January 5, 2026 • 60 mins
Tonight we're venturing into territory that goes beyond our usual encounters with large, hairy, bipedal creatures. After nearly forty years of research in the deep woods, I've come to understand that not everything strange out there can be explained by Sasquatch. Sometimes the things people encounter are even more terrifying. More strange. More impossible.This episode brings you four accounts that have haunted me since the day I first heard them.
These stories came from witnesses who trusted me with experiences they'd kept buried for years, sometimes decades. Some made me promise not to share their accounts until after they'd passed on. Others simply needed to unburden themselves of secrets too heavy to carry alone. Our journey begins with a Vietnam veteran named David Hollister who ventured into the Cherokee National Forest in the summer of nineteen seventy-one and found himself trapped in an impossible loop.
No matter which direction he walked, no matter how carefully he tracked his course with map and compass, he kept arriving at the same abandoned cabin. Inside that cabin was a journal filled with entries in his own handwriting, describing events that hadn't happened yet. David's account of escaping that gray, fog-shrouded nightmare raises questions about time and place that I still can't answer.
From there we move to the mountains of western North Carolina where a competitive ultra-marathoner I'm calling Michelle had an encounter that ended her trail running career forever. During a routine training run, she noticed a shadow keeping pace with her through the trees. A human-shaped shadow with no source. Nothing casting it. Just darkness given form, matching her speed mile after mile through the forest. What happened during those ten miles of terror left a permanent mark on Michelle, one that's still visible today in the white hair at her temples.
The third account takes us to Colorado and a story that defies everything we think we know about physics.
A retired electrical engineer named Harold Price was scanning old radio frequencies late one night when he picked up an emergency transmission from a forest ranger named William Morrison. The ranger was terrified, describing something circling his remote station in the darkness. The problem was that Morrison was broadcasting from nineteen sixty-three, more than fifty years in the past. Harold spent seven hours on the radio with a man from another era, listening helplessly as something found its way inside that station.
What Harold discovered when he researched the incident afterward confirmed his worst fears about what he'd witnessed.
Our final story comes from a father named Robert who took his family camping in the Allegheny National Forest in the summer of eighty-nine. What began as a perfect evening around the campfire turned into a night of primal terror when the family woke to discover that every sound in the forest had stopped. No crickets. No owls. No wind. Just absolute, suffocating silence. And something was circling their tent. Something they could feel but not hear. Something that carried the silence with it like an aura.
These four accounts share something in common. They all involve encounters with things that shouldn't exist. Things that operate outside the rules we think govern our world. Time loops. Sourceless shadows.
Transmissions across decades. Silence that walks like a creature.I believe these witnesses. I've heard the recordings. I've seen the evidence. I've looked into the eyes of people forever changed by what they experienced in the deep woods. Whether you believe them is up to you. But I'd encourage you to listen with an open mind. Because our forests hold secrets we're only beginning to understand. And some of those secrets are darker and stranger than anything we've imagined. The woods have secrets. And some secrets don't want to be found.
These stories came from witnesses who trusted me with experiences they'd kept buried for years, sometimes decades. Some made me promise not to share their accounts until after they'd passed on. Others simply needed to unburden themselves of secrets too heavy to carry alone. Our journey begins with a Vietnam veteran named David Hollister who ventured into the Cherokee National Forest in the summer of nineteen seventy-one and found himself trapped in an impossible loop.
No matter which direction he walked, no matter how carefully he tracked his course with map and compass, he kept arriving at the same abandoned cabin. Inside that cabin was a journal filled with entries in his own handwriting, describing events that hadn't happened yet. David's account of escaping that gray, fog-shrouded nightmare raises questions about time and place that I still can't answer.
From there we move to the mountains of western North Carolina where a competitive ultra-marathoner I'm calling Michelle had an encounter that ended her trail running career forever. During a routine training run, she noticed a shadow keeping pace with her through the trees. A human-shaped shadow with no source. Nothing casting it. Just darkness given form, matching her speed mile after mile through the forest. What happened during those ten miles of terror left a permanent mark on Michelle, one that's still visible today in the white hair at her temples.
The third account takes us to Colorado and a story that defies everything we think we know about physics.
A retired electrical engineer named Harold Price was scanning old radio frequencies late one night when he picked up an emergency transmission from a forest ranger named William Morrison. The ranger was terrified, describing something circling his remote station in the darkness. The problem was that Morrison was broadcasting from nineteen sixty-three, more than fifty years in the past. Harold spent seven hours on the radio with a man from another era, listening helplessly as something found its way inside that station.
What Harold discovered when he researched the incident afterward confirmed his worst fears about what he'd witnessed.
Our final story comes from a father named Robert who took his family camping in the Allegheny National Forest in the summer of eighty-nine. What began as a perfect evening around the campfire turned into a night of primal terror when the family woke to discover that every sound in the forest had stopped. No crickets. No owls. No wind. Just absolute, suffocating silence. And something was circling their tent. Something they could feel but not hear. Something that carried the silence with it like an aura.
These four accounts share something in common. They all involve encounters with things that shouldn't exist. Things that operate outside the rules we think govern our world. Time loops. Sourceless shadows.
Transmissions across decades. Silence that walks like a creature.I believe these witnesses. I've heard the recordings. I've seen the evidence. I've looked into the eyes of people forever changed by what they experienced in the deep woods. Whether you believe them is up to you. But I'd encourage you to listen with an open mind. Because our forests hold secrets we're only beginning to understand. And some of those secrets are darker and stranger than anything we've imagined. The woods have secrets. And some secrets don't want to be found.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness, Bigfoot,
(00:22):
dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close and
remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
(00:46):
and let's head off into the woods. If you dare,
welcome back, settle in, get comfortable, Maybe throw another log
(01:07):
on that fire if you've got one going tonight. I
want to take you somewhere different, somewhere darker, maybe somewhere stranger. See.
I've spent a lot of time out in the woods,
nearly forty years now, exploring the deep forests, chasing stories,
interviewing witnesses, and in all that time, I've heard things
that would make your blood run cold. Encounters with massive,
(01:30):
hair covered creatures that shouldn't exist, footprints that defy explanation,
sounds that echo through valleys and make even the bravest
men question what they think they know about this world.
But here's the thing, and I want to be real
with you about this. Not everything we see here or
experience in the deep woods can be explained by a
run in with a large, hairy, bipedal creature. Sometimes things
(01:53):
are even scarier and more strange. I'm talking about experiences
that go beyond the physical what we can categorize or
explain away. I'm talking about the kinds of stories that
make you wonder if the forest itself is alive, if
it's watching, if it knows things about you that you
don't even know about yourself. The four stories I'm about
(02:15):
to share with you tonight came to me over the years,
some from witnesses who sat right where you're sitting now
metaphorically speaking, some from old timers who made me promise
not to share their accounts until after they'd passed on,
And some from records and reports that got buried so
deep it took years of digging just to find them.
These aren't Sasquatch stories. Not tonight. Tonight we're going deeper,
(02:40):
so dim those lights, put your phone on silent, and
whatever you do. If you hear something outside your window
while you're listening to this, don't look. Just don't trust
me on that one. Let's begin. This first story came
to me from a man named David Hollister. Now David's dead.
Passed away into twenty nineteen from pancreatic cancer. He was
(03:03):
seventy three years old, and in the final months of
his life. He reached out to me through a mutual friend.
Said he had something he needed to get off his
chest before he went, something that had haunted him for
almost fifty years. I drove out to see him at
a hospice facility in eastern Tennessee. When I walked into
that room, I found a man who looked like he'd
(03:23):
been carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders
for half a century. Then gray eyes that had seen
something they were never meant to see. He told me
this story over the course of three visits. Each time
he'd get to a certain point and just stop, couldn't
go on, had to gather himself, had to work up
the courage to continue. What I'm about to share with
(03:45):
you is David's account, as best as I can reconstruct it.
It happened in the summer of nineteen seventy one. David
was twenty five years old, fresh out of the Army,
back from Vietnam, and trying to find himself again. A
lot of guys from that era know what I'm talking about.
You come back from a place like that, You're not
the same person anymore. The world looks different, feels different,
(04:08):
and you spend a lot of time trying to figure
out where you fit. For David, the answer was the wilderness.
He'd grown up hiking and camping in the Appalachians. His
daddy had taken him out there since he was old
enough to walk, and after everything he'd seen overseas, the
forest felt like the only place that made sense anymore,
the only place that was quiet enough for him to think.
(04:30):
So in July of seventy one, he packed up his
gear and headed into a remote section of the Cherokee
National Forest. He planned to be out there for two weeks,
just him, his pack, and the mountains. The first three
days went exactly as expected. He hiked deep into the
back country. Following old game trails and half forgotten paths
(04:50):
that his daddy had shown him years before. He set
up camp near streams, caught fish for dinner, watched the
stars at night, and felt, for the first time in
a long time something like peace. Then came Day four.
David woke up that morning to fog. Thick, heavy fog
that seemed to swallow everything more than twenty feet away. Now,
(05:12):
fog in the mountains isn't unusual. Anyone who spent time
in the Appalachians knows it can roll in fast and
sit heavy in the valleys. But this fog was different.
David said it felt oppressive, like it was pressing down
on him, like it didn't want to let go. He
decided to wait it out, made some coffee over his
camp stove, ate a cold breakfast. Figured the sun would
(05:34):
burn the fog off by mid morning, the way it
usually did, But it didn't. By noon, the fog was
still there. If anything, it had gotten thicker. David couldn't
see more than ten feet in any direction. The trees
around his camp had become vague shadows, gray shapes that
seemed to shift and move when he wasn't looking directly
(05:55):
at them. He made a decision. He'd pack up and
head back toward the main trail, get to lower elevation
where the fog might clear. He had a compass, he
had a map, He knew these woods. There was no
reason to worry. That's what he told himself. Anyway, he
broke camp and started walking due east. That's the direction
(06:16):
he needed to go to hit the main trail. He
checked his compass every few minutes, making sure he was
staying on course. The fog swallowed sound as much as sight.
His footsteps seemed muffled. The normal sounds of the forest,
the birds, the insects, the wind in the trees, all
of it was gone. Just silence, heavy, suffocating silence. After
(06:40):
about two hours of hiking, David came to a clearing,
and in that clearing there was a cabin. Now this
was strange for a couple of reasons. First, David knew
this area, he'd hiked through here before. There had never
been a cabin in this location. Second, the cabin itself
looked old, really old. The wood was weathered and gray,
(07:01):
the roof was sagging in the middle, one of the
windows was broken, and the door hung crooked on its hinges.
But here's the thing. It also looked like someone had
been there recently. There were fresh footprints in the mud
around the front step. The grass leading up to the
door was trampled down, like someone had walked that path
multiple times. David stood at the edge of that clearing
(07:23):
for a long time. Something inside him was screaming to
turn around, to go back the way he came, to
get as far away from that cabin as possible. But
another part of him, the part that had survived twelve
months in the jungle, the part that had learned to
face fear head on, that part wanted to know, needed
to know. He approached the cabin. The door opened with
(07:46):
a long, low creak that seemed to echo through the fog.
Inside the cabin was a single room. There was an
old wooden bed frame against one wall, no mattress, just
the frame, a stone fire place filled with old ashes,
a wooden table in the center of the room, and
a single chair. On the table, there was a book.
(08:08):
David walked over and picked it up. It was a journal,
leather bound, the cover cracked and worn with age. He
opened it to the first page, and that's when his
blood went cold. The handwriting in that journal was his own,
not similar to his, not reminiscent of his. It was
his handwriting, the same distinctive way he formed his letters,
(08:31):
the same slant, the same idiosyncrasies that had been with
him since grade school. His hand started shaking. He turned
to the next page, then the next. The journal was
a record of his hike, every detail where he'd camped
on day one, what he'd eaten for dinner on day two,
the stream where he'd filled his canteen on day three,
(08:53):
all of it written in his handwriting, dated with dates
that hadn't happened yet. The last entry was dated jeely
Uly nineteenth, nineteen seventy one. That was fifteen days away.
The entry read, I've stopped counting how many times I
found the cabin. It doesn't matter anymore. Nothing matters. The
fog never lifts, the forest won't let me leave. I
(09:16):
think I understand now. I think I've always been here.
I think I will always be here. If someone finds
this journal, please tell my mother. I'm sorry. I should
have listened when she told me not to come out
here alone. I should have stayed home. I should have
And that's where the entry stopped mid sentence, like whoever
was writing it had been interrupted or had simply run
(09:38):
out of the will to continue. David dropped the journal
like it had burned him. He backed away from the table,
his heart hammering in his chest, his breath coming in short,
ragged gasps. This wasn't possible. None of this was possible.
He turned and ran out of the cabin, across the clearing,
into the fog. He didn't care about direction anymore, didn't
(10:02):
care about his compass or his map. He just ran.
Branches whipped his face, roots grabbed at his feet. The
fog pressed in from all sides, Cold and wet and hungry.
He ran until his lungs burned, until his legs gave out,
until he collapsed against a tree, gasping for air, tears
streaming down his face. When he finally caught his breath,
(10:25):
when his vision cleared enough to see where he was,
David found himself standing at the edge of a clearing,
And in that clearing there was a cabin. The same
cabin he recognized, the sagging roof, the broken window, the
crooked door that still hung open from when he'd left it.
David turned and ran in the opposite direction. He ran
(10:45):
for what felt like hours. His body was screaming at
him to stop, but his mind wouldn't let him. He
had to get away, had to escape. But every time
he stopped, every time he paused to catch his breath
or check his surroundings, he found himself at the edge
of that same clearing, looking at that same cabin, the
door open waiting. He tried everything. He walked instead of ran,
(11:10):
carefully tracking his direction with his compass. He ended up
at the cabin. He climbed a ridge, gaining as much
elevation as he could. When he descended the other side,
the cabin was there. He followed a stream downhill for miles.
The stream led him right to the clearing. The cabin
was always there. No matter what he did, no matter
(11:30):
which direction he went, the forest kept bringing him back.
As the light began to fade and the fog grew darker,
David made a decision. He was going to spend the
night in the cabin. Not because he wanted to, God
knows he didn't want to, but because he was exhausted,
because his body couldn't take another step, and because somewhere
(11:51):
in the back of his mind he understood that the
forest wasn't going to let him leave anyway. At least
the cabin was shelter. He went inside, sat down in
the chair at the table, and he opened the journal again.
This time he read more carefully. The entries chronicled everything,
his growing desperation, his attempts to escape, his realization that
(12:13):
the fog never lifted that night, never truly fell, but
the light never fully returned either. Everything existed in this gray,
eternal twilight. The entries grew more erratic as they progressed.
The handwriting became shakier, the sentences more fragmented. Whoever had
written this journal, whoever this version of himself had been,
(12:34):
had slowly lost his grip on sanity. And then David
noticed something he hadn't seen before. At the back of
the journal. There were more entries dated before his hike
had started, entries from July first, nineteen seventy one, from June,
from May, going back months. And they weren't in his
handwriting anymore. They were in different handwritings, dozens of them,
(12:58):
different people, different years. The oldest entry David could find
was dated eighteen ninety two. That entry read found shelter
from the fog old cabin in a clearing, starting to
think I may never see my family again. The forest
has claimed me. May God have mercy on my soul.
(13:18):
David sat in that cabin all night. He didn't sleep,
couldn't sleep. He just sat there, holding that journal, reading
and rereading the entries of all the people who had
come before him, all the people who had found themselves
trapped in this same nightmare, all the people who had
never escaped. When dawn came, or what passed for dawn
in that gray half light, David made a decision. He
(13:41):
wasn't going to give up. He wasn't going to become
another entry in that journal. He was going to find
a way out. He picked up his pack, walked out
of the cabin and started walking south, not east like
he'd been trying, not toward the main trail, just south,
no reason, just a direction he hadn't tried yet. He
(14:02):
walked for hours. The fog remained thick, the silence remained oppressive,
and every fiber of his being expected to find himself
back at that cabin, but he didn't. Instead, after what
felt like an eternity, he began to hear something faint
at first, so faint he thought he was imagining it,
but then louder, clearer, a car, the sound of an
(14:27):
engine coming from somewhere ahead. David ran toward that sound.
His legs found strength they didn't have. His lungs found air.
He crashed through the underbrush, stumbling, falling, getting back up,
running again, and then the fog broke. Just like that.
One moment, he was surrounded by gray. The next he
(14:48):
burst out onto a dirt road, blinking in the sudden
brightness of a clear summer morning. A pickup truck was
coming down the road, an old farmer at the wheel.
The man slammed on his brakes when he saw David
emerged from the woods, wild eyed and covered in mud
and scratches. David flagged him down, begged for a ride.
Stay tuned for more backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
(15:11):
after these messages. The farmer, a man named Clyde something
David never did catch his last name, agreed to take
him back to town. On the drive, David asked what
day it was. The farmer gave him a strange look.
July fifth, he said. David had entered the forest on
July fourth. He'd spent what felt like days in that fog,
(15:34):
days of wandering, days of terror. But in the real world,
less than twenty four hours had passed. He never went
back to that section of the forest, never wanted to
see those mountains again. He moved to Tennessee, started a
new life, got married, had kids, tried to forget. But
he never could because sometimes late at night he'd dreamed
(15:58):
about that cabin, about that journal, about all those entries
and all those different handwritings. And sometimes when he woke up,
he'd find himself standing at his bedroom window, staring out
into the darkness, with no memory of how he got there,
staring south, always south. David told me that story over
the course of our three visits, and when he finished,
(16:20):
when he'd finally gotten it all out, he looked at
me with those tired, haunted eyes and asked me a question.
Do you think they're still there? He asked, all those
people who wrote in that journal, do you think they're
still in that forest, still finding their way back to
that cabin, over and over again forever. I didn't have
an answer for him. I still don't, but I'll tell
(16:43):
you this. After David passed away, I tried to find
that section of forest, tried to locate the area he'd described.
I spent two weeks combing through old maps, talking to locals,
hiking those mountains. I never found it, and maybe that's
for the best, because some places, I think don't want
to be found. Some places exist outside the normal rules,
(17:06):
outside time, outside reality, and maybe, just maybe the forest
that repeats time is still out there, still waiting, still hungry,
still keeping its prisoners in that endless gray fog forever.
The woman who told me this story asked that I
not use her real name, so for the purposes of
(17:26):
this account, I'll call her Michelle. Michelle was a trail runner,
and I don't mean someone who jogged through the park
on weekends. I mean a serious, competitive ultra marathoner who
spent more time in the wilderness than most people spend
in their own homes. She'd run one hundred mile races
through some of the most remote terrain in North America.
She'd trained in conditions that would break most athletes. Heat, cold, rain, snow,
(17:53):
none of it stopped her. She was tough, mentally and physically,
the kind of person you'd want on your side if
things went sideways in the back country, which is what
makes her story so disturbing, because if something could rattle Michelle,
then it was something truly terrifying. It happened in October
of twenty sixteen. Michelle was training for one hundred mile
(18:14):
rays scheduled for the following spring. She'd found a trail
system in the mountains of western North Carolina that she loved. Remote, technical, challenging,
perfect for building the kind of endurance and mental toughness
she'd need for the race. She'd been running those trails
for weeks, knew them like the back of her hand,
could navigate them blindfolded, she used to say. On this
(18:38):
particular day, she headed out early five in the morning,
well before sunrise. She wanted to get in a long
run before the day warmed up. October in the mountains
can be tricky cool in the morning, but the afternoons
can still get warm enough to make running uncomfortable. She'd
planned a thirty mile loop out and back on a
trail that wound through some of the most remote sections
(19:00):
of the forest. No cell service, no other people, just her,
her pack and the trees. The first fifteen miles went smoothly.
The sun came up around mile five, painting the forest
in shades of gold and red. The fall colors were
at their peak. Michelle remembers thinking how beautiful it was,
(19:20):
how lucky she felt to be out there doing what
she loved, surrounded by all that natural beauty. Then she
reached mile sixteen, and that's when she saw it. The
trail at this point ran along a ridge. On her right,
the ground dropped away into a steep ravine. On her left,
the forest pressed in close, ancient hardwoods with massive trunks
(19:42):
and branches that formed a canopy overhead. She was running
at a steady pace, her breathing rhythmic, her footfall soft
on the packed dirt trail, and as she passed a
particularly large oak tree, she noticed something in her peripheral vision,
a shadow moving through the trees to her left, keeping
pace with her. Now, shadows in the forest aren't unusual.
(20:06):
Light filters through the canopy in unpredictable ways. The trees
sway in the wind, creating movement. Your eyes can play
tricks on you when you're fatigued. Michelle knew all of this.
She was experienced enough not to let her imagination run wild,
so she glanced over quick just to confirm it was nothing.
(20:26):
But it wasn't nothing. There was a shadow moving through
those trees, a dark shape, roughly human in size and form,
sliding between the trunks, about thirty feet off the trail.
It wasn't walking, it wasn't running. It was gliding, smooth
and silent, like it was floating just above the ground.
Michelle's first thought was that someone was out there, another
(20:49):
hiker maybe, or a hunter. The area wasn't popular, but
it wasn't unheard of to encounter other people. But there
was no one there. She could see the shadow clearly,
could see its shape, its movement, its position relative to
the trees. But where the source of that shadow should
have been, where the person or thing casting it should
(21:10):
have been standing, There was nothing, just empty forest. The
shadow had no source. Michelle stopped running, came to a
complete halt in the middle of the trail, her breath
catching in her throat, her heart suddenly pounding. The shadow
stopped too. It remained motionless among the trees, watching her,
(21:30):
or at least that's what it felt like, even though
it had no eyes, no face, no features of any kind,
just a dark silhouette against the lighter background of the forest.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. Michelle stood
there on the trail, her mind racing, trying to process
what she was seeing, trying to explain it away. Light angles, fatigue, dehydration,
(21:57):
But she wasn't dehydrated. She'd been careful about her fluids.
She wasn't that fatigued. Sixteen miles was nothing for her,
and the light wasn't doing anything unusual. The sun was up,
the forest was bright. There was no reason for a
shadow to exist without something casting it, and yet there
it was. Michelle made a decision. She was going to
(22:19):
approach it, going to get close enough to understand what
she was looking at. She was a rational person. There
had to be a rational explanation. She took a step
off the trail toward the shadow. It moved not away
from her, toward her fast. Michelle felt a cold surge
of pure, primal terror, the kind of fear that bypasses
(22:43):
the thinking brain entirely, the kind that comes from somewhere
deep and ancient, from the part of us that remembers
being prey. She ran, not a controlled, measured pace, not
her careful training run. She sprinted, full speed, legs, driving hard,
arms pumping, eyes fixed on the trail ahead, and The
(23:04):
shadow kept pace. She could see it in her peripheral vision,
moving through the trees beside her, gliding silent, never falling behind,
never pulling ahead, just matching her speed exactly mile after mile.
Michelle was fast, one of the fastest trail runners in
her region. She could sustain a six minute mile pace
(23:26):
on technical terrain for hours if she had to, and
she pushed herself harder than she ever had before, harder
than any race, harder than any training run. The shadow
kept pace. She ran for five miles than ten. Her
lungs were burning, her legs were screaming, her body was
begging her to stop, but every time she glanced to
(23:48):
her left, the shadow was still there, still watching, still following.
She couldn't outrun it. At mile twenty six, the trail
emerged from the forest into a clearing, a small meadow
where the trees fell back and the sky opened up overhead.
Michelle burst out of the tree line and stumbled to
a stop, gasping for breath, her legs trembling. She turned around.
(24:11):
The shadow had stopped at the edge of the forest.
It stood there, just inside the tree line, motionless, as
if it couldn't enter the clearing or wouldn't. Michelle backed
away slowly, her eyes never leaving that dark shape. The
shadow didn't follow, but it watched. She could feel it watching,
(24:33):
even though it had no eyes, Even though it was
nothing more than darkness given form, she could feel its
attention focused on her with an intensity that made her
skin crawl. Michelle turned and ran across the meadow the
last four miles of her route. She didn't look back,
didn't slow down, didn't stop until she reached her car
(24:53):
in the Trailhead parking lot. She drove home in a daze.
Couldn't process what had happened, couldn't explain it, couldn't even
fully believe it, despite having seen it with her own eyes.
But here's the thing, the thing that still haunts her.
When she got home, she went into her bathroom to shower,
to wash off the sweat and the dirt and the terror.
(25:14):
And when she looked in the mirror, she noticed something.
Her hair had turned white at the temples, not gray white,
pure stark white. She was thirty two years old. She'd
had dark brown hair her entire life, no family history
of premature gray, but in the span of that single run,
the hair at her temples had gone completely white. Some
(25:37):
people will tell you that hair can't change color that quickly,
that it's physiologically impossible, that the stories of people's hair
turning white from fear are just myths. I've seen pictures
of Michelle from before that day, and i've seen her
in person years later. The white is still there, never
changed back. I don't know what she saw in those woods.
(26:00):
Neither does she. She's researched it extensively, read about shadow people,
read about dark entities and folklore, read about everything she
could find that might explain what happened. None of it
quite fits, because most shadow sightings involve shapes that appear
and disappear, fleeting glimpses in the corner of your eye,
(26:20):
figures that vanish when you look directly at them. This
thing didn't vanish. It stayed. It followed for ten miles.
It kept pace with one of the fastest trail runners
in the region. It tracked her through the forest like
a predator stalking prey, and it stopped at the edge
of the clearing, like it had reached some kind of boundary,
(26:40):
some line it couldn't or wouldn't cross. Michelle never ran
that trail again, gave up ultra marathons entirely. Actually, she
still runs, but only on roads now, only in populated areas,
only where there are people around. She told me she
can't shake the feeling that the shadow is still out there,
still moving through those trees, still waiting. It wasn't trying
(27:04):
to catch me, she said. That's what I realized later.
If it wanted to catch me, it could have. It
was faster than me. It proved that in the first mile.
It could have caught me anytime it wanted. So why
didn't it, I asked. She shook her head. I don't know.
Maybe it wasn't interested in catching me. Maybe it just
(27:24):
wanted me to know it was there. Maybe it was curious,
or maybe she paused, maybe it was hurting me, driving
me in a specific direction towards something, toward what. That's
what scares me, she said, because if I hadn't stopped
at that clearing, if I'd kept running into the forest
instead of coming out into the open, I don't know
(27:46):
where I would have ended up. I don't know what
was waiting for me deeper in those woods. She looked
at me with those haunted eyes, and I could see
the weight of that unanswered question still pressing down on her.
Sometimes I wonder if I made the right cho she said, quietly,
running fleeing. Sometimes I wonder if I should have faced it,
(28:06):
confronted it, found out what it was and what it wanted.
And other times other times I think running was the
only thing that saved my life. And I thank God
every day that I didn't stop, that I didn't let
it catch me, that I made it to that clearing
before she trailed off, never finished the sentence before What
(28:28):
I don't know? And maybe that's the worst part of all,
the not knowing, the question that can never be answered.
What was the shadow between the trees? And what would
have happened if it had caught her? This one's going
to get weird, folks. I'm warning you right now, because
this story involves not just the unexplained, but the seemingly impossible,
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the kind of thing that makes you question everything you
think you know about how the world works. I've told
a lot of strange stories over the years, interviewed a
lot of wis witnesses who've seen things they couldn't explain,
But this one, this one still keeps me up at night.
Let me set the stage. The year was twenty fourteen.
The place was a small town in the mountains of Colorado,
(29:13):
one of those communities that sits at the edge of wilderness,
where the last houses give way to national forest and
the nearest neighbor might be five miles up a dirt road.
A man named Harold Price lived in that town. Harold
was in his late sixties, retired from a career as
an electrical engineer, and he had one consuming passion Ham radio. Now,
(29:35):
for those of you who aren't familiar, ham radio is
amateur radio operation. It's been around for over a century,
and it allows people to communicate over long distances using
radio waves before the Internet, before cell phones. Ham radio
was how people in remote areas stayed connected, how emergency
communications got through when everything else failed. Harold had been
(29:58):
a ham radio operator since he was a teen. Stay
tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
these messages. He had a state of the art setup
in his basement, equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars.
He could talk to people on the other side of
the world, could pick up signals that most receivers couldn't
even detect, and On the night of September fourteenth, twenty fourteen,
(30:22):
he picked up something that changed his life forever. It
was around two in the morning. Harold couldn't sleep, so
he was down in his basement scanning frequencies, listening to
the chatter of other operators around the world. It was
quiet that night, not much traffic, just the occasional snippet
of conversation in Japanese or German or Russian. And then
(30:43):
he heard it, a voice, clear as day, speaking English,
broadcasting on a frequency that shouldn't have been active. This
is Ranger Station fourteen. Emergency broadcast. Is anyone receiving, please respond.
Cold's blood went cold. Not because of the message itself.
(31:03):
Emergency broadcasts happened. People got in trouble in the wilderness,
rangers called for help. That was normal. What wasn't normal
was the frequency, because the frequency that voice was broadcasting
on was a federal emergency channel that hadn't been used
since the nineteen sixties. It had been decommissioned decades ago.
(31:24):
No modern equipment even monitored it anymore, except Harold's did.
Because Harold was old school, he kept some vintage equipment
running alongside his modern gear, like to listen to the
old frequencies out of nostalgia. He grabbed his microphone keyed
the transmit button. This is Harold Price, amateur operator in Colorado.
(31:45):
I'm receiving your signal. Please state your emergency static long,
hissing static. Then the voice came back. Thank god, thank god,
someone's there. This is Ranger William Morrison, Station fourteen, Pike
National Forest. I've been trying to reach someone for hours.
Something's happening out here, something bad. Harold's hands were shaking.
(32:09):
Pike National Forest was right in his backyard. He knew
that area well, had hiked through it dozens of times.
But there was no Station fourteen. The ranger stations in
Pike National Forest were numbered one through twelve, always had been.
There was no Station fourteen. Ranger Morrison. Harold said, can
you give me your coordinates? Your exact location? More static,
(32:33):
then coordinates are Hold on a pause, shuffling sounds. Thirty
nine degrees eleven minutes forty two seconds north one hundred
five degrees thirty one minutes eighteen seconds west, elevation eighty
four hundred feet. I'm on the north slope of Mount Herman.
(32:53):
Do you copy? Harold wrote down the coordinates with trembling hands.
He knew Mount Herman. It was about thirty miles from
his house. Remote area, not many trails. I copied Ranger Morrison,
what's the nature of your emergency? A long pause. When
Morrison's voice came back, it was quieter, shakier. There's something
(33:16):
in the woods, he said. I don't know what it is.
I've been hearing it for hours, moving around the station,
making sounds I've never heard before, sounds that don't sound
like any animal I know. Have you seen anything, No,
just heard it. It's dark out there, no moon tonight,
but I can hear it getting closer. Harold was already
(33:38):
reaching for his phone. He'd call the Forest Service, call
search and rescue, get someone out there. But something made
him pause. Ranger Morrison, he said, slowly, what's today's date? Static?
Then September fourteenth, and the year A long pause, nineteen
sixty three. Why Harold's heart stopped? Nineteen sixty three? The
(34:05):
voice on the radio was broadcasting from fifty one years
in the past. That was impossible, absolutely completely impossible. Radio
waves don't travel through time. They can't. It violates everything
we know about physics, and yet there it was. Harold's
engineer brain kicked into gear. He started running through possibilities.
(34:28):
Was this a hoax, some kind of elaborate prank, But
who would know to broadcast on that obsolete frequency? Who
would know that Harold was one of the few people
still listening to it? Was it a recording, some old
broadcast from the sixties that was somehow being retransmitted, But
that didn't explain how the voice was responding to his questions.
Having a conversation with him, He decided to test it.
(34:51):
Ranger Morrison, he said, carefully, who's the current president? Kennedy?
Came the immediate reply, John F. Kennedy? Why are you
at asking me these questions? I need help? There's something
outside my station and I need help Kennedy. In September
of nineteen sixty three, Kennedy was indeed president. He wouldn't
(35:12):
be assassinated until November of that year. Harold made a decision.
Whatever was happening, whether it was real or impossible or
some kind of waking dream, there was a man on
the other end of that radio who was terrified, and
Harold wasn't going to just ignore that. Okay, Ranger Morrison,
I believe you. I'm going to try to get help
to your location, but I need you to stay on
(35:34):
the line with me. Can you do that, Yes, I
can do that. Thank you, Thank you for believing me.
What followed was the longest night of Harold Price's life.
He stayed on that radio for seven hours, from two
in the morning until nine in the morning, talking to
William Morrison, listening to his growing fear as the sounds
(35:55):
outside his station got louder closer. Morrison described what he
was hearing heavy footsteps in the underbrush, branches snapping, and
a sound, a vocalization of some kind that he said
was like nothing he'd ever heard, low and rumbling, but
with a quality to it that made his hair stand
on end. It's almost like it's speaking, Morrison said at
(36:18):
one point, like it's trying to form words, but the
words don't make sense. They're not in any language I know.
Around five in the morning, Morrison reported that the sounds
had stopped. I think it's gone, he said, I think
whatever it was, it's moved on. But he was wrong.
At seven point thirty, just as dawn was breaking, Morrison's
(36:40):
voice came through the radio again, but this time it
was different, tight, with fear, almost a whisper. It's at
the window, he said, God help me. It's at the window.
I can see it. I can see. What do you see, William?
What does it look like? A long pause? When Rrison
(37:00):
spoke again, His voice was barely audible. It looks like nothing,
he said, like a hole in the world, like darkness
given shape. But there are eyes, eyes that aren't eyes
watching me, seeing me, knowing me. William, get away from
the window. Is there another exit? Can you get out
(37:21):
of there? It's at every window now, all of them.
It's everywhere at once. How can it be everywhere at once?
Harold could hear something in the background, a sound that
made his stomach turn low, resonant, like the subsonic rumble
of an earthquake, but with a rhythm to it, a pattern. William,
(37:42):
listen to me, don't look at it. Close your eyes,
focus on my voice. It knows my name, Morrison whispered.
How does it know my name? It's speaking my name
over and over, William, William William. The background sound grew louder, closer.
Harold could hear it clearly now through the radio, and
(38:05):
every instinct in his body was screaming at him to
turn off the receiver, to break the connection, to get
as far away from that sound as possible, But he didn't.
He stayed on the line. William, stay with me. Help
is coming. Just stay with me. The door, Morrison said,
it's opening. The door. I locked it. I know I
(38:26):
locked it, but it's opening anyway. It's coming inside. There
was a crash, the sound of wood splintering, and then
William Morrison screamed. It was a sound Harold Price would
hear in his nightmares for the rest of his life,
a scream of absolute, primal terror, the sound of a
man facing something so far beyond his understanding, so far
(38:47):
beyond anything he was prepared to encounter that his mind
simply couldn't process it. The scream cut off, the radio
went silent. Harold sat in his basement, trembling, tears streaming
down his face, and waited, waited for Morrison to come
back on the line, waited for any sound, any signal,
(39:08):
any indication of what had happened. Nothing. The frequency was dead.
Harold tried to find help. He called the Forest Service,
but they had no record of arranger Station fourteen, no
record of a ranger named William Morrison. He went to
the coordinates Morrison had given him. There was nothing there,
just forest, just trees. But here's where this story gets
(39:31):
even stranger. Harold was an engineer, a meticulous man. He'd
recorded the entire conversation. He had the audio, he had proof.
So he started digging. He went to the county archives,
dug through old records, newspaper clippings from the sixties forest
service reports, and he found it. September fifteenth, nineteen sixty three,
(39:54):
a brief notice in the local paper a forest ranger
named William Morrison had disappeared while on duty at a
temporary lookout station on the north slope of Mount Hermon.
The station had been established that summer as part of
a firewatch program and was scheduled to be decommissioned at
the end of the season. Station fourteen. Morrison had been found,
(40:15):
or rather his remains had been found, three days after
his disappearance, two miles from the station. The official cause
of death was animal attack, bare, the report said, But
Harold read the details. Read about how Morrison's body had
been found, about the wounds that didn't match any known predator,
(40:35):
about the look of absolute terror, frozen on what remained
of his face, and about the radio that had been
found in the wreckage of the station, still broadcasting an
emergency signal that no one received. No one until Harold
Price fifty one years later. I met Harold in twenty sixteen,
two years after his experience. He was a changed man.
(40:57):
The confident engineer I'd heard about was gone. In his place,
was someone haunted, someone who spent his nights listening to
old frequencies, hoping to hear Morrison's voice again, hoping for
answers that never came. He played me the recording. I've
heard it the whole seven hours, and I can't explain it.
The audio quality matches equipment from the early sixties. The
(41:19):
background sounds include things that weren't present in twenty fourteen,
like the hum of an old vacuum tube radio transmitter.
The conversation references events and details that would have been
impossible to fake without extensive research into an obscure incident
that most people had never heard of. But more than that,
more than the technical details, more than the historical accuracy,
(41:43):
the fear in William Morrison's voice was real. I've heard
a lot of audio in my career a lot of
alleged evidence, a lot of recordings that people claim capture
something supernatural. Most of them are obvious fakes, hoaxes, misidentified
natural sounds. This wasn't that. The terror in that man's
voice as he described the thing at his window, the
(42:05):
absolute breakdown as it came through the door. That's not
something you can fake. I don't know how Harold Price
received a transmission from fifty one years in the past.
I don't know if radio waves can bend time, or
if time can fold back on itself, or if there
are places in the world where the normal rules simply
don't apply. What I do know is this. William Morrison
(42:28):
died on September fifteenth, nineteen sixty three, and on September fourteenth,
twenty fourteen, Harold Price heard it happen. He heard a
man from another era call out for help, and he
couldn't save him. That might be the most haunting part
of all, the knowledge that somewhere, some win William Morrison
was crying out into the darkness, begging for help, and
(42:51):
help couldn't come, not in his time, not in any time.
Some things, I suppose, are fixed. Some events can't be changed,
no matter how much we want to change them. And
some deaths are just the beginning of a very long story.
The last story I want to share with you tonight
is different from the others. It's not a story about
(43:13):
one person. It's about a family, a whole family, who
experienced something together, something they still don't talk about decades later.
I heard this account from the father, a man i'll
call Robert. He reached out to me in twenty twenty
one after hearing one of my early podcasts, said he
had something to share, something that had happened to his
(43:34):
family in the summer of nineteen eighty nine. He'd never
told anyone outside the family, never reported it, never went public,
But the weight of it, he said, was becoming too
much to carry alone. So he told me, and now
I'm telling you. In the summer of eighty nine, Robert
was thirty four years old. He had a wife, Linda,
(43:55):
and two kids, a son named Tommy who was eleven,
and a daughter named Era, who was eight. They were
a typical American family lived in a suburb of Cleveland.
Robert worked in sales, Linda was a teacher. The kids
were good kids, normal kids. Every summer the family went camping.
It was a tradition Robert had started when Tommy was
(44:16):
just a toddler. One week in the wilderness, no phones,
no television, just the four of them, the tent and
the great outdoors. That year, they'd chosen a campground in
the Allegheny National Forest in northwestern Pennsylvania. It was a
beautiful area, dense hardwood forests, clear streams, remote camp sites
(44:38):
that made you feel like you were a million miles
from civilization. They arrived on a Saturday afternoon, set up camp,
went fishing in a nearby stream, made dinner over the campfire,
roasted marshmallows, told stories, watched the stars come out. It
was perfect, the kind of evening that makes you remember
why you love being alive. Stay tuned for more backwoods
(45:01):
Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. They turned
in around nine o'clock. The kids were tired from the drive.
Robert and Linda didn't last much longer. Soon the whole
family was asleep in their tent, lulled by the sounds
of the forest, the chirping of crickets, the hooting of
an owl, the soft rustle of wind through the trees,
(45:25):
the sounds of the night Robert woke up sometime later.
He checked his watch two seventeen in the morning. He
wasn't sure what had woken him. Maybe he needed to
use the bathroom, maybe one of the kids had shifted
in their sleep. But as he lay there in the darkness,
he realized something was wrong. It was quiet, not just quiet, silent,
(45:48):
completely utterly, unnaturally silent. The crickets had stopped, the owl
was gone. There was no wind in the trees, no
sound of any kind. Nothing. Robert sat up slowly. His
heart was pounding. Every instinct he had was screaming that
something was wrong, that they were in danger. He reached
(46:09):
over and touched Linda's shoulder. She woke immediately, as if
she'd been lying there awake already, just waiting. Do you
hear that, he whispered, I don't hear anything, She whispered back.
That's what woke me up. The silence. They lay there together,
listening to the nothing, straining their ears for any sound,
(46:30):
any indication of what was happening outside their thin nylon walls.
Then Tommy spoke Dad. His voice was small, scared, something's outside.
Robert's hair stood up on the back of his neck.
What do you mean, buddy, what do you see. I
don't see anything, Tommy said, but I can feel it.
(46:52):
Something's walking around the tent. Robert listened, strained every sense
he had, and then he felt it too, not her.
Felt a pressure in his chest, await in the air,
something moving just outside the tent, so close he could
almost reach out and touch it through the fabric, but
completely impossibly silent. No footsteps, no breathing, no rustle of movement,
(47:18):
just a presence, a feeling of something massive. Watching. Sarah
started to cry, soft whimpering cries that she tried to
muffle with her sleeping bag. Linda reached over and pulled
her close, one arm around each child, her eyes fixed
on the wall of the tent. Robert reached for the flashlight.
(47:38):
His hand found it in the darkness, closed around the
familiar shape. He didn't turn it on, not yet. Something
told him that would be a mistake, that drawing attention
to themselves would be bad, very bad. They waited one minute,
two five. The presence circled the tent slow. Robert could
(48:01):
track it by the feeling alone, even though there was
no sound to follow. It moved around them in a
perfect circle, pausing at each point, as if examining them,
studying them. Then it stopped right outside the tent door.
Robert could feel it there, standing waiting. The zipper on
the tent door was six inches from his face. If
(48:23):
something wanted to get in, all it had to do
was reach out and pull. Nobody moved, nobody breathed. Robert
would later tell me that he experienced a kind of
paralysis in that moment. Not physical. He could move if
he wanted to, but something in his brain, something ancient
and primal, was screaming at him not to to stay still,
(48:45):
to stay quiet, to not draw the attention of whatever
was out there. And then, gradually, impossibly slowly, the presence
moved away. Robert felt it retreat from the tent, felt
it move across the campsite, felt it heading toward the
tree line. And as it moved, the silence moved with it.
(49:05):
That's what Robert remembers most clearly. That's what haunts him
to this day. The silence wasn't a condition of the forest.
It was attached to the thing. It followed the presence
like a shadow, like an aura. Wherever that thing went,
all sound died. As the presence reached the edge of
the campsite, Robert finally found the courage to move. He
(49:28):
crawled to the tent door, slowly, silently. He reached for
the zipper. Linda grabbed his arm. Don't, she whispered, Please, don't,
But Robert had to know, had to see. He eased
the zipper down just an inch, just enough to create
a gap he could look through, and he looked out
(49:49):
into the night. At first, he saw nothing, just the
darkness of the forest, the shapes of trees against the
slightly lighter sky, the dead coals of their campfire. Then
he saw it, moving between the trees at the edge
of the campsite, a shape, a silhouette, darker than the
darkness around it, if that makes sense, like a hole
(50:11):
cut in the fabric of the night. It was tall,
seven feet maybe eight, broad shouldered, but somehow thin, moving
with a fluid grace that seemed wrong for anything with
physical form, And as Robert watched it stopped. It turned,
and even though he couldn't see its face, even though
it was nothing more than a shape in the darkness,
(50:34):
Robert knew it was looking at him. He says he
felt its attention focus on him, like a weight like
being pinned beneath something massive, like being examined under a microscope.
Then it turned back and it walked into the forest,
and it was gone. The moment it disappeared, the silence broke.
Sound came flooding back like a dam had burst, Crickets, frogs,
(50:58):
an owl, the wind in the tree ease, all of
it all at once, so sudden and loud that it
felt almost deafening after the absolute nothing that had come before,
the family didn't sleep. They sat in that tent until dawn,
huddled together, jumping at every sound. When the first light came,
Robert was outside breaking down the camp. They were in
(51:20):
the car and driving home before the sun was fully up.
Nobody talked during the drive, four hours of complete silence.
When they got home, Robert tried to bring it up,
tried to talk about what had happened, but nobody wanted to.
Linda changed the subject, Tommy went to his room, Sarah
started crying again, so they didn't talk about it. Not then,
(51:43):
not ever. It became the family's unspoken secret, the thing
that happened that they all agreed without ever saying so,
to pretend hadn't happened. They never went camping again. Robert
told me all of this over the course of several conversations,
and at the end of our last talk, I asked
him the question I'd been wanting to ask the whole time.
(52:04):
What do you think it was? He was quiet for
a long time, then he finally spoke. I've spent twenty
three years thinking about that, he said, twenty three years
reading about cryptids and creatures and things that shouldn't exist.
And I still don't have an answer. But but I
have a theory, he paused. I don't think it was
(52:25):
a creature, not the way we think of creatures. I
don't think it was something living, at least not in
the way we understand life. I think it was an absence,
he said, an emptiness, a place where something should be.
But isn't like a hole in reality, a gap in
the world. I don't understand neither do I not really,
(52:47):
But that's the closest I can come to describing what
it felt like. It wasn't just that there was no
sound around it. It was like the silence was part
of it, like it was made of silence, made of nothing.
He looked at me with eyes that had seen something
they were never meant to see. We think of the
dark as the absence of light, he said, But what
(53:07):
if there are other kinds of absences? What if there
are things in this world that are the absence of sound,
the absence of warmth, the absence of life itself? And
what if sometimes those absences take shape? What if they move?
What if they walk through our forests and our mountains
and our darkest nights, and we only know they're there
(53:28):
because everything else has fled. I didn't have an answer
for him, still don't, But I've thought about what Robert
said a lot over the years, about the idea of
absences taking form, about the possibility that the silence itself
was the thing, not a creature that moved in silence,
but silence that moved like a creature. It's a terrifying thought.
(53:51):
Because we like to think we understand our world. We
like to believe that every question has an answer, every
phenomenon has an explanation, every misas can be solved if
we just think hard enough. But what if there are
things that exist beyond our understanding? What if there are
gaps in reality that we weren't meant to see? What
if there are absences walking among us, And the only
(54:13):
warning we get is when the world goes quiet. The
next time you're in the woods, pay attention. Listen to
the sounds around you, the birds, the insects, the wind.
And if those sounds suddenly stop, if the forest goes quiet,
if you find yourself surrounded by a silence so complete
it presses against your ear drums like a physical force,
(54:36):
don't move, don't breathe, and whatever you do, don't look,
because something might be looking back. Well that's where we
leave it for tonight. Four stories, Four encounters with things
that shouldn't exist, Four windows into a world that operates
by rules we don't understand. I told you at the
beginning that not everything in the deep Woods can be
(54:58):
explained by large, hairy, bye pedal creatures, And I hope
I've made my case. There are stranger things out there,
darker things, things that bend time and cast shadows without
substance and broadcast across decades, and walk wrapped in silence.
Are these stories true? I believe they are. I believe
(55:19):
the people who told them to me. I believe the
evidence I've seen and the recordings I've heard, and the
haunted looks in the eyes of witnesses who clearly wish
they'd never experience what they experienced. But belief isn't proof,
And in this field, in this strange corner of research
that I've devoted my life to, proof is hard to
come by. All I can offer is the stories themselves,
(55:42):
the testimonies of people who walked into the wilderness and
came back changed, the accounts of ordinary folks who encountered
something extraordinary and spent the rest of their lives trying
to make sense of it. Whether you believe them is
up to you, But I'd ask you to keep an
open mind, because our world is bigger than we know,
older than we think, and full of mysteries that science
(56:03):
has yet to explain. Maybe someday we'll have answers. Maybe
someday we'll understand what lurks in the spaces between the trees,
in the frequencies between radio stations, in the silence between sounds.
Until then, all we have are stories, and the stories
are enough to keep me searching. Thanks for listening. Stay
(56:26):
safe out there, stay curious, and remember what I always say.
The woods have secrets, and some secrets don't want to
be found. Did in spo
For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness, Bigfoot,
(00:22):
dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close and
remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
(00:46):
and let's head off into the woods. If you dare,
welcome back, settle in, get comfortable, Maybe throw another log
(01:07):
on that fire if you've got one going tonight. I
want to take you somewhere different, somewhere darker, maybe somewhere stranger. See.
I've spent a lot of time out in the woods,
nearly forty years now, exploring the deep forests, chasing stories,
interviewing witnesses, and in all that time, I've heard things
that would make your blood run cold. Encounters with massive,
(01:30):
hair covered creatures that shouldn't exist, footprints that defy explanation,
sounds that echo through valleys and make even the bravest
men question what they think they know about this world.
But here's the thing, and I want to be real
with you about this. Not everything we see here or
experience in the deep woods can be explained by a
run in with a large, hairy, bipedal creature. Sometimes things
(01:53):
are even scarier and more strange. I'm talking about experiences
that go beyond the physical what we can categorize or
explain away. I'm talking about the kinds of stories that
make you wonder if the forest itself is alive, if
it's watching, if it knows things about you that you
don't even know about yourself. The four stories I'm about
(02:15):
to share with you tonight came to me over the years,
some from witnesses who sat right where you're sitting now
metaphorically speaking, some from old timers who made me promise
not to share their accounts until after they'd passed on,
And some from records and reports that got buried so
deep it took years of digging just to find them.
These aren't Sasquatch stories. Not tonight. Tonight we're going deeper,
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so dim those lights, put your phone on silent, and
whatever you do. If you hear something outside your window
while you're listening to this, don't look. Just don't trust
me on that one. Let's begin. This first story came
to me from a man named David Hollister. Now David's dead.
Passed away into twenty nineteen from pancreatic cancer. He was
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seventy three years old, and in the final months of
his life. He reached out to me through a mutual friend.
Said he had something he needed to get off his
chest before he went, something that had haunted him for
almost fifty years. I drove out to see him at
a hospice facility in eastern Tennessee. When I walked into
that room, I found a man who looked like he'd
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been carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders
for half a century. Then gray eyes that had seen
something they were never meant to see. He told me
this story over the course of three visits. Each time
he'd get to a certain point and just stop, couldn't
go on, had to gather himself, had to work up
the courage to continue. What I'm about to share with
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you is David's account, as best as I can reconstruct it.
It happened in the summer of nineteen seventy one. David
was twenty five years old, fresh out of the Army,
back from Vietnam, and trying to find himself again. A
lot of guys from that era know what I'm talking about.
You come back from a place like that, You're not
the same person anymore. The world looks different, feels different,
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and you spend a lot of time trying to figure
out where you fit. For David, the answer was the wilderness.
He'd grown up hiking and camping in the Appalachians. His
daddy had taken him out there since he was old
enough to walk, and after everything he'd seen overseas, the
forest felt like the only place that made sense anymore,
the only place that was quiet enough for him to think.
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So in July of seventy one, he packed up his
gear and headed into a remote section of the Cherokee
National Forest. He planned to be out there for two weeks,
just him, his pack, and the mountains. The first three
days went exactly as expected. He hiked deep into the
back country. Following old game trails and half forgotten paths
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that his daddy had shown him years before. He set
up camp near streams, caught fish for dinner, watched the
stars at night, and felt, for the first time in
a long time something like peace. Then came Day four.
David woke up that morning to fog. Thick, heavy fog
that seemed to swallow everything more than twenty feet away. Now,
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fog in the mountains isn't unusual. Anyone who spent time
in the Appalachians knows it can roll in fast and
sit heavy in the valleys. But this fog was different.
David said it felt oppressive, like it was pressing down
on him, like it didn't want to let go. He
decided to wait it out, made some coffee over his
camp stove, ate a cold breakfast. Figured the sun would
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burn the fog off by mid morning, the way it
usually did, But it didn't. By noon, the fog was
still there. If anything, it had gotten thicker. David couldn't
see more than ten feet in any direction. The trees
around his camp had become vague shadows, gray shapes that
seemed to shift and move when he wasn't looking directly
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at them. He made a decision. He'd pack up and
head back toward the main trail, get to lower elevation
where the fog might clear. He had a compass, he
had a map, He knew these woods. There was no
reason to worry. That's what he told himself. Anyway, he
broke camp and started walking due east. That's the direction
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he needed to go to hit the main trail. He
checked his compass every few minutes, making sure he was
staying on course. The fog swallowed sound as much as sight.
His footsteps seemed muffled. The normal sounds of the forest,
the birds, the insects, the wind in the trees, all
of it was gone. Just silence, heavy, suffocating silence. After
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about two hours of hiking, David came to a clearing,
and in that clearing there was a cabin. Now this
was strange for a couple of reasons. First, David knew
this area, he'd hiked through here before. There had never
been a cabin in this location. Second, the cabin itself
looked old, really old. The wood was weathered and gray,
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the roof was sagging in the middle, one of the
windows was broken, and the door hung crooked on its hinges.
But here's the thing. It also looked like someone had
been there recently. There were fresh footprints in the mud
around the front step. The grass leading up to the
door was trampled down, like someone had walked that path
multiple times. David stood at the edge of that clearing
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for a long time. Something inside him was screaming to
turn around, to go back the way he came, to
get as far away from that cabin as possible. But
another part of him, the part that had survived twelve
months in the jungle, the part that had learned to
face fear head on, that part wanted to know, needed
to know. He approached the cabin. The door opened with
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a long, low creak that seemed to echo through the fog.
Inside the cabin was a single room. There was an
old wooden bed frame against one wall, no mattress, just
the frame, a stone fire place filled with old ashes,
a wooden table in the center of the room, and
a single chair. On the table, there was a book.
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David walked over and picked it up. It was a journal,
leather bound, the cover cracked and worn with age. He
opened it to the first page, and that's when his
blood went cold. The handwriting in that journal was his own,
not similar to his, not reminiscent of his. It was
his handwriting, the same distinctive way he formed his letters,
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the same slant, the same idiosyncrasies that had been with
him since grade school. His hand started shaking. He turned
to the next page, then the next. The journal was
a record of his hike, every detail where he'd camped
on day one, what he'd eaten for dinner on day two,
the stream where he'd filled his canteen on day three,
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all of it written in his handwriting, dated with dates
that hadn't happened yet. The last entry was dated jeely
Uly nineteenth, nineteen seventy one. That was fifteen days away.
The entry read, I've stopped counting how many times I
found the cabin. It doesn't matter anymore. Nothing matters. The
fog never lifts, the forest won't let me leave. I
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think I understand now. I think I've always been here.
I think I will always be here. If someone finds
this journal, please tell my mother. I'm sorry. I should
have listened when she told me not to come out
here alone. I should have stayed home. I should have
And that's where the entry stopped mid sentence, like whoever
was writing it had been interrupted or had simply run
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out of the will to continue. David dropped the journal
like it had burned him. He backed away from the table,
his heart hammering in his chest, his breath coming in short,
ragged gasps. This wasn't possible. None of this was possible.
He turned and ran out of the cabin, across the clearing,
into the fog. He didn't care about direction anymore, didn't
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care about his compass or his map. He just ran.
Branches whipped his face, roots grabbed at his feet. The
fog pressed in from all sides, Cold and wet and hungry.
He ran until his lungs burned, until his legs gave out,
until he collapsed against a tree, gasping for air, tears
streaming down his face. When he finally caught his breath,
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when his vision cleared enough to see where he was,
David found himself standing at the edge of a clearing,
And in that clearing there was a cabin. The same
cabin he recognized, the sagging roof, the broken window, the
crooked door that still hung open from when he'd left it.
David turned and ran in the opposite direction. He ran
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for what felt like hours. His body was screaming at
him to stop, but his mind wouldn't let him. He
had to get away, had to escape. But every time
he stopped, every time he paused to catch his breath
or check his surroundings, he found himself at the edge
of that same clearing, looking at that same cabin, the
door open waiting. He tried everything. He walked instead of ran,
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carefully tracking his direction with his compass. He ended up
at the cabin. He climbed a ridge, gaining as much
elevation as he could. When he descended the other side,
the cabin was there. He followed a stream downhill for miles.
The stream led him right to the clearing. The cabin
was always there. No matter what he did, no matter
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which direction he went, the forest kept bringing him back.
As the light began to fade and the fog grew darker,
David made a decision. He was going to spend the
night in the cabin. Not because he wanted to, God
knows he didn't want to, but because he was exhausted,
because his body couldn't take another step, and because somewhere
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in the back of his mind he understood that the
forest wasn't going to let him leave anyway. At least
the cabin was shelter. He went inside, sat down in
the chair at the table, and he opened the journal again.
This time he read more carefully. The entries chronicled everything,
his growing desperation, his attempts to escape, his realization that
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the fog never lifted that night, never truly fell, but
the light never fully returned either. Everything existed in this gray,
eternal twilight. The entries grew more erratic as they progressed.
The handwriting became shakier, the sentences more fragmented. Whoever had
written this journal, whoever this version of himself had been,
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had slowly lost his grip on sanity. And then David
noticed something he hadn't seen before. At the back of
the journal. There were more entries dated before his hike
had started, entries from July first, nineteen seventy one, from June,
from May, going back months. And they weren't in his
handwriting anymore. They were in different handwritings, dozens of them,
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different people, different years. The oldest entry David could find
was dated eighteen ninety two. That entry read found shelter
from the fog old cabin in a clearing, starting to
think I may never see my family again. The forest
has claimed me. May God have mercy on my soul.
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David sat in that cabin all night. He didn't sleep,
couldn't sleep. He just sat there, holding that journal, reading
and rereading the entries of all the people who had
come before him, all the people who had found themselves
trapped in this same nightmare, all the people who had
never escaped. When dawn came, or what passed for dawn
in that gray half light, David made a decision. He
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wasn't going to give up. He wasn't going to become
another entry in that journal. He was going to find
a way out. He picked up his pack, walked out
of the cabin and started walking south, not east like
he'd been trying, not toward the main trail, just south,
no reason, just a direction he hadn't tried yet. He
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walked for hours. The fog remained thick, the silence remained oppressive,
and every fiber of his being expected to find himself
back at that cabin, but he didn't. Instead, after what
felt like an eternity, he began to hear something faint
at first, so faint he thought he was imagining it,
but then louder, clearer, a car, the sound of an
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engine coming from somewhere ahead. David ran toward that sound.
His legs found strength they didn't have. His lungs found air.
He crashed through the underbrush, stumbling, falling, getting back up,
running again, and then the fog broke. Just like that.
One moment, he was surrounded by gray. The next he
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burst out onto a dirt road, blinking in the sudden
brightness of a clear summer morning. A pickup truck was
coming down the road, an old farmer at the wheel.
The man slammed on his brakes when he saw David
emerged from the woods, wild eyed and covered in mud
and scratches. David flagged him down, begged for a ride.
Stay tuned for more backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
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after these messages. The farmer, a man named Clyde something
David never did catch his last name, agreed to take
him back to town. On the drive, David asked what
day it was. The farmer gave him a strange look.
July fifth, he said. David had entered the forest on
July fourth. He'd spent what felt like days in that fog,
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days of wandering, days of terror. But in the real world,
less than twenty four hours had passed. He never went
back to that section of the forest, never wanted to
see those mountains again. He moved to Tennessee, started a
new life, got married, had kids, tried to forget. But
he never could because sometimes late at night he'd dreamed
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about that cabin, about that journal, about all those entries
and all those different handwritings. And sometimes when he woke up,
he'd find himself standing at his bedroom window, staring out
into the darkness, with no memory of how he got there,
staring south, always south. David told me that story over
the course of our three visits, and when he finished,
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when he'd finally gotten it all out, he looked at
me with those tired, haunted eyes and asked me a question.
Do you think they're still there? He asked, all those
people who wrote in that journal, do you think they're
still in that forest, still finding their way back to
that cabin, over and over again forever. I didn't have
an answer for him. I still don't, but I'll tell
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you this. After David passed away, I tried to find
that section of forest, tried to locate the area he'd described.
I spent two weeks combing through old maps, talking to locals,
hiking those mountains. I never found it, and maybe that's
for the best, because some places, I think don't want
to be found. Some places exist outside the normal rules,
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outside time, outside reality, and maybe, just maybe the forest
that repeats time is still out there, still waiting, still hungry,
still keeping its prisoners in that endless gray fog forever.
The woman who told me this story asked that I
not use her real name, so for the purposes of
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this account, I'll call her Michelle. Michelle was a trail runner,
and I don't mean someone who jogged through the park
on weekends. I mean a serious, competitive ultra marathoner who
spent more time in the wilderness than most people spend
in their own homes. She'd run one hundred mile races
through some of the most remote terrain in North America.
She'd trained in conditions that would break most athletes. Heat, cold, rain, snow,
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none of it stopped her. She was tough, mentally and physically,
the kind of person you'd want on your side if
things went sideways in the back country, which is what
makes her story so disturbing, because if something could rattle Michelle,
then it was something truly terrifying. It happened in October
of twenty sixteen. Michelle was training for one hundred mile
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rays scheduled for the following spring. She'd found a trail
system in the mountains of western North Carolina that she loved. Remote, technical, challenging,
perfect for building the kind of endurance and mental toughness
she'd need for the race. She'd been running those trails
for weeks, knew them like the back of her hand,
could navigate them blindfolded, she used to say. On this
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particular day, she headed out early five in the morning,
well before sunrise. She wanted to get in a long
run before the day warmed up. October in the mountains
can be tricky cool in the morning, but the afternoons
can still get warm enough to make running uncomfortable. She'd
planned a thirty mile loop out and back on a
trail that wound through some of the most remote sections
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of the forest. No cell service, no other people, just her,
her pack and the trees. The first fifteen miles went smoothly.
The sun came up around mile five, painting the forest
in shades of gold and red. The fall colors were
at their peak. Michelle remembers thinking how beautiful it was,
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how lucky she felt to be out there doing what
she loved, surrounded by all that natural beauty. Then she
reached mile sixteen, and that's when she saw it. The
trail at this point ran along a ridge. On her right,
the ground dropped away into a steep ravine. On her left,
the forest pressed in close, ancient hardwoods with massive trunks
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and branches that formed a canopy overhead. She was running
at a steady pace, her breathing rhythmic, her footfall soft
on the packed dirt trail, and as she passed a
particularly large oak tree, she noticed something in her peripheral vision,
a shadow moving through the trees to her left, keeping
pace with her. Now, shadows in the forest aren't unusual.
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Light filters through the canopy in unpredictable ways. The trees
sway in the wind, creating movement. Your eyes can play
tricks on you when you're fatigued. Michelle knew all of this.
She was experienced enough not to let her imagination run wild,
so she glanced over quick just to confirm it was nothing.
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But it wasn't nothing. There was a shadow moving through
those trees, a dark shape, roughly human in size and form,
sliding between the trunks, about thirty feet off the trail.
It wasn't walking, it wasn't running. It was gliding, smooth
and silent, like it was floating just above the ground.
Michelle's first thought was that someone was out there, another
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hiker maybe, or a hunter. The area wasn't popular, but
it wasn't unheard of to encounter other people. But there
was no one there. She could see the shadow clearly,
could see its shape, its movement, its position relative to
the trees. But where the source of that shadow should
have been, where the person or thing casting it should
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have been standing, There was nothing, just empty forest. The
shadow had no source. Michelle stopped running, came to a
complete halt in the middle of the trail, her breath
catching in her throat, her heart suddenly pounding. The shadow
stopped too. It remained motionless among the trees, watching her,
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or at least that's what it felt like, even though
it had no eyes, no face, no features of any kind,
just a dark silhouette against the lighter background of the forest.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. Michelle stood
there on the trail, her mind racing, trying to process
what she was seeing, trying to explain it away. Light angles, fatigue, dehydration,
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But she wasn't dehydrated. She'd been careful about her fluids.
She wasn't that fatigued. Sixteen miles was nothing for her,
and the light wasn't doing anything unusual. The sun was up,
the forest was bright. There was no reason for a
shadow to exist without something casting it, and yet there
it was. Michelle made a decision. She was going to
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approach it, going to get close enough to understand what
she was looking at. She was a rational person. There
had to be a rational explanation. She took a step
off the trail toward the shadow. It moved not away
from her, toward her fast. Michelle felt a cold surge
of pure, primal terror, the kind of fear that bypasses
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the thinking brain entirely, the kind that comes from somewhere
deep and ancient, from the part of us that remembers
being prey. She ran, not a controlled, measured pace, not
her careful training run. She sprinted, full speed, legs, driving hard,
arms pumping, eyes fixed on the trail ahead, and The
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shadow kept pace. She could see it in her peripheral vision,
moving through the trees beside her, gliding silent, never falling behind,
never pulling ahead, just matching her speed exactly mile after mile.
Michelle was fast, one of the fastest trail runners in
her region. She could sustain a six minute mile pace
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on technical terrain for hours if she had to, and
she pushed herself harder than she ever had before, harder
than any race, harder than any training run. The shadow
kept pace. She ran for five miles than ten. Her
lungs were burning, her legs were screaming, her body was
begging her to stop, but every time she glanced to
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her left, the shadow was still there, still watching, still following.
She couldn't outrun it. At mile twenty six, the trail
emerged from the forest into a clearing, a small meadow
where the trees fell back and the sky opened up overhead.
Michelle burst out of the tree line and stumbled to
a stop, gasping for breath, her legs trembling. She turned around.
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The shadow had stopped at the edge of the forest.
It stood there, just inside the tree line, motionless, as
if it couldn't enter the clearing or wouldn't. Michelle backed
away slowly, her eyes never leaving that dark shape. The
shadow didn't follow, but it watched. She could feel it watching,
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even though it had no eyes, Even though it was
nothing more than darkness given form, she could feel its
attention focused on her with an intensity that made her
skin crawl. Michelle turned and ran across the meadow the
last four miles of her route. She didn't look back,
didn't slow down, didn't stop until she reached her car
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in the Trailhead parking lot. She drove home in a daze.
Couldn't process what had happened, couldn't explain it, couldn't even
fully believe it, despite having seen it with her own eyes.
But here's the thing, the thing that still haunts her.
When she got home, she went into her bathroom to shower,
to wash off the sweat and the dirt and the terror.
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And when she looked in the mirror, she noticed something.
Her hair had turned white at the temples, not gray white,
pure stark white. She was thirty two years old. She'd
had dark brown hair her entire life, no family history
of premature gray, but in the span of that single run,
the hair at her temples had gone completely white. Some
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people will tell you that hair can't change color that quickly,
that it's physiologically impossible, that the stories of people's hair
turning white from fear are just myths. I've seen pictures
of Michelle from before that day, and i've seen her
in person years later. The white is still there, never
changed back. I don't know what she saw in those woods.
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Neither does she. She's researched it extensively, read about shadow people,
read about dark entities and folklore, read about everything she
could find that might explain what happened. None of it
quite fits, because most shadow sightings involve shapes that appear
and disappear, fleeting glimpses in the corner of your eye,
(26:20):
figures that vanish when you look directly at them. This
thing didn't vanish. It stayed. It followed for ten miles.
It kept pace with one of the fastest trail runners
in the region. It tracked her through the forest like
a predator stalking prey, and it stopped at the edge
of the clearing, like it had reached some kind of boundary,
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some line it couldn't or wouldn't cross. Michelle never ran
that trail again, gave up ultra marathons entirely. Actually, she
still runs, but only on roads now, only in populated areas,
only where there are people around. She told me she
can't shake the feeling that the shadow is still out there,
still moving through those trees, still waiting. It wasn't trying
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to catch me, she said. That's what I realized later.
If it wanted to catch me, it could have. It
was faster than me. It proved that in the first mile.
It could have caught me anytime it wanted. So why
didn't it, I asked. She shook her head. I don't know.
Maybe it wasn't interested in catching me. Maybe it just
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wanted me to know it was there. Maybe it was curious,
or maybe she paused, maybe it was hurting me, driving
me in a specific direction towards something, toward what. That's
what scares me, she said, because if I hadn't stopped
at that clearing, if I'd kept running into the forest
instead of coming out into the open, I don't know
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where I would have ended up. I don't know what
was waiting for me deeper in those woods. She looked
at me with those haunted eyes, and I could see
the weight of that unanswered question still pressing down on her.
Sometimes I wonder if I made the right cho she said, quietly,
running fleeing. Sometimes I wonder if I should have faced it,
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confronted it, found out what it was and what it wanted.
And other times other times I think running was the
only thing that saved my life. And I thank God
every day that I didn't stop, that I didn't let
it catch me, that I made it to that clearing
before she trailed off, never finished the sentence before What
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I don't know? And maybe that's the worst part of all,
the not knowing, the question that can never be answered.
What was the shadow between the trees? And what would
have happened if it had caught her? This one's going
to get weird, folks. I'm warning you right now, because
this story involves not just the unexplained, but the seemingly impossible,
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the kind of thing that makes you question everything you
think you know about how the world works. I've told
a lot of strange stories over the years, interviewed a
lot of wis witnesses who've seen things they couldn't explain,
But this one, this one still keeps me up at night.
Let me set the stage. The year was twenty fourteen.
The place was a small town in the mountains of Colorado,
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one of those communities that sits at the edge of wilderness,
where the last houses give way to national forest and
the nearest neighbor might be five miles up a dirt road.
A man named Harold Price lived in that town. Harold
was in his late sixties, retired from a career as
an electrical engineer, and he had one consuming passion Ham radio. Now,
(29:35):
for those of you who aren't familiar, ham radio is
amateur radio operation. It's been around for over a century,
and it allows people to communicate over long distances using
radio waves before the Internet, before cell phones. Ham radio
was how people in remote areas stayed connected, how emergency
communications got through when everything else failed. Harold had been
(29:58):
a ham radio operator since he was a teen. Stay
tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
these messages. He had a state of the art setup
in his basement, equipment worth tens of thousands of dollars.
He could talk to people on the other side of
the world, could pick up signals that most receivers couldn't
even detect, and On the night of September fourteenth, twenty fourteen,
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he picked up something that changed his life forever. It
was around two in the morning. Harold couldn't sleep, so
he was down in his basement scanning frequencies, listening to
the chatter of other operators around the world. It was
quiet that night, not much traffic, just the occasional snippet
of conversation in Japanese or German or Russian. And then
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he heard it, a voice, clear as day, speaking English,
broadcasting on a frequency that shouldn't have been active. This
is Ranger Station fourteen. Emergency broadcast. Is anyone receiving, please respond.
Cold's blood went cold. Not because of the message itself.
(31:03):
Emergency broadcasts happened. People got in trouble in the wilderness,
rangers called for help. That was normal. What wasn't normal
was the frequency, because the frequency that voice was broadcasting
on was a federal emergency channel that hadn't been used
since the nineteen sixties. It had been decommissioned decades ago.
(31:24):
No modern equipment even monitored it anymore, except Harold's did.
Because Harold was old school, he kept some vintage equipment
running alongside his modern gear, like to listen to the
old frequencies out of nostalgia. He grabbed his microphone keyed
the transmit button. This is Harold Price, amateur operator in Colorado.
(31:45):
I'm receiving your signal. Please state your emergency static long,
hissing static. Then the voice came back. Thank god, thank god,
someone's there. This is Ranger William Morrison, Station fourteen, Pike
National Forest. I've been trying to reach someone for hours.
Something's happening out here, something bad. Harold's hands were shaking.
(32:09):
Pike National Forest was right in his backyard. He knew
that area well, had hiked through it dozens of times.
But there was no Station fourteen. The ranger stations in
Pike National Forest were numbered one through twelve, always had been.
There was no Station fourteen. Ranger Morrison. Harold said, can
you give me your coordinates? Your exact location? More static,
(32:33):
then coordinates are Hold on a pause, shuffling sounds. Thirty
nine degrees eleven minutes forty two seconds north one hundred
five degrees thirty one minutes eighteen seconds west, elevation eighty
four hundred feet. I'm on the north slope of Mount Herman.
(32:53):
Do you copy? Harold wrote down the coordinates with trembling hands.
He knew Mount Herman. It was about thirty miles from
his house. Remote area, not many trails. I copied Ranger Morrison,
what's the nature of your emergency? A long pause. When
Morrison's voice came back, it was quieter, shakier. There's something
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in the woods, he said. I don't know what it is.
I've been hearing it for hours, moving around the station,
making sounds I've never heard before, sounds that don't sound
like any animal I know. Have you seen anything, No,
just heard it. It's dark out there, no moon tonight,
but I can hear it getting closer. Harold was already
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reaching for his phone. He'd call the Forest Service, call
search and rescue, get someone out there. But something made
him pause. Ranger Morrison, he said, slowly, what's today's date? Static?
Then September fourteenth, and the year A long pause, nineteen
sixty three. Why Harold's heart stopped? Nineteen sixty three? The
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voice on the radio was broadcasting from fifty one years
in the past. That was impossible, absolutely completely impossible. Radio
waves don't travel through time. They can't. It violates everything
we know about physics, and yet there it was. Harold's
engineer brain kicked into gear. He started running through possibilities.
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Was this a hoax, some kind of elaborate prank, But
who would know to broadcast on that obsolete frequency? Who
would know that Harold was one of the few people
still listening to it? Was it a recording, some old
broadcast from the sixties that was somehow being retransmitted, But
that didn't explain how the voice was responding to his questions.
Having a conversation with him, He decided to test it.
(34:51):
Ranger Morrison, he said, carefully, who's the current president? Kennedy?
Came the immediate reply, John F. Kennedy? Why are you
at asking me these questions? I need help? There's something
outside my station and I need help Kennedy. In September
of nineteen sixty three, Kennedy was indeed president. He wouldn't
(35:12):
be assassinated until November of that year. Harold made a decision.
Whatever was happening, whether it was real or impossible or
some kind of waking dream, there was a man on
the other end of that radio who was terrified, and
Harold wasn't going to just ignore that. Okay, Ranger Morrison,
I believe you. I'm going to try to get help
to your location, but I need you to stay on
(35:34):
the line with me. Can you do that, Yes, I
can do that. Thank you, Thank you for believing me.
What followed was the longest night of Harold Price's life.
He stayed on that radio for seven hours, from two
in the morning until nine in the morning, talking to
William Morrison, listening to his growing fear as the sounds
(35:55):
outside his station got louder closer. Morrison described what he
was hearing heavy footsteps in the underbrush, branches snapping, and
a sound, a vocalization of some kind that he said
was like nothing he'd ever heard, low and rumbling, but
with a quality to it that made his hair stand
on end. It's almost like it's speaking, Morrison said at
(36:18):
one point, like it's trying to form words, but the
words don't make sense. They're not in any language I know.
Around five in the morning, Morrison reported that the sounds
had stopped. I think it's gone, he said, I think
whatever it was, it's moved on. But he was wrong.
At seven point thirty, just as dawn was breaking, Morrison's
(36:40):
voice came through the radio again, but this time it
was different, tight, with fear, almost a whisper. It's at
the window, he said, God help me. It's at the window.
I can see it. I can see. What do you see, William?
What does it look like? A long pause? When Rrison
(37:00):
spoke again, His voice was barely audible. It looks like nothing,
he said, like a hole in the world, like darkness
given shape. But there are eyes, eyes that aren't eyes
watching me, seeing me, knowing me. William, get away from
the window. Is there another exit? Can you get out
(37:21):
of there? It's at every window now, all of them.
It's everywhere at once. How can it be everywhere at once?
Harold could hear something in the background, a sound that
made his stomach turn low, resonant, like the subsonic rumble
of an earthquake, but with a rhythm to it, a pattern. William,
(37:42):
listen to me, don't look at it. Close your eyes,
focus on my voice. It knows my name, Morrison whispered.
How does it know my name? It's speaking my name
over and over, William, William William. The background sound grew louder, closer.
Harold could hear it clearly now through the radio, and
(38:05):
every instinct in his body was screaming at him to
turn off the receiver, to break the connection, to get
as far away from that sound as possible, But he didn't.
He stayed on the line. William, stay with me. Help
is coming. Just stay with me. The door, Morrison said,
it's opening. The door. I locked it. I know I
(38:26):
locked it, but it's opening anyway. It's coming inside. There
was a crash, the sound of wood splintering, and then
William Morrison screamed. It was a sound Harold Price would
hear in his nightmares for the rest of his life,
a scream of absolute, primal terror, the sound of a
man facing something so far beyond his understanding, so far
(38:47):
beyond anything he was prepared to encounter that his mind
simply couldn't process it. The scream cut off, the radio
went silent. Harold sat in his basement, trembling, tears streaming
down his face, and waited, waited for Morrison to come
back on the line, waited for any sound, any signal,
(39:08):
any indication of what had happened. Nothing. The frequency was dead.
Harold tried to find help. He called the Forest Service,
but they had no record of arranger Station fourteen, no
record of a ranger named William Morrison. He went to
the coordinates Morrison had given him. There was nothing there,
just forest, just trees. But here's where this story gets
(39:31):
even stranger. Harold was an engineer, a meticulous man. He'd
recorded the entire conversation. He had the audio, he had proof.
So he started digging. He went to the county archives,
dug through old records, newspaper clippings from the sixties forest
service reports, and he found it. September fifteenth, nineteen sixty three,
(39:54):
a brief notice in the local paper a forest ranger
named William Morrison had disappeared while on duty at a
temporary lookout station on the north slope of Mount Hermon.
The station had been established that summer as part of
a firewatch program and was scheduled to be decommissioned at
the end of the season. Station fourteen. Morrison had been found,
(40:15):
or rather his remains had been found, three days after
his disappearance, two miles from the station. The official cause
of death was animal attack, bare, the report said, But
Harold read the details. Read about how Morrison's body had
been found, about the wounds that didn't match any known predator,
(40:35):
about the look of absolute terror, frozen on what remained
of his face, and about the radio that had been
found in the wreckage of the station, still broadcasting an
emergency signal that no one received. No one until Harold
Price fifty one years later. I met Harold in twenty sixteen,
two years after his experience. He was a changed man.
(40:57):
The confident engineer I'd heard about was gone. In his place,
was someone haunted, someone who spent his nights listening to
old frequencies, hoping to hear Morrison's voice again, hoping for
answers that never came. He played me the recording. I've
heard it the whole seven hours, and I can't explain it.
The audio quality matches equipment from the early sixties. The
(41:19):
background sounds include things that weren't present in twenty fourteen,
like the hum of an old vacuum tube radio transmitter.
The conversation references events and details that would have been
impossible to fake without extensive research into an obscure incident
that most people had never heard of. But more than that,
more than the technical details, more than the historical accuracy,
(41:43):
the fear in William Morrison's voice was real. I've heard
a lot of audio in my career a lot of
alleged evidence, a lot of recordings that people claim capture
something supernatural. Most of them are obvious fakes, hoaxes, misidentified
natural sounds. This wasn't that. The terror in that man's
voice as he described the thing at his window, the
(42:05):
absolute breakdown as it came through the door. That's not
something you can fake. I don't know how Harold Price
received a transmission from fifty one years in the past.
I don't know if radio waves can bend time, or
if time can fold back on itself, or if there
are places in the world where the normal rules simply
don't apply. What I do know is this. William Morrison
(42:28):
died on September fifteenth, nineteen sixty three, and on September fourteenth,
twenty fourteen, Harold Price heard it happen. He heard a
man from another era call out for help, and he
couldn't save him. That might be the most haunting part
of all, the knowledge that somewhere, some win William Morrison
was crying out into the darkness, begging for help, and
(42:51):
help couldn't come, not in his time, not in any time.
Some things, I suppose, are fixed. Some events can't be changed,
no matter how much we want to change them. And
some deaths are just the beginning of a very long story.
The last story I want to share with you tonight
is different from the others. It's not a story about
(43:13):
one person. It's about a family, a whole family, who
experienced something together, something they still don't talk about decades later.
I heard this account from the father, a man i'll
call Robert. He reached out to me in twenty twenty
one after hearing one of my early podcasts, said he
had something to share, something that had happened to his
(43:34):
family in the summer of nineteen eighty nine. He'd never
told anyone outside the family, never reported it, never went public,
But the weight of it, he said, was becoming too
much to carry alone. So he told me, and now
I'm telling you. In the summer of eighty nine, Robert
was thirty four years old. He had a wife, Linda,
(43:55):
and two kids, a son named Tommy who was eleven,
and a daughter named Era, who was eight. They were
a typical American family lived in a suburb of Cleveland.
Robert worked in sales, Linda was a teacher. The kids
were good kids, normal kids. Every summer the family went camping.
It was a tradition Robert had started when Tommy was
(44:16):
just a toddler. One week in the wilderness, no phones,
no television, just the four of them, the tent and
the great outdoors. That year, they'd chosen a campground in
the Allegheny National Forest in northwestern Pennsylvania. It was a
beautiful area, dense hardwood forests, clear streams, remote camp sites
(44:38):
that made you feel like you were a million miles
from civilization. They arrived on a Saturday afternoon, set up camp,
went fishing in a nearby stream, made dinner over the campfire,
roasted marshmallows, told stories, watched the stars come out. It
was perfect, the kind of evening that makes you remember
why you love being alive. Stay tuned for more backwoods
(45:01):
Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. They turned
in around nine o'clock. The kids were tired from the drive.
Robert and Linda didn't last much longer. Soon the whole
family was asleep in their tent, lulled by the sounds
of the forest, the chirping of crickets, the hooting of
an owl, the soft rustle of wind through the trees,
(45:25):
the sounds of the night Robert woke up sometime later.
He checked his watch two seventeen in the morning. He
wasn't sure what had woken him. Maybe he needed to
use the bathroom, maybe one of the kids had shifted
in their sleep. But as he lay there in the darkness,
he realized something was wrong. It was quiet, not just quiet, silent,
(45:48):
completely utterly, unnaturally silent. The crickets had stopped, the owl
was gone. There was no wind in the trees, no
sound of any kind. Nothing. Robert sat up slowly. His
heart was pounding. Every instinct he had was screaming that
something was wrong, that they were in danger. He reached
(46:09):
over and touched Linda's shoulder. She woke immediately, as if
she'd been lying there awake already, just waiting. Do you
hear that, he whispered, I don't hear anything, She whispered back.
That's what woke me up. The silence. They lay there together,
listening to the nothing, straining their ears for any sound,
(46:30):
any indication of what was happening outside their thin nylon walls.
Then Tommy spoke Dad. His voice was small, scared, something's outside.
Robert's hair stood up on the back of his neck.
What do you mean, buddy, what do you see. I
don't see anything, Tommy said, but I can feel it.
(46:52):
Something's walking around the tent. Robert listened, strained every sense
he had, and then he felt it too, not her.
Felt a pressure in his chest, await in the air,
something moving just outside the tent, so close he could
almost reach out and touch it through the fabric, but
completely impossibly silent. No footsteps, no breathing, no rustle of movement,
(47:18):
just a presence, a feeling of something massive. Watching. Sarah
started to cry, soft whimpering cries that she tried to
muffle with her sleeping bag. Linda reached over and pulled
her close, one arm around each child, her eyes fixed
on the wall of the tent. Robert reached for the flashlight.
(47:38):
His hand found it in the darkness, closed around the
familiar shape. He didn't turn it on, not yet. Something
told him that would be a mistake, that drawing attention
to themselves would be bad, very bad. They waited one minute,
two five. The presence circled the tent slow. Robert could
(48:01):
track it by the feeling alone, even though there was
no sound to follow. It moved around them in a
perfect circle, pausing at each point, as if examining them,
studying them. Then it stopped right outside the tent door.
Robert could feel it there, standing waiting. The zipper on
the tent door was six inches from his face. If
(48:23):
something wanted to get in, all it had to do
was reach out and pull. Nobody moved, nobody breathed. Robert
would later tell me that he experienced a kind of
paralysis in that moment. Not physical. He could move if
he wanted to, but something in his brain, something ancient
and primal, was screaming at him not to to stay still,
(48:45):
to stay quiet, to not draw the attention of whatever
was out there. And then, gradually, impossibly slowly, the presence
moved away. Robert felt it retreat from the tent, felt
it move across the campsite, felt it heading toward the
tree line. And as it moved, the silence moved with it.
(49:05):
That's what Robert remembers most clearly. That's what haunts him
to this day. The silence wasn't a condition of the forest.
It was attached to the thing. It followed the presence
like a shadow, like an aura. Wherever that thing went,
all sound died. As the presence reached the edge of
the campsite, Robert finally found the courage to move. He
(49:28):
crawled to the tent door, slowly, silently. He reached for
the zipper. Linda grabbed his arm. Don't, she whispered, Please, don't,
But Robert had to know, had to see. He eased
the zipper down just an inch, just enough to create
a gap he could look through, and he looked out
(49:49):
into the night. At first, he saw nothing, just the
darkness of the forest, the shapes of trees against the
slightly lighter sky, the dead coals of their campfire. Then
he saw it, moving between the trees at the edge
of the campsite, a shape, a silhouette, darker than the
darkness around it, if that makes sense, like a hole
(50:11):
cut in the fabric of the night. It was tall,
seven feet maybe eight, broad shouldered, but somehow thin, moving
with a fluid grace that seemed wrong for anything with
physical form, And as Robert watched it stopped. It turned,
and even though he couldn't see its face, even though
it was nothing more than a shape in the darkness,
(50:34):
Robert knew it was looking at him. He says he
felt its attention focus on him, like a weight like
being pinned beneath something massive, like being examined under a microscope.
Then it turned back and it walked into the forest,
and it was gone. The moment it disappeared, the silence broke.
Sound came flooding back like a dam had burst, Crickets, frogs,
(50:58):
an owl, the wind in the tree ease, all of
it all at once, so sudden and loud that it
felt almost deafening after the absolute nothing that had come before,
the family didn't sleep. They sat in that tent until dawn,
huddled together, jumping at every sound. When the first light came,
Robert was outside breaking down the camp. They were in
(51:20):
the car and driving home before the sun was fully up.
Nobody talked during the drive, four hours of complete silence.
When they got home, Robert tried to bring it up,
tried to talk about what had happened, but nobody wanted to.
Linda changed the subject, Tommy went to his room, Sarah
started crying again, so they didn't talk about it. Not then,
(51:43):
not ever. It became the family's unspoken secret, the thing
that happened that they all agreed without ever saying so,
to pretend hadn't happened. They never went camping again. Robert
told me all of this over the course of several conversations,
and at the end of our last talk, I asked
him the question I'd been wanting to ask the whole time.
(52:04):
What do you think it was? He was quiet for
a long time, then he finally spoke. I've spent twenty
three years thinking about that, he said, twenty three years
reading about cryptids and creatures and things that shouldn't exist.
And I still don't have an answer. But but I
have a theory, he paused. I don't think it was
(52:25):
a creature, not the way we think of creatures. I
don't think it was something living, at least not in
the way we understand life. I think it was an absence,
he said, an emptiness, a place where something should be.
But isn't like a hole in reality, a gap in
the world. I don't understand neither do I not really,
(52:47):
But that's the closest I can come to describing what
it felt like. It wasn't just that there was no
sound around it. It was like the silence was part
of it, like it was made of silence, made of nothing.
He looked at me with eyes that had seen something
they were never meant to see. We think of the
dark as the absence of light, he said, But what
(53:07):
if there are other kinds of absences? What if there
are things in this world that are the absence of sound,
the absence of warmth, the absence of life itself? And
what if sometimes those absences take shape? What if they move?
What if they walk through our forests and our mountains
and our darkest nights, and we only know they're there
(53:28):
because everything else has fled. I didn't have an answer
for him, still don't, But I've thought about what Robert
said a lot over the years, about the idea of
absences taking form, about the possibility that the silence itself
was the thing, not a creature that moved in silence,
but silence that moved like a creature. It's a terrifying thought.
(53:51):
Because we like to think we understand our world. We
like to believe that every question has an answer, every
phenomenon has an explanation, every misas can be solved if
we just think hard enough. But what if there are
things that exist beyond our understanding? What if there are
gaps in reality that we weren't meant to see? What
if there are absences walking among us, And the only
(54:13):
warning we get is when the world goes quiet. The
next time you're in the woods, pay attention. Listen to
the sounds around you, the birds, the insects, the wind.
And if those sounds suddenly stop, if the forest goes quiet,
if you find yourself surrounded by a silence so complete
it presses against your ear drums like a physical force,
(54:36):
don't move, don't breathe, and whatever you do, don't look,
because something might be looking back. Well that's where we
leave it for tonight. Four stories, Four encounters with things
that shouldn't exist, Four windows into a world that operates
by rules we don't understand. I told you at the
beginning that not everything in the deep Woods can be
(54:58):
explained by large, hairy, bye pedal creatures, And I hope
I've made my case. There are stranger things out there,
darker things, things that bend time and cast shadows without
substance and broadcast across decades, and walk wrapped in silence.
Are these stories true? I believe they are. I believe
(55:19):
the people who told them to me. I believe the
evidence I've seen and the recordings I've heard, and the
haunted looks in the eyes of witnesses who clearly wish
they'd never experience what they experienced. But belief isn't proof,
And in this field, in this strange corner of research
that I've devoted my life to, proof is hard to
come by. All I can offer is the stories themselves,
(55:42):
the testimonies of people who walked into the wilderness and
came back changed, the accounts of ordinary folks who encountered
something extraordinary and spent the rest of their lives trying
to make sense of it. Whether you believe them is
up to you, But I'd ask you to keep an
open mind, because our world is bigger than we know,
older than we think, and full of mysteries that science
(56:03):
has yet to explain. Maybe someday we'll have answers. Maybe
someday we'll understand what lurks in the spaces between the trees,
in the frequencies between radio stations, in the silence between sounds.
Until then, all we have are stories, and the stories
are enough to keep me searching. Thanks for listening. Stay
(56:26):
safe out there, stay curious, and remember what I always say.
The woods have secrets, and some secrets don't want to
be found. Did in spo
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