[0:13]This is one of those stories I've been sitting on for a really long time. It happened back when I was maybe 25 or 26, way before I met my wife and way before we had kids. I was a completely different person back then. Not in a bad way, just in the sense that I had the kind of free time and risk tolerance that I genuinely can't relate to anymore. I used to do these solo backpacking trips a few times a year. Usually somewhere in the Appaleations. I drive out to some remote trail head, hike deep into the back country, way off the trail and spend a few days completely off the grid. No self service, no other people, nothing. I loved it. My friends thought I was insane and honestly I kind of was. This particular trip was in the Cherokee National Forest and it changed how I see backpacking forever. I had been out there for two days and everything had been going perfectly. The weather had been great, the trail was quiet and I hadn't seen another person since the first morning. That changed pretty quickly though. On the afternoon of the second day, I noticed dark storm clouds building up to the west. I wasn't too worried at first. I'd hike through rain plenty of times and it was never a big deal. But within about an hour, I realized it wasn't going to be a passing shower. The wind up hard and the temperature dropped fast enough that I actually stopped to put on another layer. By the time the rain started, I was already looking for a spot to hunker down. The problem was that I was in a pretty exposed section of the trail. As I predicted, it wasn't a light rain. It went from windy to full on downpour in minutes. The wind was bending smaller trees sideways and I could hear branches cracking and falling in the canyon above me. I started getting genuinely concerned about my safety. was striking pretty close by and I was hiking at elevation with a metal-framed pack on my back. Not ideal. I kept pushing forward, completely soaked at that point. I was scanning the woods on either side of the trail for anything that could pass as shelter. As if by some miracle, I actually saw a structure through the trees off to my left. It was small and dark and partially hidden by the forest, but it was unmanmade. As I got closer, I realized it was a tiny one-story cabin. They looked extremely old, like it could have been a hunting cabin or a homeless shelter from decades ago. There was a single window on the side I was approaching. I can't overstate how relieved I was. I practically sprinted over to the thing and pushed the door open. Inside, it was dim, but dry. There wasn't much in there, just a chair, a small table and what looked like a cat frame pushed against the far wall. There was a stone fireplace on the right side that was clad with old ash and debris. The place honestly smelled really bad, but I didn't care about anything other than stripping out of my soaked clothes and laying down. There wasn't a couch or anything in there. So I literally just picked a spot on the floor and lied down. I was in survival mode at that point, not exploration mode. All I cared about was that I was out of the storm. It wasn't until I'd been inside for maybe 10 or 15 minutes that I started actually looking around. With the storm raging outside, there wasn't much else to do besides click on a flashlight and sunroof. So that's exactly what I did. There was more stuff in that cabin than I had initially realized for starters. There was a sleeping bag rolled up in the corner near the cat frame. It didn't look ancient like the rest of the place which confused me. There were also a couple of cans and water jugs on the table which made me think someone had been using the place as a base camp of swords. Maybe another backpack or a hunter. It wasn't unusual to find stuff like that in remote cabins, but the more I looked around the more things started bothering me. There were marks on the wall near the door. At first, I thought they were just damaged from age or weather, but when I got closer to inspect them, I could see they were scratches. There were dozens of them, some shallow and some deeper. There was no pattern or a water to the marks, at least not one I could see. I stepped back and looked at the door itself. The handle was a simple latch, which wasn't unusual. Despite the storm, I opened the door just to get a look at the mechanism. There was a metal bracket on the outside of the frame which looked like it was designed to hold a padlock. The bracket was on the outside. There was no corresponding latch on the inside that meant the door could only be locked from the outside. Things only got stranger. I shut the door and started looking around the cabin. The only thing I hadn't checked out yet was the window so I walked over to it. The glass was still perfectly intact which surprised me given the apparent age of the place. But then I noticed why. There were screws drilled into the window frame. One in each corner securing it shut. Those had also been driven in from outside and around the edges of the frame on the inside, there were more scratches. Deep ones. These were unmissable. They honestly looked like someone had tried to pry the window open with their bare hands. All of it hit me at once. Someone had been kept in this cabin, trapped as and kept against their will. I should have left right then and I did consider that, but there was a good part of me that felt like whatever had gone on in that cabin was well in the past. Everything in the cabin looks really old. Even the sleeping bag, which did look on the newer side, admittedly, was rigid and dusty. Plus the last thing I wanted to do was go back out in that storm again, so I stayed. I'm not sure how much time passed, maybe an hour, maybe more. The storm wasn't letting up at all, if anything, it had gotten worse. The rain on the roof was so loud that it was hard to hear much of anything else. That's probably why it took me so long to notice the other sound. I picked up on the scratching or scraping noises from outside, somewhere along the left wall of the cabin. At first, I thought it was a branch, but I couldn't remember if there had been branches low enough to even touch the exterior of the cabin. As I was thinking about it, I heard two heavy thumbs on the porch. They honestly didn't sound like storm sounds. This time I stood up. I did that thing where you freeze in place. and try to focus by staring at a random spot on the wall. I was trying to listen, but if someone was moving out there, it would have been impossible to hear over the storm. I started getting paranoid that those sounds I heard were just a few of many and that the rest had been drowned out by the rain. My eyes drifted over to the window. I couldn't bring myself to look through it. If someone really was out there, they'd probably be looking through it. I stayed in that position for what felt like forever. After a while, I started to relax thinking I'd just been hearing the storm, where at the very worst an animal poking around the cabin. I was almost ready to forget about everything when I heard something that sent me over the edge. Pressure on the door, like someone was leaning their full weight against it from the other side. The wood creeps and the latch rattled once before the pressure released. My heart rate instantly shot back up and that's when something clicked. Why would someone be outside in a storm like this, circling the cabin tapping on the the door was locked, nothing was stopping them and then I thought about what I found inside the cabin and it occurred to me that maybe whoever was out there didn't want to come inside. Maybe they wanted me to stay inside. Maybe the whole point was to keep me in there. I don't know if that was the right conclusion or if my mind was just spiraling but I decided I was leaving right then. I didn't care about the storm. I started moving things into my backpack as fast as I could. I had the sickening feeling that something really bad was about to happen and I was right. The next few moments were a blur. I was maybe 30 seconds from walking out the door when I heard the sound of glass shattering behind me. I spun around just in time to see something come through the window. That was all I could see before the whole room erupt in flames. The flame spread so fast that I couldn't even process what was happening. One second I was standing in the dark room and the next second the walls were on fire. The heat hit me like a physical wall and the door wouldn't bud. who is jammed from the outside. I slammed into it with all my might and it gave. It collapsed off its hinges and me with it. I scrambled to get back on my feet and I just ran. I couldn't even see. I was just running wildly through the woods and rain trying to put as much distance between myself and that cabin. But before I could get a safe distance away, I felt somethingtackled me from behind and I was back on the ground. There was a person on top of me and suddenly I was fighting for my life. and kicked and screamed, but this guy wouldn't get off me. He was yelling too, and he kept trying to get me in a choke hold. He was gouging at my eyes and pulling my hair, and I started to feel dizzy, but I managed to push him off. I got back up and kept running, and whoever had just tried to kill me was screaming like a maniac. It looked back twice. I couldn't see my attacker, but I did see the cabin, which was fully engulfed in flames. I think the picture of that fireball is burned into my brain forever. The second time I looked back, the glow was smaller, but still visible through the woods, but I just kept running. For all I knew I was being chased. I didn't stop until my legs gave out. I found a spot where a couple of large trees had fallen against each other and there was a narrow gap underneath that blocked most of the rain. I crawled under there and just collapsed. I couldn't feel my body. I don't know if it was the fire, the rain or the attack. Maybe all three, but I was completely numb. All I did was sit in that crouch position and try to keep breathing. I don't know how many hours passed under those trees, but time lost all meaning. Eventually, I felt some feeling start to reenter my body and I told myself it was move or die. Whoever was out there was probably looking for me and he couldn't have been that far away. So I got up and started moving through the woods. I didn't know where the trail was, but I didn't really care. I honestly can't tell you how I survived that night, but I did. I stumbled onto a random trail and just fell I was socked and probably bleeding from multiple places but I just kept on. Eventually the rain subsided a bit at least enough for me to figure out where I was. I made it to some random trail head by that point the storm had passed. I don't remember too much after that. All I remember is that the first person I saw drove me to a hospital. I had second degree burns on my left arm and the back of my neck and doctors told me I was lucky I hadn't inhale more smoke than I did. No of it was permanent, but it hurt like hell for a long time afterwards. By the time I was healed and safe at home, I told myself I would never camp or hike alone again. Someone had intentionally set that cabin on fire to kill me. That's the only thing that makes any sense. He was pouring rain, a full-blown thunderstorm and the roof was metal. There's no way a wooden structure goes up like that that fast unless the wood had been treated with something beforehand. I gave the police everything or as much as I could, but I could tell they weren't really going to do anything. And to be fair, I wasn't in a charged part of the woods, so it would have been silly to hound them. The only thing I don't understand is the timing of everything. My wife would probably tell you I stopped doing solo trips because I grew up and got more responsible and she's not entirely wrong, but I honestly never told her about this incident and I know I'll never go back country creek again alone.
[12:03]My name is James. This happened maybe seven or eight years ago. Back when I was in my early 20s and still doing stuff that I probably shouldn't have been doing. I had this friend Charles who was kind of notorious in our friend group for finding cool places to explore, like abandoned buildings and old factories. If it was somewhere you weren't supposed to be, Charles had probably already been there and could tell you exactly how to get in. He spent a weird amount of time on Google Earth and these niche for and he'd always be hitting the group chat with screenshots of random places he wanted to check out. Most of us would entertain his ideas but never actually follow through. I was usually the exception. Charles and I had been friends since high school and I think the reason we got along so well was that we had similar though for risk. While most of our friends would hear his pitches and go that sounds insane. I'd hear them and go when are we going. It was a dynamic that led to some great memories and a few situations that I look back on now and genuinely want how we made it out on. This story is about one of those situations. One weekend, Charles texted me about a fire out tower he'd found deep in some forest not far away from us. I really wish I could remember the name of the forest, but I can't. Charles said it had been decommissioned years ago and was just sitting out there in the middle of nowhere, completely untouched. He didn't tell me how he'd found it, but I didn't want to know. He was convinced we could hike out to it, climb it and spend the night up there. I was more I mean, things like that are usually fence off or at least protected somehow, but I promised him I'd at least come and check it out. To be fair, the idea of being 70 feet or so up in the middle of a forest with a 360 degree view sounded incredible to me. We picked a random weekend and made it happen. Charles planned the entire thing out including the drive, what to pack and how to find the tower once we were in the woods. It was a 3-hour drive away and Charles told me the hike would be off the trail, but pretty sure about 4 miles or so. We drove out early in the morning on Friday and made it into the woods sometime in the afternoon. For some reason, I was kind of expecting us to get lost or at the very least not find the tower, which is exactly why I was all the more astonished when we actually did. Seeing it through the trees for the first time was an insane sight. I remember bluring out no fucking way when I saw how tall it was. I was even more astonished when we got to the base of it and realized it was completely unprotected or fenced off. It was just sitting there in the middle of the woods waiting for us to find it. The cab at the top was the small square room with windows on all four sides. There was a metal staircase that zig zagged up the frame with a section of vertical ladder for the final stretch up to the cab. The whole thing looked like it hadn't been touched in decades. Some of the lower railings were bent or missing and there was graffiti on the support beams near the base. To be completely honest, it did not look like the type of structure anyone would be eager to climb.
[29:00]But Charles was I was practicing and I had already started. I had already started. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. I did a lot of things. 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But what would have brought a tree down like that for no reason? I had no answer. It wasn't until around sunset that I found another tree that was leaning across the trail. Its trunk was cut up. It looked like someone had tried to cut it down to block the trail. Not enough to fully cut it down. But just enough to make it difficult for anyone to pass. As soon as I saw the barricade, I knew what was happening. This wasn't some natural phenomenon. Someone was out there and they didn't want me to pass. They were actively trying to keep me from getting further into the forest. I turned around and started heading back. That's when I heard it. The rustling sound. Like someone was moving through the trees behind me. I quickened my pace and it continued. I started running. I didn't stop until I got back to my car. I got to my car around 7:00, threw all my stuff in the trunk and drove away. I drove out of there so fast. I never got a good look at my stalker. Just a shadow and a pair of glowing yellow eyes. But that's what haunts me. That someone was able to do that and I never got a good look at them. This is the last thing I'm going to tell you about the Daniel Boone Forest. I used to be a camper, now I'm not. But I still haven't found an explanation for any of it. But I do know one thing, I'm never going to the Daniel Boone National Forest ever again.```
