Shadows in the Old Green Dark

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. There's something you need to understand before I take you into these hills, before I walk you down into the deep, cathedral quiet of these forests. You need to understand what

the Appalachians actually are. These are not young mountains. They're not dramatic, jagged things like the Rockies, thrust up out of the earth in some violent geological tantrum. The Appalachians are old, ancient in a way that defies easy comprehension. They were already worn and rounded and moss covered when

the dinosaurs were walking the earth. When the first human beings set foot on this continent and looked out at this long green spine of ridgeline stretching from Alabama all the way up to Maine, these mountains were already old. The Cherokee called them home for thousands of years, the Shawnee, the Creek, the Cataba. Generation after generation of people who understood, in a way, we've largely forgotten that these mountains were alive, that the land itself had a memory, that the forests

held things, and they were right. I've spent the better part of my life collecting stories, listening, driving back roads and sitting on porches and leaning across diner tables in small towns from Georgia to Pennsylvania, letting people tell me what they've seen out there in the trees, what they've heard, what followed them home. Most of those people weren't looking

for trouble. They weren't thrill seekers. They were loggers and farmers and school teachers and veterans and grandmothers, ordinary people who encountered something in the Appalachian forests that changed them something that reminded them the hard way that we are not the apex of anything out here. We are guests,

and sometimes the host reminds you of that fact. The stories I'm going to share with you tonight are rooted in real places, real traditions, and real accounts that have been passed down through the communities of the Appalachian region for generations. Some of them go back centuries, some are more recent. All of them have one thing in common, the forest. Because in the Appalachians, the forest is where

it happens. The trees are so old and so dense in places that the canopy closes overhead like a cathedral ceiling, and the light that filters down to the ground is green and dim and ancient feeling. And you can walk one hundred yards off a trail and feel like the twenty first century simply doesn't exist. There's no cell service, no ambient hum of traffic, just the creek sounds, the bird sounds, and the wind moving through leaves that have been rustling in the same holler for ten thousand years.

That's where these stories live out there, in what the old timers called the old green dark. So get comfortable, turn up the volume and try to remember as we go that every person who told me one of these stories swore it was true. Let's go into the mountains. I want to start in Tennessee in a place that most people have never heard of, and that the people who live there are generally okay with keeping that way.

Hancock County, up in the northeastern corner of the state, sits hard against the Virginia Line, tucked up into a fold of the Clinch Mountain Range, where the hollers run deep and the communities are tight knit in the way that only comes from generations of families living in the same few square miles, going back to before the Revolutionary War.

In nineteen twenty three, a man named Elias Combs was living on a small farm at the head of one of those hollers, farming tobacco and running a trap line through the Laurel thickets above his property. He was sixty one years old, had lived his entire life in that holler, and he was not, by any account his neighbors gave a man given to exaggeration or fancy. When Elias Combs told you something, you believed it. What he told them. In the autumn of nineteen twenty three was that he'd

seen the wampus cat. Now, before I go any further, I need to give you some context, because the wampus cat is one of those pieces of Appalachian lore that gets dismissed too quickly as a regional tall tale, a campfire story to scare children. But the Cherokee had a name for this creature long before European settlers ever arrived in these mountains. They called it Oa, and the story attached to that name is one of the darkest and

most haunting origin stories in the Cherokee tradition. The way the story goes, and there are variations, as there always are with oral traditions, a young Cherokee woman followed her husband into the sacred hunting grounds one night to spy on a ritual that women were forbidden to witness. The medicine men discovered her hiding there beneath an animal skin,

watching what she should never have seen. As punishment, they bound her to that animal skin forever, transforming her into something caught between worlds, neither fully woman nor fully beast, but something worse than either, something that was both something that could not rest, could not die, and could not be consoled, and she's been walking these mountains ever since. European settlers added their own layers to the legend over

the two centuries of their presence in these hills. By the time the Scots Irish had been in Clinch Mountain Country for a few generations, the Wampa's cat had absorbed their fears and their superstitions too. The mountain people gave her new details and new fears, and made her part of their own tradition, the way mountain people have always done, by grafting new growth onto old roots. They said she smelled like death and sulfur. They set Her eyes were

the yellow green of a lantern seen through fog. They said. She moved through the laurel hell, those dense, chest high thickets of mountain laurel and rhododendron that grow in the drainages of the Clinch Mountain country, and that are so thick and twisted you genuinely can't see through them more than a few feet in any direction, so fast and so silent that you'd hear her scream from one ridge, and then hear it again from a ridge half a

mile away. Before the echo of the first scream had even died, and they said, this is the part that always gets me. They said that if you locked eyes with the wampus cat, you would lose your mind, not your life, your mind. You'd be left wandering and muttering, unable to form sentences or remember your own name, like whatever was behind those yellow green eyes had reached right in through your pupils and pulled something essential out of you.

There are accounts from the late eighteen hundreds documented by folkloris working in Hancock County of men found wandering on mountain trails in a state of complete dissociation, couldn't say their own name, couldn't recognize their families, just walking and muttering with their eyes fixed on something that wasn't there. In almost every case, the family eventually put those men in the category of having had the encounter of having looked at the wrong thing and the wrong laurel thicket

at the wrong hour. Elias Combs had his encounter on a Tuesday morning in late October. He'd gone up to check his trap sets before dawn, the way he always did, with a lantern and his old winchester. The traps were set along a creek drainage about half a mile above his farm, in a stretch of mixed hardwoods that his family had been working for decades. He knew every rock and route along that path. He could have walked it blindfolded. He'd walked it in all conditions, in all seasons for

more than twenty years. He was about as comfortable in that piece of forest as a man can be comfortable anywhere. He told his neighbors, and later told his son, who told his grandson, who told the man, who eventually told me that the trouble started before he even got to the first trap. He said, the woods went wrong. That's the phrase that got used across every retelling of this story I've encountered, and I've heard it told maybe a

dozen times over the years, the woods went wrong. What he meant by that was that everything got quiet in the wrong way. Not the quiet of early morning, which is a living quiet, full of small sounds and subtle movements, the rustle of a squirrel in the leaves, the drip of dew off branches, the soft, irregular percussion of a woodpecker somewhere in the middle distance. This was the quiet

of something large and patient, holding its breath. The creek still made it sound, because water doesn't defer to anything but everything else. Every bird, every rustling leaf, every distant coyote went silent, all at once, like a switch had been thrown. And the silence wasn't empty. That's the thing he kept coming back to when he tried to describe it afterward. The silence was full, occupied, the way a room is full when someone is standing in it in the dark, even if you can't see or hear them.

Elias stopped walking. He held up his lantern. The light pushed back the dark maybe twenty feet in every direction, and beyond that edge was solid black, the way the forest gets in the mountains before any hint of dawn. He stood perfectly still and listened with everything he had, the way a man listens when he knows something is

listening back. And then he smelled it. He described it as the smell of something long dead, not fresh dead, but long dead, the deep organic rot of something that had been lying in the wet leaves for weeks, mixed with something musky and animal and alive, and underneath all of that something else. He said he couldn't name something wrong at a chemical level, the way the air smells before a lightning strike, metallic and sharp and charged. He said.

The hair on his arm stood up inside his coat sleeves. He said, his mouth went dry so fast it was like someone had reached in and pulled every drop of moisture out of it in an instant. He didn't run, which I certainly give the old man credit for. He stood there with his winchester in one hand and his lantern in the other, and he turned in a slow circle because whatever this was, it was moving around him. He could feel it moving, even though he couldn't see

it or hear it. He could feel it the way you can feel someone standing behind you in a dark room, that certainty that is not based on any of the usual five senses, that pre rational alarm that fires somewhere deep below conscious thought. Something was circling him, slowly, methodically, the way a predator circles when it's still deciding. He

saw the eyes first. They were up on the slope above him, about thirty yards away, in the laurel thickets, and they were the color of a gas light flame, that particular yellow green that doesn't occur naturally in the eye shine of any creature. He'd ever encountered in forty plus years of hunting these mountains, not the reflective eye shine of a deer or a cat, not the red glow of a bear, something that generated its own light

rather than reflecting his. They were set wide apart, high off the ground, higher than a mountain lion's eyes would sit higher than a standing bears even. He said, they were as big around as silver dollars, and they didn't blink, just held steady and watched him burning with that cold, terrible, self generated light. He raised the winchester. He was a good shot, and he knew it, had been hunting these mountains since he was old enough to carry a gun.

He said he had a clear sight picture in the lantern light, that he could see the shape of the thing in the laurel. Low slung and massive, bigger than any mountain lion, bigger than any bear he'd ever set eyes on, moving with a fluid, slow patience that he said reminded him of water finding its way through stones. He had the front sight on the center of mass

between those eyes. He pulled the trigger. The shot echoed off the ridge line, rolled down the holler and faded into the dark, and the eyes didn't move, didn't blink, didn't drop to the ground the way a struck animal dropps, didn't bolt into the brush the way a misted animal bolts. They just stayed there, fixed on him, unwavering. After the muzzle flash had died and the powder smoke had drifted away on the still morning air, like he'd thrown a pebble at a stone wall, like the bullet had passed

through something that wasn't concerned with bullets, he said. He fired twice more, same result each time. Three shots, three clear sight pictures, three muzzle blasts that lit up the laurel for a fraction of a second, and the eyes stayed exactly where they'd been, burning with that cold light, and the thing behind them didn't move so much as a hair. And then, and this is the part that kept Elias Combs from sleeping soundly for the remaining fourteen

years of his life, the thing stood up. It rose out of the laurel on its hind legs, the way a bear will sometimes do, and it kept rising, taller than a man by a significant margin, tall enough that the top of its silhouette disappeared into the canopy above the low thicket, and when it rose, Elias said, the smell that had already been almost more than he could stand, intensified into something practically physical, something that hit the back

of the throat and the eyes simultaneously. And it made a sound that, he said he had no word for. Not a scream exactly, though there was screaming in it, not a growl, though there was rumbling in it too. He said, it was most like a woman crying, but the way a woman might cry, if crying had been invented by something that had never, in its existence possessed

any capacity for comfort or mercy. Raw and ragged, and somehow knowing, like the sound was directed at him in a personal way, like whatever was producing it understood something about him specifically, and was communicating something he did not want to understand. He ran, He's not ashamed to admit it in any version of this story I've heard. He ran back down that trail in the dark, without the lantern, which he dropped somewhere in the first fifty yards, and

never recovered a tune. For more backwoods bigfoot stories, We'll be back after these messages. He ran by feel and memory through the black forest, crashing through brush and stumbling on roots, and he didn't stop running until he hit his own farmyard and got the door of his house

shut and latched behind him. He sat at his kitchen table until his wife got up at sunrise and found him there, still in his coat, still holding the empty Winchester, staring at the kitchen wall, with the expression she later described to her children as the face a man makes when he's seen the edge of something he can't unsee. He never ran that trap line again. He sold the traps to a neighbor within the week, and didn't set foot in those woods above the farm for the remaining

fourteen years of his life. What I find most interesting about Elias Combs, what makes this story stick with me all these years after I first heard it, is what happened to the neighbor who bought the traps. I'm not going to share his name out of respect for the family, but I'll tell you that he wan up into those same Laurel thickets about two weeks after Elias's encounter running

those very same trap sets. He came back down before noon on the first day white as Chalk, and he told his wife that he'd found all of Elias's traps sprung and turned upside down, every single one of them down the whole line, not tripped by an animal, and left where they fell, turned upside down and placed back on the ground, neatly, methodically, one after another, like something had walked the line ahead of him, examined each trap, understood what it was, and deliberately flipped it over and

set it back down a message, a demonstration of comprehension. Neither man ever went back, neither man ever publicly speculated about what had walked that trap line. But the people of that holler understood, and they passed the understanding down, and the drainage above the old Combs Farm still is in a place where sensible people run trap sets after dark some doors the old time the Clinch Mountain Country

will tell you you don't open twice. Hold on to what I just told you about things that can't be explained with the tools we usually reach for, because we're going to need that mindset for this next one. We're moving east and a little south now, crossing over into the North Carolina Mountains into Burke County, where the Lynnville Gorge cuts its way through the earth like a wound that never fully healed and up on the ridge line.

Above that gorge sits Brown Mountain, a long, low forested ridge that has been making people uncomfortable for a very, very long time. Most people who've heard of Brown Mountain have heard of the lights. The Brown Mountain lights are one of the most thoroughly documented and persistently inexplicable phenomena

in the entire country. They've been officially observed, studied, and reported since at least nineteen thirteen, when the United States Geological Survey sent a man named George Rogers Ashley to investigate after widespread accounts of mysterious lights appearing above the mountain ridge line. The lights are typically described as orbs, round, glowing, sometimes red, sometimes white, sometimes orange or yellow, ranging in apparent size from that of a basketball to something considerably larger.

They appear above the tree line on Brown Mountain and the surrounding ridges, sometimes singly, sometimes in clusters. They move in ways that don't correspond to aircraft or headlights. They change color, they appear and disappear without any identifiable source, and they've been doing this for as long as anyone has kept records of them. What makes the lights scientifically

maddening is that the convenient explanations keep getting eliminated. The geological survey initially attributed the lights to locomotive headlights reflected off the mountain, and was forced to walk back that explanation when it was established that the lights had been reported long before the railroad in question was built. When a massive flood in nineteen sixteen knocked out electrical power

to the entire region, the lights continue to appear. Multiple formal federal investigations over the following decades have failed to produce a satisfactory explanation. The lights predate every convenient answer, and they keep showing up, and the best minds who've been applied to the question have ultimately come away with nothing definitive. But here's what the geological surveys don't talk about.

Here's what the official reports leave out entirely. Here's what the people who live in the communities around the Lynville Gorge, the families who've been in Burke County since before there was a Burke County, will tell you, if you sit with them long enough and earn some measure of trust, they'll tell you that the lights aren't the thing to

be afraid of. The lights are just the sign, the marker, the warning that something else is moving on that mountain, something that walks below the lights in the deep old timber of the gorge, on paths that don't appear on any map, and creak drainages that drop down into darkness so complete it's it swallows a flashlight beam before it travels ten feet. The Cherokee have known about the Brown

Mountain lights longer than anyone. Their tradition holds that the lights are the spirits of Cherokee women carrying torches through the dark, searching for their husbands and sons who died in an ancient battle fought on those ridges against a Cataba war party. It's a story of grief so enormous and so enduring that it became a permanent feature of the landscape, a sorrow so deep it lit itself on

fire and refused to stop burning across the centuries. I find that account extraordinarily moving, and I believe it contains a truth about this place, even if the specifics belong to a tradition that isn't mine. There's something correct emotionally and perhaps literally about the idea that this kind of grief leaves a permanent mark on the land that love and loss of that magnitude doesn't just evaporate, that it stays.

But the European settlers who moved into the Lynnville Gorge country in the early eighteen hundreds brought their own encounters with the mountain, and those encounters had a quality that

was darker and more immediately threatening than ancestral grief. What they described encountering in the forest below the lights was something that used the lights as a distraction, something that had learned or perhaps had always known that the lights would pull a person's eyes upward and hold them there, staring at the ridge line with their attention fixed on the spectacle above, while something moved in close behind them in the timber below. There was a family, the Perkins family.

This was roughly eighteen fifty and their account has been preserved in Burke County oral tradition ever since, who were driving a small cattle herd through the Lynnville Gorge in late September, moving the animals down from summer pasture before

the first hard freeze. Thomas Perkins, his teenage son William, and a hired hand whose name varies across the different versions of the account, which is itself interesting that the tradition ever quite settled on his name, as if some part of the community telling this story over generations understood that he was about to become someone who needed protecting, even in memory. They were making camp on the east side of the gorge when the lights appeared above the

far Ridge line. Thomas had seen the lights before. Most people who'd lived in that country any length of time had seen them, and had learned to regard them as a strange but essentially harmless feature of the landscape, like an unusual rock formation or a particularly loud waterfall. He told William and the hired man that they were nothing to worry about, electrical, maybe atmospheric. He preferred a practical explanation, even when the practical explanation didn't quite hold together. What

he could not explain was the cattle. The animals were agitated in the specific, unmistakable way that tells any experienced stockman that a predator is nearby, pressing together into a tight, miserable mass, rolling their eyes to show the white lowing in that low and hopeless register that sounds like an animal reporting to anything that might listen that it has run out of options, Thomas and the hired man took turns walking the perimeter of the camp with lanterns held high,

listening to the gorge. They heard nothing unusual. The lights moved and pulsed above the far ridge. The cattle kept pressing together. William sat by the fire and worked at not looking as frightened as he felt. Sometime past midnight, the hired man didn't come back from his perimeter walk. Thomas waited twenty minutes. Then he took a lantern and

went looking. He found the man's hat on the trail about fifty yards from camp, sitting upright in the middle of the path, not knocked off and fallen, not dropped in a hurry, but placed sat down in the middle of the trail, crown up as if someone had deliberately placed it there as a marker. He found the man's lantern ten yards further on, set carefully on the uphill

side the trail, still burning. That detail, the lantern still burning, placed neatly rather than dropped, traveled through every retelling of this account without variation. The hired man had set his lantern down gently on the side of the trail, and then had simply ceased to be there. Thomas searched, He

called the man's name into the gorge for hours. He moved through the laurel and the hardwood timber, and expanding circles from the point of the hat, taking the gorge, drainage, and the ridgeline above camp, covering every reasonable area and some unreasonable ones. He found nothing. Not that night, not the next day, when he and William searched from first light until dark. Not ever, in any final accounting, the

gorge kept whatever it had taken. What William Perkins told people later, and he told the story for the rest of his long life, without the essential details ever changing, was that while his father was out searching, he was sitting by the fire alone, and he heard breathing from the direction Thomas had gone, from the tree line on the uphill side of camp, from the heavy timber, where nobody had any reason to be and where no trail went.

It was louder than any human breathing he'd ever heard, slow and rhythmic and deep, the breathing of something enormous, patient and perfectly at ease, not labored or agitated, calm, the calm of something that knew exactly where it was and exactly what it was doing, and felt no need to rush any of it. He said he could see the firelight catching something in the tree line at the

edge of the darkness. Not eyes, not the eyeshine he'd have expected from an animal, a surface, something smooth and curved and large, just barely at the threshold of the firelight, present enough to know it was there, and too far into the dark to see it clearly. Something that was standing in the tree line and breathing slowly and waiting with all the patients of the gorge itself for something he couldn't name. He didn't move, he didn't call out.

He sat with his knees to his chest and breathed as quietly as he could, and he waited for his father. And when Thomas came back, empty handed and shaken, William told him what he'd heard. And Thomas Perkins did something that William said he'd never seen his father do in all the years of his life. He didn't question the account, he didn't investigate. He smothered the fire with dirt and silence, caught the cattle, and started them down the trail in the dark. They walked all night by the light of

one lantern. Thomas never went back into the Lynnville Gorge, again, not once, not for any reason, for the rest of his life. I've been to the Lynnville Gorge many times.

I've stood on the overlooks in the dark and watched for the lights, and I've seen them, or something that looks very much like what every account for two centuries describes, glowing orbs above the far ridge line, moving in ways that don't correspond to any human light source, pulsing and changing color and winking out and reappearing in different positions.

And standing there watching them, I've had that feeling, that specific, bone deep feeling of being watched from behind of something in the tree line at my back while my eyes are fixed on the spectacle above. That feeling that the lights are exactly what the people who know this mountain best have always said. They are a distraction. Whatever those lights are, Brown Mountain holds its secrets in the old timber of the gorge below the ridge line, and the

gorge does not give up what it takes. We're going deeper now, deeper in time, and deeper into the forest. I want to take you into the Cherokee Homeland the mountains of far western North Carolina, the Smoky Mountain Country, And I want to tell you about the most feared

being in all of Cherokee supernatural tradition. Not the most visually dramatic, not the most obviously monstrous, the most feared because the thing about the raven man that makes it uniquely terrifying is that it doesn't look like a monster. It looks like a person, usually an old person, usually someone you'd have no reason to be afraid of, and

it wants to eat your years. The raven Mocker in Cherokee kalanu Akieliski, which translates roughly as the raven that steals is a witch or something that was once a person and has become something else through the accumulation of stolen life over a very long time. I want to be clear that this is living tradition, not museum piece. The Eastern Band Cherokee Nation exists today and the raven Mocker remains part of their cultural and spiritual understanding of

the world. I share this with the respect that deserves and with full acknowledgment of the limits of my outsider's knowledge. The raven Mocker travels at night, often appearing first as a fiery light moving through the sky in the erratic, purposeful way of no natural thing, trailing a sound like the beating of enormous wings. It's drawn specifically to places

where people are sick and dying. Something in the raven mocker can detect the approach of death the way a predator can detect weakness from far away, and with great precision.

It enters those places, either invisibly or wearing the appearance of someone known to the family, a neighbor, an elder, a relative, someone whose arrival wouldn't raise alarm, And it sits beside the dying person, and it reaches into their chest, and it extracts their remaining time, not their life force in the immediate sense of killing them, their remaining unlived days,

their future. It swallows those stolen years, and the person dies earlier than they would have, and the raven mocker grows stronger and older and harder to destroy, because stolen life extends the thief's own life proportionally. A raven mocker that's been at this for centuries is ancient, beyond imagining, and ancient things in the these mountains are powerful things stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back

after these messages. The only protection was a medicine person with the right knowledge and the courage to hold it in the presence of something that would prefer you didn't the confirmation of what had happened. The terrible confirmation after the fact was finding when you prepared the body that the heart was gone, not damaged, gone as if it

had never been there. I want to tell you about a woman from a Cherokee settlement in the o'conna Lufty River drainage in the mountains of far western North Carolina in the winter of seventeen eighty. I'll call her Ayida, a Cherokee woman's name, though the account I received used her clan designation. She was a healer, as her grandmother had been and her grandmother's grandmother before that. A lineage of medicine knowledge passed through the female line, going further

back than any single person's memory could reach. She knew the plants and the ceremonies and the words. She knew what to do for fever and wound rot, and the sicknesses that grief produces in a body. And in seventeen eighty, in the mountains of western North Carolina, there was no shortage of grief to work with. This was the year of some of the most savage American militia raids against

Cherokee towns in the entire Revolutionary War period. Raids that burned communities to the ground, that killed the very old and the very young without distinction, that left the survivor scattered and hungry and sick. The settlement on the O'connallufty was dealing with all of this, and then the illness arrived on top of it, a respiratory sickness, possibly influenza.

Working through a community that was already weakened and had nowhere to go, Ayida moved from house to house and did everything she knew, and the dying were happening faster than they should have been. People who should have had days were going in hours. People who had stabilized would collapse again in the deep of the night and be gone before she could reach them. And then she found the first missing heart, and then the second, and she knew what was moving through her community on top of

everything else that was already carrying. She began sitting vigil at night. She burned tobacco and cedar, and sang the detection and protection medicines her grandmother had taught her, and she watched. She did this for four nights without seeing anything.

On the fifth night, deep in the cold hours after midnight, she heard the wings, not from outside, from inside, from within the walls of the structure, as if something enormous was beating enormous wings in a space that couldn't possibly contain them, the sound filling the interior the way sound fills the inside of a drum bone, deep, rhythmic, and underneath it barely audible, breathing, old and slow and deeply.

Terribly satisfied, she began the detection song, the medicine she'd been taught precisely for this moment, for making visible what uses invisibility as a weapon. And what she saw she declined to describe in detail. For the rest of her life. She would say only that it was wearing the form of an old man from the settlement who died the previous winter, a man she'd known, a man she'd sat

with in his passing. That the wrongness of the wearing was visible once the detection song was working, the way a coat worn by someone it wasn't made for pulls and gaps in all the wrong places, That the proportions weren't right, That the way the firelight moved across the surface of it wasn't right. That whatever was inside the

shape she recognized was not the person she'd known. She would say that when it became aware of her seeing it, the face of the dead man pulled into an expression she could not find language for, and spent years afterward trying to forget. She said it was not anger, though anger was in it. She said it was something older than anger, the way a mountain is older than the weather that moves across it, the way something that has been doing the same terrible thing for centuries regards a

single person who's standing in its way. She held the song. She stood in that room with the sick person in the corner, and the fire burning low, and this ancient thing wearing a dead man's face staring at her with eyes that processed light wrong, and she held every word of the medicine. She didn't flinch. She didn't break the

song to scream or run. She held it, word by word, note by note, for however long it took, and the thing left it unraveled the way fog unravels when the wind finds it, and the sound of wings subsided gradually, and the cold she hadn't consciously noticed building in the room, the specific dense cold the raven Mocker brings with it, colder than the air has any right to be receded. Slowly the fire found its strength again. The sick person

in the corner was still breathing. When she was sure it was gone, Ayda sat alone in that room for a long time, and then she noticed her hair, the white streaks, wide, brilliant, unmistakable, running back from her temples through the black. She was thirty two years old. She carried those streaks to her grave. She told her apprentices years later about the hardest part of that night, and it wasn't the fear, though the fear had been real and physical in a way she hadn't anticipated, even with

a lifetime of preparation. The hardest part was being able to see through the detection medicine what the thing was doing to the sick person in the corner. While it worked,

she could see the years leaving. She described it as a visible demi, the particular light that a living person carries that makes a living body different from a dead one, even before the final breath, That light pulling away in threads, drawn toward the thing in the corner, and the thing growing brighter as the person grew dim and the person showing no sign of distress, just quietly, slowly, gently running out. She said it looked peaceful. She said that was the

worst part. That the raven Mocker had learned over centuries of practice, how to be gentle when it served it, how to take what it wanted from a dying person without causing them any additional suffering in the taking. That the gentleness wasn't mercy, It was refinement, the refinement of something ancient that has had a very long time to perfect its work. The Raven Macker is not a story the Eastern Band Cherokee tell to frightened tourists. It's part

of living, spiritual and cultural practice in the community. The protections exist because the thing they protect against exists. I've been in the Smoky Mountain country at night in the old hemlock stands above the O'Connell left, and I've heard sounds there that I keep stored in the category of things I can't account for. A sound like wings. That's too loud and too purposeful for any bird. I know of a cold that arrives without any change in the wind.

I believe the woman with the white streaked haear. I believe she held the song when most of us would not have. And I believe whatever she held it against is still out there in the old hemlock hollows, still doing its ancient, patient, gentle work. We're moving north and east now, up through the mountains into West Virginia to one of the most historically layered and genuinely haunted places

in the entire Appalachian chain. Harper's Ferry sits at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers, at the eastern tip of the state, where the Blue Ridge Mountains crowd and close to the river gaps, and the water runs cold and fast between walls of sheer Rock. Most people know Harper's Ferry from the history books John Brown's raid in eighteen fifty nine, the attempt to ignite a slave rebellion that ended with Brown hanged and the country measurably

closer to tearing itself apart in the Civil War. The town carries history the way the rivers carry silt visibly in layers, always in motion. The ghost I want to tell you about pre dates John Brown by a full generation. She doesn't have an official name, a grave marker, or a documented history. The railroaders gave her a name eventually, the way working people name things that exist beyond their power to explain, and they called her Screaming Jenny. Whatever

her real name was, nobody wrote it down. She was nobody in the brutal accounting of nineteenth century America, and the cruelty of that fact only deepens what she became. In the early eighteen thirties, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was pushing its main line through the Harper's Ferry area, bringing with it all the chaos that major construction drags into a landscape, work camps, transient laborers, tool yards, men

and machinery cutting into hillsides and laying stone. And with that population of workers came the people who inhabit the margins of such things everywhere and in every era. Among them was a woman middle aged by the counts, though how much of the age on her was years and how much was the life she'd been living as impossible to know now she had no visible family, no apparent community.

She sheltered in one of the stone archways along the rail right of way, and she kept herself warm the way people with nothing kept themselves warm in that century, with small fires, rags burning in a tin basin, scraps of wood in a ring of stones, whatever the world left at the margin for someone like her to use.

On a night in October of eighteen thirty three, her fire got away from her, whether she'd fallen asleep too close to it, or whether the constant funneling wind that comes through the gap at Harper's Ferry caught a burning piece of cloth and carried it into her bedding. Nobody ever established the specifics, and nobody in any position of authority cared enough to investigate. What the railroad workers on the night shift knew was that they heard a sound

they could never afterwards fully forget or describe. A woman's voice screaming, one continuous scream, unwavering in pitch and intensity, and moving, not staying in one place the way a sound from a fixed source stays, but moving toward them along the track at a speed that wasn't possible for a person on foot When they lifted their lanterns and looked down the rail line, they saw her, running, every stitch of clothing from her waist upward, on fire, her

arms extended, her hair burning, running in a straight line down the center of the track toward them, and the scream coming from her, without any pause for breath, without any change in pitch, one continuous, raw sound. She was in the river before anyone could reach her, and the river kept her, and when morning came there was nothing

to find. One week later, the screaming started again. The first engineer to encounter it was a man named Caleb Walsh, running a freight consists through the Harper's Ferry yard on a moonless October night, seven days after the woman died. He heard the scream above the noise of his engine, above the steam and the steel grinding and the general mechanical violence of a working locomotive. Heard it clearly enough above all of that to make him look ahead down

the track, and something was coming. Not a woman on fire in the literal sense, not a burning body, something composed of light, orange red light in the specific color of burning, human in its rough geometry, moving toward him on the track at a sprint, and the scream was coming from it, that same sustained, breathless, human female sound. He kept going because a man at the throttle of

a freight train cannot simply stop. And the engine passed through the shape, and the cab went cold, in an instant, specific intense cold, as if the cab had been plunged into ice water, lasting about three seconds, and then gone. And the scream was behind him and fading, And when he looked back, the track was empty. He reported the encounter. He wasn't disciplined, which suggests he wasn't the first. He wasn't.

The accounts came in steadily over the decades following railroad workers, bridge tenders, night watchmen, and the rail yard a female shape made of fire colored light moving along the rail right of way near the river, accompanied by that scream, sometimes appearing to pursue vehicles, sometimes simply crossing the track and dissolving into the hillside. Always that color, always that sound, always the cold when you pass through or near it.

By the eighteen seventies, screaming Jenny was an established part of the oral tradition of Harper's Ferry. By the turn of the century, newspaper accounts had documented the sightings in the twentieth century. When the National Park Service took over the Harper's Ferry site, the reports didn't stop. They changed character, shifting from railroad workers to hikers and park staff and tourists who pressed their faces to the glass of the

tour bus windows and then couldn't see. A park ranger who spent more than a decade at the Harper's Ferry site, I'll call her Margaret, shared her own account with me several years ago. She'd been working at the site for nearly a year when she had her encounter. It was November, late in the afternoon shift, near closing time, and she was alone, doing a final walk through of the lower Town area near the old railroad infrastructure. Standard routine. She'd

done it dozens of times. The sound started before she saw anything. She described it carefully, choosing her words with the precision of someone who'd spent years trying to find accurate language for an imprecise experience. It started as something she almost could have attributed to wind, almost but not quite, in the same way that you can almost convince yourself a footstep in an empty house was the house settling,

except that you know it wasn't. And then it focused, sharpened into clarity, the way a radio signal locks in when you hit the right frequency. And it was a scream, a woman's scream, sustained beyond what any human respiratory system should be able to sustain, without any variation that would indicate the need for air, as if the thing producing it had no use for breath, as if the sound

was what it was made of. And it was moving, coming from the direction of the river along what used to be the rail corridor, moving toward her at a pace that was wrong for a person on foot. She stood still for several seconds, long enough for rational explanations to generate and fail. Then she left. She walked, then jogged back the way she'd come until she could see the visitor center lights ahead. She didn't look back until

she was in the light. She told me that the fear of the moment had been real and immediate, but what she returned to in the years afterward wasn't the fear. It was the quality of the sound, the grief in it. She said, it communicated something beyond simple terror, something more calm, complex, and more sustained, something that felt less like a scream of pain and more like a scream of permanent loss.

Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages, like something that had been screaming for one hundred and seventy years and understood it would be screaming for another one hundred and seventy after that, and wasn't going to stop, because stopping would mean accepting what couldn't be accepted. That woman in the Stone Archway never

had a name that anyone recorded. She was nobody. But the mountains remember her, and the gap between the rivers carries her voice and the cold that passes through you when her light goes by. That's as close as she can come now to being held by anyone from one mountain to another. But we're jumping forward now, forward across one hundred and forty years from the Civil War era into the age of the muscle car and the college campus.

We're staying in North Carolina, moving west to the high country of Avery County, to the mountain the Cherokee called Tanahwa, which means something close to great hawk or fabulous eagle, and that later settlers renamed Grandfather Mountain because the ridgeline profile seen from certain angles along what is now the Blue Ridge Parkway suggests the weathered face of an old

man looking up at the sky. Grandfather Mountain is the highest peak in the Blue Ridge section of the Appalachians, and even in full daylight, it has a quality I can only describe as deliberately occupied. The summit is exposed and wind scraped and ancient, and the forest near the top is subalpine, more like the boreal forests of northern Canada than anything you'd expect in the American South. In autumn, it has a spare, severe beauty that hits you hard

at night. In any season, the upper forest of Grandfather Mountain feels watched, feels attended, like something up there in the dark is paying careful attention to what comes and goes. In October of nineteen seventy one, four young men from booth un drove up to the Grandfather Mountain area for a weekend camping trip. They were students at Appalachian State University, David, Michael, Paul, and Robert. To use names that approximate theirs without identifying them.

Robert is the one who eventually shared the account years after the fact with a researcher collecting first hand experiences of unusual events in the Southern Appalachians. By the time the account reached me through that chain, Robert was in his mid fifties, working as an engineer in a mid sized city well outside the mountains. He was measured, careful with his language, and notably uneager to tell the story

for dramatic effect. He told it because he believed it was true, and because he thought the truth of it mattered. They set up camp on Friday afternoon below the main Ridge line, off a trail that sees moderate traffic even today, and that in the fall of nineteen seventy one, was remote enough that they spent the entire first day without

encountering another person. The weather was the perfection that October per deuces in the Southern Appalachians, sharp, clear blue sky, cold, the hardwood slopes lit up in orange and red and yellow. They had a fire going by mid afternoon, and everything was as comfortable and ordinary as a camping trip is supposed to be, right up until the moment it wasn't.

What Robert said first changed was the light, not dramatically, not a sudden dimming or a cloud crossing the sun, a subtle shift in the quality of the afternoon light, the kind of change you register before you consciously understand you've registered it, a slight flattening, a slight loss of warmth in the color of the light through the canopy.

And at the same moment, all four of them stopped what they were doing, without any communication, without any signal, they went still simultaneously, as if something had reached into each of them, and pressed pause at the same instant, and looked up the slope. There was a figure on the trail above their camp, standing completely still, sixty yards up slope, in the section of trail that ran along the edge of a rocky outcrop before disappearing over the

ridge line. It was upright bipedal, roughly bilateral human in its basic geometry, but the scale was wrong. All four of them agreed on this immediately, and without any of them needing to say so. It was too large. Robert's

estimate was seven and a half to eight feet. The others in later fragmentary accounts gave similar numbers, and it was still in the total absolute way that very large wild animals can be still, the stillness of something that doesn't feel threatened by being seen, and doesn't feel any need to move. Not one of the four spoke. Robert returned to this detail every time he told the story, and I think it's the most important detail in the

whole account. Four young men in their late teens and early twenties, the age at which performing fearlessness is essentially a full time job, the age at whitch seeing something startling on almost always produces an immediate verbal reaction. Looked up at something they couldn't account for on the trail above their camp, and not one of them said a single word, not what is that? Or do you see that?

Or hey? Nothing. The figure seemed to produce silence, the way certain sounds seemed to do, by filling the space so completely that ordinary human reflexes simply didn't fire. The figure stood for what Robert estimates as two to three minutes, knowing that time perception in that state isn't reliable. Then it moved toward them down the slope along the trail at a steady and unhurried walking pace, and completely without sound.

On a trail of gravel and exposed rock. Moving at a normal walking pace, it produced no sound at all. No footfall, no displacement of loose stone, nothing, just a large, silent shape descending the trail toward their camp in the late afternoon light. It stopped at the edge of camp, ten feet from where they were sitting, and close enough now for Robert to see the face, or what occupied the space where a face should be. He was always very careful with this part of the account. He didn't

want to overclaim. He said there were features in the facial region, but that they didn't correspond to human facial anatomy in any mapping he could make. The proportions were wrong, the relationships between the elements were off in ways he could detect but not specifically name, and the light moved across the surface of the face differently than it moves across human skin, as if the surface was processing the

light rather than simply reflecting it. Then something happened that Robert spent years trying to find language for the best he ever managed was this language was placed in him, not spoken aloud, not conveyed through any mechanism he could

identify as auditory or visual. Ideas, sequential, specific, meaningful ideas, what he could only call communication, were simply present in his understanding in a way they hadn't been a moment before, Like a door in his mind had been opened from the outside, something set through it, and the door closed again. He declined, across every retelling of this account over many years,

to share the content of what was communicated. He said only that it was a warning, that it concerned decisions he and the others had not yet made, that some of what it warned against came to pass in the years that followed, and that one of the four not Robert, returned from that camping trip, and within two weeks underwent what could only be described as a complete fracturing of his ability to maintain the basic structure of his daily reality,

a clinical level dissolution. He recovered over the better part of a year. He never discussed that weekend, not once for the rest of his life. The figure turned and walked back up the trail, without hurry, without sound, and over the ridgeline. As it disappeared, the light quality came back to normal, the birds started again, the fire crackled. The four of them sat without speaking for a long time. I've asked everyone I know with deep knowledge of Cherokee

tradition and Appalachian supernatural history. What this might have been the most consistent answer I get points toward a category of being in Cherokee cosmology that doesn't translate cleanly into any single English word, something that exists in the space between human and spirit without being reducible to either. Something that appears at specific moments in specific places for specific purposes, that the people who encounter it aren't necessarily meant to

understand fully. Messenger is the English word that comes up most often, and it's probably the least wrong word available, even though it misses dimensions of the Cherokee conceptualization. I want to add one more piece of this account because Robert shared it with the researcher as a kind of coda to the main story, and I think it deserves to be included. About three weeks after the camping trip, Robert went back to Grandfather Mountain alone. He didn't tell

any of the others he was going. He drove up to the trailhead on a weekday morning in November, when the crowds were thin and the air had turned sharply cold, and he hiked up to the section of trail where the figure had stood. He wanted to see it in daylight. He wanted to do what people often want to do after an experience like that, to return to the physical location and find something ordinary in it, to let the daylight and the familiar mechanics of hiking reduce the thing

to something manageable. He found the rocky outcrop. He found the section of trail that ran along its edge. He stood there and looked back down the slope toward where their camp had been, and he understood in full daylight that whoever or whatever had been standing on that trail above them had a complete, unobstructed view of their entire camp. Could have watched them for a long time before they noticed. It, could have been standing there on any number of a

ca before the afternoon they finally looked up. He stood there for a long time, looking down at the campsite, and he thought about that, about how long it might have been watching before it decided to approach. He hiked back down and drove home and told nobody about the return visit for fifteen years. Grandfather Mountain still restricts overnight camping in certain zones near the upper Ridge line. The official rationale is ecological preservation and the ecology of that

mountain genuinely is fragile and deserving of protection. But I've spent enough time in that subalpine forest and had enough conversations with people who know the mountain well to know that the ecological explanation is the comfortable one. Grandfather Mountain has always known. The difference between being watched at and being watched from, and the watching up there above the clouds on that ancient wind scraped ridge runs in both directions. Our last story takes us to the very top of

the chain. I know what some of you are thinking when I say New Jersey, and I need you to set that image aside entirely. The New Jersey I'm talking about has nothing to do with the shore, or the

Turnpike corridor or the skyline of the northeastern megalopolis. Northwestern New Jersey Warren in Sussex Counties, pressed up against the Delaware Water Gap on the Pennsylvania border, is mountain country, rural, densely forested, and old in the specifically Appalachian way, where the age of the land is something you feel in

your body before you understand it in your mind. The Kittatinny Ridge runs through there, part of the same continuous ridge system that connects back through Pennsylvania to the Blue Ridge in Virginia. The same geological bones, the same deep forest, the same quality of stillness in the hollows that you'll find five hundred miles further south, and in Warren County, New Jersey, there is a road with the name I

need you to hear with fresh ears. Its legal name on every county map and every road sign and every GPS system and exists is Shades of Death. Road that is not me embellishing for effect. Seven miles long, winding through the Kittatinny Ridge Country, passed a body of water called Ghost Lake, also its real name, and along the forested edge of Jenny Jump State Forest, which is itself named for a colonial era story about a girl named Jenny who allegedly jumped from a cliff to escape and attack.

The naming conventions in this particular corner of New Jersey suggest a landscape that has been honest about its nature for a very long time. The road carries genuinely grim documented history. The name itself likely accumulated from several sources. Malaria epidemics in the early nineteenth century, fed by the wetlands adjacent to the road that killed people in the surrounding communities before anyone understood what malaria was or where

it came from. A series of documented murders along the road in the nineteenth century, the specifics of which are well establish county historical records, multiple unexplained deaths over the years since, and persistent accounts of supernatural activity going back into the early eighteen hundreds. Strange lights in the wetland areas, sounds without identifiable sources, encounters on the road itself at

night that don't resolve into any satisfactory conventional explanation. The specific phenomenon I want to tell you about has come to be called the walking Man, And unlike the Cherokee traditions I've shared tonight, traditions with deep roots, long histories, and living communities who maintain them, the Walking Man is

more recent and harder to categorize. He's an accumulation, a pattern that emerges from separate accounts gathered across roughly seven decades, submitted by people who had no knowledge of each other and no shared context beyond one specific stretch of road that described the same encounter in enough consistent detail to

constitute something that deserves attention. The accounts start appearing reliably in the nineteen fifties, with possible earlier references in county newspapers that may or may not be describing the same thing. They continue through the nineteen sixties, the nineteen seventies and beyond.

People driving Shades of Death Road at night, particularly in the section nearest to Ghost Lake, a mile and a half of dense forest with no ambient light and no visible habitation, report seeing a man walking along the road. Just a man walking, not inherently remarkable, but the details that make it remarkable are These held consistent across dozens

of accounts from people who didn't know each other. He is always alone, always moving in the same direction, always wearing what witnesses describe as dark or old fashioned clothing. And he is visible only in the vehicle's mirrors, rear view, mirror, side mirror. Never when you turn your head and look directly at where he should be, only in the reflected you, only in the mirror. Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories.

We'll be back after these messages. Always and exclusively there and gone the moment direct sight is brought to bear on him, in nineteen eighty seven, Carol Hutchinson was driving home from a late hospital shift through Warren County at approximately two thirty in the morning, taking Shades of Death Road because it was genuinely faster than the highway alternatives at that hour. She knew the road well and had no particular anxiety about it. She was tired and thinking

about getting home. She was roughly in the middle of the Ghost Lake Stretch, the densest and darkest section of the road, hemmed in by forest on both sides, with no break in the tree line. When she saw him in her rearview mirror, she registered him the way you register anything in a rearview mirror at two in the morning, peripherally, automatically, the brain logging information before the conscious mind catches up. A man on the road behind her walking, She thought

odd at this hour, but people walked strange hours. She watched the mirror. He was keeping pace with the car. She was going fifteen miles an hour on that stretch. It's narrow and winding, and fifteen is genuinely a comfortable speed through there in the dark. She watched the mirror, and the man behind her was keeping pace, not falling behind. The distance between them was holding constant. He was walking ordinary walking stride, no obvious exertion, and he was keeping

pace with a car going fifteen miles an hour. She sped up twenty twenty five, faster than she was comfortable going on that road in the dark. She watched the mirror, He kept pace, The gap held. She went to thirty. Same result. Whatever physics was in operation on that road on that night, it was not the physics that applies to a man on foot and a car on a

paved road. She looked directly behind her neck, turned her head, looked through the rear windshield at the lit road surface behind her, empty tail lights, illuminating nothing but road and the dark tree line beyond. She faced forward and checked the rear view mirror. He was there, same distance, same walking pace, looking ahead, not at the mirror, not at

her walking. She made a sound. She described it afterward as not quite a word and not quite a scream, the sound a person makes when the conscious mind has been entirely overridden by something below it. She floored the accelerator and held it for the remaining mile and a half of the Ghost Lake stretch until the forest opened, and the glow of the junction with the County Road was visible ahead. She checked the rear view. At that point the road behind her was empty, just dark pavement

and the tail end of the tree line. Whatever had been there was gone, not left behind by the increase in speed, just gone absent, as if it had never been there except in the silver of the mirror. Carol Hutchinson put her name to this account publicly, and I've been grateful for that because her willingness to do so gave other people the permission to share similar experiences without the fear of being dismissed as unstable or attention seeking.

In the years since, I've collected a substantial number of corroborating accounts from that specific section of road, with that specific characteristic visible in the mirror, gone on direct inspection. I've spent a great deal of time thinking about that characteristic, because I think it's the key to understanding what this thing is and why it's frightening in a way that goes well beyond the ordinary fright of a strange figure

on a dark road. In the folk traditions of many cultures, not just Appalachian tradition, but European folk tradition, African tradition, East Asian tradition, mirrors have always occupied a special and

somewhat suspect category. The old understanding of reflective surfaces was that they showed you a different angle on reality, not simply a reversed image of what was in front of you, but a view from a slightly different register, a perspective that sees things the direct look cannot see, that catches things that look away when you look at them directly. In certain European folk traditions, mirrors are covered when someone dies in a house because the mirror might show you

the departing soul. In Haitian voodoo tradition, certain spirits are visible only in reflective surfaces. In Old Appalachian folk practice, there are specific instructions about how mirrors should be positioned and covered in certain circumstances that suggest a belief in the mirror as a threshold rather than just glass. The walking man of Shades of Death Road chooses the mirror. He's visible there and not directly, something that can keep pace with a car at thirty miles an hour, is

not limited by much. He chooses to be seen in the reflected view. He knows the difference between the mirror and the direct life look. He knows that the mirror sees differently. He permits you to catch him in that peripheral silver glimpse, and he's gone the moment you try to look straight at him. And what that suggests, if you take the old understanding seriously, is that he understands the nature of the mirror. That he's making a choice about how much of himself to reveal and to whom,

and how that he's not simply being seen. He's allowing himself to be seen from a specific angle for reasons that haven't been established yet. I've driven that road several times. I always slow through the Ghost Lake stretch. I always watch the mirrors. I want to tell you about one of those drives, because I've been honest with you all night about other people's encounters, and I think it's only fair to be honest about my own. It was a

November night, no moon. I was alone in the car, and I took the road slowly through the dense section near the lake the way I always do. I watch the rear view mirror. I watched the side mirrors the road behind me, was empty for most of that stretch, just dark pavement and the illuminated edge of the tree line in my tail lights. About halfway through the stretch, I saw something. I want to be precise about this.

I'm not going to overclaim and I'm not going to dismiss it either, because I've heard too many accounts to dismiss it, and I value honesty too much to overclaim. I saw something in the rearview mirror that was not a reflective post or a road sign or the outline of a tree branch. Something with a vertical dimension that was wrong for the natural elements of that road. Something that was there for one clear moment in the mirror and not there when I checked again two seconds later.

I didn't stop the car, I didn't go back. I don't know what I saw. I know what the people who've driven that road for the better part of a century describe seeing, and I know my experience in the mirror that November night was consistent with what they describe. Whether that means anything, I'll leave to you. But I always check if there's a thread running through all six of these stories. The wampus cat in her Laurel Thickets, the lights above Brown Mountain and what walks below them.

The raven mocker and her terrible gentle work, the burning woman on the Harper's Ferry rail line, the silent messenger on Grandfather's high trail, the walking man who exists only in the mirror on that long, dark Jersey road. I think the thread is this the Appalachian Mountains. Remember, They've been here longer than human memory, longer than human language, longer than the first human ancestor who ever stood at a tree line and wondered what was watching from the

other side. They've absorbed every joy and grief and act of violence and moment of transcendence that has ever played out in their hollers and on their ridge lines and in their old cathedral timber. The land keeps memory and away we barely understand, and mostly don't try to, because taking it seriously would require us to accept that we are not the primary authors of our own experience in places like these, that we are visitors in a space

with its own consciousness and its own concerns. That the forest, when it's deep enough and old enough, has opinions about us. And here's what I've come to believe after decades of listening to these accounts, and walking in these places, and sitting in the dark of these hollers, and listening to what the dark says back. The mountains don't mean us

harm exactly. They're not malevolent. They're indifferent in the way that anything truly ancient is indifferent, the way a river is indifferent to whether you swim in it or drown in it. What they are is honest. They show you what's there. They don't dress it up or soften it or present it in a form designed to be comfortable for you. They show you the wampus cat and the raven mocker, and the burning woman and the walking figure in the mirror, and they let you make of it

what you will. They've been doing that for ten thousand years, and they'll keep doing it long after every road we've built through them has been followed back by the trees. I'm not asking you to believe in any specific thing.

I'm asking you to consider the possibility that these mountains are not empty, That the people who lived here for thousands of years before any European set foot on this continent were telling the truth when they said the land was alive and paying attention, that the generations of loggers and farmers and railroad men and homesteaders who built their lives in these hills were telling the truth when they said, holler by holler and generation by generation, that the forest

held things that the nurse driving home from a late shift, and the park ranger doing her final walkthrough, and the sixty one year old farmer who ran his trap line in the dark for twenty years without incident until the morning everything changed. That all of those ordinary people encountering something they couldn't account for in places they thought they knew, were telling the truth because they weren't crazy, they weren't liars.

They were people doing ordinary things in extraordinary places, and the mountains showed them something real, something that reminded them in the specific and personal way the Appellachians have been reminding people since people first arrived here that the forest is older than we are, and that it has its own residence, and that the courtesy it shows us in letting us pass through it is not the same thing as indifference to our passing the old green dark is

paying attention. It always has been, thank you for coming into these woods with me. Tonight, drive safe, getting home and check your mirrors. Di