Now that I'm not confined to a plot-driven box, I can go back to telling stories the way I like to. Or, I guess, the way HE likes to.
Russell had an accident. It was pretty bad and I'm not sure when he's going to be back on here. He's got some bad motor problems now and I guess the therapy takes a long time. He'd prefer to tell you guys about the accident himself when he gets back, so I'll leave it at that.
In the meantime, he wants me to talk to you guys a little about what I do and what kinds of things I've seen. I guess he's got this project going about the stairs, I haven't read most of the posts. He told me what kind of things you guys are interested and I've spent some time thinking about it and coming up with a bunch. Russell said to make a large post, so I'll make this one a good length if I can. EDIT I can't figure out the bullet points so it's just gonna be a big paragraph of sorts.
I'm K.D, by the way.
Well first off, I really want to thank Russell for mentioning tree wells and all sorts of other stuff. What I want people to take away from all of this, more than anything, is that you need to take this stuff really seriously. We're not kidding when we tell you to bring survival gear for even brief hikes or climbs. And if you're a free-climber, well, this story is for you.
Two kids were out free-climbing at a park I used to work at in Central Oregon. Of course doing that is completely forbidden, but they were in a pretty remote area of the park and it was still pretty early in the spring for most climbers. The morning they were out, I remember there being a layer of ice on everything, but it was almost totally invisible. Sometimes that happens if the frost freezes, or if there's a little rain overnight. And I remember thinking that it was going to be a bad day, just because of that. Anyway, these kids were scaling up a cliff face and they hit a spot that must have been in the shade. That layer of frost was probably still there. They fell from about the same height, which also leads me to think they literally couldn't grip onto the rock. Their fingernails were broken from dragging them as they fell. They were conscious the whole way down. They had time to think about how they were going to die, and to wonder if it would hurt. The first kid landed on his feet, how I have no idea, and both tibia and fibula shattered. The force drove his femurs up through his body cavity and into his ribs, pushing his stomach up into his throat and tearing through everything else in its path. He didn't die right away, he dragged himself about two feet before collapsing. His friend landed on his upper back and neck, which drove his chin into his chest with enough force to shatter his jaw and sternum. Pieces of bone ripped through his heart, but if that hadn't killed him the impact to the back of his head would have. The bleeding was catastrophic and caused his bright red eyes to bulge out of his skull. They were fifteen.
I specialize in mountain rescues and a lot of what I do is pick up bodies. If you get in trouble on a mountain and you're not equipped to handle it, you're going to die. We find so many skiers each year upside down in tree wells and I wish to God I didn't know what that kind of position does to a face. You don't rot in that kind of cold, you mummify or stay frozen. Most of them are screaming or biting the snow when they die. A little girl I found last winter was sucking her thumb. Sometimes they pull their hair out, if they're in there long enough. One woman ripped off her false nails and took the real ones along with them. I'm not sure what she was trying to do.
Sometimes we find climbers at the bottom of whatever face they've fallen down. They look fine until you try to move them and the bones click around inside. That's if you get them before the cold and rigor set in. Otherwise, they're like big ice cubes. They get cold enough sometimes that if you touch them your skin sticks.
And then sometimes we find the ones that don't belong. I started putting them in a group in my head that I call the Accidental Stops. I think of the bodies I find as passengers on rides, and it helps me piece together how they end up where they do. But these ones get off the ride too soon, and they end up in strange places. There was one case where a guy with three kids disappeared and left them behind in the woods. Luckily we found them before anything happened, but we didn't find the guy until the next day. I was in an area of the park that has a lot of ravines and these tricky little rock falls in places. I was climbing up one of the ravines and in this tiny little space in the rocks something shines when I get close to it. I backed up and got my light in there and sure enough, he's smashed up in there. Somehow, the guy folded himself into a three-by-two foot space. Managed to disintegrate just about every bone in himself in the process. It's pretty amazing how far the neck can stretch when the spine isn't there. The skin is much more elastic than you'd think. Holding his body was like trying to hold onto a very slippery beanbag. There was just nothing solid in there.
A lot of times it's the kids who are Accidentals. Little boys, especially. Maybe they're the ones who wander off the most. They're the ones we find two feet under the bottom of a moving stream, dressed in the clothes they disappeared in. Cause of death: undetermined. Or we find them ten feet from where the searches began, curled up in a fern with the top half of their head and their nose sliced off. And when I say sliced, I mean the way those scientists who slice off tiny pieces of brain do it. Perfect and clean.
A boy I knew went missing three years ago. He was really sweet and he came up every year with his Troop to go camping in the summer. I used to go up to their campsite on the last night of the trip and tell scary stories to them. It was a lot of fun, and he was always very polite and would roast marshmallows for me. When he disappeared he was only fourteen. He was a really, really good kid.
He was actually one of the rare ones that goes missing at night. It's much more common for them to go missing during the day, because that's when most of them are up and wandering around. My guess is that he went to go use the bathroom and while he was out there, he noticed them and decided to go and investigate. Officially, he wandered off and got lost. That's the Park's way of saying that we have no fucking idea where the kid is, and no idea where to even begin looking. I took the news really hard. I wanted to be part of the team, and I had to fight hard to be included. Normally, they restrict Rangers who have any kind of relation to the missing person from searching, but in this case they made an exception because the area is largely mountainous terrain.
I looked for him for weeks and I hadn't found a single sign that he'd ever stepped out of the camp. Eventually, I came back to the site and started over, going over every inch of the area. If I hadn't done that I'd never have found him. He was small, by that point. Just a soccer-ball sized ball of his torso was left. Almost perfectly round, it included the curve of a lower rib and a tiny segment of his spine. The spinal cord itself was gone. I found it under a pile of dead pineneedles. It was taken to the ME and tested and confirmed. I don't know what they told the parents, but it doesn't really matter. The casket was sealed before they even got there. It would've been cruel to let them see the contents.
Like Russell, I have a lot of friends in the Service. The stress gets to you and it's nice to have people who you can talk to about it. Every year I try to meet up with my core group, Russell and two others, and we go out and camp in our secret spots during the fall. One year we invited a couple others, six of us in all, and we actually rented a cabin out in the Smoky Mountains. It was one of the best years in memory. I don't think there was a single day that we spent more than a few hours sober, usually just enough to get into town and pick up food for me. I have to eat a lot because of a condition that popped up suddenly when I was a kid. We stayed for a week, and on the last night we were all a little low. I think we were all feeling the end-of-vacation blues pretty strong. Suddenly, Mike (one of the non-regulars) pops his head up from his phone and looks out the window. "What's up?" I asked him. "I dunno, I thought something moved." "Go kill it. I'm hungry." I joked. He laughed and we forgot about it until I got up to get us more beer. The cabin didn't have electricity, which is partly why we chose it, so the only light was the fire on the other side of the room. The interior is dark and it's easy to see out, or in, at night. I'm on my way to the cooler in the kitchen when I notice someone on the edge of the property making their way toward the cabin. They're dragging themselves along the ground, and I can see that something is really wrong with their legs. I stand about two feet back from the window and watch while the others kept talking, completely unaware.
The first thing I noticed was that he had no fall clothing. The temperatures can drop very quickly during this season and anyone out here is going to need at least a coat and hat if they plan to camp out. This guy is wearing cargo shorts and a tank top. There's no major roads anywhere near here, and the closest cabin is almost five miles away, so I know he hasn't had an accident and come for help. There's enough light coming from the windows that I can see he's very tan. He's dragging himself onto the property with his elbows, his hands are held up and I can see that the fingers are all broken. They're bent and twisted and when he shuffles forward they stay rigid. I know, of course, that I need to go and help this man but I can't bring myself to do it. Too many things don't add up. I can't figure out where he would have come from and as he gets closer I can see there's no dirt on his clothes. And there's something wrong with those, too. I can't tell what it is though until he comes forward into the square of light under the window.
There's no seams. There's no collar or hemline. The fabric blends into his skin and seems to grow out of it, and when he moves it doesn't bunch up or wrinkle. It's like his clothing is a part of him. He's right below the window now, and I can see that hes making this anguished face, as if he's in pain and knows that I'm right there watching. He drags himself so close to the house that all I can see are his legs, and that's when I notice his legs and the fact that they're stretched behind him in this long long line, all the way back to the treeline he came from. Where the ankles should be, there's another calf, then another knee, and so on all the way back at least fifteen feet and who knows how much farther beyond that. There's movement at my eye level and I flinch backward and he's staring inside at me and his face reminds me of the mask of tragedy, his mouth is wrenched down so far at the corners. His neck is stretched out and his head hangs from it upside down like some kind of ripe fruit. He looks up at me from this bizarre position, with his head hanging off the side of his neck, his mouth wrenched open like that, and that's when I drop the bottles and go to get the rifle out of the mudroom. Everyone reacts and I ignore them, snugging the rifle against my shoulder, but by the time I get back and get a good shot he's gone. I decided to tell them I'd seen a big coyote. Not because I didn't think they'd believe me, but because I didn't want such a good visit to have to end that way.
I have to leave this here for now, but since there's no time limit on posts here I'll probably just update sporadically as I have time. I'll do my best to not let them be too infrequent.
Why? Why do people insist on bringing toddlers and little kids out here if they're not going to watch them constantly? I just can't imagine the level of negligence that would lead to your fucking two year old wandering off and falling down a god damn ravine. Fun fact: When someone's skull is shattered, it rumbles when you move it. Sort of like broken pottery sliding around.
So yeah, sorry I haven't been around much. Here are a few thing I thought you guys might like:
I've got a buddy down in Deschutes county who's a vetern PR. About two years ago he was spending the summer in a fire tower, and it was an unusually dry summer, so he was on high alert. His particular fire tower looked something like this like this:
One night around six or so, he was out on the balcony and looking around the area through binoculars. About what he estimated to be a mile away, he saw something moving in the brush. Someone was walking along a trail that skirted the base of the mountains. The man appeared to be in his late 50's, with a full beard and a heavy gut. He moved along at a slow but steady pace. Unfortunately for him, however, he was in a no-go area, and my friend reached for his radio to call in and request another PR to intercept him. But it wasn't on his hip where he usually kept, so he lowered the binoculars to look around. He found it and attempted to relocate the man. He found the area that the man had been in, but he was gone. My friend was puzzled, and worried as well. Had he fallen? Was he hurt? He scanned all around but there was absolutely no trace of the guy. He lowered his binoculars but as he did so there was a flash of red across his vision. He raised them and the entire field was full of a shifting red, and he could make literally no sense of what he was seeing. Of course eventually he figured it out and when he did he looked up and the man was no more than 100 yards away, still walking with that same slow pace. My friend went into what I'd guess was a mild state of shock at the impossibility of the situation because he remembers freezing and being forced to watch the man come closer to the base of the tower. There was something wrong with his eyes. They were looking down, but so far down that only the very tips of the irises were visible. That's how close he got before he stopped, just below the balcony. He craned his head up but his eyes didn't move and he opened his mouth but didn't say anything for a moment. Then his jaw moved up and down a bit and he said:
"I saw you."
The man's irises started to roll up just as they were about to make eye contact my friend managed to break his paralysis and booked it into the cabin. He slammed the door and locked it and the man was there so fast my friend said he couldn't even register it. He tapped on the glass and my friend refused to look at him. He turned his back and waited for the thing to go away. My friend believes that turning your back on a demon or other unholy thing will force it to leave, and I guess in this case he was right because the thing eventually left. My friend stayed out there for the rest of the summer but made sure to keep the doors locked at night.
It's probably some kind of really weird refraction from a lake or a kind of mirage but there's been a little cluster of sightings that I thought were interesting. They happened in the same place and at the same time, but on different days. Universally, the reports basically described the observer hiking up to a scenic viewing spot and seeing something up above the horizon. Higher up than a mirage would normally be, almost at eye level. When viewed with plain sight, it was impossible to tell what it was, but it was obviously stationary. When viewed with magnification it was possible to make out someone suspended in the air upside down, hands at his sides. Someone's teenage kid compared it to those glitches where you can see through walls and the NPCs are just standing around in weird places. Like I said, we're pretty sure it's a weird mirage from a lake, or possibly even some stupid prank, but we'll keep an eye on it.
Do you ever have a memory you can't remember, but you remember remembering it? God it's driving me crazy.
There was a big case down south a few months ago. Uncle from a prominent local family went out hunting and didn't come back. The theory was that he'd fallen into a sinkhole, since they'd been popping up in that area with the unusually heavy rainfall. Even though the search was largely conducted with this in mind, it took a long time to find him. It didn't help that his legs were gone by that point.
He was the victim of one of the absolute dumbest fucking accidents I've ever seen. One of those things that'll happen once and never again. This poor guy tripped on an exposed root and fell forward. When he reached out to catch himself, he had the unfortunate luck of breaking through into a sinkhole. It wasn't particularly deep, but unbeknownst to him it had a second entrance at the base of a tree fifty yards away. Unfortunately, the sinkhole was occupied, and he landed awkwardly on his wrists into a pile of diamondbacks. The guy survived long enough to feel one puncture his eye and another bite through his lip, but not much longer than that. Stuck almost vertically, the venom basically main-lined to his brain and he died before he could figure out a way to escape. It goes down and one of the most idiotic, senseless ways for someone to die that I've ever heard of.
This is my favorite time of year. It's not quite spring or winter. It's somewhere in between. It's too wet to camp, too dry to ski. People stay inside. I'm always grateful for that. I’ve had a lot of people express concern about outdoor sports. It’s a fair question. Are we really safe out there? They want advice. How do they keep their loved ones safe? I tell them I don’t know. How do they avoid the stairs? I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s frustrating to have nothing to offer. If I knew how to keep everyone safe, I’d have solved, arguably, one of our biggest problems in this country. The only things I can stress are what anyone else does: don't go alone. Carry a GPS locator and phone. Be prepared for anything.
There's no pattern for this kind of thing, at least not one that I can see. There's commonalities, sure, but everyone's experience is different. This winter was quiet, mostly, but sometimes we're so overwhelmed it's all we can do to tread water. These are some of the things I've dealt with in the past:
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A buddy of mine up at Crater Lake remembers the disappearance of a young man there about twenty years ago, never found. This past winter, he called me to ask for advice on a new, eerily similar case. Jack B., his wife, and two children were snowshoeing on a very, VERY well marked trail. He was in the lead, the wife was behind. That's what we know. The wife said he crested a small hill, she lost sight of him for less than a second, and in that time he fell off the face of the earth. His tracks ended in the middle of the trail. There was no where for that man to go. And yet, in a literal blink of an eye, he was gone. They've been searching for him again now that the snow pack is melting a bit but I'm sure they won't find him. That area is wrong. Something about the way the wind sounds.
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About four years ago a new recruit came to our Park to do an internship with one of the senior Rangers. He was a really nice kid, his name was Darren, I think. He actually got really lucky, timing-wise. A lady had a diabetic crash and we had to help get her out of a tricky area. Darren was so hyped up about it, and he was one of those guys who you know is just gonna do great. He's friendly, he loves the job, he's everything you look for in a Ranger. But Darren had a problem with listening, because Darren was a very devout Catholic who believed that the Lord would save him from any danger. Darren didn't believe that what we'd seen was anything to be frightened of. The only parts of Darren that we found two years after he vanished during a routine trail-walk were a quarter-inch thick slice of his left thigh and the cap of his skull.
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Very early on in my career, I used to have a thing with kids who vanished. It broke me up really bad. I was always the first guy to volunteer. I couldn't stand the thought of another kid growing up alone, with that kind of burden on them, that invisible second life. And I had a very good track record. I had this kind of sense that almost always lead me in the right direction. So I started getting called out to other parks to help in search and rescue groups. One of the ones I brought back was a little girl who was skiing up at a popular resort I was familiar with. I still remember her name, actually, it was Anna. Her dad, John H., was on ski patrol, I'd met him a few times, and he was absolutely wrecked by the whole thing. It was a familiar story: he'd been watching her ski down one of the easier slopes, following along behind. He lost sight of her for just a second and poof, she was gone. I happened to be in the area during that time, so of course I went to help him out. By that point she'd only been gone maybe half the day, so I was confident we'd be able to get her back by nightfall. We split up to cover more ground and I went into an area that I know is full of really large boulders and cliff faces. Sometimes you find kids in places like that. It was unbelievably eerie that day. The sky was totally overcast but smoke from a freak fire up north had turned everything a really strange orange color. It was dead quiet, too, like the animals didn't know if they should be awake or asleep. Something about the light made the shadows look wrong, too, like they weren't in the right places. Probably a trick of the light but it was very disorienting. By pure luck, I found her tucked into a tiny little crevice at the foot of a big boulder. I got her out and it was almost like she'd been drugged. She was missing her shoes and coat but she was warm, almost hot to the touch. I got her back down to the lodge safe and they took her to be examined. There wasn't anything in her system, she hadn't been harmed. Oddly, though, she appeared to be suffering from severe dehydration. She'd lost almost three pounds. She'd only been gone a few hours; none of it made sense. It was so bizarre that everything basically got swept under the rug in favor of cheerful stories of her return. I reconnected with John a few weeks later to see how she was doing. The first night back, he said, she woke up shrieking in the middle of the night. He couldn't comfort her. She kept saying that she didn't want to go back to the orange place. He got her to sleep and by the next morning, not only did she have no memory of the dream, she had no memory of the event at all. He politely asked that I not call again, and I obliged. I do think about her a lot, though. I wonder if she remembers now.
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My boss woke me up in the middle of the night one summer and had me run out to a campground out at the edge of the park. He said a woman had called him absolutely frantic, insisting that there was some kind of large animal outside her tent. The cops were on their way but I'd get there faster. I grabbed my personal gun and headed out to see what was going on. She'd set up camp in a pretty isolated area, so I had to park the truck and walk a ways out to her. On the way there, this smell started to become first noticeable, then almost suffocating. It was something very... primal. Musky. And angry. It set my teeth on edge, and I had my gun ready. Nothing in the forest was moving, so whatever it was was predatory. We don't have bears up here, but that's not to say one couldn't have somehow wandered down from up north. As I got closer to her tent, I could see how badly this thing had torn up her camp. Her stove had been thrown up into the trees almost twenty feet. The fire had been stomped out, the coals scattered. One side of her tent was shoved in, and I could see the outline of her inside. I called out, and as I did something on the other side of the tent moved. I froze, gun cocked. In the weak light coming from her tent all I could make out was a huge bulky shape and two tiny white pinpoints where no head should have been. She started to come out of her tent and I told her to stop. The thing made a loud chuffing sound and suddenly seemed to dissolve and melt into the ground. I fired a round into the trees where it had been, but it was gone. I examined the ground and the only trace of it was slight singeing of the dirt. It's not the first time I've seen that thing, but it's the closest I've ever been, or ever want to be.
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I saw it the first time outside of my house, in the middle of summer. It was very late, and I couldn't sleep. I was thinking about a little boy who'd gone missing; we hadn't found anything except one of his Power Rangers shoes. I was at my back door, staring out over my backyard. I was exhausted, on the edge of passing out, but I felt guilty. I didn't deserve rest while that boy was out there. I was staring at nothing but when something moved at the edge of the lawn I noticed it and focused my eyes. It looked like a very tall deer. I watched it closely. It didn't move. I couldn't tell if it could see me. I bent down to grab my binoculars for a better look. When I looked up, it was pressed up against the glass. It covered over 100 feet in less than two seconds. It was all black, covered in disgusting, rotten-looking fur, and in the middle of its chest were two tiny white eyes. It was looking right at me. It wanted me to open the door. It wanted me to come closer. I broke away and ran to the bedroom and locked myself in the bathroom, where there are no windows. I heard it tapping on the glass until the sun came up. Sometimes it asked me, in my own voice, to let it in. I didn't. Not that time, anyway.
Woah, I randomly came across this. I live the original SAR stories. This is also really great, you should post it on nosleep (with the authors consent ofcourse)