(A) Missing People, Odd Creatures & Glitch In The Matrix | Archive Ep227

[00:00:02] Welcome to the show, and thank you for joining me. On today's episode, I'll be covering some of the strangest phenomena experienced in our national parks, including missing people, bizarre deaths, odd creatures, glitches in the matrix, and much more. I'm Nic Ryan, and this is Paranormal Mysteries.

[00:00:38] Greetings once again and welcome. Before we start, I'd like to thank everyone for their support and generosity. And remember that anyone can show their support by sharing and reviewing the podcast, as well as visiting us at patreon.com or buymeacoffee.com.

[00:00:55] And if you have a paranormal experience to share, you may contact me by email at paranormalmysteriespodcast at gmail.com, through voicemail at speakpipe.com slash paranormalmysteries, or on our website at paranormalmysteriespodcast.com. The year was 1872. Mark Twain published his new book, Roughing It.

[00:01:23] William Buffalo Bill Cody was awarded the Medal of Honor. And Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to run for president. But on March 1st of that same year, something also happened that would change how people enjoyed and interacted with the great outdoors.

[00:01:40] President Alicius S. Grant signed the Yellowstone National Park Protection Act into law, and the world's first national park was born. On August 25th, 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed the act creating the National Park Service, a new federal bureau in the Department of the Interior, responsible for protecting the

[00:02:02] 35 national parks and monuments then managed by the department, and those yet to be established. Over the decades, many more parks have been added to the list, and today America has a total of 63 national parks spanning from the northern reaches of Alaska to the waters

[00:02:21] of the Florida Keys, and include over 84 million acres. While the National Park System is actually comprised of 423 national park sites, only 63 of them have the National Park designation in their names. The other sites fall into different National Park System categories like National Historic

[00:02:42] Sites, National Monuments, National Seashores, National Recreation Areas, and many others. In 2020, the National Park Service recorded a total of 237,064,332 park visitors. This number, while obviously down from previous years, is still a reminder of the staggering

[00:03:06] amount of people that look to our national parks in order to provide them with an easy and accessible way to escape their everyday lives, in some cases even offering certain visitors their very first introduction to the wilderness.

[00:03:22] I too have spent countless hours within our national parks throughout the country, and I can attest to their beauty and the sense of adventure they invoke. But along with the breathtaking scenery and wildlife, our national parks possess a darker

[00:03:36] side that an unfortunate few get to experience every year. These experiences come in many forms, ranging from terrifying encounters with unimaginable creatures to people vanishing, never to be seen again. In recent decades, many of these cases have been brought to the forefront thanks to retired

[00:03:55] police officer and the author of the missing 411 series of books, David Politis. Meanwhile, his efforts to shed light on some of these strange phenomena have also uncovered some very disturbing facts about the National Park Service itself.

[00:04:11] Facts that have made many people question what the National Park Service may be hiding. I'll be coming back around to the topic of the National Park Service itself in future episodes, but for the moment I'd like to present you with three separate stories that

[00:04:26] occurred in three different national parks. All of which seem to involve very different phenomena, but may actually have more in common with one another than we think. This first story was given to me by a poster on Reddit by the name of Edups401, and it's

[00:04:44] entitled, Strange Experiences in Yosemite National Park. And the poster says, This happened around August of this year. I'm not sure what we experienced or if there was anything paranormal about it, but whatever. It's also a bit of a long post, so I'm sorry about that.

[00:05:03] So this was a hike up to Half Dome. We had a campground about 20 minutes drive away from the trailhead, and the group was composed of me, an 18-year-old male, my uncle, a 32-year-old male, and my uncle's friend, I'll call him D.

[00:05:18] There were two girls with us, but they aren't relevant to the story. My uncle and his friend are both Christian, so there were no substances consumed that could induce the feelings I will be talking about.

[00:05:30] We got to our campsite, set up camp, and go to sleep after eating. We plan to wake up at 4 and start the hike by 4.30. I randomly wake up at 3.30am, like completely wide awake, and I look out of my hammock and

[00:05:45] I remember feeling this odd feeling as if I was woken up by something, and I remember looking out at the moonlit scene. The moon was very bright for some reason, and thinking to myself, it looks like a dream.

[00:05:57] I laid back down in the hammock but couldn't go back to sleep, and I end up waking my uncle and my friend up at 3.50. My uncle asks me, were you walking around at night? This is important, and I say no and ask why.

[00:06:12] He says that he woke up for some reason and could hear someone walking around, not like an animal but a person. I say, huh, weird, and we brush it off. We get to the trailhead around 4.30, and as everyone is unloading from the car, D says

[00:06:27] he's going to use the bathroom, which there are a couple of before the trailhead. I walk behind him for some time before falling behind and waiting for my uncle who forgot something in the car.

[00:06:38] The short, straight road from the parking lot runs directly into a T intersection with the road to the trailhead, and the bathroom is directly across from the intersection through the field a little. Those who have been there know what I'm talking about.

[00:06:52] We get to the intersection, and we wait for D to come out of the bathroom. We wait about 10 minutes before I go back and check the bathroom, but he isn't there.

[00:07:00] I get back to my uncle and I tell him that, and he says, weird, maybe he went back to the car or something, and we decide to wait a bit more. By 5.15, we begin worrying.

[00:07:12] My uncle goes to check the car while I wait at the intersection to make sure that we don't miss him if he went down the road away from the trailhead. My uncle returns and says that he isn't there either.

[00:07:23] We decide that he maybe went up to the trailhead without us for some reason, and walk up there in about 10 minutes. He isn't there either. We are kind of baffled now because there are no other logical places he would go.

[00:07:35] I decide to run back and check the car and bathroom again. I meet him halfway before I get to the intersection. He is sweaty and disheveled, with a weird look in his eyes. I say, where have you been?

[00:07:48] He then says that he went to the bathroom, and when he got back to the intersection, that we weren't there, and that he just assumed we went to the trailhead and started walking, and then met me. I say, what do you mean?

[00:08:00] We waited at the intersection for over a half an hour and checked the car, bathroom, and trailhead and you weren't there. He says, well, I don't know. I went to the bathroom. He then asks me where my uncle is, and I say that he's at the trailhead.

[00:08:14] And he asks me again, and I tell him again, and I note that it's weird that he asked me twice. As we're crossing the bridge to the trailhead, he sees a light off on the riverbank and exclaims, oh maybe that's him.

[00:08:26] And I just look at him and keep walking. I thought his behavior was very strange, like he wasn't thinking straight. We finally get on with the hike and it goes by as normal, except that we seem to be losing

[00:08:39] things, such as my uncle's small red flashlight, one of the girl's gloves, a water bottle, etc. It's like we just simply forgot about the items and couldn't remember where we could have left them.

[00:08:50] On the way back, it got dark and we turned on our flashlights, and as we neared the end of the hike, after the two waterfalls, it begins to seem as if we've been walking for far too long.

[00:09:00] My uncle also confirms this, asking me, doesn't it seem like it's taking way longer to get back? I say, yeah, I was just thinking that. We keep walking, but it still seems like we weren't making any progress.

[00:09:13] I've been on that trail many times, and as I was walking I couldn't spot any familiar landmarks. It was weird, there was this odd feeling in the air, sort of a slight menacing feeling. It's hard to describe. I remember thinking, it feels like the woods are alive.

[00:09:29] We remark three more times about how long the hike is taking and begin to laugh at it because it felt so ridiculous. After a bit, we finally and suddenly find ourselves on the final stretch and make it back to the car.

[00:09:43] Now all of this seemed odd at the time, but I just brushed it off. I only realized how weird those events felt after we got home and my aunt asked my uncle, were you camping? And he says, yeah, how'd you know?

[00:09:55] As we didn't tell them where we were going since it was kind of last minute. She says that she had an odd dream where she sees my uncle in a tent in a forest somewhere, and someone is outside his tent.

[00:10:07] She says that she couldn't see who it was but knew that there was a presence there. She says that she woke up around three and had the strong urge to pray for him, and she did.

[00:10:18] My uncle kind of looks at me after that like, are you hearing this? I honestly don't know what to make of all this, but I wanted to post it, to hear your opinions.

[00:10:32] This next report has been posted on many different sites and is fairly well known within missing person cases. This particular article comes to us from Mysterious Universe and is written by Brent Swancer. This article is entitled, The Bizarre Disappearance and Death of Charles McCuller at Crater Lake.

[00:10:51] And the article says this. The scene of this very odd story is the region of Crater Lake National Park, located in Klamath County within the majestic Cascade Range of southwest Oregon in the United States. Here the land is dominated by sprawling vistas of breathtakingly beautiful forests, fields

[00:11:11] of wildflowers, tranquil meadows and soaring cliffs and peaks, all with some of the cleanest air found anywhere in the world. Sitting within all of this natural splendor, nestled among trees and sheer cliffs that reach 7,000 to 8,000 feet into the sky, and contrasting with the verdant green around

[00:11:29] it, is a striking circle of azure blue, its surface so placid and clear that it is almost as if it is a mirror reflecting the clouds, which seem to swirl upon the lake itself. This is the stunning Crater Lake, which covers 21 square miles with intensely blue waters

[00:11:47] that plunge to depths of up to 1,949 feet, making it the deepest lake in the United States and the third deepest in the world based on average depth. So deep in fact that it was long rumored to be bottomless.

[00:12:03] Crater Lake is a caldera lake sitting in the dormant volcano Mount Mazama, which formed the lake during its last spectacular eruption in 5700 BC, a beautiful remnant of a violent natural cataclysm. It is to this majestic place that in 1975, 19-year-old Charles McCuller was drawn.

[00:12:24] In 1974, the aspiring photographer had left his home in Virginia to go on a cross-country photography expedition, traveling by bus and stopping at various places along the way to go hiking, get in adventures, and take pictures for a photographic travel journal.

[00:12:41] In January of 1975, he arrived in Eugene, Oregon, where he stayed with a friend for a few weeks, and it was during this time that he decided to go out and do some winter photography work at the scenic Crater Lake National Park.

[00:12:55] He planned to take a two-day trip to the lake, packing up his camping equipment and heading out on his own. At the time, the park was frigid, covered with snow, but he was well prepared for the conditions and had outdoor experience.

[00:13:08] At the time, it seemed like a normal thing for the intrepid adventurer and photographer to do, so his friend thought nothing of it when Charles said that he would be back in a few days before heading into the wilderness with camera in hand.

[00:13:21] It would be the last time anyone would see him alive. When two days came and went with no sign of Charles, his friend at first just assumed that he had decided to extend his camping trip, but when another day passed with still no sign, authorities were notified.

[00:13:38] They quickly found witnesses who had seen the missing man in the Diamond Lake area, about 45 minutes by car from Crater Lake, and it was believed that he had continued his trip from there and arrived safely at the lake.

[00:13:51] Other witnesses claimed that Charles had headed out hiking along the North Road, which was odd because there had been about 5 feet of snow along that route at the time. It was thought that he might have changed trails after encountering the thick snow,

[00:14:04] but no one knew for sure and there was no sign of him or his campsite in the area. A search was launched in the wilderness where he was thought to have set up camp, which rapidly

[00:14:14] grew to involve the FBI, yet efforts were hampered by immense drifts of snow, which were at times over 12 feet deep. The search included Charles' own father, who flew out to spend the summer aiding in search efforts and camping out on the shore of the lake.

[00:14:30] Even after the snows melted, not a single trace of the missing man was turned up during this time, despite exhaustive efforts on the part of authorities and the tireless efforts of Charles' father, and it seemed as if the forest had just swallowed him up.

[00:14:45] The complete lack of any sign of the missing man caused speculation that Charles may have changed his plans and left the national park altogether without telling anyone, possibly running off to start a new life somewhere. But family and friends insisted that he would never have done this.

[00:15:01] Law enforcement seemed to lean on the idea that he had simply gotten lost and died out in the wilderness. Another idea was that he had been kidnapped or even murdered. Indeed, Charles' friends and family suspected that he had been the victim of some sort of

[00:15:15] foul play, which would explain the FBI's involvement, although they made no public statement to this effect, and typically the FBI does not get involved in missing person cases unless there is some sort of foul play suspected.

[00:15:29] It was so odd that the FBI had become involved that a friend of Charles who was heavily involved in the search even sent a letter to the Senator William L. Scott asking about this, and he would say this, quote,

[00:15:43] The Federal Bureau of Investigation on two occasions has indicated that it has no authority to enter cases of missing persons. You can imagine my surprise while in Oregon searching for clues, I picked up a newspaper

[00:15:55] and read that the FBI, as well as other federal agencies, were engaged in a search for a missing person. The Senator replied, The FBI has no authority to investigate missing persons unless there is evidence to indicate a kidnapping has taken place.

[00:16:10] After returning home and reviewing the information contained in the police reports that we possess, plus maps of the area searched and the intensity of these searches without finding any signs of equipment, we concluded that Charles was not the victim of foul weather, but rather

[00:16:25] a victim of foul play. End quote. However, authorities shied away from the idea of foul play because there was no evidence of it. Their main theories were that he had run off or suffered some sort of misadventure out there in the wilderness.

[00:16:41] In the meantime, there was no sign of the missing man, no new leads, and it was as if he had just vanished off the face of the earth. It was not until the following year, of October of 1976, that a pair of hikers found a battered,

[00:16:55] torn up backpack down in a remote canyon located a full 12 miles from where Charles had been supposedly camped out, which they brought to a ranger's office. In a side pocket of the backpack was found a set of keys belonging to a Volkswagen, which

[00:17:09] had been the type of car that Charles had owned. Sensing that a break in the cold case had been found, rangers Larry Smith and Marion Jack ran a comparison with a photocopy of Charles McCuller's actual car key, and found it was a perfect match.

[00:17:25] A patrol was immediately sent out on horseback to the area where the backpack had been found near a place called Bybee Creek, and it was not long before human remains were found. And although it seemed like the final piece of the puzzling disappearance, things would

[00:17:40] only get stranger from there. There upon a log was a pair of jeans that seemed to be in remarkably good condition for how long they had been out there in the elements, but there was no shirt, coat, or boots anywhere to be seen.

[00:17:54] Within the socks that poked out from the jean legs were found to be broken off toe bones, and the jeans themselves contained nothing but some pieces of snapped off shin bones. Adding to the weirdness was the fact that the belt on the jeans had been undone, and

[00:18:09] the buttons opened, as if he at some point had decided to take them off in the frigid cold. Besides the toe and shin bones, the rest of the body was simply gone, and one ranger described it as if the man had simply... melted away.

[00:18:24] Lying a full twelve feet away from this bizarre sight was the crown of a skull and some tiny fragments of bone. A meticulous thorough search of the surroundings turned up no further trace of Charles' remains,

[00:18:36] and the majority of his body remained missing, as did all of his clothing except those jeans. Additionally, none of Charles' other personal belongings, such as his wallet and camera, were found either. Besides the completely bizarre condition of the remains, it was baffling as to how Charles

[00:18:54] had even gotten to that location to begin with. The area was extremely rugged and remote, and at the time of the disappearance, it would have been engulfed in deep drifts of snow that even skiers and snowmobiles would have a hard time with.

[00:19:07] How had he managed to hike twelve miles away from his camp in deep snow on foot, and without his shoes on? And indeed, why would he have gone to that location to begin with? The missing clothes was explained by authorities as being due to something called paradoxical

[00:19:23] undressing, in which someone with hypothermia will have the sensation of being too hot and paradoxically take their clothes off in freezing conditions. However, where had the clothes gone? Also, how would that explain the condition of the body?

[00:19:37] Where had the rest of him gone, and why was it in that state? Despite all of these anomalies, authorities would deem it a case of death by natural causes, with the body having been ravaged by wildlife after death. Case closed.

[00:19:52] However, Charles' family thinks differently, and his brother Steve would have this to say. Quote, If only those broken off shin bones could have talked to us, what do you think they'd say? I'd bet they'd say something like this.

[00:20:06] I hitched a ride with this creepy guy who stole my camera equipment and money and shot me in the head. Then on a clear day in the dead of winter he hauled my body into the remotest part of Crater Lake,

[00:20:17] took my shirt and boots off and set me up on a log and left, figuring the animals would destroy the evidence by spring. And hey, I guess it worked, because the cops ruled my death to be from natural causes. My dad doesn't buy it though. End quote.

[00:20:34] The case of Charles McCuller was brought out into the open by David Paulides, author of the Missing 411 series of books, and indeed he claims it is one of the most unsettling he has ever encountered. It seems to be for good reason,

[00:20:47] because many eerie and spooky clues seem to orbit this case. How did McCuller end up in that lonely spot, and what are we to make of the otherworldly condition of his remains? What happened to him out there? Was this just death by misadventure and the work of scavengers?

[00:21:04] Or is there something else going on here? Whatever the case may be, the mysterious vanishing and subsequent death of Charles McCuller is rather ominous and creepy, and something we seem to be unlikely to ever get to the bottom of.

[00:21:22] This next experience was given to me by another poster on Reddit by the name of Relatively Funkadelic, and it's called Undefined Humanoid Mimic Encounter in Big Bend National Park. The witness says this. I've been searching for some semblance of similarity in someone else's encounter for three years now,

[00:21:44] hoping another's experience might align even a bit with my own to validate it. Until last night, I'd found details aligning with my own encounter, but nothing I felt was concrete enough to make my story not sound absolutely insane. It still does sound insane, I know,

[00:22:01] and I have no way to further explain any of it. So all I have is what I witnessed. I found a post here from 18 days ago that sounds eerily similar to my own, the key differences being the familiarity of the voices mimicked,

[00:22:15] leading me to wonder if this thing had been watching us for a while. To get both of our voices down, it would have had to have heard us at the most recent 10 hours before we had left for work.

[00:22:26] To preface this, I typed all of this up as a DM to send someone else after reading the other guy's story, so the syntax is gonna be awful. I'm sorry that all this reads like a trashy DM,

[00:22:38] but I honestly get terrified of this thing when I spend too much time talking about it, so I'd rather not type it all out again. I've been wanting to write this out since it happened in 2018 or 2019, but I legit get really uncomfortable the moment that I start.

[00:22:53] I'm sure the thing isn't actually watching or whatever, but I don't know. I just hate retelling it, honestly. I think it's important to share though, because finding someone else's story led me to finding several others

[00:23:05] that seemed to align with whatever I saw, and it was honestly so cathartic. I figured that maybe someone else might be in the same boat and need some sort of validation that they aren't insane. So, I was living down in West Texas in this national park

[00:23:21] where the restaurant I was working at at the time rested atop a 15-minute hike up a mountain trail from the housing they had us in. I closed up the restaurant after everyone left each night,

[00:23:31] so I was always an hour or two later coming down the hill than everyone else. It was usually pretty empty, really quiet, and uncommon to encounter anyone else as the only thing on top of the mountain is the closed restaurant, gift shop, store, and some of the trailheads.

[00:23:47] There isn't much reason for anyone else to be on the trail at that hour. This one night I'm coming down. There was no moon so it was pitch black, an empty trail, and characteristically quiet.

[00:23:59] I rounded this last bend to get to my house right before I get off trail to take a shortcut through the thicket of cactus and brush, when I hear my best friend and roommate call out my name as clear as day, in the other direction.

[00:24:12] He said my name, and when I turned, he said it again. In retrospect, it sounded funny. It was close, 15 yards maybe, but it sounded far off at the same time, like if someone recorded his voice from afar but played it very nearby.

[00:24:28] It just sounded off, but not enough to flip a switch immediately. And maybe I'm painting the memory of it differently than it actually sounded. So I'm facing my house maybe 50 yards away, and the voice comes from directly to my left,

[00:24:42] on this foothill of the mountain that we'd hike around on sometimes. It has much more tree coverage than the trail I was on, and considerably more than the thicket separating me from the clearing surrounding my house. If you walked five feet in the direction the voice came from,

[00:24:56] you'd completely disappear from view of anyone on the trail, or on the back porch of the house, immediately. So, hearing my friend's voice calling me over, I was like, oh cool, we're night hiking, and I turn to follow it.

[00:25:10] But right before I take my first step into the tree line, I hear his actual voice down on our porch saying, hey, who you talking to? Which stops me. I turn back to face my house confused,

[00:25:23] just in time to see this thing burst out of the thicket I was just about to shortcut through, before hearing the first voice and turning away, and from the exact spot I had walked down every single night. And this thing bolts.

[00:25:37] It was humanoid technically, but the thing was tall and way too skinny for a human, like at least eight feet tall, but slim. It looked inhumanly slender. He was hunched over and running like he had just burst off a track mark,

[00:25:51] but it kept the same form the whole time, and never got all the way upright. As for the color, that has always messed with me, because for one I'm colorblind, and it was like a greenish yellowy thing, and I get greens and yellows mixed up a lot.

[00:26:06] It looked like it was giving off its own glow, which has always sounded so absolutely ludicrous that I never tell anyone that I do not absolutely trust to give them the benefit of the doubt, before thinking that I am completely BSing. Because if I had heard this story,

[00:26:20] I would honestly think that someone at the very least might be. Our back porch light was on though, and the thing lined up with where it would have been shining, so if this thing was translucent, it definitely could have taken on that sheen by reflecting the porch light.

[00:26:35] The colors do kind of line up I guess. If you'd reflected the light, it may have looked like this thing's color, but it certainly wasn't identical. Honestly though, I swear it had its own shine to it, like looking at a glow stick that's dying.

[00:26:49] More than enough to see, but kind of faint. Regardless, it was a light that definitely wasn't there a second before I had gotten to the shortcut. It would have stuck out for the last 50 yards of the walk at least.

[00:27:02] It should be noted that if I had followed that thing's voice, two things would have happened. One, I would have completely disappeared from view of anyone. And two, I would have turned my back on whatever that thing was, and entered into a thicket of trees, weeds, and cactus

[00:27:18] far too dense for me to turn around, run, fight back, or anything. And that trail that I would have gone towards leads directly to the edge of a cliff that drops down into a massive break in the mountain, known as the window in Big Bend National Park,

[00:27:33] that cleanly drops all of the 6,000 feet to the wide open desert below. That could be the purpose of that direction. To be honest, if I was going to do something nefarious, it would be the perfect place to both find someone

[00:27:47] and lead them quickly to a spot where no one else would come upon you. Legit, in the middle of the day, you could probably make someone disappear over there if you wanted to. Anyway, how this thing was running, it immediately felt like I had spooked it.

[00:28:01] Like how a deer runs off at a noise. But this thing was different, in that it seemed a lot more determined. It seemed intelligent, aware of its own movement, not just acting out of instinct.

[00:28:12] Kind of like spooking a person if they'd been watching you from the bushes or something. Spooked, but sentient, and definitely acting like I just foiled some nefarious plan. So naturally, I also bolt, exposing my back to this thing,

[00:28:26] but taking the opposite, slightly longer way back to my porch. My buddy, God bless his soul, is still there when I make it, and he asks me, Who are you with? His face is confused, and he keeps looking past me, and I'm like, You heard it too, right?

[00:28:42] And he says, Yeah, where are they? And I was like, What? There was multiple? Apparently, from his perspective, he had heard multiple voices alongside my own, all carrying on and joking around, talking back and forth pretty loudly.

[00:28:57] He said that there was at least three other voices talking to mine, but that it sounded like a whole crowd coming down the trail. He said that he could clearly hear us getting closer and closer for the past few minutes,

[00:29:07] and just assumed that I'd run into a hiking group and talked with them as they headed down, which was not the most uncommon thing in the daytime, but pretty uncommon for that hour of night. It took me a minute to show him that I wasn't messing with him

[00:29:21] and had not just split off from a group of hikers. I was completely alone and had not vocalized a word until he called up to ask, Who are you with? It took a second to even express my side of what was going on.

[00:29:33] I was so freaked out I couldn't find the words to actually explain, so I just kept shouting, I swear to God, I just heard your voice and then this thing. Dude, this thing. Or something similar. Eventually it registers that there were no other lights on the trail.

[00:29:49] I wasn't using a flashlight that night, so maybe there actually was some moon out, and I had just heard his voice calling me off trail and into the dark. And we both began trying to figure out what we had just witnessed.

[00:30:03] Now this part might seem a little crazy, but I'm not implying anything. I'm just saying this is what I had been doing on the walk down before this happened. So obviously, walking home solo, I hadn't actually said a word.

[00:30:15] Whoever he heard was certainly not me, and I certainly didn't come with a crowd. But I had been praying like crazy on the hike down. There had been this super dark negative energy in the house lately, and I was just trying to surround myself with light and positivity,

[00:30:30] asking God to give me strength before I walked back in. And out of nowhere, midway through the trail, I got this absolutely overwhelming joy, like an absolute ecstasy. I was screaming inside, happy as bones and just felt like I could take on the whole world.

[00:30:45] Like no matter what came, I could take it. Maybe I am implying something, because call me crazy, but I've always felt like that had something to do with how the night turned out, as opposed to how it maybe would have. I don't know.

[00:31:00] I know that part really does make me sound insane, but so does the rest of it, so whatever. I certainly don't think it was a coincidence. I'm just not sure what to make of any of it. Every detail means every detail,

[00:31:12] and that's just what was going on as the walk was happening. It would have been a noteworthy and memorable night had that thing not done any of this. It was that powerful of an energy. Anyway, that's pretty much it. The only other thing is our memories of it.

[00:31:29] Out of nowhere, I just sort of stopped thinking about it. Not like forgot, but like it was hidden behind some thick fog in my head. The next morning, I told the story to a friend, and she uncharacteristically shut me down and said something like,

[00:31:43] Y'all are just crazy and getting scared of these mountains. And she just walked off. It really wasn't like her to just dismiss someone, especially a friend, without hearing them out. She was a real empathetic lady.

[00:31:55] It was like she'd heard something that triggered a memory that she refused to touch, and shut it down before it got too close. I don't know, I could be reading into it, but that's what happened a couple of times with this story.

[00:32:08] Anyway, we'd been living on that mountain off and on for a few years at that point, and had never once heard or seen anything remotely similar to that thing. Until that night, we'd never even heard a story even vaguely resembling that.

[00:32:21] It wasn't like we got spooked of our own house, or the trail we took twice a day, every day. And it wasn't like we were seeing and hearing things based on stories that we'd projected into the darkness. But the weirdest thing happened the moment she walked away.

[00:32:36] It was like a fog just slowly poured over the memory, and the last time I remember thinking of it was that moment. And then it just disappeared for months. How in the world does something that massive and that frightening happen in your life,

[00:32:49] and you just stop thinking about it? And then one day it just popped back up. I was honestly so surprised and unsure of how I hadn't thought of it in so long. It was almost more baffling than anything we actually witnessed.

[00:33:03] I asked my friend just before I sent this if he had felt the same fog thing, and he said, absolutely. He doesn't really like talking about that night, honestly, and he's told me that. But I could not help but bring it up as often as possible,

[00:33:16] hoping that by talking it through, we'd find some sort of explanation for any of what happened. Even as I typed this message though, I felt like I'd asked him a million times already, and just forgotten his answer. Maybe I have.

[00:33:30] That isn't a super uncommon thing to do, I guess. Anyway, that's pretty much everything. I really felt like I needed to convey as many details as I could possibly remember, just in case someone reading this has had any sort of experience with any part of it.

[00:33:45] A mimic or a humanoid. Or the memory loss. Or anything. I really don't know what to make of all this. All I have are the details of that night, and my memory doing something bizarre afterward. I have never known what to make of it,

[00:33:58] but the other guy's post from a few weeks back, honestly helped me after three years of grappling with this experience. Just seeing something that might be similar, seems like I've learned as much about it as I honestly feel comfortable knowing.

[00:34:12] I just figured that maybe someone else might be in the same boat, and maybe need to see some sort of validation. Anyway, thanks for reading. Our national parks are most definitely a place of peace and refuge.

[00:34:28] And in the words of naturalist, author, and father of the national parks, John Muir, thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home. That wildness is a necessity.

[00:34:44] And that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains... of life. I fully agree with John Muir, but I can't help but wonder what other phenomena lies in wait within our national parks.

[00:35:02] And what else may be seeking refuge... within their borders. Have you seen, heard, or witnessed something paranormal in a national park? If so, please contact me through email, voicemail, or on our website, via the links in the show notes. Until next time,

[00:35:22] I hope you all have a safe and healthy rest of the week, as we uncover even more experiences... involving paranormal mysteries.