Lighthouse Horror Podcast - I Work as Search and Rescue Officer. These are My Stories

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

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I work as a search and rescue officer in California. I don't think I'll mention my name. It's not important and it's probably better if I don't. Everything I'm about to tell you did happen. Some of it happened directly to me. Some of it I know through reports and first-hand statements from people I've worked with for years. There are stories going around online about what's out there in the national parks. I've read a few of them.

Most people treat them like campfire materials. material or urban legends. That's fine. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. I'm just going to tell you what I've seen, what I've been told, and what ended up in our reports, even when we didn't know what to do with it afterward. Most search and rescue calls are kind of boring. People get tired, get turned around, panic early, and make things worse for themselves. We find them a mile or two off trail, cold and embarrassed. Those calls don't stick with you. The ones that do are the calls where distance stops making sense.

The first time that happened to me involved a six-year-old boy. He was hiking with his parents and his older sister. In a national park, they'd been to dozens of times. Wide trail, good visibility, no steep drops. According to both parents, the kids were walking 10 to 15 feet ahead of them, arguing about something insignificant. The parents stopped to check a map at a trail junction. They looked back up, and the boy was gone.

Not wandered off slowly. Gone. The sister said he'd been there when she turned around. Then he wasn't. No screaming, no running sound, nothing crashing through brush. They searched for about ten minutes before calling it in. And we responded hard. You know, multiple teams, dogs.

Air support requested. His last known point was clear and recent, which usually means a good outcome. Kids that age don't cover much ground on their own. They get scared. They hide and, you know, they sit down. The dogs picked up his scent quickly. That part made everything feel better.

The trail was clean and the track was strong. The dogs followed the trail for about a quarter mile, then stepped off to the right, into terrain that sloped downward and got rocky real fast. And that's where things stopped lighting up. The scent didn't scatter or loop, didn't double back. It went straight for another half a mile and then just ended. No road or clearing, no reason for it to end there.

We expanded the search radius, then expanded it again. The terrain didn't allow for vehicles and there were no signs of an adult presence. No footprints besides the child's, no drag marks or disturbed ground. We searched for three days. On the fourth day, a call came in from a fire lookout crew, operating in a completely different section of the park. They were reporting a child sitting near the summit of a ridge they accessed only by service road and foot trail.

The location was just under 40 miles northwest. of where the boy had gone missing. Forty miles. We assumed it was a different kid. It wasn't. When we got there, he was sitting on a rock outcropping just below the ridge line, legs dangling, swinging his feet. He was wearing the same clothes he'd vanished in.

No jacket, no pack, no shoes. His feet weren't bloody. They weren't even really dirty. He wasn't hypothermic or dehydrated or injured. He waved when he saw us. The medic checked him over while we secured the area. The boy kept asking when his parents were coming and whether his sister was still mad at him. No confusion or distress.

When asked how he got there, he shrugged and said, I walked. No one pushed him on it right away. You don't interrogate kids in the field. We packaged him and got him out. The real questions came later. During the debrief, one of the officers asked him who he'd been with while he was gone. The assumption was that maybe he'd followed another hiker or encountered someone on a lesser-used trail.

He shook his head. Then he said, Well, I was with the dear man for a little bit. The room went quiet, but nobody reacted. Kids say things. He let him talk. As to explain, he said the dear man was tall and had antlers. Didn't say horns, he said antlers.

He said one of them was gone and that the other one looked loose. He was asked if the dear man touched him. No, he said. He just walked with me. We asked him where the dear man went. He said he can't go where it's loud, the boy began. So he left. And then without being prompted, he added,

He said he's not the bad one. Someone asked who the bad one was. The wolf man, the boy said. He said watch out for him. The phrase, watch out for him, was written down verbatim. Well, the boy was reunited with his parents that night. Doctors cleared him. The story made local names.

moves for about a week, mostly focusing on the distance and the miracle angle. The dear man part never made it past internal notes. About a month later, I was assigned to a separate call in a different park. Lost hiker, adult male. We found him before nightfall, shaken, but luckily uninjured. While walking him out, he asked me if we'd seen the thing with antlers. I asked him to explain. He said he'd seen something tall.

Hall watching him from a ridge line earlier that afternoon, said it stood upright and didn't move when he yelled. He said he didn't think it was an animal because animals don't stand like that. I asked if it followed him. He said no. He said it stayed where it was and watched until he left the area. I didn't say anything back. There's not really anything useful to say in those moments.

Well, a few weeks after that, one of the Rangers who'd done a follow-up visit with the six-year-old's family called me. During the visit, they'd been talking about hiking safety with the kids. Stay together, don't wonder, don't follow strangers. The boy interrupted him. He said that doesn't work if the rocks sound hollow, the boy said. The ranger asked who said that. The dear man. The boy began.

He said that's where the wolfman goes. The ranger told me the kid said it like a warning. The ranger asked him what the wolfman was. The boy shrugged. He said he looks like a man until you get close. Then he doesn't. That was the only description he gave. Didn't elaborate or make sounds or gestures.

When the ranger tried to ask follow-up questions, the kid lost interest and went back to playing with his sister. The ranger didn't push it, and neither did I when he told me later. Kids say weird things. That's the job. You note it, and you move on. Except I didn't move on. Because I'd already heard the word once before,

and now I'd heard it again, in the same context, with the same casual certainty. The next time it came up, It wasn't a kid. It was a teenage boy, 16, missing overnight after leaving a trailhead alone. He was found the next morning, sitting against a rock face about 10 miles from where he'd been dropped off. He was exhausted and dehydrated, but otherwise fine.

While the medic was checking him, he kept looking down slope, like he expected something to come up from below. One of the officers asked him what he was looking for. The kid said, it stayed down there. The officer asked, what stayed down there? The kid hesitated, then said, The thing. The officer asked him to explain. The kid said he'd been walking downhill when he heard something moving below him.

He said he stopped because it didn't sound like an animal. He said whatever it was stayed downhill from him the entire time. The officer asked if he saw it, and the kid said no. Asked how he knew where it was, he said, You could tell. When asked why he stopped walking, the kid said, Because it told me to. That got written down, and the officer asked what it said.

The kid replied, It said not to go where the rocks echo, because that's where the wolfman goes. The interview didn't go any further. The kid shut down after that, wouldn't answer more questions. Didn't want to talk about it again. A year later, we were searching for an adult male who'd gone missing during a solo overnight trip.

Experienced backpacker in a familiar area, the weather was clear. We found him alive after two days, sitting in a dry wash that wasn't on any of his planned route. He was angry, more than scared. kept insisting we'd taken too long. During the walkout, one of the officers asked him why he'd left the trail, and the man said, "'Cause something told me not to go that way.' As to describe it, the man said it stood upright and didn't move like an animal.

He said it stayed just out of sight, always around a bend or behind a rise. One asked what the upright thing said, the man replied, it told me not to go with the sound was, because that's where the wolf man is. And that was the third adult to use that word. Nobody had said it first. Well after that, we started finding people at the edges of places like that, just sitting outside like they'd been stopped. One of the canine handlers mentioned his dog refusing to track downhill in certain drainage

Just refusing. Another officer mentioned radios cutting out only when teams moved into low, rocky areas. Just specific spots. And the weirdest one didn't involve a search at all. It involved a call from a hiker who said he'd found something and didn't want to touch it. We met him about five miles off trail. What he'd found was a pile of gear, backpack, boots, and jacket, all laid out. neatly on a flat rock. There was no blood or signs of a struggle. The owner of the gear was

never found. While we were documenting the scene, the hiker who found it asked if we'd heard about the thing that stays below. One of the officers asked what he meant. And the hiker said, some people call it the wolf man. Well, the next one didn't involve terrain warnings or kids repeating phrases. It didn't involve downhill movement or sound or anything like that. It involved an older couple who came back different. They went missing on a weekday, late spring. It was clear weather, no storms or heat advisory, nothing that would complicate a normal search. They were in their early 60s, married and retired. They'd been hiking together for years and weren't pushing anything else.

ambitious. According to the trailhead log and their itinerary, they planned to be out for six or seven hours, looping back to the same parking area. But they didn't come back. Their car was still there that evening. Rangers checked nearby trails, did searches, and we were called in the next morning. It wasn't a panic search, exactly. You know, there were no injuries reported, no health conditions noted, just overdue hikers. We ran standard procedures. Last known point was clean, no sign of distress or dropped gear, no obvious direction of travel off trail. And by the end of day one, there was nothing. By the end of day three, we were expanding the search area and bringing in additional resources. Helicopter crews ran grid patterns. Dogs worked ascent until it finned out and disappeared in

multiple places, which didn't make sense given how close together the couple had been hiking. On day five, the search was scaled back, and on day six, they walked back into the parking lot. They came out of the trees just afternoon, holding hands, walking normally, like they just finished a short hike. They went straight to their car and stood there looking at it for a long time before a ranger approached them. They didn't look injured or malnourished. They didn't look like people who'd been missing for almost a week. They looked younger. That wasn't my first thought, but it was my second.

My first thought was that I was looking at the wrong people. The ranger asked them their names, and they answered correctly. They asked them where they'd been. They said they didn't know, asked how long they thought they'd been gone and they guessed a few hours. They were brought back to base for evaluation. I was there when they checked in. Their driver's licenses were pulled from their wallets. Everything matched. Same names and addresses, same issue dates.

But the photos didn't match. The people sitting in front of us looked at least 20 years younger than the photos on their licenses. Not healthier, arrested. Younger. They were transported to a hospital for a full workup. I followed up later. There was nothing medically wrong with them. No signs of cosmetic procedures.

No hormone treatments. No conditions that explained what we were seeing. When interviewed, they couldn't account for the missing time. They remembered hiking and stopping to rest. and they remembered a bright light. They didn't remember being hungry, but were sleeping, and they didn't remember walking back. They didn't remember us?

What didn't make it into the official report were the statements from other hikers. Two separate groups came forward after the story hit local news. Both groups said they'd seen something unusual the day the couple disappeared. One group described a light above the tree, tree line that moved in a slow, circular pattern.

It was controlled. They assumed it was a helicopter at first, but said it made no sound and stayed in the same place for too long. Another group said they'd seen what they described as a round structure above a clearing off trail. They said it lowered until it was just above the trees, then rose again and disappeared straight up. The other group knew about the missing couple at the time.

Neither grew knew each other, as far as we could tell. When asked where they'd seen it, both pointed to the same general area. The area was within the original search box. Well, we went back out there later. Found nothing unusual. No markings or disturbed ground. No radiation levels. No equipment failures.

The couple moved out of state a few months later. I don't know where they went. I do know that every time I see an ID photo now, I look a little longer than I used to. Now the next story doesn't involve lights at all. It involves a box. We found it during a training weekend. Not a search, not a recovery.

Just a multi-day navigation and response exercise. In an area we use a few times a year because it's remote, difficult and mostly untouched. No trails where we were operating or campsites. No reason for anyone to be there unless they were very lost or very deliberate. One of the teams radioed in that they'd found something unusual and wanted a supervisor to come look at it before they touched it. I was closest. It was sitting in the exact center of a clearing. A rectangular box, maybe three feet long, two feet wide, and about a foot and a half tall, wrapped tightly in red material. The color hit first. It was bright, solid red. It stood out in a way that made your eyes lock onto it immediately.

And there were words written on top in black marker. Do not open. All caps. No one touched it. Well, we circled it first. That standard. Looked for wires, disturbed ground, you know, tracks, and there weren't any. The ground around it wasn't compressed. No footprints leading in or out or drag marks. Nothing that suggested how we'd gotten there. One of the officers joked that it looked like evidence from another case that had been dropped in the wrong place. No one laughed. Someone else said we should leave it alone and mark the coordinates. Another officer said it needed to be logged and removed. I remember standing there and feeling a very strong sense of dread.

Well, one of the guys grabbed it, and we moved it anyway. And the decision did not sit well with anyone afterward. We used gloves and a tarp. We loaded it carefully and transported it back to base with the rest of our equipment. At base, it was logged as found property and placed in a secure storage room. Not evidence, technically. Just an item recovered from protected land with no owner. And that's when the problems started. The first report came from a night shift ranger doing rounds. He said he heard something coming from the storage room. At first,

he said it was an animal, a raccoon, or something that had gotten in through a vent. When he checked the room, nothing was out of place. He said the sound stopped as soon as he opened the door. The next report came two nights later from a different ranger. He said he heard voices, not clear words, but something close enough that he thought someone else was in the room. When he opened the door, it stopped. No one admitted to messing with it. Nobody had any reason to. A week later, one of the officers came in early for a shift and found the box turned 90 degrees from how it had been placed. The door had been locked. Nobody could explain it.

We reviewed security footage. The cameras didn't show the storage room interior directly, just the hallway outside it. Nothing entered or exited during that time. Well, at that point, someone suggested opening it. And that suggestion died immediately. No one ever officially said why we shouldn't. We just didn't. Every time the topic came up, it was shut down without discussion.

Sometimes people would hear low sounds coming from it. Not always voices. Maybe something more like growling. Sometimes it sounded like something shifting weight. Once during a storm, the power went out briefly. When it came back on, the alarm in the storage room was tripped. The box was in the same place. But the red wrapping had a crease in it that I swear had not been there before.

We did contact outside agencies, if you're wondering. The police, the FBI? The FBI declined to take custody. They didn't say exactly what. why. Another agency sent someone out, looked at it, asked a few questions and left. No follow-up. And eventually, the decision was made to return it to where it was found. Although we didn't say it, I think we all moved deep down. We had to get that thing away from us. We took it back out under supervision and placed it exactly where it'd been sitting before.

And we left immediately. The next time we ran training in that area, the clearing was still there, but the box was gone. We don't talk about it anymore. But every once in a while, somewhere from outside our apartment will ask if anyone ever opened it. The answer is always no, and the reason's always the same. We all had a very bad feeling. Now the next one started as a routine nuisance call. People camping near one of the backcountry sites had reported hearing animals moving through camp at night.

Rangers initially wrote it off as an unusually bold pack of coyotes and advised campers to secure food and stay inside tents after dark. The calls kept coming. Not attacks or property damage, just noise. Howling that went on for hours. Not a single animal calling, but several overlapping. People described it as coordinated, like they were responding to each other. Well, we were asked to go out with a ranger team and do a night patrol,

mostly to reassure people and confirm what we were dealing with. We went out just after sunset, four of us with radios and headlamps and standard gear. We heard them before we saw any sort. The sound didn't come from one direction. It moved. One call would start to the east. Another would answer from uphill, another from behind us. The spacing didn't match coyotes.

It was too wide. One of the rangers said they sounded closer than they should have been. We cut our lights and stood still. And that's when we saw the eyes. At first, just one pair. Low to the ground. to the ground, reflecting yellow in the dark, and then another and another? There were too many to count.

They weren't scattered. They were spaced out in a loose arc, like they were watching us. Someone whispered that they were wolves. But that didn't sit right. Wolves don't behave like that around groups of people. They don't linger or circle. And wolves don't climb. The first one moved, and it went straight up.

It ran up the side of a tree, and then another one followed. We turned our lights back on, and what we saw looked like dogs or wolves, but bigger, thick bodies and long limbs, tails carried low. They didn't bear their teeth, they didn't growl when we shine lights on them. him. They just watched us. One of them dropped down from the branch without a sound and moved laterally, cutting across our line of sight faster than it should have been able to. The howling started again, closer now. It was lower pitched than coyotes. One of the rangers keyed his radio and called it in. Before he finished speaking, something moved behind him. Another one above him. He spun and

almost fell backwards when he saw it on a branch directly above him, looking straight down at him. Its eyes reflected yellow, even with a light on it. Somebody said we should back out, and nobody argued. We moved slowly, keeping our lights up, staying together, and the animals moved with us. At one point, one of them dropped down directly in front of us, blocking the path. It stood there for a few seconds, then turned and walked off to the side, opening the way again. Well, when we got back to base, everybody was shaken. We rode it up as a possible wolf sighting with abnormal behavior. That's the closest thing that fit. And over the next few weeks, more reports came in. Campers hearing movement above them in trees at night. People

finding large tracks that didn't match any known species cleanly. Too big for dogs, wrong pad shape for wolves. One hiker reported seeing dogs in the trees and was laughed off by another group until they heard the howling that night. We did another patrol, this time with daylight on our side, and we found claw marks on trunks well above head height, deep grooves. We found scat that didn't match anything we could identify. And the howling stopped abruptly a few weeks later. It was just gone. We never found a den or remains.

The area was quietly closed for wildlife activity for the rest of the season. You know, people still ask what those animals were. I don't know. But every now and then, when we're on a night call, call in heavy timber. Someone will cut their light and listen for a few seconds. Just to make sure nothing's moving above them. Now perhaps you've heard a version of this next story already.

It's been around for a long time and in some circles it's become something else entirely. I'm telling it here the way it actually happened. Because I was there. In 1999, a seven-year-old girl went missing. It was a day hike, midday, good weather, a trail busy enough that you don't expect things to go wrong, but not crowded. Her parents had taken her out dozens of times before. They weren't careless people or distracted, and they didn't do anything unusual.

They stopped for a minute to adjust their packs. The girl was a little ahead of them on the trail, but still visible. And when they looked back up, she was gone. There was no scream or sound of running. Nothing. They searched for her themselves at first, calling her name, moving up and down the trail, checking side paths. After about 15 minutes, they called it in.

We responded quickly. When a kid goes missing, everything changes. You don't wait. We treated it as a potential abduction almost immediately. That wasn't paranoia, it was procedure back then. The terrain didn't support a simple wandering on. scenario, and there was no clear downhill route where a child would naturally drift. We locked down the area.

We pulled people off the trail. We brought in dogs. We set up grids and expanded them, and we canvassed everyone who'd been nearby that day. We even took a man into custody. He'd been hiking alone. He'd been seen near the family shortly before the girl vanished. His timeline didn't line up cleanly at first, and he didn't resist when he didn't resist when we stopped him. Didn't act nervous. He answered questions calmly. He was cleared within 24 hours.

There was nothing tying him to the disappearance, no evidence or inconsistencies that held up under scrutiny. We searched for weeks. Dogs lost assent in places that didn't make sense. Didn't fade gradually and just ended. We didn't find clothing or disturbed ground. There was no indication she'd gone uphill, downhill or off the trail. Nobody said it out loud, but we all knew what we were thinking. Her parents never acted like people in denial. They never accused us of not trying hard enough. They never yelled.

They thanked us every time they saw us and brought us food and remembered all our names. They kept searching. Even after the official search was called off, they came back. at first every week, then every month, then a few times a year. They walk the trails quietly. They didn't cross into closed areas or interfere with anything. They just walked.

Years passed. I'd still see them sometimes. Older, little slower, still looking. And then one year they stopped coming. I noticed because I'd grown used to them being there. Time moved on. Nine and a half years later, I was on a solo daylight patrol near Ridge Rock, not a search, just checking trail conditions and signage after a storm.

The creek below was running high, loud enough that you had to raise your voice to be heard. I saw a little girl sitting on a flat rock near the edge, leg swinging, looking down at the water. She was alone. Yellowish hair, light jacket. My first thought was that she didn't belong there by herself. I approached slowly and asked her if she was okay. She turned and smiled. I asked her where her parents were and she shrugged.

Asked if she was lost and she said, No. Her voice sounded normal, not scared or confused. I asked her name and she told me. And that didn't hit me all at once. At first, I just registered it as familiar. You know, names repeat. I asked her how old she was, and she said seven.

I asked her how long she'd been there, and she said, not long. I asked her if she'd been hiking with someone, and she shook her head and said, No, I was just sitting. I told her we needed to walk back to camp together, and she stood up and took my hand without hesitation. As we walked, I asked her if she knew her parents' phone number, and she nodded and recited it from memory. And that's when the pieces started to line up. I called a number, and a man answered. I said, Lo, sir, this is search and rescue. I have a little girl here who says she's your daughter. There was a pause on the line. I handed the phone to the

girl and she smiled and said hi daddy there was a long silence and then the man said very quietly where are she said i'm with a nice man we're walking i took the phone back and i told them where we were they said they were on their way they arrived about 40 minutes later a man and a woman got out of the car and I stood there, not moving. They looked older than I remembered, worn down. The girl waved and said, Hi, mommy. The woman covered her mouth with both hands and dropped to her knees.

The man didn't move at all. They stared at her, like they were afraid she'd disappear again if they blinked. I stood there watching them, and that's when it hit me. It hit me. It was the same little girl. She hadn't aged a day. The parents came forward slowly, like they were approaching something wild. The woman knelt down and touched her daughter's face, her arms and her hair, like she was trying to confirm she was real. The man asked, where if you've been? The girl just shrugged. She said, said she'd been with friends.

The woman asked who, and the girl hesitated. Then she said, they said not to say too much. They said it might scare you. There was no explanation that made sense, and there still isn't. Doctors examined her. Photos were compared, and there was no difference. The family moved away shortly after that. I don't know where they went, and I don't blame them.

probably wanted to get away from here. I still think about that day. The looks on their faces, when they saw what they must have thought was a ghost. You know, I heard she grew up into a normal woman after that. It was like her life had just been paused, then unpaused. It is one of those stories that has stuck with me for a long time. Over the years, I've been present for a lot of strange recoveries and a lot of searches that ended without answer.

I've seen kids show up miles from where they vanished. I've heard the same words repeated by people who never met each other. I've listened to adults describe being guided, stopped, or redirected by things they couldn't explain without sounding ridiculous. I've heard about the dear man enough times now that I don't write it off when it comes up. Always tall and calm, never aggressive. He doesn't grab anyone or chase. he just points and warns.

Then he leaves. The wolfman comes up less often, but when it does, the tone changes. People don't talk about seeing it clearly. They talk about where it goes. Low ground, caves, narrow places where sound is different. People who come back alive tend to say the same thing.

They didn't go where they were told, not to. I have seen things that don't fit either of those categories. Lights that don't behave like aircraft, distances that collapse without reason, older people coming back younger than they left, with no memory of where the time went. Objects that shouldn't exist where they're found, left behind without explanation. None of this comes from one place, and none of it fits into a single story. I don't know if it's all connected in the way people, people, people want it to be. Maybe it is. But I think the wilderness is bigger and stranger than we give it credit for, and some parts of it don't work the way we expect. I'm not telling you

this to convince you of anything. I'm telling you because I've spent most of my adult life responding to calls where someone thought nothing bad could happen to them. People who were very careful. People who did things right. People who were gone for less than a minute. If you're going to the parks, always go with other people. Stay close together and don't wander off the trail because you think you'll be right back. If something feels wrong, don't talk yourself out of it. Turn around and leave the area.

Distance is your friend. And don't assume that just because the story sounds unbelievable that it didn't happen, some of the people we bring back don't know. how close they came to not coming back at all. If you want to go to the parks, go ahead. They are beautiful. I wouldn't have chosen this job otherwise. But like I said, bring a friend, stay together.

And if you're ever walking somewhere and you get a bad feeling, leave. While you still can.