Spooked - Dismal Falls

Episode Date: August 19, 2022

There are some places, deep in the woods, far away from civilization, that are magical. Chuck is hiking deep in the Appalachian woods when he stumbles upon one of these places: Dismal Falls. But Dismal Falls isn’t all fairies and rainbows. It’s a place of dark magic. Thanks, Chuck, for sharing your story with us! Produced by Greta Weber, original score by Clay Xavier, artwork by Teo Ducot Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

They say out of sight is out of mind. But I have wandered countless times to meet with those I cannot see. For they are still in mind to me. You're listening to Spoot. Stay as a kid. My grandfather had a shotgun. He brought it out twice every year, once. As a clock turned over on New Year's Eve,

he'd run out to the porch and blast into the sky. Plow, plow, plow, plow, plow, granddaddy. Granddaddy, you said whatever goes up has got to come down. Nah, not on New Year's Day, baby. The other time was the night before Halloween, we're in Detroit. Thousands of fires erupted the moment the sun set over the horizon. The city's rage, blazing orange and red and gold. Devil's night.

And I watched Granddad get his gun. Set up his folding chair on the porch and sit smoking his cigarette stroking the barrel. I get back up in the house now, baby. Take care of your grandmama. All around us, Detroit burns. And hiding behind the bars on our windows, looking out into the darkness past Grandaddy, I see shadows running on the sidewalk. Hooded figures wearing Batman, Superman, Donald Duck mask, carrying torches.

gasoline container, some pausing to consider our home, then hearing the cock of his gun barrel before deciding to move on. He's going to stay up to protect this. I'm going to stay up to protect him all night long if I have to, and I try. Watching, watching shadows, fires, police cars, I try. Then first light presses me awake. My face sleep mashed against the window. I jump up, scared, open the front door.

and see my granddaddy still sitting sentry on the porch, still holding his shotgun pulling the dregs from his last cigarettes, his pack with super long menthol cools empty. You keep your granny safe like I asked you? Yes sir.

Good boy. Grandaddy, wouldn't you scare? Then, for just an instant, his eyes flashed hot. He looks at me like he's seeing something else. someone else

I already paid the fire once baby I won't pay it again before he says it I never knew how his sister had passed I didn't understand that it wasn't an accident I didn't know that someone had meant to burn his black family from their home in the middle

of the night and how every person that crawled out of that inferno long ago took something of the flame with them I didn't understand that he's been battling a different fire for a very long time. Then the burn passes from his eyes and he's almost my grandfather again

and I need him back from that place. He just went. Granddaddy. Granddaddy, can I have just a little bit of ice cream up up my cornflakes? He looks at me all the way then. Baby, a lot of ice cream in there. If you don't tell your grandmama, spook stars. We know full well that things are never as they seem, that people are often fighting invisible battles against unseen forces. We know all of this.

But still, there's a different type of magic to being in the wild that highlights the mystery of everything we do not see. In our next storyteller, Chuck, Chuck comes face to face with his unknown, deep in the Appalachian wilderness, a place called Dismal Falls. My name is Chuck. I've been hanging out in the woods since I was, really young kind of been out there ever since between backpacking tours and

wilderness therapy ended up making it what I'd do for a living at this point so this happened in 2015 it was summertime and the the camp that we were working out of our main base camp from what I understand it was an old Christian summer camp I'm not sure the details but it was pretty old camp A lot of the cabins that we used had been kind of redone a little bit. And then, of course, we had the horse stables. And we had, I want to say, like, probably 15 or 16 of them. Older horses, a lot of them.

And the horses were actually essentially in therapy as well. The kids would work with them for part of their therapy. And then the horses were also being rehabilitated from abusive homes at the same time. At night, you would hear down by. the stables the donkey his name was Stanley was a mini donkey and he would start going off at night down there i don't know if anybody out there has ever heard a donkey freaking out but it can be kind of kind of weird a little bit scary but he would do that pretty consistently and then usually the next day when we would go down to do horses first thing we do is groom them and when you go to groom them

their mains and tails would be just completely in knots. Even if we had brushed them the day before, the horses would be in poor shape. So at the time, I really didn't think a lot of it, but I would have kids going to be like, look at this. Like, I didn't do this. I'd be like, okay, like, what's your point? They'd be like, we were the last group here.

Like, I didn't do this. And I'm like, well, maybe Ms. Ann did it, you know? Like, it's not part of my pay grade right now to worry about the horses' mains. I don't know a whole ton about horses, but I do remember growing up, my great grandma would talk about that happening, and she said it meant there was a witch on your farm. I guess it was because she would go out and every single day, the mains and the tails on the livestock were tangled up. It was like somebody had gone out and just went haywire on these animals, and they'd be skittish, and they would be jumpy, and they just were not. in a good mood at all.

That was one of the few things she ever talked about was she said. I swear there was a witch out here. And she would, I mean, she'd say it all the time. From the first time it happened down by the horse stables, I mean, I definitely thought of that. I remembered her saying that immediately. That damn witch. But I was like, well, you know, if it happens a couple of times, whatever.

It's not a big deal. You're like, well, it's coyotes or something like that. But with how consistently it happened. in there. I did start to wonder a little bit about that. I'd heard about Dismal Falls. I'd read about it. I read about it initially on a photography website. And I saw pictures of it and I was like, man, that's a beautiful waterfall. I want to get out there and go see this. And I got linked over to a book called Land of Waterfalls. And this is by a guy named Jim Bob Tensley. He wrote it in 88. and he wrote it about Transylvania County mainly,

which is the land of waterfalls, as they call it. There's tons of waterfalls out there, charted, uncharted. There's some that don't even have names. And he describes it as one of the most foreboding places in the Southern Appalachians. I was mainly reading to get directions. I just want to know how to get out there. Decided I was going to go check it out the next day. And so I drove up and,

I parked there at the base camp and started my hike up there. It's almost like a tunnel made out of rhododendron and mountain laurels that are so low to the ground that they're almost over your head. Very thick to get through. You're kind of on hands and knees. And that goes on for some time. Then you pop out of that. It opens up a little bit for you. And you're still going up a really steep grade.

pretty blind you can't see a whole lot and you come around this uh corner and on your left side there's this really large boulder i mean it's got to be the size of a house it's it's a big boulder so i took note of that and kept on moving and not too long after that you come to this point where the trail splits into two at that point i stopped and got my map out i was not sure that or which way to go 100%. The lower route that stayed pretty flat, according to the map, would go to the dismal wall. But the other trail that goes,

I mean, from where I was at, it looked like it went straight uphill. That's the one that goes to the waterfall. I mean, it is really steep. So I start to climb up that way. I get probably about halfway up it and just felt like I was being watched. I got that, just that pit of your stomach feeling

and hair on the back of my neck kind of stood up. And weirdly enough, my nose actually started bleeding right then too. I kind of turned around to where this kind of sense was coming from. And all I could see was just this foot and part of a robe disappear into the rhododendron thicket. Just caught a glimpse of it. At the time, I mean, we had been out the night before. I was dehydrated a little bit, kind of tired, and a little bit hungover, and so I was like,

I was like, I'm definitely seeing things, like, I should take a break. And I'm thinking, I'm like, well, how is that possible? Because I didn't hear anything. And with how thick the leaf litter is there, you can hear anything. It was quiet. It's very quiet out there. So I'm thinking about all this and it's just, it's getting me flustered. So I'm just like, all right, I'm going to keep going. Kept on moving and eventually I got to the top of this hill that I've been climbing and I crested over the top of it and there's a tree there. The tree has got a rope coming down from it that goes to another tree and that tree has a rope. And then from there it kind of puts you down in the rhododendron by the banks of Dismal Falls.

It's just a big, long bridal veil. Really, really pretty waterfall. It drops 40 feet with a nice cascade, and then it hits down, and it just runs down this, I mean, it's got to be a couple hundred feet of just slick rock. So I hike in, go sit at the bottom of the falls. I sat down to just chill out, have some water, look at the falls. Water was nice and cool, so I'm enjoying that. I was chewing on some mint.

I'm feeling good. I'm feeling really good. I'm not even stressing on the foot. Not too long after I got there and kind of had settled in, I get that feeling again like I was being watched. And kind of as I have this feeling, hear what sounded like a voice. So I turn and look and up at the very top of the cascade, there's a woman standing on top of the waterfall. I could see her plain as day. She had

kind of curly gray hair, bowed down to her shoulders. I would say she was in her 80s and was wearing a cloak, a black one or at least a dark colored one. It seemed to be in spectacular condition for somebody who runs around the woods in it. And that's about all I could make out from where I was. But no sooner had I looked at her, she turns and walks off into the rhododendron bushes. And then she's out of sight. At this point, I'm more confused and curious than scared. I'm 6'2 and I weigh like 240.

I'm a big dude. I'm not intimidated. But I'm just, trying to think like why somebody would be up there. I didn't even know you could go up there. So I decide, I decided, well, I'm going to go up there too. I'm going to go figure this out on my own. So I throw my stuff in my bag and start making my way up this slick rock next to the bridal veil.

Now it took me, it took me close to an hour to navigate through all this slick rock. This stuff is pretty serious. It's kind of tough to navigate. And I'm trying to catch my breath. And then I hear from the bottom of the falls. This time it was definitely a voice. I heard it really clearly. And it just said, hey.

And so I turn and look. And now she is at the bottom of the falls where I had just been. Now I'm trying to figure out how she would have gotten down there past me when I was coming up. because I couldn't find any other trails. Something's not right here. And I was like, this person's following me. What my brain and body said was get out of there, dude. Like, we don't need to be here.

Like, let's get out of here. Already had my pack on, so I just kind of stepped off of the bridal veil, and I just kind of went crashing through the bushes until I finally found the trail that I'd come in on. So I scramble up those rope assists, crest back over the ridge. And so now I'm heading back down. I mean, I'm trucking pretty hard downhill back toward that split in the trail where I saw the foot initially. So I blow past that point and I'm running pretty much full speed down this hill.

And I come back to that point where the big boulder is, that big house. size rock. Of course, now it's on my right side. And as I come around this blind corner around this rock, she's standing right there in the trail in front of me. And I almost ran smack into her. I took a tumble to avoid hitting her, hit the ground pretty hard. It winded me pretty good. When I came to a stop, I had basically rolled kind of up against this rock. So I'm rolled up against. My back's against the rock and I'm kind of sitting up and she is standing over top of me just looking at me no expression on her face at all and her eyes were they were so white blue that they were almost white like the irises they almost blended right into the whites of her eyes the rest of her was really

old looking but her eyes were very very youthful looking just piercing scared me to death We could stare at each other for a second. It felt like an eternity. Like time slowed down a little bit. I break contact, break eye contact with her, and kind of roll, get my feet under me, and I take off. And she just kind of watched me,

she watched me get my feet under me and go. Now I'm really running. I mean, I'm terrified at this point. The whole time I'm trying to tell myself, like, this is all, like you're making this up. Like, there's nothing to be. weird going on here, even though I'm in a dead sprint running from something. Finally get right about down closer to base camp and slowed down, check behind me, stopped,

I didn't hear anything. I figured I was not being followed. And so I just continued my walk. I got to a point in the trail where there's this down tree. And I cross over this log, come around a corner and there's a bobcat sitting in the middle of the trail. Ears were not moving, eyes were not moving, not a whisker, flinched. And that's very, that's very out of character for that animal. I mean, I've been in the woods for a long time, over 15 years, and I've only ever seen one actual wild bobcat. You're lucky to ever see one, much less one sitting, just one.

just in the trail looking at you. So I stopped, and I'm staring at this cat, and I noticed the eyes. They weren't like cat eyes. The pupils, they weren't slitted. Wasn't the same shape? I mean, they were shaped like human eyes. The pupils were, I mean, almost dead white,

like very, very light blue, almost dead white. So I knew right away, as I saw that cat's eyes. I was like, oh, that's her right there. And I was terrified. I was looking this thing, dead in its eyes. And it's kind of looking at me. And I knew, I felt it, like, deep down in my being

that she could do whatever she wanted to to me. I was at her mercy. So I started talking to her. I was like, look, I was like, you got a beautiful mountain here. I was like, well, I will never go back to your waterfall, Just like just please let me go. Like just let me go.

I didn't even speak that out loud. That was just something I thought. And no sooner had I thought that. This Bobcat turned, walked off the trail. Let me go. After that, it did take some time to process it, but really, that's when it all kind of clicked for me right there. It sunk in for me. And I was like, whoa, whoa, hold on a second.

It's just like, yeah, that was really, really weird. Like, I think I ran into it. a witch. I don't know. That's kind of just, it was very organic in the way that it just, like, my brain automatically was like, yep. So, I mean, an experience like that, it humbles you a lot, especially in that, in the position that I was in, I mean, you're, you're a big bad guide. Like, I have squared up with, I've punched a bear in the jaw. Like, I'm not intimidated by a lot of things, but sure enough, yeah, yeah, it humbled me a lot because that was probably, one of the few times of my life where I felt like truly helpless when I was laying up against

that wall looking at this what seemed to be like an 80-year-old woman. This was an old witch, and I think she's been there for a long time, longer than 80 years, I would think. I think she's much older than that. And I think that's just, that's where she lives. That's her stomping ground, and it's way out of the way for a reason. So, I mean, when I go out in the woods, like, I'm picking up trash. I'm taking care of the woods. And I think she saw that.

I think she was kind of like letting me know that she was there. Like, she's making her presence known more than anything else. And, yeah, really, that's what I got from it for the most part. Because like I said, I mean, she could have done whatever she wanted to when I was laid up against that rock wall. It sounds crazy, but I think she, I think she stopped me on that trail to judge my character. she decided for whatever reason not to not to harm me and just to see if

I was worthy enough to be in her woods and I think she determined that I must have been thank you Chuck for coming from those woods and bringing your story back with you if you listeners decide to go exploring please bring a friend original score

with by Clay Xavier He was produced by Greta Weber. We walked this path together. Spook Season 6. Have you told someone, shared these stories with the people in your life? And let me ask you, do you have a story of your own? A story no one will believe, a story you might even be afraid to tell. Tell me.

Spooked at snapjudgment.org because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. Let us know, spooked at snapjudgment.org. And tell the dark side you spooked with some spook gear. The t-shirt of your dreams available right now at snapjudgment.org. And remember, if you like your storytelling under the bright light of day, get the amazing, stupendous snap judgment podcast. It's storytelling with the beat.

Spook was created by the team that's drawn toward the dark heart of the day. the forest, except for Mark Ristich, who still doesn't understand you can't wear flip-flops in the woods. There's Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen Nguyen, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Davey Kim, Renzel, Tio DeCott, Marissa Dodge, Zoy Furno, Tiffing Delisa, Ann Ford, Doug Stewart, and Isaiah Sims. The spook theme song is by Pat McShee Miller. My name is from Washington.

I understand. There is always a... fork in the road. Whether you see it or not, whether you are careful or clever or inspired or blind, you only know you have wandered from the path after it is far too late to turn back, so be prepared. Teach your children so they will know the oldest and simplest and simplest weapon against the eternal dark. Never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, ever.