Just Creepy: Scary Stories - Appalachian Scary Stories That Will Leave You Unsettled

Episode Date: April 27, 2026

3 Appalachian Scary Stories That Will Leave You UnsettledLinktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepyStory Credits:►Sent in to https://www.justcreepy.net/Timestamps:00:00 Intro00:00:18 Story 100:25:45 Story 200:49:30 Story 3Music by:►'Decoherence' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.auBusiness inquiries:►[e-mail]#scarystories #horrorstories💀As always, thanks for watching! 💀

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Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. I have been camping my whole life. I grew up in a family that did weekend trips to Seneca Rocks and Dolly Sods, and by the time I was 12, I could set up a tent in the dark and start a fire with wet wood. I am 31 years old, and I work in commercial HVAC in Charleston, West Virginia. I mentioned that because what happened to me last July is not the story of some city kid in over his head. I knew what I was doing.

I had done the exact trip I was planning twice before, and I had spent probably 200, nights of my life sleeping in the woods. I want that to be clear before anything else. The trip I planned was a four-day loop through the Cranberry backcountry, which sits inside the Monongahela National Forest in Pocahontas County. If you have never been there, it is one of the most remote places left in the eastern United States. The Cranberry Wilderness Area covers about 47,000 acres, and the backcountry extends the roadless zone even further. There are no cell towers. The last reliable signal I had was in Richwood,

which was a solid 40-minute drive from the trailhead at Big Beachy. I know all of this because I have looked it up about a hundred times since I got back. I started on a Tuesday the 14th of July, 2025. The weather was what you would expect for a West Virginia summer. Low 80s during the day, 60s at night, humid enough that my shirt was stuck to my back before I had even locked the truck. I signed the register at the trailhead, noting the date, my route, and my expected return on Friday afternoon. There were two other names on the register from the last three days which is light for that trailhead in July.

I did not think anything of it at the time. My route was to take big beachy trail up onto the ridge, drop down into the middle fork drainage, follow that to the county line trail, loop back over the top and come out the way I came in. Roughly 22 miles over four days. easy pace. I wanted to fish the middle fork for a couple of afternoons and generally do nothing else. The first day was uneventful. The trail up Big Beachy is a grind, about three miles of steady climb through second-growth hardwood, mostly oak and maple with stretches of hemlock in the cool pockets. I saw a black bear at maybe half a mile in, a small one, probably a young male. He ran off the

second he saw me. I made camp that night on the ridge near the junction with Middle Fork Trail, ate a freeze-dried meal, and went to bed while it was still light out. The last thing I remember before falling asleep was an owl calling somewhere down the hollow. I woke up once in the middle of the night. I remember checking my watch, which is an old Cassio I take camping because it runs forever on one battery, and the time was 3.22 in the morning. Something had woken me up. I lay there listening for a while, heard nothing else, and went back to sleep. I mentioned this because it is the first thing I noticed that now seems connected to what came after, but at the time I thought nothing of it. The second day, I dropped down into the middle fork drainage. This is where it starts, not the

scary part, the part where something was off, but I had no way to put a finger on it. The descent takes you through a narrow cut in the rock, and then opens up into a wide bottom with the creek running through it. It is one of the prettiest places I have ever seen. Rotodendron thickets, hemlocks 80 and 90 feet tall, the water running clear over sandstone. On previous trips, this section had been loud with birds, warblers, thrushes, pileated woodpeckers. Anyone who spends time in the eastern woods in summer knows that bottomland is not quiet. It was quiet. I do not mean there were no birds. There were some. But it was less than I expected, and more than that, it was too even, too still.

I cannot explain it well. It was the kind of quiet you notice, and once I noticed it I could not stop noticing it. I thought about it for a minute, decided I was being paranoid, and kept walking. I set up camp that afternoon at a spot I had used before, about a quarter mile upstream from where Big Beachy empties into Middle Fork. It is a little flat bench above the creek, enough room for a tent, with a fire ring somebody had built probably 20 years ago, out of sandstone blocks. I filtered water, ate lunch, and then spent about three hours fishing. I caught four native brook trout, all small, all released. By six in the evening I was back at camp cooking dinner. I heard the first thing at about 7.30. I was sitting on a log by my fire, and from somewhere upstream, maybe a hundred

yards off, a short high laugh came through the trees. It sounded human. It sounded female. It cut off fast. I stopped chewing and sat there for a full two or three minutes. Nothing else came. Now, I want to be clear about something. Sound does funny things in those hollows. Water over rocks plays tricks on your ears if you are tired, and voices are one of the tricks it plays. A crow call can bounce off a ridge and come back wrong. I have heard a thousand. strange things in the woods over the years, and 99 times out of 100 there is a natural explanation. So I logged it, filed it, and went back to eating. It was about 20 minutes later that I heard the second thing. This one was different. This one came from the ridge above my camp, up the slope maybe 200 feet.

It was a man's voice, speaking. I could not make out words. It was just a murmur, a couple of sentences worth, and then it stopped. I stood up. I stared up the slope. The rhododendron was thick enough that I could not see more than 15 or 20 feet in. I stood there for probably a full minute. Hello? I called out. Nothing. Anyone up there? Nothing. I am a grown man. I have been alone in the woods plenty of times. I am not the type to get spooked easy, but I am going to be honest with you. At that moment, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I had had a very strong sense that someone was looking at me and had decided not to answer. I stayed up later than I normally would that night. I built the fire up bigger than I needed, kept my bearspray

in my jacket pocket, and sat facing the direction the voice had come from. I did not hear anything else. At around 11 I put the fire out, got in my tent, and lay there in the dark listening. I had my knife next to my sleeping pad, which I had never done in my life before that night. Eventually I fell asleep. The third day is the one I have been putting off writing about. I woke up at first light. The creek was loud. Mist was coming off the water. I made coffee on my stove and sat drinking it and I will tell you, in the daylight, the night before felt stupid. Of course there are other people in the cranberry. Maybe some other backpackers had camped up the hollow and I had heard them talking. The laugh could have been a bird. I had talked myself halfway out of it. I decided to take a day hike upstream, not for any particular reason. I wanted to fish some pools I had not fished before, and I was curious about whether anyone was actually camped up there. I packed a daybag with water, lunch, my rod, my bearspray, and the knife. I left the tent where it was. About a mile upstream I found the shelter.

It was about 30 feet off the creek, tucked into a notch under a rock overhang. You would not see it from the water. I would not have seen it myself, except that I had climbed up to get around a blowdown and came out on top of the ridge just above it. From that angle, looking down, I could see the shape of it through a gap in the rhododendron. It was a lean to. Somebody had built it out of branches and bark, leaned against the underside of the overhang, with a space inside maybe six feet deep and eight feet long. I stood there for a long time looking at it. Then I climbed down, Up close it was clearly old. The bark was weathered gray. Moss was growing on some of the branches, but the ground inside had been swept. That is the thing I keep coming back to. The dirt floor was

packed down smooth, and there were no leaves on it, no acorns, no sticks. You cannot walk through those woods in July without picking up debris, and there was no debris inside the shelter. Somebody had been there recently enough to sweep it out. There was a fire ring at the front of shelter, smaller than mine, built against a flat rock. I squatted down and put my hand on the ashes. They were cold. I did not know exactly what that meant, but it told me nobody had been there that morning. I should have left. Instead, because I am an idiot, I looked in the shelter. The space was bare except for two things. The first was a stack of pelts in the back corner, untanned, stiff, covered in dust, three of them. I have no idea what animal.

Too big for squirrel, too small for deer, raccoon maybe, or coyote. They had been there a while. The second was a row of small objects on a flat stone set against the back wall of the overhang. I got down on my hands and knees to see them properly. There were, I counted, 11 items. A piece of yellow nylon cord nodded. A brass button. A small red reflector, the kind that is on the back of a hiking boot.

A plastic whistle. a child's barrette with a blue plastic bow on it. A few other things I cannot remember clearly. Some metal, some plastic. They were arranged in a line, each one with a small space between it and the next, from smallest to largest. I stood up and I walked out of that shelter, and I walked back to my tent without stopping once. I was not sure what I had seen. I was not sure what it meant, but every part of me was telling me to leave. my camp, I sat on my log and tried to think. The problem was this. It was about one in the afternoon. From where I was, getting back to my truck meant either going back over Big Beachy, which was roughly

six miles with a thousand feet of climb, or going further down Middle Fork to the county line trail, and coming back the long way, which was more than 11 miles. I had enough daylight for the Big Beachy route if I started now. I would be hiking the last hour in the dark, but I would make it. I started breaking down camp. I moved faster than I normally would. I told myself I was being ridiculous, that somebody had built that shelter years ago and left some trash in it, and I was about to hike 12 miles of rough country because of a child's barrette. I told myself that the whole time I was rolling up my tent and packing my food bag and filtering a last bottle of water. I did not believe myself. My hands were not steady. I was hoisting my pack onto my back when I saw him.

He was standing on the far side of the creek, maybe 40 feet from me, in the shadow of a hemlock. I do not know how long he had been there. I do not know how I had not seen him earlier. He was a man. He was a grown man. He was not wearing any clothes. He was very thin, so thin that I could see his ribs. And his skin was a dark gray-brown color that I think was dirt and not pigment.

His hair was long and matted. His beard was long. and matted. His eyes were set deep in his skull, and I could not tell what color they were from that distance. He was standing very still, with his arms at his sides, and he was looking right at me. I want to tell you I did something brave. I did not. I stood there with my pack half on my back, and I did not move for a count of probably five or six seconds. We looked at each other across that creek. Then I said in a voice that I tried to make sound calm, Hey, he did not answer, he did not move. Are you okay? He did not answer. He did not move. I got my other arm into my pack strap. I did not turn my back on him. I reached down without looking and picked up my trekking poles. My bear spray was clipped to my shoulder strap and I moved my right hand up to where I could get to it fast. I am going to leave now, I said. Okay? He did not move. I started walking back. I started walking back.

backward, up the trail toward Big Beachy. I kept him in sight for about 30 feet, which was as far as I could get before the rhododendron closed around me. The last thing I saw was him standing in the same spot. His head turned now to keep watching me, his body still facing the creek. The second he was out of sight, I turned and I started running. I ran with a full pack for probably a quarter mile before I had to stop. My heart was going so hard I thought I was going to throw up. I bent over with my hands on my knee. and I listened. I heard him then, not close, somewhere behind me, off the trail, up the slope, a snap of a branch, a soft rustle, then quiet. Then maybe 15 seconds later another snap further up. He was paralleling me on the ridge above the trail. I have thought a lot about this since, why he did not come straight at me, why he hung back. My best guess is that he wanted to see where I was going. Maybe he wanted to get ahead of me. Maybe he wanted me to get tired. I do not know. I do not want to know. I started moving again, not running anymore because I could not run with my pack, but walking hard. The climb up out of the middle fork drainage is brutal, switchbacks through loose rock,

then a long straight pull up through the rhododendron. I was drenched in sweat inside of 10 minutes. My legs were shaking. I kept looking up the slope and I kept not seeing him. But every minute or so I would hear something, a stick, a shift of leaves. Once the sound of something breathing hard, which might have been me I do not know. I made the top of Big Beachy in maybe an hour and a half, which is faster than I have ever done that climb. By the time I got to the ridge I could barely stand. I was out of water. I had drunk my two liters on the climb.

My shirt was soaked. I stopped at the junction where I had camped the first night, and I stood there with my hands on my hips trying to catch my breath, and that is when he screamed. It was up the slope behind me, maybe a hundred yards off. It was not a word. It was just a long, high sound, and it went on for a span of maybe five or six seconds, which was more than long enough. I have never heard a human being make that sound before. I have heard coyotes, foxes, bobcats, owls. It was not any of those. It was a person, and it was a person who was trying to make me afraid, and it worked. I started running again, pack and all, down Big Beachy.

I fell twice. The second time I went down hard on my right knee, and I felt something pop, but I got up and kept going because I could hear him now, behind me and above me, moving through the brush, not bothering to be quiet anymore. He was coming down the slope to cut me off at the switchback below. I will tell you what saved my life. It was a piece of dumb luck. Big Beachy Trail has a spur about a mile and a half down from the ridge, a game trail really, that drops off the main route and goes down into a different hollow and eventually dumps out on Forest Road 76. It is not on the park service map.

I knew about it because a guy I used to fish with had showed it to me about four years earlier. It cuts maybe two miles off the trip if you are willing to scramble. I had never used to. I had never used it. When I hit the spur, I turned and took it. I do not think he expected that. I heard him for about 30 seconds after I made the turn, continuing down the main trail. Then I heard him stop. Then I heard him start coming back. By the time he figured out where I had gone, I was four or 500 yards down the spur, and I was going down a slope so steep I was half sliding on my butt through wet leaves. My knee was in serious pain. My hands were bleeding from grabbing at rhododendron roots. I did not stop. I hit Forest Road 76 at maybe seven in the evening. The light was starting to go.

I came out of the woods onto the gravel road, and for the first time in hours I was not under canopy, and the sky was still light, and I could see maybe a quarter mile down the road in either direction. I bent over and I put my hands on my knees and I cried. I'm not ashamed to say that. I cried for probably 30 seconds and then I pulled myself together and I started walking toward where I thought the main road was. I had been on the forest road for probably 10 minutes when I heard a truck. It was a pickup, an older Ford coming up behind me from the direction I had come.

I stepped into the middle of the road and I waved my arms. The driver was an older guy, maybe 60, a local. He pulled up beside me and rolled down the window. You all right, son? I tried to answer and I could not. I just shook my head. He looked at me for a second. Then he said,

Get in. I got in. He did not ask me anything else for a long time. He just drove. When we got down to the pavement, which was Route 150, he pulled over at a wide spot and killed the engine and he said, You want to tell me what happened up there. So I told him.

He listened the whole way. through without saying anything. When I was done, he was quiet for a bit. And then he said, I am going to drive you to the sheriff's station in Marlinton. You can tell them what you told me. I am going to tell you something first, though. I have lived in Pocahontas County my whole life, and people go missing in those woods. Not often, not enough that the state pays attention. But it happens. My cousin's boy, back in 1998, went in at Big Beachy and did not come out. They never found him. There was a couple from Ohio in 2009.

Hunter in 2015. Every five or six years it happens, and every time the story is the same, experienced outdoorsmen, good weather, no reason to get lost, just gone. I did not say anything. He started the truck and he drove me to Marlinton. I gave my statement to a deputy named Collins.

He wrote everything down. He was polite. He asked me a lot of questions. At the end of it, he told me he would pass it along to the Forest Service and the state police. I could tell he was not sure what to do with it. I do not blame him. A story about a naked man in the woods is not the kind of thing that gets a task force put together. But here is the part I did not expect. Two days later, on Friday morning, I got a call from a state police sergeant named Mullins.

He wanted to know if I could come in and talk to him and a couple of Forest Service investigators. I drove up to Marlinton that afternoon. I was in a conference room with Mullins, two Forest Service guys, and a woman from the FBI field office in Clarksburg. They did not tell me everything. What they told me was this. They had sent two Rangers up Big Beachy on Thursday morning to check on what I had reported. The Rangers had found my old campsite at Middle Fork. They had also found the shelter I described, exactly where I described it. The pelts were there.

The row of objects was there. They had photographs. They asked me to identify the objects one by one, from pictures before they asked me anything else. I did. The Berret, they told me later, matched one that had belonged to a nine-year-old girl named Emma Whitfield, who had disappeared from a campsite at Summit Lake

with her family on July 21st, 2019. Summit Lake is about 12 miles north of where I was. Her parents had been in the other tent. She had gone to use the bathroom in the woods at night and never come back. There was a massive search. Nothing was ever found. The brass button was from a U.S. Army uniform coat, probably from the 1970s. The red reflector, they suspected but could not confirm,

was from a boot belonging to a man named Robert Harkness, a solo backpacker from Pittsburgh who had gone missing in the Cranberry in October of 2021. They did not tell me what the other objects were connected to. I think they had matches for some and not for others. What they did tell me, about six weeks later, after they had done a full forensic sweep of the shelter and the surrounding hollow, was that they had found human remains, partial, skeletal, at least four individuals based on what they recovered, possibly more,

buried at different depths, at different times. The oldest looked to be from the 1990s, The most recent was from within the last two or three years. They did not catch him that summer. They spent the rest of July and August up there. Dogs, helicopters, teams on foot. The FBI was involved because of the interstate nature of the victims. They found a second shelter, about four miles east of the first one,

smaller, older, with similar objects inside. They found a cache of food, mostly jerky and foraged stuff, stashed in a hollow tree. They found tracks, human footprints, barefoot, adult male, in a few places. They did not find him. My theory, and I am not an investigator, is that he heard them coming from a long way off and left. The cranberry backs up against the George Washington and Jefferson, which backs up against the Cherokee, which backs up against the Nantahala, which backs up against the Pisgah. If a man knows how to live in those woods, and this one clearly did, he can move a long way without ever crossing a road. I figured he had moved. I figured he was in a different national forest by the fall, and he had

probably built a new shelter, and he was probably doing the same things to some other hiker he came across. I stopped sleeping well for a while. I will not lie about that. There's one more thing. About eight months after all of this, in March of 26, Sergeant Mullins called me. He said, He said they had a body. Someone had found it in a ravine about 30 miles south of the cranberry, just inside the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest in Virginia. Adult male, unidentified, probably dead for a few weeks. No clothing. Extreme emaciation. Cause of death was exposure. They did not think he had been murdered. They thought he had gotten caught out in a late winter storm and had not been able to get back to shelter. They ran his DNA.

It came back as a match for a man named Earl Linley Staten, who had walked off the grounds of Weston State Hospital in Weston, West Virginia, during a work detail in March of 1984. He had been committed after killing his mother and sister with a hunting knife in the town of Hacker Valley when he was 19 years old. He had been at the state hospital for three years. He was 22 years old when he walked away. He was 64 years old when they found him in that ravine. They matched fibers and DNA from the body to the shelter I had found.

They matched hair from the shelter to the remains of two of the victims buried nearby. I do not know the full list of what they were able to connect to him. I know it was enough that they closed a number of open cases. Emma Whitfield's parents were told. I do not know what exactly they were told. I hope it helped. The man I saw across the creek was Earl Linley Staten. He had lived in the woods of the woods of the,

Monongahela for 42 years. He had killed some number of people that nobody has given me a final count on. And the last thing he had done before the winter took him, that anyone knows of, was chase me up out of the middle fork drainage and scream at me from a hundred yards away on Big Beechy Ridge. I think about that a lot. I think about how close it was. If I had not known about that spur trail, he would have cut me off at the switchback below. There is no question in my mind about that. I would be another set of bones in that hollow, and my mother would still be waiting to find out what happened to me. I am alive because a guy named Mike, who I had not fished with in probably six years, showed me a shortcut one afternoon in the fall of 2021 because he wanted to get back to his truck in time for the game.

I called Mike last month and told him the whole story. He did not say much. At the end of it, he said, well, beers on me next time. I told him that sounded just about right. I am a wildlife biology research technician. I work out of Western Carolina University in Kulloee, North Carolina, and most of my summer field seasons I spend alone in the backcountry deploying and retrieving acoustic bat monitors. I am 34 years old.

I have a master's degree in ecology. I have been doing this kind of fieldwork for eight years. I want to say up front that I do not scare easy in the woods. I know the sound of black bears at night and of feral hogs rooting through blueberries and of barred owls calling back and forth across a hollow. Nothing I am about to tell you was any of those things. In August of 2024, I was running a 10-day deployment and retrieval in the Joyce Kilmer's Slick Rock Wilderness, which sits on the North Carolina side of the Tennessee line in the

Nantahala National Forest. If you have been there, you know. It is one of the last big old... growth tracks left in the eastern United States. Some of the tulip poplars on the Joyce Kilmer side are over 400 years old, and there are trees in there you cannot get your arms halfway around. The slick rock side is rougher, less visited, fewer maintained trails. My survey grid spanned both sections and covered about 6,000 acres. The northernmost points were up toward hangover lead. The southernmost were down near naked ground gap. I came in on the

Sunday the 4th of August, driving up Forest Service Road 81 to Big Fat Gap. That is the standard approach. I staged my ATV at the gap, then backpacked in about three miles to a flat spot near the head of Slick Rock Creek where I have base camped before. The setup was straightforward. Day hike out to a grid point, deploy a recorder, hike back, and repeat at a different point the next day. Every three or four days, I would pick up the earliest units and redone. deploy them further out. This is standard protocol for acoustic bat surveys. The recorders run from dusk until dawn and capture ultrasonic calls that we later analyze by species. Monday, I deployed the first recorder at a grid point along a small tributary about a mile northeast of camp.

Tuesday, I deployed a second one further north, closer to hangover. Both days were long, hot, buggy, standard August in the southern Appalachians. I ate dinner at dusk, watched the bats come out over the creek, and went to bed. Monday night I slept straight through. Tuesday night I woke up at about two in the morning thinking I had heard a voice. I was in my tent. I was lying on my back. I had been asleep.

Then I was awake. And the reason I was awake was that somewhere out in the dark, probably a long way off, a man had said something. I could not recover the words from memory, just the same. sound itself. A male voice talking, not shouting. I lay there for probably 20 minutes. Nothing else came. I had been camped in the wilderness since Sunday, and I had not seen another person. There are AT-section hikers who come through the slick rock side occasionally, and there is the How-lead Trail that sees some use, but my base camp was well off any maintained route. I told myself it had been a dream, or a barred owl, or two branches rubbing against each other in a way that

that had sounded human. I went back to sleep. Wednesday I dayhiked out to retrieve the first recorder, the one I had put out Monday. The hike took me about an hour and a half each way. I pulled the unit from the tree where I had strapped it, swapped out the SD card for a fresh one, reset the timer, and hiked back to camp. By the time I was back at my tent, it was mid-afternoon. I ate lunch. I pulled out my laptop and the card reader, and I started my usual problem. process, which is to spot-check the recording from the previous night before archiving the file to my external drive. The way the analysis software works is it displays a spectrogram of the recording across time,

with frequency on the vertical axis. Bat calls are short chirps, visible on the spectrogram, in the 30 to 80 kHz range depending on the species. I scan through visually first, marking anything that could be a confirmed bat-fetched pass. Then I listened to the audio slowed down to pull it into the range of human hearing. The unit also records audible range audio as an ambient track, which we use for quality control. It was on the ambient track that I heard the voices. The first one came in at 1.47 in the morning. Two men. They were talking, close enough to the recorder that I could make out words.

I listened to the clip three times. The first man said something about a pump. The second man said the word Tuesday. The first man laughed. They moved on, and within 30 seconds the ambient track was quiet again, except for the creek and the insects. I sat on my log in front of my tent, and I stared at the laptop for a long time. The recorder I had retrieved was a mile and a half from any trail.

It was in a drainage that did not connect to any route hikers would use. The grid point was in a dense rhododendron thicket on the south-facing slope above a small, unnamed, tributary. Nobody had any business being there at 147 in the morning. Nobody. I scrolled forward through the ambient track. I found three more stretches of voice, the latest one at 409 in the morning. Different voices. At least one woman. Most of it was too faint to parse. The middle stretch was clearer. A male voice said, And this is word for word. I wrote it down. He said, that run is done. We can move the rest on Thursday. Thursday was the next day. I sat there for a while

longer, and I thought about what to do. My first thought was, this is a drug operation. I work in the Nantahala every summer, and you do hear about it. The Forest Service has been dealing with marijuana cultivation inside the National Forest Boundaries for decades. Most of what I had read about in the last few years involved cartel-affiliated groups operating on the Tennessee side and occasionally crossing the line. Large plots, irrigation systems tapped from creeks, armed security. The Rangers had been doing joint raids with DEA for a long time. My second thought was that I was probably getting ahead of myself. Maybe it was a group of backcountry hunters scouting for fall. Maybe it was a work crew. Maybe there was a perfectly ordinary explanation. My third thought,

which I could not get rid of, was that whatever it was, it involved the word pump and the plan to move something on Thursday, and it was happening within a mile or so of a recorder I had personally strapped to a tree. I decided I would hike back out there in the morning, quietly, and look around. I would stay on high ground. I would not approach anything. If I saw evidence of an operation, I would back out, hike to my ATV, drive to the nearest ranger station, and report it. That is what I decided. I did not sleep well Wednesday night. I heard a lot of things that were probably nothing. Every branch creek felt wrong. I kept my bare spray inside the tent with me, and I kept my knife open next to my sleeping pad. I watched the dawn come up through the rainfly at

about six, and I was glad to be out of the tent. Thursday morning I made coffee, ate a bar, and packed a daybag. I took water, my lunch, my map and compass, my GPS, my GPS, my bear spray, my knife, and a pair of binoculars. I left my main pack and my tent at camp. I hiked out in the direction of the grid point I had pulled the recorder from the day before, but I did not go to the grid point. I climbed above it. There is a low ridge that sits just north of the drainage where my recorder had been. I worked my way up through the rhododendron to the ridge line. From the top I had a decent view down the drainage. I sat there in the shade with the bonoenix. and I glanced the creek bottom. At first I saw nothing. The drainage was choked with

rhododendron and hemlock. The creek was a thin thread of water through dense vegetation. I moved along the ridge maybe a hundred yards further east to get a different angle, and I tried again. That is when I saw the black plastic. It was about a quarter mile down the drainage from where I was sitting, a long, thin stripe of black running along the slope, partially buried, irrigation line. Once I knew what I was looking at, I could trace it. It ran out of the creek, uphill through the rhododendron, and disappeared into a thicker stand of trees on the opposite slope.

I followed the line with the binoculars. In the thicker stand, through a small gap in the canopy, I could see green, not the green of the surrounding forest, a different green, a lighter green, rows of it and movement, a small shape moving between the rows. I was looking at a grow. I sat there for probably ten minutes, trying to estimate how many plants I was looking at.

It was hard to tell through the canopy gap, but the visible section was large. Easily hundreds of plants, probably more. And that was just the section I could see. Grow operations of that type are often networked across multiple plots to make them harder to spot from the air. I put the binoculars down. I sat very still. I took a long time to think. The fact that I had heard voices on my recorder the

night before meant the operation was being actively tended at night. The reference to Thursday meant they were doing something today, moving product. I did not know what direction. I did not know who was out there now or where they were. I did not know if they had security postings on the ridges. For all I knew, I was already being watched. I lowered myself flat and I began to work my way back along the ridge the way I had come, keeping the crest of the ridge between me and the grow. I moved slow. I did not hurry. I did not crack branches. I had done enough off-trail work in that kind of terrain to move quietly when I had to, and I had to now. It took me close to two hours to get back down to the drainage I had come up, and another hour to get back within sight

of my base camp. I stopped before I broke out of the trees at the edge of the camp flat. Something told me to stop. I had been thinking about the voices and the plastic and the movement in the canopy gap the whole way, and I was already in a state where everything felt wrong, so I cannot say what I saw next was because I was paying more attention than I normally would. But my tent was not where I had left it. I had pitched it on a specific flat spot, at a specific angle, with the door facing the creek. That is where I always pitch it. When I looked across the clearing to where my camp was, my tent was still pitched, still staked down, but it had been moved. The corner nearest the creek was now about four feet further from the creek than it had been.

The rainfly was on slightly crooked. Somebody had taken the tent down. They had looked inside. They had put it back up. I stood in the trees and I stared at my camp for a long time. There was no one visible. The camp looked empty, but somebody had been there. I thought about my options, running straight for the AT.

was the obvious answer, but it was also the most predictable. Big Fat Gap was five miles from where I stood via the trail I had hiked in on. If they had come to my camp, they had seen the kind of gear I had, they had seen my topo maps if those had been left out, they had maybe even seen my field notebook with my grid points marked. They would know where I came in. If they wanted to cut me off, the trail back to Big Fat Gap was the place they would do it. The second option was to go cross-country west, dropped down off the slick rock side into Calderwood Lake, and follow the shoreline until I could flag down a fishing boat or reach Highway 129. That was a long way. Ten miles of rough country. I would not make it before dark. I would be moving at night on terrain I did not know well.

The third option was to hike south instead of north, get onto the Haou-lead Trail, follow it down to the Jenkins Meadow Trail, and come out on Forest Service Road 62 at Horse Cove Ridge. That was also long, seven or eight miles, but it was a direction they would not expect, and the trails were reasonable. I went with the third option. I did not go into my camp. I did not retrieve my tent or my main pack or any of my equipment other than what I had on me. My laptop was in my daybag.

The SD cards were in my daybag. That was what mattered. Everything else was replaceable. I backed out of the tree lines slowly, worked my way around the clearing on the west side, staying in cover, and once I had put maybe 300 yards between me and camp, I started moving south. I moved for about four hours before I heard them. The first sound was a voice. It was behind me, a few hundred yards back, down in a drainage I had already climbed out of. I dropped to one knee. I held my breath. The voice came again. A second voice answered it.

They were close enough that I knew they were on foot, not on an ATV, and they were following my route. I had two choices. Keep moving south on the ground I had been covering, which they were apparently on too, or break off the line I had been following and hide. I broke off. Fifty yards to my east, the slope steepened, and there was a rock face about 20 feet high with a band of rhododendron below it. I got into the rhododendron.

I worked my way along the base of the rock until I found a spot where the underbrush was thick enough that I could flatten myself against the rock and not be visible from above or from the downslope side. I lay there. I took my boots off so I could put them under my chest and not have them digging into the ground in a way that might catch somebody's eye. I closed the zippers on my daybag so nothing would rattle. I breathed through my mouth.

They passed me at about six in the evening. I heard them before I saw them, two men. They were talking quietly, but they were not whispering, and they were not being careful. I could not make out everything they said. The gist of what I caught was that someone had told them a camera had triggered at some location, and they had split up to look for whoever had triggered it, and they were supposed to meet back at a specific point before dark. One of them was irritated. The other one sounded tired. I saw them through the leaves. They were about 40 feet away, walking along a contour that cut just above my position. Both of them were wearing

camouflage. Both of them had rifles over their shoulders, not hunting rifles. What I would call tactical rifles, short, black. One of them had a pistol on his hip as well. They moved in a way that told me they had been in those woods a lot. They did not stumble. They did not break branches. They had the walk of men who had been doing this for years. They went by me and they kept going south. The sound of their voices faded. I did not move. for a very long time. At some point the light started to go. I did not have a watch on me that I could check without moving,

but I knew from the way the light was dropping through the canopy that it was getting toward eight. In August in that part of the country, the full dark does not come until almost 9.30. I waited. I made myself wait. I counted out 2,000 seconds in my head, slow, because I did not trust myself to be still without something to do.

When it was full dark, I put my boots back on. I worked my way out of the rhododendron. I had a small headlamp in my bag with a red filter. I did not turn it on. I went by moonlight. That night I was lucky. There was a waxing moon past first quarter, and the sky was mostly clear. Where the canopy was thin, I could see my feet.

Where the canopy was thick, I used my hands and I took my time. I did not keep going south after that. I did not want to follow them. I cut east instead, working my way toward the ridge that I knew would eventually connect to the Howl-le-lead trail, but taking a longer route than I had originally planned. I was hoping that if they had set up an ambush somewhere on my expected path, I would come in behind them instead of in front. I walked all night. I do not remember most of it clearly. I remember the sound of my own breathing. I remember the wet leaves on the ground, and the way the moonlight came through the gaps in the canopy. I remember stepping over a downed hemlock and putting my hand on something soft,

and then realizing it was a mushroom the size of a dinner plate. I remember drinking water from my bottle, and then filtering more from a creek at around two in the morning, crouched in the dark. My hands shaking so badly it took me three tries to get the filter threaded. I remember also, twice, thinking I heard someone behind me. Once I was sure of it, I stopped and I turned, and I listened,

and I heard nothing, and I waited for a count of five minutes, and I heard nothing, and I moved on. The second time was a deer. It crossed the trail in front of me about 20 feet out. I saw the white of its tail in the moonlight. It stood, and it looked at me, and then it walked off. I sat down on a log for about 10 minutes after that because my legs could not take anymore. I hit the Howe-lead Trail at about 4 in the morning. Getting on the trail was the first moment since I had seen the grow that I allowed myself to believe I was going to make it out. The trail was real. It was a maintained path. It would take me to naked ground, and from naked ground I could pick up Jenkins Meadow, and that would drop me to the road. I knew the route. I had hiked it twice before. I did

the last six miles in a half-conscious state, barely tracking what I was doing. The sun came up, birds started. I remember a thrush singing somewhere off the trail, and I remember being aware for the first time in maybe 20 hours that there were still normal things happening in the world. I passed two small streams, and I filled my bottle at both of them. Around seven in the morning I smelled wood smoke, and for about 30 seconds I thought I was about to walk into another camp,

and I almost turned around. But it was a lawful camp. Two men in their 50s, sitting at a fire, making coffee, hiking gear stacked on the ground behind them. They had come up the night before from Jenkins Meadow. They looked at me and one of them said, Brother, you all right? I must have looked worse than I thought, because the other one was already pouring coffee into an extra cup before I had answered. I told them the short version. They did not ask follow-up questions. The older one walked with me the rest of the of the way down to the road while his friend packed up camp behind us.

When we got to the road, I used his cell phone, which had reception on the ridge, and I called the sheriff's office in Graham County. They told me to wait where I was. An hour later, two sheriff's deputies and a law enforcement ranger from the Nantahala National Forest arrived in two trucks. I sat in the front seat of the ranger's truck with the air conditioning on, drinking water from a bottle he handed me, and I told him everything from the beginning. When I was a front seat of the ranger's truck, When I got to the part about the voices on my acoustic recordings, he stopped me and asked if I still had the recording. I did. I had the SD card, and I had the laptop file.

He got on the radio. The next 48 hours ran together in my memory. Statements, agencies, drives. I talked to a DEA agent out of the Knoxville office. I talked to two investigators from the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. I gave them my recording. I gave them my GPS coordinates for the grid point and for the Rock Ridge where I had glassed the grow. I told them about the voices on the trail and the two men with the rifles.

I described them in as much detail as I could. The raid happened 11 days later. I know this because they told me afterward. I was not there. I was at home in Kulohi, and I had been told by one of the FBI investigators to stay put until they had the area secured. On the morning of Monday the 19th of August, a joint task force of DEA, USFS law enforcement, SBI, and the Graham County Sheriff's Office flew in by helicopter on two separate landing zones, deployed ground teams, and hit the grow from two directions.

They found and destroyed approximately 36,000 marijuana plants, distributed across four separate plots. They found a base camp, pumps, generators, irrigation tubing, fertilizer drums, sleeping shelters, and a significant quantity of firearms. They arrested five men. Two of them were Mexican nationals in the country on expired visas. Two of them were U.S. citizens from Texas and Georgia. The fifth was a local man out of Cherokee County, North Carolina, who had been providing

supply runs and lookouts for the group. Two of the men, the FBI investigator told me in October, had active warrants out of other states, one for a murder in 2021 in the Texas Panhandle, one for armed robbery and felony assault in Georgia. The investigator told me off the record that he believed the two men I had heard on the trail, the ones with the rifles, were those two. My audio recording was used as evidence in their federal trafficking charges. It was not played in open court, but it was part of the file. All five men pled out in 2025. The Texas one got 27 years. on the combined state and federal charges. The Georgia one got 19. The other three got between

five and 11 years each, depending on their role in the operation. I went back to fieldwork the following summer. I did not go back to Joyce Kilmer Slick Rock. I rerouted my survey grid onto the Pizga side and we modified the project to stay closer to maintain trails. My P.I. was fine with it. He told me he would have done the same thing. I still have the ambient audio track from the night of Tuesday the 6th of August, 2004. I kept a copy. I am not entirely sure why. I do not listen to it. But when somebody at a conference asks me, because some of my colleagues in the bat research community know the story, and it has gotten around, what the biggest thing I have learned in the field is, I tell them the same thing every time. Always listen to your recordings.

Even the parts you think are empty. Especially the parts you think are empty. Sometimes the thing you are recording is not the thing you set out to record. And sometimes the thing you record is the reason you make at home. My brother and I have a tradition. Every August, we spend four or five days in the Cahatta wilderness in North Georgia. We've been doing it since I was 23, and he was 20. Our dad took us there the summer before my senior year of high school,

and he died of a heart attack the spring after that. And so the summer after that, we went back on our own. We agreed we'd keep going, no matter what, four nights, just us. I'm 40 now. He's 37. We've done this trip 15 times. The Cahuda is about 37,000 acres of federal wilderness in the Chattahoochee National Forest, right up against the Tennessee state line. Most people who know the area know the Jacks River.

That's where most hikers go. The river is beautiful and the falls are worth the drive. Our spot is not near there. It's a flat bench above a small feeder creek, off one of the less-traveled trails, about four miles from the nearest parking lot. In 15 years, we've seen exactly three other groups of people pass through the drainage below us. All three were just hiking through. Nobody has ever camped where we camp.

I want to put that out there up front. Our spot is not popular. there's no reason for anyone to be there. The summer I'm going to tell you about was August of 2022. We drove in on a Tuesday. My brother picked me up at my house in Chattanooga at 5.30 in the morning. I'm a commercial electrician, and I'd just come off a long stretch finishing out a warehouse in Cleveland, Tennessee,

so I was tired. He drove. We got to the trailhead by eight. We took the hike in slow. It's a mix of old forest roadbed and single track, with one good creek crossing at about the two-mile mark. We ate lunch at the crossing, that's what we always do. Then we pushed on and rolled into our spot around two in the afternoon.

Same flat bench, same fire ring we'd built ourselves, using the same sandstone blocks over the years, same view of the creek below us, same ridge rising up across the way, everything right where we'd left it the summer before. We spent the first afternoon doing what we always do, set up the tents we sleep in separate tents we figured that out years ago we're both too old to put up with each other snoring hung the bear bag filtered water from the creek built a small fire in the ring

made dinner talked about our kids he has two i have one our jobs our mom who's in assisted living now outside atlanta it was a normal first evening the sun went down around eight-fifteen We were both in our tents by ten. This is where I have to start being careful about what I say, because I want to tell it the way I remember it, not the way it's gotten in my head over the last couple years. I woke up sometime in the middle of the night. I don't wear a watch camping, and my phone was off in my pack.

But it felt late, full dark. The fire was out. I was awake because I'd heard something. A soft sound, not loud, not close. I couldn't place it. I lay there for a couple of minutes. Nothing came again. I told myself it was a deer or a possum or my brother turning over in his sleeping bag. Eventually I went back to sleep. In the morning, I asked him if he'd gotten up in the night. He said no. I didn't mention the sound. We had coffee and oatmeal and I let it go. The second day was the kind of day we go out there for. We hiked up the

creek about a mile to a pool my brother likes to fish. He caught two small rainbows and let them go. I sat on a log and read a paperback. I remember thinking as I sat there that I was lucky, that it was good to have a brother who'd still do this with me, that kind of thinking. We got back to camp around three. It was hot, upper 80s. My brother lay down in his tent with the flaps open and said he was going to nap. I told him I'd go filter water. The creek is maybe 50 feet below the bench we camp on, down a short slope through rhododendron and mountain laurel. The pool I filter from is tucked behind a big sandstone block at the base of the slope. From the creek you can't see our camp, and from camp you can't really see the creek.

The rhododendron is thick in there. You have to duck to get through. I had my filter in two bottles. I got down to the pool and I sat on the edge of the sandstone and I started pumping. It's a slow process. The filter I use you have to work by hand. I'd filled the first bottle and I was halfway through the second one when I looked up. There was a woman standing on the other side of the creek. She was about 30 feet from me. The creek at that pool is maybe 8 feet wide.

She was just past the rhododendron on the far bank, standing on bare dirt in a small gap between the trees. She was old. Her hair was long and gray and it wasn't pulled back. It was just hanging loose past her shoulders. She was wearing a dark dress, long sleeves, long skirt down to her ankles. The color was faded, not black. Maybe dark blue, maybe brown.

I couldn't tell. She was looking at me. I stopped pumping the filter. I said, hello? She didn't say anything. She didn't move. I said, are you lost? You need any help?

She didn't say anything. She didn't move. I'm going to tell you now that I sat there for what was probably ten seconds. maybe 15, without doing anything. I was thinking a lot of things at once. I was thinking that an old woman in a long dress had no business being at that pool in the Cahuda in August. I was thinking about how she'd gotten there.

The nearest trail is a quarter mile from that pool, through thick brush, and there's no easy route in or out. I was thinking she might need help. I was also thinking, and I'm embarrassed to say this, but I'm being honest, that something about her standing there looking at me was making the hair on my arms stand up. I stood up slowly.

I put the filter down on the rock. I said, My brother and I are camped just up the hill. If you need anything. She turned. Just turned without saying anything, without any change of expression that I could see. She turned to her right,

walked two steps into the rhododendron on the far bank, and was gone. I stood there for probably a full minute. I waited for a sound, a branch cracking, movement, anything. There was nothing. I picked up my filter and my two bottles, and I walked back up the slope to camp faster than I'd come down. My brother was sitting up in his tent when I got back.

He took one look at me and said, What? I told him. I told him about the old woman. I told him what she looked like. I told him how she walked away. He listened without saying anything. When I was done, he said,

You sure? I'm sure. On the other side of the creek? On the other side. He stood up and put his boots on. We walked back down to the pool together. I showed him exactly where I'd been sitting. I pointed to the gap in the rhododendron on the far bank.

We crossed the creek, which took a minute because you have to rock hop, and we got over to the gap. There were no tracks. The ground was bare dirt. You could see where my boots had printed in it. There was nothing else. No prints. No disturbance.

no scuff marks going into the rhododendron, nothing. He stood there for a while. Then he said, Could have been a section hiker. There's a couple of miles of AT Access Trail not too far from here. Maybe she came down off that and got turned around. I said, in a long dress. He said, people do weird stuff in the woods.

Neither of us really believed it. We walked back up to camp and we didn't talk about it for a while. I got my book out and I pretended to read. My brother started putting a late lunch together. Around five, he said, If you want to pack up and go, we can pack up and go. I thought about it. The sun was already starting to slide behind the ridge.

Four miles back to the truck, with full packs, would put us on the trail in the dark for the last hour. I said, no, it was probably nothing. Let's stay. I wish I'd said yes, but we stayed. That second night I didn't sleep well. I kept waking up every hour or so, listening. Around three in the morning, best I can guess, I was awake and lying there,

and I heard something I couldn't explain. It was a hum, low, soft, not constant, it would come and go. For 20 or 30 seconds there'd be a hum, and then it would stop, and then a minute later it would start again. I thought about calling over to my brother's tent. I didn't. I kept telling myself it was some natural sound. The creek, wind in the pines, some nightbird I wasn't familiar with.

The truth is it matched none of those. It was a person, humming a tune under their breath, quiet, not knowing anyone else was around. I lay there with my eyes open for maybe an hour. The humming stopped at some point and didn't come back. I fell asleep. In the morning I was the first one up. I was sitting by the dead fire with my coffee when my brother came out of his tent. He sat down across from me.

He didn't say good morning. He said, did you hear someone humming last night? I set my cup down. Yeah. We looked at each other. He said, I figured it was you at first. It wasn't me. I know.

Neither of us said anything for a minute. Then he said, that's two things. The third day I kept waiting to feel better about being there, and I didn't. The woods felt different. I can't put it any better than that. The birds were there. The creek was there. The sun came up and the air got hot.

But there was something to the place, some feeling I hadn't ever had there before. We didn't go far from camp. We didn't want to. We puttered around. My brother read. I whittled a stick into nothing in particular, which is something I do when I'm trying not to think. Around noon I noticed that our trekking poles, both sets, which we'd leaned against a big hickory tree near the fire ring the night before,

were no longer against the hickory. They were against a different tree, about ten feet away, a smaller beach, leaned up together the way we always lean them. I asked my brother, he said he hadn't touched them. I said, me neither. He looked at the poles for a long time. He said, maybe we're not remembering right. I said maybe.

But we both knew where we'd leaned them. Later that afternoon, we went to refill water at the creek together. Neither of us went alone to the creek after what I saw. At the pool I stopped and looked at the gap in the rhododendron across the way for a minute. There was nothing there. It was just trees. My brother waited for me to get my fill, and then we went back up to camp. We ate dinner early.

We'd both started eyeing the angle of the sun, talking about how the days were getting shorter. neither of us came out and said that we wanted the sun to stay up longer. We both felt it. The sun went down around 8.10. We put the fire out before full dark because we both kind of wanted to be in our tents. Neither of us said it. I remember sitting by the fire for the last 20 minutes of daylight,

and my brother kept looking past me, up into the trees on the uphill side of camp. I didn't ask him what he was looking at. I didn't want to know. I was in my tent by probably nine, way earlier than I'd normally turn in. I lay there in my sleeping bag with my headlamp off, and I listened. I heard my brother shifting in his tent. I heard the creek.

I heard an owl somewhere off to the west, a barred owl, calling for maybe 20 minutes, and then going quiet. Then nothing. I don't know what time it was when I heard the first footstep. I wasn't asleep. I was close to it. The footstep brought me all the way back. It was close.

It was right outside my tent. A single compression of leaves and dirt and small sticks. One foot. Then quiet. I held my breath. A second step. Different direction. Moving around the tent.

Maybe six feet away. I reached very slow for my headlamp. I got it in my hand. I didn't turn it on. A third step. Now it was on the far side of the tent between my tent. tent and my brothers, which were set up about 15 feet apart, then a fourth, behind my brother's tent now. I said in a normal voice, not loud, you awake? My brother said, yeah. I said, you hear that?

He said, yeah. I turned my headlamp on and unzipped my tent and swept the light across the camp. My brother unzipped his at the same time. Our lights moved across the ground, the trees, the fire ring, the hickory, the beach where the trekking poles were still leaned. We We saw nothing. The camp was empty. We stayed up for a while after that. We didn't get out of our tents, but we kept our lights on and we talked back and forth in low voices about nothing in particular. My brother's kids. A movie we'd both seen a few months before. The price of gas. Anything to have something to say. After maybe a half hour of that, the footsteps started again. They weren't close this time. They were further back in the trees, maybe 30 feet uphill from

camp, one step, a long pause, another step, not in a pattern of someone walking, in a pattern of someone standing still and shifting their weight occasionally. We listened to it for a long time, I don't know how long, probably 20 minutes, it didn't get closer, it didn't go away, it just kept happening, slow, irregular, from the same general area up the slope. At some point my brother said, I'm not getting out of my tent. I said, I'm not either. The sound stopped sometime before dawn. I don't know when exactly. I think I slept for maybe 45 minutes before it got light. When I came out of my tent at first light, my brother was already out of his, sitting by the cold fire ring with his pack half loaded. He looked at me and he

said, we're going. I said, yeah. We packed in maybe 20 minutes. We didn't talk while we did it. We rolled the tents up wet with dew and stuffed them into the stuff sacks. We took down the bare bag. We scattered the ashes in the fire ring. We drank the last of the water in our bottles and didn't refill. Then we walked out. On the way out I looked twice at the slope uphill from camp, where the sounds had come from. Both times I didn't see anything.

The second time my brother caught me looking. He said, Don't. I didn't look again. We made it to the truck in a little under three hours, which is fast for that trail with full packs. Neither of us said much on the drive out. We stopped at a gas station in Blue Ridge and got coffees. We ate at a Waffle House outside Ellie J. By noon we were halfway back to Chattanooga. He dropped me off at my house around three in the afternoon. I hauled my pack in and dumped it on the floor of my garage, and I took a shower, and I sat on my couch and I didn't do much of anything for the

rest of the day. My wife got home from work at 5.30. She'd expected me to be gone two more days. She could tell something was off. I told her my brother and I had decided to cut the trip short. She asked why. I said we'd both heard some noises at night and decided to pack out. I didn't tell her about the woman at the creek. I didn't tell her about the footsteps. I didn't tell her anything else.

I was embarrassed to. I'm telling you now because I'm telling the whole story for the first time, and my wife has since heard most of it, but not at the time. It was two days later Saturday that I unpacked my gear. I was in the garage going through my pack, airing out the tent, checking the filter, restocking my first aid kit. I was pulling things out of the various pockets to reorganize them for the next trip. On the right side of my pack, in the zippered pocket where I normally keep my compass and a couple of snack bars, I found something that wasn't mine.

It was a small leather pouch, about two inches square, soft leather, old, darkened with age, tied closed with a thin strip of the same leather. I sat down on the garage floor, and I looked at it for probably a full minute before I opened it. Inside was a photograph, not a regular photograph, a tin type. I didn't know that word at the time. What I saw was a small thin rectangle of dark metal with an image on it. The image was a portrait of a woman, an older woman, seated, dark dress,

long sleeves, long skirt. Her hair was long and loose past her shoulders. She was facing the camera but looking slightly off to the left. She was not smiling. I sat on the concrete floor of my garage with that tin type in my hand for a long time. Here's the thing I keep coming back to. My pack had been with me the whole trip. I'd had it on my back the whole hike in.

I'd kept it in my tent every night. I filtered water with the filter that came out of that same pocket more than once. There had been no leather pouch in that pocket on the drive up. There had been no leather pouch in that pocket when we set up camp. I had opened and closed that pocket at least ten times during the trip. The pouch had not been there. I called my brother. He drove over that night.

I showed him the pouch and the tin type. He sat on my garage floor next to me, and he looked at it and he didn't say anything for a long time. Then he said, Is that her? I looked at the picture again. The woman in the picture. The woman I'd seen at the creek.

I don't know. I want to tell you that I do know, that I looked at that tin type and I was certain it was the same woman, but I'm not certain. The woman I saw at the creek was standing 30 feet from me in the dim light under a thick canopy. I only saw her face for a few seconds. The woman in the tin type was photographed in a studio, under whatever passed for studio lighting in the 1870s. Could have been her. Could have been a different woman in a similar dress from a similar time. I don't know. I said to my brother, I don't know. He said me neither. That was two years ago. My brother and I have talked about that trip maybe five or six times since then. Not often.

It's not something either of us wants to dwell on. A few months after we got back, I took the tin type to an antique dealer in Chattanooga on Cherokee Boulevard. I didn't tell him how I'd come by it. I just asked him what it was. He said it was a tin type, and he said it was in good condition. and he said, based on the photographer's mark on the back, which I hadn't even noticed, it had come out of a studio in Athens, Tennessee, in the late 1870s or early 1880s. Athens, Tennessee is about 35 miles from the Kohuda Wilderness. I asked him what the tin type would be worth. He said, $30 or $40, maybe more to the right buyer.

I didn't sell it. I still have it. It's in a drawer in my desk at home, still in its pouch. which is also genuine, the dealer said, and probably from the same era. I don't look at it often. What I keep coming back to is not the woman at the creek, or the humming, or the footsteps around the tents. Those things I can maybe explain away if I try hard enough. Someone hiking through, a rare nightbird, a bear, or a raccoon, or some animal moving through the leaves at intervals that happen to feel wrong. What I can't explain is the pouch in my pack.

Someone put it there, someone opened the zippered pocket of my pack, in the three and a half days we were in that drainage, and put a Victorian leather pouch containing a tin type from 140 years ago inside it, and closed the zipper back up and left. At some point when I wasn't looking, at some point when the pack was either right next to me, or right next to my brother, who was only 10 feet away at any given time,

or hanging from a tree in our bear bag 15 feet off the ground between the two tents. I don't know who. I don't know why. I don't know when. My brother and I still do our August trip. We don't go to the Kohuda anymore. We go up to the Mount Rogers area in Virginia, which is a solid seven-hour drive from Chattanooga, but we both feel better about it. The trip is different. It's good, but it's not what it was. I wrote all this out last month because I decided I wanted to tell it to somebody. I've never sold the tin type, and I've never really known what to do with it. I thought thought about mailing it back to Athens, Tennessee. I even looked up the address of the old

studio. It's a bank now. I thought about throwing the thing away, but I'm not going to. It's the only physical thing I have from that trip that I know, beyond any doubt, I didn't bring in with me. It's the only thing I know for sure. The rest I can't prove. The rest I only have our memories of, and our memories maybe can't be trusted. But the tin type is real. It's in my death. It's in my death. You can come look at it.