Up next in 10
Something is happening on the trails that does not fit inside park brochures. Skeletal things standing by tents, faceless hikers whistling from the trees, portals on ridges, and cryptid creatures that stare into you like they already know you.
There is a moment on the trail when the silence feels wrong. The air is the same, the trees are the same, but something in the background has shifted out of place, as if the world is holding its breath and watching you.
If you have ever had a strange or terrifying experience while hiking, camping, or backpacking, I want to hear it. Tell me where it happened, what year it was, and what you saw, heard, or felt that still does not make sense. Drop your story in the comments, upvote the ones that resonate with you, and let me know which of tonight’s cases hit you hardest. The more we compare these encounters, the more precise the pattern becomes.
👤 I'm Lon Strickler, creator of Phantoms & Monsters, and I’ve been a paranormal researcher and intuitive investigator for over 45 years. My work has been featured on numerous television shows, including Ancient Aliens, Paranormal Witness, Monsters and Mysteries in America, and Unsolved Mysteries, as well as on radio shows such as Coast to Coast AM.
🔍 If you've had an unexplained encounter, whether cryptid, alien, supernatural, or other, I want to hear from you. Submit your experience and evidence via:
🌐 https://phantomsandmonsters.com - You can also submit your sighting or encounter report at the website.
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Show More Show Less View Video Transcript
0:02
Tonight on Famers Radio, we lace up our boots and follow 10 hikers and campers
0:08
into places where the trail does not just lead through the woods. In these
0:13
stories, the path clips the edge of something else.
0:18
Some step into it for a few strides. Some are stalked along it for days.
0:25
Some are placed gently back into their world when they should have died. Others
0:31
catch a glimpse of a world that wanted very much to keep them.
0:37
You will hear about a skeletal beast standing 20 ft from a tent in Devon, a
0:43
fall in Connecticut that should have ended with a shattered skull, a faceless
0:48
whistler in Wisconsin, and a small yeti stepping aside on an icy ledge before
0:55
climbing away like it owns the mountain. We will walk past a phantom house in
1:01
Ohio, meet a 5- foot mantis on a ridge in the Sierra, Nevada,
1:08
stand over a surgically opened deer in Maine, and sit with a man in a cascade
1:14
who spent 15 days being played like live prey.
1:21
Then we'll step through a portal on Saddle Blanket Mountain and face a hairy hand reaching for a human throat before
1:28
finishing on the Smoky Mountain Trail where an upright doglike being leaves
1:34
one hiker oddly changed for the better. Now, some of these accounts feel like
1:40
predation. Some look a lot like protection. All of them carry the same message. The wild is
1:48
still wild. and some of what lives in it does not care whether we believe it or
1:54
not. This is fans of Monsters Radio where the veil lives one story at a time and thank
1:59
you for joining us. Now, our first story comes from Devon,
2:04
England, and it starts on it starts as a recovery trip. A 16-year-old who has
2:11
broken his back in a serious accident decides he's finally ready to move on with his life again.
2:18
The body has healed enough for a late adventure. The mind needs something more than hospital walls. So, his mother
2:26
drops him off in the countryside in a patch of forest that feels quiet and private. The kind of ground that seems
2:33
perfect if you're young and you want nobody around.
2:38
He does what most of us would do. He settles the tent, sets the tent quickly before the light dies, cracks the cider,
2:46
and lets a little bit of YouTube noise replace the silence of the woods.
2:52
The first hint that something is off is subtle. His phone battery drops faster
2:57
than it should, even while it's plugged into a charger. That alone might not mean much. Bad
3:04
cable, tired battery. It's easy to ignore right up until the sound of the forest changes.
3:11
He hears heavy footsteps in the underbrush. Not a single set of boots, but what sounds like dozens of football
3:18
footfalls at once, pounding towards the tent.
3:24
In a moment, his mind goes straight to very human fears. An angry landowner. A
3:30
drunk walker is looking for trouble. someone with a gun who does not appreciate a teenager camping on private
3:37
property. He does sensible things. He unzips the tent, puts his hands up to show he's no
3:45
threat, and steps out ready to explain himself. There's nobody there.
3:52
No one is on the path. No human shape between the trees. Just the kind of
3:57
silence that does not feel like usual quiet. The footsteps that are near,
4:03
nearly on top of him, cut off in an unnatural stillness. That is when the dread hits him. Not in
4:11
his thoughts, but in his body. He slowly turns his head and realizes he's not
4:17
alone. Standing about 20 ft away is something 5 foot tall and wrong.
4:23
It looks like a hairless, emaciated dog standing there, and yet not quite
4:28
doglike at all. The body is skeletal. Its face is blank and frozen in a snarl,
4:35
lips pulled back far enough to show rows of jagged teeth.
4:40
It's not advancing. It's just there, utterly present, utterly alien to his
4:45
experience of the natural world. Fight or flight does not kick in. This
4:51
is a deeper freeze some witnesses describe when their nervous system shuts down everything except the instinct to
4:58
hide. He drives back or dives back into the tent, zips it shut as if that thin
5:06
fabric is a wall, and curls into a ball on the floor while his mind tries to
5:11
protect itself from what his eyes just registered.
5:16
Time becomes strange. Eventually, he fumbles on the phone. The battery's dead. He swaps to a portable charger and
5:24
waits through an agonizing stretch until the screen finally blinks back to life at 3% power. Just enough to send one
5:33
message. He sends his pre-arranged code to his mother with his location pin.
5:39
Emergency extraction. Come now. The phone dies before she can
5:45
respond. Hours pass. Every small crack of a twig,
5:51
every brush of movement outside the nylon becomes that skeletal thing in his
5:56
imagination. He is convinced that if he steps outside again, it'll be waiting. At some point,
6:03
the sound of an engine reaches him through the trees. He risk a look and sees his mother car
6:09
mother's car at the edge of the site. There is no careful breakdown, no
6:15
collecting gear, no I mean he grabs his bag and runs leaving the tent, the
6:20
supplies, everything except his body behind. He never sees the creature again. Now to this day, he allows for
6:27
the possibility that stress and fatigue played tricks on his senses.
6:32
He's not someone who lightly claims supernatural experiences. But what he cannot shake is the feeling
6:38
that something in those private woods was already there waiting and that it took his pleasure as a chance to make
6:46
its point. Some places do not want you to be there. Some things do not need to
6:53
move toward you. They just let you see them once and you never come back.
7:00
Now, that first story brings us right to the edge of predation. Our next case steps into something much
7:07
stranger. It's not about something that is trying to scare a hiker away. It's about
7:13
something bending physics just enough to keep him alive.
7:20
Now, our second report comes from Gay City State Park in Hebbran, Connecticut.
7:26
It's spring. The witness is alone by choice. His wife is a home pregnant, so he takes the long outer loop trail
7:34
roughly five miles from the deep woods or through the deep woods to enjoy a quiet day and clear his head.
7:42
There is a steep downhill section paved entirely in stone, not flat rock, but
7:48
loose boulders of the size of soccer balls and yoga balls.
7:54
The whole slope is a field of hard rolling obstacles. Any misstep there is
7:59
going to hurt. This is not his first time on that trail.
8:04
He likes to run to hop from rock to rock on his way down and he does what he has
8:10
done many times before. Now, halfway down the mountain, something goes wrong. He misses a stone
8:17
or his foot catches and in the next instant he should be slamming into the
8:23
rocky ground. Instead, he has the clear sensation of the terrain sliding
8:28
underneath him as he's being carried or floated through the air. Gravity seems to be stepping aside. Then
8:35
everything goes black. When he comes back to himself, he's lying on his arms and stomach in a gap
8:43
between boulders that he described just enough to hold his body.
8:48
His legs rest on a rock behind him. His shins are bruised deeply from the impact, which makes sense.
8:56
What does not make sense in his head, his torso, his spine, there's no damage, no concussion, no broken bones, nothing
9:04
that matches the fall he knows he took. He stands, takes stock, calls his wife,
9:11
and tells tells her that he's all right, though he does not really understand
9:16
why. For most people, the story would end there. Lucky break on the rocks. But
9:22
he does the right thing. He goes back a few days later when his body has calmed down, determined to find that exact
9:29
pocket between the stones, the space that saved his life. But he can't find
9:35
it. He searches up and down that slope and finds no cavity big enough to cradle
9:40
a prone human body the way he remembers. The entire hillside is an interlocking
9:46
field of hard stone that offers one likely outcome if you fall. Head trauma.
9:53
He knows he should be dead or severely injured. Instead, he's alive, confused, and still ratt rattled years later.
10:02
You have already added your note to this one, and I agree. We are looking at either a classic intervention by
10:08
something that can move a human body in midfall or a brief slip into an alternate re alignment of the terrain
10:16
where the rocks did temporarily give him that one safe space before reality
10:21
snapped back into place. Now, in the first case, something in the
10:27
woods let a young man feel pure terror. In the second, something enables another man to live. Our next group does not get
10:36
a rescue or a direct threat, at least not in the physical sense. They have a
10:42
question, a whistle, and a face that res refuses to resolve
10:47
no matter how hard they look. Now, this third report comes from Lake
10:54
uh Kagza State Park in Wisconsin in October 2024.
11:01
A group of friends is camping and geocaching, doing what many people on those trails
11:07
do, enjoying the last light of the day as they circle a prairie ring by forest.
11:14
The sun has dropped just behind the tree line. Visibility is still good. Flashlights are not needed yet.
11:22
The first thing that changes is the soundsscape. The bugs go quiet. The birds stop. Even their own voices fall
11:30
off. Then something whistles at them from the woods.
11:35
It is a sharp, bone- chilling whistle that cuts through the silence and drops the whole group into an instant focus.
11:42
No one speaks. Then comes a second whistle. This one more broken up, less perfect. The kind of sound that might
11:49
easily be written off as a human trying to get attention.
11:54
The woman telling the story calls out a firm hello. looking for that rational
11:59
explanation. She wants whoever this is there to reveal themselves and explain why they
12:05
just whistled twice at a group of strangers. A voice answers coming around
12:11
the bend of the trail toward them. I thought you were a dog.
12:17
That's a strange line to open at Twilight on a quiet trail, but it's just plausible enough to keep everyone from
12:23
bowling. The figure passes the group. Our witness, who makes a point of memorizing
12:30
faces for safety reasons, cannot make out facial features at all. She assumes
12:35
it's the adrenaline or nerves or keep and keeps moving. As the group, they
12:41
agree the encounter is odd, but obviously not dangerous. They decide it's time to get off the trail.
12:49
On the way back to the car, all four of them scan the surroundings. They're on the edge, but still trying to treat this
12:55
like a strange human meeting. That's when the situation escalates.
13:02
The exact figure appears again at the edge of the trail, this time closer to the woods, turned away from them,
13:08
staring out over the field. The group continues to walk, trying not to react.
13:15
In a flat, strangely dry tone, the thing speaks again. Who is that guy?
13:22
It doesn't turn out to look at them. It just comments. Our witness, still
13:28
wanting a logical structure to cling to, assumes it must be referring to her boyfriend behind the
13:34
group. She answers automatically. The same guy from earlier. They do not stop. They do
13:42
not engage. They walk. And they do not break the silence until they're safely off the trail. Back at camp, they
13:48
debrief. That is where this encounter takes on a different weight. Each of them reports
13:55
independently that in both passes they could not see a face.
14:00
Not an obscured face, not one blurred by bad light. Light light, a kind of smear
14:06
fog where the eyes, nose, and mouth should have been. They could detect the general structure
14:12
of the head. They can see where the features should have been, but there was
14:17
nothing there. Because it whistled and because it felt wrong, they labeled it as a skin walker.
14:26
Even as they acknowledge that culturally skinwalker lore is not rooted in that part of Wisconsin.
14:33
in your files. This may fit better in a category of humanoid mimics or
14:39
ultraterrestrial intelligence that can approximate a human form but have
14:44
trouble with the face which is often most challenging part of our pattern to reproduce.
14:50
The sense of being watched continues into the night.
14:56
This witness who is spiritually inclined says she took steps to protect herself before sleeping. But she also notes that
15:03
there have been strange encounters in her life since that night. Something may have tagged her. It may have simply
15:09
taken an interest. Now, we've gone from a skeletal thing in
15:15
Devonshshire to a face that never reasonably appears in Wisconsin.
15:20
Now, let's change elevation and culture now and walk out onto the narrow
15:25
mountain trail in Nepal where a very strange kind of figure is waiting on the
15:31
ice. Now, during the winter 1983 to 1984, a
15:39
graduate student joined a trekking group bound for Everest base camp. This is not
15:45
a summit bid. It's a classic mountain pil pilgrimage which stops at
15:51
monasteries along the way to let the body adjust to the altitude. It is cold, stark, and quiet. In winter,
15:59
the higher elevations are nearly deserted. The pack train goes ahead that day to
16:04
set up camp. Hikers move on their own, each at their own place pace along the
16:10
narrow trails that cling to the sides of the mountain. Our witness reaches a
16:16
sharp corner on the ledge where the path runs along a small icefall. He steps
16:23
around it and finds that he's not alone. Standing in the trail is a primate that
16:29
should not be there. It's 3 to four foot tall, thickly covered in reddish hair like an
16:35
orangutang with long arms and a musculature of a natural hiker. For 10
16:41
seconds, maybe less. They look at each other. There is no scream, no charge, no
16:47
display of aggression. Then the animal turns, climbs up to the 20 to 25 ft ice
16:52
face with fluid practiced movements and disappears over the top.
16:58
He's left feeling nonplusted more than afraid.
17:04
It is an odd almost gentle encounter. Then he reach re reaches the sherpa god and decide describes what he saw and the
17:11
god gives him a name yeti. Through broken English the witness
17:16
learns that to the sherpa yetis are not a single giant white monster.
17:22
The word covers a range of wild beings in the region. Some small, some large,
17:27
some more apeike, some more mysterious.
17:32
I had spoken with this witness myself and vetted his details for our purposes
17:38
tonight. This is import this is important because it reminds us that not all these stories sit at the very edge
17:44
of reality. Some are exactly what they sound like. An intelligent undiscovered
17:50
primate living in terrain that most humans visit only in passing recognized by local people and folded internal
17:57
language under a name that has become myth in the west. Now, from a small shore-footed ape on
18:04
the ice fall, we move back to the American heartland to another ridge, another road, another presence that
18:11
reaches into a hiker's reality with something that looks familiar at first glance. A house with every light on.
18:21
Now, this fifth report takes us to Portland, or Ohio, an old river road
18:27
along on Old River Road along the Ohio River. Our witness practically grew up there.
18:34
His extended family lives on that road. He knows every gravel lane, every bend,
18:39
every fishing spot in every hill. It's his second home. Tonight he is camping
18:45
on his aunt and uncle's lower land near the river with friends, doing what they had done many summers before, fishing,
18:53
laughing, drinking, and late walks on the back roads. At one point, he and two friends decide
19:00
to take a short hike. One of them is completely sober. They're loud, relaxed,
19:05
and confident. There's no expectation of anything strange.
19:11
Then he notices something out of the corner of his eyes. In the distance, on a road he knows well, stands a house lit
19:17
up as if every switch is on. Windows are blazing, structure clears against the
19:23
dark. He stops and points. His friends at first thought nothing of it. It's just a
19:30
house. Except the witnesses know with absolute certainty that there no houses there. There has never been one at that
19:37
location. They walk closer on the gravel road and as they close the distance, the
19:43
situation shifts from odd to terrifying. Something appears on the road about 20
19:48
foot ahead of them. The description is brief and blurred by adrenaline.
19:54
They do not stand and study. All three of them break and run flat back to the
20:00
to the camp. The next day, he drives the same road in daylight in the truck just
20:06
to confirm what his memory insist on. There's nothing there. No house, no
20:12
foundation, no structure that could have been mistaken for a home in the dark.
20:18
Months later, a friend brings over a copy of the Moth Man Prophecies. Our witness has never heard of the Mo
20:25
Man legend. He watches the film and comes almost panicstricken as he recognizes the
20:31
pattern, the kind of form he and his friends saw that night. He calls his
20:36
hiking partner and tells them to watch the movie. When that friend calls back,
20:41
he is nearly hysterical. They both know that whatever they saw on
20:47
Old River Road matches closely with the archetype they had no conscious knowledge of at that time.
20:56
This is just one more point on a larger winged humanoid and mothland style map
21:01
as also adds a layer that we see in other encounters. The environment can be manipulated. Structures can appear where
21:09
none exist in everyday reality like stages, sets or lures.
21:14
The house with every light on may not have been a house at all. It may have been a projected front, a way to pull
21:21
three men deeper into a zone or something was waiting.
21:31
Now, that's a good place to shift gears from winged humanoids into something even stranger. We're going to go back
21:38
west now to a high ridge in the Sierra Neadas where the rock ring like metal
21:45
and some something insect like and intelligent drops in for a closer look.
21:51
But first, so if you're enjoying tonight's presentation and want to hear more stories like this, don't forget to
21:56
hit the like button and subscribe to Phantoms of Monsters Radio. It really helps us out to reach more people who
22:03
are searching for answers about the unexplained. Make sure to click the notification bell
22:09
so that you won't miss any of our live shows.
22:14
Now, our next witness writes in after hearing me talk on spaced out radio about crawler humanoids in the Sierra
22:21
Nevada, including a being you have called or I have called Penelope.
22:28
She recognizes something in that conversation that lines up with her very own strange encounter near Taho City
22:35
about eight years ago and she finally decides to share it.
22:40
She is solo backpacking and knows the area around Mount Dana well.
22:46
This is a gear test trip before a more serious expedition.
22:51
Not her first time at altitude. At about 5 in the afternoon, she's on a
22:56
ridge at roughly 7,000 ft. An outcrop of stone captures her attention. The rock
23:03
is oddly geometric. When she taps it, it rings.
23:08
Not like a normal mountain stone, but like a hollow tank. Intrigued, she
23:13
pockets a few pieces as samples. Now, as she is putting the rocks away
23:19
and getting ready to hike down to her chosen campsite, she hears a fluttering sound, the kind of noise a pigeon might
23:26
make when it lands nearby. She turns her head casually, expecting a
23:32
bird. What she sees instead stops her cold. Standing near her is a preying
23:39
mantis, at least 5 foot tall. It's upright. It's a ab abdomen curved
23:46
so it stands roughly chest tied to her crouched position. The posture is not
23:51
purely an insect in some ways bearing an almost as almost human. She finds
23:57
herself at eye level with it. The manis reach out reaches out grabs a piece of
24:02
food she has been eating and eats it while looking straight at her. There's
24:07
no panic in its movements. It is curious, present and utterly
24:13
honest in her perception. Then without drama, its wings extended. It takes off
24:18
and disappears. In the moments and hours after, she feels extremely nauseous and develops a
24:24
severe migraine. She rationalizes as at first as hydration or from altitude, but
24:31
the memory of the encounter remains clear as if it happened yesterday. She even tried to get a photograph, but
24:38
the bean was gone before she could make the or bring the phone up.
24:43
Now, there have been other mantis type reports out in the Sierra Neadas. Taken together, they suggest either another
24:49
former ultraterrestrial presence using secttoid avatars or a literal species
24:56
that can step closer to our layer of reality for brief interactions.
25:02
The details about the geometric stone with the ring are are fascinating. It's
25:07
it's hidden inside buried structures of unusual geology that might be associated
25:13
with their presence. We move now from a mantis that feeds in
25:19
front of a human in another kind of feeding entirely. The following report out of Maine
25:25
involves a slow blood trail of wounded deer in a scene that witnesses still
25:31
cannot make sense of. In south central Maine about seven years
25:38
ago, a bushwhacker spent three hours climbing steadily uphill before taking a break. He finds a rock with a good view,
25:46
eats, reads a bit, and notices a small stream with a short waterfall nearby.
25:53
On his way to cool off, he picks blueberries and enjoys a moment that is about as peaceful as the woods can get.
26:01
Down by the stream, he realizes something is wrong. On the stones along the bank, he sees small, fresh drops of
26:08
blood, bright and shiny. A trail of drops lead along the path
26:14
that is surprisingly easy to follow. He grabs his pack, curiosity now replacing
26:19
relaxation, and tracks the blood. The drops increase in size and the number
26:25
until he reaches a patch of flattened fern and a heavy concentration of blood.
26:31
This is clearly where something profound occurred. He decides that this is no longer
26:37
something he wants to be in the middle of and chooses to head out and report if he sees anyone.
26:43
Hours later, while setting up his hammock at a different spot, he hears a lot of rustling behind him.
26:50
He turns to see a deer with a massive slash down its side, stumbling and clearly at the edge of collapse.
26:58
It spooks when he moves, bolts downhill, and goes down about 600 yardds away. He
27:05
assumes it's the work of a predator, maybe a big cat, and leaves it to nature.
27:10
The next morning, he checks on the carcass. What he finds is not natural at all. The deer is dead, but its organs
27:17
have been rude removed and laid out neatly beside the body. The incision
27:24
along its side is shockingly clean, more like surgical cut than a claw or tooth tear. The organs are arranged, not
27:32
scattered, and nothing has touched them. There are no obvious tracks, no bite marks on the meat. No signs of
27:39
scavengers have been feeding. This is not how predators in the wild
27:45
behave. Even the needest human hunter does not typically take the time to lay out organs beside a carcass in the
27:52
middle of the woods, then leave them untouched for hours. The witness admits that he does not want to know what it
28:00
did. He's still troubled by the fact that in a forest ecosystem completely with mouths, nothing came to eat from
28:09
such an exposed easy meal. In Maine, something uses surgical
28:16
precision on the deer. Now, in our filing case, in the Cascades, something
28:21
uses psychological pressure on a tired hiker over nearly two weeks before
28:27
filing re finally revealing itself.
28:34
In August of 2009, another solo hiker sets out along the Gordon Peak Trail in
28:39
a remote stretch of the Oregon Cascades. He plans to spend roughly two weeks. The
28:46
first days are routine. He is experienced and he knows what he can
28:51
forage and fish and he expects the usual mix of mix of difficulty and reward.
29:00
On the sixth or seventh days, something changes. The hair on the back of his neck stands up and stays up.
29:07
The sense of being watched never fades. He writes it off as at first as a
29:13
mountain line in the area. That's a rational explanation. Then at night, he begins to hear how
29:20
that are not wolves, not coyotes, and not bears. The closest analog he can find is the
29:26
calls of apes and monkeys. These noises continue night after night,
29:32
coupled with movements around his camp and something rumaging through his gear. He naturally assumes is a raccoon or
29:38
bear. On the 11th day, he wakes to find his food bag, which has been correctly hung
29:45
in the tree on the ground and the line was cut cleanly, not chewed. Cut. All
29:51
his food is gone. He chooses to continue despite this, relying on his knowledge of edible
29:57
plants and fish to carry him for the next last four days.
30:03
The activity continues until the 13th night when a new behavior appears. Rocks
30:09
being begin to hit his tent. Not little pebbles from a tree, but deliberate
30:14
throws. Something is pelting him from the dark. Exhausted and free, he finally
30:20
breaks and screams into the darkness, begging whatever it is to leave him alone. Part of him hopes it's a person
30:27
who will yell back. Instead, the forest falls completely
30:33
silent for the first time at night. Then a single scream, louder and more
30:38
vicious than anything he has ever heard so far. Tears through the trees or
30:44
terrors through the trees. After that, there was nothing. Utter silence again.
30:50
He doesn't sleep, but he waits. The next day, he forces himself onward, feeling
30:56
haunted, feeling as if something is pacing him just out of sight. Toward
31:01
evening, he stops to rest, sits down, and finally sees it. Between the trees
31:07
moves a prominent tall figure bigger than any man or known animal he has ever seen, gliding through the forest without
31:14
making a sound. He shouts at it. He turns his head and looks at him. He
31:20
cannot make out precise details through the brush and the fading light, but he knows instinctively that it's what he
31:26
has been been calling cutting and and that's been cutting calling and throwing throwing stones at him.
31:33
At that point, something in him shifts. Fear gives way to anger. He throws a
31:40
rock at the figure, pulls his knife, and charges it. That is not a move I would recommend,
31:46
but in that moment, he's done being prayed on. The bean turns and runs, moving with
31:52
long, effortless strides that leave him far behind. He chases, but quickly
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exhaust himself and collapses. Eventually, he backtracks to his pack and camp.
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After that, the night was quiet. The next morning, he covers the last 10 miles on the trail head. And as he
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approaches the end, the forest slowly returns to normal. Bird, songs, insects, small animals. The sense of being
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stalked drained away. He reaches the car, sits down behind the wheel, and
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cries. Later, a ranger jokes that there are a lot of Bigfoot sightings in the area and
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suggests that it was probably a local messing with him or his imagination. But the but behavior pattern much
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matches too many Sasquatch styles reports to ignore prolong intimidation,
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food taken, rope cuts, rock throwing vocalizations of building and climb with
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one dominating scream. Once the game is over, the human is
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allowed to leave. Now, if you've been feeling the escalation building across these
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stories, we're not done yet. Um, our ninth case is perhaps the most overt example of a
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portal or parallel environment I have seen in a hiking context. It involves a
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single step, a sudden jungle, and a whispered word that sounds very much
33:21
like gloating.
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On another trip in Oregon, this time along the old Malalo Indian Trail that runs the ridges of Saddle Blanket
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Mountain at to Oakidge, a hiker experiences something that will haunt him for years. It's a beautiful August
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day, two days into his expected twoe trek. The sky is clear, the breeze is strong, and everything seems normal.
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He's walking along enjoying the sun in the wind. When in the middle of a step, everything changes. The world goes gray
33:58
and blurry as if someone had slipped a pair of barely ground prescription
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glasses over his eyes. As he continues to step, the gray darkens and the blur
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turns into a chaotic mess of shapes that do not make sense. Feels as if he passes
34:16
through a barrier. When his foot hits the ground for the second step, the environment snaps into
34:23
clarity again, but nothing around him is the same.
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It's night now with no stars. The wind is gone. The Douglas fur pines have been
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replaced by dense jungle-like vegetation. The cool mountain air has become hot,
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heavy, and humid. A continuous high-pitched scream hangs in the air.
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He feels a surge of adrenaline so intense that time seems to slow down. In one or two seconds, his senses take far
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more than they should. Every instinct in his body tells him that he's in extreme
34:57
danger. He takes one more step forward and then stops. At that moment, he hears
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a whispered word just over his right shoulder. Gotcha. He cannot tell if he hears it with his
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ears or his mind. It does not feel directed at him in a way a person would speak to another
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person. It feels like something talking to itself, pleased as if a trap had just
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captured what it was meant to catch. That quiet word is what saves him.
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Terror hits so hard he feels his heart pause. He gasps, pulls in a lung full of
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thick air, and throws himself backward, retracing the footsteps he had just taken. And as he does, he looks over his
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right shoulder and sees an arm reaching for his throat from behind.
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It is a dark hairy right arm and hand thin yet powerful covered in coarse
35:51
black hair. The hand has pale ivory spade shaped nails clean and well-kept.
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The thumb sits lower on the hand than a human thumb would closer to the wrist. As he moves back, the thumbnail grazes
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his neck without breaking the skin. The hand closes on empty air where his
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stood had been a split second earlier. Then it fades away as he crosses back through the barrier.
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He takes two more backward steps. With each step, the world brightens and the familiar firm pines come back into view.
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By the third step, he is standing once again at Saddle Blank Blanket Mountain in a clear daylight and wind. He keeps
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moving backward in terror. Only then does he see what he passed through. Hang in the air in front of him
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is an oval patch the size of a large doorway. A shimmer in the atmosphere that makes the forest behind look like
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it's underwater. By his fifth step backward, the shimmer thins and vanishes. The woods look
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perfectly normal. It had taken him nearly two days to hike
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to that point. It takes him three hours to run back to the truck. For years
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afterward, he has had nightmares about what would have happened if he had driven his vehicle through a similar
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invisible doorway on the road. He studies cases of people vanishing in full view of others and finds many that
37:19
seem to fit the pattern of sudden unexplained disappearances. He reads about parallel universes in
37:26
quantum physics. Nothing quite squares the circle of what he experienced.
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From an investigative standpoint, this looks and feels like a trap. A fixed
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portal held in place along a known trail, hidden on one side and evident on the other. Whoever or whatever owns that
37:46
hand expected him to keep walking. It may have called others.
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He was only spared because the predator behind him spoke aloud now of its success and gave him just enough warning
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to jump back. Now, we're going to close with something more familiar in terms of category, but
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not any less unsettling. An upright canine on a Smoky Mountain Trail
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that somehow leaves the witness more awake and more alive than ever before.
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Now, this final story takes us to western North Carolina near the Great Smoky Mountains in July 2021.
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Now, the witness is coming out of two years of being cooped up and needs solitude. He picks a spot in Haywood
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County for a solo camping trip, sets up camp on Friday night without incident, and heads out at dawn for a steep hike
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to beat the summer heat. As he climbs, his breathing hard focused
38:47
on the grade and the strain in his legs. At first, he barely registers the dog
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far up the trail. It is only when it keeps coming closer
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that his brain begins to flag something is off. The animal's large, much larger
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than a usual trail dog. As the distance closes, he realizes why
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it looks so strange. The animal is not on all fours. It is moving forward on
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its hind legs only with a smooth, confident gate. The fur is grayish brown. The bulk is comparable to a bear.
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He looks around and sees no one else in the trail, just himself in this thing on the remote mountain path with no easy
39:29
exit. Fear rises as he realizes he has never seen anything like this and has no idea
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what its intentions are. He decides to hold his ground and not make any sudden
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movements, hoping that if he stays calm, the creature will pass and leave him alone.
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At approximately 100 ft, it stops. It fixes him with what he describes as
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piercing eyes, and he has the powerful sense that it is soundly speaking to
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him, fearing his reading his fear and confusion. There's no overt anger in its posture.
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It feels more like an intense curiosity, the way a domestic dog might rush up to a stranger and then pause, studying
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their reaction. After this wordless exchange, the being
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steps off the trail and moves into the trees. Shortly afterwards, he's overwhelmed by the powerful stench of
40:23
sulfur so strong it makes him gag. He begins to feel dizzy and faint and sits
40:29
down on a log to catch his breath and gather his thoughts. As he sits, he tries to convince himself
40:36
that dehydration or heat might have produced an hallucination. Yet, the memory of the counter is crisp. The
40:43
sensation that the creature knew precisely what he was feeling is hard to dismiss.
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He heads back to camp, eats, and makes a practical decision. Whatever just
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happened, he doesn't want to spend another night out there. He packs up and leaves.
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In the days that follow, he realizes something else has changed. The heavy funk that had weighed on him before the
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trip had lifted. His perspective on his life had shifted in a way he cannot fully define. as if that brief intense
41:13
meeting with the upright doglike being had shaken something loose inside of
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him. Now, from our perspective, this is an immaculate fit with the upright canine
41:25
or dog man category with a twist. Now, the softer smell suggests some energetic
41:31
events are overlapping reality. The emotional after effects feel almost like a forced pattern of a break where an
41:39
encounter with a non-human intelligence snaps a human witness out of a stagnant
41:45
state. It's not always about fear. Sometimes the trail throws something at us that
41:52
also functions as a spiritual reset.
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Now when you lay these 10 encounters side by side, specific patterns emerge.
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Places go unnaturally quiet. Batteries drain at the worst possible moment. Trails that should be predictable
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suddenly produce phantom houses, faceless hikers, skeletal beast, and
42:17
jungle worlds that are only two steps away. Some forces in these stories clearly see
42:24
us as prey or as an experimental material. Others act more like lifeguards than
42:30
hunters, reaching in just far enough to keep the human body from smashing into a stone.
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And woven through all of it is the sense that our hiking maps cover only a thin layer of what is out there. Now, if you
42:44
spend enough nights in the mountains, sooner or later you hear that wrong sound in the trees or feel the hair in
42:50
your arm stand up for reasons you can't quite explain. Most people laugh it off, hike out, and
42:57
never talk about it. The witnesses tonight did speak, and their accounts give us rare windows into what might be
43:04
sharing the ridge lines, the ravines, and the switchbacks along with us. If you have walked into that silence
43:11
yourself, if you have stepped out of the reality of one of the or two strides on a lonely trail, I'd like to hear it from
43:18
you. Sometimes the only way to see the larger pattern is to gather one hiker's
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story at
#Occult & Paranormal