Bigfoot In The Cave

woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and remember some things in the woods don't want to be found. Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads, and let's head off into the woods if you dare. I get a lot of emails. Some of them are short, a line or two, a name, a state, a thank you for the show. A few of them ramble, and that's fine, because rambling is sometimes how a person works their way around to the thing they actually want to say.

Once in a while, though, an email comes in that I have to sit with for a couple of days before I can even answer it. The kind where you read it through and then you read it through again, and then you stand up and walk around your house for a minute, because the air in the room feels a little different than it did before you opened it. This is one of those. The man who sent it asked me to read it on the show. He said, his name is Keith. He said he's been a listener

for a few years now. He said he debated for the better part of several months whether to send anything at all, and that when he finally did, he wrote it in one sitting at his kitchen table at about two in the morning, because that's when these things tend to come up out of him. He didn't ask for anonymity.

He gave me his real first name. He told me where he lives in general terms, and where this happened in general terms, and he asked me not to be too specific about either, because there are still two other men in this story, and one of them isn't doing well, and Keith doesn't want any of this landing on his doorstep. I'm going to honor that. I'll tell you up front that I cannot verify what Keith experienced. I haven't stood at the mouth of the cave he describes. I haven't

met him in person. I've talked with him over the phone twice for about an hour each time, and I'll say this, he doesn't sound like a man trying to sell me anything. He sounds like a man who is still, almost a year later, trying to talk himself into believing what his own eyes saw. Keith and his two friends, Josh and Caleb are experienced spalunkers. That part matters. They aren't kids who watched a video and decided to crawl into a hole on a Saturday. They've been doing this

for the better part of two days decades. They know about bad air, about flash floods, about cold water sumps and rotten rope, and the slow trick of fatigue. At depth, they know what they're doing underground. What happened to them, if you take Keith at his word, was something none of their experience prepared them for. I'm not going to tell you what to make of it. That isn't my

job tonight. My job tonight is to read his email the way he wrote it, with his permission, and to let you sit with it the way I've been sitting with it. So pour yourself something, turn the lights down a little. If that's how you like to listen and settle in. This is Keith's email, Brian. I want to start by saying I never thought i'd be the guy

writing one of these. I've heard enough of your shows to know what kind of email lands in your inbox most weeks, and I always thought, well, those are fine for them. Those are other people's stories. I'm a project manager. I run a small crew. I have a wife and a girl in middle school, and a dog that thinks he's people. I do not have a story except now

I do. I want to tell it the whole way through because I think if I tell it once, all the way to the end, I might be able to put it down for a while and go to sleep at a reasonable hour. Again, my wife would appreciate that, so would I. So if you'll let me work my way into it, I'll get there. I have to tell you about Caleb's grandfather first. There's no way around him

without him. None of this happens without him. The three of us don't drive seven hours into the kind of country where the gas stations have hand lettered signs and the cell service drops out about an hour before you mean it too. Without him, we never find that hole in the rock at all. Caleb's grandfather was named Hollis. Everybody called him Pap. He was a coal man for the first half of his life and a carpenter for

the second half, and somewhere in between. He was a hunter, a trapper, a fiddle player, and the kind of man you didn't sass twice. He was born in Letcher County, Kentucky, and he died there about fourteen months ago, eighty six years old, in his own bed, which he had asked for. Caleb was the one who found him. He'd driven down that morning to bring him groceries. Caleb and Pap were close, in the way that grandsons and grandfathers sometimes are when

the father in between has gone missing. Somewhere along the way Caleb's dad left when Caleb was five, Pap stepped into the gap. He taught Caleb how to fish, how to clean a rifle, how to set a trot line, how to shake a man's hand without making it a contest. He taught him how to read the weather off the

way the leaves turned their backs to the wind. He taught him one hundred small things that fathers are supposed to teach, and once in a great while, when the bourbon was out and the porch light was on, and the cicadas were doing their slow work in the woods behind the house. He taught him about the places in those mountains a person should not go. There were a

few of them, according to Pipe. There was a stretch of creek up pass Sergeant that he wouldn't fish because some happened to a cousin of his there in the nineteen forties that he would not discuss. There was a stand of old timber up the ridge from his property where he wouldn't hunt, because he said the deer wouldn't bed down there, and a man should pay attention when

the deer tell him something. And there was a hole in the rock on the north face of a ridge maybe twelve miles from his house, in the middle of a piece of national forest land, that he warned Caleb about more than once, in a tone that didn't allow for follow up questions. Caleb told us more than once over the years the things Pap had said about that hole,

He'd say. Pap told me when I was nine that if I ever found myself up that draw by accident, I should turn around and walk out the way I came in, and I should not go back, not for a dropped pack, not for a wounded dog, not for anything, he'd say. Pap told me he knew two men who went in there before the war, and only one came out, and that the one who came out never spoke a full sentence again for the rest of his life, he'd say.

Pap told me once, when I pushed him, that he himself stood at the mouth of at one time when he was about my age, and that whatever was in there made the hair stand up on his neck so bad his teeth hurt, and he turned around and went home and never went back. That's the kind of thing Caleb grew up hearing. You have to understand. The three of us have been caving together since we were nineteen

years old, Caleb, Josh and me. We met our first year of college at a little outing club that met on Tuesday nights in a basement that smelled like old carpet, and we've been at it ever since. Indiana, Tennessee, West Virginia, Alabama. All the big systems, plenty of small ones. Caleb's the most patient of the three of us. He's the one who'll spend twenty minutes finding the right line through a breakdown when Josh and I are already trying to muscle

through it. Josh is the strongest. He was a marine for six years before he came back home and went into welding, and his shoulders looked like he's been doing pull up since the womb. And I'm the cautious one. I'm the one who packs the second backup light and the third backup and a my lar blanket I have never used. I'm the one who annoys the other two by reading the survey notes out loud in the truck

on the drive in. I want you to hold all of that in your head as you listen to the rest of this Three grown men decades of experience between us. None of us drinks underground, none of us take short cuts. None of us has ever been the kind of person who sees what isn't there. Whatever you make of what I'm about to tell you, it didn't happen to a couple of weekend warriors. It happened to the three of us. I'd put my reputation on Caleb and Josh in any

cave you want a name. They'd say the same about me. Pap died in early September of last year. Caleb went down for the funeral. He stayed for two weeks after because somebody had to start sorting through eighty six years of one man's life, and Caleb's mother wasn't up for it. Pap had a workshop behind the house that hadn't been touched since the Reagan administration. He had a hall closet full of paper, grocery bags full of receipts. He had a shoe box full of black and white photographs of

people whose names had died with him. And in the back of a drawer in the kitchen, underneath a stack of old utility bills, Caleb found a folded piece of graph paper. It was a map, hand drawn in pencil on paper that had gone soft. Along the creases, there

was a stretch of road on it. Caleb recognized there was a creek, there was a contour line that meant a ridge, and on the north side of that ridge there was a small black circle, And next to the circle, in perhaps tight square handwriting, there were two words don't go. That was it, no date, no name for the place, just the map and those two words. Kept in the back of a drawer in a man's kitchen for who knows how many decades. Caleb didn't tell us about it

right away. He sat on it for about a month. He told me later that he'd found it on a Tuesday, and that he'd put it back in the drawer and gone outside and sat in his truck and cried for the better part of an hour. He said it felt like Pap had left him a question, not an answer, a question the kind of grandfather leaves a grandson when he's run out of time. He brought it up to us in October. We were all three at Josh's place for one of our Sunday cookouts. Josh's wife had taken

the kids to her sisters. Caleb went out to his truck, came back with the map, and laid it on the kitchen table between the bowls of chili. He didn't say anything for a long minute. Then he tapped his finger on that little black circle, and he told us what was on it, PAP's stories, the two men before the war, the hair on the neck, the hand drawn warning. And then he asked us if we'd go with him. I

said no, I want to be clear about that. The first thing I said sitting at that kitchen table was no I said, Caleb, your grandfather was a smart man, and he told you not to go, and that ought to be the end of it. I said, you'll regret it. I said, if it's so bad, he wrote a warning on a map and hit it under the gas bill. What business have we got there? Josh took the other side. Josh said, with respect. Pap was an old countryman. He had stories about a lot of places. He had stories

about that creek where his cousin drowned. And there's nothing wrong with that creek now except a little erosion. Those old men told a thousand of those stories. Most of them are about a moonshine still that somebody didn't want found. If there's a real cave up there nobody knows about in the middle of a national forest, that's a once in a lifetime thing. We owe it to ourselves to at least look at the entrance. And Caleb, and this is the part I keep coming back to, Caleb said,

I have to know. He said it quietly. He wasn't pushing it. He was asking. My granddad spent his whole life trying to keep me from that place, he told us. And now he's gone, and I don't have anybody to ask anymore, and I have to know what he was trying to keep me from. If I don't go look at that ridge once with my own eyes, I'm going to think about it for the rest of my life. I would rather go with the two of you than alone.

That last sentence was the one that got me, because I knew, sitting there at that kitchen table that he was going to go either way, and I knew Josh was going to go with him either way, and I knew that if I didn't go, I'd spend the rest of my life trying to live with the version of this where they walked out without me and something happened and I wasn't there to make it not happen. So I said yes. We picked a weekend in early November.

The leaves would be down by then, which would help us see the lay of the land, and the snakes would be sleeping, which would help with everything else. We told our wives we were going caving in eastern Kentucky for three days. That part was true. We didn't tell them the rest. I'm not proud of that. I'm just telling you the way it was. We took two trucks because Josh's place is a couple of hours out of the way from mine and Caleb's. We met up at

a diner outside London, Kentucky, on a Thursday morning. I remember Josh ordered biscuits and gravy and ate the whole plate in about ninety seconds, because he wanted to be done before I started telling him about the survey reports. I had not actually been able to find for this cave because there were no survey reports for this cave, because as far as the official record was concerned, this cave did not exist. There's no entry for it in any of the Grotto's files, there's nothing in the Federal

land surveys we could find. It's a hole in the rock that, as far as I can tell, only Pap and a few other old men ever knew about, and most of them are dead. That should have told me something. We drove the rest of the way that afternoon. The road got narrower, and then it turned to gravel, and then it turned to a dirt track that pretended to be a road for about a mile before it gave up. We pulled the trucks off into a little flat spot

under some pines. Caleb walked a slow circle around them, hands in his pockets, looking at the way the trees grew. This is the place, he told us, This is where paps map ends. We had the truck set up as a base. We'd hike in from there, sleep in tents at the foot of the ridge that night, hike up to the entrance the next morning, and be in the cave by mid morning Friday. The plan was to do a long surface day on Friday, get a feel for the system, come back out before dark, and decide that

night whether to push it harder on Saturday. That was the plan. We made camp in the last of the light. Caleb cooked, Josh got a fire going. I sat against my pack and listened to the woods the way I always do for the first half hour. I always do that. You can learn a lot about a place from the way it sounds. In the first half hour. I'll tell you what I noticed. I noticed I couldn't hear any birds. It was already coming on toward dark, so that wasn't

necessarily strange. I noticed I couldn't hear any deer moving either. That was a little strange. It was November in Kentucky. There should have been dear moving. Stay tuned for more backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back. After these messages, I noticed I couldn't hear coyotes once it got full dark. Not one yip, not one howl the whole night. I told myself I was looking for things to be wrong.

I told myself I'd been spooked by Caleb stories, and I needed to get my head right before we went underground. I drank some coffee, I went to sleep. I slept fine. Friday morning, we hiked up. The ridge was steeper than the contour lines made it look they always are. We took our time, We gained elevation slow. When we got to where the map said the entrance ought to be, we spread out and worked the slope in a line.

Caleb found it. He whistled that low two note whistle he does, and Josh and I made our way over to him. The entrance wasn't a yawning mouth in the side of the mountain. It wasn't dramatic. It was a slot in the rock, about four feet high and maybe two feet across at the widest point, set behind a cluster of mountain laurel that you would walk past if you didn't know to look. There was a little bit of cool air coming out of it, the way air comes out of a cave that's connected to something bigger.

There was a faint, faint smell on that air. Not bad, just earthy, the way a root seller smells. Nothing alarming. Caleb stood there for a long minute. He had his hand on the rock above the slot. He was looking into the dark. I couldn't tell what he was thinking. He's not a guy who tells you what he's thinking unless you ask, and even then he takes his time about it. After a while, Josh said well, Caleb said yeah, and we went in. The first hundred feet were a

stoop walk. Then it opened up into a low room maybe thirty feet across, with a sandy floor and a smooth ceilinged passage going off the back of it to the right standard limestone, clean, dry, a little cool. We stopped there to put on our helmets and check our lights. I remember Josh laughing about something. I remember Caleb checking his watch the way he does, marking the time. We entered eight forty seven in the morning. We had told

ourselves we'd be back out by four. The passage off the back of that room ran for about four hundred feet more or less straight, with a slight downward grade. We walked it in a loose line, Caleb in front, Me in the middle, Josh in the back. Caleb was reading the cave for us. Watch your step here, this rock's loose. The ceiling drops in about ten feet. There's an old mud floor here. It's been dry for a long time. The kind of running commentary you're glad to

have when you're in unfamiliar ground. It was good cave. I want to say that the first hour, hour and a half we were having a good time. The system was clean, the formations were beautiful. We came through one little chamber that had soda straws hanging from the ceiling so thick and so long that Josh said it looked like a chandelier somebody had forgotten to turn on. Caleb took pictures. We were quiet, the way you get quiet in a cave because the air swallows your voice, and

after a while you stopped trying to fill it. Around two hours in we hit the first pitch. It was a vertical drop of maybe thirty five feet into what looked from the lip like a much larger room. We'd brought rope, of course, we'd brought rope. Josh set the anchor. Caleb went down first. I was second. Josh came down last. The rope ran clean. The room at the bottom was a real room. I'd put it at two hundred feet long, eighty feet wide, ceiling maybe forty feet at the center.

There was a stream running through it, and honest to God, underground stream three feet across, clear and cold and fast. There was a sandy bank along one side of it. There were formations on the far wall that looked like a frozen waterfall. I have to tell you that room was beautiful. It was one of the most beautiful rooms I've ever been in in any cave anywhere. We stood there for a few minutes with our lights off, all three of us, the way you do sometimes in a

place like that, just to feel the dark. It was while we were standing there in the dark that I heard the first thing. It was a sound far off that I cannot describe to you exactly. The closest I can get is to say it was a low, slow exhalation, like a man letting out a long breath. But it was not a man, and it was not close, and it was a long enough breath that no man could have made it. I thought I had imagined it. I

almost asked the other two if they'd heard anything. Then I told myself, you're standing in the dark in a cave you've never been in. Of course, your brain's making up sounds. And I let it go. I didn't say a word about it. We turned our lights back on. Caleb pointed at the stream. We can follow that. He said, streams going somewhere. Let's follow it for an hour and then turn around. So we followed the stream. The passage downstream from that big room was lower ceiling, but it

was wide and the floor was good. We walked, We kept walking. After about twenty minutes, the passage made a sharp turn to the left and the ceiling dropped to maybe six feet, and the air changed. This is the part that's hard to put into words. The air changed. It got warmer, not by a lot, maybe two degrees, but in a cave, two degrees is something Caves don't change temperature. The temperature in a cave is the average annual temperature of the surface above it, and it stays

there more or less forever. You feel two degrees in a cave, you feel it on your skin. The three of us all felt it at the same time, because all three of us slowed down at the same time, and there was a smell on the warm air. It wasn't a strong smell. It wasn't a hit you in the face smell. It was just present where before there had been nothing. It was a wet animal smell, not a skunk smell, not a deer smell, not a bear smell. And I know what a bear smell's like. I've had

a black bear come through camp before. It was a sharp, dirty, organic smell, the way a wet dog smells if the dog has been rolling in something it shouldn't have. There was something else under it that I want to call rot, but it wasn't quite rot. It was older than rot. It was the way the back of a long closed barn smells when you finally open the doors in the spring. You guys smell that, Josh said, Caleb said, yeah, I said, let's stop a minute. We stopped. We stood there in

that low passage and we listened. I could hear the stream behind us. I could hear my own heart. I could hear, I thought, very far ahead of us, a sound like water dripping, but slower than water drips, and at irregular intervals. I wanted to turn around. Right then, I wanted to tell the other two, this is enough. We found the cave. We walked the cave. Pap was right, let's go. I wanted to. I didn't. I didn't, And I have asked myself one hundred times since then why

I didn't. And the only answer I have is that I did not want to be the one who called it. I did not want to be the man who got spooked and made the other two turn around. I think Josh felt the same way. I think Caleb did too. I think all three of us were standing there in that low, warm passage, with our hands on our hips, smelling that smell, and all three of us were waiting for one of the other two to be the one to say that's enough. None of us said it. Ten

more minutes, Caleb said, then we turn around. We went ten more minutes. The passage opened up again, not into a big room, this time into a junction. The stream bent off to the left and disappeared into a low slot straight ahead. The passage came continued, and to the right there was a third opening, taller than the others, maybe nine feet high, a real arch in the rock, smooth edged, like water had worked it for a long time. But it didn't have a stream coming out of it.

It was a dry passage. The smell was coming from the dry passage. I want to tell you the next part, the way it happened, because the order of it matters. Caleb stepped toward the dry passage. He didn't go in, He just stepped toward it, and he raised his light and he played the beam down into the dark. About thirty feet inside that opening, on the floor on the right hand side. His light caught something. He held the beam steady. We all looked. It was bones. I know

how that sounds. A pile of bones in a cave isn't necessarily anything. Animals fall into caves, animals get washed into caves. There are bones in lots of caves. But this was a pile maybe four feet across loss an eighteen inches high, of bones that had been put there, not scattered, not strewn, stacked in the rough, careless way

a person stacks firewood when they're tired. There were long bones, leg bones, what I'm fairly sure was a skull at one end of the pile that was too big to be a deer and the wrong shape to be a bear. There were what looked like rib cages crushed flat. There were small bones the size of squirrel bones mixed in. The whole pile had a yellowish look, except for a few that were white, fresh enough that I could see, even from thirty feet away that they still had pieces

of cartilage on them. Nobody said anything. I want to tell you about one other thing in that passage, because it was the thing that moved Caleb. The bone pile was bad. The bone pile alone. If it had been the only thing in there, we might have stood and looked at it for another minute. We might have argued about whether what we were looking at was old or recent, or natural or arranged. We might have done what people do, which is talk ourselves out of the thing. Our gut

is telling us. The thing that didn't let us do that was on the wall above the bones, about seven feet up. There were marks on the wall. They weren't pictures, they weren't letters or anything I could read or recognize. They were grooves, four of them, parallel, running down the limestone in long, slightly curved lines, the way fingers dragged through wet sand. The grooves were maybe three feet long. The spacing between them was wider than my hand spread out.

They went into the rock about half an inch in a place where the rock was hard. You don't gouge half an inch into limestone with your hands. I'm telling you that, as a man who's worked construction for twenty years and knows what it takes to scratch a piece of stone, you don't do that. Whatever made those grooves was very strong, and it had done it many times in the same place, the way a bear marks a tree.

But no bear made those marks because they were too high and too wide and too deep, and they were inside a cave that no bear had ever been in. That was when the three of us moved. What we did was very slowly. All three of us take a half step backward. Caleb said, very quietly, we're done. He said it in a tone I hadn't heard him use before. He said it the way a man says the kid's choking when he doesn't have time to raise his voice. He turned, he started walking back the way we'd come.

Josh and I followed. We walked, We didn't run, We didn't speak. Josh was behind me, Caleb was in front of me. The lights were on. The pace was steady. The pace was a little quicker than it had been on the way in, but it was steady. We were

going to walk out of there. We were going to go back through the low passage, back into the big room with the stream, back up the rope, back through the four hundred feet of straight passage, back through the entrance room, back through the four foot slot, and out into the November sun. We were going to do it the right way. Forty five minutes an hour at the outside. We had headlamps, backups, food, water, rope. We were going

to be fine. That was when the growl came. It wasn't a wolf, it wasn't a coyote, it wasn't a bear. I've heard all three. It was deeper than any of those. It was lower in pitch than I would have thought a living thing could go. It came from behind us, from the direction of the dry passage, but it filled the cave the way a cord on a pipe organ fills a church. It wasn't loud. That's the part nobody believes.

It wasn't loud, and it wasn't close, and it didn't have to be either of those things, because it was the kind of sound that goes into your chest before it goes into your ears. It said one thing. It said, you're in my house. It didn't say it in words, I want to be clear. It was a sund not a word. But every animal you've ever startled on a hike, or in a yard or in a barn has made some version of that sound, and you understood it. I have a dog. I know what no sounds like. I

flushed deer, I know what go away sounds like. This was that. It was the most articulate growl I've ever heard, in the sense that there was no mistaking what it meant. Behind me, Josh said, oh, just oh, just that one word. He said it the way a man says it when he's been hit in the stomach and the air's gone out of him. Caleb didn't say anything. Caleb started walking faster, not running, walking faster. I matched his pace, Josh matched mine.

We were maybe two hundred feet back into the low passage, headed for the big room when the second growl came same direction as the first, but closer. By close, I mean it had moved. It had moved fast. It was no longer at the dry passage. It was somewhere behind us, in the same passage we were walking in, and it was coming after us, and it wasn't in any hurry because it didn't need to be. That was when I started running. I'm not proud of it. I want to be clear about that. I'm not proud that I was

the first one to break. But I started running, and the other two started running, and we ran through that low passage, ducking where we had to duck headlamps, swinging the beams, jumping all over the walls. I could hear our boots, I could hear our breath. I could hear behind us something that wasn't boots but was hitting the floor in the same rhythm a man's feet would hit the floor, except faster and heavier and longer between the strikes, because whatever it was had a longer stride than a man.

It was running. We came out of the low passage into the big room with the stream. I saw Caleb's beams swing across the far wall, looking for the rope. The rope was still there against the far wall, and we ran for it. Stay tuned from Wore back Woods big Foot Stories. We'll be back after these messages. Josh got there first. Josh is the strongest. Josh was already on the rope by the time Caleb got there. Caleb shouted, go go, go the way you say it to a

kid you're shoving onto a bus. Josh went. He was halfway up before I got to the bottom. He's strong. I've never seen a man climb a rope that fast. Caleb pushed me to the rope. You next, he told me. I said, you go. He said, I'm bigger, I'll be slower. You go, I went. I want to tell you what happened while I was on that rope, because what happened on that rope is the part I think about every night. I was climbing. I'm decent on a rope. Not Josh fast,

but decent. I was climbing, and I was looking up at Josh's boots above me and behind me and below me. The cave got quiet. The growling stopped, the footsteps stopped, everything stopped all at once. The way a room goes quiet when a person you didn't know was there clears their throat. I didn't want to look down, but I looked down. Caleb was at the bottom of the rope. He was facing away from the rope, facing back the way we'd come, the way we'd come in from the

low passage. His headlamp was on, his beam was pointed into the mouth of that passage, and in the beam at the far end of it, maybe forty feet from him. I saw something step out of the dark. I'm going to describe it the way I saw it. I'm not going to use the word that everybody wants me to use. I'm not going to call it that, because if I call it that, you'll hear that word and your brain will fill in a picture. And the picture your brain fills in isn't the thing I saw. The thing I

saw was its own thing. I want you to see what I saw. It was tall. I want to start there. It was tall enough that the top of its head when it stepped clear of the passage, wasn't far from the ceiling of the big room, and the ceiling of that room was i'd guess somewhere between nine and ten feet at the edge where it stood. It wasn't a man's height. It wasn't close to a man's height. Whatever it was, it was a head and shoulders taller than a tall man, and it was whiter than two men

set side by side. At the chest. It was covered in hair, But the hair wasn't the thing I noticed first. The thing I noticed first was the way it stood. It stood the way a big animal stands when it hasn't decided yet whether to charge. Its weight was forward, Its arms hung long and loose at its sides. Its head was tilted slightly, the way a dog tilts its head when it's listening to a sound it can't quite place.

Its eyes were dark. I couldn't see the color. They caught the light from Caleb's headlamp, but they didn't throw the light back the way an animal's eyes do. They absorbed it. The face around the eyes was flat, more flat than it should have been, with a brow that came down heavy over the eyes, and a jaw that was square and wide and closed. It was looking at Caleb. I want to tell you, Brian, that what I felt in that moment wasn't the thing I would have expected

to feel. I expected to feel terror. I did feel terror, but there was something underneath the terror that was harder to name. The closest I can come is to say it was the feeling of being seen. It was the feeling of being recognized as something specific, not as prey. That sounds dramatic, and I want to avoid that, as

something specific, as an intruder. The way you'd feel if you came home in the middle of the night and turned on a light and found a stranger sitting in your living room, and the stranger looked at you, and you understood, with no need for words, that the stranger had been waiting for you. That was what was on its face. I froze on the rope. I have to admit that I just froze. I was probably twelve feet up with my legs wrapped, my arms locked in the ascender,

and I couldn't make myself move. I watched it Watch Caleb. I watched Caleb not move. Caleb was a smart man. Caleb had grown up with Pap. Caleb knew the way Pap had known that you don't run from the thing that's deciding whether to chase you. Then the second one came out of the passage. This one was smaller. I want to say smaller, but smaller is the wrong word, because it was still bigger than any man I've ever stood next to. It was smaller relative to the first.

It came up beside the first and stopped, and it looked at Caleb too, and they stood there together, and they didn't make a sound. Above me on the rope, Josh was at the top. I heard him pull himself over the lip. I heard him in a voice i'd never heard him use, a voice I wouldn't have known. Was Josh calling down to me, Keith climb. I climbed.

I don't remember climbing. I remember the next thing I remember, which is being at the top of the rope and Josh grabbing the back of my pack and hauling me over the lip and onto the floor of the upper passage like I weighed nothing. I remember turning around on my hands and knees and looking back down into the big room. Caleb was on the rope he'd started up. He was maybe ten feet off the floor. He was climbing fast. He was climbing as fast as Josh had climbed.

The two things at the mouth of the passage had moved, they'd walked or stepped or come ten feet into the room. They were watching him climb. And there was a third one now behind them in the passage, taller than either of the first two. And this one was the one that was making a sound. It was making a sound I'm going to fail to describe. It was a low, chesty rumble. But it had a shape to it, the way a word has a shape. It was the same shape over and over, three notes, low low, lower, a pattern,

a repeated pattern. I don't know what the pattern meant. I don't know. I'll tell you what I think the pattern meant. I think it was a call. I think it was a call to the others, the others we'd heard further back in the cave, the others that had made the bones in that pile, the others that had made the dripping sound at the back of the dry passage. The others we never saw, and that I'm grateful every day that we never saw. I think the third one was telling them come. I think it was telling them

prey is on the wall. I think it was telling them to hurry. That's what I think. I can't prove it. I'm telling you what it felt like. The first rock came in while Caleb was about twenty feet up the rope. I don't mean a pebble. I don't mean a hand sized stone. I mean a rock that was, by my best estimate, after thinking about it for many sleepless nights, somewhere between the size of a soft ball and the

size of a small bowling ball. It came across the room flat and fast, and it hit the wall of rock about two feet to the left of the rope, and it hit hard enough that it cracked. The rock cracked when it hit the wall. There was a sound like a rifle going off in a small room, and then the sound of pieces of the rock hitting the floor. The thing that had thrown it was the second one, the smaller one. I saw the arm come down, I saw the shoulder follow through. The throw wasn't the wild,

panicked throw of a frightened animal. The throw was deliberate. It was aimed. It was aimed at the rope. It missed by two feet because Caleb was moving on the rope. The thing was leading him the way a hunter leads a moving target with a rifle. It was trying to knock him off the rope. It was hunting him. The second rock came a second after the first. Caleb was moving. The rock hit the rope itself. I saw the rope kick. I saw Caleb hold on. I don't know how. I

don't know how he held on. The rock that hit the rope was bigger than the first one. It bounced off and hit the floor and rolled and stopped against the far wall. Josh was screaming at me. He was holding the rope above the lip, leaning down, hand out, screaming, climb, climb, climb, climb. He wasn't screaming at me. He was screaming at Caleb. I was pressed against the lip with my head over the edge, watching useless. Caleb climbed. Caleb climbed like a

man on fire. He cleared the lip. Josh grabbed him and pulled him over, and we all three lay on the floor of that upper passage in a pile, breathing, and below us in the big room, the three things stood in the middle of the floor and looked up at the lip of the pitch and made no sound at all. We didn't pull the rope. That's the next thing I want to tell you, because It's the kind of detail you only think about later. We didn't pull the rope up. We left it there. I've thought about

that for a year. I think about it because it was Josh's rope. It was a good rope. It was probably four hundred dollars a climbing rope. And we left it hanging in that big room because we couldn't stand the idea of leaning out over that lip, even for the seconds it would have taken to coil it up with those things below us. We got up. We started walking. We didn't run, because there was nowhere to run to. We walked fast the four hundred feet of straight passage

back to the entrance room. And we didn't stop, and we didn't speak. And behind us, somewhere far behind us, I could hear the three notes again, low, low, lower. They weren't following. They hadn't climbed up after us, they'd stayed in the big room. The Three Notes weren't getting closer. They were just there behind us, telling us they knew where we were. We came up through the entrance room. We came out through the four foot slot. I came

out last. I crawled out on my hands and knees into November sun, into a sky so blue it didn't look real, into air that didn't smell like that smell. And I lay on my back on the leaves outside the entrance, and I cried. I cried like a child. I didn't even try not to. Caleb was sitting against a tree with his head in his hands and his

shoulders shaking. Josh was standing about ten feet away, with his back to us, his hands on top of his head, looking out over the slope below us, and he wasn't making any sound at all, but I could see his shoulders going up and down. I want to tell you something about Josh. Josh is a marine. Josh has been in firefights. Josh has, by his own count, had bullets passed close enough to his head that he could feel

the air move. Josh has never, in twenty years, been the one to talk about what he saw or did over there. The one time I asked him in college, after a few beers, his answer was, Keith, there are things a man sees that he doesn't get the help of words for. That was all he said. He looked at me, he drank his beer. We talked about something else standing outside that cave with his hands on his head, looking down the slope, Josh said, very quietly, I've never

been that scared, not over there, not anywhere. We didn't stay on that ridge another night. We packed the camp by headlamp. We hiked out in the dark, which is something I would have told you twenty four hours earlier that I'd never do, because hiking unfamiliar Appellachian terrain in the dark is how people break ankles and die of exposure. We hiked it anyway. We made it to the trucks.

We drove. We drove the two trucks and convoy down that dirt track and onto the gravel and onto the road, and we didn't stop until we were two counties away in the parking lot of a waffle house at one in the morning, where we sat in a booth and drank coffee and didn't eat the food we ordered and didn't say a single word to each other for forty minutes. Caleb was the one who broke the silence. Pap knew. He said, I want you to hear that the way he said it. He didn't say Pap was right, He

didn't say we should have listened. He said Pap knew, as in the man had stood in that cave once sixty odd years ago and seen what we'd seen or heard what we'd heard, and walked out, and then spent the rest of his life trying to make sure his only grandson didn't. Josh said, we're not telling anybody. I said, we have to tell somebody who, Josh said, Tell me who. Tell me who we tell Keith that doesn't think we're crazy. Tell me who we tell that goes back in there

and gets killed and it's our fault. Tell me who we tell that doesn't put a damn camera crew in there, gets thirty more people killed and turns this into a circus. We're not telling anybody. He's right, Caleb said, I sat with it. I sat with it for a long time in that booth. I sat with my coffee that I wasn't drinking, and eventually I said, Okay, that was the agreement we made. I'm breaking it now. I'm breaking it

by telling you. Caleb knows I'm writing this. He's the one who finally told me six months in that he thought it'd be all right if I told one person you've listened to that show for years that man takes care with what he gets sent. If it had helped you, put it down, write it to him. Josh doesn't know I'm writing this. Josh and I are still close and I love him. But Josh hasn't been the same since we came out of that cave. He works, he goes home, he sees his kids. He doesn't laugh the way he

used to. He drinks more than he used to. His wife asked me about three months after we got back if anything had happened on that trip, and I lied to her. I lied to her face and I told her no, the trip was fine. Josh has always been quiet after a hard caving trip. She didn't believe me. She didn't push, she nodded, and she went back inside the house. And that was the end of it. And I haven't been able to look at her, really look at her since that night. Caleb's doing better than Josh.

I think Caleb's doing better because Caleb already had a way to think about it. Caleb had pap stories. Caleb had the warning. Caleb came up out of that cave, and he had a frame already in his head that he could put what we'd seen into. He had the pegs to hang it on. Josh and I didn't. Josh and I went into that cave with the worldview of two men who believed they understood what was in the woods, and we came out of that cave with the worldview

of two men who don't. I sleep with a light on now, not a bright light, a small night light in the hallway, the kind you'd put in for a kid. My wife asked me about it after the first week, and I told her I'd been having trouble getting up in the night without stubbing my toes, and she didn't push it, but she knows. Wives know. I haven't been back into a cave since, not even a tourist cave.

Caleb suggested about four months in that the three of us should do an easy weekend trip somewhere familiar, just to put our boots in cave dirt again, just to remind ourselves that it isn't all like that. I told him i'd think about it. I'm still thinking about it. I don't know if I'll ever be ready. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. I do miss it. I miss being underground there's a quiet down there, in a good cave that you can't

get anywhere else on this earth. I came up out of that cave and I lost it and I haven't gotten it back. And I think about that sometimes when I'm driving home from work and I see the light going on a hillside in the distance, and I remember that there's dark country, real dark country, on the other

side of it. I jump at sounds I never used to jump at the neighbor's gate latch, the ice maker in the freezer, anything chesty and low, anything in the lowest part of the audible range, anything that sounds for

half a second, like the start of that growl. My daughter slammed a cabinet a few months ago, the way kids do, and I came around the corner of the kitchen with my hands up like I was going to fight somebody, and she looked at me with this face, and I had to make a joke of it, and I went and sat in the garage afterward for a while because I could feel my hand shaking and I didn't want her to see it. I went back six

weeks later to the parking spot, not the ridge. I drove down there in the middle of a Wednesday by myself, told my wife I had a job site to look at. I sat in my truck in that little flat under the pines. I didn't get out. I sat there for about forty minutes. I wanted to know if I could feel them. If you can understand what I mean, I wanted to know of standing two miles from that hole on the ridge would feel different than standing in any other piece of woods. It did. I felt watched. I

can't prove I was watched. I can't prove the feeling wasn't entirely in my head. But I sat in that truck for forty minutes and I didn't get out, And when I drove home, I felt better the further away I got, the way you feel better the further you get from a hospital where somebody you love is sick. I've been trying since we came back to find anything in the historical record about that ridge or that area. I'm not a historian, I'm not a researcher. I'm a

guy with Google. But I've looked. I've spent a lot of nights looking. There are stories, if you know where to look, stories about that whole part of Eastern Kentucky stories. The old families tell stories the Cherokee and the Shawnee told about the country up in those hollers, about places a person shouldn't go after dark. I'm not going to repeat those stories here, because I know what kind of show you run, and I know you don't want me piling up folklore on top of what I saw to

make my story sound bigger than it is. But I'll tell you the stories are there. They're old, they're consistent, and they say in their own ways what Pap said in his There are places in those mountains that aren't ours. That's what I came out of that cave understanding. There are places where something else lives, something that was here before us, something that's done a very good job for

a very long time of not being seen. And every once in a while, three idiots with helmets and headlamps walk into one of those places by accident, and the thing that lives there has to make a decision about what to do with them. And we got lucky. The thing that came after us in that big room could have caught Caleb on that rope, it chose not to. I think about what kind of creature draws a line in the dark and decides this far, no further. I don't have a clean ending for you. I know how

your shows usually end. I know the way the music comes in at the end, and the way you wrap a story. I don't have that. What I have is my friend Caleb buried his grandfather a year ago, and his grandfather left him a question, and we went and we answered the question. And the answer is that Pap was right. And the answer is that we shouldn't have gone. And the answer is that there was a reason, an old reason, an older reason than this country has been a country that good men in those hills knew to

stay off that ridge. That's the answer. There's no extra act. After that, we came home. We kept our jobs, We hugged our wives, and tried to carry on with our lives. About a month ago, I had a dream. I don't usually remember my dreams, but I remember this one vividly. I was standing at the four foot slot in the rock the entrance, on a sunny afternoon, with no pack

and no helmet. I was just standing there. The slot was open, the cool air was coming out of it the way it had that morning, and I knew in the dream that something was standing inside the slot, just out of the light, looking at me. I couldn't see it, I could feel it, and it wasn't angry, that's the thing. It wasn't threatening me. It was just looking at me, and it was waiting, the way something waits when it has all the time in the world and it knows

you'll come back. Eventually. I woke up. I lay there in bed in the dark, next to my wife. I told myself, Keith, you're not going back. I told myself out loud. I said it, I'm not going back. I'm not I'm not going back. But I dream about it about twice a week now. The dream doesn't feel like a warning. The dream feels like a reminder. The dream feels like something is very patiently on the other side of the world from me, remembering my face. I'm going

to send this before I lose my nerve. Thank you for the show, thank you for taking the time to read this. I'm sorry it ran so long. I've wanted to tell somebody this for a year, and you turned out to be the somebody. I hope that's all right. Take care, Keith, I wrote Keith back and the two of us talked. And now you've heard it the way I heard it. As I said at the start, I can't tell you what to make of it. I have

my own thoughts, you'll have yours. Keith mentioned near the end that he believes they are places in this country that aren't ours. He said it the way a man says something he's come to believe slowly against his own preference. I've been thinking about that line for a few weeks now. I've been thinking about Pap, and about what kind of man holds a piece of knowledge like that for sixty

odd years and never quite lets go of it. And I've been thinking about what it costs Pap to write those two words on that map and put it in the back of the kitchen drawer, knowing that someday his grandson would find it. There's a kind of love in that, a hard country kind of love, the kind that warns you twice and then lets you make your own choice. I hope wherever Pap is, he knows the warning got through, even if it took a little longer than he meant

it to. Until next time, take care of each other out there, And if your granddad ever told you to stay off a particular piece of ground. Friend, do me a favor. Stay off it, did, Di