The Stairs In The Woods | Creep Cast
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*Rain*

Oh, baby. Oh, baby. I'm excited. I am pumped. I'm so ready for it. This is a good first episode to start with. I'm glad you suggested this. Yeah, yeah. Like, it's foundational to a ton of internet horror. And also, like, it's just a cool story to analyze, right? Because it's known for one specific thing, but the story does a lot more than just that one specific thing as well.

Yeah. Here, we can get into it. But, Wendy, why don't you go ahead and tell the audience what we're even starting with here? By starting with, do you mean the story or, like, this podcast? Either or. I'm just excited all around. I'm pumped. Everybody. I'm amped up. Welcome to Creepcast. I'm so excited for it. Me and my man here. Can I call you by your, like, real human name or Meat Canyon? Yeah. Okay, cool. You can call me by real name, Nathaniel. Okay, yeah.

Hunter here, Hunter and I have been talking about this podcast for like over a year now. And it's been like in the back of my head constantly. Like as soon as I get settled, we got to do this. And now I'm settled and now we're doing this. And I'm so, oh, I'm so ready. I'm so excited. I am too. I am too. It's given me a nice way to just, it's an excuse just to consume stuff that's like, it

It's almost like listening to nice albums or something, right? Yeah. Like, consuming these horror stories, it's always like, oh, yeah, I heard that one's good, but you never really take time to do it. So this is just, like, my little excuse to always have time. Now I get to make time to do it. And that, to me, is exciting. And today, you know, this is a story that I've heard of but I'd never, like, dived into. And I was really happy that I did.

Very, very excited about today's first subject of our first episode. The first episode of Creepcast. I'm so ready. It's so weird that it's tangible now, that it was something we've talked about forever, but now it's here. It's real. You can touch it. It feels good. I'm so excited. Settle in, people, because today we're talking about an extremely scary, not even old, but in terms of internet, I would say it's

It has some age on it now. Almost a decade old now. In terms of internet, that's prehistoric in a way. It's actually over a decade. It was 2010, so it's been 13 years. My sighting here says 2015. I'm way off. The first part came out in 2010. The series, I think it went into 2015. I see, I see. Okay.

Which, for people wondering, what are we talking about today? What are we diving into? We're talking about the Search and Rescue series. Yes, from r slash no sleep. A classic, classic thing. A classic. That has spawned a lot of modern internet horror, but some people don't even realize. Sure, they're probably familiar with the story, but they don't realize it created a ton of stuff that's really popular now.

Yeah, and I think that you can tell in how not only is it presented, but also it's like a... It's almost like a...

I don't want to say juvenile, but it's written in a way that feels like a Reddit post almost. Or it feels very personal, which I think translates really well into a lot of the narratives that happen with even video formats of found footage stuff or even some Mandela catalog type stuff too. It has that personality, those little characteristics that I love. And it's fun seeing it here before really this thing was conceptualized before other things. Sure, you had your...

you know, some found footage stuff or some other kind of like, at like little, little aspects of horror. But this seeing it in text form like this and seeing the response, even in the post is really fun. Like I, it's just a, it was such an enjoyable find. So it's cool. And it's, it's a series of stories broken up into seven parts, seven delicious parts or eight parts.

It's eight parts, counting the finale. And then there's been some other stuff that the creator has done later on as like some final updates in the past few years. We'll get into all that when we get to it. But yeah, the main bulk of the story is eight parts. Which I guess, do you want to give a rundown of like what is the general synopsis of the story? Absolutely. So the original post was made to r slash nosleep.

Simply titled, I'm a search and rescue officer for the U.S. Forest Service. I have some stories to tell. And from there, it is exactly what the title describes. It is someone who has worked in national parks, describing some of the weird things that they've come across in those parks. As the series goes on, the person who is documenting these stories begins to speak to other Park Service Rangers about stories that they've had.

And then that kind of compounds into a greater conspiracy happening at this park. And the story like naturally unfolds from that starting point. But basically the eight parts of the series are a recounting of strange things that go bump in the night in the United States National Parks, which is a great format for, uh,

like a horror story to this degree because not only is there already so many like supernatural stories or conspiratorial stories around the National Park Service, but it's these, you know, for the most part, undocumented gaps of forest in the United States that we're supposed to like have a good handle on, know what goes on out there.

But there's still so many, like in the real world, there's so many stories of people going missing, unexplainable disappearances and deaths and what have you. And the story, I'm a search and rescue officer, really capitalizes on a lot of that fear people seem to have around national parks and the park service as a whole. To me, this is the number one manifesto of why you should never work in the U.S. Forest Service. It's outread to me. Because as we'll see in this document, too,

It's like, not only is it coming from her perspective, but it's also coming from her second storytelling of her being like, you know, oh, I asked a colleague of mine about stuff they've seen. Or like her, like basically recounting other people who also work in the Forest Service, which also makes this kind of, I wouldn't say even being working in a U.S. Forest Service is it

a mundane job. But when I first saw it, I was like, yeah, you think of like the stereotypical, like almost like park ranger or something like that. Right. But it, it takes on like weird, almost like government kind of conspiracy stuff or like things that are, that are hidden. And there's a lot of like little fun entries that are, that I think are just really fun that play into it being such a, just kind of like a real, uh,

reciting real events, which is fun. Which is the stuff of her seeing crazy monsters and being like, I probably shouldn't talk about this or I'd lose my job. And it's like, fuck the job! Run away! Go to safety! You know what I mean? There is a degree it reaches midway through where you're like, bro, just quit. What are you doing here? Get the hell out of here. Which we were talking about this earlier and it was funny because I was like, I was...

I was kind of telling you about some of the parts that I thought were like really amusing and stuff. And then you were right. You're like, yeah, it starts off really plausible and it gets like just nosedives in the SEP. But at the same time, that's fun. I really enjoy that. Oh, yeah. It's fun because like the way the story starts is you're in this position where

of like oh this could really happen there's a bunch of people i know who like just heard the part one and thinks that the stairs in the woods are like a real story like oh yeah this started like as a completely non-fiction thing um and that's kind of the tone it maintains in the beginning of like this could really happen and then once you're lured into that setting

Then it becomes, there's something going on here. Stuff keeps happening. It's more frequent now. And like I said, like I made the joke to you, it kind of gets into SCP Foundation territory there. But it really does almost hit the degree of like, we're part of agents who are meant to keep secret. There's things that are covering up. And it makes me really excited to where the series might go in the future. But we'll talk about that stuff when we get to the end of this.

Yeah, I was going to say, if anything, let's start diving into the actual first part here. Absolutely. Which, like we said, they're like almost – it's like a collection of just like memories, but it's just like tiny, extremely condensed short stories of just retelling events. Which starts off with the berry-picking children story.

uh which is a which is an interesting one to start with but then what i like to which also before we get into this too is that there's some in the in the beginning at least where she'll tell us some like very creepy weird stuff and then she'll kind of mix it in with some stuff like the guy who is hiding up in a tree because of a moose and it's just like little funny moments where it's like haha yeah we always talk about that because that's a funny time which the blending of like horror and like

kind of comical, like, weird experiences you would have at your job give this a lot more authenticity, which I think adds to what you were saying about, like, the staircase thing, about people thinking that it's real, the staircases are actually out there. And I think that these little human moments really tie in all of these things in just these little text blurbs. Yeah, and also, like, I don't know if...

I can't remember if this is said in the story or I've been in contact with the author for those watching and she's very cool. She's very nice. But I can't remember if it was in conversation with her or an interview I saw of her or if it's said in the story. But the character of this story is a man named Russell. He is the search and rescue officer that the fictional character in the story is focused around. So,

So typically if we say she, we're referring to the author. If we say he, we're referring to the character. Because the author didn't suffer as intensely as Russell did. But Russell was having a hard go of it in the story. Yes, very hard go of it. And therefore a bit too, after researching about the author as well, I almost just put her as the archetype.

in the story as well. Like I almost, not to say that I didn't, not to say that Russell doesn't come up, but I started just reading myself almost as if it's her personal entries or something. I just, if I got that level of immersion from it. So yeah,

Yeah, so if I slip up, that's the reason why. Absolutely. So we can go ahead and start in the beginning of it. So, yeah, as you mentioned, it begins with the berry picking story, right? Again, this is just from the premise of a search and rescue officer describing some of the cases he's been on. And it starts with these two kids who are out berry picking, and then one of them, or both of them go missing. They find one of the kids who says that their sibling was taken away by the, quote, bear man.

Already coming out of the gate swinging. Like, first story. That's how you know you're getting into some fun cryptotory territory where it's quote animal and it followed with man. It could be any kind of animal. Giraffe man. And you're like, oh, fuck. Immediately. It's very nice. And yeah, it is the sister who's found quickly. And yeah, I love that. The rescuers find her and she's just, yeah, he was taken by the bear man.

So creepy. Which she describes it as being a tall, hairy-type man with a weird face resembling a bear. Which, in my mind, I love these kind of things when it's a child saying it, because to me, I almost read that as, like... Because also to clarify, too, the author, or the Russell, never tells you which forest it is. He's just like, I'm going to lose my job. You know, I don't want to say where it's at. Mm-hmm.

So to me, I thought Appalachian Mountains, and I just assumed like inbred hills have eyes kind of, you know, wrong turn hillbilly. When I read the description or whenever she says the description of tall, hairy and weird face, this is horrifying. And to especially call like an inbred redneck guy, a bear man to me was frightening, which I'm sure it's an actual bear man. But for when I was reading it, I was like, oh, God.

I also, like I was reading this and the whole way through, I was thinking like Appalachia up until she described a moose. And I was like, oh, sure. Okay. Yep. All right. Fair. But yeah, I had the same thought, like bear man. That's clearly West Virginia. No question. Yeah. Like kind of like West Virginia. And it's kind of cool. I think this is the one too, where there's a couple search and rescue type things.

beats in these stories, but they talk about like the grid system of like going out and trying to find people. And you like really like the, the, the search and rescue people. It isn't like they were like, Oh, okay, well he's gone. It's like, no, she, or the author really goes into describing like how extensive the search is. It puts a lot of like humanity into the character. And then only to the find no traces of the boy at all. And it's still just gone. No trace of them or an abduction, no struggle. It's just like simply disappeared, which is, is,

An extremely haunting way to start it, but also in a weird way, too, these blurbs, which I don't know if the author meant to do this, but a lot of these blurbs tie in with the way that they present information. You're like, oh, shit, I wonder if... Did the kid go up the stairs later on? Yeah. How did they leave? These tie-in are really fun, but...

Starting off with Bear Man, it's pretty solid. What's also cool about it, how you mentioned stuff ties in, there's stuff that you don't realize ties in until later on in it. For example, in this next section, and still the part one, right after the author's done describing how

the bear man, like that whole story. Uh, it then moves in and starts talking about how sometimes they'll be out on search expeditions and the canines will try to get them to go up a straight up cliff. Like they'll be walking and it's like the dog doesn't process or the scent they're following doesn't register with the cliff face in front of them.

is related to the greater stuff going on. You're drip fed information in a way that you don't really realize you are until the story starts to come together. And that's a really cool move from an author to pull off. Yeah, or even just setting up the idea of like introducing how they do search patterns. Because I know with the canines, the canines leading to cliffs kind of section of this first part is whenever the...

The dogs are leading them to these insanely steep and sheer cliffs. The entire thing that baffles the person is that it just defies every aspect of logic of how somebody could have gotten there or how this person... How these bodies are so...

The missing persons are found in just completely different locations, like miles and miles and miles away, which leads into some just fun thought experimenting of what exactly is going on and how these stories kind of tie into each other. I think it does a really good job about leading the reader into coming up with their own kind of conclusions or theories or something, which I think especially for like SCP or like

These horror... Letting a reader's imagination run wild and also try to come up with conclusions that are fun and not annoying is the most satisfying thing. Because if you ever are in a situation where you're reading something and you're like, oh god, that's stupid. You know that you're in the wrong, but whenever you're being like, oh shit, I bet this is like...

I don't know, weird dimensional traveling things or something without getting into like layers of like Sasquatch teleportation. You know that you're, you know, you're doing something pretty fun. Yeah. The, there's a, I mean, the other one that comes to mind just in terms of part one is also the section with the young woman in the tree.

Where it's like a young woman climbs a tree to get a better view while hiking with her mother and grandpa. And she never comes down from the tree.

Which is... That's a kind of terrifying one, too, because it's like... Because they mention that they lose sight of her as she goes up into the branches. So they're like, oh, she's still up there. They just never see her again. Just never see her again. Doesn't come down. Yeah. The whole time, too, I was just thinking, like, oh, something's going to happen and she's going to, like, plummet down and they're going to see her die. But that's, like, nowhere near as horrifying as climbing up an extremely tall tree to get a better view and just simply never coming down.

And I know that whenever I was watching this, too, I don't know why, but like when I or when I was reading this, I just started getting imagery in my head of like just like a really thick fogged forest kind of thing. Like, I don't know if I don't know if your mind's eye kind of started like picturing the forest, too, but just thinking about this, like almost hauntingly like.

labyrinth of a forest was... Yeah, yeah. Just kind of kept flooding my mind and just the idea of climbing up. Because then I started... You start, like, picturing yourself climbing up it. And to me, when I was reading it, I almost thought, like, that you'd never see the top of the tree either. So she's just, like, continuously climbing and climbing and climbing, being like, where the...

Where the fuck is the end of the story? The story later touches on dimensional shifts, like what you're talking about. And it's more of what we were saying, that you're given stuff that later turns out to be part of the bigger picture. So yeah, maybe this woman just kept climbing forever, right? There's no clue. There's a couple other stuff in part one that I think is worth pointing out. One thing I really like that the story does is it doesn't just...

hang on the supernatural elements. A lot of the time, Russell will give us stories about unrelated to supernatural events. Like in part one, he mentions the story of there was one time that a nine-year-old girl fell down an embankment and died. And he talks about how awful that was going and retrieving her body. That's not supernatural. It's just a tragedy that took place.

So stuff coming in like that really helps to keep the story feeling valid as it continues in kind of the more subtle parts of it. Very macabre. Very like... It kind of made me think of other almost like Japanese folk tales or something like that, especially with the following of that. You know, the accident of the girl, it leads her mother to commit suicide after that incident. And it's just like...

horribly bleak and tragic, but that within itself is just like its own horror of like, you're right. It isn't leaning on the supernatural, but in a way it does feel like some kind of like, I don't know, just the dark, the dark force of, uh, circumstances or like, what's the word I'm looking for? Like accidents, just like the dark force of like what, uh,

like a tragic slip can cause and stuff and the kind of like horrors of that. So, and I, I do think that also grounds it a bit more in reality too, because I, I can only imagine how many people, which coincidentally after reading this too, I have a friend who works in the, like kind of a forestry or as a forester in, uh,

up in the Pacific Northwest. And they say that they find... It's insane what people find. Like, a lot of dead bodies from just, like, random hikers and stuff. Because especially, like, if somebody's going missing, they usually don't send cops.

out into the woods. They just wouldn't know how to travel. They have to send foresters, state park officials, all that stuff. But I mean, the amount of stuff that you find out there, including that, or like just crazy shit, like bags of like piss and feces, which it's like, dude, you're out in the forest. You could just piss and shit on the ground if you wanted to. But they're in bags. And like weird sex cults and all kinds of weird stuff happens out in this forest. And I think that like just little instances like this ground it a bit more in reality to where if you ever did look that up, you're like, oh God, this

This kind of stuff does happen, which I think just gives it a sense of authenticity that's fun. And then you lead yourself into stuff like, you know, the faceless man in part one too. And you're like, okay, well, I hope that's not fucking real, my lord.

which a climber during a solo trip encounters a man with no face wearing a parka and ski pants on a mountain, which I don't know why, but I kind of, I giggled whenever I heard about the parka and the ski pants. I don't know why it's just a big fluffy. It's like a Michelin man outfit. You know what I mean?

But he's disturbed by the encounter and he rushes down the mountain, resulting in a fall and a broken leg. While trapped, he hears the faceless man muffled screams throughout the night. The climber eventually is rescued but is deeply traumatized by the experience. Which I always love. A lot of these stories end with people that have escaped the forest. And it gives the forest almost like it's its own entity. You know what I mean? Some of these people are like they escape and they'll probably never return kind of thing.

Very opposite of Ted the Caver. These people are probably a little smarter than Ted, is what I would say.

Yeah, it's like something else about the way the faceless man is described too. It's like he's climbing up a cliff and then he comes across someone with no face, obviously terrifying, right? Tries to get down the cliff, falls, breaks his leg, can't go any further. And then all night he hears the quote muffled screams. It's like this thing has a face behind its skin and you can hear it trying to scream through it and it kept trying to climb down to get to him. Yeah.

Yeah. Climbing down. That is, that is such a true statement though. Like skin stretched over someone's face. It almost makes him like, it's like he's, he's screaming in the night, but it's like, it's, it took on like a perception of like, is he like suffocating? Is he just like in this forever hell torture, you know? And then, but then the maliciousness of him trying to always find him, find the man with the broken leg.

So freaky. So freaky. Which, then, I guess, let me see. We have a couple more from part one. Of course, it ends with the staircase one, but I want to save that one for last. Yeah. Which is, there's another search for a young woman who's separated from her hiking group, and she's found under a log in a state of shock. She repeatedly mentions being followed by a big man with black eyes. Yeah.

As rescuers near their base, she becomes increasingly agitated, claiming the man is making faces and wants to take her and the rescuers. The woman also references a scar on a rescuer's neck that she shouldn't have known about. So weird, like almost like just a weird paranormal, almost like telepathic thing happening.

almost like fortune or not fortune, but like mind reader or something. Yeah. A lot of weird mental stuff there. It's like the, the creature she's imagining was just like, Oh, well this woman's clearly insane until she says, uh, the thing says she, the monster says he doesn't like the scar on the back of your neck, which was a covered up scar that the woman couldn't have seen. So it gives like validity to this. The scariest part, and this is something else I really like about like all eight parts of the story. The scariest part about this, uh,

insert to me is when Russell is describing the noise that he's hearing because he doesn't see anything while this woman's talking about it. He just hears something. And the way it's worded is he says...

We finally got her to keep moving, but we started hearing these weird noises coming from all around us. It was almost like coughing, but more rhythmic and deeper. It was almost insect-like. Like, what? I love that. An insect coughing noise that was rhythmic and deeper? Yeah, an insect coughing noise.

Which I wonder if the parallel there was supposed to be with the black eyes to make you think that maybe it was like kind of an insect kind of monster. Oh, I didn't even put that together. Yeah, black eyes. Almost like a giant grasshopper kind of thing. Oh, bro. Because it's funny that you, it's funny you said that too, because when I read that too, I was like, oh, fuck. Because I was perceiving it as like, oh, okay, we're getting into like alien territory. Almost is what I was thinking. Yeah. Big black eyes. Sure. You know, all the tropes are there for that.

But whenever I heard the rhythmic coughing, which while I was reading it, I don't know if you did too, but whenever I read this kind of stuff, you almost try to mimic the kind of cough to kind of get a vibe for it. And I was doing it until I heard insect, and I was like, what the fuck? And I'm like, oh, well, no wonder I can't think of what it is because of an insect coughing. Oh, no. So I sat there, and I kept doing these weird grass, like trying to do a grasshopper cough or something. Yeah.

I couldn't think of what it would sound like. And I was going to ask you what you thought that that would... What an insect cough would sound like. I would think... Well, if you did it on the podcast, I guess I will too. It's probably like a... I can't do it correctly. Hold on. It's like... I guess. I don't know. To me, in my head, it sounds kind of like...

To me in my head, it sounds like a cicada almost. Oh, yeah. Like the little guttural noises they make. Yeah. But there's like a million of them? Yeah, yeah. So it's like this is the cicada man who's out here in the woods. Honestly, cicada man sounds. That's more haunting than the bear man. I have to admit. I would not want to see a cicada man over the bear man. No, not the bear man. Yeah, I wouldn't like that. I wouldn't like that.

You know what I'm talking about, right? In the movie Men in Black? Yeah. Yeah, okay, okay, okay. Yes, yes, yes. That's what's following the parade out there. That's what I mean, yeah. I would like that still. Last but certainly not least, to end the part one, is the staircase in the wilderness, which is just... I think this is pretty much... As we've said before, this is like the quintessential reason that I think these stories are so popular, is the staircase in the wilderness kind of...

I think that's kind of what grabbed people, which for good reason. I think that there's... It's like a perfect sandbox situation of you present an idea and you're able to easily add on to it as are other people, which makes it super fun just to kind of see that community grow. But essentially, the SAR officers...

frequently encounter unexplained staircases in remote forest areas. These staircases resemble typical house stairs, but are found isolated in the wilderness. Officers are advised not to investigate or approach them or approach these staircases, which this section was relatively small. It was like...

They had just kind of seen some... Russell had just kind of seen some staircases. But you can... The tone of it completely shifts when his superiors are like, yeah, don't even go near him. Don't even, like, look at him. Just, like, if you see one, just don't even go near it at all. Which...

I really, really enjoy because it sets up perfectly the idea of like, well, you're definitely going to have to explore it at one time. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's just planting that seed. It's the childish nature of a character being told, well, don't go do that. And you're like, what the fuck, dude? That's a nice staircase. It plays so well. I think one of the reasons it got so popular is like,

A lot of the horror mentioned in part one is... I mean, there's some subtle stuff, you know, but most of it's more over, right? It's like there's a faceless man on top of the mountain or there's like the cicada man or whatever, like in the trees. Like scary stuff, but you know, it's horror. But when I first read that like little paragraph about, oh, every now and then when you're 34, 40 miles away from civilization, you'll find a staircase in the middle of the woods. It immediately...

Gave me a chill because it's like, I think a lot of people can almost remember what she's talking about here.

Oh dude. Yeah. I remember being the kid and like running around the woods of Appalachia. I remember coming across a door one time. There was just a door out in the middle of the woods. Like no explanation. Just standing there. Oh yeah. Like it, it's, it speaks to a memory, a dream you've had almost, uh, because outwardly there's nothing explicitly violent about it. It's just staircase middle of the woods. Uh,

And that combined with the fact that you will run... If you're in the woods long enough, you will run into staircases because there was either, you know, old trailers that were parked there that they left the stairs behind when they pulled the trailers out. Maybe there was an old, like, fire watch tower that they tore down, but part of the stairs are still there. It's like there's parts...

of it that are so familiar to people even though it's such an alien setting and i think that's the reason the stairs in the woods is what so many people took away from this part oh yeah i mean like just kind of what you're saying about finding the door in the woods to me it's like even on like a cattle farm like i used to we used to live on this uh like 700 acre cattle farm we my mom rented a uh a house behind this guy like the farmer's house or the cattle farmer's house

And even back there, some of his family used to live way back in the pastures and stuff. So now there's just all of these dilapidated homes, even. Just like old homes that people just don't live in anymore. But they're broken down. There's holes in them and stuff. And even as a kid, to me, my whole thing was every time I was there, it...

You were saying that these violent outcomes, I always just thought about why did they leave? Who broke in here and did this? You kind of think about the worst. I don't think anybody ever thinks naturally of like, oh, people just don't live here anymore. To me, it sets in motion what happened here. And even going inside and seeing stuff and seeing remnants of someone's past life is just...

that is so uneasy. But that immediately led me to believe, because when I heard the staircase the first time, which my perception changed as these entries went on, but the first time, I kind of pictured what you were saying, where, yeah, it's a staircase, but there's maybe other remnants of the house around them, is how I first perceived it. Which it's like, it is just a standing staircase, but maybe there's a door laying down by it, maybe like...

bits of rubble or something, but still that would be odd that the staircase was there. But that's because of just these core memories. That's where my mind went. Yeah. But obviously as the stories go on, it becomes a lot. I mean, like I think that picture becomes a lot more clear. One common thing too. And one of the reasons the stairs is a bit more like,

a bit more ominous than other stuff. Like where I'm from in Appalachia, like East Tennessee, Kentucky area, you'll be back in the mountains sometimes and you'll just come across old chimneys because what would happen is these old houses built in the 1800s, the chimney would be made out of like stone, stone and like hard materials, but the rest of the house was like wood. So as the house deteriorates, everything else is destroyed, but the chimney is still standing.

So when you see a chimney out in the woods, like if you're sure it could be creepy, it can be kind of weird, but your brain can also be like, okay, I get why it makes sense that the chimneys, what remained intact because like,

You know, you'll come across cemeteries out in the woods. It makes sense why the headstones are still there. They're stone. But a staircase is just strange enough. Like, all right, Frontiersman did not have multi-story houses. If for whatever reason there was a two-story house out here, that staircase would not be in pristine condition. It would not still be standing. It has just enough gaps in reasoning to make it so strange. It works from a horror perspective really well.

Exactly. It's just the unsettling nature of whenever you actually think about it and it doesn't make sense. That's whenever I think it really sets in. Because like you said, it's like, yeah, it's mundane. It's just a staircase. But when you actually start to like,

give it a little more thought. It's almost like whenever you walk away, you're like, huh, you kind of shrug your shoulders. And then when you walk away, you're like, wait, what the fuck? And then you turn around. That's what kind of horror this is to me. I'm like, wait, what? And then you kind of turn around and that's when you witness it. But that kind of encapsulates the first part. Missing story or missing people stories. We do get some kind of like weird monster stuff. Some very like, you know, standard, not standard, but you know, like general accidents happening. But

Everything, I think, is explored a little more in part two. Which, between these, what was the release schedule like? Did you look into that at all? Because I had August to December. So the first one came out March of 2010. March of 2010, okay. The second part came out... I think I'm reading r slash no sleeps. No sleeps.

I think I'm on Reddit right. I don't know how to operate Reddit. I see where it says created March of 2010. I think that's the subreddit. That is my bad. So yeah, that's what I get. All right. First one. You were probably right in the beginning when you were like, oh, it's nearly 10 years old. Yeah. I could have swore it was 2015.

Yeah, it's 2015. I'm just stupid. All right, all right. I was like, holy shit, did I totally fuck that up? There's some people who really love this story freaking out right now at me. Okay. Yeah, they're like, no!

From what I read, it was from August 2015, and then the last part was December 2015. But I didn't know, and it's eight parts. I just didn't know if it was frequently, however many couple. Because essentially, what is that? That's four months, so maybe two entries per month. Now that I know what I'm doing. Now that I know what I'm doing. The first three...

The first three parts came out in a span of three days. August 25th to August 27th of 2015. Man, people were eating good right there. They were eating good, yeah. And then part four was September of 2015. So, like a week later. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess the first few parts are buried frequently. As we get to them, I'll check the times so I know where to look. Man, someone is yelling at me in the comments about it. It wasn't... It's our first episode! Come on! It's not 13 years!

First piece of information Wendigoon states Objectively wrong Incorrect So far off the mark Drop the ball dude

drop the damn precedent early on perfect it's fun though because i like because i think the response to this too was pretty i think people like were falling in love with it pretty quick from if if memory serves correctly so to have the person kind of also respond because in the second part uh the author of these also respond to what is it david paul leads is that how you pronounce it uh david politis

Paulides. Yeah. God, Paul leads. Jesus Christ. David Paulides' work and there's similarities there and kind of just immediately responding to some of the comments, which once again, I kind of like how quick the author did that because once again, it does feel, it feels like social media, which that's what I think is fun.

It's like utilizing the internet and the social media to also like be transparent with your audience and then provide more stories is just really fun.

I like that because I think some people could be like, you know, I'm going to just upload and not interact. Like, I'm just going to, you know, it's the art of it. But I think that the art of the storytelling here is the interaction with people and that trying to build that authenticity with them again. So I just I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that they they didn't just stick to this thing. They were interactive with the comments and to be on the side around that time when these were.

when these were being uploaded, must have been so fun. Oh, absolutely, man. Must have been so fun. And David Paulides, who Russell talks about in the beginning, or the author, but Russell talks about in the beginning, is the guy who coined the whole missing 411 thing, which are you familiar with that at all?

I just briefly from researching this, but I honestly, I haven't really gotten too much into it. So, so missing four one one is a bit of my, my, I wouldn't say my forte, but I am, I do dabble. Uh, uh, one of my only in person videos I've ever done were actually went on location for a video was about a missing four one one case. Um,

So missing 401 is the term started again by David Pilatus. Uh, it basically is referring to people that go missing in the wilderness or more specifically national parks without much of an explanation. Uh,

411 is just the police code for information. So the phrase missing 411 just means missing information. Yeah, that's cool. What Russell's doing here at the beginning is explaining that David Paulides has already talked about a lot of the stuff Russell's going to get into, kind of these inexplicable disappearances that happen in national parks.

With David Politis' work too, does it tend to be... Because I know that it was missing stories from basically wilderness or forest, but I didn't know, does it go into cryptid stuff too? Or is it just like... So David Politis is... Okay, so it's just... Yeah, Missing 411 is real missing person cases. Okay, so this is just based in actual reality and shit. David Politis was basically a journalist who was looking into otherwise unreported

disappearing cases that happen to national parks. Part of, I mean, like people can check out his work for himself. I don't mean to put words in his mouth, but part of what Politis was doing was kind of uncovering that the parks weren't advertising a lot of the dangers that exist in them. And most of his stories revolve around like

completely inexplicable disappearances like the one that i made a video about in person was about this boy named dennis martin who was just near his parents like a few feet away and then they turned their back for a second and he's gone and they had like hundreds and hundreds of search crew covered the area for weeks and weeks and they never found anything like stories like that how haunting dude yeah haunting he was right there yeah five years looking absolutely

Looking up some of these, though, too, for my boy David Polite is here. He is a Bigfoot guy. He is. He's a huge Bigfoot guy. He's a big Bigfoot guy. So I just want to put that out there. I want to clarify. Not that he never brings up cryptids, but the disappearances he covers are real disappearances.

Okay. All right. Not to say he doesn't introduce some of the... Because I know the comment section is going to be like, oh, that Bigfoot son of a bitch. Yeah, I know who David Politis is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. So I just want to put that out there. Okay. So yes, they are missing a real person, but he likes to dabble. Yeah. Why not, dude? He likes to dribble the ball. That's what I'm doing right now. I dabble. Who doesn't?

The turning around, which also, as I get older, which maybe some of younger people who might be listening to this too, whenever you're a little older and the perception of losing a child becomes more and more real, that, like, haunting. Just absolutely haunting. Especially just to turn around and someone's gone. Inexplicable. Like, I don't even know how you would wrap your mind around that. Just even the logistics of that. What does that look like? You know? It's insane. Like, I've heard some personal accounts, and it's like...

It's hard to, like you said, wrap your brain around a person's there, you're perceiving them, and then they don't exist seconds later. It's weird. It's so strange. You said that you've talked with people about it? Oh, no. I've listened to interviews, recordings, and stuff like that with individuals. Thankfully, I don't know anyone that's happened to personally.

Yeah, I was going to be like, how could you have possibly never told me this? Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I was a part of a big missing persons case. I was a part of an alien abduction case back then. I did go looking for a dead body one time.

Dude, what kid? How old were you? Were you nine? Nine or ten? No, no, no. Not like that. Like, it was a... Well, stand by me action? No, it was an actual police investigation for someone who was believed to be murdered. And...

When I was like, I probably shouldn't talk about this, but it's too late now. When I was like 10 or 11, my dad's like, it'll be good for you. Come on. You should come on this search through the woods.

And I remember being like 10 years old and I was like, what do I need to be on the lookout for? My dad was like, oh, you'll probably smell him first. You'll know when you see it. You'll know when you see it, son. How fucked up would that be, though, if young Wendigo was walking through the deal and he's like, Daddy, why is this woman with a red dress? Why is she face down and her limbs are all weird?

He found it! I feel like that would fundamentally corrupt you as a person. What's funny is, too, I didn't think anything of it when I was a kid. I'm like, hee-hee, I'm going to go look for someone who died. It was a family friend of ours, which is why we were out there. I can't wait to... Oh, the missing person was a friend of yours? Yeah, family friend. I didn't know him personally. It was like my dad's friend's... I mean, like...

And they found him. They found him not alive. So that was nice. Not far from where we were searching. That is nice. They found him dead. So there was a, there was like a chance that young Wendigo would have been like, Oh, would you look at that? It's,

Oh, this is nice. I feel like the entire time you were looking through, to me, I don't know why, I picture you as the pouty kid who's just wanting to be home playing Dragon Ball Z, Budokai Tenkaichi 3. At one point, I was thinking about going home to play video games. I just want to go home and play this game. What's also, to give you more of a visual, I was a child, and there was a lot of brush in the woods, so I had a golf club.

and I was swinging it to cut down the tree branches. You just end up mauling a dead body with a golf club. This isn't tall brush. This is a dead body. Dad! Can I go home now? I was just the most arrogant, stupid kid.

Going through the woods swinging a golf club like I wish I was playing Star Wars right now. Yeah, families crying. People are just like, do you see anything? And you're just like, God, I'm supposed to be playing Revenge of the Sith on PS2 right now. God, this sucks. Bro, that's not far off. No, of course it's not. The thing about it, too, is everybody goes through that, dude. Everybody does. When you're a kid, you go through that.

Even like you can't process like even like a funeral or something when you're younger. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like not caring about the gravity of what's happening. So it's just like children have no business. You just got to leave them at home. Lock them in a room. They'll be fine. Yeah, they'll be fine. I wonder what would have happened to me if I found the body. Like I wonder if that would have changed the course of anything I'm doing right now. I don't know because it's very interesting you say that because to me –

because you didn't see it. I feel like now that I psychologically think that you have started these in-depth horror research videos because you're trying to find that connection that you missed a long time ago. I feel like you might be a car salesman. Wait a minute. I'm

Wait, hold on. Explain both of those things you just said. Are you saying that I'm making YouTube videos because I'm chasing the high I never got of finding a dead body? Yes, absolutely. And what do you mean by car salesman?

I think that you would have gotten your fix. Like, you would have been like, you would have seen some things. So I think it would have corrupted you in some weird way to where your life would have taken a more normal approach to maybe, yeah, you would be like enterprise cars, renting cars. And that would be like a copy. Hold on, hold on. You're talking about like the high glories of being a car salesman. What do you mean? I think it's a pretty good gig.

It's a market that's never going to die. I just think that it's a more traditional take. It's a more traditional take. Versus now, I feel like you're desperately trying to cling on to wanting to find a dead body. Which, God forbid you find one. Because I think if you did find one, once again, I think that you would take on a very normal job, I feel like. You're saying if I did find the dead body, I would be a car salesman right now? Yes. Okay, I see. Yeah, for some reason that makes sense. Because you would have gotten your fix. Right.

And that would have been water cooler talk forever. You can talk about that forever. I would have been just like a guy. You're saying that me being a couple hundred feet over in the search party is the difference between Wendigoon and an accountant. Yes. Literally. Yes. Like I would have found it and just been like, and I'm done now. I'm good. Exactly. If your golf club would have smacked into the side of a dead body,

you would be at H&R Block right now. That would be water cooler talk that you could use forever. Forever. But now you're chasing the high. And now the problem is now, too, you know too much. So God forbid you find what you're looking for. I don't know what it is, but God forbid is what I say. You see, you're evaluating my entire channel, the career, even this podcast is all just a symptom of me not getting my birthright of finding a body in the woods. I think...

To me, it feels like divine intervention. It feels like you weren't supposed to find it because this was your quest. This was your goal, you know? To have the thirst, the want to find that. Can we go back to the search and rescue officer, I feel like?

I'm too introspective right now. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. Which I want to say, part two, it gets interesting. I'm just going to dive right back into this because we went into the David thing. We found out that you are definitely searching for a dead body. It doesn't matter. But in the second part of this,

is that we get to see the stairs again. It's another entry of the stairs, except this time it's different shapes, sizes, you know, conditions, more broken down, different kinds of things. Because before it was just a standard house staircase. But now in this one, there's like other dilapidated ones, other brand new looking stairs, and even some like resembling lighthouses, which is kind of interesting. But the storyteller or Russell avoids photographing or interacting with the stairs because

to not risk their job which as we said earlier i was just like i would take a picture i'd take a few pictures or two if i'm being honest yeah of the stairs you're saying absolutely yeah absolutely assuming it doesn't like who's gonna believe you do it yeah yeah who's gonna believe you imagine going up to somebody at like a bar or like a red robin you've had a long day working for the forest right gotta go to a red robin get a nice gourmet burger

And you try telling somebody that you found a lighthouse staircase in the middle of the woods and you don't snap a pic. How? How is that possible? That's fair, yeah. Yeah. Especially in the modern age because the person writing this story is like, it's not like these are found notes from the 80s. This is someone actively uploading to the internet. So they have access to a camera. Exactly. Which, again, it makes me want to say that like,

It was probably so much funner to be in a horror vacuum in, like, the 80s. When it's just, like, technology wasn't there yet. Because now a smartphone ruins everything. It really does. It ruins just about everything. You have to, like, work around it. And it's so boring. But...

At the same time, too, you have to have a stakes in your story. Or in your story, you have to have circumstances to your stakes. I.e., well, I can't take a photo because I'll lose my job. But at the end of the day, whenever you're finding goat people, dying children...

I feel like the losing of my job wouldn't be that much of a factor. I feel like I would snap the pic, dude. It would probably be on Snapchat or something. If it's 2015, it'd be on Vine. There would be a fucking vine of a staircase in the forest, okay? By the end of the story, it's like, I don't want to lose my job. Anyway, so we lost 12 more hikers to the flesh. Like...

I really don't want to lose my job, but there are 75 missing people in the woods. We have no idea either.

But we did just see a toothless goat running around yelling like a baby or whatever, which we'll get to that soon too. Yeah, let's continue into it. So they talk about the stairs, clarify it, stairs in the woods, all very familiar at this point. Yeah, there's a couple of clarifications. They clarified the faceless man too. Yep, yep, they did. Clarify the climber encountering a man with no face on a peak.

wearing park and ski mask just kind of does like a little, you know, just clarifies that guy. And then they go into the story of the missing older man. If you want to talk about that one. Yes. Yeah. So they mentioned that there was an old man who goes missing out on a trail and

The wife call says that he's a very experienced hiker, but recently he has been taking seizure medication. Hasn't come home in a while, so he's missing the time he's supposed to take his prescription. She's getting worried about him. So the team goes out to look for him.

Mm.

The tree itself was too wide and too, you know, dramatic of an angle for him to have climbed up there. But for whatever reason, there is his walking cane up in the tree and they never find another clue of him. I love that. Yeah. Just a little touch. And what I like about that, too, is that it's once again calling back to the part one of the girl who climbed up the tree to never be seen again. So now it's just now we're getting multiple cases and it becomes something that you can't avoid. Right.

And it also makes you think, you know, you're talking about not taking pictures of these staircases. I mean, I'm like, we have these goddamn death trees all around us, dude. I'm freaking out. All right. You're telling me we can't take pictures of staircases and their staircases in the woods. But God forbid you climb a tree. I mean, like my Lord. So I don't know. But I do love these little tie ins. And a lot of these stories, too. It's I wouldn't say that it's all the same. But.

But I mean, it is all like it is missing persons, you know, so a lot of the stories are going to be and they never found them again, which whenever reciting it back and like whenever it's like just little blurbs of us talking, it might sound kind of same Z. But in the actual thick of it, whenever you're like reading this, like from beginning to end, it all just feels like a conceptualized like

like, Rolodex of thoughts and, like, memories of this person. So take that as you will, I guess. I didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know if people were going to be like, oh, God, all of these are just them ending in, you know, and they were never found again. But that is kind of essentially what this is, is a park ranger talking about missing cases. And I mean, it's also, like I said, indicative of a lot of real, like, missing 411 cases. Not the supernatural elements, but the idea of just like, yeah, they were never found again. Nothing came of it.

Yeah. And I mean, but sometimes they do like this next one. I love to is the the one about the missing five year old boy who he disappears during a family picnic. And his siblings mention a, quote, big man with scary face leading him into the woods, which is very fun. And they find the boy's body 15 miles away in a place inaccessible to a child with no signs of injury or struggle, which is.

It's like bordering on almost like, I don't know, like Slenderman levels of territories here. You know what I mean? Like children going into the woods trying to find his mansion kind of thing. To be 15 miles away. And just the Russell's description of just like it makes no sense here.

how this could have happened is the most haunting. Well, I guess that being 15 miles away, what's wild about it too, is this is actually based off an actual missing four one, one case, uh, that myself and Aiden Mattis covered in one of my videos. But there was a case of a boy. I think he was, he was three or four. Uh,

who just disappeared from his family and they found him in a tree in the middle of the swamp. Like it was like 12 or 15 miles away a few days later. Um, or no, it was like 48 hours. It was like super low amount of time. Um,

And Survivorman tried to recreate the trip in the amount of time he couldn't. It was like a very weird case. Yeah, weird stuff like that happens. Not the details about the man with the scary face and whatnot. Sure, sure. But again, this is kind of baked into a sort of terrifying reality. How do they... What does the conclusion look like then, too? You know what I mean? Like, when people are reporting on that, is it just like it's an accident? Or like, what did they come... Like, how did they... If I recall this story correctly...

this is the child that actually survived. I've covered so many missing 4.1. I forget the exact details. If I remember right, that child lived and he was like three or four when asked to recount it. The only thing he mentioned, uh, was that it was like a, he saw a cat or something like that. Uh, some, at least some people think maybe a mountain lion carried him that far and then didn't eat him for some reason, carried him up a tree, um, which would be weird. But, uh,

There's like... If I recall correctly, that kid lived and then told rescuers that he saw a cat and there was no other explanation he could give. He was too young to understand what happened to him. Stupid fucking kids, dude. God damn it.

I wish the kid had... That's all you saw? It was like a cat. It's like, God. There's a lot of those where they find them dead days later in impossible locations. There's one story, again, not to get sidetracked from this, but I remember one case. Sure.

Where like this dude who was like this expert hiker went missing and then his body got found at the bottom of a ravine after all the snow melted. But there was this stage where like they found his backpack with like snacks laid out and like a Red Bull opened up.

20 miles in the other direction from between where he went missing and where his body was found. Like, the guy got lost, had a meal, left all his stuff behind, just walked into the woods and died. It's weird, too, because I wonder how much of, like, whenever people are studying this, do they think, like, oh... Like, I wonder how much of that they look into, like... I mean, I don't... Like, suicidal tendencies or something, right? Like... Yeah. You know. Is the person going? Was he struggling in his own life? Because...

That is almost what I think when I see that kind of stuff is they just like abandon the stuff. It's almost like a wake-up realization moment or something and they left. Because any other event makes it feel so inexplicable. Sometimes I do think that is the case. This specific one, again, assuming I'm not getting the details mixed up, he was hiking the Crazies, which is in like the Rocky Mountains. He was hiking the Crazies with a couple of friends. He went back to get...

Oh, I remember what it was. He had, they had these way boys set up on the mountain and the mule that was carrying his gear bucked, knocked it over the mountain. So he goes back to a way point to resupply and they never see him again. And then that's when they find him like, you know, when the spring comes. Um, but it was just like, he was out with his guys, like, hold on, I'm going to head back and grab something. And then just off the face of the earth.

just tragically yeah it it makes you ask a lot of questions which is again one of the reasons that i find this story so compelling because i find myself asking questions similar to what well yeah especially the the more that you actually research the realities of these situations the more creepy it becomes and also the the funner i think so even the more eccentric stuff like in this one which you know in part two we get a lot of stuff once again like there's the

the guy who died in a tree well, and it's just kind of another accident, but one of just the horrors of like natural disasters and like human, human error, I guess. Um,

And then we get more staircase stuff and people being like, for the love of God, do not take a picture of those. Don't even go near them. Keep reciting that. But then my favorite part of part two definitely is the meowing man. Love the meowing man. Yeah, that's so creepy. Might be the highlight of the whole thing for me, if I'm being completely honest. Yeah, would you like to explain it?

Yeah, which is an older woman faints after hearing a man making a meow sound in a strange buzzy tone in the woods. The narrator investigates but only hears the sound without finding its source. So essentially a woman is, I mean, like she sees the man, if I remember correctly. She even sees him and it's just a man out in the woods meowing.

Like, essentially, it's them trying to find this meowing man and not being able to see him. But the person's like, I saw this guy. He was standing out in the middle of essentially nowhere meowing at me. Which to me...

That was the most invasive one. This was the one that was... Because it touches on several things where it felt ethereal, but it also felt like the idea of just a man standing in the woods meowing at me is horrifying. It's so simple and so effective. I mean, even just putting yourself in a situation of camping and you're in your tent, right? And maybe it's like a light mist tapping on your tent. And you just hear...

It sounds funny, but at the end of the day, I mean, I would shit myself. I would probably cry. I would legitimately cry. Especially the idea of, like, it's on different levels. Because one, it could be an insane person, which is horrifying. Or another horrifying thing is the reality that someone is fucking with you, and they're trying to, like...

They're trying to mess with your mind. They're trying to scare you. And I hate that as well. Because it's like a weird game of chess. And it's... Ugh. Ugh, God. Meow, man. Ugh. I like it too because initially the person hears it and thinks it's a...

It is an actual cat. And then they listen closer and they're like, oh, that's someone trying to sound like a cat, which, oh my gosh, that's horrifying. Especially them, like the woman saying like, oh, that's when I realized that, no, this is a guy doing a cat impression. Yeah. Which is funny. It's funny. It's funny to think about like coming across that realization. You're like, oh God, is that a house cat I hear? Meow. And you're like,

Okay, that's definitely a guy doing it. Which also makes it sound like, at first it was kind of compelling, and then over time he kind of stopped trying to make it so cat-like. It's like, meow, you know, at first. And at the end he's just like, meow. Doing a fucking Markiplier meow. Yeah, he's doing the Markiplier meow.

Just a market player in the woods doing that? What if it was just a guy on his iPhone? He was lost and he was watching market player videos to make himself feel good. You never know. You never know. Moving into part three, we get... This is whenever they talk about... Russell's kind of talking about... Starts it off by confidentiality. Can't talk about where the work location is for security, job security reasons. He can't lose this job, dude.

Can't lose it. Clearly the most important thing happening. This job pays $1.7 million a year. It has to, bro. It has to. Which sadly, I think I looked it up and it was like,

It was something like, it's a very, like, there's so many jobs that probably make you get similar pay, which I know it's probably too, like, well, you get to work outside and stuff. But I'm like, bro, with what you've seen, it's just not worth it. There's no benefits that is worth. It's not worth it at all. I don't care if they're paid dental. I'm having none of it. Absolutely not. But in part three, too, this is where Russell talks to one of his former superiors about the stairs, right? Mm-hmm.

This is when we get the staircase, but this is when he's talking to like a past coworker or like manager or whatever. However, the system for foresters work.

But they like indulge more information into him, right? Oh, yeah. I know what you're talking about. In the beginning, he says, however, one of my former superiors no longer works as a SAR officer and I'm going to talk to him about it. So I'll talk to him later this week. So it's basically saying that there will be more Stairs stories coming later in the series. Oh, I see. I see. I see. That's kind of a fun way to like...

Yeah.

Which in this one too, there's a lot of like child stuff. Like there's a couple different child ones, which there's the... There's the incidents with the young couple and their baby where you come across... Or they come across and it's like the baby died from like a fall, which is just kind of a freak accident tragedy. Yeah, that one's pretty sad. But then there's the personal experience that Russell has where...

It's they say it's their scariest incident in their career involving a lost child. And it's bizarre because it was like a deafening sound and looped recording of a child crying. It was like the same. Yeah. Oh, that's over and over again. So weird. Yeah. Cause he describes it as like, he's out there with another search and rescue officer and they hear what sounds like a train. Yeah.

like right next to them. So their immediate thought is, Oh, it's an avalanche or something. Right. Yeah. Um, so they start to freak out and they're in each other's ears screaming, but neither one can hear the other. And then the sound just stops and nothing's happened. Like you're just, you're in the woods. You hear the rapture and then nothing, nothing changed. That was a definitive moment where this is like my walk away situation. You know what I mean? Um,

We're done That's like a personal because the thing about that that's that's like Russell's personal story. That's not hearsay That's not them talking to a Suspect or like you know somebody involved in a story that's Russell's own experience So where it's like after everything you've heard and that happens to you. How do you stay? How do you stay? insane

And it's weird because they mix in some stuff where it's like, yeah. And then one of the entries, too, in part three is – so you have the deafening crying baby thing. They can't hear. It's like basically Jacob's Ladder. It kind of reminded me of – Yeah, that's pretty similar. Yeah, yeah. It's like a weird Jacob's Ladder experience. If you guys haven't seen that movie, it's a Tim –

I almost said Robinson. That's the guy from I Think You Should Leave. What's the actor's name? It's something Robinson, right? Is it? I think it's Tim Robbins. Tim Robbins. Tim and Rob, whatever. It's the guy from Shawshank Redemption. It doesn't matter. But you should watch the movie. But then they have those horrifying things. They have all this child death. And then

And then all of a sudden they throw in like, yeah, a guy was afraid of a moose. I just thought it was cute. I thought. Yeah, that is a funny part. I remember reading that and being like, I hate that you did this. Because at the same time, too, it also, to me, what was fun about this narratively was that you're introducing a thing of like maybe the author is or maybe like Russell still isn't taking this seriously. Like they could. Russell understands the narrative.

consequences and the weight of what's going on. But I don't think because that he's only had one thing happen to him. I think that he still hasn't really grasped how crazy this is.

You know? Yeah. Well, I mean, like in that same story to further push what you were saying about the loud noise, that's the one where they hear the cry. So like he's out there with his boy, that happens. And then they're searching into the night because it's a young kid who went missing and they hear what sounds like a little girl crying.

And they're getting closer to it. And then they eventually realize it is not the sound of a girl naturally crying. It is a loop like it's being played on the recording of a kid crying. It's like the same sniffle, yell, breath. Yeah, it's in a circle. Like something mimicking a few seconds of a kid crying.

And then they run out of there. So the train noise and the looped recording of a crying happened at the same time. And you're like, all right, I'll clock in tomorrow. I'll see you then. Yeah, exactly. Damn, man. Well, are we still going to Long John Silver's after this? I just like to think that Russell goes to nothing but like extremely popular, like commercial shows.

All right, so we went to Red Robin last week, but I guess I'll meet you at Long John Silver's tonight. I'll see you on our clock in early tomorrow, man. He has never been inside of a fine dining establishment. No, absolutely not.

Absolutely not. Which, in this story still, we get one more staircase one, but it's them actually this time they break protocol and actually go and investigate the staircase. Yeah, this is a friend of Russell's who's doing this. Yeah, sorry, this is them

telling them what was going on right and he basically talks about like how like eerie it was how silent it was but then also like the overwhelming sense of like as they say like wrongdoing like they felt like they were doing something wrong or being watched potentially like it's kind of like when you do something you're like uh this feels bad like i have a bad feeling um but this is like also you've been you begin to discover the potential links between

his actions and the failure to find a missing person, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. So the buddy describes he goes to the stairs and he walks up them, which you're not supposed to do. No. I really like this moment. When he's standing at the top of the stairs, he realizes all the noises have disappeared.

the sound of the birds, sound of the leaves, stuff like that just quit. And it's completely silent. So he starts to make noises to himself and he can't hear, like he can't hear anything up there. So he freaks out, runs down the stairs, leaves. And then when they get back to, because the reason he was out there in the first place is they were looking for a missing kid. They get back to, um, the ranger station and one of the older rangers starts yelling at him and says, you went up them, didn't you?

And Russell's friends like, what are you talking about? And the older guy says, I know you went up them because we didn't find the kid. They're nowhere to be found. You went up them. And that adds an interesting layer to it, right? Like there's, even if it doesn't happen to you, consequences will happen somewhere if you go with the stairs. Yeah. Almost like a weird butterfly effect.

It's like a weird kind of thing of like it's repercussions of doing something. And also the text that they use or like the verb, like the way that it's written too is that it's not inquisitively of like question mark. You went up them, didn't you? Did you go up them? It's them just point blank being like, you went up the stairs. Yeah. You went up them, didn't you? You did it.

So, and I think that like, it also goes to show that like, this isn't the first time that someone's done that. Like they have records of it, but no one is just talking about it. It's so weird that the hierarchy of people aren't just like, yeah, if you go up them, X will happen. They're just like not giving any information, which to me starts to lead into like weird conspiracy stuff of like, who is at the top of this that doesn't want anybody to talk about any of these things, especially if you work for the place.

It's that damn pay, dude. It's the damn pay. They cover dental, man. What more do you want? I'm telling you, yeah. We do dental and eyes. Oh, man. Where do I sign up? Oh, my God. Sign me up. Oh, my God. There's this part later in the story where one of the older guys is describing it and says, yeah, the part service used to make you sign an NDA around it, but then they realized they don't have to because no one wants to talk about what's happening anyway, which leads into, gosh, what is...

What do some of these people know about that they're not willing to talk about? Yeah, I very love Kraftian with that line, especially very like just the horrors of what you find, like of the unimaginable or the unseen, which

Which is really fun. It's like, which also, what a flex. Well, we don't need NDAs because people don't even want to talk about what they see. People don't want to talk about the giant stair thing. I was like, really? Even just the legality of that? You don't want one person to sign that? Are you serious? But the rest of the stories in this are, it's the disabled boy who goes missing and they find his body kind of in a

different location too. Yep. Yeah. They find him wrapped around, uh, an ice figure of a man. Like he's, he's dead in the, for one, he's been missing three months, but he looks like he's been dead for three days in the snow. Yeah. Extremely well preserved. And then he's holding like a little ice sculpture of what looks like a person.

It's just like, yep, that's it. That's how they found him. The ice sculpture I thought was interesting. And it's just the justification. It's like, the funny thing, and I know I keep saying this, it's just the idea that you hear these stories and you've had things that happen to you as well. You're just like, yeah, and they found the disabled boy and, yep, he had an ice sculpture. So that was kind of a...

That was kind of a weird one. What's another? Let me look at my roll of that. It's like, you have so many stories. Run for your life, for the love of God. And the last one was the screaming figure. The encounter with the screaming figure guy describes a colleague's encounter with a screaming figure in the woods, initially thought to be a mountain lion. The figure takes an impossibly long step towards the colleague, who then flees, which I love that visual. Impossibly long step.

Possibly long step. It made me think of like a senior payload cartoon or something. Exactly. Like a cartoonishly like leg extending. It just, it gave me like a, especially when senior payload, when he did the Medela catalog cartoon, it gave me that kind of vibe for, but also for people who haven't like grown up near like rural or like farming land, uh,

a mountain lion sounds like a crying woman. And then vice versa with coyotes and foxes sound like crying children. So it's... To me, this brought me back to a place when I grew up more on that cattle farm property. It actually scared the shit out of me because that crying sound is so indistinguishable. When you hear it, you're like, oh my God, they're really out tonight. But the idea that the figure who's making this cry

mountain lion coo, like, you know, feral cat crying sound takes that impossibly long step. It's just really fun. It also like, it also plays into the idea of like, how delirious are these people? Like, is the, is the forest doing something to them? It kind of, that's what kind of made me think too. Like,

That's a good point I hadn't thought about before, yeah. Is the forest, once again, as I remember, I brought this up a little earlier, was like, is the forest an entity that is playing games with its victims? Which I thought was kind of cool. Just like a really weird way of like almost giving them like...

hallucinations and doing this stuff, which the reason I thought that too was that if the forest is like its own entity and doing this thing, that would explain people being like, how did they travel so far? And it's probably like the people didn't think that they were traveling as far as they really were. And it's leading them, uh,

in straight lines, just like miles and miles and perception of time gets changed, but it's just like all because they're like almost hypnotized or they're like controlled by some, something that the forest is putting out into the air or something. Who, like who knows? I haven't thought about that, but maybe everything they're seeing isn't literal. Maybe part of it is the implication the woods is putting on them. Yeah. Yeah. I mean like everything that we've heard so far is all either hearsay and

And also even looking at this from different directions, different assumptions, ideas. Wow. I found out not only that I found out your backstory, but I'm finding out the backstory of all these people as well. I am. I'm like, it's like L.A. Noire.

Especially you. You know what I would have loved if we were in person? I would have loved to see that. You know L.A. Noire, the game? Yeah, I'm familiar. If I would have given you that question about the dead body to see your face, to see how it would have been the reaction. You know how you can tell if somebody's lying in that game? Where their face gets all scrunched up or weird. It's like, yeah, definitely. I would have loved to see. Do you do your videos because you're trying to see a dead body? And you're like, no.

No. Of course not. Shut up. Stop asking about it. Someone's going to make a rock star 3D model of your body and do that animation. It's going to be so good.

Maybe you should check with them. Yeah, yeah. Everything that we've seen so far, though, has been hearsay. And even Russell's experience was so, like, abstract. Like, it's so, like, ethereal in nature, even. Just like the train sound. They hear these things, but they can't hear each other. To me, it seems like something is...

fucking with people's perception like it's fucking with the reality not saying that it's like maybe interdimensional travel but to me it feels like something is happening to the individual like the landscape isn't changing but the individual is under some kind of hypnosis is how i see it

That's an interesting point. Into part four, which is all of... I'm pretty sure this one's all of KD's story. Or these are just different people's stories. It's a few different accounts. Yeah, yeah. So he mentions that he went to a training weekend where there's a bunch of other expert search and rescue people, stuff like that. And they each have their own weird stories of stuff that happened. Which, this is a real...

This is a real sea shanty kind of round table of horrible things to talk. What we're doing right now. Exactly. It feels like it. It feels like all of the stories. It's just like, yep, this happened. And they kind of like take a swig from there. You know, like the boat is just rocking and they're just like, remember that, that climbers gruesome death. You remember that one? It's like, Oh yeah. It just feels like, it feels like a story circle. I don't want to be a part of it. But I mean, Katie stories are all like the tragic, like the family accident on the mountain.

Which is the, that's the snow, yeah. A family snowshoeing goes off map, causing a fatal accident. They fall 300 feet down a slope, resulting in the immediate death of the parents and one child. You know, real lighthearted, fun stuff. Surviving children endure horrific ordeals. One freezes to death seeking help. The other found injured. So only one person survives there. Horribly tragic. Horrible. Horrible.

Yeah, and again, it's nothing explicitly supernatural. It's just a horrifying story of what could happen. It's just once again giving reality, giving real stories put in, and then it just blindsides you. That becomes the fun thing is when you read something that's so mundane or normal, you almost expect – you start – at least for me when I was reading, which is interesting. I don't know if it happened to you, is that –

Even whenever they do these things where it's just like, oh yeah, it was a tragic accident. Almost every time I'm like, I don't know. What caused them to go over? I start to conspiracize with myself of like, with all this bits of information, it almost feels like there could be no human error. It feels like there is something...

controlling every aspect of people's actions. Because we know so much, right, about what's going on in the woods that we know that there's some malicious force happening. So yeah, any of these otherwise inconspicuous stories could be something more. I think my favorite one out of Katie's stories was the climber who disemboweled

like the disemboweled uh climber but the he was disemboweled by his own axe and the team discovers the mutilated body under a cliff intestines all spilled out the horrific scene deeply disturbs even an experienced uh SAR officer which I was like really this is the thing that you know well I mean this this person with their intestines spilt out it's like you've seen all these other things and it's like well I got to see his gutty works it's freaked me out like on the job you

a guy gored to death? How many dead bodies have I seen? Hold on, hold on, hold on. Yes, the people on this job have seen some stuff, more so than is expected for a normal workforce. If you saw someone gored to death, like

ripped out by a pickaxe on top of a mountain. You might be like, hmm, that's kind of upsetting. I'm saying that it is upsetting. I'm just saying that they put a real emphasis on like, he's like, oh, this one really got to me. And I'm like, out of all the things I've heard, I've seen people take cartoonishly long steps. Oh, you're saying our character. You're saying Russell shouldn't have any. Okay, all right. I'm saying that every office, like every sire,

or SAR officer in this story, so KD here, should not be affected. Because they've seen... You're talking about our SCP Foundation agents that we're dealing with. Yes, yes, yes. The reader obviously can, but I'm just saying when they take moments to be like, KD's like, yeah, this one really messed me up. I'm like, oh, really? This is the one that got you. Yeah, because she immediately follows it up with talking to the devil. Yeah, exactly! Exactly! That's interesting.

Even the one, what's the next one? The young boy, yeah, with the fuzzy man. Whatever. Yeah, okay, all right, all right. Point made, point made. You win, you win. Yeah, so it's just weird. It's like, oh, that one got to me. It's like, KD, shut the fuck up. Shut up. I've been in hell listening to these stories, and now you're like, well, seriously, the pickaxe.

That one got to me, if I'm being honest. Okay, all right, all right. You win. You win that one. Yeah, the next one that Gaty talks about is the fuzzy man. That boy goes missing. They find the boy months later still alive, right? Is that what it is? Or no, no, they find...

The same boy reappears in good condition, but his brother disappears in mere seconds. Let me look at it so I get this right. I think this is the one where one kid went missing, then the parents go back to honor the sight their child went missing, and then that kid also goes missing. Yes, it's this one. Yeah, because they're out berry picking, and the whole thing was that the kid goes missing, but the kid that was missing before...

comes back and he's in perfect condition but the kid that they came there with is now lost or he does he disappears and yeah the boy who comes back recounts the fuzzy man uh which is a blurry eyeless figure in the woods who cared for him and said he wasn't the right kid

Yeah, which is terrifying. It implies that this fuzzy man that kept this kid alive for a while even remarks that whenever it got dark out that the fuzzy man made it brighter, whatever that means. So like this fuzzy man, I think he also mentions that he doesn't have eyes at one point. Yeah, he says blurry and eyeless. Eyeless, yes. And imagine this man, which the kid, once again, he's not freaking out, he's just like,

He told me I wasn't the right kind. Which he doesn't say kid. He says the right kind. What does that mean? Yeah, that's right. That's right. But it implies that... Also, what does the fuzzy man sound like? Well, what's really creepy about it is they're like... Katie's like, oh, by fuzzy, do you mean hairless? Do you mean like Bigfoot? And he's like, no, he kind of looks like when you blur your eyes and everything looks fuzzy. He looked like that. Yeah. But without eyes. Weird.

Yeah, almost like formless. It's like a not, what is it, completely formed, basically static or something. Yeah, he's made of the essence of blurry, whatever that means. So that kid comes back, but then his brother disappears, implying that his brother was the right kind because they never see that kid again.

Yeah, I think that's the assumption. But you never know. I mean, that kid could come back as well. I feel like, I'm not going to lie. If I was that kid, that would fuck me up. That this weird static man didn't think I was the right kind.

That would be your problem with it? That would. Well, as a kid, I would be. Getting rejected by the static man? Getting rejected by the eyeless man who can't see me, mind you. He's just, this is just him. Just kind of like, he pokes my fat stomach and he's like, you are not the right kind. And now my skinny ass cute brother gets missed. And I'm like, okay, dude.

Fuck that guy. You know? I was like, yeah, that's bullshit. That would fuck me up if I was a kid. Body dysmorphia, dude. For real. And then the last one with KD's too. KD's story, basically it's just like she gets lost. Or KD gets lost, which is weird because obviously an expert of the woods. And it's like a lost where it's like, oh, I don't know where I'm at. I think that the way that they describe it is more like,

I had no idea where I was at, like on earth kind of thing. It's like totally disoriented. Like I don't even know where I'm at in the world kind of thing. Like it doesn't even feel familiar whatsoever, but they, Katie hears a croaky internal voice urging her to eat leading to near self harm with a hunting knife. So basically like almost cannibalizing herself.

And she's found days later having traveled dangerously far with no memory of elapsed time, which basically she had, I think it was two days, two or three days, right? She thinks it's been like an hour, and then the guy who finds her is like, it's been two days. And also, when she sees him, she's so hungry, she pulls a knife on him. It's like she has this cannibalism set into herself. Yeah, exactly.

She didn't know either. She was like, I don't know what came over me, but it was just like her gut instinct just to be like, I'm going to cut this dude up and eat him. Which who hasn't been there, dude?

Just keep going. I can't deal with you right now. We cut to E.W.'s story, which is a mysterious death of a boy near the stairs, which I think this is our first time ever hearing about a dead body near the stairs. This is the first time the stairs directly cause a death. I mean, it's implied the guy who walked up him, but this is the first time there's like a body there. Yeah, sure.

which is an 11-year-old boy named Joey vanishes near a river leading to a puzzling search. The star finds his body by a set of stairs in a remote area, curled up and dead. Post-mortem examination reveals inexplicable hole punch-like holes in his organs with no external wounds, which I love how they describe that. They say his organs are like Swiss cheese. So gross. So gross and so good. I love that. I mean, like...

What's interesting about that whole story is they describe a kid goes missing and they do a search for him. And as they're doing the search operation, they like the dogs will pick up a scent and then lose it, then pick it up, then lose it. And when they look at the map to see how, what order they're doing it, it's in a checkerboard segment as it describes. So if you imagine a checkerboard with like the red and black spaces, um,

In the red spaces, the dogs smell. When they pass into the black spaces, they lose the scent and they get into red and they pick it up again. Like it further leads into the idea that there's some kind of dimensional rift happening in this woods. It's very cool. It's a very cool idea. And then when they find the kid himself dead at the bottom of the stairs, his holes, I mean, his organs are almost full of these checkerboarded holes. It looks like a hole punch. Something stabbed him across his organs.

But no punctures to the skin, though, mind you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. His skin, externally, totally fine. But inside, his organs have been shredded. It's like he got pulled through some kind of dimensional rift. It's very creepy. With all these conspiracy things, too, I'm surprised that in this level of the story so far, because even the mortician sees it, right? And the mortician's just like, yeah, I've never seen anything like this before in my life. Right? Yeah, yeah. I'm surprised there isn't more things about people like...

teams taking the body. Like, almost like, because it, like we said before, it feels like there's people that are trying to stop this information and

So I'm surprised so far in the story here, there isn't something where it's just like, oh, we have to call these people to pick it up or something. Like almost somebody interfering with that information to the outside world, which maybe it's supposed to be alluded that, you know, the mortician maybe cuts into it, but maybe like no one else really sees it. But I don't know. Something especially with that distinguished of an injury. Because so far, you know, people are like missing or it's accidents, but this is like...

Just on a whole different level. I mean, this is like our first extremely paranormal kind of like surreal kill that's confirmed by someone else outside of the forest, which is kind of interesting. Then last but not least, we have PB. PB. Warnings. This is another staircase one. PB shares disturbing incidents related to the mysterious stairs in the woods.

describes a man's hand being sliced off and a woman's brain vessel bursting upon interacting with the stairs, talks about the unpredictable but invariable tragic consequences of engaging with these stairs, and emphasizes the impossibility of finding the same stair twice and the eerie phenomena surrounding them. So we do get into back... We're getting into back rooms, kind of like parallel...

like you're saying dimension parallel dimension type stuff you never see the same stairs twice right it mentions that you walk up them and your hand can just disappear maybe your brain explodes they're clearly not like not only are the stairs not supposed to be there visually in the sense of the reality that they're currently in they shouldn't be there they cause glitches almost when they come into contact which I'm telling you man once again when I was reading this I was thinking I think that the stairs are just like

It feels like it is what the forest is like presenting to you as something like it's masking it as something. You know what I mean? Like almost like it's resembling a staircase that maybe you've seen before in your life or something. It's like taking into your memories and it's like a staircase that maybe you've seen before, but it's disguising some other contraption that you're walking on or like entering or something along those lines.

I just... I think that... I think that there's something more to play than just, like, having it be interdimensional travel or something. I feel like it's... It's like masking. It's like some kind of masking situation in reality or whatever. I don't know. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting, interesting.

And then part five. We're closing in, dude. We're over halfway. We're moving. We're chugging along. We're getting through it. We're chugging along, which is the firefighter's horrific discovery in a tree, which a firefighter previously experienced in tree trimming is called for rescue operation to retrieve a child from a massive tree. Upon retrieving the child, he discovers a macabre scene. The child's body is entangled in the branches, intestines gruesomely hanging from his mouth and the other end, draped...

This is definitely the most brutal body horror of the entire thing. It's like the most violent description in the whole series. Sure.

It's almost like a very true. They described this like if a vacuum was like, if the kid got sucked into a vacuum and everything got ripped out of him at once. And that's just like draped across the top of the trees. Like there's again, no explanation, no stuff given. It's, it's left up to the reader's imagination. What could have caused this scene?

The infested with flies part is pretty fucking disgusting. Like, that's pretty horrid. I think that, like... What's interesting about this one is that they've included so many, like, accidents that when I read it at first, the infested fly thing is probably a bit hard to sell, but it almost reads like a murder in a way. Like, a really fucked up murder is how I kind of read it at first. Which is...

just like a violent circumstance in these woods. But I don't know. Did you read this one as paranormal? Or did you read this one more as like, like some kind of, because of everything that's happened so far, I read it as paranormal. I understand why you could just read it as like a sick, messed up serial killer kind of thing. But given, given the past of everything that's happened, I did in fact, sure. I mean, it could be even be something to where it's like, it could even be something where someone is, you know,

Some kind of one of these monsters did it as well. Once again, though, I read it in a way where it's like a murderer affected by whatever he was affected with in this forest or like led to do this kind of thing in a craze or something. And we just haven't found that body yet. But it's hard to say, too, because like I said, at this point, the story, too, I'm still.

hoping that they introduce some more real elements because we are getting more fantastical we're introducing a lot of new things so it'd be kind of cool to have still bits of realism this far in to really make sure that the story is grounded that the that the things that we're doing now aren't going so over the top because you know as you're writing these things you're

Continuously, you have to evolve and you have to showcase bigger and crazier things as you crescendo to your finale. But I think that you do need to still ground yourself in the reality that this is a job that someone would show up to and that there are still real things that can happen. So I think maybe it's even me just like almost, I mean, this is fucked up to say, but wanting it to be a murder to just be like it's a horrible reality of something that could happen in the real world.

I'm just taking set the setting in the forest, but, uh, the next one is the veterans observation of the stairs and the faceless man encounter. We get to, we get a, we get a nice combination here, dude. Yeah. So a veteran, a veteran discusses encountering stairs in the wilderness. Uh,

including a particularly unsettling type that appear upside down like a surreal remnant of a tornado's aftermath. This one's double weird because you can almost quantify a staircase left behind. You cannot quantify an upside-down staircase in the middle of the woods. And he mentions that they're more rare than the regular staircases. But if the normal ones cause the damage that we've heard so far, what would an upside-down one do? It's a terrifying idea. Yeah.

It makes me think that like even if you if it's that surreal and that like manipulated in our own reality, it makes me think that even if you like look at it, that you would be affected or something. You know what I mean? Like it feels like. Yeah. Like its reach or its effect is has to be greater somehow because its presentation is so absurd and so distorted. Yeah, I really like that.

Yeah. There's another one where the veteran recounts a personal encounter with a figure lacking a face. The entity moves with unnatural speed and silence approaching him by a river. This is similar to the other tales that we've heard so far in the story of like these people appearing without a face. And I think that what was interesting about this one too, is that the entity displays a ghastly feature where its throat opens up like a mouth smiling grotesquely and it speaks in a disturbing and unnatural manner.

Which I like to tie in with this one because it kind of gave... Because, you know, before we said it's like a muffled scream. Yeah. It was basically like skin draped over a face. I'm wondering now whenever we got to this part where I was like, oh, I wonder if this is the same thing and the scream was coming from its throat and if it just sounded...

you know unnatural just because it was must maybe like a what is it what is it called whenever like somebody's the smoking thing and you put the hole in their neck what the fuck is that called oh yeah yeah tracheotomy yeah it's from it's from the the ectomy or whatever but i forget what the name of the actual i want to say it's a tracheectomy yeah that's the procedure is that also what the hole is called afterwards

Yeah, I know what you're talking about. The voice box. But it's it's that voice box thing. So I'm wondering because he says it's in an unnatural manner. So I'm wondering if it's the same thing or is it like a series of things? I don't know. I mean, whenever I read it, I think that it's I think it's probably the same entity is what I is what I'm thinking. The same kind of faceless ghoul walking around. But, you know, and part five ends with the woman's childhood encounter with the mutilated man.

That one's a cool story. I do like this one, too. I also like that it's like a childhood memory. I don't know why. It's just creepy. There's always something about introducing your child, like the recollections of when you're a kid, if it translates to reality. Because usually that stuff is always distorted. But if it's something as traumatic as this, you almost want to believe that it's true. Yeah. Yeah.

The woman shares a childhood memory of exploring a recently burnt forest with her friend. That's a fun, that's a fun friend activity. Great. Uh,

Yeah. You know that beautiful forest? Yeah, it's burnt. Let's go look at it. Where they encounter a man with parts of his face horrifically removed. The man, bleeding profusely and dressed in strangely outdated clothing, is disoriented and terrified, warning against being touched lest he be taken back to an unknown frightful place. The incident leaves a lasting scar on the woman and her friend, leading them to forever avoid the woods and never speak of the encounter again.

Which also the guy, whenever he says, don't touch me or I'll be like, you know, it'll happen to me again. He like runs off, just sprints. He just gets the hell out of there. Which once again, I'm telling you, man, I feel like I just feel like this forest is doing something. I feel like it's like with outdated clothes, which is it, which I think the author is trying to basically say that like time, I mean, time travel, right?

Yeah, she describes it as a gray... They're wearing a gray coat that has red trimming on it, which is... I think that was some... Initially, I thought Confederate because gray coat, but that doesn't make sense because they describe the story as taking place in Maine. So...

Maybe. I mean, also the forest displaces stuff. So it could have been a Confederate. It could have been like a Revolutionary War garb or something like that. Basically a soldier from some previous American war.

She mentions it that there is blood on his kneecaps, on his forehead, and on his nose. Like they're cut off. Implying that either he was walking and like something cut off the front of his face and his knees. Or maybe he fell down.

And like his knees and face got like cut by something. What my theory with that is maybe back in like, cause he says that, or she says the character, the character, I believe here's a woman recounting the story when she was a child that this soldier ran up to her and started shaking her and asked where his company is like what's happening. And when she pulled out her phone or some, some mechanical device, he started freaking out and ran away. So I think what happened is this soldier, uh,

was in like, you know, civil war, revolutionary war, something like that. And he came across the staircase in the woods.

He walks to the top of the stairs and similar to how it was described earlier, your hand can just get cut clean off. If you reach too far out of the stairs, he was standing near the top. And then this imaginary, like the blade effectively of it. It's like, I imagine it almost as like a piano wire shooting up from the stairs itself. Yeah. They shoot up, sliced it, sliced his nose, sliced his forehead, sliced his knees. And all of a sudden he was in the modern age.

And then he runs, he finds this girl, freaks out because of technology, runs off, and who knows what happens to him. I think it was a time transportation because of his own encounter with the stairs. What led you to believe, so do you think that it's just the army just because of his getup? Yeah, yeah. She describes it as, hold on, I can find. Because, well, you're right. It's like a gray outfit with the red trim. But to me, whenever I read that, I almost read that as like an older SAR uniform. Yeah.

Oh, you might be right about that, actually. I thought that it might have been, like, I think, because I was right there with you, too, though. I do think that he traveled up a staircase, got sliced, and he went way too far. And instead of just his arm and stuff, his whole body got transported out into a different time. And now it's this guy who is like, who knows? I mean, it could have just been. I remember why I think it was a military, because he kept asking about his unit.

Well, even when I read unit, it still made me think of, like, the SAR, like, his... That's true. That's true. His... I mean, not platoon. It's, like, his unit. You know, his unit number of, like... In the search and rescue. Yeah, that's very true. He had a... Yeah, here's the phrasing. He had some kind of weird gray cloth jacket and almost formal pants on, and the jacket had these weird buttons and red borders on it. Yeah, I want... I mean, it...

It's very ambiguous. I mean, I think that it could very well be something as old as like 1800s or even 1700s or something like that. To me, whenever I read it, yeah, I just imagine like a way or like 60s, like 60s SAR. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Or something like that. You know what I mean? Just kind of like an older material, but it's still formal in that way. But yeah, I just thought it was like, oh, this is a dude from a different time. Yeah. And I was definitely a man out of time either way.

Yeah, and I was trying to read back through, but there was no other stories because I was hoping that when I was going back through that it would be like, oh, this is about like

An older SAR person talks about like one of their colleagues going missing. I'm like, oh, that would have been a tie in. But who knows? I mean, it's just some guy at a time showing up traumatizing these people. And then now they never have never stepped anywhere near the woods again at all, which is smart. I say, finally, thank God.

Someone has one crazy thing happen and they're like, that's enough. I'm good. But they haven't been tempted by the pay yet. The pay or the benefits. They haven't been tempted by the massive pay that the park service is putting down. The massive, massive pay. You'll figure it out one day. That leads us into part six. Six of eight. We're rounding the final turn here, which is...

Part six is the rookie conversation revealing disturbing SAR incidences because, you know, what we've had so far isn't disturbing enough. But a friend shares an unsettling search and rescue case, including rapid, unexplainable deaths and bizarre circumstances. Describes finding a man with a family crushed...

with a fatally crushed skull in an area devoid of rocks or hard objects and recalls discovering a woman in a desert who died of drowning with her lungs full of water and no nearby water resources.

really by this point i think in part six it's really ramping up the dimensional travel stuff a lot of people that shouldn't be this area are in this area i.e you know like head crushed by presumably rocks no no rocks or any hard stuff like basically like in a pasture of grass and then even a person drowning in a desert and their body is full of water so once again we're just getting more teleportation stuff um

We get the tragic case of a young man with Down syndrome, goes missing under mysterious circumstances as well, found severely injured in a canyon, mentions a little sad boy wanting to play and trade, quote-unquote trade, and dies after sharing haunted last words about being cold and longing for his mother. Just horribly, horribly tragic. Which I wonder, too, coincidentally, I wonder if...

Just from generally reading this, there's a couple, there's more than one. I think there's like maybe four or five, maybe even six, people with like mental illness of some kind being affected and being perpetrated there. I know there's been some movies that that has been, like in Stephen King's Dreamcatcher,

The person who can like interdimensionally talk to people is a Down syndrome child. And I don't know if they're trying to link that as well, that like because of this mental illness that they're able to communicate or do something with these people. I don't know if there's some kind of narrative there, but.

just food for thought. Uh, another one is a senior Rangers disturbing story of a severed hand, a portion of the, I like how I come back and you're talking about down syndrome. Well, there's, it happens a lot. It happened. It happens a lot. Sure. Whatever you say, did you, I know we'll be here. And yeah, don't worry. I was actually just talking about the entire movie synopsis of radio. I hope that was fine. Okay. I figured, did you, did you hear what I had to say though, about the, the down syndrome? Uh, this, this,

This entire Reddit thread, I think there's five or six different cases of maybe four or five mentally ill children or people. There is a through line of some kind of connection. Did you ever read or watch Stephen King's Dreamcatcher?

Yes. Yeah. So in that movie, the whole correlation with that is that because of his mental illness, he's able to talk with this like out like otherworldly monster that's been plaguing these people's dreams. So I didn't know if this was trying to do something similar where it's like because of their circumstance and they don't have similar, you know, like relationships.

because of their abnormalities with their mental illnesses, are they connected in some different way? Do they get some kind of different perception of this thing? Are they able to communicate with whatever they're doing more? I mean, with this one, it's tragic about the little boy wanting to play and trade. It's more peaceful, which we'd have to go back through and check again, but I don't think any of the other ones are also super deranged. If anything, I think that they're all somewhat...

kind of like peaceful by nature, I guess. But of course, uh, he dies with, uh, his haunting last words, um,

longing for his mom it's a very sad very sad one but i just thought that was an interest like thinking about it now this far in the story it's just it's just a lot of different coincidences there i don't know if it's and there was that part if i recall right you may have just talked about this while i was replacing the battery but wasn't there a section where it kind of implies that he kind of gave his life for someone else i believe so way yeah yeah there's something about um

He was unable to function alone. It's when the search and rescue officer is talking to him. He says... Hold up where it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was crying and he said something about how the little sad boy had wanted him to come play. He said the little boy wanted to trade so he could go home. And then he closed his eyes and he woke up again. He was in the canyon. So it's like this...

this man like went with this child. Uh, and it also implies there's some entity in the forest collecting children, collecting people for whatever reason. Yeah. Cause there was also the story earlier with the two brothers. Yeah. The right time. And one wasn't, yeah, the right time. The other one was different. And here we have a story of a little boy taking this man away and wanting to trade so he can go home. So for whatever reason, something in the woods is kind of collecting people.

Yeah. So one of the entities, which is interesting because there's several, I wonder how much of these, which I guess whenever we're done talking about it, cause we're almost done talking about all the parts we can talk about. I have a couple through lines that I want to talk about, but just to wrap up part six, there's also the encounter with the back flipping man, which I just, I thought this one was kind of funny.

That one's pretty good. While searching for the mountain lion, an officer encounters a man performing unnatural backflips through the forest. The man approaches rapidly, ignoring warnings and warning shots, then flees after the shot is fired. The bizarre behavior and agility of the man leave the officers deeply unsettled, which I agree. Can you imagine seeing a guy doing profusely fast...

back flips to the forest and he only runs away until you fire a pistol. He's like, oh shit. He like runs. I thought that was really funny. I like that one a lot. It's pretty good. Did you, uh, did you do the part about the severed hand in the tree? Yeah. Okay, cool. All right. Yeah. It's interesting too, where it's described as like growing out of the middle of a tree. It's,

There's something about this park where it feels like they are collecting flesh almost, right? Collecting data in a sense for these faceless people that walk around. It's like they're trying to kind of almost copy paste human features into different parts of the park to either put on these faceless figures or whatnot. And they keep getting stuff wrong. A hand popping out of a tree, um,

It describes later that one of the park rangers encountered someone whose face looked too big for their head. Like, it's like they're learning what people are like. That also lines up with a lot of the noises they make, the crying on loop, stuff like that. It's like, it's like skinwalkers almost trying to learn how to be human or the entity of the park itself trying to learn to be human, but they keep making mistakes.

trying to mimic things that they hear in responses of like an entity that is learning a new species, almost trying to capture the species. Similar to that in that same story where the girl is talking about going to the burnout forest and encountering the old, you know, soldier search and rescue worker, whatever. She mentions that they saw the skeleton of a deer, but they didn't go near it because the deer's antlers didn't look right.

Um, I don't know if that's implying that this deer was some kind of supernatural entity or if it was again, another example of the woods creating something abnormal on accident. Yeah. I always wondered, I wish that we got more description of what the antlers, what the antlers looked like. Like almost like, yeah. If, uh,

I don't know. Like, I almost think that it's like, instead of like regular antler bones, like, is it like, is it pieces of human skin? Like another pieces of the deer's bone structure that manifested into the antlers. Like I almost thought it like when I initially thought of it too, I was like,

you know, almost thinking of like maybe like someone's rib cage replaced on top of like the deer's head or something like the way the curvature of that. That's true. Just something odd, you know, where it's like, well, that looks right, but it's not. So it's uncanny and it has that, you know, people, but obviously people wouldn't also just be like, oh, that it's a rib cage or who knows what it is. You know, it's just something a little more interesting. I wish we had a little more visual information there, even if it wasn't like fully descriptive, but just enough to kind of like titillate the senses. Yeah.

I think. Going into part seven, we have some more cryptids here in the Rake and the Windigo.

Which is fun. Which is the... Yeah. That's right about it. The narrator touches on frequently asked topics about cryptids such as the Rake and a creature described in folklore as a humanoid figure with grotesque features and the Wendigo, a mythical creature in Native American folklore often associated with cannibalism, insatiable greed, and cultural taboos. So once again, Russell here kind of talking about...

talking directly to the audience, just kind of describing some of the stuff. It admits to limited knowledge, but acknowledges stories that seem loosely related to these legends, emphasizes the need for practical approach in the wilderness to maintain a sense of normalcy and avoids succumbing to fear and paranoia. So basically them being like, well, I'm not going to read in all this stuff and just assume that these things that I'm seeing are associated with these legends, etc.,

But can admit to like, yeah, I mean, some of them might be similar, but I'm not going to like dive into it, which I don't know. Do you agree with that sentiment? Do you agree that like like by not researching yourself into that, that that brings like normality to your job? If you see all that crazy stuff.

So hold up. Phrase that question again. Do I think it brings normality to see that weird stuff? Is that what you're saying? Russell is saying that I'm not going to investigate into these cryptids that you guys are saying that I'm not – that Russell is not knowledgeable of. And he's not going to research it because he wants to keep a sense of normality and not cause paranoia and fear. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I think that is true to agree. They even discuss that at the point when they're, I think it was the old service ranger talking about like all the stuff that can go wrong with the stairs in the woods. He kind of alludes to the idea that maybe people won't talk about it because once they acknowledge it, they have to deal with the fact that it's real.

So in a sense, maybe it's the same way with like these Wendigo creatures and things like that. Maybe it's just something that you don't want to look at directly. Almost like a weird kind of like parallels to with like just for viewers to maybe comprehend a bit better to like kind of like demons in movies or something like that or like demons. It's like acknowledging it gives it more power in the physical world or something.

something along those lines i think that like by acknowledging it and by like giving more of your attention to it it feeds off that paranoia or feeds off your attention um and it kind of like is like reeling you in in some kind of way so yeah yeah but the kd comes back for this one and talks about it's their wendigo uh entity that they came across actually in this thing too we actually get a we get our first i don't i think this might be our first time they ever talked about an actual location which

which Katie shares a story from her friend H about a camping trip near the warm Springs reservation in central Oregon. I think that's the first time we ever get like an actual, it, it like we get hints about stuff about like, Oh, well, um, it, it's in an area with a lot of mountains and terrain there's moose there. So we know it's kind of like P and W region, but here it's actually described earlier. There was the friend's story in Maine that was said, but that's not described to be this area. Yeah.

Katie's friend's story is kind of with the idea that it's related to this area and it's in Oregon. So it kind of confirms suspicions of this being somewhere in the, uh, the Rockies or like Yellowstone ish area. And I mean, this one is just them encountering a creature resembling a deer, but walking on two legs with cloudy milky eyes, similar to Wendigo's description. Um,

But they ignore the creature and avoid interacting with it, adhering to his grandfather's warnings about mysterious entities in the wilderness. So basically, this one felt like it was just like them seeing a Wendigo kind of entry, but them not really paying much attention to it and just hoping that it wouldn't fuck with them, per their grandfather being like, you don't want to mess with a deer that stands on two legs. It'll fuck you up for real. Just don't even look at it.

It's a pretty good roll of thumb. That sounds really scary, Grandpa. I don't care. It is scary as shit. Just, I don't know. Twiddle with your thumbs. Okay, thanks, Grandpa. It turns out he was right. Yeah, he was. He was right, right? Because they ignore it and it doesn't happen. He was right. It would be very hard not to be like, hey...

You know? Like, that's what... Well, I mean, that... What are you doing? Like, she describes it, and the kid who's, like, facing away from it, it's standing right behind him, whispering to him. Oh, yeah. And the kid's like, so, have you seen that cool new Ed, Edd n Eddy episode? Yeah. That was pretty cool. That was a pretty cool time. It's so funny, because, like, you're, like, shaking in fear. The thing's like...

whispering behind you. And it's like, so then Ed slaps his belly and he says pink belly. And then there was this other part where he says butter toast. It was the funniest fucking thing I've ever seen in my life. I imagine that's how your childhood went though. Literally. I remember the episode of Ed, that it scared me when Ed eats his mattress.

I remember being revolted by that. I do remember that. I was revolted. It revolted me as a child. Do you remember that episode where, I forget what the context was, but Ed's parents takes away his stairs? Do you remember that? Yeah, because he lives in the basement, right? Yeah, he lives in a basement, so he's like, oh, I'm grounded, so my parents took the stairs. So, yeah.

That's some liminal horror. That's where the stairs went. That is liminal horror. Especially because you never see the parents in that show. I know that there's so many fun conspiracies of like, who the fuck took the stairs, Ed? His parents are just an entity that eats stairs.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, we're getting too sidetracked, but we're almost done. We're almost done. Thank you guys for staying with us. We're so close. We're having a lot of fun with this. But just to rattle these last ones off, we get another encounter with the Faceless Man, which is a friend of Russell's.

That's a bit of an understatement. Yeah, leaving an eerie impression. Which, it's like... I mean, really imagine that for a second.

uh, excuse me, do you know where the local Red Robin is? Uh, yeah, man. Oh, and he's like, has a face. He's like, oh, he like just dead sprints into the woods. How would you even process that? A smooth, a smooth faceless surface. The way it's described is pretty good too. Cause they're like on top of a staircase painting. Yeah. And then it's like, they look over their shoulder, they're faceless. They blink and he has a face all of a sudden. And it's like, huh, was that my bad? But then the guy's acting so weird that you're like, uh, maybe that wasn't my bad.

It is a very well-played moment of tension. It's a well-played moment of tension, and I think that it escalates it perfectly by exactly. You're asking yourself, is this situation weird? Until the guy literally disappears into the woods. No, I had every right to be weirded out by that. Okay, that makes sense. Imagine you're talking to a guy, and he's like, hey, could you give me a ride down the street? And you're like, no. And he's like, okay, and just walks off into the tree line. I'd be like, that man's on his own journey.

man's taking shortcuts left and right he's going to a place i cannot follow the trail scout meeting with a disproportionately faced man which is another individual recounts meeting an older man while scouting trails whose facial features were unnaturally large compared to his head creating disturbed and surreal visual which you've talked you were talking about that earlier but yeah that one's fun i i i like how simple this one is because it's

Just the idea, like picturing my head, it was very comical, but that made it more scary to me is how funny his face would have been. Hello, I was scouting for these trails and just wanted to say hello. It's just a giant man with like spaghetti strand hair. Could I offer you a peppermint? No.

It honestly would look like one of your cartoons. It would. His face is too big for his head. Like one of your, one of your purposely scary cartoons. It would be one of the ones too. Too much gum in his smile. Extremely tiny teeth. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, definitely. Like it's interesting too, how it's described with like,

The way it's phrased, too, like his face was just too big for his head. Not that his head was big. His face was too big for it. And you sit there and you're thinking to yourself, like, what would that look like? You know, like the eyes, the mouth. It creates a very uncanny picture in your head. I like it very well. It's very subtle.

Yeah. I mean, obviously the face isn't subtle, but it's not like his face exploded and became a monster or something. It's just like... It's not like some kind of jump scare. It's just the uncanny nature of the situation even. I mean, like, I imagine the disproportionate of his face, it isn't so cartoonish. It's probably just awkward enough, you know? Yeah, and also he goes back to that thing I talked about earlier, the idea that...

these monsters, these faceless creatures, wherever they are, are trying to learn humans. They're trying to learn what they look like, how they act. Actually, since they're going from faceless to just too big of a face, it almost implies they're getting better at it.

Which is scary. Yeah, it's learning. It's learning and it's adapting. It's just the simplicity. It's like if each one of these people are asking for a ride to Red Robin, you know that it hasn't learned that core aspect of normal human conversation. But visually, it's getting better. And that's what's crazy too. Then you're going to start seeing normal people that are just acting slightly off. And that's going to be way, way harder to comprehend. Or to even delineate between an actual person.

So even if they don't get it perfectly right, like 80 and 80 percent perfect like replica is going to feel like, yeah, this is just a fucking weirdo that I've met a hundred times before at Walmart or something, which the last two little parts of seven are the girl sleepwalking to the stairs mysteriously. She kind of talks about.

You know, speaks cryptically about needing to leave and mentions, quote-unquote, it being there. Doesn't really describe what it is. It's just it is there before waking up with no memory of the event. And then the last one is the child with a cognitive condition talks of communicating... Or communicating stares, which is a child with a cognitive condition disappears and is later found describing an encounter with mysterious stares that communicated with him. The child account suggests a supernatural aspect to the stares and he felt...

He had never left his original spot and mentions the stairs wanting him to stay, which once again, cognitive thing now having another kind of interaction or I would say almost peaceful interaction with this thing. And now the stairs this time are instead of wanting to trade, they're like, I want you to stay and,

I really wonder what that correlation is with the weird... So that encounter specifically is interesting because it's a young boy and he says that the stairs came up to him. Yeah. So for one, does that mean he walked away and he just thought that he was kind of floating or did the stairs physically float through the woods to get to him? Oh, no, no. I don't like to say float. I like to think it's like

like dragging on the ground like it's bulldozing through the woods wouldn't that be so much creepier though it's like the breaking of branches and leaves with the rock yes yes yes yes yeah exactly yeah just a nice victorian staircase beautiful used to ride these babies for miles patting it

It's a fun little thing, but the idea of the desperation of the staircase wanting him to stay. You said Victorian. I'm imagining a marble staircase 20 feet high. It's playing the British royal theme as it's going through the woods. Just taking out trees as it goes. It's breaking it, and it's like, please stay.

And the boy describes it as calmly. He's like, no, I'm not going to. Please stay with me. Like nice music. He's just like toppling over these 400-year-old trees. No, I'm not going to. I'm leaving. Just like a snooty-ass kid. And then to try to maintain what little bit...

Power we have left. He says... Because it's about to devolve, I can feel it. He says that he kept saying that the stairs were like the campfire over and over. Maybe he's referring to the way the fire started slow and got bigger, like the stairs kind of manifested in front of him when they appeared. Maybe he means like with the fire came. I don't know, but that's a very haunting idea. And then he says...

That he heard a sound so loud that he had to cover his ears, which reminds me of the story that Russell told earlier about the train noise that he heard. Once again, it's just... Unless you read it, obviously it doesn't... But the way that when you read this, the way that these things kind of circle back and tie in are really fun. And it's not so much that we're getting more information, but it's just different experiences. And you get little hints of like...

just how other people experience these things, which I find really rewarding. It's just, it's, it's, it's a subtle thing, but it's nice. It's, it's cool to not just this crazy thing happened and we never hear about it again. It's like, no people have had experiences similar to other people. Like it's not just a one-off crazy thing. It's like, these things are existing in this forest. So, but this leads us to the final part, part eight.

Which is... It starts off... Yeah, let's go. Which Russell, or the narrator, acknowledges the unexpected level of attention their stories have received. By this point, it's probably extremely popular on r slash no sleep. It mentions being questioned about the mysterious stairs in the woods, faces reprimand from superiors, and is warned against speaking further about the stairs...

indicating the sensitivity and secrecy surrounding the topic. So once again, kind of like stifling, like we're not going to get any more of these. This is going to be probably my last post because my job that I just cannot seem to fathom leaving is saying what, which also to by this time with the amount of secrecy behind it, it kind of almost seems like they can't really leave. Like I imagine it's probably like something where it's like, how does a person quit area 51? Yeah.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Like once you've been in for that long, you're stuck. Mm-hmm. Which, yeah. I mean, it's like there's no way people are just going to let you leave with that information. So maybe it's something where it's like I have to stay. But it starts off with disturbing tales circulating among among rangers, which is many stories are being shared among rangers. Some too unsettling to forget. One story involves a young woman who disappeared with only part of her tongue and lower jaw later found.

cut with precision which uh makes you think of another staircase thing makes you think that like yeah some kind of dimensional traveling like you're saying with like the the piano wire like just got cut right as soon as like maybe a dimension shift or something like that kind of like cube the movie cube makes you think of that a little bit it is familiar to that yeah yeah yeah uh encounters absolutely encounters encounters with more uh black uh eyed entities and

which is the story circulated of black eyed individuals in the woods, imitating natural sounds. One specific tale from a deer hunter details, a terrifying encounter with a human like figure composed of raw meat and hair capable of mimicking sounds, including hunters. That's one of my favorites. That is my favorite. That's one of my favorites. That's my favorite. Good. So good. And I love that it's mimicking sounds, which like the hunters, a gunshot,

I love that. Love, love, love, love that. He says he's in his tent and then he sees what looks like a human face press into the side of the tent. So good. Jumps out and he fires two shots in the air. He looks behind him and it's something made, he describes it as a roadkill shoved in the shape of a person.

And it kind of has the form of a face And it looks at him and makes The noise of the two gunshots He just did and then takes off into the woods Bro it's like It's again like the woods Are collecting flesh and trying to Put together people They're collecting flesh and with this one too With the way that they talked about the hair It almost made me think that it was like a deer Like a deer meat

like, forcefully formed into the shape of a human. The way that they describe the hair being in there, it made me think it's almost like an inversed deer. Except, like, without the antlers and stuff, it's just, like, contorted and crushed into this, like, form. Totally unnatural. And also, the reason, too, with the gunshots and the hunter, it just made me think that that's another thing with, like,

The hunter and the deer, et cetera, except the deer becomes the predator this time around. Kind of made me think that was the vibe. But I would say without a doubt it's probably my favorite visual, and especially the way they describe it. Just such a fun collection. And it does, like you said, it goes to show that the forest itself or something in the forest is collecting people. Is it made of some of these missing people? Who knows? It's so fun. I love it.

Yeah. It's great. It's great. The last two are the unnerving sightings and phenomena, which is a couple reports seeing a climber without gear scaling a steep cliff and then bizarrely snapping in half and leaping off the peak. This climber... That one's so wild. It is. It is very, very wild. Imagine seeing that. They're looking through binoculars and they see...

A climber go to the top, do an exaggerated wave at them, snap in half and jump off the cliff. And then Russell's like, I can't do anything about it because 10 other people have seen the same thing. Like what? Yeah, it's like the most intense free fall documentary or whatever the fuck that movie was or free climbing documentary, whatever that we see. Like just to see that and the cartoonish wave is so good. But then to have 10 other people report that,

Is it the same person they're seeing too? Yeah, 10 other people have seen this climber go to the top, wave at them. And keep in mind, this person's watching through binoculars, so they're hundreds and hundreds of yards away. This climber knows immediately where they're at, looks at them, waves, cracks in half, jumps off the cliff. Several people have seen the same thing. What's weird too is at the end of this, they decide to not document it and to not investigate it any further, even though there's been 10 people that have seen it.

I don't may at this point like at that point in the story I don't think that not only are they not capable of it I don't think that the individual like Russell wants to know more about it he's just like that's unexplainable that's terrifying I don't want to look any further into it yeah and I wondered how much of it too is just like even if I wrote this down no one's gonna see it like I think that he knows like the higher-ups aren't letting any of this shit going out so why what's the point of even documenting it down I

Uh...

But the idea of the person also continuously climbing up, it almost reads like a Prometheus kind of level of torture. Except with him waving, it seems like it's almost jolly, which feels weird. So it almost feels like he's in this perpetual loop of getting tortured every day, like almost like Sisyphus rolling the ball up the hill or Prometheus getting his innards eaten out by vultures. It's just like this weird ritual that he does every day, maybe at the same time.

pretty fun. Yeah. I like how much weird stuff's happening in the park. I think it's all connected because the park itself is some kind of entity, but it's terrifying how diverse it can be, the horrors that it can put out. Yeah. And especially with them not

documenting this down it leads really well into the final passage which russell expresses their inability to comprehend fully the mysteries associated with their job plans to seize updates for the time being due to job jeopardy but expresses a desire to return in a different format when possible and it ends with advice for safe wilderness exploration and cryptic warning about the stairs to avoid interacting with them in any manner and that's the last entry we get

The last words of it are so good because he says like in the last lines, if you go out into the woods, I encourage you to be safe. Bring water, food, survival equipment. Let people know where you're going and when you'll be back. Don't go on uncharted paths unless you know exactly what you're doing. And above all, don't touch them. Don't look at them. Don't go up them.

I love that. It's great. It's fantastic. It's a perfect little pinpoint for the end of every kind of horror that we've seen. You know what I mean? Yeah. It touches on everything without having to say it, and it's brilliant. And with that, I mean, this is the search and rescue. What a story. We did it. We covered it. I'm a search and rescue officer. It's a great, great story. Great story. I love so much, too, how, like, sure, it's not a...

It's not a standard, like, linear narrative in the sense of all these events happening to the same person in order. It is kind of a narrator's, like, oh, this happened to this person, this happened to this person. But they're each so well done. They tie together with, like, the lore. They interconnect to each other so well. It's a classic for a reason, for sure. Yeah. It perfectly encapsulates someone's start, like, the starting of... Like, it encapsulates the...

the job that someone has, right? It seems like the perfect amount of weird scenarios with enough cryptic messaging to see, like, I can't really talk about it any further, but it's just so fun, and I love when people can play with social media in this regard. It's the same reason why I love Ted the Caver so much and, like, his weird blog post entry for people to read, like,

That feels like something that can exist. It's from the perspective of somebody who is trying to be like, this is a real super, you know, like this is a real thing that happened. And I think the author, which I think we should definitely give a shout out to Carrie Hammons.

uh, just killed it. It's, it's such an amazing, amazing story, especially I see a lot of people in comment sections. Cause you know, uh, even when people have like read this whole thing on YouTube, which if you're, if you're looking for even like a nice morning drive kind of thing, you can listen to people, uh, read it on YouTube and stuff. It's like a two and a half hour long, um, usually two and a half hour long audio, uh,

But I see a lot of people cite the 20, like 2015, like these kind of times on Reddit for sleep, like for scary stories is like a golden era of like really, really fun stuff. So I'm excited to dive more into like other stuff from the 2015, 2016 era. Cause I hear that's like where a lot of this beautiful, beautiful work really originated from and where a lot of people were, especially on r slash no sleep. We're going ham. So yeah. Yeah.

No, like, Carrie did a fantastic job. And I've also been in contact with Carrie since we started playing out this episode. She is a lovely, lovely person to talk to. Very kind. She is a fan of both of our channels, which is very sweet. Hi, Carrie. Hi, Carrie. Did a fantastic job here. We love your stuff. So I talked to Carrie a bit about, like, the plans for the series and whatnot.

Uh, and what had happened is after the first eight parts came out, the plan was to make it into a book. Like this was basically her, her test drive of sorts for the series. Oh really? Uh, she was, she, yeah. So the idea was, this was eventually going to be like a novel of sorts, porting all this together. Uh,

And then over the course of making that novel, she was reached out to, um, no, this isn't coming from Carrie. This is coming from like research I've done around it. Uh, she was reached out to by, uh, the TV show channel zero because they wanted to adapt it into one of their episodes, which channel zero has a habit of doing that. They did that with candle Cove, um, different internet horror stories, making it into it. So they were going to use the stairs. They're going to use the whole story of I'm a search and rescue officer, uh,

For a season called Butcher's Creek, I believe was the name of it. Or Butcher's something like that. I'm pretty sure it's Butcher's Creek. Anyway, so they get the rights from her to do that season. And then...

Carrie didn't say any of this. Carrie said that everyone she worked with was very nice. She said nothing negative. I am saying this as my own opinion from looking at the story of I'm a search and rescue officer. And then looking at what, uh, no, uh, channel zero did with the show. They did not do a good job adapting it in my own opinion. Uh,

they pretty much just took the element of the stairs in the woods. They kind of left the rest of the lore behind. Yeah. But in the process for that, she basically had to give them rights to the story for a while. So she, it seems that she was unable to continue her book for a bit and kind of stepped back from the story. So for a while, the, for a few years there, the story was kind of in limbo. Like we have the test version for it on no sleep. She started to put a novel together and then the channel zero thing slowed that down. But,

But I'm very happy to announce this. After talking to Carrie, she is actively working to continue the story, to add more entries to it, to expand on the lore. And she knows the whole story she wants to tell from start to end. And Carrie has been so, so gracious enough to allow me to see some of her work in progress stuff.

for what this is going to turn into. Oh, shit. And I have to say, it's really, really cool. She builds out on a lot of the lore involving the staircases. She builds out on a lot of the lore involving what's secretly happening in the park. It is very awesome. So I encourage everyone, we'll put a link to it in the description. Hell yes. If you go to Reddit at her name, it's user forward slash search and rescue woods. It is the same name she used to tell this story. So if you just look up the original story itself on Reddit, you'll find it. We'll put it up on the screen too. She is,

We'll put it up on the screen as well. She is using that account to post updates regarding the story and whatnot. So the story has been picked back up and she is planning to move forward with it in the future. So go follow there to get announcements. I'm so excited to see where this is going. And from what I have seen, it's really cool. Y'all are going to like it. I love that. Almost a decade later and still coming back.

it's it's gonna i can't wait to even read into it myself it's also just a good warning sign too for hollywood shit where it's like if we have any readers who are writing their own stuff be very wary of how you give your rights away to yeah these people making stuff because they will literally i mean like especially with the channel zero thing they'll use one aspect remove all of the subtlety and like things that made something great just for the aesthetics and just for like

I mean, essentially the clout of what you made. So just be very weary of that because they will literally... You think... They will prey on anybody, dude. You got to watch out. So just...

keep that warning but I will say Carrie that's fucking amazing I'm so stoked to see oh I'm so excited for where it's going from here and all the stuff I said about like channel zero is not that Carrie hasn't said any of that to me she's only described good things about it I am just I am ascribing the bad yeah yeah because like I want to get into writing I want to work with more people in the industry and stuff like that and a lot of the time yeah there are people out there who can be sort of scavengers kind of predatory to authors works and whatnot and

And I'm not saying that explicitly applies here, but that's what it looks like from the outside looking in. It's about 90% of people.

90% of the industry. Yeah, that's typically how it plays to me. I'm so pumped that the series is continuing. Oh, yeah. If you actually go to the there's now a subreddit for Stairs in the Woods. There is a master document where she has kind of wrote some auxiliary stories to it. So different stories that take place in the same universe from people outside of Russell's perspective and stuff like that. And it's very cool. She's putting together lore for an entire world here that builds off of this. I think y'all are going to love it. So

So check her out, follow her, and be ready for whenever more of this comes out because if you liked where it's been so far, you're definitely going to like where it's going. Exactly. And I think that it's one of those things too where if you – I think just as a general rule of thumb too because I'm very curious. I mean this is our first episode, right? This is the first thing we've ever covered. I think that if you're a big horror person and you haven't dived into actually reading horror works –

Please start with this one. I mean, like, this is like a great way. It condenses itself down into these micro short stories. And I think it'll make you appreciate the art form a lot. That is just like short stories and like reading something. Reading something can be such a fun way to get yourself in the mood to like.

Get fucking spooked. Enjoy the vibes of it. You know? I mean, it's such a great way for your own imagination to scare yourself. So use this as an opportunity if you have never read something scary before. Use this opportunity to go and read this. It's a great piece of literature. It's a great story. I'm so stoked that we covered... We chose this. This is a great one. This is also all... This is all of Wendy's doing for having this be our first episode. So very, very stoked. And I'm so, so curious to see how people...

respond to this first episode and also what maybe what we're doing next who knows which I'm not going to say here I'm excited for the show I'm so pumped I think this was a great first episode I enjoyed it as always my man had a great time and yeah I'm excited to see where we go from here like great first story to cover I can't wait to see what we do in the future this was a lot of fun

Yeah, I think based off of the comments and stuff, I think that we'll use that as maybe where we'll go with next. But I know we have a bunch of ideas brewing right now. But until next time, this has been Creepcast Episode 1. Thank you guys for listening, and we will see you in the next one. Creepcast! Thank you all so much for watching. It means the world. Thank you all. Peace!