Pod Insights Heart Starts Pounding: Horrors, Hauntings and Mysteries 136. Reddit Scary Stories: True Camping Horror Tales (feat. National Park After Dark) About this episode From a recent and tragic double murder in Devil's Den State Park, to a hiker entering a time warp, to unknowingly encountering a serial killer while camping, today we're talking through all the terrifying and mysterious national park stories.
Make sure to follow our guests of today's episode @NationalParkAfterDarkPodcast https://www.youtube.com/@NationalParkAfterDarkPodcast
Episodes Mentioned:
110. Backwoods Horror: Unexplained Disappearances in the Alaska Triangle
122. Appalachian Trail Horror: Strange Encounters, Feral People, Mysterious Lights, and More
99. Horror In The Mountains: The Khamar-Daban Incident
127. Camping Horror Stories // Dark Summer VOL. 2
NPAD: Episode 4: A Serial Killer in Yosemite
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Transcript 15,331 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kaelyn Moore? This episode is brought to you by Prenuvo. When it comes to your health, there's a lot that you can't see or feel. And sometimes having more information can make all the difference. That's where Prenuvo comes in. Prenuvo offers proactive, whole body MRI scans designed to help identify potential health concerns, including many cancers, aneurysms, and other conditions, sometimes before symptoms appear. The Prenuvo scan is non-invasive, uses no radiation, and is designed to give people a detailed picture of what's happening inside their bodies. Taking care of your health isn't just about responding when something feels wrong. It's about being proactive and making informed decisions. Prenuvo is helping people take a different approach to understanding their health.
0:43 Kaelyn Moore? To learn more about Prenuvo and get $300 off your whole body MRI, go to prenuvo.com/hsp and use code HSP. That's P-R-E-N-U-V-O dot com slash HSP. Terms and conditions apply. Hello and welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. As always, I'm your host, Kayla Moore. Today, we are going to talk about terrifying but true stories of things that people have encountered while hiking and camping. You're going to hear stories about strange clapping noises coming from nowhere in the woods, people losing time while hiking that they can't account for, horrifying encounters with strangers on secluded trails, and so much more.
1:27 Kaelyn Moore? And there is no one better to join me today than the hosts of National Park After Dark, Danielle and Cassie. These girls have covered hundreds of episodes showcasing the beauty, but also the horrors inside of national parks. Because even though there's more and more people entering these parks every year, more and more of them never leave. And what do we always say here at Heart Starts Pounding? When you enter the forest, you re-enter the food chain. So, welcome to Danielle and Cassie.
1:56 Speaker 01 Hello, thank you so much for the lovely introduction.
1:59 Kaelyn Moore? Yes, it's so good.
2:00 Speaker 02 Good to be here.
2:01 Kaelyn Moore? I'm so glad we're doing this one. I am terrified of the woods, but I love camping. I love national parks, but I also really love exploring all of the scary and weird and bizarre and supernatural things that go on inside of those parks. And that's really your forte.
2:17 Speaker 02 It is.
2:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's part of the draw, right? Like, you're curious about what happens in the woods and you want to experience it for yourself.
2:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, and exactly what you just said, where when you enter the woods, you enter the food chain back in, and it's so true. I mean, there are just a lot of things that can happen when you're out there.
2:36 Kaelyn Moore? I know. It feels like we're no longer apex predators when we enter the woods. I have to ask before we jump into the stories, because we have a lot of really good and really scary stories picked out today that we're going to go into. What is the scariest national park?
2:50 Speaker 01 Oh, that's tough. Oh, that is tough. Scary, like which category of scary? Like spooky or?
2:58 Kaelyn Moore? Let's do, okay, we'll do one spookiest and one, like, watch your back when you're camping in this park.
3:04 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. That is such a good question. I would say watcher, when I think of watch your back, I think more of wildlife. And that's just because that's what I'm like most afraid of, because I freak myself out with those stories the most. So that's like a personal opinion, even though we all know humans are far more dangerous than wildlife. But when I'm watching my back the most in parks, I think I'm in Alaska.
3:34 Kaelyn Moore? We talk a lot about Alaska at Heart's First Sunday. We have a whole episode just on the really strange, mysterious disappearances that happen there, because more people disappear in Alaska than any other state.
3:47 Speaker 01 It's just so remote. It's so wild. It's so beautiful. It has so much to offer, but there's a lot that happens there that kind of runs the gamut, from wildlife to missing persons to true crime. It has a little, a little bit of everything. So that's my answer, I think. Alaskan national parks are in a league of their own.
4:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think that's a good answer, especially because if you do find yourself ever needing help, a lot of times the only way to get to you is a bush plane, which isn't very comforting when you're, if you're alone, which you probably shouldn't be in Alaska.
4:18 Kaelyn Moore? Right. So like even little things, well, I guess, breaking your
4:22 Speaker 01 Ankle isn't a little thing, but even if you just break your ankle, you have to be airlifted out, I imagine, a lot of times.
4:28 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah. And even like a smaller injury could be detrimental when you're in a place with no access to help at all.
4:35 Speaker 01 Right. Yeah. So if you break your ankle in Great Smoky Mountains, like it's still an inconvenience, but it's the most visited national park in the United States. Like your odds of being helped and getting to aid is a lot better than if you're in Gates of the Arctic and you're pretty much SOL. So.
4:56 Kaelyn Moore? I think it's the remoteness that always scares me about the woods. The fact that like something could happen and you could just be there by yourself for a long time, or you could see something and no one else is around to verify that thing. We hear a lot of those stories too, but that kind of brings me to the first story that I want to dive into today. This story takes place in a park I think a lot of people don't necessarily think of as being remote, but we're going to talk about how, just how remote it actually is. This is something that's been in the news. I think a lot of people listening have probably heard at least something about this, but this is the double murder that just happened in Devil's Den State Park. So on July 26th of this year, 2025, the Brink family was
5:40 Kaelyn Moore? out hiking in Devil's Den State Park. Devil's Den is this park that's nestled in the Ozarks in the northwest corner of Arkansas. It's this super picturesque place with hiking trails, beautiful views, and it's been described as really a perfect place for a family to spend the day. The Brinks had just moved to the area about a week prior and they decided that they were going to take a pretty easy hike with two of their daughters. The family consisted of 43-year-old Clinton Brink. He was set to start a new job just two days later. 41-year-old Kristen Brink. She was a licensed nurse. Together, the couple had three daughters, but that day only two of the daughters were with them, a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old. The couple had made it about a half mile into the park when it
6:24 Kaelyn Moore? seems like a stranger approached them. Now, normally when you run into a stranger on a trail, you say hi and you pass them. Sometimes you may stop to chat, but these encounters are typically warm. There's this inherent camaraderie in the outdoors community, which is why the Brinks were probably completely caught off guard when this stranger pulled out a knife and started stabbing Clinton repeatedly.
6:50 Kaelyn Moore? There wasn't much Clinton could do to protect himself, but Kristin, thinking incredibly fast with what some have described as a mother's instinct, whisked her two young children away from the scene and brought them to safety. And then she made the incredibly brave decision to go back to the scene and try to help her husband. The children watched as she fearlessly disappeared back into the woods. Around 2:30 PM that day, a call came in on a police radio that there may have been an assault in Devil's Den Park. Witnesses reported seeing a man with blood on his face emerging out of the trail, and concerned, they called it in. And it was around that time that the two young girls flagged another hiker they found on the trail.
7:33 Kaelyn Moore? And this one showed them the kindness and community that is usually felt amongst hikers. They listened as the girls described what happened to their father, how their mother ran to save him, but also they gave a description of this man. He had blond hair, he was about 30 years old, and he wasn't anyone they had ever seen before. About an hour into the search, officials searching the trail started hearing screaming. They followed the screams to a trail of blood that led to the scene of the crime. There were the bodies of Clinton and Kristin, and neither had survived the attack. But with the help of the two young girls, as well as other hikers in the park that day,
8:16 Kaelyn Moore? investigators were able to start piecing together more clues. Witnesses had seen the man get into a black sedan with a license plate that had been taped over. A photo taken inside of the park by what seems to be an unknowing witness shows the man earlier in the day facing away from the camera. He's wearing black pants and a black long-sleeved shirt, a baseball cap, and he's carrying two bags over his shoulders. Police were able to quickly get a composite sketch out to the surrounding community and they were immediately flooded with tips. And within just a few days, they found their guy. A 28-year-old named Andrew James McGann was arrested during a haircut 30 miles away from where the attacks had taken place. And probably the
9:01 Kaelyn Moore? most terrifying detail in this entire thing is that McGann was an elementary school teacher. He was a fifth grade teacher at Spring Creek Elementary School in Oklahoma during the 2023 to 2024 school year, but he left after being placed on administrative leave in the spring of 2023 due to concerns about classroom management, professional judgment, and student favoritism. He was later hired by Springdale Public Schools in Arkansas for the upcoming school year, though he had not begun employment or had any contact with the students or family yet. Police believe that this attack was completely random, as if McGann entered the park that day to hunt for victims. And he specifically chose Devil's
9:44 Kaelyn Moore? Den State Park because of its lack of cellphone service, thick vegetation, and secluded areas. And one horrifying fact that some people have pointed out is that McGann moved states quite often for teaching jobs, and officials now believe that these are likely not McGann's first victims. Though he passed a background check to become a teacher and hasn't ever been charged with other crimes, police are now looking into unsolved murders around his other teaching jobs to see if they can find any connection. And I'll add here that this case is currently unfolding, but this is all of the information we have as of August 4. The thing that really strikes me about that one, which we were talking, you guys brought
10:27 Kaelyn Moore? up, is the remoteness and that like the remoteness of an area being the really scary thing, and someone specifically targeting a place because of its remoteness. I don't know if you've come across that in other stories you've covered on National Park After Dark.
10:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. We definitely have. There have been a lot. My first, when you mentioned that, my first thought is that the AT has seen some similar type of attacks, unfortunately.
10:53 Kaelyn Moore? AT being Appalachian Trail?
10:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:56 Kaelyn Moore? Okay, yeah. For my listeners, that might not be as familiar as your listeners.
11:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, the Appalachian Trail, it is really, it's one of the most popular through hikes, and unfortunately, there's been several. Different instances that have happened where people have been attacked on the trail. And it's been the same instance where we're seeing in this case, where someone took advantage of the remoteness of the park that thought that no one else was going to be around, that they could probably get away with it. And unfortunately, in this case, it feels like this was probably very premeditated and that they did choose this location, which I always, always hate hearing these stories because these parks are supposed to be a safe haven for people. And to know that you're out with your family, with your children on a nature hike,
11:45 Speaker 02 exposing them to the outdoors and hiking, and to have someone take that away and ruin it in such a tragic and horrific way is just so, it's so upsetting to hear.
11:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, and my mind instantly went to an episode that I covered, I think it was in 2022. It was an earlier episode before we hit the 100 mark for sure. And it's kind of just in relation to the randomness. Obviously, there's the remote aspect, but there's just like, there is, what is the reason? And sometimes it is just random. And I did an episode in Olympic National Park where a young woman, her name was Jane Constantino. She was in her early 30s and she was on a solo bike trip. She biked from Colorado all the way to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. She was about to get her bike into the ocean, which was her goal.
12:42 Speaker 01 And a man just randomly murdered her, same way, stabbed her to death and left the park. And people passed him, same thing, like noticed blood on him. And he was caught rather quickly, but. Same thing. It's just like you, your brain tries to make reason of these things. And sometimes it's just people are evil and do evil things, even in the most beautiful places.
13:09 Kaelyn Moore? Yes, absolutely. And I think we talked a little bit, we had an episode where we talk about the Appalachian Trail and we cover this case of the two, the gay couple in the eighties who were killed by just, I forget what his name was, but this man just saw these women who were on a hike in between, I think it was their summer break, they were taking just a long hike before they went back to school. This guy found them and just started following them on the trail. They kept running into him and he seemed to be not really a local. It turns out he was living in a cave along the trail and just kept popping out to follow them and then open fired on them when they were in a little clearing, just setting up camp and having a really lovely afternoon.
13:52 Kaelyn Moore? But the thing that came out about that case was how rare this is. Like this is not something that happens very often, which is why it is so shocking when we hear about these cases. Because like we mentioned, the community is so strong. It's full of people who are very nice to each other. Oftentimes people hike the Appalachian Trail and make tons of friends.
14:13 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:13 Kaelyn Moore? The whole way, you're just chatting with people. People are like cooking you grilled cheese out on the side and stuff. And so when, when something like this happens, it's especially devastating. But in this story too, just kind of seeing how everyone immediately came together and all of the witness statements that came out, all of the tips that flooded in, like everyone really banded together to find this person and they found him so fast.
14:35 Speaker 01 That's one thing that we've really found in the outdoor community, just in our own interactions, is that the outdoor community is so bonded and so strong and it's such a special place that when tragedy does hit, unfortunately like this, that people really rally around the people who are affected and try to help in any way that they can.
14:56 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah, definitely. When you hike in areas where you don't have cell service, are there like specific precautions that you take?
15:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, certainly. We have a couple of things. First of all, we, one of the cardinal rules of hiking, especially if you're by yourself or if you're going into an area that you know is remote and you're not going to have any cell service or things like that, is in your car, you're supposed to leave your plans. Not like exactly, you know, your move for move or anything like that, but general in date, out date, and what general trail you're going to be on. Just in case something does happen and you know, somebody note a ranger notices your car there. It's nice to have something on your windshield that kind of shows your itinerary.
15:48 Speaker 01 Also, we hike with a Garmin inReach. That is obviously something that we've never had to use and hopefully don't have to, but it's nice to have in case something does happen and we need to reach either search and rescue, or we can program it to send out texts to friends and family. So that's also really nice to have. So those are the top two things that come to my mind.
16:13 Kaelyn Moore? Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't heard the leaving your plans in a car, but that's obviously such a good idea.
16:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, just leaving a little note on your windshield just inside. So if someone walks by and they notice that your car's been there for a little while and they see that you were supposed to be back the day before, but your car's still there. It'll send some red flag warnings out and people might start looking for you. Also, something that we always do whenever we go out is just to let our friends and family know. Always have someone know where you are and what your plans are because yes, it's great to have that on your windshield, especially for rangers and stuff. But say that there's limited patrol or someone just doesn't notice your car for a little while. Having someone somewhere that's expecting to hear from you at a certain time is always really helpful. So if you do go
17:04 Speaker 02 out, if you are gone longer than expected, then someone can flag it pretty immediately.
17:09 Kaelyn Moore? I'm sure there's so many cases of people going on hikes and no one knows that they're supposed to be back that night. Thinking maybe they're gone for the whole week. So when they don't show up in seven days, no one really is thinking much about it. But yeah, that makes a lot of sense that you need to tell people exactly when you're supposed to be back, or at least when you're thinking of being back. This episode is brought to you by Toyota. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it all starts with a great deal from your local Toyota dealer. Make a smart buy on an all-wheel-drive Camry, Corolla Cross, or get a Corolla sedan packed with the latest features, advanced tech, and head-turning style. Take a test drive in two of Toyota's most popular SUVs,
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18:33 Kaelyn Moore? Do you want to read your next story that you have?
18:35 Speaker 01 For sure. My first story is titled, "Time mysteriously skipped ahead a few hours while hiking in a remote area." In parentheses, "New Mexico", and it is from Reddit user puddlesdown. "I often explore remote locations and old mining areas because I'm an avid rockhound. On one trip in central New Mexico, I left my hotel at 7:30 a.m. My destination was less than 30 minutes away, 10 miles by highway, 3 miles by paved road, and then 2 miles up a relatively well-maintained dirt road, followed by a 3/4-mile hike to the rockhounding spot. It was supposed to be a pretty easy trip compared to the others I have done. When I got off the highway, I decided to fill up on gas for good measure.
19:18 Speaker 01 I kept the receipt, so there's no doubt I bought gas. However, about halfway up the dirt road, 4 miles from the gas station, I noticed my gas gauge drop to about 1/4 of a tank. That had never happened before." When I got to the area where I needed to get out and start walking, I walked a few feet and noticed a better place to leave my car, so I went back to move it. This took less than 10 minutes. My car wouldn't start. The battery was dead. I still had the receipt for the battery in my glove box showing I had purchased a new one a week prior. I checked it against the battery under the hood and sure enough, the new battery was installed properly. Luckily, it was under warranty.
20:00 Speaker 01 The entire dirt road was uphill and I noticed a truck driving up, so I decided to wait and ask for a jump. It was a man and a wife who were very kind and gave me a jump. My car started and I moved it to the new spot. The time was 8:45 when I finally started hiking. The hike itself was uneventful and took 90 minutes. When I got back to my car, it was 10:15 a.m. I was feeling pretty hungry, so I decided to order takeout from near my hotel. I figured it would take me about 30 minutes or so to get back and the food would be ready for pickup when I got back to town. The problem was, when I put in my online order, the confirmation said my food would be ready at 6:00 p.m. That didn't make any sense, so I tried calling the restaurant, but no answer.
20:45 Speaker 01 So I decided to just drive there and ask them to prepare it ASAP. First, I was going to stop at the gas station and figure out why I didn't get the gas that I paid for. I still had the receipt and my gas tank was still at a quarter of a tank. So I drove the two miles back down the dirt road. When I reached the end and pulled out onto the frontage road, my gas tank showed it was full again. When I got to the restaurant, ready to tell them that 6:00 p.m. didn't work for me, my order was already ready. That was a relief, but it was then, picking up my order, I looked at the time and it was 6:05 p.m. It should have been 10:45 a.m. I looked up at the sky and sure enough, the sun was getting low.
21:28 Speaker 01 I lost seven hours somehow and can't account for it. And there's an update from the original OP here. And they say, "I wear an analog watch when rock hounding in case I lose signal." The time on my phone and my watch matched up until I checked my watch at the restaurant. I had to readjust that watch after I got food. I was keeping an eye on the sun to help me keep track of my direction. And it was climbing to its apex when I got back to my car after hiking. And it was starting to heat up like normal for a late morning. But soon after I got food, dusk settled in. I wish that I could explain it. I've been doing this kind of thing for 25 years and have experienced heat stroke and heat exhaustion.
22:11 Speaker 01 And unfortunately, delusion brought on by septic shock. But this wasn't any of those. I had plenty of water, vitamins, electrolytes, you name it. And the time jumped when I was in an air conditioned car in October. It was a good idea, though. And that's it. Wow, what a story.
22:30 Kaelyn Moore? Oh, I hear a lot of stories of people losing a lot of time in the woods.
22:35 Speaker 01 You know where my first, first thought goes to? And I think Cassie knows what I'm gonna say. Lost time, I think of aliens.
22:44 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah, that does come up a lot when people are talking about lost time. Explain why that's the first place that you went, because I'm curious.
22:50 Speaker 01 Well, so in I, there's one thing about me is I am a huge extraterrestrial fan, always have been. And we don't do a ton of alien abduction stories on National Park After Dark, but we've done a handful. And each and every one of them, there is an element of lost time.
23:09 Kaelyn Moore? Yes.
23:09 Speaker 01 That is a through line, no matter what. And in stories that we haven't covered, that I've just heard of on my own. It's just something that you see, it's an element of every alien abduction or encounter story that you just see across time. Is this loss of unaccounted for time that there's no explanation. And sometimes later on, as people are like working through their experience, they'll start to put some pieces back together. But that initial, in the initial aftermath, people are just confused as to what happened because they have no recollection of it.
23:46 Kaelyn Moore? That's like a big part of the Betty and Barney Hill story, right?
23:49 Speaker 01 Yes.
23:50 Kaelyn Moore? Is that they lose a lot of time. And I think it's interesting then that this story took place in New Mexico. He specifically calls out New Mexico, which to me is the most alien abduction state of them all.
24:01 Speaker 01 Yeah. Oh, because of the Roswell situation. Yeah.
24:06 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah. You just hear a lot of like eerie stories about people seeing things. It's got this big, open sky that's often clear, so you can see a lot of things. And people just are always talking about seeing UFOs. And then, of course, there's the Roswell of it all. But interesting that, yeah, maybe this was some sort of alien thing. I don't, it didn't sound like he saw anything else, but is that kind of, like, do people just lose time and then they realize it's aliens? Or is there like an element of like, but I saw this light and then, and then all of a sudden I lost time?
24:37 Speaker 01 Well, that's the hole in the story for me.
24:39 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's the hole in the story for me too, because it, when you look at the Betty and Barney Hill story, they saw something and then they lost time. And same with Travis Walton, he also saw something and then lost time.
24:54 Speaker 01 And same with the Alagash Four that we did up in Maine.
24:56 Speaker 02 In the Alagash Four, they saw something. So that is definitely, that's definitely, it's so strange too. And I love that they pointed out that they've experienced heat stroke before. They know that they were fine physically, that there's no explanation for that. Because that was kind of where my mind went for a second. Cause I was like, wait, you're in the desert, it's New Mexico, did something happen? So for them to point that out, now I'm like, wait, how?
25:22 Speaker 01 Oh, hold on, there's another element here though, about the battery. And it might be a stretch, but sometimes with different alien encounters and things like that, it, whatever technology that they utilize warps and kind of messes with ours. People's batteries drain, electronics go haywire and go on the fritz. And so that could be something to attribute.
25:52 Kaelyn Moore? Cause it was the gas and it was the battery.
25:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:54 Kaelyn Moore? The battery died immediately, but he had just bought a new battery, which, okay, maybe that's a one off. But the gas, like to buy gas, to then lose all that gas and then to, for the gas to randomly reappear is very strange.
26:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
26:08 Speaker 02 My thought with that, and this might just be because I had a car that did this, if you were on a hill.
26:13 Kaelyn Moore? Oh yeah, of course.
26:14 Speaker 02 The, the measurement would like, I'm like, are you just, is your car just in a weird position? And then you got to the bottom and it's flat and now it shows the right amount of gas again. So for that part for me, I was like, well, that I can explain away.
26:27 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah.
26:28 Speaker 02 But the rest of it.
26:31 Speaker 02 It's very odd, very, very odd.
26:33 Speaker 01 I've never, every time I hear a story like this, I definitely give it some credit and thought because I've never lost time like that.
26:41 Speaker 02 No.
26:42 Speaker 01 Unless I was drunk or something, which is a whole nother story. But just like out rock hounding, like just a normal day and losing a chunk of six plus hours is very strange.
26:54 Kaelyn Moore? I was talking to this woman once, have you heard of Thompson Park in New York?
26:59 Speaker 02 No.
26:59 Kaelyn Moore? Thompson Park is, people say it's the area 51 of New York. There's supposedly very weird things that happen there, but I was looking into it and I ended up talking to this woman who told me this story that when she was 16, she and her boyfriend were out in Thompson Park, it's all, it's just a little park in this residential neighborhood area too. It's not this big, massive thing. There's like little hiking trails and stuff, but it's, it's not crazy big. So she was with her boyfriend and they just, they were at a family party. So all of his family was there and they take off on this little, little path just for a 20 minute walk. And she said she was gone for 20 minutes and then they come back after this hike and his family is freaking out and they're like, where the
27:44 Kaelyn Moore? hell have you been? It's been two hours. We've been running around the park screaming your name and we didn't know where you were. We thought you guys left. We didn't know what happened. And she was like, it was so weird because we were not that far from where they were. So if they actually were yelling our names, they would have, we would have heard them. But one thing that she couldn't figure out, and, and she was like a totally normal woman too. She was like, I, I can't explain this at all. And this, it freaks me out to this day. She's probably mid 30s. She was like, I still think about this all the time. It still freaks me out. But the family had run through that trail and didn't see them. And she insisted that that was the only place in the park that they, the two of them had gone was just on this one little trail. So she couldn't figure out how they didn't see them while she was there.
28:28 Kaelyn Moore? And I was like, that's so weird. Let me look into it. So I started looking into like the history of the park. And it turns out, take this for what you will, that in the 70s, there was a witch named Gail that lived in the area. And she's on record. She gives interviews. She, she died in maybe 2020, but like later in life, she had done interviews with local news and stuff. And so she tells a story about how in the 70s, she put a curse on the park that causes people to lose time by entering different dimensions. And so she said that she would like slip through the dimensions in the park. And this woman that I talked to had never heard of that before. Like she, she was very unaware that that was a thing. So it's not like she was pulling my leg or anything. So I let her know. I
29:09 Kaelyn Moore? was like, maybe it was from this curse that this witch put on the park back in the 70s. But it was crazy. It's not aliens, but it is, I guess, another thing. Like, maybe there was some sort of witch that cursed this area. Who knows? But I just, that, that's a time slip story that always sticks with me.
29:29 Speaker 02 That's so funny, because in my head, when you were telling that story, I kept thinking interdimensional, like some type of you're in the same place, but you're in different dimensions is the only thing that I could think of that you could be standing and yelling and going through the same area, but knowing you don't see each other and you totally miss each other. So that's so interesting that someone has come forward and been like, I, did she ever explain why she cursed the park?
29:53 Kaelyn Moore? It wasn't a malicious curse. She just, she just said she did. I guess she was really feeling it in the 70s that this park needed.
30:02 Speaker 02 It's like the best prank.
30:04 Kaelyn Moore? Seriously. But now, but it's literally called the, the area 51 of New York, because so many people have weird experiences like that. And it has become known as this kind of alien. There's even like a, a big alien head on the sign because they thought it was maybe aliens. But I really think it was just this woman in the 70s who put this weird interdimensional curse on the park.
30:25 Speaker 02 We'll add it to our list of places to visit.
30:29 Kaelyn Moore? Get me out of this dimension.
30:31 Speaker 01 I want to go somewhere else.
30:33 Kaelyn Moore? I know. Tell me what you find if you, if you go into Gail's dimension that she set upon the park.
30:39 Speaker 02 Yeah. Now I'm so curious. I could, I could do another dimension, I think, for a few minutes.
30:44 Kaelyn Moore? It's not that far from you guys either, because you're already kind of over on that side of the, the country anyways.
30:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, we're on the East Coast.
30:50 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah. Take a day. Switch dimensions. Go take a day trip.
30:56 Speaker 02 Yeah. Day trip to another dimension. Yeah.
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33:04 Kaelyn Moore? Okay, I'm gonna read the next one that I have for you guys. This one is called Florida Appalachia Cola National Forest Creepy Encounter With A Serial Killer. And this comes from Reddit user Dr. Jim Danger. So this story goes. When I was about 18, me and some friends took a road trip about seven hours or so down to the Appalachia Colo National Forest near Tallahassee, Florida. We were gonna do a little camping, drink a few ice cold Natty Lights, you know, 18-year-old stuff. As such, we didn't want to be bothered by any park rangers, so we drove way deep into the woods. We got there, we set up camp, we had said Natty Lights, and me and a friend decided to go do a little exploring. So we walked about 100 yards from our site back to the main road.
33:49 Kaelyn Moore? And we saw another path directly across from us, so we kept walking. Immediately, we started seeing signs that someone had lived there for a while. Big bags of trash, stuff like that. It should have been this huge red flag to turn around, but, you know, we were 18. Nothing could hurt us, right? So we get to this campsite of an older white guy living out of his van. Clothesline strung up, coolers placed around it, this big gorgeous dog. I think maybe a golden retriever. We tried to back out, but he saw us, so he started talking to us. He seemed friendly enough. He asked us where we were from, told us about some cool spots to check out in the park. And we ended up chatting for 10 minutes and then going on our way.
34:33 Kaelyn Moore? I kept thinking to myself how odd it was that he gave all of his directions in steps, not yards or miles. Guy always seemed to be a little off balance as well. Not like he was stumbling drunk, but as if he was walking on a balance beam, kind of swaying from side to side. Oh, and he was super excited to talk about national parks and forests, especially ones where we were from. Okay, camping part over, we went back to our tents. Fast forward two months, that same friend calls me late at night and he tells me to turn on the news. I oblige and I see an old dude with a van. You see where this might be headed, but I didn't. So I get pretty annoyed at my friend for waking me up.
35:18 Kaelyn Moore? "No, watch," he tells me. And then I see the golden retriever and everything clicks. What the hell? That man's name was Gary Michael Hilton and he was convicted of at least four murders. He kidnapped and murdered a girl on Blood Mountain in Georgia, an older couple in North Carolina, and a girl at that campsite that we were at not long after we left. Yes, the very same places that he had been talking to us about. Obviously, we called the cops and they put us in touch with the FBI and we got flown down back to the area to take investigators to the campsite. We had to point out every spot we saw, anything, tell them exactly what he told us, show them
36:03 Kaelyn Moore? all the places that he described to us. And I didn't find out until after the trial, but apparently they found what appeared to be a partially destroyed human finger bone in an area near the site. So I had to fly down again to testify. Have you guys covered Gary Michael Hilton at all on your show? Cause he, he's known as like the National Park serial killer.
36:26 Speaker 01 The National, yeah, Forest Killer or something.
36:29 Kaelyn Moore? Or National, yeah, National Forest.
36:31 Speaker 01 He's recommended to us all the time. We have not covered him.
36:34 Kaelyn Moore? Let me give, I have like a little overview here for people who might not be familiar with him. So Gary Michael Hilton is a US Army veteran known as the National Forest, you were right, National Forest Serial Killer. And he's an American drifter convicted of murdering four people across Georgia, North Carolina and Florida between 2007 and 2008. His victims include 24-year-old Meredith Emerson, who was abducted while hiking in Georgia, elderly couple John and Irene Bryant, who were attacked in North Carolina, and Cheryl Hodges Dunlap, a Florida nurse who's Decapitated body was found in the Appalachia Cola National Forest. Hilton used his victims ATM cards before killing them and he often disposed of their bodies in remote wooded areas.
37:18 Kaelyn Moore? He was sentenced to life in Georgia and received a death sentence in Florida for Dunlap's murder, which I looked into this, he actually publicly confessed to that murder this year in 2025. He had never publicly confessed to it before. He was doing an interview with Court TV, just a casual interview. They were asking him questions. He was like, I'm not going to tell you anything. And then all of a sudden he was like, do you want to know something? I did kill her.
37:46 Speaker 02 Wow.
37:47 Kaelyn Moore? And the Court TV interviewer is like, oh, you've never said that before. He's like, no, I've never said that before, but I'm ready to admit it now. I did kill her, which was crazy. I mean, he's 78 now, so maybe he's kind of having like a deathbed confessions moment.
38:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, to be that interviewer, to be like, wait a second. What are you revealing to me now?
38:07 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So scary, but I know that one. I didn't know if you guys had covered him because he is such a, he's known for his like forest murders.
38:20 Speaker 02 We get recommendations for it all the time. We have not covered him as of yet, but we are familiar with him because his story is just, of course, he's another person, how you mentioned at the beginning of this episode of someone going into remote areas and targeting people.
38:36 Kaelyn Moore? Right, right. And also it seems like he lived in the area. The thing that really struck me about that story is something that I think about when I go hiking too, is you just never really know who you're running into. And so if you see a campsite that's kind of weird and stands out to you, and then months later you come back and you see that it's on the news is just so, so eerie to me.
39:00 Speaker 02 To know how close you were to something so horrific.
39:02 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah.
39:03 Speaker 01 We've had a couple of people write in, so we do, twice a month, we do Trail Tales, which is just listener stories. And we've had quite a few people write in about having, just in retrospect, obviously, you know, just like this one.
39:20 Speaker 01 But with Carrie Stainer from Yosemite and Cassie, I think, covered that episode in like, I don't know, episode four?
39:29 Speaker 02 It's like the third episode I ever did or something.
39:32 Kaelyn Moore? Oh, I'm not familiar. Can you give me an overview also for like my listeners who might not be familiar?
39:37 Speaker 02 Yeah. So Carrie Stainer was a serial killer that was active in Yosemite National Park. And I can't, I'd have to look back on the year. It was a while. I want to say the seventies or eighties that this was happening. But he worked as a maintenance guy at one of the hotels that was right outside of the park. And he actually, he attacked a woman and her daughter and her daughter's friend who were staying in the hotel. And he also attacked a woman who was working in the park in a remote area. And it became huge headlines because he was just preying on people that were within the park. And there are some speculation that he has more victims that we're not aware of.
40:19 Speaker 02 But his whole story is really interesting because there's Carrie Stainer who ended up being caught and is a serial killer. And he was caught staying at a lodge, like in, he was in a, someone, he was in a hot tub in a hotel with someone and they were, saw him on the news, like in the background and was like, hold on a second. Wait a minute.
40:40 Speaker 01 Like, I was just in a tub with that guy.
40:42 Kaelyn Moore? Oh, oh, my gosh.
40:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:43 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah. Like having a casual conversation and the guy from the tub? Oh, yeah. Whoa. Scary.
40:50 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. And so he ended up being caught because people recognized him from, from the news and stuff. But also his family story is interesting too, because his brother, Steven Spader, was actually abducted, Stainer, sorry, was actually abducted as a child. And he was abducted by this man and was taken for quite some time. And it was huge news for a very, very long time.
41:17 Kaelyn Moore? That's right. Yeah. I think I had, I didn't know the specifics about the serial killer brother, but I had heard the headline of like, oh, there was this little boy who was kidnapped and then his brother went on to become a serial killer.
41:30 Speaker 02 Yeah.
41:31 Kaelyn Moore? In your research during that episode, did it seem like? The kidnapping of a child at all affected the way that the other brother grew up to become a serial killer? Or did those feel like separate things?
41:44 Speaker 02 I don't know. It's hard to say because I think that it it must have had an effect on him at some point. But I do remember specifically when I was researching it, that his family was kind of shocked at the apathy he had towards his brother after he was found. Like, he's even seen on some news coverage where everyone's like smiling and crying and so happy that his brother is back and safe. And you can see Carrie in the background, just stone face. And people said that they thought he felt a little bit of jealousy towards the attention that his brother was getting and that he didn't get it. And so there was like a weird
42:24 Speaker 02 dynamic there where he never, he never seemed to care. I don't know if care is the right word.
42:31 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah, maybe he was already suffering from a lack of empathy as a child. Something that a lot of serial killers suffer from.
42:39 Speaker 02 Something was off with him, for sure.
42:41 Kaelyn Moore? Wow. That's really scary. Okay, so your listeners, in hindsight, said that they had stayed near where he was.
42:49 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:49 Kaelyn Moore? Oof.
42:50 Speaker 02 Or stayed in the hotel that he worked at, at the time, or had an interaction with him. We've had a few listeners who have met him.
42:59 Kaelyn Moore? Whoa. And I met, was he targeting women?
43:01 Speaker 02 Yes.
43:02 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah. And so I imagine a lot of your listeners are young women, too, where you're like, you're really like, oh, my God, that was almost me.
43:07 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. It's so easy to put yourself in those shoes when you see the type of people he's, people like that are attacking. And then you can envision yourself as that. And you're doing, you're in similar situations as well. So it's very easy to put yourself there.
43:22 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah. This is different, but I remember my mom telling me when she was, I can't remember how old she was, but she and all of her friends cut their hair short because Son of Sam was operating not too far away from where they were. And he was, it seemed like he was targeting really long haired brunette women. And so women just started cutting their hair because you're so scared. You don't know where this person is. You don't know if they're going to target you. You don't really know how to protect yourself. A lot of times too.
43:49 Speaker 02 You don't want to draw attention.
43:50 Kaelyn Moore? You don't want to draw attention. We cover this on Clues, the other true crime show that I do. But a lot of times, the news will withhold a lot of information from the public too, to not scare people. But it's information that like, young women could really use that, hey, there is a serial killer in this park, maybe be careful. But they don't want to scare people. So they're not telling anyone that he's operating in Yosemite. And it just, yeah, you just really don't know how to protect yourself in that situation.
44:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, you don't want to cause mass chaos, but at the same time, people need to know how to protect themselves at the.
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46:29 Kaelyn Moore? All right, so the ones that I've been covering so far have been a little bit more true crime focused, and the ones that you have are a little more supernatural focused. So I'm actually really excited for you to read the next story that you guys have.
46:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, so the story that I have is titled, "Something Strange Is Happening in a Remote Town Outside Glacier National Park", and it's by Reddit user designer-stable6209. And I really like this one too, because we were just in Glacier National Park.
46:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, just got back.
46:59 Kaelyn Moore? Okay, so you have to verify if you, if what happens in this story, if you could see it happening in the park.
47:06 Speaker 02 For sure, we'll see. There's a little town in remote northern Montana, right on the river just outside of Glacier National Park, near the Canadian border, where I've had a few experiences I still can't explain. My boyfriend and I go up there a lot in the summer. We're big into fly fishing and rafting, and it's kind of our favorite escape. It's insanely beautiful. There's a bar and music venue with a tiny mercantile at the center of town, but no cell service, no Wi-Fi, and it takes a long time to drive down a dirt road to get there. Big mountains, a rushing river, and this feeling that you're somewhere different. We always joke that it's like a portal. The first weird thing that happened was about four years ago.
47:47 Speaker 02 We were up there with three friends, staying in a private cabin that belonged to a friend of a friend. It was pretty close to a few other cabins. After grilling and hanging by the fire until around midnight, everyone but my boyfriend and I went inside to sleep. We stayed back to grab something from the truck and ended up just sitting in the truck bed, talking and watching the stars. That's when I heard it. A single loud clap, coming from somewhere behind us, maybe 100 yards out. A few seconds later, another clap, just one, but this time from our right. Then another from the left. They were spaced out, not fast or random, and each one clearly came from a different direction.
48:29 Speaker 02 Then another clap came from behind us again, only closer, this time maybe 75 yards away. One at a time, loud and from different angles, it felt intentional, like something was circling us. At one point, we heard another clap and dogs in the area started barking. We looked at each other but didn't say a word. We were frozen. Then, we heard one more. This one was so close, it felt like it was right there. Without speaking, we both jumped up and sprinted to the cabin. I've never run that fast in my life. It wasn't just being creeped out, it was that full-body panic, the kind where your brain is just screaming to get inside. As soon as we shut the cabin door behind us, we heard one last clap.
49:14 Speaker 02 It came from the woods right outside, maybe 15 feet away. Last year, we were back in the area, this time camping about 10 miles down the road at a lesser-known spot along the river we were floating on during that day. It was a group of us in a few tents, and there was a guy we didn't know staying in a sprinter van fairly close to us. He was friendly and we talked to him for a while. He mentioned he used to be in the Air Force. Later that night, our group of six or so friends was split up. Some were by the fire, a few were down by the river, and someone was off behind us in the trees peeing. I looked up and saw this flashlight in the sky, kind of like a shooting star, coming from the right to the left. But then it suddenly stopped, grew in brightness, flashed, hovered for a second, glowing bright,
49:59 Speaker 02 and then shot straight up into the sky incredibly fast before disappearing. Right away, people from all over the campsite started yelling, "Did you see that?", including the guy in the Sprinter van. He came over saying he saw it too and told us it wasn't his first time. He said he's been seeing that same phenomenon twice before at the exact campsite. Considering his background in the Air Force, it definitely gave more weight to know how shocked he seemed by it. Later that night, we also saw Starlink satellites pass overhead, and those were really easy to recognize and totally different from what we had seen earlier. A month or so later, we were back in town at the bar seeing live music. We started chatting with one of the guys in the band, just talking about the area in general, and the campground came up casually.
50:44 Speaker 02 We didn't say a single word about what had happened to us there, but the musician just goes, "Damn, that campground is beautiful, but every time I'm there, I see UFOs." We just stared at him. "We also have a friend who works for Glacier National Park and has seen or heard about unmarked government vehicles heading into that area more than once. I'll be heading back to that campsite in July and will definitely report back if anything else strange happens." Oh, man.
51:11 Kaelyn Moore? There you go. There's your aliens.
51:13 Speaker 02 We were so close and we didn't even see them.
51:16 Speaker 01 I know exactly the town this person is talking about also. And they didn't name it, so I don't know if I should. But, I mean, it's not like a government secret or anything, but...
51:28 Speaker 02 Yeah. I'm curious.
51:31 Speaker 01 The mercantile gave it away.
51:33 Kaelyn Moore? Oh. Oh, okay, okay, okay.
51:36 Speaker 01 We were close to it. We didn't go. We didn't go on our trip. But just... Based on our own experience there recently, you know, a couple of weeks ago, the sky over Montana, I mean, it's big sky country for a reason. And just the amount that you can see, I don't doubt that people see strange things quite often, if you're paying attention to the sky. There's a lot to see on the ground, too. I mean, it's so stunning there. But erratic behavior by a light in the sky, it's hard to go anywhere else other than UFOs in your mind. It's just so hard, like nowadays,
52:17 Speaker 01 with all the different technology and like things going on with the military. And it's harder and harder to be like, that's definitely otherworldly, because there's some crazy stuff that we're utilizing and stuff, especially in, I don't know, when somebody from the military themselves are like, eh, that's not us.
52:37 Kaelyn Moore? Right, right.
52:37 Speaker 01 That's harder to be like, oh, okay. I'm all team UFO, though, so I don't have to say it again.
52:44 Kaelyn Moore? Well, I had actually, okay, so the clapping at the beginning, I think is related to what everyone has was seeing in the sky at the park. Because I had heard other stories about people who experienced UFOs or thought that they had experienced UFOs, where there does seem to be sound coming from every direction all around you. I had heard at one point, it sounds like kind of like monkeys chittering was one of the sounds someone described. But the clapping coming from every direction is really scary. And also, I'm a big believer that animals know more than we do. And so the dogs freaking out, too. Maybe the dogs had kind of caught on to the fact that there was like something there that wasn't supposed to be there with that clapping sound.
53:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, confirming that something's off.
53:31 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah, right, exactly.
53:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, not to take this in another direction, but when I first thought or was hearing you describe the clapping and the different intentional, like there's some sort of intelligence behind it. It's not random noise.
53:47 Speaker 02 Bigfoot.
53:48 Speaker 01 I was thinking Bigfoot, but not the clapping. I was thinking more of, because usually when people talk about Bigfoot or Sasquatch, they're talking about knocking because there's a behavior that's attributed to Bigfoot that is kind of like what our great apes and chimps do with territorial behavior as far as like taking wood and knocking it against a tree. Um, and that's kind of like, that pops up in different Bigfoot stories as far as like, it's like, maybe like a warning or something like that. But the, I've never heard of clapping with Bigfoot. I don't know. Have you, Cassie?
54:27 Speaker 02 I guess it is more knocking. Yeah.
54:30 Kaelyn Moore? Are you guys all in on Bigfoot?
54:33 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
54:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
54:36 Kaelyn Moore? Well, because you, you, I mean, you would know more than me. This is, this is your whole domain. You spend more time in the forest and you also spend more time like reading about the forest, talking about it. So you would know.
54:46 Speaker 02 Danielle is very much the Bigfoot. I believe that there is a version of Bigfoot that exists, but Danielle is very, she, she has the knowledge.
54:57 Speaker 01 It's so funny, like right out of camera sight, it's behind my camera, but I have a shelf and it literally has a ghost, a Bigfoot and an alien. And it's like, that's my trifecta. I love believing in things that are like the quote unquote, quote unbelievable. Like I just think it makes life more exciting and
55:18 Kaelyn Moore? I agree. I totally agree.
55:19 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's just like, why not expand your mind and kind of consider different possibilities? It's, it is wild. It's hard to believe that there's a great ape thing in the woods of the world, but why not?
55:35 Kaelyn Moore? I think so. It is very hard for people to believe, but I will say we like, we cover a lot of folklore at Heartland's Prouding. We have episodes on Brazilian folklore, Appalachian folklore, and a really common theme in folklore spanning every single country, spanning every single time period is creatures in the woods that no one can explain. And the way that they're described don't make sense with any of the other wildlife that lives in the area at the time. In Brazil, they had these giant sloths that really resembled Bigfoot. And so people are like, is that actually Bigfoot that they were seeing? And we just didn't know, but there are really big hairy. Giant creatures that have human-like descriptions, I guess, that appear all over
56:19 Kaelyn Moore? the world in every single time period, in folklore and stories that are passed orally to each other. So when I hear that, I'm like, there's, there is stuff deep within the woods that we just don't know about.
56:32 Speaker 01 There's something to that. To believe that we know everything there is to know about the world and every species and every single thing that lives here and has forever is crazy. There's so much unknown about the world and to be able to hear these stories and to have like some type of belief that something is out there. It's not only interesting and I think makes life more fun, but I think realistic. Like who's to say that these things don't exist?
57:01 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah. Is there any region of the US where there's the most amount of Bigfoot sightings?
57:05 Speaker 01 Pacific Northwest. Probably, yeah, the PNW.
57:09 Kaelyn Moore? Oh, interesting. Okay.
57:10 Speaker 01 Yeah. When, and that was like, one of the funnest parts about, I've, I've lived quite a few different places over time. I like to move a lot and I lived in Washington State for two years and that was just so fun because everything was Bigfoot themed. I mean, they definitely lean into it hard there. But yeah, Washington, Oregon area is just kind of like a hub for Bigfoot.
57:37 Kaelyn Moore? Okay. Which is kind of the area, sort of, of Glacier National Park.
57:42 Speaker 01 No, that's Montana.
57:43 Kaelyn Moore? It's Montana, but I guess like in the, in the grand scheme of the world, it's sort of the same area. Yeah. Up in that corner of the US.
57:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:53 Kaelyn Moore? So it's a little different. No, I get that. Maybe that Bigfoot got lost and was in Montana instead of the Pacific Northwest.
57:59 Speaker 01 I mean, there's descriptions of creatures that are kind of run in the same vein as, I think Bigfoot is kind of like this umbrella term, but if you really think about it, people who are super into this stuff, I mean, I like to think that I'm pretty into it, but I'm by no means, I mean, there are so many other people who are way more knowledgeable, but you have like the skunk ape, you have the grass man, you have yeti, you have Bigfoot, you have yawi, you have all of these different names. I kind of think of it like when you think of wildlife that we actually know, not cryptozoology, but wildlife we know for a fact exists, like.
58:41 Speaker 01 In simple terms, bears, you know that bears exist, but there are different types of bears, depending on where you are in the world. And I think it's not super far off base to kind of attribute that to Bigfoot.
58:54 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah, that there's different, not species.
58:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, species.
58:58 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah, species, like with dogs.
59:00 Speaker 01 Right, yeah.
59:00 Kaelyn Moore? It's like, this is the golden retriever one, this is the lab. That's so interesting. But that kind of goes back to what I was talking about with just how many different cultures have independently seen things like that in the woods. It makes sense that it's something.
59:16 Speaker 01 It's gotta be.
59:17 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah. Ooh, okay, so maybe that is what it was in Glacier National Park.
59:22 Speaker 01 Maybe they were two different, there was an alien and something else? I don't know, there's been, I'm not sure if I'm on board with this 100% because I don't know enough, but people have been writing in to us specifically about this too, as far as like, I don't know if it's a new theory, but a lot of people think that Bigfoot and extraterrestrials are connected.
59:47 Kaelyn Moore? I have heard that.
59:48 Speaker 01 There's some overlap with UFO sightings and Bigfoot sightings, like time wise and geographic wise. So I don't know, maybe it could be both.
59:56 Kaelyn Moore? I had heard too that Bigfoot, there's maybe an interdimensional element to Bigfoot.
1:00:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:01 Kaelyn Moore? That's why he's hard to nail down is because he can kind of come in and out of different dimensions and pop in different places. I know there's a lot of very supernatural stuff surrounding him. So yeah, maybe it's all tied together.
1:00:13 Speaker 01 Yeah. Who's to say?
1:00:15 Kaelyn Moore? Who's to say?
1:00:19 Kaelyn Moore? All right, do you want to read your next one?
1:00:21 Speaker 01 Yeah. So my next story is titled, scary experience in Mount Rainier National Park by Reddit user recent underscore fox underscore 2091. And I'm excited because I also lived here. I went to a van life meetup in Inumclaw, Washington over the weekend. The city is close to Mount Rainier National Park, and because I had already made the trip, I figured I might as well camp overnight nearby the park in a dispersed camping spot in the forest. I brought some ingredients to make carne asada tacos, downloaded some movies, and was ready for a nice cozy evening in my van, something which I do on most weekends in various campsites around the state. When I got there, I hiked around the campsite, which was very nice, save for the
1:01:04 Speaker 01 large amounts of trash, which was littered about, which actually made me really sad. The trail led to two fire pits, not too far from where I had parked, and it ended at a quiet riverbank. It seemed like it was a good spot that local teens might go to drink and smoke weed. There was even a log bench with the word 420 painted colorfully on its seat. I wasn't sure how recently people had been here, and there were open half-drink cans around the fire pits that seemed cold. I wasn't quite sure if this meant anything in the moment. I decided that it likely wasn't an active camp, and that's where I chose to set up camp. The spot wasn't terribly isolated. Every thirty minutes or so, someone would drive by to claim another campsite down the
1:01:46 Speaker 01 Lonely Fire Road, some trucks, and even an RV. People like me looking to spend time out in nature and who don't want to shell out the extra cash for a campsite. After exploring the area, I went back to my van to start making dinner. I used a satellite communicator to check in with my friends and family, as I didn't have any service this deep into the forest. The sun was setting, and as I sat down to eat my tacos, I left my doors open to let the air flow, and the cool breeze felt amazing. But after eating, and when it was quiet, I started noticing a sound in the distance. They sounded like gunshots, really almost like cannon shots. Deep, rhythmic booms echoing in the valley every few seconds.
1:02:28 Speaker 01 What accompanied those noises was the noise of a chainsaw, much closer than the gunshots. Now, neither of these noises are very uncommon to hear when camping on fire roads, to be honest. It wouldn't be unheard of for someone to use a chainsaw to cut down a larger tree trunk into firewood, summer fire ban be damned. But then, saw some campers start to leave, including an RV, which was particularly unusual. Finding a campsite for an RV can be hard, but it is especially hard to find one at night. The rule is to always find camp before the sun sets, and the sun had only just disappeared from the sky. Something spooked them, and I wondered if it would be wise to follow their lead.
1:03:11 Speaker 01 However, I had unwashed dishes on the counter and was in no mood to move, and so I didn't. I did, however, triple-check that all my doors and windows were locked before drifting to sleep. That night can only be described as hazy and disorienting. I have very little memory of anything that had happened, but the evidence that something had most definitely happened was very evident. I remember being awake in the pitch black of night, struggling to breathe. Not choking, my lungs were filled with air, but I remember the feeling of drowning. I remember the plating desperation for air. I remember trying to see with my sight being wholly consumed by the darkness in front of me. I have memory of trying to punch out a window to no avail.
1:03:56 Speaker 01 I remember making my way to the side doors of my van to open the door to breathe, and then I woke up in bed and the sun was in the sky. I would have chalked this up to a really bad dream, but all around me, my van was damaged. It looked like there had been a struggle. Some of my window blinds were sliced and ruined. One of my windows had a scratch mark from the inside. Even the air vent on my ceiling was obliterated from the inside. My curtain rack was pulled down from the ceiling, which was screwed into a beam. I didn't think I was even capable of this. The van was very well ventilated, so I am unsure as to why I would have had trouble breathing in the first place. My carbon monoxide detector was silent, and the van was very well ventilated after cooking.
1:04:41 Speaker 01 I have no idea what could have caused me to do this and ruined my lovely van. I saw no indication of any kind of forced entry, and all of the damage was done from the inside by me trying to get out, I guess. My knuckles were very sore, as well as my feet, as I had probably hit them hard on the various cabinets in the van on my way out. A pole I used to prop up my canopy was strangely out of place in the middle of the floor and broken at the ends. I have never had any form of night terrors or sleepwalking before this, except for one incident, also nearby Mount Rainier National Park.
1:05:16 Speaker 01 A few months ago, my friends and I were driving once again through Enamclaw, trying to find a camping spot where we might be able to post up. It was nighttime already, and as I said before, finding camp at night can be pretty difficult. We were driving down the same road I had taken for my recent trip, and we had gotten a tip from a local about a mountain which had some good dispersed camping. We were tired and hungry and just wanted to start setting up camp. We passed a few spots, mostly mud and rock, none very appealing. We decided to pick the least muddy spot we could find, and I helped them set up their tents. It was one of my very first trips in my van, and I was excited to test it out. As we were setting up camp, we heard the wind blowing ominously through the trees,
1:06:00 Speaker 01 causing them to creak loudly, threatening us with a fall. And this particular area of the mountain was very unlevelled in the most unsettling way. So, we thus referred to this campsite as "The Ominous Land." When we slept that night, a few things of note happened. My friend Melissa claims to have heard squeaking noises as if someone was wearing a latex bodysuit. She refers to the sound as "The Happy Gimpers." Kurt, her boyfriend, swears he heard a bear that night. However, the worst of it was when, in the middle of the night, they both heard me yell "Bloody murder" from my van. Kurt rushed out of the tent, tripping a few times in his haste, and rushed over to swing open the doors, but I was asleep.
1:06:45 Speaker 01 He asked what was wrong, and he thought that someone was attacking me. I had no idea what he was talking about. I have no memory at all of any nightmares preceding it or anything. I have no idea what any of this means. I've been on many trips in the van since with different people, and nothing like this has ever happened anywhere else. It has only happened when I've been in Mount Rainier National Park. To be honest, thinking about the feeling of drowning in the darkness makes me very much not want to revisit the subject anytime soon. So, I don't believe I'll be visiting the park anytime in the near future for camping either. There is something strange going on there.
1:07:24 Kaelyn Moore? Do you agree as someone who's lived there?
1:07:27 Speaker 01 I don't know. I'm gonna say... That I have certainly felt strange vibes in different locations, but I have personally never experienced them in Mount Rainier. I've actually had kind of the opposite experience. Um, so I don't know. I can't say that I would be on board with like that feeling of, because I've been in that exact area. Um, but at the same time, people have different experiences, you know? So who am I to say?
1:08:00 Kaelyn Moore? Well, one thing that I've noticed in some of the camping and hiking mysterious disappearances that we've covered is there's this element of people making decisions when they're hiking and camping that they wouldn't normally make in their everyday lives. And so there, some investigators believe that there is maybe a level of hypnosis that can happen if you're by yourself in the woods. You're not around people, you don't have other people's perspectives on things or you're trying to make decisions for yourself. Also, if you've been hiking a really long time, you could be dehydrated, you could be tired. You could be seeing the same thing over and over again. And so there maybe is this level in the wilderness of hypnosis that occurs inside of people that causes
1:08:45 Kaelyn Moore? strange things to happen to their brains, which is what I thought of when she was saying like, I don't ever get this weird sleep paralysis thing, except when I'm in this park. Like, maybe there really is something about this park that is doing that to her brain.
1:08:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:08:59 Kaelyn Moore? As well.
1:09:00 Speaker 01 There's two things that I thought of when I was reading this story and they're kind of unrelated. The first is Cassie and I have talked about this before, but when we're camping, which we've done a lot of.
1:09:13 Kaelyn Moore? Many times.
1:09:14 Speaker 01 Is there's something about camping, regardless of if we had a particularly strenuous day or anything like that, but we just sleep and dream differently when we're camping.
1:09:29 Kaelyn Moore? Interesting. Can you explain a little bit more?
1:09:32 Speaker 02 I almost always have vivid dreams every night that I'm camping and I don't have a theme to them, but I don't have a lot of vivid dreams just at home or in a hotel or anything. But whenever I'm sleeping outside on the ground, I have very, very vivid dreams.
1:09:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, and we do a lot of traveling and sleeping in different loca- I mean, we've been to almost every continent.
1:09:58 Speaker 01 We've been on trains, boats, hotels, falukas, like we've been everywhere and kind of had pretty much every type of experience of like sleeping somewhere that you can. And there's just something different about when you're sleeping outdoors. It's this sort of like,
1:10:19 Speaker 01 I don't want to say hypnotic, but it really is different. It's a deeper, and I don't know if it's like you're returning to this connection in nature and something shifts in you. But we know we're not alone with that. We have plenty of friends who have had either just weird experiences at night when they're asleep. I don't think anything to this degree, but definitely like Cassie just said, like just there's this vividness that comes with sleeping outdoors and not really sure what that stems from, but we've experienced it. And of course, there's like this element of your mind playing tricks on you of like, I heard this, I heard that.
1:10:59 Speaker 01 You know, and attributing it like your mind being like, oh, that was definitely X, Y, or Z, even though it's just like a squirrel walking in the brush. You know, your mind is like on high alert. Um, so there's that. But there's also, and this is not a story we've covered, but again, it is, I, you probably have just knowing your catalog, but the Dyatlov Pass.
1:11:25 Kaelyn Moore? We haven't covered it. We covered something similar, the Kamar Daban incident. But yeah, Dyatlov Pass is another one where I think they looked at that crime scene and felt like there was a possibility that all of those people made a decision in that moment that they couldn't explain. Or that was different than what they would have normally done. Yeah.
1:11:43 Speaker 01 And it has elements of from being on the inside and trying to get out. Like there's not something coming from the outside in, which is what we see a lot with either a human attacking you or wildlife or a natural disaster. Like there's something coming at you or into your space. But here, like something's happening inside the van and her waking up and being like, I was trying to get out for some reason. And that's.
1:12:14 Speaker 02 That has similar elements to, you know, that story with what happened to those people.
1:12:20 Kaelyn Moore? Which makes me think that it's something internal that's happening. It's something like within your mind or physiological that's happening where you're feeling this need to get out more than an external threat influencing that behavior, which that's really scary to me. And the fact that that does happen to people outdoors, in the wilderness, on long camping trips is so, so spooky.
1:12:43 Speaker 02 Yeah. And having just such a kind of violent reaction in your sleep where you're clawing at your whole van ripping off curtains and you have this memory when you wake up of not being able to breathe and trying to escape. And then you see everything around you. It's like, whatever I was feeling, I was up and about and I was like really physically trying to get out of this.
1:13:06 Kaelyn Moore? I'm curious if anyone listening to this has sleep terror and if this mimics something that you've experienced. Cause I have, growing up, you know, when you're on a family vacation, you all sleep in the same hotel room. I have a sibling who has, I would describe it as mild sleep terror. Not that they've ever gone to get help for it. But so when we would be all sleeping in the hotel room, Leo, my sibling would wake up and start clawing at the ceiling or would look up as if there was someone above them and just would be clawing, clawing, clawing. And I remember this one time specifically, they're clawing, they sit up, they turn to me, eyes still closed, dead asleep. I start shaking them awake. And I was like, what just happened? What like, what were you seeing that I didn't see? And to them, there were
1:13:51 Kaelyn Moore? people in a great above their face that they were trying to claw at and help and save. But it was so visual. It was so real in that moment and their body was acting out that exact scene. But I just had never heard, except for maybe a very few cases of someone getting up because this, whoever wrote this account said that their whole van was basically destroyed. Like they had gotten up and none of that woke them up. Like punching the windows didn't wake them up. Destroying the tubes at the end of the, the van didn't wake them up. That is really intense to experience, I imagine.
1:14:24 Speaker 01 To be physically sore the next day.
1:14:27 Kaelyn Moore? Yeah, like you fought.
1:14:29 Speaker 01 That's super interesting.
1:14:31 Kaelyn Moore? It also begs the question, did someone get into the van?
1:14:33 Speaker 01 Right. Well, didn't they say the doors were locked?
1:14:35 Kaelyn Moore? They did say that, but I guess you could have locked the door on the way out. Yeah, I don't know what that would have been, but that's always like a big fear of mine, too, is that I'm sleeping and I wake up and I learn that someone else has been in my space.
1:14:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:14:46 Kaelyn Moore? Very, very spooky to me.
1:14:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, for all the times that Cassie and I have spent together at night, I don't think, you're not a big, Cassie's the most silent, like statuesque sleeper I have ever met. It's actually kind of weird, like on the other end of the spectrum.
1:15:08 Speaker 02 I just like find a spot and I don't move or make a peep until the morning.
1:15:13 Speaker 01 I'm so jealous. Yeah, she lays down like a vampire and just closes her eyes. She's like, I'm about to sleep and she just like shuts down like a robot and then wakes up in the same way. It's wild.
1:15:26 Speaker 02 And I'm like, all right, I'm up.
1:15:29 Kaelyn Moore? Oh, my God, I'm so jealous. I wish I could sleep like that.
1:15:32 Speaker 01 Ah, same.
1:15:33 Kaelyn Moore? That's crazy. Well, I think that's, those are the stories that we have for today. I'm very curious, I always ask the audience at the end, what types of stories scare them the most? Some people really freak out with the supernatural stories. Some people really freak out with the more grounded, true crimey stories. I wonder if it's going to be different because these all took place in the woods and in national parks. Because for me, national parks, the woods, big foresty areas really represent the unknown in a way that you just don't encounter in your regular, everyday life. So the element of the supernatural existing within that, to me, is like so spooky, but also cool and enticing, and it makes me want to go even more, even though I do share these stories about how scary it is.
1:16:19 Kaelyn Moore? Do you guys have any, if, for anyone who's listening, that is maybe?
1:16:23 Speaker 02 Scared to go camping because they hear all these stories. What advice do you have for them? That's a great question. If you are scared to go camping, but you want to go, I would, my advice would be to bring a friend with you so you're not alone and to start off easy. I mean, you can start off at a campground that has bathrooms, that has other people around, that has facilities, so you can start off kind of easy. Also, my favorite trick of camping, which I know probably is not for everybody, but it's my favorite thing and has changed my life. Danielle hates it. I know what you're about to say. I don't even know if I co-sign this, but I sleep with earplugs in.
1:17:07 Speaker 02 I just, I always say to Danielle, I'm like, whatever's happening outside my tent is none of my business. And it's only because with earplugs, I can still hear. Like if there is a big noise outside, I'm still going to hear it. It doesn't make me sway. I can't hear anything, but when I sleep, I'm such a delicate sleeper where if there's, if it's quiet and there's any noise around me, I wake up and if I'm outside, I immediately freak myself out. I'm like, what is that? Who is that? And I found that it makes me sleeping at night not work well. And I'm just up all night, even if a squirrel walks by, I'm like, a bear. And then I have to be like, okay, think about it. That was the smallest footstep. That's not a bear.
1:17:51 Speaker 02 And I just freaked myself out. So I found that if I wear earplugs at night, it kind of drowns out those small noises and I can sleep better. That's really good advice. Yeah. Unless you really want to hear anything that's coming. Yeah. If you want to freak yourself out. Which I totally understand that side of the coin too, but. What did she call it in the story? The happy gimpers, just a man in full latex, maybe outside of their tent? I hate that so much.
1:18:18 Speaker 01 Like, that is so specific also.
1:18:23 Speaker 02 It's like an American horror story, the Evan Peters latex suit.
1:18:27 Speaker 01 That's the first thing that came to my mind.
1:18:30 Speaker 02 No, thank you.
1:18:31 Speaker 01 I mean, weirder things have happened out there. So that's, I'm not saying it's like completely impossible, but.
1:18:36 Speaker 02 True.
1:18:36 Speaker 01 That's what I'm talking about, your mind attributing, like making connections that probably aren't realistic, but.
1:18:44 Speaker 02 Yes, totally.
1:18:46 Speaker 01 I don't know. My advice is to just. Go for it for people who aren't accustomed to camping. And like Cassie said, you can start small. It doesn't have to be this huge expedition where you're solo through hiking in the middle of, you know, the Pacific Northwest and you've never been there or whatever. But just, I think that through our experiences with camping and traveling and recreating outdoors, whether together in a small group or even by ourselves, like alone, I think that recreating outdoors in whatever way, whether it's hiking or camping, or even taking your RV or your Sprinter van, it just gives you confidence.
1:19:31 Kaelyn Moore? Yes. Yeah, I agree with that.
1:19:33 Speaker 01 You definitely, you know, you rely on yourself. And I think a lot of times in our day to day life, like even if you're doing things alone, you're, you have support, you know, whether it's the support of technology or other people or infrastructure, things like that. And when you're camping and you're just kind of reconnecting with nature, you have to be self reliant and you have to problem solve on your own. And it just forces you to be independent in a way you don't get to be a lot. And that boosts your confidence and that will trickle out and definitely touch other parts of your life. So I don't think you have to be an avid outdoors person to get those benefits. But spending time in nature in whatever capacity
1:20:17 Speaker 01 you feel is best will definitely improve your life.
1:20:21 Kaelyn Moore? I love that so much. I think that's so accurate. The idea of being in a situation where you have to problem solve for yourself, I think instills a lot of confidence in people.
1:20:30 Speaker 01 For sure. And usually it's not because like you're hearing Bigfoot or
1:20:35 Kaelyn Moore? Right, yeah, that's not the problem you have to solve. It's more like how to build a tent.
1:20:39 Speaker 01 Right, yeah, how to build a tent, how to get fresh water, how to ration, how to, you know, read a map, use a compass, like just things like that.
1:20:48 Kaelyn Moore? Yes, yeah. Well, I love it. I hope everyone who's listening does not get too scared and still wants to go out and explore and camp and do all those things. At least my listeners, I know your, your listeners are like so into that and go on trips with you guys, which is very, very cool. But I think that's all I have today. Where can everyone find you if they want to listen to your show?
1:21:06 Speaker 02 Yeah. So if you want to check out our show, we're on all streaming platforms. You can check us out on Apple and Spotify at National Park After Dark. You can see us, we have a website. It's npadpodcast.com. That also lists all of our episodes there and has our other things. And we're also on Instagram at National Park After Dark as well. If you want to follow along and see all the episodes, we like to post pictures and little short clips of the episodes on our socials as well.
1:21:35 Kaelyn Moore? Awesome. Definitely head over, check out the show. Lots of good spooky scary hiking and outdoorsy episodes. I think you guys have over 300 episodes I was seeing. So there's no limit, basically, on how much you guys can listen to the show. That's all we have for this episode of Heart Starts Pounding. Thank you so much for tuning in. I will be back next week with an episode on lost media that you were never supposed to see. So you're definitely going to want to stick around for that. And until then, stay curious.
1:22:12 Kaelyn Moore? This episode is brought to you by our partner, Vistaprint. If you run a small business, you know that there's a moment where you go from just doing the thing you love to realizing you need stuff, like physical stuff. Custom merch for an event, branded apparel for your team, business cards that actually look professional. That was definitely me with Heart Starts Pounding. What started as a podcast I made in my closet turned into something that had merch, had mugs, had stickers, had all of this stuff that I needed to get made. And Vistaprint made it so much less overwhelming. They are a true print expert. Premium quality products, fast turnaround and design tools that actually make sense. I actually got custom mugs made from Vistaprint and they are gorgeous and very, very good quality.
1:22:53 Kaelyn Moore? The quality feels expensive without having an expensive price tag. There's a reason over 17 million businesses trust Vistaprint with their print needs. Vistaprint, print your possible. Right now, new customers get 20% off with code NEW20 at Vistaprint.com. That's 20% off at Vistaprint.com using code NEW20. Do you want more darkly curious stories in your life? Sign up for our Patreon for free and Get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content, our weekly Rogue Detecting Society newsletter, and the HSP Book Club. Paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access, which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point. You also get a cool Jinx sticker after your first three months. And you can check it all out with a free seven-day trial. Link in the bio or go to patreon.com backslash heartstartspounding.
1:23:38 Kaelyn Moore? But whatever you do, stay curious.
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