For my own safety, I will be using fake names for people and locations as I describe my experience. Whistle-blowers often end up dead, after all.
I used to live in a small town nestled up in the mountains, surrounded by a famous national forest. Let’s call this town Greenville. Being born and raised there, I had an affinity and distinct familiarity with the surrounding mountain and its forest. Douglas, a childhood best friend, would accompany me on countless camping and hiking treks through the numerous trails located near our town.
Now here’s a disturbing fact you may or may not have known: an absurd number of people go missing in national parks and forests every year. A quick Google search will tell you that 1,180 people have gone missing in national parks between 2018 and 2023. That boils down to almost 300 people going missing EVERY year. Why do I bring this up? Well, over a dozen people have gone missing in the national forests around Greenville in the twenty odd years I lived there. And it’s a miracle that Douglas and I did not end up being among those numbers.
You see, Douglas and I had a few disturbing experiences in that forest over the years. Back in the summer of 1999, we went out with our dads on a camping trip. Being adventurous and reckless kids at the time, Douglas and I snuck off the main trail and got out of sight from our parents. We spent hours playing hide and seek in the woods, looking at strange plants and poking at ant hills. Y’know, pre-teen boy stuff. Well, we started to panic when it got dark and we couldn’t find our way back to the trail.
“Dad? Where are you.” We both cried and called out. Soon the sun had dipped beyond the horizon, blanketing the forest in twilight.
“Adam, I’m scared,” Douglas said, jumping at the sound of an owl hooting in the distance. I took in a deep breath, looking around and thinking of a way to calm my friend down.
That’s when we heard something ahead of us. It sounded like the footsteps of a large man running across the brush at full sprint. Focusing my attention to the source of the sound, I scanned the treeline and caught glimpse of a shadow darting between the tree trunks. Whatever made those huge footsteps moved like lightening between the trees, so fast you could blink and miss it. My heart dropped when I realized this shadow creature was zig-zagging its way forward, towards where Douglas and I stood.
“What the hell is that?” Douglas asked, his voice cracking in panic. Grabbing his arm, I tugged on him and started running in the opposite direction.
“I don’t know but we need to get out of here!”
We ran through the forest, weaving between the trees until my lungs burned from the strain of running. I only looked back once, seeing the creature gaining on us at an alarming rate. For a brief moment, I thought I saw glowing amber eyes attached to the creature’s blurry and distorted face.
By some miracle, we popped out of the forest and arrived at one of the trails. Flashlights were beaming through the treeline further down the trail, and we both sprinted full speed for the lights. At some point, that creature had stopped chasing us. We eventually ran into the people with the flashlights, who happened to be a search party that our dads had rounded up to go looking for us. Needless to say, we were in a lot of trouble and they didn’t buy our story of being chased by a shadow monster.
The next incident happened on my 21st birthday, back in the fall of 2008. My father took me on a camping trip up in the mountains and brought along a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to celebrate my legal drinking age. The plan was to set up camp, get drunk but not totally hammered, and maybe hunt some squirrel the next morning with my .22 long rifle. Well we arrive at the campsite, get everything set up, and all seems to be going normal. That is, until nightfall.
I had just downed my 3rd shot of whiskey when a screeching sound wailed out into the cold night air. My dad, who was off relieving himself on a tree just outside the glow of the campfire, laughed in response to the noise.
“What’s the matter, kiddo? Jack on the rocks too strong fer ya?”
He stumbled back over to the campfire, fixing up the zipper on his jeans.
“I didn’t make that sound,” I told him. He raised an eyebrow before grinning at me, like he thought I was messing with him. Just when he was about to say something, that screeching sound erupted into the night air once again. It sounded much closer than before.
“What in the hell?” My dad shouted, looking around at the darkness surrounding our campsite. He rushed over to his tent and brought out his old lever action hunting rifle and my comparably tiny .22 long rifle and tosses me my gun.
“What was that?” I asked, checking my rifle and turning off the safety. He loaded up a round in his gun and brought it up close to his chest, ready to aim. In all the years I knew my old man, I had never seen his eyes so wide and full of alarm.
“Boy I don’t know,” he said, keeping his head on a swivel. “Been huntin’ out here for years and I ain’t never heard an animal make a sound like that. Can’t be good.”
I sat by the campfire, my hands shaking and unable to think of anything to say. Then the sound screeched out a 3rd time, seemingly from somewhere right above me in the tree canopy. Taking me off guard, the screech made me jump back in fear, nearly causing me to soil my pants.
If I could describe the sound, it had to be a mixture of a dying coyote and the strained vocal cords of a human child screaming in pain. Well, my dad wasn’t having any of it. When he heard that sound booming from right above where I sat, he cursed and took aim with his rifle. The blast temporarily lit up the surrounding woods with the muzzle flash and sent a crack echoing through the wilderness.
Following the gunshot, I heard a loud thud on the forest floor, as if something heavier than a grizzly bear had just jumped off the highest tree branch. Heavy footsteps followed, indicating something had broken out into a full sprint heading away from our campsite. We didn’t get any sound sleep that night despite having some alcohol in us, and luckily the rest of the trip went by uneventful.
The final experience I’ll talk about before I reveal the truth is a gruesome one, so if you’re squeamish, please be warned. A few years ago, a young woman went missing in the woods around Greenville. She was a local of the town, so everyone had come together to form a search party and look for her. That’s just what we were about, a small town was a close knit community and we looked out for each other.
Douglas and I decided to join the search party and we were assigned to comb through the far north eastern section of the woods. We scoured the woods, calling out that woman’s name for hours.
“Jessica, are you out here?”
She never turned up. Eventually, it got late and we had to turn back. Even though we brought flashlights along, the search party advised us not to go too far out at night since it could risk more people getting turned around and lost. Remembering the other chilling experiences I had in the forest at night, I had no problem with that stipulation. Douglas, on the other hand, didn’t quite agree and indeed grew irritated that we had to pack up and leave before nightfall. You see, Douglas had a bit of a romantic interest in Jessica, so his motivation to find her ran much deeper than mine. Which is exactly why he stopped when he saw a small cave nestled between the trees on the side of the mountain.
This cave wasn’t unusual. There were plenty of them all over the mountain hidden within the forest, which made excellent hibernation dens for the local black bears. For that reason, I adamantly protested when Douglas suggested we go looking in the cave for Jessica.
“C’mon, maybe she took shelter in there! We gotta at least look.”
He drew closer to the cave, taking out the flashlight and shining it through the maw. At this point, twilight had crept in and detouring through a possible bear cave was the last thing I wanted to do.
“You wanna go in there, fine. I’ll stay out here and wait.”
I gave him a dead serious look. He scowled and turned to enter the cave, calling me a coward and a few other choice names as he entered. Taking a seat on a nearby rock, I waited and kept the flashlight on, pointed at the cave.
It grew darker and my anxiety began to rise. What was only a few minutes had felt more like hours. When the silver glint of the full moon began to peak through the tree canopy, I cursed and turned to face the cave.
“Doug, are you done looking around yet?”
My voice echoed back from the cave. Just when I thought there wouldn’t be a response, I heard my own voice speaking back to me. It said the same exact thing, albeit in a much lower, almost choppy and broken sounding voice:
“Doug, are you done looking around yet?
Frozen in place, I didn’t know what to think. I heard my echo, and then the voice of something repeating my words back. I could feel my heart exploding in my chest as I turned to examine the forest around me.
While I had my back turned to the cave, I heard Douglas scream. Quickly shining my light back to the entrance, I heard his footsteps crashing on the stone as he raced out of the darkness. His breathing had been elevated to hyperventilating levels, and he spoke incoherent nonsense:
“Dude, it’s horrible - I, oh my God I, dude,”
He fell to his knees, sobbing uncontrollably as he dropped the flashlight.
“Woah, calm down, just breathe and tell me what’s wrong.”
He continued crying nonstop, unable to piece together words. I sat there rubbing his back, glancing back up at the cave and wondering what he saw. When his sobbing grew softer, another noise began to grab my attention. It was a wet, uncomfortable, mouth slapping sound. Think of a big dog chewing on a piece of raw meat. When I realized the sound came from the maw of the cave, I raised my light at the entrance and felt all the blood drain from my body.
A tall, humanoid shadow stood inside the cave. Amber eyes locked with mine and I watched in absolute horror and disgust as long, lanky and inhuman arms ripped flesh straight off of a dismembered human leg. Blood dripped off the severed body part as the creature took the bit of flesh and stuffed it into a mouth I couldn’t even make out on its oblong head. Then I heard that wet, deeply uncomfortable chewing noise as that thing ate the raw human flesh.
At some point, Douglas must have noticed the creature because he broke out screaming at the top of his lungs. I screamed with him, and we both ran away as fast as our feet would allow. Fortunately, that thing did not follow.
I am now convinced that what I saw in that forest was a Wendigo. You see, after all my traumatic experiences, I’ve grown an affinity to research the paranormal and the unknown. The Wendigo is a creature known for feasting on the flesh of humans, and seems to best fit the description of what I saw in the forest that day.
Now, here’s an interesting twist. The Wendigo has long been said to have a weakness against fire, silver, and cold weather. The reason I mention this is because the national forest around Greenville suffered a catastrophic wildfire back in 2021. Since then, disappearances in the area have stopped. But there’s more.
In my last year of living in Greenville, just weeks before the fire, a group of strange people arrived at our town. They drove all black cars with government license plates. At the time, I was working as a volunteer for the park ranger services. These strange people came to the park ranger office, asked a few questions to my boss, and disappeared off into the woods for hours before coming back and just abruptly leaving. Six days later, the forest fire that would devastate Greenville and the surrounding mountain would begin.
Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I firmly believe that the government stepped in to a Wendigo crisis unfolding around Greenville…
And their solution was to burn it all down.