The Ram of Concretion

Oh boy, it's time for our Easter Spooktacular! 

This episode chronicles the journal entries of an amateur adventurer as he explores the forest around his hometown in search of cool rocks. 

Transcript

You wake up to a plastic purple egg on your husband's pillow. You crack it open, and inside is a cute little note that says “Happy Easter! Can you find all the eggs?” You marvel at the fact that he’s gotten up early enough to plan an egg hunt, and you drag yourself out of bed. The next one is in the coffee filters; he knows that’s your first stop. This time it’s a green egg, and the note inside says, “You have 20 minutes.” You think that’s a bit silly, but you can’t turn down a challenge. The next egg in the medicine cabinet says, “I know what you did,” and you start to worry. Then one on the sofa says, “A husband for a husband.” You don’t know what order you’re going in now; you’re blindly tearing up your house. You find “You’re almost out of time. You find “you’ll never make it.” You count frantically, then you realize you don’t even know how many eggs there are supposed to be. But you glance at your phone, and you see your time is up. Soon, there’s a call coming in from a number you had saved, but one you’d hoped to never need again. You take a deep breath, and you hit accept on ‘The Podcast Inside Your House.’

March 5th 2026. 

My name is Aaron Raleigh, and if you’re reading this, it means that you want to know all about how I made my first big discovery. The first of many big discoveries, I’m sure. But dear reader, I’m glad that you’ve joined me here to witness my humble origins. 

I figure with this journal entry here, I’m going to set the scene for you in my little town of Kanin. If I had to use one word to describe Kanin, it would be ‘Wilting.’ It’s still vibrant, still beautiful, but you can tell that it isn’t what it used to be. 

That’s not an uncommon story here in the foothills of Appalachia. But our town's decay is made worse by the fallout of the mining industry. Which again, isn’t all that uncommon, you get a lot of coal mining, and limestone mining pretty much everywhere in this part of the world. And that leaves a bad enough impact on the environment. You get arsenic and lead from that alone. Plus, you get waterways polluted with rust and acid, which hits the aquatic life in creeks especially badly. 

Our little pocket of the mountains was mostly spared from coal mining. But that’s just because we have other resources here. We have the bad luck of being the first town south of an old zinc mine. They used to dump their waste straight into the Mugwort river which flows right through our town. So back in the day, we were the first stop for cadmium, mercury, and even more lead. 

Nowadays, we’re dealing with a salt mine to the west. But that one mostly just kills wildlife instead of poisoning us. Well, I guess it’s still leaching out some toxic things, but in much smaller amounts than the zinc mine ever did. See, any amount of mining disturbs the ecosystem. It digs up minerals, metals, things that aren’t meant to be breaching the surface, and it all gets into the groundwater. But at least with our current mine, it’s mostly just salt and rust, neither of which makes a substantial impact on the already high cancer rates here.

So now that we’ve established the backdrop here, the things that are wrong with the town, I want to tell you about why I love it. I’m sure they’re all the same reasons that anyone who loves living in a small town might say, but that doesn't make them any less true. 

I’m writing this entry from one of my favorite hiking trails. It runs along a hill, and when the leaves are gone, you can actually look over the town. Kanin is beautiful, especially from here. With the town only ever shrinking, we haven’t really had to build anything new in the last hundred years or so. So it’s all brick walls and slate roofing and ornate facades. It looks like a place lost in time. And you only spot the pollution if you know what to look for. Like how the buildings right up against the Mugwort river are in good condition, but they’re abandoned and boarded up nonetheless. It isn’t safe to be right on the water. 

Another thing I love is that there isn’t a person in town that I don’t know. And while that’s annoying in a lot of ways, I also can’t imagine living any other way. I’ve got friends who live in bigger cities, and while it’s true they’ve got more friends near them, more kids their age, more places to go. I feel like the sense of community erodes more in places where people get too dense. 

It’s just me and my dad here. But growing up, I never felt at a loss for family. Our neighbor next door, Mrs. Mitchell, has always been like a grandmother to me. She brings over food and cookies and comes over just to chat, sometimes for way, way too long. And in return, I come over anytime she needs something heavy in her house moved, or anytime the deer knock down her garden fence. 

Professor Morris is like an uncle to me. But to be fair, he’s kind of the kooky uncle of the entire town. Anytime you go over to his house, he’ll tell you stories about the globe-trotting adventures he’s been on. And if you make the mistake of going out for coffee or lunch with him, he always finds ways to embarrass you. He’ll tell you, dad jokes, or flirt with the waitresses. Or worse, he’ll tell dad jokes to the waitresses. But he’s alright really, once you get to know him. Maybe the coolest thing about Professor Morris is that he used to know my grandfather, and he remembers him even better than my dad does. 

And I guess I should mention my dad. Because if you’re reading these journals, you already know how that’s turned out. And as of today, he and I both know how that’s going to turn out, too. And we don’t need to go into that anymore than we already have. Except to say that that’s another reason I love this town. Because everyone, and I mean everyone, has helped out with paying for my dad's treatment. If they hadn't, he’d probably already be gone. You don't get that devotion in a place where you don’t even know your neighbor's name. At least I don’t think so. 

But anyway, this entry has gone on way too long. Next time I’m gonna tell you all about my grandfather, and how he inspired me to write these journals, and catalogue the little expeditions I’m about to go on. 

March 8th 2026. 

Welcome back to another journal entry. It’s a Sunday today, and I’ve just got done interviewing Professor Morris about my grandpa, Franklin Raleigh, the famed explorer and travel writer. By the time you read this, though, I’m sure he’ll also be known as the grandfather of the current famous explorer, me, Aaron Raleigh. 

But anyway, Franklin died over 30 years ago. My dad was even younger than me when he passed. He didn’t get a lot of time with him. But in addition to all the articles and books Grandpa wrote, we’ve also got all his old journals. Growing up, I always felt like I knew my grandfather well because of that.

The journals especially feel like a window into his life. There are typos, bad jokes, and some tidbits about him being a ladies' man that I really could have done without. But they provide that extra layer that helps humanize him. 

Today, I asked Professor Morris what he remembered about Franklin that I couldn't find in all his writings. What I could archive here that hasn’t already been written down. 

Morris told me about how Franklin had the goofiest laugh. That he’d snort and giggle, and even if you weren’t already laughing at whatever he laughed at, you’d start just from hearing him,

He talked about how Franklin never kept to the same hours. He’d be nocturnal one week, staying up all hours of the night, then back to getting up at sunrise the next week. 

Franklin had a fiery temper, but he never held a grudge. He’d be starting fights one minute, then palling around with the guys he’d just insulted the next. He was a man who was always intense, and being around him could be downright exhausting at times. 

Morris had never actually gone on any of Frankin's big expeditions. But I already knew a lot about those. Franklin always wanted to be either higher or lower than humans should be. He did mostly mountain climbing and sea expeditions. He never tackled Everest though, saying there was no point as everyone had already been there. 

Morris told me that you could never trust anything that Franklin said unless you had photographic proof. That he was known to exaggerate things, just for the hell of it. If Franklin said he saw a shark the size of a whale, well, the only thing you could count on was that he saw a shark. Probably. 

But Franklin had plenty of pictures to back up his adventures. And perhaps the tall tales he spun when his camera failed him were part of why he got somewhat famous. Other men were going to the places he went. It wasn’t like he was discovering new continents and sailing to parts unknown. But he acted as if he were some grand pioneer fording parts of the world no one else had ever seen. Plus, he’d occasionally spot yetis or sea beasts that defied explanation. 

Maybe that’s the only reason anyone knows his name. Because he fibbed and fought his way into legend status. I’d long suspected grandpa exaggerated things, as I think anyone who read his writings did. But that had never bothered me. I always felt like his stories helped bring a sense of wonder back into the world, even if maybe all of them weren’t true. 

But the thing that Morris told me today that really stuck with me was that he’d often talk with Franklin right before he set off on his missions. And they’d always joke that this one would be the last, and Franklin would soon meet either a snowy or a watery grave. Morris said that grandpa never seemed bothered by that possibility. He'd always say. “If death wants to meet me there, then that’ll be just one more discovery, won’t it?”

He did meet death eventually. But it wasn’t at the top of some distant mountain or deep in the ocean. No, it was practically in his own backyard. Franklin was helping a friend on a project to chronicle the diversity of insect life. He was catching flies in the woods behind his house, just a few hours away from here, in fact. 

This was for a study his friend was doing on how easy it is to make discoveries, quite literally, in one's own backyard. Apparently, there are so many insect species that even some that live near us aren't properly cataloged. And while grandpa was out setting little flytraps in the woods, woods that he’d walked in hundreds of times before, he stepped in a spot that he’d never happened to step in before. And he fell straight down, far enough to break his legs at the bottom of a cavern. 

Franklin lived alone, and his friend wasn’t due back for another week. By the time they found him, he’d died from some combination of thirst, or shock, or heart failure. 

They named both a new fly species and the cave after him. Which seems morbid, but he would have been offended if they named it after anyone else. 

Professor Morris has pictures of that cave. I’m actually writing this from his couch right now, flipping through an old scrapbook. The cave is a cool place, with some interesting crystal formations. But my favorite picture is Professor Morris standing by the plaque marking where grandpa died, and giving it the middle finger. There’s a group of tourists mostly out of frame, but the guide is staring at Professor Morris, shocked. I bet that was a fun one to explain. 

This is all, in a way, what inspired me to start these journals. See, I’ve been out of school for a month now to take care of dad. And I know I’m going to go back soon, or worst case, I’ll get my GED in a year or two. I know there are more pressing things happening right now. But I can’t help but feel like I’m wasting time right now. So these little journals are going to catalogue my attempt to do something meaningful. To make my own discovery. If grandpa can find a cave right in his own backyard, what might I be able to find with an entire forest at my disposal? 

With enough time and effort, I’m sure I can make some wondrous discovery of my own. Maybe I’ll come across a new species, either extant or extinct. I’ll take either a living creature or some groundbreaking new fossil; I’m not picky. Or maybe I’ll find a new cave system, like grandpa, though I hope I don't discover it the same way he did. Or maybe I’ll stumble upon a legendary creature, finally snapping irrefutable proof of Bigfoot or the goatman. 

Whatever I find, I just hope it’s sensational. I hope it brings the news and the tourists and injects a little life back into this town. I hope it helps people see Kanin the same way I see it. As something worth saving. Something worth cleaning up and bringing back to life 

March 9th 2026

Today I’m writing from the side of a creekbed in the hills about two miles or so southeast of town. I’m sitting on a huge circular rock, and looking over a creekbed that’s dotted with more of these same perfectly round rocks. They look like eggs, an illusion made even more powerful because some of them have eroded or cracked open, and the inside erodes much quicker than the outer shell. This spot looks like how I’d imagine a dragon’s nest would look. When my friends and I first stumbled upon these rocks, we thought for sure they were dinosaur eggs. 

Well, it turns out they are fossils in a way, but not eggs. They’re a type of rock called concretions. My old teacher, Mr. Lopez, told me all about them. Before I left school, that is. I can’t talk to him these days because he’s too nice. See, he’s always been a great teacher, but also a huge asshole. And now that everyone in town has to be overly nice to me all the time, he’s stopped being a jerk. It’s unnatural. 

But anyway, I remember last year he took an entire day to tell us all about concretions when me and my buddies showed him our pictures of this place. Mr. Lopez actually used to help catalogue fossils back in the day, and he had some awesome pictures of his own that he made a little slideshow with. I’ll try to explain what I remember. 

Basically, concretions are a type of fossil. They form when something dies in very specific conditions, where the sediment has all the right properties to form a natural cement. Then the iron from the blood of the dead thing pulls in all the right minerals to basically form a shell of natural concrete around the carcass. Which fossilizes it, and makes this big circle around whatever died. And the concretion ends up harder than the rock around it, making it stick out as shale and sandstone erode away. 

They look really neat on their own, but the coolest thing about them is that at the center or the nucleus, as it’s called, sometimes you can find the original fossil of the creature that the concretion formed around. 

Mr. Lopez showed us a bunch of pictures of concretions from his fossil days. There were a ton of crabs, I guess they preserve well, but also some fish. There was even one that formed around an ancient fern-like plant. 

Today I brought up a pickaxe and broke open just two of the smaller ones to see what was inside them. One of them didn’t have anything identifiable in it. The other, though, had an ammonite, or at least some kind of shelled creature that looked similar. 

These concretions could very well be hiding some kind of wonderful discovery. I don’t even know where to begin with breaking open the big ones, though. But there’s definitely potential here. 

March 15th 2026

I’m writing this from one of the study rooms at the library. I’ve just gotten done with an impromptu history lesson from Ms. Davis. She was my history teacher, and she’s been the main one helping me try to coordinate for finals so that maybe I won’t have to repeat junior year whenever I can come back to school. 

I meant to write sooner than this. But, well, there’s a reason I had to pretty much put everything on hold. I really only get out when someone can be home with my dad. And people have been helping, of course. But with everyone in town chipping in to help pay the bills, I really don’t feel right asking for people’s time, too. Especially with how intensive caring for my dad is at this stage. 

But enough about that. Let’s talk about history. I told Ms. Davis all about my quest to find some grand discovery here. And she told me about a historic mystery she’d always wondered about. 

She told me about how, when she was a little girl, there were a bunch of military men who came to town. They said they were performing a training exercise of some kind, but to pretty much everyone in town, it was clear that excuse was horseshit. Ms. Davis actually said that by the way. I guess when your dad is dying of cancer, people stop thinking they need to treat you like a kid. 

But anyway, the military guys were in town for an entire month. Some stayed at the motel, but most of them just camped out in the woods. And whatever they were doing, it was clear they were searching for something. Hikers and hunters would catch them moving through the woods in a grid. And after about a month, they either found what they needed or gave up. 

No one in town ever found out what really happened. But Ms. Davis said the rumor mill talked about some genetic experiment that escaped from a secret base. Or maybe they were searching for a downed alien spaceship. She showed me all the newspaper articles from the time. We were in the library for hours, just scanning through the microfilm. The whole time the military guys were here, the local paper was putting crazy theories and blurry pictures of the military men on the front page. 

Ms. Davis had always wondered just what had actually happened. She told me I should keep an eye out for monsters and aliens on my expeditions. I promised her that if I saw anything scary, I’d get photographic proof.

March 16th 2026

Well, wouldn’t you know it, it’s only been a day, and I’m back again. I’ve always been pretty sure that Ms. Davis and my dad used to date. And today she showed up and said she wanted to talk with him for a while. 

I don’t want to leave her there all afternoon, but I made time for a quick hike to one of my favorite places. It’s just a little pond south of my house, but because it’s a pond and not a creek, it’s been spared from some of the worst of the mining fallout. There’s no visible rust at least, and the fish and frogs and crawdads seem so much more prevalent here. 

I knew this place was special even as a kid, before I understood the full damage that’s been done to our ecosystem. The plants are denser, the birds group closer, so they sing more often, and they sing louder. Don’t get me wrong, the nature around here is all stunning. But here it’s like a small glimpse into what things used to be before we dug up all that poison from deep in the earth. 

I’m sitting on a log watching the tadpoles right now. They’re swimming all together like a school of fish. The trees are just starting to put out the first nubs of leaves. And the boldest of the spring flowers have started to break the ground’s surface. 

I wonder if we can ever get the world back to this. If we can ever get rid of the salt and the rust and lead that’s thinning the trees, and gutting our life expectancy. 

That’s what I wanted to study before I had to put school on hold. Environmental science of some kind. I hope I still can when I go back. But lately I’ve just had this thought that I can’t shake. 

With my dad on death's door so young. And grandpa not making it that much further past him in his time. Well, I just can’t stop thinking that you never really know how much time you have left. I hope I still get time to make a difference. 

March 17th 2016

Mr. Lopez stopped by today. I’m talking to my teachers more than I ever did when I was in school. He dropped off a portable rock drill, which I guess you can use to take core samples. 

I think Ms. Davis told him I didn’t appreciate him being overly nice to me. Because he told me if I broke the drill or lost it, he’d make sure I never graduated. 

Me and Ms. Davis had done a whole lot of talking and crying last night. She hadn’t realized how quickly Dad was going downhill. She told me a lot of things I never knew about him. But that isn’t for this journal. Not everyone wants their life cataloged the way grandpa did. The way I do. 

March 27th 2026

Things have been busy, but today I’m writing from a few miles past that spot with all the concretions. Past that spot, there’s just more and more of them. I’ve been drilling and cracking rocks today, and I’ve found some neat stuff. In one of the nuclei, I found a tiny fish. And in another, I found an ammonite again. A lot of them are empty, but that’s okay.

I learned to use the rock drill on the bigger ones, but to be honest, I really don’t know what I’m looking for in a core sample. But I gathered a few just to show Mr. Lopez and see what he thinks. 

I’ve got a few hours until sunset, so I’m gonna hike out a ways and see what’s further down the creek. 

March 28th, 2026

I didn’t have time to write this down last night. But I found something incredible. 

I thought it was a flying saucer at first. Thanks, Ms. Davis, for putting that into my head. But no, it’s just a downed airplane. But the thing is, I can’t find any records of a plane getting lost here. 

It’s absolutely huge too. It was getting dark when I found it, though, so I didn’t get to look at it very much. The hike home was miserable in the dark, by the way. But I’m going back as soon as I can. I’ll get pictures, videos, and all those important things. 

I did grab a little souvenir, though. In the creek, there were a bunch of really weirdly shaped rocks, and I brought back one that looked exactly like a hammer. 

Mr. Lopez came over this morning to check it out. It’s funny, I don’t think I’ve let my friends in the house once since things got really bad. But it feels different inviting adults over. Maybe because they’ve seen death before, especially cancer, and especially in this town. 

While all the things in my dad's room beeped and buzzed, Mr. Lopez didn’t even blink. We just talked about rocks. We used a hammer to crack open the rust colored rock. And we discovered that inside of it was, well, a hammer. 

Mr. Lopez told me that what we’d found was actually a concretion, too. He said that in the right conditions, with either enough salt or iron present, concretions could form around man-made objects. And they’d do so incredibly quickly, in just a few years. 

I guess that was the one silver lining of all the mining in town. All the salt and rust made for some cool rocks. 

I didn’t tell Mr. Lopez about what else I’d found, though. I wanted that to be a big surprise, and one properly documented. 

April 4th, 2026

I’m writing this from the hospital. 

They don’t think the end is coming too soon, but things have hit the point where it’s not safe for me to just be keeping an eye on dad anymore. Really, if he’d had different insurance, we could have been doing this the whole time. But as things are, that would have cost more than everyone in our town could have ever helped to cover. Even waiting as long as we have, I don’t know how this is going to go. I don’t know how I’ll ever pay everyone back for what they’ve done for me. 

I’m going out tomorrow to take pictures of that plane crash. But this whole adventure is feeling silly to me now. Maybe we’ll get some news stories about the discovery, though. Maybe I can leverage my 15 minutes of fame for some pity donations, so I’m not beginning adulthood on the brink of bankruptcy.

The ideas I’d been entertaining about growing up to be some globe-trotting explorer. Well, they all feel stupid now. 

April 5th, 2026

I’m writing this just as I’ve reached the place crash. Being back in the woods makes me feel like anything is possible. Like maybe things will be okay. I try to hold onto that feeling while I can. 

It’s Easter today. Though I’ve never been religious, I’ve always liked the idea of it. And the symbolism of the rebirth, of resurrection, it feels nice. On the hike here, I’ve been entertaining my fantasies again, those of making some fantastical discovery that will revitalize Kanin. 

I try to picture the bare patches from salt pollution gone. I try to picture the creeks clear and teaming with life. I try to picture the people swimming and fishing in the Mugwort River. Maybe I could be the one to bring all that. 

I’m going to set this journal down for a bit and start cataloging. 

April 5th, 2026 Entry 2

The plane itself is incredibly well preserved. One wing is still attached, and the fuselage is pretty intact aside from where the other wing ripped off. The interior is pretty sheltered from the weather. The instruments, dials, and seats are in beautiful shape. 

Though the plane is huge, it's a cargo carrier of some kind, not a passenger plane. Thankfully, there are no skeletons anywhere in it. Whatever happened, the pilots had either parachuted out or survived the crash. Though I don’t know about anyone’s odds of surviving beyond that. I tried not to touch or disturb too much inside the plane itself. I feel like there’s a lot of history there. 

In the creek beside the wreckage, there are more little artifacts that have concretions forming around them. And underneath them, there are more of the stone concretions, too. There’s something beautiful about that. Fossils from millions of years ago, when this was all an ocean, are sitting right underneath fossils just beginning to form around human artifacts from only a few short decades ago. 

For the most part, the natural fossils have stayed their normal gray color, the rust only converging on the metal things. But there’s one large concretion in the middle of the creek that appears almost to be a mixture of both. It’s perfectly round, like the stone ones, but it also has a layer of fresh iron oxide over it. 

I think I’ll get a sample of that, as a little souvenir. After all, it wouldn't be Easter if I didn’t crack open an egg, right?

April 5th, 2026. Final Entry

I’m so sorry.

I’m writing this about a five-minute sprint away from the wreckage. My phone and my video camera are both destroyed, so this journal will serve as the only record of what’s happened to me here. 

I’m so sorry. I can’t say that enough. 

My whole body is shaking. My left hand, the one I’d steadied the concretion with, is rapidly deteriorating. That’s the only way I can properly describe it. It’s like a bloody wound that just keeps growing, the skin sloughing away. At least I don’t feel it. At least not yet. 

My right hand is still usable, for now. But I know what this is. I taste metal. You always see people saying that in the movies when this happens. 

I’m going to try and make it into town, but if I don’t, I just want to say again that I’m so, so sorry. I just wanted to help. I wanted our little town to be in the papers, and I guess now it will be. But it won’t be cleaned up, it won’t be resurrected. I've made sure of that. I’ve made sure that the environment here, this town, will be uninhabitable for hundreds, if not thousands of years. 

Because that wasn't a rock I drilled into. It was what the military had tried and failed to retrieve all those years ago. What I’ve just opened up, in the creek that flows right down to my town, is a lost nuclear warhead. 

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the podcast inside your house! To hear every tale of terror as they are released, subscribe to our show on your podcast app or on Youtube or follow us on Instagram and Bluesky.Until Next Time, remember that old saying, life is like a basket of eggs; you never know what you’re going to get.