Things I Found in The Woods: Cryptid Sign

Broken saplings. Eight to ten feet up. In a row. Through remote timber where the surrounding trees were untouched. A true story of life in Appalachia. 

A cow horn, nine feet up in an oak, in woods so quiet you could hear your own heartbeat.

Tree structures that matched formations being documented two thousand miles away — by researchers Wallace had never heard of, in forests he had never visited.

He noticed all of it years before he knew anyone associated these things with anything.

That sequence is the only part that matters.

The Fox Is Still On Fire: The Warnings is now available on Amazon.

Twelve unwritten rules. Exposed in writing for the first time. The things Appalachian people were told to do — and never do — in the woods, on the roads, on the porch, and in the presence of the dead. Rules that traveled across mountains, state lines, and generations without changing.

The explanations changed constantly.

The rules didn't.

The Fox Is Still On Fire: The Warnings — Wallace Cole

Available now at amazon.com.

Pay attention to what is paying attention to you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Things I found in the trees I once stood looking up at a cow horn lodged nine feet up in the crotch of an oak tree, in deep timber, on a summer afternoon when the birds had stopped singing, and the woods were so quiet I could hear my own heartbeat. I stood there for five minutes, trying to imagine how it got there. A storm couldn't have blown it there. No way a cow could have lost it or broke it off up there. A man couldn't reach that high to place it there. A squirrel couldn't carry it there. There was no explanation, and somewhere during those five minutes, I realized the hair on my arms and the back of my neck was standing straight up. And I had been alone in those woods for a very long time. Or maybe alone is exactly what I wasn't. It was quiet. Dead quiet. I'm Wallace Cole. This is the Appalachian Notebook. And this is a story about the things I found in the timber before I had any idea what I was looking at. Long before I knew anyone associated these things with Bigfoot, I noticed them. I saw them in the woods around my home. Not because I was looking. I wasn't looking for anything. I was a hunter, a walker. A teenager who spent time in timber near Lindside, West Virginia, and up on Peter's Mountain, the ridge that forms the border between Monroe County and Craig County, Virginia. I knew those woods the way you know a room you've lived in your whole life. Not every detail, but the shape of things. The way the light came through the canopy in October, amber and rust, and a red so dark it was almost purple. The way the creek sounded different in August than it did in April. The sweet wrought smell of leaves turning on the forest floor in fall, and the green, cathedral silence of deep timber in summer, when the air barely moved, and the only sound was your own boots on the ground. I loved those woods. That is important. Because what I am about to tell you happened in a place I loved, and the things I found there did not make me love it less. They made me understand that I had been walking through something I did not fully understand for years, and the woods had been patient about it. When something was wrong, I noticed. Things were wrong in those woods. Not dramatically wrong, not horror movie wrong, just wrong enough to make you stop walking and stand very still, and look at something for a long time before you admitted to yourself that you didn't have an explanation for it. And sometimes when you stood still long enough, the woods would go quiet around you. Not peaceful quiet, not the good quiet of a porch after supper, or cattle settling under shade trees in the afternoon. A different quiet the kind where the birds stop and the insects stop, and the breeze that had been moving through the upper branches just stops. And you were standing in silence that feels like it has weight to it, like something else had stopped too, and was waiting to see what you would do next. The first things I noticed were formations. Two heavy branches, or small trunks, crossed into an X shape, held in place by support branches at the base. Not leaning against each other the way trees fall across one another in a storm. These looked placed, deliberate. The kind of configuration you'd have to stand there and stare at for a full minute before you could bring yourself to say what your eyes were already telling you, which was that wind did not do that. Tepee like formations. Three or four logs leaned together, tips touching, bases spread wide, like a frame for something, like a shelter that nobody was using or had stopped using, or and this is the thought that always made the back of my neck go cold, hadn't started using yet. I found them near our home in Lindside. I found them hunting on Peter's Mountain. Different locations, different years, same configurations, and every time that same quiet would settle over the woods around me, like the timber itself was holding its breath while I stood there, looking at something I could not explain. And then there were the trees, with their roots in the air. This is the one that got under my skin and stayed there. When a tree falls, it falls. The roots pull up a disc of soil, and the trunk lies where gravity puts it. That's simple. That's nature doing what nature does. But what I was seeing were trees that appeared to have been uprooted somewhere else, and carried, and set down, with the root ball pointing at the sky. In locations where the ground showed no hole, no disc of torn soil, no sign that the tree had ever grown there. It was somewhere it hadn't been. And there was no explanation on the ground, or in the air, or anywhere in my experience for how it got there. I'd stand in front of one of those root balls and the woods would be very quiet around me, and I'd think how did that get like that? Not what creature did this? Just how? The structures puzzled me. The brakes bothered me. Small trees, saplings, some of them three or four inches in diameter, snapped at eight to ten feet up. Not at the base where wind catches a tree, not at a knot or a natural weak point where disease or rot had softened the wood. At a consistent height, like something had reached up and wrapped around the trunk, and snapped it the way you'd snap a pencil. Except a pencil is a quarter inch thick, and these were three inches of green hardwood. And not just one. In a row, one after another, a line of them, running through the timber, like something tall had walked along and broken them off as it went, the way a man drags his hand along a fence. Except this wasn't a fence, and whatever was doing the dragging was doing it eight feet in the air. I saw this more than once, different locations, same pattern, same height, same clean breaks, same row. And every time I found one I would stand there, very still, and the silence would come down through the canopy like something pouring into the space around me, and I could feel in a place below my thinking, that I was not standing in an empty woods. I was standing in a woods where something had been, and I was not entirely sure it had left. I asked the questions anyone would ask. If wind did this, why didn't the smaller trees around them break first? A three inch sapling will ride out a storm that snaps a bigger tree at the base. You don't get saplings snapping at eight feet, while the five inch tree ten feet away is standing there, untouched. If wind did this, why were the brakes in a line? Wind doesn't select a path through timber and follow it the way you'd follow a game trail. Wind is broad, it hits everything. What I was looking at was narrow, a track, a path. A line of broken things with unbroken things on both sides, and the line went somewhere, and wherever it went, it went there on purpose. What breaks a tree at eight to ten feet and leaves the base standing? Nothing I knew about headed eight feet. Nothing with a name. What animal does this? A black bear can reach about six feet standing. Bears claw. They strip bark, they rub. They don't snap three inch hardwood saplings eight feet up in a sequence through the woods. Not a bull elk, not a deer. Not anything in the books. What person does this? You can't reach eight feet without something to stand on. Nobody hauls a stepladder into remote timber to snap saplings in a line. And why would they? There's no prank in it. No audience, no payoff. Just broken trees on a ridge where nobody goes. And nobody would see them. And nobody, as far as I could tell, had seen them, except me. And possibly whatever broke them. I didn't answer any of those questions. I just asked them and moved on, and saw the same thing again weeks or months later in a different part of the woods, and asked them again and moved on again. And every time the woods were quieter than they should have been. And every time the quiet felt less like absence, and more like attention. One detail has stayed with me longer than all the others. I found a cow horn lodged about nine feet up in the crotch of an oak tree. I stopped and looked at it, the way you look at something that has no business being where it is. The way you'd look at a shoe on your roof. The way you'd look at a kitchen chair sitting in the middle of an empty field. Your mind goes very still, because it is trying to solve a problem that has no solution. A cow horn and a tree. Nine feet up, not at the base where a flood might have deposited it, not tangled in low brush where an animal might have dropped it. Nine feet up in the crotch, wedged in as though someone or something had placed it there the way you'd set a coffee cup on a shelf. And the oak was old, and the woods were quiet. And the shadows under the canopy had that deep green stillness they get on a summer afternoon when nothing is moving, and even the birds have stopped, and the air itself seems to be holding still perfectly still. The way air holds still when something large is standing very close to you, and you haven't seen it yet. I stood there looking up at that horn, and I could feel the hair on my arm standing up. And that is not something I say lightly, because I have hunted those mountains since I was old enough to carry a rifle, and I do not spook easily. But my body was telling me something my mind wasn't ready to hear. And my body, I have learned, is usually ahead of my mind in the woods. I ran through explanations the way you flip through a deck of cards, looking for the one that matches. Tornado No Tornado Flood Not a floodplain, and nine feet up is above any flood line I'd ever seen in that country. A bird of prey. No bird in West Virginia is carrying a cow horn and placing it in a tree crotch nine feet above the ground. A person if the person was nine feet tall. Or if they brought a ladder into remote timber for no reason anyone could explain. None of those explanations fit, and the one that did fit, the one that sat there in the back of my mind like a shape in a dark doorway that you can almost see, but not quite, was the one I wasn't ready to say out loud. I left the cow horn where it was. I kept walking. But I walked a little faster than I had been walking, and I did not look back. And the woods behind me stayed quiet, the kind of quiet that doesn't feel like nothing, but like something that has decided not to make a sound. I thought about that horn for years. I am thinking about it right now. Here's the part of this story that matters most. I saw all of this, the X shapes, the teepees, the roots in air trees, the line breaks, the cow horn, over a period of years. I noticed them the way you notice anything odd in a landscape you know well, a crack in a wall you see every day. A sound your car makes that it didn't make before. Something off. I didn't connect them to each other. I didn't connect them to anything. They were separate puzzles that hadn't been put together yet. Then, years later, I started reading. Not about Bigfoot, initially, about Appalachian folklore, about the things people in these mountains had been reporting for a hundred and fifty years. The woodbooger, the wild man, the Yahoo. And somewhere in that reading, buried in a chapter I almost skipped, I came across descriptions of tree structures, X shapes, arches, bent trees, broken saplings, found in areas where sightings had been reported. People in Washington state were finding the same formations I'd been looking at in Monroe County for decades. People in Ohio in Oregon in the mountains of British Columbia. The same X shapes, the same teepee formations, the same saplings broken at a height no person could comfortably reach, the same trees placed where they hadn't grown. I was sitting in my own living room with the lights on, and the hair on my arms went up again. And I sat there for a long time, very still. The way I used to stand in the timber when the silence came down. Not because it proved anything. It didn't prove anything. It still doesn't. But something had been in my woods for years. And something had been in their woods two thousand miles away, doing the same things. I want to be careful here, because being careful is the only thing that separates observation from the kind of speculation that turns a man into a punchline. Wind and storms can create unusual formations. Ice can bend saplings into arches. Logging machinery stacks trees in arrangements that don't look natural. Bears rub, beavers cut. Kids build forts. For many of the tree formations that get attributed to Bigfoot, I think those explanations work. I mean that. But they don't explain a line of three inch saplings snapped at eight to ten feet, in a row, through timber where the surrounding trees are untouched. They don't explain a cow horn nine feet up in an oak. They don't explain why I was finding the same things in Monroe County that researchers were documenting two thousand miles away, decades apart, in forests that share nothing in common but latitude and hardwood and silence. And the fact that something large, apparently, moves through them. I'm not saying these structures were built by Bigfoot. I don't have footprints next to the formations. I don't have hair samples from the broken trunks. I don't have a photograph of anything putting a cow horn in a tree. What I have is observation. Years of it, in my own woods, noticed before the framework arrived. That sequence matters. If I'd read about Bigfoot tree structures first and then gone into the woods looking for them, I'd suspect my own eyes. Confirmation bias is real. You see what you're looking for. Every honest person knows this about themselves. But I wasn't looking. I was hunting. I was walking. I was doing the things a man does in the mountains he grew up in. And the mountains had things in them that didn't add up. Most of us walk through the woods and see trees. We see what we expect to see, which is nothing unusual. And that is not a flaw. That is how a person gets through the day. We filter, we dismiss, we explain. If you stopped to examine every broken branch and every crossed log in the forest, you'd never make it home before dark. But once in a while something doesn't pass through the filter. Something makes you stop. Something makes you stand in front of a cow horn nine feet up in an oak tree, in the middle of deep timber, in the middle of a summer afternoon when the birds have stopped singing, and the woods are so quiet you can hear your own heartbeat. And you stand there for five minutes, trying to imagine how it got there, and you can't, and you realize your hands are shaking, and you realize you have been alone in those woods for a very long time. Or maybe that's the wrong word. Maybe alone is exactly what you weren't. I keep those formations in a mental drawer all their own. It's a drawer that doesn't close all the way. You can hear sliding open in the middle of the night when the house is dark and the woods behind the property are darker. Before you knew what nothing sounds like when something is standing in it.