BWBS Ep:187 Bigfoot, Bears, and The Ranger

I know that you want to listen to your podcast, so I'm going to keep it short. Because if you think it's important to make a duroze choices, can ASR maybe help? Well, I think, how then? Well, for example, when you're doing a lot of things that are you love to do. Will you know more about the insurance where a duroze schade-for-stel can be? Go to asr.nl slash duurzamekeuzes. This does ASR for you and a duroze. ASR does it. So, then you can now listen to your podcast. Have you ever wondered why Victorians mailed dead birds as love letters? Why the 1800s had so many miracle tonics that were just cocaine? Or why an entire town once blamed a goat for political corruption? Then, dear listener, you have found your people. Welcome to the Strange History Podcast, where every episode explores the bizarre, hilarious, unsettling, and occasionally, someone please check on humanity corners of our past. We dig up the stories your textbooks skipped, from haunted mansions and medical oddities to forgotten jobs, cursed holidays, and historical scandals so ridiculous they sound fake, but aren't. And yes, there will be sarcastic commentary, historical chaos, and questionable fake sponsors like Dr. Pumpernickel's patented goat-based relationship therapy. side effects may include regret. So come join the adventure. You can find the Strange History podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. Because history wasn't just weird, it was beautifully, catastrophically weird. For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace. Some blame wild animals. Others whisper of creatures the world refuses to believe in. But those who have survived, they know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness. Bigfoot, dogmen, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make it out. Others aren't so lucky. Are you ready? Because once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and remember, some things in the woods don't want to be found. Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto-downloads, and let's head off into the woods if you dare. so i got an email a few weeks back that really stopped me in my tracks and you know i get a lot of emails i get messages through the website through social media people reaching out after they hear the show and i'm grateful for every single one of them but every now and then one comes through that just hits different. This was one of those. The subject line just said, from one uniform to another. That's it. Nothing else. And when I opened it up and started reading, I understood why. I'm going to share this with you tonight because the man who wrote it gave me permission to do so. He asked me to change a few details, keep the location vague, and only use his first name. I'm going to honor all of that. What I'm not going to do is water down. What happened to him? He didn't water it down when he wrote it, and I'm not about to start editing a man's truth. His name is Kevin. He's a park ranger. Has been for going on 22 years now. He works in the Pacific Northwest, and that's about as specific as I'm going to get on location. He asked me not to narrow it down any further than that, and honestly, after you hear what happened to him, you'll understand why. This man still works in that region. He still puts on that uniform. He still goes out into those woods. And the last thing he needs is somebody connecting the dots and figuring out exactly who he is and where this took place. Kevin told me he's been listening to the show for a few years now. Said he found it one night when he couldn't sleep and just started going through episodes. He said what kept him coming back was hearing me talk about my own encounter and hearing me share stories from other law enforcement and first responders. He said it was the first time he ever heard anyone in any kind of official capacity talk openly about this stuff without being the butt of a joke. And that right there, that's why I do this. That's the whole reason. He told me he's never shared what happened to him with anyone. Not his wife. Not his buddies at work. Not a single soul. He said he's carried it for almost nine years now and it's eaten at him every single day. He said hearing me talk about my experience in North Georgia as a kid and what I saw in 2024 from 10 feet away. He said that was the moment he knew he wasn't crazy. He said he sat in his truck in the driveway after that episode ended and just put his head on the steering wheel and cried. I'm not going to lie to you. When I read that part, I had to stop for a minute myself. So here's what happened. I'm going to read parts of his email directly and then fill in around it because he gave me a pretty detailed account. Some of it I'll paraphrase, some of it I'll read just the way he wrote it. Because the way he said certain things, I couldn't improve on it, if I tried. Kevin said it was early October. The leaves were just starting to turn, but it was still warm enough during the day that you could get by in a long-sleeved shirt, without a jacket. The nights were a different story. The nights were already getting cold, dropping into the low 30s up at elevation. He said the sky was that deep fall blue that only lasts a few weeks before everything goes gray for the winter. He'd been assigned to a week-long solo backcountry bear survey. Now, for those of you who aren't familiar with what that involves, a bear survey is basically a comprehensive field study. You go out into a designated area and you're documenting everything. Bear sign, scat, tracks, claw marks on trees, game trail activity, hair samples caught on bark. You're checking bait stations, trail cameras, cataloging den sites, the whole deal. And in a place like the Pacific Northwest, you're doing all of this in some of the most remote, rugged, thickly forested country in the lower 48. Kevin said the area he was assigned to was about a four hour drive from the nearest ranger station. and then another six miles on foot from where he parked his truck. This wasn't some spot next to a campground or a popular trailhead. This was deep. He said once you got about two miles in from the road, the forest just swallowed you. The canopy got so thick in places that even at noon, it felt like dusk. Old growth mixed with second growth. Big Douglas firs. Western red cedar. Hemlocks that had been standing since before the Civil War. The kind of place where the moss hangs off everything and the ground is so soft from decades of fallen needles that your boots barely make a sound. He'd done surveys like this before. Plenty of times. He was experienced in the backcountry. He carried a sidearm, which is standard for rangers working in bear country. He had bear spray. He had a satellite communicator for emergencies. He had all his gear dialed in. He wasn't some weekend warrior stumbling around in the woods. This man knew what he was doing, and that's what makes what happened to him so significant. Because when somebody with 20 plus years in the field tells you something wasn't right, you better listen. Day one. Kevin hiked in, set up his base camp in a small clearing next to a creek. He said it was a spot he'd actually camped in once before, about five years prior, on a different survey. He liked it because the creek gave him a water source. The clearing gave him good visibility in most directions. And there was a natural rock face on one side that acted almost like a wall at his back. Smart. That's exactly how you pick a camp in bear country. You want to be able to see what's coming. He got his tent up, got his food hung in a bear bag about 100 yards from camp, and set up his cook area. He said everything was normal. Birds were singing. A Stellar's Jay was giving him a hard time from a branch overhead the way they always do. Squirrels were running around. Creek was babbling. Normal woods. Normal day. He said he decided to do a short survey loop that first afternoon, just to get the lay of the land and shake off the drive. He headed north from camp, following a game trail that ran along a ridge. He was marking waypoints on his GPS, noting bear sign, the usual routine. and about two miles from camp. That's when he saw the first thing that didn't add up. He came into an area where several trees were broken. Now, he said he wants to be real clear about this because he knows how it sounds. He's seen storm damage. He's seen trees snapped by wind, knocked over by other falling trees, broken by heavy snow loads. He knows what natural damage looks like. This wasn't that. He said there were six or seven trees in a rough cluster and every single one of them was broken at roughly the same height, right around eight feet, not snapped clean the way wind does it. These were twisted. He said the brakes looked like someone had grabbed the trunk and just torqued it. The wood fibers were spiraled. Some of them still had the top portion hanging on by a few strands of wood, dangling down like a broken arm. Others had been twisted completely off, and the tops were lying on the ground nearby. eye. Now Kevin said he stood there for a good long while just staring at this. He walked around the whole cluster. He looked at each break and he said the thing that really got under his skin was the height. Eight feet. Every one of them. Consistent. No animal he knew of could do that. A bear couldn't do that. Bears can bend small saplings over to get at berries but they can't grab a four or five inch diameter trunk at eight feet and twist it apart. That's not a thing bears do. And the wind doesn't twist trees. The wind snaps them, pushes them over, breaks them in half. It doesn't twist them like a dish rag. He said he took photographs and made notes, but in his notes he just wrote, unusual tree damage, possible storm event. Because what else was he going to write? He wasn't about to put anything else down on an official document, but he said standing there in those trees, he felt something he hadn't felt in a long time. He felt like he was being watched. He told himself it was nothing. Told himself he was just keyed up from the hike in, from being alone, from the strangeness of those trees. He finished his loop and headed back to camp. He said the whole way back, the woods felt different, quieter, not silent exactly, but like somebody had turned the volume down. The birds weren't as loud. The squirrels weren't chattering as much. Just this subtle shift that you'd never notice if you weren't tuned into it. But Kevin was tuned in. 22 years in those woods, you learn to read the forest the way some people read a room. And something was off. That first night at camp, he made dinner. Said he cooked up some freeze-dried beef stew and sat by his fire going over his notes from the afternoon loop. The sky had cleared up and the stars were ridiculous. You know how it gets out there when you're far enough from any town. No light pollution. Just stars from one horizon to the other. So thick it almost doesn't look real. He said he sat there drinking coffee and listening to the creek and trying to talk himself out of what he was feeling. See, the thing about being experienced in the woods is that you learn to trust your instincts. Your gut will tell you things before your brain catches up. And Kevin's gut was talking to him. It was saying something about those trees wasn't right. Something about the way the forest went quiet on his hike back wasn't normal. But his brain kept overruling it. His brain kept saying, you've been out here a hundred times. Everything's fine. Go to sleep. He said he sat there by the fire for a long time just listening. The creek was running steady. That constant white noise that usually puts him right to sleep. An owl was working the slope above him somewhere, calling every few minutes. Normal stuff. Woods at night stuff. He kept telling himself that. Normal. All of it. Normal. He turned in around nine, crawled into his tent, zipped up, laid there in his sleeping bag listening to the creak and the occasional pop from the dying fire. And he said he actually slept okay. Not great. He woke up a couple of times to what he thought might have been a branch falling somewhere in the distance, but nothing alarming. Nothing that set off any alarms. Just normal forest sounds filtered through nylon tent walls. He woke up at first light. The birds were already going. A woodpecker was hammering away on something nearby. He unzipped his tent and the morning air hit him like a cold washcloth. That sharp Pacific Northwest chill that comes right before the sun gets above the ridgeline. He made coffee on his little camp stove, ate some oatmeal, packed his day kit, and headed out for day two of the survey. He decided to go east this time, into a drainage he hadn't explored before. It was rougher terrain, lots of downed timber to climb over, thick underbrush, the kind of country that makes you earn every step. He said he was about three miles from camp when he found the structure. Now, I've talked about these on the show before. Lots of researchers have documented them. Tree structures in the woods that don't have any natural explanation. Some people call them teepee structures because that's exactly what they look like. Branches and small logs lean together in a conical shape, like somebody was building a frame for a shelter. And that's exactly what Kevin found. He said it was tucked back in a thick stand of young hemlocks. And if he hadn't been pushing through the brush to check a game trail, he would have walked right past it. He said it was big, maybe eight feet tall at the peak, constructed from branches that ranged from about two inches to four inches in diameter. Some of them still had green needles on them, which told him they'd been freshly broken from living trees, not picked up off the ground. And they were arranged, not randomly piled, arranged with the thick ends on the ground and the thinner ends leaning together at the top. Intentional, deliberate. it. He said he walked around it slowly, taking it in from every angle. The construction was rough, but purposeful. Not like somebody built it with tools. More like something with tremendous strength had just grabbed these branches, ripped them off trees, and jammed them together. Some of the break points on the branches still had fresh sap weeping from them. The wood was green and flexible. This wasn't old. This had been built recently. Days, maybe. A week at the outside. And there was a smell. He mentioned this almost as an afterthought, but I think it's significant. He said when he got close to the structure, there was an odor. Not strong, not overpowering, but present. He said it reminded him of a wet dog mixed with something else he couldn't place. Something musky. Something that had a sharp edge to it, almost chemical. He said he'd been around bears his whole career, and it wasn't bear. Bears have their own smell, and this wasn't it. This was different. This was something he'd never encountered before. He crouched down and looked inside the structure. The interior was about five feet across at the base. The ground inside was compressed, matted down, like something had been sitting or lying in there. And there was more of that smell inside, stronger. He backed out and that's when he looked down and saw the footprint. It was right at the base of the structure, partially obscured by some duff and dead needles, but clear enough that there was no mistaking what it was. He said it was a bare footprint, no tread pattern, no boot sole, bare skin pressed into dirt, and it was big. He estimated it at about 16 inches long and maybe 6 or 7 inches wide at the ball of the foot. Five toe impressions. A clear heel. And what he said really struck him was the depth. This print was sunken deep. Way deeper than his own boot print in the same soil. And he was wearing a full pack. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. I understand that you want to listen to your podcast, so I'll keep it short. Because if you think it's important to make a cost-effective choices, maybe Acer can help. I hear you think, how then? For example, when you're making a cost-effective decision of the things that you love are, you want to know more about the insurance where a cost-effective decision is? Go to acer.nl slash cost-effective choices. This is Acer for you and a cost-effective society. Acer does it. So, now you can listen to your podcast. Whatever made this track was heavy. Real heavy. He said the toes were interesting. They weren't like human toes. They were thicker, more uniform in size, and they were splayed out wider than a human foot would splay, even barefoot. The ball of the foot had a pronounced ridge across it, and the heel was rounded and deep, suggesting something that walked with a powerful heel strike. This wasn't a human footprint that had been distorted. Everything about it said this came from something that walked upright on two legs, but wasn't human. He said he just stared at it. He knelt down next to it and just stared. He said his heart was hammering so hard he could feel it in his throat. Because he knew what he was looking at. He'd heard about these things. He'd listened to my show. He'd read some of the research. But hearing about it and seeing it right there in the dirt six inches from your knee are two completely different experiences. It's like the difference between reading about a car accident and being in one. The information is the same. The reality is a different universe. He took photographs, multiple angles. He measured it with the tape measure he carries in his field kit. And then he stood up and slowly scanned the tree line in every direction. He said the forest was dead quiet. Not a bird. Not a bug. Nothing. Just the faint sound of wind moving through the canopy way up above him. and that feeling of being watched that he'd had the day before. It was back, ten times stronger. He said he made a decision right then that he later questioned for the rest of the week. He decided to stay. He told himself he was a professional. He had a job to do. Bear survey. One week. He wasn't going to pack up and hike out because of a footprint and some broken trees. He wasn't going to be that guy. So he documented what he found, marked the waypoint, and kept going. But he said from that moment on, the whole feel of the trip changed. Every shadow looked different. Every snap of a twig in the distance carried weight it didn't carry before. He was on edge, and he knew it. And knowing it didn't help one bit. Day two, that evening back at camp, Kevin said he built his fire a little bigger than usual. Told himself it was because the temperature was dropping, which it was. But he knew the real reason. He wanted light. He wanted to be able to see beyond the immediate circle of his camp. He sat with his back to the rock face and ate his dinner and tried to read a book he'd brought. But he couldn't focus. His eyes kept drifting up from the page to the tree line. The creek was about 30 feet to his left. Beyond the creek, the forest rose up a gentle slope. big timber, widely spaced, with thick undergrowth between the trunks. Directly ahead of him, maybe 50 yards out, was a wall of dark trees that marked where the clearing ended and the deep forest began To his right more trees more undergrowth but not as thick Behind him was the rock face So he had three sides that were essentially open to the forest. He said it was around ten at night when he heard the first sound. A howl. But not a coyote. Not a wolf. He's heard both countless times. He's heard elk bugle. He's heard mountain lions scream. He's heard barn owls make that horrible shrieking sound that makes people call 911 thinking somebody's being murdered in the woods. He knows the catalog of sounds that these forests produce. This wasn't in the catalog. He said this was lower, deeper. It had a guttural quality to it, like it was coming from a chest cavity the size of a 50-gallon drum. It started low, somewhere down in the bass register, and then rose in pitch, slowly, steadily, climbing up through a range that he said no human voice could sustain. It held at the top for what felt like 10 or 12 seconds, just this long, sustained note that hung in the air like a physical thing, and then it trailed off into this wavering moan that made the hair on his arm stand straight up. And it was close, not distant, not miles away. He estimated it at maybe 300 to 400 yards, somewhere on the slope above the creek. He said the quality of the sound was what really got to him. It wasn't just loud. It had this fullness to it, this roundness, like it was coming from a massive body. He compared it to the difference between a car horn and a ship's horn. Same concept, different scale. A car horn is sharp and thin. A ship's horn fills the air around you, vibrates your chest. That's what this was like. It had mass. It had weight. Whatever was making that sound had lungs and vocal cords that dwarfed anything he'd ever encountered in two decades of working in these forests. He said he sat completely still. His hand went to his sidearm and rested on the grip. He didn't draw it. Just rested his hand there. And he listened. The fire crackled and popped and he actually wished it would stop so he could hear better. Then from a completely different direction, off to his right and further away, something answered. A series of short, sharp barking sounds, followed by this long, descending whoop. He said it sounded like somebody yelling into a canyon, but there was no canyon. Just flat forest in that direction. And the whoop had this resonance to it, this depth, that told him whatever was making it, was big. You don't get that kind of bass from a small animal. You just don't. Then the first one, the one on the slope above the creek, made a sound he described as a rapid series of breathy grunting vocalizations. Short, rhythmic, building in speed and intensity. He said it sounded exactly like what I've described on the show when I've played audio samples of chimpanzee pant hoots. That escalating series of breathy calls that chimps use in the wild. He said he'd watched nature documentaries. He knew that sound. And hearing it in the forests of the Pacific Northwest, at 10 o'clock at night while sitting alone by a campfire was one of the most wrong and terrifying things he'd ever experienced in his life. Now let me stop here for a second. I want you to understand something. Kevin specifically referenced the pant hoot vocalizations that I've discussed on the show. This is a sound that's been reported by witnesses and researchers for decades. The fact that a great ape vocalization is being heard in North American forests by credible witnesses, by people like Kevin who know what they're hearing. That should tell us something. That should tell us a lot. He said the vocalizations went back and forth for maybe 20 minutes, sometimes overlapping, like a conversation. Sometimes one would go quiet for a while, and then the other would start up from a slightly different position, like it had moved. He said the one on the slope above the creek seemed to be getting closer, not fast, not rushing in, just incrementally closer each time it vocalized, like it was working its way down toward his camp. Kevin said he did not sleep that night, not a single minute. He kept the fire going until dawn, feeding it every time it started to die down. He sat with his back against the rock and his hand on his weapon, and he waited for daylight like a man waiting for a rescue boat. When the sun finally came up, the birds came back. The squirrels came back. The forest sounded normal again. and Kevin said he sat there in the gray morning light and had a very serious conversation with himself about what to do. He told himself there could be explanations. Owls can make weird sounds. Coyotes can sound strange. Maybe it was something he couldn't identify in the dark, and his mind filled in the blanks. He ran through every rational explanation he could think of, and none of them fit. Not really. Not if he was being honest with himself. but he wasn't ready to be honest with himself yet. Not at that point. So he made a pot of coffee, ate some breakfast, and went out for day three of the survey. He went south this time, into a river bottom thick with alder and cottonwood, good bear habitat, lots of berry bushes, fallen logs full of grubs, the kind of rich wet lowland that black bears gravitate to in the fall when they're packing on wait for winter. He found plenty of sign, Scat piles, some of them fresh enough that they were still steaming in the cool morning air. Claw marks on several trees. The long vertical gouges that bears leave when they stretch up and rake their claws down the bark. A couple of well-worn game trails with bear tracks pressed into the mud. He documented everything. GPS waypoints. Photographs. Field notes. He was doing his job, staying busy. trying to convince himself that the previous night had been a one-time thing. He said working helped. There's something about routine that calms the mind. Measure the scat. Photograph it with the scale card. Note the location. Mark the waypoint. Move on. Find the next sign. Repeat. It's methodical. It's orderly. And after a night of listening to sounds that defied explanation, orderly felt good. Orderly felt safe. But he said something was different now. Underneath the routine, underneath the professionalism, a wire had been tripped in his nervous system that he couldn't untrip. He was moving through the forest differently, stopping more often, listening harder, scanning the trees further out, not just looking at the ground in front of him the way you do when you're tracking. He caught himself looking behind him constantly, which he said he never does. Every 20 or 30 steps, his head would swivel, and he'd check his six. Like he was on patrol in a bad neighborhood instead of doing a wildlife survey. He's been in these woods his entire career. He doesn't get spooked, but he was spooked. There was no point in pretending otherwise. Something in his hindbrain, some old primate alarm system that we all carry but almost never activate, had been switched on by what he heard the night before and it wasn't switching off. He also said something interesting about the animal behavior that day. The bear sign he was finding was all old, fresh enough to be relevant for the survey, but the actual bears themselves seemed to have cleared out of the immediate area. Normally on a survey like this, especially in good habitat in early October, he'd expect to actually see bears. Maybe not up close, but in the distance. Movement in the trees. A dark shape going over a log. Something. He saw nothing. Not a single bear all day. Just their leftover evidence. Like they'd all decided to be somewhere else. And he said the birds were different too. Not absent, but restless. Jays and crows especially. They were agitated, calling more than usual. Moving around from tree to tree like they couldn't settle. If you've spent any time in the woods, you know that corvids are the alarm system of the forest. When they're upset, something's usually causing it. He noted it, filed it away, kept working. He got back to camp in the late afternoon and noticed something immediately. There were rocks on the ground near his tent that hadn't been there when he left. Three of them, baseball-sized, sitting in a loose cluster about 10 feet from his tent flap. Now, his camp was in a clearing. The nearest rock face was behind him, maybe 30 feet away. The ground in the clearing was soft soil and duff. There were no rocks just lying around in the middle of the clearing. These had come from somewhere else, and they hadn't rolled there. The ground was flat. They'd been placed there, or thrown there. He picked them up, turned them over in his hands. They were river rocks. Smooth, rounded, the kind you find in creek beds, worn down by thousands of years of water moving over them. The creek was thirty feet away. Somebody or something had taken rocks from that creek and put them next to his tent while he was gone. He said he actually checked his camp to see if anything else had been disturbed. His tent was still zipped. His gear was where he left it. The bear bag was still hanging. Nothing was ransacked or torn into. It wasn't a bear raid. Bears don't neatly place rocks next to your tent and leave everything else alone. Bears tear things apart. They rip open packs. They shred tents looking for food. Whatever visited his camp while he was gone didn't want his food. It wanted to send a message. He said at that point, the rational part of his brain was starting to lose the argument. Because rocks next to your tent, after what he'd heard the night before, after the broken trees and the footprint and the structure, that's not a coincidence. That's a pattern. And patterns mean intelligence. Patterns mean something is doing this on purpose. Something came to his camp, assessed it, picked up rocks from the creek, carried them over, and left them where he'd be sure to find them. That's not instinct. That's not random behavior. That's a calculated action with an intended result. He rebuilt his fire, bigger than the night before. He went out to the edge of the clearing and gathered armloads of dead wood, enough to keep the fire going strong all night if he had to. He hung his lantern from a branch to give himself more light. He ate dinner, and he waited. The forest settled into its nighttime rhythm, or what should have been its nighttime rhythm. The creek kept running. That was constant. An owl called a few times from somewhere behind the rock face. Insects were chirping, though not as many as the first night, because the temperature was dropping steadily as the week went on. He said he sat there on his log with his back to the rock and just listened, hyper-focused. Every sound categorized and filed. That's the creek. That's the owl. That's the wind in the hemlock needles. Normal. Normal. Normal. It started again around 930. A single long howl from the slope above the creek. Lower this time. Closer. Much closer. He estimated maybe 150 yards. The sound rolled down the slope and across the creek and into his camp. and it settled on him like a cold blanket. There was no mistaking it. No more telling himself it might be something else. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. This was the same sound from the night before, coming from the same general direction. And it was closer than it had been. Then silence for about 10 minutes. Long minutes. He counted them. watching the second hand on his watch because he needed something concrete to focus on, something measurable, something that made sense, then a series of knocks, wood on wood, measured, deliberate, three knocks, a pause, then two more. He said it sounded exactly like somebody taking a thick branch and slamming it against a tree trunk. The sound was sharp and loud and carried through the trees with a crack that echoed off the rock face behind him. He said the rhythm was what unsettled him most. It wasn't random. It wasn't an animal blundering into something. Three and two. A pattern. A signal. Communication. Then more silence. And then, from directly ahead of him, from the dark wall of trees at the edge of the clearing, he heard something moving. Not sneaking. Moving. Branches brushing against something big. The sound of weight settling on the forest floor. Footsteps, if you could call them that. Heavy, slow, methodical footsteps, spaced way further apart than a human stride. Coming closer, getting louder, and then stopping. Kevin said he was standing now. He'd stood up from the log he was sitting on, and he'd drawn his sidearm, and he was just standing there by the fire, staring into the dark at the edge of the clearing, trying to see something, anything, and seeing nothing but a black wall of trees and shadow. And then he saw the eyes. This is the part of his email that got me. This is the part where I had to set my phone down and take a breath. Because what he described was exactly, and I mean exactly, what I saw in Washington State in the summer of 2024. He said two points of light appeared in the darkness at the tree line. Not reflecting the firelight like a deer's eyes would. Not that amber or green eye shine you get from a raccoon or a coyote or a bear. These were white, bright, pale, almost luminous white. Not blinding. Not like a flashlight. More like two small moons hovering in the blackness between the trees. Self-contained. And steady. And they were high. He said they were at least seven and a half to eight feet off the ground. He could gauge it because they were right next to a tree he'd walked past earlier that day. And he knew roughly how tall the lower branches were. He said what struck him about the eyes was that they didn't behave like animal eyeshine. When you catch a deer in your headlights or your flashlight beam hits a raccoon up in a tree, those eyes reflect and they shift. The animal moves its head, looks away, blinks. These didn't do any of that. They were fixed on him, steady as a laser pointer, and they had a quality to them that he kept coming back to in his email. He said they looked aware. not the blank reflexive glow of an animal caught in a light source. Something behind those eyes was thinking, watching him the way a person watches somebody, with intent, with interest, with calculation. He said the eyes didn't blink, they just stared. Two white points of light, perfectly level, spaced about the width you'd expect for a face that was much wider than a human face. And behind the eyes, or rather surrounding them, He could just barely make out a shape, a mass, something large and dark standing perfectly still in the tree line, partially obscured by a hemlock trunk. He said the mass was enormous, wider than the tree it was standing next to, and tall. The eyes were at eight feet, which meant the top of the head was even higher. He was looking at something that stood well over eight feet tall and was built like a commercial refrigerator turned sideways. He said he stood there for what was probably two or three minutes, but felt like an hour. Just him and whatever that was, staring at each other across 50 yards of clearing. The fire between them. His gun was up, not aimed at it, just up, at a low ready. He said his hand was shaking and he couldn't stop it, and that embarrassed him because he'd been in dangerous situations before. He'd faced down aggressive bears. He'd been in confrontations in his career that could have gone sideways. His hands never shook. They were shaking now. He said his body had overridden his training and his experience and his pride and was responding at a level he couldn't control. A level below conscious thought. His body knew what it was looking at, even if his mind hadn't fully accepted it yet. And his body was terrified. Then the eyes moved. Not fast. Slowly. They shifted to the left, gliding smoothly and he realized the thing was walking. parallel to the tree line, not coming toward him, not retreating, just moving laterally, watching him the whole time. He said the movement was fluid and silent. He couldn't hear footsteps. He couldn't hear brush moving. For something that big, it made almost no sound. And the eyes stayed locked on him the entire time, reflecting that eerie white glow until they finally disappeared behind a thick stand of trees and were gone. He said he stood there with his gun out for another 30 minutes before he moved. His legs were cramping from standing rigid. His jaw hurt from clenching his teeth. And the forest had gone completely silent again. Whatever had been out there was gone. Or at least it wanted him to think it was. He did not sleep that night either. Two nights now with no sleep. And he was starting to feel it. The fatigue was mixing with the fear and creating something ugly in his head. A kind of frantic, desperate alertness that made his eyes ache and his thoughts race. He said he kept seeing those white eyes every time he blinked. Day four. Kevin said he should have left. He says that now, and he knew it then. But something kept him there. Part of it was stubbornness. Part of it was the job. If he came back after three days on a seven-day survey, there would be questions. There would be paperwork. There would be explanations required. And what was he going to say? He saw a pair of eyes in the dark. He heard some weird sounds. He found some rocks near his tent. They'd look at him the way people always look at you when you talk about this stuff. That slight change in their expression. That tiny flicker that says they've just reclassified you from competent professional to crackpot. He wasn't ready for that. So he stayed. Day four, he changed his survey route. He went west. away from the slope where the sounds had been coming from. The terrain was different over there, more open in places, with meadows breaking up the tree cover. He thought maybe he'd feel better with some open sky above him. And for a few hours he did. The sun was out. He found good bear sign. He was doing his job and almost feeling normal again. Then he found more tracks. Same as before. Bear feet. Massive. But this time there were several in a row, pressed into the mud along a seep spring, a trackway. He counted seven clear prints in sequence, and they told a story. Whatever made them had been walking on two legs, with a stride length of about four and a half feet. Kevin's stride at a comfortable walk is about two and a half feet, so this thing was moving casually, just walking along, and its stride was nearly double his. He measured the prints, same size as the one near the structure, 16 inches, give or take deep, heavy and in the soil next to one of the prints he found something else a partial hand print like whatever it was had knelt down or bent over and put its hand on the ground for balance he said the handprint was enormous much bigger than his hand and wider with thick finger impressions He said it looked almost human, but the palm was too broad and the fingers were too thick. He photographed everything, and then he got out of there, didn't walk. He said he moved at a pace just below a jog all the way back to camp. Three miles of rough terrain and he covered it in under 40 minutes. He was winded and sweating when he got back, and the sun was still up, and he still felt better being in his camp than being out there in those trees. That evening he seriously considered packing up. He sat by his fire and laid it all out in his mind. Broken trees twisted at eight feet. Teepee structure. Massive bare footprints and a trackway. A handprint. Rocks placed near his tent. Vocalizations that matched no known wildlife in the region. eye shine that was white elevated to 8 feet attached to something enormous standing in the trees he knew what all of this pointed to he wasn't stupid he'd been listening to my show for 3 years he'd done his own quiet research on the side he knew exactly what was going on something was out there with him something big something bipedal something intelligent enough to build structures and move rocks and vocalize in complex patterns and stalk a human being through the forest while barely making a sound. And it wasn't a bear. But he stayed. One more night, he told himself. He'd do day five and six, get enough data to fill out the survey, and then hike out on day seven like he was supposed to. Just keep it together for three more days. Night four. This was the bad one. This is where everything escalated. He said it started earlier than the previous nights, right around eight o'clock, just after full dark. He was sitting by his fire, eating dehydrated chili, and he heard a branch snap. Not a twig. Not a small stick. He said it sounded like a two-inch limb getting broken in half, and it came from the creek side of his camp. The side with the least visibility because of the brush along the creek bank. He stopped eating. Set his bowl down. Listened. Another snap. Closer. Then a sound like something heavy stepping into the creek. A splash. Not a delicate splash like a deer picking its way across. A heavy, deliberate splash like a person wading through in boots. Except there was nobody else out there. He was alone. Miles from anyone. Then the rock started. He said the first one came out of nowhere. It hit the ground about five feet to his right with a solid thud and rolled to a stop against his gear pile. A rock about the size of a softball. River rock. Smooth. just like the ones he'd found near his tent. Then another one. This one hit closer, maybe three feet away. He heard it whistle through the air before it hit. Whoever was throwing these wasn't lobbing them gently. They were putting some force behind it. He stood up, drew his weapon, pointed it toward the creek, yelled. He said he yelled something like, Hey, I'm armed. Back off. Which, when you think about it, is a perfectly reasonable thing to yell when rocks are being thrown at you in the dark. It's also a little bit absurd when the thing throwing the rocks might not understand English. But what else are you going to do? The rocks stopped. For about 30 seconds. And then a stick came flying out of the darkness on the opposite side, from the tree line ahead of him. A stick about three feet long and as thick as his wrist. It landed in the edge of his fire and kicked up a shower of sparks. He said he actually had to kick it out of the fire before it scattered the coals. Now there were two of them. Or at least, things were coming from two different directions. One from the creek side. One from the tree line. He was being flanked. And he knew it. The tactical part of his brain. The part that had kept him alive for two decades in the field. That part recognized what was happening. He was being tested. Probed. Something was figuring out how he'd react. What he'd do. How far they could push before he broke. More rocks. Three, four, five in quick succession. Some from the creek side, some from the tree line. They weren't trying to hit him. At least it didn't seem like they were trying to. But they were getting closer. Tighter. Like the circle was shrinking. Then the vocalization started. From the creek, a deep, aggressive barking sound. Short, sharp, explosive barks that he said sounded like a very large, very angry dog. but with a resonance and a power behind them that no dog could produce. And from the tree line, those pant hoots again. Faster this time. More intense. Escalating in pitch and speed like something working itself into a frenzy. Kevin said he backed up until his shoulders were against the rock face. He had his weapon in both hands, in a proper grip, and he was sweeping the tree line, trying to find a target. But there was nothing to see. Just darkness and firelight and shadow and those terrible sounds coming from both sides. He said the barking from the creek side got louder, got closer, and then he heard something crashing through the underbrush. Not walking. Running. Charging. Heavy footsteps pounding the ground. Brush snapping and breaking. And whatever it was, it was big enough and moving fast enough that he could feel the vibration in the ground through the soles of his boots. It came at him through a thick wall of salal and vine maple between the creek and the clearing. He couldn't see it, but he could hear it. And it was close. Maybe 20 feet. Maybe 15. The brush was shaking and snapping and this thing was coming through it like a freight train. And he had to make a decision right then. Right in that moment. And he made it. He fired. Four rounds. Quick succession. Into the brush. Toward the sound. Not aimed at a target because there was no target to see. Just fired at the sound. At the crashing. At whatever was about to come through that wall of vegetation and into his camp. The crashing stopped. Instantly. Like a switch was flipped. One second, something enormous was barreling through the brush. The next second, dead silence. He said it was so abrupt that for a second he thought he'd gone deaf. But then he could hear the ringing in his ears and the faint hiss of the fire and he knew his hearing was still there. Whatever had been charging had simply stopped. In its tracks. In the middle of that thick brush. Just stopped. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Uhm, I understand that you want to listen to your podcast, so I'll keep it short. Because if you think it's important to make a valuable choice, maybe the ASR can help. Now I hear you think, how then? Well, for example, when you're doing a expensive thing, you're doing a expensive thing. Want to know more about the insurance where expensive expensive damage is? Go to asr.nl slash duurzamekeuzes. This is ASR for you and a more expensive community. ASR does it. So, we can now listen to your podcast. He said he could taste metal in his mouth, that coppery taste you get from pure adrenaline flooding your system. His hands were shaking again, both of them this time. His whole body was shaking. His legs felt like they were made of wet sand. His vision was tunneled down to a narrow cone focused on that wall of brush where the sound had been. He waited, gun up, scanning, listening past the ringing in his ears for any sound, any movement, any indication of what had just happened. Had he hit it? Was it lying in that brush right now? Was it wounded? Was it dead? Or had it just stopped and was standing there 15 feet away on the other side of vegetation too thick to see through, deciding what to do next? He said those questions ran through his mind on a loop. The not knowing was almost worse than the charge itself. Because if it was still standing there, alive and now angry, and it decided to come through anyway. Four rounds hadn't stopped it and he didn't know if the rest of his magazine would either. From the tree line in front of him, far back in the darkness, a single long howl rose up. Low. Mournful. Different from the aggressive sounds he'd been hearing. This one had a quality to it that he struggled to describe. He said it sounded like grief. Like something in pain. Not physical pain, he clarified. emotional pain like a sound of distress a sound of loss it went on and on wavering dropping rising slightly and then fading out and then from even further away off to the south something answered a short series of barks followed by silence he said that mournful howl is the sound that wakes him up at night not the barking not the charge that howl because of what it might mean if he hit one of them and that howl was a reaction to it then he has to live with that and he does every day then nothing absolute nothing for the rest of the night whatever was out there pulled back whether it was because of the gunshots or because the charge achieved what it was meant to achieve which was to terrify him into leaving or because something had been hurt and the priority shifted from intimidation to something else he didn't know but they were gone, at least for the moment. Kevin said he sat against that rock face all night with his weapon in his lap and four rounds short of a full magazine. He didn't reload. He said he thought about it, but his hands were shaking too badly to manipulate the magazine, and he was afraid if he started fumbling with it, that's when something would come. So he just sat there with what he had and waited for dawn. He said the fire burned down to coals, and he couldn't bring himself to move to feed it. So the light slowly faded and he sat there in the dark, just him and the stars and the dying glow of embers. And he stared at the brush where that thing had charged and he waited. He said his mind went to strange places during those hours. He thought about his wife, thought about what she was doing right then, probably sleeping, safe in their bed. No idea that her husband was sitting in the dark in a forest clearing with a half-empty gun, surrounded by something that shouldn't exist. He thought about his kids. Thought about how close he might have just come to never seeing them again. And that thought right there, that was the one that broke through everything else. That was the one that made the decision for him. He said that night lasted a thousand years. When the sun came up on day five, Kevin made a decision. He was done. Survey or no survey, job or no job, he was hiking out. He'd figure out the paperwork later. He'd come up with an explanation. But he was not spending another night in that camp. He broke camp. And I want you to notice how he describes this part because it tells you everything about his state of mind. He said he packed his gear in about 20 minutes, a process that normally takes him an hour because he's methodical. He said he didn't bother organizing anything. He just stuffed everything into his pack and strapped it down and got moving. He left his bear bag hanging in the tree because he didn't want to spend the time getting it down. 22 years of backcountry experience and this man abandoned gear because he wanted to put distance between himself and that place. The hike out was six miles. He said it was the longest six miles of his life. Every step of it felt like walking a tightrope over a bottomless pit. He was exhausted from two nights of no sleep and running on pure adrenaline fumes, and his body was reminding him of that with every stride. His knees ached. His pack felt twice as heavy as it should have. His mouth was dry because he'd forgotten to fill his water bottles before he left camp, and he wasn't about to stop at a creek to do it. Every shadow in the trees could have been something standing there, watching him leave. Every sound made him flinch. A squirrel running across a branch sounded like footsteps. A grouse flushing from a thicket nearly gave him a heart attack. He said he kept his weapon drawn for the first two miles, which he's never done before on a trail. Not once in 22 years. Rangers don't hike with their weapons out. It's not how you move through the backcountry. But he wasn't a ranger that morning. He was a man trying to get out of somewhere alive. He said at one point, about three miles in, he heard something moving parallel to him in the trees. Off to his left, maybe 50 yards out. Moving when he moved. Stopping when he stopped. He said he stopped three separate times to listen. And each time, a few seconds after he went still, the movement in the trees went still too. And each time he started walking again, it started up again, matching his pace, keeping its distance, escorting him out, or stalking him. He still doesn't know which. He said he didn't look. He made a conscious decision to not turn and look into those trees. Because he was afraid of what he'd see. And he was afraid that if he saw it, in daylight, up close, that whatever thin thread was holding his composure together would snap. So he kept walking, eyes forward, gun in hand. Jaw clenched so tight his teeth hurt. About a mile from the trailhead, the movement in the trees stopped. Just stopped. He walked for another ten minutes and heard nothing. Whatever had been paralleling him had peeled off. Let him go. He said the relief was so intense he actually felt dizzy, like a weight had been lifted that he didn't know was physically pressing down on him. He said at one point on the hike he stopped on a ridge and looked back the way he'd come, and the forest just stretched out below him, endless, dark green, unbroken, and he felt so small. He said he felt like an ant trying to walk off a football field, and the thing that owned that football field was somewhere in the stands, watching. He said looking at all those trees, miles and miles of them, knowing what was down in there among them, changed the way he sees the forest. Used to be. Looking at that view filled him with pride. It was his workplace. His responsibility. His mission to protect. Now it filled him with something else. Not quite fear. Something deeper. A kind of awe that has teeth in it. A recognition that these forests are older than us and belong to something other than us. And we're only there because whatever else lives in them allows it. He made it to his truck. He said when he saw it sitting there at the trailhead, dusty and alone in that little gravel pullout, he almost broke down. He threw his pack in the bed, got in the cab, locked the doors, and just sat there for ten minutes with his forehead on the steering wheel. Breathing. Just breathing. Trying to slow his heart rate. Trying to stop the shaking. He said he could smell himself, and he smelled like smoke and sweat and something else. Something sour. The smell of sustained fear leaking out through your pores. Then he drove. Four hours back to the ranger station. And during that drive, he put together his story. The missing rounds. That was the problem. When you carry a service weapon, your ammunition count matters. If rounds are missing, there's a report. There's an investigation. There are questions. And he had four rounds gone from his magazine. He needed an explanation that made sense and wouldn't destroy his career. So he told them it was a bear, a large, rogue black bear that bluff-charged his camp. He said it came in aggressive, wouldn't back down, and he fired four warning shots to drive it off. Simple. Clean. Believable. It happens. Not often, but it happens. Rangers in bear country occasionally have to discharge their weapons. It's documented. There's a protocol. They asked him why he ended the survey two days early. He said the bear activity in the area made him uncomfortable continuing solo, and he wanted to recommend a two-person team for follow-up. They accepted that. They filed the report. Nobody questioned it. Why would they? He was a veteran ranger with a spotless record. If he said it was a bear, it was a bear. But it wasn't a bear. and Kevin has lived with that lie for almost nine years. He's carried it. It's weighed on him. He told me he's thought about that week every single day since it happened. He said sometimes he wakes up at night and he can still see those white eyes staring at him from the tree line. Still feel the ground vibrating under his boots as that thing charged through the brush. Still hear that mournful howl echoing through the darkness after the gunshots. He said the thing that haunts him most is not knowing if he hit one of them. Those four rounds went into thick brush in the dark. He has no idea if any of them connected. He said he thinks about that a lot. If he did hit one, did he kill it? Did he wound it? Is there something out there with a bullet in it because of him? And what would that mean? What would that change? He said he went back to the area once, about a year later, in daylight, in a vehicle, on a forest road that got him within about a mile of the old camp. He didn't hike in. He said he couldn't. He just stood at the edge of the road and looked into the trees and tried to feel something. Tried to sense whether it was still out there. He said the forest looked the same as it always did. Green and quiet and ancient and completely indifferent to his fear. He didn't go back again after that. There's a part of Kevin's email toward the end that I want to share. Not word for word, but the gist of it. Because I think it's important. He talked about what this experience did to him as a person. He said before that week, he loved his job. Loved being in the backcountry. Loved the solitude. Loved the feeling of being the only human for miles. After that week, the solitude felt different. It didn't feel peaceful anymore. It felt exposed. Like being alone in the woods meant being alone with whatever else was in those woods. And once you know something else is there, something that's bigger and stronger and faster and smarter than you in that environment, you can't unknow it. You can't go back to the way things were before. He said he still goes out, still does his job, still runs surveys and patrols and all the things a park ranger does. But he's never been the same. He said there's a part of him that's always listening now, always scanning, always waiting for those white eyes to show up in the tree line again. He said it's exhausting, carrying that kind of vigilance on top of everything else. It wears you down. It changes the way you move through the world. And he can't talk about it. That's the other thing. He can't tell his wife because he doesn't want to scare her. She already worries about him being out in the backcountry alone. If she knew what really happened that week, she'd never let him go out there again. And his buddies at work, the other rangers? Forget it. The culture doesn't allow for it. You don't walk into the break room and say, hey, I think a Sasquatch threw rocks at me and charged my camp. You just don't. Not if you want to keep your reputation. Not if you want to keep your job. So he kept quiet for nine years, listening to other people's stories on my show, knowing that every word they were saying matched his own experience, knowing he wasn't alone in what he'd seen and heard, but never saying a word himself, just carrying it alone. Until now. I want to say something to Kevin directly, even though he'll hear this when the episode drops. Kevin brother thank you Thank you for trusting me with this Thank you for writing it down and sending it in I know what that cost you I know how hard it is to take something you kept locked up for years and put it into words and hand it to somebody else. That takes guts. And coming from a man who spent 22 years in uniform, protecting the public and taking care of our wild places, that means more to me than I can express. I also want to say this. You didn't do anything wrong out there. Not a single thing. you responded to a threat to your safety the way you were trained to respond you discharged your weapon in defense of your life and whatever story you had to tell afterward to protect your career and your livelihood i don't judge you for that not for one second you did what you had to do and the fact that you've carried this alone for almost a decade tells me you're a better man than most and for those of you listening who are in law enforcement or park service or fire or military or any kind of first responder role and you've had an experience like Kevin's, my inbox is always open. You can find me through the website. You can reach out on social media. I don't use last names. I don't use specific locations. I protect my sources the same way I'd want to be protected. Because I've been where you are. I know what it's like to see something that doesn't fit into the world as you understood it and have to walk around afterward pretending like everything's fine. It's not fine. And you don't have to pretend with me. Now let me talk about a few things from Kevin's account that I want to highlight, because they match patterns we've seen over and over again in encounter reports. The tree breaks. Twisted trees, broken at eight feet, in a cluster. This has been documented by researchers across North America. The twisting is important. A storm doesn't twist a tree. Heavy snow doesn't twist a tree. Something with hands twists a tree. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. So, then you can listen to your podcast now. random debris. They're not natural deadfall patterns. They show intentional construction. Branches broken from living trees, arranged in a specific configuration. Is it a shelter? A territorial marker? A signpost? We don't know. But it's deliberate, and it keeps showing up. The footprints, 16 inches, consistent with thousands of track finds across the Pacific northwest and beyond. The depth of the tracks indicating extreme weight. The handprint indicating a primate with manual dexterity. These are physical evidence. They're in the ground. You can measure them. You can photograph them. And they keep showing up in exactly the places you'd expect them to show up if a large undocumented primate was living in our forests. The vocalizations. This is a big one for me. The howls, the whoops, the wood knocks, the pant hoots. Kevin described sounds that match reports from witnesses all over the country. And the pant hoots in particular are significant because that's a vocalization associated with great apes. Chimpanzees use pant hoots for long distance communication. It's a complex vocalization that requires specific vocal anatomy. And here's a park ranger in the Pacific Northwest hearing it in the middle of the night. Either every single one of these witnesses is independently fabricating the same obscure primate vocalization, or something is out there making that sound. You tell me which is more likely. And the rock throwing. Classic. Absolutely classic encounter behavior. Rocks being thrown into camps, at vehicles, at people. Not to injure, usually. Not direct hits. But close. Always close. It's intimidation. It's a message. It says, I know you're here. I can reach you. And I want you gone. That's intelligent behavior. That's problem solving. That's not some random animal stumbling around in the dark. I had rocks thrown at me twice while I was on expedition up in the Radium Hot Springs area with Todd standing in October of 2023. It's one of the strangest things that I've ever experienced. The bluff charge. This is where it gets serious. and I want to be real careful here because Kevin fired his weapon. That's a significant event. He was charged by something large enough to shake the ground, coming at him through brush too thick to see through. He couldn't identify his target. He fired in self-defense. And he's carried the weight of that decision for nine years. I was bluff charged by something I couldn't see when I was 12 years old. And let me tell you, that sort of thing sticks with you. Obviously, I have no way of knowing for sure. but based on everything he described, the escalating pattern of activity, the sounds from multiple directions, the rocks, the sticks thrown in the fire, and then the charge. I think he was being run off. I think whatever was out there had been watching him from day one, had been monitoring his movements, had been testing him with the vocalizations and the rocks. And when he didn't leave, the decision was made to force the issue. The charge was the final push. Get out, or something worse is going to happen. And Kevin responded the way any of us would respond when something the size of a small car is crashing through the brush towards you in the dark. He defended himself. And I think the gunshots were probably the only thing that stopped what could have been a catastrophic confrontation. The white eye shine. I saved this for last because it's personal to me. Kevin described exactly what I saw in 2024. Exactly. White eyes shine. Not amber. Not green. Not red. White. Luminous. High off the ground. Steady and unblinking. I've talked about this on Sasquatch Odyssey and as a guest on other podcasts many times. It's one of the most consistent features reported in close-range encounters. And it's one of the things that tells me we're dealing with something that doesn't match any known wildlife. No known North American animal produces white eye shine at eight feet off the ground. None. You can go through every field guide ever published. It's not in there. When Kevin described those eyes, I felt like I was back in Washington State. Standing in the dark. Seeing something that changed my life forever. And here's this man. A decorated park ranger with over two decades of service. Seeing the same thing. Same eyes. Same height. Same bone deep terror. Kevin's not making this up. I'm not making this up. The law enforcement officers and first responders and military personnel who've contacted me with their own experiences are not making this up. Something is living in these forests. Something big. Something intelligent. Something that doesn't want to be found, but makes itself known when we wander too deep into its territory. And people like Kevin are the ones who pay the price for that. They see it. They experience it. And then they have to go on with their lives and pretend it didn't happen because the world isn't ready to hear it. Because admitting what they saw would cost them their credibility, their careers, their standing in their communities. I get these emails and messages more often than you'd think. From rangers. From wildlife biologists. From law enforcement. From military personnel. From people who've spent their lives working in the outdoors and have seen things they can't explain and can't talk about. And the common thread, the thing that connects every single one of their stories, is the silence afterward. The mandatory, self-imposed, career-protecting silence. These are trained observers. These are people whose literal job it is to know what's in the woods. And they're seeing something that's not supposed to be there. And they're being forced to pretend they didn't. Think about what that does to a person. Year after year. Knowing what you know. Seeing what you've seen. And smiling and nodding when somebody at a dinner party makes a Bigfoot joke. Kevin lived that for nine years. Nine years of carrying this alone. Nine years of lying awake at night seeing white eyes in the dark. Nine years of going back out into those forests knowing what's in there with him. That takes a toll. It has to. You can't compartmentalize something like that forever. Eventually it leaks out. Eventually the weight of it finds the cracks. I think that's why he wrote to me. Not because he wanted fame or attention. He made me promise to keep him anonymous. He wrote because the weight had gotten to be too much. Because hearing other people tell their stories on the show, hearing me talk about my own experience, opened a door he'd been holding shut for almost a decade. And once that door opened a crack, everything behind it came pouring out. Nine years worth of fear and confusion and guilt and wonder. all of it compressed into a 12-page email that I've been reading to you tonight. But I'll tell you what, the world is changing. Slowly. But it's changing. More people are willing to listen now than ever before. More people are willing to consider the possibility that our understanding of what lives in the wilderness isn't complete. And every time someone like Kevin finds the courage to share their story, that wall of skepticism gets a little shorter, a little easier to see over. Every email like this, every phone call, every conversation, chips away at the idea that these encounters only happen to unstable people looking for attention. Kevin isn't unstable. Kevin is a 22-year veteran of the Park Service. And what happened to him is real. Kevin, if you're listening, you're not alone. You were never alone. And I don't mean that in a philosophical sense. I mean that literally. There are thousands of people out there who've had experiences just like yours. Rangers, cops, soldiers, hunters, hikers, regular people from all walks of life who've gone into the woods and come back changed. You're part of a community now, whether you ever put your full name to this story or not. You're one of us and we got your back. Stay safe out there, brother. And thank you for your service, both to the public and to the truth. That's Kevin's story. I want to thank him again for sending it in and for trusting me to share it. If this resonated with you, if you've got a story of your own that you've been carrying around, don't let it eat you alive. Reach out. I'm here. You can click the link right here in the show notes. Head over to our website. Scroll down to the About Me section. There's a button to leave me a voicemail. Or you can send me an old-fashioned email to brian at paranormalworldproductions.com. And Kevin, wherever you are right now, I hope you're doing alright tonight. I hope you know that telling your story mattered. And I hope, for the first time in nine years, that wait feels a little bit lighter. Until next time, stay curious, stay safe, and keep your eyes on the tree line. Good night, everybody. I understand that you want to listen to your podcast, so I will keep it short. Because if you think it's important to make a lot of choices, maybe AASR can help. Now I think, how then? Well, for example, when you're doing something to do with the things you love, you're going to be able to do more. Will you know more about the insurance where a duerzaam schaderairstel can be? Go to asr.nl. This is for you and a duerzame community. ASR does it. So, then you can listen to your podcast. Thank you. Do it. So, then you can listen to your podcast. I know you want to listen to your podcast, so I'll keep it short. Because if you think it's important to make a duurzaam choices, can Acer maybe help? Well, I think, how then? Well, for example, when it's a lot of stuff that you love are, you want to know more about the where a duurzaam schadehersetel can be? Go to acer.nl slash duurzamekeuzes. 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