We've all heard the popular tales.

The terrifying red eyed shadow of the Mothman, a herald of disaster.

The poltergeist torment of the Bell family, A haunting so violent it was recognized by the state of Tennessee.

We've heard of the strange lights on Brown Mountain and the shadowy form of Bigfoot known here as the Wood Booger.

These stories are the gateways, the well worn paths into the dark woods of Appalachian folklore.

But the mountains are vast and the deepest hollers hide stories that are not told so often, stories that are quieter, stranger, and in many ways more disturbing.

These are the legends that are whispered, not shouted.

They are the true unsolved horrors and the chilling accounts that blur the line between the natural and the profoundly unnatural.

These are the untold legends of the Appalachian Mountains.

The most unsettling fear in these mountains isn't always the monster you can see.

It's the one you can hear, the one that sounds familiar.

There is a rule passed down through generations, known by anyone who spent enough time in the deep woods.

If you are out in the forest and you hear someone call your name, you don't answer.

No matter how much it sounds like your mother, your brother or your best friend, no matter how convincing, how filled with panic or love that voice sounds, you don't turn around, you don't acknowledge it.

You just get up and walk away.

And you don't run.

Running, they say, excites it.

This is the fear of the mimic in Scottish and Irish lore, brought over by the 1st settlers.

It was called a fetch, A spectral AA doppelganger whose appearance was a grim omen of death.

But in the isolation of the Appalachian hills, that legend mutated.

It became something more predatory.

It's not just a sign of something bad, it is the bad thing.

Hikers and hunters tell stories of being deep in the wilderness, miles from any living soul, only to hear a clear voice call their name from just behind the tree line.

They tell of hearing a perfect imitation of a loved one crying for help, trying to lure them off the path and into the dense brush.

One man checking his property line in rural Kentucky recalled hearing his wife call him for dinner, her voice clear as day.

But he was 2 miles from his house, and his wife was at work in the next town over.

Another story passed around forums of Appalachian Trail hikers tells of a young woman who, while camping with her father, heard him whispering to her from outside the tent in the middle of the night, telling her to come out and see the stars.

The only problem was, her father was snoring loudly right next to her.

In some tales, it's not a human voice at all.

It's the cry of an infant, a baby wailing in the middle of a dark forest, a sound designed to trigger our deepest instinct to help.

It's a sound that cuts through the night and seems to come from just a few yards away in a thicket of briars.

But those who follow the sound, pushing through the thorns to find the child, are never seen again.

Or they are found days later, miles from where they started, with no memory of what happened and a persistent, vacant terror in their eyes.

These entities are known by many names.

Haints, the old word for a spirit flesh Gates, a newer term for a thing that wears the shape of what it's not.

But the core of the terror is the same.

It's a psychological predator.

It doesn't just want to scare you, it wants to fool you.

It wants you to acknowledge it.

It wants you to let it in.

They say If you answer, you give it permission.

You invite it to take your voice or your skin.

This fear of the uninvited, the mimic at the door, is so ingrained in the culture that it has its own architectural defense.

Drive through the rural parts of the South and you may still see it, Porch ceilings painted a very specific, pale, chalky shade of blue.

They call it haint blue.

The tradition comes from the Gullah Geechee people of the Low Country, but it's spread deep into the mountains.

The belief has two variations.

The first is that the spirits or haunts are tricked into thinking the ceiling is the sky and they pass right through, confused, unable to find entry to the home.

The 2nd, and more sinister, is that haunts cannot cross water.

That pale blue-green paint mimics the color of water, creating a spiritual barrier that the uninvited entity cannot or will not cross.

It is a line of defense painted on the home against the thing that whispers your name from the dark.

This idea of wrongness, of something pretending to be natural, has taken on a more physical form in recent years.

It's a creature that has become one of the region's most disturbing new legends.

People are seeing something in the woods, something that looks like a deer but isn't.

They call it the not deer.

The accounts are chillingly consistent.

You see it on the side of the road at dusk or standing just inside the woods on a hike.

At first glance, it's just a deer.

But then you notice the details are wrong.

Its proportions are off.

The legs are too long or they bend in the wrong direction.

The neck is too stiff or too long.

Its movements are jerky, uncoordinated, like a puppet, as if its bones are not connected properly.

It glitches, moving in sharp, sudden frames like a bad film reel.

Some report seeing a deer with a face that is too small for its head, or one that moves with a predator's gait, not a prey animal's.

Most terrifying of all are the eyes.

A deer, a prey animal, has eyes on the sides of its head, giving it a wide field of vision to spot predators.

The not deer is reported to have eyes that face forward like a human, like a predator, and it doesn't run.

A normal deer will bolt at the sight of a person.

The not deer just stands and watches.

Witnesses report a feeling of overwhelming dread, a primal instinct screaming that the thing they are looking at is deeply, fundamentally wrong.

It's the gaze of an Abacus, not an animal.

It's calculating.

Some have even reported it standing on its hind legs, not like a deer rearing in defense, but standing comfortably like a man before dropping back to all fours and glitching away into the trees.

Skeptics, of course, have a plausible and frankly equally horrifying explanation.

Chronic wasting disease, or CWD.

It's a very real, incurable and fatal neurological disease spreading through deer populations in North America.

It's a prion disease.

Like mad cow.

It attacks the brain, causing the deer to become emaciated, to drool, to lose their fear of humans, and to move in bizarre, uncoordinated ways.

They call it zombie deer disease.

So what is the not deer?

Is it a modern Cryptid?

A spirit of the woods?

Is it the same entity that mimics a human voice, now trying and failing to mimic an animal's form?

Or is it something even more terrifying, A real sickness ravaged animal, its brain destroyed by disease, staring at you with an aggression it should not have?

In Appalachia, the line between the two is often meaningless.

The horror is the same, but the mimic and the not Deer are not the only things people have seen for centuries.

Long before the 1st settlers, the Cherokee spoke of a race of liver eating witches.

One in particular was a master of the mimic.

They called her Utlonta, or Spearfinger.

Spearfinger was a witch who could change her shape.

She would often appear as a harmless old woman, a grandmotherly figure who would wander into a village and offer to brush the hair of the children.

She was the trusted stranger, the kind face that offered comfort.

She would sing to them and gently stroke their hair, lulling them to sleep.

The true horror of Spearfinger was her patience.

She was a monster you invited into your home, into your family.

She would win the trust of the entire village before she would strike.

And when a child was asleep, she would use her one terrible secret.

Her right forefinger was not a finger at all, but a long, razor sharp blade of stone like Obsidian, which she kept hidden under a fold of skin.

With it, she would Pierce the child's back, a tiny pinprick wound over the liver.

She would magically cut out their liver and then magically heal the wound, leaving no mark.

The child would wake up feeling tired, and a day or two later they would sicken and die of a mysterious illness.

Spearfinger would devour the Livers, her one source of power and immortality.

She was a deceiver, a creature that hid its monstrosity behind a familiar, trusting face.

The Cherokee hunters eventually tracked her down after medicine men divine the source of the deaths.

They set a trap, a pit with sharpened stakes.

But her skin, they learned, was like stone.

Arrows and Spears bounced off her.

The hunters were about to be slaughtered when a great bird, a titmouse, flew down and landed on her right hand.

It sang una hlu, Una hlu, the Cherokee word for heart.

The hunters understood her heart was not in her chest, but in her right hand, hidden in the palm of her stone finger.

A great warrior shot an arrow into her palm and the stone skinned witch was finally destroyed.

But not all monsters are so subtle.

Some are raw, brutal force and some have a more modern and perhaps more terrifying origin.

This brings us to the Land Between the Lakes.

Today, it's a National Recreation Area, a sliver of land in Kentucky and Tennessee, nestled between two massive man made lakes.

It's 170,000 acres of forest and swampland, a popular spot for camping and hunting.

But it wasn't always this way.

Before the 1960s, this was the land between the rivers.

It was home to hundreds of families, small towns and communities like Golden Pond in Eddyville that had been there for generations.

Then the Tennessee Valley Authority, the TVA, decided to build the dams that would create the lakes.

They systematically bought out every single property.

Over 700 families were forced to leave their homes, often under threat of eminent domain.

This wasn't a gentle exodus.

It was a forced removal.

Whole towns were drowned.

Cemeteries were hastily relocated, but many were lost.

Family graves were submerged.

And today, when the water level is low, boaters can sometimes see the tops of forgotten headstones breaking the surface.

The land was flooded, the people scattered, leaving behind a new man made wilderness dotted with the flooded ruins of old homes and the graves of the forgotten.

It is a place with a deep modern scar, a place of displacement and anger.

And in this scar, something has taken root.

Since the 1970s, reports have trickled out of the Land Between the Lakes, Reports of a creature.

It's not a bear.

It's not a man.

Locals call it the Beast of LBL.

The descriptions are primal, A bipedal wolf like creature, 7 to 8 feet tall, covered in shaggy dark hair with glowing red or yellow eyes.

It is a dog man, a werewolf, but one without the lunar cycle.

It is simply and always a monster.

The stories are terrifying.

Campers who hear bone chilling howls just outside their tents.

Hunters who find massive, unidentifiable tracks.

But the most prominent legend is that of a family attacked in the 1980's.

The story, now a piece of regional folklore, claims a family was mauled in their camper, torn apart by something within human strength.

The more paranoid version of the legend claims the TVA knew the creature was there, that the creation of the dams and the forced removal of the population wasn't just for hydroelectric power.

It was to create a buffer zone, a quarantined wilderness for a monster they couldn't control.

The Land Between the Lakes is a place of profound unease, a land taken from its people and given back to the wild.

And in that wild an old fear thrives, the fear of the wolf that walks like a man.

Is the beast a simple Cryptid?

Or is it an avatar of the anger of the land itself, a manifestation of the trauma inflicted on the people and the graves that were drowned?

This fear of the Wildman, the man who has become a beast, is a recurring theme.

It's a line that feels perilously thin in the deep isolation of the mountains.

For as long as people have lived in these mountains, there have been stories of Wildman, feral humans living deep in the woods, cut off from all society.

In 1877, in the Globe Valley of North Carolina, a party of gold miners reported an encounter with what they called a Wildman.

They described him as a giant standing over 6 feet tall, naked and covered in dark matted hair.

When he saw the miners, he pounded on his chest before bounding away into the forest with the speed of a deer.

They tracked him to a cave filled with the bones of animals.

In 1896, hunters in East Tennessee claimed to have captured the Wildman of Chilhowie.

They described a naked man with hair and beard to his waist and long Talon like fingernails.

They said he overpowered them with brute strength before a larger posse finally captured him and sent him to an insane asylum.

These accounts were dismissed as tall tales, local curiosities.

They were stories of hermits, of outcasts, of people lost to the wilderness.

They were folklore until June 14th, 1969.

This is the story of Dennis Martin.

He was six years old.

On that Saturday, he was on a Father's Day weekend camping trip with his father, grandfather and older brother in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The family was camped at Spence Field, a beautiful grassy highland bald, in the late afternoon.

Around 4:30 PM, Dennis and his brother, along with some other children from a nearby family, decided to play a prank on the adults.

They would hide in the bushes on opposite sides of the trail and jump out to scare them.

Dennis, wearing a bright red T-shirt, crouched behind a Bush.

His father, William Martin, saw him hide.

The other children jumped out laughing.

Dennis Martin did not.

When he didn't reappear after a few minutes, his father went to the Bush.

Dennis was gone.

He called his name.

There was no answer.

In a matter of 5 minutes, in broad daylight, in a wide open field with his father just yards away, Dennis Martin had vanished.

The area is not a simple forest.

Spence Field is on the Appalachian Trail, but it is surrounded by what searchers call a green hell.

The rhododendron thickets are so dense you cannot see your hand in front of your face.

The ground is a maze of sinkholes, concealed ravines and sudden sheer drop offs.

What followed was the largest search and rescue operation in the history of the National Park Service.

Over 1400 people, including the Green Berets, scoured 56 square miles of this impossible terrain.

But a severe thunderstorm hit that first night.

3 inches of rain fell in a matter of hours, washing away any tracks, any scent, any hope.

The temperature plummeted.

There was no way a six year old child, alone and exposed, could have survived that first night.

The searchers found nothing.

No scrap of his red shirt, no footprint, no trace.

He was gone.

The official theory is the most logical one.

The little boy wandered off, got lost in the dense forest and fog, and succumbed to the cold and exposure of that first rainy night.

His remains, they assume, were scattered by animals.

But another theory emerged, one that the Martin family itself believed, a theory based on a chilling eyewitness account that came in that same afternoon, about 5 miles away from Spence Field, in a more remote area called Rowan's Creek.

Another family, the Key family from nearby Townsend, was hiking that afternoon.

Around the same time Dennis disappeared, Harold Key heard something that made his blood run cold.

It was, he said, an enormous, sickening scream.

A few minutes later, the family saw something moving in the woods, running fast up the trail.

It was a man, but Harold Key described him as unkempt, shaggy and rough looking.

He was a wild man, hidden in the brush, watching them, and he was carrying something over his shoulder, something that Key, in the brief and terrifying glimpse, thought looked like a small bundle of cloth or clothing.

He couldn't be sure.

Frightened, the Key family left the area.

They didn't learn that a child was missing until the next day.

The FBI investigated their report but couldn't find a definitive link.

The distance was great, the timing uncertain, but the story stuck.

A wild man, a shaggy, rough looking man, running through the woods carrying a bundle.

Just after a sickening scream was heard.

At the same time, a child vanished without a trace.

The Park Service dismissed the theory.

They believed it was impossible for a man to carry a child 5 miles through that rough terrain so quickly.

But William Martin, the boy's father, always believed his son was taken.

He spent the rest of his life searching.

He never stopped.

He died in 1995, still not knowing what happened.

Dennis Martin was never found.

He remains one of the most haunting and terrifying mysteries of the Great Smoky Mountains, a true Horror Story where the plausible and the fantastic meet in a place of unbearable grief.

This fear of what lives in the woods, what watches from beyond the tree line, is an ancient one.

But sometimes the horror isn't just a single being, but the place itself.

Before the Cherokee, there were other people in these mountains, and the legends of them are even stranger.

The Cherokee told the first white settlers of the Moon Eyed people.

These were, according to legend, a race of small, pale skinned humanoids who lived in the mountains long before any others.

They were a nocturnal race.

Their eyes were so sensitive that they were blinded by the sun, so they lived in caves and underground tunnels, emerging only at night to build their strange windowless stone structures.

The Cherokee, the people of the dawn, were their enemies.

The legend states that the Cherokee arriving in the region fought a great battle with the moon eyed people driving them from their homes.

In one version, the Cherokee attacked them on a rare day of a full moon, and the moon eyed people, confused by the bright light, were routed and fled, vanishing underground for good for centuries.

This was just a story, but Appalachia is littered with mysterious pre Columbian stone ruins.

The most famous is the Judiculla Rock in North Carolina.

A massive soapstone boulder covered in thousands of pet glyphs.

There are also stone walls and forts like the one at Fort Mountain, Georgia, whose origins are still debated by archaeologists.

Are these the remnants of the moon eyed people?

Was there a real pre Cherokee race that lived in these mountains?

A people whose history has been lost, transformed into a story of pale cave dwelling creatures of the night?

The idea of a lost subterranean race living just beneath our feet, a parallel civilization dwelling in the dark, is a horror that taps into our most ancient fears.

And sometimes the land itself seems to echo with a memory, a phenomenon that defies all explanation.

This is the mystery of the Brown Mountain Lights.

For well over a century, perhaps far longer, people have gathered on overlooks in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina to watch them.

They appear as glowing orbs of light rising from the valley around Brown Mountain.

They are silent.

They can be white, red, yellow or blue.

They hover, dance, drift slowly for a few minutes and then vanish.

They are not car headlights.

They are not campfires.

Witnesses report them moving with intelligent, curious purpose, sometimes approaching the overlooks before darting away at impossible speeds.

The earliest written accounts date to the 1800's.

The Cherokee have legends about them that are far older.

1 Legend says that a great battle was fought on the mountain in the year 1200, and the lights are the spectral lanterns of Cherokee maidens still searching the hills for their husbands and fathers who died in the fight.

In the early 20th century, the phenomenon became so famous that the US government got involved.

In 1913, AUS Geological Survey engineer studied the lights and came to a prosaic conclusion.

They were headlights from a locomotive on the Catawba Valley Southern Railway.

The mystery was for a time considered solved.

Then, in 1916, a catastrophic flood tore through the region.

The hurricane that stalled over the mountains washed out entire towns.

The railroad bridges were destroyed, the tracks twisted and carried away.

The train stopped running.

The brown mountain lights did not.

They continued to appear, just as they always had.

New studies were launched in the 1920s.

They were blamed on car headlights from a newly built highway.

But again, the lights appeared in places and at angles that headlights could not reach.

They were seen long before cars were common.

Theories have ranged from swamp gas in a region with the wrong geology to ball lightning, to stranger ideas of static electricity or piezoelectric energy released by the courts in the mountains.

No one knows.

They are simply there, a silent, unexplained and deeply unsettling light watched by generations.

A true mystery that the mountains refuse to give up.

This sense of a curse, of a land that transforms people, is a recurring theme.

It's not just the land itself, but the things that walk it.

In East Tennessee and western North Carolina, they tell the story of the Wampus Cat.

On the surface it's a Cryptid, a large supernatural Panther, a painter, as they'd say.

But its origin is what makes it terrifying.

The story goes that long ago, a Cherokee woman was convinced her husband was cheating on her.

He would sneak away at night, and she believed he was meeting another lover.

One night she wrapped herself in the skin of a Mountain Lion to disguise herself, and she stalked him through the woods.

She followed him to a clearing where he met with the other men of the tribe.

But they weren't meeting lovers.

They were gathered around a fire, performing a sacred secret ceremony.

The men were shape shifting, communing with the spirits of the hunt, just as the medicine man was telling a sacred story.

The woman hidden in the bushes lean too far and a twig snapped.

The men discovered her.

Spying on this sacred men only ritual was a terrible crime.

The medicine man cursed her.

He used his magic to permanently bind the cougar skin to her body, transforming her into a hideous monster.

Half woman, half cat.

She was driven mad, doomed to wander the mountains forever, howling in despair and hunting for what she had lost.

She became the wompest cat, a creature of forbidden knowledge, a symbol of what happens when you look too closely at things not meant for human eyes.

They say you can still hear her wailing on moonless nights, a sound that is not quite a woman's scream and not quite a panther's cry.

A sound of eternal pain that, like the Mimic's voice, seems designed to draw you into the darkness.

But of all the ancient legends, 1 inspired more terror than any other.

More than Spearfinger, more than the Wampus Cat.

Because this monster was not in the woods, it was in the village.

It was your neighbor.

This is the terror of the Raven Mocker.

In Cherokee belief, the Raven Mocker is the most feared and evil of all witches.

They are men and women who have used dark magic to extend their own lives by stealing the lives of others.

They prey on the sick and the dying.

When a person is near death, weak and helpless, the Raven mocker comes.

They are invisible to all but the most powerful medicine men.

They sweep into the home, often in the shape of a black bird, and stand over the sick person's bed.

Then they begin to mocker the person tormenting them, pushing them further from life.

They invisibly pull the heart from the dying person's body and consume it, absorbing the remaining years of that person's life into their own.

The victim dies and the witch, invigorated, adds another few years to their unnatural lifespan.

The only sign of their presence is that the other people in the room, the grieving family, feel a sudden, inexplicable exhaustion, as if their own energy is being drained.

The dying person may, in their final moments, cry out in terror at something unseen.

After the witch is fed, they must return to their own body before the sun rises.

They often travel as a fiery shooting orb in the night sky.

If anyone sees this orb, they know a Raven mocker has just fed and someone in the community has just died.

The most terrifying part is their secrecy.

By day they are normal members of the tribe.

They are old, respected, seemingly feeble, but at night they are soul eaters.

If one is ever discovered, they are executed and their body burns with a strange, unnatural light.

The Raven Mocker is the ultimate paranoia, the idea that the person you trust most, the elder, the grandmother, could be the very thing feeding on your family's life Force One stolen year at a time.

But all the legends of monsters and spirits, of curses and strange lights, pale before the true, documented horror that these mountains have inflicted on the people who live there.

The true horror isn't just in the folklore, it's in the history buried under the earth.

This is the story of the Fratterville Mine disaster, Coal Creek, Tennessee, May 19th, 19 O2.

Coal was the lifeblood of Appalachia and it was a profession that demanded a daily blood sacrifice.

That morning, 216 men and boys, some as young as 12, went down into the Fratterville Mine.

At around 7:20, AMA series of massive explosions tore through the mine.

A pocket of volatile methane gas had been ignited.

The force of the blast was so powerful it shook the earth for miles, killing many instantly.

But it didn't kill all of them.

The majority of the miners, over 100 men, were trapped in the deepest, darkest sections of the mine.

The explosions had caused a cave in, blocking their only exit, and as the fire raged, it consumed the breathable air, replacing it with, after damp, a toxic, suffocating mix of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.

They knew almost immediately that there was no escape.

They were going to die slowly in the dark.

And so they began to write.

In the hours they had left, as the air grew thinner and their friends and family members fell asleep around them, the miners used chalk and slate to write final, heartbreaking letters to their loved ones.

They wrote on the mine walls.

They wrote in their notebooks.

This wasn't a quick death.

It was a slow, agonizing suffocation.

They sat in the pitch black, listening to the groans of the dying mountain around them, the slow, ragged breathing of their sons, their fathers, their brothers.

The only light was the flickering of their carbide lamps, which grew dimmer and dimmer as the oxygen vanished.

A 25 year old miner named Jacob Vowel trapped with his 14 year old son Albert wrote to his wife Ellen, My dear Ellen, we are all perishing for air.

Oh God for one more breath.

Ellen, Remember Me as long as you live.

Goodbye darling, we are all dying.

The air is so bad.

We will all soon be with Jesus.

It is now 10:00.

Albert said he has put his trust in God.

He is 14 years old.

He is with me.

We are all trusting in God.

Nearby, Powell Harmon wrote.

Dear loving wife and children, I am in this mine.

The air is bad.

I want you to meet me in heaven.

God has saved me.

Trust in God.

Goodbye.

For hours the rescuers clawed at the entrance, but it was hopeless.

When they finally broke through, they found rooms full of men lying as if they were asleep and on the walls these final desperate testaments of love written in the dark.

The only sound in that mine for hours must have been the scratching of chalk and the weeping of men counting their last moments.

Of the 216 who went down, not a single one survived.

It was the worst mining disaster in the state's history.

The horror of Fraterville did not end with the bodies.

The community was destroyed.

The widows and children were left destitute, and the mine itself became a place of profound dread.

Local legend says that for years other miners refused to go near that section, claiming they could hear the voices of the dead men whispering in the dark, claiming they could hear Jacob Vowel still calling for his Ellen.

It is a true story of being buried alive, a horror that was, for the people of Appalachia, not a gothic fantasy, but a constant, terrifying possibility.

This fear of the grave, of the darkness beneath the earth, manifested in other ways.

Sometimes the horror was not a mine collapse, but a simple, terrible mistake.

This is the true story of Octavia Hatcher, Pikeville, KY 1891.

Octavia Hatcher was a young, wealthy wife and a new mother.

Her infant son, Jacob, fell ill and died in January of that year.

Octavia was consumed by grief.

She fell into a deep, unshakable depression, spending her days in bed listless, refusing to eat.

This was a time before postpartum depression was understood.

In the spring her condition worsened.

She slipped into a coma.

On May 2nd, she was pronounced dead.

In the 19th century, burial was a swift affair.

Embalming was not yet common practice, and especially in the warm spring months, the fear of disease spreading meant bodies were interred quickly.

Octavia was buried in the local cemetery.

Just a few days later, a strange sickness began to spread through the town.

It was a sleeping sickness likely caused by the setsy fly, and several other people fell into comas just as Octavia had.

And then they woke up.

A horrifying realization dawned on Octavia's husband, a wave of ice cold panic.

He and the town doctor raced to the cemetery.

They began the agonizing work of exhuming her coffin.

When they finally opened the lid, they were met with a sight of unspeakable horror.

Octavia was not lying peacefully.

Her body was contorted.

Her face was a mask of terror, her eyes wide.

The lining of the coffin lid, just above her head and hands was shredded and torn.

Her fingernails were broken and bloody.

She had been buried alive.

She had woken up in her own coffin in the pitch black suffocating dark, 6 feet under the earth.

It is the ultimate claustrophobic nightmare.

A private silent scream that no one in the living world could hear.

She had clawed at the lid until she suffocated or died of terror.

Her husband was destroyed by the discovery.

He had her reburied in a special casket and commissioned a life-size statue of her in her favorite dress to be placed over her grave.

That statue stands in the Pikeville Cemetery to this day, a stone monument to a true, unimaginable Appalachian horror.

The fear of the premature burial was so profound that safety coffins rigged with bells and breathing tubes became a brief, morbid fad.

Octavia's story is the nightmare that fueled that fear.

The fear of something from the woods, the fear of a curse, the fear of the grave.

These are primal, but perhaps the most agonizing horror is the one that leaves no answers at all, the one that comes from inside your own home, from the smoke and the fire and the questions that can never be answered.

This is the story of the Sauder children.

Fayetteville, WV Christmas Eve, 1945.

George and Jenny Sauder, Italian immigrants, had built a good life.

They had a successful business and a large, happy family, 10 children in all.

That Christmas Eve, nine of them were home.

Their eldest son, Joe, was away with the army.

That night, the phone rang.

It was just after 1:00 AM Jenny Sauter answered.

It was a wrong number, a woman's voice she didn't recognize, asking for someone she didn't know.

Jenny could hear the sound of laughter and clinking glasses in the background, as if from a party.

Jenny hung up, annoyed, and noticed that the lights were still on and the front door was unlocked, which was unusual.

She assumed the children were still excited about Christmas.

She turned them off, locked the door and went back to bed.

About half an hour later, at

1:30 AM, she woke again to a strange sound, a loud thump and then a rolling noise on the roof, as if something heavy had been dropped and rolled down.

She ignored it and tried to sleep.

Half an hour after that, she woke up for good.

The house was on fire.

George's office was burning.

George, Jenny and four of their children, John, George Junior, Marian and Sylvia escaped the burning home, but five of their children were trapped upstairs.

Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jenny and Betty.

Ages 1412108 and 5.

George Sauter smashed a window to get back inside, but the staircase was already a wall of fire.

He ran to get his ladder to climb to their window.

The ladder, which was always kept leaning against the side of the house, was gone.

It had vanished.

He then ran to his two coal trucks, intending to pull one up to the house and climb on it to reach the window.

He turned the key in the first.

Nothing.

A dead click.

He tried the second, the same.

Both trucks, which had worked perfectly just hours before, were inexplicably dead.

A neighbor saw the blaze and tried to call the fire department from her home.

The phone line was dead.

Another neighbor had to drive into town to find the Fire Chief, FJ Morris.

The fire department didn't

arrive until 8:00 AM the next morning, 7 hours after the fire started.

By then, the house was a pile of ash.

The five children were presumed dead.

The official report said they had died in the fire, which was caused by faulty wiring.

But George Sauder knew this was a lie.

He had just had the wiring in the house completely redone, and the electric company had certified it as safe.

And then the real nightmare began.

When the ashes cooled, the Fire Chief sifted through the rubble.

He reported finding no bones, no remains of any kind.

He told the grieving Sauders that the fire must have been hot enough to completely cremate the bodies.

But Jenny Sauder couldn't accept this.

She worked at a crematorium.

She knew it took a 2000° fire for over 2 hours to destroy bone and their house, a wooden structure, had burned for only 45 minutes before collapsing.

The Sauders began to question everything.

Why did none of the five children upstairs wake up?

Why did the ladder go missing?

Why did the truck suddenly fail?

What about the wrong number?

Phone call?

A perfect distraction.

And the thump on the roof.

Was that an incendiary bomb?

Then the strange clues began to surface.

A telephone repairman confirmed the sotter's line hadn't been burned through.

It had been cut.

The latter was found days later thrown into an embankment 75 feet from the house.

A bus driver passing through Fayetteville late that night said he saw people in a car throwing balls of fire at the house.

And then the threats.

George Sauter had been an outspoken critic of Benito Mussolini, and his Italian American community had its share of tensions.

Months before the fire, an insurance salesman had threatened George.

When George refused to buy a policy, the man warned him that his house is going up in smoke and your children are going to be destroyed.

You are going to be paying for The Dirty remarks you have been making about Mussolini.

The Sauters hired a private investigator.

He discovered a local man had allegedly stolen George's ladder, but the man never confessed.

The investigator also learned that the Fire Chief, FJ Morris, had in fact found something in the ashes.

He'd found a heart.

He'd buried it in a metal box at the scene, telling no one the Soders had the box exhumed.

The heart was a beef liver, completely untouched by the fire.

It had clearly been planted.

George Sauter began to believe his children were not dead.

He believed they had been kidnapped.

This was not an accident.

It was a planned military style operation with the arson as a diversion.

For the rest of their lives, George and Jenny Sauter searched.

In 1952 they erected a billboard on Route 16 with the pictures of their five missing children and a reward for their return.

It became a landmark of grief.

Then in 196722 years after the fire, Jenny Sauter received a letter.

It was postmarked from Central City, KY.

Inside was a single photograph.

It was a picture of a young man in his mid 20s.

He looked uncannily like an adult version of their son Louis, with the same dark curly hair and deep set eyes.

On the back of the photo, a cryptic handwritten note.

Louis Sauter.

I love brother Frankie.

You little boys.

A90132 or three.

Five.

The family hired another private detective to trace the letter and the man, but he vanished and the trail went cold.

Was it a cruel joke or was it Louis reaching out?

George Sauter died in 1969, the same year Dennis Martin disappeared.

He never gave up hope, believing his children were still alive.

Jenny Sauter wore black in mourning every day for the rest of her life.

She died in 1989.

the Billboard, a grim monument to an unsolved Appalachian mystery, was finally taken down.

What happened on that Christmas Eve?

Was it a tragic accident?

A perfect storm of coincidences?

Or was it a plotted, monstrous crime, a kidnapping orchestrated under the cover of arson?

The Appalachian Mountains hold these stories tight.

They are a land of staggering beauty and profound, isolating shadow, a place where the unbelievable feels possible, and where the true stories are often more terrifying than any legend.

The unknown horror of the mimics voice in the woods.

The predatory wrongness of the not deer.

The shaggy Wildman seen running from a scream.

The unexplainable orbs of Brown Mountain.

The final loving words of dying miners trapped in the earth.

The howl of a beast in a land reclaimed by water.

The lonely grave of a woman who woke up too late, and the empty, ashen basement where five children should have been.

These are the stories that remind us that the oldest and darkest places in this country still have secrets to keep, and that some horrors, true or not, are never fully untold.

They just wait in the silence of the mountains to be remembered.