant aside and reached
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for the first journal. The leather was soft with age,
supple in a way that only genuine antiquity achieved. The
pages inside were yellowed but sound, covered in a dense,
elegant scrip that slanted rightward in the fashion of eighteenth
century penmanship. He opened it to the first page. The
handwriting was neat and precise, the kind of penmanship they
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don't teach anymore. The ink had faded from black to brown,
the words were still perfectly legible. The first entry was
dated March fifteenth, seventeen ninety nine. I begin this account
with a full understanding that no sane man who reads
it will believe what I am about to relate. I
accept this. I have accepted that my sanity itself may
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be called into question by future readers should these pages
survive me. Yet I am compelled to write regardless, for
I have witnessed things that demand documentation, even if that
documentation serves only as a warning to those who might
follow in my footsteps. My name is Elijah Stone. I
am a captain in the Virginia Militia, retired these four
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years since the conclusion of our nation's struggle for independence.
I am forty two years of age, sound of mind
and body, and I'm about to lead an expedition into
the western wilderness in search of something that I suspect
has been watching humanity since before we learn to walk upright.
Marcus read the passage three times. His historians training warred
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with something deeper, something that recognized the authenticity of the document,
even as his rational mind tried to dismiss the content
as fantasy. Watching humanity since before we learned to walk upright,
what the hell did that mean? He carried everything upstairs,
the journals, the portfolio, the letters, the pendant, all of it.
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He spread the collection across his father's table, the firelight
flickering across leather and paper and stone. His training as
a historian kicked in automatically. He examined the paper first,
rag content hand laid with the characteristic chain lines of
period manufacture. The ink was iron gall consistent with late
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eighteenth century writing. The binding of the journals was handstitched
using thread that matched the period. Everything checked out, Everything
was genuine. Marcus had handled enough antique documents to recognize
authenticity when he saw it. These journals were They'd been
written in seventeen ninety nine or thereabouts by someone who
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had access to the materials of that era. But the content,
the content was something else entirely. He returned to the
first journal and began to read in earnest. The fire
burned low. Marcus didn't notice the whiskey sat untouched at
his elbow. He didn't notice that either the storm outside
had passed, giving way to a silence so complete it
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seemed to have weight and texture. He didn't notice any
of it. All he could see were the words on
the page. I first heard stories of the creatures during
the war. We were encamped at Valley Forge, that miserable
winter that nearly ended our revolution before it truly began,
and I'd been assigned to coordinate with a company of
Oneda scouts who had allied themselves with our cause. They
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were remarkable men, these Oneida, possessed of skills in woodcraft
that put our best frontiersmen to shame. But it was
not their practical abilities that captured my attention. It was
their stories. One night, as we huddled around a fire
that seemed barely capable of cutting the cold, a scout
named Joseph, he had taken a Christian name, as many
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of the Oneida, had, spoke of the old ones who
lived in the deep forests. His people called them by
a name I cannot properly render in English letters, but
which sounded something like Ottnallarge the stone Giants in translation,
though Joseph insisted this was not quite accurate. They are
not giants, he said. They are the elder brothers. They
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were here before us, they will be here after us.
They watch, but they do not interfere unless provoked. I
pressed him for details. Joseph was reluctant at first. These matters,
he said, were not for outsiders. But the cold and
the war and the shared suffering had built a bridge
between us. He told me of creatures that walked upright
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like men, but were covered in hair like beasts. Creatures
that stood taller than the tallest and possessed strength beyond
anything human. Creatures that lived in family groups and communicated
in ways that humans could barely perceive. Have you seen them,
I asked. Joseph was silent for a long moment. Then
he said, my grandfather saw them. He was hunting alone
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in the mountains when he was a young man. They
let him see them. They do not show themselves to everyone.
Marcus stopped reading. His hands were trembling again, and this
time he couldn't blame it on the cold. The details
were too specific, too accurate. Valley Forge winner of seventeen
seventy seven to seventy eight the dates were right. The
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Oneada Scouts had indeed allied with the Continental Army. The
physical description of the winter camp, the rationing, the desperation,
all of it matched what Marcus knew from his own
research into the Revolutionary War. Either his ancestor had been
there exactly as he claimed, or he'd been a remarkably
well informed force who somehow created documents that would fool
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modern analysis. Marcus reached for the whiskey and took a
long drink. The burn helped clear his head a little.
He kept reading. I dismissed the story at first as
the sort of superstition that all peoples carry with them
from their primitive past, but the seed had been planted.
Over the following years. As the war ground on and
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finally concluded, I encountered the stories again and again. A
German settler in Pennsylvania who swore he had found footprints
too large to be human near his farmstead. A French
trapper who had traded with tribes far to the west
and heard their legends of Le Grand Sauvage, the Great
wild Ones. A naturalist from Philadelphia who had collected reports
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from across the frontier and believed against all scientific orthodoxy
that something unknown walked the American wilderness. The idea took
hold of me. I cannot explain why. Perhaps it was
the purposelessness I felt after the war, the sense that
I had survived something terrible, only to find ordinary life
unbearable in its monotony. Perhaps it was the nightmares that
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plagued me, dreams of men dying in ways I could
not prevent, dreams that left me sweating and screaming in
the darkness. Perhaps I simply needed something to believe in,
something beyond the politics and commerce that consumed my countrymen.
Whatever the reason, I began to plan an expedition. Marcus
set the journal down and stared at the fire. The
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flames had died to embers, casting a dull, red glow
across the room. He thought about his father, the long
walks in the mountains, the strange hours he kept, the
isolation that had driven everyone away, the way he would
sometimes stare at the forest with an expression that wasn't
quite fear, but wasn't comfortable either. Marcus had spent his
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entire adult life trying to understand his father, trying to
explain the distance and the silence and the inexplicable choices. Now,
sitting in his father's chair, reading his ancestors' words, he
felt something shifting in his understanding. His father hadn't been
a recluse, hadn't been avoiding his family out of coldness
or cruelty or simple preference for solitude. He'd been a guardian,
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protecting something, watching for something, waiting for something that might
never come, or might come at any moment. The weight
of inherited responsibility settled onto Marcus's shoulders like a physical thing.
He picked up the journal and kept reading. The hours passed,
Marcus didn't notice. He read about Elijah's preparations, his gathering
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of men at Thornton's tavern in Richmond, the careful selection
of supplies and horses and weapons. He read character sketches
of each expedition member. James McAllister, the hot tempered Scottish
soldier who'd served with Elijah at Brandywine. Samuel Bridger, the
Kentucky frontiersman who knew more than he was saying. Doctor
Thomas Ashworth, the arrogant naturalist who believed everything could be
(28:01):
explained by science. Reverend Josiah Whitmore, whose faith had been shattered.
By personal tragedy, each man rendered in precise, vivid detail,
each man carrying his own secrets, his own reasons for
joining an expedition into the unknown, and underlying it all
a growing sense of dread, a certainty that Elijah Stone
(28:24):
knew even before they departed, that not all of them
would return. Dawn broke through the windows. Gray light filtered
into the cabin, mixing with the last glow of the
dying fire. Marcus looked up from the journal and realized
he'd been reading all night. His eyes burned, his neck
ached from hunching over the table, his mouth was dry,
(28:46):
and his hands had cramped into claws from gripping the
ancient leather. But he couldn't stop. The first journal ended
with the expedition's departure from Richmond, nine men riding west
into the wilderness, following rumors and legends towards something that
might not exist, except Marcus knew now that it did exist.
The detail in Elijah's account was too specific, too consistent,
(29:10):
too genuine to be fiction. Whatever his ancestor had encountered
in those western mountains, he'd encountered something real. Marcus reached
for the second journal. His hand was shaking. He thought
about calling in sick to work. He was supposed to
be back in Chicago in three days, supposed to teach
a seminar on colonial American economics, supposed to resume his
(29:32):
normal life as if nothing had changed. But everything had
changed everything. He opened the second journal and began to read.
March fifteenth to twenty fifth, seventeen ninety nine, Richmond, Virginia.
I write these words by candlelight in the room above
Thornton's Tavern in Richmond, where I've taken lodgings for the
(29:52):
duration of our preparations. Below me, I can hear the
men I've gathered, some of them, at least, stay tuned
for more backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Drinking and talking in the way that men do when
they are about to embark upon something foolish. I do
not join them tonight. I find that I need solitude
(30:14):
to order my thoughts before committing them to paper. Let
me begin, then, at the beginning. The idea of this
expedition has consumed me for nearly four years. Since the
end of the war, I have found myself unable to
settle into the quiet life that so many of my
fellow veterans seemed to embrace with relief. They returned to
their farms, their trades, their families. They put away their
(30:38):
muskets and picked up their plows. They tried to forget
what they had seen. I could not forget. I do
not mean the battles, though God knows, those memories are
burned into my brain as surely as a brand upon flesh.
I mean the other things, the things that happened in
the dark spaces between the fighting, The things the Oneida
(30:58):
scouts whispered about around on campfires when they thought no
one was listening, the creatures in the woods. I have
spent the year since the war collecting accounts, traveling the frontier,
speaking with trappers and traders and Native peoples, documenting every
sighting every legend, every whisper of something large and unknown
walking the American wilderness. What I have found has convinced
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me beyond doubt. There is something out there, something that
has existed alongside humanity for longer than recorded history, something
that our native peoples know well but rarely speak of,
Something that watches us from the shadows of ancient forests.
And I am going to find it. The men began
arriving three weeks ago. Some I had invited personally, veterans
(31:45):
of the war, whom I knew to be steady under
fire and capable in the wilderness. Others came on their own,
drawn by rumors of my expedition that had apparently spread
further than I intended. Let me record their names and
natures that future sure readers might know. Who walked into
the unknown at my side. James McAllister Jim, to those
(32:06):
who know him, was the first to arrive. A Scotsman
from the Highland Clearances. He'd come to the colonies as
a boy and grown into one of the finest riflemen
I have ever known. We served together at Brandywine and Germantown,
and I watched him put a ball through a British
officer's eye at two hundred yards in the chaos of battle.
He's twenty nine years old, now, hot tempered and quick
(32:28):
to anger, but utterly loyal to those he considers friends.
The war cost Jim everything. His family had settled on
a farm in the Shenandoah Valley. While we were fighting
the British in the north. Loyalist raiders burned the place
to the ground, his parents, his sisters, his young wife,
all of them gone. When word reached him, something in
(32:51):
Jim broke and never quite healed. I am the closest
thing he has left a family. And when I told
him I was going into the wilderness on what many
would call a fool errand, he simply nodded and asked
when we were leaving. Samuel Bridger arrived next, having walked
two hundred miles from Kentucky to join us. He's forty
two years old, weathered by a lifetime on the frontier,
(33:13):
with a face like tanned leather and eyes that missed nothing.
Sam can't read or write, but he knows the wilderness
better than any man alive. He's trapped beaver from the
Ohio to the Mississippi, traded with tribes that most white
men have never heard of, and survived alone in country
that would kill an ordinary man in a week. But
there's something about Sam that troubles me, a quality of watching,
(33:37):
of waiting. When I asked him why he wanted to
join the expedition, he said something that has stayed with me.
I've been waiting twenty years for someone to go looking,
he said, twenty years since I saw something that no
one would believe. I pressed him for details. He refused
to elaborate, but his eyes when he spoke of it,
there was fear there and something else, something that looked
(34:01):
almost like hunger. Doctor Thomas Ashworth came from Philadelphia with
a wagonful of scientific equipment and an attitude of intellectual
superiority that has already made him unpopular with the others.
He's fifty one years old, a physician and naturalist who
has published papers on American fauna in several respected journals.
(34:21):
He's also funding most of our expedition, which means I
must tolerate his arrogance. Thomas believes that whatever we find
will be perfectly natural, some previously undiscovered species of great ape.
He suggests, perhaps a surviving population of something that should
have gone extinct millennia ago. He has no patience for
native legends or frontier superstitions. Everything he insists can be
(34:45):
explained by science. I suspect that his certainty will be
one of the first casualties of our journey. The Reverend
Josiah Whitmore is an unexpected addition to our company, a
former minister from Massachusetts. He's fifty five years old and
looks older, worn down by grief that he carries like
a physical weight. His wife and three children died of
(35:07):
smallpox eight years ago. He lost his faith that day
and has spent the years since searching for something to
replace it. Josiah heard about my expedition through a mutual
acquaintance and sought me out. He wants to find evidence,
he says, evidence of God's design in a world that
suddenly seems random and cruel. I don't know if our
(35:27):
expedition will provide what he's looking for, but they's still
beneath his sadness, and I have learned never to underestimate
a man who has lost everything and survived. Solomon Friedman
is a freed blacksmith from Maryland, thirty five years old,
with hands that can bend iron and a mind as
sharp as any scholars. He carries his freedom papers everywhere,
(35:49):
even though we're traveling into territory where the law barely exists.
Solomon's grandmother was brought from Africa as a child, and
she told him stories of forest people in the deep
jungles of her homeland, Creatures that walked like men but
were not men. Creatures that watched from the shadows, and
sometimes took people who wandered too far from their villages.
(36:11):
Solomon believes not in the specific creatures I seek, but
in the existence of things unknown to European science. His
perspective is unlike anyone else's in our company, and I
value it more than I can say. Henri Beaumont is
a French Canadian voyager from Montreal, thirty three years old,
with a charming smile that hides more than it reveals.
(36:33):
He speaks English, French, and at least four native languages fluently,
and he is traded with tribes across the northern territories.
Henri knows the legends intimately. He's heard versions of them
from the Cree, the Ojibwe, the Algonquin, the Iroquois. Every tribe,
he says, has stories of large, hairy creatures that walk
(36:54):
upright in the deep forests. Henri is capable and experienced,
but I don't hirely trust him. There's something behind that
easy smile that he's not sharing, something that brought him here.
Despite the risks, I will watch him carefully. William Harper
is our artist commission to document the expedition's findings. He's
(37:15):
only twenty seven years old, slight and pale, and seems
utterly unsuited for wilderness travel. His hands shake when he's cold,
which in the mountains will be most of the time.
He startles at sudden sounds and sleeps poorly in unfamiliar places.
But his eyes see things others miss. When I showed
him a cast i'd made of a footprint found in
(37:37):
western Pennsylvania, eighteen inches long with five distinct toes, he
studied it for a long time before speaking, There's power
in this print, he said. Finally, this foot was made
for living in places we can't follow. I don't know
exactly what he meant, but I knew in that moment
that I needed him on this expedition. Finally, there is
(37:58):
Ezekiel young Zeke, who is my nephew and who has
no business being here at all. He's only nineteen, barely
more than a boy, and he ran away from his
mother's house in Fredericksburg to join us. Margaret, my sister,
will never forgive me if something happens to him. But
I couldn't send him away. He has his father's stubbornness
(38:19):
and his mother's courage, and he was going to follow us,
whether I gave permission or not. Better to have him
where I can watch over him than to have him
trailing behind, getting into trouble on his own. Zeke believes
this will be the greatest adventure of his life. He
may be right, though not in the way he imagines.
So there we are, nine men gathered in a tavern
(38:40):
in Richmond, preparing to ride into the unknown. We leave
at dawn tomorrow with fifteen horses, supplies for eighteen months,
and enough weapons and ammunition to fight a small war.
We will need all of it. I am certain of that,
though I cannot explain how I know. The Oneada scout
Joseph told me something else that night at Valley Forge,
(39:02):
something I did not record in my earlier notes because
it seemed too strange, too impossible to credit. The Stone
giants watch, he said, they have always watched. They know
us better than we know ourselves. I asked him what
he meant they decide. He said, when they see you,
they decide. Some they let pass, some they take. There's
(39:26):
no way to know which you will be until the
moment comes. Tomorrow we ride west. Tomorrow we begin the
journey that will answer the questions that have haunted me
for four years. God help us all. Marcus set down
the first journal and reached for his coffee. It had
gone cold hours ago, but he drank it anyway. Outside.
(39:48):
The morning sun had broken through the clouds, casting long
shadows across the cabin floor. He'd been reading for almost
thirty six hours now, with only brief breaks for food
and bathroom visits. Part of his mind, the academic, the historian,
the skeptic, kept insisting that he should stop, eat a
real meal, get some sleep, approach this material with proper
(40:11):
scholarly distance. But he couldn't stop. The words on the
page had their hooks in him, pulling him deeper into
a story that felt less like reading and more like remembering.
His ancestor's voice was so clear, so present. The details
were too specific to be invented, the emotions too raw
to be faked. Whatever Elijah Stone had experienced in those
(40:34):
western mountains, He'd poured his entire soul into documenting it,
and the hints of what was coming, the warnings, the forebodings,
the growing sense of something terrible waiting in the wilderness
kept Marcus turning pages like a man compelled. He thought
about his father again. Robert Stone had read these journals,
(40:54):
had read them many times, judging by the careful notes
written in the margins in his father's handwriting, notes about
dates and locations, cross references to historical records, questions that
had clearly plagued him for years. Had his father ever
gone looking? Had he ever tried to find what Elijah
Stone had found? Marcus thought about those long walks in
(41:16):
the mountains, the way his father would sometimes be gone
for days at a time, returning muddy and exhausted, with
a look in his eyes that Marcus had never been
able to name. Maybe he had gone looking, maybe he'd
found something, or maybe he'd spent his entire life waiting
for something that never came. Marcus picked up the second
journal and opened it to where he'd left off. The
(41:38):
pages crackled slightly as he turned them, the old paper,
protesting the handling. The expedition had left Richmond, nine men
riding into the wilderness, following legends and whispers towards something
that might not exist. Except it did exist. Marcus was
certain of that now, as certain as he'd ever been
of anything in his academic career. He found his place
(42:01):
in the narrative and continued reading March twenty fifth through
April eighth, seventeen ninety nine the Allegheny Mountains. The first
two weeks passed easier than I had expected. We followed
established roads west from Richmond, making good time through the
Virginia Piedmont and into the foothills of the Alleghenies. The
weather held fair, and the men began to find their
(42:23):
rhythms with each other. Jim and Zeke became unlikely friends,
the battle hardened scotsmen, taking my young nephew under his wing.
I would see them riding side by side, Jim pointing
out tracks and plants, and teaching Zeke the woodcraft that
had kept him alive through four years of war. My
sister would have been furious, but I was grateful. If
(42:44):
there was any one I trusted to keep Zeke alive
in a crisis, it was Jim McAllister. Thomas and Solomon
spent the evenings in debate the Philadelphia Naturalists, pitting his
European scientific training against the blacksmith's deep knowledge of African traditions.
It was a strange pairing, but productive. I think Thomas
was beginning to realize that his certainties might not survive
(43:06):
the wilderness intact. Henry scouted ahead each day, returning with
news of clear trails and safe river crossings. He was
good at what he did, uncommonly good, but there remained
that quality about him that I couldn't quite trust, that
smile that didn't reach his eyes. Sam rode at the
front of the column, rarely speaking, always watching. He seemed
(43:29):
to know the land, instinctively choosing paths that avoided the
worst of the terrain. When I asked how he knew
which way to go, he simply said, the land tells me,
I let it go. Sam would share his secrets when
he was ready, or he wouldn't. Either way, pressing him
would do no good will. Harper rode in the middle
(43:50):
of our formation, his sketchbook opened across his saddle, his
pencil moving constantly, he drew everything, the mountains rising ahead
of us, the faces of the men, the way the
light filtered through the canopy. His talent was remarkable, but
there was something obsessive about the way he worked, as
if he was trying to capture something that might otherwise
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escape him. Josiah brought up the rear, praying constantly in
a voice too low for anyone to hear. The former
reverend had found a kind of peace on the trail,
though whether it was peace with his God or simply
acceptance of his fate, I could not say. On the
eighth day, the roads ended. The transition was gradual at first.
(44:31):
The well maintained track became a trail, The trail became
a path. The path became nothing, just forests stretching away
in every direction, Trees so large that ten men couldn't
circle their trunks, canopy so thick that midday felt like twilight.
This was the frontier, the edge of known territory. Beyond
(44:52):
this point, the maps were guesswork and wishful, thinking we're
in their country now. Sam said that evening, as we
made camp, it was the most he'd spoken in days.
Whose country, Thomas asked. Sam didn't answer. He just looked
at the forest around us and shook his head. Stay
tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
these messages. That night, I woke to a sound I
(45:17):
had never heard before, wood knocking, three sharp strikes, like
someone hitting a tree trunk with a heavy stick. The
sound echoed through the darkness, clear and distinct and then stopped.
I lay in my bedroll, heart hammering, straining to hear.
The silence was absolute. No crickets, no owls, no wind
(45:39):
in the leaves, just that terrible, waiting silence. Then the
knocking came again, three times, further away, this time, like
something retreating into the forest. I didn't sleep the rest
of the night. In the morning, I asked the others
if they'd heard anything. Most had slept through it, but
Sam nodded slowly. They know we're here, he said, they've
(46:02):
known since we crossed into the mountains. They Thomas demanded,
what is they? You keep speaking in riddles? Man Sam
looked at him for a long moment. Then he turned
and walked into the forest. He came back an hour later,
his face grim. Found something, he said, you should all
see it. We followed him through the underbrush to a
(46:24):
small stream about half a mile from camp. The water
ran clear over smooth stones. The bank's muddy from recent rain,
and there pressed into that mud were footprints. I had
seen the cast i'd shown to Will Harper. I had
read the descriptions in the accounts I'd collected. I thought
I was prepared for what we might find I was
(46:45):
not prepared. The prints were enormous, eighteen inches long at
least and sunk deep into the mud by massive weight.
Five toes clearly visible a heel an arch, the architecture
of a human foot, but scaled up to dimensions that
made no sense. Thomas dropped to his knees beside the Prince,
(47:05):
his hand shaking as he produced a measuring tape from
his pack. He muttered to himself as he worked numbers
and calculations that seemed to bring him comfort. Twelve inches across,
he said, the depth suggests a weight of at least
five hundred pounds. The stride length, he looked up at us,
his face pale. The stride length is nearly five feet.
(47:27):
What does that mean, Zeke asked. It means whatever made
these prints is tall. Thomas said, very tall, and it
was moving quickly. I studied the tracks more carefully. They
led from the forest to the stream, and then nothing,
no prince on the other side. Whatever made them had
crossed the water without leaving a trace. It went upstream,
(47:48):
Sam said. He pointed at the water, walked in the
stream to hide its trail. How do you know which
way it went? Thomas asked, I don't know, I can
feel it. The banks for another hour, but found nothing.
Whatever had made those prints, it was gone, and it
hadn't wanted us to follow. That night, the knocking came again,
(48:11):
closer this time, and it wasn't alone. There were sounds
from multiple directions, calls and responses, like a conversation in
a language we couldn't understand. The horses were restless, pulling
at their leads, their eyes rolling with fear. Solomon spent
most of the night calming them, whispering in a language
(48:31):
that wasn't English, something his grandmother had taught him, he said,
for speaking to frightened animals. When dawn finally came, we
discovered that our food supplies had been disturbed. We'd hung
them from a branch fifteen feet up, well out of
reach of any bear. The rope was still there, but
the bundle was gone. No claw marks, Jim said, examining
(48:52):
the scene, No tearing. Whatever took it, just took it
while we slept twenty feet away, Josiah added, his voice steady,
but his eyes betraying his fear. Sam stood apart, looking
at the forest with an expression I couldn't read. If
they wanted us dead, he said, finally, we'd be dead already.
(49:13):
No one had a response to that. Marcus stopped reading
and rubbed his eyes. The sun had moved across the
sky while he'd been lost in the journals, and the
cabin was growing dim. He should eat something, should sleep,
should do something other than sit in this chair, burning
through his ancestors' words like a man possessed. But he
(49:33):
couldn't stop. The narrative had its hooks in him now,
the creeping dread, the subtle wrongness, the growing certainty that
something was out there, watching, waiting. It was masterfully constructed.
If this was fiction, it was the work of a genius.
But it wasn't fiction. Marcus had examined the journals with
(49:53):
his historian's eye, and everything about them screamed authenticity. The paper,
the ink, the binding, the handwriting, the historical details. All
of it was genuine, which meant that Elijah Stone had
actually experienced what he was describing. Marcus thought about the
footprints eighteen inches long, five hundred pounds, something that walked
(50:16):
upright like a man, but wasn't a man. He thought
about the sound of wood knocking in the night, three times, always,
three He thought about his father sitting in the same chair,
reading these same words, year after year, decade after decade,
guarding a secret that had consumed his entire life. What
(50:38):
had his father been watching for? Marcus picked up the
journal and kept reading. We pressed on what else could
we do? Turn back because of some footprints and stolen food.
The men would have followed me if I'd ordered it,
but I knew they'd think less of me for it,
and truth be told, I didn't want to turn back.
The evidence we'd found only made me more determined to
(51:00):
the source. April brought warmer weather but harder travel. The
terrain grew rougher with every mile, steep ridges and deep valleys,
streams that had to be forded or bridged, deadfall that
blocked our path and forced long detours. The horses struggled,
and by the end of the first week we'd lost
one to a broken leg on a rocky slope. Through
(51:22):
it all, the signs continued. Footprints appeared at the edges
of our camps, always in the morning, as if something
had stood and watched us while we slept. The prints
varied in size, some smaller than what we'd found by
the stream, others larger, suggesting multiple individuals. The knocking came
every night, now multiple sources, multiple directions, building into patterns
(51:46):
that felt almost like communication. The men grew used to it,
or at least stopped jumping at every sound, but no
one slept well anymore. And then there were the structures.
Will spotted the first one on a cold morning, when
frost still sparkled on the ground, a teepee like arrangement
of branches carefully leaned against a tree trunk, the ends
(52:07):
stripped of bark, too deliberate to be natural, too large
to be made by any animal we knew of bears.
Don't do this, Thomas said, examining it with the intensity
of a man whose worldview was crumbling. This is this
is tool use, This is intentional construction. He photographed it.
(52:28):
He'd brought a cumbersome camera apparatus that required ten minutes
of preparation for each exposure, and documented every detail in
his notebook. But I could see the doubt creeping into
his eyes. More structures appeared over the following days. Arches
woven from flexible branches, stone stacked in precise formations, bent
(52:48):
saplings that pointed in specific directions, a language in the landscape.
If only we could read it. Sam could read some
of it, or he claimed he could. That one means
stay away, he said, pointing at a particular arrangement of
twisted branches. That one marks territory. How do you know,
Thomas demanded. Sam was silent for a long moment. Then
(53:11):
he spoke, because I've seen them before. That night around
the fire, Sam finally told us about his encounter twenty
years ago. He said, a blizzard in the northern mountains.
He'd been young then, barely more than a boy, trapping
alone in territory he shouldn't have entered. I thought I
was going to die, he said, found a rock overhang,
(53:33):
crawled underneath, made my peace with God. Then something picked
me up. He described being carried through the storm by
something massive and warm, being taken to a cave where
others waited in the darkness, being examined, handled, passed from
one set of enormous hands to another. They were deciding,
he said, I could feel it. They were deciding what
(53:56):
to do with me. What happened, Zeke asked, his young
face pale in the firelight. They let me go. I
woke up alone in the cave. The storm passed, and
there was a trail of footprints leading back toward my camp.
When I got there, there was a pile of dried
meat outside my shelter. They'd fed me, saved me. Let
(54:17):
me go, why, I asked. Sam looked at me with
eyes that had seen too much. I've spent twenty years
trying to figure that out. That's why I'm here, Captain.
I need to know why none of us slept That night.
We sat around the fire, watching the darkness, listening to
the wood knocks that echoed through the forest. They were
(54:38):
out there, they were watching us, and they were getting closer.
The journal entry ended there, and Marcus realized he was
holding his breath. He exhaled slowly, his hands trembling as
he set the book down. The fire in the cabin
had died to embers, and the room was cold. How
long had he been reading? Hours? Days he'd lost. He
(55:01):
stood up, his joints protesting, and walked to the window.
The mountains rose in the darkness, their shapes blacker than
the black sky behind them. No lights out there, no roads,
no houses, no evidence that humans had ever touched this place.
His father had looked out this same window, year after year,
(55:21):
watching what had he been watching for? Marcus thought about
Sam Bridger's story, the blizzard, the cave, the examination by
hands that weren't human, the decision made in the darkness,
the release. Why save him? That was the question, wasn't it?
If these creatures existed, and the evidence in these journals
(55:43):
strongly suggested they did, then what were they? Animals? Something more,
something that could think, plan, decide, something that could choose
to let a man live or not. Marcus went to
the kitchen and made coffee, strong and black, the way
his father had always drunk it. He found food in
(56:04):
the pantry, canned goods, dried fruit, things that would keep forever,
and forced himself to eat, even though he wasn't hungry.
Then he went back to the chair, picked up the journal,
and kept reading.
Speaker 1 (57:14):
Did b
S S S S S.
Speaker 2 (01:02):
The rain had been falling for three days straight when
Marcus Stone finally turned onto the gravel road that led
to his father's cabin. His father's cabin, the words still
felt wrong in his mouth, like speaking a foreign language
he'd once known but had forgotten over the years. Twenty
three years of estrangement didn't vanish just because Robert Stone
had finally done what everyone eventually does. Marcus killed the
(01:27):
engine and sat in the rental car, listening to the
rain drum against the roof through the water streaked windshield.
The cabin looked smaller than he remembered, smaller and older,
hunched beneath the dripping oaks like a man who'd given
up on standing straight. The Blue Ridge mountains rose behind it,
their peaks lost in the low October clouds. He should
(01:48):
have come back before now. He knew that his mother
had told him so before she died, and his sister
Sarah had reminded him every Christmas and every Birthday and
every time their father had another spell that sent him
to the house spital. But the silence between Marcus and
his father had calcified into something harder than stubbornness. Harder
than pride. It had become a kind of religion, their estrangement,
(02:11):
something they both believed in too deeply to question. Now
Robert Stone was dead, and Marcus was forty five years old,
and he was sitting in a rental car in the
Virginia Mountains, trying to work up the courage to walk
into a house he hadn't entered since he was twenty two.
The lawyer's voice echoed in his head, dry and professional.
(02:31):
Your father left everything to you, doctor Stone, the cabin,
the land, his personal effects, and there was a specific
instruction regarding a trunk in the cellar. Marcus had laughed
at that, a trunk in the cellar, like something out
of a Gothic novel, But the lawyer hadn't laughed. The
lawyer had handed him an envelope with a key inside
(02:52):
and a note in his father's handwriting the same cramped,
careful script Marcus remembered from childhood. This has been pasted
down since the time of our ancestor, Captain Elijah Stone.
What's inside is your burden now, as it was mine.
I spent my life guarding the secret. Maybe you'll be
braver than I was. Maybe you'll understand why I became
(03:14):
who I became. Read them all before you decide what
to do. Marcus had read the note six times on
the flight from Chicago. He still didn't know what to
make of it. His father had always been strange, withdrawn, secretive,
prone to long walks in the mountains from which he'd
return muddy and exhausted, and unwilling to explain where he'd been.
(03:36):
As a boy, Marcus had invented stories to explain his
father's behavior. Secret government work, a hidden second family, a
life of adventure that he couldn't share with his wife
and children. The truth, Marcus had decided long ago, was
probably simpler and sadder. His father was just a difficult
man who preferred his own company to anyone else's, a
(03:58):
man who'd rather wander the woods alone and sit at
the dinner table with his family. But that note, that
note suggested something else entirely. The drive from Dulles had
taken five hours, five hours through Virginia countryside that grew
wilder with every mile. The interstate gave way to state highways,
which gave way to county roads, which gave way to
(04:19):
gravel paths that barely deserved to be called roads at all.
The GPS had given up somewhere around Staunton, its polite
computerized voice admitting defeat against terrain that hadn't changed much
since the Revolutionary War. Marcus knew the way, though his
body remembered, even if his conscious mind had tried to forget.
Left at the split oak, right where the old mill
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foundation crumbled, beside the creek, straight through the gap in
the ridge where the road narrowed to a single lane.
The mountains pressed in on either side. Ancient mountains, these Appalachians,
older than the Rockies, older than the Alps, worn down
by time into something that looked but wasn't. People disappeared
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in these hills, Hikers who wandered off trails, hunters who
went too deep. They'd find them, sometimes days or weeks later.
Sometimes they'd never find them at all. His father had
never seemed worried about the wilderness, had walked into it
like he was coming home. Marcus gripped the steering wheel tighter.
The rain intensified, hammering against the roof and waves. Lightning
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flickered somewhere behind the peaks, followed by thunder that rolled
through the valleys like the echo of artillery fire. He
thought about turning around, just driving back to the airport,
catching the first flight to Chicago, and letting Sarah deal
with all of this. She was better suited to it anyway.
She'd stayed in touch with their father, she'd made the
obligatory visits. She'd held his hand at the end, But
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the note was addressed to him. The trunk was left
to him. Whatever burden their father had carried for all
those years, he'd chosen Marcus to bear it next. Why
that was the question that had gnawed at him through
the entire flight, through the rental car process, through every
mile of that long drive. Why him he was the
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one who'd left, the one who'd built a wall of
silence and refused to take it down, the one who'd
missed his own father's funeral because he couldn't face No,
he'd missed the funeral because he'd chosen to miss it,
because some part of him was still angry after all
these years, Angry at the silences, the absences, the way
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his father had retreated into himself after his mother died,
Angry at the man who'd been present in body but
gone in spirit for most of Marcus's teenage years, and
now his father was dead, and Marcus was angry at himself,
and none of it mattered anymore. The cabin materialized through
the rain, a smear of dark wood and stone against
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the gray green blur of the forest. Marcus pulled up
beside the porch and killed the engine again. The wiper stopped,
and water immediately began to sheet across the windshield, obscuring
the view. He sat there for a long time, listening
to the rain, feeling the weight of twenty three years
pressing down on his chest. Then he grabbed his bag,
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threw open the door, and ran for the porch. The
key was under the third flagstone from the left. His
father had kept it there for as long as Marcus
could remember. Anyone could have found it, anyone could have
walked in at any time, but his father had never
worried about that. Nothing in there worth stealing, he'd said once,
and anyone fool enough to come this far into the
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mountains for what little I have deserves whatever they can carry.
Marcus turned the key in the lock. The door swung
inward on hinges that didn't creak. His father had always
been meticulous about maintenance, and the smell hit him like
a physical force, pipe tobacco, old books, the particular mustiness
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of a house where a single person has lived alone
for too long, and underneath it all something else, something
almost sweet, like dried flowers or aged paper, or memory itself.
He stood in the doorway, rain dripping from his coat
onto the worn wooden floor, and breathed it all in.
The furniture was exactly as he remembered, heavy oak pieces
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that had probably been in the family for generations. The
stone fireplace that dominated the main room, its hearth swept
clean and waiting for kindling. Bookshelves lining every available wall,
crammed with volumes on history, natural science, and subjects Marcus
couldn't categorize at a glance. His father's reading glasses sat
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on the arm of the leather chair by the fire.
A coffee cup waited on the kitchen counter, still bearing
the ring where liquid had evaporated. Small signs of a
life interrupted, of a man who'd expected to come back
and never did. Marcus set his bag down and walked
through the cabin room by room like a crime scene investigator.
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He thought, and then pushed the thought away because it
felt disrespectful. The bedroom in back was neat and sparse,
a single bed, a dresser, a night stand with a
stack of books. His father had died in the hospital.
Sarah had told him, a stroke that hit fast and hard.
He'd collapsed on the porch, probably coming back from one
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of his walks, and by the time the ambulance arrived
the damage was done. Two days in the ICU, and
then it was over. Marcus hadn't gone to see him,
hadn't even considered it until Sarah called to say it
was too late. And now he was here in his
father's house, surrounded by his father's things, and the guilt
was a physical weight in his chest. He walked to
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his old bedroom. The door was closed. He hesitated with
his hand on the knob, then pushed it open. Nothing
had changed. His high school track trophies still sat on
the shelf. His posters bands he no longer listened to
movies he barely remembered still hung on the wall. His
bed was made with the same blue comforter he'd slept
(10:03):
under as a teenager, a shrine. His father had preserved
it like a shrine to a son who'd abandoned him.
Marcus closed the door quickly. He couldn't look at that
room right now, couldn't process what it meant that his
father had kept it exactly the same for twenty three years.
He went back to the main room and stood before
the fireplace. The wood was already laid, ready to light.
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His father had been prepared for everything. Marcus found matches
on the mantel and struck one. The kindling caught immediately.
His father had used fat wood, the resinous pine that
burns hot and fast, and within minutes a proper fire
was crackling in the hearth. He found his father's whiskey
in the cabinet. Good stuff too, single mault from Scotland,
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probably saved for occasions that never came. Marcus poured two
fingers into a glass that still sat in the drying rack,
and settled into his father's chair. The leather creaked under
his weight, The fire popped and hissed outside, the rain
continued to fall. He pulled his father's note from his
pocket and read it again. This has been passed down
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since the time of our ancestor, Captain Elijah Stone. Captain
Elijah Stone, Marcus knew the name, of course, every Stone
knew the name. The family patriarch, the Revolutionary War hero,
the man who'd settled this land after the war and
built the original cabin that had eventually become this one.
There was a portrait of him somewhere. Marcus had seen
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it as a child, showing a stern faced man in
Continental Army uniform. What's inside is your burden now as
it was mine? What had his father been guarding all
these years? What secret could possibly be important enough to
explain a lifetime of isolation and silence? Marcus drained his
glass and poured another. The whiskey burned going down, but
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it was a good burn, a warming burn. He felt
something loosening in his chest, though, whether it was the
alcohol or the fire, or just the strangeness of being here,
he couldn't say. I spent my life guarding this secret.
His father had been a professor once history, like Marcus.
That's where Marcus had gotten his love of the past,
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though he'd never admitted it. Robert Stone had taught at
the University of Virginia for twenty years before retiring early,
too early, everyone said, to this cabin in the mountains.
He'd published papers, given lectures, mentored graduate students, and then
one day he'd simply stopped, packed up his office, sold
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his house in Charlottesville, and disappeared into the Blue Ridge.
Marcus had been sixteen when it happened. His mother had
been dead for two years by then, cancer taking her
slowly and painfully while Marcus watched, and his father withdrew
further and further into himself. And then the move to
the mountains, and Marcus being shuttled between the cabin and
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his grandmother's house in Richmond, and finally, mercifully college and
escape and a life of his own. Maybe you'll be
braver than I was. Braver about what what required bravery.
Read them all before you decide what to do. The
trunk and the cellar, whatever was in there. His father
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wanted him to read it, all of it, before deciding
what whether to continue guarding the secret, whether to reveal it.
Marcus finished his second whiskey and set the glass down.
The fire had settled into a steady burn, orange flames
licking at the larger logs. The rain still hammered against
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the roof, but the thunder had moved off to the east.
He thought about waiting until morning, getting some sleep, approaching
whatever waited for him in the cellar, with fresh eyes
and a clear head. That's what a sensible person would do.
A rational person. But he'd driven five hours through a storm.
He'd walked into a house he had an inner in
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over two decades. He'd sat in his father's chair and
drunk his father's whiskey and felt the weight of twenty
three years of silence pressing down on him. He wasn't
going to be able to sleep, not with that trunk waiting.
Marcus stood up and walked to the study. The bookshelf
on the far wall had always been off limits. As
a boy, Marcus had been forbidden to touch it, forbidden
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to move it, forbidden to even speculate about what might
be behind it. His father's one absolute rule in a
house that otherwise had very few There's nothing for you there,
his father had said when Marcus asked, and something in
his voice, a hardness, a finality, had convinced young Marcus
not to ask again. Now Marcus stood before that bookshelf,
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forty five years old, his father dead and buried, and
for the first time in his life, he was going
to see what lay behind it. The mechanism was hidden
in the decorative molding, A small lever disguised as part
of the carved pattern. Day tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
We'll be back after these messages. Marcus found it almost
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by accident, his fingers tracing the woodwork the way they'd
wanted to trace it when he was a boy. Something
clicked and the shelf swung outward on concealed rollers. Behind
it was a door, old wood, reinforced with iron bands
that had gone orange with rust. A lock that looked
as ancient as the house itself, and carved into the wood,
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barely visible in the dim light, symbols that Marcus didn't recognize,
not quite letters, not quite pictures, something in between. He
pulled the key from the envelope. The iron was heavy
in his hand, cold, despite being in his pocket. It
fit the lock perfectly. Of course, The mechanism resisted for
a moment years of disuse, and then gave way with
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a grinding click that seemed too loud in the silence.
The door swung inward on darkness. Marcus found the flashlight
that hung on a hook beside the door. His father
had thought of everything, and clicked it on a beam
of white light cut through the black, illuminating stone steps
that descended into the earth the cellar. He'd imagined this
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moment so many times as a child, elaborate fantasies about
what horrors or treasures might lurk beneath the cabin, pirate gold,
revolutionary war munitions, the skeleton of some long dead enemy,
a child's imagination running wild with the possibilities of a
locked door and a forbidden room. The reality as he
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descended was more mundane and somehow more unsettling. The cellar
was smaller than he'd expected, perhaps fifteen feet square, with
walls of stacked stone and a ceiling low enough that
he had to duck in places. The air was cool
and dry, with the smell of earth and age and
something almost sweet like old paper. And in the center
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of the room, waiting for him as it had waited
for his father, and his father's fe and however many
generations of stones before them, sat the trunk. Marcus's breath
caught in his throat. It was larger than he'd imagined,
nearly four feet long, bound in iron and oak, with
brass fittings that had gone green with verdigris. The patina
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of true age covered every surface, not the manufactured distressing
of antique reproductions, but the deep weathering of something genuinely old,
two hundred years old, if he was to believe his
father's note, maybe older. He approached it slowly, his footsteps
echoing off the stone walls. The flashlight beam played across
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the trunk's surface, revealing more of those strange symbols carved
into the wood, the same ones that adorned the door,
the same ones he'd never seen before in any of
his years studying American history. There was a second lock
on the trunk, smaller than the one on the door,
but just as old. Marcus found another key waiting in
a small box mounted on the wall. His father always
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prepared and fitted it to the mechanism. His hands were shaking,
he told himself it was the cold. The lock opened
with a click that seemed to reverberate through the small space.
Marcus lifted the lid. The hinges groaned in protest, but
held slowly. Carefully. He raised the top of the trunk
and looked inside. The first thing he saw was leather,
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cracked brown leather wrapped in oil cloth that had once
been waterproof but had long since dried to brittleness. He
lifted the bundle and felt the weight of it. Not
heavy exactly, but substantial, meaningful. He set it aside and
kept looking. Seven leather bound journals, their covers cracked but intact.
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A portfolio tied with faded ribbon, A bundle of letters
secured with twine that had gone almost black with age.
A small wooden box carved with more of those strange symbols,
and at the very bottom, folded in cloth, something that
glinted in the flashlight's beam. Marcus reached for it, his
fingers brushing against cool stone. A pendant, rough hewn about
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the size of his palm, hanging from a leather cord
that was still surprisingly supple. The stone was dark granite maybe,
or some kind of volcanic rock, and carved with symbols
that matched the ones on the trunk and door. But
these symbols were different, more intricate, more purposeful, like they
meant something specific. Marcus set the pendant aside and reached
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for the first journal. The leather was soft with age,
supple in a way that only genuine antiquity achieved. The
pages inside were yellowed but sound, covered in a dense,
elegant scrip that slanted rightward in the fashion of eighteenth
century penmanship. He opened it to the first page. The
handwriting was neat and precise, the kind of penmanship they
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don't teach anymore. The ink had faded from black to brown,
the words were still perfectly legible. The first entry was
dated March fifteenth, seventeen ninety nine. I begin this account
with a full understanding that no sane man who reads
it will believe what I am about to relate. I
accept this. I have accepted that my sanity itself may
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be called into question by future readers should these pages
survive me. Yet I am compelled to write regardless, for
I have witnessed things that demand documentation, even if that
documentation serves only as a warning to those who might
follow in my footsteps. My name is Elijah Stone. I
am a captain in the Virginia Militia, retired these four
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years since the conclusion of our nation's struggle for independence.
I am forty two years of age, sound of mind
and body, and I'm about to lead an expedition into
the western wilderness in search of something that I suspect
has been watching humanity since before we learn to walk upright.
Marcus read the passage three times. His historians training warred
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with something deeper, something that recognized the authenticity of the document,
even as his rational mind tried to dismiss the content
as fantasy. Watching humanity since before we learned to walk upright,
what the hell did that mean? He carried everything upstairs,
the journals, the portfolio, the letters, the pendant, all of it.
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He spread the collection across his father's table, the firelight
flickering across leather and paper and stone. His training as
a historian kicked in automatically. He examined the paper first,
rag content hand laid with the characteristic chain lines of
period manufacture. The ink was iron gall consistent with late
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eighteenth century writing. The binding of the journals was handstitched
using thread that matched the period. Everything checked out, Everything
was genuine. Marcus had handled enough antique documents to recognize
authenticity when he saw it. These journals were They'd been
written in seventeen ninety nine or thereabouts by someone who
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had access to the materials of that era. But the content,
the content was something else entirely. He returned to the
first journal and began to read in earnest. The fire
burned low. Marcus didn't notice the whiskey sat untouched at
his elbow. He didn't notice that either the storm outside
had passed, giving way to a silence so complete it
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seemed to have weight and texture. He didn't notice any
of it. All he could see were the words on
the page. I first heard stories of the creatures during
the war. We were encamped at Valley Forge, that miserable
winter that nearly ended our revolution before it truly began,
and I'd been assigned to coordinate with a company of
Oneda scouts who had allied themselves with our cause. They
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were remarkable men, these Oneida, possessed of skills in woodcraft
that put our best frontiersmen to shame. But it was
not their practical abilities that captured my attention. It was
their stories. One night, as we huddled around a fire
that seemed barely capable of cutting the cold, a scout
named Joseph, he had taken a Christian name, as many
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of the Oneida, had, spoke of the old ones who
lived in the deep forests. His people called them by
a name I cannot properly render in English letters, but
which sounded something like Ottnallarge the stone Giants in translation,
though Joseph insisted this was not quite accurate. They are
not giants, he said. They are the elder brothers. They
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were here before us, they will be here after us.
They watch, but they do not interfere unless provoked. I
pressed him for details. Joseph was reluctant at first. These matters,
he said, were not for outsiders. But the cold and
the war and the shared suffering had built a bridge
between us. He told me of creatures that walked upright
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like men, but were covered in hair like beasts. Creatures
that stood taller than the tallest and possessed strength beyond
anything human. Creatures that lived in family groups and communicated
in ways that humans could barely perceive. Have you seen them,
I asked. Joseph was silent for a long moment. Then
he said, my grandfather saw them. He was hunting alone
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in the mountains when he was a young man. They
let him see them. They do not show themselves to everyone.
Marcus stopped reading. His hands were trembling again, and this
time he couldn't blame it on the cold. The details
were too specific, too accurate. Valley Forge winner of seventeen
seventy seven to seventy eight the dates were right. The
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Oneada Scouts had indeed allied with the Continental Army. The
physical description of the winter camp, the rationing, the desperation,
all of it matched what Marcus knew from his own
research into the Revolutionary War. Either his ancestor had been
there exactly as he claimed, or he'd been a remarkably
well informed force who somehow created documents that would fool
(25:03):
modern analysis. Marcus reached for the whiskey and took a
long drink. The burn helped clear his head a little.
He kept reading. I dismissed the story at first as
the sort of superstition that all peoples carry with them
from their primitive past, but the seed had been planted.
Over the following years. As the war ground on and
(25:23):
finally concluded, I encountered the stories again and again. A
German settler in Pennsylvania who swore he had found footprints
too large to be human near his farmstead. A French
trapper who had traded with tribes far to the west
and heard their legends of Le Grand Sauvage, the Great
wild Ones. A naturalist from Philadelphia who had collected reports
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from across the frontier and believed against all scientific orthodoxy
that something unknown walked the American wilderness. The idea took
hold of me. I cannot explain why. Perhaps it was
the purposelessness I felt after the war, the sense that
I had survived something terrible, only to find ordinary life
unbearable in its monotony. Perhaps it was the nightmares that
(26:07):
plagued me, dreams of men dying in ways I could
not prevent, dreams that left me sweating and screaming in
the darkness. Perhaps I simply needed something to believe in,
something beyond the politics and commerce that consumed my countrymen.
Whatever the reason, I began to plan an expedition. Marcus
set the journal down and stared at the fire. The
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flames had died to embers, casting a dull, red glow
across the room. He thought about his father, the long
walks in the mountains, the strange hours he kept, the
isolation that had driven everyone away, the way he would
sometimes stare at the forest with an expression that wasn't
quite fear, but wasn't comfortable either. Marcus had spent his
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entire adult life trying to understand his father, trying to
explain the distance and the silence and the inexplicable choices. Now,
sitting in his father's chair, reading his ancestors' words, he
felt something shifting in his understanding. His father hadn't been
a recluse, hadn't been avoiding his family out of coldness
or cruelty or simple preference for solitude. He'd been a guardian,
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protecting something, watching for something, waiting for something that might
never come, or might come at any moment. The weight
of inherited responsibility settled onto Marcus's shoulders like a physical thing.
He picked up the journal and kept reading. The hours passed,
Marcus didn't notice. He read about Elijah's preparations, his gathering
(27:38):
of men at Thornton's tavern in Richmond, the careful selection
of supplies and horses and weapons. He read character sketches
of each expedition member. James McAllister, the hot tempered Scottish
soldier who'd served with Elijah at Brandywine. Samuel Bridger, the
Kentucky frontiersman who knew more than he was saying. Doctor
Thomas Ashworth, the arrogant naturalist who believed everything could be
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explained by science. Reverend Josiah Whitmore, whose faith had been shattered.
By personal tragedy, each man rendered in precise, vivid detail,
each man carrying his own secrets, his own reasons for
joining an expedition into the unknown, and underlying it all
a growing sense of dread, a certainty that Elijah Stone
(28:24):
knew even before they departed, that not all of them
would return. Dawn broke through the windows. Gray light filtered
into the cabin, mixing with the last glow of the
dying fire. Marcus looked up from the journal and realized
he'd been reading all night. His eyes burned, his neck
ached from hunching over the table, his mouth was dry,
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and his hands had cramped into claws from gripping the
ancient leather. But he couldn't stop. The first journal ended
with the expedition's departure from Richmond, nine men riding west
into the wilderness, following rumors and legends towards something that
might not exist, except Marcus knew now that it did exist.
The detail in Elijah's account was too specific, too consistent,
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too genuine to be fiction. Whatever his ancestor had encountered
in those western mountains, he'd encountered something real. Marcus reached
for the second journal. His hand was shaking. He thought
about calling in sick to work. He was supposed to
be back in Chicago in three days, supposed to teach
a seminar on colonial American economics, supposed to resume his
(29:32):
normal life as if nothing had changed. But everything had
changed everything. He opened the second journal and began to read.
March fifteenth to twenty fifth, seventeen ninety nine, Richmond, Virginia.
I write these words by candlelight in the room above
Thornton's Tavern in Richmond, where I've taken lodgings for the
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duration of our preparations. Below me, I can hear the
men I've gathered, some of them, at least, stay tuned
for more backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Drinking and talking in the way that men do when
they are about to embark upon something foolish. I do
not join them tonight. I find that I need solitude
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to order my thoughts before committing them to paper. Let
me begin, then, at the beginning. The idea of this
expedition has consumed me for nearly four years. Since the
end of the war, I have found myself unable to
settle into the quiet life that so many of my
fellow veterans seemed to embrace with relief. They returned to
their farms, their trades, their families. They put away their
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muskets and picked up their plows. They tried to forget
what they had seen. I could not forget. I do
not mean the battles, though God knows, those memories are
burned into my brain as surely as a brand upon flesh.
I mean the other things, the things that happened in
the dark spaces between the fighting, The things the Oneida
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scouts whispered about around on campfires when they thought no
one was listening, the creatures in the woods. I have
spent the year since the war collecting accounts, traveling the frontier,
speaking with trappers and traders and Native peoples, documenting every
sighting every legend, every whisper of something large and unknown
walking the American wilderness. What I have found has convinced
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me beyond doubt. There is something out there, something that
has existed alongside humanity for longer than recorded history, something
that our native peoples know well but rarely speak of,
Something that watches us from the shadows of ancient forests.
And I am going to find it. The men began
arriving three weeks ago. Some I had invited personally, veterans
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of the war, whom I knew to be steady under
fire and capable in the wilderness. Others came on their own,
drawn by rumors of my expedition that had apparently spread
further than I intended. Let me record their names and
natures that future sure readers might know. Who walked into
the unknown at my side. James McAllister Jim, to those
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who know him, was the first to arrive. A Scotsman
from the Highland Clearances. He'd come to the colonies as
a boy and grown into one of the finest riflemen
I have ever known. We served together at Brandywine and Germantown,
and I watched him put a ball through a British
officer's eye at two hundred yards in the chaos of battle.
He's twenty nine years old, now, hot tempered and quick
(32:28):
to anger, but utterly loyal to those he considers friends.
The war cost Jim everything. His family had settled on
a farm in the Shenandoah Valley. While we were fighting
the British in the north. Loyalist raiders burned the place
to the ground, his parents, his sisters, his young wife,
all of them gone. When word reached him, something in
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Jim broke and never quite healed. I am the closest
thing he has left a family. And when I told
him I was going into the wilderness on what many
would call a fool errand, he simply nodded and asked
when we were leaving. Samuel Bridger arrived next, having walked
two hundred miles from Kentucky to join us. He's forty
two years old, weathered by a lifetime on the frontier,
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with a face like tanned leather and eyes that missed nothing.
Sam can't read or write, but he knows the wilderness
better than any man alive. He's trapped beaver from the
Ohio to the Mississippi, traded with tribes that most white
men have never heard of, and survived alone in country
that would kill an ordinary man in a week. But
there's something about Sam that troubles me, a quality of watching,
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of waiting. When I asked him why he wanted to
join the expedition, he said something that has stayed with me.
I've been waiting twenty years for someone to go looking,
he said, twenty years since I saw something that no
one would believe. I pressed him for details. He refused
to elaborate, but his eyes when he spoke of it,
there was fear there and something else, something that looked
(34:01):
almost like hunger. Doctor Thomas Ashworth came from Philadelphia with
a wagonful of scientific equipment and an attitude of intellectual
superiority that has already made him unpopular with the others.
He's fifty one years old, a physician and naturalist who
has published papers on American fauna in several respected journals.
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He's also funding most of our expedition, which means I
must tolerate his arrogance. Thomas believes that whatever we find
will be perfectly natural, some previously undiscovered species of great ape.
He suggests, perhaps a surviving population of something that should
have gone extinct millennia ago. He has no patience for
native legends or frontier superstitions. Everything he insists can be
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explained by science. I suspect that his certainty will be
one of the first casualties of our journey. The Reverend
Josiah Whitmore is an unexpected addition to our company, a
former minister from Massachusetts. He's fifty five years old and
looks older, worn down by grief that he carries like
a physical weight. His wife and three children died of
(35:07):
smallpox eight years ago. He lost his faith that day
and has spent the years since searching for something to
replace it. Josiah heard about my expedition through a mutual
acquaintance and sought me out. He wants to find evidence,
he says, evidence of God's design in a world that
suddenly seems random and cruel. I don't know if our
(35:27):
expedition will provide what he's looking for, but they's still
beneath his sadness, and I have learned never to underestimate
a man who has lost everything and survived. Solomon Friedman
is a freed blacksmith from Maryland, thirty five years old,
with hands that can bend iron and a mind as
sharp as any scholars. He carries his freedom papers everywhere,
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even though we're traveling into territory where the law barely exists.
Solomon's grandmother was brought from Africa as a child, and
she told him stories of forest people in the deep
jungles of her homeland, Creatures that walked like men but
were not men. Creatures that watched from the shadows, and
sometimes took people who wandered too far from their villages.
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Solomon believes not in the specific creatures I seek, but
in the existence of things unknown to European science. His
perspective is unlike anyone else's in our company, and I
value it more than I can say. Henri Beaumont is
a French Canadian voyager from Montreal, thirty three years old,
with a charming smile that hides more than it reveals.
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He speaks English, French, and at least four native languages fluently,
and he is traded with tribes across the northern territories.
Henri knows the legends intimately. He's heard versions of them
from the Cree, the Ojibwe, the Algonquin, the Iroquois. Every tribe,
he says, has stories of large, hairy creatures that walk
(36:54):
upright in the deep forests. Henri is capable and experienced,
but I don't hirely trust him. There's something behind that
easy smile that he's not sharing, something that brought him here.
Despite the risks, I will watch him carefully. William Harper
is our artist commission to document the expedition's findings. He's
(37:15):
only twenty seven years old, slight and pale, and seems
utterly unsuited for wilderness travel. His hands shake when he's cold,
which in the mountains will be most of the time.
He startles at sudden sounds and sleeps poorly in unfamiliar places.
But his eyes see things others miss. When I showed
him a cast i'd made of a footprint found in
(37:37):
western Pennsylvania, eighteen inches long with five distinct toes, he
studied it for a long time before speaking, There's power
in this print, he said. Finally, this foot was made
for living in places we can't follow. I don't know
exactly what he meant, but I knew in that moment
that I needed him on this expedition. Finally, there is
(37:58):
Ezekiel young Zeke, who is my nephew and who has
no business being here at all. He's only nineteen, barely
more than a boy, and he ran away from his
mother's house in Fredericksburg to join us. Margaret, my sister,
will never forgive me if something happens to him. But
I couldn't send him away. He has his father's stubbornness
(38:19):
and his mother's courage, and he was going to follow us,
whether I gave permission or not. Better to have him
where I can watch over him than to have him
trailing behind, getting into trouble on his own. Zeke believes
this will be the greatest adventure of his life. He
may be right, though not in the way he imagines.
So there we are, nine men gathered in a tavern
(38:40):
in Richmond, preparing to ride into the unknown. We leave
at dawn tomorrow with fifteen horses, supplies for eighteen months,
and enough weapons and ammunition to fight a small war.
We will need all of it. I am certain of that,
though I cannot explain how I know. The Oneada scout
Joseph told me something else that night at Valley Forge,
(39:02):
something I did not record in my earlier notes because
it seemed too strange, too impossible to credit. The Stone
giants watch, he said, they have always watched. They know
us better than we know ourselves. I asked him what
he meant they decide. He said, when they see you,
they decide. Some they let pass, some they take. There's
(39:26):
no way to know which you will be until the
moment comes. Tomorrow we ride west. Tomorrow we begin the
journey that will answer the questions that have haunted me
for four years. God help us all. Marcus set down
the first journal and reached for his coffee. It had
gone cold hours ago, but he drank it anyway. Outside.
(39:48):
The morning sun had broken through the clouds, casting long
shadows across the cabin floor. He'd been reading for almost
thirty six hours now, with only brief breaks for food
and bathroom visits. Part of his mind, the academic, the historian,
the skeptic, kept insisting that he should stop, eat a
real meal, get some sleep, approach this material with proper
(40:11):
scholarly distance. But he couldn't stop. The words on the
page had their hooks in him, pulling him deeper into
a story that felt less like reading and more like remembering.
His ancestor's voice was so clear, so present. The details
were too specific to be invented, the emotions too raw
to be faked. Whatever Elijah Stone had experienced in those
(40:34):
western mountains, He'd poured his entire soul into documenting it,
and the hints of what was coming, the warnings, the forebodings,
the growing sense of something terrible waiting in the wilderness
kept Marcus turning pages like a man compelled. He thought
about his father again. Robert Stone had read these journals,
(40:54):
had read them many times, judging by the careful notes
written in the margins in his father's handwriting, notes about
dates and locations, cross references to historical records, questions that
had clearly plagued him for years. Had his father ever
gone looking? Had he ever tried to find what Elijah
Stone had found? Marcus thought about those long walks in
(41:16):
the mountains, the way his father would sometimes be gone
for days at a time, returning muddy and exhausted, with
a look in his eyes that Marcus had never been
able to name. Maybe he had gone looking, maybe he'd
found something, or maybe he'd spent his entire life waiting
for something that never came. Marcus picked up the second
journal and opened it to where he'd left off. The
(41:38):
pages crackled slightly as he turned them, the old paper,
protesting the handling. The expedition had left Richmond, nine men
riding into the wilderness, following legends and whispers towards something
that might not exist. Except it did exist. Marcus was
certain of that now, as certain as he'd ever been
of anything in his academic career. He found his place
(42:01):
in the narrative and continued reading March twenty fifth through
April eighth, seventeen ninety nine the Allegheny Mountains. The first
two weeks passed easier than I had expected. We followed
established roads west from Richmond, making good time through the
Virginia Piedmont and into the foothills of the Alleghenies. The
weather held fair, and the men began to find their
(42:23):
rhythms with each other. Jim and Zeke became unlikely friends,
the battle hardened scotsmen, taking my young nephew under his wing.
I would see them riding side by side, Jim pointing
out tracks and plants, and teaching Zeke the woodcraft that
had kept him alive through four years of war. My
sister would have been furious, but I was grateful. If
(42:44):
there was any one I trusted to keep Zeke alive
in a crisis, it was Jim McAllister. Thomas and Solomon
spent the evenings in debate the Philadelphia Naturalists, pitting his
European scientific training against the blacksmith's deep knowledge of African traditions.
It was a strange pairing, but productive. I think Thomas
was beginning to realize that his certainties might not survive
(43:06):
the wilderness intact. Henry scouted ahead each day, returning with
news of clear trails and safe river crossings. He was
good at what he did, uncommonly good, but there remained
that quality about him that I couldn't quite trust, that
smile that didn't reach his eyes. Sam rode at the
front of the column, rarely speaking, always watching. He seemed
(43:29):
to know the land, instinctively choosing paths that avoided the
worst of the terrain. When I asked how he knew
which way to go, he simply said, the land tells me,
I let it go. Sam would share his secrets when
he was ready, or he wouldn't. Either way, pressing him
would do no good will. Harper rode in the middle
(43:50):
of our formation, his sketchbook opened across his saddle, his
pencil moving constantly, he drew everything, the mountains rising ahead
of us, the faces of the men, the way the
light filtered through the canopy. His talent was remarkable, but
there was something obsessive about the way he worked, as
if he was trying to capture something that might otherwise
(44:11):
escape him. Josiah brought up the rear, praying constantly in
a voice too low for anyone to hear. The former
reverend had found a kind of peace on the trail,
though whether it was peace with his God or simply
acceptance of his fate, I could not say. On the
eighth day, the roads ended. The transition was gradual at first.
(44:31):
The well maintained track became a trail, The trail became
a path. The path became nothing, just forests stretching away
in every direction, Trees so large that ten men couldn't
circle their trunks, canopy so thick that midday felt like twilight.
This was the frontier, the edge of known territory. Beyond
(44:52):
this point, the maps were guesswork and wishful, thinking we're
in their country now. Sam said that evening, as we
made camp, it was the most he'd spoken in days.
Whose country, Thomas asked. Sam didn't answer. He just looked
at the forest around us and shook his head. Stay
tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
these messages. That night, I woke to a sound I
(45:17):
had never heard before, wood knocking, three sharp strikes, like
someone hitting a tree trunk with a heavy stick. The
sound echoed through the darkness, clear and distinct and then stopped.
I lay in my bedroll, heart hammering, straining to hear.
The silence was absolute. No crickets, no owls, no wind
(45:39):
in the leaves, just that terrible, waiting silence. Then the
knocking came again, three times, further away, this time, like
something retreating into the forest. I didn't sleep the rest
of the night. In the morning, I asked the others
if they'd heard anything. Most had slept through it, but
Sam nodded slowly. They know we're here, he said, they've
(46:02):
known since we crossed into the mountains. They Thomas demanded,
what is they? You keep speaking in riddles? Man Sam
looked at him for a long moment. Then he turned
and walked into the forest. He came back an hour later,
his face grim. Found something, he said, you should all
see it. We followed him through the underbrush to a
(46:24):
small stream about half a mile from camp. The water
ran clear over smooth stones. The bank's muddy from recent rain,
and there pressed into that mud were footprints. I had
seen the cast i'd shown to Will Harper. I had
read the descriptions in the accounts I'd collected. I thought
I was prepared for what we might find I was
(46:45):
not prepared. The prints were enormous, eighteen inches long at
least and sunk deep into the mud by massive weight.
Five toes clearly visible a heel an arch, the architecture
of a human foot, but scaled up to dimensions that
made no sense. Thomas dropped to his knees beside the Prince,
(47:05):
his hand shaking as he produced a measuring tape from
his pack. He muttered to himself as he worked numbers
and calculations that seemed to bring him comfort. Twelve inches across,
he said, the depth suggests a weight of at least
five hundred pounds. The stride length, he looked up at us,
his face pale. The stride length is nearly five feet.
(47:27):
What does that mean, Zeke asked. It means whatever made
these prints is tall. Thomas said, very tall, and it
was moving quickly. I studied the tracks more carefully. They
led from the forest to the stream, and then nothing,
no prince on the other side. Whatever made them had
crossed the water without leaving a trace. It went upstream,
(47:48):
Sam said. He pointed at the water, walked in the
stream to hide its trail. How do you know which
way it went? Thomas asked, I don't know, I can
feel it. The banks for another hour, but found nothing.
Whatever had made those prints, it was gone, and it
hadn't wanted us to follow. That night, the knocking came again,
(48:11):
closer this time, and it wasn't alone. There were sounds
from multiple directions, calls and responses, like a conversation in
a language we couldn't understand. The horses were restless, pulling
at their leads, their eyes rolling with fear. Solomon spent
most of the night calming them, whispering in a language
(48:31):
that wasn't English, something his grandmother had taught him, he said,
for speaking to frightened animals. When dawn finally came, we
discovered that our food supplies had been disturbed. We'd hung
them from a branch fifteen feet up, well out of
reach of any bear. The rope was still there, but
the bundle was gone. No claw marks, Jim said, examining
(48:52):
the scene, No tearing. Whatever took it, just took it
while we slept twenty feet away, Josiah added, his voice steady,
but his eyes betraying his fear. Sam stood apart, looking
at the forest with an expression I couldn't read. If
they wanted us dead, he said, finally, we'd be dead already.
(49:13):
No one had a response to that. Marcus stopped reading
and rubbed his eyes. The sun had moved across the
sky while he'd been lost in the journals, and the
cabin was growing dim. He should eat something, should sleep,
should do something other than sit in this chair, burning
through his ancestors' words like a man possessed. But he
(49:33):
couldn't stop. The narrative had its hooks in him now,
the creeping dread, the subtle wrongness, the growing certainty that
something was out there, watching, waiting. It was masterfully constructed.
If this was fiction, it was the work of a genius.
But it wasn't fiction. Marcus had examined the journals with
(49:53):
his historian's eye, and everything about them screamed authenticity. The paper,
the ink, the binding, the handwriting, the historical details. All
of it was genuine, which meant that Elijah Stone had
actually experienced what he was describing. Marcus thought about the
footprints eighteen inches long, five hundred pounds, something that walked
(50:16):
upright like a man, but wasn't a man. He thought
about the sound of wood knocking in the night, three times, always,
three He thought about his father sitting in the same chair,
reading these same words, year after year, decade after decade,
guarding a secret that had consumed his entire life. What
(50:38):
had his father been watching for? Marcus picked up the
journal and kept reading. We pressed on what else could
we do? Turn back because of some footprints and stolen food.
The men would have followed me if I'd ordered it,
but I knew they'd think less of me for it,
and truth be told, I didn't want to turn back.
The evidence we'd found only made me more determined to
(51:00):
the source. April brought warmer weather but harder travel. The
terrain grew rougher with every mile, steep ridges and deep valleys,
streams that had to be forded or bridged, deadfall that
blocked our path and forced long detours. The horses struggled,
and by the end of the first week we'd lost
one to a broken leg on a rocky slope. Through
(51:22):
it all, the signs continued. Footprints appeared at the edges
of our camps, always in the morning, as if something
had stood and watched us while we slept. The prints
varied in size, some smaller than what we'd found by
the stream, others larger, suggesting multiple individuals. The knocking came
every night, now multiple sources, multiple directions, building into patterns
(51:46):
that felt almost like communication. The men grew used to it,
or at least stopped jumping at every sound, but no
one slept well anymore. And then there were the structures.
Will spotted the first one on a cold morning, when
frost still sparkled on the ground, a teepee like arrangement
of branches carefully leaned against a tree trunk, the ends
(52:07):
stripped of bark, too deliberate to be natural, too large
to be made by any animal we knew of bears.
Don't do this, Thomas said, examining it with the intensity
of a man whose worldview was crumbling. This is this
is tool use, This is intentional construction. He photographed it.
(52:28):
He'd brought a cumbersome camera apparatus that required ten minutes
of preparation for each exposure, and documented every detail in
his notebook. But I could see the doubt creeping into
his eyes. More structures appeared over the following days. Arches
woven from flexible branches, stone stacked in precise formations, bent
(52:48):
saplings that pointed in specific directions, a language in the landscape.
If only we could read it. Sam could read some
of it, or he claimed he could. That one means
stay away, he said, pointing at a particular arrangement of
twisted branches. That one marks territory. How do you know,
Thomas demanded. Sam was silent for a long moment. Then
(53:11):
he spoke, because I've seen them before. That night around
the fire, Sam finally told us about his encounter twenty
years ago. He said, a blizzard in the northern mountains.
He'd been young then, barely more than a boy, trapping
alone in territory he shouldn't have entered. I thought I
was going to die, he said, found a rock overhang,
(53:33):
crawled underneath, made my peace with God. Then something picked
me up. He described being carried through the storm by
something massive and warm, being taken to a cave where
others waited in the darkness, being examined, handled, passed from
one set of enormous hands to another. They were deciding,
he said, I could feel it. They were deciding what
(53:56):
to do with me. What happened, Zeke asked, his young
face pale in the firelight. They let me go. I
woke up alone in the cave. The storm passed, and
there was a trail of footprints leading back toward my camp.
When I got there, there was a pile of dried
meat outside my shelter. They'd fed me, saved me. Let
(54:17):
me go, why, I asked. Sam looked at me with
eyes that had seen too much. I've spent twenty years
trying to figure that out. That's why I'm here, Captain.
I need to know why none of us slept That night.
We sat around the fire, watching the darkness, listening to
the wood knocks that echoed through the forest. They were
(54:38):
out there, they were watching us, and they were getting closer.
The journal entry ended there, and Marcus realized he was
holding his breath. He exhaled slowly, his hands trembling as
he set the book down. The fire in the cabin
had died to embers, and the room was cold. How
long had he been reading? Hours? Days he'd lost. He
(55:01):
stood up, his joints protesting, and walked to the window.
The mountains rose in the darkness, their shapes blacker than
the black sky behind them. No lights out there, no roads,
no houses, no evidence that humans had ever touched this place.
His father had looked out this same window, year after year,
(55:21):
watching what had he been watching for? Marcus thought about
Sam Bridger's story, the blizzard, the cave, the examination by
hands that weren't human, the decision made in the darkness,
the release. Why save him? That was the question, wasn't it?
If these creatures existed, and the evidence in these journals
(55:43):
strongly suggested they did, then what were they? Animals? Something more,
something that could think, plan, decide, something that could choose
to let a man live or not. Marcus went to
the kitchen and made coffee, strong and black, the way
his father had always drunk it. He found food in
(56:04):
the pantry, canned goods, dried fruit, things that would keep forever,
and forced himself to eat, even though he wasn't hungry.
Then he went back to the chair, picked up the journal,
and kept reading.
Speaker 1 (57:14):
Did b
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