Stay Out of the Woods

I'm Luke Lamana, and this is War Time Stories. 12 days down. Two more to go. This bite. I should order a pizza. Hey, does anybody remember our grid point? Huh? Well, it's just the RTO again. Hey man, I know you're doing battery runs, but do you happen to have any caffeine on you like a monster or something? What the hell are you doing? You know I can't hear you, right? Good thing you're a radio man, not a sniper, because. Oh shit, oh, the hell is that? What the. The stories you're about to hear were first submitted to Nick Orton's "Tales from the Grid Square" project. All of the soldiers who shared these accounts were stationed on Fort Campbell, conducting field training at various times and dates when these events happened. The first soldier writes, "I'm stationed at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The training area we have is called the Back 40, thousands of acres of ranges and training sites. My story takes place in the Back 40 near a makeshift town called Cassidy. It's located in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by forest and thick underbrush, and at that time it was mid-July, so everything was in full bloom. My company was conducting a two-week field exercise in this area, and after we had secured this town, my platoon was tasked with pulling a blocking position about 100 meters into the woodline from this town. So this is like day 12 of the two-week field exercise. I'm located on the far right of our blocking position with my squad. I'm a squad leader of my infantry platoon, and we dig into our position. I'm located 10 to 15 meters from my soldiers with my back up against a tree. Darkness sets on the Back 40, the guys are tired, and my team leaders are doing their checks to ensure these guys are awake. Hours go by, and I didn't keep track of time, but if I had to guess, it was around midnight. No moon. Only thing you could see was to our rear where the town of Cassidy was located. My alpha team leader is laying with his team on the line, and we're pulling a 50/50 security detail, so one man up the other is sleep. My Bravo team leader is sleeping next to me. Our platoon radio man, the RTO, is walking back and forth behind us, bouncing between my squad and the others all online in this blocking position. So every 20 to 30 minutes, I hear him walking by, and eventually he comes to me and says, "Hey Sergeant, you good on radio batteries?" "I'm good dude, I reply." So being used to hearing him walking by so much, I hear something, and not even thinking about it, I ignore it. Then it gets closer, and closer, and a lot slower in movement. I look over my shoulder and say what the effort you're doing, and that's when I saw whatever it was in a mid-crouch pose about 20 meters from me, making these low, subtle growling noises, like a dog or wolf. I froze and felt the hair on the back of my neck stand, and my heart start to race. So this was, stood at least 5 foot tall, crouched over, sinking lower and lower to the ground. At this point paralyzed, with confusion and fear, and I watch it for another 10 to 12 seconds, and then I reached and grabbed my e-tool, this small shovel, not taking my eyes off when I'm looking at, then I quickly flip my PSQ20s my night vision, and as I did this, this creature ran in a diagonal line for me, fast, and when I say fast, I mean, booking it in a low stance. I flipped my 20s to thermal, and I saw the outline of this thing running. Everyone around me heard it crashing through the woods. It ran too fast to be a man, and too big to be a deer, especially since it was fully standing up as it was crashing through the brush. Whatever it was eventually came back. Later that night, another squad leader told me that he heard loud, deep, sniffing noises near his position, and his soldiers were saying that they could smell what resembled a wet dog smell. One time before dawn, all of us heard this loud, guttural noise that started up immediately after we heard some coyotes. Coyotes are pretty common in the area, and you'll always hear them, bipping, and whatnot. But when this thing howled, or whatever this noise was, the coyotes all stopped instantly. I had always heard stories, and never believed it, as well as others in my platoon. But after this encounter we all agreed that we were not alone that night, and there is something lurking out there. It was canine by the look of it, it was dark. I don't want to speculate and give false details, but in the face it was elongated, like a snout from what I could see. I grew up playing in the woods, camping and hunting. I'd never seen or heard anything like that, or felt like that, ever. Hey, Sergeant! Yeah. Uh, our whole is filling with water. Yep, sure is. Uh, okay, anyone got any cigarettes? Preferably dry ones. Uh, it's times like these that make me wonder if four years of this is really worth the free college. Don't forget about the Dodge Charger. Who's that? Probably the RTO again. Yo, what are you doing? You lose something back there. You need any help? If all got our nods, is that a coyote? Sounds way too big to be a coyote, paints. Get your nods up. The interesting thing here is that the second story seems to have happened during the same exercise as the first, but possibly not on the same night based on the timelines these two soldiers mentioned. But whether it was or not, we have a second soldier reporting an unnerving animal encounter while in the field on Fort Campbell, this time during a cloud burst. While there are many species of wild animals living in the dense forests of Kentucky, both on and off the base, again, this one wasn't something that they recognized. As with the first soldier, this was largely because of the way the thing moved. I was in the first battalion, 502nd infantry regiment. Our company had just taken Cassidy training town after about five days of situational training exercise, what we called STX. At the town secured, we get pushed out to the wood line to set up a defensive line for any potential follow-on attacks, and naturally it starts pissing on us as soon as we get into the woods. At this point, dudes are spent and annoyed that we got pushed out of the village where there was, you know, cover. We could have been in the buildings or something, but no, we got to go out in the woods. There was a lot of the usual "why is it always arple-tune" type deal. So we set up a perimeter, setting up a position running perpendicular to a ditch, located on the left of our position, the squad leader and myself are coming. located with the gunner and assistant gunner. As we lay in the rain, it didn't take long for us to just stop giving a crap. We just ended up leaning back on some trees side by side, waiting for the index or change of mission. While we were smoking and joking, minus the smoking since, at this point, our cigarettes were soggy mush, up walks the platoon RTO to swap some 148s, our handheld radio batteries. We noticed him early due to the leaves and twigs and the sound of all of his 140 pounds walking slowly and cautiously through the forest. He makes the swap and walks off. About 20 or 30 minutes passed, and we hear the same weighted footsteps approaching. None of us had our nods, our night vision down, or even on, so we just assumed that it was the RTO. The footsteps got close, and we waited for him to say something. But it was just quiet. And after a moment of awkward silence, we call out like, "Yo, what are you doing?" But again, there was no response. Then we heard what I can only describe as heavy sniffing sounds from behind us. Sounded like a "hound dog" trying to find something. The sounds seemed to come from a few meters back behind my squad leader on the right. We sat there and listened, trying to figure out what it was. Then we hear the sounds of crunching leaves and more sniffing somewhere between me and the assistant gunner. Now startled, the gunner and I bring up our nods and turn around to see what the hell this thing was. And at that point, we hear this thing as it now barrels into the ditch on our right and speeds down deeper into the woods. And all of us are just sitting there dumbfounded at what just happened. Whatever that thing was, it was way too heavy sounding to be a coyote. Its footsteps sounded more like someone or something sprinting on two legs instead of four. So that ruled out a hog, skunk, or any other normal animal out in the woods with us. We kind of all looked at each other. And I mean, we'd all heard stories. So that's when it hits us, like, damn. Maybe we just saw something people called the dogman. As I say, we were well aware of the dogman. Be it on the back 40 or in the woods of the land between the lakes area. The funny thing was our first sergeant is super into the lore, I guess you'd call it. And we mentioned this thing happening to us. And then he gives us this huge backstory on dogman. And he mentioned stuff about how the Native Americans were pushed off the land between the lakes area to settle it, only for them to then curse it and some other crazy sounding stuff. Alright. Last point should the somewhere pass this tree line. Oh, shit! Do you see it? What the hell is it? What is that alligator? I don't know. Let's just keep moving. It's it's following us. Don't stop. Just keep going. This first story was originally shared with Nick Orton, who runs the Tales from the Gridsquare project. It takes place on a military installation at least half of my fellow Marines are very familiar with. Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Paris Island. Located off the coast of South Carolina near the town of Port Royal, Paris Island is where all Marine recruits who live east of the Mississippi can expect to find themselves going through basic training. I myself was a West Coast recruit, Hollywood Marine, so I trained at MCRD San Diego, you know, where the real Marines come from. Then again, I'd probably trade those hills in California for the horrible biting insects they have in South Carolina. We can all agree that boot camp was equally miserable for all of us, just in different ways. I had to laugh at this five-star Google review left by Marine who graduated from Paris Island back in 1996. You don't get much restful sleep, not much in the way of quality meal time, communal showers, staff was visibly upset all the time, seemed to have anger issues, but they give you a rifle, all in all would visit again. If there is one thing that unites all Marines, regardless of when they served, it's boot camp stories. It's actually kind of a cliche among Marines. Everyone gets sick of hearing boot camp stories, but yet everyone has so many of them to tell that they just keep popping up in conversation. Usually it's the funniest or worst thing that happened to them, or another recruit, while in boot camp. On an average day while doing field training and basic, the worst things you'd hear from a recruit coming out of the marshy pine forests of Paris Island might be a story about a water moccasin, an alligator, or probably worse, an angry drill instructor. But no animal like what this Marine describes is known to live there. What he encountered is arguably a boot camp story that falls under the heading of terrifying. He writes, January February 2018 was roughly when my platoon ended up going through our basic warrior training, face BWT. Yeah, boot camp stories, woohoo. At this point, the weather wasn't too terrible at Paris Island. I remember getting to the hooches for the first night and finding out I was on the 2-3am roving watch shift. Wasn't too pleased, but whatever shit happens. Ended up getting woken up, started off my rove. It wasn't that bad overall, but I'd say around 0-230-0-240. I got a really strong creepy vibe from one of the taped-off areas of the woods behind our hooch. There was a light on the rear end of set hooch, and it was bright enough to just barely light up the tape running across the trees. I specifically remember getting the urge to look at one bush off to my left, so I sighted in on it to get a better look. Just as soon as I got my sight settled on that bush, I saw a pale, emaciated arm pop out, followed shortly by a gaunt human-like face. Definitely some uncanny valley feels to it, very human adjacent, but very wrong. It stayed low to the ground, and then popped its head up almost like it was watching me. The light from the back of the hooch was reflecting off its eyes, so the super creepy feeling just amplified from there. It was gone almost as soon as it popped up when the other rover walked around to me and asked me what was up. The thing ducked down, and it crawled back amazingly quick. At this point, I already had a general idea of what I might have seen. I'm Native American, and the stories from my mom's side of the family have always stuck with me. I ended up passing it off as sleep deprivation, which was also extremely likely. Still, really freaking weird though. Fast forward to the following night, we were doing our nightland navigation portion of BWT, and I was ready to clock out. Me and my buddy ended up getting paired together, and we're making our way over to our second of three points. Hit the mocan, got our stamp, or whole punch, or whatever it was, and we're heading back to our third point so we could finish up. We ended up walking past a circle of palm-front, looking plants that type that sound like plastic blinds when the leaves hit each other, and I brushed against the leaves. As soon as I did, I heard one of the most unsettling noises out of the woods I've probably ever heard. I've spent a lot of time outdoors and in the woods, but not much time down in the Carolinas, so also likely explainable. Definitely new to me though. It was a combination of a gutter visceral hiss, growl, and groan, all at the same time. Instant nope, so we picked up the pace, but the entire way to our third point, something was following us. It sounded like it was on all fours, but extremely quick and decently heavy. It sounded like it was darting in between cover, but I didn't exactly turn around to verify. My buddy confirmed it was weird. As forward yet again to the crucible, the last final exercise of bootcamp, I got stuck with road guards on our hike back from page field before the EGA ceremony where they give you your Eagle Globe and Anchor, so we were all the way at the front. Once again, I got a spooky vibe, and I decided to look over to my right. I see the same thing from the bushes in the taped-off portion of the woods from BWT, the face. It's slinking along the tree line, keeping pace with us. It was on all fours, pale skin, very long and emaciated limbs. Think of all the rake pictures you've ever seen, and that was basically it. I opted to turn my head back to the front and eventually down to watch the boots of the guy in front of me. Not sure if anyone else noticed it, but again, could very well have been sleep deprivation or paranoia, who knows. When I finished training, I went home on my 10 days of boot leave, and I talked to some of the elders in my community. They didn't explicitly state what it was, but they did say that if that was indeed what was following me. There wasn't a whole lot that I could do to get rid of it. I could protect myself against it, with certain medicine and prayers, but that was about to get rid of it. See oldest trick in the book, try to make us think they're injured cubs. Alright, how are we moving in? Just like always, alright, alright, you go that way, I'm gonna go this way. Hey, uh, fully break off, yeah, what's up, something to feel off about this to you, yeah, you feel that way too? I just thought maybe, it's because we haven't been out here in a while. Well, maybe they changed their tactics, I don't know, we've come this far, let's just go. This first story was posted online by a US Marine with the handle that one guy, Brian. We will therefore assume that we can call him Brian. They're setting out into the woods one evening, looking to hunt down a pack of coyotes. Brian, alongside another fellow Marine, suddenly realized that the coyote sounds they had been following, weren't being made by coyotes. He writes, "My story begins after my first tour in Iraq. I view myself as a very tough person, but it isn't hard to find someone tougher than me. I grew up in an area where the high desert begins to turn into the forest. This is as close as you can get to being in the woods without actually being in the woods. Lots of trees, but very little running or standing water. I spent much of my youth exploring this area. So much so, most people would see it as walking into their living room. As one can expect, there were two things that I wanted to do when I got home on leave. Some booze with old friends and go back into those woods. There was always something new to find, like where Native Americans had chiseled out some of their arrows, just random things like that. Well, one night on leave, my best friend and I went out to hunt down some coyotes that had been terrorizing local ranches, something he and I were well known for. I forgot to mention, my best friend was also a Marine. I called him Boot at the time because he just got out of boot camp. He'd already determined where this pack like to hunt at night. Coyotes are nocturnal and like to make lots of yipping noises, so they are easier to hunt at night. I won't get into too many details for hunting coyotes for protection reasons. So we are getting close to their den, and we can tell because they start the old trick any predator makes, the whole pretend I'm a cub or injured rabbit's stick. We start our typical closing in tactic. However, while we are doing so, we're having a convo that is something along the lines of this is different. I make the assumption that it's because we haven't been out here in a while and that they may have changed some of their tactics since our last hunt, so we continue on. Nothing changes as we get closer. And as we get to within about 25 yards of the coyote den, we both realize that this is clearly not what it seems. So we make a decision to go communication silent, move back out of the grove of trees, this den is, and wait for movement. I can't remember the amount of time that passed, but it was under an hour. The memory is a bit foggy, but the first thing I remember is my friend calling me by my last name. Something I was used to being in the military, but it was weird coming from someone I grew up with. A couple of minutes later, we saw movement. We called it out to each other. It emerged from the trees. What I saw was a man, but he was as tall as the trees, which were about 7-10 feet in height. I'm terrified at this point, and I don't know if it was PTSD or just plain old fear, but I aimed in and shot it. I waited for it to take a few steps and fall down, but it didn't. It just kept walking. My friend fires, and the same thing happens. At this point, we go into battle mode and keep firing, intent on killing it. Our thought was that it was trying to lure us because it knew how we hunted and tried to use it against us. It just stops and turns perpendicular to our positions and walks off. Now I was using a 308, and my friend was using a 30-OT6. This thing should have dropped after the first 5 rounds, but it didn't. We considered chasing it, but then realized that whatever it takes to kill it, we just didn't have it. We did a tactical retreat for about a quarter mile, then just booked it home. We found the actual coyote den a week later, about 10 miles on the opposite side of the town that we lived in. Whatever this thing was, it had clearly been hunting us for a very long time to lead us that far in the wrong direction and had planned accordingly. Because it even knew how to leave feces and urine from different members of a coyote pack. My friend and I still hunt if needed, but we always talk about that one time we were the hunted. This story takes us back across the globe to the United States, as told by a young Marine stationed on the East Coast. It is one among many strange and unexplained stories featured in the tales from the Gridsquare books, which I'll link here and in the description section. He writes, "So I want to start this off by saying this was my second or third month in the Jacksonville, North Carolina area. I had just been stationed on Marine Corps Air Station, New River, but I wanted to explore LaJune because I knew I would have to go there from time to time to perform my duties and such. So one night, around midnight, I get in my car and head over to LaJune and drive around, exploring and learning my way around the base. At around 0300, I decided to head back to my barracks and I plug it into my GPS. Like story short, I get lost and I end up on a long road down towards one of the base's decommission gates way back near Hubert. If you've spent any time in the onslau area on LaJune, you know that the wee hours of the morning can get pretty foggy and it creates an overall uneasy feeling. I realize my mistake, I turn around and I start heading back the way I came. As I'm driving back, my car starts to suddenly rattle and shake. I guess that one of the artillery battalions was running a night off close by or something. I keep going down this road and it's lined by street lights, maybe a hundred feet or more. based apart, illuminating a street through the fog just enough. All of a sudden, it felt like I was on a drawbridge. And I shit you not, three tanks, vintage-looking, maybe Vietnam era, come rolling from the tree line on the right about 300 feet away from me. They travel across the road and into the tree line on the other side. They had men manning the turrets and everything. I could only make out the men from the shoulders up, but they weren't wearing our modern Kevlar helmets instead it looked like they had the old GI helmets with no fabric covers on them from the way the street lights were reflecting off of the tops. After they passed, I immediately thought I might have accidentally ventured into a restricted part of the base, like a tank range or something. But when I finally pulled up to the part of the road where they had crossed, there were no signs of them. There's no money track marks on the road, and both of the tree lines were super dense. You couldn't even fit a squad of guys through there, without at least hacking a few saplings down. I don't know what I saw, but those tanks and soldiers looked like they were straight out of Vietnam. Hey man, do you have any idea where the hell Trail Fox 7 enters back onto the hardball? Stupid question, I know. Because I think I'm about two wrong turns from bearing this van on a swamp. I did know where I was going, like 20 minutes ago, the frickin mill GPS just crapped out. What trailer you want? No clue. GPS died. Yeah, appreciate the update. Looks like I've hit a water crossing. I gotta get out. Rainin. Yeah, it's raining. I don't know, look. Yeah, there's no shot. This van is going to make it through this. The trail is too narrow, no, it's trees on both sides, and if I drive off this trail, it's going to get stuck in the mud. Well, that sucks, let us know if you get stuck and we'll send somebody to pull you out. I take a while. Yeah, outstanding observation, thanks. What the hell was that? This next story was written by another soldier who, like the previous guy, was working as part of an observer coach trainer team at Fort Polk's Joint Readiness Training Center. What was supposed to be an ordinary day on the job took a strange turn when he found himself lost in the woods on a dark rainy night. He writes, "So I'm an OCT down at GRTC and still relatively new. My last rotation back in March 2023 was only the second in this position and the first was in the previous November. During that first rotation, I didn't experience anything odd or abnormal. However, that changed very quickly the second time around. The first half of the rotation played out as expected and it was time for the mid-row AAR, mid-rotation after action report. I grabbed our task forces 15 packs van in the morning and drove out to the box to pick up the units top five and escort them to their appropriate after action report locations. After several hours of driving these guys around, I picked them up from their final meeting and drove them back out to the talk, Tactical Operations Center, around the Geronimo drop zone. By the time we got out there, it was about 2200, so it's absolutely pitch black outside, I was chilling because I was in the 15 packs van and I could just white light my way out of there. But just as I'm pulling away, I get a shout that someone needed to be dropped off at the unit's CTCP Combat Trains command post. I took a quick look at my map and it appeared to be right along my route back to East Gate, so no worries, right? But after several turns, I quickly realized that it was going to be sketch. It had been pissing rain for several days and usually decent trails had turned into complete sludge. I was essentially off-roading this 15 packs van through the box, just praying that I wouldn't have to call someone to tell them I got stuck. So I dropped this guy off at the CTCP, but it was so far from any decent roads that now I've got to find my way back to the hard ball, the hard paper road, so I can head home. This is where the fun really started. As I turn onto another trail, the mil GPS completely craps the bed. There's no service whatsoever. So I'm kind of trying to track where I am on this trail through pure guesswork. The trail continues to get narrower and narrower to the point where trees are basically scraping either side of the van. The branches were so dense on either side, I couldn't even make out shapes through the side windows. At this point, the situation goes from bad to worse. The trails are super muddy, as I said, and now I'm approaching a low water crossing that's quite literally in the red. And I just kind of sat there weighing the option of pulling a Leroy Jenkins and sending this van across at top speed, trying not to get it stuck in the mud. But thankfully, my better judgment went out and I realized that that was probably an absolutely terrible idea. So I'm pretty stressed out at this point because I've come to realize that now there's absolutely no way I can turn this van around. One, because of how tight the road is, and two, because anything off the trail is super muddy. I can't leave the trail. So I get out of the van and I try to relax a little bit, work out a better game plan, and that's when things start getting strange. As soon as I close the door behind me, I heard what sounded like a scream. At first, I thought it was maybe a large cat of some sort, roughly two or three hundred meters off into the woods, directly ahead of the direction I'm facing. But by the time I was able to process what I was hearing, this sound completely envelopes me on both sides of the road. This scream then seemed to morph into the sound of a woman laughing, like a maniacal cackling laugh that is now it seems like it's coming from all around me. Needless to say, I was absolutely freaked out. So being the brave but sensible soldier I was, I jumped back into the van and just Ricky Bobby-style reversed that thing for like half a mile before finally getting back to a decent stretch of road where I could navigate myself out. I desperately tried to convince myself that it was nothing and I was just tired and stressed which I was and at this point I had never heard of what some of the guys call the box switch. The next night I'm out there at the talk and someone brought up the witch. Apparently they had also heard some pretty strange noises the previous night that were similar to what I had heard. The only difference was that we were probably like two to three clicks, kilometers away from one another at the time. This led me to do the absolute worst thing possible. I took out my phone and started to Google stuff about the box. What started as me searching does Ford Polk have bobcats quickly devolved into a reddit thread that literally described our location and experiences down to the last detail of what I'd experienced. I don't think I've ever felt chills like that in my entire life. If I'd read the thread prior to the experience or if I'd even had knowledge of the spooky stuff that goes on in the box, I would have easily been able to blame what would happen to me on my imagination. The fact that I found all this information after what happened to me, that is what really freaked me out. One of the primary reasons I wouldn't take better care of myself is because if something is inconvenient, it's hard to form a new habit. As I've gotten older, I've started paying a lot more attention to what I'm putting in my body, but figuring out daily supplements, it's an absolute mess. I've got things recommended by my doctor, I research things my friends are recommending. Everybody seems to have a different opinion, and that's one of the reasons I gravitated toward something like blueprints, longevity mix, creatine, calcium, glycine, lysine, magnesium, taurine, vitamin C. I've bought all that stuff in separate bottles before, I just always get tired of keeping track of 20 different pills and filling those little pill boxes every week with blueprint. It's one scoop, I throw it in a tea, a smoothie, whatever I'm doing, and I'm done. Blueprint was created by Brian Johnson, the don't die guy, and it's built around scientific evidence, study level doses with real world testing. One scoop is designed to support energy-focused sleep, cellular resistance, and healthy aging. Science back, precision-dost, no BS, for limited time only, new customers get 20% off, plus free shipping at blueprint.brionjohnson.com by using code wartime stories at checkout. Let's code wartime stories at blueprint.brionjohnson.com for 20% off. After you purchase, they will ask where you heard about them, please support our show and tell them who sent you. Speaking of keeping things simple, when I started building a website for the channel for wartime stories, I didn't have anybody to do it for me, I needed to do it myself. I'm not a web designer, and I really didn't want to start running an online store, and have that become another full-time job. I started with one of Shopify's templates, I built everything from there, and it's been smooth sailing ever since, and that's probably what I like most about it. We primarily sell t-shirts, and Shopify handles so much of what happens behind the scenes, the orders, inventory, fulfillment, so I'm not sitting here trying to manage all that by myself. And for the person actually buying something, their shop pay, which makes checkout simple, it lets returning customers use their saved information for faster checkout, so I can spend my time actually working on stories, instead of figuring out how to run an online store. If you're ready to hear that of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.com/WartimeStories to start your free trial today. That's right, start your free trial at Shopify.com/WartimeStories. This next soldier was serving with the same airborne unit as the first two, but it's uncertain whether his encounter took place on the same night as the first two. The first soldier mentioned being in a two week training exercise, and this third soldier says his was a four week exercise. While the legend of the dogman creature typically stands on its own, as being some kind of undocumented bipedal animal, as alluded to in the last story, this next soldier offers a possible explanation as to what the origin of the dogman really is. He believes it might be a creature spoken about often in native folklore. He also got a much better look at it. I'm in the 101st Airborne's 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment. There's a lot of rumors and superstition among the guys about skinwalkers and old Native American spirits on the back 40. The trail of tears ran right through the base, and there's tons of unmarked graves at the army has either intentionally ignored or simply lacks the funding to do anything about. Anyway, one night during a four week training density in the back 40 of Ford Campbell, a buddy and I are pulling guard on a road using our NBGs. We're laying down on the roadside, and there's this stormed rain pipe that runs under the road horizontally, a couple of feet to our seven o'clock. It's around 0200 in the morning, so it's dark, there's a light rain falling, I'm watching the road one way, and my buddy is watching the other way as we wait for the enemy. And that's when something strange happened. All of a sudden, my buddy is rolling around, hooping and hollering about something touching him. Like it grabbed me bro, holy effing shit, it tried to pull me into the drain. I didn't know what the hell was going on, so I peeked my head into the stormed rain to have a look. From somewhere inside I heard what sounded like grunting, kind of like a wild boar. It was distant, but I also swore I could hear the sound of human feet slapping on concrete as it ran away. I stepped back from the drain and aimed my NBGs across the street towards the exit of the drain pipe while my buddy crawled away. What I saw, standing across the road in the tree line, 75 meters away, looking right at us, can only be described as a legit dogman. It had to be 8 to 9 feet tall, with a canine's head, the body of a wolf, and standing on its hind legs. Its shoulders were broad, but I couldn't tell if it had hair, or if its skin was just leathery, but I did see ears, pointy and large, almost elfish-like. On seeing it, I yelled and let off a burst of simm-round, you know, we didn't have any live ammunition, right, of course, knocking a lie, it scared the complete hell out of me. This dogman then turned and runs into the woods, it's knocking down some of the smaller trees and snapping some of them in half, as it then dropped down to all fours and ran away. About a week after this happened, I was with my commanding officer at RTO. Our night vision was on, and we are walking through the thickest brush you've ever seen in your life. I'm talking thorn bushes like 10 feet tall, it was like trying to walk through a giant broom. The whole company gets separated in this mess, and that's when we hear it. There were these howls coming from somewhere in between our platoons. Our CO even put word out on the radio, asking what the hell it was. There was no way a normal animal was moving around so quickly in the type of brush we were in. It was freaky. Some of us were later called into our first arts and office, and we re-told the story, and he basically said to keep it to ourselves and to never say anything about it to anyone. Whatever that thing was, it tore my buddy's uniform up pretty bad when it grabbed him and tried to pull him into the drain pipe. I still think about it, often. I can still see the eyes. Those are what stood out the most. When I looked at it under nods, its eyes were glowing. As far as cryptid stories go, Dogman's story seemed to be as old as any of the other strange creatures roaming the woods. Encounters seemed to stretch back even before the arrival of white settlers. During the early days of colonization, French trappers and frontiersmen working with Shawnee fur traders were told by the natives to be wary of a shapeshifting creature they called "the loop guru". According to one of their legends, a Shawnee medicine man gained the ability to transform into a wolf. However, he began abusing this power and was killed while still in his wolf form. It is said that his vengeful spirit still roams the woods. It seems the French combined these trapper stories with their own legends of European werewolves. As a result, the native "loop guru" became the inspiration for the Rugeru, a werewolf-like creature of Cajun folklore that is said to stalk the swamps, bayous and forests of Louisiana. And whether dogman has been seen as far south as Louisiana or not, calling it folklore makes it seem like it's only stories. Far from being told only as a native legend, one of the first documented encounters with a dog-faced humanoid creature took place in 1887 in Wexford County, Michigan, as witnessed by two lumberjacks. The man described the creature as a seven-foot tall monster with a dog's head and the torso of a man, and it was said to have blue or amber eyes with a howl that sounded like a human. They also stated that it walked upright on its two hind legs. Since then, there have been numerous sightings reported throughout Michigan, most of which are in the northwest lower peninsula. The creature is locally known as the Michigan Dogman. The notoriety of the Dogman creature really began in the late 1970s or early 1980s, though. A family visiting from Florida was found torn to pieces in their RV, in the land between the lake's national recreation area. The campground spans the border of Kentucky and Tennessee. The names of the parents aren't recorded, but they apparently had two children, Bradley and Megan. Megan wasn't found with the rest of her family inside the RV, though. Police reportedly stated that her remains had been hauled up into a tree. A police deputy named Philip Douglas and a state trooper named William Foksen discovered the bodies. It's difficult to source any official police reports to substantiate this gruesome story, not that anyone could expect the police to document this sort of thing as anything other than an animal attack. But whether all of the stories about Dogman are as true as they are told, the people living in and around the land between the lakes area are affected by these stories still today. The existence of the Dogman, locally called the Beast of the Land between the Lakes, is far from being an obscure legend. Many Kentucky and Tennessee locals have heard the stories. A fairly recent interview in 2020 for the Hot Town Chronicle produced a statement from a public affair specialist with the U.S. Forest Service. When Carlin Lewis was asked about his knowledge of the creature, he stated the following. "We have no evidence, records, documentation of any validated sightings of the beast. Some of our staff have worked on land between the lakes for many years. A lot of them know every nook and cranny. They've never seen anything that would point back to a beast existing." The article was written by journalist Dalton York, and it highlights the controversy surrounding the beast of LBL folklore, which is evidently considered offensive by some former residents of the land between the rivers or land between the lakes LBL area. Their families were displaced by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1940s to make way for the construction of two large man-made lakes, part of the state's regional development goals for things like flood control, navigation improvement, and hydroelectric power generation. But this displacement meant that people lost their family homes and had to relocate. The dog band folklore has since become a touchy issue for residents who don't like the idea of their home being associated with a far-fetched legend. Families feel that the legend disrespects their rich local history and the memory of their communities, particularly the hundreds of family cemeteries that remain in the area. Still, the stories being shared about the creature encounters, like the ones shared by the soldiers here, are anything but insincere. These individuals present themselves as very serious about what they saw, as much as any person who was encountered at Bigfoot or any of the other strange things seen in the woods around Kentucky and Tennessee. Word has it that the stories alone are enough to make hunters shy away from the area around the lakes. It's widely known to be a place that is best avoided. A few of those that have been called either brave or dumb enough to try hunting in the woods, have later said that they did have the ominous feeling of being watched. That of course could just be their imagination, but even though they've never found any evidence to verify the creature's existence, some park rangers have reportedly stated that they are often asked by nervous campers about strange howls often heard coming from the woods at night. Perhaps even these howls are cases of mistaken identity, but then considering there are stories about a dog-headed creature prowling around the land between the lakes area, maybe we shouldn't be surprised that soldiers training on Fort Campbell have seen the same thing. After all, the base and its massive back-forty training area is situated only about 16 miles away from the land between the lakes, just at the east. One more reason our soldiers should try to stay awake on fire watch. May of 2015, field training, Fort Knox Kentucky, platoon-sized patrol base, two men fighting positions, expecting up four roleplayers enemy operational forces to hassle us all night, what time is it? Hold up. Is that what the wolf? Hey, wake up. What? Dude, wake up. What? Put your knots on. Slow. I need you to see something. Where? 11 o'clock. Left of that log, maybe 75 meters out. See that gap? The face. I don't. I don't. Oh, shit. What was that? I don't know. Whatever it was, it had a face. Oh, that was not out for. Was it an animal? Bro, it had a face. So, what is it? Sleep deprivation or the nightmarish reality of Native American folklore? Whatever these creatures are. What makes the stories more compelling for me is that their description often remains consistent across different encounters. As is indicated in this next story, emailed directly to me by a soldier serving in the U.S. Army. He writes, "I had a strange incident at Fort Knox back around May of 2015. We were conducting M4 calls and doing extra training on the side to pass time and check boxes. Eventually, it hits nighttime and the LT decides to do a platoon-sized patrol base in the woods for whatever reason. We get our spacing and have our two-man teams. We were expecting the other platoon to mess with us throughout the night, so we were actually paying attention. On my shift around 1 a.m., I catch some movement, around 75 meters out. Nothing really distinctive, but it caught my attention. I began to scan the area, trying to make sure it was actually the other platoon, the OP4, or just an animal. As I started scanning from left to right, I saw a very obvious face looking at me, where a log and a tree met. Unnaturally pale, even with the crappy nods I could tell that. Oversized eyes seemingly too big for the head. No hair that I could tell. If it had ears, I don't remember seeing them. It had a weird jawline, like it was struggling to keep its mouth shut. It kept peaking up and down looking our way. Finally my buddy woke up and asked what was up. On hearing his voice, I assume this thing froze and looked in his direction. I whispered as quietly as I could to put his nods on and told him where to look. As soon as he did, that thing booked it. The sound of it crashing around like that caused us both to jump. The next day we debated on saying anything, but trying to tell people you saw a ghoul goast or whatever is an exactly the easiest thing to explain, we ultimately decided to keep it to ourselves. Still, no idea what it was. This next story was shared by a soldier serving with the Green Berets, the US Army's branch of Socom, the Special Operations Command. I never worked directly with the Green Berets. I worked on the Marine Corps side of Socom during my second enlistment, but of course, whether it's the Raiders, Green Berets, Seals, or PJs, I'm sure we all talk crap about who's the toughest. But compared to conventional military forces, you can imagine that special ops guys all have a reputation for being tough as nails. But just reading this guy's story, I don't blame him for being as unnerved as he was. He asked to remain anonymous. During some PMT drills or pre-mission training that he was conducting, on Fort Lewis in Washington, he recounted what happened to him while patrolling through the woods at night with his team. 2006 Fort Lewis Washington. I was previously deployed to Bosnia and Afghanistan and was the 18th Charlie Special Forces Engineer on the team. We were doing an exercise, patrolling, reacting to contact and breaking contact drills during PMT before we deployed to Iraq. We were in one of the really remote training areas of Fort Lewis. The whole exercise was kind of last minute. so it was all we had available. We were near the towns of Rainier and Yelm in an area called Skukumchuk, super remote and basically in the shadow of Mount Rainier. At night we would go to 33% security in our patrol base, but we kept coming into contact with something, something that none of us could figure out. We would see figures and shapes moving in the shadows and could hear foliage snapping. Fort Lewis's cloudy 90% of the time, so night vision goggles were practically useless, but we had them. The thermals that we had been using back then were okay, but they burned through batteries and were heavy, so we didn't take them, we left them in the arms room. At first, we thought that these noises and all the stuff going on might be local hillbillies and red necks, up to no good, tracking us. I mean, a dozen full auto M4s with lasers, optics, night vision goggles and radios is worth a lot of money. They might have been trying to steal them. Out in Washington, we knew there were bears, large cats and other wildlife, so even though our command didn't know about it, we all carried two mags of unaccounted for range ammo, just in case. We had basically taken the ammo off the range when nobody was looking. But eventually, we bumped up from 33% to 50% security, so half of our guys are awake, and our team sergeant and commander decided that training was over. The liability of whatever was going on out there wasn't worth the squeeze, so to speak. Soon the order was given, live mags were loaded, but no rounds chambered, not yet anyway. We started backtracking on the trail we came in on, but my senior said something was off. And then we saw them, tracks. They were hard to make out in the dark, but they were large, and they were set deep into the mud, like whoever they belonged to was weighed down with gear. Our initial thought was that it was the locals wearing the same kind of boots as us. At this point, we were still convinced that we were dealing with sketchy hillbillies, and the thought of messing with them a little was too good to pass up. A little payback for screwing with us, you know. So we picked up a trail and started tracking them. We could smell it before we found it. This sickly sweet smell of rotten flesh, wet dog fur, and done. Green burais are supposed to be able to handle anything. Stuff that would even make a billy goat puke, but this was rough. Me and another teammate dropped rocks and went ahead to scout, while the team set up a linear counter ambush and patrol base. We found a clearing in the forest, kind of like a deer or elk bedding area, but with tree limbs and brush laid down, like a bed you'd learn to make in survival school. The smell made us want to leave immediately, but what was even scarier was that the limbs were broken off all the trees around us and up to a height of twice our own height. I spotted some hair. It looked like an elk or deer at first, but then I got a closer look. In the little bit of light that we had, I took it to be brown, maybe reddish, but it was coarse and thick, like hog hair. We then reported our findings. Everyone was thinking it, but no one was saying it. It was still a few hours until morning, and we weren't afraid of a fight, but a warm dry team room with beer and pizza sounded way better than staying in a field with what was possibly out there with us. So we threw out our rucks and patroled to the nearest road, which was pretty far off. And the whole time, we could all hear and feel that we were being followed, but from a distance. You could almost feel a level of mutual respect in the mountain air. They must have known we were different from other humans because of the way we moved, slowly, tactically, conserving our energy, ready for a fight if it came to it. We'd clearly worn out our welcome in that remote training area, but if it came to a fight, we each had 60 rounds and knew how to use them. Just as it was getting light, and everyone's nerves were on edge, we saw headlights on the road. It was an LMTV, and we flagged it down and got a ride back to the compound. To this day, I still believe that we stumbled into the territory of more than one Sasquatch. And if we'd acted any differently, things could have turned out badly for both sides. (birds chirping) (upbeat music) This next account was translated from an article on a Russian news website, under the subheading of science and mysteries. The author, Dmitri Sudakov, writes, "A few years ago, the so-called "black archaeologists" were extremely active. These were people conducting independent excavations at the locations of World War II battles, looking for precious war trophies. Sometimes during their searches, they would report experiencing very strange phenomena. Alexei, a black archaeologist, who used to excavate in the woods near Bryansk, where the Russian front was located in 1942 to 1943, told an interesting story, he writes, "We excavated the bodies of six Russian "and 11 German soldiers, "for of which were Vettermacht soldiers "in a swamp trench shelter. "We cut the logs and discovered decomposed German boots "with bones sticking out. "Then we began a more careful excavation "and found pelvic bones, a spine, and ribs. "Little by little, we dug out remnants of four people. "It was getting dark. "We left the skeletons at the trench "and camped out on a meadow about 200 yards away. "At night, something happened. "We were woken up by Valera, a guy on duty. "He told us that something weird was going on. "We got up and started listening carefully. "We could hear German speech, songs, laughter, "and the distinct clatter of tracks. "It was very scary. "In the morning, we returned to the trench. "It looked the same as when we left it. "But when we walked a little further, "we saw tank ditches. "And, most amazingly, fresh tank tracks." (car engine rumbling) - Damn, I almost missed the turn. - Black horse, too. This is Ghost 6. You guys still look to AA. - Yep, we're here. We're in U.S. - Cutting around the perimeter road, had a stop at OCEs for fuel and grab some ice. - Stopping. We're waiting for ya. Don't get lost. - Yeah, yeah, shut up. You're never gonna let me. - I don't know. - Sorry, not you. I see something. - Now I'm lost. What are you talking about? - Hey, you guys have like an R.T.U. wandering around out here, or something? - Not that I know of, why? - There's somebody standing out here. In a cemetery. - I don't know if he's up private. It's a guy lost 3.5. - Yeah, I don't know. He's just standing in one spot. Maybe he's doing a map check. I'm gonna just get out real quick and check on him. - No, it's not me. Don't get murdered by car people. - Yo, hey. You with the R.T.U.? X-row? Are you lost or something? You can catch a ride with me if you need it. (eerie music) Several of these stories were first shared with the tales from the GridSquare project. In this first account, a soldier recalls happening across something unusual, while driving along the perimeter road on the box's outer limits. What he initially took to be a lost soldier turned out to be something else entirely. He writes, "I was an OCT, Observer Coach Trainer at JRTC. One night, I took our Humvee to get refueled, and filled up my ice chest at OCE's before heading back to link up with my rotational unit. I took a road along the perimeter of the box, mainly so I could haul ass to the west side without running into the RTU, the return to unit that was maneuvering. The sun had set, and it was raining. The road itself passed by this old family cemetery at an intersection that had been there for God knows how long. As I approached the intersection, I slowed to a stop and saw a figure standing in the cemetery dressed in what looked like a dark poncho. I stopped and got out, thinking that it was probably a soldier from the RTU who was messing around or got himself lost. Or maybe even an X-row, exercise rules of engagement, casualty, that was just wandering around for some reason. So I step out into the rain and yell out to this person like, "Hey, what are you doing?" And this figure just lets out this high-pitched scream before disappearing into the rain. After it vanished, the air just reaked of sulfur. I had seen enough. I hauled ass back to my Humvee and took off like a bat out of hell. I eventually linked up with the rest of my OC team and told them what happened. I was surprised when one of the other guys told me about something that had happened to them than I before. Apparently, they were down around a location called Smithville and when the guy went to check on the RTU, he saw a figure standing over a soldier who was sleeping on the ground. Whatever this was, it took off when he tried to get close. But from what he described, it was similar to whoever or whatever I saw standing in the cemetery. And the weird stuff didn't stop there. Throughout my time at JRTC, we would find these figures and trines in the training area, like season one of true detective type stuff. But in hindsight, my encounter that night in the graveyard was the creepiest for me by far. You young whipper snapper, do you come all the way through that holler? Yes, ma'am. Is that all right? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to trespass or nothing. Boy, don't you ever go through there, ever. There was a reason they went and blocked that road. Oh, why is that, ma'am? Ah, well, it's best you come up on the porch and sit for a spell, boy. I'm going to tell you the stories. Now, whether you believe me or not, ain't my business, but you ask around. Other people can tell you. Come on in, you're too young for Latin, but I'll get you some lemonade. While massive bipedal hominids roaming the forests of North America are often considered to be curious, gentle animals, Brian's story isn't the only one that exposes the creatures more predatory nature. This next story, set against the backdrop of Tennessee's Walden Ridge Trail, gives further insight into the uncanny mimicking abilities of these elusive cryptids. The author, an unidentified veteran who will refer to as "Mark," recalls a harrowing encounter he had, with a creature known locally as "The Whistling Jack." He writes, "This is a true story. I have never told this story to anyone before now, for reasons that will be obvious after you hear it." This story takes place over several time periods. I am 53 years old. I grew up in a small community on the southern end of Walden's Ridge in eastern Tennessee. Walden's Ridge is a flat plateau that spans most of Tennessee from south to north on the east side of the Squatchy Valley. Coming up, I lived in a small community there, only a little over 200 people. We just called it the mountain. The community was surrounded on all sides by forest, bordering the "Prentice Cooper" game reserve. As a kid, we would ride our bikes all over the trails and old dirt roads out on that mountain, hiking, hunting, and just exploring the woods were among the most popular of our hobbies. In 1976, when I was 12, I had an old mini-bike. This took me even further into the woods. There was this one old dirt track we discovered that begins my story. It was an old road. The two parallel ruts forming it could have only been formed by wagon wheels and maybe deepened by the old Model T or its contemporary rivals. I rode down this old road alone one afternoon, and as I exited the other end back into an inhabited area, an old lady called to me from her front porch. I knew this old lady's name, but I will use no real names here to protect their anonymity. This lady asked me, "Did you come all the way through that "huller" of the "hullo"? Yes, ma'am. I replied. And she said, "Boy, you don't ever go through there. There's a reason why they blocked that road." "Now she had me curious," I asked, "why?" She says, "Set down, boy, I'm going to tell you a story, whether you believe it or not ain't my business, but if you ask around other people can tell you." And this is the first time that I had ever heard about Whistling Jack. I always thought the name sounded silly, but you have to understand these were the same kind of people that called a species of quail a bob-white because of its unique call or called a yellow perch, a sunfish because of its bright yellow belly. It all makes a kind of sense when you learn about these things. The old lady I was talking to had lived in that community all her life. Her family had lived there for generations since shortly after Boone and Crocket had settled Tennessee. Her story, that she told me, took place in the early 1900s, before World War I. In those days, people here rode horses and carried guns. It was still a wild area. This was long before the TVA, Tennis Valley Authority, had brought electricity to these hills. There were two families. For the sake of the story, we will call them the Smiths and the Browns. The Smith family and the Brown family had small farms on opposite sides of the hollow. On Saturday, a couple of times a month, the boys of the two families would get together at one farm or the other, and play cards, drink some moonshine, home brew, homemade wine, and generally have some fun. One faithful Saturday, the socializing went on well past midnight. This was not something that ever happened, as they were normally the type to go to bed early and rise at dawn. Well, it was around 1 a.m., when the Brown boys, climbed on their horses and started down into the hollow on their way home. The trail they followed to the bottom of the hollow crossed the small creek at the bottom of a sand bar, overlooked by a large boulder. As they started to cross the creek this particular night, they heard a bird call from the top of the boulder. The innocent sound, for some reason, panicked the horses. All but one of them bolted across the creek and up the trail as fast as they could gallop. The youngest brother was thrown from his horse as it reared in panic. The one thing it may have saved his life was the fact that his lantern fell in the sand, and it did not break or go out. After up the trail, as his brothers got their mounts under control, they then heard six rapid shots from a 45. They forced their horses to go back down to the creek. When they arrived at the grizzly scene before them, they saw their kid brother on his knees in the sand by the lantern, trying to load his gun, dropping some of the bullets from his shaking hands. A few feet from him was his dead horse, bleeding from its throat. "I shot it," he said. "You know I never miss this close." It took them a while to get the story out of him. But he said that, when he had been thrown from his horse, he looked up in time to see two large red eyes on top of the boulder. It whistled again as it then jumped for his horse. It all happened so fast, he barely had time to unload his revolver into it in a quick succession of shots, before it was on his horse taking it down. the ground. It was big, it ran stooped over on two legs, it was dark, shaggy, and stank. The quick shots of the pistol were not enough to save the horse, but he knew he had hit it as it gave a hissing growl and ran off into the woods. They had heard enough, scared and now wary, they loaded him onto one of the boys' horses and rode home as fast as they could. The next morning, just after dawn, all the boys and their father took their guns and went back down the trail to the creek with the intention of hunting this thing down and recovering the youngest son's saddle and gear off the horse. They were all experienced hunters and trackers. Despite this, when they got to the creek crossing, the horse was gone. All the gear, saddle, bridle, rifle pouch were gone as well. The sand had been brushed clean, like it had been swept with a pine branch. Even the blood was partially covered. No tracks could be found and no trace of the horse or its gear, except the blood mixed in the sand. Something about the way she gripped my arm when she said this, the look on her face made me believe her. I told her I would not go back down there. I meant it. I rode the long way around the highway to get home. And little did I know at the time that my story had not quite ended. Well, probably time to get going. Wait. Is that a bobway? They're not supposed to be calling us late at night. All right, it's time to get out of here. 13 years later, I was 25. After four years in the military and a brief failed marriage, I was back on the mountain for a while. Depression soon had me roaming the woods again. When I wasn't working, the woods brought me peace, and there was one spot in particular. Just a couple of hundred yards from the top of a line of sandstone cliffs along the bluff on the western side of the mountain, there was an old-growth pine grove. I don't know if you've ever been in an old-growth pine grove in the forest. The massive pine trees just seemed to radiate a peaceful quiet feeling. The thick canopy they provide inhibits undergrowth, so instead of crunchy dead leaves, you will have a carpet of fallen pine needles that cushion and silence your steps. It is common to find lush beds of moss in these places too. This place was several miles from that hollow I told you about before on the other side of the plateau. Foolishly, I had spent the afternoon, evening, and well into the night hiking along the bottom of the cliffs. I had a small backpack, a little food, a couple of drinks, among other things, and a couple of flashlights in case I found a cave I wanted to look into. I also carried my old Winchester Model 9712 gauge, good, solid shotgun. It would hold five rounds in the magazine and one more in the chamber if you were that careless. I should have known better than to be out there after dark. There were a lot of factors involved that got me there at that moment. Sometime around midnight, I had been sitting in a nice spot where I could see the lights from the valley miles away, having a few sips of bourbon. Thinking about things just enjoying the peace and quiet. As I packed my stuff to go home, I heard a bob white call a couple of hundred yards below me along the heavily wooded slope. It seemed perfectly normal for about two or three seconds, and then I froze in mid-movement. If it would have been a whipper will, or any of the normal night birds, it would not have even phased me. But I knew that a bob white was a quail, and quails are not nocturnal birds. As if this was not puzzling enough, I heard another bob white answer from along the slope to the north at about my elevation. Then the first one called back from below me, and now I knew that it had moved closer. I have never been one to scare easily, but this was too strange. I stuffed my last things in my backpack, slung it over my shoulders, grab my gun, and started up towards the cliffs. There was a nice moon, so I did not use a flashlight, I didn't want a light to give away my position. But as I eased through the brush, trying to be as quiet as possible, I got some electrical tape out of my backpack and began taping one of my flashlights to the tubular magazine under the barrel of my shotgun. The calls of the strange bob whites were still sounding from time to time, always answering each other, always getting closer, no matter how quickly and quietly I moved. Now I was starting to get scared. I, who had always known my way around in the forest, always knew what the denizens of my woods would do, how they would react, was out of my experience pool here. This moment is when that story came back to me, the story that that strange old lady had told me 13 years earlier. I began to believe I knew what was tracking me, and yes I was being tracked, I could feel it. With this realization came a plan. By this time the bob whites were really close, I could now hear their steps trying to mirror mine. They were big, heavy sounding steps. Once in a while I would stop and I would hear them take a step or two before they stopped as well. I would not be hunted so easily. I knew where I was, directly atop the cliff above me is where the pine grove grew, just about 500 feet from the cliff. At the bottom of this cliff, at this point there would be a deep crevice. Crack formed from thousands of years of rain and the ice forming in the massive layers of sandstone and slowly spreading it. It formed an inverted V about four feet wide at the bottom, at the base of the cliff going back about 30 feet. Along the left-handed side of the inner crevice, the layered stone being pulled apart over time had made a ledge that rose from the rear of the crevice to an opening at the top just big enough for someone my size to squeeze through. Once through you would be on a ledge 30 feet or so up the cliff face. The overhanging layer of rock left just enough room to crawl along the ledge on your belly for about 40 or 50 feet. Then it opened up into a rock slide that you could climb to the top. The entire cliff was between 80 to 100 feet from bottom to top at this spot. I got there as quickly and quietly as I could manage. This took maybe only one or two minutes, but under the circumstances it seemed like time stretched on forever. Then I was in the crevice. I was soon on the ledge at the top of the crevice. I had pushed my backpack and gun in front of me to get through the tight space. I was not taking time for stealth now. I was crawling and dragging and pushing my things to get to the rock slide almost free. As I got to the slide and began to climb, I re-slung my backpack, strapped my gun over my shoulder, and went up on all fours. I could hear something shuffling around at the bottom of the cliff outside the crevice that I'd crawled in through. I didn't know why they didn't go in. I wasn't about to sit around thinking about it. I kept climbing. Once I hit the top, I ran to the grove all the way to the middle of it. I leaned against one of the massive old pines in the middle of the grove and dropped my backpack, sat my gun down and took a bottle from my bag. I needed a drink. I took a swig of bourbon as I realized my hands were shaking and I was dribbling it everywhere. Then I heard footsteps and a bob white. I have no idea to this day how they got to the top of the cliff that quickly. The cliff stretched for over a half mile south and about a mile and a half to the north. It was a sheer cliff face in both directions. That tight crawl to the crevice was the only way up here. But there they were. I could now hear their steps clearly, long steps, longer than a man's gate. They were coming. I dropped the bottle. I grabbed my gun, switched on the light as I raised it. I pumped around into the chamber, took another from my pocket and slid it in the magazine to replace it. They came closer and closer. Then they stopped at the edge of the grove, just deep enough in the brush. to hide from my light. They were quiet, but I kept my light trained on the spot where I'd heard the last sound. Why did they stop? They'd run me down why did they not come up? I could see the light beam shaking slightly. Fear had filled my blood with adrenaline. My heart was thundering in my ears. Then they moved. I could hear the long steps moving, going each way. They were circling me. Panicked, I swung my gun back and forth waiting for a shot. They circled all the way around to the other side of the grove, away from the cliff, and met up again. It was as if they were looking for a place where they could come at me, unseen. My gun was pointing at the spot where I thought they were, and I had had enough. I fired, pumped the gun and fired again. Then I heard a scream. Excuse me, but I almost wet myself just then. I do not know if I can describe this to you adequately. It was not a scream of pain so much as an angry, hateful sound. It was a scream like a chimp makes on TV except deeper and throatier. Hair stood up on the back of my neck. Then I heard them crashing through the brush, away from me, across the plateau, deeper into the woods. They just left. After some length of time, I had no idea how long. It had been silent for a while. I could sense that they were gone. It occurred to me to check my watch. I didn't do this at first because it would mean lowering my gun, but eventually I had to know how long it would be until dawn. When I looked at my watch, it was 3.18am, roughly 2.5 hours until daylight. I stayed there and waited. As soon as it was light enough that I could see well enough not to be ambushed, I left and ran home. In 28 years, I have not set foot in the woods there. I hike in the woods, camp, and fish, but I have not hunted since then. As a matter of fact, about 2 months after that night, I moved way down in Alabama to a small industrial town and took a job. I stayed there for about 25 years until early 2015. In late 2014, a relative passed away and left us a place in the Sikwachi Valley near the mountain where I grew up. I can see the cliffs just a few miles from my front porch, but I would never go there. But I don't think that is quite the end of this story. The house I live in sits on the edge of a 32-acre wooded property in the middle of a small community at the foot of that mountain. It seems a lot of animals use these 32 acres as a way stop between the mountain forests and the woods along the Sikwachi River that runs down the middle of the valley. When we moved in, my daughter was already living here. She had a big old dog named Buddy. Buddy was a big, tough dog. He had been known to take on a coyote more than once here to protect his turf. A week or so after I moved in, I had become one of Buddy's best friends. He no longer barked or growled at me when I came home. Here is where it gets strange. Sometimes at night, he would get really excited, barking and howling enough to get me outside with my rifle. I never saw anything except Buddy when I would go out there. He would bark, looking at the woods every so often, glancing over his shoulder at me, like checking that I was still there, then back at the woods barking. I never saw anything and would end up bringing him in and letting him sleep on the rug so I could get some rest. This went on for three weeks, until one night when he started his warning barking routine, I went out and heard it. My light would not penetrate far enough into the thick brush to see it, but I heard it. Long, heavy steps going back into the woods away from us. I swear my blood ran cold. I have not heard those footsteps again since that night, but he still had restless nights from time to time for the next couple of years, but I never again heard the footsteps in the brush. All of the research I've done into local folk tales and accounts of this thing leads me to believe it is either some type of Sasquatch or Skunkape. The accounts always describe a very large, foul-smelling, bipedal, powerful, apish creature. The only detail that differs from accounts of other aggressive Sasquatch encounters is the signature Whistling call. In all honesty, at this point, I cannot claim to have actually seen anything. I know what I heard and what I've experienced, but I have not seen anything yet. Checkpoint 1, this is base plate. Radio check over. Base plate, checkpoint 1. Yeah, go ahead. Checkpoint 1, you're missing a check-in over. Yeah, copy that. Area secure, no movement, no contacts. Same as before, over. Checkpoint 1, that's not the point. Just check the area. What the hell? Base plate. Base plate, come in over. Weird. Checkpoint 1, radio check, station, come in over. Yeah, you're getting anything? No, radios are dead, everything's down. What the hell is that? You hear that? I don't know. It's not coming from the camp. It's coming from your direction. So, I've been following your channel for quite some time now. I found it while watching another channel called Bedtime Stories. It popped up and I decided to give it a shot. Well, as it turns out, I have a story of my own that I'd like to share. But if I'm being completely honest, I don't know how to type this down. It will probably sound strange and unbelievable, but hey, there's a lot of strange and unbelievable stuff already out there. With all the events currently happening around the world with other various sightings and whatnot, I really just wanted to share my experience with somebody. It's easier to share this with someone on the net because if I said this to someone face to face, I'd probably be ridiculed at best or lose my job at worst, depending on who I was telling. See, I'm not supposed to be talking about this. I'm just a simple soldier in the Croatian military. So you can probably understand why that would be the case, but I really don't care anymore. I just want to get this off my chest and I honestly doubt any of my higher ups would find out anyways, knock on wood. This all happened in August 2019, but first, here's a little something about me. My name is Mario and I live in Croatia. As I already mentioned, I work in the Croatian Armed Forces. More specifically, I serve as a combat engineer or a pioneer, as we call it, clearing minefields leftover from the Croatian War of Independence back in the 90s, as well as unexploded ordinance from various training exercises. This isn't all that important. It just means I spend a lot of time away from home in the ass-end of nowhere, mostly in forested areas and remote abandoned villages and military installations that are still deemed unsafe due to all the mines scattered half-hazardly by all sides of the war. One such area is the Aeogen Kvatronik military training grounds located near the town of Sluña. The training grounds were built by the former Yugoslavia in 1965 and encompass roughly 240 square kilometers of rugged forested terrain. During the war, the area was held by Serb forces and extensively mined with all sorts of anti-personnel and anti-tank mines. Most of it has been cleared, but there's still a lot of work to do. These training grounds have been frequently visited by the US military, as well as European armies like Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland, etc. Some areas are actually still off limits due to the demining process, but these are far from the spots used for training and other activities. This is where my story comes in. Now, due to this place being so damn big, we soldiers are often forced to haul our own supplies of fuel, ammunition, explosives, food and water with us. So we built ourselves a makeshift depot for our trucks and demining machines, living quarters, and so on. On this particular exercise, we placed our camp in a gorge with enough room for everything we needed and more. It honestly looked like a small town by the time we were all set up. And of course, we had guys on guard duty conducting patrols inside and outside the camp. There are bears, jackals, and boars in those parts, and we wanted to keep them as far as possible. They don't like the noise and the lights, so they rarely ever try to get close, but you can never be too careful. That night, as luck would have it, I got the short end of the stick and found myself on the night shift. Myself and a number of other guys were spread out along the road that led up to the hill into the forest above the camp. We had some hundred meters between each of us, and I was in a position on the highest point above the camp. Some four hundred meters away from it. From there, the road went down again and into the forest. There was another guy just down the road for me, but other than that, I was basically on my lonesome up on top of that hill. The shift started at midnight and we were supposed to patrol up and down our assigned sectors of the road for the next four hours, checking in every 30 minutes with status updates. So we do as we're told for the next hour, patrolling the perimeter, shining our flashlights around and doing our check-ins, who's boring as hell, and let me tell you, it was a hot summer night. So seeing as nothing was really happening, I decided to have a little break. I found a spot from where I could loom down at the camp and took a seat. As my better judgment, I started to doze off. I was acting up for a second, I've got it now, all good in my end. All right, let me know if it drops again, I can get someone to bring batteries up over. Yeah, go up to that, over. What the hell? 3, 4 radio check, any station, come in, over. Perfect, flashlight is, you've got to be kidding me, and cell phone. What the hell is going on? Hello? So, I doze off, and luckily for me, when the guys started calling in, the radio woke me up, and I reported in, all clear, or so I thought, "About 10 minutes after this, I'm back on patrol." And a strong wind blows in, I didn't think much of it, but it caught my attention because the entire night, up to that point, had been quite calm, and still. And at the same time, my radio emits this high pitched squealing noise, before going quiet altogether. I'm thinking to myself, "Oh man, there goes my battery, and sure enough, the radio was dead." And that's when things started to get, really weird. As I was trying to find my spare battery, I noticed my flashlight, starting to flicker, before it too, then crapped out, and died. I sighed and reached for my phone, convinced that this was just some horrible run of bad luck. But despite being fully charged, before that night's patrol, my phone battery, was also completely dead. I was beyond confused at this point, like, how the hell does this happen? I looked around and noticed that I couldn't see the flashlights from the other patrols, either. What are the odds that all of us had faulty batteries? I looked down towards the camp and saw that all the lights were still on. So what the hell was happening? And then it announced itself. Behind me, in the distance, I heard the sounds of tree branches breaking. How do I explain it? It wasn't like someone was walking on them, but as if they were literally breaking off these huge branches and letting them fall to the ground, if that makes sense. So I'm now facing the forest and its pitch black. The sky was cloudy, so there's no moon or starlight. I can't see anything. I can only listen as the sound of cracking tree limbs is getting closer and closer. Now, I'm starting to hear something else mixed in. It was a sort of. sound, like this steady, low electronic pulse that you could feel in your chest. I really don't know how else to describe it. At this point, I also realized that this thing, whatever it is, is somewhere above the trees. Now I hear footsteps on the trail coming towards me. I turned to look and see one of the other guys who was posted down the road running towards me yelling what the F is going on, what's that sound. I could also hear some of the other guys posted nearby shouting, and as it turned out, they all had the same problem with their electronics as I did. I staggered back from the tree line as that other guy caught up to me, but he wasn't sticking around. He just ran, straight past me, and kept going down the road. I wanted to run, too, but I just couldn't. The sound then got so loud that I couldn't even hear the other guy shouting anymore. And that's when it hit me. A pressure came down on me that was unlike anything I'd ever experienced. It wasn't like a strong gust of wind or air, but pressure, as if something invisible was literally pressing me down. Like imagine someone just piling more and more weight onto your shoulders, pushing you down to the ground. I tried to look up to get a glimpse of this thing, but it was so dark. Like I could barely see as far as my nose. It was absolutely terrifying. This may have lasted for about a minute or two before the sound moved on. It was now heading towards our camp in the gorge below. As I turned to look out over the gorge, I see the camp lights slowly flicker and die. Now the entire area is completely blacked out. But at least I could hear the other guys posted along the road calling out. For the next five minutes or so, that loud pulsing sound, I could hear it, moving further and further away until it disappeared somewhere in the distance. To be honest, I have no idea how much time it passed since the start of the ordeal, maybe 20 minutes or so. Eventually, I composed myself enough to start heading back down the road towards the camp. When I arrived, the whole place was in a state of confusion. Guys were milling around outside, asking what the hell just happened. Being electronic in the camp was fried, lights, computers, radios, phones, even the trucks refused to start. So with lighters in hand, we sat in the tents until morning, when someone finally came to check on us because we didn't call in the whole night. The officer in charge, oh I see, he explained what had happened to this person who showed up and we were told to stay put. About an hour or so later, a truck arrived and offloaded a bunch of gear and more personnel – I have no idea who these guys were, but one by one, they checked each and every one of us for radiation, apparently. As well as they checked the camp and the surrounding area, thankfully, we were all clean. You could actually see the direction that this thing, whatever it was, had taken through the forest because a lot of the trees were missing their tops and higher branches, and these were healthy trees, not some dried up dead ones. Once we were cleared, all 50 of us were loaded onto trucks and taken back to the main base. From there, we were ushered into the mess hall and had a little talk with the base commander where he questioned us about what we saw. As he was grilling us, I noticed that there were three people sitting at the table with him dressed in these plain grey suits. They didn't say anything, they just sat there observing as we talked about what we witnessed. I didn't see any insignia on them, and sure, maybe I was a bit paranoid given everything that happened, but I'm almost certain that these guys weren't civilians. Everything about them screamed military, maybe intel officers or something. So after the base commander was done, the guys in suits finally spoke up, and basically said that if we said anything about this to anyone, or tried to go public with it, there would be consequences. Basically, we'd lose our jobs, or possibly even end up in jail for sharing what they called military secrets. Give me a break. As if Croatia had some kind of top secret military program. But whatever the case, they were dead serious about us keeping quiet. Let me tell you this. That night, while this was all happening, I was scared shitless. To be in pitch black darkness, unable to see what's going on around you, and the only thing you can can do is stay put and listen, that was just pure terror that I never want to experience again. I actually had trouble sleeping for the next month or so afterwards, even writing this out now is giving me goosebumps. So that's my story. Do with it as you will. Read it, delete it, I don't care. I'm just happy to get it off my chest. I know it probably sounds like some kind of sci-fi fantasy, but it really is not. I wish I never had to live through that, but it is what it is. Whatever this thing was, it wasn't a drone or a weather balloon. It was much, much bigger. Mike, I don't like this. Can we go? She's just in the band in house, babe. Don't worry about it. You want to see what's behind door number three? Okay, all right, come on. Let's just look in this last room and then we'll go. Mike, let's go. Yeah, yeah. I saw it just, just, just go. Try to move quietly. Damn it. Go, go, go, go. This final story can be found in Ethan Hayes book and counters in the woods volume six. In it, a marine veteran who will call Mike recalls a terrifying incident that happened to him just prior to enlisting. Like the soldier in the previous encounter, he says he still has no idea what he saw, but the memory of it has bothered him ever since. He writes, for those who have grown up back east in the country, many will be familiar with the occasional abandoned house that still stands. These are relics, some dating back to the 1920s or so and left to rot. Before I enlisted in the Marines, after graduating college, these replaces my friends and I would visit to dig for old trinkets to collect, like mason jars or rare coins. Growing up in the tidewater area of Virginia, it felt like there was never a shortage of these old homes and I personally enjoyed checking them out. When I went to college in West Virginia, my days of searching out these places had given way to partying and chasing girls. One of these girls, I was interested in like to go hiking, so I found myself doing just that. It was a gorgeous spring day. The temperature was perfect, hovering around the high sixties and there wasn't a cloud in the sky, a picture perfect, bluebird day. She had heard about a cool trail about an hour south of Morgantown, so with a day pack filled with water, snacks, and a blanket to raster picnic along the way, we headed out. If anyone is familiar with West Virginia, they'll know how mountainous it is, so the trail would no doubt present some physical challenges and changes in elevation. We started in and had no problem the first hour, then we started down along a creek, and to my surprise, we found an old abandoned house. There were signs of an old road or drive now covered with trees, by the looks of the place it had been easily abandoned for over half a century. Curious, I wanted to go in and have a look. My girlfriend objected at first, but after a bit of coaxing, I got her to say yes. We made our way up to the front porch, or what was left of it, as it was rotten. Unable to safely get in through the front door, we made our way to the back, where we found a stack of cinder blocks making a small staircase. This wasn't the original, and told me that people had come back and visited this place at some point. We scaled the blocks and entered through the old rotting and weathered back door. We were now standing in the kitchen, which surprisingly still looked like one. The cabinets, while in decay, still hung on the walls, an old wood burning stove was tucked in the corner. I immediately took notice, as most of these old stoves were removed by collectors, but this one was still there, and I noticed it seemed to have been recently used. On the counter, I saw some wrappers and empty potato chip bags, another sign that people had been there recently. I wasn't surprised by this. As I said, I often visited these abandoned homes when I was a kid. I opened a couple of cabinets only to find rotting packages or old tin cans of food. I hadn't noticed my girlfriend had moved on to the next room until she called out for me to go in there. By the tone in her voice, I could sense something was off. I hurried out of the kitchen and could see her face was ashen and her eyes were wide like saucers. I asked her what was wrong, but before she replied, I saw what she was so scared of. In the corner of what was the dining room was a pile of bones. Not human bones, but bones of animals. I think they were mostly deer, but I saw some dogs and even cat skulls in there as well. My girlfriend was ready to leave, but I wanted to keep looking. I know you may be thinking that we were trespassing, but at the time, my thought was that if a homeless person was here, we had just as much right to be there as they did. I took her hand and told her we'd be safe and asked her to come upstairs with me. She resisted, but again, eventually gave in. Looking back, I wish she had been more forceful, or maybe I should have been less stupid as it would have saved our relationship, and would have saved me the endless nightmares and therapy I've had to endure since. With her hand in mind, we exited the dining room and made our way up through the empty living and family rooms. From there, we started up the stairs. The walls at one time had been covered in wallpaper, which was now faded, some of it covered in mold or peeling off the wall. The railing for the stairs wasn't too bad minus a few balusters that were broken or missing. We found three rooms on the upper floor. The one at the far end had its door closed, and the other two were open enough that we could see inside. There was nothing in them, but broken bottles and trash. And one wall was a pentagram. What's with old homes and pentagrams? I could tell by her gripping my arm that my girlfriend was now very scared and I'll admit I was now a bit on edge, but I also felt that tinge of excitement. We made our way to the bedroom with the closed door. I turned the knob and slowly pushed it open. I remember the door creaking like something straight out of a horror movie. The room had a mattress on the floor, and on it we saw a person sleeping. My girlfriend almost screamed, but managed to stop herself. I wasn't quite sure what we were looking at, because it didn't appear to be exactly human. Whatever it was, it was naked, and its skin was very pale. I vividly recall it being bald. My girlfriend was tugging on my arm and motioning with her head like we need to leave. I'm not sure what it was lying there, but it struck me with enough fear to want to immediately turn around and get the hell out. So that's what we did. We turned around and started heading for the stairs. We were moving quickly, but also trying to be careful not to make any noise, but then I kicked a bottle. And it perfectly just slipped through the space between the two balusters and fell to the wooden floor on the first level. It smashed. I swear to this day, that was the loudest thing I'd ever heard. And when it broke, we heard rustling coming from behind us, the bedroom, where the weird person thing was. My girlfriend lets out a scream and sprints for the stairs. I was right behind her. So she's racing down the stairs, but before she reaches the bottom, she trips and falls face-first onto the floor, hitting her chin. I come down and I pick her up. When she looked up, she left out another scream. I look up and see that this thing is now standing at the top of the stairs. It's about five and a half feet. It had a normal sized abdomen and its arms were extraordinarily long. Nothing about this. This thing looked human. It then opens its mouth and screams. My girlfriend is now sprinting for the kitchen in the back door with me right behind her. And I can hear that this thing was coming down the stairs after us. My heart was racing so hard I thought I was going to have a heart attack. So we sprint through the kitchen and out the back door. My girlfriend doesn't even stop to go down the center block steps. She just leaps from the doorway and I do the same. We took off running but not towards the way we'd come in. We went the opposite way along the old road. I heard the thing as it got to the back door and it screamed again but I didn't have it in me to look back. I felt that if the thing was going to follow us, I'd hear it. But I didn't. We ran and ran for maybe about 10 minutes until we're both at a breath and just collapsed on the ground in exhaustion. For deep breaths, my girlfriend is, she keeps asking me what this thing was. I just kept saying, "I don't know, I don't know." And the fact was, I didn't know. It was very much human-like but also not. Its skin was pale, like white and it didn't have any hair. We waited for about an hour then decided to make our way back. We didn't plan on taking the road but instead we climbed a large hill to the left of it which would give us the elevation we could use to see and it would also put some distance between us and the house. As we made our way up, I kept the house in my field of view which was then about 100 or so yards away. I didn't see any movement until we got to the top of the hill. I told my girlfriend to stop so we could take some cover behind a large fallen oak tree. And I'm peering down and I see the creature running around the house. But it wasn't on two legs, instead it was racing around on all fours, around and around it's going and it would stop and it would lift its head and I swear. It acted like it was sniffing the air. It would then continue this crazy circling of the house. Then it came around the back of the house but instead of continuing to circle, as it had been doing, it went over to what looked like an old brick well. It jumps up on the edge and then disappears down inside it. And I'm shocked by this, I'm thinking why on earth is it going down into the well. My girlfriend didn't care and desperately wanted to keep moving as we were still an hour away from the car. I was curious, up until this thing reappears with another creature. Now there were two of them. I'd seen enough, we both got up and started running again, sprinting, we ran and ran and ran. And what had taken an hour to hike took us maybe 20 minutes to run. We burst from the woods, our faces covered in sweat and some blood from cuts we got from branches as we pushed through some thick brush. Everything seems surreal and I don't know if I was just dizzy from the exhaustion but my vision was blurry and felt like I was going to faint. I told my girlfriend this, she took the keys from me and started the car. We spun out of there and onto the county road. When we got back to the dorms, she wouldn't even look at me, much less talk to me. I asked if she wanted me to stay with her and she said no. She broke up with me the following week. I tried numerous times to talk with my now ex-girlfriend about this but she didn't want anything to do with me or what we'd experienced. I was curious though and wanted to find out what those creatures could have been. All I can guess is that they were rakes or pale crawlers and most likely lived underground. I figured the well was dry and was an access for them, I never went back and warned anyone I knew who talked about hiking to stay clear of that area but I never told them what I saw. Just said I'd seen a mountain lion along the trail and kept it at that. But over the years, I couldn't help but think about others who may have come face to face with them and if they did, had they been hurt or worse. This curiosity led me to go back. However, this time I was going with some capable friends and guns. My good friend Brad, a former MP in the army and Tim, who was a Marine, both joined me. I shared my story with them and, like others, they simply thought that my old girlfriend and I had seen some in Brad homeless people. But nevertheless, they agreed to come with me to check it out. The second we pulled off the county road to the trailhead, I knew something was off. Where the trailhead used to be was a sign which warned us to stay out, private property. I didn't recall the trail ever being on private property and I couldn't help wondering if something bad happened that would make them close the path to the public. Instead of turning us away, that sign only fueled our curiosity and desire to see what was going on. We easily navigated around the sign and made our way into the woods. The time of year was the same as last, making for some deja vu moments as we hiked the trail which had become overgrown. As we got closer, the tension of this moment got very real and we all became very quiet. Tim was a smart-ass and tried to diffuse the tension with some jokes. Brad on the other hand was very serious and I could see that his expression had become stern and focused. Hold up, is that it? I didn't remember seeing an old foundation there before, we'd been hiking for close to an hour at that point and I was just starting to wonder if I'd misremembered the location entirely. It was a foundation, bricks. The footprint made sense, you could see the corners, the layout, but the house itself was completely gone, not collapsed, not rotted away, gone. Is this the well? I saw what Tim was pointing at, a circular ring of brick near the edge of the foundation. It looked exactly how I remembered it. Yeah, that's it. It's filled in. They hadn't just torn the house down. They'd filled the well with debris from the demolition, bricks, timber, tree limbs, whatever they could find. That told me a lot. If someone had gone through the trouble of burying the well, it wasn't just to clean up the property. It may be wonder whether people had come here and run into the same things we had. I don't know, you weren't lying about the house. I told you, the well's right where I'd said it'd be. As far as the physical details went, everything lined up with my story. Same layout, same well, same stretch of woods. We ended up sitting there for nearly an hour, just eating, drinking water, letting the woods settle around us. At first, all I wanted to do was head back, but we'd come that far, and I decided I wasn't ready to leave yet. You want to check around a little more? Yeah, let's take a look. We first headed up the old drive for a way, but found nothing of note. Then went off the drive about a hundred yards on either side, but still didn't find anything worth mentioning. We found ourselves back at the house's foundation, but noticed something out of place. On the south corner of the foundation, it was the skull of what looked like a cat. We looked at each other, kind of puzzled, and a bit weirded out. Then we started asking one another if that was there before. And we all agreed it hadn't been. A loud crack, like a large branch snapping, came from the north. We cramed our heads in the direction of the sound, but couldn't see anything. At this point, Tim is suggesting that we just move on. His typical laid-back, nonchalant attitude was nowhere to be seen. And it wasn't the one to run from a fight. So he pulls out his semi-automatic pistol. I for one was with Tim and told Brad we should go, but Brad said no. He clearly wanted to confront whatever this was. Tim and I are both strongly urging him to come with us, and he finally gives in. But as we turn to leave, something starts hitting us, and we realize there is like a hail of bones being thrown at us. That was enough for me. I turned and sprinted. retreated, back down the trail towards the truck with Tim right on my heels, but not Brad. I stopped and looked back at him. He looked pissed, and he just levels his pistol in the direction of the woods where the bones are coming from and just starts firing. Watching Brad standing there, holding his ground, I guess, me and Tim just felt inspired to do the same. So we go back, Brad was on his second mag when we joined him and started firing into the tree line. After a minute, we stopped and listened. The bones had stopped being thrown, and there was silence. Brad moved first and headed into the trees, moving the direction of where the bones had been coming from. We had our pistols up and ready as we pushed our way through this thick brush and eventually came out the other side. There, we found a large hole in the ground, wide enough for a man to crouch and disappear inside. You seeing this? We knew exactly what it was, and we knew exactly where it would lead to. Brad was fired up. For a second, I thought he might crawl straight into this thing like some kind of Vietnam tunnel rat, but instead I think we made our point. Can we go now? Yeah, let's uh, let's go. That was it. We all turned and headed back. I was expecting to have more bones thrown, or at least hear those things following us, but everything stayed quiet. We got back to the truck, loaded in, and headed for the first bar we could find. Over a cold beer at the bar, we talked about what had happened and came to a conclusion. There were others that knew about these things, which explains why the house was destroyed. Or aggression that day probably scared, whatever these things were. But one thing still bothers me. If there were two, there are probably more. This next story was found in the book, Encounters in the Woods, Volume 1, by Ethan Hayes. The account written by the son of a Marine Corps veteran details a chilling run-in that the two had while hiking along a remote trail in Washington. It was fall, and I was hiking with my dad. I hadn't seen him in a while, and we both hadn't been out hiking in a long time. I researched some trails, looking for one that was off the beaten path. One thing I didn't want to do was get stuck behind a bunch of people or have to worry about parking. I found a spot about an hour away, a ways out from the city, the park sat on the edge of a national forest. I'd say exactly, but I don't want to spoil the place nor do I want a group of big-foot people racing into the area. We set out that morning. It was cool and crisp, and according to the weather report, we were going to have clear skies to enjoy our day. We arrived at the trailhead about mid-morning and planned on making it a solid two-hour hike. For being 68, my dad was in pretty good shape. Heck, after our first climb, I was wondering if he was in better shape than I was. My dad had been Marine, and prided himself on his fitness, and it showed. The reviews of the hiking spot were spot-on. It was remote, no one to be seen, and there wasn't even a car in the parking lot. On the side of the initial climb, the first hour of the hike proved to be relatively flat and easy. We crossed over several large fields, and had a forest of pines to go through before we turned head back. When we entered the forest, the bright sunlight morning was dimmed by the shadows of the thick pine grove. We both stopped and took it all in. It was beautiful. My dad pulled out his old camera and started snapping some photos, some with me and them, some of just trees and nature and stuff. He swung his camera to the right and peered through the viewfinder. And it was then that he let out a sharp gasp. He lowered the camera and started pointing out into the woods. When he called my name, I could hear the fear in his voice. He took a few big steps backwards, still pointing, and then he tripped over a fallen tree. All I heard was a loud thud and crack. I didn't see what he was looking at, but I turned just in time to see him falling onto the ground. His leg bent the wrong way, completely the wrong way, like bone jutting out and everything, and he is howling in pain. So I run over to him, and I mean, I'll admit I totally freaked out for a second. I just froze, but I got it together and I started to perform basic first aid. I compressed the open wound, using some cloth I wrapped it as tightly as I could. Through his grunts of pain, my dad is asking me, "Did you see it?" I asked him what he meant, and he replied, "The monster." I didn't process what he was saying until after I finished wrapping his leg. His arms shook as he tried to sit up, and he's saying, "There, over there. I saw it standing over there." I looked to where he was pointing, and I didn't see anything but pine trees. So now my mind is racing. How am I going to get him out of there without making his leg worse? I pulled my phone out, and of course, there wasn't a signal this far out. I was so frustrated, but the situation was what it was. Because my dad went on about this hairy seven-foot tall monster, I kind of just rolled my eyes. In my mind, my dad is clearly going into shock. I took off my backpack and pulled out a water bottle, urging him to drink and rest so I could try to think of a plan to get us out of here. But he wasn't having any of it, he just wanted to leave right away. So I made him a deal. If I went to investigate what he saw, he would take a moment to rest and get some water in him. He nodded in agreement and took the water bottle. I got up and turned to look where he saw this monster, and again, all I saw was just tall pine trees and some small saplings which were scattered along the ground. I took a few steps, but then stopped when I heard a branch snap loudly to my left. I looked, but nothing just more trees. I stared for a minute, ready to just write all this off when I saw something move. At first, I thought it was the wind blowing a branch or leaves, but these were pines and pines don't have leaves, and it was too low down on a tree to be a branch. I kept my eyes glued to the spot because something was there. Looking dark that was just barely sticking out from the side of the tree. My mind went into overdrive trying to think of a normal explanation, but I was starting to get worried. What could this be blowing in the breeze? Because it sure as hell looked like long hair. I closed my eyes, took a breath and looked again, gone. It was just gone. My heart sank, and I had this annoying sensation starting in my gut. If it was no longer there, then whatever it was, it moved, and if it had moved, then whatever it was was alive. My dad called out to me, asking what I was looking at. I didn't answer. I wasn't ready to admit that maybe he was right. I have always thought about myself as a science guy and a monster in the woods that just wasn't science. That was science fiction at best. Hell, it was pseudoscience. Dad called out to me again, but I kept my eyes fixed on the spot where I thought I saw something, and it was then that I heard my dad cry out in pain. I was about to turn my attention towards him whenever the hell was watching us peeked out from around the tree for a split second. At the sight of it, I nearly fell over in shock. It was a face, a human-like face, but it wasn't human. Tired to explain, it had all the features of a human face, but it simply was not human. Many of the features were larger or slightly different, and its head was elongated at the top or cone shape. The face had hair, and where there wasn't, the skin was gray, grayish in color. Its eyes were large, and its nose was flat and wide. I took a few steps back, my eyes still glued on where I'd seen the face pop out, before turning back and running towards my dad. by the look on my face, he knew I'd now seen what he. He saw. I immediately told him that we needed to go. And even though he was in a lot of pain, he didn't argue. I squated down getting ready to lift him up. I wrapped one of my arms under my dad's shoulders and pressed him up until we were both standing. I told him that I would do my best, but he was going to have to hop on his good leg. As we began making our way down the trail, we heard a knocking sound behind us. We both knew what made it, and it only made us want to move faster. But that only lasted a few hops and my dad was quickly getting worn out. I can only imagine how much pain he was in with that kind of break. Then all of a sudden a rock landed just feet from us. I was now tempted to just pick my dad up in a fireman's carry and haul him out. I was terrified. And now I wondered if the thing was pursuing us or just trying to get us to leave. I wanted to turn around and look back, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Just as we finally exited the woods, another rock. This one quite large, smashed through the tall grass of the field we were in. Whatever that thing was could have easily caught up with us by now, but it hadn't. I think you just wanted to scare us and make us leave, well, message received. As we made our way further and further away from the pines, our fear began to die down. After we were a good 300 or so feet away, we stopped and caught our breath. It was at that point I looked over my shoulder, and I could finally see the creature in its entirety. He was on the edge of the tree line, just in the shadows. So my hunch was correct, it seemed like it just wanted us to go away. I think we must have entered its territory, and it came to check us out, and then the rocks must have been its way of warning us and telling us to leave. Thinking about bears or something, I thought maybe it had little ones around, or this is just what it does, it's territorial. I'm probably not ever going to find out, because after we made it back to our car safely, I decided I'm never going back there. I do wonder if other people had similar encounters there, or was it just the right timing that me and my dad happened to be walking through the area when it was there. I took my dad to the hospital, and his leg is fine, he's back stronger than ever, and in fact I'm seeing him this weekend. But this time, we plan on going fishing. Sargent, how long is this halt going to be? No idea, just if you got him smoke him, we might be here for a minute. Anybody know why we're halted? No, hopefully it's enough time for this MRE heater to work. I don't want to eat my chilling mat cold. Hey, you know you're not supposed to use those heaters inside, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, you get a higher VA rating, I'm sure you'll thank you later. Yeah, well, somehow I feel like that's going to be really hard to get service connected. But you do you. Wait, what is. Hey guys, I think we got a lieutenant that got himself lost on. What the hell is going on in the middle of the night now? Huh. Don't you just love seeing thermal ghosts on these things? Yeah. You saw that? That person that just walked across the road and then turned into a ball of light. Weird. Yeah. Told you you shouldn't have an MRE heater in here. This next story was written by a soldier who served as a driver aboard a striker armored personnel carrier. Strikers are loaded with all kinds of advanced tech that allow them to perform a number of roles from fire support to troop transport and metabac. The drivers in particular rely heavily on what's called a DVE, or driver's vision enhancer. DVEs are essentially thermal imaging systems that allow armored vehicle personnel to see where they're going in low light or poor visibility conditions. And according to this story, they sometimes have a habit of picking up on other things that are not normally visible to the naked eye. He writes. As a striker crewman, I would often see a lot of orbs on the DVE and my vehicle commander would see stuff through the crows, common remotely operated weapon station, while on security. But the coolest and creepiest thing I ever saw was during JRTC. My truck got repurposed as the designated M/EV, Metabac vehicle, since our primary one broke down. When this went down, I believe we were on our way to a location called Singarri for our final mission. We left for Darlem, or however it spelled, and our convoy eventually came to a halt. Our vehicle was offset a little towards the middle of the road, and I had my DVE on black hot. Basically, any heat signatures like people, animals, vehicles, or whatever would show up as solid black. As I'm looking at the display, I see this semi-transparent human figure, dark gray, and the thermals appear about 30 or so meters up the road, walking from right to left. What stood out to me from the other orbs and stuff that I'd seen was that you could actually see this thing steps, and even it's arm swinging as it crossed the road. Once the figure finally made it to the other side of the path, it turned into an orb shape, it just floated upwards until it was out of the DVE view. In the back of the striker, there's a screen where the squad leader sits that shows the DVE feed. I turned to him and jokingly said, "I just love seeing the thermal ghosts on the screen," or something like that. Hearing this, he just kind of laughed it off, but it was clear that he had just seen the exact same thing that I did. We're like, sure, that these buildings are empty, right? This kind of looks like the kind of neighborhood the hills have ice people to live in. I'm sure PMO patrols here all the time may look, most of the doors have locks on them. That one doesn't. The wooden hut over there, the door is open. You want to go look inside? Yeah, okay. This last story centers around two soldiers who got bored late at night, typical during training, and snuck off to walk around one of the back 40s numerous mock villages. Many of these training sites and buildings are abandoned. Since the base is so big, the army seems to just leave things to rot instead of spending tax dollars on tearing them down when it isn't absolutely necessary. But as I've heard from police officers stationed on the base, these buildings can be an attractive spot for squatters and vagrants who hop the fences and, evidently, other things. I was in the middle of Operation Lethal Eagle 3, which was a field training exercise for the 3rd Brigade Combat Team at Fort Campbell. I'm an air traffic controller attached to the command post, and at the time of this writing, what I'm about to tell you happened only a few days ago. I'm on the night shift with my buddy, and every other group has already gone back to the rear, except for our main staff and anyone running the CP, as well as an artillery battery not far from the CP site. So that means there's really nothing for me and my buddy to do. Being bored, we left the CP and went for a little nighttime walk, heading to the woodline or exploring the small wooden and concrete huts of the training village we were currently set up in. But this night, we decided to sneak past the road guard, who was another dude we knew, just sitting under a tarp with some NPCs. It's not past him and went to this other village a short ways down the road. There was just enough moon lights that we didn't need anything else to guide us. We arrive at this place and its collection of six wooden huts and six concrete shacks and they are completely abandoned. So we walk in and we finally turn on our headlamps or red lights as we are now far enough away and at a much lower risk of being caught. In this whole place just gives me the creeps, tall, overgrown grass, these old dilapidated structures, buildings. The doors on most of them were locked but one of them was hanging open just a bit. So we're standing there on the gravel road just staring at this open door and I couldn't shake the feeling that something was inside of it. We close the gap and my friend takes point, reaching to push the door further open. And just as he does so the entire back wall of the wooden shack starts to shake and we hear a very loud kicking of the gravel for a few moments. We both jumped back when this happened and braced ourselves for someone or something to come charging out at us from the open door. There was nothing. When everything went silent my buddy pushes the door fully open and we now see that the room is completely empty. The only thing we really noticed was that one area had a large amount of the gravel that had been moved to reveal a patch of fresh dirt and the back wall had a massive hole in it. There seemed to be a kind of rut below the hole. Like you see if you put a dog up against a wall it's going to dig under the wall. This looked like something had scraped its way past this wall at least a couple of times. And when we saw this, I froze in place, the hairs on the back of my neck start standing up and then we heard something outside the door behind us rustling around in the tall grass. We quickly turned and in the light of the moon we could see the outline of what I first thought was a large, like a really strong looking man, mostly hidden in the grass with his head exposed. Well, I would have assumed it was a man if it didn't have a canine wolf-like head with reflective eyes staring back at us. I want to chalk up what we saw to being a coyote because there's certainly plenty of them around the base. But no coyote is built like that. It was silent and so were we. We just kind of stayed there for a few moments watching one another. Then my buddy raised his arms and stomped forward the sort of thing you do if you wanted to scare off an animal. But this thing barely flinched if only slightly before it then slowly dropped its head back below the top of the grass. We immediately knew that we needed to leave. And watching each other's backs, we high-tailed it out of there as quickly and quietly as possible. All the while that burning sensation of being watched stayed with me for the entire walk. We didn't want to run, um, didn't seem like a good idea. And the whole time I just had this horrible sense of being watched as we walked back to our CP. So we sneak past the road guard again and we get back to the CP and once there we take a deep breath and started to talk about what we had just seen, I still can't fully explain what it was, but the fear that I felt while looking at it was like, is like nothing I've ever experienced in my life. The following story was submitted by Jacob Kalam or Kalam. I'm not a service man, but my dad was. We were stationed at Fort Campbell from about 1997 to 2006. We just moved there from Germany. Me and my family had a number of unexplained and supernatural events happened to us during that time, but there were a couple that were particularly terrifying. We lived in Woodlawn, about ten minutes from one of the vac gates at Campbell, the one heading towards the Hunter's Lodge and where the golf course is. Good morning, our dad woke us up at about three or four. He had to be at work early that morning for some kind of battalion run or other unit training event. Since we didn't have a babysitter, he had to take us along with him to work. We would spend the day hanging out in his command building. It was still very dark outside as we drove up what I believe was the 101st Airborne Road to reach one of the base's back entrances. We just rounded a curve in the road and suddenly saw something up ahead of us. There was an old horse barn near the road. Between the road and the barn, there was something I could initially only describe as a huge person. As we got closer, we could clearly see that it was not a human being. It must have been eight to nine feet tall and covered in hair. Before we reached it, this thing suddenly let out an awful noise, like a shrieking roar or a howl. Then it bolted across the road in front of us before disappearing inside the tree line. Completely freaked us out. And then there was the smell. We were riding in a jeep out in the open air. You ever passed by a dead animal on the side of the road? Well, the smell was awful, like wet hot garbage. I've got more stories than just that one. On those roads at night and usually around autumn, it always got more active. I don't know if it was because all of the deer roaming around, but the big-foot activity seemed to always happen to us. I think everyone who's had sightings or encounters like that usually has a level head, and probably just wants to tell someone about it, to see if someone they know has ever had a similar experience, so they don't think they're crazy. The following story was submitted by Laura Lee, 99. I also experienced something while stationed at Fort Campbell in 2019. While I was on fire guard at night during a training event in a hard site out in the back 40, I heard a noise that sounded like something walking just out of sight. You have the soldier who was on shift with me heard it as well. For the next half hour, we stayed close together, trying to convince each other and ourselves that the footsteps and yipping sounds we were hearing, coming from just out of view, were coyotes. The following comments were submitted by N. Perez in 1986. My stepdad had a similar experience in Fort Benning, Georgia, in the 90s, and by that I mean that he heard some kind of monstrous howl while he was out in the field. He said it was some kind of animal or being that him and his buddy had never heard before, and had freaked them out. Until I saw that Fort Campbell episode, it clicked in my mind. Now, I'm currently stationed at Fort Campbell myself. I walked for a few miles alone through the back 41 night, since I couldn't drive to where I needed to get to. I hadn't heard any stories like this back then. I didn't see anything strange that night, but now. well, I ever do that again. nope. The following story was submitted by El Guapo. I was in the army in the early 80s. My MOS was 11 Bravo Infantry. I was stationed at Fort Lewis in Colorado. One evening, out in the field training area, we were conducting a nighttime land navigation exercise, and we had been paired in two-man teams for safety reasons. During that training, a fellow soldier and his battle buddy had been following one of their plotted azimuths, the compass direction from one of their navigation points to the next one. As they walked a straight line through the area, they reached an open clearing. A head of them, out in the clearing in the moonlight, they saw what they described as a man-ape. When they later recounted what they saw, I remember one of them was so shook up about it. And I knew him to be a level-headed man that was not known to lie. He was scared. When we think of Bigfoot, especially in the context of the battle. battle of a pecanian story. There are a variety of opinions about his temperament. Some people argue that he's a gentle giant, while others would tell you that he's as unpredictable and violent as a rabid dog. But according to this next story, shared by another anonymous US Army veteran, which was also shared in Ethan Hayes' book, Bigfoot may be a little more complex than we give him credit for. You know, I've read many stories about people's encounters with Bigfoot. Most of them pretty scary, even terrifying. But I've been thinking, maybe people are just scared of the unknown, or perceive the creature to be evil when, I believe it's just an animal, a curious animal, a smart one, territorial, and maybe even kind. Now, I'm not saying they can't do things which would freak you out, but I think that's just them protecting their ever dwindling territory. Anyway, my encounter began when I was 27. I just got out of the army, and instead of moving back home to Iowa, I decided to keep the adventure going. I moved to a little piece of land just outside of Yakima, Washington. I wanted to live off the land for a while, just to be by myself. I needed some peace and quiet to process everything I'd been through in Iraq. I rented an old trailer which sat on five acres. I was surrounded by woods, and I loved it. In the late spring, I spent my days preparing a garden and wandering around the area, scouting the land around me. The first time I thought something was off was when I went hiking. While exploring the woods around my place, I found some interesting tree structures. Large branches are even smaller trees, uprooted, and arranged, like, set alongside each other like large crosses or axes. And I knew right away that these weren't created naturally. They had been intentionally made. After the first week, I was sitting on my front porch enjoying a beer. I like to sit in the dark, no real light, just the silver moon and stars above me. As I'm sipping my drink, I hear it. Someone walking slowly, deliberately through the woods, right inside the tree line near my front yard. At first, I thought it could be a neighbor walking back to their house, but then I remembered that the nearest property was at least a mile away. I mean, I really didn't care. I wasn't scared. I just finished my beer and went to bed. The next night, I heard the same walking. This time, I called out, and the walking stopped. The next day, I was in the front yard near the woods and saw something odd. A stack of rocks, placed on a fallen log. Four of them stacked right on top of each other. Okay, weird. Whoever was in those woods must have done that. I laughed and went about my day. But later, when I was making dinner that night, I had an idea. A weird idea, I'd play a game. I'd leave something for whoever it was and see if they would do the same. So I grabbed a beer, took it down to the log and set it on it, and then went back to the porch and sat in the dark. About 20 minutes later, I heard the footsteps again, same as before. I said hello, asked how they were doing, and nothing else. I just waited. The next morning, I was curious. I went down to the log, discovered that the beer was gone, and in its place was a series of twigs all lined up by size. I laughed. All right, let the games begin. That night, I decided to up the ante. I put out an old medal that I'd been awarded. I was actually excited to see what would be left in exchange in the morning. Like every night before, I sat on my porch, had my beer, and listened to the walking. The next morning came, and I rushed down to find a pile of acorns. The medal was gone. I looked around to see if anyone was close by, but there was nothing. It was then I saw a footprint in some mud, and it was huge, like 14 inches and barefoot. That is when it hit me. This wasn't a person. This was a Sasquatch. I'd heard about them, of course, but I never really thought they were real. But now, I didn't know what to think. I did wonder if my neighbor was messing with me, so I paid him a visit. He was a nice older man, also an army vet who'd served years prior in Vietnam. He said he hadn't been walking around at night behind my house, and he definitely hadn't left anything in the woods near me. I didn't go into detail, but I got the feeling that he knew what I was talking about. That he knew what or who I was dealing with. The next night came, and this time, I thought about leaving some food. I cooked up some hamburgers, and made one extra one for my visitor. I left it down there on the log, and went back to my spot on the porch. Again, I waited. Like clockwork, the walking. But this time, I could hear it walk right up to the edge of the woods where I'd left the hamburger. I tried to see it, but there wasn't enough lights. But to this day, I swear I at least saw the silhouette of the creature. I was tempted to go down and have a look, but I thought it was best not to, and so I just waited for morning. When morning came, I went down to find that the burger was gone, and in its place were blackberries. Dude, I laughed so loud I was actually communicating with a Sasquatch. This back and forth continued on for weeks. I'd leave various food items, and in return, I'd get berries, acorns, and even what I think was a half-eaten squirrel. I was enjoying this, and starting to contemplate if I should try to get this on film. But I decided against it. I just wanted to experience this for myself. I had an appointment at the VA, and since it was a distance to drive, I planned to stay overnight and to visit a friend. My visit ended up going beyond a day, and lasted three. It was great seeing an old army buddy, but I was looking forward to going back home. When I got back, I found that the trailer had been broken into. There were footprints all around it, and the refrigerator and pantry had been completely ransacked. At first I was pissed off, but the more I thought about it, it made sense. I had been feeding this thing, and when I stopped, it went looking for me in the food. I didn't like that it had messed up my place, but like I said, I understood. It was my fault. These things, while intelligent, are just animals. I cleaned up the mess, fixed the door, and probably went back to my nightly routine. For another nine months, I'd leave something, and would be given an item in return. I did ask it not to come back to my house. I kind of shouted at it. And you know what, it never did. I never once felt fear. Then again, I'd seen what real terror was in Iraq. So a hungry animal who was smart enough to leave gifts, and for me, wasn't terrifying. I've since left the area, and I don't live there anymore, but I often wonder what happened to it, and if whoever is living there is enjoying the creature's company, like I did. The story of the battle of Abe Kenyon. The kind of story that any red-blooded soldier stationed in Washington would keep in the back of his mind, as he packed his gear and was sent out for a field op in the nearby wilderness. The name of the story itself makes it sound like a wartime anecdote, but it was as much of a battle as anyone could ask for. Abe Kenyon is only about two miles to the east of the dormant volcano I mentioned, Mount St. Helens. Ask around, and it seems like all the people who live there have heard about the story. The story takes place just over a hundred years ago, back in July of 1924, when a group of gold miners found themselves in a very hairy predicament. The story originated from a man named Fred Beck, one of the miners who was there. In 1967, he and his son Ronald published a book titled, "I Fought the Eight Men of Mount St. Helens, Washington." According to Fred, he and four other miners had been prospecting around Mount St. Helens and the Lewis River for the last six years. At the time, the story takes place, they were hiking through the Washington forest to their usual spot. A gold mine they called "The Vander White Mine," located in a remote canyon near the base of the massive volcano. After years of working the area, they had become accustomed to it, but on this track, Fred said that he and the others couldn't help shake the feeling that something was off. Arriving at their usual campsite, an improvised cabin built by the men a few years earlier, Fred and the men settled in. Things were business as usual for a couple of days. But then, almost every night, the men began hearing strange noises. Fred described the sounds in his book. We had been hearing noises in the evening for about a week. We heard a shrill peculiar whistling each evening. We would hear it coming from one ridge, and then hear an answering whistling. from another ridge. We also heard a sound, which I could best describe as a booming, thumping sound, just like something was hitting itself on its chest. In spite of the strange sounds and Fred suffering from a bad toothache, all in all the men's dig was going well. Spirits were high. One day, while taking a breather from digging in the hot sun, Fred went with another guy, Hank, to fetch some water from a nearby spring. Fred had just stooped down by the water to fill his bucket when Hank yelled. Fred whipped around to see that Hank, now facing away from him, was pointing his rifle at something in the trees about a hundred yards away. Hank yelled and raised his rifle and at that instant I saw it. It was a hairy creature and he was about a hundred yards away on the other side of a little canyon standing by a pine tree. It dodged behind the tree and poked his head out from the side of the tree and at the same time, Hank shot. I can see the bark fly out from the tree from each of his three shots. The creature I judge to have been about seven feet tall with blackish brown hair. It disappeared from our view for a short time, but then we saw it running fast and upright, about two hundred yards down the little canyon. I shot three times before it disappeared from view. Terrified, the two men quickly filled their buckets and ran, water sloshing out of them, all the way back to the cabin. It took some time to catch their breath, but once they did, they told their friends about what they just seen down by the creek. Fred and Hank were clearly terrified by the encounter. The other three agreed that they would stay one more night and then leave the canyon the next morning and head back to town. Problem was, that would soon become the most terrifying night of their lives. Around midnight, the miners were suddenly woken up by loud, banging noises against the cabin. It sounded like large rocks were being thrown at it. Sure enough, something was throwing rocks at them, big ones. Big enough that they were starting to splinter the stacked logs that made up the cabin walls. The men grabbed their rifles and pistols, unsure of what to do. Going outside, certainly seemed like the worst idea. The cabin didn't have any windows, but the massive rocks were starting to break open small gaps between the logs. The men used these to try to see what was outside. What they saw, horrified them. Their cabin was surrounded by at least three large, hairy creatures standing on two legs. They watched the creatures moving around the cabin, picking up large boulders and hurling them towards it. Whatever these things were, they could tell they were a human, but they seemed far more intelligent than most animals. The only time we shot our guns that night was when the creatures were attacking our cabin. When they would quiet down for a few minutes, we would quit shooting. I told the rest of the party that maybe if they saw we were only shooting when they attacked, they might realize we were only defending ourselves. We could have had clear shots at them through the opening left by the chinking head we chosen to shoot. We did shoot, however, when they climbed up on our roof. We shot round after round through the roof. We had embraced the huge log door with a long pole taken from the bunk bed. The creatures were pushing against it and the whole door vibrated from the impact. We responded by firing many more rounds through the door. They pushed against the walls of the cabin as if trying to push the cabin over, but this was pretty much an impossibility. A hank and I did most of the shooting. The rest of the party crowded to the far end of the cabin, guns in their hands. The attack continued the remainder of the night with only short intervals between. A most profound and frightening experience occurred when one of the creatures being close to the cabin reached an arm through the gap in the wall and grabbed one of our axes by the handle. Before the thing could pull the axe out I turned the head of the axe upright so that it caught on the logs and at the same time hank shot barely missing my hand. None of the men slept that night. The attacks continued until dawn. Only when it started to get light the creatures finally appeared to leave. The men weren't sure if they would get another chance so they took the opportunity to leave the area themselves. They thought it was best to leave most of the gear behind since it would slow them down. Hopefully they'd be able to come back another time and get it, but even if not their lives were more valuable. Grabbing their weapons after one final look through the gaps in the walls, they removed the wood brace from the door and cautiously stepped outside. But after scanning the surrounding canyon it was Fred who saw it first, one of the creatures standing near the edge of a nearby cliff. It was not long before I saw one of the ape-like creatures standing about 80 yards away near the edge of the canyon. I shot three times and it toppled over the cliff down into the gorge, some 400 feet below. For reasons we can only guess, although completely understandable, Fred said that he and the other men all agreed to say nothing about the incident to anyone. In the end, they were so disturbed by the whole ordeal that they decided to never go back to the van der White mine. No amount of gold was worth dying for. In spite of their agreement, the story eventually got out. Frank said in his book that his friend Hank spilled the beans, and reported the incident to the local park rangers. Maybe he had hoped to make sure nobody got hurt from wandering into the area themselves. But from there, things snowballed until the story of the so-called "Mountain Devils" was making headlines. Thousands of people flocked to what was eventually dubbed "Ape Canyon" from all over the country, hoping to catch a glimpse of the strange creatures seen by a group of gold miners. Even a well-known big game hunter armed with an elephant gun traveled all the way from England with hopes of bagging one for his exotic collection. Despite being hounded by reporters, Fred and the other men were never known to speak openly about what had happened. At least not without a lot of persistence. Fred would eventually be goaded into leading two reporters and a park ranger back to the cabin site. Fred also left most of their names out of his book for their own privacy. Two of the men's identities remain unknown. Aside from Fred's book, the only reason we do know more about the men involved is because their family members eventually came forward about the incident many years later. The names of three of the men are generally accepted to be Leroy Smith, Marion Smith, though it's unclear if they're related. And of course, Fred Beck. Frank later clarified that the man he referred to in his book as "Hank" was a pseudonym he used since the man he was referring to was a key figure in the story, what with his telling the park rangers about the story and the whole thing ending up getting out of control and being released to the public. Probably because of their unwillingness to speak about it, a lot of questions remain unanswered. In 100 years since the Battle of Ape Canyon, the site of the encounter has changed significantly thanks to the 1981 eruption of Mount St. Helens. However, in 2013, researcher Mark Mercell located what he believed to be the foundations of the cabin used by the minors. ominously, Mark said that buried in the dirt he found numerous spent shell casings. These would match to the rifles Fred Beck said that he and Hank were carrying on the night of the attack. All of this to say, whatever we think about these creatures, based on Fred's story, it seems that they might be territorial. They can also be highly aggressive and even gunfire might not be enough to keep them away. But unfortunately, because of the army safety regulations, most soldiers training the field don't actually carry live ammunition with them. These following stories would have us wondering if the soldiers training in the woods of Washington shouldn't be given some kind of exception to this rule. What do you think they call the frees? I don't know. Probably lost a rifle or something. Hallelujah. Remind me to thank whatever port bastard is getting chewed out right now. It's the only reason we're finally getting some sleep. Hey, I'm putting my ear pro in. Somebody wake me up for my radio watch. I am getting six hours straight tonight. How come you get last watch? Also alarm. Just static. Go back to sleep. Dear Lord, please don't let them find that rifle. At least not till tomorrow. Who went to bed? It was Solomon. If it's Solomon, I won't feel bad if they never find it. Maybe they'll finally kick his ass out of the army. This last account gives us a bit of a different perspective of military training inside the notorious Fort Poke Box, that is the perspective of the opposing force, or simply OP4. The OP4's job is to play the role of the enemy, depending on what deployment the troops are preparing for, the OP4 can take many forms, from small groups of insurgents to modern fighting forces with their own ground and air assets. I've played OP4 before, and it's always more fun being the one ambushing other people rather than being ambushed. But whether it's the soldiers in training or the OP4 task with making their lives as difficult as possible, the box switch, clearly, doesn't discriminate. This soldier writes, "My unit was on an OP4 rotation this past summer from late July to late August. This was my first time at GRTC and I knew nothing about the training station or its long paranormal history. I've always been a bit of a skeptic when it comes to that sort of thing, but after this experience, I think I might be a believer. It was our last full night in the box before our culminating event. My squad was in a gun truck that was separated from our main element by maybe about a mile. We were isolated and completely alone. We didn't know the exact location of the enemy, but we knew they were at least a mile or so away from us. Right before dusk, we got word over the radio that we had gone into attack freeze, meaning that all activity relating to the training exercise had been temporarily stopped. Overjoyed at the potential of a few extra hours of solid sleep, we dropped our security and had a two-man team chilling in the Humvee on radio watch, just in case the freeze got lifted. Darkness settled quickly and myself, my squad leader and team leader, were laid out in our bed rolls, just talking before we went to sleep. That's when we heard something. Just as things went quiet and we were all about to dose off, a sound that I can only describe as a woman screaming, followed by the deep voice of a man laughing, sounded from the direction of the nearby road. We all shot up and tried to listen for more, but everything had gone eerily silent. The three of us who were outside of the Humvee heard the noise and asked each other what the heck was at. And it should also be noted that we'd already spent a week in the box by this point, so we were all pretty well accustomed to the normal ambient sounds of the environment, insects, animals and stuff. This didn't sound like any animal I'd ever heard before. Maybe about two hours later, my buddy and I are now on radio guard and we're still pretty freaked out. He joked about how what we had heard sounded a lot like a witch. But at that point, none of us had heard about the box witch, just like we didn't know any of the other paranormal accounts from other servicemen who've rotated through the box. The next day, we linked up with the rest of our elements and one of our other buddies walks up and asks how our night went. I told him that it went really well except for the weird stuff we heard out in the woods. This is where things started to get weird, well, weirder than they already were. Before I could even explain the sound and what it was, my buddy goes, "Did it sound like a woman's screaming and a man laughing?" Dude, I instantly got the chills. He told us he had heard the screaming and laughing, which were then followed by what sounded like a massive tree falling. He said that it was so loud that he almost mistook it for a sim round going off. But when he and a few others went to go check in the next morning, there was no collapse tree. He said he distinctly remembered the sound of leaves hitting the ground. When we got back to the bricks, the barracks at Tiger Land, I hopped online and started doing some research about Fort Poke. This brought me to a podcast link titled JRTC Fort Poke Box Witch. Man, my heart sank. It was at that moment I knew that there was an explanation to what I'd heard that night, and it wasn't anything natural or friendly. [Music] War Time Stories is created and hosted by me, Luc LaMana, 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. Artwork by Piccata and Radomere Isgarovic.