Just Creepy: Scary Stories - Don't Go Into the Deep Woods Alone | 2 Forest Horror Stories

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

Don't Go Into the Deep Woods Alone | 2 Forest Horror StoriesLinktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepyStory Credits:►Sent in to https://www.justcreepy.net/Timestamps:00:00 Intro00:00:18 Story 100:31:18 Story 2Music 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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I know these mountains. I know the Absarokas and the bear tooths and every drainage between Cody and the Montana line. I've tracked wounded elk through chest deep snow at 9,000 feet. I've pulled drowned fishermen out of the Clark's Fork in June, when the runoff turned it into something that would kill you in 40 seconds. I've put down a grizzly that wandered into a church parking lot in Wapiti on a Sunday morning. Nothing I've done in this job prepared me for what I found on Elk Creek in May of 2003. I need to write this down because the official report doesn't tell the whole story.

The report says what the county attorney told me to say. It says what would hold up. It does not say what actually happened, and it does not explain the things I saw in that canyon that I still can't explain, sitting here 14 months later at my kitchen table in Cody, with the doors locked and the porch light on. It started with a phone call on a Tuesday morning, May 9th. I was at my desk in the regional office filling out harvest reports from the spring turkey season when dispatch patched through a call from a woman named Brenda Kyle. She lived on a small cattle operation south of Clark, Wyoming, right where the foothills start climbing toward the

Absaroka Range. She told me her neighbor, a man named Dale Purcell, hadn't been seen in six days. Dale was 71 years old. He lived alone in a two-room cabin on 160 acres at the mouth of Elk Creek Canyon, about 14 miles south of Clark on a dirt road that turned to mud every spring and was impassable from November through April. He had no phone, no internet, and no vehicle. He'd sold his truck three years earlier and told Brenda he didn't need it anymore. He walked everywhere or rode one of his two horses. He came into Clark once a week, usually on Wednesdays, to pick up mail and buy groceries at the Sinclair station.

He hadn't shown up the previous Wednesday, and now it was Tuesday and Brenda was worried. Did you call the sheriff? I asked. I called. They said they'd send someone out when they could. That was four days ago. That didn't surprise me. Park County is bigger than some eastern states, and the sheriff's office runs thin.

A 71-year-old hermit missing a grocery run wasn't going to move to the top of the list. But I knew Dale. Not well. I'd spoken with him maybe a dozen times over the years about elk damage on his fences, and once about a mountain lion that had been taking his chickens. He was quiet, sharp, and tougher than most men half his age. He wasn't the type to fall down and not get back up. I'll drive out there this afternoon, I told Brenda. I left the office around one and took my truck south on the highway toward Clark, then turned off onto County Road 7, which follows the north fork

of Elk Creek toward the mountains. The road was in bad shape. The snow had only been off it for about three weeks, and the surface was soft and rutted. My truck is a state-issued Ford F-250 with four-wheel drive and good tires. And even so, I had to crawl through a few sections where the mud was axle-deep. The country out there is big and empty in a way that's hard to describe if you haven't seen it. The foothills rise up in long, grassy ridges dotted with sagebrush and the occasional stand of Douglas fir. The sky is enormous. You can see 50 miles in every direction, and for most of those 50 miles there's nothing. No buildings, no fences, no people, just grass and sage and rock and sky. But when you turn up Elk Creek Canyon,

The country changes fast. The ridges close in and the creek drops into a narrow slot carved through gray limestone. The Douglas fir gets thick. Engelman's spruce fills in the north-facing slopes. The sky shrinks to a strip of blue between the canyon walls, and within a quarter mile you go from open rangeland to deep forest, where the sun doesn't hit the ground until midday. Dale's cabin sat about two miles up the canyon on a small bench above the creek.

I'd been there twice before, both times it had been fall, and the aspens in the canyon had been bright yellow, and the air had been cold and clean. This time the aspens were just starting to leaf out, pale green, almost translucent, and the air smelled like wet earth and snow melt. I pulled up to the cabin at 2.15 in the afternoon. The first thing I noticed was the door. It was open. Not all the way, maybe eight inches. I could see the dark interior of the cabin through the gap. I got out of the truck and stood in the yard for a minute, looking around. The cabin was small and old, built from hand-hewn logs that had gone silver-gray with age. There was a covered porch with a wooden bench and a pair of muckboots sitting next to the door.

A splitting mall was buried in a chopping block near a pile of firewood. Everything looked normal except the door. Dale's two horses were not in the corral. The gate was open and the corral was empty. I walked up to the porch and called out. Dale, it's Warden Haskell, you home? No answer. I pushed the door open with my knuckle and looked inside. The cabin was one large room with a kitchen area on the left and a bed against the back wall. A wood stove sat in the center with a stovepipe going up through the ceiling.

There was a table with two chairs, a bookshelf made from planks and cinder blocks, and a gun rack on the wall holding a lever action rifle and a single shot 20 gauge. The bed was made. The wood stove was cold. There were dishes in the sink. A plate, a fork, a tin cup. A cast iron skillet sat on the stove top with the remains of something burned into the bottom. Eggs maybe. The smell inside was stale and close. Nobody had opened a window in at least a week. On the table, I found Dale's watch. It was a timex with a timex with a small. the brown leather band, sitting face up next to a glass of water that had gone flat and dusty. His reading glasses were there too, folded on top of a paperback western.

I picked up the book and looked at the cover. Louis Lamour. There was a receipt from the Sinclair Station in Clark tucked between the pages as a bookmark, dated Wednesday, April 26. His last trip to town, two weeks ago, not one. That meant Dale had been missing longer than Brenda Thurne. thought. I went back outside and walked the property. The chicken coop was behind the cabin. The door was open and the chickens were gone. No bodies, no feathers, no sign of a predator

getting in. The birds were just gone. I checked the small garden plot on the south side. It hadn't been turned yet for the season. A wheelbarrow sat next to it, tipped on its side. I walked down to the creek and looked at the muddy bank. There were boot prints, Dales, I assumed, leading from the cabin to the water. They went to the creek and came back. Normal pattern, nothing unusual. But near the tree line on the far side of the creek, I found something else. Elk tracks, a lot of them. More than I'd expect to see in one place, even during spring migration. The tracks covered an area of about 20 square feet on the muddy bank, pressed deep and overlapping. It looked like a herd of 15 or 20 elk had stood in one spot for a long time, just stood there,

right across the creek from Dale's cabin, facing the cabin. I crouched down and studied the tracks. They were fresh, within the last few days, based on the moisture in the mud. But the pattern was wrong. Elk moved through. They don't congregate in a tight group on an exposed creek bank 20 yards from a human dwelling. They graze in meadows. They bed down in timber. They don't stand in the mud and stare at a cabin. I stood up and looked at the tree line across the creek. The spruce was thick and dark, climbing steeply up the north wall of the canyon. I couldn't see more than 30 feet into the trees.

Something moved. I saw it for less than a second. A shape, upright, pulling back behind a spruce trunk about 40 feet into the timber. It was fast. One moment it was there, and the next it was behind the tree. I had the impression of height, tall, taller than a person, and dark coloring, but that was it. Hello, I called? This is Wyoming Game and Fish. Come on out. Nothing. No movement, no sound. I waited a full minute watching the trees. A Stellar's Jay screamed somewhere up the canyon.

The creek made its constant noise, nothing else. I told myself it was an elk. A cow standing upright behind a tree would look tall. The dark coloring could have been. in the shadowed trunk playing tricks. I almost believed it. I went back to the cabin and radioed dispatch. I told them I had a possible missing person at the Purcell property on Elk Creek and requested a welfare check from the sheriff's office. Dispatch said they'd relay the message. I asked how long it would take. Dispatch said they didn't know. I should have left. My job was to report it and let law enforcement handle it. I'm a game warden, not a search and rescue volunteer. But I kept thinking about Dale's watch on the table. Dale wore that watch every day. I'd never

seen him without it. A man who wears a watch every day doesn't take it off and leave it on the table unless he's planning to come right back. And Dale hadn't come back. I decided to hike up the canyon and look for him. The creek trail was the only logical route. The canyon walls were too steep for a 71-year-old man to climb, and the creek bottom was the path Dale used to access his back acreage. If he'd gone up the canyon and gotten hurt, he'd be along the creek. I locked my truck, checked my sidearm, a 40-caliber Glock 22 that I carried on my hip, and made sure I had my bear spray. I also grabbed the satellite communicator from the glove box. No cell service in Elk Creek Canyon. No cell service within 10 miles of Elk Creek Canyon.

I started up the trail at 3 in the afternoon. The plan was to hike for two hours, turn around and be back at the truck before dark. Sunset was around 8.15 that time of year, so I had plenty of daylight. The canyon narrowed quickly above Dale's cabin. The creek filled most of the bottom, and the trail, just a beaten path, not maintained by anyone, wound along the north bank, crossing the water on rocks in a few places. The spruce and fir closed in overhead. The canyon walls rose on both sides, gray rock streaked with orange light,

lichen, getting steeper the further I went. After about half a mile, I was in a slot no wider than 60 feet, with the creek in the middle and timber on both sides pressed against the rock. Not loving your AT&T or T Mobile Bill? Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news. Bring your AT&T or T Mobile Bill to Verizon and we'll give you a better deal. So get away from that unfortunate phone bill and get to Verizon. Run, ride, canoe. Whatever it takes, we'll be here. Bring your AT&T or T Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal on the best network. A better deal. No surprises. That's Verizon. Best network based on root metrics best overall mobile network performance U.S. second half 2025. All rights reserved.

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Nars, better together. Visit Sephora to shop now. The elk tracks continued along the trail. Not just along the trail, on the trail. In the mud, in the soft spots, in every place where the ground held an impression, there were elk tracks, dozens of them, all heading up the canyon. and like the tracks by the cabin the spacing was wrong. Elk in a herd spread out.

They wander. They stopped to browse. These tracks were in a tight line, one after another, evenly spaced. Single file. I've been working with elk for 15 years, and I have never seen elk travel in single file. I stopped and knelt down to look at one of the prints. It was a mature cow track, about four inches long,

clean impression, sharp edges, very fresh. I put my finger in the track, and the mud was still wet at the bottom. These tracks had been made within the last few hours. I stood up and looked ahead. The trail curved around a bend where the canyon wall jutted out over the creek. I couldn't see past it. The sound of the water was loud, echoing off the rock walls. I listened for anything else, branches breaking, hooves on rock.

The grunting sounds elk make when they're moving in a group. Nothing. I kept going. Around the bend, the canyon opened up slightly into a small meadow, maybe two acres, where an avalanche had knocked down the timber years ago. New growth was coming in. Young aspen, willow, and tall grass that was just starting to green up. The creek braided through the meadow in three or four channels. The elk were there. I counted them from the tree line before I stepped into the open. 19. All cows. No calves. No calves. which was unusual for May. Calving season was underway,

and most cows would be with their newborns by now. These were all adults, and they were standing in the meadow in a tight group, shoulder to shoulder, facing the same direction. They were facing up the canyon, away from me. I've seen thousands of elk in my career. Tens of thousands. I've watched them graze, migrate, cav, rut, fight, and die.

I have never seen a herd of elk stand motionless, in a tight group, all facing the same direction, in complete silence. They weren't grazing, they weren't moving, they weren't flicking their ears or swishing their tails. They were standing still. I stepped into the meadow and waited for them to react. Elk are skittish. A lone person on foot at 50 yards should have sent them running. They didn't move. Hey, I shouted. Nothing. I walked closer. 40 yards, 30, 25. I was close enough to see their eyes. They were open, wide open.

The nearest cow was looking straight ahead up the canyon, and I could see the white around her iris. Her nostrils were flared. Her legs were rigid, planted in the mud. They were afraid. I've seen elk spooked by grizzlies, by wolves, by helicopters, by thunder. I've seen the way they bunch up when a predator is close. But when elk are afraid, they run.

That's what elk do. They're built to run. These elk were not running. They were standing in the open, packed together, shaking. I realized the nearest cow was trembling. A fine, continuous tremor running through her front legs and shoulders. I looked at the others. They were all trembling. 19 elk, standing in a meadow, shaking, staring up the canyon at something I couldn't see. The temperature hadn't changed, but I felt cold. I unsnapped the retention strap on my holster. I walked around the herd, giving them a wide berth, and continued up the canyon past the meadow. The trail entered the timber again on the far side. The trees were thicker here, old-growth spruce, some of them three feet across, with branches that started 20 feet up and created a canopy so dense that the forest floor was bare dirt and dead needles.

Very little undergrowth, long sight lines between the trunks. About 200 yards past the meadow, I found dead. Dale's hat. It was a tan Stetson, sweat-stained and shaped the way a working man shapes a hat over decades. It was lying crowned down on the trail in the dirt. I picked it up and looked at it. There was no blood on it, no damage. It had been dropped or it had fallen off his head. I set it on a branch and kept walking. Fifty yards further, I found his jacket, a brown Carhart workcoat lying in the middle of the trail with both arms spread out flat. I picked it up.

The pockets were empty. No tears. No blood. I folded it and set it on a log. Thirty yards after the jacket, I found his shirt. A green and black flannel, pearl snaps, lying crumpled against the base of a tree. I didn't pick it up. I stood over it and felt something shift inside my chest.

A man doesn't take off his hat, his coat, and his shirt on a trail in a fifty-year. degree canyon in May, unless something is very wrong. I pulled out my Glock and held it at my side. The trail continued up the canyon. The creek was quieter here, flowing through a deeper channel with less gradient. The spruce was enormous and silent. No birds. I realized I hadn't heard a bird since the meadow, no squirrels, no insects. The only sound was my boots on the dirt and the faint rush of water. 80 yards past the shirt, I found his undershirt. White, V-neck, size large. Dropped on the trail.

Then his belt. Then one boot. Then the other boot. Twenty feet from the first. I was following a trail of clothing up a canyon. Each piece dropped at a different point, and the gaps between them were getting shorter. Whatever had happened, it had happened faster as it went on.

I stopped. I was breathing hard and not from exertion. I looked around. The forest was open between the trunks. I could see a hundred feet in every direction. Nothing moved. The trees stood in their rows, massive and dark, and the light came down in columns through the canopy.

I should have turned around. I know that now. I knew it then. But Dale was out here, and if he was hurt, every minute mattered. He was 71 years old with no coat and no boots in a mountain canyon that dropped below freezing every night. I kept going. The trail climbed a short rise and then dropped down to a section of creek where a log jam had created a pool about 15 feet across. The water was clear and deep. I could see the rocky bottom,

maybe four feet down. The logs were old and gray and stacked three high where the current had jammed them together. Dale's jeans were draped over the log jam, folded at the waist and laid across the top log, not thrown, not dropped, placed. I walked to the edge of the pool and looked down. The water was clear enough to see every stone on the bottom. There was nothing in the pool, no body, no gear, just cold, clean water moving slowly through the jam. On the far side of the pool, the mud bank was torn up.

Not footprints, it looked like something had been dragged. Two parallel furrows in the mud, about 18 inches apart, leading from the water's edge into the timber. I walked around the pool and crouched down next to the drag marks. They led into the trees. I could follow them with my eyes for about 30 feet before the shadows made it impossible to see. The furrows were smooth and deep, about two inches wide each,

and they ran perfectly parallel. Between them, the ground was scraped clean. I stood up and followed the drag marks into the timber, 15 feet, 20. The light dropped. The spruce canopy was thick here, and the ground was covered in dead needles that muffled every sound. The drag marks continued ahead of me, straight and even, pulling through the needlebed toward the base of the canyon's north wall. At 30 feet I smelled it. The same sour, organic smell, spoiled meat. It hit me in a wave and I stopped breathing through my nose. It was strong, close.

At 40 feet the drag marks ended at a crack in the canyon wall. The crack was about three feet wide at the bay. and maybe seven feet tall, narrowing to a point at the top. It went back into the rock at an angle, and I couldn't see how deep it was. The edges of the crack were smooth limestone, damp, stained dark near the bottom. The drag marks went straight into it. I stood at the opening and shined my flashlight inside. The crack angled to the left and widened into a space I couldn't fully see. The walls were wet. The floor was dirt and rock. light caught something about eight feet in, a shape on the ground, pale against the dark earth.

I took one step inside. The smell was overwhelming. My eyes watered. I held my flashlight in my left hand and my Glock in my right, arms crossed at the wrists, the way I'd been trained. The pale shape was skin, a human back, bare, face down on the ground. The body was wedged into a narrow section of the where the walls came close together. The arms were pinned against the sides, extended above the head, pulled forward by the wrists into the tightest part of the crevice. Dale? My voice cracked off the wet rock. The body didn't move. I took another step in and reached out with my flashlight hand to touch the shoulder. The skin was cold, not room temperature cold, deep cold, the kind that comes from lying on stone in a mountain canyon for days.

pressed two fingers against the neck. No pulse. The flesh was rigid. Dale Purcell was dead. I leaned in to see his face. His head was turned to the side, cheek pressed against the rock floor. His eyes were open. His mouth was open. The expression on his face, I don't want to describe it in detail. I'll say this. I've seen men who died in fear. Car accidents. Hunting incidents. A drowning once. The face of a person who dies in fear looks a certain way. Dale's face looked like that, but worse. His jaw was locked open so wide that the tendons in his neck stood out in cords. I backed out of the crack.

I needed air. I needed to not be in that space. I stumbled out into the timber and bent over with my hands on my knees and breathed. Then I heard something behind me, inside the crack. A scraping sound. Stone on stone. Slow and rhythmic. Something moving.

against the walls of the crevice, deeper in, past where Dale's body lay. The sound was steady, measured, getting louder. I straightened up and aimed my Glock at the opening. My flashlight beam shook. I could see the first few feet of the crack, the damp walls, the dark floor, Dale's bare feet pointing toward me. Past Dale's body, deeper in the dark, something moved. I saw it in the flashlight beam for less than two seconds, a shape, pale, pale. Too many angles. It was pressed against the ceiling of the crevice, up where the crack narrowed, and it was moving forward. Toward the opening. Toward me. It was on all fours but inverted, flattened against the rock ceiling, and the limbs were too long and they bent wrong. It was pulling itself

forward with its fingers. I fired. The sound of a forty caliber round in a limestone canyon is something I will never forget. The report bounced off every surface and hit me from all directions at once. I fired three times. I don't remember aiming. The muzzle flash lit up the inside of the crack in white strobes, and in those flashes I saw the shape pull backward. Fast. It retracted into the dark, gone in less than a second, and then there was just the ringing in my ears, and the smell of gunpowder mixing with the smell of rot. I ran. I turned and ran through the tip of the timber toward the trail. Branches hit my face.

I tripped on a route and went down hard on my left side. My Glock skidded across the dirt. I scrambled for it, grabbed it, got to my feet, and kept running. I hit the trail and sprinted downstream. Past the log jam, past the places where I'd found Dale's clothing. I didn't stop for any of it. My lungs burned. My left knee was screaming from the fall.

When I reached the meadow, the elk were gone. all 19 of them. The meadow was empty, but the grass where they'd been standing was trampled flat, and in the mud at the edge of the meadow, I could see their tracks heading down the canyon at a full run, all of them, at the same time. While I'd been up the canyon, something had finally sent them running. I didn't slow down until I reached Dale's cabin. I crossed the creek, ran through his yard and got in my truck. I locked the doors. I sat there for a full minute with the engine running and my hands shaking so hard I couldn't grip the steering wheel. Then I put the truck in gear and drove. I hit the highway 35 minutes later and called dispatch on the

radio. I told them I'd found Dale Purcell deceased in a rock formation in Elk Creek Canyon. I told them to send the sheriff and the coroner and to do it now. Dispatch asked for details. I said I'd give a full statement when they arrived. I drove to the junction where the county road met the highway and parked. I waited for the sheriff. I did not go back into the canyon. The sheriff arrived with two deputies and the county coroner at 645. I led them to the trailhead at Dale's cabin, but I did not go back up the canyon with them. I told the sheriff I'd injured my knee on the trail, which was true, and that I needed to stay with the vehicles. He gave me a look but didn't argue. I think he could see something in my face that told him not to push.

They were gone for three hours. When they came back, it was almost ten at night, and the canyon was full dark. The sheriff, a man named Bill Meacham, who I'd worked with for eight years, came to my truck and leaned against the hood. He looked tired. He looked shaken, which was not something I'd ever seen from Bill Meacham. We recovered the body, he said. Coroners got him.

And? And what? Did you go past the body, into the back of the crevice? He looked at me for a long time. There is no back of the crevice. It dead ends about three feet past where he was lying. Solid rock. I stared at him.

The crack ends, Tom. It's a shallow fissure. Goes back maybe 12 feet total. There's nothing in there. That's not possible. I'm telling you what I saw. I was in there with a headlamp. The walls close up and it ends.

There's nowhere for anything to go. I didn't argue. There was no point. I knew what I'd seen. I knew what I'd heard. And I knew that whatever had been in that crack, pressed against the ceiling, pulling itself toward me with those wrong bending arms, was not there when Bill and his deputies went in three hours later. The coroner's report listed Dale Purcell's cause of death as hypothermia and exposure. The report noted that the deceased was found unclothed in a rock formation, consistent with paradoxical undressing, a known symptom of severe hypothermia in which the victim perceives extreme heat

and removes their clothing. The report noted mild contusions on the wrists and ankles, consistent with rough terrain. The report did not explain why a man experiencing hypothermia in May, when nighttime temperatures in the canyon rarely dropped below 35 degrees, would walk two miles up a canyon, remove every piece of clothing in sequence, and wedge himself face first into a crack in a rock wall. The report did not mention drag marks. I went back to Dale's cabin one more time, in June with a deputy. I wanted to check on the property. The horses had come back on their own. A rancher down the valley found them on the road and put them in a pasture. The cabin was as I'd left it. Watch on the table, book, glasses. I walked down to the creek to look at the elk tracks.

They were still there, partially washed out by rain, but visible. The deputy looked at them and said that was a lot of elk. I looked across the creek at the tree line, at the spruce, standing dark and close together, climbing the north wall of the canyon into shadow. Nothing moved, but the birds were quiet, and the air had that sour edge to it, faint, coming and going. I told the deputy we should leave. He didn't ask why.

I transferred to a desk position two months later. I told my supervisor I wanted to focus on administration for a while. He was surprised. I'd always been a fieldman, always preferred the truck to the office, but he approved the transfer. I sit at a desk now. I do paperwork. I don't go into the backcountry anymore.

My wife asks me sometimes if I'm okay. I tell her I'm fine. I tell her the knee is bothering me and the fieldwork was getting hard. She accepts this. She doesn't know about Elk Creek. Nobody does except Bill Meacham, and Bill and I don't talk about it. There is one thing that still bothers me more than anything else, more than the sound in the crevice, more than what I saw in the flashlight beam, more than the look on Dale's face. It's the elk. 19 cows, standing in a meadow, shaking, facing up the canyon, not running. Elk always run. It's what they do.

They didn't run because they knew it wouldn't help. Whatever was up that canyon, those animals understood something about it that I didn't. They understood that running wouldn't save them. So they just stood there, trembling, waiting. I think about Dale, wearing his watch every day for decades, taking it off and leaving it on the table next to a glass of water. I think he understood it too. I think he knew, the way the elk knew, that leaving wasn't an option.

I think he walked up that canyon because something told him to and I think he took off his clothes because something told him to and I think he crawled into that crack in the rock because something told him to and I think the thing that told him to do all of it is still in Elk Creek Canyon in a crevice that goes back 12 feet and ends at solid rock or doesn't end at all depending on when you're looking I don't go to the mountains anymore I sit at my desk I fill out paperwork

And every night before bed, I check the locks on the doors, and I leave the porch light on, because the dark has weight now, and I don't trust what's in it. If you're ever driving south of Clark, Wyoming, and you see the turnoff for County Road 7, don't take it. Keep driving. Go to Yellowstone. Go to the Teton's. Go anywhere else.

Elk Creek is not a place for people. It belongs to something else now. This episode is brought to you by Ultima Replenisher. Health is all about balance, like a salad with fries. So why not have balance in your hydration? With six essential electrolytes and no junk, Ultima provides balanced hydration you can enjoy every day. That means no sugar, calories, or carbs, and it's not loaded with sodium. Just delicious plant-based flavors you'll actually look forward to drinking.

Shop Ultima on Amazon or in store at Target and Whole Foods Market. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that can be? could heal your heart. Well, that's Tova's reality. An elderly widow working at an aquarium. Tova forms an unlikely friendship with the crumudgeonly Marcellus, whose remarkable intelligence leads her to a life-changing discovery. Watch remarkably bright creatures with your remarkable moms this Mother's Day weekend, only on Netflix May 8th. This happened in April of 2019. I've gone back and forth about posting it for years now, but a thread I saw last week about

strange encounters in the Monongahela National Forest finally pushed me over the edge. What happened to me and my friend Chris in the backcountry near Durban, West Virginia, was real, and I have a four-inch scar on my left forearm that proves it. I need to get this out. All of it. From the beginning. Chris and I had been planning a spring backpacking trip since January. We were both living in Columbus, Ohio at the time, both 26, both working jobs we hated, me at a logistics warehouse, him doing IT support for a dental office chain. We'd done plenty of camping before, mostly state parks in Ohio, and a few trips to Red River Gorge in Kentucky.

Nothing extreme, but we weren't beginners either. We had good gear, and we knew how to read a trail map. Chris found the route. It was a 32-mile loop in the Monongahela National Forest that would take us through the Laurel Fork Wilderness, and then south. along the ridge toward the Greenbrier River Trail. The idea was to do it in four days, three nights. We'd start at the trailhead off Forest Road 14, hike down through the Laurel Fork Valley on day one, then cut south on day two along an old railroad grade that wasn't on all the

maps. Day three, we'd climb up and over the ridge and come out near Durbin, where we'd parked Chris's truck at a gas station. It was a good plan, not overly ambitious. We'd cover 8 to 10 miles a day, which was comfortable for both of us. We drove out on a Thursday morning in early April, left Columbus around 5 in the morning, and got to the trailhead a little after 10. The drive-through Pocahontas County was beautiful in that early spring way. The trees hadn't fully leafed out yet, so everything had that gray-brown skeleton look, but the ground was covered in green. Fiddleheads coming up. Trillium starting to bloom. The forest floor was alive. The forest floor was alive even though the canopy was still mostly bare. We signed the trail register at the trailhead.

I remember there were only two other entries in the past week. One was a couple from Virginia who'd gone in three days before. The other was a solo hiker named Dee Rusk who'd signed in the day before with no listed destination, just the name and the date. That's it. I didn't think anything of it at the time. The first day was perfect. We followed the Laurel Fork Trail south along the creek. The water was high from snow melt, loud and clear and cold. We saw two deer within the first mile, a pileated woodpecker hammered away at a dead hemlock right over the trail, and we stood there for five minutes watching it. The weather was cool, maybe 50 degrees, and the sky was overcast, but not threatening. We made camp around four in the afternoon at a

flat spot near the creek, maybe six miles in, set up both tents. I had a big Agnes-Cobes proper spur, and Chris had a Nemo dagger. We cooked dinner on his jet boil, freeze-dried beef stroganoff that tasted better than it had any right to, and sat by the creek until dark. That first night was quiet. I slept well, no complaints. Day two is when things started to feel off. We broke camp around 8 in the morning and continued south. The plan was to find the old railroad grade that cut east toward the ridge. Chris had the route marked on his garment, and I had a printed Topo map as backup. We found the junction around 11. It wasn't well marked. There was a faded blaze on a beech tree and a narrow gap in the brush, where the old railbed cut through.

Without the GPS, we probably would have walked right past it. The railroad grade was overgrown, but still followable. It was flat and straight for long stretches, the way old logging railroads always are, and then it would curve around a hollow, and the ground would drop away on one side into steep nothing. The undergrowth was thick. In places it formed a tunnel over the old grade, and we had to duck and push through. Everything was wet. The ground was soft. Our boots sank in. About an hour after we turned onto the railroad grade, I noticed footprints. They were boot prints, pretty fresh, heading the same direction we were going. The tread pattern was distinct, a deep lug sole, probably a size 10 or 11. They were pressed deep into the

the mud, which meant either a heavy person or a heavy pack. Someone else is out here, I said. Chris looked down at the prince and shrugged, probably that solo hiker from the register. That made sense. D. Rusk. Signed in a day before us with no destination. Could have easily come this way. We kept hiking. The prince continued ahead of us, sometimes clear in the mud, sometimes disappearing on harder ground, then reappearing. I said, started paying closer attention to them. Not because I was worried, just because when you're hiking and there's nothing else to look at, you notice things. Around one in the afternoon, we stopped for lunch at a wide spot where the railroad grade crossed a small stream. I sat down on a log

and pulled out a tortilla and some peanut butter, and that's when I noticed the footprints again, but something was wrong. The prints came to the stream from the west, the direction we'd been hiking. They crossed through the shallow water. Then on the other side they turned around and came back. Chris, look at this. He came over and we both stood there staring at the mud. The prince went east across the stream, then turned around and came back west. Then they went east again, then back west again. The person had crossed this stream at least four times. Maybe they were looking for a campsite, Chris said. Or they dropped something. Yeah, maybe. But the person, but the Prince didn't fan out or scatter the way they would if someone was searching for something.

They were in a straight line, east, west, east, west, back and forth across the same six-foot stretch of stream over and over. I counted the tracks. At least eight crossings, maybe more. Some of the prints overlapped and it was hard to tell. We ate lunch. I kept looking at those prints. There was something about them that bothered me, but I couldn't put it into words at the time. Looking back now, I think it was the spacing. Each print was evenly spaced, exactly the same distance apart, every single one. Nobody walks that consistently, especially not while crossing a rocky stream bed eight times. We packed up and kept moving. The afternoon got quiet. The birds had been active all morning, warblers, thrushes, the usual spring chorus,

but by two o'clock, the forest was silent. I remember noticing it because Chris and I had been talking about a podcast he'd been listening to, and when we stopped talking, there was just nothing. No birds, no wind, no water. We'd moved away from the creek, and we were deep in second-growth hardwood with thick brush on both sides of the grade. The canopy was still mostly bare, but the evergreen bushes were dense, and you couldn't see more than 15 or 20 feet into the woods in any direction. Chris stopped walking. You smell that? He said. I inhaled. There was a smell. It was faint but distinct. Sour and organic, the way meat smells when it's been sitting in a warm car for too long. It came in waves. There for a

second, then gone, then back. Dead animal? I said. Probably. We kept walking. The smell faded after a few hundred yards and I forgot about it. At around four in the afternoon, we started looking for a campsite. The railroad grade had started to climb and the terrain was getting steeper. We found a decent spot on a small bench above the trail, flat enough for two tents, with a seep spring nearby for water. We set up camp and I filtered water while Chris gathered wood for a fire. He came back with an armful of sticks and a weird look on his face. There's a campsite down the hill, he said. Someone was here recently. How recently? Last night, maybe. There's a fire ring with warm ash, and a bunch of gear just sitting there.

I followed him down the slope about 200 feet to a flat area in the brush. He was right. There was a fire ring made of river stones, and inside it the ash was gray and soft. Not cold, but not warm either. It had probably been burning within the last 24 hours. The gear is what got my attention. There was a blue tarp strung up between two trees with paracord, and underneath it, a sleeping bag was laid out flat on.

on the ground. An olive green compression sack sat next to it, half open, with clothes spilling out, a water bottle, a headlamp, a can of sterno, and a pair of hiking boots placed neatly side by side at the foot of the sleeping bag. The boots had deep lug soles, size 10 or 11. I looked at Chris. He was already looking at me. Those are the same prints, I said. Yeah. Where is this person? Chris didn't answer. We both stood there staring at the campsite. Everything was arranged neatly. The sleeping bag was laid out flat, not bunched up or twisted. The boots were perfectly aligned. The clothes in the compression sack were folded. But the person was gone, and they'd left everything behind, including their boots. You don't hike barefoot

in the Monongahela in April. The ground is cold and covered in rocks and roots and thorns. You just don't do it. Maybe they went to get water, Chris said, or they're filtering someone nearby. Without boots? We called out. Hello, anybody out here? Our voices hit the thick brush and went nowhere. No response. We waited a few minutes and called out again. Nothing. I wanted to leave. I didn't say that to Chris because I didn't have a reason. There was nothing threatening about a campsite with no one at it. People leave gear behind sometimes. There were a hundred explanations, but standing there looking at those empty boots placed so neatly at the foot of that sleeping bag, I wanted to leave. We went back up the hill to our camp and cooked dinner. We didn't

talk about the campsite much. I think we were both trying not to make it into something it wasn't. But I noticed Chris kept his headlamp on his head all through dinner, even though it was still light out. And when I went to hang our bear bag, I took the long way around so I wouldn't have to pass near that lower campsite. I crawled into my tent around 8.30. I read for a while on my phone, then turned it off and lay there listening. The forest was still quiet. No frogs, which was strange for April.

No owls. Just the faint sound of water seeping through the rocks nearby. I fell asleep around 10. I woke up at 1.47 in the morning. I know the exact time because I checked my phone immediately. Something had woken me up, but I wasn't sure what. I lay there on my back, holding my breath, listening. Footsteps.

They were close, maybe 30 feet from my tent, slow, steady footsteps moving through the leaf litter. Heal to toe, heel to toe, evenly spaced, the same rhythm. I told myself it was a deer. Deer walk through camp all the time. But deer don't walk in an even rhythm. They stop and start. They paused to listen and then move in quick bursts.

Whatever was walking out there was moving at a constant pace, never speeding up, never slowing down. The footsteps circled to my left, then they stopped. I didn't move, I didn't breathe. I stared at the ceiling of my tent and waited. Nothing happened for what felt like three or four minutes. Then the footsteps started again, this time moving away from my tent and toward Chris's. They passed between our tents. I could hear them go by.

no more than 10 feet from my rainfly. And then they stopped again, right next to Chris's tent. I wanted to call out to him. I wanted to unzip my tent and look, but I didn't do either of those things. I just lay there, rigid, with my hand on my phone, and my heart pounding so hard I was sure whatever was out there could hear it. The footsteps stayed next to Chris's tent for a long time, minutes.

I strained to hear anything else. Breathing, rustling, anything that would tell me what was standing three feet from my friend's tent in the middle of the night. But there was nothing, just silence, and then, very faintly, a sound I can only describe as scratching, light, slow scratching against the nylon of Chris's tent fly. It lasted about ten seconds. Then the footsteps started again, moving away from both tents, heading downhill. Toward the lower campsite. I didn't sleep again that night.

I lay there with my knife in my hand until the sky started to lighten around 6.15. When I got out of my tent, Chris was already up. He was sitting on a log with his sleeping bag wrapped around his shoulders, staring at the trees. He looked terrible, pale, dark circles under his eyes. Did you hear that? He said. Yeah. Something touched my tent.

I know. I heard it. What was it? I don't know. We stood there in the gray morning light and looked at the ground around our tents. There were no clear prints. The ground up on the bench was covered in thick leaf litter, and it was hard to see tracks. But the leaves were disturbed. Something had walked through. I told Chris I wanted to check the lower campsite.

He didn't want to go. I didn't want to go either, but I felt compelled to look. I think part of me was hoping to find D. Rusk sitting there making coffee. and I could laugh at myself for being scared. We went down the slope together. The campsite was empty. The gear was still there. The sleeping bag.

The boots. The tarp. Everything exactly as it had been the night before. Except for one thing. The water bottle had been moved. The night before, it had been sitting upright next to the sleeping bag. Now it was about three feet away, lying on its side, empty. And next to where the water bottle had been,

the leaves and dirt had been scraped away in a small area, exposing bare earth. Something had scratched at the ground there. The marks were narrow and deep, about four inches long, and there were five of them running parallel to each other. I looked at Chris. He looked at the marks. Neither of us said what we were both thinking. We should go, he said.

I agreed. We went back to camp, packed up as fast as I've ever packed in my life, and were on the trail by seven. The plan had been to stay one more night in the backcountry, but we both wanted out. We decided to push straight for Durban instead of doing the ridge route. That meant cutting north on a forest road and taking a longer but more open path to the truck. More miles, but less time in the thick woods.

We hiked fast. The morning was cold and gray and still silent. No birds, no wind. The forest felt wrong to me, and I know that's vague, but I don't know how else to say it. It felt watched. It felt held. Every direction I looked was the same wall of bare gray trunks and green undergrowth, and I couldn't shake the feeling that something was just beyond my line of sight, keeping pace with us, staying hidden behind the next trunk, the next thicket. We reached the forest road around 10 in the morning, and the relief was physical. The road was gravel, wide and open,

with clear sight lines in both directions. I could see the sky. I could see the sky. I could see more than 20 feet ahead of me. My shoulders dropped. My breathing slowed. Chris looked at me and almost smiled. We're fine, he said. Probably a bear or something poking around last night. Yeah, probably. We started walking north on the forest road. It was easy going. Flat, wide, no mud. The temperature climbed into the mid-50s and a few birds started singing. Things felt normal again. I started to believe the bear explanation. Bears are curious. Bears walk through camp. A bear could have made those scratching sounds against Chris's tent. The marks on the ground at the campsite. Those could have been a bear too. Claws digging for grubs. We'd been on the forest road for about two hours when we came around a curve

and saw a truck. It was parked on the shoulder. A silver Ford F-150 with West Virginia plates. The engine was off. The driver's door was open. Nobody was inside. We slid. We slid. We slid. slowed down and approached carefully. The truck was in good shape, no damage, no sign of an accident. There was a Carhart jacket folded on the passenger seat, a thermos in the cup holder, and a copy of a Pocahontas County newspaper on the dashboard from the previous Saturday. Whoever owned this truck hadn't been gone long. Chris leaned inside and looked around. Keys are in the ignition, he said. That was the detail that broke something open inside me. People don't leave their keys in the ignition and walk away with the door open.

Not even in West Virginia. Not even on a forest road in the middle of nowhere. Let's keep moving, I said. We kept walking. Faster now. The forest road wound north through a hollow, then climbed up a gentle grade. We had maybe eight miles to go before we'd hit the paved road that led into Durban. I figured we could make it by mid-afternoon if we kept up the pace.

We didn't make it without incident. At around one in the afternoon, we stopped to eat lunch on a flat rock near a stream that crossed under the forest road through a culvert. We'd been quiet for most of the morning. I was eating a granola bar when Chris said, do you hear that? I listened. At first I didn't hear anything. Then I did. It was a tapping sound, rhythmic, even.

Coming from the woods to our left, maybe a hundred feet off the road. Tap, tap, tap, tap, steady and consistent about one tap per second. Woodpecker, I said. That's not a woodpecker. He was right. A woodpecker's rhythm is erratic. Fast bursts with pauses. This was perfectly even.

Tap, tap, tap, tap. The same interval every time. And it didn't sound like wood. It sounded harder. Stone on stone, maybe. Or bone on wood. We sat there listening to it for about a minute. It didn't stop.

It didn't change rhythm. It didn't move. Let's go, Chris said. We left the rest of our lunch on the rock and started walking again. The tapping continued behind us for about 200 yards, then stopped. I didn't look back. That's when the next thing happened. And this is the part I've never told anyone except Chris and my brother.

We were walking fast, almost jogging, and the forest road curved to the right around a thick stand of hemlocks. I was in front. I came around the curve and stopped. There was a person standing in the middle of the road. They were about 150 feet ahead of us, standing perfectly still, facing our direction. I couldn't make out features at that distance, but I could see the outline. It was a tall figure, well over six feet, wearing dark clothing, no pack, no gear, just standing there in the middle of the gravel road with their arms at their sides.

Chris came up behind me and stopped. Is that someone? he said, yeah. We stood there looking at this person. They didn't move, didn't wave, didn't call out, they just stood there. Hello? I yelled. My voice echoed off the hillside. You okay? Nothing. No response. No movement. Maybe they need help, Chris said. Maybe. But neither of us moved forward. We just stood there on the road with this figure 150 feet ahead, and for 30 seconds or so, nobody did anything. Then the figure took a step toward us. It was a single step, one foot forward, then still again.

And there was something wrong with the way they moved. The step was too smooth, too controlled. There was no weight shift, no natural lean. It was mechanical. Another step. Same smooth, even motion. We need to go around, I said. Go around where?

He was right. The road was the only clear path. On both sides the forest was thick. Dense bushes, fallen trees, steep terrain. Going off trail would slow us down massively, and we'd lose the road. but I did not want to walk toward that figure. Back, I said. We go back to the last fork and find another way.

That's three miles. The figure took another step, then another, walking toward us now at that same even, steady pace, the same rhythm as the footsteps around our tents, the same spacing as the boot prints in the mud. Chris grabbed my arm, run. We turned around and ran. I don't remember a lot of the next few minutes clearly.

I remember my pack bouncing against my back. I remember the gravel crunching under my boots. I remember looking back once and seeing the figure still on the road behind us, walking at that same steady pace, not running, not rushing, just walking, even and smooth. We ran for about a quarter mile before Chris pulled me off the road to the right, into the trees. There was a gap in the bushes and we pushed through it, branches scraping our faces and arms. We half ran, half stumbled down a slope into a drainage, splashing through a shallow creek, and then climbed up the other side.

We didn't stop until we hit another old logging road about 200 yards off the forest road. We stood there, bent over, gasping. Chris had his hands on his knees. I leaned against a tree and tried to breathe. What was that? he said between breaths. I shook my head. I didn't know. It was a person.

It had to be a person. but nothing about the way it moved was right. We followed the logging road east, hoping it would connect to another road or trail that would take us toward Durban. The GPS showed a network of old roads in the area. Some of them were marked, some weren't. We just needed to keep moving east,

and eventually we'd hit Route 28, the main road through the valley. For about an hour, things were okay. The logging road was rough but passable, and we made decent time. The forest opened up, in places where old clear cuts had grown back into young birch and cherry trees. I could see the sky. I could see a long way. My heart rate slowed. Then we dropped back into thick forest,

and the logging road ended at a wall of fallen trees and brush. Just stopped. The forest closed in around us and the GPS showed nothing ahead but unbroken green for at least a mile. Chris sat down on a log. We could go back. I'm not going back. Then we push through. Compass East. We'll hit the river eventually. That's what we did. We left the road and went into the woods, heading east by compass, pushing through underbrush and climbing over deadfall. The brush was thick in places and we had to force our way through, holding branches aside and crawling under them. The light dropped. The canopy above us was a web of bare branches and lower down, a ceiling of waxy green leaves that blocked out the sky. I was pushing through a tangle of mountain laurel when

I heard Chris yell behind me. Not a scream. A yell, short and sharp and cut off. I spun around. Chris was on the ground about 20 feet behind me, face down in the leaves. His pack was still on. He was scrambling, trying to get up, but something was pulling him backward by his left leg. I couldn't see what had him. The brush was too thick. All I could see was Chris on the ground. His fingers digging into the dirt and his body sliding backward through the leaves. I dropped my pack and ran toward him. I grabbed his wrists and pulled. He was heavy. Chris was about 190 plus his pack and whatever had his leg was strong. I pulled as hard as I could and his body stopped sliding, but I couldn't pull him toward me. It was a stalemate. I was braced against a tree root,

hauling on his arms, and something in the green tangle behind him was hauling on his leg. leg. Chris was making sounds I'd never heard a person make before, not screaming, grunting, desperate, animal grunting, his fingers clawing at my forearm so hard I could feel his nails tearing through my jacket and into my skin. Then his left boot came off. Whatever had him lost its grip when the boot slid free, and Chris lurched forward into me. We both went down. I rolled to the side and scrambled to my feet, grabbed Chris by his packstrap, and dragged him forward through the brush. He got his feet under him and we ran.

We crashed through the brush. Branches hit my face, drew blood. My left forearm was bleeding where Chris's nails had torn the skin, four parallel gouges that would later need eight stitches. Chris was limping badly, running on one boot and one sock, but he was running. I heard something behind us in the thicket, not footsteps, not exactly. It was a sound of movement through brush. branches breaking, but it was too fast and too even. That same steady rhythm. Whatever it was,

it wasn't crashing through the way we were. It was moving smoothly, pushing through without effort. We broke out of the undergrowth into a clearing, an old log landing, maybe half an acre of open ground covered in tall dead grass and stumps. On the far side, I could see a cut in the hillside where an old road led down into a hollow. We sprinted across the clearing. I looked back once, At the edge of the thicket, where we'd come out the branches were still moving, swaying side to side slow and even. But nothing came out of the tree line. We kept running.

The old road led down into a hollow and then connected to a gravel forest road. And that road led east for about three miles until it hit Route 28. When we finally stepped on to pavement, I nearly collapsed. Chris did collapse. He sat down on the yellow center line. and put his head in his hands and didn't move for five minutes. We walked south on Route 28 for about two miles until we reached the gas station in Durbin,

where Chris's truck was parked. The woman behind the counter looked at us, bleeding, filthy, one of us missing a boot, and asked if we were okay. Chris told her we'd gotten lost on the trail. She gave us each a bottle of water on the house and didn't ask any more questions. We drove back to Columbus that night.

Three and a half hours in the truck and we barely spoke. I went to an urgent care the next morning and got stitches in my forearm. The nurse asked what happened, and I told her I'd scratched it on a branch while hiking. She gave me a look that said she didn't believe me, but she didn't push it. Chris and I didn't talk about what happened for almost three weeks. Then one night he called me and asked if I wanted to get a beer. We went to a bar near campus and sat in a back booth and finally talked about it. He told me what he'd felt when he'd been pulled down.

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for the stay. Not his boot, his ankle, above the boot. The grip was tight and cold. He said the fingers, and he was sure they were fingers, not claws, not teeth, wrapped all the way around his ankle. He said whatever grabbed him was strong enough that when I was pulling his arms, he felt like he was going to be torn in half. He also told me something I didn't know. When the boot came off and he lurched free, he'd looked back for just a second. He said he saw a hand, a human hand, pale, with long fingers,

pulling his empty boot into the brush. He said the hand moved too fast. It was there, holding the boot, and then it just retracted into the green, gone. I asked him if he saw anything else. A face, a body, anything. He said no, just the hand. We finished our beers and didn't talk about it again for a long time.

Here's what I know. Something was living in those woods near the Greenbrier Valley in April of 2019. It walked upright. It had hands. It moved with a steady, even rhythm that didn't match anything natural I've ever seen. It followed us from the Laurel Fork area to the Forest Road, a distance of over 10 miles. It was strong enough to drag a 190-pound man through heavy brush.

And whatever it was, it had been at D. Rusk's campsite before we got there. I've looked up D. Rusk. I've searched missing persons reports for Pocahontas County from that spring. I've checked online forums and hiking communities. I found one post from August of 2019 on a West Virginia hiking forum. A user with no other posts asked a... anyone had found a blue tarp and camping gear along the old railroad grade south of Laurel Fork. Nobody responded.

I've never been back to the Monongahela. Chris and I still go camping, but we stick to state parks now. Busy ones. With other people around. With cell service. My forearm healed, four thin white scars where Chris's fingernails dug in while something in the undergrowth tried to take him. I look at them every day.

They're the only proof I have that it. any of this happened, and some nights when I'm lying in bed in the dark, I run my fingers over those scars, and I remember the sound of something moving through the brush behind us with that steady, even rhythm. I know what grabbed Chris. I don't know what it was, but it had hands, and it was patient, and it's still out there in those woods, somewhere between the Laurel Fork and the Greenbrier River, in that thick green tangle of brush where you can't see more than 15 feet in any direction. Don't hike that railroad grade. Stay on the marked trails. And the bird stops singing and you smell something sour in the air. Leave. Don't wait for dark. Don't convince

yourself it's nothing. Just leave. I wish we had.