For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.

Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world refuses to believe in.

But those who have survived they know the truth.

Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot, dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation.

Some make it out, others aren't so lucky.

Are you ready, because once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the woods alone again.

So grab your flashlight, stay close, and remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.

Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads, and let's head off into the woods if you dare.

Chapter twenty six, home Fires.

Daniel settled into his new life with the contentment of a man who'd found his place.

The Pizza Place, a family owned joint called Mountain Pies, had opened in March, about six miles down the road from our property.

It was a small operation, just a kitchen and a few tables, but the food was good and the owners were good people.

The Hartley family had moved up from Georgia a few years back looking for a quieter life, and they'd poured everything they had into making the restaurant work.

Daniel started as assistant manager, but quickly became indispensable.

He handled the books, managed the staff, dealt with suppliers.

He came home smelling of dough and tomato sauce, tired but happy, talking about the day's challenges with an enthusiasm I hadn't seen in years.

You know what I love about this, he said one evening, as we sat on the porch watching the sunset.

Nobody's trying to kill me, nobody's threatening us, nobody's making mysterious phone calls in the middle of the night.

I just make pizza and go home.

Sounds boring, I teased.

Boring is underrated.

After everything we've been through, boring is exactly what I needed.

He was right.

The intensity of the investigation, the threats, the constant sense of danger, it had taken a toll on both of us.

We'd been living on adrenaline for so long that we'd forgotten what normal felt like.

Now, finally we had a chance to remember.

Our life had found a rhythm.

I spent my morning's researching, my afternoon's interviewing my evening's editing and preparing episodes.

Daniel worked his shifts at the restaurant, came home, cooked dinner.

We talked about our days, about the stories I was collecting, about the funny things that happened at the pizza place.

We went to bed together, slept soundly, woke up ready to do it all again.

It was simple, it was peaceful.

It was everything we'd dreamed of when we'd first moved to these mountains.

But the work continued.

The work always continued.

The podcast had become something bigger than I'd ever imagined.

By the end of my second year, Sasquatch Odyssey had been downloaded over five million times.

The community had grown to tens of thousands of active members.

I'd been featured in magazines, interviewed on radio shows, invited to speak at conferences.

The money was coming into enough to cover our expenses, enough to invest in better equipment, enough to feel secure for the first time in years.

We weren't rich by any means, but we weren't struggling either.

The podcast was working, and more importantly, it was making a difference.

I knew this because of the emails I received, hundreds of them every week, from people who'd found the podcast and felt validated for the first time in their lives.

People who'd been carrying their encounters in secret, afraid to speak, convinced they were alone, people who'd finally found a community that understood.

One email in particular stood out.

It came from a woman named Margaret, seventy eight years old, living in a nursing home in rural Pennsylvania.

She'd had an encounter in nineteen fifty two.

She was a young girl walking home from school through the woods when she'd seen a creature watching her from behind a fallen tree.

I've never told anyone, Margaret wrote, seventy years, I've kept the secret.

My husband didn't know, my children don't know.

I was always afraid they'd think I was crazy.

But I'm old now and I don't have much time left, and I needed to tell someone before I die.

I needed someone to know that what I saw was real.

Thank you for creating a space where people like me can finally speak.

Thank you for believing us, Thank you for carrying our stories forward.

I read that email with tears in my eyes.

This was why I did this work, not for the money, not for the recognition, for Margaret, for all the Margaret's out there carrying secrets they were afraid to share.

For the witnesses who deserved to be heard, for the truth that had been hidden for too long.

The podcast was giving them a voice, and I would keep doing it as long as there were stories to tell.

The third year brought new challenges.

As the podcast grew, so did the scrutiny.

Skeptics came out in force, attacking MY credibility, dismissing my witnesses, demanding scientific proof that I couldn't provide.

Some of them were genuine debunkers, committed to rational inquiry.

Others were trolls looking to stir up trouble.

A few I suspected were more sinister, part of the same apparatus that had tried to shut us down before.

I learned to handle them, to respond calmly, to present the evidence without getting defensive, To acknowledge the limits of what I could prove while standing firm on what I knew to be true.

It wasn't easy, but it was necessary.

The bigger challenge was maintaining quality.

As the volume of potential interviews exploded, I was receiving dozens of requests every day, too many to possibly accommodate.

I had to develop systems for screening, for prioritizing, for identifying the stories that were most worth telling.

I hired a part time researcher to help with the workload, then a second one.

The podcast was becoming a business, and while that brought benefits, it also brought complications I hadn't anticipated.

One of those complications arrived in April in the form of a phone call from a producer in Los Angeles.

Mister Patterson, my name is Amanda Gardner.

I'm with Meridian Productions.

We've been following your podcast for some time, and we'd like to discuss a potential partnership.

What kind of partnership a television series, documentary style based on Sasquatch Odyssey.

We'd feature your interviews, recreate some of the encounters, add production value that you can achieve with a podcast alone.

It would reach millions of viewers who've never heard of your show.

I was skeptical television meant giving up control.

It meant letting other people make decisions about how the stories were told.

It meant the kind of sensationalism that I'd always tried to avoid.

But it also meant exposure.

It meant reaching people who wouldn't find the podcast on their own.

It meant amplifying the voices of witnesses who deserve to be heard.

I'll think about it, I said, Take all the time you need.

But mister Patterson, I want you to know that we're committed to doing this right.

We've seen too many shows exploit this subject for cheap thrills.

That's not what we're interested in.

We want to tell these stories with the respect and authenticity they deserve.

I told Daniel about the offer that evening.

What do you think, I asked, I think you should be careful, he said.

Television changes things.

It's not like the podcast, where you control everything.

Once you sign a contract, you're playing by their rules.

I know, but the reach, the reach is tempting.

But is it worth it if they turned these stories into a freak show.

I didn't have an answer, not yet, but the question stayed with me, turning over in my mind as I continued the work that had become my life's calling.

The four hundred and fiftieth interview happened on a rainy Tuesday in September.

The witness was a man named Jacob Whitehorse, a Navajo elder from Arizona.

He'd reached out to me through the community forum, asking to share stories from his people's tradition.

We call them the Yet it'so, Jacob said, his voice carrying the weight of centuries, the big Giant.

They've been part of our stories since the beginning, not as monsters to be feared, but as neighbors to be respected.

Different from us, living by different rules, but part of the same world.

Tell me about your personal experiences.

I've seen them three times in my life, once as a child, once as a young man, once as an Each time the encounter taught me something, something about respect, about humility, about our place in the web of life.

What did you learn?

Jacob was quiet for a moment.

When he spoke again, his voice was soft.

I learned that we are not alone.

I learned that the world is bigger than we think, full of beings and forces that we can't fully understand.

And I learned that our job, the job of humans, is not to conquer or control, but to live in balance, to take what we need and give back what we can, to be good neighbors to all the creatures who share this earth with us.

Do you think these creatures are spiritual beings.

I think the line between physical and spiritual is thinner than you Westerners believe.

These beings walk in both worlds.

They have bodies you can see in touch, but they also have spirits that can reach across the divide.

They are teachers if we're willing to learn, guides, if we're willing to follow.

What do you think is happening now?

Why are the sightings increasing?

Because the balance is broken.

Humanity has taken too much, destroyed too much, forgotten too much.

The old ways are dying, the web of life is fraying, and the Yaidzo are concerned.

They've watched us for millennia, hoping we would find our way, but time is running out.

The world is changing, and not for the better.

What can we do?

Listen, learn, Remember what our ancestors knew.

These beings are trying to tell us something through their appearances, through their communications, through the very fact of their existence.

They're reminding us that we're not the only ones who matter, that the world doesn't belong to us alone, that we have responsibilities we've been ignoring for too long.

Jacob's interview stayed with me long after we hung up.

His words echoed through my mind as I edited the episode as I fell asleep that night, as I woke up to another day of searching for truth, a reckoning was coming.

I didn't know when, didn't know how, but I knew that Jacob was right.

We had responsibilities, we had lessons to learn, and the creatures in the shadows were waiting to see if we'd finally pay attention.

As the third year drew to a close, I took stock of everything I'd built.

Four hundred and fifty interviews, five million downloads, a community spanning dozens of countries, Witnesses validated secret, shared, truth spread, and yet it felt like we were just beginning.

The creatures were still out there, watching from the darkness.

The cover up was crumbling, but not yet collapsed.

The truth was emerging but had not yet been fully revealed.

There was so much more to do, so many more stories to tell, so many more people to reach.

I looked out at the mountains, at the endless forest that surrounded our home, and I made a promise to myself.

I would keep going, no matter how long it took, no matter what obstacles appeared, I would keep searching for the truth, Keep giving voice to the witnesses, Keep preparing the world for what was coming, because that's what I'd been called to do, That's what I'd been preparing for my whole life, since that day in the woods behind our house in Lyrely, when I was twelve years old.

The odyssey continued, and I was ready for whatever came next.

Chapter twenty seven, Separating Wheat from Chaff.

Not every interview was a gem.

In fact, as the podcast grew and more people reached out, I found myself spending increasing amounts of time filtering through stories that ranged from the dubious to the outright absurd.

For every Earl Hutchins or Mary Catherine O'Brien witnesses whose sincerity and detail convinced me of their authenticity, there were a dozen others whose accounts raised red flags.

Some were obvious hoaxers, looking for attention or trying to capitalize on the podcast's growing audience.

These were usually easy to spot, inconsistent details, borrowed elements from famous cases, an eagerness to be featured that felt more like self promotion than truth telling.

Others were harder to categorize, people who genuinely believed what they were saying, but whose stories didn't hold up under scrutiny.

People who'd conflated dreams with reality, who'd embellished mundane experiences into extraordinary ones, who'd convinced themselves of encounters that had never actually happened.

And then there were the ones that made me question whether I was wasting my time entirely.

The interview that nearly broke me came in the spring of my third year.

His name was Derek Fontaine, a forty two year old construction worker from British Columbia.

He'd reached out through the website, claiming to have had an encounter unlike any I documented before.

His initial email was vague but intriguing, promising details that would change everything I thought I knew about these creatures.

I should have known better.

The vague promises, the grandiose claims, these were warning signs I'd learned to recognize.

But I was tired, stretched thin by the volume of requests, and his location in the Pacific Northwest Prime Sasquatch Territory made me give him the benefit of the doubt.

We scheduled a video call for a Tuesday evening.

Derek appeared on screen, looking exactly like I'd expected.

A stocky, bearded man in a flannel shirt sitting in what appeared to be a basement wreck room.

He seemed nervous, fidgeting with something off camera, avoiding eye contact.

Thanks for taking the time, Derek, I said, why don't you start by telling me about your encounter.

Well, it happened back in twenty fifteen, he began.

I was on this camping trip up near Harrison Lake, a men's retreat, you know, bunch of guys from my church, getting back to nature, doing the whole bonding thing.

Stay tuned for more backwoods big Foot store.

We'll be back after these messages.

How many people were on the trip, about fifteen.

I think we had a base camp set up, tents all around, fire pit in the middle.

Real nice setup.

And what happened?

Derek shifted uncomfortably.

Well, the first couple nights were normal, hiking, fishing, sitting around the fire, telling stories.

But on the third night something changed changed.

How I couldn't sleep.

It was hot and I'd had too much coffee after dinner, so I was just lying there in my tent, staring at the ceiling when I heard something outside.

Footsteps, heavy footsteps circling the camp.

This was familiar territory.

I nodded encouragingly.

I didn't think much of it at first.

Figured it was a bear, maybe one of the other guys going to take a leak.

But then my tent flap opened.

Someone came into your tent.

Something came into my tent.

Derek's voice dropped to a near whisper.

It was It was a sasquatch, a female.

I could tell, because well I could tell.

I felt a not forming in my stomach.

I'd heard stories like this before, claims of intimate encounters with these creatures that stretched credulity beyond the breaking point.

What happened next, Derek, He wouldn't meet my eyes.

She we look I know this sounds crazy, but she came into my tent and she we had relations, sexual relations.

She wanted it.

I could tell the way she looked at me, the way she touched me.

I held up my hand, hold on.

You're telling me that a sasquatch entered your tent while you were surrounded by fourteen other men, and you had sexual intercourse with it, her with her, And yes, that's what I'm saying.

Did anyone else see this creature.

Did anyone hear anything?

No?

She was quiet, real quiet, and it was It was over pretty quick, Derek.

I tried to keep my voice level professional.

I've interviewed hundreds of witnesses.

I've heard stories that would make most people's hair stand up.

But this is not consistent with anything we know about these creatures behavior.

I knew you wouldn't believe me.

Nobody believes me.

It's not about belief, it's about evidence.

It's about patterns.

In all the documented encounters, across decades of research, there's never been a credible report of this kind of interaction.

These creatures avoid human contact.

They don't seek out intimate encounters with strangers in tents.

Maybe I'm special.

Maybe she saw something in me, Derek.

My patience was wearing thin.

Did you report this to anyone at the time?

Did you tell the other men on the retreat?

No?

I was embarrassed.

I didn't know what to say.

Are there any physical traces, any evidence at all that this happened?

Well?

No, but I know what I experienced.

It was real.

It was the most real thing that's ever happened to me.

I took a deep breath.

I appreciate you reaching out, Derek, but I'm not going to be able to feature this story on the podcast.

The lack of corroborating evidence, the inconsistency with known behavior patterns that I stopped myself.

It just doesn't meet the standards I've set for the show.

Derek's face hardened.

You're just like all the others.

You say you want the truth, but when someone gives it to you, you can't handle it.

I want credible truth, I want verifiable experiences.

What you're describing is what happened, whether you believe it or not.

The call ended shortly after that, with Derek hanging up in obvious frustration.

I sat in my studio staring at the blank screen, wondering for the hundredth time if I was doing this right.

Daniel found me on the porch an hour later, nursing a beer and watching the stars come out rough interview, He asked, sitting down beside me, you could say that I told him about Derek, about the story, about my frustration.

The thing is he seemed to genuinely believe it.

He wasn't lying exactly, he was just, I don't know, deluded fantasizing.

Does it matter.

You can't put every story on the show, I know, but it's getting harder to sort through them all.

For every legitimate witness, there are five Derek Fontaines, people who've convinced themselves of experiences that never happened, people who want attention or validation, or just someone to listen to their fantasies.

That's the price of success, Daniel said.

The bigger the platform, the more noise you have to filter out.

I just don't want to become one of those shows, the ones that'll put anything on air as long as it's sensational.

That's not what this is supposed to be about.

Then don't let it become that you've built something real here, Brian, that helps people.

Don't let the Derek Fontanes of the world make you forget that.

He was right, of course he usually was, but the frustration lingered, a reminder that this work, this calling, wasn't always easy.

Sometimes it meant disappointing people, Sometimes it meant being the bad guy.

But if I didn't maintain standards, if I didn't filter the wheat from the chaff, the podcast would become worthless, just another collection of tall tales and wishful thinking.

And that would help no one.

So I kept filtering, kept sorting, kept searching for the real stories buried under the mountain of noise.

The next interview couldn't have been more different.

Her name was Gloria Reyes, a sixty four year old retired nurse from rural New Mexico.

She'd been hesitant to reach out, her email full of apologies and disclaimers, convinced that no one would take her seriously.

I've never told anyone about this, she said when we connected, not my husband, not my children.

I was afraid they'd think I'd lost my mind.

Tell me what happened, Gloria.

It was nineteen ninety two.

I was working at a small hospital in Las Vegas.

That's Las Vegas, New Mexico, not Nevada.

We served a lot of the outlying communities, ranches and pueblos that didn't have their own medical facilities.

What happened that year?

A young man was brought in late one night, a Navajo boy, maybe nineteen or twenty.

He'd been found wandering on the highway, dehydrated, confused, covered in scratches and bruises.

The people who found him thought he'd been in an accident.

But there was no damage vehicle anywhere nearby.

What was his condition physically?

He was okay, dehydrated and scraped up, but nothing serious.

But mentally he was somewhere else.

He kept mumbling about the big people, about being taken, being held.

Being examined.

We assumed he was delirious, maybe on drugs, maybe suffering from heat stroke.

What did he describe as his condition stabilized the story became clear.

He said he'd been camping in the mountains when something grabbed him, something big and hairy, walking on two legs.

Multiple creatures, actually, he said there were at least three of them.

They'd carried him to a cave, held him there for what he thought was several days, and then released him near the highway.

Did you believe him at the time, I didn't know what to believe.

His story was consistent, detailed, specific in ways that didn't seem like fabrication, but it was also impossible.

Creatures like that didn't exist.

That's what I told myself.

What made you change your mind?

The physical evidence.

Gloria's voice grew quieter When we examined him more thoroughly.

We found things we couldn't explain.

Hair caught in his clothing that didn't match any known animal, bruises on his arms and patterns that suggested large hue annoid hands, and his feet.

His feet were injured in a way that suggested he'd been carried for miles, not walked.

What happened to the evidence, that's the strangest part.

The next morning, two men showed up at the hospital, federal agents, they said, though they never showed proper id they took all the physical evidence, the hair samples, the photographs we'd taken of the bruises.

They interviewed the young man for hours, and when they were done, he signed a statement saying he'd been confused and didn't remember what had happened to him.

He recanted, he was terrified.

I saw his face when those men were done with him.

He'd been threatened, I'm sure of it.

They made him afraid to tell the truth.

And you've kept this secret for thirty years.

What choice did I have?

I was a nurse at a small hospital.

Those men made it clear that talking about what happened would have consequences, and I had a family to think about, a career to protect.

She paused, But I'm retired now.

My husband passed two years ago, and I'm tired of carrying the secret.

That boy, that young man, he deserved to be believed, and I need someone to know what really happened.

Gloria's story was everything Derek Fontaine's wasn't, specific, verifiable, consistent with known patterns.

The involvement of mysterious federal agents, the confiscation of evidence, the intimidation of witnesses.

It all fit with what I'd learned about the cover up, And unlike Derek's fantasy, Gloria's account came with something else, corroboration.

The young Navajo man she treated, she still remembered his name, and with some digging, I might be able to find him.

This was why I did this work.

This was why I pushed through the Derek Fontaines and the hoaxers and the attention seekers, because buried under all that noise were stories like Gloria's, real experiences, real witnesses, real pieces of the truth.

Wheat among the Chaff, Chapter twenty eight, Ghosts from the Past.

The Men in Black returned on a Thursday evening in October.

I hadn't thought about them in months.

The podcast had become my life.

The community had become my focus, and the threats that had once kept me up at night had faded into memory.

Maybe I'd grown complacent.

Maybe I'd convinced myself that they'd given up, that the information was too far out of their control to contain anymore.

I was wrong.

Daniel was at the restaurant working the dinner shift.

I was in my studio editing an episode.

When the driveway alarm chimed.

We got false alarm, sometimes dear, mostly occasionally a black bear wandering through, so I almost ignored it, but something made me check the monitor.

Two black SUVs were rolling up the drive My heart rate spiked.

I watched as the vehicle stopped in front of the house.

As four men in dark suits emerged.

They moved with the same choreographed precision I remembered from years ago, spreading out to cover the approaches to the house while two of them walked toward the porch.

I grabbed my rifle, still kept by the door, still loaded, and stepped outside.

That's far enough, I said.

The lead man stopped.

He was different from the ones who'd visited before, younger, with a harder edge to his features, but the look in his eyes was the same, the cold certainty of someone operating with authority.

They didn't have to explain, mister Patterson, we're not here to cause trouble.

Then why are you here to deliver a message and to make a request.

I'm listening.

The man reached into his jacket, slowly, making sure I could see his hands.

He pulled out a Manila folder and held it up.

You've been busy these past few years, the podcast, the community you've built, the attention you brought to this subject, it's been impressive.

Thank you.

Now get to the point.

The point is that you've reached across roads, mister Patterson.

The work you've been doing, documenting encounters, collecting testimony, building a public record, it's had consequences, some of them intended, some of them less.

So what consequences?

People are asking questions, People in positions of power, congressional staffers, journalists, academics.

The pressure is building for official acknowledgment of what you've been documenting, and that puts certain interests in a difficult position.

Good, that's what I was hoping for.

The man smiled, but there was no warmth in it.

We anticipated you'd say that, which is why we're offering an alternative.

He extended the folder toward me.

What is that information?

The kind of information you've been seeking for years?

Details about the creatures, about the research that's been conducted, about what we really know and how long we've known it, And what's the catch?

No catch, that's a request.

You take this information, you add it to your research, but you don't identify where it came from, and you stop pushing for official disclosure.

Let the information speak for itself without forcing the government's hand.

I stared at him.

You want me to become your mouthpiece.

We want you to become a partner, someone who helps manage the transition, rather than forcing it to happen on an uncontrolled timetable.

And if I refuse, the man's expression didn't change.

Then we continue as we have been, monitoring, containing doing what's necessary to maintain order.

You mean threatening people, suppressing evidence, covering up the truth, maintaining order, he repeated, Mister Patterson, you've seen a fraction of what's out there.

The creatures you've been documenting, they're just one piece of a much larger picture.

There are things in this world that would break most people's minds if they knew about them.

We're not the villains you've made us out to be.

We're the ones holding back the tide.

I thought about the Mount Saint Helen's documents, the evidence of government program studying these creatures for decades, the pattern of cover ups and silencings that stretched back generations.

I've seen more than you think.

I said.

Something flickered in the man's eyes, Surprise maybe or recognition.

Then you understand why we're concerned.

What I understand is that you've been lying to people for decades, hiding the truth because you thought we couldn't handle it, And now that the truth is coming out anyway, you want to control the narrative.

We want to prevent panic, we want to ensure a stable transition.

Is that so unreasonable.

It's not your decision to make the people deserve to know the truth, all of it, not just what you think they can handle.

The man's sighed, I was afraid you'd say that.

He set the folder on the porch, railing the offer stands.

Take some time, think it over, read what's in that folder.

Maybe it will change your perspective.

And if it doesn't, then I suppose we'll see who's right about what's best for humanity.

I hope for everyone's sake that it's not you.

Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.

We'll be back after these messages.

He turned and walked back to the SUVs.

The other men followed, moving with that same eerie precision.

Within moments, they were gone, disappearing down the driveway and into the night.

I stood on the porch for a long time, the folder in my hands, wondering what I'd just agreed to or refused.

The folder contained exactly what the man had promised.

Information, pages and pages of it, documents i'd never seen before, with classification stamps and agency headers, and detailed research findings, studies on Sasquatch physiology conducted at facilities i'd never heard of, psychological profiles of wisitnesses compiled over decades, maps showing known habitation zones marked with encounter frequencies and population estimates, and something else, something that made my blood run cold, a section on interdimensional hypotheses.

The documents suggested that the creatures weren't simply undiscovered primates hiding in the wilderness.

They were something else, beings that existed partially outside our normal perception of reality.

They could move between dimensions.

The researchers theorized they could become invisible or nearly so, they could sense human intention and avoid detection with uncanny precision.

This explained things the way they seemed to vanish without trace, the difficulty in obtaining clear photographs or physical evidence, the psychic phenomena that some witnesses reported.

But it also raised more questions than it answered.

If the creatures were interdimensional, what did that mean for the other things the government was hiding, The UFOs, the paranormal phenomena, all the strangeness that had been suppressed for so long.

Were they all connected?

All part of the same vast mystery that we were only beginning to glimpse.

I stayed up all night, reading and rereading the documents.

When Daniel came home from his shift, he found me surrounded by papers, red eyed, and wired on coffee.

Brian, what's going on?

I told him about the men, about the offer, about the folder and what it contained.

He listened without interrupting, his face growing more concerned with every word.

What are you going to do?

He asked?

When I finished.

I don't know.

Part of me wants to take this information and run with it, put it all on the podcast, let the world see what they've been hiding, and the other part, the other part wonders if they're right, if the truth is too dangerous to just dump on an unprepared public, if I'd be causing more harm than good.

Daniel quiet for a moment.

Do you trust them?

No, not even a little.

Then there's your answer.

Whatever they're offering, whatever they want you to do, it's not for your benefit.

It's for theirs, but the information.

Use it, but use it on your terms, not theirs.

Don't become their partner, don't help them control the narrative.

Just keep doing what you've been doing and add this to the pile.

He made it sound so simple.

Maybe it was.

I looked at the documents spread across the table, years of suppressed research, decades of hidden truth, and now it was in my hands, waiting for me to decide what to do with it.

Okay, I said, finally, we do it my way.

Daniel squeezed my shoulder.

That's my boy.

I started organizing the documents, preparing to incorporate them into my research.

The men in black would be watching, waiting to see what I did.

Let them watch them see that I couldn't be bought or intimidated.

The truth was coming out one way or another.

The truth was coming out, and nothing they did was going to stop it.

Chapter twenty nine, The Fire Returns.

The second attack came eighteen months after the documentary release.

This time they didn't bother with subtlety.

A group of men in tactical gear faces hidden behind balaclavas, descended on our property at three in the morning.

They set fires in multiple locations simultaneously, the studio, the garage, the tool shed.

By the time we woke to the smell of smoke, the flames were already out of control.

We escaped with our lives barely.

Daniel was the one who woke first, shaking me out of a deep sleep with urgency in his voice.

Brian, Brian, wake up, something's wrong.

I smelled it before I opened my eyes, Smoke, acrid and thick, already seeping under the bedroom door.

We moved on ins, grabbing clothes, phones, the emergency bag we'd prepared for exactly this kind of situation.

The house itself was still intact, but the studio was fully engulfed.

Flames shot into the night sky, painting the mountains in shades of orange and red.

The garage was burning too, and the shed where we kept the lawn equipment.

I called nine one one while Daniel sprayed the house with the garden hose, trying to keep the flames from spreading.

The fire department arrived within twenty minutes, fast for a rural area, but by then the studio was a total loss.

This was coordinated, the fire investigator said, surveying the damage the next morning.

Multiple points of origin accelerant at each location.

This wasn't vandalism, This was a professional operation.

Can you prove that I can document what I found?

But proving who's responsible?

He shook his head.

These people know what they're doing.

They don't leave evidence.

The attack made now national news, a former sheriff targeted for his research into unexplained phenomena, a podcast host silenced by Arson.

The story played perfectly into the narrative we'd been building a government cover up so determined to maintain its secrets that it would burn down homes to stop the truth from getting out.

The response was overwhelming.

Donations poured in from around the world, equipment, money, offers of safe haven.

The community I'd been building rallied around us determined to show that we couldn't be silenced, and Amanda called with news that changed everything.

I've got a television deal, she said, a major network.

They want to produce a docuseriies based on the podcast, full editorial control, no censorship, After everything that's happened, They're not afraid of the blowback.

They're counting on the blowback.

Controversy drives ratings, and this is the most controversial story in decades, she paused.

They saw what happened to your house.

Everyone saw, and they want to tell the world what's really going on.

When do we start?

As soon as you're ready.

They're willing to fund a complete rebuild of your studio, better equipment than you had before.

Security that'll actually work this time.

I looked at Daniel at the ruins of everything we'd built, at the life we'd have to reconstruct for the second time.

He nodded, Tell them we're in, I said.

The production dwarfed anything we'd done before.

Amanda assembled a team of professionals, camera operators, sound engineers, researchers, security personnel.

They descended on North Carolina like a small army, setting up in a rented facility while my new studio was being built.

The concept was ambitious, a ten episode series, each focusing on a different aspect of the phenomenon, encounters, evidence, government cover up, international connections, the history of research, and finally, an expedition into the heart of the Piska following the trail we'd been documenting for years.

This is going to be different from the first documentary, Amanda explained, that was about revealing the cover up.

This is about building an irrefutable case for the creature's existence.

You mean, actually finding them.

That's the goal.

We've got the best equipment money can buy, thermal cameras, night vision drones with infrared sensors.

If there's anything out there, we're going to document it, and if we don't, then we document everything else.

We found the witness testimonies, the physical evidence, the patterns you and Zach have been mapping.

Even without direct visual proof, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.

The filming took six months.

We traveled across the country, revisiting witnesses, documenting evidence, building the case piece by piece.

Each episode was crafted to lead viewers deeper into the mystery, starting with basic questions and ending with implications that shook the foundations of what they thought they knew.

I was on camera for most of it, guiding viewers through the evidence, sharing my own experiences, asking the questions that no one in authority was willing to ask.

It was exhausting, it was exhilarating, and it was necessary.

The expedition into the Pisga came last ten days in the wilderness with a full production crew, following the trails we'd mapped, setting up surveillance in locations with the highest concentration of encounters, days of hiking, nights of waiting, hours of footage that showed nothing but empty forest, and then on the eighth night, something happened.

We were camped in a hollow near the site where Austin Mercer had disappeared.

The thermal cameras were running, the audio equipment was recording, and I was sitting by the fire keeping watch while most of the crew slept.

The sound started around two in the morning, knocks, the sharp crack of a branch being struck against a tree, once twice, three times, coming from somewhere in the darkness beyond our camp.

I signaled to the camera operator, who was awake with me.

He trained his lens toward the sound.

Switching to night vision, we saw nothing clearly, but we could hear it.

Footsteps, heavy bipedal footsteps, circling our camp, staying just beyond the range of the cameras, just beyond the reach of our lights.

And then the vocalizations began, a howl rising from somewhere deep in the forest, joined by another from a different direction than a third, a fourth, a chorus of voices calling to each other across the darkness.

The crew woke.

Everyone was on their feet, cameras, rolling equipment, running, capturing every second.

We never saw the creatures clearly.

They were too smart, too experienced it, staying hidden.

But we heard them, We documented them, We proved they were there.

And when the sun came up and the sounds faded into silence, we knew we had something significant.

Not definitive proof that would require actual clear footage, but evidence, compelling, documented, irrefutable evidence that something was out there, something that the world would have to reckon with.

The Austin Mercer case remained unsolved.

I'd made peace with that as much as I could.

The trail camera footage we'd recovered told a grim story, a young man running through the forest, something massive in pursuit, screams that cut off abruptly.

Whatever had happened to Austin, it hadn't been good.

His parents had held a memorial service.

They'd placed a marker at the campsite where he'd last been seen, a simple wooden cross with his name and dates.

I visited the site during our expedition, stood there in the clearing, looking at the trees, feeling the way of all the questions I couldn't answer.

Austin was gone.

His body was somewhere in these mountains, hidden in a place we might never find.

But his story had become part of something larger.

His disappearance had sparked an investigation that had grown into a movement.

Maybe that was enough.

Maybe that was all any of us could hope for, to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

I knelt by the marker and said a quiet prayer for Austin, for all the people who'd vanished into these forests over the years, for the truth that was still waiting to be found.

Then I stood up and went back to work.

SA