Appalachian Trail Horror: Strange Encounters, Feral People, Mysterious Lights, and More
A strange man stalks two women on their camping trip. A strange dog has been caught on a loop for hundreds of years at the foot of a mountain. And lights that have no source, and no explanation. Today we're taking a trip through the Appalachian trail. Bring your flashlight.
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SOURCES
General Trail Info:
Appalachian Mountains | Definition, Map, Location, Trail, & Facts | Britannica
Shelters | Appalachian Trail Conservancy
Safety Tips and Crime Prevention | Appalachian Trail Conservancy
A Guide to Safety on the Appalachian Trail - The New York Times
Appalachian National Scenic Trail (U.S. National Park Service)
Appalachian National Scenic Trail
Crime on the Appalachian Trail - The Trek
How Did the Appalachian Trail Murder Suspect Slip Through the Cracks?
Hiking on the AT on the Anniversary of a Trail Murder - The Trek
Washington Post: Blood on the Mountain
The Grisly Double Homicide That Haunts the Appalachian Trail
Claudia and Rebecca:
Romantic Hike Turns Tragic: The 1988 Appalachian Trail Murder of Rebecca Wright | Criminal
1988 Michaux State Forest tragedy: 'Rage' drove cave-dweller to kill woman
Snarly Yowl:
“South Mountain Magic” by Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89098850985&seq=82
West Virginia's Snarly Yow - Coffee House Writers
Cryptids of the South: West Virginia’s Snarly Yow | East Tennessean
How the Rules of Appalachia TikTok Trend Affects Appalachian Tourism – THE PROWLER
https://www.newspapers.com/image/23128394/?match=1&terms=snarly%20yow
https://www.newspapers.com/image/1050673512/?match=1&terms=snarly%20yow
https://www.newspapers.com/image/7851186/?match=1&terms=snarly%20yow
https://www.newspapers.com/image/20750916/?match=1&terms=snarly%20yow
Ghosts:
Creepy Stories from the Appalachian Trail
“South Mountain Magic” by Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89098850985&seq=82
https://www.newspapers.com/image/73446348/?match=1&terms=burke%20county%20mysterious%20light
https://www.newspapers.com/image/990565719/?match=1&terms=%22brown%20mountain%20light%22
TRANSCRIPT
The Appalachian Mountains stretch like a spine across the eastern United States — from the deep, humid woods of Alabama and Georgia, all the way North to the cold, silent forests at the edge of Maine, and beyond that, into the darker wilds of Canada.
They’re beautiful. Verdant. Alive. But they’re also old. Parts of these mountains began forming over a billion years ago and The range as we know it took shape around 260 million years ago. If you were to climb one of its many peaks — and stand alone in the quiet wind — you could place your hand on rock that’s half a billion years old. Rock that has watched. Rock that has waited.
You might know the line from the old John Denver song — “Life is old there, older than the trees, younger than the mountains.” It’s more than just a lyric. These mountains were here before trees even existed… before the land crawled with life. And yet, today, they teem with it — hazy forests, hidden hollows, and things that whisper just beyond the trail.
Many believe these mountains hold ancient secrets that have been there long before humans. Ones that we could never understand, but ones that we occasionally come into contact with.
Because cutting through these mountains is the Appalachian trail. A trail that around 3 million people visit annually, but only a small handful of people finish. You see, the whole trail is almost 3,000 miles long, traveling through 14 states. Starting at the foot of Springer Mountain in Georgia, and ending in the crisp cool air of Maine. And it acts as an entry point to the mysteries of these mountains.
This is heart starts pounding, and I’m your host Kaelyn Moore
Today, I want to take you with me through parts of the trail, and show you some of the secrets of the mountains. We’re going to encounter tales of feral people, a creature that’s been lurking in the woods for hundreds of years, and some mysterious lights no one can make any sense of. But we need to be careful where we step. Out here, the forest watches — and sometimes, it remembers you
Before we take our first step, though, I want to shout out listener Krzysztof who sent me pictures from a time he went caving in a very haunted section of Owl Mountain in Poland. It made me think a lot of appalachia, actually, because I talked about this in a bonus episode I did one month, but some believe the most haunted parts of Appalachia are actually in the massive tunnel and cave systems below the ground. For centuries, people have heard tommyknockers, that is little creatures that knock and tap on the cave walls, oftentimes before disasters. If you’re new to Patreon or Apple subscriptions or still enjoying your free trial from binge week last week, you can check out that episode from October of 2024.
Ok, let’s begin our hike.
Our journey starts on the part of the trail where the sun shines through the trees, and large fields are full of flowers. We’re in Michaux (Mishow) State Park, in the Pennsylvania section of the trail.
It’s peaceful here, even though its a more populated part of the trail. The air feels impossibly fresh.
It doesn’t make any sense that a place like this would be a scene of abject horror, but that’s what happened almost 40 years ago.
On May 12th, 1988 32-year-old Claudia Brenner headed into the Appalachian wilderness with her girlfriend, 29-year-old Rebecca Wright.
Claudia was excited about this trip. She and Rebecca had enjoyed hiking and camping together ever since they had met and fallen in love three years earlier at Virginia Tech. The Appalachian Trail was sort of the ultimate outdoorsy adventure. Their plan was to do a two-day hiking loop in the Pennsylvania section of the trail and camp along the way.
The first night, the girls set up camp close by to a shelter. Now, Camping on the trail is facilitated by its network of shelters, which are usually wooden structures with three walls and a slanted lean-to kind of roof. They don’t have many amenities, just a shelf with a logbook and a pen so those passing through can record their stay and connect with other hikers. Most are near a water source and outhouse, so some hikers set up camp near the shelters and just use the facilities, which is what the girls did.
It seems like that night was pretty uneventful, but the next morning, Rebecca had gone to the shelter to check for a logbook while Claudia stayed back at their camp.
When all of a sudden, she heard someone running towards her out of the woods. It was Rebecca, she looked rattled, and panicked, and she was checking over her shoulder like someone was following her. Clauda stood and asked her what was wrong, what happened.
Rebecca told her that she was going to use the shelter bathroom, but when she opened the door, there was a man in there. He was unusually tall, and shockingly thin, with wild, scraggly hair on his head and chin. His cheeks were so hollow that it made his lips pucker out like a fish, and he had small, beady eyes deeply set in their sockets. He was also, completely naked.
But as Rebecca registered what was happening, and tried to leave, the man approached her, with a wicked grin, and asked her for a cigarette. She could also tell that he was aroused, and she wondered if he had been waiting in there for her.
She was able to run away, and After that, the women packed up their camp and left. Walking swiftly through the forest as it thickened, and the trail became more narrow. They didn’t stop again until they needed to check their map an hour later. By that point they figured they were far enough away from the shelter that they could relax a little. they focused on getting their bearings, and the thick brush pulsed around them with animal chatter and the low, thrum of nature.
But Then Claudia heard another sound. An unnatural one. It was the crunch of someone stepping on leaves.
She whipped around to see a man emerging from the trees. Tall, gaunt, with sunken cheeks and wild hair. It was the same man. He had followed them.
only this time, he was fully clothed. and not only that, on his right shoulder there was a leather strap that connected to a .22 rifle.
He approached the women, who had nowhere to go. There was no one else around, nothing but miles of trees until the next shelter. Maybe that instinct, not fight, not flight, but freeze set in.
He told them they seemed lost, likely referring to the map they were holding. But the women didn’t want to make small talk with him. It’s not entirely clear how long this interaction lasted, But at some point, Claudia and Rebecca were able to get away from the man and continue on their hike, walking at an elevated pace to the next shelter, the sense of eyes on their backs the entire time.
They soon found their next camping site, by the mid to late afternoon and a small sense of relief washed over them. The area was calm and beautiful, there were tall trees beside a small babbling brooke of cool, clear water. No people around, so Rebecca and Claudia could enjoy each other's company in private.
They spent the afternoon basking in the warm spring sun, sitting by the river in each other's arms, and laughing. It was perfect.
They didn’t know that just beyond the treeline, a pair of eyes had locked in on them. It was the man.
Just then, a gunshot rang out through the meadow , and Claudia’s right arm above her elbow exploded. She looked down to see blood and torn flesh, but her brain couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing, or what she had heard. Rebecca knew instantly though, and before she could scream out “he’s got a gun”, Claudia was hit again.
Bullets rang out one after the other, and Rebecca shouted for Claudia to run behind a tree. By that point, Claudia had been struck multiple times, including on the top of her head, but by following Rebecca’s advice, she was able to duck out of the way of the oncoming bullets.
After what felt like forever, the bullets stopped, and the two women waited a moment before they tried escaping. Both of them had been hit, badly. By that point, Rebecca couldn’t carry herself out of the forest. Claudia tried picking her up, but quickly realized she wouldn’t be able to carry her out of the forest. So, she did the only thing she could think of, she made her girlfriend as comfortable as possible, told her she’d be back, and then ran to get help.
For four miles, Claudia ran, soaked in blood, through the tangled brush and mountain laurel as it got darker and darker. The whole time she worried that the strange man would find her, but the need to get help for Rebecca carried her the entire way. Eventually, she was picked up by two men on Shippensburg Road, and she guided them to where her girlfriend was, but by that time, she had passed away from her injuries.
Police searched the area, looking for a man who fit the description Claudia was able to give them, and eventually he was eventually found hiding out in a Mennonite community in Pennsylvania. Because the community didn’t watch TV or listen to the radio, they had no idea that the man who walked onto their compound was wanted for murder and attempted murder, and I can’t imagine what they must have felt as police swarmed their farms and hauled him away.
His name was Stephen Roy Carr, and he was a 29 year old man who sometimes lived in a cave along the Appalachian trail. Some locals described him as being a feral person of the appalachian mountains.
Lore of feral people varies in the region. Some believe that during the great depression, some people couldn’t afford to live in society, so they built their own secret societies in the mountains. And now, after generations of living in the wilderness, their less like people and more like animals. Others believe that Feral people are an entirely different species of person, ones who have evolved to survive in the caves and forests of Appalachia.
I’m not sure where that leaves Stephen, but he was a man who preferred the caves of Appalachia over living in society. He preferred being alone, and seemed to hyper fixate on female hikers of the trail, making advances on them, and then retaliating when they didn’t accept.
Claudia would survive her wounds and be able to tell her story in court at the trial for Rebecca’s murder. And one of the saddest things I’ve read about this case, other than the young woman’s death, is that Stephen’s defense attorney, Michael George, tried to convince the jury that Stephen had every right to fire at the women because they were putting their homosexual relationship on display. He hoped that the conservative, small town, judge would see Stephen as a rational man, driven to do something irrational because of the women’s behavior. But judge Oscar Spicer didn’t see him as that at all. He recognized that Stephen was a monster, and a threat to the community, and sentenced him to Life in prison, where he remains to this day.
Rebecca and Claudia’s story is devastating, and it’s not the only violent tragedy that has happened on the Appalachian Trail. I will say, murder rates on the trail are low- 12 people have been murdered there since 1974. The most recent victim was in 2019, a hiker named Ronald S. Sanchez Jr. He was an Army vet who used hiking to alleviate some of his PTSD symptoms that developed after he served 3 tours in Iraq. He was killed on a section of the Virginia trail by a man who had previously stabbed a 30 year old woman in the areal. Ronald was with three other campers when the attacker wandered into their campsite and started threatening them. And when Ronald confronted the man, he was stabbed repeatedly.
But even though these kinds of horror are rare, the publication The Trek reported that something like 40 percent of hikers said that a strange person made them feel unsafe on or near the trail. And many bring protection like pepper spray or dogs with them.
This really stuck out to me. Because if murder is so rare, then why do so many people feel unsafe? Why do so many people look over their shoulders as they walk through the woods?
Well, according to some that live in the area, it’s not just the people you have to be worried about. They say there’s something supernatural in the old mountains of appalachia, and those eyes you feel on your back might be something otherworldly watching you from the trees.
Let’s walk on the trail a little further into the woods, shall we? We’re taking a two day hike south to South Mountain in Maryland. where the trees start to get closer to one another and the canopy thickens above your head. Where the last shelter is far behind you, and you haven't seen another person in about 10 miles.
The path in front gets darker, the birds hush. You pass an old marker, so covered in moss and worn by time and elements that it’s impossible to read. This makes you shudder. It’s a sign of civilization, but it also reminds you this place can consume civilization.
You look at your map to get your bearings, and feel your stomach flip. You have been warned about this section, by other hikers and locals alike. They whispered to you, in a quiet, urgent tone, to tread carefully, watch your step, and be ready to run at any moment…
Tips like these are easy to find. Forums online are full of information, some contain sweet anecdotes about how to actually do the hike. But some detail the more unsettling things that hikers encountered in the shadows of the footpath.
Like this one story from Reddit from around 2019. The user deleted their name, but it was from a thread titled “what are your creepiest stories/encounters on this trail?” They wrote: “Not me but my husband (I was off trail injured by this point). He was hiking and saw a deer cut perfectly in half on the trail, but only the back half was left. He said it looked like it was cut with a laser—it was so precise. No blood drops, no jagged cuts or anything. Just the back half of a doe, left perfectly in the middle of the trail...”
These kinds of strange, indescribable horrors aren’t unheard of. In fact, there are enough of them, that communities along the Appalachian Trail tend to have a lot of rules about how to stay safe.
Children are warned about going out on Fridays, because eerie things happen that day. And if it’s grim and stormy, people tend to stay at home because bad weather means unlucky forces are around. I talked about others in our first appalachian horror episode, dont look in the trees, if you heard something, no you didn’t
But there’s one rule the locals know that doesn’t get talked about enough.
Don’t go near a certain patch of highway near The South Mountain in Maryland. Because you’re not going to like what you find there.
A long time ago, around the year 1900, a 30-year-old man named William had to do some errands in a Maryland town called Boonsboro. Boonsboro is by the foot of South Mountain, a peak on the Appalachian Trail.
William lived just a short walk from town, Which was a good thing because he didn’t wrap up his errands until 10 o’clock that evening. It was dark by the time he headed home to his wife and family in their cabin on a hill. His route took him along a roadway, with no light to guide him but the stars, twinkling in the endless sky above.
The wooded road loomed in front of him, completely dark and eerily quiet. as William passed by the foot of South Mountain, he saw something. It was in the road up ahead, and stood out from the rest of the murky night.
He tried to focus his eyes on its dark outline, when he noticed two red eyes glowing back at him.
It was a silhouette of an enormous animal. It looked like a dog, but it was far bigger than any canine he had ever seen. It was quieter, too. All it did was stand there, like a rigid, monstrous statue in the middle of the road, blocking his path.
William’s mind raced, ruled by fear and instinct rather than any kind of logic. Before he knew what he was doing, he grabbed a rock and chucked it at the creature. He did this over and over, picking up what he could find to throw at the dog and try to scare it away.
But the animal didn’t move. nothing that William threw actually hit it. Everything seemed to fall to the earth, like it had passed right through.
William’s fear curdled his stomach, but he kept attacking. He even ran towards the dog, intent on shoving it out of his path. As he got close, he saw the animal was as black as the night around it, with a red, vibrant mouth that hung open in a snarl.
He swung his fists…but he didn’t hit fur or mass. His blows just sailed through the air, passing through the dog, just like the stones had. It was as if this creature did not exist at all.
William staggered back And while he must have considered running…he couldn’t move. Because on the road in front of him, an extraordinary thing was happening. The animal was growing. It swelled in size, getting bigger and bigger until it blocked the entire roadway. And all William could do was stand there, in total shock, watching this supernatural fiend inflate.
Then all of a sudden, the dog snarled, bared its teeth….and vanished. Leaving William alone and shaking, on an empty mountain highway.
Around the year 1900, hundreds of people saw the same creature that William encountered on a certain stretch of highway near the South Mountain in Maryland. It eventually earned the name The Snarly Yow sometimes called the snarly yowl..
Everyone who saw it reported the same thing, a massive, black dog with a red mouth and a formidable snarl. Locals who saw it always spotted it at various points along the same route: It came down a narrow mountain path, crossed the National Pike highway, went down another hill, crossed a stream, and then disappeared into a canyon. It was almost like it was patrolling the highway pass, like some kind of otherworldly guardian.
At the time, some thought it was a new species of animal that lived nearby. But they realized that didn’t make sense. Mostly because it left no evidence of its existence – no tracks, hair, nothing. And those who encountered it, claimed if they threw things at it – like William had – those things just went through its body, instead of hitting it.
The creature was spotted frequently around 1900, but then sightings all but stopped. Though there have been a few throughout the years.
In 1975, there was a bus of kids returning from a field trip in Washington. During the ride home, the driver noticed a black dog standing off to the side of the road. He slowed down to pass it, but in the rearview he could see the dog sprinting towards the bus at an unnaturally fast speed.
The driver sped up, but no matter how fast he went, the dog was faster, and eventually he overtook the bus. And then stopped right in front of it.
The driver slammed on the brakes, bracing himself for what was to come . The kids all screamed as they screeched to a halt. Two distinct THUDS as the front and back tires rolled over the dog.
The driver was horrified and got out to see what the damage was. He peered down under the front to look at the tires. But…there was nothing there. No guts, no tufts of fur, no sign that he had just hit an animal.
When the driver looked up, he saw an impossible sight. Standing in the road up ahead, baring its teeth – was the black dog. It was very much alive and completely unharmed. It stood there for a few moments, let out a haunting yowl , and then vanished into thin air.
The legend of the snarly yow very much remains in the area today.
It is said to appear in front of cars, sometimes standing upright on its back legs. But it’s never hit by the vehicles, since they just go right through it. It can also run very fast, faster than a horse going at a full sprint.
Some consider it a bad omen, and say if you see it three times, you’ll die. Some have suggested hikers of the appalachian trail squeeze their eyes shut while walking through the area. You don’t want to risk the creature crossing your path three times.
In variations of its lore, it also makes a yowling noise – hence the name Snarly Yowl. As you walk through the forest with your eyes closed, you may hear its scream in the distance. If you do, the only option you have is to squeeze your eyes even tighter.
No one exactly knows where the creature came from, some believe it’s as ancient as the area it inhabits, but Some think that German immigrants brought the creature to the States in the 1700s when they settled the area. They were the first ones to actually see it.
From what I’ve researched, i haven’t found any legends of the snarly yowl from the Native American tribes in the area. So maybe it did somehow come with Germans, and now it’s forever cursed to stalk the land.
But maybe you believe it’s just a legend, and as you walk through South Mountain where the yowl stalks, you wont look over your shoulder, you wont turn your head when you hear a terrifying otherworldly howl. But you will come to a sign on the summit. And when you brush away the dirt and leaves, you’ll read four words that the locals don’t want you to ignore. Beware The Snarly Yow.
More, after the break.
BREAK 2
For our last story, I want to tell you about one of the trail's eeriest unsolved mysteries. But first, you need to go even further into the woods. We’re heading to Boone, North carolina
You hurry down an ever-darkening, meandering trail. The terrain goes up an incline, and soon you are not walking but climbing. Your legs ache as you navigate rocky outcrops and densely wooded cliffs, but you keep going. Because night is coming.
You were hoping to reach the next shelter before dusk, but the sun is vanishing fast. Soon, it is gone completely, and an inky blackness descends around you.
So You walk on in the darkness for hours, trudging through the most desolate part of the trail in the middle of the night, with only the stars above lighting your way.
When all of a sudden, you’re out of the woods, standing on top of a mountain lookout. Before you lie looming, shadowy mountain ridges ahead, and that’s when you see something that makes your heart pound. A flurry of quivering lights peppering the mountains and sky. Not stars, no, some of them appear to be ON the mountain. they’re something else.
These are the brown mountain lights, a mystery that still haunts the Appalachian mountains to this day.
A few decades ago, Dr. Daniel B. Caton was driving down the dark roads near Brown Mountain, a peak on the Appalachian Trail near Asheville, North Carolina.
Dr. Caton was an astronomy professor at Appalachian State University. And that night, he wanted to go look for a strange phenomenon in the sky that one of his students had told him about.
See, Dr. Caton had heard about mysterious lights that would appear over Boone, North Carolina, and were only seen from Brown Mountain. But he had chalked it up to local Appalachian legend. He didn’t grow up in Appalachia, so maybe he didn’t know that it’s the kind of place where the legends are sometimes true.
So for years, he never thought too hard about these lights, until one day, a student in his intro to Astronomy course claimed that he had seen the lights, and they were real.
There’s no way, Dr. Caton thought. So On his way home that night, he had decided to take a detour. The unplanned stop was Wiseman’s View, an observation area that looked out over a gorge at the edge of the Appalachian Trail.
So he got out of his car and stood at the gorge, staring up at the sky for about an hour. The lights from Boone pollute a little bit of the atmosphere, which hides some of the stars, but for the most part it’s a beautiful view.
But nothing about it felt paranormal. Nothing in the sky looked out of place. Maybe the student had mistaken some of the visible planets for unexplainable lights. This would make a great lesson come next week, he thought. When he was finally ready to leave, he started to turn away. Before he could, he saw something that made him freeze. There was a bright flash in the sky, as a circle of light lit up over the city, bigger than a star but smaller than the moon, and brighter than either. It lasted for a few seconds, then vanished again.
After this, Dr. Caton became infatuated with what he had seen and spent years trying to get to the bottom of it. To do so, he installed two cameras overlooking Brown Mountain. He figured if he was going to prove that something was going on, he’d need to catch it on camera. That way there’d be no question that it wasn’t just a glitch. And one night in 2016, he actually captured a grainy shot of the phenomenon
I’ve seen this picture, and it’s kind of amazing. It shows a dark mountain range, a horizon of lights from the surrounding communities, and there, too high to be a city light, there is a bright flash that appears, hovers for a few seconds, and then vanishes.
Even though this photo was significant, Dr. Caton was by no means the first person to see the Brown Mountain Lights. People have been spotting the lights around the mountain for over two centuries.
Most describe them as star-like dots. But what’s strange is they act differently for everyone. Sometimes the lights move slowly, and other times they explode like fireworks. That is, if they’re seen at all. The lights rarely appear. And Only a few have been in the right spot at the right time, and witnessed their ethereal, mysterious beauty.
But no one – including Dr. Caton – have ever been able to fully explain their existence. Though many have tried over the years.
In 1913, a local paper ran an article that stated “much has been said in the papers about the mysterious light which can be seen from certain points in Burke County. A Light which arises from nowhere so far as the natural eye can discern, is visible for a time and then passes out. It has been observed for years by many Burke people and finally so much interest was aroused that the government was importuned to send an expert to pass on the mystery.”
The article goes on to explain how the “expert” (what kind of expert is never explained) declared that it was the light from the train, and then took off. That conclusion drove the locals up the wall.
Another article from 1927 proclaims that the mystery had finally been solved. The light, according to the Geologist that was interviewed, was…. The light from the train. Locals were quick to point out that the lights didn’t behave like train lights. They moved erratically, and were sometimes seen ABOVE the mountains. Also, they had the train schedules and they knew the lights were seen even at times the train wasn’t going through the mountain.
The geologist explained that those times it must have been car lights.
But in 1913 when the first article ran, there would have been hardly any cars in the area.
I even found ANOTHER article from 1967 that suggested the lights were just a mirage. Once again, the locals were not convinced by this answer.
There are other theories of course. Some think the lights are caused by natural gasses from the mountain, or a specific kind of lightning.
But here’s the thing. These lights have been around for far longer than electricity and train lights. They’ve been around for so long, that like much of the strange happenings in the area, they’ve cemented themselves in folklore. And the stories about them are rich and representative of the people in the area.
For instance, the Cherokee people think they know where the lights come from.
There’s a bit of indigenous lore from the tribe that speaks of a violent battle long ago, between the Cherokees and another tribe on the mountain. After the carnage was over, the mothers, widows, and sisters of the men who died, marched into the darkness. They carried torches and had tears in their eyes as they hunted for the bodies of their fallen.
Those lights are the echo of their path, which was filled with so much anguish that their spirits are still imprinted on the mountain, decades later.
To this day, we still don’t know what causes the Brown Mountain lights. Though explanations seem to change with the times. In the 60’s, they were largely thought to be alien, and a local man named Ralph Lael claimed he had telepathic communication with the lights. According to him, aliens from a planet called Pewam would abduct him and take him throughout space, teaching him how to save Earth.
Others believe that they’re ball lightening. Some still think it’s reflections of train and car lights, others think it’s balls of gas that spontaneously combust, like will o wisps over a bog.
But we don’t know, and we may never know. And as you’re walking on the trail, trying to think to yourself what the lights could possibly be, before you know it you’re at another shelter. People are setting up their tents and sitting by the fire, cracking beers and chatting.
You all start sharing stories about what you’ve seen and heard in your time on the trail, you're adding to the local tapestry of legends about this place, it’s mystery, it’s horror, it’s magic. And you start to forget where these stories come from, and you come to think of them as legends and something in you relaxes. Maybe there’s nothing to fear on the trail, maybe these are all tales people have been sharing with each other for centuries.
And just then, you hear something whistle in the tree above you.
That’s all I have for you today on Heart Starts Pounding. Please let me know if you’ve ever hiked the Appalachian trail, and what stories and legends you’ve heard if so. You can find a form to reach out to me at heartstartspoudning.com. We will be back next week for a dark story, one of stalking, of paranoia, and one where the truth is very hard to make sense of. Join me here for that next week, and until then, STAY CURIOUS