7 True Mountain Horror Stories | "Something Was Following Us Through the Fog" 😱 That Will Make Every Mountain Trail Feel Haunted

Hello everyone and welcome back to horror stories. I know many of you use these episodes to fall asleep so before you drift off, I'd love it if you could leave a comment letting me know where you're listening from around the world. Also don't forget to like and subscribe if you're enjoying the episodes. 31 After my divorce in 2012, rafting around Mount Hood became my way of getting away from everything. Each weekend that June I drove out of Portland and threw myself into the rapids, letting the icy spray rinse away whatever turmoil I had left back in the city. My coworker Beth had been urging me to come along with her usual rafting group. On a Thursday afternoon with the forecast predicting clear weather all weekend, I finally agreed. Thanks of us gathered at the launch site near government camp, me, Beth and her boyfriend Nathan, a Portland couple named Grayson Frank, and Oliver who worked at the outdoor equipment store where we had rented our gear. Oliver had a pair of unnerving green eyes that never seemed to settle on whoever he was speaking to. His gaze constantly drifted toward the trees or lingered over the water, as though he were deciphering a map nobody else could see. The white river was muddy that morning, its current swirling with far more debris than normal, snapped branches, slabs of bark, and even what appeared to be old pieces of lumber rolled through the water. Our guide Chuck repeatedly glanced at his phone, mumbling about weather updates from farther upstream, still the rafting company already had our payment, and none of us wanted to be the frightened one who decided to pull out. He set off at about 10 am, for roughly the first hour, the trip seemed ordinary enough. Nathan made jokes about how hopeless he was with a paddle, and Gray squealed whenever we passed through even a small stretch of rapids. Oliver sat quietly at the rear of the raft, his green eyes watching the canyon walls climb around us. Then the river shifted from brown to a dense color that was nearly black, and within minutes the temperature fell by 15 degrees. It began shouting instructions, ordering us to paddle as hard as we could toward the right bank. But by then the current had accelerated into something unlike anything I had ever felt. The raft swung sideways, I saw Frank's paddle torn out of his grip as if it were nothing more than a tooth pick. Grace's screams had changed too. There was actual panic in them now, none of the light-hearted excitement from before. The thunder of the water grew overwhelming. It wasn't coming only from the river around us. Something enormous was rushing down from upstream. I glimpsed a towering surge of brown water with whole trees caught inside it just before a raft overturned. The blow was like being struck by a car. Freezing water drove into my mouth and nose, rolling me through total darkness. I remember my helmet striking rocks with a cracking sound, a flash of Oliver's green windbreaker passing me, and then nothing except violent swirling confusion. When I finally surfaced choking and struggling for breath half our group had disappeared, Beth was hanging onto an upside-down raft perhaps 50 feet downstream. Nathan was nowhere I could see. Neither Frank nor Grace was visible at all. Oliver though was beside me. His arm was hooked tightly around my life vest, and he was hauling me toward shore with strength I wouldn't have expected. The current fought to drag us back into the main channel, where wreckage as large as cars rolled past. We crashed against a concrete structure extending from the river bank. Oliver pushed me onto it, then dragged himself up behind me. I couldn't stop shaking. My teeth knocked together so violently that I was afraid they might break. A deep cut crossed Oliver's forehead and blood streamed down his cheek, diluted by the river water. The concrete surface beneath us was actually the entrance to what looked like a drainage tunnel. It was perhaps eight feet across and ran straight into the hillside. Oliver was drawing breath in short strained bursts. When he attempted to get upright his left leg gave way beneath him. No bone had pierced the skin, but below the knee. His leg bent at an angle it never should have. The noise he made wasn't exactly a scream. It sounded more like air escaping under pressure from a punctured tire. That was when the rain began. It didn't fall in ordinary drops. It came down in curtains so heavy I could hardly see ten feet ahead. The river was rising before our eyes. Its brown water reaching farther up the concrete platform every few seconds. We had to get undercover quickly, and the tunnel was the only shelter available. I pulled Oliver's arm across my shoulders and dragged him half supported through the opening. Inside the temperature fell another ten degrees. Our voices bounced through the darkness with a strange echo. Around twenty feet in I discovered a dry shelf where debris from previous floods had piled up. Plastic bottles, broken pieces of styrofoam, and snarls of fishing line. I eased Oliver down onto it and checked my phone. There was no reception, only that taunting message saying emergency calls were the sole option. Oliver's skin was turning grey. He kept murmuring that he could see lights farther inside the tunnel. I assumed he was slipping into shock until I looked over my shoulder and noticed them myself. Dim yellow patches of light shown from somewhere deep in the darkness, resembling the glow of old industrial fixtures. Coming in me said to remain where we were and wait for someone to rescue us. But Oliver needed proper medical care. His breaths were growing quick and shallow. When I touched his forehead, his skin was chilly and clammy, even while blood continued leaking from the wound. I told him I was going to investigate the lights. Perhaps there was a maintenance doorway, or a phone we could use to call for help. After approximately a hundred feet, the tunnel bent, and the concrete changed to much older construction. Red brick formed the walls, with corroded metal brackets spaced every few yards. The yellow glow became stronger. Now I could hear other sounds as well, a soft electrical drone in what seemed to be dripping water somewhere in a broad open space. The passage widened into a chamber with three additional tunnels branching away from it. Rusting mining equipment rested along the walls. There were rails for carts, pickaxes and helmets that still had carbide lamps fixed to them. A makeshift string of construction bulbs ran overhead, providing the light. Their heavy orange cables wound toward the tunnel on the far left. The dusty ground was covered in fresh footprints. There were dozens in different sizes, including prints left by bare feet. Then the odor reached me. Human excrement, spoiled food, and another smell underneath them both. Clinged sugary and chemical, like antifreeze mingled with decomposition. I followed the illuminated passage on the left and entered what appeared to have once been a miner's bunkhouse. Metal bed frames stood in rows against the walls, but the room was clearly still being used. Most of the frames held grimy mattresses, with sleeping bags and blankets in assorted stages of deterioration. Used syringes were scattered across the floor beside glass pipes and blackened spoons. It stopped my breathing, though, as the wall at the back. Photographs, dozens of them, fastened there with rusty nails. Missing person notices driver's licenses, social security cards. Some appeared fairly new. Others had faded or suffered damage from water. A wet rattling cough sounded somewhere farther inside the complex. Voices followed it, several people speaking with slurred words that overlapped one another. With shaking hands I took a driver's license off the wall. I recognized the woman in the photograph. She was from Gresham and advanced on a hiking trip three months earlier. Her disappearance had received extensive coverage on the local news. Other noises followed, feet dragging along the floor, metal grating over stone. I began retreating toward the passage I had entered through, but footsteps were approaching from that direction as well. Whoever they belonged to was now between Oliver and me. I slipped behind an overturned mining cart just as two people stepped out of the shadows. One was a woman who looked to be in her 40s dressed in several layers of dirty clothing. The person with her was much younger, perhaps 20, with infected sores spread across his neck and arms. They placed their feet cautiously like people finding their way through poor light, despite the bulbs illuminating the room perfectly well. The woman paused beside a mattress and reached underneath it. She brought out a transparent plastic bag stuffed with wallets, wristwatches, and rings. Emptying everything onto the bed, she began separating the items with the efficiency of someone who had done it many times. The younger man drifted toward a corner. Only then did I notice a number of coolers piled against the wall. He lifted the lid of one and the odor that poured out brought bile into my throat. And behind the cart I couldn't make out what the cooler held. The woman sharply ordered him to shut it. She said they had to wait until the others returned from the river. She said floods always offered opportunities, and the group that day had been ideal. Taurus carrying decent equipment and likely cash as well. My phone was still tucked in my pocket. Carefully drew it out, desperate to run. record some evidence of what I was witnessing, but the light from the display would expose my hiding place immediately. More voices traveled in from the main passage. It sounded like three people coming back, perhaps four. The woman shouted a question to them, asking whether they had discovered anyone else. A man answered that they had hauled two more people out of the river, but just one of them was breathing. My heart pounded against my chest. I could hear something heavy being dragged over the ground. I needed to reach Oliver again. With the sounds covering my movements I crawled away from the cart and eased into another passage, hoping it would curve around to the spot where I had left him. This tunnel was older and tighter, reinforced with wooden beams that appeared close to giving out. After what seemed like hours, though it was probably only a few minutes, I caught the sound of Oliver struggling to breathe somewhere ahead. He hadn't moved from where I'd put him. His eyes, however, had rolled upward until only the whites showed. I gently shook him and whispered his name. For a moment his gaze returned and met mine. Then I heard footsteps inside the main drainage tunnel. Several people were approaching. The decision I made next has never stopped haunting me. Oliver had no chance of moving quickly enough. If I attempted to carry him, they would catch us both. And a heap of debris I located a small recess. I tucked him into it as deeply as I could and concealed him beneath rubbish and old tarps. I told him I would return with help, even though we both understood that it was a lie. Then I ran. I headed toward the opening in the flood outside, instead of farther into the underground complex. Behind me the voices rose. They sounded furious as they realized somebody had been inside their living space. I rushed out of the tunnel and saw how much higher the river had climbed. Torrents of brown water raced by only a few feet from the entrance. I jumped without stopping to think. The flow seized me at once. It hurled me against stones and rolled me through the dark boiling water. I sank beneath the surface twice, then a third time, my lungs aching desperately for air. At last the river flung me onto a gravel bar a mile downstream. That was where a search and rescue crew discovered me. Twenty minutes afterward they located Beth and Nathan alive, holding onto trees two miles downstream. Frank's body was found three days later. Grace and Oliver were never located. I gave the police the entire account, the drainage passage, the old mine complex, its inhabitants, the wall covered with missing people's documents and pictures, and the coolers. I showed them the driver's license I had taken to. They dispatched teams to examine the area. According to them, however, the tunnel I described had been closed off in 2003 following a structural collapse. The opening I had entered was entirely underwater. Weeks later, once the floodwaters had gone down, all they discovered was smooth concrete in the exact place where I insisted the entrance had stood. The driver's license was authentic. But they told me, I might have picked it up anywhere among the debris carried by the flood. They found no indication that squatters had been there, no mining complex, no photographs attached to any walls. In the official report Oliver is recorded as a flood casualty presumed to have drowned. They proposed that the trauma, together with hypothermia, had made me hallucinate. But I know what I witnessed underground. Because when the rain comes down hard enough, I find myself thinking about those coolers, and why the woman hadn't wandered one open before it was time. And I understand why Oliver never got out. Story 2 The Appalachian Mountains have always drawn me in. There's something about those ancient ridgelines and mornings wrapped in mist that leaves you feeling connected to something much greater than yourself. In 2018, I was making a living as a freelance graphic designer, and I was wearing myself out with an endless stream of corporate assignments, and late night spent looking at computer screens. My girlfriend, Lisa and I agreed that we needed a proper escape. A quick weekend in Asheville wouldn't be enough. We wanted to spend some real time out in the wilderness. We chose Mount Mitchell because it was the tallest peak east of the Mississippi, and neither of us had visited it. Our idea was straightforward. Spend three days hiking, sleep at the designated campsites, and step away from everything digital. We left Charlotte on a Thursday morning and early October. The foliage had only just begun changing color, and the temperatures were still pleasant enough to make camping comfortable. The first indication that this wouldn't be the trip we had imagined came in the parking lot at the trailhead. While we sorted our backpacks and checked our drinking water one more time, I spotted a man near the edge of the woods, perhaps thirty feet from us. He had unwashed out jeans in a deep green flannel shirt. There was no backpack, and he wasn't wearing hiking boots. Instead he had ordinary work boots that appeared thoroughly worn. His gray hair fell below his shoulders in a disheveled mass. His face was so weather beaten that I couldn't begin to place his age. He might have been forty. He might just as easily have been sixty. And bothered me most was his complete lack of movement. He simply stood there observing us, his light blue eyes seemingly never blinking. Lisa hadn't seen him yet. She was occupied with tightening the straps on her pack. By the time I nudged her and pointed him out, he had already turned toward the forest and disappeared among the trees. He walked with a peculiar flowing ease that seemed at odds with his rugged appearance. We got on to the trail around noon following the deep gap trail through thick stands of spruce and fur. For the first two hours everything was exactly what we had wanted. The air was cool, birds called through the woods, and pine needles made a satisfying crunch beneath our boots. Lisa repeatedly paused to take pictures of mushrooms and logs blanketed in moss. I concentrated on the steady pattern of my footsteps and the feeling of breathing fresh mountain air. Nearly three miles along we came to a little clearing overlooking distant summits and stopped for a drink. That was when I noticed him again. The man from the parking area stood on a rocky ledge about fifty yards uphill. He wore the same clothes, held himself in the same position, and watched us with that same unwavering stare. What made it so strange was that we had maintained a fairly good pace. The trail was narrow and nobody had passed us. This time Lisa noticed him as well. We looked at each other, equally puzzled. "Hey there," I called in a friendly voice, lifting my hand away. He gave no answer. He remained motionless like a figure sculpted out of the mountain itself. Maybe he knows a shortcut. Lisa offered as we put our things away and resumed walking, trying to find an ordinary explanation. But taking a shortcut through that landscape hardly seemed possible. The tangles of Rhododendron filled the undergrowth, and the hillsides were so steep that forcing a path through them would have been both draining and hazardous. We continued along the trail, each of us occasionally looking over a shoulder. The man had disappeared once more. As we approached the ridge, the climb became increasingly demanding. The path zigzagged through stretches where we had to grab roots and rocks to pull ourselves upward. My legs ached, and Lisa was breathing heavily by the time we came to a more level area beside a narrow stream. We had been walking for close to four hours and decided to refill our bottles with filtered water and have a few energy bars. I was crouched beside the stream working the pump filter to fill our bottles. When Lisa seized my arm with enough force to hurt, I followed the direction of her pointing hand. The man was on the other side of the stream, no more than 20 feet away, partly concealed by the trunk of an enormous hemlock. This time he was doing more than staring. He was smiling. The expression spread slowly and deliberately across his face, exposing discolored yellow teeth. His clothing looked just as it had before. There wasn't any visible sweater dirt on it, despite whatever road he had taken through that punishing terrain. I rose carefully, never taking my eyes off him, and called again, raising my voice. Do you need help? Are you lost? He didn't say a word. That horrible smile simply brought in a little. Lisa whispered that we needed to get away immediately. I agreed. We hurriedly gathered our belongings, leaving the water filtering unfinished and set off again at a speed that was probably unwise at that altitude. My heart was pounding and the physical effort wasn't the only reason. Every few minutes one of us glanced behind us, neither of us saw him. The trail carried us into an area of dead trees, killed by the balsam woolly adelgid. Their pale skeletons rose like guards through the fog that was beginning to drift in. We arrived at our assigned campsite around six o'clock. It was a modest clearing with a firing in enough room for several tents. Two parties had already settled there, a family with teenage children and an older couple equipped with expensive outdoor gear. Seeing ordinary hikers again brought an enormous sense of relief. As we pitched our tent, I discreetly asked the older couple whether they had encountered anyone unusual on the trails. The husband introduced himself as Bill from Raleigh, an odd expression across his face. "Grey Hare, no backpack," he asked. "I nodded." He said they had spotted that same man on three separate occasions that day. Somehow he had always been in front of them, and every time he had simply watched. His wife Joyce told us she had been hiking on that mountain for twenty years. She had heard accounts of someone matching his description, supposedly a hermit or something similar who lived there without permission and trailed hikers for reasons no one could explain. The casual, factual way she described it sent a prickling sensation over my skin. Night settled over the campsite. We sat beside our separate camp stoves preparing dinner, and I kept searching the forest edge. I expected those pale eyes to appear at any moment, catching the light from our headlamps. That night was miserable. Each twig that broke and every whisper of leaves may be jerked upright inside my sleeping bag. Lisa tried to settle my nerves, saying it was likely deer or raccoons moving around outside. But I knew she was frightened too. She kept making sure the tenth zippers were closed all the way. At approximately two in the morning I heard footsteps. They were slow and purposeful, making their way around our campsite. This wasn't the unpredictable movement of an animal. These were evenly paced human steps crossing the packed earth. I lay almost without breathing as they came to a stop directly outside our tent. Through the thin nylon I could hear someone drawing breath. It was a rough wet sound, like the breathing of a person whose lungs were filling with fluid. Lisa was awake beside me. In the darkness her hand searched for mine and clamped around it so tightly that her fingernails pressed into my palm. The breathing went on for what seemed like hours. In reality it was probably only a matter of minutes. Eventually the footsteps resumed heading toward the other tents, somewhere nearby a zipper opened or closed. It might have been at Bill and Joyce's tent. I heard low muffled voices, then the sound stopped. There was only the wind moving through the dead trees and the pounding of my own heart. The arrival of mourning felt like a release, it was overcast and foggy, but its ordinary appearance was wonderful. When we climbed out of our tent, the family with the teenagers was already taking down their campsite. The parents looked worn and exhausted, their children were quieter than you would expect. Bill said that he and Joyce had heard the footsteps as well. He had even shown his flashlight outside to look, but hadn't seen anything. He decided that everyone should leave together. There was safety in having more people around, or at least that was what we were counting on. Instead of continuing the loop we had planned, we would follow the shortest route back to the parking lot. While we dismantled our campsite, I saw something that made my throat tighten. The soft ground surrounding our tents was marked with boot prints. Dozens upon dozens of them, as if somebody had walked circles around us for hours. Looks stretched away in every direction before vanishing into the woods. Joyce noticed that several sets appear to climb directly up sharply sloping ground. The kind of terrain that would have been almost impossible to negotiate in the dark. After that we wasted no time leaving. Hardly anyone spoke. The only sounds were rapid footsteps and strained breathing as we all but ran along the descending trail. About an hour into the journey down, the fog became so dense that we could scarcely make out anything 30 feet in front of us. We were forced to reduce our pace. With the rocks wet we couldn't take the chance of someone losing their footing. That was when the situation became worse. The man showed up again, and this time he had company. Shapes emerged through the mist. Three figures, possibly four. Each war similarly worn workflows, and each had the same long gray hair. They occupied different positions around our group, showing through openings in the fog in what looked like a deliberately arranged formation. One of the teenagers a boy called Ryan began to cry. His father drew him close. Bill lifted his hiking poles as if he could use them to defend us, although all of us understood how little good they would do. The figures remained still. None of them spoke. They simply stood among the fog. And Lisa cut sight of something that made her gasp. One of the men had a fated orange bandana tied around his neck. It was the same kind of bandana we had noticed on a missing hiker poster at the Ranger Station. The poster's date was from the previous summer. We pressed close together and continued down the path, almost shuffling along as one crowded body. The figures came after us. They held the same distance the entire time, fading into the fog and emerging again like apparitions. Eventually we arrived at a fork. Joyce recommended taking the longer branch, the one that passed the Ranger Station, instead of heading directly toward the parking area. Nobody objected. As we turned on to the other route, one of the figures moved on to the trail behind us. For the first time, I saw his face clearly from the side. His skin had a gray unhealthy power, like that of someone who had been ill for years. His eyes looked wrong somehow. They were too open, too bright, with pupils enlarged even in the daylight. His mouth opened as though he was about to say something. That was when I saw his teeth. They had been filed into points. They weren't simply sharp by nature. Someone had deliberately ground them down. I caught hold of Lisa and pushed her ahead, urging the whole group to pick up the pace. We moved down the trail in a mixture of running and stumbling. Our packs jolted against our backs, and our lungs burned as we struggled to breathe the thin mountain air. When the Ranger Station finally materialized through the mist, it felt miraculous. It was a small timber building with smoke curling from its chimney. We charged through the doorway in a disordered crush of people in backpacks, catching the two Rangers inside completely off guard. They saw our expressions and immediately began responding as though they were dealing with an emergency. The older Ranger was a woman with cropped silver hair and gentle eyes. She secured the door behind us while the younger male Ranger called over the radio for assistance. We tried to tell them what had happened, tripping over our sentences in the rush to explain. As she listened, the woman's face grew more and more serious. She went to a filing cabinet, removed a bulky folder, and laid photographs and written reports across her desk. There were dozens of recorded encounters, reaching all the way back to 1987. Pictures showed boottracks and locations where they shouldn't have been possible. There were statements from terrified hikers, and there was something worse. Reports of missing people, at least 15 of them. Every one of those people had last been seen on trails where the grey-haired men had also been observed. The Ranger told us they had spent years attempting to apprehend these people. They thought the men belonged to a group living far inside the mountain's least accessible areas, perhaps using the cave systems that threaded through the region. The younger Ranger Dale had been watching through a window. Without warning, he took a step backward. "They're here," he said softly. We could see them through the glass. There weren't merely three or four now. At least a dozen figures stood along the clearing's edge, just beyond the boundary of the fog. She one of them was male. Everyone had that same long grey hair, and everyone stood utterly motionless. The older Ranger had introduced herself as Captain Torres. She snatched up her radio and requested an immediate evacuation, along with law enforcement support. She told us the men had never come toward the station before. They had never ventured this near civilization. As we waited for assistance, she talked through some of the explanations people had considered. Perhaps they were the offspring of moonshineers whose descendants had become feral generations earlier. Perhaps they belonged to a cult that had withdrawn into the mountains. Or perhaps the explanation was stranger still. No one actually knew. Within an hour, state police reached the station with a search and rescue team. They accompanied us back to our vehicles while another team got ready to search the surrounding area. As we pulled away, I looked behind us. The figures were gone. They had slipped back into the mountain as though they had dissolved into it. The police searched turned up nothing. No footprints, no campsites. Nothing to suggest those men had been there at all. But a week afterward, Captain Torres phoned me. Investigators had discovered something in one of the more remote cave systems, improvised living quarters, equipment stolen from hikers who had disappeared, and marks scratched into the cave walls that resembled tally counts, hundreds upon hundreds of them. Story 3 Uncle Hank's voicemail arrived on a Thursday afternoon while I was repairing a broken carburetor at the shop. His gravelly voice came through over the noise in the garage. Your mom's attorney passed along your number. I've got something that belonged to your dad. Thought you might want it. Come up to Bannerlck if you're interested. That was the entire message. No greeting. No explanation. Only a few abrupt sentences after 11 years without a word. I cleaned the grease from my hands and listened to it. to it a second time. Mom had been dead for four months, and now the brother-in-law who had dropped out of our lives during the same week Dad went missing suddenly wanted to speak to me. I was 27. I figured I was old enough to face whatever he had to tell me. Three days afterward, I drove along Highway 105 through the morning mist. Watching the blue ridge peaks rise against the sky like jagged broken teeth. Banner elk seemed smaller than the town I remembered. Peabody's grocery, where Dad had always bought supplies for the trails, was now a CBD store. But the sunrise diner was still pouring the same harsh coffee into the same chipped mugs. On my second morning there, I found Hank in a corner booth, bent over a plate of scrambled eggs. The years hadn't been gentle with him. Deep crease has marked his face. His hair had turned entirely white, and his shoulders curled forward as though he were shielding something. When I settled into the seat opposite him, his eyes lifted toward mine. For an instant, the way his brows drew together reminded me of Dad. Jesus kid, he set under his breath, putting his fork aside. You're the spitting image of him. Even got that same stubborn look around your mouth. His fingertips tapped against the form like a tabletop. I could see a slight tremor in them. Whatever had prompted him to call me was clearly wearing him down. After a long stretch of silence, he pushed a battered watch across the table. Your dad's time X. They found it last month during construction near the old Beach Mountain Service Road, figured it ought to be yours. The face was fractured, and dark stains marked the leather strap. They could have been mud. They could have been something else. I lifted it and felt its weight in my palm. I remembered Dad tapping on it over and over whenever he was working something out in his head. The little date display had stopped on the 15th, three days after he had gone out for what mom described as an ordinary trail maintenance assignment. Hank watched while I rotated the watch between my fingers. His jaw kept shifting, as if he were trying to chew through the words he couldn't bring himself to say. There's something else he eventually told me. But we're not talking about it here. Too many people listening. You still know how to handle a hike? The question sat between us like a dare. Of course I did. Dad had seen to that. Before I was tan, he had hauled me along practically every trail within 50 miles. Hank already knew it. He wasn't really asking about hiking. He was trying to judge whether I could stomach what he was about to show me. I can keep pace, I said, slipping the watch into my pocket. He gave a slow nod, dropped a $20 bill on the table, and got to his feet with a grunt. Tomorrow, five in the morning on the dot, old Ranger Station parking lot off 194, where layers and bring a headlamp will be out there all day. At the door, he hesitated without fully turning around. And kid, keep where you're going to yourself. Some things ought to stay buried, but now that you're here, he left the sentence unfinished and stepped outside into the light morning rain. I hardly slept that night. The heater in my motel room clicked and complained while I lay beneath the lamp, examining Dad's watch. The damage crystal was wept with cracks. Underneath, I could see dried flecks of something the color of rust. At about two in the morning, I abandoned the idea of sleeping and began searching online for news coverage from 2011. There wasn't much. Local trail guide missing. Search suspended after two weeks because of early winter storms. No body found. But one piece of information caught my attention. Something I had never been told. Hank was the last person who had seen Dad alive. They had separated on the trail, intending to return to their trucks and meet before sundown. Dad hadn't come back. And now 11 years afterward, Hank wanted to lead me into that very same area. Anticipation and fear twisted together in my stomach. When I reached the Ranger Station Laud at 4.55 AM, it was deserted. My headlight sliced through the darkness before dawn. Hank's rust-covered Ford was already parked there. It's exhaust-sending vapor into the chili mountain air. He stood against the tailgate in the same faded car-hard jacket I remembered in wearing when I was a child. A pack rested on the ground beside him. "Good. You're ahead of time," he said, lifting the backpack onto his shoulders. The trails pretty grown over these days. They quit taking care of it after. He didn't need to say the rest. After Dad vanished. After the search crews stopped looking. After the forest service decided that certain roots were better allowed to disappear. We started walking without another word. The beams from our headlamps rising and falling in the mist. The trail sign was gone, but Hank located the gap in the rotor dendrin as though his body remembered it. He pushed through branches weighted with dew. For two hours, neither of us spoke. Our breathing in the crackle of dead leaves under our boots were the only sounds we made. The root climbed through hemlock and yellow birch, tracing what might once have been a logging road many decades earlier. Every now and then, Hank stopped to examine the trees, apparently recognizing markers I couldn't distinguish. Something about the woods felt different. They were too silent. No birds called. There was only the faint sound of wind moving among the branches. We paused for water beside a boulder covered in moss. Finally, I asked the question that had been building since the diner. Why do this now? Why bring me out here after so many years? Hank swallowed a long mouthful of water before he replied. They're getting ready to enlarge the dam. Next month, they're surveying and clearing this whole section. If there's still anything here to find. His voice faded, but I understood what he meant. We were running out of chances. At around nine that morning, we reached the branch leading to the service tunnel. A chain link fence stood across the road. Rust-red signs warned of dangerous conditions and identified the land as federal property. Someone had sliced through the fence years earlier, leaving whether dead has bent outward. Hank passed through the opening without pausing, moving as if he had used it before, judging from the warn earth beyond it. He had probably used it plenty of times. Ahead of us was the tunnel entrance, a concrete opening set into the mountain side. It belonged to the old hydroelectric network built in the '60s. This is where we went our separate ways that day. Hank said quietly. His words echoed against the surrounding rocks. Your dad wanted to look over the trails up above. I headed down here to deal with some trees that had fallen. Stupid way to do it. His headlamp moved across the entrance. I saw him stiffen from head to foot. Fresh gouges marked the concrete around the sealed ventilation grates as if someone had been working at them with the tools. "Somebody's been here," I said, stating what was plain in front of us. Hank had already stepped closer. He traced the scratches with his fingers. His breathing suddenly quicker and shallower. "We have to get in," he said. He reached into his pack and pulled out a crowbar. That was when I understood that he had intended this from the beginning. The metal had been worn smooth through repeated use. This wasn't something he had picked up at a hardware store just for that morning. What's inside, Hank? I caught his arm before he could set the bar against the grate. What actually happened to my dad? He pulled free of my grip. For the first time since we had sat across from each other in the diner, he looked directly into my eyes. His expression held something caught between anger and sorrow. You want to hear it? Your father uncovered something he wasn't supposed to. Records from the company that built the dam, men buried in the concrete, workers who died during construction, and it all got hidden so the job could stay on schedule. He swallowed. He was going to make it public. The crowbar struck the rocks with a clatter as his hands started trembling uncontrollably. I tried to talk amount of it, told him to let it go, told him it was 40 years back, that nobody gave a damn about some construction workers who died in the 60s. He wouldn't hear it. Said those men had families, and their families had a right to know. Hank sagged against the tunnel wall. All at once he looked every bit of his 63 years. The evening before that hike, somebody rang the house, told him to back off. He figured the power company was just trying to scare him. But when we came up here, his voice broke. They were already waiting. Three men dressed for hunting, only they weren't after deer. I heard gunfire from down here and ran up. By the time I got to the upper trail, he couldn't finish. One steady raised a shaking finger and pointed into the tunnel's darkness. Without saying anything more, he retrieved the crowbar and forced the great loose. Metal screamed against concrete, the sound carrying far into the mountain. The odor reached us immediately. Wet soil. Rust. And beneath both something organic that smelled deeply wrong. We switched on our headlamps and went inside. The passage extended roughly 30 feet before widening into a maintenance room. Outdated electrical panels covered the walls, their instruments on. Some lidden coated with dust, but the sight of the floor stopped me cold. In one corner, recent tool strikes had chipped and scored the concrete, beside the damaged patch lay of pickaxe at a garbage bag that was already half full. Hank approached it as though he were walking in his sleep. "I've kept coming back," he whispered. Every few months, breaking a little more away, trying to find him, trying to get him home. The bag contained pieces of fabric, leather and other fragments I didn't want to name. At the bottom was a wallet. Through its clear plastic sleeve, Dad's driver's license looked up at me. His photograph still held the same smile, untouched by all the years that had passed. They forced me to help. Hank's voice had dwindled until I could barely hear him. Told me I'd die too if I refused. We brought him down here, put him in with the others, and sealed it up. I've carried that every day since. Thinking about your mother and the truth I had kept from her. Seeing you get older in the Christmas pictures, his words broke apart into crying. I stood with my father's wallet in my hands, grief and fury pulling at each other inside my chest. Some part of me wanted to turn that crowbar on Hank. I wanted him to suffer for being too afraid to stand up to them, but the greater part of me felt nothing except emptiness as though learning the truth had scraped out everything inside. "We're bringing him home," I finally said. Every bit of him. Then you're telling the police. Hank nodded and rubbed his face with his dirty hands. "I know. I knew when I made that call. I just had to tell somebody else first. Had to make you understand." For the following two hours, we worked without speaking, carefully removing what was left. The people responsible for his death were likely dead themselves by then, or sheltered behind teams of corporate attorneys. But Dad would finally receive a decent burial, and what had happened would finally come into the light. Walking back down the mountain felt unreal, like moving through a dream. Hank held the bag, I held Dad's wallet, neither of us had anything to say. When we returned to the parking area, the afternoon sunlight seemed impossibly bright. Everything looked far too ordinary for what we had just done. I drove behind Hank to the sheriff's office in town. I watched him go through the entrance with his shoulders straightened for the first time in 11 years. The investigation afterward appeared on regional news. The bodies discovered inside the dam, a cover-up stretching back decades. The power companies rushed to separate themselves from contractors who had been dead for years. Investigators uncovered seven other workers encased in the concrete. Their families had been told that the men had simply walked away from their jobs and vanished. Dad's disappearance was officially resolved as a homicide, although nobody would ever be brought to trial for his murder. When pleaded guilty to improperly handling human remains, he received an 18-month sentence and served nine months. On a clear morning in December, I scattered Dad's ashes on Grandfather Mountain. There was only me, the wind, and the view he had always loved. Mom never learned what really happened. Maybe that was a kindness. I still wear his time X. The fracture in its crystal reminds me that certain truths are worth giving your life a war, while others can consume you from the inside if you allow them. Every so often Hank sends me a letter from Florida, where he settled after getting out. I never answer. I don't discard the letters either. I keep them in a box alongside Dad's wallet and the newspaper articles about the investigation at the dam. Sometimes at night that tunnel returns in my dreams. I dream about the immense weight of the mountains and everything they hide beneath them. But most of the time I'm simply relieved that Dad is no longer trapped under all that concrete. He's free now, carried on the breeze, belonging to the mountains he loved. That is enough. It has to be. Story 4. The phone rang at three in the morning on a Thursday and early September. By then I had spent about eight years volunteering with Cumberland County Search and Rescue, helping out whenever they needed more people. In rural Tennessee missing hikers weren't unusual. Most were visitors from the city who misjudged the landscape or lost their bearings once the sun went down. But something about this call felt wrong from the incident I answered. Sheriff Dawson sounded strained as though he was working to reassure himself that this was an ordinary situation. We've got a missing teenager, Madison, 17-year-old boy named Lucas Brenner. His parents say he headed out hiking alone yesterday morning, should have been home for dinner. His phone's out of power now but we managed to retrieve the GPS information before it stopped transmitting. I was already getting my boots on holding the phone between my ear and shoulder. His next word stopped me with one boot only partly laced. The location records showed that Lucas had walked for six hours and brought carefully measured circles before his phone died. It wasn't the erratic route of somebody frightened or lost. These were intentional loops, each roughly a quarter of a mile across. The strangest detail was the place where the tracking ended. The coordinates put him at the center of a clearing that appeared on none of our maps. I knew that forest as well as I knew my own hands. I had explored it since childhood and there was no open-glade at the location his phone had recorded. Several coordinates were coordinates and finding a missing 17-year-old mattered more than sorting out a discrepancy on a map. I picked up my backpack, checked my equipment again, and left to join the search party at the trailhead. The trip to Copper Ridge took around 40 minutes along twisting mountain roads. When I arrived, Dawn was beginning to spread a sickly orange glow across the trees. The color reminded me of something from a feverish dream. Three other volunteers had beaten me there. One was Tom Hutchinson, a former park ranger I had worked alongside before. The other two were newer recruits, and I never caught their names. Sheriff Dawson laid a topographic map across the hood of his patrol car and traced Lucas's movements with a red pen. Seeing those precise circles on papers end up prickling chill across my skin. They had an almost ceremonial appearance, resembling patterns from the old books of folklore my grandmother used to keep around. Tom seemed to be thinking the same thing. He shook his head repeatedly, muttering that nothing about the root looked natural. We split into teams of two. I took the root that led most directly toward the point where Lucas's phone had stopped sending a signal. For the first couple of miles, the surroundings were familiar Tennessee backcountry, dense brush, stones covered in moss, and occasional deer trails threading through patches of brambles. As I neared the coordinates though, the forest began changing in ways that left my chest feeling constricted. First, the bird stopped calling. The usual woodland sounds dropped away all at once, the kind of sudden silence that often means a predator is nearby. Then I began looking more closely at the trees. Someone had cut designs into their bark. The marks weren't recent. They had been there long enough for the trees to begin healing around the wounds. There were triangles enclosed by circles, spirals that became uncomfortable to stare at, and strange branching shapes that brought lightning to mind, or veins. The farther I went, the more carvings I found. Eventually almost every trunk carried at least one. That was when I noticed the first wooden carving hanging from a branch. It was suspended directly at eye height, moving gently despite the absence of any breeze. So larger than my palm it appeared to have been fashioned from cedar. It represented a person but the arms and legs had more joints than they should have. Its face was an empty oval. A single drilled opening occupied the place where a mouth ought to have been. Over the years I had encountered plenty of things hikers left beside trails. Small handmade sculptures decorated stones that sort of thing. This didn't feel like any of those, age and repeated handling had polished the wood smooth. It looked as though somebody had kept it with them for years before placing it on that branch. As I continued more figures came into view, some resembled people. Others looked like animals imagined by someone who had never seen one and knew them only from descriptions. A deer whose legs bent backward, a bird with four wings extending in the shape of a cross. Many figure hung precisely at eye level. They were separated by about 20 feet, forming a root that led farther into the forest. A burst of noise from my radio startled me. Tom's voice emerged through the interference. Madison are you running into anything strange? Because these footprints I'm looking at. Well, I can't make sense of them. His folks said the kid had on size 10 Nike's, but I've got tracks from at least four different kinds of shoes here all headed the same way. I pressed the transmit button to answer. Then I saw the print. In a patch of soft ground between two carved trees was the impression of a Buddha I knew. Not from anything I had seen lately. I recognized it because 23 years earlier, I had spent hours studying that exact soul pattern, trying to understand why. Why it was the only sign anyone had found of my older brother, Danny. On the morning he vanished during a camping trip in those same woods, the search crews discovered one footprint from his left boot, only one. It had been driven deeply into the mud as though he had remained in that spot for hours. The mark in front of me was identical. The size matched. The wear along the heel matched. Even the tiny notch in the rubber near the big toe was there. For a moment I couldn't remember how to breathe. Danny had been 14 when he disappeared, only three years younger than Lucas. According to the official explanation, he had likely fallen into one of the concealed ravines. They never recovered his body. I had never believed it. Danny knew that forest better than anybody. When I was small he used to take me out there to show me fox stents and explain which berries we could safely eat. When the boot print at my feet was fresh, it couldn't have been more than a day old. I started reaching for the radio again, then froze at a sound that raised every hair along my arms. Someone was humming. There wasn't really a melody. It was more like one sustained tone, wavering higher and lower, coming from ahead of me where the trees crowded more closely together. Something about the sound made it impossible to decide whether I was hearing one person or several voices holding the same unsteady note. The nearer I came to it, the less recognizable the hanging figures became. People's bodies topped with animal heads, animals fitted with human hands, other shapes that didn't fully belong to either category. Everyone faced the same way, directing attention farther into the woods like distorted trail markers. The images cut into the trunks changed as well. Some of the simple designs they now depicted elaborate scenes. On one tree, a ring of people held hands around something I couldn't identify. Their heads tilted back as though they were crying out or singing. Another carving showed a lone person moving between two lines of watching figures, even through the crude workmanship I could tell that the person walking had the wrong proportions. The arms extended too far. The legs bent in too many places. The humming strengthened. Other noises began to emerge beneath it, footsteps passing through fallen leaves. But their cadence was wrong as if the people making them kept losing track of how many legs they were supposed to have. Then I entered the clearing that had no business being there. It appeared without warning. The forest ended along the edge of a flawless circle, about 40 yards in diameter. The ground held the low thick grass you sometimes see in old meadows. But the grass was growing in spirals. When I tried to trace the patterns with my eyes for too long, they began to water. Lucas stood in the middle, still dressed in his red hiking jacket and cargo pants. He was moving through the same circular motions shown in the GPS records. His steps were even an automatic, as though he were following a line visible only to him. His eyes remained open, but they weren't focused on anything. The wavering hum was coming from him, but he wasn't the only person walking. Seven or eight others of various ages moved alongside him, all following the same circling route. Some were dressed in contemporary clothing. Other outfits appeared to be decades old. A man in jeans and a faded flannel shirt looked exactly like the person pictured on missing hiker notices from 2008. A woman wearing a yellowed sundress, resembled a photograph from an unsolved 1987 disappearance I had reviewed during search and rescue training. I tried shouting Lucas's name. My voice sounded distorted, as though I were speaking from beneath the surface of water. Then I became aware of the figures around the clearing's perimeter. Looking at them was difficult. My gaze seemed to slip away whenever I tried to hold it steady, but I could distinguish at least a dozen of them standing there, observing the people walking. A few appeared entirely ordinary wearing everyday clothes. The others didn't. They were excessively tall. Their limbs folded at angles that made me feel sick. Their faces seemed to alter whenever I attempted to bring them into focus. One turned in my direction. It was wearing Danny's jacket, the blue windbreaker. The one with a rip in the left sleeve from when he had snagged it on a fence. But whatever stood inside it wasn't my brother. It wore his clothes. It was his height. It even balanced its weight on one leg in the same way he always had. The face, though, was wrong. It looked as if somebody had reconstructed him using an indistinct photograph, reproducing the broad outline while leaving out everything that had made him a person. It gave me a smile crowded with too many teeth. Then it motioned for me to come closer, using a hand with more joints than any hand should have. Every instinct I had demanded that I run. But Lucas was still there. I made myself step onto the grass. Immediately moving felt like waiting through heavy syrup. The air had substance inside that clearing. It pushed against my body from every direction. The humming seemed to work its way into my skull, blurring my thoughts. I struggled toward the center, concentrating on reaching Lucas. With every step, though, I could feel my movements beginning to match the walkers. My feet wandered to angle sideways, to enter the circle, to keep traveling around and around until, until want. I clamped my teeth hard onto my tongue, letting the pain hold my attention in place. The thing dressed in Danny's windbreaker advanced toward me. Other figures began leaving their positions around the boundary. They seemed to slide across the ground rather than walk. I caught Lucas by the arm, touching him felt like grabbing an energized wire. Images poured through my mind. I saw the forest from overhead, containing dozens of clearings like the one around us. Every clearing had its own circling group. I saw people brought into those places across decades. Maybe centuries. They followed the hanging wooden shapes and the carved trunks, using them like a trail of breadcrumbs. When I saw what became of the people who finished their circles, they were hollowed out. Something else moved into the space they left behind. Something capable of assuming their appearance, but never capable of reproducing it properly. The jolt shattered whatever had taken hold of Lucas. His gaze abruptly sharpened. He sucked in air as if he hadn't breathed in hours. Ron I told him. That was all. Thank God he did exactly that. He plunged back among the trees. Behind us the humming changed into a sound closer to screams. Those uneven footsteps followed. They were gaining on us. As we passed the wooden figures their heads appeared to turn. The carvings on the trees had changed too. Now they showed images of things chasing people, of people being caught. We kept running until my lungs felt scorched. Lucas stumbled along beside me but he managed to maintain our pace. I relied on my GPS to guide us. I no longer trusted any route through those trees. Behind us the woods had fallen utterly quiet. The only sounds left were our feet crashing through the undergrowth and the harsh pull of our breathing. Three hours passed before we reached the road where I had left my vehicle. After I called over the radio it took another hour for the remaining search teams to reach us. Lucas couldn't account for what had happened. He remembered entering the woods. His next memory was coming to in the clearing while I shook him. The other teams located the marked trees and the hanging wooden figures. But at the coordinates recorded by the GPS there was no clearing. The sheriff's department filed the case as a successful recovery. Lucas's parents were so grateful to have him home that they didn't press for explanations. I know though that those things are still among the trees. They were the faces of people who disappeared. They moved through circles that never end. And they wait for somebody else to follow those small wooden carvings into openings in the forest that aren't supposed to exist. The following week I left search and rescue. I moved two states away. Sometimes Danny appears in my dreams. The real Danny. And I wonder whether any piece of him remains in that forest. Or whether he has become another hollow thing dressed in clothes I recognize. Inviting strangers farther into the woods with a smile that holds too many teeth. Story five. It has been four years since that weekend on Cheat Mountain. And I still sometimes jolt awake at three in the morning. Certain I can hear branches breaking one after another outside my window. I was 28 at the time, living in Elkins, West Virginia, and working construction with a crew I'd been close to since high school. Our form in Pete was a broad stocky former Marine who seemed capable of following a deer's tracks across Bear Rock if he set his mind to it. Julio took care of our electrical work, constantly joking that people up in the mountains still regarded electricity as a form of witchcraft. Sam was our plumber. He carried a fishing pole practically everywhere, including job sites. In cases, lunch break gave him a chance to try a promising creek. That Friday and early August, we had just finished an exhausting week of renovation work at a textile mill that had stood empty since the 70s. None of us liked being inside that place. Corroded machinery. filled the rooms and a strange yellow mold coated the walls. Looking at it for too long made your eyes start watering. Pete proposed a camping trip to clear our heads. He knew a place near an area where he had been hunting ever since his father first brought him there in the '90s. He wouldn't stop talking about the clear untouched streams crowded with native brook trout. The meadows weren't early riser might spot elk and the biggest advantage of all. No phone reception for 40 miles in any direction. After five consecutive days of inhaling demolition dust and that miserable mold, the idea of sleeping beneath a sky full of stars sounded like exactly the cure we needed. We left Saturday morning in Pete's battered Chevy Silverado. The bed was packed with enough equipment to keep us going for a month if it came to that. The mountain roads twisted ahead of us becoming tighter and narrower the farther we drove. Cavement turned to gravel. Eventually even the gravel disappeared, leaving dirt track squeezed between enormous red spruce trees. Julio entertained himself with remarks about banjo music and questions about whether we had brought sufficient ammunition. But when we reached the truly remote woods, even he stopped joking. Those trees were nothing like the ones around town. They looked ancient. With trunk so broad that five people joining hands would have been needed to encircle them. The air tasted fresh, yet there was a heaviness to it as those secrets had been steeping there for hundreds of years. Pete stopped at an unsigned pull-off roughly two miles before the actual trail began. He said his father had always insisted that the finest places were the ones you had to work to reach. We walked for perhaps three hours, taking a route Peter shortest was a trail. To the rest of us, it mostly resembled unrelated openings in the brush. Near noon we climbed over a ridge and finally looked down on the meadow he had described. It was a flawless bowl of grass and closed on every side by dark woodland. A stream ran through its center, throwing back the sunlight like fragments of shattered glass. We pitched our camp close to the forest edge. The water was near enough that we could hear it burbling, but we stayed far enough away to avoid the morning dew. Everything looked ideal. Then Sam spotted the second campsite. It stood about 200 yards upstream, concealed among three immense boulders that created a natural barrier against the wind. Whoever had put it together had built the most expertly arranged wilderness camp I had ever encountered. This wasn't somebody tossing up a tent for a single night. It was practically a building. Fallen limbs had been bound with paracord to form a raised platform about four feet above the ground, presumably to keep out dampness and animals. Above it, a tarp had been stretched at carefully calculated angles that would shed rain exactly where it needed to go. Flat stones lined the fire pit, fitted together with the skill of a mason. A metal cooking grate hung over it at precisely the right height. The whole arrangement suggested military discipline, but the thing that unsettled us most was how well it blended into its surroundings. Had Sam not wandered upstream looking for places to fish, none of us would have noticed it hidden behind those rocks. Pete immediately slipped into his old marine habits. He circled the site, studying every part of it while the rest of us remained a little farther back. He began pointing out details we hadn't recognized. Firewood had been organized by thickness from the smallest kindling to full logs. Every piece had been trimmed to a uniform length. A filtration set up used plastic bottles, sand and charcoal. It was elaborate enough to make even swamp water safe to drink. Lengths of snare line were neatly wound and suspended from selected branches ready to be put into use. Yet there was nothing personal anywhere. No bed roll, no pack, no spare clothing. Nothing that suggested a person actually stayed there. Julio said perhaps we had stumbled across Bigfoot's vacation place. His laughs sounded strained and uneasy. Pete lowered himself beside the fire pit and extended a hand above the ashes. He withdrew it quickly. The embers beneath them still held heat. We agreed to return to our own campsite. Nobody voiced the thought we all shared. The person who had built that camp was probably observing us at that very moment. The rest of the afternoon felt awkward intense. We made an effort to behave normally, but every noise among the trees made somebody flinch. Sam abandoned fishing after an hour. He said something about the stream didn't feel right, as though the fish understood something the rest of us didn't. At around four Pete recommended gathering wood before nightfall. That was when we came across the first dead animal. A rapid hung between two trees, approximately 50 yards from our tents. Its fur had been completely removed. Beneath it, pink muscles shown in the sunlight filtering through the branches. The way it had been tied was complicated. There wasn't a basic loop around it, but a series of intricate knots holding its body stretched open. Almost as though someone had arranged it for viewing. Pete used his knife to cut it loose, his jaw rigid. We discovered three others displayed the same way. Together, they formed an uneven circle around our camp. Julio was ready to leave immediately. He wanted us to collect everything, get back to the truck and drive into town. Pete persuaded us to remain. He said the person responsible was attempting to frighten us away. If they had meant to injure us, they would already have done it. He had encountered that kind of psychological intimidation in Afghanistan he told us. Local people warning outsiders to avoid particular valleys. That evening, our fire was much larger than it needed to be. None of us acknowledged being afraid, but we all kept adding wood until the flames rose six feet into the air. We roasted hot dogs, open beers, and attempted to trade the usual stories people tell around a campsite. Every conversation faltered after only a few lines, past the circle of firelight that darkness seemed to wear of us, and unfriendly. It felt as if it were bearing down on the camp from every side. Around midnight, Sam caught my arm so forcefully that his grip left bruises. His other hand shook as he pointed toward the edge of the trees. A man stood absolutely motionless between two pines, perhaps 30 feet away. Our fire barely illuminated him. It gave us just enough light to distinguish ripped military fatigues and a beard that reached his chest and tangled gray strands. His eyes caught the flames the way a night animal's eyes catch light. Two orange points suspended in the blackness. What froze me with fear, though, was the possibility that he had been standing there for a long time. Not one of us had heard him arrive. There had been no crack of a twig, no brushing of leaves, nothing at all. Pete rose slowly moving a hand toward the knife at his waist and asked whether the man needed assistance. The figure offered no response. He didn't shift. He didn't blink. He simply watched us with those fiery eyes. After perhaps 30 seconds, which seemed to stretch into hours, he stepped backward once. Then he was gone, swallowed by the forest without making the slightest noise. Pete snatched up his flashlight and searched the trees where the man had stood. There was nothing to find. No impressions in the pine needles. No damage branches. No indication that anyone had occupied that spot. We remained awake for the rest of the night, sitting with our backs against one another. We took turns watching while the others attempted to catch a little sleep. Whenever a log snapped in the fire or the breeze shifted a branch, we all startled awake, hearts racing. At last, the first dull light of morning began seeping through the canopy. That was when we found the message our visitor had left. The four animal bodies we had cut down the previous afternoon were now hanging inside our campsite. They had been suspended from the very trees we had used for our food bags. The ones meant to keep our supplies beyond the reach of bears. But that wasn't the part that disturbed us most. The cord holding them up belonged to us. Someone had removed it from our backpacks without any of us noticing. And the bodies were secured with the same elaborate knots we had seen before. We packed without saying a word. Equipment went straight into bags. We didn't even bother properly rolling our sleeping bags. All we wanted was to leave as quickly as we could. While we worked, Pete continually surveyed the woods. His military training had taken over. And he moved through practice positions that let him keep every angle covered. As we dismantled the final tent, Julio noticed something cut into the bark of the tree where it had been staked. The wounds in the bark were fresh. They formed an inscription. SM-73-17. The color drained from Pete's face. He said there was something he had to look into once we returned to town. We nearly ran the entire way to the truck. A hike that had taken three hours on the way in took less than 90 minutes going back. Nobody paid attention to branches scraping our skin or ankles twisting as we rushed across uneven ground. The whole way I felt as though someone was watching my back. It was that crawling feeling of being followed by something that understood those woods infinitely better than we ever would. on the drive to Elkins nobody spoke. The only exception was Pete. [BLANK_AUDIO] under his breath and hammering at his phone whenever we pass through a patch with reception. Back at his apartment, he dug out a hunting magazine from 2003. It contained an article about unexplained disappearances on Cheat Mountain. A smaller section beside it discussed local legends, including one known as the Ghost Ranger. According to the story, a special forces soldier called Scott Maddox had left his military unit without permission in 1973 after suffering a psychiatric breakdown. He had fled into the mountains. A large-scale search failed to locate him and he was eventually presumed dead. But for decades afterward, people hiking and hunting in the area had described disturbing encounters. Highly sophisticated camps that seemed to materialize and disappear in a single night. Dead animals positioned in patterns that looked ceremonial, brief sightings of a feral looking man in aging military clothing, slipping through the trees as effortlessly as smoke. The article said that if Maddox remained alive, he would have been in his 70s by then. Pete went back over the numbers we had seen on the tree, 73, 17, 1973 to 2017. 44 years, none of us ever returned to Cheat Mountain. We never discussed the trip on the job either. Every so often though I noticed Pete staring into empty space with a haunted expression. I know where his thoughts have gone, back to those orange eyes beyond the fire, back to the question of whether Scott Maddox is still living out there, still observing, still driving people away from whatever he is guarding or whatever he is trying to escape, somewhere inside those seemingly endless woods. Story 6. Most people head into the mountains to find silence. I went there looking for sounds. I was 21, nearing the end of my wildlife biology degree, and urgently needed recordings of nighttime animal calls for my senior thesis. Professor Whitman had let me borrow the department's finest equipment. Infrared cameras, parabolic microphones, motion detectors, the works. Altogether, it was probably worth more than my battered Ford Ranger. I had chosen a knock-a-mountain precisely because so few people camp there anymore. Even the Ranger at the station attempted to discourage me. He said the trails weren't properly maintained and that phone reception disappeared once you got beyond the first mile. To me, that sounded ideal for observing wildlife without human interference. I assured him I could manage. I said I had plenty of experience camping alone, which was mostly accurate if childhood nights in my backyard qualified. Getting my campsite ready that first afternoon seemed ordinary enough. About four miles up the mountain, I located a level patch and closed by dense hemlocks and loaded dendron shrubs. They made something like natural walls around my tent. At approximately five, fog began moving in. Sooner than I had anticipated, anything more than 20 feet away dissolved into a gray haze. As I arranged the equipment, I noticed peculiar impressions in the soft ground beside my tent. They weren't exactly footprints. They looked more like something had dragged itself along, leaving little handshaped marks mixed into the trail. The impressions circled the place where I had set my gear, as though something had crawled around examining it while I was off collecting wood. I assumed a raccoon or a possum was responsible, although the arrangement didn't resemble anything I had learned about. The distances between the marks were wrong too. They were spaced farther apart than they should have been for any animal I recognized. Each handprint showed five separate fingers, but the fingers appeared elongated as if something had gripped the soil and hauled itself forward. That first night I kept the recording equipment operating and stayed awake until three in the morning. The woods were full of familiar noises. Bard Owls called, deer pushed through the brush, and smaller mammals occasionally stirred the leaves. But at about 230, every sound stopped. It wasn't the slow hush that settles over an area when a predator moves through. Everything cut off in the same instant as though somebody had muted the forest. Then a low pulsing hum reached me from somewhere outside the circle of hemlocks. It wasn't quite a song. It sounded more like a person struggling to recall a melody they had heard only once, missing notes and repeatedly beginning again. The noise traveled slowly around my camp, completing a circle while remaining hidden in the mist. I turned my parabolic microphone toward it and watched the recording levels jump. The instant I moved, the humming ceased. 20 minutes afterward, the ordinary sounds of the forest resumed together. I persuaded myself that another researcher had been nearby, or perhaps a hiker who had lost their way. Still, I couldn't account for why a lost person would walk around my camp rather than come over and ask for assistance. The following morning I found that someone had repositioned my hiking boots. I had left them outside the tent, covered with mud from the hike the previous day. Now they stood side by side, perfectly straight at the entrance, and they were immaculate. This wasn't a quick wipe. They looked as though somebody had worked a damp cloth into every channel of the souls. Even the laces had been tied again in tidy matching bows. My immediate explanation was that another camper had decided to mess with me, but I hadn't encountered anyone on the trail, and the closest established campsite lay miles away. More crawling tracks encircled the tent. These were newer, pressed firmly into earth dampened by the morning dew. Alongside the handprints, I could now distinguish what appeared to be marks left by knees. The pattern suggested a creature traveling on all fours, with limbs too lengthy for its torso, forced to display them outward to keep itself balanced. I devoted that day to placing cameras around a broader perimeter. I was determined to get an image of whatever had been coming into my camp. The fog never cleared. It only fluctuated between dense and even denser. Seeing farther than 30 feet was impossible. While repositioning one of the infrared cameras, I discovered something that briefly stopped my breathing. On a level stone set a small collection of bones laid out in an exact spiral. They were fine and fragile, likely belonging to birds or rodents. Every trace of flesh had been removed, and the bones had been bleached white. A lone human tooth occupied the middle. From its size, it looked like a child's molar. My fingers shook as I lifted it. The root was still whole. It hadn't snapped off. Somehow the entire tooth had been pulled out intact. I folded it into tissue paper and put it in my backpack. I thought about taking it to the Rangers. But I kept coming up with the reasons to avoid the hike back down. My thesis was due soon, I reminded myself. I still didn't have enough material. The first direct encounter happened on the third night. After the previous nights of keeping a watch, I was exhausted. Around midnight, I fell asleep inside my tent. A quiet scrape against the fabric woke me. It didn't sound forceful. There was an almost gentle quality to it, like fingernails being drawn across the material and measured unhurried strokes. The scratching traveled from the bottom of the tent along one side. Every so often it stopped as though searching for a particular spot. My fading campfire cast light behind whatever was outside. Through the thin tent wall, I could make out its shadow. The proportions made no sense. Its arms extended too far. Its body was too short in relation to its limbs. Its head dipped in swayed in a manner that didn't seem connected to the movements of the rest of it. It crawled around the tent three times, humming that fractured tune. Occasionally it pushed what I took to be its face against the nylon. Each brief impression made me clutch my sleeping bag more tightly around myself. By morning my equipment had been tampered with again. This time the interference seemed deliberate. The memory cards had been taken out of two cameras and arranged in a neat pile of my folding camp chair. The remaining camera aimed toward my tent was still running. I snatched it up with trembling hands and played back the recording on its little LCD display. For the most part there was only darkness and drifting fog. Then the timestamp reached 347 am. And there it was. The footage was rough, grainy and pale from the infrared illumination. Even so I could see enough. A long whiteish shape crawled into view. It moved with an appalling flexibility that made me think of a contortionist. Its limbs folded in too many places as though they contained additional joints. And its fingers. God those fingers. They extended to impossible lengths as it dragged itself across the ground. Its head was worse. It was twisted into a position that should have snapped its neck, looking toward the lens while the rest of its body traveled another way. The facial details were indistinct. I could make out a pair of dark areas where the eyes auto-whip been, and an opening that might have been a mouth. It gave so widely that it resembled a never-ending scream without a sound. That morning I gathered most of my equipment and prepared to leave. But in the parking area at the trailhead I noticed an elderly local man restocking the box that that held. trail maps. His volunteer badge identified him as Earl. When I asked what he knew about that section of Unica Mountain, his manner changed completely. He told me about Christopher, a seven-year-old boy who had disappeared there in 1976 after wandering away from a family picnic. Two weeks later, searchers located his shoes. They had been washed clean and positioned carefully on a rock. Nobody ever found the boy. Earl moved closer. He smelled of tobacco and smoke from a wood fire. In a whisper, he said some people believed Christopher had never truly gone away. They believed something living in those mountains had altered him. Turned him into something different. Mountains have been here a long time, he told me. Longer than most anything. Sometimes they hang on to what they take. Just rearrange it a little. He refused to elaborate. He only shook his head and returned to his pickup. Every instinct I possessed was telling me to get into my truck and leave. Instead, I climbed back up. I needed additional footage, more proof. Something that would establish that my mind wasn't coming apart. That night, I pointed every camera inward toward the tent. Then I sat in my camp chair holding a flashlight and bear spray. Resolved to face whatever had been following me. The humming began sooner this time around 11. Now it rose from several places at once, as though three or four sources were moving among the trees. The fog was dense enough that I could barely see my feet. Moisture hung in the air, leaving everything against my skin cold and unpleasantly damp. Then another sound made my chest constrict. A child's voice, high and sweet. It was singing ring around the rosy, drawing the melody out in slow, dragging notes. But the lyrics weren't right. They had been warped into something else. Ashes, ashes, we crawled down. The line repeated endlessly until the word stopped meaning anything and became only noises. Wet gargling noises. The song ended as its source arrived at the boundary of the light around my camp. I moved my flashlight along the trees and briefly caught sight of pale skin among the rhododendron leaves. Perhaps fifteen feet away. It wasn't concealing itself. It was standing there, waiting, moving faintly from side to side like a tree stirred by wind. I called into the darkness and asked whether somebody needed help. In response, the thing lowered itself onto all fours and darted sideways like a crab. It's overlong limbs bent and straightened in ways that were painful to watch. Twice it circled where I sat, always keeping to the outer limit of what I could see. Now I could hear it breathing. The sound was harsh and wet, like air being drawn through lungs full of water. Finally it came closer, crawling with its stomach nearly brushing the earth. For the first time I got a clear look at its face. The features were human, but they had been stretched into the wrong arrangement, as though somebody had taken a child's face and tugged it over a skull that was too big. The eyes were black and oversized. They never blinked. They simply watched me while its mouth opened and shut. Opened and shut. No sound came from it except that dreadful water-longed breathing. I didn't flee. I couldn't. Every muscle had seized. I could only remain in the chair with my flashlight gripped in my hand while it examined me through those dark, unblinking eyes. It extended one absurdly long arm and placed its hand on my boot. The touch reminded me of the way my boots had been cleaned. Those elongated fingers trace the laces with something close to gentle curiosity. Then it spoke, or attempted to. Its voice seemed to contain several layers. A child speaking beneath water mixed with another presence. Something older. Something damaged. Play with me. It delivered the words awkwardly and far too slowly as if it were trying to recall the mechanics of talking. It said the same phrase seven or eight times. With each repetition the voice became less like a person and more like an animal reproducing noises it had once overheard. At last I recovered enough control to scream. The creature recoiled and scrambled into the fog on all fours. Before it vanished though it left something on the ground beside my chair. A small school photograph. The paper was yellowed and damaged by water. It showed a dark haired boy smiling with a gap between his teeth. On the reverse and a mother's careful script were the words, Christopher, age seven, spring 1976. I abandoned everything except my keys in the picture. I drove through the night straight back to campus. I didn't pull over until I reached the parking lot outside my apartment building. For three days I convinced myself that I was safe. Whatever that creature was, it belonged up on the mountain. It would remain there. Then I began noticing small changes. When I got home the deadbolt on my apartment door would be open, even though I always locked it before leaving. The shoes inside my closet would be shifted into new arrangements, sorted according to size and color. One night I woke and discovered my bedroom window standing open. The screen had been pushed out. Mud marked the sill in the shape of hands. Hands that were too narrow, too long, with too many joints. Last week the humming returned. It always comes between two and three in the morning. From the alley behind my building. I've stopped sleeping. I've stopped attending classes. Christopher's photograph now rests on my bedside table. I keep hoping that perhaps it wants the picture returned. That giving it back might bring this to an end. But underneath those hopes I understand what Earl was trying to tell me. The mountain doesn't merely hold onto the things it takes. Sometimes something it has taken comes home after you. Searching for another person to play with. Another person to change. Story 7 People imagine search and rescue as a constant rush of adrenaline, signal flares, helicopters overhead, dogs barking. In reality much of the work happens in silence. You're out in the forest following signs that have already gone cold, wishing for a miracle while bracing yourself to discover something you'd rather never see. I volunteered in the white mountains for roughly six years, mostly on weekends. That particular day the call concerned a woman hiking alone. She was in her thirties, knew what she was doing, and had registered at the trailhead before heading in. But she hadn't returned. Two days later her vehicle was still sitting in the parking lot. Our assignment was to search an established route. The terrain was familiar with no particularly difficult sections, and there hadn't been any storms nearby. It sounded like an ordinary operation, the sort that often ends with us locating somebody a short distance off the trail, nursing a sprained ankle beside an empty bottle of water. My partner was Ellis. He had less experience than I did, was probably in his early twenties, and seemed far too cheerful for the circumstances. After that morning we were given a loop at a lower elevation near a place called Echo Nauch. A few neglected branches split away from the route, mostly old paths used by hunters. There were also gullies where sounds seemed to disappear, absorbed as completely as if the slopes had been lined with heavy velvet. Ellis concentrated on calling the woman's name. I managed the GPS unit that recorded where we had searched. There was nothing complicated about it, just a trail of points on a digital map showing our progress. But when I checked our route against her, we had been supplied with the track recorded by her own GPS device. I noticed something peculiar. She had paused at three locations that seemed to have no connection to one another. Each was a small dip in the ground, well away from the trail. None had water, shelter, or anything else that might explain why she would choose it as a resting place. They were odd little hollows folded into the terrain. The kind you scarcely recognize unless you're already standing inside them. They don't register at the edges of your vision. Even the light seems to enter them incorrectly, as though the surrounding woods are trying to keep them concealed. That bothered me. I added red markers to the three locations, but kept my concerns to myself. I wasn't ready to tell Ellis and risk sounding paranoid. As we approached the first hollow where her GPS indicated she had remained for almost 20 minutes, my uneasiness grew. The silence wasn't the only problem. I know what a forest sounds like after its birds have moved away. This was something else. It felt as though we were entering a place that had never contained sound to begin with. I have no better way of explaining it. There was no pine smell, no moving air. Only that faint sense of pressure that builds before a thunderstorm, despite the sky being clear of clouds. We didn't locate her. We found a circular patch of disrupted moss, as if somebody had spent time sitting there or crouching close to the ground. What drew my attention most, however, was a shallow groove in the soil, perhaps two feet long. Initially I assumed a branch had been pulled across it. But there were no snap twigs or scattered leaves and the mark was too even, too clean. It looked intentional. I photographed it with my camera. phone although technically we aren't supposed to make records outside the dispatch reporting process. Alice suggested jokingly that she might simply have stopped to use the bathroom. I couldn't bring myself to laugh. She had remained there too long, and if she had only wanted a break, why settle somewhere that barely felt like a place you could breathe? The next depression was even more unsettling. We arrived around the middle of the afternoon. The sun was still well above us, yet almost none of its light reached the ground there. The trees stood so close together that their spacing seemed unnatural, as though someone had deliberately planted them to block out every possible beam. Her GPS showed a longer pause this time, nearly 40 minutes. I began wondering whether stopping had been her choice at all. There was no evidence that she had fallen and no abandoned equipment. Still, the place gave me the impression of being under observation. Not the familiar feeling of a deer studying you from the brush, or a person watching through binoculars. There was an organized quality to it, as though the atmosphere itself were keeping track of us. Alice appeared oblivious. He walked along chatting about his dog, his college classes, and the music he had lined up for the drive-back. I wanted to tell him to be quiet, but I couldn't explain why his talking was getting under my skin so badly. Perhaps I was afraid we would rouse something. On the way to the third location, neither of us spoke much. The trail constricted and eventually disappeared altogether. Something about that made our usual search party conversation difficult to maintain. By the time we reached the last position saved on her GPS, dusk was approaching. A gentle slope rose ahead of us, covered with loose stones. At its crass lay a collection of boulders that looked as though somebody had thrown them into place. Her backpack was underneath them. It hadn't been left on the ground. It hadn't merely been tucked out of sight. It had been buried. Alice immediately reported the discovery over the radio while I knelt for a closer look. There was no blood. None of the straps had been ripped. Nothing suggested an animal had interfered with it. It was simply a full-closed backpack concealed beneath three substantial rocks that didn't seem to belong in that position. I raised my head to look for movement among the trees. That was when I spotted the camera. It was a trail camera in an old weather resistant housing fixed high on a trunk. Too high for a lone hiker to have casually attached it. Whoever installed it had climbed the tree to reach that spot. The lens faced the exact location where the backpack had been covered. It wasn't pointed in some arbitrary direction. It wasn't monitoring the trail. A six-sensation crept along my spine. It wasn't quite fear. More a growing certainty that we were somewhere we shouldn't be. At a time when we shouldn't be there, as though the forest was only just willing to put up with our presence. I asked Alice whether he could see the camera. He narrowed his eyes than nodded slowly. He wondered aloud if it might belong to a wildlife study. I didn't reply. I was already using my phone to take more photographs, even with its battery nearly exhausted. I needed something to show, the backpack, the stones, the camera. There was no natural reason for those things to be arranged together like that. Someone had organized it. We placed a flag at the site, saved the coordinates, and made our way out before darkness settled. Alice kept looking behind us as we walked, something he hadn't done a single time earlier. That was all the confirmation I needed. Once we returned to base, I retrieved the entries for other recent disappearances. There had been three over the preceding six months, each in a separate search zone. Every one of them had GPS records displaying the same behavior. Short pauses and places where stopping made no sense. I laid the maps over one another. Viewed from sufficiently far above, the stopping points traced a loose spiral. It gave the impression that somebody was conducting trials, adjusting something, calibrating it. And if the camera held recordings, somebody had been monitoring the outcomes. The following morning I returned by myself. I told the team I had neglected to mark something correctly. That wasn't entirely untrue. I took a climbing strap gloves and an additional battery from my phone. Getting up the tree required more time than I had anticipated. Parts of the bark were badly decayed. Immediately below the camera, a rusty nail protruded from the trunk, suggesting the device had been installed and repositioned. The SD card remained inside. There was no lock, no wiring, no manufacturer's label. I slipped the card into my pocket and got out of there quickly. I didn't revisit either of the other depressions. By then, I was certain that whatever we had stumbled into involved more than a single missing hiker. At home, I couldn't bring myself to insert the card into my laptop immediately. For several hours, I left it lying on the desk. Almost as though leaving it untouched might somehow alter what it contained. When I finally examined it, I found seven folders. Six board dates that meant nothing to me. The seventh had no name. Inside were photographs with timestamps, apparently captured by motion detection at intervals of perhaps five to ten seconds. Most depicted an empty stretch of forest, then someone would enter the image, walking, crouching, occasionally remaining utterly motionless, positioned just away from the middle of the frame. The clothing never changed. The face did. In every image, it was different. Blurred, but not in the way a moving subject blurs. It looked as though the camera had some difficulty rendering it, as though it couldn't maintain the shape. I had looked through perhaps a hundred pictures when I found the woman. She stood beneath that same tree still wearing her backpack. Her head was tilted toward the lens. There was no terror in her expression. Only acceptance. Resignation. Nothing followed that photograph. The sequence stopped there. I removed the SD card, carried it into my garage and smashed it with a hammer. Then I burned what remained in the fire pit. I understand how foolish that was. It may have been irresponsible, too, but I couldn't bear the thought of anybody else looking at what I had seen. And I didn't want to provide the person who had installed that camera with the reason to search for it. I continued to volunteer, but I no longer accept assignments involving technology. Anything centered on GPS histories or tracking devices is something I avoid. When somebody mentions unusual diversions at a missing hiker's route, I leave the search to another volunteer. I've considered giving up the work completely. Then I think about someone out there recording the results, observing, learning, improving, if there is even the slightest possibility that I can prevent them from taking another person, or failing that. Ensure that person isn't simply forgotten. I'll continue searching those woods, but I never pause in the hollows now, not for even a moment.