Just Creepy: Scary Stories - True Deep Woods Horror Stories That Will Disturb You

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

These are 2 True Deep Woods Horror Stories That Will Disturb YouLinktree: https://linktr.ee/its_just_creepyStory Credits:►Sent in to https://www.justcreepy.net/Timestamps:00:00 Intro00:00:18 Story 100:37:28 Story 2Music by:►'Shadows and Dust' by Scott Buckley - released under CC-BY 4.0. www.scottbuckley.com.auBusiness inquiries:►[e-mail]#scarystories #horrorstories #DeepWoods💀As always, thanks for watching! 💀

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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. Right now I am sitting in a motel 6 off Route 9 in Brattleboro, Vermont, and I have not slept in 31 hours. The door is locked. The chain is on. I pushed the dresser in front of it, which took me about 15 minutes because the thing is made of actual particle board, I was worried it would just disintegrate, but it's there. It wouldn't stop anyone who truly wanted in. I know that, but it makes me feel something adjacent to safe, and adjacent is the best I can manage right now. I need to talk about what happened during the last four days near

Burnt Ridge, in the Green Mountain National Forest. I need to talk about it because I told the Forest Ranger, and she looked at me with this very specific kind of patience, the kind where someone is deciding whether you're drunk, mentally unwell, or just an idiot, and said she'd make a note. I need to talk about it because I called my roommate Priya back at UVM and tried to explain, and she asked if I'd eaten any of the mushrooms I found, and when I said no, she asked if I was sure, and I hung up on her. I am not high. I am not having a psychotic break, though I've considered it. I found something in those woods, or it found me. And the fact that nobody else seems alarmed is the part that makes my hands shake when I try to hold my coffee steady. Let me back up. My name is

Corwin. Corwin Alvarez Tate. I'm 20 years old. I'm a junior at the University of Vermont studying ecology and natural resources, and I have been foraging wild mushrooms since I was 14. when my grandfather taught me on his property outside Keene, New Hampshire. Grandpa Oren was not a mystical man. He was a retired postal worker who watched Jeopardy every night at 7 and kept a meticulous notebook of every species he'd ever identified with the date, GPS coordinates, and a colored pencil sketch. He gave me that notebook when I turned 16.

I still carry it in my pack. Mushroom foraging is not some whimsical cottage core hobby for me. It's methodical, it's scientific. You learn the substrates, the seasons, the moisture conditions, the tree associations. You learn which species will kill you, and which ones just look alarming. You learn that a destroying angel, Amanita Bisporegara, is the most beautiful white mushroom you'll ever see, and it will shut down your liver in 72 hours. You develop respect.

Every spring, usually around the third or fourth week of April, I go on a soul of a soul. Foraging trip. This year it fell on April 21st through April 25th, 2024. Five days, four nights, camping at a backcountry site I've used three years running, about four miles off Forest Road 271, in a little hollow near a creek that feeds into the Deerfield River drainage. The spot has no official name. I call it the kettle, because the terrain dips down into this rounded depression with steep sides and a flat mossy bottom. Cell service is non-existent. The nearest trailhead with a parking lot is about six miles south.

This is important. I know these woods. Not casually. I know them the way you know the layout of your childhood home in the dark. I know which way the creek bends. I know where the old stone walls from abandoned farms cut through the forest. I know where the big yellow birch fell across the trail in 2022, and still hasn't been cleared.

I have GPS waypoints saved for 43 different locations where I've found productive mushroom patches. One of those waypoints, number 27 in my list, is a mossy hemlock log, about two feet in diameter, maybe 12 feet long, in an advanced state of decay, sitting in a flat area roughly 30 feet west of the creek. I have harvested oyster mushrooms from this log

in April of 2022, and 2023. I photographed it both years. I took measurements. The log does not move. Logs do not move. This is not a complicated concept. A waterlogged hemlock trunk in that state of decomposition would weigh conservatively 800 pounds, probably more. The log moved, but I'm getting ahead of myself. That's the middle of the story. Let me tell you the beginning, and I'll try to keep the timeline straight, even though right now my brain wants to jump to the worst parts. I arrived at the Forest Road 271 pull-off on Sunday, April 21st, around 2 in the afternoon. Weather was overcast, mid-40s, light wind from the northwest, good foraging conditions.

The ground was soft from snowmelt in recent rain. I loaded my pack, tent, sleeping bag, cook kit, water filter, bear canister, field guides, collection bags, Grandpa Orrin's notebook, GPS unit, and started walking. The hike in was normal, completely normal. I want to emphasize this because what came later makes me want to retroactively see signs everywhere, to tell you the forest felt wrong from the start, but that would be dishonest. The forest felt exactly the way it always feels in late April in Vermont. Muddy, cold, alive with the sound of water moving everywhere,

birds starting to come back. I heard a pileated woodpecker drumming on a dead ash. I saw fresh moose tracks in the mud near the creek crossing. I startled a roughed grouse that exploded out of the brush and made my heart pound for about five seconds, which is a thing that happens to every single person who walks through northeastern woods in spring. Nothing unusual. I set up camp in the kettle around 4.30, got my tent steak down, filtered water, ate a dinner of instant ramen with a pouch of tuna mixed in.

not glamorous, but calories are calories. I reviewed my GPS waypoints and planned my route for the next morning. I'd hit the hemlock log first, then work north along the creek toward a sugar maple stand, where I'd found black trumpets the previous fall. I crawled into my sleeping bag at maybe 8.45. It gets dark early when you're in a hollow with steep sides. I fell asleep listening to the creek and a barred owl calling from somewhere upslope to the east. That first night was fine. Now, here in the Motel 6, I keep going over Monday, April 22nd, trying to decide exactly when things shifted. I think I know, but it's hard to be sure, because the shift was so small, so easy to dismiss. I woke up at 615, frost on the tent,

cold enough to see my breath. I made instant coffee with my little backpacking stove, the jet boil flash, the blue one, if that matters. And I mention it because these specific details are the things keeping me anchored right now, reminding me I was a real person doing real things in a real place. I ate two granola bars, the kind brand, dark chocolate with sea salt, and started hiking toward Waypoint 27 at around 7. The walk to the hemlock log takes about 20 minutes from camp, slightly uphill, then across the creek on a series of rocks I've used before,

Then through a stand of hemlocks, living ones, old growth, with that dark cathedral quality where the canopy blocks most of the light, and the understory is just ferns and moss. The hemlock log sits in a small clearing where a tree fell and opened up the canopy enough for some light to get through. I came into the clearing and I saw it immediately. The log was not where it should have been. I stopped walking. I pulled out my GPS.

Waypoint 27 was marked at the precise coordinates I'd recorded in 2002. North 42 degrees, 53 minutes, 11.4 seconds. West 72 degrees, 52 minutes, 41.8 seconds. I was standing at those coordinates. The log was not there. It was about 40 feet to the northeast. I walked over to it. It was the same log.

I'm certain of this. It had the same distinctive Y-shaped crack near one end where a branch had broken away. It had the same section of bark peeling back to expose the white rot underneath. It even had oyster mushroom primordia, tiny pins the very beginning of a flush, starting to emerge from the same fissures I'd harvested from before. Forty feet. My first thought, my rational ecology student thought, was that I'd simply recorded the coordinates wrong. GPS units have margin of error. Trees fall and change. the landscape. Maybe I was misremembering the clearing, so I took new coordinates, noted

the discrepancy in Grandpa Orrin's notebook, and started examining the mushrooms. The primordia were too young to harvest, but would be ready in two or three days. Good, that's what I'd come for. But something nagged at me while I was crouched there. The ground where the log now sat was compressed. The moss beneath it was flattened and dead, which is what you'd expect from a log that had been sitting in one spot for years. But between the log's current position and its old position, those 40 feet, there was a track, a subtle one. The leaf litter was disturbed in a continuous line, pushed to either side, and the moss was scraped.

It was the kind of mark you'd see if someone had dragged something very heavy in a straight line. Logs don't get dragged. There was nothing that could explain it. No flood evidence. The area was well above the creek's high water mark. No signs of heavy machinery, no tire tracks, no bootprints, no skid marks from chains or cables. Just this scraped pushed aside trail through the leaf litter connecting point A to point B. I stood there for a while, maybe ten minutes.

I remember I started fixating on the specific species of moss that had been scraped. It was a thawydium, probably thawydium delicatulam, a very common feather moss. And I was mentally cataloging its growth rate and how, long it would take to recover, and I realized I was doing that thing I do when I'm anxious, where I retreat into taxonomy because taxonomy is orderly and makes sense. I took photographs. I wrote everything down. I told myself there was an explanation and I'd figure it out later.

I continued my foraging route. The rest of Monday was productive. I found a nice patch of Dryad's saddle on a dying elm, some early chicken of the woods on an oak. Unusual for April. But the warm March we'd had might have pushed. things forward. I found no morels, which was disappointing, but not surprising given the elevation. I returned to camp, had dinner, went to sleep. Yama Vah Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's

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an app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Here is the thing that bothered me, though, and I didn't fully register it until later. When I crossed the creek on my way back that afternoon, the rocks I always use were different. Not the same rocks. These were flatter, more evenly spaced, almost deliberately arranged.

I remember thinking, huh, someone improved this cross. And then I just walked across and kept going. Nobody improved that crossing. There is nobody out there to improve it. I need to pause and tell you where I am now. It is Thursday, April 25th, 1147 at night. I checked into this motel at around six. I have eaten a subway sandwich, the Italian BMT, foot long, because I hadn't eaten since yesterday morning and I was shaking. I've been writing this on my laptop, which is at 38% battery. The motel has Wi-Fi. The parking lot outside has three other cars in it. I can hear the TV in the room next door. These are facts. These are real. I am telling you these things because I need them to be true and I need someone else to know they are true. Okay. Tuesday, April 23rd, I woke up earlier than I meant to, 520, maybe 525, still dark. I lay in my sleeping bag and listened because something had woken me and in the wood. you learn to pay attention to what wakes you. It was quiet. That was what was wrong. No creek

sound. The creek was maybe 60 feet from my tent. It's a decent size stream in April, swollen with snow melt, and it makes constant noise, water over rocks, that rushing, churning sound that becomes a kind of white noise you stop noticing until it stops. And it had stopped. I unzipped my tent and stepped out in my long underwear and camp shoes. The air was cold and still. No frost this time, warmer night. I walked toward the creek with my headlamp on. The creek was still there, but it was flowing in the wrong direction. I want to be careful about how I describe this because I know how it sounds. I know what you're thinking. Creeks don't reverse direction. This guy is confused. He was disoriented from sleep. Here is what I will tell you. I have a degree concentration

in watershed hydrology. I have stood at this creek dozens of times. It flows south-southwest, down the drainage toward the Deerfield River. The gradient is obvious. You can see the land slopes downhill to the south. Water doesn't flow uphill. The water was flowing north, not fast, slowly, sluggishly, with none of the turbulence you'd expect from a healthy spring creek.

Just this smooth, dark, purposeful movement in the wrong direction. and it was silent. Flowing water makes noise because of turbulence, because of the interaction with the stream bed. This water moved over the rocks without any sound at all, and I stood there on the bank watching it in the beam of my headlamp, and I felt, I didn't feel afraid. That's the honest truth.

I felt offended. I felt this surge of irritation, almost anger, because this wasn't possible, and it was insulting that I was seeing it. I squatted down and put my hand in the water to confirm what my eyes were telling me, and the water was warm. Not hot, not bath water, but noticeably, undeniably warm, probably 65 degrees or so, when it should have been in the low 40s from snowmelt.

I pulled my hand out. I went back to my tent. I sat on my sleeping pad, and I wrote down exactly what I'd observed. With the time, in Grandpa Orrin's notebook, At the top of the entry I wrote, Possible, thermal source, need to investigate at daylight.

I was rationalizing. I know that now. But what was I supposed to do? Panic? Run six miles to my car in the dark because the creek was weird? I am a scientist. Scientists observe and record and test hypotheses.

Scientists do not flee into the night because water was warm. At 6.45, when it was light enough to see, I went back to the creek. It was flowing south-southwest, normal direction, normal temperature. I checked with the thermometer on my water filter, and it read 41 degrees. Normal noise, normal turbulence, normal everything. I almost convinced myself I had dreamed it, almost.

But my right hand still smelled faintly of something mineral and sulfurous, which is not what a clean mountain creek smells like, and when I looked at my camp shoes, the soles were muddy from the walk to the creek bank, which would not have been the case if I'd stayed in my tent all night. I decided to go check on the hemlock log. I told myself it was because the oyster mushrooms might have grown enough overnight in the warm conditions, which was a legitimate mycological reason. But the actual reason, the one I wrote in the notebook later that evening with a kind of bleak honesty, was that I wanted to see if it had moved again. It had, not far this time, maybe eight feet, further to the northeast.

Same scraped trail in the moss and leaf litter. Same dead compression where it currently sat. But there was something new. Around the log, in a rough circle with a radius of about 10 feet, every stick and twig and piece of forest debris had been arranged, not scattered, arranged, parallel lines, dozens of small sticks, each between six and 18 inches long,

all pointing toward the log, laid out on the ground in a radial line, ground in a radial pattern. It was precise. Every stick was evenly spaced from its neighbors. The pattern was deliberate and exact and absolutely not something that any natural process could produce. I started laughing. Not because it was funny, because my body didn't know what else to do. I stood there in the hemlock clearing and I laughed in this breathless, stuttering way. And then I stopped and I said, out loud, who is doing this? The forest didn't answer. obviously, but I stood still and I listened, and I heard something I hadn't noticed before,

a very faint sound, rhythmic, coming from somewhere to the north, tapping, tap, tap, tap, evenly spaced, about one tap per second. It sounded exactly, and I want to be precise, exactly the way it sounds when you take a stick and hit it against a tree trunk, a hollow, woody knock. It went on for maybe 45 seconds while I stood frozen. Then it stopped. I did not investigate. I am not brave. I am not stupid. I took my photographs, recorded everything in the notebook, and went back to camp on a different route than the one I'd come in on. I packed up my tent and moved my campsite 300 yards south, still within the kettle but further from the creek and further from the hemlock log. That afternoon, I tried to occupy myself with

normal foraging. I found a beautiful cluster of oyster mushrooms on a different substrate, a fallen poplar about half a mile south of camp. I found some pheasant backs. I cleaned and stored them in paper bags in my bear canister. I went through the motions, but every few minutes I'd stop and listen, and once or twice I heard, or thought I heard, that tapping. Distant, directional.

Always from the north. Here in the motel room I just got up and checked the door again. Chain still on. Dresser still in place. I looked through the peephole and the part. parking lot was empty under the sodium lights. No one there. The TV next door has gone quiet. It is 12.22 in the morning. I keep thinking about something my grandfather said once. We were foraging chanterels on his property, and I asked him if he'd ever found anything weird

in the woods, anything he couldn't explain. He got very still. Grandpa Orrin was not a still man. He was always moving, always fidgeting, and he said, once, near the border. But I don't talk about that because talking about things gives them weight. I asked him what he meant, and he shook his head and said, Corwin, some things in the woods are not for us. They're not against us. They're just not for us. And the smartest thing you can do is leave them be. I should have left them be. Wednesday, April 24th, yesterday, the day everything broke. I woke up at my normal time, around six. I had slept badly, kept waking up to listen. Here. nothing unusual, then lying there for 20 or 30 minutes before drifting off again. My back hurt

from the uneven ground at the new campsite. I was irritable. I was questioning my own observations. I actually wrote in the notebook that morning. Consider possibility that I am experiencing some kind of episode. No family history of psychosis, but stress plus isolation plus sleep disruption can produce perceptual disturbances. I decided this would be my last. full day. I'd do one more foraging run, harvest the oysters from the poplar I'd found, check a few other spots, and hike out Thursday morning. Reasonable, measured. The decision of a rational person making adjustments based on incomplete data. At around nine in the morning, I hiked to the poplar to harvest the oyster mushrooms. They were beautiful, big, fresh,

white, gray, with that slightly rolled edge that tells you they're at peak. I had my knife out and I was cutting them when I heard footsteps, not tapping, footsteps, boots on leaf litter, the crunch and rustle of someone walking, and they were close, maybe 50, 60 feet away, coming from the east. My whole body went alert, not afraid, not exactly, focused. Every sense concentrated on that sound. I stood up slowly and looked toward the source. A man walked out the hemlocks. He was tall, 6-2, 6-3 maybe, thin, but not gaunt. He wore a dark green canvas jacket, the kind you'd buy at an Army surplus store, and brown canvas pants and leather boots. He had a pack, an old external frame pack, the kind nobody uses anymore, with a faded orange rain cover

half attached. His hair was dark and long, tied back. He had a beard. He looked to be in his 50s, maybe older, with deep lines in his face and very pale eyes. Gray or light blue I couldn't tell from that distance. Morning, he said. Morning, I said. He walked closer, stopped about 20 feet away. He looked at the mushrooms in my hand, then at the poplar, then at me. Oysters? he asked.

Yeah, Plurotus Ostratus, good flush. He nodded. Early for oysters. Warm march, I said. That's right, he said. that's right warm march. He smiled. His teeth were very white and very even, and there were too many of them. I know how that sounds. I know teeth are teeth, but I looked at his smile, and I counted, involuntarily, the way I count everything, and there were too many teeth in that smile. The proportions were wrong.

The mouth was too wide for the face, or the teeth were too small, or there were extras crammed in at the edges. I couldn't pinpoint it exactly, but my hands started sweating and I put the knife back in its sheath on my belt, and I took a small step backward without deciding to. You camping around here? he asked. Just passing through, I lied. Day hike from the trailhead. Long day hike. He looked south, toward where the trailhead would be. Six miles? I like walking. Me too, he said. I walk a lot through here, mostly at night. There was a lot. no reason for that last sentence. It was not a thing a normal person would volunteer in casual trail conversation. You don't tell a stranger you walk through remote forest at night. It's not

threatening exactly, plenty of people night hike. But the way he said it, with that too wide smile still in place, delivered it with this weight, this significance. And I felt my stomach clench. Well, I said, better keep moving, long walk back. Sure, he said. You find that. You find anything interesting besides the oysters some pheasant backs nothing special nothing special he repeated he tilted his head to one side you sure nothing unusual i didn't answer i put the mushrooms in my bag and i started walking south toward the trailhead away from my actual camp because i was not going to lead this man to where i slept hey he called after me i stopped i didn't turn around I don't know why I stopped. My body just did it.

Your log moved again, he said, in case you were wondering. I turned around. He was gone, not walking away, not behind a tree, gone. The space where he had been standing was empty. The forest was silent except for the creek, flowing in the correct direction, for whatever that was worth. I stood there for a long time, two minutes, maybe three. I scanned the trees in every direction, nothing moved, no footsteps, no rustling, no tapping.

A chickadee called from somewhere overhead, its two-note song, and that small, normal sound cracked something in me, and I started walking. Fast. Not running. I know better than to run on uneven terrain with a pack, but walking as fast as I could maintain. I did not go to my camp. I walked south. I walked the full six miles to the trailhead. I got in my car, a 2017 Subaru cross-trek, dark gray, the most Vermont car in existence, and I drove. I drove to Brattleboro, I checked into this motel. I have not gone back for my tent, my sleeping bag, my cook kit, or my bear canister.

That gear can rot in the kettle forever for all I care. But that's not the end. That's not why I'm writing this at one in the morning with the dresser against the door. The end is what happened after I checked in. I took a shower, a long one, 40 minutes maybe, standing under water so hot it turned my skin red, trying to feel clean, trying to feel normal. I put on the spare clothes from my car, a UVM sweatshirt and jeans I keep in the trunk. I went to subway and got the Italian BMT.

I came back and sat on the bed and opened Grandpa Orin's notebook to write down the day's events while they were fresh. I flipped to the entry from Tuesday, the one where I documented the reversed creek and the stick arrangement around the hemlock log. The entry was different. My handwriting was there. My pencil, my slant, my specific way of making capital letters. The date was correct. Tuesday, April 23rd, 2004. The location was correct.

The time was correct. But the words were wrong. Where I had written about the creek flowing. north, the entry now read, Creek nominal, no anomalies, warm night, aprox 52 degrees, good conditions for fungal growth. Where I had written about the stick arrangement and the log moving another eight feet, the entry now read, hemlock log stable at original coordinates, primordia developing well, expect harvestable flush by Thursday, no disturbance. Where I had written my note about possible perceptual disturbances, there was instead a single line.

Feeling well, sleeping well, nothing unusual to report. It was my handwriting. Every letter, every characteristic, the pencil pressure, the way I write my lowercase A with a slightly open top, the way my G descends with a straight line instead of a loop. It was mine. I did not write those words. I flipped to Monday's entry. Same thing.

My description of the log's initial 40-foot displacement had been replaced with a mundane cheerful entry about normal foraging. The photographs on my phone were still there. I checked immediately, hands shaking so badly I could barely work the screen. But the notebook, the physical notebook, Grandpa Orrin's notebook, had been altered. Someone, some thing, had been in my pack, had taken the notebook, had studied my handwriting carefully enough to replicate it perfectly, had rewritten my observations to say nothing happened, had tried to erased the evidence. I went through the entire notebook. Every entry, going back years, everything else was untouched. Grandpa Orrin's entries in his blocky print. My earlier entries from

2022 and 23, all exactly as I remembered them. Only the entries from this trip had been changed. Only the ones where I recorded impossible things. I sat on the motel bed, and I held the notebook in my hands, and I felt something I have never felt before. Not fear, despair, this total crushing despair, because the notebook was supposed to be the proof. The notebook was the scientific record. The notebook was the thing that would make someone believe me, and it had been taken from me. Not by force, by forgery, by someone or something that could perfectly replicate my handwriting, that had access to my possessions while I slept, that understood exactly.

what the notebook meant to me and precisely how to neutralize it. I have the photographs. I keep telling myself I have the photographs. The time-stamped GPS photos of the log in its wrong position. The stick arrangements, the drag marks. Those are on my phone, backed up to the cloud. Those can't be rewritten in pencil in the dark, but the notebook. The notebook was supposed to be sacred.

It was Grandpa Orin's. It was the one unbroken line of truth connecting me to be. truth connecting me to a man who taught me to observe the world honestly and record what I saw without flinching, and someone put their hands on it, someone sat somewhere, in the dark while I slept 60 feet away, or in some other time and place I can't fathom, and they carefully, patiently, precisely rode over my truth with a comfortable nothing. Nothing unusual to report. It is now 2.14 in the morning. I have re-read everything I've written. I want to add some things. First, the man in the green jacket knew about the log.

He said, your log moved again. He said this with a smile that had too many teeth in it, and then he was not there anymore. I have been trying to construct a rational explanation for this, and I cannot. A prankster would have to have followed me for three years to know about the log. Would have to be strong enough to move 800 pounds of waterlogged hemlock. Would have to be able to replicate my handwriting flawlessly. would have to be able to vanish from an open patch of forest in the time it takes to turn around. Second, I went back through my earlier entries in the notebook, the real ones, the untouched ones,

and I found something I had somehow never noticed before. In Grandpa Orrin's section, near the back, there's an entry from September 14, 1997. He was foraging in northern New Hampshire near Pittsburgh, close to the Canadian border. The entry reads, Found the same birch log displaced again, Third time this month. Approximately 20 feet in any from last position. Stick formations present.

Did not approach. Do not approach. Do not engage. Leave offerings of found food and depart. He walks at night and he is not done with this forest. He will move what he wants to move. Do not let him know you see it. And then, in a different pencil, pressed harder,

underlined twice, do not talk about this. Do not give it wait. Grandpa Orin. Who told me some things in the woods are not for us. Who got very still that one time I asked? Who knew? Who had been dealing with this, or something identical to it?

27 years ago. 200 miles north. Who had figured out the rules and followed them and survived. And I broke every single one of his rules. I approached, I documented, I engaged, I practically announced myself as a witness. And then I talked to the man in the green jacket, and I let him see that I knew,

and he smiled at me with his wrong mouth, and told me my log had moved, and now he knows my face, and he knows I see. I have to believe, I have to, that the rules still apply, that leaving is enough, that putting distance between myself in those woods is enough. Grandpa Orrin foraged for 30 more years after that entry,

and died of a heart attack in his living room at 81 watching Jeopardy, which is exactly the way he would have wanted to go. He encountered this thing, and he walked away, and it led him. But Grandpa Orrin didn't write it all down. Grandpa Orrin didn't take photographs. Grandpa Orrin didn't stand in a clearing and say, Who is doing this out loud? Which I realize now was perhaps the worst thing I could have done. And Grandpa Orrin never had someone rewrite his notebook. That's the part that keeps me staring me staring at the door. The notebook was in my pack. My pack was in my tent. My tent was 300 yards from where it had been the night before because I moved it. And still, sometime during the night

between Tuesday and Wednesday, something found my camp, opened my pack, extracted the notebook, paged through it to find the correct entries, and spent what must have been considerable time in the dark, by what light, forging replacements. It was in my tent. with me while I slept, or it didn't need to be. Maybe it can just change things. Maybe the distance doesn't matter. Maybe right now, while I type this, the photographs on my phone are being replaced with pictures of normal mushrooms on a stationary log, with no stick formations in sight. I keep checking. They're still there. They're still there. I'm going to stop writing now. In the morning I will drive back to Burlington. I will go to campus. I will hand the notebook to Dr. Marin Lifshin,

my ecology professor, and I will show her the entries that are not mine, and the entry from Grandpa Orrin and the photographs on my phone. She will probably refer me to student counseling services. That is fine. At least there will be a record held by someone else that I can't be gaslit out of. I am going to close this laptop and try to sleep. I am going to leave the light on because I I am 20 years old, and I am not ashamed to say, I need the light on tonight. I am going to try not to think about the fact that the motel room door has a gap at the bottom of about an inch, and that gap leads to the parking lot, and the parking lot leads to the road, and the road leads to the forest, and the forest goes on and on, and the things in it walk at night. One more thing.

When I was in the shower earlier, during those 40 minutes of scalding water, I heard something through the bathroom door, from the main room, a small sound, easy to dismiss, easy to explain away as the ice machine down the hall or a door closing in another room. Tap, tap, tap, evenly spaced, about one per second. It lasted for maybe 30 seconds, and then it stopped. And when I came out of the bathroom, everything was exactly where I'd left it, and the door was still locked, and the chain was still on. But Grandpa Orrin's notebook was open on the bed. I had left it closed in my backpack on the floor. I picked it up and checked the entries.

They haven't changed again. The forged ones are still there. Nothing new has been added. But the notebook was open to Grandpa Orrin's entry from September 14th, 1997. The one about the rules. The one that ends with, do not give it wait. I think that was a warning. I think that was the last courtesy I'm going to get.

And I think the smartest thing I can do, The thing Grandpa Orrin would tell me to do if he were alive and sitting in this motel room with me is to post this, close my laptop, and never speak of it again. Not to Priya. Not to Dr. Lifshin. Not to anyone, ever. I'm going to delete the photographs from my phone. I'm going to tear out my entries from this trip and burn them in the motel parking lot.

I'm going to close the notebook and put it away and follow Grandpa Orin's rules from this moment forward. Years too late, but maybe not irredeemably so. Some things in the woods are not for us. I'm leaving them be now. But I wanted someone, even strangers, even people I'll never meet, to know that it's real. The logs move. The water reverses. The sticks arrange themselves in patterns.

And there's a man in a green jacket with too many teeth who walks at night and knows exactly what you've seen. Don't go to Burnt Ridge. Don't look for Waypoint 27. Don't go looking for proof of what I've described, because the proof has a way of being taken from you. Gently, precisely, in handwriting you'd swear was your own. I'm turning the light off now. I've given this enough weight. This episode is brought to you by Netflix's remarkably bright creatures. What if a Pacific octopus held the key to a mystery that could heal your heart?

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and you make sounds with your mouth or a little wooden box that are supposed to convince a bird, a bird with better eyesight than a fighter pilot, that you are a lonely hen looking for company. You do this for hours, sometimes days. You do this in places where there is no cell service, no trail markers, no other human beings for miles in every direction, and the whole time you are making yourself sound vulnerable. You are broadcasting an invitation into the woods, and you never really think about what else might be listening. I need to get that out. of the way first because everything I'm about to describe happened during spring gobbler season in West Virginia, and if you don't understand the setup, the rest of it won't land right.

My name is Corwin Haig. I'm 38. I work as a mechanical engineer for a company that makes industrial ventilation systems, ducks, dampers, the kind of stuff you walk past in the ceiling of every hospital and office building, and never think about twice. It's boring work that pays well, and it affords me the ability to take two weeks off every April to do the one thing I actually care about, which is hunting turkeys in the mountains of Pocahontas County. I've been hunting since I was nine years old. My father, Rudy Haig, put a 20-gauge in my hands the spring of 1995, and walked me into the woods behind our property in Durban.

He taught me the Yelps, the Clucks, the purrs. He taught me how to read sign on the ground, scratchings in the leaf litter, drag marks from strutting tom, the J-shaped droppings versus the curly-kew ones. He taught me that turkeys will come to the sound of another turkey, but they will absolutely not come to the sound of a human being pretending to be a turkey if you get even one note wrong. They know. They always know.

Dad died in 2017. Pancreatic cancer. 11 weeks from diagnosis to funeral. I still hunt every spring on the same ridge line above the Greenbrier River, where he first took me. And every year I set up a little folding chair next to a white oak that I call Rudy's tree. Though it's just an ordinary white oak, nothing special about it except that he leaned against it on our last hunt together, the April before the diagnosis. This past spring, April of 2024, I went up to Pocahontas County with two friends from work, Nestor Albrecht and Fom Trann.

Nestor is from originally from Redding, Pennsylvania, and Fom grew up in Virginia Beach. Neither of them are what you'd call seasoned woodsmen. Nestor had been turkey hunting exactly twice before and killed one bird on a guided hunt in Missouri. Fom had never been turkey hunting at all, but had been asking me for two years to take him, and I finally said yes, because honestly I thought it would be good to have the company.

The woods have felt different since Dad died, quieter, but not in a peaceful way. Quieter in the way a room gets quiet when someone walks in, and everyone stops talking. We drove down from Morgantown on Friday, April 19th, and got to the cabin around 7.30 in the evening. The cabin belongs to my uncle Dwayne. It's nothing fancy. Two bedrooms.

A wood stove. A porch that's been threatening to collapse since the Clinton administration. No internet. No television. Cell service if you walk up the gravel road about a quarter mile and stand on the left side near the old fence post and hold your phone above your head. And even then it's one big. bar of LTE that cuts out if a cloud passes over. We unloaded gear, eight sandwiches, and I spread a topo map on the kitchen table to show them where we'd be going. The spot I had in mind was about a

40-minute hike from the cabin, up a hollow I call Fern Creek. That's not its official name. I don't think it has one. To a bench on the southeast face of a ridge that runs roughly north-south above the river valley. I'd roosted birds there every spring for the last six years. good timber, open understory, the kind of place where you can see a turkey at 80 yards through the trees and have time to get your gun up. Here's the first thing I want you to hold on to, because it's the detail I didn't pay enough attention to at the time. While I was showing Nestor and Fam the map, I pointed out a section of woods about a half mile northwest of my usual setup, a little saddle between two knobs where the terrain dips down and then rises again. And I told them that we would not be

going there. Pham asked why, and I said because the turkeys don't use it. Which was true, but that wasn't the whole reason. The whole reason is that my father told me, when I was maybe 11 or 12, that the saddle was a place where sound does funny things. He said he'd been up there once in the 80s and heard a hen yelping from the far side, and when he worked his way over to set up on it, the yelping moved. Not the way a turkey moves. Turkeys walk and stop, walk and stop and you can track the progression. This moved in a straight line at a constant speed, from one end of the saddle to the other, then stopped. And when it stopped, it started again, from the exact spot where it had begun. The same series of yelps, the same cadence, the same number of notes.

He said it did this three times, and then on the fourth repetition, the yelping turned into something that was almost a yelp, but not quite, a sound that had the rhythm of a turkey, but the tonal quality of something with a larger throat. And Dad, who was not a superstitious man, who was a postal carrier and a deacon at Durban Presbyterian Church, and who read Louis Lemore novels and watched Jeopardy every weeknight. Dad turned around and walked out of those woods and never went back to the saddle again. He told me this once, we never discussed it again. He didn't frame it as a ghost story. He didn't say he thought it was anything supernatural.

He just said the saddle was a place where Sound did funny things, and we didn't hunt there. I accepted that the way you accept everything your father tells you when you're 12, completely, and without question. So I told Nestor and Fam we wouldn't be going there, and Fam shrugged, and Nestor was already half asleep on the couch, and we turned in early because opening morning meant alarms at 4.15. Saturday, April 20th. My phone alarm went off at 4.15 in the morning, and I already had that feeling I get on opening day. A full-body alertness that has nothing to do with caffeine. I woke the other two. Fam was up fast. Nestor took convincing. We got dressed in the dark, base layers, then

camo, then face masks, then gloves. I reminded them both. No talking above a whisper once we leave the cabin. No white clothing, no sudden movements. Turkeys see in color and they see movement better than any animal in North America. If a Tom is looking your direction and you blink too hard, he's gone. We were on the trail by 445, headlamps on red mode. The air was cold for April, I'd guess mid-30s, and there was a ground fog sitting in the hollow that made the headlamp beams look solid, these red columns pushing into white vapor. The hike in was uneventory. I set Nestor up against a big red oak about 60 yards to my south with a good shooting lane through a gap in the laurel. Fam I kept with me at Rudy's tree so I could call for both of us and coach him through his first setup.

By 5'10 we were seated, backs against trees, guns across our laps. 12-gauge Mossburg 500s, both of us. I loaded mine with heavyweight TSS number 9 shot, expensive shells, $7 a round. but they patterned so tight at 40 yards you could cover the spread with a dinner plate. Fam had Winchester longbeards, which are perfectly fine. I mentioned the ammunition because later it's going to matter that I knew exactly what was in my gun and exactly what it could do at specific distances. We sat. The woods were dark, no sound except a barred owl working somewhere to our west, that classic Who Cooke's for You Call that most people know from movies. I didn't call,

You don't call before fly down. You sit and you listen and you wait for the birds to tell you where they are. At 532, I know the exact time because I checked my watch. An old Cassio with an Indyglow backlight. The first gobble of the morning ripped through the hollow, close, maybe 150 yards uphill and slightly to the north. A deep, rolling, full-chested gobble that vibrated in my sternum. I squeezed Pham's forearm once, which was. was our signal for bird. He squeezed back. I could feel his pulse through his camo sleeve.

It was fast. A second bird gobbled maybe 200 yards east of the first. Then a third, farther out, somewhere on the next ridge over. Three tom's within working distance. That's a good morning. I let them gobble on the roost for another 15 minutes. At 547 I pulled out a mouth call, a Woodhaven Ninja, and let out a sequence of soft tree yelps. Just three notes. Quiet, raspy, the sound of a hen who's just woken up and is thinking about flying down. The first Tom double-gobbled, immediate response. He was interested. I waited two minutes and yelped again.

Same three notes, slightly louder. The Tom gobbled again. And then I heard what I expected, the heavy wing-beats of a turkey pitching out of a roost tree, that distinctive wump-wump-wump-of-a-pound bird dropping through branches and catching air. He was on the ground. I clucked twice, soft, the way a hen does when she's feeding and content and in no hurry. Nothing for a minute. Then, drumming.

If you've never heard a turkey drum, trust me, you'll never forget it once you have. It's not a sound you hear so much as feel, a low-frequency vibration, almost subsonic, that comes from the tom puffing out his chest and vibrating his body feathers. He was close. inside a hundred yards and closing. I didn't call again. When they're coming, you shut up. Every call you make is a chance to hit a wrong note,

and at close range, a wrong note is the end of your hunt. Fom was rigid beside me. I could see the white of his knuckle, where his finger rested along the trigger guard. I remember thinking, first time, he's feeling it. There is nothing in the world that compares to the sound of a gobbler closing distance, on your position, nothing. It is ancient and electric and it makes your hands shake no matter how

many times you've done it. At 5.59, the tom appeared. He came around a blowdown at about 70 yards, too far for a shot, and he was in full strut, tail fanned, beard swinging, head swollen and cycling through red, white, and blue. He was beautiful. A three-year bird, maybe four, with a nine- or ten-inch beard and spurs I could see even at that distance. catching the early light. He strutted toward us, 60 yards, 55, 50. Fam shifted his gun barrel an inch. The Tom's head snapped to alert, periscope up, neck stretched, staring directly at us. He stood motionless for what felt like a full minute, but was probably five seconds. Then he putted, that sharp, single-note alarm call, and walked away, not running. Turkeys don't always run when

they're spooked. Sometimes they just walk away with enormous dignity, and there is nothing you can do about it. Fom exhaled. Sorry, he whispered. It happens, I said, and it does. It happens to everyone. We sat for another hour, and didn't hear another gobble. The morning warmed up. A pileated woodpecker hammered a dead ash about 20 yards above us, showering us with wood chips. Around 7.30, Nestor came walking up from his position and we regrouped and decided to relocate for the late morning. This is where it started. I suggested we push farther up the ridge and worked the eastern face, where I'd heard that second bird gobbling at fly down. We hiked uphill through open hardwoods, mostly red and white oak with some hickory, and the walking was pleasant. April in the Allegheny

mountains is a particular kind of beautiful that I won't try to oversell. The red buds were blooming, The forest floor was carpeted in trillium and toothwort. Everything was damp and green and alive. We were maybe 20 minutes into the hike when Nestor stopped. Somebody's calling, he said. I stopped. Fam stopped. We listened.

From the north. From the direction of the saddle my father had told me to avoid. There was a hen yelping. Clear, loud, aggressive yelps. A lost hen call. The kind of calling that says, I'm here. Where is everybody? Come find me. That's a good one, Nestor said.

He meant he thought it was a real hen, and that a real hen in that direction might have tombs with her. I listened for another ten seconds. The Yelps came again. Same sequence. Same cadence. Same number of notes. I counted seven.

We're not going that way, I said. Why? There's clearly birds up. There are birds on the east face, too. We heard one this morning. Let's work that. Nester gave me a look but didn't push it. Fam was already checking his phone for signal,

a habit I was going to have to break him of, and hadn't been paying attention. We continued east. I set up the three of us in a line along a bench with good visibility, about 20 yards apart. I called periodically through the morning. Yelps, clucks, an occasional cut sequence. Nothing responded.

By 11 o'clock the woods were dead quiet, and we walked back to the cabin for lunch. Over sandwiches, Nestor brought it up again. That hen calling this morning, that was really close, like three, 400 yards. Why won't you hunt that direction? The terrain's bad, I said. It's a saddle. Everything funnels out the sides.

No way to set up on a bird coming through there. This was technically true, but practically irrelevant. You can set up on a bird anywhere if you're willing to improvise. Nestor knew this. He'd been around me enough to know I was. being evasive. Your uncle owned that section too? It's all national forest up there, Monongahela. So what's the problem? I almost told him what my father had said, but I was sitting in a cabin with fluorescent lights and a propane stove and a refrigerator humming, and it felt

ridiculous, the kind of story that would make Nestor think I was losing my edge. So I just said, I've never had luck there. The birds don't pattern through that saddle. Trust me. He dropped it. We ate. We napped. In the afternoon, we scouted some fields to the south where I'd seen hens feeding in previous years, and we found fresh scratchings in one pile of tom droppings, and we made a plan for the next morning. Sunday, April 21st, same routine. 4.15 alarm. Into the woods by 4.45. I set us up on the edge of a field this time, along a fence line where I'd found the scratchings the day before. The morning started well.

two tom's gobbling from roost trees inside 300 yards, and one of them pitched down and came to my calling so perfectly that he walked into the field at 612, with his beard nearly touching the ground, and his tail in full fan, and Fam shot him at 32 yards, and the bird folded, and it was beautiful. Fam's hands were shaking so hard afterward that he couldn't hold the bird for a photo. I had to prop it up against a fence post and let him kneel next to it. His eyes were wet.

I won't pretend mine weren't. I kept thinking about Dad, and 1995, and my first bird, and how some things come around again, even when the person who started them is gone. We tagged the bird and packed it out and got back to the cabin by 8.30. While Nestor and I cleaned the turkey, Fom went up the gravel road to get signal and call his wife. He was gone a long time. When he came back, he was quieter than usual. Everything good? I asked.

Yeah. Hey, Corwin. When I was up on the road, I heard something weird. Weird how? Turkey sounds, hen sounds, yelping. Coming from up the ridge north of us. Okay. But it was, I don't know. It sounded the same. The same as what? No, I mean, it sounded the same as itself. It repeated. The exact same yelps. The exact same timing. Three times in a row. I timed it on my watch. each sequence was about six seconds, and the gap between them was about eight seconds, and it did it three times, and then stopped. I set down the knife I was using to remove the turkey's crop.

I wiped my hands on my jeans. I looked at fam, and he was watching me with this expression. I can only describe as confused attentiveness, not scared, not worried, just aware that he'd heard something he didn't have a category for. turkeys repeat themselves, I said. Hens will do the same Yelp sequence over and over. With the exact same timing between repetitions, sometimes, down to the second?

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This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. They're creatures of habit. Fom accepted this, or seemed to. But there it was again. The detail, the repetition, the mechanical precision of it. The same thing my father had described 30-some years ago. That afternoon we hunted separately. Nestor went south to try the fields.

FAM stayed at the cabin to rest. He was running on adrenaline. and sandwich meat and not much else. I went up the ridge alone, telling myself I was going to check the east face again, and knowing in the back of my mind that I was going to walk north toward the saddle. Here's the thing about being a grown man versus being a 12-year-old boy. When you're 12, your father tells you not to go somewhere and you don't go. When you're 38, your dead father's 20-year-old instruction starts to feel less binding,

not because you respect him less, because the need to understand has gotten bigger than the fear. I walked the ridge for maybe 25 minutes heading north. The terrain was familiar at first, and then less so. I'd been on this part of the ridge before, but not often, and the forest character changed as I went. The oaks gave way to more hemlock and yellow birch. The understory got thicker. Rhododendron closed in on both sides. The ground was damper, spongier.

My boots made almost no noise. At approximately 2.40 in the afternoon I reached the edge of the saddle. It was maybe 200 yards across, running east-west, a low point between two gentle knobs, like the waist of an hourglass. The trees were different in the saddle, mostly beach, with that smooth gray bark that looks like concrete. The canopy was high, and the understory was almost non-existent, just bare dirt and last years leaves and a few scattered ferns. You could see from one end of the saddle to the other.

It was, from a turkey hunting perspective, a completely reasonable place to set up. Good visibility, open shooting lanes. If a bird walked through here, you'd see him at a hundred yards. My father had been wrong, or lying, when he said the terrain was bad. I sat down against a beech tree at the southern edge of the saddle. I pulled out my mouth call. I didn't intend to call. I just held in my palm and sat there and listened. The woods were quiet. Not silent. There was a breeze moving through the canopy, and somewhere a nut hatch was doing its nasal yank, yank, yank, but quiet in the way woods get in the early afternoon when most birds are done moving and everything is just waiting for the evening to start. I sat for 15 minutes. Nothing. I was about to

stand up and leave when I heard the yelping. It came from the far side of the saddle, the north side, And it was loud. Not close, but loud in the way that a confident hen is loud, the kind of aggressive lost call that carries through timber. I counted the notes, seven yelps, same as what Nestor and I had heard the morning before. I didn't respond. I just listened. Eight seconds of silence. Then, seven yelps, same cadence, same pitch, same rhythm. I could have conducted it. 8 seconds of silence, 7 Yelps, 8 seconds, 7 Yelps, 4 repetitions, exactly what my father had described. On the fifth repetition, the Yelps changed. The rhythm was the same, seven notes.

The spacing between them was the same. But the tonal quality shifted. The sound got deeper, fuller. The notes lost their clucky, sharp-edged turkey quality and became rounder, more resonant. It was still recognizably a series of Yelps. Yelps. The cadence was perfect, but the voice producing them was wrong. Too large, too smooth. A turkey syrinx produces sound with a particular buzzy, reedy texture that you can identify even through earplugs. This sound had no buzz to it. It was clean, pure-toned. The way a human

would sound if they were trying to replicate turkey yelps purely with their vocal cords, and doing an almost, almost perfect job of it. my hands go numb, not cold numb, adrenaline numb. My fingers tingled and my grip on the mouth call loosened and I almost dropped it. The sound stopped. Then from the same direction, maybe 100 yards away, in the beach trees on the north side of the saddle, I heard my father's voice. Corwin, come on up. I need to be clear about what I mean. I don't mean I heard a voice that reminded me of my father. I don't mean I heard something that in my grief-addled brain I interpreted as my father. I mean I heard my father's actual voice, Rudy Hague's voice, with his particular eastern West Virginia accent,

and his particular low register, and the particular way he clipped the R in my name, so it sounded more like Co-Win, than Corwin. I heard the exact words he used to say to me from his tree stand when he wanted me to come to his position. Corwin, come on up. He said it every opening morning when he'd found a good spot. He said it the way you'd say, dinner's ready, casual. Warm. A father calling his son to come see something good. My father had been dead for seven years. I did not move. I sat against that beech tree with my 12-gauge across my lap and my hands tingling

and my jaw clenched so hard my molars creaked and I did not move. Corwin, come on up. Same words, same cadence, same clipped R, same warmth. I want to tell you I felt grief or terror or some poetic emotion that would make this a better story. What I actually felt was a precise, focused anger that I did not fully understand. Something was in those woods using my father's voice, using the specific intonation and phrasing of a dead man to lure me across a saddle, and my response was not fear. My response was offense, deep, personal, thermonuclear offense. The way you'd feel if someone showed up at Thanksgiving wearing your dead father's face and sat in his chair. chair, and used his napkin ring and set his grace.

I raised my gun, not to my shoulder, just up off my lap, barrel pointed in the general direction of the voice, safety still on. A readiness posture. Corwin. Just my name now. And this time, this is the detail that I cannot stop thinking about. Three months later, this is the detail that I will think about until I die. This time the voice was closer, not by a lot, maybe ten yards closer.

But I hadn't heard footsteps. I hadn't heard leaf litter crunch, or a branch snap, or the soft cusseration of fabric against brush. The voice had simply moved closer, the way a sound moves when you turn up a speaker. Corwin, closer again, maybe 80 yards now, still in the beach trees on the north side of the saddle, still invisible. The understory was open. I could see 80 yards in every direction, and there was nothing there, no person, no animal, no turkey. nothing. I stood up. I thumbed the safety off. I had the gun at low ready, stock under my armpit, barrel at 45 degrees, finger outside the trigger guard. I stared into the beaches,

and I saw absolutely nothing. Come on up, 70 yards. The voice came from behind a particular beach tree. I could tell by the slight muffled the way the trunk absorbed some of the higher frequencies. I stared at that tree. It was maybe 18 inches in diameter. Nothing was behind it. Nothing could have been behind it without being visible from my angle. I spoke for the first time. My voice was steady in a way I did not expect. You're not him.

Silence. The woods were so quiet I could hear my own blood moving through my ears. Then, a single yelp, just one note. But not a turkey yelp, and not a human yelp. Something between the two, a note that started with the buzzy texture of a real hen, and then transitioned, mid-note, into a cleaner, rounder tone, a blend, a negotiation between two different kinds of throat. I backed away. I didn't turn around. I kept the gun up, and I backed south, out of the saddle step by step, watching the beaches. My boots found the ground behind me

through feel alone. I moved slowly. 20 yards, 40, 60. When I reached the rhododendron at the southern edge of the saddle, where the ridge began to climb again, I heard the yelping resum behind me. Seven notes, eight seconds of silence, seven notes, eight seconds, seven notes. On the fourth repetition it shifted again, lower and smoother, and I turned and walked fast down the ridge toward the cabin and I did not look back. I didn't tell Nestor or Fam what happened. Not that evening, not over dinner, not over the bourbon that Nestor had brought from a distillery in Lexington. I sat on the porch and drank and listened to the dark and told myself there was an explanation, a bird, an echo,

some freak acoustic property of the saddle that my father had noticed decades ago and that my grief had sculpted into something with agency and intent. But here's the thing, and this is where I need you to understand something about me and about turkey calling. I have been running mouth calls for 29 years. I can tell the difference between a Jake and a two-year-old Tom by their gobble. I can tell the difference between a real hen and a man with a box call at 200 yards. I have judged calling competitions.

I won the West Virginia State Friction Call Championship in 2011. When I tell you that the sound I heard in the saddle was not a turkey and not a human, when I tell you it was something that could produce both types of sound and blend between them in a single note, I am telling you this from a position of specific practiced earned expertise. I know what turkeys sound like. I know what humans sound like. What I heard in the saddle was neither.

Monday, April 22nd. I wanted to leave. I didn't say so. Nestor was fired up. He hadn't killed a bird yet. And Pham wanted to hunt again, even though he'd already tagged out. I told Fam he could come along as a cameraman if he wanted, and he jumped at it. We hunted the fields to the south.

It was a slow morning. Distant gobbles. Nothing workable. By 9 o'clock Nestor was restless and suggested we try the east face of the ridge. We hiked up, set up, I called, nothing came. At around 10.15, Nestor said he was going to push farther north and see if he could strike a bird off the ridge. Don't go past the big hemlock stand, I said. The hemlock stand was about 300 yards south of the saddle. Why? Because the birds aren't up there. How do you know? We haven't tried. I know this mountain nester. The birds are south and east. They're not in that saddle. You keep saying that. What's wrong with the saddle? I should have told him. Right then. I should have said, something is in the saddle that uses sounds to draw people in, and it used my dead father's voice yesterday, and I don't know what it is, but I know it's real, and I know it's not human, and I know it's not a bird. But I did. didn't. Because it sounded insane. Because Nestor is a practical man from Reading, Pennsylvania, who troubleshoots HVAC control systems for a living and has no patience for anything that can't be measured with a multimeter. Because I was still half convincing myself that I'd imagined it.

Just trust me, I said. He looked at me for a long moment. Then he adjusted his gun on his shoulder and walked north. Nestor. He kept walking. I looked at Pham. looked at me, he'd heard the yelping from the road, he'd noticed the repetition. Something in his face told me he understood that my resistance to the saddle was more than

superstition, even if he didn't know the specifics. We should go with him, Fam said. He was right. I hated that he was right. We followed Nestor up the ridge. He moved fast, long legs, hunting boots that he'd actually broken in properly. I'll give him that. And we caught up to him just as he reached the hemlock stand. The hemlocks were old growth, some of them three feet in diameter. With that dark cathedral quality that old hemlock groves have, the light dropped, the air cooled. Nestor, wait, he stopped.

What? If you're going up there, we go together, and we stay tight, and if I say we leave, we leave. No discussion. He looked at me with an expression that combined curiosity, amusement, and the faintest edge of concern. Corwin. What the hell is up there?

I don't know. That's why we stay together. We walked through the hemlocks in a line, me in front, fam in the middle, Nestor in the back. The saddle opened up ahead of us, that same expanse of smooth barked beach trees

and bare forest floor. It looked different with other people there, smaller maybe, less ominous. Sunlight was coming through the canopy and long-angled shafts, and the beach leaves. Last years, still clinging to the lower branches and that way beach leaves do, were pale and papery and rustling in a light breeze.

I stopped us at the southern edge, same spot I'd sat the day before, I pointed across the saddle. Yesterday afternoon I sat here, I heard yelping from over there, the north side, maybe a hundred yards out, seven yelps in a sequence, repeating every eight seconds, four times. On the fifth repetition the sound changed, got deeper, then it, then it what? Then it spoke to me, in my father's voice. Nestor stared at me. It said my name. It said, come on up.

Those were words my father used to say to me in the woods. It said them in his exact voice, and the voice moved closer without any sound of footsteps. Nestor said nothing for about ten seconds. Then, okay. Okay, okay, I hear you. believe you heard that. I didn't say I heard that. I said it happened. Right. Okay. So what do you want to do? I want to leave. But you came up here anyway. Because you came up here. Nestor nodded slowly. He looked across the saddle. Fam had gone very quiet. He was holding his phone in his hand,

not using it, just holding it, the way people hold objects when they want something solid in their grip. Let's just sit here for ten minutes, Nestor said. If nothing happens, we go back down and hunt the fields. Deal? I didn't want to sit for ten minutes. But Nestor had this look, a look I recognized from work, from meetings where a client insists something is impossible, and Nestor decides to prove them wrong through sheer patience, and I knew he wouldn't leave until he'd given the saddle a fair chance. We sat down, Three abreast, backs against the same beech tree, guns across laps. The tree was wide enough to accommodate all three of us if we pressed our shoulders together. We waited. Five minutes. Nothing. The woods were ordinary. A blue jay screamed somewhere to the east.

Squirrels chased each other through the canopy. Seven minutes. Nothing. Nestor shifted his weight. Pham still had his phone in a death grip. Nine minutes. All right, Nestor said, starting to stand. I think your mountain is Seven Yelps They came from the north side of the saddle Exactly where I'd heard them the day before Loud, clear, aggressive

Seven notes in a perfect ascending sequence The classic lost hen call Textbook, the kind of yelping you'd hear On a competition stage Nestor froze halfway to standing He lowered himself back down Eight seconds of silence Seven Yelps

Identical, same pitch, same cadence, same everything. Eight seconds, seven Yelps. Nestor whispered, that's a hen. Count the repetitions, I whispered back. Eight seconds. Seven Yelps. That was four. On the fifth repetition, the Yelps deepened. The transition happened mid-sequence this time. The first three notes were turkey. The fourth was the blend. And the last three were pure, round, clean tones that no turkey has ever made. I watched Nestor's face as it happened. His expression went through a rapid series of changes, recognition, confusion, denial, and then something I can only describe as recalibration,

the look of an engineer encountering a system that violates its own specifications. What the hell was that? Nestor, wait, I said, silence, 10 seconds, 20. Nestor. It was Nestor's name in a voice I didn't recognize, low, male, slightly nasal. The accent was wrong for West Virginia. flatter, more Midwestern. Nestor went white, not pale, white. The color drained from his face so fast I thought he might pass out. Nestor, come on up. The same phrasing it had used on me, but in a different

voice, in a voice that, based on Nestor's reaction, he recognized, who is that? Fom whispered. Nestor didn't answer. His jaw was working, but no words came out. His hands were shaking, Not the excited tremor Fahm had after his turkey, but a deep, involuntary vibration that went all the way to his elbows. Nestor, we're leaving, right now. I stood. I pulled Fam up. I grabbed Nestor's arm and hauled him to his feet. His gun almost fell. I caught it by the barrel and shoved it into his chest, and he grabbed it reflexively. That's my grandfather, Nestor said. His voice was flat, drained. That's my grandfather's voice. He's been dead since 2009.

I know, we're leaving. We walked south, fast. I kept us in a line, me in front, Nestor in the middle, fam bringing up the rear and walking backward every few steps to check behind us. We got through the hemlocks and down the ridge in maybe 15 minutes, and we didn't stop until we hit the gravel road by the cabin. On the porch, Nestor sat on the steps and put his face in his hands. He stayed that way for a long time.

When he looked up, his eyes were red. It had his accent, he said. My grandfather came over from Germany when he was 14. He had this specific way of saying my name. He couldn't do the R at the end right. He always turned it into a D. And it did that. It turned the R into a D.

I know, I said. It did the same thing with my dad's voice yesterday. The clipped R, a detail only I would recognize. So what is it? I don't know. A person? Someone with a recording? I heard no footsteps. I saw nothing in the trees. And it knew my father's voice, a voice that no recording exists of as far as I know. My dad didn't do videos. He didn't leave voicemails. He called. You picked up. He talked. He hung up. Nestor rubbed his face. My grandfather was the same way. Never liked being recorded.

Pham had been leaning against the porch railing, arms folded, staring at the ground. He spoke up for the first time since the saddle. It tried me too. Nestor and I both looked at him. When we were walking out, you were ahead of me, Corwin, and Nestor was in the middle. I heard, from behind us, from the direction of the saddle, I heard my mother say my name, in Vietnamese. My birth name, not Fom, my family name. the name she called me when I was a boy.

Your mother's alive, I said. Yes, she's alive and she lives in Virginia Beach and she's fine. I called her from the road yesterday, but I heard her voice say my name, from the woods, in the exact tone she used when she was calling me inside for dinner. And I didn't say anything because, I don't know why, because I thought I'd imagined it. None of us spoke for a while. We left that afternoon, broke camp a day early. I told Nestor and Fam that we'd come back in the fall for deer season,

and we'd hunt the south end of the property, and we would not go anywhere near the saddle. They agreed. No argument from either of them. The drive back to Morgantown took three and a half hours, and we barely spoke. The radio was on, NPR, then country, then static through the mountain gaps, and each of us sat with our own version of what had happened

and tried to fit it into the world we'd understood. before. Here's what I've done since. I called Uncle Dwayne and asked him if he'd ever heard anything strange in the saddle north of his cabin. He was quiet for a long time and then said, Your daddy told you about that, did he? I said yes. He said, Rudy and I went up there together in 86 or 87, heard the yelping, heard it change, and then we heard our mother, your grandmother calling us for supper. She'd been dead two years by then. We left and didn't talk about it for a while, and then Rudy told me he'd gone back alone and heard it again. And that time it used his own voice, calling back to him, his own voice, saying his own name.

After that, he said, we don't go up there, and we don't talk about it, and we don't take Corwin up there. So that's what we did. I asked him if he had any idea what it was. No, he said, and I don't want one. Some things you don't need an explanation for. You just need a boundary. I went to the Pocahontas County Courthouse two weeks later and pulled property records and old survey maps for the area around the saddle.

National Forest Land, like I said, part of the Monongahela. But before the Forest Service acquired it in the 1930s, it belonged to a family called Cutlip. The Cutlips were old mountain people, some of the earliest settlers in that part of Pocahontas County, dating back to the 1780s. I couldn't find much about them specifically, but in a local history book published in 1961 by a woman named Aldine Ryder, I found a single reference to the saddle.

She called it The Answering Place. No further explanation. Just a mention in a chapter about local place names and their origins that the saddle between the two knobs above Fern Creek was known to older residents as the answering place, and had been called that since before living memory. The answering place, the thing answers. That's what it does. You make a sound, a turkey call, a name, a voice, and it answers.

It takes what you give it, and it sends it back to you in the voice of someone you loved. Someone who's gone. Or in Fom's case, someone who's still alive but far away. Someone whose voice you associate with safety and home and being called inside where it's warm. It's an answer designed to make you move toward it. And here is the part that won't leave me alone. The part that I think about at three in the morning when I'm lying in bed in my apartment in Morgantown

staring at the ceiling. How long has it been doing this? The cutlip settled that hollow in the 1780s. The name, The Answering Place, predates living memory as of 1961. That means people have been hearing voices from that saddle for 200 years at minimum. Voices of the dead. Voices of the absent. voices calibrated to the specific, individual, verifiable memories of whoever is listening.

200 years of answering, and in all that time, across all those voices, across all those calls, has anyone gone to it? Has anyone heard their dead mother or their dead father, or their dead grandfather calling their name with the right accent and the right inflection and the right warmth, and walked north into the beech trees to find them? I think so. I think some of them have. I think that's the whole point, and I think about my father, my practical, steady, Louis Lamor reading, jeopardy-watching father, going back to the saddle alone after that first visit with Dwayne, going back and hearing it use his own voice, his own name, and I think about

how he must have stood there at the edge of the beaches and heard himself calling to himself, and understood, in a way that transcended logic or superstition, that he was looking at something patient, something that had been there before the cutlips and before the Shawnee and before anyone, sitting in that dip between two knobs, waiting for a sound to answer. I am not going back to the saddle. That is my boundary. But every April, when the turkeys start gobbling on the ridges above the Greenbrier River, I think about the answering place, and I wonder what it's calling right now, and whose voice it's using, and whether the person hearing it knows to walk the other way. And I wonder if it ever gets tired of being almost right, almost a turkey, almost a grandfather,

almost a mother calling you home, and whether the trying is the point, or whether one day it'll get it perfect. That's the thing that keeps me up, not that it almost sounds right, but that it's getting closer. I filed a report with the Monongahela National Forest Ranger Station in Marlinton on April 29th. I didn't mention voices or dead relatives. I said I'd heard unusual vocalizations in the saddle above Fern Creek that I couldn't identify as any known species, and that I wanted it on record in case other hunters reported similar experiences. The ranger who took my report, a young woman named Tessa Grohl, wrote it all down and was polite and professional, and then, as I was leaving, said,

You're not the first person to file something about that saddle. I asked how many others there had been. She said she couldn't tell me that. But she said the Forest Service had placed a trail camera in the saddle in 2021, and retrieved it six months later, and that the camera had recorded over 1,400 motion-activated clips. Fourteen hundred, I said. Of what?

Of nothing, she said. The camera triggered 1,400 times and there was nothing in any of the frames. Not a deer, not a squirrel, not a leaf blowing by. Just the empty saddle from 1,400 slightly different moments, with nothing there. She smiled in a way that did not reach her eyes and said, Have a good season, Mr. Haig. And I walked out of the ranger station and got in my truck and drove home, and I have not been back. Spring just slid into your DMs.

Grab that boho look for that rooftop dinner, those sandals that can keep up with you, and hang some string lights to give your patio a glow up. Spring's calling. Ross, work your magic.