The Bluff Overlook

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called AutoQuote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive Car Insurance quote with rates from other companies. So you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Try it a try after this episode at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible. Financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more. Plus you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it. So your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money when you bundle your home and auto policies. The process only takes minutes and it could meet hundreds more in your pocket. Visit Progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. 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 Backwood's Bigfoot Stories, where we share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness. Bigfoot, Dogman, 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. If you're coming into this cold, do yourself a favor and go back to the beginning. Everything in this series connects. The encounters stack on each other in a way that only makes sense if you've heard the full progression. And what Garrett's about to describe won't carry its real weight unless you understand what he'd already been through by the time it happened. Here's the short version for context. Over the previous two years, Garrett had experienced escalating contact with something on his remote mountain property in western North Carolina. Wood knocking from the ridge, 17 inch bipedal tracks, a visual siding at the meadow's edge, the systematic harvesting of his garden by a creature that defeated every countermeasure he set up, a trail camera image of an enormous hand, his brother's voice replicated and used to lure him into a ravine. And most recently, fresh snow revealing that something had been circling his cabin nightly, pausing at his bedroom window, pressing its hands against the walls and watching him sleep. Each encounter pushed the boundary a little further. Each one revealed something new about what the creature was capable of and how closely it had been observing Garrett's life. And throughout all of it, there'd been a thread running underneath the surface that Garrett hadn't pulled on yet. A thread that led back to Earl, the man who'd built the cabin and lived on that land for four decades. And the things Earl had said that didn't seem to mean much at the time, but kept gaining significance with every passing month. One of those things was a warning about a bluff. Here's what Garrett wrote, I want to go back to my first afternoon on the property. The day I met Earl, because something he said that day planted a seed I didn't recognize as a seed until it had already grown roots. We'd been sitting on the porch for a couple of hours by that point. He told me about building the cabin with Frank. He told me about Reba and her zeneas and the birdsongs she could identify from the kitchen sink. He told me about the well and the creek and the spring that never dried up. And somewhere in the middle of all that, during a pause where he was looking out at the ridge, he pointed northeast toward a spot I could barely make out through the trees. See that ledge up there? Where the rock sticks out above the timber. I squinted. About half a mile up the slope, maybe a little more. There was a rocky shelf that jutted from the ridge line. Grey stone, angular, partially covered in lichen. It rose above the surrounding canopy by maybe 20 or 30 feet. From the porch, it looked like a fist pushing up through the trees. Frank used to hunt from up there, Earl said. Fall mornings, he'd climb up before dawn and sit on the edge with his rifle across his knees and wait for deer. Said you could see three counties from the top. Burke, McDowell, and a sliver of Rutherford if the haze wasn't too bad. Good spot. Then his expression changed. It was subtle. A tightening around the eyes. A slight drop in his jaw, like he was about to say something he'd been debating whether to say. And in that voice he used for things that mattered. The flat, quiet register that stripped away inflection and left only the words themselves. He said, Don't go up there after dark. There's no good reason to be on that bluff after sundown. I waited for an explanation. None came. He picked up his coffee cup and took a slow sip and looked away. And the moment passed. We moved on to talking about the property boundaries and the price. And I filed his warning in the back of my mind alongside the other cryptic things he'd said. The mountains got its own rhythm. Reba's garden wasn't worth the trouble. Don't go to the bluff after dark. I didn't think about the bluff much during my first two years on the property. I had enough happening at lower elevations to keep me occupied. The knocking, the garden, the mimicry, the snow tracks. All of it took place within the immediate vicinity of the cabin. Within the first couple hundred yards of the meadow and the tree line. The bluff was half a mile away and six or seven hundred feet higher in elevation. Up on the ridge line and terrain, I rarely visited. It existed at the edge of my awareness the way a locked room exists in a house. You know it's there. You know it's probably fine. You just don't have a reason to open the door. That changed in the spring of 2016. The winter had been long. After the snow tracks in January, I'd spent the remaining cold months in a state of heightened awareness that was exhausting to maintain. I slept light. I checked the perimeter of the cabin every morning, walking the full circuit the way I used to check a job site before the crew arrived, scanning the ground for evidence, looking at the windows for smudges, studying the log walls for new marks. I kept the spiral notebook updated with every observation, every sound, every feeling of being watched that I couldn't attach to a specific stimulus. The knocking had been quiet since the night of the strikes that shattered the oak bark, and by March, it still hadn't resumed. The mountain was silent in a way that felt deliberate, like a conversation that had been paused mid-sentence. But after the snow tracks, I understood that silence differently. The creatures hadn't left for the winter. They'd just stopped making noise. The knocking, the garden visits, the mimicry. Those were the part of the activity that was above the waterline. Below it, invisible without the freak recording medium of nine inches of fresh snow. The physical visits had continued. They'd been circling my cabin, standing at my windows, pressing their hands to my walls, and doing it all without a sound. That knowledge sat with me through the remaining cold months and into the spring. It colored everything. Every quiet evening, every uneventful night, every morning when I stepped onto the porch and saw nothing unusual, I understood that nothing unusual didn't mean nothing happening. It meant the happening was invisible. The absence of evidence wasn't evidence of absence. It was evidence of competence. Cliff checked in on me weekly. He'd call on Sunday evenings and we'd talk for 20 or 30 minutes, and he'd ask the same question every time. Anything new? Most weeks, the answer was no. The creature, or creatures, had pulled back. Whether that was seasonal behavior, a response to the snow revealing their routine, or something else entirely, I couldn't tell. But the contact had stopped, and the silence that replaced it was both a relief and a source of low-grade anxiety. Relief because I could sleep more than four hours a night. Anxiety because I knew from two years of experience that silence on this mountain was never permanent. It was an intermission, not an ending. April brought warmth and green and the return of the birds. The whipperwills came back. The wood thrushes set up in the oaks near Bishop Creek and filled the evenings with that fluted song that sounds like someone asking a question they already know the answer to. Reba's zinnias pushed through the soil again, right on schedule, and I let them grow because at this point they felt like roommates I'd inherited along with the cabin. The knocking returned in mid-April. Tentative at first. A single strike from the ridge every few evenings, always after sunset, always from the northeast. The same direction as the bluff. I noted it in the notebook, but didn't react beyond that. I'd learned that my reaction seemed to influence the behavior, and I wanted to see what would happen if I simply listened without responding. Without walking toward the sound. Without knocking back. Without changing my routine in any visible way. What happened was escalation. By early May, the single strikes had become pairs. By late May, the pairs were being answered from the southwest, from down near the creek. The same call and response pattern I'd documented during my first summer. And by early June, the knocking was nightly again, coming from multiple directions, with an energy and frequency that surpassed anything I'd heard before. Something had changed, not in me, in them. I started thinking about the bluff. The thought crept in gradually, the way important thoughts often do. Not as a sudden decision, but as a slow accumulation of reasons. The knocking was coming from the ridge, from the northeast, from the direction of that rocky shelf Earl had warned me about. The tracks in the snow had come from the same general vector. The overnight circuit of the cabin had originated from the northeast treeline. Every approach, every sound, every piece of evidence pointed toward the upper portion of the ridge as the thing's primary corridor. It's highway. It's route between wherever it spent its days, and the vicinity of my cabin. The bluff sat right in the middle of that corridor. I wanted to see it. Not from the porch through binoculars, which is how I'd been looking at the ridge for two years. I wanted to stand on it. I wanted to understand the terrain that the creature used. I wanted to see my cabin from the perspective of something that had been watching it from above. And yes, I wanted to go there because Earl told me not to. I'm not proud of that. But I'd spent two years collecting fragments of information from a man who parceled out truth the way a miser parcels out coins, one piece at a time. Always less than the whole. Always leaving you to guess at what he was holding back. Every oblique comment Earl had made, every half warning, every carefully worded non-answer, had eventually been validated by something I experienced on the property. Reba's garden, the mountain's rhythm. The bluff warning was the last one I hadn't tested, and the researcher in me, the part that had been documenting and measuring and photographing for two years, needed to know why he'd said it. I decided to go on a Saturday in mid June, June 18th, 2016. I picked a Saturday because I wanted the full day, and I picked mid June because the days were long. Sunset wasn't until nearly nine and I'd have maximum daylight for the hike up and back. I also picked mid June because the forest would be at peak foliage, which meant maximum cover on the slopes, which meant anything moving below the ridge line would be harder to spot from below. That cut both ways. I'd be harder to see too. But I didn't go during the day. I went in the evening. I need to explain that decision because it's the one people are going to question the most, and they should. Earl specifically said, don't go after dark. And I planned my trip to arrive at the bluff right around sunset, which meant I'd be up there as the light failed and I'd be hiking back down in the dark. Here's my reasoning, flawed as it was. The creature was nocturnal, or at least crepuscular, most active around dawn and dusk and through the night. Every encounter I'd had, every piece of evidence I'd collected, pointed to a pattern of activity that began at or shortly after sunset. If I wanted to observe what was happening on that bluff, I needed to be there when the activity started. Going at noon on a Tuesday would have shown me a nice view and some rocks and nothing else. I also believed based on two years of contact that the creature wasn't aggressive toward me. It had circled my cabin. It had stood at my windows. It had called my name in my brother's voice. It had harvested my garden and turned off my radio and examined my trail camera. In all of that, it had never made a threatening move. Never charged, never bluff charged, never thrown anything, never vocalized in a way that communicated aggression. It was curious, intelligent and invasive, but it wasn't violent. That assessment turned out to be mostly correct, but mostly correct and entirely safe are very different things. And I learned the distance between them on that bluff. I left the cabin at 6.30. Bowie stayed behind. I debated bringing him for most of the afternoon, going back and forth on it while I packed my day pack and checked the batteries in the flashlight. Part of me wanted the comfort of having him along. Bowie was my anchor. He'd been at my side for every encounter, every sleepless night, every morning perimeter check. Having him there made the world feel more navigable. But ultimately, I decided against it because I didn't know what the terrain was like up there. And I didn't want him off leash on a cliff edge. Bowie was a bold dog. He'd chase a squirrel off a deck without looking first. A cliff face wouldn't occur to him as a problem until he was already over it. I left him in the cabin with food, water and his blanket by the hearth. He watched me leave through the front window, standing on his hind legs with his paws on the sill. And I could see his ears tracking me as I crossed the meadow and headed into the trees. He barked twice, not his alarm bark. His, where are you going without me bark? I felt guilty about it for the first hundred yards. The hike started on the game trail behind the cabin, the same trail where I'd found the first set of tracks in the clay after the rainstorm two summers earlier. The trail was well worn from deer and other wildlife, a narrow path beaten through the leaf litter that switched back up the slope in a series of gentle turns. I followed it up slope through the hardwoods, past the property line marked with my faded orange flagging tape and into the national forest. The transition was invisible on the ground, no fence, no signs. Just an imaginary line on a survey map that the forest paid no attention to. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Big Foot Stories. We'll be back after these messages. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast Smart Choice. Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive Car Insurance Quote with rates from other companies. So you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you. Give it a try after this episode at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home and more. Plus you can count on their great customer service to help you when you need it so your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. The evening was warm and still. Late June heat lingered in the hollows and the air smelled like heated earth and the sweet rot of last year's leaves composting beneath the fresh canopy. Lightning bugs were starting up in the meadow behind me. I could see their yellow pulses blinking in the grass as I climbed above the tree line and looked back. The cabin was already below me. The green roof glinting in the lateral light and the meadow was a bright oval surrounded by dark forest. From just a few hundred feet of elevation, the view was already better than anything I'd had from ground level. The trail thinned as the elevation increased, narrowing from a well-worn path to a faint track through leaf litter to, eventually, nothing. The deer had their own roots at higher elevation and they didn't align with mine. By the time I'd gained 300 feet, I was navigating by terrain alone, picking my way between trees and over rock outcrops, heading northeast toward the spine of the ridge. I used the compass occasionally to confirm my direction, but mostly I navigated by the slope itself, keeping the incline on my left shoulder and the drainage on my right. The forest changed as I climbed. The lower slopes were dominated by oak, hickory, and tulip poplar, the standard southern Appalachian hardwood mix that covered most of the property below 2,800 feet. But as I gained altitude, the composition shifted. More chestnut oak with its deeply furrowed bark and leathery leaves. More sour wood, thin and elegant, already showing the first hints of the crimson it would turn in October. The occasional cluster of table mountain pine clinging to the thinner soil on exposed rock faces. Their needles sharp and dense, their posture crooked from decades of wind. The trees were shorter up here, gnarled by weather, and the canopy opened in places to reveal glimpses of the sky, which was still bright at seven o'clock, the sun well above the western ridges. A roughed grouse exploded from the underbrush about 10 feet in front of me, and nearly stopped my heart. It rocketed upward through the canopy in a blur of brown feathers and wingbeats, and I stood there with my hand on my chest, breathing hard, waiting for the adrenaline to settle. That's the thing about hiking alone in a forest where you know things live. Every startled bird becomes a potential encounter. Every snap twig becomes a footstep. Your nervous system runs hot because it's been trained, through two years of experience, to treat every unexpected sound as significant. It took me about 45 minutes to reach the base of the bluff. The last 200 yards were steep, a scramble over exposed rock and through a stand of rhododendron that grew thick in the moist shade beneath the cliff face. The bluff itself was a shelf of gray granite, maybe 60 feet wide and 20 feet deep, thrusting out from the ridgeline like a diving board. The face below it dropped away in a near vertical cliff, perhaps 80 feet down to a talus slope of broken rock and scrubby vegetation. Beyond the talus, the forest continued downslope in a steep, unbroken descent toward a drainage that fed into Bishop Creek. I pulled myself up the last few feet of rock and stood on the bluff for the first time. Earl wasn't exaggerating. The view was extraordinary. Three counties spread out below me in every direction, the ridges folding into each other in shades of blue and green that faded toward the horizon. I could see the valley where Hendersonville sat, a smudge of development in Hayes 15 or 20 miles to the south. I could see the dark line of the Blue Ridge Parkway tracing the crest of the mountains to the west. And directly below me, maybe half a mile away and 600 feet lower, I could see my cabin, the green metal roof, the meadow, the workshop, the thread of Bishop Creek catching the low sun, my truck in the driveway, a dark rectangle on the gravel. The cabin looked small from up here, fragile, a single structure in an ocean of forest surrounded on all sides by wilderness that didn't know or care it was there. I'd always thought of the cabin as substantial, solid, a fortress of hand-hewn logs and stone. But from the bluff, it was a speck, a comma in a paragraph that stretched for miles in every direction. And the forest around it was vast, unbroken, dense and deep and ancient and full of things I couldn't see. I understood in that moment something I hadn't fully grasped from ground level, the creature's perspective. From up here, the cabin wasn't a barrier or a boundary or a fortification. It was visible, exposed, trackable. You could stand on this bluff and watch a person move between the house and the workshop. You could see the garden plot or where the garden had been. You could see the porch, the driveway, the path to the creek. Everything I did on that property, every routine, every habit, every daily pattern was readable from this elevation. The creature didn't need to be in the tree line to observe me. It just needed to be up here. And it had been up here. I knew that before I found the evidence because the evidence was everywhere. The surface of the bluff was weathered granite, too hard to hold footprints, but the margins told the story. Along the back edge where the rock met the slope, there was a strip of soil about two feet wide. In that soil, compressed and aged but still visible, were tracks, not one set, many overlapping impressions of bare feet. The same general dimensions I'd been documenting for two years, pressed into the dirt at various depths and angles. Some were fresh enough that the edges were still crisp. Others were weathered, softened by rain, weeks or months old. The soil along the back of the bluff was a palimpsest of visits, layer upon layer, a record of repeated use that went back further than I could determine. The bluff wasn't just on the creature's route. The bluff was a destination, a vantage point, a watch tower. I found other things. Scattered along the eastern edge of the shelf, there was a collection of stones, not a natural scatter, an arrangement. Twelve or fifteen rocks, varying in size from a baseball to a cantaloupe, stacked and grouped in a way that didn't match any geological process I was aware of. Some were stacked two or three high, balanced with a stability that suggested careful placement. Others were lined up in a short row, touching end to end, like a fence or a boundary marker. One cluster formed a rough semi-circle around a flat slab of granite that looked like it could serve as a seat or a platform. The arrangement wasn't geometric or symmetrical. It was loose, organic, the kind of thing that could have been dismissed as random if you looked at it for two seconds. But I'd spend enough time in the woods to know that rocks don't stack themselves and they don't form semi-circles on their own. Gravity doesn't stack things in neat rows. Water doesn't create balanced stacks on a flat ledge with no slope to concentrate debris. Something had gathered these stones and placed them here. Over time, repeatedly. I'd heard about this. In the research I'd been doing since finding your podcasts, I'd come across reports of stone structures associated with Sasquatch activity areas. Cairns, stacks, arranged piles. They show up in encounter reports from all over North America, from the Pacific Northwest, to the Ozarks, to the Appalachian chain. Nobody agrees on what they mean. Some researchers think they're territorial markers. Some think they're navigational aids like trail signs. Some think they're play, the way a child stacks blocks. Others think we're projecting meaning onto debris that the creatures moved for practical reasons we don't understand. I didn't know which interpretation was right. But standing on that bluff, looking at a semi-circle of stones arranged around a flat slab with a view of three counties, I had the distinct and unshakable feeling that I was standing in someone's living room. Dennis at the hardware store had mentioned once that old timers in the valley used to talk about rock piles on the ridges. He'd brought it up in the context of a conversation about property boundaries, saying that some of the early settlers used stacked stones as corner markers, but that you'd sometimes find stacks in places that didn't correspond to any known survey. He'd shrugged it off as random geology. Rocks do weird things on slopes, he'd said, but I remembered the way he'd paused before saying it. The same kind of pause Earl used before delivering one of his half truths. And I wondered now if Dennis knew more than he'd let on. There was also a local legend I'd picked up from a woman at the feed store in Chimney Rock, sometime during my second summer. She'd overheard me asking about wildlife in the area and had volunteered without prompting a story her grandmother used to tell about the Ridgewalkers. She said her grandmother had grown up on a farm near the base of the mountains in the 1920s and 30s and that the old people in the community used to warn children away from the upper ridges after dark. The Ridgewalkers she said were tall, hairy and quiet. They came down from the heights in the fall to take food from gardens and root cellars and they went back up in the winter. People didn't talk about them in town. They didn't report them to anybody. They just knew they were there, the way you know the creek floods in spring or the frost comes in October. Part of the landscape, part of the calendar. I'd filed that conversation away as local color at the time. Mountain communities are full of folklore and not all of it maps onto reality. But standing on the bluff, looking at the stone arrangements and the track filled margins and the view of my cabin half a mile below, the woman's story came back to me with a weight it hadn't carried before. Ridgewalkers coming down from the heights, taking food from gardens, going back up in winter. It was a description of exactly what I'd been experiencing, passed down through generations of mountain families who dealt with the same thing and developed the same response Earl had developed. Silence, acceptance, a quiet adjustment of daily life to accommodate something that couldn't be explained and wouldn't go away. I sat down on the flat slab which was warm from the afternoon sun and looked out at the view. The sun was dropping toward the western ridges. I estimated about 90 minutes of daylight left. The shadows were lengthening in the hollows below and the eastern slopes had already gone dark. The air was cooling, that transition from daytime warmth to evening chill that happens fast at elevation. I drank some water and ate the granola bar I'd brought and tried to absorb what I was seeing. A high point with a commanding view of the surrounding terrain, including my cabin. Evidence of repeated use over an extended period, stone arrangements suggesting habitual occupation, tracks in the margin soil indicating multiple visits. This wasn't a place the creature passed through on its way somewhere else. This was a place it came to. Sad at, spent time on, looking down at the same view I was looking at, watching the same cabin, watching me. I thought about Frank, Earl's brother, the Mason who'd built the chimney. Frank, who used to hunt from this bluff in the fall, sitting on the edge with his rifle across his knees. Had Frank seen them up here? Had he encountered evidence like what I was finding? Had he told Earl about it? And was that the root of Earl's warning? Don't go up there after dark, not because of the cliff edge or the difficult terrain, because of what uses the bluff after the sun goes down. I thought about Dennis at the hardware store. The day I'd asked about Earl's property, Dennis had said Earl was particular. He'd said Earl would size me up before saying 10 words. I'd attributed that to the reclusiveness of an elderly man who'd been living alone in the mountains. But maybe Earl wasn't sizing me up to see if I was a good buyer. Maybe he was sizing me up to see if I was the kind of person who could handle the truth about the property, and had decided I wasn't. Not yet. The sun touched the ridge to the west at 755. The light went from gold to amber to a deep orange that turned the rock face of the bluff, the color of rust. I watched my shadow stretch across the granite and reach toward the cliff edge, elongating as the sun dropped degree by degree. And then I heard it below me down on the tallest slope beneath the cliff face, a sound I'd never heard before in any of my encounters. Stones clacking, not rolling, not falling, clacking. The sharp, deliberate collision of one rock being struck against another. Two distinct impacts spaced about a second apart. The acoustic quality was different from wood knocking, harder, brighter, higher pitched. Stone on stone produces a sound that cuts rather than resonates. And these cuts were clean and precise and clearly intentional. I crawled to the edge of the bluff on my hands and knees and looked over. The cliff face dropped away beneath me in a near vertical wall of granite, fractured and fissured, with small ledges and clumps of vegetation clinging to the crevices. Below the cliff, the tallest slope fanned out in a broad apron of broken rock and scree, angling steeply downward into the tree line, about 80 feet below where I lay. The slope was in shadow. The sun had dropped behind the ridge, and the eastern face of the mountain was darkening fast. I could see the rocks clearly enough, gray and angular, scattered across the slope in the random pattern of material that had calved from the cliff face over centuries of freezing and thawing. But the shadows between them were deep, and anything standing on that slope below about mid height would have been difficult to see. I lay flat on the granite, my chin on my hands, and stared down into the gathering dark. The stone clacking came again. Two strikes, same interval. Coming from the lower portion of the tallest, near where the rocks gave way to the first trees, maybe 60 feet below me and slightly to the right, I still couldn't see anything. Then I heard movement, not footsteps, not the careful measured approach I'd heard from the tree line during the garden observation. This was displacement, heavy displacement, rocks shifting under weight, the grinding, scraping sound of stone surfaces moving against each other as something large repositioned itself on the slope. The kind of sound a boulder makes when it settles after being disturbed, except boulders don't settle repeatedly, and they don't settle in rhythm. Something was down there, on the tallus, in the shadow beneath my feet, and it was big enough that its movement rearranged the rocks around it. Stay tuned for more Backwood's Bigfoot Stories. We'll be back after these messages. Here's Ryan Reynolds from Mint Mobile, the message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Dismissed? Unheard? Or just plain tired of the old healthcare system? You're not alone. In fact, even today, 75% of women seeking care from menopause and perimenopause issues are left entirely untreated. But it's time for a change. It's time for Mitty. Mitty's not just a healthcare provider. It's a women's telehealth clinic founded and supported by world-class leaders in women's health. There are clinicians provide one-on-one, face-to-face consultations where they truly listen to your unique needs. They offer a full range of holistic, data-driven solutions that isn't one-size-fits-all care. This is care uniquely tailored for you. At Mitty, you will find that their mission is clear to help all women thrive in midlife, giving them access to the healthcare they deserve because they believe midlife isn't the middle at all. It is the beginning of your second act. Ready to feel your best and write your second act script? Visit joinmitty.com today to book your personalized insurance-covered virtual visit. That's joinmitty.com. Mitty, the care women deserve. I'm lying on my stomach on a cliff edge, looking down a near vertical face into a darkening slope, and something I can't see is below me making noise. I want to describe what that felt like because the physical sensation was as significant as the emotional one. My body was pressed against the granite, which was still holding warmth from the afternoon sun. My hands were flat on the rock, fingers splayed, gripping nothing but wanting to grip something. My heart was hammering, and I could feel the pulse in my chest where it pressed against the stone. Every muscle was engaged, every sense straining downward. My eyes were watering from not blinking, and my breathing had gone so shallow that I wasn't getting enough oxygen, which I only realized when my vision started to sparkle at the edges, and I had to force myself to take a full breath. The stone clacking came a third time, but from a different position, further left along the slope, 20 or 30 feet from the first location, two sources, two positions, the same sound. My stomach dropped the way it had in the ravine when Wade's voice came from two directions, because it meant the same thing it had meant then. There was more than one. I lay still and listened. The mountain was doing that thing it does when they're close. The pressurized silence, the absence of bird song and insect noise, the whipper wills that had been calling from the hollow below had gone quiet. The only sounds were the stone strikes, the rock displacement, and my own breathing. Then the displacement sound moved, not randomly, directionally. Whatever was on the lower talus was climbing, coming up the slope, toward the base of the cliff face directly below where I lay. I should have gotten up and left. I know that. Every rational thought I had was telling me to back away from the edge, stand up, and hike down the way I'd come while there was still enough light to navigate. But I couldn't move. Not because I was paralyzed by fear, though fear was certainly part of it. I couldn't move because something had appeared on the slope below me, and I couldn't look away from it. It stepped out of the shadow at the base of a large boulder about 40 feet below the cliff face, stepped out the way a person steps out of a doorway. One moment, the shadow behind the boulder was solid and featureless, just another dark pocket in the uneven terrain. The next, there was a shape occupying the space between the boulder and the cliff wall, and the shape was upright and massive and alive. The light was bad. Dusk in a shaded eastern exposure, with the sun already behind the ridge and the ambient glow fading by the minute. But I could see enough, more than I'd seen in any previous encounter, because the angle was different. I was above it, looking down at something that had always been at my level or in the shadows at the edge of my vision. This time, for the first time, I had the vantage. The shape was tall, proportionally similar to what I'd seen at the meadow and through the workshop window, but harder to judge exact height from this angle, because I was looking down at it rather than across at it. What I could judge was mass. This thing was built the way a gorilla is built, dense through the core, with a chest that was disproportionately wide for the height. The shoulders were enormous, sloping outward at an angle that suggested muscle attachment points on a skeleton built for a different kind of strength than ours. Not the angular bony shoulders of a lean person, thick rounded shoulders that blended into the neck and upper arms in a continuous slope of muscle and hair. The head was what stopped me. I could see it for the first time. Really see it. Because I was above it, and the angle revealed what ground level encounters had hidden in canopy shadow and darkness. The head was conical, not pointed, not flat. It rose to a slight peak at the crown, like a head that carried a sagittal crest running front to back along the top of the skull. The same kind of bony ridge you see on gorilla skulls, the anchor point for massive jaw muscles. The hair on the head was longer than on the body, four or five inches at least, and it hung down the sides and back the way uncombed hair hangs on a person who hasn't touched it in years. It was matted in places and loose in others, and it moved slightly in the faint evening breeze that was drifting up the cliff face. It was standing on the talus, on a slope that I'd had to scramble to climb that afternoon, using my hands and my boots, and every ounce of balance I could muster. Standing there as casually as I'd stand on a sidewalk. The rocks under its feet weren't shifting. It had found stable footing on a surface that was essentially a pile of loose rubble, balancing four or five hundred pounds on stones that had slid under my hundred and ninety, and it was holding that position without visible effort. Without even the micro adjustments that a human makes when standing on uneven ground. It was just there, planted, as fixed as the boulders around it, and it was looking up at me. I could see its face, not clearly, not in the kind of detail that would let me draw a portrait, but enough to register features. A broad, flat nose. A brow ridge that protruded far enough to cast a shadow over the eyes, even in the low light. A jaw that was wider than a human jaw, set forward slightly, giving the face a prognathous profile. The mouth was closed. The expression, to the extent that I could read an expression on a face that wasn't human, was neutral. Not aggressive, not afraid, not curious, just present, aware. The way a person looks at you when they've been expecting you and aren't surprised that you showed up. It was looking straight at me. Straight up, eighty feet, at the edge of a cliff where I was lying on my stomach with my face hanging over the void. And its eyes, which I couldn't see in detail, but could feel the way you feel someone staring at you in a dark room, were locked on mine. I have never, in my life, experienced the kind of fear I felt in that moment. And I want to be specific about why, because it wasn't the fear of being attacked or eaten or physically harmed. It was the fear of being seen, fully, completely. By something that wasn't supposed to exist, something that occupied a category my brain didn't have a file for. The creature below me was real. It was breathing. It was looking at me with eyes that processed my image and transmitted it to a brain that understood what it was seeing. And it wasn't running. It wasn't hiding. It wasn't flinching or retreating or breaking eye contact. It was standing on a rock slope in the gathering dark and looking up at a human being with an absolute lack of fear that communicated something I'd never felt from another living thing. I am not afraid of you. Not as a threat. Not as a dominance display. As a fact. The way a mountain isn't afraid of the weather. The way the ocean isn't afraid of the shore. The creature below me existed on a scale where my presence, my species, my entire category of being, didn't register as a threat. I was observed. I was known. And I was irrelevant to its sense of safety. That broke something in me. Not permanently. But in the moment, it broke the framework I'd been using to understand these encounters. Every previous incident, the knocking, the garden, the mimicry, the snow tracks, I'd been processing through the lens of a human observing an animal. I was the researcher. It was the subject. I documented. It behaved. The power dynamic, the framing, the narrative structure. All of it positioned me as the active party and the creature as the reactive one. Standing on that bluff, looking down into a face that looked back at me without the slightest flicker of concern, the frame inverted. I wasn't the observer. I was the observed. I hadn't hiked up to the bluff to find the creature's watchtower. The watchtower had been here all along. And the creature had been watching me from it for two years. And now I'd finally walked into the surveillance post and seen the monitors. And the monitors were pointed at my house. Then the stones clacked again, not from the creature below me, from the left, further along the cliff base. A second set of strikes, sharper and faster than the first, three impacts in quick succession. And the creature's head turned toward the sound slowly, without urgency. The way you'd turn your head if someone beside you said your name. I followed its gaze to the left, along the base of the cliff, and saw the second one. It was further away, maybe 50 yards along the cliff face, standing on a ledge that jutted from the rock wall about 20 feet above the tallow. Smaller than the first, not by a lot, but noticeably shorter and narrower in the shoulders. It was holding something in its right hand, a stone, roughly the size of a grapefruit. And as I watched, it struck the stone against the cliff face beside it. A clean, hard strike that sent sparks of rock dust into the air and produced the sharp clacking sound I'd been hearing. Stone knocking. The same principle as wood knocking, but using the cliff face as the striking surface. The smaller one was also looking at me. Same upward angle, same neutral expression, same complete absence of fear or deference. It held the stone loosely, arm at its side, and regarded me the way you'd regard a bird that had landed on a fence post. Interesting. Briefly, not important. Then from behind and below the second creature, a sound. Not stone clacking, not wood knocking, a vocalization. It started low. Below what I'd call a proper sound. More of a pressure change than a noise. A subsonic rumble that I registered first in my chest. A vibration in my sternum and ribcage. Before my ears picked up the audible component. The frequency climbed from that sub-base foundation into a guttural, rumbling tone that was more vibration than voice. The kind of bass frequency you feel in your bones before your ears properly register it. It climbed in pitch over maybe three seconds, rising from a hum to a moan to something that I can only describe as a howl that had been stripped of its wildness and replaced with something else. Purpose. Structure. The sound wasn't frantic. It wasn't agitated. It wasn't the startled cry of a disturbed animal or the territorial roar of something defending its ground. It was controlled. Melodic almost. A sustained note that modulated slightly as it rose. Shifting and timbre the way a human voice shifts when it moves between chest register and head register. With a tonal quality that suggested a vocal apparatus of enormous complexity and range. The note held for five or six seconds. During those seconds I could feel the granite vibrating under my chest. The air in the space between the cliff face and the talus seemed to thicken. The sound waves bouncing between the rock surfaces and amplifying in the natural amphitheater of the terrain. Then the note dropped back down the scale in a controlled descent. Stepped rather than sliding as if the creature was choosing specific pitches on the way down. The last audible portion was a low rumble that I felt through the granite beneath me long after it became inaudible to my ears. The subsonic component lingered for another two or three seconds after the audible sound had stopped. A phantom pressure in my chest that faded slowly, reluctantly, as if the rock itself was releasing the vibration one molecule at a time. A third voice. A third creature. Below and behind the other two. Hidden in the trees at the bottom of the talus. I never saw it, but I heard it. And in hearing it, I understood something that the visual encounters hadn't taught me. These things had language or something close to language. The vocalization I'd just heard wasn't a grunt or a scream or a howl. It was a statement with internal structure. A beginning and a middle and an end. Pitch variation that suggested meaning. And a delivery that was deliberately controlled. Whatever the third creature was communicating to the other two, it was doing so with a vocal instrument that was as far beyond a bear's growl or a coyote's howl as a symphony is beyond a car alarm. And the two I could see both oriented toward the sound simultaneously. The way people turned towards someone entering a room. Naturally, without startle. The big one below me rotated its head to the left. The smaller one on the ledge turned its body slightly. Both movements were calm, attentive, responsive. The way members of a family turn when someone speaks at the dinner table. Three, at minimum, on the slope below the bluff. Within 100 yards of where I lay with my face hanging over a cliff edge and fading light. The first creature, the big one directly below me, turned its attention back to me. It hadn't moved from its position. It hadn't shifted its weight or adjusted its stance. It had just turned its head toward the vocalization and turned it back. And now it was looking at me again with those shadow hidden eyes. And I could feel the full weight of its attention pressing down on me. The way sunlight presses down on a dark surface. Not with force. With heat. With a quality of presence that left nowhere to hide. I lay there for about two minutes. The light was going fast. The talus was losing definition. The shadow line was climbing the cliff face. And soon the creatures would be invisible. Standing in darkness at the base of a cliff I was lying on top of. And near total dark. I made a decision that was half rational and half animal. Stay tuned for more Backwood's Bigfoot Stories. We'll be back after these messages. This podcast is supported by Midi Health. Are you in midlife, feeling dismissed, unheard, or just plain tired of the old healthcare system? You're not alone. In fact, even today, 75% of women seeking care from menopause and perimenopause issues are left entirely untreated. But it's time for a change. It's time for Midi. Midi's not just a healthcare provider. It's a women's telehealth clinic founded and supported by world-class leaders in women's health. There are clinicians provide one-on-one, face-to-face consultations where they truly listen to your unique needs. They offer a full range of holistic, data-driven solutions that isn't one-size fits all care. This is care uniquely tailored for you. At Midi, you will find that their mission is clear to help all women thrive in midlife, giving them access to the healthcare they deserve. Because they believe midlife isn't the middle at all. It is the beginning of your second act. Ready to feel your best and write your second act script? Visit joinmidi.com today to book your personalized insurance-covered virtual visit. That's joinmidi.com. Midi, the care women deserve. Hi, my name's Andrew Dunkley, the host of the Space Nuts podcast. Hoping you can join me and Professor Fred Watson every week, in fact, twice a week for a regular dose of astronomy and space science. Yeah, we talk serious topics, but it doesn't always go according to plan. This could turn the whole understanding of the cosmological model upside down. Oh, Jordy's upset by that. No, you've hit the nail on the head there, I think. That's agreement. That's agreement, is that? Jordy, if I'm really sorry. Yeah, we do have a bit of fun, but we also talk serious topics every week. And our second show of the week is always dedicated to audience questions. We welcome those with open arms. So if you'd like to join us, Space Nuts, the podcast, you can download it from your favorite podcasting platform. See you soon. 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. I pushed myself back from the edge, slowly, inch by inch, keeping my body flat, and my movements smooth. I didn't want to make sudden movements. I didn't want to stand up and present my full profile against the sky, silhouetted for everything below to see. I didn't want to do anything that might change the equation between us, whatever that equation was. The granite scraped against my chest and belt buckle as I slid backward. My elbows dug into the rock. The sound of my own body moving across stone seemed impossibly loud in the silence. Once I was far enough from the edge that I couldn't see the slope below, and more importantly, they couldn't see me. I rose to a crouch. Then I stood. My legs were trembling so badly that I had to plant my feet wide to keep from stumbling. My hands were shaking. My mouth was so dry my tongue stuck to the roof of it. The muscles in my neck were rigid from the tension of holding my head over the edge for so long, and a sharp pain ran down the left side of my spine when I straightened up. The stone clacking came one more time from the ledge where the smaller one had been. A single strike, casual, almost conversational. I didn't look back. I didn't want to see them again. Not because I was afraid of what they do, but because I was afraid of what looking back would mean. It would mean engagement. It would mean acknowledgement that we were sharing this moment, occupying the same space on this mountain at the same time, aware of each other in a way that couldn't be undone. I wasn't ready for that. I was barely ready for what had already happened. I crossed the bluff to the back edge where the rock met the slope. The route back was the same route I'd come up, but the light was failing, and the terrain that had been challenging in daylight was treacherous and dusk. Shadows pooled in the low spots and made the ground look flat where it wasn't. Rocks that had been obvious footholds on the way up disappeared into the general darkening of the forest floor. Branches that I ducked under at eye level were now invisible until they snagged my pack or raked my face. I moved fast, faster than I should have on a steep slope with loose footing, but the adrenaline was driving my legs and my lungs, and the only thought in my head was down. Get down. Get below the ridge line. Get into the hard woods where the trees were familiar and the ground was beaten and the distance between me and the bluff grew with every step. I fell once. About halfway down, on a stretch of exposed rock that was slick with moisture from the evening dew, my right foot skidded out from under me and I went down hard on my left hip, sliding about four feet before a root cluster stopped me. The impact knocked the flashlight out of my hand and it tumbled down the slope ahead of me. Its beams spinning through the trees in a wild arc before wedging between two rocks about 10 feet below. I crawled to it, picked it up, checked it, still working. My hip was screaming. I'd have a bruise the size of a dinner plate by morning, but nothing was broken and I could still walk. The forest around me was silent, that total pressurized silence, but it was a different silence than the one I'd felt on the bluff. This one had movement in it. I couldn't hear specific sounds, no footsteps, no branch breaks, no breathing, but there was a quality to the dark around me that felt occupied, inhabited, as if the trees themselves were populated with things that were watching me descend and choosing to let me pass. I don't know how to explain that feeling to someone who hasn't experienced it. It's not paranoia. Paranoia is the unfounded belief that you're being watched. This was the founded certainty. The evidence-based, years-in-the-making, thoroughly documented knowledge that things lived in these trees that could see in the dark and move without sound and had been tracking my movements since the day I moved on to the property. I wasn't imagining their presence. I was accounting for it, the way you account for traffic on a highway, the way you account for currents in a river. It's there. You can't change it. You adjust. The last section through the Rotodendron Thicket at the base of the ridge was a controlled stumble, branches raking my arms and face, my boots sliding on the damp leaves underneath. I hit the game trail and followed it by feel more than sight, my flashlight beam bouncing off the trees ahead of me. The trail was blessedly clear and well-worn, and my feet found the packed surface with the relief of a driver hitting pavement after a dirt road. I broke out of the tree line and into the meadow at 840. The last color was draining from the western sky, a thin line of salmon pink along the ridge that faded to blue above and then to the deep purple of the coming night. The first stars were out. The cabin was a dark shape ahead of me. The porch light I'd left on glowing yellow in the single window by the front door. Warm light, human light, the oldest beacon in the world. I crossed the meadow at a jog, climbed the porch steps, unlocked the door, went inside, and closed it behind me, locked it, leaned against it, stood there with my forehead against the wood and my eyes closed and my heart pounding. Bowie was on his blanket by the hearth. He lifted his head, wagged his tail once, and laid it back down. Business as usual. The cabin smelled like firewood and coffee and the faint lavender of riba sachet behind the spice rack. It smelled like home, and standing in it, breathing it, feeling the warmth of the wood stove and the solid floor under my boots. I felt something that I can only describe as the gratitude of someone who has just come in from a world that is bigger and older and more populated than they ever imagined, and has found that the small safe space they've built is still standing. I sat on the couch and shook for about 10 minutes, not from cold, not from exertion, from the full body discharge of adrenaline and cortisol and whatever other chemicals flood your system when you spent 30 minutes lying on a rock above three things that could have pulled you off the edge without effort and chose not to. When the shaking stopped, I went to the kitchen and drank two full glasses of water. Then I sat at the table with the spiral notebook and tried to write down what had happened. I couldn't. Not that night. The experience was too fresh, too vast, too full of implications that I hadn't begun to process. I wrote a few lines, the date, the time, the location, the number of creatures, the stone clacking, the vocalization from the tree line, the face. The face was the thing I kept coming back to. That broad, impassive, upward tilted face looking at me without fear, without aggression, without anything I could name except awareness. I'd seen the other encounters and fragments, a silhouette at the meadow's edge, a shape moving through moonlit garden rows, a voice without a body, tracks without a trackmaker, but on the bluff I'd seen a face, features, the brow ridge and the jaw and the flat nose, and the conical skull with its crest of matted hair. Not a monster's face, not a movie creature's face, a face that belonged to something alive and ancient and utterly unimpressed by my existence. I've seen bare faces at close range. I've seen the flat alien stare of a copperhead at striking distance. I've looked into the eyes of feral dogs that were deciding whether to bite. Every one of those faces communicated something I could read, hunger, fear, aggression, calculation. The face on the talus slope communicated none of those things. It communicated presence, just that. I'm here, I see you, and I'm not interested in what you think about it. I closed the notebook and went to bed. Bowie took his position in the hallway. The cabin was dark, the mountain was quiet, and for the first time since I'd moved on to the property, I dreamed about them. Not a nightmare, not a fear dream. I dreamed I was standing on the bluff in full daylight and below me, on the talus slope, there were more of them. Not three, dozens. Standing among the rocks like they'd always been there, like the rocks themselves had come to life in taken upright form. They were all looking up at me. And in the dream, I sat down on the edge of the cliff and looked back at them. And the feeling wasn't fear. It was recognition. The feeling you get when you realize you've been sharing a room with someone for a long time, and you've only just now noticed they're there. I woke up at dawn feeling something I hadn't felt in months. Not peace exactly, but clarity. A settling. As if some internal argument I'd been having with myself since the first wood knock had finally reached a verdict. The argument had been simple. One voice said, this can't be real. Another said, it is. They'd been going back and forth for two years. The skeptic and the witness trading evidence and counter argument, neither one winning, the stalemate draining energy from everything else in my life. But the bluff had ended it. You can argue with sounds. You can rationalize tracks. You can explain away a shape in the dark at the edge of a meadow. You cannot argue with a face. You cannot rationalize three separate creatures standing on a slope below you, communicating with each other, regarding you with the common difference of something that has been watching you for years and has already made up its mind about what you are. They're real. There are more than one. They live on this mountain. They've been watching me since I arrived. And they're not going anywhere. That verdict brought a strange kind of calm, not the calm of safety, the calm of resolved uncertainty. I didn't have to wonder anymore. I didn't have to hedge or qualify or maintain the fiction that there might be a conventional explanation for what was happening on my property. The fiction was over. The truth was standing on a rock slope at dusk, looking up at me with eyes I couldn't see but could feel. And it wasn't asking for my permission or my belief. It just was. I made coffee. I sat on the porch. The morning was cool and clear. The meadow bright with dew. The ridge sharp against the sky. Everything looked exactly the same as it had every other morning for two years. But I saw it differently now. The tree line wasn't a boundary. It was a border. The ridge wasn't a backdrop. It was an occupied territory. And the cabin, my cabin, Earl's cabin, the thing built to last, was a small warm node in a network of activity that extended up the slope along the ridge, across the bluff, down the talus, to the creek, and back again. Night after night, season after season, year after year. I called Cliff that morning. I told him about the bluff, the tracks, the stone arrangements, the three creatures on the slope, the face looking up at me, the vocalization from the tree line, the stone clacking. He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, three, yeah, at the same time, same time, same slope, communicating with each other. I could hear him processing this, adding it to the growing weight of evidence that had been accumulating since the first phone call I'd made about the knocking. Garrett, he said, that's a population. That's not a stray animal. That's a group. I know. That changes everything. I know that too. And he was right. It did change everything. Because a single creature, however terrifying, however intelligent, is an anomaly, an outlier, something that can be explained away as a freak occurrence, a relic, a mistaken classification. But three creatures operating in coordination, communicating with acoustic signals, using a high point for surveillance, demonstrating family group behavior. That's a species. That's a social structure. That's a population occupying a territory with intention and organization. And they'd been doing it on this mountain, above my cabin, within half a mile of where I slept, for at least as long as I'd been there, probably longer, probably much longer. I went back to the bluff three more times that summer, always in the evening, always alone. Each time I made the climb with the same mix of trepidation and compulsion that had driven the first visit. And each time the bluff was empty when I arrived, no creatures on the talus, no vocalizations from the tree line, no stone clacking from the ledges below, just the view and the wind and the slowly dimming sky. But the evidence of use was always fresh. On my second visit in early July, I found new tracks in the margin soil along the back edge, at least two distinct sizes overlapping, pressed into the dirt since the last rain. The stone arrangements had changed. Rocks I remembered from my first visit had been moved to new positions. Two that had been stacked near the eastern edge were now separated and placed at opposite ends of the slab. A new stone, a piece of milky quartz the size of a softball, had been added to the semi-circle near the flat sitting stone. I photographed the changes and compared them to the images from June. The rearrangement was unmistakable. On my third visit, late July, the arrangement had shifted again. I was beginning to think of it as a living installation, a thing that was constantly being modified by hands I never saw. Each visit revealed a different configuration and while I couldn't decode any pattern or meaning in the placement, the fact that it changed consistently told me the bluff was being visited regularly between my trips. I was seeing snapshots of an ongoing process, like checking a garden once a week and seeing the plants in different stages each time. I never saw them from the overlook again, though I found fresh tracks each time. The bluff changed my relationship with the ridge. Before, the ridge line had been an abstraction, a dark line above the tree canopy where sounds came from and creatures approached from. After climbing it, standing on it, seeing the view, it became a real place with real geography. I could picture the terrain, I could visualize the root from the ridge down to my cabin. I could imagine, with uncomfortable clarity, what it looked like from up there on a dark night. The warm glow from the cabin windows, the shape of the roof against the meadow, the faint thread of smoke from the chimney, a beacon in the forest, visible for miles to anything with eyes and the elevation to use them. Stay tuned for more Backwood's Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. According to statistics, the average person walks past 36 murders in their lifetime. Unlike in Hollywood movies, they're not easy to spot. They seamlessly blend into our everyday lives, assuming roles as friendly neighbors, helpful colleagues or even the person lying beside you each night. Using a basket of research and primary audio, Morbidology is an award-winning true crime podcast that shines a light on the darkest corners of humanity. Through our investigation, we have attained evidence which we are not releasing at this time, which leads us to believe JoLeen is not alive. Join into Morbidology each week across all podcast platforms. On my fourth visit in August, I found something new. On the flat slab I'd sat on that first evening, the stone where I'd eaten my granola bar and looked out at the view and then watched the world tilt on its axis. Someone had placed a small, smooth river stone, not the rough granite that littered the bluff naturally and had broken from the cliff face over centuries of weathering. A water-polished stone, the kind you'd find in a creek bed after years of tumbling. Oval, about the size of an egg, with a surface so smooth it felt almost waxy under my thumb. It was a warm brown color with a single band of lighter mineral running around its circumference. It was sitting in the exact center of the slab, positioned with the kind of precision that doesn't happen by accident. Not balanced on an edge, not teetering, placed flat, stable, centered, intentionally. I looked around. The bluff was empty. The tallow was quiet. The forest below was still. The evening was calm, the air barely moving, and the only sound was a distant crow calling from somewhere in the valley. I picked up the stone. It was warm from the sun, smooth, dense, heavier than it looked. The kind of stone that feels good in your hand, the kind you'd skip across a pond as a kid or put in your pocket for no reason, except that the weight and texture of it felt satisfying. It fit my palm perfectly, and when I closed my fingers around it, the warmth of the stone transferred into my skin like a handshake. I stood there holding it for a long time, turning it over, looking at the mineral band, feeling the polish. This stone had come from a creek. There was no creek on the bluff. The nearest water was Bishop Creek, half a mile below and 600 feet lower in elevation. Somebody had carried this stone from the creek to the bluff, climbing the same slope I climbed, navigating the same terrain, and placed it on the exact spot where I'd been sitting during my previous visits. I don't know what it means. I don't know if it was left for me specifically, or if I'm projecting attention onto the random migration of a rock from a creek to a cliff top. Rocks can travel. Animals move things. Floods carry debris to strange places. There are explanations that don't involve a creature making a deliberate offering. But I know the stone wasn't there on my second visit, and I know it wasn't there on my third, and I know it was there on my fourth, and I know it was placed on the exact spot where I'd sat, and I know that the creek is half a mile away and 600 vertical feet below. I put the stone in my pocket and carried it home. It's on my nightstand right now, next to the flashlight and the alarm clock. I pick it up sometimes when I can't sleep. I hold it in my hand and feel the smoothness and the weight and the warmth it absorbs from my skin, and I think about someone carrying it up a mountain and placing it where they knew I'd find it. Earl passed away in September of 2016. The assisted living facility in Myrian called me on a Tuesday morning. A nurse named Donna, who'd been taking care of him for the past year, said he'd gone in his sleep the night before. She said he'd eaten dinner, watched some television, and told her good night the way he always did, with a nod and a half smile that suggested he had more to say, but had decided against it. Then he'd gone to bed and didn't wake up. 84 years old, the last of the Jessups on that piece of land, or off it. The funeral was small. I drove to Myrian on a gray Thursday morning, the kind of overcast day where the clouds sit on the ridgelines like hats, and the valleys fill with a soft, even light that makes everything look like a painting done in muted colors. Dennis from the hardware store was there, in a suit that was too big for him, standing at the back of the chapel with his hands folded. A few people from the valley who'd known Earl and Reba. A couple I didn't recognize who turned out to be Reba's niece and her husband from Morganton. A minister who said kind things about a man he'd probably only met a handful of times, and who described Earl's life with the generic warmth that ministers use when they don't really know the deceased, but want to honor them anyway. I sat in the front pew because nobody else did, and because I felt like someone who'd lived in Earl's cabin and walked his land and drunk water from his well owed him the respect of sitting close. After the service, I went back to the cemetery on the property. I drove up the gravel road through the gate, past the cabin, and parked near the wrought iron fence on the northeast corner. The headstones were there in their familiar arrangement, Reba, Earl's parents, Frank, the brother who'd built the chimney and hunted from the bluff and died of emphysema in 89. And now a fresh mound of earth beside Reba's stone, where Earl had been laid that morning by a crew from the funeral home while I was at the service. His headstone was already set. He'd ordered it months ago, Donna told me. Paid for it himself, picked the stone, wrote the inscription. It was simple and plain, the same gray granite as Reba's, with his name, his dates, and the words. He built it to last. I stood at his grave for a long time. The mountain was quiet around me. The oaks above the cemetery were still green, late summer holding on. But a few of the sour woods had started to turn, their leaves blushing crimson at the edges. A breeze came through and moved the branches and dropped a single acorn onto the wrought iron fence with a ping that sounded like a tiny bell. And I talked to him, not out loud, in my head. I told him I understood now. I told him I knew why Reba's garden wasn't worth the trouble. I told him I knew why the mountain had its own rhythm, and that I'd been listening to that rhythm for two years and was only just beginning to learn the language. I told him I knew what was on the bluff and why he'd warned me not to go there after dark. And I told him I wished he'd just said it. Straight out, clear and direct. The way he would have told me the well pump was on the fritz or the porch needed reframing. Just looked me in the eye that first afternoon and said, there are things on this mountain that aren't in any book. They're tall and they're smart, and they're not afraid of us. They use the bluff as a lookout. They walk past your cabin at night. They've been here longer than the cabin, longer than you, longer than me, and they're not leaving. But Earl hadn't said that. He'd said it sideways, in half sentences and warnings and careful omissions, because he was a man of his generation and his culture. A man who'd lived through decades of social pressure to keep quiet about things that didn't fit the accepted version of reality. In rural Appalachia, in the communities where Earl had spent his entire life, admitting you'd seen something in the woods that couldn't be explained was a fast track to isolation. People would smile to your face and whisper behind your back, and the whispers would follow you for the rest of your days. Earl had protected himself in Reba by keeping their mouths shut, and he'd tried to protect me by dropping hints he hoped I'd be smart enough to follow without him having to say the words out loud. I was smart enough, just slow. Two years, slow. But I was catching up. I put my hand on Earl's headstone. The granite was cool under my palm. I left it there for a few seconds, the same way he'd put his hand on my shoulder the first day we walked the property together. And I said the only thing that seemed adequate. Thank you. Then I got in my truck and drove back to the cabin and fed Bowie and sat on the porch and watched the sun go down and listen to the mountain breathe. I'll leave it here. The next part of my story is about the dogs, specifically about the night Bowie and a second dog I'd taken in. Chased something into the woods and didn't come back, and what I found when I went looking for them. That story takes a turn I wasn't ready for. It takes all of this into a place that I still have trouble talking about. But I'll tell it. Because you've listened this far, and you deserve to hear what happened next. Garrett. That was story five from Garrett. And I have to tell you, of everything Garrett has shared with me across these 10 accounts, this is the one I've gone back to the most. Not because it's the scariest. It's not. Not because it's the most dramatic. Story three with the mimicry probably holds that title. I keep going back to this one because of what it implies. Three creatures on a talus slope below a high point that overlooks Garrett's cabin using stone on stone communication, demonstrating group coordination, and displaying a complete absence of fear in the presence of a human observer. That last part is what keeps me up at night. Because in my experience, fear is the primary behavioral driver in almost every wildlife encounter. An animal sees a human and it runs or it threatens or it freezes. Even apex predators, bears, mountain lions, they register human presence as a variable that changes their behavior. We matter to them. We're a factor in their calculations. What Garrett described on that bluff is something that doesn't treat us as a factor at all. Something that looked at him the way he might look at a bird on a fence post. Briefly interesting, not important. That's not the behavior of an animal that exists at the margins of survival, dodging humans and hiding from detection. That's the behavior of something that considers itself the dominant presence in its territory and regards us as background noise. I've spoken with researchers who believe these creatures are rare, isolated, barely hanging on at the edges of the wilderness. Garrett's account challenges that assumption directly. Three individuals at one location, communicating, coordinating, surveilling from a high point. That's not a remnant population. That's a thriving one. Next time, Story 6. The Night the Dogs Didn't Come Back. And based on what Garrett's told me, that one's going to be hard to hear. Stay safe, stay curious, and I'll talk to you next time.