Stairs In The Woods | CreepCast

38:45I don't ask about that kind of thing because past a certain point, it doesn't really matter. Someone is missing, and it's my job to find them. We went out in a standard search formation, and it wasn't long before one of our vets found signs that the guy had gone off the trail. We grouped up and followed him, spreading out in a fan to make sure we were covering as much ground as possible. Suddenly, a call comes over the radio telling us all to head back to the vet's location, and we come right away, because this usually means the missing person is injured and we need a full team to help get them out safely.

39:18we meet back up and the vet is just standing at the base of a tree with his hands on the sides of his head i asked my buddy what's going on he points up into the branches of this tree i almost couldn't believe what i was seeing but there's a walking stick dangling from a branch at least 30 feet off the ground a little strap thing on the handle been looped around the branch and it's just hanging there. There's no way the guy could have tossed it up that far, and we don't have any other signs that he's still in the area. We call up into the tree, but it's obvious no one's in it. We're all just sort of left scratching our heads.

39:55We keep searching for the guy, but we never find him. We even bring our canines out, but they lose the scent long before this tree. Eventually, the search is called off because there are other calls we have to attend to. Past a certain point, There's not much we can do. This guy's wife called us every day for months asking if we found her husband. It was heartbreaking to hear her get more and more hopeless each time. I'm not sure why this call in particular was so upsetting, but I think it was just the sheer improbability of it. That and the questions that were raised, how the hell had this guy's cane ended up there?

40:31Did someone kill him and toss that up some weird trophy? We did our best to find him. It was almost like a taunt. we still talk about that one from time to time man imagine like again the campfire thing it's like okay did he go up a staircase and get up there yeah yeah kill him and drag him up there or the staircase is kind of an interesting theory actually walking out randomly that he walked to the top of the staircase yeah yeah got snagged by something and then yeah exactly yeah there's a lot there's so many like but again it leaves enough room where all we see is the aftermath so it's well there's always like a extremely like sad and bitter taste in your mouth because these do a good job also by like showing the victim's family like just that little thing of like she called every day just heartbreaking you know brutal yeah or alternatively did the bear man show up and hurl this dude into the sky yeah the bug the bug man and the bear man just fucking suplexed him to the moon

41:35missing kids are the most heartbreaking doesn't matter what circumstances they go missing under it's never easy and we always always dread the ones we find deceased it's not common but it does happen david politis talks a lot about kids search and rescue teams found in places they shouldn't be or couldn't be i can honestly say i've heard about this kind of thing happening more than i've seen it but I'll share one of the ones that I think about a lot that I witnessed personally. Mother and her three kids were out for a picnic in an area of the park that has a small lake. One is six, one is five, and the other is about three.

42:13She's watching them all really closely, and according to her, she never lets them out of her side at any time. She never saw anyone else in that area either, which is important. She packs their stuff up, and they start to head back to the parking area. Now, this lake is only about two miles into the woods, and it's on a very clearly established trail. It's almost impossible to get lost getting from the parking area to it unless you're deliberately going off the path like an imbecile. Her kids are walking in front of her when she hears what sounds like someone coming up the path behind her. She turns around, and in the four or so seconds she's not looking, her five-year-old son vanishes.

42:56she figures he stepped off the trail to pee or something and she asked her other two where he went they both tell her that a big man with the scary face came out of the woods next to them took the kid's hand and let him into the trees the two remaining kids don't seem upset in fact she says later that it seems like they've been drugged they're sort of spacey and fuzzy so of course, she freaks out, starts looking frantically in the area for her kid. She's screaming his name and she says at one point she thinks she heard him answer her. Now, obviously, she can't go blindly running into the woods.

43:33She's got the other two kids. So she calls the police and they send us out immediately. We respond and we start the search for him. Over the course of this search, which spans miles, we never find a single trace of the kid. Canines can't pick up any scent. We literally anything that would signify a child being there. Of course, there's suspicion about the mother for a while, but it's pretty clear that she's completely destroyed by the whole thing. We looked for this kid for weeks, with a lot of volunteer help. But eventually, search peters out, and we have to move on. The volunteers keep searching, though.

44:11One day, we get a call on the radio letting us know that a body's been found and needs to be recovered. They tell us the location and none of us can believe it. We figure it has to be a different kid. But we go out there about 15 miles from the site where he vanished. Sure enough, we find the body of the kid we've been looking for. I've been trying to figure out how this kid got where he did ever since we found him. And I've never come up with an answer. Volunteer just happened to be in the area because he figured he might as well look in places no one else would think to on the off chance the body had been dumped.

44:46He comes to the base of a tall, rocky slope, and halfway up, he sees something. Looks through his binoculars, and sure enough, it's the body of a little boy, stuffed in a little opening in the rock. He recognizes the color of the kid's shirt, so he knows right away that it's the missing boy. That's when he calls it in, and we're dispatched. It took us almost an hour to get his body down, and none of us could believe what we were seeing. Not only was the kid 15 miles from where he'd started, there was no possible way he could have gotten up there on his own. This slope is treacherous, and it's hard even for us with our climbing gear.

45:26Five-year-old boy had no way of getting up there, of that uncertain. Not only that, but the kid doesn't have a scratch on him. His shoes are gone, but his feet aren't damaged or dirty. So it wasn't as if an animal dragged him up there. From what we can tell, he hasn't been dead that long. He'd been out there over a month by that point, and it looked like he'd only been dead for, at most, a day or two. The whole thing was unbelievably strange. It was one of the most disconcerting calls I've ever been on. We found out later that the coroner determined the kid had died from exposure. He'd frozen to death, probably late at night, two days before we found him.

46:06There were no suspects, no answers. Date. It's one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. Jesus. So he was stuffed inside. Do you think he was just trapped? He couldn't get out of the... No, because they mentioned that it's a place of a rock face where a kid couldn't have gone. So it's like the fuzzy man, the man with the scary face or whatever. Or not the fuzzy man. The fuzzy man shows up later. The man with the scary face, like, leads him by the hand, and then maybe the kid dies in the woods, so he just shoves his body into a rock crevice. like halfway up a mountain side. Jesus. God to find that too would be fucking disgusting.

46:43Good Lord. It's weird though. It's like these things where I can't tell if they're leading them to the stairs or if it's like, cause like it doesn't seem like they're being murdered. They're just one of the many things that happens out here. I just, yeah. I mean, you're probably right. I just thought it's in a weird way. It feels like in this unnatural world, all these things are connected in some, I don't know. It's, it's just odd. yep i also it reminds me a lot of these details remind me of real cases there was one case i think this was it was somewhere in like the pnw i think montana uh where this i think he was four he was with his family and he was found he was out camping and he disappears and they'd have a big hunt for him for two days and they find him i may be getting two of them combined in my head They find him in the middle of like a pond on a tree.

47:38And he's alive. He's still alive. And they ask him what happened. And he's like, the cat, a big cat or a kitty or something like that was with him. And then he was just up in that tree and he couldn't give any more explanation. But he had gotten, I think, 12 miles over the course of a day or so. Uh, and there was an episode of survivor man where he tried to recreate the path in the same timeframe and he couldn't do it. Well, I was going to say, I had a four year old, I feel like people might be like 15 miles. Isn't that far? 12 miles. Isn't that far? That's right. It's a sheer rock face straight.

48:21Yeah, exactly. It's not like it's just straight path. It's up major. I mean, like you'd have to walk. It'd be, it would be insane. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Four year old though. So the only theory people make is like maybe a cougar carried him all the way and left him on top of a tree for some reason. Just stay here. You'll be fine. Yeah. So, you know, weird stuff happens out there. I've heard, dude, so I was camping not long ago, and we were out in the middle of the woods, and I wasn't tent camping. I was just on a bivvy in a tarp. I was curled up in my sleeping bag. This is around, I think, three in the morning, middle of nowhere, underneath the trees, super dark.

49:03And I'm going to sleep. And right before I fell asleep, I heard so distinctly a car unlocking. Like someone hit a key fob, a little click, click, you know? Yeah. And dude, I shot up and was spinning around 20 miles from any roadway, right? Yeah. and bro it messed with me I was like what would make that noise can you imagine a mountain lion stealing your whip just runs me over with my forerunner drives it all the way up in the woods who is that whatever and then they has his head out the window I think he does a fucking donut and he flips you off with his paw and he drives off I'd honestly be like, that's pretty sick.

49:59That's a cool cat. That's a cool mountain lion. That's the coolest thing that ever happened to me. Yeah. Mount lion steals my car. That was the coolest thing that ever happened to me. Yeah, exactly. You die frozen out of nowhere. Yeah. You know what? Almost worth it. Almost worth it. I want to take a moment to thank today's sponsor, Turtle Beach. Things don't always age well, like my chair that died. But some things like Turtle Beach age great. When I was 12 years old, playing on an Xbox 360, Turtle Beach was the brand to get, and I'm happy to tell you that in 2025, they're still the brand that continues to deliver high-quality sound and comfortable functionality.

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52:14So get in on it while you can. Thank you to Turtle Beach for sponsoring the show. Their link will be in the description. We are now back to the episode. One of my first jobs as a trainee was a search op for a four-year-old kid that had gone separated from his mom. This was one of those cases where we knew we were going to find him because the dogs were on a strong scent trail, and we saw clear signs that he was in the area. We ended up finding him in a berry patch about half a mile from where he'd last been seen. Kid wasn't even aware that he'd wandered that far. One of the vets brought him back, which I was glad for because I'm really not good with kids.

52:48and I find it hard to talk to them and keep them company. As my trainer and I are headed back, she decides to take me on a detour to show me one of the hot spots where we tend to find missing people. It's a natural dip in the land near a popular trail and people usually move downhill because it's easier. We hike out there, it's a few miles away, and we get there in about an hour or so. As we're walking around the area and she's pointing out places she's found people in the past, I see something in the distance. Now, this area we're in is about eight miles from the main parking area, though there's back roads you can take to get closer if you don't want to hike that far.

53:27But we're on state-protected land, which means there can't be any kind of commercial or residential development out here. The most you'll ever see is a fire tower, makeshift shelter that homeless people think they can get away with building. But I can see from here that whatever this thing is has straight edges. if there's one thing you learned quickly, it's that nature rarely makes straight lines. I point it out, but she doesn't say anything. She just hangs back and lets me wander over and check it out. I get within about 20 feet of it, and all the hair on the back of my neck stands up. It's a staircase in the middle of the woods.

54:04In the proper context, it would literally be the most benign thing ever. It's just a normal staircase with beige carpet and about 10 steps tall but instead of being in a house where it obviously should be it's out here in the middle of the woods the sides aren't carpeted obviously and i can see the wood it's made of it's almost like a video game glitch where the house has failed to load completely and the stairs are the only thing visible i stand there it's like my brain is working overtime and trying to make sense of what i'm seeing my trainer comes and stands next to me and she just stands there casually, looking at it as if it's the least interesting thing in the world.

54:43I ask her what the thing is doing here, and she just chuckles. Get used to it, Rookie. You're going to see a lot of them. I start to move closer, but she grabs my arm. Hard. I wouldn't do that. Her voice is casual, but her grip is tight, and I just stand there looking at her. You're going to see them all the time, but don't go near them. Don't touch them. Don't go up to them. Just ignore them. I start to ask her about it, but something in the way she's looking at me tells me that it's best if I don't. We'd end up moving on, and the subject doesn't come up again for the rest of my training. She was right, though.

55:18I'd say about every fifth call I go on, I end up running across a set of stairs. Sometimes they're relatively close to the path, maybe within two or three miles. Sometimes they're 20, 30 miles out, literally in the middle of nowhere, and I only find them during the broadcast searches or training weekends. They're usually in good condition, but sometimes it looks like they've been out there for miles. All different kinds, all different sizes. The biggest divers saw looked like they came out of a turn-of-the-century mansion and were at least 10 feet wide with steps leading up at least 15 or 20 feet.

55:55I've tried talking about it with people, but they just give me the same response my trainer did. It's normal. Don't worry about it. They're not a big deal, but don't go close to them or up to them. When trainees ask me about it now, I give them the same response. I don't really know what else to tell them. I'm really hoping someday I get a better answer, but it hasn't happened yet. I feel like by not telling you what would happen if you go up, it would make me go up it. Yeah, well, you'd go up and immediately get like particle eviscerated. Or just so, because also it seems like I'm guessing if I had to guess, it seems like each staircase leads to a different area or something or attracts something different.

56:34You know what I mean? like I doubt all the staircases lead to the same place to me the staircase which the story never gives you a clear answer but to me the staircase almost feels like a lure you know it's just like a little hook dangling there to be like oh come on just walk on me yeah cause it's like there's some entity that wants people to cross over to join or whatever and you need to go up so it's almost like humans go up on these Let me ask you this. This is what the image will be, to be placed out in the woods. Let me ask you this. If you were a paranormal entity in the woods, what would be your lure?

57:13am I like what would get me personally or if I was yeah yeah yeah the latter um mine go ahead hot dogs dan i was gonna say women i guess that only gets half the population if it has to be one blanket what do you mean that only gets half the population you could still you can be a woman out in the middle of woods and anybody's gonna be like oh are you okay i'm over here now i'm talking it needs to be like a like a random object like can you imagine walking through the what you're walking through the deep deep woods when When I said women, by the way, I mean, I mean explicitly like a goth, baddie type.

58:00Oh, buddy. I'm saying a very specific kind of lore. I know what you mean. I know what's going on in your mind. I'm not just saying like the voice of a woman. I'm talking like, uh, I'm talking like the big milky boobies. Well, okay. All right. I didn't say that. I'm talking like, I get it. When, when the coyotes like, Oh God, I'm going to hum and I was like the eyes popping out of the head. That's what I was referring to. hitting the table ah yeah uh so if it had to be an item if it had to be an item you said hot dog stand right yeah i think a hot dog stand's pretty good that would get me in the middle of the woods i mean can you imagine that you're walking through the woods and all of a sudden you're like a glizzy stand and also it has all the feaks and right on it it has all this stuff of like as relish has ketchup mustard everything you could want right and it smells delightful that's how i would do it yeah well if so if i if i'm a smart entity that knows that would look out of place and suspicious i would do one of those like uh the little boxes they set up on trails where you can like it's like emergency supplies with like food and stuff like that like beef jerky see if i were you know it's kind of interesting like it's not necessarily as uncanny as the stairs in the woods.

59:15But what if you were, let me, what if I evolved yours a little bit? What if it was one of those boxes in neighborhoods, in hipster neighborhoods where people leave books? Yeah. It's one of those. Like a book trade thing? Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's one of those. What is this? That kind of thing. You're the book bandit. You're the book bandit. Okay, let's phrase it a bit differently. Because it seems that the point of the stairs is you have to walk through them, like you have to go through the portal. So what would you set up to make people walk through an area? I would have. Okay. So you have to, because in my mind, if you take a book across the threshold, so you're saying this has to be an actual threshold.

59:55You have to cross mine would be a slip and slide.

1:00:01And enticing, an enticing slip inside. And let me tell you, it has all the water features and everything too. Can you imagine trying to not be like, I mean, dude, no one's out here. I can just go on this really quick I'm not going to ask where the water's coming from or why it's in pristine condition I would say it's impossible if no one else is around you I'm not going to look stupid a fully operational slip and slide a tight rope between two trees one of those things we try to bounce on it it even has the mat underneath it I think those are two good I think I've given two fairly good ones You know, it's weird thinking about this now.

1:00:40Like, what would you have to make people walk through a random staircase is probably the best lure because that I feel like I have a natural inclination to walk up it. You know, if it was what if it was a tightrope where you could you couldn't see the other end of the like you couldn't see what it was tied to. I think I absolutely would not get on that. I think I was walking through the woods again across that. I'm not touching it. no way what about the slip inside what about the slip inside where you didn't see the end of it no i'm not i'm not getting on a slip inside in the middle of the woods i can't see the end of it right i'm talking about the rest of the way soaking wet the water fountains that were going on it do you want to hike the rest of the way back soaked i don't think i really mind i think i probably got kind of dirty with wet socks you know how much that sucks obviously you don't fucking wear your socks and shoes.

1:01:36You take it off. You go on. On your knees and you get back you put on your dry socks and you put on your shoes. That's what any normal person would do. I feel like the stairs are the easiest because people just like will walk up the staircase. I am not trying to dethrone the stairs. You asked me what the portal would be. Okay, you have not said one. But you're the one that originally asked. I said a woman and then I said a big titted, thick-eyed woman with fishnets. No, you are adding adjectives I did not put on this young lady I'm deciphering woman we don't need to emphasize the age you were like but hey listen it's not just a voice fellas you did say that because you said that's because I said that only attracts half and you're like no it doesn't if a woman is calling out in the woods and I clarified I'm not talking about a woman calling out in the woods I'm talking about you make eye contact and you do the whole coyote like and you like run for a second like Scooby-Doo in place and then take off like pew and there's a little cloud of smoke.

1:02:37That's what I'm talking about. Not like a help. Help me. Help. Because if I'm in the woods and I just hear that I am not. What do you mean you're not going to help? Okay. Alright. Alright. Realistically. Yeah. Realistically. Yeah. I am going to help. But we're not talking about a realistic scenario. We're talking about a realistic setup. Yeah. No we're talking about a lure. Yes. If I'm in the woods and I hear someone yelling help and I go look and it's just a voice that's kind of spatially calling out from somewhere. No, I would go look to make sure it's not someone that needs help. I feel like you would look for someone to make sure it's not that needs help.

1:03:14But if it's a, if I get to a patch and I'm like, the noise is coming from right here, but there's no one here. I'm leaving. Well, sure. But I'm saying that you went, you would, it would, because in my mind at first it's kind of far away. And then the closer you get, the louder it gets to where it keeps luring you in of like, I'm close. I'm very close. but then by the time that you but by the time that i figure you you know that it's not real i feel like the thing has gotten you is what i would assume right probably you're much by the time i realized i would probably be got right whereas i can tell you levels of uncannyness i agree i mean i'd be like i'm getting the fuck out here exactly exactly or if i kept getting deep burning woman yeah if you see a woman you got you gotta get all the way up to it before you realize is my point easy all right you see exactly that's my point no no no easy 100 % you're like if I see a woman I gotta get all the way up to it hurricane baby not like that no

1:04:14and I tell you what what's even more poignant is also if you see a slip and slide that you'd be like okay well obviously I'm doing this but then there's no way to get off of it see that's the slip and slide effect too is that you're like we and you're like okay this is kind of going on too long and now you're gonna slip it for exactly too slippery can't move no way of stopping go down a large slide in the woods sounds like a very like penny wise it scenario it does it's too childish but i will say it would be effective for me at least i'm a very dumb man i'm curious i feel like a lot i legitimately actually believe that a lot of people would fall for the slip and slide it would be too enticing it would be uncanny but i think that it's so comically like it's so almost like embedded with our youth that I feel like there would be like, I don't think that you would look at it with hostility for some reason to me, the stairs in the woods, I'm like, that's just creepy.

1:05:03Cause it feels like something has been destroyed. It's like a loss of life around this, a full blown slip and slide with the arches of like the fountains going on it. I think that you would, you would bypass your normal intuition. And I think that you would, you would participate. Yeah. I think you would definitely apply. I can't apply the exact same reasoning to a woman. Okay. All right. Lord, you know, Hurricane Helene. We get it. I understand. I don't like the way you keep saying that. Hurricane Helene. In relation to this scenario. Hurricane Helene. And obviously everything I'm saying is in respect to my wife.

1:05:42But I'm saying that's the easiest way to get a guy to walk into the woods with absolutely no credit or thought to what's happening. You could have said that last thing with more of a fucking lie. I'm saying it was all respect to. my wife of course of course my wife yeah i wouldn't fall for it now because i'm a married man largest wink ever definitely with respect to my wife my wife i'm just saying hurricane helene i'm just i'm saying that i of course wouldn't fall for it because i'm a married man but if i was to trap a man that would be the way i trap it as i think that we can at least agree that there would be a lot of easy ways to actually lure humans to the woods honestly dude put a weird put a funny looking stick out there yeah or like something like i'm like what's that i gotta go get that that or if you did a thing like we just like if you had like a like a giant like a big pumpkin out there right there's a big pumpkin but it's formed in a way that looks like it has a giant ass where it's kind of funny you're like doesn't look like a big butt yeah it was like a big butthole you like look up in it look at the butt i think people that would lure people in too yeah and then boom you're you're it's too late now you're in the pocket dimension good luck idiot

1:07:00all right that that was a good way to burn up 10 minutes oops sorry

1:07:09this is another one that was less spooky and more sad a young man went missing late in winter when realistically no one should be going that far out onto the trails We closed a lot of them, but some remain open year-round, unless there's a shitload of snow. We did an op for him, but we had about six feet of snow on the ground. Damn. It was an unusually heavy snow year, and we knew it wasn't likely that we'd find him until spring when the thaw came. Sure enough, when the first big thaw came, a hiker reported a body a little ways off the main trail. We found him at the base of a tree in a pile of melted snow.

1:07:45I knew right away what had happened and it scared the living shit out of me most of you who ski or snowboard or spend any amount of time on a mountain will probably have guessed too when snow falls it doesn't collect as thick in the areas beneath the branches it happens most with fir trees because they have a sort of closed umbrella shape so what you end up with is a space around the base of the tree that's filled with a mixture of loose powdery snow air and branches They're called tree wells, and they're not immediately obvious if you don't know what you're looking for. We put up signs in the welcome center, big ones, letting people know how dangerous they are.

1:08:24But every year that we get an unusual amount of snow, at least one person doesn't read them or doesn't take the warning seriously, and we find out about it in the spring. My best guess is that this young man was hiking and got tired, or maybe a cramp from walking in the deep snow. He went to go sit at the base of the tree, not knowing that there was a tree well, and fell in. He got stuck with his feet up, and the surrounding snow caved in around him. And able to free himself, he suffocated. It's called snow immersion suffocation, and it doesn't usually happen except in really deep snow. But if he gets stuck in a weird position, like this guy did, even six feet of snow can be lethal.

1:09:07What scared me the most was imagining how he must have struggled. upside down in the freezing cold. He didn't die quickly. The snow would have formed a dense, heavy pile on top of him, and it would have been literally impossible to get out. As it got harder to breathe, he would have known what was happening. I can't even imagine what he was thinking in his last moments. Good fucking lord. Yep. Yeah, that would be, uh... You know what? I'll say it. Not good. thank you for clarifying that you're welcome you're welcome i try someone had to a lot of my less outdoorsy friends want to know if i've ever seen the goat man while i've been out on calls unfortunately or i guess fortunately i've never had anything quite like that happen i guess the closest was the whole black-eyed man thing but i didn't see anything however there was one call where i had something kind of similar happen but i'm not sure i'm willing to chalk it up to the coat man.

1:10:09We got a report that an older woman had faded along one of our trails and needed assistance getting back down to the main area. We hike up to where she's at and her husband's just beside himself. He runs, well, I guess more jogs to us and tells us that he was a little ways off the trail looking at something when his wife started screaming behind him. Runs back to her and she's passed out on the trail. We get her on a backboard and as we're getting her down to the welcome center, she comes to and starts screaming again. I calm her down and ask her what happened. I can't remember verbatim what she said, but essentially what happened was this.

1:10:47She'd been waiting for her husband when he started hearing this really strange sound. She said it sounded sort of like a cat, but it was off somehow. She couldn't quite figure out why. She went a little ahead to try and hear it better, but it sounded like it was coming closer. She said the closer it got, the more uneasy she was, until she finally figured out what was wrong. I do remember this next part because it was so weird that I don't think I could have forgotten it if I tried. It wasn't a cat. It was a man. Saying the word meow over and over. Just meow, meow, meow. But it wasn't a man. It couldn't have been, because I've never heard a man make his voice buzz like that.

1:11:34I thought my hearing aid was going out, but it wasn't. I adjusted it, and it still sounded all buzzy. It was awful. He was coming closer, but I couldn't see him. And the closer he got, the more scared I was. And the last thing I remember was a shape coming out of the trees. And I guess that's when I fainted. Now, obviously, I'm a little perplexed as to why a guy would be out in the woods chanting meow meow at people. So once we get down the mountain, I tell my superior that I'm going to go search the area to see if I can find anything. Gives me the go ahead and I grab her radio and hike back to where she fainted.

1:12:11I don't see anyone, so I keep going about a mile more. And when I head back, I go off the trail to see if I can figure out where she saw him coming from. It's almost sunset by this point, and I don't have any desire to be out at night alone, so I just sort of write it off and make a mental note to check it out again tomorrow. As I'm headed back, I start to hear something in the distance. I stop, and I call for anyone in the immediate area to identify themselves. The sound didn't come closer or get louder, but it sounded exactly like a man saying, Yow, yow, in this really odd monotone. As comical as it makes it sound, it was almost like that guy on South Park with the Electrolarynx, Ned.

1:12:58I go off the trail in the direction I think it's coming from, but I never seem to get closer. It's almost like it's coming from all directions. Eventually, it just sort of fades out. I ended up going back to the Welcome Center. I didn't get any further reports like that and even though I went back to the area I never heard that exact sound again I suppose it could have been some stupid kid out there messing with people but even I have to admit it was weird a group of men with like a sexual fetish of being a cat or something is horrifying out there and then being like just meow that within itself is just fucking horrifying let alone it being like a paranormal thing or something weird like that just men with like a fetish out in the woods fucking with people terrifying absolutely terrifying i think this is probably the thing i remember most from this story besides the stairs i think all the time about hearing an animal noise and then realizing it's someone making an animal noise it's like a man i like i always imagine that when i'm like reading this i just kept imagining like a very bad like like an orange morph suit or something like a skin tight morph suit like just a shitty outfit the guy has yeah he's a crawling around on all fours some big sexual deviant I like how you don't even put any goat man or supernatural spin on it's just a pervert well I mean like but seriously how fucking horrifying is that fuck that would be terrifying this far out like imagining a guy like yeah like why are you out here randomly out there because then you have to imagine he walked in there normally at some point, stopped, I'm far out enough here, so he could, like, I don't know, role-play his, like, weird fetish thing, packed up his clothes into a bag, whatever, put it behind a tree, and now he's just, like, walking around the woods, and now when he sees people walk by, he's, like, able to fuck with them.

1:14:55Nah. Nope. I'm good. No, thank you. I feel like you'd be a good search and rescue officer. That might be one of the nicest things you've ever said to me. Thank you. You want to do a role-play? All right. All right. So you're coming up to me. You're a search and rescue officer. I'm an old woman and my leg is broken. Okay. So first off.

1:15:23Hold still, ma 'am. Hold still. We need to hold on. Don't touch me. Am I by myself here? Don't touch me. Am I by myself here? Do not touch me. Am I by myself? Okay. I'm by myself. It hurts. Ma 'am, I need to put a splint on this. I need to put a splint on this. There was a man. Otherwise, it's going to get worse. The man, he's going to come back. He's going to kill us. Please, we quake. Ma 'am, I need you to calm down. Who's going to kill us? Who? Hello. Did you hear him? What? Did someone say hello in a vaguely South American slash Spanish accent? What? He's back. He's back. He's back. Okay. Well, ma 'am, I've got a splint on now.

1:16:03I need you to stay. I think I hear that too man I am over here You're over here Whoever is there identify yourself Oh god he's back I have brought the food The food you've brought food Do you see him What I'm looking in that direction What is he I'm having trouble seeing Describe what you're seeing So I can tell you if it's him or not okay well i'm currently hello sir i'm right here role place where are you at i'm right in front of you i have brought i have brought the food okay well since i'm currently in a role play scenario i don't actually see anything but clearly the person who has a leading objective they're getting to with this voice and accent give me some clues as to what i'm looking at i have brought the food I'm going to pass out.

1:16:59Just tell me what he looks like so I can verify if it's him. Okay, he looks like a DoorDash guy. Are you Rebecca? Ma 'am, is your name Rebecca? My name's Sarah. I'm looking for Rebecca. I have the food. I think you've got the wrong address. What does he look like? What does he look like? Give me extra fist. How tall is he? he's he's probably 5 '10 tan skin dark hair oh no oh god what shirt does he have on does he have a shirt he's horizontal red and white shirt polo I've tried to drop the bag I'm gonna need to take a picture I don't think that I think you've got the wrong address you know it's funny because when I entered this scenario it was over me being a search and rescue officer Sir, have a good day.

1:17:56I have to get out of here. I have other jobs I have to do. Is he gone? Yeah, he's gone. He's walking away. You hear the bushes move. What's that? What's that noise?

1:18:13There's bushes over there. Hey, ma 'am, who's my guide in this? There's bushes moving. I don't see anyone yet. We're going to have to wait for an indicator so I can have something to work off of to see what that noise might be. You better go look at what that is to help us. Ma 'am, you're still bleeding. I put the splint on. I haven't put it. I don't feel good. Look, I'm a search rescue officer here. Here's a tourniquet. I'm putting a tourniquet on you. It's going to hurt a lot. Boom, there it is. Cry more worried about the bush. We should get out of here. We should leave. I should not go randomly walk to a bush while an old lady has a leg broken in the middle of the trail.

1:18:55We should leave. I'm up. I'm walking. I'm over at the bush. I'm standing at the bush.

1:19:04Get out of here. Who are you, Bush? Identify yourself. Get out of here. Who is it? I've been trying to get out of here since we showed up. I don't know why there was a door dash driver in the middle of a hiking trail. You don't want to help her. Get out of here. Why don't I want to help her? What is he saying? Don't tell her what I just said. Just get, you got to get out of here. Well, who is, what is he saying? Okay. I'm okay. Okay, ma 'am. Let's go back to camp. Come on. I'm going to lift you up. You're on my shoulder and we're walking back to camp.

1:19:46Ow. What? My leg hurts. I'm walking. Ow. Okay. All right. I don't know how long. I don't know how long this scenario is going on for. Are we to the camp yet? We didn't really participate that hard. You're not giving me anything. That's like bushes. You have to go. You have to be more. It doesn't matter. We'll end it. I was going to have the guy be naked. He's going to say he stole. She's wearing my clothes. And then she was going to be wearing his clothes. I walked over. She actually was. She was Rebecca. Wow. It was good. I had a whole thing that was waking up. I never saw that one coming. You weren't giving.

1:20:28I walked up to the bushes. I spoke. You could have been like, there's a naked man or I'm naked or something. You're just like, don't trust her. I'm looking. I'm looking in the bush. What's going on? Because you could have been like, sir, get out of the bush. And I was going to say, I can't. I'm naked. Why are you playing so coy with me? That's the game. You have to unveil more. I can't just give you everything. That's the thing. I'm sorry to role play the way you wanted me to. You never do, especially in the bedroom. See how he's blushing, Chet? We both know that's a lie, considering the horrific text messages you send me unprompted.

1:21:12Can't you see I'm reaching out? I'm trying to get affection from you. can't you see i'm desperately reaching out for love this does this does kind of feel like a cat that's like walks up to you it's like pawing at your pants like i'm making bread on your pants that kind of sounds like i came on your pants that's not what i'm saying i mean the thing making biscuits whatever the fuck it's called okay making biscuits is the term for it i just made bread on your pants don't give them that don't give them that they're too feral as is. You remember all those like old TikTok, not TikTok, like the old Vine accounts or Tumblr accounts that would just be like YouTube guys, like Markiplier, Jacksepticeye, or like Dan and Phil and stuff, and it'd be edits about how they're secretly in a relationship.

1:22:01I feel like those girls found us, because I see those all the time. There was people that said Markiplier and Jacksepticeye were having sex with each other? No, they would just make edits where it looked like the two of them would kiss or stuff like that like they wanted them to what I'm saying is those people found us so you don't need to give them that much room well I can tell you right now Markiplier and Jack Subtacare those are better looking guys than us I would agree with that us we don't make love we make slop is what we make okay okay as if we were as if we did the edits it would be a mud pit of despair okay alright alright alright search and rescue officer okay end of that segment mud pit what man it's a little dirty

1:23:00so this kind of turned into a massive wall of text and for that I apologize I wanted to get to the stories my friend told me and he does have some good ones so i'll post those tomorrow evening i also have a few more of my own i think you guys will like i'm sorry to keep you all in suspense again hopefully the stories here make up for it and help you get through the next 24 hours until i can post again edit since it seems like all of you would like to hear more tomorrow i'll write up as many stories as i can and do a massive post i'll include my friends stories and i'll see if i can get a hold of few more people who might have interesting things to talk about.

1:23:38I just wasn't sure how people felt about big, huge walls of text, but if you're all okay with it, I'll post lots of stories. End of part two. Part three, baby! Maybe we can get into some more roleplay, too. Hello? Part three. I am here for my DoorDash order. Part three. Well, once again, you guys have blown me away with your staggering amount of responses to my stories. What? just blowing past what I said. You're like, well, once again, you guys have blown me away with your staggering amount of response. It's just funny. I thought that was silly. Well, I can see you being good at DoorDash too, Isaiah.

1:24:22Okay. Well, I'm not going to answer because that will open up a door for you to want to roleplay it. If you were dropping off a DoorDash, here we go. If you were dropping off a Chick-fil-A order, drop it down, take a picture of it and a person answered to you and they were wearing a kimono if i look extremely obese i mean huge basically if i was sitting there and i was all bald hairless and i was wearing a kimono a sheer kimono that had like j it was like jade green and i had a long brown fu manchu uh at the door and i was just like thank you so much would you would you engage in conversation with that person or would you just leave it and be like okay have a good one I would do what I would do for every client have a good one alright first off don't refer to your your DoorDash recipients as clients because that's not that's not appropriate that seems like you know it's not that business cat it's not that business form what do you want me to call him the hogs I feed slop well yes if a large obese man in a kimono with a brown Fu Manchu yes you can call him a hog here's your fried chicken sandwich pig is what you should say oh my god what if he had a katana what if he was holding a katana would you hey man you want to play for you'll play ghost to answer the door dash driver with a weapon well he's he opens the front door because you just left it there and he has a katana he's like hey man you want to come inside play starfox uh no i've got other orders sorry he grips it with both hands puts it in like a combat position.

1:26:08I can tell no, sorry, sir. I've got other orders. I can tell the guy that is currently setting up this, this scenario really wants me to come inside and play star Fox for something. He has set up, but I have a job to do, which is read a scary story. So I have a good one. Take care. All right. No problem, man. Have a good day. God bless. There you go. I would imagine he struck a pose like crouching tiger, hitting dragon with the sword. He had like the two fingers up and he was holding the sword like this whatever. Yeah, that'd be sick. I said come in and play Star Fox. I mean, I'd probably fucking go and play Star Fox.

1:26:47I'd be kind of scared. I can't do it anymore. I'm sorry. It's assuming random tangents. I'm sorry. Go ahead. maybe one day I'll be brave enough you want to come in here and get into a little trouble

1:27:09no thank you sir I still have orders all right and just know my door is always open

1:27:20there's no way I can respond to each of you individually so I'm just going to address some common things again and then move on to the stories. I'm going to write as many as I can think of in addition to my friend's stories, and I will probably not update again until I get a chance to answer some questions that I myself have for my superiors. All right, so common questions I find you all had. I'm not comfortable talking about where exactly I work, unfortunately. In all reality, some of the things I've mentioned here could get me in a lot of trouble or fired, so it's best if I just don't discuss them too much.

1:27:54I will say that I'm in the US and in the area that is compromised of a great deal of wilderness. We're talking hundreds of miles of thick forest with a mountain range and a few lakes. There's still a great amount of interest in the stairs and luckily for you guys, my friend has a story that I think you all will be interested in. I'll go into them more at the end of this update. As for whether or not I've ever thought of asking my superiors about them, I have, but again, I don't want to risk my job. However, one of my former superiors no longer works as a search and rescue officer, and it's possible that he may be willing to talk to me about it.

1:28:30I'll be speaking to him later in the week, and I'll let you all know what comes with that. As far as advice on becoming a search and rescue officer goes, I think the best advice I can give is to contact your local Forest Service office and see if they offer in training courses or what the qualifications are. I've been doing this for years, and I started out as a volunteer helping on search and rescue operations. It's a great job, despite the occasional tragic situations, and I wouldn't want to do anything else. All right, so let's move on to the stories. The first happened on a case that I went on right after I got out of training, and was still pretty new to everything.

1:29:06Before I took this job, I was a volunteer, so I had a basic idea of what to expect. But on those calls, you're mostly dealing with finding lost people after vets have found signs of them. As a search and rescue officer, you go out for all kinds of cases, from animal bites to heart attacks. This case got called in early in the morning from a young couple who were up on one of the trails that goes by the lake. The husband was completely hysterical, and we couldn't really figure out what was going on. We could hear the woman screaming in the background, and he was begging for us to come up there right away.

1:29:41When we get there, we see him holding his wife. She's got something in her arms. She's screaming these awful, almost animal-like screams, and he's sobbing. He sees us, and he screams at us to help them. Please, get an ambulance up here. Now, obviously, we can't just drive an ambulance up the walking path, so we ask him if his wife needs help or if she can walk on her own. He's still hysterical, but he manages to tell us that it's not his wife that needs help. I go over. Can you hear the dog barking? Yeah, it scared the shit out of me. Actually, if I'm being like that one, I was like, oh, my God.

1:30:15It kind of got me. I was like getting to the story. So there's people at the house working on it right now. And Benny hates company. So I lock him in the bedroom and turn on bird, like bird feeder cameras because he just watches the birds. And like he just stays locked in, stares out. But when the birds get into fights, he gets really fired up. Oh, shit. Really? Like if the birds start like squawking at each other, he gets in on it. He jumps up and starts barking. So that's what that was. I go over while one of the vets tries to calm him down, and I ask the wife what's going on. She's rocking, holding something, and just shrieking over and over.

1:30:56I crouch down and see that whatever she's holding is covering her with blood. That's when I notice a sling on her front, and my heart sinks. I ask her to tell me what's going on, and I sort of pry her arms gently open so I can see what she's holding. It's her baby, obviously dead. His head has caved in on one side, and he's covered in scratches. now i've seen dead bodies before but something about this whole situation hits me hard i have to take a second to compose myself and i get up and go get one of the other vets who's standing by i tell him that it's a dead kid he sort of pats my shoulder and tells me he'll deal with it took us over an hour to get this woman to let us see her kid every time we try to take it from her she flips out and tells us we can't have him that we'll be okay if we just leave her alone let her help him eventually one of the vets manages to calm her down and she gives us the body took him back to the med area but when the emts showed up they told us there was never any hope of saving the kid he died instantly from the trauma to his head i was good buddies with one of the nurses who met them at the hospital and she told me later what had happened there's now the couple had been walking with the baby in the sling they stopped because the kid was fussing dad takes the kid and is holding him looking out over the little gully by the path The mom comes to stand next to him.

1:32:13She ends up stepping on a loose patch of soil and she trips. She falls into the dad, who drops the kid, who ends up falling about 20 feet down this little gully onto the rocks at the bottom. Dad climbed down and recovered the kid, but he'd fallen right on his head and was dead by the time he got there. The baby was only about 15 months old. Total freak accident. A series of events that coalesced into the worst possible outcome. probably one of the more awful calls i've been on i haven't seen a lot of animal bites in my time as a search and rescue officer mostly because there aren't that many animals that come around the area while there are bears in the area they tend to stay pretty far away from people and sightings are highly unusual most of the animals you'll see are small ones like coyotes raccoons or skunks what we do see frequently though are moose and let me tell you moose are nasty guys they'll chase after anything for any reason god help you if you get in between a female and its baby one of the more amusing calls was the guy who'd gotten chased down by an absolutely massive male moose and was stuck up a tree took us almost an hour to get him down and when he was finally on solid ground again he looks at me and says god damn them fuckers is big up close i guess that's not really a scary story but we still laugh about that one god i honestly don't know if

1:33:42yeah honestly don't know if i'd forgotten this story but it is by far scariest thing that's happened to me i guess maybe i've tried so long to forget about it that i just didn't come to mind right away. As someone who spends literally all of their time in the woods, you don't ever want to let yourself get scared of being alone or out of the middle of nowhere. That's why when you have experiences like this, tend to just forget about them and move on. This is, to date, the only thing that's ever made me really seriously consider if this job is the right one for me. I don't really like talking about it much, but I'll do the best I can to remember it at all.

1:34:17As I recall, this took place right at the end of spring It was a typical lost child call A four-year-old girl had wandered away from her parents' campsite And had been missing for about two hours Her parents were completely despondent And told us what most parents do My kid would never wander away She's so good about staying close She's never done anything like this before We assured the parents that we'll do everything we can to find her And we spread out in a standard search formation I was partnered with one of my good buddies, and we were sort of casually holding conversations while we hiked.

1:34:51I know it sounds callous, but you do sort of become desensitized when you've done this long enough. It becomes the norm, and I think to a certain extent, you have to learn to desensitize yourself in order to work this job. We search for a good two hours, going well beyond where we think she'd be. And we come out of a small valley when something makes us both stop in unison. We freeze and look at each other. There's almost a sensation like a plane depressurizing. My ears pop and I have this odd sensation of having dropped about 10 feet. I start to ask my buddy if he felt that. Before I can, we hear the loudest sound I've ever heard in my life.

1:35:31It's almost like a freight train passing directly by us, but it's coming from every direction at once, including above and below us. He screams something to me, but I can't hear him over this deafening roar. Understandably freaked out, we look all around us, trying to find the source of the sound, but neither of us sees anything. Of course, my first thought is a landslide, but we're not near any cliffs, and even if we were, it would have hit us by now. The sound goes on and on, and we're trying to yell to each other, but even standing close together we can't hear anything but this sound. Then, as suddenly as it starts, it stops, like someone threw a switch and cut it off.

1:36:13we stand there for a second perfectly still and slowly the normal sounds of the woods come back he asked me what just happened i kind of shrug and we stand there looking at each other for a minute i get on the radio and ask if anyone else just heard the end of the world but no one else hears it even though we're all within shouting distance of each other my buddy and i just sort of shrug it off and keep going it's great it happens you know things like that about an hour later we all check up on the radios and no one's found the little girl most of the time we won't search when it gets dark but because we don't have any kind of lead on her few of us decide to keep going including me and my buddy we keep close together and we're calling out for every couple of minutes at this point i'm hoping beyond hope that we find her because while i may not like kids any of them being out all alone in the dark is awful the woods can be intimidating to kids in the daylight at night well it's a whole different beast but we're not seeing any signs of her or getting any responses and around midnight we decided to turn around and head back to the rendezvous point we're about halfway back when my buddy stops shines his light to the right of us into a really thick deadfall or group of dead trees i ask him if he's heard a response he just tells me to be quiet a second and listen.

1:37:37I do, and in the distance, I can hear what sounds like a kid crying. Nope. We both called the girl's name and listened for any kind of response, but it's just this really faint crying. We head in the direction of this deadfall and go around it, calling her name over and over. As we get closer to the crying, I start getting this weird feeling in my gut, and I tell my buddy that something isn't right. he tells me he feels the same way but we can't figure out what it is we stop where we are and call the girl's name again at the same time we both figure it out the crying is on a loop it's the same little hitching sob then wailed and quiet hiccup repeated over and over it's exactly the same every time and without saying another word we both take off running it's the only time i've ever lost my composure like that but something about it was so incredibly wrong and neither of us wanted to stay out there anymore when we got back to the rendezvous we asked if anyone else had heard anything strange but no one else knew what we were talking about i know it sounds sort of anti-glimactic but that call messed me up for a long time as for the little girl we never found a trace of her we keep an eye out for and all the other people who we've never found but frankly i doubt we'll ever find anything that one uh i like that one a lot the idea of figuring out the crimes on a loop is terrifying yeah i don't like that i don't think i like that one man that that's so effective though isn't it like realizing that the girl you're going for it's like the same like the same little tones over and over that it's almost like the noise they heard, the loud noise was maybe this girl being taken or crossed over, like that's the sound of a dimensional rift or something.

1:39:36And now whatever entity's out here is wearing her face. It's like using her voice as a lure to get more people to come out. But it's bad at it. It's bad at it. Like the stairs in the woods, the mimicry's not perfect. There's like an offness to it. I love the idea of hearing animal noises and realizing they're human or hearing human noises and realizing they're automated. That's creepy. Of the missing persons calls I've gone out on, only a handful have ever resulted in a complete disappearance, meaning no trace of the person and no body ever found. But sometimes, finding a body just leads to more questions than answers.

1:40:12Here's some of the bodies we found that have become infamous in our team. A teenage boy whose remains were recovered almost a year after he vanished. We found the top of his skull, two finger bones and his camera almost 40 miles from where he was last seen. The camera, sadly, was destroyed. The pelvis of an older man who had vanished a month earlier. That was all we found. The lower jaw and right foot of a two-year-old boy on the highest peak of a ridge in the southern part of the park. The body of a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome almost 20 miles from where she'd vanished. She died of exposure three weeks after going missing and all of her clothes were intact except for her shoes and jacket.

1:40:56There were berries and cooked meat in her stomach when they did the autopsy. Coroner said it appeared as if someone had been taking care of her. There were no suspects ever identified. Now that's messed up. That's very, very fucked. Something out there's been feeding her up until her death, like the boy that was shoved into the rock. It's very odd. It's like sometimes it feels like things are like taking care of them. Like it's not super malicious, but yeah, I don't know. That's fucking creepy. The frozen body of a one-year-old baby found a week after vanishing in the hollow trunk of a tree 10 miles from the area he was last seen.

1:41:30There was fresh milk found in his stomach, but his tongue was gone. Oh, my God. See stuff like that, right? Where it's like they were being taken care of, but there's also like a mutilation associated with it. Yeah. Oof. A single vertebra and right kneecap of a three-year-old girl found in the snow almost 20 miles from the campground her family had been at the previous summer. Now, on to a couple of the stories my friend told me. I mentioned that you were all interested in the stairs, and you're in luck. He's had a closer encounter with them. Though he doesn't have any explanation for them, he does have a bit more experience with them than I do.

1:42:06My buddy's been a search and rescue officer for about seven years. He started when he was a junior in college, and he had a very similar experience when he first encountered the stairs. His trainer told him almost the same thing mine did, which was to never go near, touch, or send them. For the first year, he did just that. But apparently his curiosity got the better of him, and on one call he broke away from the line and went to go check a set of them out. He said they were about 10 miles from the path where a teenage girl had vanished, and the dogs were following a scent. He was on his own, lagging behind the main group when he saw a set of stairs off to his left.

1:42:43They looked like they were from a new house, because the carpeting was pristine and white. He said that as he got closer, he didn't feel any different or hear any weird noises. He was expecting something to happen, like bleeding from his ears or collapsing, but he got right up next to them and didn't feel anything. The only thing, he said, that was odd was that there was absolutely no debris on the steps. No dirt, leaves, dust, anything. And there didn't appear to be any signs of animal or insect activity in the immediate area, which he found strange. It was less like things were avoiding them and more like they just happened to be in a relatively barren part of the forest.

1:43:24He touched the stairs and didn't feel anything except that sort of sticking feeling you get from new carpet. Making sure his radio was on, he slowly climbed the stairs. He said it was terrifying, because the way they'd been stigmatized, he wasn't really sure what was going to happen to them. He joked that half of him expected to be teleported to some other dimension And the other half was watching for a UFO to come swooping down But he got to the top with little event He stood there looking around But, he said, the longer he stood at the top step The more he felt like he was doing something very, very wrong He described it as the feeling you'd get if you were in the part of a government building That you have no business being in as if someone was going to come and arrest you or shoot you in the back of the head at any second.

1:44:14Tried to brush it off, but the feeling got stronger and stronger, and that's when he realized that he couldn't hear anything anymore. The sounds of the forest were gone, and he couldn't hear his own breathing. It was like some kind of weird, awful tinnitus, but more oppressive. He climbed back down and rejoined the search and didn't mention what he'd done. but he said the weirdest part came after his trainer was waiting back at the welcome center after the search ended for the day and he cornered my buddy before he could leave he said his trainer had this look of intense anger he asked what was wrong you went up them didn't you my buddy said it wasn't phrased as a question he asked how his trainer knew trainer just shook his head because we didn't find her.

1:45:02The dogs lost her scent. My buddy asked what that had to do with anything. The trainer asked how long he'd been on the stairs and my buddy said no more than a minute. The trainer gave him this really awful almost dead-eyed look and told him that if he ever went up another set of stairs again he'd be fired. Immediately. The trainer walked away and I guess he's never answered any of the questions my buddy had asked about it since. Now that's cool. I like the idea that if someone goes up the staircase, someone goes missing. Well, it just makes sense at this point too, right? Either the person on the staircase or someone in the woods.

1:45:39I like the idea that it's like a trade. Odd, odd, odd. I mean no likey. My buddy has been involved in a lot of missing persons cases where there's never been a trace of them found. I mentioned David Politis. My buddy said he can confirm that those stories are, for the most part, accurate. it. He said that most of the time, the person isn't found right away. They're either never found, they're found weeks, months, or years later, places they can't possibly have gone to. One story he told me really stood out that involved a five-year-old boy with a severe mental disability. The little boy vanished from a picnic area in the late fall.

1:46:14In addition to the mental disability, he was also physically handicapped. His parents explained over and over that he simply could not have vanished. It was impossible. Someone had to have taken him. My buddy said they searched for this kid for weeks, going miles out of the accepted range, but it was like he'd never been there. The dogs couldn't pick up his sin anywhere, not even in the picnic area where he'd apparently vanished from. Suspicion fell on the parents, but it was pretty clear that they were devastated and hadn't done anything sinister to their kid. Search was concluded about a month later and my buddy said everyone had pretty much forgotten it by later in the winter.

1:46:54He was out on a training op in the snow, on one of the higher peaks, when he came across something in the snow. He said he saw it from far away at first. When he got closer, he realized it was a shirt, frozen and sticking part of the way out of the powder. He recognized it as belonging to the kid because it had a distinctive pattern. About 20 yards away, he found the kid's body, laying partially buried in the snow. My buddy said there was no way the kid had been dead for more than a few days even though he'd been missing for almost three months. The kid was curled around something. When my buddy brushed off the snow to see what it was he said he almost couldn't believe what he was seeing.

1:47:36It was a big chunk of ice that had been carved crudely to look like a sort of person. The kid was holding it so tight that it had frostbitten his chest and hands which my buddy could tell even with the decay that had taken place. He radioed the rest of the crew and they took the body off the mountain. Now, he recapped all of this for me and to put it simply, there was no way this kid could have both survived for almost three months on his own or have gotten to this peak. There was no physical way this child could have walked almost 50 miles and ended up on the top of the damn mountain. Top it off, there was nothing in the kid's stomach or colon.

1:48:18nothing not even water it was like my buddy said the kid had been taken off the face of the earth put in suspended animation and dropped on this mountain months later only to die of exposure he's never really gotten over that one yeah i would argue that that's a hard one to get over this kind of thing some would never get over is there does it seem like there's a correlation with like mentally uh mentally ill people basically because like this person had a mental disability there was another one that had a mental disability have you noticed that um yes it seems like there's a string of people that just like mentally disabled people seem to be targeted mentally disabled and children i think it's the idea that maybe if not being preyed upon easier they're more trusting to like go away with figures like the scary-faced man and stuff like that almost like preying on innocence or something like that probably yeah yeah like the innocence of it is what leads them also the what was that thing about um um the oh the ice person it's similar to the no face person on top of the mountain that there's stuff that like there's these featureless figures that look like people but aren't up there there's some connections you can draw i like how there's enough hints that you can draw connections between things but there's never like oh this is how it works or this is what it does Well, yeah, because if you gave that much to then not only would it lose its mystique, but then also it like wouldn't be a you would there would be a mystery element anymore.

1:49:51Like the more that we know about it, the less the story has that exciting thrill to it. You know, it's got to it's got to keep that campfire edge. Mm hmm. I agree. The last story I'll share from him was one that took place relatively recently. Only a few months ago. They were out doing a recon for Mount Lions because there have been several reports of sightings in the last couple of days. one of our jobs is to scout out the areas where these animals are seen to ensure that if they are in the area we can warm people and close off those trails he was out on his own in a very heavily forested part of the park toward dusk when he heard what sounded like a woman screaming in the distance now as most of you know when a mount lion screams it sounds almost exactly like a woman being brutally murdered it's unsettling but far from abnormal my buddy radioed back and let ops to know he'd heard one and that he was going to keep going to see if he could figure out where its territory started.

1:50:47He heard the Mount Lion scream a couple more times, always from the same spot, and determined the approximate area of the Mount Lion's territory. He was about to head back when he heard another scream, this time within only a few yards of him. Of course, he freaks out and starts heading back at a much faster pace because the last thing he wants is to run into a damn mountain lion and get mauled to death as he got back on the path and started heading back screaming followed him and he broke into a jog when he was about a mile from ops screaming stopped and he turned around to see if it was following him it was almost night by this point but he said in the distance just before the path rounded a corner he could see what looked like a male figure he called out to them warning them that the paths were closed and that he needed to come back to the welcome center faker just stood there my buddy started to walk over when he was about 10 yards away faker took as he described an impossibly long step toward him and let out the same scream my buddy had been hearing.

1:52:00My buddy didn't even say anything. He just turned and sprinted back to ops, never looking behind him. By the time he got back, the screaming had moved back into the woods. He didn't mention it to anyone else. He just said that there was a mountain line in the area that they would need to close those paths until the animal could be located and moved. Dude, no. Did you have an impossibly long step? It's so haunting. I don't know why, but it is in your head. You're trying to picture what that looks like and it's like what do you mean an impossibly long step like it's floating as it's stepping almost uh that's great man the author knows how to i'm not just glazing them because they're a friend but man to put that level of detail like all the all these little things that like make the scares play out so well like the crying was on a loop it was a person saying to me out an impossibly long step like these little accents that go so far the uh the girl on loop though is by far the scariest little girl crying on yeah that one yeah that one's pretty good yeah because it's like you're you're looking for and you're like oh she's right around here but then you realize it's a thing that's using her voice yeah that's that's solid the possibly long step though that's fine i love i love a nice uncanny step you're like what yeah yeah also feels like he can get to you so much quicker you're like nope just start running no no no no i'm good yeah he's walking but it's faster than your sprint we're gonna end this story here since it's turned into a huge wall of text i'm going to be heading out on a yearly training op tomorrow morning so i'll be gone until early next week i'll be meeting with a lot of former trainers and buddies who work in other areas of the park and i'll be asking around about any stories they'd like to share i'm so glad you guys have been interested in my stories once i'm back from this op i'll continue to share them and that is the end of part three part four Hey guys, back from my training op and I have a lot of really interesting stories to share with you.

1:54:00We got enough that I'm going to break them up into two parts, this being the first. I love to put them all in one entry, but I just haven't had a chance to write them all down yet. Didn't have anything too crazy happen while I was out there, but we did have one incident with a rookie that I found relevant. Since I'm sure you guys have been waiting for these, I'll just get right into the stories. I'll sign each batch of stories to the person who told them to me. kd kd is a vet who's been a search rescue officer for about 15 years she specializes in high elevation mountain rescues and is widely considered one of the best in her field she was one of the more enthusiastic storytellers and since we were together a fair amount during exercises she ended up telling me about four that really stuck with me the first she told me in response to my asking about her most traumatic calls she shook her head and told me that really bad calls happen more frequently on the mountain since the potential for nasty accidents is higher about five years ago one of the parks she worked at had a string of disappearances it was a bad year she said one of the worst on record as far as weather went they were getting about a foot of new snow every couple of days and there were a few avalanches that killed some climbers they warned people about staying on the mapped areas but of course there was always those who don't listen in one particularly nasty case an entire family got wiped out because their father decided he knew better than the officials and he took them out into an area that wasn't safe they were snowshoeing and as best kd could figure they walked onto a shelf of snow that looked solid but actually wasn't it gave way and this family went ass over tea kettle almost 300 feet down a slope they landed on the rocks at the bottom and the parents died instantly one of the kids did as well but the other two survived one had a broken leg and fractured ribs the other was almost unharmed save for some bruising and a sprained ankle the uninjured child left his sibling behind and set out to help him kd said the kid didn't make it more than a half mile before a storm overtook him kid stopped to try and get warm or maybe just to rest and ended up freezing to death good god they ended up finding the family with the help of some witnesses who saw them heading out into the wilderness and she was the one to find the kid who'd frozen to death looking for help she said it had started to snow just enough to obscure long distance vision but not enough to make searching impossible she saw a figure sitting in the snow up ahead and she got to it as quickly as possible she described in detail now as she got closer she realized first that it was a child second that they were deceased third that they had frozen in one of the most pitiful positions she's ever found a corpse in.

1:56:46The kid was sitting upright, with his knees tucked up against his chest. His arms were curled around them, and his head was tucked up into his coat. When she moved the coat to look at his face, she saw that he died crying. His face was twisted, and the tears were frozen on his cheeks. She said it was painfully obvious that the kid was terrified when he succumbed to hypothermia and as a mother and broke her heart. She told me repeatedly that she hopes the father is burning in hell as we speak. The other traumatic stories she told me that stood out in my mind was one that happened when she was a rookie.

1:57:21Her team got a report of an experienced climber who hadn't come home the previous day. His wife was convinced that something bad had happened because he never failed to come home on time. They went out looking for him and had to climb what sounded like some very technically challenging parts of the mountain. They got to a relatively flat area and Katie started seeing blood in the snow she followed the trail and as she went she started seeing a little bits of tissue she wasn't sure exactly what body part it had come from but but the further she followed it or there was she followed this blood and tissue trail to a sheltered area under a cliff face and she finds the climber she said there was so much blood more than she'd ever seen before He was lying face down, one arm stretched in front of him, as if he died crawling.

1:58:14She looks closer and sees that he's been partially disemboweled, which is where the tissue had come from. The guy has an ice pick tucked into a hip holster and it's covered in blood. Of course, they'll never be sure exactly what happened, but she said as best she can figure, this is what went down. Guy had been attempting to climb up to the next area and had been using his ice axe to ascend. He probably hit a loose patch and had fallen. On the way down, or possibly when he landed, he got impaled by the axe and had disemboweled him. He dragged himself along, tearing pieces of himself out as he went, and died under the cliff face.

1:58:53She isn't terribly bothered by gore, but I guess a few of the guys who came to help her remove the body threw up when they turned him over, and a good portion of his intestines spilled out. Jesus. i like all the real stories mixed in with the supernatural ones you know it almost feels too like the real stories are the ones that i'm more effective like the more i'm like oh my god i always feel like i'm i'm hitting heavier with the real ones i think just because it does have such a i don't know like it's less fantastical and you're like oh man that's horrible that you know but it it feels fake because it's a bug man or whatever the fuck it is but other things you're like oh my god putting yourself in that position is fucking horrifying that could just happen to someone a lot of the things i mentioned to her that i was interested in hearing about any experiences she had with people completely disappearing her eyes light up and she leans in close to me want to hear a real doozy she tells me about how when she first started there was a case that got a lot of attention in the media a family had been out berry picking in an area of the forest very close to the entrance of the park they had two little boys both under the age of five and at some point during the day, one of them vanishes.

2:00:02There's an absolutely massive search, and they find absolutely nothing. It's another of those cases where it's like the kid was never there in the first place. The dogs just sit down and don't pick up on anything. No trace of the kid is found. The search goes on for about two months, but is eventually called off. Fast forward to six months later. The family comes back to place flowers at a memorial that had been set up for the kid. They bring their other son. While they're placing the flowers, they lose sight of the kid for about three seconds, and in that span of time, he vanishes into thin air.

2:00:37Now, obviously, parents are beyond devastated. It's awful enough to lose one child, but to lose two is beyond imagining. Search is huge, one of the largest in state history. There are about 300 volunteers coming every inch of the park looking for the kid. But again, there's no trace of him. The search goes on for about a week, with people looking miles from the part of the park he vanished from. And then, almost two weeks later, a volunteer almost 15 miles from the designated search area radios in that he's found the kid. They assume that the kid was dead, but the volunteer says he's not only alive, he's in good shape.

2:01:15Katie and her team go out to recover the kid, and when they get there, she can't believe that this is the kid that's been missing his clothes are clean no dirt on him anywhere and he doesn't appear traumatized volunteer says he found the kid sitting on the log playing with a little twig bundle that's bound together with some old rope katie asks him where he's been who he was with out here those two weeks and the kid tells her that he's been with the fuzzy man now katie firmly believes in bigfoot so she gets all excited and asks what he means by fuzzy. Was he hairy? The kid says no, he wasn't hairy.

2:01:52He was a fuzzy man. And he describes a man that's blurry. Like when you close your eyes, but not all the way closed. He says the man, oh, that's so good. Oh man, the fuzzy man. And he's like a blur. Oh, that's great. He says the man came out of the trees and took the kid with him deep into the woods. the kid says he slept in a hollow tree and the fuzzy man gave him berries to eat KD asked if the man was mean he scared the kid and the kid says no he wasn't scary but I didn't like how he didn't have eyes

2:02:30oh yeah that's normal that happens out here KD's just like mmhmm stands up and just starts crying goes to the room I'll be right back and goes to the room just starts crying yeah one second would you mind excuse me real quick just have to go to the little explorer's room katie says they got the kid back to headquarters and a cop takes him into town to talk to him more about what happened she's friends with the cop that talked to him and she said the kid described being kept in this tree by the fuzzy man and given berries whenever he was hungry he was allowed to wander around a very specific clearing but when he tried to go further the fuzzy man would get mad and yell real loud, even though he didn't have a mouth.

2:03:11When the kid got scared at night, the fuzzy man made it go brighter, gave him the twig bundle. He said the fuzzy man was going to keep him, but he had to let him go because the kid wasn't the right kind. Okay. You're not the right kind of kid. No, thanks. He either can't or won't elaborate more on that. The cops are just sort of left scratching their heads. The search for his brother is renewed with no results. kid has no idea where his brother might be they never find him you know it's that kind of thing happens sometimes I guess I love the idea of like the fuzzy man how it's a creature with like no eyes no mouth and the kid just describes it as like a blur like fuzzy that's so uncanny like when it's dark he would make it grow go brighter whatever that means so good it's very I like the very childlike name that does feel like it would be like oh it's like yeah like a sasquatch kind of thing or an animal but no it's literally a child just describing like basically an aber like a like an aberration right some kind of like yeah just like almost weird noise that's like populating in the in the actual physical space very odd it also makes you think like what is um Mmmmm.

2:04:31is this connected to some of the other stuff we've seen Like, is this connected to the bug man? Is this connected to the scary face man or the bear man mentioned earlier? Are these all one of the same? Are these different entities? Again, it gives you enough to ask questions, but not answers. The last story that Katie told me was of something that happened to her when she got separated from her training group when she was a rookie. They were learning the basics of high elevation belaying on a well mapped side of the mountain. And she had to use the bathroom. She went off about 50 yards from the group during a meal break and did her business.

2:05:05I'll tell the rest exactly as she told it to me.

2:05:30completely lost and you have no idea what to do. So I stood there for a while, just trying to figure out where the fuck I was and what I was supposed to do. But the longer I stand there, the more confused and turn around I get. So I started walking. As I recall, I just picked up a random direction and went for it. And as I'm walking, just getting worse and worse to the point where I have no concept of why I'm on the mountain in the first place. I'm just trudging through the snow and then I start hearing this voice. It's kind of inside my head, almost, like if a frog could talk, all low and croaky.

2:06:06It's telling me over and over, it's okay, it's okay. You just need to find something to eat. Find something to eat and you'll be okay. Just keep walking and find something to eat. Eat, eat. So I start looking around for anything I can eat and I swear to god I've never felt that hungry in my whole life. It was bottomless. I think I'd eaten just about anything you put in front of me right then. I had no concept of time, so I had no idea how long I'd been out when I hear an actual voice coming towards me. I go forward and see one of the other search and rescue officers and he looks fucking terrified.

2:06:45He's running towards me asking if I'm okay and what the hell I'm doing out here. and the scary thing was, as he's running toward me, I kind of see myself reaching to my belt for my hunting knife. I'm not really even thinking about what I'm doing. But what I'm thinking is that I have to eat. If I don't eat, I'll never be okay again. So I just have to eat. He sees me doing that and he backs off right away. He yells at me to put my knife away and he's not going to hurt me. And that kind of snaps me back. All of a sudden, I know exactly where I am, and I put the knife away. I run to him and ask how long I've been gone, thinking he'd tell me I've been gone for half an hour or so, but he tells me I've been gone for two fucking days.

2:07:32I've gone over two peaks, ended up almost on the other side of the mountain, and if I'd keep going, I would have ended up wandering into about 300 miles of wilderness. They never found me. He can't believe I'm not dead. And of course, I don't know what the fuck to think. To me, no time has passed at all. I don't say anything. I just go back with them to the rendezvous point, and I'm taken to the HQ to be airlifted to the hospital. When I get there, they do all kinds of tests and try to figure out what happened. As best they can guess, I had some kind of weird fugue state, which is kind of like amnesia or a weird seizure that knocked my brain out of whack, but the truth is that we don't really know.

2:08:12It's never happened again. But I'll tell you, ever since then, I never go out there alone. People rag on me for making them come with me when I have to go leave the group, but I just tell them that listening to me piss in the snow is better than losing me for two fucking days on a freezing mountain. Do you think that was the fuzzy man too? Could be. That almost sounded like Wendigo in nature. Like the whole, you have to eat something, you have like the hunger that consumes you. She just cannibalizes her buddy in the middle of the woods. I think it could be the idea though of uh having to find something to eat it's one of those things of like giving like putting somebody into a state of like they have no idea what's going on amnesia basically and being like you have to find something to eat so now they just keep wandering deeper and deeper into the forest like I wonder if they were never like they'll never find something but then coming across just the person you know like if it would have found any kind of animal they probably would have just ate it raw alive or whatever kind of interesting compel like the hunger like some supernatural sense overwhelms them ew next person i talked to is ew a former trainer who now works as an emt he still comes to ops like this to help out but doesn't work full-time for us anymore he specialized in finding lost kids he seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to knowing where they'd gone he's a legend among the more senior vets but he gets embarrassed if you compliment met him on his work he sat down with me at dinner one evening and ended up swapping stories most of them were just casual but when we got on the subject of our weirder calls i mentioned that i'd had a buddy who'd gone up a set of stairs got kind of quiet and asked me if i heard of a little boy who disappeared from this park a few years back i hadn't so he tells me the story they were out looking for this 11 year old boy joey who'd gone missing near a river of course the first thought was that he'd fallen in and drowned but when they brought dogs out they led search and rescue officers away from the river and up into a very densely forested area when we do searches for people search in a grid pattern and we search every box of the grid incredibly thoroughly what EW's team noticed right away was that a very strange pattern was emerging dogs and alternating boxes were picking up Joey's scent but losing it when they overlapped with another box if you think of it like a checkerboard joey sent was being picked up in random black squares but never in red this of course didn't make any sense because how could the kid bounce from area to area without leaving the sin in each place he passed ew and his partner pass into a new box of the grid ew notices a set of stairs about 50 yards away he tells his partner that they need to go check near it, but his partner flat out refuses.

2:11:04He tells EW that he's made it a point never to go near any stairs he sees, and that while it may be routine, he's not to pretend that it's normal. He tells EW that he'll wait in sight while EW checks. EW says he was irritated, but he felt for the guy and didn't push him on the subject. I walked over to the stairs. They were small, kind of like stairs into a basement. I don't really feel strongly one way or the other about them. The stairs, I mean. So I wasn't scared or anything. I guess I'm like everyone else. I just prefer not to think about them too much. Anyway, I went over and I could see that there was something lying on the bottom step.

2:11:46Sort of curled up. My heart sinks because of course you always hope for the best. And we were confident that we'd find this kid alive because he'd only been missing for a few hours. but I knew right away that it was him, and that he was dead. He was curled up in a little ball on the step, holding his stomach. It looked like he'd been in horrible pain when he died. I didn't see any blood except some on his lips and chin. I radioed in that I found him, and we got his body back to command. My poor family, they were devastated. Parents couldn't understand how he'd be dead, because he'd only been gone for such a short amount of time.

2:12:19And on top of that, we didn't have any obvious cause of death, which just made it worse. I figured he'd probably eaten something poisonous since he was holding his stomach when I found him, but I didn't want to guess It's hard enough to hear that your kid is dead, let alone have some stupid search and rescue officer guy guessing about what happened I took him away and I went home and tried not to think about it I hate finding dead kids, man I love this job, but it's just one of those reasons I left I got two daughters and the thought of losing them that way just... He choked up a little here. I'm not great with emotional stuff like that, and it's always sort of awkward to see a grown man cry, so I didn't really know what to do.

2:12:58Pulled himself together eventually, though, and kept going. We'd always hear back from the coroners about cause of death. It's not really our job to know, I guess, and sometimes if they think it's foul play, they won't tell us because of legal bullshit, but I've got a friend who works for the sheriff's department, and he usually has passed along any interesting info if I ask, in this case. I actually got a call from him about a week later. He asks if I remember the kid, and of course I do. He says some seriously weird shit is going on. He tells me, VW man, you're going to think I'm crazy, but the coroner has no idea what happened to this kid.

2:13:33He's never even seen anything like it. My friend goes on to tell me that when the coroner opened the kid up, he couldn't even believe what he was seeing. The kid's organs were like Swiss cheese. These quarter-sized holes were punched clean through just about every single organ that kid had, aside from his heart and lungs. But his colon, his stomach, his kidneys, and even one of his testicles were full of these clean holes. My friend said the coroner described it as someone had taken a hole punch and punched holes out of everything. They were so neat. But the kid didn't have a scratch on them. No entry or exit wounds.

2:14:10The closest anyone there had ever seen like it was a guy who filled himself up with buckshot a year or so back when he was cleaning his rifle. So no one had a clue what could possibly have caused this. My friend asked me if I had ever heard of anything like it, or if he had any similar cases in the past, but I had never heard of something like that. I told him I wasn't going to be any help to him. As far as I know, the coroner determined the cause of death is something like massive eternal bleeding. But no one knows what really happened. and I've never been able to forget that kid. I have nightmares about it sometimes.

2:14:42I don't let my kids into the woods alone, and when we go together, I never let them out of my sight. I used to love it out here. That case and a couple others just sort of ruined it for me. Dinner was over, so we started to clean up and go back to our cabins. Before, we went our separate ways, put a stand on my shoulder and looked at me really close. It tells me that there's bad things out here. things that don't care if we have families or lives or that we can think and feel. He tells me to be careful, and he walks away. I didn't get a chance to talk with him again, but that story stuck with me.

2:15:17I like, so it's similar to the grid pattern. It's as if the kid got dimensionally torn apart, right? Yeah. Like he occupies one space, but then everything kind of shifts over at 50 % margins. Like everything kind of gets split in half and draws away from itself, including his internal organs. It's a really cool, it's really sick setup. I just had def finding just fucking extremely, it's almost alien, you know, like it's like, I almost like some kind of weird experiment was happening on them. And it's like, there's no entry or exit. It's just, it's so, I don't know. It's almost surgical, I guess is why I keep harping on that.

2:15:55It's like a, it's an injury pattern you would never see. Also, I have to mention it because I'm that guy you wouldn't have buckshot out of a rifle it would be a shotgun so explain that search and rescue woods there you go I'm very smart and it's important I point that out it matters I promise by pure coincidence I got to talk to another vet PB who's been in the search and rescue field for years we were partnered on a grid sweep during a training exercise and and we were chatting casually about how we liked the job, what kind of things we'd seen and the like. At one point, we passed an old set of stairs, though these were probably from an old fire lookout, given the area that we were in.

2:16:40Sort of casually mentioned that I was curious about the stairs, and that I wished I knew more about them. He got kind of quiet and looked like he wanted to tell me something. Wasn't sure if he should. Finally told me to turn my radio off. Obviously, this is something we are never, ever supposed to do, but I did, and he did the same. about seven years ago he tells me he was out on a call with a rookie they were in the area of the park that had a lot of strange reports and events disappearances stories about lights in the forest odd noise things like that the rookie was totally spooked kept going on and on about things out in the woods according to pb the guy wouldn't stop talking about the goat man just on and on goat man this and go man that finally i told him that there was plenty else to be afraid of out there and that was very real and that he better get over this thing with the goat man.

2:17:29The rookie wanted to know what kinds of things I was talking about and I just told him to shut up and walk. Recrested a little ridge and there was a staircase about 10 yards ahead. The rookie stops dead in his tracks and just stands there looking at them. I tell him, see, that's something you should be afraid of. And the rookie asked me what the hell these things are doing here. For some reason, I just opened up and told him the truth or what I've been told is the truth. I could have gotten in a lot of trouble for doing what I did. I could get in a lot of trouble for repeating it to you. But you're a nice kid.

2:18:00I want you to stop looking into this. Quit while you're ahead. So I'll tell you what I know, under the condition that you never breathe a word to the suits. I told him I wouldn't say a word, and he double-checks that our radios were off. When I first started out, we were a little less tight-lipped about them, and other things that happened out here. We warned people before they were even hired that there was weird shit going on. I guess the Forest Service was tired of having such a massive turnover rate, and they wanted people to know what they were getting into. So they started having people sign these agreements, and they wouldn't go to the media about what they were going to see.

2:18:37The FS didn't want to scare people away. So the last thing they needed were spooked rookies running off to the media with stories of ghosts and haunted stares. but eventually, they found out that the agreements weren't necessary. People not only didn't want to talk about what they saw, they wouldn't. A few times, media tried to talk to people when the kids or hikers would disappear and no one would say a word. I can't really explain it. I guess we just don't really want to admit anything is wrong. It's our job, to be on the woods every single day. We don't need to be spooked. The best way to avoid that is to pretend like everything's okay.

2:19:14So I'll tell you everything I can think of. And after that, I'm done talking about it for good. And I expect you not to bring it up around me, ever. The stairs have been out here as long as the parks have existed. We have records going back decades describing them. Sometimes people go up them and nothing happens. Other times, look, I really don't like talking about this, but sometimes really bad shit happens. I saw one guy get his hand sliced clean off when he got to the top of the step. He reached out to touch like a tree branch. And then it happened so fast, one second it was there, and the next it was gone.

2:19:48Completely clean wound. We didn't find his hand. The guy almost died. Another time, a woman touched one of the stairs and a blood vessel in her brain exploded. Literally exploded like a water balloon. She sort of stumbled down and came over to me and all she got out was, I think something's wrong with me. She dropped like a sack of flour, dead before she hit the ground. I'll never get the way the blood leaked into her eyes. Before she died, I watched it turn red. I watched it happen, and there wasn't a single thing I could do to help. We warned people not to go anywhere near them, but there's always at least one idiot who does.

2:20:24And even if nothing happens to them, something bad always happens. Our kids go missing as we're on the trail, someone dies the next day, cut in half in a completely safe part of the park. And I don't know why, but something bad always happens. I don't know exactly why they're out here, but it doesn't matter. They're here. And if we're smart, we tell our new officers exactly what they'd be capable of. We were both quiet for a little while. I was afraid to talk because I wasn't sure if he was done. It looked like he wanted to say something else. Finally, he spoke up again. Have you ever noticed how you can't find the same ones twice?

2:21:01I nodded, expecting him to continue, but he just stayed quiet, walking alongside me. and eventually he started a story about the biggest deer he'd ever seen in the park didn't bring up the subject again and i didn't press him for any more stories he dropped out of the op on the next day apparently he left before the sun came up said he was sick none of us heard from him since he left i'm gonna stop here for the time being i'll try and post the next part in the coming days but with that being the end of summer things are pretty busy here thanks for the continued interest guys you've really awakened this curiosity in me that I didn't know I had end of part four so part five gosh it's so good part five I'm noticing has the first not safe for work tag so that's fun yay yeah we we love them we um so I love I love the stairs the ones I love the details about like you go up them something weird happens I like you know what it reminds me of it reminds me of what were they called the mother horse eyes the things around the flesh interface oh god damn what are those the zones yeah the little yeah I think there were zones incident zones incident zones yeah these incident zones appear that if something steps into them like their flesh disappears or like the part of them that touches it evaporates and in there it was because they go to feed the the interface but here it's almost like they're just being taken over into a different dimension for some reason.

2:22:37That's what, that's what like you walk to the top of the stairs and pieces are all of you or pieces of you just disappear. Don't like that. It's also similar. It's also similar to the flesh interface in that you can just die from coming into contact with it. Cause in there it talks about kids getting in mother horse eyes, kids get tips to their fingers taken off and then they die from it months later. like they've been poisoned because they came into contact with it it's kind of similar to the girl's brain um just getting a massive andeurism out in the woods yeah the guy in his hand slice clean off is crazy too yeah just reaches out and then boop hang on it's also kind of interesting too that it makes it seem like every time something bad happens someone has walked on the stairs even if it's like not them you know well that's why they lost that kid that night and that veteran came up and said, you went up them, didn't you?

2:23:27Just know that anytime you go up the stairs, something bad happens. It's pretty cool. Part five, you ready? Yes, sir. I apologize for the short update, guys. Things have gotten a little crazy around here and I'm not sure how often I'll be able to update going forward. I really appreciate all the support you guys have given me. I'll only have a couple of stories to share with you. I'll be interested to see what you all think. A firefighter who was helping us at the training op told me about a call he'd gone on, supposedly to help rescue a kid from an absolutely massive tree. He said they didn't give him details, but they needed him to come out and help because they lacked the proper equipment.

2:24:02He'd been called out specifically because this thing was so huge that search and rescue officers didn't feel safe trying to climb it. He'd been a tree trimmer before joining the VFD, so it was easy enough for him to grab his old equipment and come help out. He was let out about two miles, and the team stopped at one of the biggest trees in the area and pointed up. He laughed and asked the AWP, how can the kid have gotten up there? Made some jokes about the old cat in a tree thing, but the captain just shook his head and told him to get up there and get the kid down. He said he knew something was up, but he didn't push it.

2:24:38He said that as he climbed the tree, he started wondering if they were playing a prank on him. There's no way this kid should have been able to climb this fucking thing. It was massive at the base, but about halfway up it started tapering. I'd almost had to turn back a few times because I really didn't think it was going to hold me. But he said he kept going. And when he was just about at the top, he saw a flash of blue in the branches. I saw the kid's shirt sort of caught in a branch. And I called out to him and I told him to come near me if he could. But he didn't say anything. I kept moving, calling the kid's name and telling him not to be scared that I was there to help him.

2:25:13By the time I got to him, I knew he wasn't going to answer me. I found him, or what was left of him, cradled in the fork of a branch. The fact that he was up there was sheer luck. If he'd fallen any other way, he would have come crashing down. It wouldn't have mattered, though, because this kid was dead long before he ended up in that tree. I don't know who put him up there, or how, or why, but it was fucking sick. The kid's intestines had popped out of his mouth and were hanging in the branches. It was like some sick fucking Christmas tree, the way they were draped all over everything. I got a better look and saw that even popped out of his ass.

2:25:48His guts were hanging out of the bottom of his pants. His eyes were gone. I assume shoved out from whatever force caused him to fucking pop like a stress ball. You ever seen a body that's been floating in water for a long time? How their tongues kind of swell up and stick out? It's like that. I remember because there were flies crawling all over it. I think I must have gone into shock because, man, I just pushed the kid down with a stick and broke off a branch. I just kind of poked him until he fell. I don't know why I did that. I almost lost my job because of that. But man, the thought of hauling that kid down over my shoulder the whole way, gathering his guts up and coiling them around me like rope so they couldn't get snagged.

2:26:31I couldn't do it. I've seen a lot of dead kids. More than I'd ever admit. I've seen kids who had hidden the full bathtub during a house fire, boiled them alive, turned them into a literal soup. I don't know what did this, but the thought of touching that kid's body made me feel like I was going to lose my mind. I heard him hit the ground and I figured everyone would freak out, but they knew he was dead when they sent me up there. They didn't say anything, but they didn't shout or freak out or anything. I got to the bottom and started to get up in the captain's face, asking him who he thought he was sending me up there when they knew damn well the kid was dead.

2:27:08But he just told me it was none of my concern and thanked me for getting the evidence down. I remember he said that. I remember it specifically because it was so weird to hear it phrased that way. The evidence. Like he wasn't even a fucking person. Like he'd never had a little kid who got lost and had something fucking unspeakable happen to him. Captain of the crew led me back out of the woods, but he and two others stayed behind. And I thought that was weird. Why wouldn't they have just helped that kid out? I tried to ask him, but the guys leading me out just told me they couldn't discuss the inopen case.

2:27:41I asked him what he thought had happened to the kid and he got really pensive and thought about it for a bit I would have said a crush injury based on how his guts came out like that but with those injuries you see massive contusions under the skin obvious trauma this wasn't like that it was almost like the kid got caught in a big vacuum and had his guts sucked down but even then there was no trauma none at all it bothers me man it bothers the hell out of me that's also another the author keeps doing this search and rescue keeps doing this cool thing where they put these improbable scenarios in the middle of the woods and the setting makes it so uncanny like the recording of the uh the crying and stuff like that the looping crying but here it's like even for this kid to have died that way he would have had to have been in like a space vacuum well it's like the swiss cheese holes you know yeah yeah it's like what on earth like how did that get here you know yeah like i said it's it's it seems like some kind of sick it's it seems like some kind of weird experiment or something yeah some kind of like unnatural experiment of some kind or something maybe even could have been a thing where people which this is me just you know whatever when people go up the stairs maybe that's just a thing of like he was like fucking thrown out everything his organs were sucked out of him another time is maybe the kid went up the stairs and literally just like there's it was just tons of holes inside of his body like it just like a giant like fucking thorn bush or something stuck him you know there's so many different again there's so many different options of how things could have happened but there's so it's the unexplainableness the oddness of it that it's so peculiar it's off-putting you know one of the vets that the training operates no sleep and he recognized my stories he knows me pretty well and we've saw up stories before.

2:29:37He asked if he could share something he's noticed about the stairs and some thoughts he's had. I'm really glad you decided to share these. I think it's important that people be aware of what's out there, especially since the Forest Service is doing such a good job at covering it all up. I asked him what he meant. What do you mean, what do I mean? The lack of any kind of media attention? No coverage of missing kids or bodies found miles from where they get lost in the first place? David Pilatus hit this right on the head. The Forest Service is doing everything they can to keep people coming here, even if it isn't safe.

2:30:08I mean, to be fair, it's not like these things happen every day, but the numbers add up, and it's worth looking into. Especially the stairs. I was surprised you didn't mention the flipped ones. I didn't know what he was talking about. I couldn't remember him ever talking about something like that. It seemed somewhat incredulous. Dude, I can't believe you've been on this this long without seeing them. No one told you about them? I shrugged and asked him to elaborate. Well, there's the normal stairs, the ones that pop up when we're out of ways. I know you know about them, but sometimes I run across ones that are flipped upside down.

2:30:42I guess it would be like if you had a dollhouse and the stairs were a separate piece. Now take that, flip it upside down so the top is stuck in the dirt, and put it out in the woods. They're like that. I don't see them often, but they're odd. But they're odd to say the least. Makes me think of footage taken after a tornado. When the houses are all blown apart and random things are left standing, like chimneys and garden walls. Those ones freak me out more than the normal ones. Yeah, I can't write this off as easily. I don't scare you very easily, like most of us who work out here, but the idea stuck with me and it bothers me.

2:31:17Going to try and find out more about them. He also mentioned how many people were bothered by the guy with no face. He got really excited and told me he'd seen something similar. I was out on a training exercise a few years ago. I was camped out in my tent and I heard someone walking around outside of a camp. We're told not to wander far, which, you know. So I wondered if maybe it was a rookie who'd gotten up to pee and couldn't find his way back. Remember that guy in our group a few years back who almost fell off the damn mountain? Well, I'm paranoid about that happening again. So I got to see what was going on and went to the edge of camp and I called to whoever it was and told them the camp was this way.

2:31:56but they kept going back out into the woods so I went after them. I knew it was stupid but I was half asleep and I just really didn't want to deal with some idiot getting hurt. I followed this thing on a dead straight course for about a mile but then it stopped on the edge of a little river. I could see the outline of it because the water was reflecting the moon and it looked just like an ordinary guy. He had a pack on and it looked like he was facing me. I asked if he was okay if he needed help and he cocked his head like he didn't understand me. I always had my pocket knife on me. It's got a little thumb light attached to it.

2:32:31So I turned that on and lit up his chest so I wouldn't blind him. He was breathing slow and deep, so I wondered if he was sleepwalking. I went closer and asked him again if he was okay and moved the light up, and something just didn't seem right. So I stopped. He kept breathing in real slow, deep breaths. I sort of figured out gradually that that's what was bothering me. It was like he was pretending to breathe, but not actually doing it. His breasts were too even and deep, and all of his movements were exaggerated, like his shoulders were going up and his chest moving. I told him to identify himself, and he made his muffled noise.

2:33:13I moved the light up, and I shit you not, this guy had no face, just smooth skin. I freaked out and I sort of fumbled my light, but I saw him move toward me, but he didn't actually move. I just don't know how to explain it. But one second, he was at the edge of the river, and the next, he was five feet from me. I never looked away or blinked. It was like he moved so fast my brain couldn't keep up. I tripped and fell on my ass, and I could see this line open up on his throat. It stretched up to his ears, and his head tilted back, and he smiled at me with his throat. There wasn't any blood, just this gaping dark hole.

2:33:53and I swear he smiled at me with his gash in his throat. I got up and I ran as fast as I could back to camp. I couldn't hear him following me, but I felt like he was always right behind me, even though when I looked back, I couldn't see him. I calmed down when I got back to camp and the fire was still going. And I guess that pack mentality of being with other people made me stop and breathe a little. I waited by the fire to see if he'd follow me there. I didn't hear anything else for a few hours. So I went back to bed. I know it sounds weird, but the whole thing was so surreal that it was almost like I immediately wrote it off as my imagination.

2:34:27I will say the scariest, the scariest record of that is I love the breathing thing. Like he's breathing in his shoulders. So good. Yeah. Creepy. Like he's like, he's trying to look like he's breathing, man. That's so good. It's all. It's similar. So similar to the stairs and similar to like the cry loop. It's like something that isn't human trying to come off as human. and it's like oh well this is what people look like but they have the face wrong it's like oh well this is what people breathe like but it's too exaggerated and of course uh it's like oh well i want to come off as friendly so i'm going to smile but it doesn't know where the smile goes so it puts a gash in the throat that's so it's so creepy it's like something wants us to cross over to the other side so bad again similar to stairs it's like oh people walk up these so i'll put this out here the no face thing i mean we see that a lot like no fate like that i just that it's just that little thing like almost like you know i mean the smile it is what it is like i'm not like super stoked on that but i will say like just that breathing thing of like this uncanny breath is just yeah is that's all i love that a lot of fun also that's the same guy that definitely takes giant strides yeah well it gets too close again it's like they're trying to walk but they don't know what walking is so it's like a different it's like they're doing the same thing in the wrong steps almost they're trying to get the aspects of it down but they're bad at it man that's so good the mimicry is so good we were telling ghost stories one night before bed just to scare each other and poke fun at whoever got creeped out most of the time it's the rookies but one woman told a story that actually managed to get under my skin a little bit and i know the same was true for others she said it was true but then again every ghost story told around a campfire is true somehow though i don't think she was making it up it had that ring of truth that only really traumatizing events have she said that when she was a kid she and her friend used to go out in the woods behind her house a lot she lived in northern maine where there's a lot of dense unpopulated national forest she said the woods up there aren't like they are here so thick in places that the trees block out the sun almost completely she and her friend grew up there so they weren't scared of being out there alone but they did always maintain a sense of caution in certain areas she said it was never really talked about but they always knew not to go more than a mile or two beyond their homes adults never said why there's an unspoken rule that no one ventured out that far she and her friend made up stories about bears as big as houses lived out there and used to scare each other by hiding and making growling noises while the others search for them.

2:37:08I love that. She said one summer there was a series of awful storms that blew down a lot of trees. Set one part of the forest a few miles behind her house on fire. Fire crews got it under control. She said some of them came back not quite the same. It was like they'd been to war. You could tell who'd really gotten scared because they had the same look on their faces. I think it's called shell shock. My friend and I said they were like walking dead people. They didn't smile or say anything. It went up to them and most of them left town as soon as everything was over. I asked my parents about it but they said they didn't know what I was talking about.

2:37:49Once everyone was told the woods were safe again, my friend and I decided to try and hike out to where the fire had been. We didn't tell our parents where we were going. It was pretty exciting to think that we were disobeying them like that. We hiked about two miles or so and we started seeing burnt trees and stuff i remember my friend got really upset because we found the skeleton of a deer curled up under a tree i practically had to drag her away she wanted to bury it but i didn't want her touching it because its antlers were weird i can't remember why just remember thinking there was something wrong with them i didn't want either of us going near it that's so cool how do you think they're how do you think they were how do you think what a cool little detail what a cool rate of detail um maybe like too many points or like they were growing weird or backwards i like to think that they were like i like to think that they were like you know because they're usually jolted out like branches it becomes it'd be kind of sick if they're all curled like very like all swirly like too smooth and swirly you know yeah they're all too like uh to the lines don't move the way deer antlers just normally move yeah something like that man that's such a sick little similar to the breathing stuff like that just like the antlers on the body were weird like i love those little details are so i like how nonchalantly it said or like it's just so candid like it's just like oh i didn't want to touch it because the weird the horns are kind of weird but it isn't but it isn't like giving you this big grandiose explanation it's just more of an afterthought but that's the thing that just fucking hit you the hardest you're like what go back what can we go back yeah can we get some clarification on that uh she's like no no no i don't think you will the farther we went the more burn everything got eventually there were no standing trees and it was like being on another planet almost nothing green just brown and black everywhere we were standing there looking at it all we both heard someone shouting in the distance i panicked because i thought it was my dad and that he was going to tell me i was grounded my friend broke off and went to hide behind a rock because she said she didn't want to be caught out here her parents had forbidden her to come out in the woods at all and she lied and told them we were going to a movie i followed her and we kept listening i could hear this voice getting closer and i realized they were calling for help i thought maybe it was some hiker who got lost and needed directions back to town that used to happen all the time so i was used to helping people out heard him following my voice so i kept calling out until i saw him running in the distance he got closer and i could see that his face was all red i told my friend to give me her pack because she had a first aid kit she made this noise like she was grossed out and she asked if i saw his face told her to shut up and i jogged up to meet him I stopped about halfway and when he stopped in front of me I could see that his nose and lips and part of his forehead were all gone.

2:40:59Oof. It was like they'd been sliced clean off. He was bleeding bad and I saw the knees of his pants were red too. I took a step back but I was too scared to move much and he grabbed my shoulders. Felt like I got a shock and he jerked back. he started babbling and i couldn't tell what he was saying except that he was asking how long he'd been gone he asked me where his unit was but i just shook my head he looked at me over and he saw my walkman and he screamed he just kept babbling and touching his face and i realized he wasn't wearing the right clothing some kind of weird gray cloth jacket and almost formal pants on and the jacket has these weird buttons and red borders on it i kept shaking my head and told him I couldn't understand what he was saying.

2:41:45I wanted to open the first aid kit when he just screamed again and said that the only thing I could really understand... Don't touch me! You'll make me go back there! After that, he ran off. I could hear him screaming the whole time. When I couldn't hear him anymore, I turned around and my friend was crying. I just turned around and started walking back towards him. She asked me over and over what happened and who that was, but I didn't say anything. When we got home, I told her I didn't want to play in the woods with her anymore. We're still friends, but we don't talk about that guy. Not ever.

2:42:22I'll update you guys as soon as I'm able. Appreciate the continued support. Yeah, exactly. The last story being like a Confederate soldier that definitely like either walked up the woods or something, like walked up the stairs a long time ago. Yeah. It's pretty fun, too. It seems like... You can also see where the injury was because it's his lips, nose, forehead, and knees. So it's like he was stepping and then like the frontal plane made contact. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the, uh, uh, the, um, the idea too, cause this idea is that like, has he just been trapped in a void for over a hundred years or something?

2:43:00Could be a void could also, because they talk about time moves. There's been several instances where time gets weird. Like the girl who thinks she's gone an hour, she's gone two days. the little kids who are that one boy that says was gone a month. And when they find him, he's like the same condition, same clothes, not dirty or anything. So maybe you just skip, or maybe for this Confederate guy, maybe he did go to some weird pocket dimension for a while and then wind up in Maine and like the nineties, you know, that's so cool. The visual, the visual being in a burnt forest and it's foggy. And then through the fog comes running a man with a red face.

2:43:36He's bleeding everywhere in a Confederate uniform. that's so terrifying yeah you'd be even more terrifying too i don't know why if it's a guy in a reenactment they're like oh my god you're from hundreds of years ago he's like no no i swear to god i'm not it's like that's a weird thing my name's jason i work at big lots yeah i work at enron how's the company doing do i still have my job they're like oh

2:44:04Well, as long as I can go to my office at the World Trade Center, I'll be okay. Yeah, exactly. 56 floor, beautiful views.

2:44:15Buddy, you dodged a bullet. It's like his nose and forehead's going off. He's like, what do you mean? They're like, you're in better shape. Trust me. Well, that should be fine. As long as my secondary office at Building 7 next to the World Trade Center is okay. I don't think anything bad would happen to it. Since if anything were to happen to the towers, it has its own structural support system and there would never be a reason it would fall. Meaning thankfully all of the CIA and FBI's budget documents can be kept in one place safe from attack. If I have my, and I gotta say, luckily I still have an end at the Pentagon, so it'll be okay.

2:44:55As long as they don't hit the East wing of the Pentagon, which of course as mentioned holds records of all the stairs in the woods were just trying to kill specifically this guy that's like the it's like that that's the yeah we don't need to the stairs the stairs in the woods were built by like george bush to like cover up yeah yeah exactly all kinds of stairs george that's why it sounds good that's why dick that's why dick cheney shot that guy in the woods yeah exactly hey do you see that staircase

2:45:34That was an accident. Let's go back. I thought the deer was looking at my stairs. Turns out it was a man in a camo jacket. Oops. Oops. That was an accident. Oopsie daisy. Dick I just don't know about these stairs Dick

2:46:02but but if it gets us to the island quicker it's all connected the stairs were to kill the confederate soldier was the guy Dick Cheney shot in the woods yeah where am I just a random guy in the woods sorry you startled me you saw me is that the vice president is that the vice president yeah

2:46:39yeah so yeah good story good bit good bit part 6 also has a not safe so the not safe for work tag was just the guy it was the boy It was the boy with the guts. Disabowd, whatever. Which I will say, it is nice to have a not safe for work tag that is not safe for work in a not child sexual abuse sense. That does feel good to have. It feels refreshing. We don't see that a lot. It feels refreshing. No, we do not. We do not. But don't worry, because part six also has one, so we'll see. Well, we'll see if it changes, but normally our stories, they use every letter of that abbreviation. they really leave nothing to the imagination it is capital all the way through yeah painful all the way through all right i will say too we've been recording for three hours this this record this recording has felt like like brisk like i feel like this has been a lot of fun i think having all these things be micro micro doses is like it keeps re-engaging you in a fun way so i don't know a lot a lot of games it rolling well i agree which later on he's definitely adding more information um as the parts are progressing but still uh it still feels like these campfire stories which i think that's like that's the essence of what makes this such a memorable experience yeah yeah it's been way too long since i've posted an update and i'm sorry about that there's also been some confusion about the new formatting requirements on the board which i've cleared up so these next few stories are going to be posted a little differently i'll be in chronological order and i'll do my best to tie them into each other as much as i can so it doesn't skip around too much when i started out as a rookie no one told me about the job in terms of weird things that could happen i'm assuming this was largely to prevent me from freaking out and abandoning the park but but a few months into my service when i was still a rookie friend and i were drunk at a party and he opened up a bit you can get a little crazy out there i guess i think the worst of the ones where people die when they just shouldn't you know or when we find them dead like 10 minutes after someone says that they saw them last they were fine when i passed them on the switchback i swear that sort of shit like take this guy i found one spring out on a really popular trail someone comes into the vc freaking out about some guy who's lying in the middle of the path in this giant pool of blood so we run out there then we find this guy dead as a doornail which absolutely which he absolutely should be because the back of his head is like mashed potatoes the skull is decimated brains are leaking out like custard filling and the guy's old so you figure yeah he probably fell in his head old people fall all the time it's no big deal except that this area where he fell doesn't have any big rocks there's not even stumps or big branches and on top of that there's no blood trail so he clearly died where he dropped now that's when you turn to murder but were people just out of line out of line of sight with the guy if someone came up behind him and murdered him there's no way someone would have had someone would have heard and again even if someone had there'd be a blood trail splatter all over place but everyone on the scene said it looked exactly Act like he'd fallen and smashed his head on a rock.

2:50:03So what the fuck did he hit his head on? And then there was this lady I found in a different park about five years ago. Back when I was upstate, we found her in the middle of a stand or like big junipers curled around the trunk like she was hugging it. And we picked her up to move her and a fucking waterfall comes out of her mouth, splashing all over my shoes. her clothes were all dry and her hair is dry but the amount of water in her lungs and stomach was phenomenal unreal man coroner's report says the cause of death was drowning her lungs were completely full of water this even though we're in the middle of the high desert and there isn't a body of water for uh miles no puddles no nothing no signs of no signs of anyone else being out there.

2:50:53I mean, yeah, it's possible they were murdered, but why would you go out of the way and do it like that? Why not just stab them and be done with it? I don't know. It just sits weird with me. That woman we found in the desert full of water, a little weird. That one is pretty. That one's pretty sweet. The idea of a woman being found completely dry corner of the tree and you move her and then she just gushes out water. pretty fucked up she's not even hair's not like she's completely dry it's so I think the implication is that this stuff under like the the stair stuff the dimensional transport and stuff isn't just on the stairs it can be other places too I think I see um so it's like she drowned but in the water her body drifted into this rift that teleported it here um which is like in hindsight very similar to the flesh interface trace concept um i there's something i was gonna say about the oh yeah it's further as to like the un without every other death something about it's just a little bit off it also reminds me of a lot of weird like sort of missing 411 cases i'll read about every now and then where there's a really strange detail like that like uh there's this one where a little boy went missing and the only trace they found of him was one of his socks on top of a mountain like 30 miles away and it's like okay how like what happened there you know it reminds me of that where just one detail is unexplainable and it makes the whole thing strange right now of course that freaked me out a little we were wasted and i guess i sort of wrote it off as a fluke also assume there was exaggeration there since you know we were wasted i don't like talking about this next case very much it was an awful one that I've done my best to forget about, but of course, it's easier said than done.

2:52:47This happened about six months after the conversation with my friend at the bar, and up until that point, I hadn't had a lot of really weird shit go down. A few things here and there, and of course the stares, but it's amazingly easy to get used to stuff like that when it's treated as if it's normal. This case was a little different. A guy with Down syndrome in his 20s went missing after his family lost sight of him on a major path. This was odd in and of itself because this guy never really left his mom's side. She was absolutely convinced he'd been kidnapped, and unfortunately, a ranger who isn't with the park anymore insinuated that no one was going to kidnap someone, well, with that kind of disability.

2:53:25Not very... That would be you as a park ranger. Just evil. Not evil. Just... I am who I am. You can't blame a dog for being a dog. You can't blame a man. Exactly. You see, now you're learning. Exactly. You can't hold it. It's in one's nature to be terrible. I am who I am. Do not try to change me. Not very tactful, to say the least. Wasted a lot of time trying to calm her down enough to get information about him, and then we put out an official missing persons call. Because of the urgency of the situation, him being mostly unable to function alone, we had local police come in and help us. We didn't find him the first night, which was heartbreaking.

2:54:09None of us wanted to think about him being alone out there. We assume he just kept wandering and was staying ahead of us. We brought out Hellies the next day, and they spotted him in a little canyon. I helped bring him back up, but he was in bad shape. I think we all knew he wasn't going to make it. He'd fallen and broken his spine. Jesus. Couldn't feel his lower half. He'd also broken both his legs, one of the femur, and he lost a lot of blood. He was confused and scared while he was alone, so he probably exacerbated the injuries by dragging himself a little ways. I know it sounds awful, but while I was riding in the copter with him, I asked him why he'd wandered off.

2:54:48Just wanted something to tell his mother. Probably to know it wasn't her fault, because he was fading fast and I didn't think she could ask him herself. He was crying, and he said something about how the little sad boy had wanted him to come play. He said the little boy wanted to trade so he could go home. And he closed his eyes, and when we woke up again, he was in the canyon. I'm not sure that's exactly what he said, but it's what I thought the gist of it was. He kept crying, asking where his mommy was, and I held his hand and tried my best to keep him calm. It was cold out there. He kept saying that.

2:55:30It was cold out there. My legs was frozen. It was cold out there. It's cold in me. He was getting even weaker, so he eventually stopped talking. He closed his eyes for a while. Then, we were about five minutes from the hospital. He looked right at me with these big tears running down his face, and he said, Mama won't see me no more. Love, Mama. Wish she was here. He closed his eyes, and he just never woke up. It was horrible. I like talking about it the case was one of the first ones that really rattled me badly man the little boy wanted to trade so it's like the fuzzy man again like the thing where it's like I keep the kids but you're not right but that kid wasn't right so he got to go so maybe kids can trade with other people but they have to choose to one was I'm like wondering if the kid was stuck in this place right if he's stuck in like this kind of zone and he's like basically trading spots.

2:56:35Like I wonder if him dying there, like, I don't know. There's just something there. Like I'm wondering what he would be trading. That isn't just his life or his place in the zone. You know? Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Interesting. Man, that's a gosh. These stories are so good. Okay. Because of how badly it affected me, I reached out to a senior ranger and who ended up helping me through it. sign went on and we got to know each other better he ended up sharing one of his own stories with me it was disturbing but it helped to know that I wasn't the only one affected by things going on out here I think this must have happened I think this must have happened before I think this must have happened before you got here because I think it's happened while you were because I think if it happened while you were oh my fucking god oh god my fucking brain fucking idiot brain jesus christ what the fuck did i do that was i dropped as a kid my fucking god i think this must have happened before you got here because i think if it had happened while you were here you'd have remembered it i know it didn't end up the officer says all that he fucking should i know it i know it didn't end up in the news for some reason but i think most People who've been here long enough know about it.

2:58:00The park sold off a portion of land to a logging company, and it was a real controversial thing. But it wasn't that large or old of a plot. It was right after the recession, so we needed the cash bad. Anyway, they were filling this plot of land, and we got a call that we need to get our supervisors out right away. I don't know why, but they ended up sending me and a few other guys along with the heads. I guess for power and numbers to see what was up. We got there and these guys are crowded around a tree that they've just cut down. They're all pissed off and freaking out and the foreman comes over and says he wants to know what we were up to.

2:58:40What the hell y 'all think this is? Some kind of sick joke? You've got a lot of fucking nerve pulling this shit. We bought this land fired square. Well, we don't know what the hell he was talking about. so it brings us over to this felled tree and points at it and tells us that when they cut it down it was just like this and they'll be damned if they put it they put it there inside the tree was all rotted out and hollow in one spot and when they cut it down it exposed that chamber and inside it is a hand like a perfectly severed hand oh that's fun and it looks like it's actually fused inside of the tree well now we think they're pulling a joke so we tell them that we don't like being fucked with and we started to leave and they've and they tell us that they've actually called the cops and that they'll go right to the media if we don't stick around well that gets the head's attention so they stick around and talk to the police about it everyone is denying that they put the hand of the tree and besides how would anyone have done that it's clearly it's clearly a real hand but it's not mummified or skeletal it's brand new probably not even a day over old, and it's definitely fused with the wood.

2:59:52You can see it's coming right out of it. The loggers, they insist that they didn't put it there. Somehow, this fresh human hand ended up fused inside of this living tree, and the cops have them cut up that section of tree into a movable chunk. Then, they take the hand away, and the area's closed off. There's a pretty big investigation, but I know they didn't find any answers. Now it's become this legend. As far as I know, we haven't sold any more property for logging interesting i like the idea of like when something that goes missing in the woods it shows up somewhere else in the woods it's interesting too that it doesn't just show up it like materializes with something else like it like it becomes a part of something yeah exactly yeah i think i think that's a cool feature yeah yeah as you all know i went to a training seminar recently and heard some amazing and horrible things there one of the guys i talked to while i was there told me a story when we were all around the campfire one night we were both pretty drunk we'll see a pattern here and we were swapping stories you told me this one god damn it my fucking brain i'm telling you man i'm like so i'm like every time i see every time i see the quote to just read no i did no okay no no no every time i see the quotation i'm like i feel like a like a kid who is like on a baseball team who's like not going to do well at bat.

3:01:14Going up to the plate. Exactly. So I'm just like kind of like barely sluggishly walking up to plate. Oh boy, here we go again. Just knowing I'm going to disappoint all my teammates. All right. It's okay, buddy. This is a slow, like just one paragraph. This is a slow pitch. Me and another guy were out on field search because some campers reported screaming noises at night. So we head out there to look for whatever fucking mountain lion was wandered into the area and I'm pissed. We've had three of them show up in the camping areas that year alone and I'm getting tired of hell of constantly having to deal with them.

3:01:49Plus, I just don't like them anyway. They're paying the ass and they're loud and they scare the shit out of me. Fucking cats. Pieces of shit. Alright, this guy's right in my alley. I'm growing about it. This is you talking about. This is the easiest read I've ever had. I'm growing about it. Maybe more of a t-ball than a pitch. really yeah it really is i'm groaning about it to the guy i'm with and he thinks it's a real fucking riot so we're seeing all these broken branches and what looks like dens and we're pretty sure we know where this thing is i call in they tell me to call and confirm if possible which you know just means they want you to step in a big pile of shit and use that as proof i'm not seeing any though so i basically just tell them to shove it i'm done we know the damn things out here somewhere even if i'm not stepping in its shit or inside its mouth or whatever the The guy I'm with wanders off to take a piss or whatever, and I stay behind watching this little burrow under a tree to see if maybe a fox or something is living under it.

3:02:44Cause I love foxes man, they're cute as hell. But anyway, I'm watching this tree and I start hearing branches crackling and it's coming from the direction my partner went opposite of. Now I've got my pistol, but you and I both know it's not going to do shit against the cat. I cock it and holler at my partner to get his dumb ass back, but he's too far and he can't hear me. I stand up and get my sights out where the thing is approaching and I shit you not man. I Just about peed myself. This guy is coming towards me and he's back flipping through the fucking woods Like instead of walking he's doing these crazy fucking backflips and I swear to God he cleared He cleared every fucking log and bush in his path.

3:03:25It was like he knew right where he was going I yelled the guy to stop right where he is Then I'm pulling my gun right at him, but it keeps coming and I just kind of lost it I shot the ground in front of him and it was dumb fucking thing to do but but man I didn't want this guy anywhere near me When I fired he was about 50 yards from me and as soon as I the gun goes off He whirls around and goes back back flipping back into the woods And my partner hears my gun go off and runs back and asks what's up and I tell them that there's some fucking weirdo Out here hopped up on God knows what and we need to get the hell out of Dodge I let the cops know what happened and I didn't get any trouble for firing but man I don't know what that motherfucker was on but I've never seen anything like that before shit was absolutely butt fuck crazy I want to say too if there was a guy can you imagine a man continuously back flipping through a force that would be the scariest thing I've ever seen that is the scariest thing that we have we've talked about in this podcast so far bro just imagine hearing or just like like getting closer and you just see a guy also can you imagine barely seeing his face because you just make eye contact with him every once in a while because he keeps back flipping upside down yeah exactly I would have shot him he's upside down so he's upside down but the face is right side up

3:04:54like when you look at him his eyes are where his chin should be yeah mouth is on his forehead man that's such a creepy visual just and you know he's going fast too you know this dude's like flipping like a um gymnast just gosh that's terrifying it's fine it's like it's so scary it's funny like thinking about that happening to you in the middle of the night well also bro who who is even going to believe like you saying that to somebody what the who the fuck is going to believe that. Yeah, the guy just wouldn't stop flipping. I'd be like, uh-huh. Would never buy. I would never believe that. Of course not.

3:05:36Because he said a guy's back flipping through the woods in the middle of the night coming right at you. But it goes back to the whole thing about the uncanniness of these humanoids that they're trying to mimic human motion and mobility, but it all comes off wrong. I think we can agree that there's stuff going on out here in the woods. Well, I'm not going to spout off about what it could be or offer any theories. I want people to take away from all this is that it is so damn important to be safe when you're out there. A lot of you think you're invincible. The fact is that you can die out there or be hurt or go missing.

3:06:11It's easier than you'd ever imagine. I apologize for this relatively short update, guys. I'll do my absolute best to continue this series as soon as possible. Thanks for all your continuing support. It means the world to me. End of part six. Part seven!

3:06:31Can you imagine that motherfucker backflipping at you and then the guy who's like uncannily making those long strides towards you as well? I'd be like, what the fuck is going on in these woods, dude? Just start shooting stuff, man. I would pull the gun on myself. I wouldn't care. I'd be like, man. I'm not taking prisoners. Something's getting shot here right now. I'll tell you right now, it's going to be me. I'm like, nah, I'm good. No satisfaction for these guys. Sorry. Bye-bye. part seven one of the topics i get asked about a lot here and in real life involving things like the rake the wendigo oh oh is me way to go the wendigo and other related legends i can't honestly say that i know a lot about any of them but based on some light reading i did i can't say that i've heard stories that seem to be loosely related to them you've heard the old adage that legends like that come from somewhere and i'm sure that's true but as you all know i tried to take things with a grain of salt.

3:07:27You have to out here. Sort of like working in a hospital, I'd imagine. You could spend all day thinking about how many people have died there and how there are probably ghosts, or whatever you want to call them, all over the place. But it doesn't do you any good. Just makes it harder to do your job. I think a lot of us feel that way and that's why we try to just go back to our work like everything's fine. Once you get paranoid, there's not really any going back and a lot of cadets quit because of it. My park especially seems to be a high turnover rate because the cadets graduate and get so freaked out about everything and they can't seem to let it go.

3:08:03You have to learn to internalize things and shut off. I've talked to KD a bit about her experience because I wanted to know what she thought about the Wendigo. She didn't really have anything in particular to say about it. Aside from that, she didn't want to think about it that much, but she told me a friend of hers had had something similar happen. I contacted this person H over Skype and they agreed to talk to me a bit. They're aware of my work here. They're fine with me posting the story exactly as they wrote it. Now batting number 10 100 is what it feels like. I grew up in Central Oregon. This one I'm trying to find the end of the quotation mark.

3:08:47It's a big one. This one might be closer to a curveball. This is a screwball coming at 93 miles an hour over your top left shoulder. I have to persevere, and I have to make this. High left to mid-right. This has to be crazy, bitch. I'm going to say that this is a, I apologize for anyone listening. This is going to probably be a long strand of hiccups and pauses. Try to decipher it the best you can. I sincerely apologize. Okay. I grew up in Central Oregon, and there's a reservation called Warm Springs about two or so hours from where I lived. I only mention that because a lot of people in that in that.

3:09:28I only mention that because a lot of people in my area have friends there, and a lot of the land in that area belongs to that tribe. When I was a kid, we used to go camping up there. Not on the res, of course, but in that area. And I met a lot of kids who grew up there. I got to know one kid really well. His name was Nolan, and we ended up hanging out a lot when our families were in the area. Our folks got to know each other, so we'd all be in touch and camp out around the same time. We camp out for about two weeks, so we were out for a long time. I asked him if he camped in an RV. Yeah, my dad had one, so I guess I wasn't really camping, but we'd take our tents and stuff and set them up away from camp most nights.

3:10:09I didn't like sleeping in there because I like being outside. We talked for a bit about camping. So anyway, sorry. One year, Nolan and I were out there. I think we must have been like 12 or so. We wanted to go out and camp near the river because we wanted to try night fishing. I think we must have been out about a third of a mile from a main camp, far enough away from where we couldn't hear or see anyone else. I remember that. We were messing around most of the day, and I don't really remember much about it. But we ended up building a fire at some point, and I was really impressed because he had this flint or something that he used to start it.

3:10:43I'd never seen anyone do that before, so I thought it was pretty cool. I got him to teach me how to do it, and we lit some stuff on fire, which, looking back, was really stupid because it was the middle of fucking summer, and if I remember right, the fire warning was either a yellow or orange, but thankfully, we didn't start anything major, and when it got dark, we sat around and talked about whatever it is 12-year-olds talk about. I don't really remember. What I do remember is that at some point, he looked over my shoulder at the river and asked me if I could see something. The way our camp was set up, we were about 10 feet from the river and we were at the widest point, so it's probably about 20 feet to the other bank.

3:11:21It gets hot up there in the summer, but that water's still cold, which is important. I look over my shoulder and I can see something wading into the river on the other side. From where we were, it looked like a deer, but we couldn't really tell because of the fire. I got up to look closer and I saw a pair of antlers, so I figured it was a buck. but I thought it was weird it was wading into the water, and it was definitely heading for us. And I asked Nolan what he thought we should do. He's looking at the fire with this weird expression as he tells me to sit down and shut up. So I do so. Because I'd never seen him act like that way before.

3:12:00He's wishing at me to ignore it, just to keep talking like we were, but I couldn't think of anything to say. He was saying something about an episode of some show, but I could hear the deer coming through the water. so I wasn't really paying any attention and I kept trying to see it over his shoulder but every time I did he sort of hit me with his arm and made sure to look at him I wasn't really scared I remember I was just sort of confused but then I hear the deer coming out of the water and I could kind of make out what it looked like and I realized it wasn't a deer because whatever it was I was walking on two legs I started to get up I was super freaked out but Nolan just yanked me back down and talked louder about this television show.

3:12:43I could tell he was just as scared as I was, probably even more. He leaned in and poked the fire with a stick and whispered that whatever I do, I can't speak to it. I could see it come closer, and it stood right behind Nolan's back. I was about ready to pee my pants. I think I'd probably have to run if it had been alone. But I didn't want to leave Nolan, so I kept sitting really still and sneaking glances at it. It wasn't that tall, but the way that it carried itself was wrong. Like its center of bounds was screwed up. I can't really describe it. But it was kind of like it kept shifting too far forward.

3:13:20It just stood there behind Nolan for a long time, and eventually Nolan ran out of things to say, and we just kind of sat there for a second. The fire was making noise. But I thought I could hear this thing talking in a really low voice. I could hear what it was saying. and I leaned forward a tiny bit and I actually did pee my pants when I leaned forward too. I couldn't see its face but I saw its eyes. They were cloudy and milky. If you want to know what it looked like find that scene from Lord of the Rings where Frodo falls in that lake and all the dead people are floating towards him. That's what it looked like.

3:13:57So all I know so all I saw were these two white eyes floating above Nolan's head and the really vague shape of an antler's coming out of its head. I don't know what my face looked like, but at exactly that same time, Noel and I fucking booked it out of there. And we ran nonstop until we got back to the main camp. My pants were soaked with piss, so I took them off as we were running and threw them in the bushes. We both stopped once we were in front of Dad's RV and we couldn't see anything chasing us. So we stood there and caught our breath and I asked him what the things, what that thing was, but he said he didn't know.

3:14:35He said his grandpa had only warned him that if anything ever came up to him when he was out in the desert, he was never, ever supposed to talk to it or listen to anything it had to say. I wanted to know if he heard it talking too, and he said that the only thing he'd be able to understand was, help you. I think we ended up sleeping in the RV with my parents, and the next night, we went back out and didn't see anything. it does remind me in a lot of ways of the wendigo legend there's a phrase you describe it that i think fits perfectly which is that the wendigo is the spirit of the lonely places you know that sometimes when i'm out in the wind out in the wilds where i know there's no one around me for miles and miles i get this weird kind of craving that i really can't explain i don't know what it I don't know if it happens to anyone else but it's the desire to consume it's not like I crave anything it's not like I crave anything in particular but more of this weird distracting hunger that comes from every part of my gut also wanted to man I was so right I was so right I was so right with the hunger thing earlier man god your voice scared the shit out of me I was lost in the sauce there I also wanted to find out more about these faceless man if I was able and I found new similar things I surrounded my circles of friends, and one of them said he was out doing repairs at a park in his area, and he saw something kind of like that.

3:16:01We were having dinner in town, five of us including myself. This guy, he was repainting in an information booth and heard a man asking for directions to the nearest campsite. He didn't turn around because he was up on a ladder, but he informed the man that there weren't any campsites nearby, but that if he headed down the road about four miles, he'd find one at another park. He asked if he could be of any other help, but the man said no and thanked him. My friend said he kept painting, but he was listening and never heard the man leave. The second he came up and talked to me, the hairs on my neck stood up, but I wasn't sure why.

3:16:40I just had this really uneasy feeling about the whole thing. I wanted to finish paint and get out of there. I figured maybe part of it was that I couldn't turn around to look at him, but something just fell off. There was also this weird smell floating around even before the guy talked to me. Kind of like old period blood. I looked around to see what was causing it, but didn't find anything. So I waited for the guy to walk away. But I didn't hear him leave, which made me think he was just standing there and watching me. So I asked again if I could do anything for him, and he didn't answer. I knew he was there, though, because I hadn't heard him leave.

3:17:20So I did this awkward turn on the ladder to look down and see what he was doing. I have to admit, it could have just been my brain fucking up. But I swear to you, Russ, for a split second, when I turned around, that fucker didn't have a face like he had no face. It was almost concave and totally smooth. And I just about had a fucking heart attack because I couldn't even wrap up my brain. I couldn't even wrap my brain around what I was seeing. I think I started to say something, but there was this kind of pop inside my head and suddenly he was just normal looking guy. I must've been looking, I must've looked fucking weird because he asked me if I was okay.

3:17:58And I was just like, Oh yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine. He asked about the campsite again. I pointed, I pointed to where he was supposed to go. And he's like, I'm not from around here. Can you help me get there? Now this is when I was, now this is when I knew there was something really up because and there's no way this guy got out here and didn't know where he was and for that matter there's no car around so how did he get here in the first place i said i was sorry but that i couldn't take him anywhere in the company vehicle and he and he's like you know please i really don't know where i am could you come with me and help me get there so now i'm seriously weirded out and i started wondering if there was some kind of ambush or whatever and I told him I could call him a taxi to come out and take him where he wants to go.

3:18:41And I pull out my phone. He just goes, oh, no, and walks away real quickly. But he doesn't walk out of the park. He just walks back into the fucking trees. And I got right in my fucking truck and I start to get out of there. Fuck the pain or whatever. I looked in my mirror and see where he was. And I was leaving. He's standing right at the tree line again. And I don't know how he got there so fast. but this time, I know that fucker didn't have a face. He was just watching me leave. Right before I turned the corner, he took a big step back into the trees and kind of dissolved, I guess. Maybe it was just dark, so he blended in, but it felt more like he just melted away.

3:19:21Interestingly, right after this guy finished his story, someone else piped up with another one, but with a slightly different twist. You know, actually, I had something sort of weird like that happen a while back. I was out doing some trail scouting and I was out in the middle of nowhere figuring out where we were going to have this trail run though. I hadn't seen anyone else for probably a good two hours so I wasn't really paying attention to where I was going. I was just looking at the ground for the most part then out of nowhere I crested this hill this little hill and almost ran into this guy.

3:19:54He was older, probably in his 60s and I started to apologize to him for running into him and then I noticed his face. I probably looked like a complete douchebag because I stopped and just stared at him and it took me a second to figure out what was wrong but this guy's face was huge I know that sounds weird but that's the only way to describe it his head wasn't big or anything it was normal but the amount of space in his face was just way too much like if you text someone's face and enlarge it all by about two times he doesn't say nothing He just kind of looks at me and I backed up and wasn't stuttering and saying I'm sorry.

3:20:34And I went around him and fucking got out of there and did what I needed to do. The whole time I kept looking behind me because I was so freaked out that he'd pop up behind or something. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I swear to you, it was one of the creepiest things I'd ever seen. I switched the topic to the stairs a little later and there was a definite shift in enthusiasm. No one spoke up at first. There was real stigma around discussing them, even when we were away from work. But I broke the ice with a story of my own, and the guy who told the story about the faceless man told this one, albeit very quietly.

3:21:07A couple years ago, I was camping with my girlfriend, and we were about two miles from the road at the sidonel. We went to bed that night, but we couldn't sleep because... Someone interjected a funny comment, and we dangerously closed to getting off on another subject. But I'll get back on track. Yeah, funny, you fucker. No. It was because we kept hearing that grinding noise. My brother used to grind his teeth in his sleep, and it kind of reminds me of that. My girlfriend was freaking out, but I just kept telling her to ignore it. I've heard it before. You just have to ignore it. It goes away eventually.

3:21:42You just, you guys know what I mean. We all knew what he meant. So eventually, I got her back to sleep. I woke up probably two hours later because something was just off. I rolled over and she wasn't there. And I kind of freaked out because he thought for a second. And then he took a very long drink. Anyway, I ran out of the tent calling her name. But I didn't have to go far. She was standing at the edge of the camp, looking at something in the trees. And I could see that she was really pale. The fire was low, but bright enough to see her. Anyway, so I ran up to see what was going on. And she was dead asleep.

3:22:19But her eyes were open. She had this real spaced out look, you know. So I put my arm around her to lead her back, but she wouldn't move. She just said really quietly something like, I have to go now, Eddie. I have to go. It's here. And I was like, you're just sleepwalking. Come back to bed. But she wouldn't budge. She just kept staying there and saying that she had to go. I looked where she was looking, and there was a fucking staircase right about 15 yards away. Gray one, concrete. And she had started to walk toward it. But I yanked her back and that woke her up. She looked at me like I was out of my fucking mind.

3:22:58And she asked what the fuck she was doing out of the tent. And I didn't tell her anything. I just told her she was sleepwalking. Grinding was gone. So she went back to the tent with me and fell asleep again. I don't know. I don't like thinking about it, you know. We all knew. You guys remember the kids with, I can't remember what it was. some kind of brain fuck up not downs but something like that someone else brought up well i got to read the report he gave when they found him a week after he went missing and it was fucked up beyond belief i mean you have to take it with a grain of salt because who knows what kind of kid actually thinks this is real but some of this stuff i i don't think he could have made it up like what first of all he talked about the stairs he said he'd been watching his dad build a fire and the stairs came up to him and he had to go up them or something bad would happen the cops couldn't really understand what he was talking about after that because he just kept saying that like the campfire and over and over you know and he kept mentioning sounds but he couldn't say what sounds just that it was loud and he covered his ears and he couldn't hear them but the thing i remember most is that they asked him where exactly he'd gone and he just said that he was right there he kept pointing at himself and they said that they thought that they meant that he thought he never left he said he wasn't scared because the stairs were there and they said that they talked to him but not like people talk like i said it was really convoluted and hard to understand and i have a feeling the cops didn't take most of it down they ended up just saying that the kid had some kind of amnesia or fugue, and they didn't think foul play was involved.

3:24:50Doesn't really explain why he came back a week later perfectly fine without a speck of dirt on him and well fed, but hey, what the cop says goes. Still a lot of questions I want to answer. I'll continue to ask around and find out whatever I can. The next update should be soon. Thanks for being so patient. You can also find me on Tumblr at searchandrescuewoods.tumblr.com. End of part seven. Congratulations. You did a really good job. Yay! Good on that. I remember that whole part, but I forgot it was a part of this series. Oh, interesting. So you remember that as a story, but you forgot that it's a part of this.

3:25:31I remembered so distinctly the one about the Wendigo or the Skinwalker coming up to them by the campfire and then looking forward to not addressing it. I remember the guy asking for a ride and then walking into the woods. I remember all that, but I totally forgot it was part of the series. I like the idea of these guys sharing stories for the first time. And you could tell that they're all very nervous to do so. Yeah, but they've got a lot on their chest. Yeah. Man, I really like the faceless guy walking into the woods. I like how he says the stairs came up to him like the campfire, almost implying that as the fire grows, he watched the stairs materialize out of the ground, like you watched an appearance of them happen again there's just so many cool ideas and presentations and again there's stuff you can connect like the girls seeing the staircase and like going into fugue state with the one search and rescue officer who seemed to be in a fugue state and then there's the mental illness thing propping up again like maybe they're too trusting like the innocence that's being preyed upon and stuff like that there's a bunch of there's a bunch of cool places you can draw lines between stuff yeah well final part final part let's do it part eight this will be my final update for now things have deteriorated here to a degree that i didn't foresee i didn't know how much writing about the things that are happening out here would affect every single part of my life and maybe that was stupid of me maybe i should have considered it more seriously but honestly i just thought i was writing about things that a few people would want to hear i didn't think it would get this much attention people People ask me about the stairs now.

3:27:08It doesn't happen every day, but when it does happen, I never really know what to say. My bosses know someone's talking about them, and I'm sure that if they know, the higher ups know. And I can tell you that they aren't happy about it. I've been formally told that I am not to speak a word about them to anyone anymore, which is part of the reason this has to be my final update. I can't risk my job for this, as much as it's been wonderful to get a lot of these things off my mind, I still do love my work and I need to be out here. If anything, my being aware of what's really going on is enough reason to stick it out.

3:27:42I may not be able to tell people that they're out there, but if I see them, I can wreck traffic away somewhere safer. Because of the amount of attention the stories have gotten, I've heard a lot of stories being swapped back and forth. I've heard so many I can't even remember most of them. Ones I do remember are the ones that I wish I could forget. One story that's made the rounds here was about a young woman who disappeared upstate. Initially, everyone assumed she was a runaway. She didn't come from a great home life, and so it really wasn't any kind of surprise that she chose to cut and run.

3:28:15But people started coming forward, saying that they'd seen her around the park shortly before she vanished, so some of the rangers in the area were sent out to make sure she hadn't hung herself or something on any of the back trails. It took them a while, But they did find her. Well, not all of her. Just half of her tongue and a quarter of her lower jaw. Very clean cuts from what I heard. They've never found the rest of her. So many stories about children. So many of them going missing and turning up in caves wedged in between impossible tight spaces. So many of them found on mountain peaks or at the bottom of sheer gullies.

3:28:52Missing shoes, missing socks, or found with both in perfect condition despite them being miles and miles away from where they vanished. so many stories of black-eyed people wandering around the woods and calling out in the night mimicking the sound of running water or bobcat screaming running water's crazy that's insane just sounds like a shreem man one man in particular goes to every news station he thinks will listen to him and tells the same story he was deer hunting camped out in a very remote area and woke up because something was scraping against his tent he thought it was a raccoon or a fox until the thing pressed its face against the door of the tent at which point he could very clearly make out a human nose and mouth he kicked at it it leaped back and was gone by the time he opened the tent flap gun it aside he fired two warning shots and when the sounds had faded he heard a snap behind him a man was standing at the edge of the campsite this man was not wearing any clothing but he also didn't possess any kind of human flesh as this hunter described it the man was made of some kind of amalgamation of raw meat and hair sick as if someone had scooped up roadkill and molded it into the vague shape of a man that's similar to the ice remember the guy that was made out of ice that was like a person it's like using stuff face was lumpy and only a rough approximation of a human face the thing opened its lopsided mouth and from it came the sound of the gun the hunter had fired that's awesome it it did this twice before mimicking the sound of the tent zipper and fleeing into the night.

3:30:27Whatever that would fuck me up. I'd be like, cool, I'm leaving. It opens its mouth. The meat pile makes two gunshot noises and then your tent and then runs off into the darkness. Opens his mouth and just makes a warning shot. Oh, it's terrifying. A young couple out for a hike in the rocky areas of my park reported to me yesterday that they had seen something strange out on a pink I'm very familiar with. They were taking turns looking through a pair of binoculars when the man noticed a hiker climbing up a very steep part of the cliff face. He watched the man scale the slope, and it didn't occur to him until the incident was over that this person had no climbing gear.

3:31:04When the climber reached the top of the peak, which is about five miles away, they turned and faced the young man. He said whoever, or whatever this person was, was looking right at them. The climber waved in an exaggerated manner before snapping in half at the waist, sideways, and leaping off the peak. young man didn't see where the climber landed i sent them on their way with assurances i'd check it out i lied i won't be turning in a report because there are 10 others exactly like it the climber is well known in that area i don't question it anymore is that not so sick i love that is that not so cool the idea of like the like maybe a guy died he like fell over the mountain and died there so now it just looks like him climbs to the top waves jumps off climbs to the top waves jumps off.

3:31:52It's so good. There's so many things I won't be able to understand about my job. It would take me years to relate all of the things I've heard in the last few months. When I feel like my job isn't in jeopardy, I'll come back. Maybe in a different format, but I will come back. Thank you all for sticking by my side and enjoying the things I've talked about. If you go out into the woods, I encourage you to be safe. Bring water, food, survival equipment let people know where you're going and when you'll be back don't go on uncharted paths unless you know exactly what you're doing and above all don't touch them don't look at them don't go up them and that is the end that's the end of stairs in the woods they have two notes at the end about again the tumbler search and rescue woods and then they also said i realize i probably should have mentioned this in the beginning the series is being paused but the story is going to live on a book is in the works the first draft is coming along very nicely keep a lookout no sleep and then i spoke to the uh author who's my friend as mentioned earlier and they said they're still working on it and there should be an announcement soon so the also isaiah also got a uh story that i don't think it's i don't i don't think it's linked exactly i don't think they ever posted it okay but the guy did pretty sure the author did direct us to another story about like boy scouts um that we're going to be reading on our patreon but we'll just leave it there just because it's not pertaining exactly to the story but that'll be uh an extra episode that we'll have up on the patreon if you'd like to do it it's you know what's crazy though is it it's insane that we did have a great first episode we just didn't read it correctly you know i mean i think like being able to actually sit down and read it again how fun because i know we reread it for and then when you're talking about something in hindsight it's never as good as just like reading it and then being immersed into it because there's so many you know we've seen a lot of stories like this too now with like creepy out in the woods things wendigo skinwalker type stuff but still i just i love this little digestible format of like getting a little spook and then going into the next thing and having like all these different fun flavors that you get to choose from which is really nice.

3:34:06Don't get me wrong. I love long continuous stories that have a great payoff or, you know, when they do have a great payoff, but it is nice just having something like this. It's, it's, this was a really fun read through and I'm glad, I'm glad we read it. Yep. Yeah. I think some of the details in this story are so good, like the mimicry stuff and like the most, and obviously the stairs is like I said earlier, a mainstay of online internet horror from the story that did such a good job with it. It's an incredible story. that deserves its flowers and i'm glad it gets them uh i really can't wait for a book or something to come out they had posted after this on the same account a cup of two updates that if i recall right were supposed to be parts of the book or like early chapters of the book um have like little sneak peeks um so we'll leave those for you on their account again user search and rescue woods be linked in the description if you want to read those for yourself uh but like as they said more is on the way and we're going to read a little bonus over on the Patreon too.

3:35:05So there's certainly more of this. The author deserves a ton of love. They're not, again, not only a good friend, but a great writer as you've heard. So yeah, be sure to support him because this is great. This is an OG in the internet horror realm for good reason. And also an OG for us because it was the first creep cast episode. Yeah. I mean, it's hard not to almost get fucking emotional talking about it, but I mean like two years of doing this guys is such a huge fucking blessing. we had an amazing live charity show i mean like what this fandom has become what this podcast has become is insane like i never expected something like this to occur you know with just a buddy that was just kind of an offhanded idea that i had one day so it's cool to um just kind of see how far it's come and it's just i don't know it's awesome you know i know that like not every story we read is a fucking banger but i can always say like you guys supporting the authors and supporting this podcast making memes making art writing your own stories now very inspiring and it's just fucking cool to see we really do have like an amazing fandom so i appreciate you yeah yeah you guys are fantastic uh you have been a blessing every step of the way to allow this podcast to be so successful to enjoy it as much as we have um see just love and support I never take it for granted.

3:36:25So thank you guys for how good you've been to me. Happy two years, guys. Stay creeped. Happy two years. And we will see you in the next one. Bye-bye. See you in the next one. I have to give an insult to Hunter right now. Man, we just had a sappy moment. It's hard to be mean. I can do it. I can push through. If I bet he get lured away by metal music and something gross, like a giant zit popping or something like that. Yeah. A metal zit. That's what would get him. Yeah. Happy two years, guys. Bye.

3:37:25Thank you.

3:37:57That one was my favorite. I remember all that, but I...