Something in the Snow

What's up look look there those tracks I don't know what you think bear too big and no claw marks Roy look at the spacing I noticed that yeah moves maybe Patrol one tower one come in over a tower one this is patrol one you need to back say again over start moving back to the tower now over what are you seeing the same thing better song it's big over where north of you near the pond maybe 200 meters over can you still see it take a deep just get back here now so yeah we're going you think it's an animal just the hell is that run run on a freezing winter night near the Norwegian Russian border two soldiers were sent into the woods to investigate movement outside their watch tower the expected bear moose maybe a person trying to cross the border but whenever was moving through those trees it was much bigger than that I'm Luke Lamana and this is wartime stories this first story takes us to one of the most remote corners of northern Norway and I'll be honest I didn't even realize until reading this account but Norway shares a border with Russia it's not a huge border just over a hundred miles of frozen sparsely populated wilderness but for the Norwegian army it matters because out there standing above the trees our observation towers facing east and inside those towers are soldiers watching the border through the long nights bad weather and miles of forest where there is almost nothing around them no towns no traffic no cell phones just a small team a cabin tower and the dark woods below the soldiers who do this job are called border-yagers and according to the soldier who shared this story he was nineteen years old when he was selected for one of those patrol teams and sent north in the dead of winter at first it sounded like a military assignment that would be miserable but straightforward keep watch walk patrols monitor the border try not to freeze to death but not long after his team arrived at one of the smaller installations the soldiers they were relieving mentioned seeing a large dark figure moving through the forest they assumed it was an animal bear a moose something normal but a few nights later when one of the men in the tower saw something huge cross near the border two soldiers were sent into the woods to investigate and what they found in the snow didn't look like any animal track they'd ever seen he writes so I read some creepy stories from people serving in the armies of their respective countries and figured I'd throw my own out there a bit of background I served in the Norwegian Army here in Norway each of us is expected to serve a mandatory year in the armed forces if our physical and psychological health is up to standard after I joined up I was sent as far north as Norway goes hoping to be assigned as a guard along the Norwegian Russian border the guys that do this job are called border acres and being that things with Russia are a little tense it's one of the most prioritized sections of the Norwegian Army there's a whole selection process when it comes to deciding who gets to guard the border and do the cool yeager stuff I put my name forward and six months later I was put into a small patrol group consisting of four men there was Olev our team leader myself the assistant team leader Roy our medic and Peter our comms guy they shipped us out to one of the smaller installations near the border and after a few more days of waiting we finally got the call we were all pretty young at the time I was about 19 and just hyped being there so we're loaded into a truck and driven out about three kilometers before this road comes to an end we dismount wrap our weapons are here start walking along a small gravel trail that leads to the observation tower this was in the dead of winter it's getting colder and darker each day the snow is falling wind howling but these were the kind of conditions that we were trained in hell a lot of Norwegians are practically raised in that kind of weather so not a big deal about five hours later we reach our destination a 25 meter high tower with a small cabin at the bottom our home for the next 22 days no access to cell phones or anything like that fun times our job here was basically just to keep eyes on the border 24/7 and then walk patrols along the borderline on arrival we shot the shit with some of the guys we were relieving they gave us the lowdown on anything they experienced the usual administrative BS but before they left one of the guys made mention of seeing a big dark figure moving through the woods during one of his shifts he didn't sound too worried probably just a moose or a bear so we kind of just brushed it off this observation tower was incredibly remote there's no buildings or people around for several kilometers in any direction so we are truly on our own out there after carrying all our gear weapons and food into the cabin we give our equipment a good clean as it was now soaked covered in snow and as we're doing that our medic Roy he's up in the tower because someone has to be up there at all times with all of our stuff cleaned and squared away 11 I start preparing dinner as Peter is doing an inspection of the base basically just making sure that the other guys left everything clean orderly as they should now the dark is coming and without any lights besides the red LED lamp on top of the tower it is pitch black outside temperatures about 24 degrees Celsius that's negative 11.2 degrees Fahrenheit for any Americans out there so I went to the storage room broke out the firewood got the fireplace going all 11 I finished cooking dinner and the three of us take our plates of potatoes greens and elk meat to enjoy in front of the cabin small television now in the cabin there's a phone that connects us downstairs directly to whoever's up in the tower makes communications more efficient and after about 20 minutes of us chilling out enjoying our food that phone starts ringing I answer it and of course it's Roy up in the tower and he tells me that he had just seen something lurking out in the woods about a kilometer away from our position on the Russian side of the border and apparently the tower's radar also picked up movement in that direction he didn't sound scared or anything just wanted to keep us up to date in case we needed to go out there and apprehend some guy you know trying to cross the border legally so I just tell him keep an eye out keep his posted use the thermal binoculars if so needed anyway fast forward it's now about 8 30 pm and I'm preparing for my shift that starts at nine I take a shower make myself some coffee and watch TV for a few more minutes before grabbing my gear and I make my way up it's like a million steps I finally reach the top pull up in the hatch there's this last ladder that you have to climb up and being closedops room Roy's inside he's doing good nothing to report besides the weird crappy saw earlier in the woods as he gets his stuff and steps out he's like good watch which is a dumb but comforting little tradition that we had I sit down for myself some more coffee and I'm just chilling out as I'm now keeping an eye on these monitors I tell you more about the kinds of equipment that we had in that tower but a lot of that is but what I can tell you is that we had a computer which was strictly used for emailing and chatting with other bases and towers along the border. So I start chatting with a buddy of mine who's on in another tower just to kill some time. The night again is pitch black, sky, full of stars, the moon, also the aurora borealis is out in all its glory, absolutely beautiful. But the boredom was getting to me. I remember sitting there, cursing to myself like, why the hell do we need to sit here all night? Like, can't even see shit when it's dark. Hour goes by, then two, I've got one hour left, and then Pete is going to come up and take over. And that's when the lights go out. All of the monitors in the tower just go black, and now I'm sitting in total darkness. And I'm kind of panicked because I can't leave the tower, but at the same time now I can't phone the guys downstairs in the cabin for further instruction because phones also did. So I just sit there for maybe five minutes, just kind of freaking out about the whole thing, and finally the power turns back on. Peter comes up, we talk some smack about the whole power search thing. So I wish him a good watch, I go back down to the cabin. It's now a little after midnight by the time I get back in. Eleven Roy, they're already passed out in the cabin's bedroom. I went to the fridge, made myself a snack, watched a little more TV, and then I go to rack out and here is where our troubles really start. The cabin's bedroom is small with four beds, one for each patrol member. There's also a phone in here as well that acts as kind of an alarm of sorts. If the guy in the tower calls and no one answers, he basically has the option to wake everybody up in case of an emergency. So I get settled in, I set my alarm on my watch and I'm just trying to close my eyes and I'm listening to eleven Roy, they're snoring like woodwork. And wouldn't you know it. Just as I find a comfortable sleeping position, phone starts ringing, and I'm like, damn it. You know like has some officer decided to call at an exercise in the middle of the night, some stupid, but when I picked up, it's Peter and his eye could tell his voice is actually shaking. And he's like, dude, you need to wake up the rest of the guys. So I'm like, okay, slow down, like what's going on? I think there's some Syrian refugee trying to cross the border or something, and he's like, just wake them the hell up and send them all up here. And then he hangs up. So I wake the guys up and I tell them that Peter for some undisclosed reason needs us up in the tower. So all of us now like half asleep. We put our clothes back on, grabbed our gear, and hauled ass up those million tower steps. When we reach the ops room, Peter does not look like himself. It's still dark in the room, but even in the moonlight, I can see like his face is paper pale. Now Oliv is our team leader, but he's more of a friend than anything else, so he sits Peter down, a little counseling session, and he's like, okay, what's going on? And at this, Peter says that he saw something huge come across the border. It wasn't a bear or a moose, and it definitely, he says, wasn't human. And Oliv is just kind of looking at him and disbelief, and he's like, you know, maybe you're feeling the effects of too much coffee, sleep deprivation, but Peter is insisting that he saw something. So we all kind of look at each other, and during situations like this, two people have to head out to investigate this, while the other two stay in the tower to prevent an all-out crisis from popping off across the border. So Roy and I pull the short stick. Oliv is going to stay with Peter up in the tower, and me and Roy, we check our weapons, we switch on the comms, GPS, and we're getting prepped to go out on a patrol. And at this point, we were convinced that we were dealing with some kind of animals, so we did not call this into the main station, trying to avoid any sort of panic. And you know what? Peter was right. There was something out there, not a bear or a moose, or a person. Much worse. Okay, so we leave the tower. We start making our way down this steep hill, it leads to a large pond, which is closer to the border. It's not windy out, but it is cold as hell, and a snow makes things eerily silent. We had night vision, but we didn't need it. It was dark outside, but the snow, being very reflective, combined with the stars, the moon, and everything, illuminated before us pretty well. So we're walking, and it's about 30 minutes later, and we finally reached the coordinates that were given to us. We turn on our flashlights, and we're looking around. And bear in the snow are these prints. They look like gigantic holes, like pictures someone just took their fist, and shoved it straight down into the snow, except this person's fists would have to be the size of a large, thick log. Where does hell? These footprints, or whatever they are, are clustered together in a relatively big area, but maybe two to three meters square, but the distance between each cluster, that was a different story, because each of those was at least two to three meters apart. So now my adrenaline's pumping, and Roy and I are just looking at each other and disbelief like, what the hell could have done this like what made these prints? There's no claws, so not a bear. Way too big, really, to be anything like that. Maybe a moose kind of tromping through galloping through something like that. And that's when our comms suddenly go off and scare the shit out of us. It was Oliv, and he is panicked. I could hear it in his voice, and he's telling us, drop what you're doing. Get your ass back to the tower. And I'm like, bro, it took 30 minutes to get out here. I'm like, why? And he said, because they had just seen the same thing that Peter saw, and it was big. So now I'm freaking out. And I said, okay, so where's the last thing that he saw it? And he said that it was near that big pond, which at this point was just maybe 200 meters north of us. Needless to say, we immediately turn around and just start booking it back towards the tower, but deep snow, all the gear up, we're not moving very quickly. And as we're tromping through the snow, that's when we hear this blood curdling, very not human shriek. It was so loud that it knocked the snow off the tree branches overhead. We're like in snow dropping down on top of us. And immediately we turned towards where the sound came from, and we see it. We see something two to three hundred meters away. It's hard to get a good look at because of the distance and it being dark, but it was definitely there. It wasn't big and width, but it was tall. The trees in that area are maybe eight to nine meters high. And God help me. Maybe it was just the fear or the low light or whatever, but this thing looked to be at least the same height. I just grabbed Roy, and I was like, dude, run. Honestly, I don't remember much from the first part of the run. I just remember everything would kind of black. And I remember feeling pain in my throat. I remember tasting blood, just probably the cold air. Anyway, I was just praying we didn't trip and wipe out in the snow. We did have to stop at one point. And we're just full like 360 scanning with our rifles around us. And then we hear another shriek. And it sounded just as loud as the first one. We can't see this thing, but then we hear this. And we feel it. You can feel it in the ground. Like the ground is literally shaking with these heavy thumps. So that's it, break times over. We at that point we dropped everything, but our essential gear kept our radios our rifles and our line gear we just took off. Finally, we hit this trail. Now we can move a little bit faster and we come over the last hill. We can now see the tower. At that point, O-Lev comes over the radio and through through the running out of the way. I can kind of make out that he's telling us that whatever the hell is behind us, it's not far. He's looking at it through binoculars. He said that he saw it lurking through one of the overgrown areas besides the trail that we're still on. We hear another shriek, sounds closer, and it just sounds pissed. I ran faster at that point than I have ever run in my life. I thought I was gonna drop dead from sheer exhaustion, but just something kept me going. So we sprint this last 50 meters to the cabin, and I'm shaking so bad I can barely get the code in. Finally, I get it in, door pops open. We fall in, slam the door shut. Takes us a second to kind of get our wits about us, and then our first instinct grabbed the weapons, 11 Peter's weapons, and as much ammo as we can carry, and we booked it up the stairs into the ops tower. We explained to 11 Peter what we saw, what we thought we saw. And they're just pale as ghosts listening to the story. Roy had a hard time, he could barely talk. So we wrote down what had happened best as we could, he tried to be as detailed as possible, and we sent that off via email to the main station, and then we just spent the rest of the night up in the tower with our weapons. Not really saying anything. Fast forward, we decided to reschedule our patrol plan so that we were really only at our outside the tower during the day. And as we certainly would have expected, our nobody, the officers back at the main station, didn't believe a word of our account. They actually kind of made fun of us. But they were at least glad we didn't call in supports. Over what they deemed to be just some kind of animal. This all happened maybe three years ago, I'm 22 now. And I no longer have contact with olever Peter, but Roy, I did catch when he took his own life. Sometime last year. I don't want to be that guy and say that it had anything to do with this incident, because I don't know. I mean, for all I know, he could have been dealing with some other heavy stuff that he just kept hidden from everybody. I didn't know Roy for that long, but I seemed like a good dude. I just feel like I maybe owe it to him to share what we experienced that night near the Russian border. This next story takes us from northern Norway to Finland. And like Norway, one thing that's important to understand about Finland is that military service is a much more normal part of life than it is for, say, most Americans. Finland has conscription. So a lot of young men grow up knowing that at some point they will probably spend some time in uniform training in the forests, learning to move through the terrain, getting used to the kind of cold, dark isolated places that most people would rather avoid. This account took place in 2016, not long after this finished soldier had started basic training. It was one of his first real field exercises. The recruits were on the woods, setting up tents, digging fighting positions, pulling guard shifts, firing blanks, normal, basic training, recruit type stuff. And at first he says it felt like a camping trip, just with more camo, more yelling and rifles. But then he got sick, fever, burning throat, can't sleep. And every time he's managing to drift off, he says he kept having the same kind of nightmare that there's something out in the trees watching him. And at first he just assumed it was the fever. But then another recruit comes into his tent in the middle of the night and tells him there was someone outside. And by the next evening, multiple soldiers are realizing that whatever is moving around this training area, it's not an instructor, it's not a scout, it's not an officer just messing around with the new guys. And it's not any normal animal. He writes. First of all, I apologize for my English. As you can imagine, it's not my native language. Just to add a bit of context, in the Finnish army, we have a rank that sits in between corporal and sergeant. It's called Alokrasanti in Finnish, which roughly translates to under sergeant in English. I'm not sure if you have a rank like that in America, but for simplicity, I will just refer to them as sergeants going forward. They are typically the ones responsible for training new recruits. There were usually two of them for every eight to 10 newbies. Anyway, here is my story. This happened back in 2016 at Vekarajarvi. We were at a close combat training area, and it was actually our first proper exercise out in the forest. Being the bunch of new recruits that we were, we were all pretty excited. It was also going to be the first time that we would get to fire live ammunition in the woods. At first, it was the usual stuff. It would be marching to the area. We set up our tents, dug fighting positions, generally just got settled in. It was a warm summer evening, and honestly felt more like a camping trip, just with more camo foxholes, guns. I was having a great time. So of course, my body chose that night to come down with a fever. My throat was burning so badly, it hurt to swallow. But thankfully, one of our sergeants was understanding. He gave my guard shift to another recruits so that I could get some rest. It didn't really help. Between my fever, the sounds of nature and the occasional footsteps of recruits passing by on a patrol, I slept like shit. But it wasn't just that. I know it sounds weird, but every time I managed to drift off, I'd have these dreams, nightmares, about some kind of creature just watching me from the woods. I'd wake up, brush it off as some fever dream, but at some point, one of the other recruits, let's call him Kimmy, he stumbles into the tent. And he looks me straight in the eyes. And when he speaks, his voice is shaking. And he says, there's someone out there. I was sharing the tent with one of our sergeants, and he sits up, he stares at Kimmy, more annoyed and concerned. Told him he was probably just the first lieutenant, testing our defenses. Kimmy has the tent, he leaves the tent, but I could tell he wasn't entirely convinced. I mean, it made sense for the officers and other sergeants to want to keep us on our toes, you know, make sure we're doing our jobs and all, but something about Kimmy's spooked demeanor and on top of my dreams. I don't know, it just kept bothering me. The next morning, I was feeling a little bit more like myself. We ate breakfast, we trained, spent the day firing off blanks, just normal recruits stuff, but we were all having a good time. And after lunch, I was having a smoke with Kimmy that recruit who came into the tent the night before. And I finally had a chance to ask him if he ever found out who was out there in the woods. He stayed silent for a moment before he said it was probably just our worn officer, like the sergeant said. I don't know if even he believed his own words, but none of us said anything more about it after that. We went back to digging our positions and smoking cigarettes whenever we had a chance. However, as the sun started going down, I noticed that Kimmy was starting to get a little nervous. The others noticed this, too, and started poking fun here and there. But after a while, everyone started acting differently, more tense, more alert, the whole vibe had completely changed. Rumors started spreading that scouts or instructors are out in the woods ready to spook the new guys, and then those rumors changed into stories about recruits who had supposedly died in the training area. Nobody was panicking, but I think it's safe to say that we all had a strange feeling. And that night, after being sick for a little while, it is now my turn on the night shift. At around 2,200, I was assigned to guard one of the fighting positions. Our guard shifts were always done in Paris. I relieved one of the guys that was already there while the other stayed with me for his last 30 minutes. For the first few minutes, everything was calm, quiet. That is, until we spotted movement on the far side of the clearing, maybe 100, 200 meters away. My buddy, Scoff, he said something like, those damned scouts. He asked if we should sound the alarm, but I told him not to worry about it. I kind of figured it was just some guys from the neighboring company who got themselves turned around. But that was when something stepped out of the trees and into the clearing. My heart nearly stopped, and I cried. heard my buddy curse under his breath. There really was something standing there, and it sure as hell wasn't a scout or some officer, it was way too big to be any normal person. Neither of us spoke a word, we just stood there and our whole, staring at this huge black figure standing completely still in the middle of the clearing under the dim moonlight. I couldn't make out any features, but it wasn't moving, it was just there. Then we hear footsteps behind us, it's the guy who's coming to relieve my buddy. And he doesn't even get to the foxhole, he just stops dead in his tracks at some point. And he says, "What the hell is that?" And this thing, whatever it was, it noticed us, I'm sure of it. It was staring directly at our position, just inside the tree line. Fear had all of us in a vice, like we were afraid of even breathing too loud. And when the creature started walking towards us, we just bolted back into the trees towards the camp. I'm not proud of it, but I can honestly admit that during all this, I was terrified, like near the point of tears. And when I heard the sound of branches snapping nearer, what sounded like our old position of the tree line, we knew then that this thing is following us. As we near the edge of camp, one of the other guards shouted us, and demanding we stop, you know, give him a password. Somehow I think one of us actually managed to scream the correct password back at him before saying something to the effect of, "We need to get the hell out of here." We caused quite a scene, and soon the whole camp was a way of asking us what had happened, and then a sergeant and another NCO arrived, and told us to explain ourselves. We told them what had happened, and to my surprise, they seemed to take us very seriously. The two of them, along with one of the recruits, they grabbed their weapons, and went to go check on the fighting position. As for the rest of us frightened recruits, we were told to stay quiet, stay in the tents, and to kill all of the lights. When I tell you the tension inside the tent was unbelievable, everyone whispered trying to guess what we had seen. I was honestly trying to think about anything but that. Eventually, the two sergeants and their recruit came back, and when I saw them, their faces were completely white. Some part of me knew that they had seen exactly what we saw. But before anyone could ask a question, we were ordered straight back into our sleeping bags. Nobody slept much after that, the fear and uncertainty stayed with all of us for the rest of the night. The next morning we saw a bunch of sergeants and NCOs gathered around one of the lieutenants, and we couldn't pick up much of the conversation, but we definitely knew it was about us and everything that had happened the previous night. Guys were refusing to pull cart shifts, and it sounded like they were debating on moving the location of the camp entirely. It's weird, I heard one of the sergeants say, "There's always something with this place." Later on, we managed to get our sergeant alone and asked him about what he'd seen. By the look on his face, he was clear he didn't really want to talk about it, either. But he admitted to us that, "Yes, there was something out there that night, something big, black, and something that definitely wasn't an animal, at least not any normal one." So, that's it. That's my story. I've looked into it, and this thing has reportedly been cited all over Finland, both by civilians and soldiers. After reading both of these accounts, one question immediately comes to mind. What the actual hell did these two soldiers witness? By the way, they both described their respective creatures. They seemed adamant that what they saw was not any kind of large animal. While the Norwegian soldier was able to offer a bit more of a description of what he encountered, we don't know much about what our fence saw, besides that it was big and dark. Beyond that, the details become a little bit vague, and while that leaves us with more questions and answers, it also makes both stories all the more intriguing. So I started digging, not necessarily for an explanation, but to see whether Finnish nor region, or Nordic folklore, in general contained anything that would remotely resemble what these men described. That's when I came across something known as the Hisi. The Hisi is more prominent in Finnish lore than anywhere else, and the word can mean different things, depending on where you are in Finland in which tradition you're looking at. In some of the oldest stories, the Hisi is described as a giant being that inhabits the deepest and most remote forests. It's a creature of immense strength, one that can uproot trees, hurl massive stones, tends to avoid human settlements whenever possible. Some descriptions portray it with skin, resembling moss and bark, allowing it to blend into the surrounding wilderness. Others describe it as being covered in coarse hair, or even a tangled mess of roots and branches. Whatever the case, it belongs to oral traditions that stretch back centuries. Now, am I suggesting that these soldiers encountered a Hisi? Well, how can I? There's simply no way to know what they witnessed. But one thing I've noticed over the years is that when soldiers report something unusual, in a particular part of the world, the local folklore often contains stories that sound surprisingly familiar. Whether that's coincidence, cultural influence, or something else entirely, well, that's up to you. But as strange as these two encounters may be, this next story is every bit as odd. And if what this soldier, says he saw, was a little on the smaller side of things. Hey guys, real quick, I wanted to say thank you to the folks who helped make episodes like this possible, our sponsors. In the Marine Corps, whenever something was unnecessarily complicated, we would say, "Can you break that down, Barney style?" And considering Marines are also known as "cran eaters," I've carried that philosophy pretty far into civilian life. Weekly episodes are no joke in terms of the workload, so because it saves me so much time, especially with reading a large amount of material, I now use AI tools constantly for wartime stories, researching, fact checking, organizing scripts, but you have a lot of choices when it comes to AI, and every AI seems to be better at something different. Well, that means I don't want to spend time figuring out the AI, which model I need at which specific time and prompt, and so enter perplexity computer. It automatically chooses the right AI models for different parts of the project. I give it the job, it figures out the tools. So I recently gave it an entire wartime story script, and I told it to fact check everything, check the military terminology, find continuity problems, and organize the episode for production. It came back with a fully sourced report, it tracked down the original stories, in case I needed to reference those, it caught an incorrect British army rank, and even found some of the continuity errors that we missed. I am thrilled with this, it is such a time saver, so for a limited time only, our listeners can try perplexity computer for free, head to pplx.ai/wartimestories, that's pplx.ai/wartimestories to try computer today. Most AI tools are still answering questions while perplexity computer is completing full projects. Now, speaking of keeping things simple, let's not gun safety. I've got 4 kids, and they're smart, but they're also kids. Telling them don't touch that is not something they're always going to listen to. Me, I keep this, a stop-ox pro on my nightstand. It's completely mechanical, there's no fingerprint reader, no batteries, no keys, and it's really quick to open once you know the 5 button combination. I actually gave this to my kids, and I told them to try to open it and make it a game, and my two older boys gave it a college try, but they couldn't figure it out, they don't have the dexterity for it, and then my two younger ones couldn't care less. But my wife and I can easily open this, and I like that because I've used biometric locks before. Your fingers damp, wrong position, you end up trying to do it multiple times, and that's not something I want to deal with when quick access actually matters. Stop-ox is also made right here in America, and they've recently introduced the larger you can using the same mechanical locking system with more room for your equipment. For limited time, our listeners get 10% off at stop-ox when you use code wartimestories to check out. If you do stop-ox USA.com and use code wartimestories for 10% off your entire order. At viewpurchase they will ask where you heard about them, please support our show and tell them who sent you. This final story takes us to Sweden, and compared to the first two accounts, this one is a lot different. No huge creature moving through the snow near the Russian border, no dark figure crossing a finished training area. This one comes from a medic in the Swedish army, and it was first sent to my buddy Nick over at The Tales from the Gridsquare project. The soldier who shared the story also runs his own Instagram page under the handle. Kot Mechaniker, K-O-T-T-M-E-K-A-N-I-K-E-R. According to him, Sweden doesn't have cryptids in the same way Americans talk about Bigfoot or Dogmen. What they have? have is Older, Vason, a broad word for beings and spirits from Scandinavian folklore, trolls for a spirit, the Hulldra, and the little people that soldiers sometimes claim to hear moving around their fighting positions at night. Small voices, footsteps, gear, mysteriously being moved. The kind of thing that sounds ridiculous until you're the one alone in a foxhole, half asleep, listening to something whisper in the dark. And according to this medic, one night during a training exercise, he didn't just hear them, he saw them, he writes. So a medic in the Swedish military, we don't really have cryptids here, like in America or mainland Europe, but we do have our fair share of ghosts and other strange things out in the woods. We have Vason, like from the TV show Grim. And for the most part, nearly every soldier I know has some kind of story about Nordic gnomes, hearing them talking, walking around your post, moving stuff around, basically just being little rascals. We also have a class or race of Hulldra that we here in Sweden know as the raw. These things are basically shapeshifting beings that live out in the woods, they can be either good or bad, but most stories paint them as something you should probably avoid. In most tellings, raw present themselves as beautiful women in order to seduce unsuspecting men, they lure them down to some kind of lair before, well, killing them. Then there's trolls, people see them from time to time roaming around the hills at night. But where I live, we don't have raw or trolls, we have gnomes and various other mythical little people. Generally speaking, gnomes are not dangerous, but if you somehow manage to piss them off, they will gladly kill your dog or burn your house down. However, if you respect them and the forest chances are they'll just play little tricks here and there. I think there's even a tale from the royal castle in Stockholm, from way back about a guard who actually talked to a gnomes and it was recorded in the official logbook. So yeah, lots of soldiers have stories about these things. This one is mine. This took place during a training exercise a few years ago. I was in a foxhole pulling a watch in the middle of the night, all is quiet. When I suddenly hear voices like maybe 15 meters in front of me, I bring my rifle up ready to challenge whoever is out there when I see them. Just standing there are two gnomes, small as hell, like two toddlers and pointy hats having a chill conversation about, I don't know, something. Even in that moment I wasn't so much afraid as I was confused because this had to be sleep deprivation, right? I mean, I'd been up for god knows how long by that point, so it's the only thing that made any sense to me. But when I got to talking to some of the other guys the next morning, well, it turned out that I wasn't the only one to see or hear these things wandering around the woods that night. A while back, we did an episode about Mount Valtovara, death mountain. A remote mountain in Corelia near the finish border, known for its weirdness, twisted trees, strange stone formations, dead lakes and old stories about the land being sacred, dangerous, or somehow connected to something beyond the normal world. Gives you the impression that people believe it's a place where portals can be opened to other places, kind of a skin walker ranch in Scandinavia, sort of vibe. And in that episode we talked about a story from the Winter War during World War I, where Soviet units supposedly went up onto that mountain and never came back. According to the legend, finished soldiers later investigated after hearing gunfire and screaming coming from the mountain in the middle of the night. And when they got up there, they found the entire Russian unit dead, torn apart, scattered across the snow. So the whole mystery was basically, what the hell did it? Was it wolves, a bear, was it finished troops who somehow got up there, did all that, and that left without being seen? Maybe a Russian plant, you know, some guy in the units or some sort of special group. Or was it something tied to the older stories surrounding them out itself? At the time, that story was very hard to put into any kind of clean category. Not a, it's not a cryptid story, it's not a ghost story, it's not really even just a war story. It was just this weird, ugly little mystery sitting on top of a mountain that already had a strange reputation. But after reading the first two accounts in this episode, the Norwegian and Finnish stories, it got me thinking about death mountain again. Because maybe there is a more grounded way to look at it, not necessarily normal, but maybe less fantastical than legend would make it sound. I mean, what did those soldiers actually describe? So in Norway, there's a small patrol team posted near the Russian border in the dead of winter, they're isolated, surrounded by nothing but snow and forest. And at first, they think they might be dealing with a large animal, maybe a bear, maybe a moose, maybe even a person, trying to cross the border. And then Peter sees something huge outside the tower. Mike and Roy go into the woods to investigate and they find these enormous impressions punched deep into the snow, spaced much farther apart than any normal stride. And then they hear this massive piercing scream coming from somewhere in the trees. And whatever it was, it followed them. It essentially chased them back to the tower, moving, seemingly faster than they could, but keeping its distance. Then in Finland, you have another group of soldiers out in the woods during training, different country, different setting, different season, but the description starts to feel familiar. A large, dark figure steps out from the tree line and stands in the middle of a clearing. Multiple men see it, it moves on two legs. And when their sergeants go out to investigate, they apparently see enough that one of them later admits there really was something out there, something big, something dark, something that wasn't any normal animal. Now with the artwork in the episode and with some of the folklore we talk about, I think your mind naturally goes towards this almost tree-like creature, moss, bark, roots, branches. I got the depiction in my mind of like an ant from Lord of the Rings when I first read this. And visually I get why we went in that direction, it kind of hypes the legend, but when you strip these stories down to what these men actually describe, I don't know that you have to picture a giant walking tree. It could be something much more familiar than that, a tall, upright humanoid creature that is known to live in dense forests and possesses an innate kind of curiosity, something covered in long hair or matted fur that in bad lighting, snow, moonlight or through trees could look, like moss or bark hanging off of its body, something with large enough feet and heavy enough to leave strange impressions in the snow, something that moves on two legs, something that can scream, something that seems to watch people from a distance, follow them, but always tends to stay just far enough inside the timber that no one ever gets a clean look. And that general kind of story is not unique to Scandinavia, you hear versions of it all over the world, different names, different languages, different folklore attached to it. So maybe some of these old stories were not originally describing these more mythological creatures that they eventually became in the retellings, maybe people were just trying to explain something they actually saw, something that didn't fit any animal they had ever known. Well, that doesn't mean we have an answer to Mount Bolthavara, and maybe nothing happened there the way the legend says, maybe it was wolves or the war, whether battlefield rumours scavengers, a story that grew over time because that mountain already had a reputation. But after hearing modern soldiers in Norway and Finland describe huge upright things, moving through those same northern forests, stories like death mountain start to hit a little differently. And then of course you have the sweetest story, which is completely different, a medic and a foxhole here, small voices, looks out and sees what he describes as two little people standing there in the woods, funny little hats and everything. The deprivation is clearly his own suggestion. And I don't really know what else to do with that one. but even there it fits the larger point. In that part of the world, the forest has never just been scenery. It's part of the culture, clearly part of the military environment and part of the old fear. The legends people have always had about what might be living just out of sight. So I don't know what these men encountered. I don't know if the Norwegian soldiers saw the same kind of thing that the Finnish recruits saw. But I do think they all sit in that same strange place where military experience, bad conditions, folklore, fear, and maybe something real, all start to overlap. And maybe the real reason those old legends lasted in the first place is because every now and then someone would go back out into the forest and see something that made them understand why people, their ancestors, had been warning each other about those places for centuries. And out there, in the forests of Northern Europe, where the snow is deep, the nights are long, and the trees can make even trained soldiers feel small. It isn't hard to understand why those stories never really went away. (gentle music) (upbeat music) War time stories is created and hosted by me, Lucle Manna, written by Jake Howard and myself. Audio editing, sound design, mixing and mastering by Alex Carpenter, with additional audio work by me. Animation and motion design and production coordination by David Williamson. Research by Jake Howard and myself. Art work by Pekata and Radimir Isgarovic. Hey guys, thanks for sticking around here for the after-action in the credits. All right. You know, I did have kind of a moment of like, my mind just went blank like, what the heck am I gonna talk about here in the after-action? 'Cause it felt like I was about to just have to force something. The only thing related to Scandinavia that I could ever come up with is my own family relation, my mother's family is from Finland. And I mean, two things that was far as war and creepy stuff that jump out is one, my grandmother, I, she's at a state in life where sometimes when she tells these stories, it's not clear whether the details she's offering are exact, but she did tell me a little bit about the war experience and I guess the most significant thing I remember her telling me was that the Nazis came to her property. They lived on a farm, they burned their house down. And she said that they were basically taking shelter, they were hiding out in the sauna, which is a separate building, you know, the hotbox, the steam room that the Finnish people have accustomed for. So luckily they didn't burn everything down, but I guess that I don't know what the Nazis' intention was other than just stopping enemy soldiers from having a place to camp or to use or any resources or what, I don't think my grandmother was really able to explain why they did that, but I guess maybe probably was a common thing. And the other thing was a house that my mother lived in for a little while when she was a child before my grandfather took a coal mining job in Canada and then they moved to Canada. And there was a house that he was renting in Finland before they left and then some months later, you know, within that first year after they'd moved overseas to Canada, he had somehow managed to stay in touch with the landlord. And the landlord, I guess, called him, and this would have been back in the '60s, early '70s, he called him a long distance call. And he was asking my grandfather, you know, did you have any sort of weird experiences in the house while you were living in it? And my grandfather, he was strictly Christian type and he's just like, no, like we didn't have any sort of like paranormal basics, like we had no, nothing like that. Like we don't abide by those sorts of things. And I guess the guy went on to explain to my grandfather that after my mother's family, after they had moved out, a witch or a wicking or somebody that practiced witchcraft, whatever that is, had moved into the house for a short time. They had been practicing all kinds of rituals and dark magic in the house. And after they moved out, the next tenants that lived in the house were apparently, they didn't want to stay in the house any longer because the doors opening and closing, voices, sounds, things like that, it just creeped them out. So my mother, when I got her talking about her, any experiences she had with the paranormal, that was once she brought up. So she wasn't there in the house for it, but she just thought it was really creepy that the house that he used to live in is now like, you know, scat all kinds of weird stuff in it. So that's a Scandinavia. We don't get too many stories from there, but if I'm stepping outside of my narrator box here, as I try to keep it professional inside the episode, but if I was gonna offer my more direct personal thoughts, I'm pretty sold on the existence of Bigfoot at this point. And one of the things that kind of leads me to lend credibility to its existence is stories like this, where as was presented in the episode, I mean, you kind of get the impression of like a giant tree monster. But when you compare it to other sightings, I mean, this just comes off like a Bigfoot encounter story. I mean, just guys moving through the woods at night and they see this massive thing terrifies them. I mean, I've never heard of a tree screaming. So, I mean, it's something akin to being an animal. And Bigfoot screams are often, you know, associated with like human sounding, but not human because the vocal range and how loud they are is just not human. So I just, it kind of lends a little bit of credibility in my mind that somebody presents this story as just being this really freaky thing that they saw in the woods. And they're not trying to sell it as a I saw Bigfoot. This is my story. They're just trying to say, I saw something crazy. You're never going to believe it. And this is what I saw. And they never make, they never seem to make that connection in all of their, you know, all the time after the story. Maybe they don't even believe in Bigfoot, right? They're not going to even consider that as an option. But I, that's just what, and as far as the artwork is concerned, the way these stories kind of come together, I'm not really heavily involved in the earlier processes. We've got it kind of down pat, where we're doing a weekly episode. So it's, we don't have a lot of time to do a lot of prep. And so I might give the green light on like the story content, the subject, the kind of schedule. But then between the script being completed, before I really review it, it goes to artwork. So Piccato or Ratamy are working on artwork. And they come up sometimes with, you know, based on Jake's recommendations. So the tree monster kind of threw me. And that would be something that I would look at. And I'd be like, okay, this is hard to swallow. Like, I'm not ready to believe, I'm okay with Bigfoot. You'd humanoid, big hairy guy, you know, it's entirely plausible in the realm of evolutionary theory. But a tree monster, like an ant from, from Lord of the Rings, I'm a little on the fence there. But I do think it's, I do get, it portrays the legend well because that's kind of the impression you get when it's late at night. You're tired and you see some freaky thing that looks like a giant tree monster. And I love how the art turned out. But what I'm saying is that I honestly did not even come to any sort of conclusion until after I finished reading the script and I'm thinking about it like, we did edit it. Like after I kind of read over it and had time to digest it, I'm pretty sure these guys just saw what a lot of other people see in different parts of the world. So let me know what you think. I mean, if that's the impression you got before I started blabbing about it. As far as the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the little, the little people with the hats, I got nothing. I, I sleep deprivation combined with pre-existing suppositions, pre-existing beliefs about what might live out there. 'Cause I, that's another thing I'm not ready to believe in. I saw a really funny meme, sometime in the last couple of months where you got that blonde guy that looks really tough. He's looking, you see his profile, like looking at something and then he's always like having some disagreement and he like, he's like this big tough guy about it. Um, if you know what I'm talking about, I'm sorry. It's a meme. And at the top, the top panel it shows like these little Kebler Elves type red-haired, you know, snow white dwarves and they're like, hey, you know, these are, it was comparing North, European cryptids to North American cryptids. And so the European cryptids are like these happy little elves who are like, hey, let's go inside of our mushroom house and have tea. And then in the bottom one, it was North American. And it's a Wendigo that horrible looking creature with deer antlers and a deer skull as a head. And the guy's got his AR and all his gear. And he's, you know, he's challenging this Wendigo. He's like, bring it on. And the Wendigo is just laughing and saying, he's gonna rip his head off and like turn his skull into a toilet or something like that. So, yeah, European cryptids are sometimes a little more friendly, I guess, in the telling. But the gnome say, "I don't know. I don't know what this guy. I mean, I believe him that he saw it, and I believe in, as far as other people here in the voices, I don't know how to resolve that in my mind." He obviously kind of, he's like, "Well, I guess I saw what I saw, but I don't know if I'm ready to believe in the little people with red hats yet." But that's just me. I can be wrong about everything, really, so I won't hang my hat on that yet, but thanks guys for listening. Thanks for watching. For subscribing, liking, sharing, commenting, anything and everything you guys do that helps keep the show going. Really appreciate it here, wartime stories. As always, you shout out to both our patrons, our YouTube channel members for your incredible support. May God be with each and every one of you, no matter what you're dealing with. And I will see you in the next episode.