The Lets Read Podcast - 343: THIS SMALL TOWN WENT INSANE | 9 TERRIFYING True Scary Stories / Rain Ambience | EP 329

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about being being in the middle of nowhere & the rocky mountainsHAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?[e-mail] ME ON -►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/♫ Music & Cover art: INEKThttps://www.youtube.com/@inektToday's episode is sponsored by:- Mint Mobile

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please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. You probably never think it to look at me today, but I used to be a pretty cool guy back when. These days, I make a living fixing cars and motorcycles, partly on the back of skills that I picked up in my former life, as the guitarist and a touring rock and roll band. Now, we never made it big or anything. We didn't sell out stadiums or earn a platinum record, but we made enough money-selling tapes and t-shirts and merchandise and tickets to our shows to earn a pretty decent living for ourselves. Now, we were based out of Boston and played a lot of shows in New York and Philly, but we also played all over the country too, doing that old school touring schedule thing of planning conquests with nothing but a map and a phone book.

And that's how we ended up doing a kind of Rocky Mountain Rock and Roll tour during the summer of 1977, one that took us through Utah, Wyoming, and most relevant to this story, Colorado. And so we managed to book ourselves on to the bill of a music festival in a little mountain town called Lake City. It was a bit of a family affair, so we played a couple of Gordon Lightfoot and Neil Diamond numbers, along with a couple of the softer tunes. Now, it was light duty, as my World War II vet dad used to say, and we were still working, but it was also a chance to relax and recharge our batteries a little before the heavier shows up in Aspen and Boulder and Denver started.

Now we finished our set at around 5.30 and then walked around talking to the locals and enjoying their hospitality. I have myself a little green chili bison burger, a delicacy that no other burger has managed to top, by the way, while our bassist, this crazy SOB, ate a whole plate of Rocky Mountain oysters all to himself, much to the amusement of the locals, it would seem. And if you don't know what those are, boy, do I envy you. Now, one of the folks we got to talking to was a man named Jed, who was particularly pleased with us thanks to our cover of, if you could read my mind, which he said was his and his wife's song. Now, we got to talking about some of the other music we like to play, and at the mention of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, he joked about us being a band of traveling

Satanus. He knew all the panic surrounding metal was bull crap and remembered when the release of Psycho back in 1960 had folks saying society was, quote, unquote, going to hell. He even said he took his teenage son to see Carrie during Thanksgiving weekend of that previous year, and as a huge fan of the king, we quickly established a mutual love of all things creepy. Now, maybe an hour or two later, Jed said that he had to jet, but before he did, he asked if we'd be interested in seeing a genuine ghost town named Carson before we left for our next stop. Now, we were pretty thrilled at the idea because doing cool stuff like that was half the reason we went on tour in the first place. We didn't just get to play shows and make money.

We got to see America, too. And I'd say that there were few things all five band members could get excited about, like the idea of seeing a real-life ghost town. We met up with Jed bright and early the next morning, and then we followed his car up a bunch of gravelly mountain tracks till we eventually reached a dead end. Jed apologized and said that we'd have to walk about a mile up the mountain to get to Carson, but we didn't mind at all. It was actually kind of nice to be able to stretch our legs after spending so long on the bus.

And then after a short walk through a whole bunch of trees, we entered a clearing that had around a dozen wooden buildings all standing, derelict. Now, Jed told us Carson was founded back in 1889 as a silver mining settlement, and that for a few years it was home to almost 500 minors, as well as around half a dozen families who sold them food and equipment and laundry services. The town prospered for a few years, with a few extra bunkhouses being built to accommodate even more of those miners. But by 1895, not a single soul remained,

and Carson had been completely abandoned. And when we asked what happened, Jed told us that there were two explanations. The official one and the unofficial one. The official one had been propagated by the town's owner and financier, who tried selling the land because the silver mine had supposedly run dry. But the unofficial explanation, which Jed says was the God's honest truth, had been passed by word of mouth from generation to generation, and this one was considerably creepier.

Jed said that he'd heard the tale from his grandfather, who in turn had heard it from a little. lady who used to live up in Carson with her family. Jed's grandfather was a deputy sheriff, a man who could smell a lie the way other men could smell pie baking in an oven, and his grandpa believed every single word that lady had to say. He hadn't just heard it from her either. He said he met a handful of others who claimed to have been there that day. Some said a riot erupted up there in the mine and that the company's armed guards had

to step in to put it down with lead. But the girl Jedd's grandfather spoke to, her paw had actually gone up to the mine and seen the aftermath with his own two eyes. He said it was just some minor strike that turned violent. It had been an all-out slaughter with every man for himself. And the folks in Carson realized what was going on when a couple of wounded miners came running into town. They'd already heard gunshots echoing down the mountainside. But seeing as they relied on hunters and trappers for all their fresh sheds, meat, and they didn't think much of it. But when those first miners came running into town

with cuts and stab wounds and riddled with buckshot, they sure as heck thought something of it then. Half the mining company's guards were off duty, either sleeping in the bunkhouse or drinking in the canteen. But when they heard how a bunch of miners had suddenly and unexpectedly started attacking their fellow workers and had even managed to overpower the on-duty guards, they grabbed their guns and ran up the mountain to assist them. And as more and more miners came limping down the mountain, the families living in Carson began tending to the wounded as best they could. They waited for the guards to come back, having put down the men responsible for starting

the riot. But just like Jed said, it was no ordinary riot. And then when the gunfire stopped and no one came back down the mountain, some of Carson's menfolk ran up the slopes to see what had happened. But when they arrived, What they saw terrified them. There were dead bodies laying all round the mine's entrance, some belonging to miners and some belonging to guards.

It made for a terrible scene, but it was nothing compared to what waited for them inside the mine. From the mine's entrance all the way down to its pit, the dead and dying lay side by side in puddles of each other's blood. Jed was told that in some sections, the blood ran down the shaft in little rivers, as pools of it higher up began to overflow and run down the passageways. And there must have been at least a hundred dead miners in another 50 on death's door.

So as fast as they could, Carson's men began carrying the wounded out of the cave to be treated by the camp's doctor. And Jed said that he was told how awful the wounds were. Some men had been shot point-blank with 12-gauge shotguns, meaning whole limbs had been blown off. And in other cases, whole torsusers had been torn open in. shredded. But the wounds inflicted by pickaxes were just as gruesome. Some men were completely impaled, handles hanging from their fronts with the point of pickaxes emerging from their backs. Others had their skulls completely annihilated and in some cases a dead man's only wound was a

gaping hole on the top of his skull. It was a bloodbath. The worst thing any of Carson's men had ever seen, and they'd live through half a dozen Rocky Mountain winters, two bear attacks, and even an attack by a gang of outlaws. They've seen some stuff in their time driving their wagons out east and living up in those mountains, but nothing like what they saw in that mine that day. Miners were dying just because they couldn't get help fast enough. The men would carry him out, and they'd seem in pain but otherwise fine. Then when they got back to him after seeing to those who were more severely wounded, the men had bled to death. It was awful, but the killing wasn't over, not yet.

As the men are clearing out the wounded, they have to go deeper and deeper into the mine, and then at one point the son of the town butcher went running down into the mine to go get some help, but he never came back. And when his father went down to look for him, he found his boy with a pickaxe in his hands, hacking up corpses so furiously that he was completely covered in their blood. His father tried to stop him, but the boy attacked him. And no matter how much his father tried, the boy wouldn't stop. And in the end, the butcher had to put his own son down to keep him from hurting anyone else. And then he came out of that mind screaming and insane with grief.

And that's when they made the decision to seal the place up. And after gathering up as much dynamite as they could, the walking wounded were able to blow the entrance and bury both the dead and the wounded alike. There were rumors that seeing all that death made the boy go crazy, that his mind just couldn't handle it, and it slipped away from him as he walked among the dead with the coppery stink of fresh blood in the air. But those that were there say that there was something down there, maybe some kind of gas or fungal spore, that was to blame for making some of the miners turn on their comrades. It happened to the butcher's boy, and he himself got a dose when he was down there to look for his

son, because all he could do was scream and cry and struggle, as his friends and family tried to keep him still. He wasn't just out of his mind with the grief. There was something else affecting him, something the survivors thought best to bury. Jed said the mining company paid to have all the bodies collected and returned, but they fired the survivors, and he fired the survivors, and tried to have them in prison for blowing their mine sky high. The company thought they got everybody's body off that mountainside, but Jed said that he knew of people that had found bones in the woods below the mine, not animal bones either, human bones. He actually asked if we wanted to go look for ourselves because there was a slim chance that we might even find a souvenir, as he put it.

We told him we were good, and had seen all we needed to. If there was any of it, if there was any anywhere on earth that was genuinely haunted. It was that old mining town, and we didn't want any of those old ghosts putting a curse on our tour because we'd been dumb enough to go off with some of those bones. And Jed laughed at that, and we did too, but it wasn't entirely a joke, not in my case anyway. We called it quits not long after, and then we're back on the road and headed for Aspen. We had Lake City and Carson in our rear view, but Jed's story stuck with me for the whole rest of of the tour. It stuck with me so much that when we got back home, I rented a book from the Boston Library about mining disasters. Now, it made for obviously a terrifying read, and I learned that there's

a gas called hydrogen sulfide, and it's something miners called stink damp, which is known to have a narcotic effect in certain doses. It is possible that the men at the mine's deepest point were suddenly exposed to high levels of this stink damp, at which point they lost their minds. And the rest of the massacre could possibly be explained by a kind of herd mentality, or collective panic whereby confused and frightened men were gripped by a sort of primal kill-or-be-killed mentality. But the thing I've never been able to figure out is why the guards turned on each other too. Jedson had appeared as if the company guards, the ones who'd been off-duty and stationed in town, had begun attacking each other during the final stages of the massacre.

And to me, that suggests something other than narcotic gases were to blame for what had happened. I've often wondered what the real cause was, but there also comes a point where I tell myself to stop thinking about it because the things my imagination starts to dream up can really start to frighten me. I didn't grow up wanting to be a coroner. No kid does, I guess, really. I actually wanted to be a doctor, but since I didn't have the grades for medical school and I still wanted to turn my love of anatomy into a career,

I decided being a coroner was my best bet. Now, for those that are unaware of what a coroner does, I'll just break it down, Barney-style. Whenever someone dies and we aren't super-duper sure how they died, it's my job to take a look under the hood, as we say, and figure it out. I used to work in the city and for quite a while, too. But I feel like a man in my line of work can only work in a city for so long before he

either quits, moves elsewhere, or loses his mind completely. Me, I decided to move elsewhere. Some work quiet and calm, which is how I ended up in Poulson, Montana. It's a pretty little town on the edge of a bay, and with just 5,000 people living here, it's considerably quieter than my previous home of almost four million. Now, back there, it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for me to complete three or four post-mortems in a 24-hour period. Now, I'm lucky if I see maybe three or four a year. And as you can probably imagine, that suits me just fine considering that I only took a minor salary hit.

But then I guess, ironically, it's here that I perform the most memorable autopsy of my entire career. And it's one of those that's memorable for all the wrong reasons and why I sent you the story. Now one morning, I got a call from a deputy sheriff to tell me that a young girl had passed away. And from the moment I heard his voice, I knew that this one was going to be different. She'd been found the previous night, wandering on the 35 in her bare feet. The driver that spotted her turned around to see if she needed any help, and found a young girl on death's door. She looked terrible, starved and beaten, and was mumbling all kinds of gibberish till she eventually passed out.

The driver tried to keep her awake and talking, and then when he realized that she was probably slipping away, he even tried performing CPR. But unfortunately, the poor thing passed away before the emergency crews could get to her. Naturally, the sheriff's department wanted to know exactly what killed her. But more importantly, they wanted to know if I thought that there was also a, who element to it, as in, was it a tragic accident, or was it murder? But when the girl's body arrived at my office, I found that there were many more questions to be asked, and some very frightening ones too. And when it came time for the autopsy, the forensic pathologist I work with agreed that he'd never seen anything like it.

At 5'7, the girl appeared to be in her late teens or early 20s, but she didn't weigh an ounce over 70 pounds. She was also this very sick shade of yellow, which indicated liver and kidney failure, but that wasn't even half of it. She'd quite clearly been starved, and her body was so heavily covered in burns and scars that it seemed her abuse had been almost systematic, like someone had been trying to slowly disfigure her, one patch of flesh at a time. We discovered the girl's eyes had actually been gouged out, and that her

her finger and toenails appear to have been completely and deliberately removed. It was also evidence someone had tried to either torture or sterilize her by piercing her abdomen with some hot wires or needles. The technicians collected swabs and samples, and then the pathologist proceeded to cut that old distinctive Y shape into the chest of the deceased. And the effects of her starvation were evidence of the girl's organs, yet bizarrely we found quite a sizable amount of partially digested, organic material in her lower digestive track.

Now, this, along with samples of her blood and spinal fluids, was tested at our on-site laboratory, and what our technicians found was truly shocking. The contents of the girl's stomach turned out to be a mix of two very distinct varieties of fungi, fly agaric and the suitably named Deathcap. Now, the Death Cap needs no introduction, as I'm sure you know. It does what its name suggests. Some might say that fly agaric is also suitably named, because while ingesting it won't make you fly,

it does have intense hallucinogenic effects on those who use it. The implications of its presence terrified us. And when it came to writing up the post-mortem, we almost didn't want to believe our own conclusions. Judging from the bruises around her wrists, ankles, and neck, someone had kept the girl prisoner, and the level of starvation suggested this had been for a considerable amount of time. During this period, she had been systemically tortured and maimed by someone exceptionally sadistic.

Then, once she was hungry enough to eat just about anything put in front of her, the girl's captor fed her a fatal mix of mushrooms and just let her go. Even if she was still in possession of her sight, we judged the girl was far too weak to have mounted any kind of serious, escape attempt. So either something inconceivable occurred and she wandered free from captivity or her captor deliberately set her free. She spent her final hours wandering through the woods and what must have been complete confusion and unimaginable agony. It was the single most horrifying post-mortem I've ever had the displeasure of overseeing, but it raised the question. Just who the

hell was evil enough to inflict such an ordeal on an innocent young woman. Once our examination was complete in the final report written up, the girl's body was transported to a local funeral home. Our official conclusion was that the girl had been murdered via poisoning, and there were comorbid factors of starvation and historical physical abuse. This led to a murder investigation being opened, but sadly, it's one that's never been closed. I've overseen many, many post-mortems in my time as a coroner, and there have been more memorable ones that I care to count. But not one of them haunts me, and I mean truly haunts me like that poor young woman, who spent her final few hours on this earth, blind, terrified,

and wandering around alone in the middle of nowhere. When I was 28 years old, I was still living in Denver, and a few friends and I went out for dinner and drinks. It was fun at first. It was fun at first, But as the sun went down and the alcohol started to flow, I realized that I just wasn't feeling it. I had really gotten into yoga, running, and eating healthy that summer, so even though staying out late and partying was still fun, I just didn't have the energy for it anymore. I stayed for one last drink before saying goodbye to my friends and then walked outside to catch a cab. And then as I was waiting, I heard a man's voice off to the right of me asking, Are you waiting for a cab, too? And that is how I met Patrick.

It turns out we're in very similar situations. He'd been out celebrating his brother's birthday, but had quit drinking a few years back. And so before everyone got too drunk and too annoying, he figured that he'd head home to save himself the headache. Now, I like the idea of a guy who didn't drink, so after establishing that we were both single and of similar ages, I began to drop some not so subtle hints that he should ask for my number.

We were having such fun flirting that we almost didn't notice when an empty cab drove right past us. And then when the next one came around, Patrick insisted that I be the one to take it. Now, he was a gentleman, and he was handsome, and he was charming. So when he texted me about grabbing some coffee sometime, you can bet that I texted back. We dated for two years and fell deeply in love with one another. He was the ideal partner, except for one tiny peccadillo, his past. Now, I know in literally any other circumstance a guy not being frank about his history is a huge red flag, but Patrick wasn't entirely opaque.

He talked about high school, he talked about climbing the career ladder in his 20s, and he was willing to be frank about past relationships too. The other thing he wasn't so open about was college. He said his first two years were basically non-stop partying, and it got so bad that he had to repeat a few courses during a sophomore year. He talked about falling in with a pretty bad crowd and how he had to cut himself off from them just to get his degree. And I could tell that he was embarrassed, maybe even a little ashamed, so I didn't push him on it. I just liked that he'd changed. And then one day, Patrick asked me to go hiking with him.

Now, I was surprised because Patrick was just about the least. East outdoorsy type of guy you could imagine. He worked out, but he loved the indoor gym that he was a member of, and he was way more interested in gadgets and gizmos than the natural world. So when he asked me if I wanted to go hiking of all things, I was actually kind of stunned, but I was super excited. You see, maybe six months prior we've been talking about the prospect of getting married and even having children. Not so much with each other was just sort of a in general thing. Patrick asked what my ideal proposal location would be, and he gave me examples like the bridge in Central Park or the top of the Eiffel Tower. But after considering it, I decided I'd much rather be proposed to in a place

of natural beauty rather than artificial. And I remember he nodded like, okay, unconventional. I like it. But I never thought in a million years he'd actually keep it in mind. So that Sunday morning, when he asked if I wanted to go hiking up near Golden Gate Park that following weekend, it dawned on me how Patrick might actually be planning on proposing. And I started freaking out in text messages to friends saying that I didn't know if I was ready. Now, I mean, I wanted to marry him. I just didn't know what kind of wife I was going to be or if our relationship would survive the transition from casual to serious commitment.

Our friends said that I was just overthinking things and that I should just just trust that initial gut feeling of excitement. It was true that realizing a proposal was on the cards had made me so very happy. So rather than continue to ruminate, I just simply waited for the date of the hiking trip. And when it came, I just knew that I was going to say yes. Now, the first two hours or so was just a dream. My usually outdoorsy, adverse boyfriend had put a ton of effort into making sure that he had all the right equipment,

and being his typical self, he brought a bunch of cool gadgets along too. Stuff like straws with built-in water filters and solar-powered phone chargers just in case we got at low on battery. And the scenery was beautiful. The weather in the Rockies was great, and as Patrick guided us along the trails towards our mystery destination, I got more and more excited. And before long, he took us up the trail that wound up this very steep slope, and when we got to the top, We found ourselves at a sort of steep earthen cliff that overlooked the forest below. It was an incredible view, and knowing what was coming, I started to get a little emotional. Now, Patrick looked at me, smiling as I wiped away the tears and said,

You know what I'm going to ask you, right? And I just laughed and said yes, expecting him to drop to one knee and produce a ring at any moment. But he didn't. Instead, Patrick started explaining how. he had brought me all the way out there to propose, there was just something he needed to tell me first. Now, right away, I got nervous and Patrick could sense it. I thought that he'd try and reassure me that it wasn't anything too serious, but he didn't. He just stayed quiet until I'm saying something like, what is it? He asked me if I loved him, and if I trusted him.

But when I answered yes, he didn't seem any more sure of himself. He asked if I could keep a secret, if I could keep the most important secret of his whole life, and again, I said yes, but I was wrong. Patrick began telling me how, during his second year of college, he and his frat buddies went to an off-campus party, some kind of warehouse rave type of deal. And he said this was when he and his friends were on their very worst behavior, drinking like fish and fighting like sailors, and generally causing trouble for anyone and everyone.

And then at this party, he starts flirting with this girl and they head off someplace to make out. Patrick said that they made out for a while, and then the girl says something like, come back inside and dance with me. But after he returned from what passed for a bar, the girl was gone. Now, he went looking all over for her,

but couldn't find her anywhere. And then when he spots her, maybe a half hour later, she's completely obliterated. Patrick said that he didn't know was liquor. It was something else like Ruffies, but the girl seemed on the verge of passing out. He tried to get her back to the frat house, but when she was just about conscious enough to object,

Patrick didn't want to go home empty-handed, shall we say. He did look and sound like he was ashamed of himself as he said it, but Patrick admitted to taking this semi-conscious girl to some dark corner of the wearing. house compound and doing stuff to her. And I guess the look of disgust on my face was plain to see because he frantically added that this was the single biggest regret of his entire life, and he explained how he wasn't that guy anymore, how it made him afraid to have daughters knowing certain kinds of men harbor some

predatory instincts. And he said it was a long time ago, that he lived with a regret ever since, and I thought that was it. and it was only after a minute or two of just sort of processing it that I asked if he'd ever tried to find the girl and make amends for what he'd done and that's when I realized that this story wasn't over Patrick said when he was done he left the girl lying there where she was she was passed out completely by then but all he gave a crap about was going back

inside to get a drink because he was thirsty now he too was highly intoxicated at this point but he didn't use that as excuse for his behavior. He knew how selfish it was for him to just leave her there. She could have been overdosing or she could have choked on her own puke, but Patrick said it was a full hour before it occurred to him to go back and check on her. He said he asked his friends not to leave until he got back and then he went out expecting to find the girl sleeping, as he put it. And yet when he got there, he found that not only was the girl awake and was somewhat more sober than before, But she remembered what he'd done to her before she passed out anyway, and she was obviously livid.

She told Patrick that she was going to go to the cops, because she wasn't about to let some piece of crap rat boy get away with treating her like that. I felt proud of her, and I didn't even know her, but then Patrick said something that made my blood run cold when he described how he snapped. He said he pictured his whole life unraveling and how life after prison wouldn't be worth living. He had the world at his feet, but that girl was about to yank the carpet out from under him, and he couldn't let that happen. When Patrick finally uttered the words to me, I didn't mean to kill her. I felt my entire world crumbling around me.

And it was like this out-of-body experience, watching myself from afar while my heart broke in my chest, not just for me either and the life I thought I was going to have. I was heartbroken for that poor girl and just trying to be. to do the right thing, resulted in Patrick accidentally crushing her larynx. He said he just wanted to scare her at first, and then he just wanted to make the problem go away. But all that fear had him squeezing just a little too hard, and Patrick didn't realize just how much damage he was doing until he felt the girl's throat just sort of give way in his hands.

He said her eyes went all wide as she tried to get air into her lungs. But she couldn't. And then maybe a minute or two later, she was dead. Patrick said he could have ran for help, but he didn't because he was scared. And instead of getting help, and once he was sure that the girl was dead, Patrick went back inside the warehouse party and asked his closest friend in the frat for one hell of a favor. It was one he granted.

And then over the next couple of hours, they managed to hide the girl's body someplace no one would ever find it. Patrick never said exactly where, but he kind of hinted it was some kind of state park or forest, at which point it suddenly made sense why he hated the idea of hiking. He told me he was sorry, deeply and truly sorry, and that he'd do anything to take back his mistake. But it was also a mistake committed by his old self, his younger self,

and he didn't think that it was one his new self had to pay for. Patrick then asked me if I thought that was a reasonable thing to say, and I suddenly realized just how vulnerable I really was. If I said no, and that I thought that he was a murdering piece of crap, and I didn't want to marry him, what was to stop him from silencing me too? He could just shove me down the steep slope and then bash my head in at the bottom to finish me off, and no one might ever find me. I'd end up just like that girl.

On a missing poster with my family wondering what the hell had happened to me, but deep down, knowing that I was gone. I knew I couldn't reject him. I knew I had to at least act like I understood. And so I underwent one of the most painfully surreal experiences of my entire life, and I pretended to be the fiancé of a murderer, someone who violates people. And I told him I agreed, but the new hymn shouldn't have to pay for his old crimes.

I told him I wasn't about to let one shot at happiness slip through my fingers because some skank decided to run her mouth. I'm ashamed to say that I said that, but it's true. I'd have said just about anything to get out of that forest alive because I figured what I planned on really doing would justify it. I leaned into the morbid curiosity that I felt and asked if he was scared that the girl's body would end up being found, and more importantly, what was going to happen to us if he ended up getting caught? Colorado had the death penalty at the time, so, as Patrick said, if he got caught, it was over for us. And then we talked about the prospect of dating again after one of us passes away. Like I said, it was surreal in the extreme, but, and this is probably going to sound a bit.

insane. I felt safe with him. I thought I had him. I thought I tricked him. And then after our hike was done and we walked back to his car, I felt this rush of almost victory knowing that I'd survived. And all I had to do to ensure my continual survival was to sort of keep the act up till I could get home and call the cops. But before I could do that, all the pretending I'd done resulted in a state of almost complete nervous collapse. After getting home, I think I cried for a straight hour, and then I called my mom and cried for another hour on top of that. It was probably the worst day of my life hands down in terms of catastrophic mental trauma, but then once I was done crying, I'd pulled myself together and hung up on mom and then called 911. I packed an overnight bag

as I waited for them to arrive because I planned on staying with my mom for the foreseeable future after Patrick got arrested. Now, I was scared that they'd maybe let him go for some reason, be it lack of evidence or him getting bail or whatever. But it turned out that I didn't have to worry about anything like that because when the cops showed up at his place looking to talk with him, he was nowhere to be found. I talked to the Denver PD a lot in the weeks that followed,

but I also ended up getting a call from two detectives in Arizona where Patrick went to college. They were very interested in his story. because the location of the murder, along with the timing of the girl's disposal, made it easier to figure out where to look. I then also got a call from an FBI agent who asked if Patrick ever went by another name or if he ever mentioned owning a fake passport. I said no to both questions, and the agent never came out and said it,

but it was kind of obvious that they thought Patrick had fled the country somehow. They just didn't know how or where he'd gone. And then the agent asked if there was anywhere in the world that I thought he might have gone, some more special that he might have mentioned wanting to visit. And I told them about Patrick mentioning Paris in Rome one time, but aside from that, he never seemed all that interested in traveling. And to this day, he's never been found. But I still hold out hope that he'll show up someplace one day and that he'll finally have to pay for what he did to that poor girl.

And that's almost my ideal scenario. I open the newspaper one day and there's Patrick's face under the headline saying something like fugitive apprehended overseas. But my nightmare scenario goes a little something like this. One day, and maybe even someday soon, I'm sitting home alone and there's a knock at my door. I go to open it, so comfortable and confident that I don't bother checking the peephole. And then when I open it, there he is. there's Patrick, and he's come to shut me up for good. You know, I really prefer keeping my money where I can see it,

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equivalent to $15 per month. New customer offer for first three months only, then full-price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See MintMobile for details. You might find this a very unusual submission, but I think it's one that you and your viewers might enjoy, and while I prefer to remain anonymous, I can assure you that it's actually genuine. Now, without giving you my entire life story, I grew up in the United Kingdom,

but my parents are Greek and Iranian. They met in London after emigrating, worked hard to make a life for themselves, and then had me. They pushed me to do well in school, consoled me when my attempts to become a footballer failed, and then were pleased as punch when I was accepted into Oxford University to study Greco-Persian history. Dad liked the idea of me staying in academia. Mom agreed, but thought that I should study medicine. Yet not long after I graduated, I got a letter from an institution known as the Government Communications headquarters who invited me to attend a job interview. Now, to the untrained ear, Government Communications HQ might sound rather boring, but let me

assure you, it is not. That's because GCHQ is responsible for providing signals and intelligence to the government and armed forces of the United Kingdom. It was first established after the First World War, then during the second, it worked on breaking German Enigma codes out of Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. Now, getting hired by them didn't make me some glorified IT guy. It made me, for all intents and purposes, a spy. And I later found out that I'd been headhunted by the recruitment team while I was at university, partially because of my academic and sporting performance, but mainly for my language skills. I spoke a little bit of Greek, but my mom's side of the family were very involved when I was a kid, so while I wasn't

completely fluent in Farsi, I knew much more than most about Persian language and culture and could easily pass as Iranian. And this made me an ideal candidate to spy on the Islamic Republic. So for the first 18 months of my career, I trained for that. But then, on a sunny afternoon, UK time, in September of 2001, 19 hijackers changed the course of history, as you know. And after the towers fell, and W. told New York how the world is about to hear them, my department's focus shifted from Iran to Afghanistan. But seeing as the two countries have very similar languages in Dari and Farsi, it made me a highly rated asset and one that was itching to be deployed. Now, less than two weeks after the attacks, I was sitting in a briefing room going over the details of the assignment that I've been given.

London to Cyprus, Cyprus to Turkmenistan, and then from there, I'd transform myself from a British civil servant to an Iranian journalist before taking a taxi over the border into Afghanistan. Now, my destination was the ancient city of Harat, where I'd gather intelligence on Taliban morale and troop numbers prior to what was undoubtedly going to be an American-led invasion. While in Harat, I learned that many Taliban fighters have been sent to the mountains around 30 miles southeast of the city. There they were digging in, stockpiling munitions, and preparing to resist coalition forces. So, that's where I went. I was advised to hire a guide to escort me through the wilderness and towards the mountains.

I didn't want to get lost, but neither did I want to attract too much attention to myself. So I hitched a ride to a small village within two days' walk of the mountains, then did just that. Walked. Getting up into those mountains made for the toughest hike of my life. Then following one particularly grueling climb, I was relieved to see a gently sloping valley that led deeper into the mountains. It was beautiful in its way, like a little slice of Shangri-La. But as I looked around, I suddenly spotted two men standing on a ridge some distance behind me. They were little more than specks all the way up there, but I could tell that they were watching me,

and I remember thinking to myself, I'd be in a terrible spot of bother if one of those chaps had a rifle. As I walked further and further away from them, and the valley stayed nice and quiet, I started to relax. I started thinking that there were just two curious shepherds, but no sooner had that thought entered my head, the first bullet struck the rocks about 50 meters away from me. It was terrifying, impossible to put words into it and away, and I've never felt anything like it. There was nothing ahead of me but open ground,

so all I could do was run as fast as I could and hope the gunman was just some goon with an AK and not an expert marksman. Because if he was, I was dead. And the first bullet landed about 50 meters away in a spray of dust and gravel, but when the second hit, it was even closer. I landed no more than 20 meters ahead of me after whizzing over my head. And the next was closer still, landing just within arm's reach. But by then, I had made it to a grouping of large rocks that I could bound between to put something solid between me and those bullets.

And eventually I was faced with a stretch of open ground leading up to a gentle ridge, and, I waited to see if another shot came, and then when I was met with only silence, I ran for the ridge, praying the gunman had given up and wasn't just reloading, but no more bullets were fired. It was a relief to be on the other side of the ridge, knowing I was totally out of sight, but I knew that I still wasn't safe. The gunman and his pal could be pursuing me, or there could be additional assailants waiting ahead. And with no choice, I pushed on as fast as I could, until I suddenly spotted a plume of smoke rising in the distance. It wasn't until I got much closer that I realized that it was a tea house,

and that was another huge relief, because with the sun beginning to set, it was an ideal place to bed down for the night. Most Afghan tea houses serve tea and simple meals, but many feature side rooms or second floors that function as guest houses. Guests are packed into one large room with nothing but a mat to sleep on, so it's not exactly the rits. but they serve as a wholesome shelter for travelers during the longer, colder nights,

and when the passes are blocked by winter snows. I drew some stairs after making my way inside, but after the owner, rather loudly, asked where I was from, my cover story seemed to lessen the tension. There was a clear interest in me, but I was left to eat and drink in peace. After a few hours of nursing cups of tea and talking with fellow travelers, I approached the tea house's owner regarding accommodating. for the night. I was directed to a back room where, just as I expected, several other men sat on

their sleeping mats, which were placed around the room. The walls were bare, the floor was covered in a mosaic of carpets, and there was a large silver tea set in the middle of the room. But what really grabbed my attention was the Kalashnikov that sat in one man's lap. Some of the men seemed to recognize me from the tea house's main room and greeted me before telling the others who I was, or rather who I wasn't. I ran with my cover and began asking their thoughts on al-Qaeda, the United States, Osama bin Laden, while writing notes in Farsi's shorthand on a notepad.

They bought my story wholesale, and in line with Afghan hospitality customs, they promised to do their utmost to look after me during my stay. But then, after one of them asked me how my stay in Afghanistan had been, I couldn't help but mention the unfortunate shooting incident, which had occurred earlier that day. Some of the men tutted and shook their heads, muttering, Babashi, which means like criminals or gangsters.

But as I described how the distant shots had come out of nowhere and I'd rush forward into cover, I noticed the man with the gun shared a very sheepish look with another man sitting next to him. The Afghans pride themselves on being good hosts, so I initially confused the look with one of embarrassment. But when I finish my story, you can imagine my shock what the man with a rifle basically said,

sorry, that was me. He did it in a very long-winded, very Afghan way, with a, I shot at someone a day, but it couldn't have been you, becoming, it might have been you, and ending with, it was probably you, and I'm sorry. And to understand how surreal this was for me, you have to understand the manner in which this man was apologizing to me. If I almost killed a man,

if I almost orphaned his children and widowed his children, wife, I'd beg his forgiveness, not just because he could quite easily have me imprisoned, but because I'd have robbed him of his most precious possession, his life. But that is a very Western mindset, because there are places in the world where human life is not nearly so highly valuable. And so when I say that the man apologized to me in a way that you might do after bumping someone's trolley in a supermarket, I say it sincerely. To him, His shots didn't hit me because God didn't let them. If I was favored by God, then I must be all right.

But why shoot at me in the first place? And when I asked the man, he said that it was for two reasons. The first being that I was quite obviously a foreigner. This utterly confounded me, as I'd spent months preparing and was kidded out an authentic and well-worn Afghan attire. Yet according to the gunman, he knew that I wasn't Afghan because, and these are his words, I didn't walk like it. And then since there was a good chance that it was some kind of American infiltrator,

not far off, boys, the gunman decided that there was no harm in shooting at me. He says this to his companion, but his companion laughs and then says something to the effect of, you'll never hit him at his distance, you're a terrible shot. To which he replies, oh yeah, watch me. It was a bet. I was nearly shot and potentially killed over little more than a bet. The perpetrators were deeply apologetic and claimed that they'd never have shot me if they'd known that I was an Iranian Muslim. But it was still a very strange and very bitter pill to swallow that I'd nearly been killed to prevent a man losing face.

And it was also a reminder that if they found out who I really was, I'd be in a hell of a lot of trouble. So instead of showing what I really felt, which was a mix of terror and relief, I acted calm as you like and told them God obviously had a hell of a lot of trouble. planned for me. And both men were very pleased by my veneer of fatalism. But it was just that, a cover. As deep down, I was more frightened than I'd ever been in my entire life. Yet thanks to my training, I'd learned not to show it. The group and I talked until the wee small hours of the morning and I made notes on anything and everything pertinent. The two men even offered to walk me further up the mountains so I could reach Taliban positions and safety. But I departed before the call to Don prayers while everyone was still asleep.

I reached the Taliban positions, conducted a few interviews with their lieutenants and commanders, and all without having my cover even close to being blown. And then just a few weeks later, American B-52s were dropping bombs on them, all based on my intelligence reports. And I sometimes think about that tea house, and I hope it survived the American bombing. One day, God willing, I can go back there and be a traveler under some very deadly. different circumstances. For almost two decades now, I've worked as a helicopter pilot for Utah's Department of Public Safety. People are often surprised by what a varied job it actually is.

Because while we obviously provide a lot of support to law enforcement, we also perform medical evacuations, assist with wildfire and disaster response, and most relevant to my story today, we support search and rescue operations out in the Rockies. I'm on call 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So sometimes I'm grabbing my gear in the middle of dinner or in the middle of the night because someone's gotten themselves into trouble in the UWC. That's the Uinta-Wasatch-Cash-C national forest, about 30 miles east of Salt Lake. Most of the time the calls come from hikers or climbers who get lost or hurt in the mountains.

Or sometimes we get skiers caught in avalanches during winter. But then other times, I find myself flying into situations that are much more unsettling than just a lost hiker or stranded skier. And the bird I fly most is the Airbus H-125, a single-engine helicopter that's ideal for flying through the Rockies. It's got enough power for high-altitude work, which is crucial around here, since elevations can regularly push 10,000 feet or more

during search-and-rescue operations. I take off from the airport in Salt Lake, and then within minutes, I'm soaring up into the mountains to link up with the ground team. The air gets thin quick, so you've got to manage your power carefully. The H-125 handles it well, but it can sometimes feel very different to flying at sea level. It's beautiful up there in the mountains, but the weather can turn on a dime.

One minute it's clear blue skies. The next, you're dealing with turbulence from down drafts off the peaks, or snowstorms that come out of nowhere and cut visibility down to nothing. But even when the weather's fine, the cut weather's fine, the cut. kind of flying they have to do up there can get real dangerous real quick. On more than one occasion, I've had to hover in tight spots, like above a narrow ridge with my rotors less than 20 feet or so from the treetops. I then have to hold that position on pain of death while the crew lowers the hoist to a stranded

climber with a busted leg. Those hoists really come in handy for pulling people out of tough spots, like steep canyons or cliffs where you can't land, but they're not a fix-all. To fill the gaps, me and my crew keep the bird loaded up with stuff like night vision goggles, searchlights, and recco detectors. A real handy piece of equipment which can pinpoint people wearing reflective clothing. Because flying SAR missions and the Utah Rockies is no joke, we need all the help we can get out there. And despite all I've said, most ops are actually pretty straightforward in terms of what we do. We spot them, drop a line, and then haul the mountain crack a beer back at HQ.

but there's one from a couple of years back that still has me wondering what in the world really happen out there. It started just like any other call might do, with a phone on my nightstand dragging me out of sleep. The missing man's wife had called 911 just a few hours before, after her husband failed to return home following a solo hike up near Hayden Peak. I wasn't expecting anything too intense. The last couple of ops involved rescuing pencil-pushing city boys who'd bitten off more

than they could chew, so I figured it might be more of the same. But after flying over the area surrounding Farm Creek Peak, we couldn't spot our hiker anywhere. The ground team was already on location, with some combing the trails on ATVs, so we decided to open up our search area to see what we could find. Eventually, we found ourselves flying over a place called Wilson's Peak, the highest point in the entire state of Utah, and the terrain up there is brutal, with sheer cliffs and deep snowpack, and since it was a long way off the area our hiker was said to be, we didn't expect to find anything. But no sooner had we gotten close enough that my pilot spotted something through thermal imaging.

It was weak, but it was damn sure human-shaped, and it was up on a narrow bluff about 8,000 feet up. I banked us closer, eyes peeled, and then suddenly, there he was, the missing hiker. He was sitting near a ledge, no tent, no pack, just him in a thin jacket, limply waving one arm and looking like he'd been through hell. I radioed the ground teams, telling them that we had a visual and passing on the man's coordinates, and the ground team acknowledged and then sent ATVs in our direction. But after a tense 20 minutes of them probing the approaches,

the leads come back over the radio saying the approach is iced over and far too steep. To get to the guy without putting the chopper in danger, they'd need specialists with climbing gear, which would take around two hours. The trouble was, from the looks of him, I didn't think the guy had two hours left. Now, I looked at my co-pilot, and he looked at me, and we both agreed, screw it. We're going in low, drop the line. And to say it was a risky move would be one heck of an understatement. Regulations say to keep a buffer for wind shear and rotor wash, but I dipped the nose and threaded the chopper between pine trees and the contour of the slope.

The altimeter started yelling warnings at me as we got within 50 feet of the bluff, which was dangerously low for a winch-op in such gusty conditions. My winch medic, a guy with balls of steel named Tony Rays, clipped the winch to his rig, lowered himself onto the cable as I hovered in place, then edged across the ledge towards our missing hiker. Once he reached him, Rays asked the guy if it was good enough to hold on to something. The guy couldn't stand, but Rays managed to get the very unglamorously named crotch strap between his legs, and then with the little assistance he was good to go.

We couldn't linger. Fuel was burning, and the winds were picking up. I spotted a flat meadow a mile down the valley, clear and flat enough to safely set down Rays in the hiker. My co-pilot pulled the line up a little and up came Ray's in our hiker, and then off we went to gently drop them off before I set us down and we waited for the ground crew. Once our rotors were still, myself and my co-pilot hopped out to go check on the hiker. We found him propped up against the log, wrapped in foil blankets, while Ray set up an IV, but something was off. Our hiker had been missing for less than 24 hours, but he looked gaunt, like he hadn't eaten

in days, and he was dehydrated to the point that his tongue was a little swollen and he had trouble speaking. Even stranger, the guy couldn't seem to remember his own name, not at first anyway. Hypothermia makes people slow, but it doesn't fog their memory, and this guy was all glassy-eyed and confused when we asked his name. He didn't say it, but we could tell that he couldn't remember, and then after maybe a minute or two, it seemed to just come back to him, like the phone number of an old girlfriend or something. And I remember kneeling down next to him and saying, Hey, buddy, what happened?

How'd you end up in that? And he broke eye contact and then stared off, kind of blinking for a second, before saying he couldn't remember. The only things he did remember were hiking alone, realizing someone was following him and then running to try and escape them. Then the next thing he knew,

he was way up the side of the mountain, too exhausted to climb back down. again. That was it. No significant details to go on. No coherent timeline. Just he was alone, got scared, and then ran in a blind panic till he came to again. The ground team rolled up on their ATVs within maybe 10 to 15, and then the medics began swarming the guy. We waited for Rays to finish talking to the ground team lead, hoping that the guy would get more talkative as he warmed up. But he didn't. His memory stayed foggy and we never found out how a guy with no equipment climbed all the way up to that bluff.

The paramedics chalked it up to exposure or delirium. Missing hikers often try to climb up high so aircraft can spot them and don't anticipate the nights getting fatally cold. So after they loaded him up, they took him off to the ER in Provo for treatment, saying all would make sense once the guy's memory came back to him. We wrapped the op, flew back to base, and then debrief with all the standard paperwork. And we'd done our job, maybe even saved a guy's life in the process, so it should have been high fives all around after hitting the bar for celebration beers.

But all we did was sit around talking about it because none of it made any sense. The bluff near Wilson's Peak was almost a day's walk from Hayden, the place the guy was reported missing. That meant that he'd hiked and climbed over 15 miles as the crow-es. To get from Hayden to Wilson, which if you know the terrain seems next to impossible, especially at night. And then to get up the bluff that he was on, he must have truly believed that his life was in danger, because I don't know if you're a climber, or if any climbers are actually listening, but I'm talking class five scrambling against vertical faces, something any usual amateur would consider themselves incapable of. Now this guy had no climbing gear, no experience listed in his profile, as the family confirmed that he was a casual weekend walker from the flatlands.

And so in that case, how the heck did he free climb that in a panic in snow without breaking his own damn neck? Investigators followed up on his claims of a pursuit, but they didn't find a second set of tracks on the snows below, and there were no reports of suspicious activity from any place else in the park. The guy recovered physically and was happily reunited with his wife and kids following a brief stay in the hospital, but his memories stayed like Swiss cheese. The last thing he recalled clearly was realizing that he was being followed, and then apart from a few flashes of running, climbing, and fearing for his life, it was all dark patches. In the years since, I must have

gone it over in my head maybe a hundred times already, and I wonder what spook the guy so bad. that he actually turned into a damn mountain goat. And the only thing that really tracks is a bear. A big old black bear standing on two legs, which might have started chasing him on four. And that's the only sight that I could figure would trigger that kind of primal fear, in which case it could have been a mama bear

just taking care of her cubs. But then what if it wasn't? What if it really was a man out there lurking among the trees and waiting for some hapless hiker to come along so he could hunt them through the tree? I mean, let me know what you think, but both are scary in their own way. But it still doesn't explain the distances involved or how our hiker climbed up that bluff. And it kills me thinking I'll never find out.

And it will forever remain. A mystery. More than 20 years ago now, way back during the summer of 2002, I received some of the worst news of my entire life. My favorite aunt, Janie, who I'd been very close with after mom died when I was young, had suddenly and tragically passed away. It was devastating, but perhaps even more so, because it came at a very inopportune time for me.

I guess no death comes as a quote-unquote good time, but Aunt Janie died as I was going through a series of bitter financial struggles. I moved across the country a few times before to pursue my dream of, I guess that's not entirely relevant, but let's just say that it wasn't going well, and I barely had two quarters to rub together. I couldn't afford a flight, and I really didn't want to leave my car alone for days because it had almost certainly been stolen by the time I got back.

And so not wanting to miss the funeral for fear of forever regretting it, I decided that I was going to drive almost 3,000 miles from Newark, New Jersey, to my hometown of Sacramento, California. And sometimes when I look back on it, I wonder what in the world I was thinking, embarking on a 6,000-mile round trip. But at the time, it made perfect sense. I hated living in Newark so bad that I'd have done anything to get away for a while. Now, nothing against the city itself. It's not nearly as bad as some people make it out to be,

but my living arrangements left much to be desired and for multiple reasons, too. I also figured that since I hadn't really seen much of the country I lived in, it was a great excuse for a road trip. Then, and this is probably the craziest part, I figured that I might buy an RV while back in California, assuming that I got some inheritance money, and I'd drive that back to Jersey instead. And like I said, I'm not really sure what I was thinking,

but my idea of that road trip and the reality of it would turn out to be very different. On the third day of my journey, I'd reach the western side of Wyoming. I'd just stopped in a little town called Lyman for a light lunch and then planned to stop for gas in a place called Evanston before crossing over into Utah. But after maybe 45 minutes of being on the highway, I spotted a small town on the horizon,

one that I was pretty sure not Evanston. I remember as slowly as I reached the town limits while thinking, well top off my tank here if possible, and I started looking around for a gas station. But then, rather than wasting time driving around in circles, I figured that I'd just ask someone for directions. The place had an old-timey vibe about it, and a bunch of stores had signs that looked like they were in Swedish or maybe German. And then aside from a couple of rundown houses, it was honestly picturesque.

People looked friendly, it had that wholesome small town feel to it, so I didn't think twice about rolling down my window and asking a passerby for some pointers. Now, the first person I spotted was a middle-aged woman walking along the sidewalk, carrying a few shopping bags. I called out to her and she walked over to my window, and then after a nice welcoming to the town, she told me that the gas station was almost smack-bang in the middle of things, not far from town square.

I thanked her and told her how pretty her town was, and she said that I was welcome, but then as I was driving off, she did something very out of the ordinary. She pointed her fist at me, with her index and pinky fingers raised and then said what sounded like thin and gangly. She said it with a smile.

and then turned her back and walked off. So at the time, I figured it was little more than just like some harmless idiosyncrasy. And I also figured that I hadn't heard her correctly because there was no way that she said thin and gangly. It had to be something else. But then, what was up with that sort of devil-horns rock gesture she made too? And as I drove toward the town square, I figured that I was probably just overthinking things. Maybe she had arthritis and couldn't make a whole fist while pointing. and then whatever she said, the smile in her face suggested it probably wasn't mean or rude or

whatever. And so with that in mind, I continued on towards the town square and the gas station. When I arrived, the gas station's pumps looked like they were from the 60s, and a smiling attendant had to walk out from the station to give me advice on how to use them. He was friendly about it, but he clearly took a great deal of amusement in seeing a millennial like me struggling to use something so outdated. Now, once it was done, I walked inside to pay him. I made a little small talk as I took my change, realizing that I hadn't seen any signage outside of town, so I didn't know what it was called. And the guy kind of chuckled, shook his head, and said, damned kids. But he never mentioned the town's name as he went back to reading his paper. I feared he probably wasn't

the conversational type, so I just thanked him and turned and began walking back to my car. But as I did, I heard that weird phrase spoke in a second time. Now, from behind me, I thought I heard the attendant say, From thin and gangly. And he said it in the same way as you'd tell someone see you later. Now, I then said back, sorry, what did you say? But not in the sort of confrontation or demanding way.

I was just sure to stay as courteous as I could. But instead of explaining himself, the guy simply said it a second time, Only that time, he said it so slowly that I could hear exactly what he was saying. Von Hinning Gangen. He didn't just repeat himself, though. He said it aggressively, almost like it was a warning. And if it was a warning, it was one that I didn't need to be given twice.

I walked straight back out to my car, intent on getting the hell out of town. Something weird was going on, and I suddenly felt very unwelcome. When I stopped at some lights at the edge of the town square, I noticed someone gesturing to me from the sidewalk off to my left. He was waving gently and had a smile on his face, but by then I was so wary that I wasn't convinced his intentions were pure. I waved back cautiously, and then he started moving his fists in a circle as if to say, roll your window down. I didn't roll it down completely. Like I said, I was still kind of wary, but as soon as you saw the gap in the glass, he started pointing at me with his innings.

index and pinky finger, just like that lady did before yelling out, Von Hinen gangen! I rolled my window up again, wondering what the hell I was thinking and rolling it down a little. The lights were still on red, so I had to just sit there and keep calm until they turned green. But in the meantime, the guy kept on yelling that weird phrase at me as loud as he could, and that wasn't even the weirdest part. There were people walking past him, a lot of them, too. but they were either completely ignoring the guy, like he was sort of invisible or something,

or they just sort of looked on and smiled at his outbursts while some of them were even laughing to themselves as they passed. I was actually kind of dumbstruck for a second, so as the guy yelling started walking towards my window, all I could do was watch him and wonder if he was crazy or if something else was happening, something I couldn't explain so easily. But when he slammed his fist into my window, I was dragging. out of that dumbstruck stupor. I began yelling at him to get the hell away from my car, but as I did, the car behind started honking since the lights had turned green.

I just drove. And I'd have broken the speed limit if I wasn't certain that I'd end up getting pulled over by some weird cop who'd do, who knows what, probably after yelling that weird phrase at me. And I know that's probably what you're thinking at this point. Like, why not call the cops or drive to the town sheriff's office or police department? Well, to put it straight and simple, I was terrified. The last thing I wanted to do was hang out in a place that was just so bizarrely hostile, so I tried to flee.

And so after I saw the light had turned green, I put my foot down, staying within the speed limit, of course, and tried making my way to the town's western limits. I was still shaken by the guy attacking my car, but my escape was going well, so I was able to stay calm. But then as I was confident I was going the right way, Two teenage boys jumped out in front of my car so suddenly that I had to slam on the brakes. I yelled at them to get the hell out of the street. But then, I'm pretty sure you can guess what they did next.

Yeah, they pointed their fists at me in that same devilhorn-style salute, and then they each began yelling von Hinen-Gangen. Not quite in unison, but very loudly. I remember screaming in frustration as I backed up and tried to drive around them, But then they moved aside and blocked me again. I yelled at them for a second time to move out of the way, but they just kept on yelling those damned words at me with these big crap-eating grins on their faces.

I knew I'd have to turn around and find another way out of town. I just couldn't run those boys over either. I wanted to. Don't get me wrong, but you see my point. But then as I looked behind me to check of the street was clear, I saw a third boy running at my driver's side window, and he's carrying this big old stick in his hands. I knew what he was about to do with it, so I did my best to speed up my attempts to turn around. But it was too slow, and he was too quick.

But he wasn't just quick. That kid was strong, too, because when he sent that stick smashing into my window, it caused the glass to actually crack in a spider-web pattern. Now, I screamed, and the boys laughed, and then, honestly, I didn't try to run them over, but they were forced to duck out of the way as I put my car into drive and put my foot down again. They didn't just quit it either. They chased my car running as fast as I could until I reached the town limits, and I kept looking up into my rear view watching them run right down the middle of the street.

A couple of grown-ups were walking around, but they didn't seem to pay any attention at all to those boys as they ran screaming behind my car. I distinctly remember yelling what the F is wrong with this town as I finally hit the open highway trying desperately to stop from breaking down completely. And I think I lasted about five or six months. I was tops before I pulled over to the side of the road and burst into tears. It took a while before I was calm enough to drive again. But then I got back on the highway, and I realized that I wasn't where I thought I was. It took a while to actually orientate myself, but when I did, I managed to

get back on the road to Evanston. When I arrived about an hour later, I stopped and checked a map to see where the sheriff or police department was. I didn't want to ask any more strangers, I didn't want to risk it. I drove to the police department, and then after arranging to talk with an officer, he led me to some kind of interview room where I told him the whole story. I actually tried to omit the little detail about them shouting weird phrases at me because I knew that that would just make me sound crazy. But even so, the way I described the town and the way its people acted towards me, I had the officer raising his eyebrows on more than one occasion. When I was done, and I was practically begging him to do something, he asked if I was okay to wait for a while, because he

needed to go talk to the chief. I got ready to wait for a while, you know, because stuff like that nearly always takes an annoyingly long amount of time, at least in my experience, but then no more than five minutes went by before the chief appeared in the department's waiting area and asked if he could speak with me. I could tell just from the way he greeted me that it wasn't going to be good news, but hearing it was surreal to say the least. The chief said I wasn't the first person to fall afoul to what he called German town, and I probably wouldn't be the last either. Because hating and shunning outsiders was practically a proud old tradition over there.

And I told him about the weird phrase they've been yelling, the von Hinengangan, which turned out to be some sort of archaic German way of saying, get the hell out of here, as well as the attacks. The chief said that I was lucky not to get worse, because he'd known folks to need medical treatment after accidentally driving through there. Germantown was in the place's actual name, its occupants called it something else. But the whole being mean to outsiders thing started way back in the 1800s, I guess, after someone brought some plague into the town.

They were already super old-school religious and had a lot of superstitions, so after that it became tradition to just sort of shoe away outsiders. I asked if it had happened before, and worse too. why hadn't anything been done about it? I thought the answer would be a complicated one, but it wasn't, because all it boiled down to was a small town banding together and putting up a wall of silence. The most of the county had ever been able to pin on anyone

was a disorderly conduct charge, because local law enforcement essentially refused to do anything about crimes perpetrated on outsiders. I could try to gather evidence for litigation, but without witnesses, there wasn't a case. And so, according to the police chiefs, there, the best thing that I could do for myself was to get in my car, keep on driving to wherever I was going, and just try to forget it ever happened. Now, anything else would only bring on more

trouble. And I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I mean, call me naive, but I thought that there was a common law in this country that meant that people couldn't just get away with stuff like that. But obviously I was wrong. The chief said everyone in Evanston always avoided Germantown like the plague. Or if they did drive through it, they made damned sure not to do so with a low gas gauge, and they never, ever stopped. Now, I made it to my aunt's funeral, but I never did buy that RV. I ended up flying back to Newark, grabbing my things, and then flying back to Sacramento to live with my dad. There's a whole other story to that, but let's just say that what I experienced in Germantown

had me reassessing what was important in life. We kind of normalized cities as being dangerous places, or just accept certain neighborhoods or streets being tantamount to a sort of no-go zone. And I guess I didn't realize that that same thing applies to small towns, in the middle of nowhere, too. One morning, way back in October of 2007, a retired day hiker was trekking up the north lateral moraine trail when he came across a shallow karst cave system just off the beaten path. He claimed to have interest in what he called pioneer relics, things like rusted tin cans and shattered crockery left behind from the old covered wagons, which used to snake through the front range.

And so he made a habit of shining his flashlight into the darkness and looking around for old artifacts. But what he found that day was no antique. He found bones, human bones, and said that they were scattered around the cave floor and looked old, bleached, and white. And he thought that they were just animal bones at first, but then he found the skull. He told the dispatch, or that he realized that it was a skeleton, maybe one left over from the Donner Party or at least some other tradition of the sea type situation. And he said they looked 100 years old,

but he was wrong. And the person that proved him wrong was me. Whenever anyone finds human remains and they're not fresh, medical examiners like me get a call. And it's our job to head out to wherever the remains are found and give our expert opinion on how and why they're owner passed away. Most of the time, we just simply drive over to the location of the remains and then drive back to the office once we're done. But on this occasion, since the remains were found

way up in the Rockies, we were flying in by helicopter. We arrived around midday. Myself, a tech from the CBI lab in Greenlee, a photographer from the coroner's office, and a couple of rangers from the park service to keep the area secure. It took a while, but we eventually found the cave the hiker had referred to, which was more like a crack in the granite. And then we sooned up in these Tyvec, those sort of white suits that you see in CSI, and then we flicked on our headlamps and entered the cave to lay out a 10-by-10-meter baseline. Now, what struck me initially was that the remains were partial,

meaning that it wasn't a complete skeleton. We found things like a detached mandibular. fragments of a radius ulnar pair and a scattering of phalanches and thoracic vertebrae. But there was no pelvis and neither were there any long bones below the femurra, the thigh bones, which were also entirely absent. Now the hiker was right about the bones to an extent, because they appear to have been there for a very long time. Under the light of my LED beams, I could see the cortical bone was marred by fine vertical striations,

which suggested decades of exposure to freezing winds. But then, the more I looked at it, the more something started to nag at me. When we found the skull, I took a good, long look at it, and I was looking for gnaw marks from rodents or other tooth marks, which we call carnivore pitting from large predators. But there was nothing but uniform periostial stripping, which was way too clean to be weather damage. And this left only one plausible explanation.

The flesh had been cut away from the bone by something very sharp. Now, I bagged a sample right there, a shard of bone used for our preliminary histology, which is the fancy term for putting something under a microscope. And once we made a mobile unit set up at the trailhead, we ran the sample under the portable FTIR spectrometer, and then watched it as it lit up like a flare. There was a high amount of hydroxyapotite crystallinity, but the sample also exhibited some unusual thermal degradation signatures,

which to me indicated sub-lethal heating at a temperature of around 170 to 220 degrees Fahrenheit. There was no charring, and what we were looking at wasn't any kind of regular diogenesis or decomposition, and that left only one feasible explanation. The bones had been boiled. After returning to the cave and continuing our analysis, more pieces of the puzzle began falling into place. We found a well-used, enameled iron cooking pot at the rear of the cave. Traces of bone marrow residue clung to its interior,

with its lipid profiles consistent with the same kind that comes from human femurs. High and oleic acid, low in polyunsaturated fats. The discovery of more bones proved that the defleshing had been anything but crude scavenging. It had been methodical. There were parallel incision marks on the ends of the bones, and judging by the micro-striations, they'd been inflicted by some kind of carbon steel fillething knife, most likely complete with a serrated edge. And to the best of my judgment, I'd have to say the flesh had been removed immediately after death, before the bones were simmered to make a broth of tenderized marrow.

There would be no logical reason to do this other than consumption, in which case it made sense that the lower limbs were missing as the medias cuts had most likely been hauled away for later. Now in plain English, this wasn't the kind of survival cannibalism people were forced into on the Oregon Trail. It had been staged in isolation, most likely to evade prying eyes of rangers and hikers. This was in desperation.

This was a feast. We had the remains airlifted to the Denver, lab that afternoon, where a full post-mortem unfolded over the course of several weeks. Now, it took a while, but we heard the carbon dating on the sample we took peg the year of death between 2003 and 2005. There was no corresponding dental records for the teeth that remained in the skull. The molars showed moderate damage, but there were no fillings or orthodonic work done, so my best guess involved being some kind of vagrant. Now, we extracted some degraded DNA, and then ran it through the state's database as well as CODIS,

the FBI's combined DNA index system, and we got zero hits. There were no familial matches, no cold case crossovers, nothing. And in terms of where the victim was from, enamel analysis hinted at a Midwestern upbringing. But in contrast to my theory that this person was a vagrant, the only thing that came up in the toxicology reports were trace caffeine metabolites. There was no indication of a struggle, no restraint artifacts on the wrists, cause of death was most likely asphyxiation or blunt force, executed elsewhere, then transported to the karst cave for what I guess you might call,

the harvest. The case files have been archived for more than six years now, gathering digital dust in the Colorado Bureau of Investigation's unsolved ledger. Now, the killer, who was most likely male considering the brute force required to do what he did clean slip the noose, so to speak, meaning somewhere out there in the sprawl of flyover country, or maybe in some tiny mountain town, there's a murderer and a cannibal breathing free air. I used to imagine it sometimes, his pot bubbling over with bone broth as he packaged up the better cuts. I can't forget it, and I know I never will, because in this line of work, some fractures never heal.

Rare occasion that someone asks me what I do for a living, my reply always prompts the same response every single time. I say, I'm a limnologist. Then they say, what the heck is that? So, in as few words as possible, I'm a scientist, and I study freshwater, meaning anything from lakes to ponds to reservoirs, and my job is to understand how they work as ecosystems. I'll measure how deep they are, I'll check their chemical composition, as well as taking notes of what lives in them, and if applicable, how it all changes with the seasons. I guess I'm a nerd for water, but I love my job for another reason, and that's all the field work I get to do. I've always been happier outdoors than indoors, so the fieldwork side of things

was a big appeal when it came time to apply for jobs. I'm a regular visitor to national parks, but sometimes my work takes me out to some very remote places that are far from the beaten track. I'm talking lakes tucked away behind miles of logging roads or ponds that are so deep in the back country that there's no cell service or gas station for miles and miles around. Now, once I arrive at my site, I'll haul my equipment from my truck, the depth sounders, water samplers, and oxygen probes, and then I'll take measurements of temperature and oxygen at different depths to build what we call a profile. It can be pretty lonely work, and obviously that has its own set of downside. but then came one day when I learned that sometimes, alone, is better. So on the day in question, I had been out on the lake all morning pulling up sediment cores. These are really long, heavy cylinders full of mud from the lake's bottom,

and analyzing them layer by layer can tell you the story of the lake's past. It was one of those remote southwestern lakes, Lake Walker and Nevada, to be exact, where the road just kind of gives up points and turns out. into gravel. No one goes out there unless they've got a reason, and since there are a few good reasons to be out at some muddy lake in the middle of the desert, I thought I was alone. And by the time I got the last course sealed and logged, my arms felt like they were just about ready to fall off, and with the sun starting to dip behind the tree line, it signaled the end of my day's work. I sort of trudged back up the path to where I'd park the truck. In it was my old field rig,

loaded with gear, data sheets, and a cooler full of samples. It was expensive gear, too, so much so that it'd be cheaper to replace me than it would be my equipment. And so you can imagine my horror when I finally spotted my truck and saw that the driver's side window had been smashed in. I ran, convinced that some meth had stolen tens of thousands of dollars worth of specialist equipment, and I could already see him flipping it for a few hundred bucks and then smoking or injecting months of work into his lungs or veins. And then by the time I was terminated for my job,

denied what I believed was my life's purpose, he'd already be robbing his next victim. I was catastrophizing, I suppose, these hypotheticals, panic-stricken at the idea of all that work amounting to nothing. But while I found a heck of a lot of glass all over the seats, there was nothing missing. In fact, rather than steal from me, whoever broke my window had only,

added things, not taking them away. Because underneath the windshield wiper, pinned in place by the plastic, was a torn scrap of cardboard on which was written, We Left You a Gift. And by all estimates my window had been broken by the fist-sized rock, which now lay on the passenger's seat. And looking at it, I figured that was my gift. I distinctly remember being terrified that someone was about to step out of the nearby tree line, someone who'd been watching and waiting to give me more of their gifts.

But thankfully, there was no one. And then after sweeping all the broken glass from off my seat, I started on the long drive back to the dirt road that had taken me toward the highway. By the time I was moving again, I'd calm down a little, but by then I was also just mad. I mean, who the hell sees a stranger's truck parked in the middle of nowhere, and their first thought is, I'm going to smash it. I figured it was probably just some dumb teenagers, bodies of men, the minds of children,

with mile-wide cruel streaks to boot. And then as I considered the probability of the cops being able to catch them, I felt something moving against my leg. I thought maybe a fly might have gotten to the truck, so I sort of just jerk my leg a little to get it off of me. But the feeling didn't stop, and I realized that whatever it was, it was way bigger than any fly. I then remember taking my eyes off the road and looking down in my leg, and that's when I saw

what was crawling up it, and my heart nearly stopped in my chest. It was a bark scorpion, one of the most venomous in all of North America. That was my gift, not the rock, and despite my education and IQ, I hadn't realized until it was way too late. Every instinct told me to slam on the brakes and jump out and try to bat it off my life. leg, but I was doing 60 down some winding road with one with no shoulder to speak of. I just remember gripping the wheel so hard that my hands hurt afterwards as I forced myself to breathe, and when they say that time slows down in those sorts of situations, I didn't know

how true that really was until those moments. Each second stretched out like a rubber band as I watched that scorpion slowly crawl up my leg, and as each one slipped by, I watched the scorpion edge closer and closer to my groin. I managed to ease off the gas, signal and roll to a stop on a narrow gravel turnout. My heart felt like it was going to explode in my chest as I shifted into park and then I unbuckled my seatbelt, opened my door as smoothly and slowly as I could. I stepped out one leg at a time, and then after raising the fabric from off the skin of my thigh, so as if it sort of stung it would penetrate my skin, I began to shake my pants.

until the scorpion fell and hit the ground. I practically jumped back into my truck and slammed the door again. But when I did, I was hit by this wave of relief and spent the next few minutes with my head and my hands. I don't think that I'd have been so terrified in all my life, and to this day, I struggled to think of a time where I felt more panic-stricken. It wasn't even so much the scorpion, because while people have died after being stung by barked Scorpions, those deaths are very rare. It was the idea of trying to keep my car on the road when my

legs felt numb and I went into convulsions. Then if another truck or car drove by, and I might as well have finished that day in several more pieces than I started. I told the guys back at the office about what happened. I needed no encouragement to file a police report because God knows I didn't want whoever left that scorpion in my car to get away with it. But I also knew that there was a Very slim chance anything would come out of it, so I wasn't surprised when months turned into a year, and I didn't hear back from the cops in Nevada. To this day, I sometimes catch myself wondering who the hell would do something like that and why, but I think deep down, I know.

My grandpa used to say some folks were born with the devil in them, and while I have a more scientific explanation, it doesn't make it any less digestible. Some people are just bad, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. Ever since I can remember, I've always been into post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows. There's no exaggeration either. The first movie I ever remember watching

was a Peter Graves one from the 70s called Where Have All the People Gone? It's about a mysterious natural disaster, a solar flash that turns like 90% of people into ash and leaves everyone else to wander this deserted dead landscape. If I watched it nowadays, I'd probably think it was pretty lame, but back then, it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. I mean, Mad Max was awesome too, but the idea of people disappearing seemed like it'd be sort of strangely peaceful. Now, cut to about 15 years later, and I don't have to look far to understand my fascination with abandoned places.

And throughout the summer of 1996, me and my buddy Stan started ticking off as many Texas ghost towns as we possibly could. We visited Mesquite over in Borden County, and then we hit up Best in Reagan and Langry over in Valverde. We'd walk around, take pictures, drink a few beers, and then drive back home once we were back under the limit again. And you might think once you've seen one abandoned town, you've seen them all. But that couldn't be any further from the truth. Each one has something unique to offer. It's just that sometimes that thing isn't always good. So after Langrey, me and Stan started looking up other places to visit.

It wasn't easy back then. We didn't have access to the internet to just look these things up. So when Stan found a place, he called me up, excited as hell, and told me all about a little place called Lobo. Apparently water was found in the area back in the mid-1800s, and it became a watering hole for pioneers heading west. A railroad depot was established a few years later, under the designation Lobo because of all the wolves that roamed around the area,

and that's how the town got its name. By the late 20s, the town had almost 30 permanent residents, but more than 100 railroad workers that were stationed around the depot, too. There was a hotel, a general store, and a bunch of other businesses, and then came the earthquake. Well, two earthquakes, and then the wells ran dry. Stan said that, and he swore this was no word of a lie, a guy called William Christ bought the whole place in the 60s. He opened up a general store and a gas station in the hopes of reviving the place and offered discounted rents to anyone who'd come live there.

But then, weirdly enough, there was a weird kind of crime wave around Lobo, and then a bunch of Bill Christ's businesses all burned down one night, and he abandoned the place. That was 1991. meaning by 1996 the place had been abandoned for five years, but unlike a lot of other places, almost every building in Lobo was still standing. In fact, I'd say it was the most complete abandoned town we'd ever visited, and the closest I'd ever been to recreating the stuff I saw and where have all the people gone.

As you can imagine, I was absolutely over the moon, and so was Stan. It was like we'd walk straight onto the set of some post-apocalyptic survival movie, But little did we know, it was about to become part horror movie too. Because after walking around for no more than a few minutes, me and Stan had heard a sudden scream. It might sound dumb, but at the time, I looked at him and asked if he'd set it up. Like he'd, I don't know, haid someone to stop by and scare the crap out of me by unleashing some blood-curdling scream. But I turned to him, and the look of fear on his face told me all I needed to know. Since we'd heard Lobo was popular with Urbex enthusiasts, some people who also appreciate abandoned places,

we figured some other group had run into trouble, some obviously painful trouble by the sounds of things. So we did what we'd want anyone else to do if that was us in that situation, which was run to help. We ran in the direction of the screams, then as we got closer, we heard the sound of someone else cursing. I don't know about Stan. But I thought it sounded like whoever he was with trying to calm him down. He'd fallen, broken his leg, and his buddies telling him to keep quiet so he can concentrate. But it wasn't that at all. Stan yelled out, Hang on, we're coming.

At which point the person's screaming started yelling, please help me and all sorts of stuff. And we heard the other voice again too, and right away I realized that we might have misjudged the situation. Something didn't sound right about the way that he was talking, but I could barely hear him over the screens. So I also didn't stop running because both me and Stan were still under the impression someone needed help. Well, they did. There was just no way that we could save them because the people making him scream found me and Stan before we could find the person needing saving. We didn't see the guy. We just saw some six-foot monster wearing gloves and a crow bar.

and then another guy, smaller, yelling at the bigger guy to get us. Now, we turned on our heels and then sprinted all the way back to the car with that huge guy on our tail. But thanks to him being such a muffin, we were able to safely outrun him, and the last time we saw him, he was in our rear view as we drove off. We called the cops from some gas station and drove with some deputy all the way back to where we'd been, so he could see exactly what we were talking about. We didn't expect anyone to be there when we got back, and we were right on that. But what was left was a lot of blood.

We think someone was being tortured. Maybe for information, maybe just revenge, and the people who orchestrated it were obviously some very shady people. If they were killing someone out there, they'd do it just before fleeing, right? So it had to be torture. And just writing that out gives me chills. It was the first time that we'd run into anything like that while touring some abandoned places, and while it wasn't the last, nothing ever quite compared to the insanity that happened that day in Lobo. Hey, friends, thanks for listening.

Don't forget to hit that follow button to be alerted of our weekly episodes every Tuesday at 1 p.m. EST. And if you haven't already, check out Let's Read on YouTube, where you can catch all my new video releases every Monday and Thursday at 9.5. PM EST. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you in the next episode.