SC EP:1198 What I saw fills me with dread

Mason writes "I'm not quite sure how to start this other than with my first encounter.

In the summer of 2013 or 2014, I went camping with my friend Perry and his father in upstate New York, we lived in Saranac Lake, which is 15 minutes down the road from Lake Placid where the 1980 miracle on ice occurred. Upstate New York is nothing like the city that the state is most famously known for, its mountainous, and covered in forests, and is also home to the Adirondack state park, where our little town was nestled.

We had gone with his nearly estranged father to a camping ground near a lake, which one I cannot remember, as the area is littered with them. What I do remember however is Perry's father had stopped us setting up camp to tell us a scary story, ironically enough about Sasquatch. He told us a story about it taking food and attacking campers, but the two of us both teenagers, blew off his story. I for one have always had an interest in Bigfoot, but growing up, every adult in my life had talked down to me or made fun of this interest, causing me to in a sense disengage from them when they attempted to talk shop with me.

This camp ground was large, and had over 20 slots, and his father had splurged in an attempt to reconcile with Perry, opting to rent a site next to the lake. Between our campsite and every other was about 100 feet of thick woods, to allow privacy between the families camping. At the time I believe it was us, and two other families as it was nearing the end of summer, and they were a few sites away from us. The camping was fun, and nothing too exciting occurred other than the three of us learning to set up an over complicated bass pro tent for a small family. At around 10 o'clock that night give or take an hour we had been sitting around our campfire when Perry's father's demeanor changed. For most of this day we had all three been very excited and having fun, but at this point in the night he seemed to suddenly become very serious. He got us to clean up our campsite and pack up everything aside from a large cooler he had brought along. Then he had ushered us into the tent. Perry and I, both being 13 or 14, were still awake, laughing over dumb jokes and attempting not to wake Perry's father when we began to hear walking. At this time I had not been as well versed of the sounds of the woods as I would become later in life, but even then I could distinguish the sound of bipedal walking, especially when it sounded heavy. We heard something begin to approach our campsite, and at first I had wondered if it were a loon or heron which were all over the lake during the day. This however was quickly disproven when it approached our tent. Perry's face suddenly became filled with fear, fear which matched the sudden sinking feeling growing in my chest and stomach. I had turned slightly to my left, onto my back, as I was closest to the side this unknown had approached, and something inside me demanded I not have my back to whatever this was. We sat there for what felt like forever, but could only have been a minute, when the side of the tent began to push in slowly, what was pushing it in has never left me. What I can only describe as a poorly outlined hand had pushed in the side of the tent. The tent wall had bulged inwards a good five or six inches and was starting to stretch as far inward as it could before the tent began to bend. The hand itself reminded me of my fathers hand, he is a man of 6 feet and over 250 pounds, and had hands that remind me of the cartoon character wreck it Ralph, or more accurately like a baseball glove. What shocked me most of all was that this hand seemed to be double or triple the size of my father's hands.

I believe if it were not for what happened next, it may have kept moving its hand further. Perry's father actively spoke in his sleep, a quirk of his that I at the time did not know. He had said something quiet, but just loud enough that it caused this hand to pull away. It was at this moment that the air began to feel electrified, like we had done something wrong, and the fear in my body then and even now rewriting this spiked. The woods had gone deadly silent, the only sound we could hear was the water from the lake make ten feet from our tent.

We froze, Perry and I had lain as flat as possible to avoid bringing attention to ourselves, and were doing our best to slow our breathing, to keep quiet. Perry's father however had mumbled something else, and Perry decided he would attempt to wake him. It half worked, as his father seemed to hear Perry whispering to him, because the next thing I knew his father chuckled and said "You're trying to scare me for the story aren't you? Not gonna work" and moments later, his father was once again asleep.

As he spoke, we heard and felt the steps from earlier walk away from us, further into our campsite. We had pitched our tent on the edge of the site because a large picnic table sat in the center, this table is where we left our cooler. I mention this because you could hear the wood suddenly creaking as if something heavy was leaned on it or sat on it. Following this was the sound of the cooler opening, and the sound of plastic bags and cans being sorted through.

Perry and I held our breath, terrified. At the time I refused to believe it was Bigfoot, because I did not want what was happening to ruin my enjoyment of the subject.

We listened to it for quite some time, I believe four or five minutes, rummaging through the cooler, before we heard the cooler close, and the steps begin to move away. The next thing we heard was something entering the water, and the sound of something swimming away.

We stayed awake after that, or more accurately I did, Perry eventually got to sleep, I can only imagine he was exhausted from the terror we had felt. I, in my infinite wisdom of a brazen 13 or 14 year old, waited for sunrise to exit the tent, where I found our cooler still on the table but moved, and many of the items we had brought in the cooler strewn about the site. I did not see tracks, as the ground here was too hard, but what I did notice was that the cooler felt oily on the handles, like someone who had washed their hands in seed oils had touched it, or someone who had done an oil change had just manhandled the cooler. It also smelled slightly of mildew, or more accurately it smelled like stale air.

When Perry woke and so did his father, Perry apparently had decided to not talk about what had happened, and his father thought I was trying to scare him for as he put it "payback for yesterdays story".

Suffice to say, I had grown a pair of eyes in the back of my head that night, which would keep me aware in the woods for years to come.

My second encounter is extremely brief, and at the time I was convinced by my mother that it was simply foxes attempting to mate. For you if you want to see where this one occurred, we lived at

220 Riverside Drive, Saranac Lake New York. Down the road from my old home was thick woods that went on fire miles, which are still there. My home was just up the road from it.

I know this had occurred in 2014 because my father had given me an IPad he no longer wanted for my birthday which was in March of that year. I had been up late watching YouTube, and enjoying some pirated shows on the site, and when I say late I mean 1 or 2 AM late.

I had always been spooked by sounds I'd never heard before, but never as afraid as what this would do to me.

I had just decided I needed to sleep when my dog Lakota, a Keeshond I just recently adopted began to whine. His cage was in my room. For context, this home was three stories tall, but built on an a steep hill. We had gotten this home from a family friend who had been building it for himself, but decided he didn't want it when he found a "better property". My room was on the "ground floor". I put this in quotations because my room and the entire left half of the ground floor sat 10 feet above the driveway. The driveway, was about 40 or 50 feet long, extending past our house to a garage which is built into the hill, the hill itself was covered in thick woods and it was maybe 70 feet between our house and the people behind it. The driveway itself also opened a path up behind the garage, up into the woods.

So my room is about 10 feet above the driveway, but directly beside it, and I have a single window here. I had the window partly cracked, and my room was pretty quiet, I was trying not to wake my mother upstairs because her room was directly above mine and she could be very upset if I was too loud and woke her up. I was relaxed and enjoying myself as I had said before when a sound I can only describe as a bloody scream exploded up from the driveway. It was both deep and high pitched, and vibrated the glass in the windows, my TV and my entire body. I was instantly overcome with the deepest fear I have ever felt, and I threw the iPad down. Normally if I heard something that scared me I would just close the window and my bedroom door and hide under the covers, but this filled me with so much terror I threw my iPad, left my dog behind and went running into the hall. As soon as I made it into the hall, I could hear something in the distance answer back. I too began screaming, only instead of a guttural two toned shrieking I began screaming for my mother.

She came rushing down the stairs, I can only assume she too was awoken by these sounds. She however was angry with me. According to her that was foxes sending out a mating call. I had told her I don't believe her and her response still sticks with me as an oddly funny reaction to such a terrifying moment. "What do you want me to do? Go outside and shoot it? I'm not doing that!"

I believe my panic had sent the screamer away from our home, because I never heard that sound again after the initial scream and answer from down the road.

For years I just accepted my mother's reality, because I didn't know what else it could be, until I was listening to your show. I'm not sure what episode it was but I know the sound. The moment I heard it I had a full blown panic attack, and was brought right back to that night. Every time I hear that sound I go back, not as panicked as before thankfully, but that sound will haunt me for the rest of my life. It is only thanks to you that I know what it was now. The audio I think of sounds feminine almost, like a banshee almost, and is followed by a deep call at the end. I believe it may have been on a recent episode.

Now for my final encounter or rather what I'd refer to as the most terrifying 3 months of my life.

I moved to Virginia in 2016, and have lived here since then. It was last year, 2024, when I had lost my job in retail. I had lost my grandmother who had been there my whole life, she had been there for me when I lost my sister in 2009 and even been there holding one of my mothers legs when I was born. This loss had hit me hard and I had lost the passion I had for my job and most things around me. It had been my spouse Lynn's suggestion that I go into something new, something that got me outside, to help me find my passion for work again. So I applied to FedEX Ground in Winchester Virginia, and to my delight I got the job fairly quickly. I was trained, and put into my own truck within a month and a half of getting the gig. My route was Luray Virginia, specifically the area around Highway US-211 East, called Fairview. This area is mostly hills, woods, farms, pastures, and creeks. This is about as rural as you can get, internet vanishes here, your phone loses signal, and most people you speak to is related to five others here. I loved my route, except for three places on it.

To start was Piney Mountain Road. Piney Mountain goes up to a small paved circle where houses have mailboxes. The houses these boxes belong to were each up a steep mountain whose roads were carved out of the mud and dirt between trees, and every driveway was a challenge: the worst of all was at the top of the mountain, where a house had an inclined driveway. This driveway had no good turn arounds aside from a small patch of dirt that sat precariously over a small drop of about 70 feet onto a slope with a slight incline of 80°. I would have to do an eleven point turn to turn my vehicle around and then pray to god my brakes didn't give out as I delivered these peoples packages. Well the more I delivered to them, the more I felt like someone was going to come out of the woods and attack me in the truck.

Every time I delivered to this home I was filled with dread to the point I once just left their boxes in the driveway and nearly killed myself flying down the mountain. There was one night however, when I was out extremely late delivering, that I arrived at the paved circle at the bottom of the mountain, and decided I was never driving up there again. I parked and was on the phone with my spouse, with an earbud in one ear. I was delivering to the only house at the bottom before I was to go up the mountain, when I began to hear nearly every sound I've ever heard you play on the podcast start up that mountain, I heard arguing samurai chatter, I heard howling, screaming, I heard branches and trees being torn apart, and I flew into my truck, leaving their packages in a drop box that belonged their neighbors and I left in tears.

Next, would be Morning Star Road or as google calls it "Jewell Hollow Road." Not much happened here aside from two things. I saw a distant figure up on a hill one day for maybe a moment that was man shaped and black, and an old woman who told me and I quote her directly "the boogers don't like you speeding around here."

To finish out I would have to drive up a road directly behind the Shenandoah national park HQ, East Rocky Branch. This road went far back into the woods, surround by it really, on the right side of the road was a 10 foot drop into a ditch with a river at the center, and on the left was a hill connected to a small mountain. I drove this entire road, delivering boxes to every house, except for the ones at the ends. Every time I would drive down this road I would get an odd feeling, like I was being watched. I had chalked it up to paranoia; because I had been listening to your shows episodes I'd downloaded on the app, I just had become a true member and not an Apple podcast listener anymore. For months I was just calling it paranoia, denying the occasional stick break, the woods going silent, or the feeling of being watched. There was even a point when I had gone a different road this occurred so I assumed I had just begun overthinking, until the last two months I worked for FedEX. I had a house I delivered to at the end, which had a large cleared yard with trees surrounding it. There was a large opening about maybe 40 feet wide that looked all the way to a small waterfall about 200 feet from where I'd park in their gravel driveway. I had met the family who lived here a few times, and the father was a good 6'5 maybe 6'6. This is important because I would often see the father about halfway back towards this waterfall, and he would stand beside a tree in this clear view in order to talk with me as I delivered packages, mainly to tell me where to place them.

It was November, and I was arriving in their driveway on a day they must not have been home, because their car that usually blocked me from doing an easy turn around in this driveway was gone. So I parked sideways in the driveway, and began to take their package out. I hadn't noticed it yet, but the woods were silent aside from the occasional gust of wind. The package was quite heavy; and I had been spouting some expletives as I was not in the best of shape, but I eventually got it on their porch. Once I did, I turned around and looked back in the clearing.

What I saw fills me with dread to this day. "