The Surveyor's Confession

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.

piece of something, and the pieces before it matter. But for those of you who've been here since Herschel's deer camp, let me take you through where we've been, because I want all of it fresh in your mind. Nineteen seventy eight, Herschel and three hunting buddies on a least parcel in the Kahudah Wilderness. Something came into their camp over the course of five nights and made itself known in stages.

Coolers moved without damage, a deer carcass placed in the fire ring, coordinated knocking between the valley and the ridge, bipedal footsteps heavy enough to feel through the ground, and on the last night, reddish eye shine at eight feet in the hemlocks. When they broke camp, Herschel found a line of creek stones at the edge of the bench,

evenly spaced, pointing north. Nineteen ninety four, Karen a seasonal Forest Service worker maintaining a fire road along the ridge line in Polk County, Tennessee, twelve miles north of Herschel's camp.

Over three weeks, she documented tree breaks, a recurring smell on a schedule nineteen inch tracks in creek mud, and handprints with an opposing thumb on a clay bank, then the flat tire at night, the footsteps on the gravel, the pacing, and that breath, one long exhale from above her head height, close enough to hear the rasp of it.

Two thousand and three, Marcus, a competitive bow hunter, on her ridge saddle in the Cherokee National Forest a few more miles north, he watched something step off a stump and walk upright through a cli cut for nearly four and a half minutes through a Swarowsky spotting scope, dark brown, seven and a half feet, arms to mid thigh. When he went back three days later with the trail camera, the SD card came back with nighttime images of an

upright figure with infrared eyeshine. His brother, a state wildlife biologist, looked at the photos and said, I can't tell you what that is. Twenty eleven, David, a youth pastor, driving a van full of teenagers through the valley on a two lane highway. Something walked into the road, tall enough that the headlights caught it at the chest. The van

hit it hard enough to spin into a ditch. When David got out, it was standing at the tree line watching two of the teenagers now adults, corroborated every detail. The tow truck driver who responded mentioned he'd pulled three other vehicles out of that same quarter mile stretch in

the past year. Four stories, four decades. Four people who've never spoken to each other, same ridgeline, same valley, same corridor, same behavioral patterns, patience, deliberation, control, something that doesn't stumble into encounters by accident, something that manages them. And now we're here part five. This story is different from the other four, and I need to explain why before we get into it. The first four submissions came to me independently,

different months, different formats, no awareness of each other. I noticed the geographic pattern myself after the third one came in when I happened to pull up a map. This one came in because of the series. A man named Jean listened to the first four episodes as they aired. He told me he started casually. His daughter had sent him a link, which I think says something about how stories travel through families. He listened to part one while he was doing dishes. By part two, he was sitting

at the kitchen table with the volume up. By part three. He wasn't doing anything else. He was just listening. And somewhere around the middle of part three, when Marcus describes the clear cut in the Cherokee, Jeene paused the audio. He got up from his kitchen table. He walked down the hallway to a closet, and he pulled out a cardboard box he hadn't opened in over thirty years. The box was dusty, the tape holding it shut was yellowed

and brittle. He told me he stood there in the hallway holding it and his hands were trembling, and it wasn't from the weight. When he wrote to me, his email was one paragraph long. It said, I've been listening to your series and I need to talk to you. I surveyed the property boundary that runs through every location your people are describing. I did it in nineteen eighty seven for a timber company. I have field notes, plat maps,

and a cassette tape I recorded on site. I also have information about the geography of that ridge line that none of your other guests mentioned, and I think it might explain why this corridor exists. Please call me. I called him within the hour. Jeane is seventy one retired, lives in a small town in North Georgia about forty minutes from Dalton, which, if you've been paying attention, puts him in the same general orbit as Herschel, though the two men have never met and didn't know each other

existed until this series aired. He worked as a land surveyor for thirty four years. Started as a rodman that's the entry level position, the person who holds the rod while the instrument operator takes the readings. In nineteen seventy six, right out of high school. His father had been in construction, and Jean grew up around job sites. He took to surveying naturally. The precision of it appealed to him. The outdoor work appealed to him.

the corridor and documenting what's inside them. If you don't know what land surveyors actually do day to day, let me give you the short version because it matters. Surveyors establish property boundaries using precision instruments transit theodolite GPS in later years to measure angles and distances between fixed points on the ground. They set monuments, which are permanent markers iron pins driven into the earth, concrete posts, sometimes just a nail in a tree. At corners, and a long

boundary lines. They create plat maps, which are scale drawing showing the shape of a property, the distances between monuments, the bearings of each line, and any significant features that fall within or along the boundary. Roads, creeks, rockout crops, structures, easements. All of it goes on the map. Here's the thing about surveyors that most people don't appreciate. They walk the ground, every foot of it. They don't look at satellite images or fly over in a helicopter.

Kohutta region and Georgia north into Polk County, Tennessee. They needed updated plat maps, boundary verification, and a timber cruise, which is an inventory of the standing timber species and volume to determine what was worth cutting and what wasn't. Jane's firm got the contract. Jean and his partner, a man named Bill, who he'd worked with for about six years at that point, were assigned the boundary survey. The timber crews would be done separately by a forestry crew.

The job was big. Eight thousand acres is a lot of ground. To put it in perspective, that's about twelve and a half square miles. The perimeter of the track was roughly twenty two miles, plus internal divisions between parcels that had been subdivided over the years by different owners. Gene and Bill estimated it would take three to four weeks in the field to walk the entire boundary, set monuments at every corner and angle point, and gather all

the data they needed for the plat maps. They couldn't commute. The property was too remote, too far from any paved road to drive in and out every day, so they'd camp on site, the way Gene had done on dozens

of jobs before this one. The timber company gave them a contact name, a set of old plat maps from the previous survey, which were from the early seventies and weren't reliable, and a general directive walk the boundary, verify or replace all existing monuments, set new ones where needed, and produce an updated set of plat maps that could be used for the timber crews and for any future transactions involving the property. Standard scope of work. Nothing unusual about the job on paper.

food for a week. They'd resupply on weekends when they drove home. And then they started walking the lines. Here's what I want you to understand about what Gene found over the next three and a half weeks and whyat mattered for this series. Jane wasn't looking for anything unusual. He wasn't a researcher. He wasn't interested in the paranormal.

I could hear him turning the pages. The paper is yellowed, the ink is faded in places, but the entries are legible, and they're detailed. In the first week, working the southern boundary near the Georgia Tennessee line, Jane and Bill encountered terrain that Jene described as the quietest ground I've ever worked on. He didn't mean that in a poetic way.

He meant it literally. The southern portion of the tract includes the upper end of the valley, the same valley Herschel described the same one Karen's fire Road overlooked, the same gap between ridges that all five stories in this series keep coming back to. And Jean said, when they dropped into that valley to survey a boundary line that crossed it, the sound changed. The birds stopped, the wind, noise dropped. Even their own footsteps sounded muffled, like the

ground was absorbing the sound instead of reflecting it. I made a note about it, Jean said, March nineteenth, eighty seven. I wrote, valley floor between ridges unusual, ually quiet, sound dampening effect. Bill noticed it too. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. That's word for word from the notebook. Bill noticed it.

in the same location. That's not anecdotal anymore. That's a pattern with physical characteristics. Jane told me the quiet bothered Bill more than it bothered him. Bill was a talker, similar to Jimbo and Herschel's crew, the kind of guy who filled silence with conversation because silence made him uncomfortable. When they were working in that valley, Bill talked more, louder, faster, like he was trying to compensate for the missing sound. Jane noticed it, but didn't say anything. They had work

to do, But I asked Jane about it. Did Bill ever say anything directly about the valley? Did he ever name what he was feeling? Once, Jeene said, we were running a line along the valley floor, and Bill stopped and said, this place doesn't want us here, just like that flat not joking. I looked at him and he looked at me, and neither of us said anything else. We just went back to work. I want to sit on that for a second. This place does want us here.

A professional land surveyor, a man who's walked through every kind of terrain in the Southern Appalachians stops in the middle of a job and says that not this place is creepy or I don't like it here. He said, it doesn't want them there, like the land itself had an opinion. And here's something else. I asked Jane about the nights, because they were camping on the track for three and a half weeks, sleeping out there, and I

wanted to know what the knights were like. He told me most nights were fine, quiet, they'd eat, clean up, turn in early because the days started at dawn. He'd read by flashlight for a little while and fall asleep. Nothing unusual. Bill snored the fire would die down normal

camp nights, but there were two or three nights. Gene couldn't pin down exactly which ones because he didn't log them the way he logged his daytime observations, where he woke up and the woods were silent, not quiet, silent, the kind of silence where you noticed the absence of sound, the way you'd notice a light going out. No insects, no owls, no creak, noise, nothing. He'd lie in his tent and listen and feel his heart rate climb and not know why. Nothing happened on those nights. Nothing he

could point to. No sounds, no movement, no footsteps, just the silence and the feeling, the same feeling he'd had on the valley floor during the day that something was out there close paying attention. He never got up to look, he told me he didn't want to see whatever it was. I wasn't a brave.

That's what it does to people. It isolates them inside their own experience, because the experience doesn't have a category, and you can't share something you can't categorize. Over the first two weeks, as they worked their way north along the property boundary, Gene logged several things in his field notes that he filed under terrain observations at the time, just standard field documentation stuff that went into the notebook, because that's what surveyors do. You write down what you see,

whether you understand it or not. He didn't attach any special significance to these observations in eighty seven. They were just entries in a composition notebook data without context. Thirty

seven years later, the context arrived. Tree breaks. He found them along the ridge line on the western boundary, small diameter hardwood, sour wood, dogwood, young hickory, snapped between six and nine feet above the ground, some with tops propped against adjacent trees in ways that didn't look like natural windfall, a few with what he described in his notes as spiral fractures, though at the time he attributed them to

ice loading from the previous winter. He logged the locations and estimated the ages of the breaks where he could, based on how weather the exposed wood was. He told me he counted at least fifteen along a two mile stretch of the ridge. He didn't think it was unusual at the time. He'd seen ice damage before, but he'd never seen it concentrated along a ridge line and a line like that, and he'd never seen spiral fractures in sourwood from ice. He made a note of it and

kept moving. When he heard Karen and Marcus described the same thing, same species, same height range, same spiral fractures, same linear pattern along the ridge, he said, the hair on his arms stood up. He was sitting at his kitchen table listening on his phone, and he looked down at his own arms and the hair was standing straight up. That's when I got up and went to the closet, he told me. That's when I.

in the mud. They were big, shaped roughly like a human foot heel ball toes, but much larger than any human foot he'd ever seen. He didn't have a tape measure on his hip at that moment. His chain and pins were in Bill's hands, so he eyeballed the length against his own boot, which was a size of level about twelve inches. The prints were significantly longer. He estimated

sixteen to seventeen inches in his notes. There were four of them, two on each side, walking pattern coming down from the uphill side of the creek, crossing the mud, and continuing into the timber on the far bank. The stride was long, longer than his own by a wide margin. He and Bill looked at them. Bill said, somebody's been walking the creek. Gene nodded. They discussed it for maybe a minute. Who would be out here barefoot? Probably a local, maybe someone from a property to.

The foot grew or they belonged to different individuals, But they're in the same location, the same creek drainage, separated by seven years. Whatever was leaving those prints in eighty seven was still leaving them in ninety four, or something like it was. I asked Gene if it occurred to him at the time that the prince might not be human. No, he said, now for a second, why would it. I was a twenty seven year old surveyor walking a property

line in the mountains. I didn't know anything about this subject. I'd never thought about it. I wrote it down, because that's what you do when you see something out of the ordinary, you note it, and then I went back to work. That's what surveyors do. You note everything, even the stuff you don't understand. And that's one of the things I find most compelling about Jean's account. He wasn't filtering any of this through a big foot lens. He

had no framework for that. He was just a guy with a notebook and a transit, documenting what he found on the ground as he walked through it. The observations are clean. They're not shaped by expectation or belief or hope. They're just data points sitting in a composition notebook for thirty seven years, waiting for someone to come along and provide the context that makes them mean something. Jeene was that someone. He just didn't know it yet. Here's where

Gene's story goes from interesting to something else entirely. About halfway through the survey, roughly the end of the second week, Jeane and Bill reached a section of the western boundary that climbed to the ridge crest and followed it north for about a mile and a half. This was the spine of the corridor, the high ground between the two valleys, the same ridge line that every story in this series references. The boundary line ran right along the top of it.

They were working their way north, setting monuments, recording bearings and distances when they came to a feature Gene described as a rock outcrop on the western face of the ridge, limestone exposed by erosion, sticking out of the slope like a shelf. Below the outcrop, partially concealed by rhododendron and a tangle of fallen timber, there was an opening, a hole in the rock.

like a pocket. Bill wanted to go closer. Jeane told him to leave it. They weren't there to explore caves. They were there to set a boundary line, and the line was uphill from the opening. But Jean did something that turned out to matter a great deal. He pulled out his compass and took a bearing from the cave entrance to his nearest monument. He measured the approximate distance by pacing it, and he wrote a description in his notebook.

Cave opening approximately four feet wide by three feet tall in limestone outcrop, air movement from interior opening faces west southwest, concealed by rhododendron and deadfall. That entry sat in a composition notebook for thirty seven years. They kept working over the next two days as they continued north along the ridge crest, they found two more openings, and this is where Jeane's story started to feel different to him, even in eighty seven. Not alarming, just notable. One opening might

be an anomaly. Two you start thinking about geology. Three in a mile and a half, all in limestone, all on the same face of the same ridge, all producing airflow. That's not random, that's a system. The second opening was larger than the first, maybe five feet across, roughly oval, with a clear draft of cool air flowing from the interior. Jeanne said he stood about ten feet from it and

could feel the air on his face. It was noticeably colder than the ambient temperature, which told him the passage behind it was significant. The deeper a cave goes, the cooler and more consistent the air temperature, and a strong draft usually means there's another opening somewhere creating airflow through the system. The third was smaller, partially collapsed. It looked like the roof of the entrance had caved in at

some point. Broken limestone blocks were piled in front of the opening, but you could still see space behind the rubble, and Jane could hear a faint echo when he spoke near it. Something was back there.

who spent decades reading terrain. But the implication of it, the idea that there might be a continuous underground passage system running the length of that ridge line, that implication would take on a completely different meaning. Thirty seven years later, Gene marked all three on his working plat map. He recorded their positions in his notes, and when he got back to camp that evening, he radioed the timber company's field coordinator, a guy whose name Gene remembers but asked

me not to use on the show. Gene told him about the caves and asked a straightforward question, how do you want these handled on the survey? Were they to be included in the timber inventory? Were their mineral rights or easements he needed to know about. Did the company want the openings mapped in detail or just noted on the plat. What happened next is something Gene has been turning over in his head ever since. The coordinator didn't hesitate, he didn't ask questions, he didn't say, let me check

and get back to you. He responded immediately, like he'd been waiting for this call, or like he'd had this conversation before. He told Gene to mark the cave locations as excluded on the plat maps. He said the company was aware of them, that they predated the current ownership, and that they were to be excluded from the survey, from the timber inventory, and from any future development plans.

He told Gene not to enter the caves, not to send anyone else into the caves, and not to include any detail about them in his field notes beyond a simple notation that the areas were excluded per company direction. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Gene asked why liability. The coordinator said, we don't want anyone going in there and getting hurt. Mark them excluded and move on. Gene told me that

explanation made sense on the surface. Cave liability is a real thing. Property owners can be held responsible if someone enters a cave on their land and gets injured or dies. Plenty of landowners fence off for gate cave entrances on their property for exactly that reason. Excluding them from the survey and flagging them as off limits was a reasonable legal precaution. But here's what didn't add up, and this is the part Jane kept circling back to in our conversations.

The coordinator already knew about the caves. Gene hadn't told him how many there were. He hadn't given locations. He just said he'd found cave openings along the western face of the ridge. The coordinator didn't ask how many, didn't

ask where exactly, didn't ask for coordinates or descriptions. He just said to mark them excluded, which means either someone had already documented them or the coordinator had been brief to expect this call and had his instructions ready, and the directive wasn't just note them, it was exclude them. That's a specific legal term in land surveying, and I want to make sure you understand what it means. When you exclude an area from a survey, You're drawing the

property boundary around it. You're carving out a piece of ground and saying, legally, this area is not part of this tract. It doesn't belong to the surveyed property. It's a hole in the map. Jane told me he'd done exclusions before, cemeteries, public road rights of way, utility easements where a power company or pipeline has a legal claim to a strip of ground owned government reservations. Every exclusion he'd ever done had a clear, documented legal basis, a

recorded easement, a deed restriction, a government claim. You could look it up in the county records and find the paperwork. He looked up the paperwork on these caves. There was no mineral rights reservation on the deed, no government easement filed on those parcels, no recorded claim of any kind that would legally justify excluding those areas from the survey. They were just excluded, no documented reason, just a phone call from a field coordinator who already knew about them

and didn't want to discuss it. He wasn't rude about it, Jeane told me, wasn't hostile, but there was a wall there. I could feel it. The conversation had reached a boundary, and I was not going to be allowed past it. So I marked the exclusions and I moved on that was my job. The client says, exclude, I exclude. I don't need to know why, but I've wanted to know

why for thirty seven years. He marked the exclusions on the plat, drew the boundary lines around them, three little voids on an eight thousand acre map, and he moved on to the next section of the survey. But here's the detail that connects everything. And I need you to hear this clearly, because this is the moment when the

whole series snaps into focus. When Gene went home after the eighty seven survey and drafted the final plat maps, the clean, finished versions, drawn to scale, with all measurements, bearings, monuments, and exclusions marked. Those maps became the legal record of the property. They show the shape of the tract, the boundary lines, the internal parcel divisions, and the three excluded areas where the caves are. Those maps sat in a filing cabinet at Jean's office for years, then went into

the box when he retired. He hadn't looked at them since he closed the files. The night he listened to part three The bow Hunter, he pulled out the plat maps along with his field notes. He unfolded them on his kitchen table. They're large format sheets, about twenty four by thirty six inches, drawn in pencil and ink on vellum.

the plat maps and started comparing. Then he started marking, based on the terrain descriptions, the elevation references, and the geographic details mentioned in the first three episodes of the Corridor series. He marked the approximate locations of Herschel's camp, Karen's fire road, and Marcus's clear cut on the topo map. He used a red pen three dots. He told me it took him about twenty minutes to place each one, cross referencing what the witnesses had described with the contour

lines and drainage features on the tapo. Then he looked at the plat maps. All three dots fell within the survey boundary of the tract he'd walked in nineteen eighty seven. Herschel's camp was on the southern end, Karen's fire road was along the midsection of the western boundary. Marcus's clearcut was near the northern end. Three encounters spanning twenty five years, and every one of them was inside the property line Jeane had surveyed. After Part four aired the church van,

he marked that location too. The highway where David's van was hit crosses through the valley at a point that falls within the eastern boundary of the tract.

along a corridor. When he showed me this, when he described the overlay, the encounter locations inside the boundary, the caves along the ridge between them. I asked him the question I'd been building toward the whole conversation, Gene, what do you think those caves are? He didn't hesitate. He said, I think they're connected. I think there's a passage system running under that ridge, a network north south following the

limestone formation. That's how Kars geology works. Where you find one solution cave, you find more, and they connect underground through passages carved by water over millions of years. Some of those systems run for miles, some of them are huge, and most of them have never been mapped because nobody knows the entrances are there. I hear him thinking, I think whatever your people have been seeing in that corridor, whatever's been seen there for the last forty some years,

lives there underground in the cave system. I think the valley is the surface corridor and the caves are the subsurface corridor. Same route, same direction, two levels. The thing moves underground when it wants to disappear, It surfaces when it wants to be seen, or when it needs to move through the valley for whatever reason food water territory. The caves are the home base, the valley is the range.

Many more have never been entered. The idea that a ridge line with exposed limestone on its western face might contain a continuous underground network isn't far fetched. It's expected that's what limestone does when groundwater works through it over geologic time. And the idea that something large and intelligent might use such a system as shelter moving underground along the ridge, invisible, protected, thermally regulated, and surfacing at different

points through different entrances as needed. That would explain things about this series that I haven't been able to explain any other way. It would explain why encounters happen at different locations along the same line, but never at the same location twice. The thing isn't walking the surface for forty miles, it's popping up at different exits. It would explain why the thing seems to appear and disappear without leaving a consistent surface trail. It's going underground. It would

explain the biological silence. Animals near the cave openings would know what's in them. They would avoid those areas the way prey animals avoid the mouth of a predator's den. It would explain why no one has ever found a permanent shelter, a bedding site, a food cash, or a den on the surface, because the shelter isn't on the surface.

And it would explain the corridor itself, not as a migration route, which is what I initially assumed when I started mapping these encounters, but as a territory, a home range organized around a geological feature that provides concealment, temperature stability, protection from weather, and a way to move unseen across miles of ridgeline without ever breaking the surface. I want to be careful here. I'm not saying that's definitively what's happening. I don't have proof.

those opening since. But I'm telling you that a retired land surveyor with thirty four years of experience, a man who walked that ground with a transit and a chain and a pair of composition notebooks, found physical features on that ridge line that align with every encounter in this series. And when he overlaid his nineteen eighty seven plat maps with the locations from five independent witness accounts spanning four decades, everything lined up. The encounters, the caves, the ridge line,

the corridor. That's not nothing. That might be the most significant thing any witness in this series has contributed. Not because Jean saw a creature.

in shoe boxes in his workshop. On the night of March twenty fifth, nineteen eighty seven, about twelve days into the survey, Jean set the recorder on a flat rock about thirty feet from their camp. The camp was on the eastern side of the ridge at roughly twenty eight hundred feet, on a small shelf of level ground, similar to the bench Herschel's group had used nine years earlier. Whether it was the same spot, Jeane doesn't know, but

the elevation and terrain description matched closely. It was a clear night, cold, probably low thirties.

quiet wind in the canopy, very light. A few minutes later, an owl somewhere to the south, then more quiet, some faint insect noise, which surprised him because it was March, but the early spring species come out on warm evenings even when it's still cold at night. Crickets very faint, normal mountain sounds, nothing interesting, And then at about the forty minute mark something else. Jeene described it to me carefully.

He's a careful man. He chooses words the way he choose a monument location, deliberately and with precision.

Their howls sit in the upper register, almost yipping. This sound was in the basement deep chest register, the kind of sound that comes from something with a large thoracic cavity and a long vocal tract. And it was loud, not ear splitting, but big like. The volume was a function of the size of the thing producing it, not the effort it was putting into it. And it was long.

Gene estimated eight to ten seconds of sustained vocalization, one continuous sound, rising and falling, tapering off at the end. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. That's a long time for any animal vocalization. Coyote howls are typically two to four seconds. Wolf howls can go longer, but wolves weren't in that part of Tennessee. In eighty seven, he played it for Bill at breakfast.

Bill said, coyote. Jeane said, yeah, probably. They looked at each other over their coffee, and neither of them said anything else about it. Jeane kept the tape, he didn't erase it, he didn't.

In part two, Karen described the breath she heard in the timber next to the road, not a vocalization exactly, but a sound produced by something with a large airway, low, deep, close enough that the volume and tone told her the source was big. When Jeane heard those descriptions, when he heard Herschel say deep and resonant and felt it in my chest, something in the back of his mind clicked a connection he hadn't made in thirty seven years. He paused the episode. He got up from his kitchen table.

He walked down the hallway to the closet, pulled out the cardboard box, dug through the field notes and the plat maps until he found the tape. A Sony micro cassette labeled in his handwriting ambient camp. March twenty five, eighty seven. He went to his workshop, opened drawers until he found an old micro cassette player, one he'd kept for no particular reason, the way people keep old electronics they never quite throw away. He put in fresh batteries, snapped the tape in, rewound, it hit play.

he told me. He sat in his workshop with the tiny speaker held up to his ear, and for the first time in thirty seven years, he heard that sound again, and this time with Herschel's description and Karen's description, and Marcus's and David's accounts fresh in his mind, with his own field notes spread out on the kitchen table, with the cave locations and the tree breaks and the tracks in the creek all lined up in his head. For the first time, this time, it wasn't a coyote. He

knew it wasn't a coyote. He'd been telling himself it was a coyote since nineteen eighty seven because that was the only category available to him. But now he had other categories. Now he had context, and in context, the sound on that tape was something else entirely. He played it for me over the phone, held the micro cassette player up to his cell phone and let it run. I want to be honest with you about the audio quality.

It's rough. We're talking about a thirty seven year old microcassette recorded on a consumer grade device, played through a tiny built in speaker, and transmitted over a cellular connection. It's not studio quality. It's not even good quality. But I could hear it. A low sound, wavering rising and falling, sustained deep enough that it registered more as a vibration than a tone in the lower frequencies. It didn't sound like any coyote I've ever heard, and I've heard a

lot of coyotes. I've heard them in person, I've heard them on recordings. I've heard them in every part of the Southern Appalachians over nearly four decades of field work. What was on Jean's tape sounded more like what Herschel described, something with volume and chest cavity behind it, something big. I can't play it for you on this episode, not yet.

Jeene and I are talking about the best way to handle the tape, whether to have it professionally digitized and cleaned up, whether to have the audio spectrally analyzed by someone who knows what they're doing, how to release it in a way that preserves the chain of custody and the integrity of the recording. That's a conversation that's still happening, But the tape exists. I've heard it, and what's on it is consistent with what multiple witnesses in this series

described independently. I asked Jane why he called his email the surveyor's confession, that word confession. I wanted to know why he chose it. He was quiet for a long time, longer than he'd been quiet at any other point in our conversations. I could hear him breathing on the line, not upset, just gathering something. Then he said, because I walked that ground. I walked every foot of that boundary line. I spent three and a half weeks on that ridge with my boots on the dirt and my eyes on

the terrain. I found things, tracks in the creek mud that I wrote off as somebody walking barefoot, tree breaks that I blamed on ice, caves that a company wanted hidden for reasons they wouldn't explain. I recorded a sound on tape that I told myself was a coyote for thirty seven years, because that was easier than asking what else it might be. He stopped, took a breath, and I put it all in a box. I closed the lid, I put the box in a closet, and I walked

away from it. I went to the next job, and the next job, and the next job, and I didn't look back for thirty seven years. I had data, physical, documented, dated data that might have mattered to someone, that might have helped someone else understand what they were going through. And I kept it in a cardboard box because I didn't know what it meant, and I was too practical, or too busy, or too scared to try to figure

it out. I want to pause here because I think what Jane said next is the most important thing anyone has said in this entire series. Then I heard your show, I heard herschel describe that valley, and I thought, I know that valley. I've been in that valley. I can close my eyes right now and feel what it felt like standing on that valley floor. I heard Karen talk about tree breaks at six to nine feet, and I thought, I logged those brakes. I wrote them down in a

notebook that's sitting in my closet right now. I heard Marcus describe a clear cut in the Cherokee, and I pulled up my maps, and that clearcut sits right on the northern boundary of the tract I surveyed. And when I heard about the church van on that highway, I thought, that road crosses my survey. That intersection is on my

plat map. His voice got quieter. I had the map, Brian, I had the map the whole time, the map that ties all of these stories to one pece of ground, one tract, one ridge, one set of caves that somebody didn't want anyone to know about. I've had it since nineteen eighty seven, and I never showed it to a soul. He told me he felt responsible, not for what happened

to these people. He knows he didn't cause any of that, but for the silence for the fact that information existed, real physical, documented, professional grade survey data that could have provided context for experiences that five separate people have been carrying alone, some of them for decades, and that information sat in a box in a closet because the man who created it didn't think it mattered. That's the confession,

he said. I knew something was different about that place, not what was there, but that the place itself was different. I felt it. Bill felt it the whole time we worked that tract. There was something off about the ridge, and we both knew it. We never said it to each other because that's not the kind of thing you say out loud on a job. You just do the work and move on. He paused one more time. But I should have said something to somebody at some point

in thirty seven years. I should have opened that box and looked at what was inside it and tried to figure out what it meant. And I didn't. That's what I'm confessing. I told Jane he had nothing to apologize for. I told him that honestly, and I meant it. He was twenty seven years old in eighty seven. He was doing his job. There were no podcasts no online forms, no easy way to share information about this subject without being laughed at or dismissed. He did what any reasonable

person would do with observations that didn't make sense. He recorded them accurately, he filed them properly, and he moved on to the next assignment. That's not a failure. That's professionalism. The fact that he pulled the box back out, that he heard five strangers describe a place he recognized, and decided, at seventy one years old, to pick up the phone and share what he nen new, that's not a confession.

corridor from inside it. Gene experienced it from above, from the surveyor's perspective, literally mapping its boundaries and recording its features. He gave us the container that all the other stories fit inside. So let me tell you where we are, because I think you deserve to hear it laid out plainly, without dramatics, without hype, just the facts as I understand them.

After eight months of conversations and a lot of time with maps and field notes and phone calls, some people contacted me independently over a period of about eight months. None of them know each other, none of them had any prior connection. Each of them described an experience that took place in a different decade seventy eight, eighty seven, ninety four, three, and twenty eleven. Four of them described

direct encounters with something large, bipedal, and unidentifiable. The fifth documented physical evidence and geological features that provide possible context for all four encounters. Every one of their stories takes place along the same north South ridge line, within the boundaries of a single eight thousand acre tract of land that was professionally surveyed in nineteen eighty seven. The ridge line runs for roughly forty miles through some of the

most remote terrain in the southern Appalachians. A narrow valley cuts between two parallel ridges through the heart of it, and along the western face of the ridge. In exposed limestone, there are at least three cave openings producing airflow consistent with significant underground passages. A timber company that owned the land ordered those caves excluded from the survey without legal justification.

The same surveyor who found those caves also documented tree breaks at six to nine feet along the ridge line, some with spiral fractures. He found large barefoot impressions in

creek mud measuring sixteen to seventeen inches. He recorded an unidentified vocalization on cassette tape that he attributed to a coyote for thirty seven years until he heard similar sounds described by witnesses in this series, and his plat maps went Overlaid with the encounterlocations from the other four stories show that every encounter took place within the track boundary, every single one. I'm not going to tell you what all of this means. I'm not going to wrap it

up in a bow and hand you a conclusion. That's not what this series was designed to do. I've said from part one that I'm not pushing a theory. I'm laying out stories in order with details and letting you sit with them.

series described isn't random behavior. It's intelligence. It's the behavior of something that understands risk and manages it. And I think there are more stories out there, more people who've walked that ridge or driven that highway, or camped in that valley and experienced something they couldn't explain. People who did what Gene did put it in a box and close the lid because they didn't have anyone to tell.

People who are listening right now and recognizing something in what I'm describing, because it happened to them in those mountains or in mountains like them, and they've never said.

Five people, five decades, one corridor. Something's there, It's been there a long time, and now you know about it too. I want to thank the five people who trusted me with their stories for this series. Herschel, Karen, Marcus, David and Jane. You carried these experiences for years, some of

you for decades, and you decided to share them. That takes real courage, more than most people understand, and it matters more than you probably realize, because somewhere right now, somebody is hearing this who's been carrying the same kind of weight, and they just heard five other people say the thing out loud that they've never been able to say.