Forest Horror Stories to Tell Around the Fire

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They found canned food, water jugs. Empty medication bottles, burned family belongings, and enough bedding to suggest that someone had been living underground for years. They never found the man who wore the fourth hood. What I didn't tell them at first was that I hadn't discovered him that night. I'd known he was in those woods for almost two years. This happened between October of 2017 and October of 2019 on the northwest side of Fort Wayne, Indiana. I was 16 when it started. I'm 25 now, and I still haven't come up with a good explanation for why I let it continue as long as I did. There are excuses, obviously. I was a kid. I was trespassing. I didn't understand what I was seeing. Those things were all true in the beginning. They stopped being true long before I finally asked anyone for help. The neighborhood where I grew up was built in the early 2000s. Most of the houses had the same vinyl siding. Most of the houses had the same two-car garages and the same small backyards divided by white fences. Ours sat near the end of a dead-end street. Behind our backyard was a retention basin. Beyond that was an old wire fence, separating the neighborhood from roughly 60 acres of undeveloped land. Everyone called it the Weller property, although I didn't learn why until much later. The land had once been part of a farm. By the time my family moved there, most of it had become land. By the time my family moved there, most of it had become thick woods. A county drainage creek crossed the property, and the remains of an old farm lane ran north toward a two-lane road. Deeper in, there was a concrete foundation filled with brush. My dad told me a farmhouse had burned there before our subdivision existed. There were no trespassing signs along the fence. Once or twice a year, the Neighborhood Association sent out an email reminding parents that the property contained unstable structures and that their children needed to see it. that their children needed to see it. A small holding company technically owned it, but nobody maintained it. Teenagers went back there to drink. Younger kids built forts near the creek. People occasionally dumped broken furniture along the farm lane. Before I started the project, I had never seen an adult inside those woods during the day. I started going there because I wanted to make videos about local legends. I had a small channel that barely anyone watched. Most of what I uploaded was a video. It was about abandoned buildings, strange local history, and supposedly haunted places around Allen County. I had made a video about an old cemetery and another about a closed motel where a man had died in one of the rooms. The videos weren't good. I filmed them on my phone, recorded narration in my closet, and used free editing software. My most successful upload had fewer than 2,000 views. At 16, that was enough to make me believe I could eventually build a room. But I couldn't find a real audience if I found the right story. The Weller property had several rumors attached to it. Older kids claimed there was an uncovered well near the foundation. Others said the basement had been filled while part of the house was still inside it. One version said a homeless man had died on the property and was buried somewhere near the creek. I couldn't verify any of it. That made me want to film it. There was a section of damaged fence behind the retention basin. If I lifted the wall, I could see it. If I lifted the wire, I could crawl underneath without bending it any further. I started entering the property during the day to learn the layout. When I was ready to record, I went after midnight. The woods looked more frightening at night, and there was less chance of another teenager walking into the background. I carried my phone, a flashlight, a small tripod, and a cheap handheld audio recorder. I wanted footage of the burned foundation and clean recordings of the creek, the wind, and the trees. I planned to use those sounds beneath the narration. My parents thought I was filming around the neighborhood. They didn't know I had entered private property. The first few nights were uneventful. I filmed the farm lane, the creek crossing, and the damaged no trespassing signs. I found the concrete foundation but stayed several yards from it because brush covered most of the interior. The first time I saw the man was a few weeks before Halloween. It was after one in the morning. I had placed the audio recorder on a stump near the foundation and was filming a slow pass across the concrete with my phone. I noticed movement beyond the far wall. At first, I assumed it was a deer. Then a man rose from inside the foundation. He was tall and heavily built. He wore dark work pants, boots, and an old green coat. His head and face were covered by a welding hood. It was an older style made from dark fiberglass. The surface was scratched and faded. Rust covered the screws around the sides, and strips of cloth had been attached along the bottom to cover his neck. The dark filter had been removed from the rectangular viewing window. In its place was a scratched piece of clear plastic. I could see part of his face behind it, but not enough to make out any features. He held a short shovel in one hand. The man climbed from the foundation and knelt beside a section of burned concrete. He dug into the dirt with the shovel, then used his hands to clear away smaller pieces. I lowered my phone but kept recording. He removed something from the ground. It was a burned metal handle, possibly from a kitchen drawer. He cleaned it against his coat and held it in front of the viewing window. He remained there for several seconds. As I shifted my weight, one of the metal tripod legs scraped across the concrete. The man turned toward me. The rectangular window in the welding hood pointed directly at my position. I didn't move. He dropped the shovel and came over the foundation wall. I grabbed the tripod with my free hand and ran, my phone still recording. I forgot the audio recorder on the stump. The man followed. He didn't call for me to stop. He moved through the brush with his head lowered, using one arm to protect the front of the hood. He hit several branches without slowing down. I reached the creek and crossed. Using a line of rocks I had found during the day, my shoe slipped on the final one and my leg went into the water almost to the knee. By the time I climbed the opposite bank, the man had reached the creek. I ran toward the retention basin. I kept expecting him to catch me before I reached the fence. When I crawled beneath the wire and entered the neighborhood, I looked back. The man had stopped inside the woods. He stood about fifteen feet from the fence with his arms hanging at his sides. The rectangular window faced me. The fence was low enough that he could have crossed it in seconds. Nothing physical prevented him from following me. He watched until I reached the first house, then returned to the woods. I entered through our back door and went upstairs. My parents were asleep. Only after I reached my room did I realize my phone had recorded most of the encounter. The picture was unstable because I had never stopped the recording when I ran. It showed the man rising from the foundation wall. I ran. I looked at the foundation, holding the burned handle, and turning toward me. The rest was mostly the ground and my own hand around the phone. I watched the usable section at least twenty times. My first thought was that I had finally captured something people would want to see. I imagined the title, thumbnail, and comments. I thought about returning during the day to record an introduction beside the foundation. Then I remembered how quickly the man had moved toward me. I didn't upload anything. I also didn't tell my parents or call the police. Doing that would mean admitting I had been trespassing. The property owner could press charges, and my parents would take away my phone and computer. More importantly, reporting the man would end the project before I understood what I had found. I told myself I needed more information first. The following afternoon, I returned for the audio recorder. It was no longer on the stump. I found it near the creek with the battery door open. The batteries and memory card were missing. The recorder itself wasn't damaged. I didn't know whether the man had taken it apart or whether someone else had found it. Either way, it confirmed that he had searched the area after I left. I stayed out of the woods for nearly two months. During that time, I worked on other videos, but I couldn't stop thinking about the man in the welding hood. I checked local news reports for assaults, escaped patients, or anyone seen wearing similar clothing. I found nothing. By December, I had convinced myself that he was probably a local homeless man using the foundation as a camp. I also began wondering whether the welding hood was connected to one of the property's legends. The first snow arrived shortly before Christmas. It didn't stick to the roads, but a thin layer remained in the woods. I returned without my phone. I carried only a flashlight and a pocket, I found the man near the burned foundation. He wasn't wandering or staring into the distance. He was working. Thin lines had been strung between the trees around the western side of the property. Some were tied to pieces of scrap metal that would fall if the line was disturbed. Others marked narrow pits covered with brush. Near a pile of canned food, he had built two small deadfall traps. They were too small to injure a person, but large enough to kill a raccoon, or a possum. The man moved from one line to the next, checking the knots and resetting sections that had come loose. He had created a hidden perimeter around the foundation. That explained how he had detected me during the first encounter. I had probably crossed one of his lines without noticing it. I watched him repair the perimeter for almost an hour. He moved with focus and seemed completely aware of his surroundings. Then he climbed inside the foundation, and began digging again. He uncovered a burned kitchen utensil and part of a ceramic plate. He cleaned both items and placed them inside a canvas bag. I shifted my weight and caught one of the trip lines with my ankle. A piece of metal dropped against the ground. The man turned. I stepped backward, but the line had wrapped around my shoe. By the time I freed it, he had climbed from the foundation. I ran toward the creek. He followed until I reached the opposite bank. Instead of crossing, he stopped and watched me leave. That encounter changed my understanding of him. He wasn't patrolling the woods to frighten people. He was protecting something near the foundation. I began returning every few weeks. Sometimes I found him digging through the burned remains. Other times, he repaired the perimeter or carried water from the creek in plastic containers. He had survival routines. He checked his feet. He ate his food before touching it. He never used the same route to approach the foundation twice in a row. He removed human trash from the area surrounding his traps so it wouldn't draw attention. He also had periods when those routines broke down. One night in January, an ambulance traveled along the county road with its siren on. The sound wasn't especially loud from where I stood, but the man reacted immediately. He dropped the water container he was carrying and covered the sides of the welding hood. He lowered himself to the ground and pressed his face into the dirt. The ambulance passed. He remained down for several minutes. When he finally stood, he appeared confused. He walked through one of his own trip lines and pulled it from the tree without noticing. He entered a patch of thorny brush instead of taking the clear route beside it. His coat caught. He pulled until the fabric tore. I watched him struggle and felt something I hadn't expected. I felt sorry for him. I don't know what to do. I found him near the creek. When he saw me, he didn't run. We stood around twenty yards apart. I raised both hands to show that they were empty. I don't have one, I said. He continued staring through the rectangular window. I didn't bring a camera. His head moved slightly. I apologized. Saying it aloud made me feel ridiculous, but I kept going. I told him I wouldn't place anything else in the woods. The man's breathing became louder. One hand rose to the bottom of the welding hood. When he spoke, his voice was rough and strained. No more pictures. Those were the first words I ever heard him say. I told him there wouldn't be any more. He backed away without turning around. Once there were several trees between us, he left. That encounter should have been the point when I told an adult. I knew the man could speak and had enough awareness to understand what I was doing. I also knew my cameras had terrified him. Instead, I started leaving things for him. I placed bottled water, canned food, socks, and basic first aid supplies on the stump where I had left the coat. He took the socks and bandages first. The food remained untouched for more than a week. After a heavy rain, two cans disappeared. I never left notes. I didn't want him to think I expected anything in return. Our encounters remained distant through that summer. He seemed to recognize me. If he found me near the creek, he usually stopped, waited for me to move aside, and continued along his route. Once, I watched him repair one of the hood's side straps beside the creek. He raised it just high enough to reach the buckle. I saw scar tissue extending across his jaw and down the side of his neck. I became protective of him in a way I had no right to. I was so scared that I couldn't even look at him. I was so scared right to be. When neighborhood kids entered the woods, I watched until they left. I moved some of my supplies farther from the usual trails. Once, I told two younger boys that I had found hunting traps near the creek because I wanted them to turn around. Near the end of August, three older teenagers entered through the farm lane after midnight. They were carrying beer and using their phones for light. I was near the foundation when I saw them. The man in the welding hood was there too. He was checking one of the perimeter lines behind a collapsed concrete wall. One teenager noticed movement and called out. The man dropped low and moved toward the creek. The teenagers followed. They thought they were chasing another kid or someone guarding the property. One picked up a broken board. Another began recording with his phone. I stepped back and looked around. I saw a man with a broken board. I stepped onto the farm lane and yelled that someone had called the police about their truck. They immediately turned around. I stayed near the foundation until their vehicle left. When I returned to the creek, the man was gone. The following night, I found the supplies I'd left scattered across the ground. The cans were dented and one water bottle had been crushed. I couldn't tell whether the man had done it or whether an animal had gotten into them. I didn't see him again for almost a month. That was the first time I understood how fragile the situation was. He had remained hidden because most people didn't know he existed. One careless encounter could change that. At the same time, I continued observing him. I knew when he was most likely to check his perimeter. I knew which routes he used after rain and which sections of the creek he avoided on weekends. I knew emergency vehicles frightened him and that he sometimes spent hours digging through the burned foundation. I told myself I was helping. Mostly, I was watching. The next winter was harsh. There were long stretches when I didn't see him at all. I worried he had frozen somewhere or moved on. Then I would find an empty water bottle near the stump or see the gray coat moving between the trees. He seemed thinner, but he was still physically imposing. The fear I felt around him was different from the fear of our first encounter. I didn't think he was hunting me. I worried that I might startle him during one of his confused periods and cause him to panic. One night in February, I found him kneeling near the remains of the farmhouse. Snow covered the foundation. He was digging beside the filled entrance to the old basement. A fire engine passed on the road. The man dropped the small shovel and covered both sides of the welding hood. He pushed himself backward across the concrete until his boot caught beneath a fallen board. He kept pulling, until the board snapped. I stayed where I was. After the siren faded, he remained on the ground with both arms wrapped around his head. It lasted close to fifteen minutes. When he finally stood, he noticed me. For a moment, I thought he might come closer. Instead, he touched two fingers to the rectangular viewing window and left. By then, I was seventeen and nearing the end of my junior year. My grades had fallen. I was still a student. I spent less time making videos and more time thinking about the man. My mother asked several times if something was wrong. I blamed school and work. I had started thinking about what would happen if I moved away for college. The idea of leaving him alone bothered me. That should have told me how far the obsession had gone. I didn't know his name. I didn't know whether he wanted my help. I didn't even know for certain where he slept. Still, I felt responsible for him. That summer, survey markers appeared along the old farm lane. Orange ribbon was tied to branches, and stakes were driven into the ground near the foundation. Someone also replaced two of the no trespassing signs. I learned from a neighbor that the holding company was considering selling the land to a developer. Another subdivision was planned for the area. My first thought wasn't about the loss of the woods. It was about the man in the welding hood. I didn't know what he was doing. I didn't know what he did. Construction workers would find the perimeter lines and traps. If he reacted to them the way he had reacted to my cameras, someone could get hurt. The man himself was far more likely to be hurt. Nobody approaching a large stranger in a damaged welding hood would assume he was frightened. I decided to find out who owned the land. The county assessor's website listed the property under Weller Holdings, which explained the name everyone used. From there, I found an old newspaper article about the farmhouse fire. The fire happened in February of 2003. A faulty electrical connection started it shortly after midnight. A woman named Diane Weller and her nine-year-old son, Owen, died inside. Diane's older son, Matthew, was 20. He escaped through a basement window but suffered serious burns. A firefighter found him in the yard trying to return to the house. That detail made me stop reading. I found two more articles about the farmhouse fire. I mentioned that Matthew remained hospitalized for several months. Another described his father's farm equipment repair business, which had operated from a workshop behind the house. The article included a photograph of the burned workshop. Several welding tanks and pieces of metal equipment were visible among the remains. The hood finally made sense. There was nothing else about Matthew until his father's obituary nine years later. Then I found a missing person notice from 2004. I found a missing person notice from 2004. I found a missing person notice from 2014. Matthew Weller had disappeared from a supervised residence near New Haven. He was 31 at the time. The notice described him as tall, broad-shouldered, and in need of medication. It said he might be confused and asked people not to approach him suddenly. He had never been officially located. I sat in front of the computer for a long time. The missing man's age fit. His height and build fit. The burns fit. The reaction to sirens fit. The welding equipment fit. Most of all, the property fit. Matthew had grown up there. His mother and little brother had died in the house. If he had returned after disappearing, his hidden camp was probably somewhere near the foundation. It was more than enough to call the number on the missing person notice. I didn't. I told myself Matthew had survived in those woods for years without me. The people responsible for supervising him had already lost him once. Police might surround the property and frighten him. If he rushed at an officer while wearing the welding hood, the outcome could be much worse. Those concerns weren't unreasonable. They also weren't the entire reason I stayed silent. I didn't want him taken away. I had spent almost two years studying him, learning his roots, and trying to understand his behavior. He had become the most important part of my life. If I reported him, it would end. The woods would be searched, the broken fence would be repaired, and the mystery would belong to other people. I was ashamed of that thought, so I covered it with concern for his safety. Over the next month, construction activity increased. Workers cleared sections along the farm lane. A soil testing truck remained on the property for two days. The man disappeared. For the first week, I assumed he was avoiding the workers. After three weeks, I worried he had left for good. The food and water I placed near the creek remained untouched. By late October, I was 18. It had been almost exactly two years since the first encounter. The night he returned, heavy rain had been falling for several hours. The retention basin was already filling, and water moved quickly through the drainage creek. I wouldn't normally have entered the woods under those conditions, but I saw him from my bedroom. He crossed the far side of the basin just beyond the fence. Even at that distance, I recognized the square outline of the welding hood and the way he carried his left shoulder slightly lower than the right. The gray coat showed beneath his green one. I waited until he entered the trees, then went downstairs. I brought my phone, flashlight, and a rain jacket. I also left a note on my desk, saying I had gone for a walk. It didn't say where. The creek had risen above the rocks I normally used to cross. I followed the bank until I found a downed tree that could hold my weight. By the time I reached the farmhouse, my shoes and pants were soaked. Several perimeter lines had been cut by survey workers. The remaining ones sagged between the trees. I stepped over them as I followed Matthew toward the foundation. His welding hood was cracked along one side. Mud covered his clothes. He carried a canvas bag and walked with a heavy limp. I almost called out to him. Before I could, he cleared dead brush from a rusted steel hatchet. He lifted the hatch, lowered the canvas bag onto a narrow concrete stairway, and disappeared underground. The hatch settled closed behind him. I remained in the rain, staring at it. I finally knew where he lived. If I had been a better person, I would have gone home and contacted someone. I had no medical training, no way of knowing whether he was seriously injured, and no right to enter his shelter. Instead, I waited. After about 15 minutes, I crossed the foundation and cleared the brush from the hatch. It was extremely heavy, but it wasn't locked. I lifted it far enough to enter, turned on my flashlight, and went down. The concrete stairs were narrow and wet. The hatch settled closed behind me as I reached the bottom. A short passage extended ahead. Part of it had been repaired with plywood and metal braces. Plastic sheets. Plastic sheets covered the walls where rainwater entered through cracks. I later learned that the structure had started as a storm shelter built in the early 1960s. The Weller family had expanded it and connected it to the farmhouse basement. When the house burned and the basement was filled, the outside entrance remained. At the time, I didn't know any of that. I only knew I was underground in the home of a man who had destroyed my cameras with a rock. I tried my phone and found that I had no signal. The first room contained shelves made from boards and concrete blocks. Cans were arranged by size. Water jugs lined one wall. There were batteries, flashlights, cleaning supplies, tools, wire, and folded clothes. Everything was worn, but it wasn't thrown around. This wasn't a temporary hiding place. Someone had lived there for a long time. The passage continued into a larger room. A small room. A small camping stove burned on a table, heating a dented metal pot. The canvas bag Matthew had carried rested on the floor. Three chairs surrounded the table. One was a metal folding chair. Another was made of wood with a cracked seat. The third was small enough for a child. I moved my flashlight across the room. A shelf on the opposite wall held three welding hoods. With the damaged one he had worn into the shelter, that meant he had at least four. Each had been modified in the same way. The dark filter lenses had been removed, and replaced with scratched pieces of clear plastic. Cloth padding had been attached inside, and strips of fabric hung from the bottoms to protect his neck. One had been repaired with wire. Another had a burned section along the side. Seeing them together frightened me more than seeing Matthew beside the foundation ever had. For a few seconds, I wondered if several people used the shelter. Then I saw the room. I saw the repairs. Each hood had been adjusted to fit the same head. They weren't equipment for a group. They were replacements. On a shelf beneath them were empty prescription bottles. Most of the labels had been peeled away. Beside those were objects damaged by fire. A set of keys fused together. Part of a kitchen clock. Several blackened utensils. And a child's baseball glove with burned leather. The metal drawer handle I had watched Matthew dig from the foundation was there, too. I should have left immediately. I had already found enough to know that my theory was probably correct. Then I saw blood on the floor. There were several drops near the canvas bag, and a smear leading toward a narrow passage at the rear of the room. I thought about his limp. I convinced myself he might be badly hurt. I followed the blood. The rear passage led to a smaller concrete chamber. A battery lantern sat on the floor. Its light was weak. But it was enough to see Matthew sitting against the far wall. The welding hood rested beside him. For two years, I had imagined what might be underneath it. Every version had been worse than reality, because every version had turned him into something other than a person. The right side of his face was badly scarred. The skin around his cheek and jaw had tightened as it healed, pulling the corner of his mouth downward. Most of his right ear was missing. The scarring continued down his neck and disappeared beneath the grey coat I had left for him. A strip of cloth was tied tightly around his lower leg, but blood had soaked through it and run into his boot. He held the burned baseball glove in both hands. I said his name. "Matthew?" His head rose. The change in him was immediate. He dropped the glove, pushed himself upright, and came across the chamber. I backed into the passage. "Matthew, wait." He grabbed the front of my rainjacket with both hands. His injured leg gave way, but his upper body continued forward and drove me against the wall. The back of my head struck concrete. I tried to pull his hands away, but I couldn't move them. His face was inches from mine. His eyes moved over me without settling. He didn't appear to recognize me. "It's me," I said. "From the creek." His grip tightened. I pushed against his injured leg. Matthew released me and staggered into the larger room. I moved after him, intending to reach the stairs. He turned quickly, and I backed into the table. The metal pot fell and knocked the camping stove onto its side. The burner remained lit. A blanket hanging beside the table slipped down across it, and the lower edge caught before I could reach it. Matthew stopped. He stared at the fire. I grabbed one of the water jugs, but before I could open it, Matthew dropped beside the table. He tried to beat out the flames with his bare hands. I yelled at him to move. He didn't react. The fire climbed the blanket. Matthew seized it and tore it from where it hung. The burning fabric folded across his arms. I grabbed it and pulled it away. He struck me across the shoulder hard enough to knock me on to one of the chairs. "Owen," he said. He wasn't looking at me anymore. He turned toward the sealed section at the rear of the room. "Owen," I said. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. his injured leg, twisted free, and fell backward into one of the shelves. The impact pulled a support away from the wall. The entire shelf tipped into the passage. Cans, tools, and pieces of concrete struck the floor. The end of one board caught me across the forehead. The shelf came down diagonally behind me, blocking most of the route to the stairs. For a moment, I couldn't see clearly. When I touched my face, my fingers came away covered in blood. Matthew stood over me. I tried to crawl away, but he knelt beside me. His entire expression changed when he saw the blood. He removed a clean cloth from his coat and pressed it against my forehead. I'm sorry, he said. Those were the last words I heard from him. Smoke continued moving through the room. Matthew put the damaged welding hood back on. He grinned. I gripped the fallen shelf and lifted one side. I crawled beneath it. He pushed it far enough away from the wall to clear the passage, then followed. At the bottom of the stairs, I pushed against the steel hatch. It moved several inches and stopped. Mud and debris had collected along the outside edge. Matthew put one shoulder beneath it. The hatch opened. Rainwater poured down the stairs as we climbed. I crawled out first and rolled onto the wet ground. Matthew emerged behind me without the canvas bag or any of his supplies. The welding hood covered his face again. His hands had been burned by the fire, and blood ran from his injured leg. I reached for my phone. Matthew backed away. Wait, I said. You need help. He turned toward the creek. I called his name. He stopped briefly but didn't look back. Then he entered the trees. My phone regained service near the farmland. I called his name. I called his name. I called emergency services and told the dispatcher there had been a fire in an underground structure and that an injured man had run into the woods. After that, I called my mother. Police and firefighters arrived within half an hour. I waited beside the road with my rain jacket pressed against my forehead. My mother reached me first. She had no idea the underground structure existed, and there was no simple way to explain how I knew about it. I initially told the police I had followed the man, because I saw that he was injured. That was true. I said it was the first time I had ever seen him. That was not. Firefighters entered the shelter and confirmed the flames were out. Police searched the property through the rest of the night. They found an emergency exit at the rear of the structure. It was a narrow concrete passage that opened near the drainage creek. The lower part of it was flooded by the rising water, which was most likely why the injured man had been forced to use the water. Once the water receded, investigators determined that the creek-side passage had normally allowed him to enter and leave the shelter without going anywhere near the foundation. A search dog followed the creek north before losing the trail near a drainage pipe beneath the county road. With the heavy rain and rising water, there wasn't much to follow. The man was gone. The police found the three welding hoods on the shelf, the bedding, and enough food to feed him. The man was gone. The man was gone. time. They found receipts from several towns, some more than 20 miles away. That suggested he hadn't remained in the woods continuously. They also found wire, homemade alarms, and pieces from several small animal traps. There were no weapons beyond ordinary tools and a kitchen knife. There was no evidence that anyone had been held there. No stolen property from the surrounding houses was found. Police checked local reports and couldn't connect the occupant to any attack or break-in. Two days later, I told them the truth. I told a detective about the first encounter at the foundation, the winter coat, the trail cameras, and the conversation where the man asked me not to take more pictures. I gave them the damaged memory card, the original phone recording, and my written record of sightings. My parents sat beside me while I explained that I had been killed. I told them that I had been killed. I told them that I had been entering the property after midnight for two years. My mother cried. My dad became so angry that the detective asked him to step outside. The detective wanted to know why I hadn't reported the man sooner. I gave him every answer I had given myself. I was trespassing. I didn't know if he had committed a crime. I was worried the police would frighten him. I thought taking him from the shelter might make things worse. The detective listened and then asked if part of me had wanted to capture the entire story before anyone else found it. I couldn't answer him. Nothing inside the shelter carried Matthew Weller's name. The prescription labels had been removed, and none of the clothes contained identification. Investigators compared my description of the man's face and injuries with information from the old fire investigation and Matthew's missing person file. His age, height, build, burns, connection to the property, and the belongings recovered from the shelter all fit. Everyone involved believed the man was probably Matthew. They could never prove it. Without finding him or uncovering something that directly established his identity, the police continued to list Matthew Weller as missing. Officially, the person who had occupied the shelter remained unidentified. Nobody reported a confirmed sighting of Matthew after that night. The sale of the property never went through. The shelter entrance was sealed the following spring. A taller fence was installed around the old foundation. The damaged section behind the retention basin was repaired. For several months, I checked missing person sites and local news reports every day. There were possible sightings in Ohio and southern Michigan, but none were verified. One person claimed a man wearing a welding hood had been seen near an abandoned railroad building outside Auburn. Police searched and found nothing. Eventually, the updates stopped. I've spent years reconsidering everything I saw. I can't diagnose the man in the shelter. I don't know exactly what condition he had, what treatment he received, or what happened during the years before he returned to the property. I still believe he was Matthew. I don't know whether the welding hood was only meant to hide his burns, or whether wearing something from his father's workshop made him feel safe. I also can't say he was harmless. He was extremely strong. Sometimes confused, and capable of reacting violently when frightened. He could have killed me underground without intending to. But I no longer believe he was waiting in those woods to hurt anyone. The first night, he wasn't guarding the property from me. He was recovering pieces of the home where his family died. The perimeter lines and traps weren't part of some plan to hunt people. They protected his food and warned him when someone entered the only place he felt safe. When he found the trail cameras, he didn't smash them because he wanted to frighten me. He smashed them because I had hidden them around his home and photographed him without his knowledge. In the shelter, he attacked me because I entered the only private place he had left. When the fire started, he stopped seeing me. He saw the night his family died. Even after I caused the fire and fought him, he got me outside. I still have the broken battery cover from the trail cameras. I don't keep it as evidence of what he did. I keep it because it reminds me of what I did. I went into those woods looking for an urban legend. When I found a frightened and deeply unwell person instead, I kept filming because the truth wasn't as exciting as the story I wanted. What keeps me awake now isn't the idea that Matthew might still be hiding somewhere. It's the possibility that he died alone after I frightened him out of the only place he considered home. For two years, I told myself that watching him was the same as caring about him. When I finally admitted he needed more help than I could give, the only help I knew how to bring was the kind he had spent years hiding from. I've written this post four times and deleted it three. My wife finally told me to just put it up somewhere because I've been carrying it for almost ten years and it's starting to show. So here it is. I'm not going to name the exact area because the last thing that place needs is traffic. If you hunt northeastern Minnesota, you might recognize the country anyway. That's fine. Just don't go looking for the spot. I mean that. My name doesn't matter. I was fifty-three years old when this happened. Born and raised on the Iron Range and I'd been deer hunting since I was eleven. My partner, I'll call him Rick, went to high school with me. We'd hunted the rifle opener together every year since 1989. Twenty-eight straight seasons. Weddings. Funerals. One divorce. One heart attack. We never missed an opener. That's the kind of friendship it was. The kind where you don't talk much because everything's already been said. This happened over five days in November of 2016. I'm going to tell it in order, and I'm going to tell it in plain, because I've heard enough campfire versions of stories like this to know how they get embellished. Nothing here is embellished. If anything, I'm leaving things out because I still can't make sentences out of them. Our spot was walk-in country in the Superior National Forest, north of the Divide. You park at a pull-off on a gravel forest road, and then you hike a little over three miles down an old logging grade that the forest has mostly taken back. At the end of it there's a low ridge of maple and birch that drops off into a black spruce bog on the north side. We'd hunted that ridge for 19 years. We had two ladder stands about 400 yards apart, and we camped in a canvas wall tent in a little clearing on the south slope, out of the wind. Three miles of dragging gear on a plastic sled is a lot of work for two men in their 50s, and every year we said this would be the last year we did it, and every year we did it again. The reason was simple: nobody else went in there. In 19 years we'd seen exactly one other human being back on that ridge. A grouse hunter who'd gotten turned around, and that was in 2004. It was our place. That mattered to us more than the deer did, honestly. We got to the pull-off around one in the afternoon on Friday. The weather was decent for early November, mid-thirties, grey, no snow yet, which was a disappointment because you want tracking snow on the opener. We loaded the sleds and started in. Here's the first thing, and at the time it was nothing. About a mile down the grade, Rick stopped and stood there with his head cocked. I asked him what. He said, "Listen." I listened. I didn't hear anything. He said, "Yeah, that's what I mean." I want to explain this to the people reading who don't spend time in the north woods. The forest in November is not loud, but it is never silent. There are chickadees, there are red squirrels, which are the loudest animal in the woods, per pound of body weight, and they scold you the entire way down any trail. There are ravens somewhere. There's wind in the tops of the pines, even when there's no wind on the ground. There is a constant, low texture of sound that you stop consciously hearing after about age twelve, but your body keeps hearing it, and your body notices when it's gone. It was gone. The woods sounded the way a room sounds. I remember I could hear my own pulse. I could hear the sound of a bird. went around again. Rick got his flashlight and his rifle. I unzipped the flap and he put the beam out into the trees and tracked the sound with it. And I am telling you, the light was on the sound. The beam was pointed directly at the place the footsteps were coming from, close enough that we could hear individual leaves compress, maybe 25 or 30 yards, open hardwoods with no brush, and the light showed us tree trunks and falling frost crystals and nothing else. The steps continued through the beam, through it, leaves crunching in a moving spot on the ground that we were both staring at, and the spot was empty. Rick said, hey, loud. His voice cracked on it. The footsteps stopped, not the way an animal stops, mid-stride, freezing. They finished a step, placed the next foot down, settled, and stopped. The way a man stops when he arrives somewhere. Then the woods went back to being a photograph and stayed that way until morning. Neither of us slept. Around three in the morning, Rick said into the dark, we should go home tomorrow. I said, yeah, and here is the thing I will regret for the rest of my life, and I've made my peace with the fact that peace isn't coming on this one. By sunrise in the daylight, with coffee going and the stove ticking, and the woods looking like the same woods we'd hunted for 19 years, we talked ourselves out of it. We were two grown men. We'd driven four hours and dragged sleds three miles. Sound carries funny in the cold. Frost crystals fool a flashlight beam. A moose walks in a two-beat rhythm if it's ambling. That was mine. I came up with that one, and Rick let me have it because we both wanted it. We decided to hunt Sunday morning, pull the stands Sunday afternoon, and pack out Monday. One more sit. That was my idea. Sunday morning was warmer, low 40s, still gray. We walked out to the stands together as far as the split in the trail, and then went our ways. Before he turned off, Rick did something he'd never done in 28 years. He stuck out his hand. We shook hands, at 610 in the morning, on a deer trail, for no reason either of us said out loud. I've turned that over about 10,000 times since. I don't think he knew anything. I think his body knew something. The same way my body had known about the silence on the walk in. The morning sit was the same photograph. I climbed down at 11, and we ate lunch. And everything at camp was normal enough that we were almost cheerful. In the daylight, it's hard to hold on to what the dark showed you. That's not a weakness of ours specifically. It's a design feature of people, I think. And mostly it serves us well. And once in a while, it kills somebody. The plan for the afternoon. Last sit from 1 to 430, then pull both stands before dark. Done hunting. Pack out Monday morning. Rick walked west at 1250. Radio check at 1. In the stand. His voice sounded fine. Bored even. At 220, I heard the silence get worse. I know how that reads. I've spent almost ten years trying to say it better, and I can't. There are levels below quiet, is what I found out that afternoon. The woods had been silent for two days, and at 2.20 in the afternoon that silence dropped through a floor I didn't know was there, into something with pressure behind it. My ears ached. The light seemed to thicken, not darken, thicken. Every hair on my body stood up, and I had the sudden overwhelming animal certainty that I needed to be small and still, and I obeyed it. I sat in that ladder stand without moving one muscle for what my watch said afterward was over 40 minutes, and what my body said was four hours. I did not hear footsteps. I did not hear a scream, a shot, a call for help. That's what tortures me. Whatever happened 400 yards west of me happened inside the deepest quiet I've ever experienced, and I was pinned inside it too, obedient, hiding, while my best friend went wherever he went. Just after three, a raven called, and the pressure released the way your ears pop on a hill, and the ordinary silence came back and felt almost friendly. I keyed the radio. You awake over there? Nothing. Dead batteries, I told myself, keying it two more times. He fell asleep. He climbed down to, and left the radio in the stand. I gave it 10 minutes and tried again, and then I climbed down and walked west. I came over the last rise at 3.40 in the afternoon, and I could see his stand from 80 yards. Orange. You see orange first. His orange hat was on the ground at the base of the ladder. I ran the last 80 yards, which you should never do with a loaded rifle, and I don't care. Here's what was at Rick's stand. His hat, on the ground, upright, resting where it would land off a hook, not off a head. His rifle, and this is the detail the sheriff's people kept coming back to. His rifle, leaning against the ladder, muzzle up, safety on, unloaded, with the cartridges standing in a row on the seat of the stand. Five cartridges, standing upright in a straight row, evenly spaced. Rick had never unloaded a rifle that way in his life. Nobody unloads a rifle that way. His pack hung on its hook. His thermos, still warm, in the pack. His boot tracks came in from the east on the trail from the split. They walked to the ladder. Around the base of the ladder, the frozen leaves were pressed in a churned patch two or three feet wide. No tracks left that stand. Not east back down the trail. Not in any direction. I'm a decent tracker. Not a legend, but 30-plus years ago, I was a police officer. I was a police officer. And I circled that stand in rings for over an hour while the light died, and the leaf litter and frost held sign everywhere. My own tracks printing crisp and obvious. And his went in, and did not come out. I fired three signal shots at 5 o'clock. Waited. Three more at 5.30. The reports went out flat into that country and came back thin. Nothing answered. I will not walk you through that night hour, but I will not walk you through that night hour, but I will not walk you through that night hour. I will not walk you through that night hour, but I will not walk you through that night hour. I stayed, in the dark, at his stand, with a fire, calling his name until my voice went. Twice, from up the ridge to the northwest, in the far distance, I heard one knock. Wood on wood. Both times I stood up and screamed his name at it, which was either brave or the stupidest thing I've ever done. And both times the answer was: the photograph's silence. At first light, I left his stand exactly as it was, hiked out three miles in ninety minutes, drove until I had cell signal, and called the county sheriff at 8:15 on Monday morning. What follows I'll compress, because most of a search is procedure, and the procedure part worked the way it's supposed to. The sheriff's office took it seriously and moved fast. By Monday afternoon, there were deputies, a forest service officer, and the county's volunteer search and rescue team standing in the middle of the night. and rescue team staging at the pull-off. By Tuesday, there were over 40 people, a state patrol helicopter making passes, and two canine units. I'll give you the facts that stuck, the ones the searchers themselves couldn't file anywhere. The dogs would not work north of the stand. Both dogs, separately, hours apart, took Rick's scent from his hat and worked the trail happily right up to the base of the ladder, and then wanted no part of the ground past it. The first dog sat down. I watched this. She took scent, moved north maybe 15 yards into the open hardwoods, stopped, came back, and sat next to her handler and would not be sent again. A five-year-old working shepherd with dozens of finds, refusing. The second dog, Tuesday morning, did the same thing at almost exactly the same time. 15 or 20 yards north of the stand. And the handler told the incident commander, in my hearing, she's acting the way she acts on a cadaver find, except there's no find. Both handlers marked the same line on the map without having talked to each other. Grid searchers reported their radios dropping out in one drainage northwest of the ridge, just static in a bowl of maybe 40 acres, working fine outside it. Equipment does fail. It failed. There were 11 different people in the same 40 acres. Monday night, a volunteer searcher, a big kid, mid-twenties, a wildland firefighter, not a flincher, walked out of the woods at the end of his grid, put his gear in his truck, and left. He told the coordinator he was sorry, and that he wouldn't be back, and he wouldn't say anything else. I got his number later and called him, months after, told him who I was. He was quiet a long time, and then he said, something paced my line for two hours, ten yards into the brush, and when I stopped, it stopped, and when I shined it, there was nothing, and I have a daughter. And he hung up, politely, and I never bothered him again. theory, which was reasonable, was that Rick had climbed down, walked off to relieve himself or follow a sound, gotten turned around, and succumbed to hypothermia. Except the tracks argued with it, and the rifle argued with it, and every hour that passed argued with it, because the nights went down into the teens, and Rick was in wool, but not in survival gear. By Wednesday morning he'd been out three nights. Nobody said the word recovery around me, and everybody was thinking it. I was thinking it. I'd stopped eating. I sat at the staging area writing the phone call to his wife in my head, over and over, in different words. At 9.50 on Wednesday morning, November 9th, the radio at the command post came alive, and it was a confused conservation officer relaying a call from a grouse hunter, and the grouse hunter had Rick, 11 miles away, northeast, alive. I want to lay out the geography. Because this is the part that ended any chance of me accepting a normal explanation. Rick was found sitting against the trunk of a white pine on the far side of a river that runs well northeast of our ridge. To reach that pine from his stand, you travel 11 miles in a straight line, across two spruce bogs, that in early November are unfrozen muck laced with open water, across the river itself, which at the nearest crossing that week was thigh-deep and moving and 34 degrees. And through several miles of blowdown from a windstorm years back, that searchers on the grid crews described as "crawling country." Fit, equipped SAR people would call that "a brutal two-day trip." Rick was 53 years old with a stented heart. He was found 70 hours after I last heard his voice. He was found sitting upright, awake, facing northwest. Facing, the conservation officer noted, back toward our ridge. His boots were worn out. His boots were gone. Not shredded. Not nearby. Gone. Both of them. And he was sitting there in his wool socks. And the socks, after 11 miles of that country, after two bogs and a thigh-deep river, were clean. Clean and bone-dry. Not a burr in the wool. Not a stain on the soles. The nurse in the ER in Ely remarked on it. She said she'd peeled socks off day hikers that were in worse shape than the ones that came off a man wearing a pair of socks. The nurse said she'd peeled socks off day hikers that were in worse shape than the ones that came off a man wearing a pair of socks. She said she'd peeled socks off day hikers that were in worse shape than the ones that came off a man who'd been three days in the bush. He was dehydrated and cold, but his core temperature, after three nights that touched 14 degrees, was 94. Low. Survivable low. Explain that to me. People die of exposure overnight in that country in November with their boots on. His clothes weren't even torn. The grouse hunter, an older local guy, said Rick was awake when he found him and looked directly at him and said one thing. Is it Wednesday? And then didn't speak again for a day and a half. Rick spent four days in the hospital. Physically, he came back fine. Better than fine, weirdly. His doctor told him whatever he'd done out there, his heart had tolerated it, which his doctor found impressive, and I find one more wrong thing on the pile. The county wrote it up as a lost hunter, self-rescue, found by a passerby. On paper, that's what it is. The searchers know what's on paper and what isn't. The two dog handlers know. The kid with the daughter knows. Rick says he doesn't remember. That's the official version between us, and I honored it for two years. He didn't remember climbing down, didn't remember the 70 hours, remembered the grouse hunter's orange vest, and then the helicopter. Trauma does that, the doctors said, and hypothermia does that, and I nodded along. Three years later, at his youngest daughter's house. We'll be right back. Home of the Save. I waited. He finished his drink. Then he said, And I remember being set down. At the end. I remember the sitting down part. Being placed. The way you'd put down something you were done carrying. Careful. That's all. That's everything. I said okay. We went back inside, and he danced with his daughter, and we have never spoken about it again. That's not an open wound between us. It's the opposite. It's the same. The most closed thing in my life. Some doors you shut together. On purpose. And you both hold the handle for a second. And then you go back to being friends who don't talk much because everything's already been said. Here's how it all ended up, so nobody has to wonder. Rick is alive today. He's 62. He sold his rifles the spring after it happened. Took up walleye fishing with a fury, and moved with his wife to a lake place where the trees stay a polite distance from the house. He's a grandfather four times over. He's happy. I checked with him before writing this post. Told him I needed to put it down somewhere. He read it. All of it. Handed my phone back and said, You spelled cadaver right. That's Rick. I went back in one time, in May of 2017, with my nephew and my brother-in-law, in daylight, to pull the stands and the tent, and every trace of us out of there. The woods that day were lighted. Loud. Chickadees. Squirrels. A grouse drumming somewhere. Ravens overhead. As loud and ordinary and alive as any woods I've ever walked. And somehow that was the most frightening trip of my life. Because it felt exactly the way an empty house feels when it's been cleaned before you arrive. We took everything. I left the county a thank you letter, and the search and rescue team a check. And I have never gone back, and I never will. And neither will Rick. And as far as I know, no one hunts that ridge to this day. I don't hunt anymore either. I didn't sell my rifle out of fear. I sold it because hunting was a thing Rick and I did. And that thing is finished. And I'd rather remember 28 good openers than sit in a tree alone listening for a two-beat step. I never learned what was in those woods. I've made my peace with that too. And here's the shape of the peace. Whatever it was, it took my friend for three days to figure out what it was. It took me three days, carried him 11 miles through country that should have killed him, kept him warm through three freezing nights, and set him down. Carefully, by his own word, where a man with an orange vest would walk past the next morning. It never touched me. It never hurt him. It let us both go home. I don't need to know what it was. I know what it did. It gave him back. And now you know everything I know. The door is shut. And I'm done carrying him. I'm done carrying it. And I'm done carrying it. ♪ Every home ♪ I'm not giving up. I am selling the building. The final season of FX is the bear. The restaurant is flooded. Everything's either going to be okay. Or not. We are outgunned and we are outmanned, but we have each other. FX is the bear. The final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney plus.