182. Backwoods Horror: The Creatures Appalachians Still Fear

Across Appalachia, thousands of people keep reporting the same thing: a massive black cat in the woods that screams like a woman being murdered. The government says it doesn't exist, there are NO official reports of big black cats in the area. But the Cherokee had a name for what lives in those mountains, and its story is far older, and far more wicked, than a misidentified panther. Today, we’re diving into the stories of The Wampus Cat and Spearfinger. Subscribe on⁠ Patreon⁠ https://www.patreon.com/heartstartspounding to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society and enjoy ad-free listening, monthly bonus content, merch discounts and more. Members of our High Council on Patreon also have access to our weekly after-show, Footnotes, where I share my case file with our producer, Matt. You can also enjoy many of these same perks, including ad-free listening and bonus content when you subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Follow on⁠ Tik Tok⁠ https://www.tiktok.com/@heartstartspounding?lang=en and⁠ Instagram⁠ https://www.instagram.com/heartstartspounding/ for a daily dose of horror.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kaelyn Moore?

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• 0:44Kaelyn Moore?

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• 1:01Speaker 01

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• 1:49Kaelyn Moore?

  It's that time of year again. When the days are longer, but the nights feel darker. When the crackle of the campfire seems to summon ghosts. And every step along the lake bottom feels like something might be tracking you down. It's the moment you realize you can't find your way out of the woods. It's dark summer.

• 2:18Kaelyn Moore?

  Welcome back to another episode of Heart Starts Pounding. As always, I'm your host, Kaitlin Moore, and welcome to Dark Summer, Volume Three, everyone. This year, for July and August, the sun might be out for longer, but the nights are getting darker. And if you're one of our loyal listeners from below the equator, just pretend it's summer for me. But also, I have some stories from your neck of the woods, so don't you worry. This dark summer, we're going to be exploring deep underwater caves and haunted hiking trails. We're gonna get deep into the forest and hear the most terrifying stories from inside. We're setting sail on another cruise ship, and we're gonna witness a little bit of cannibalism. I mean, it really wouldn't be dark summer without it, you know? But

• 3:00Kaelyn Moore?

  today, we're gonna start our summer break by heading to one of our favorite locations, way inside the woods of Appalachia. I want to tell you about something that's been brewing there for generations, and the bizarre creature that people have seen there recently. But first, Dark Summer means limited time Dark Summer merch goes live this week. We have two new t-shirts that I want you guys to check out. I'm calling them Dark Summer and Light Summer. And what could be more summer than a Heart Starts Pounding bandana? Shout out to Katie at Studio24, who did the designs. You can check those out, along with our evergreen Heart Starts Pounding merch, t-shirts, hoodies, notebooks, and more, at shop.hardspounding.com later this week. And as always, Heart Starts Pounding subs get big discounts. 10% off

• 3:43Kaelyn Moore?

  for the $5 subs on Patreon, and 20% off for the High Council tier. You can get those codes on Patreon. Also, before we jump in, we're gonna be starting our summer book club with Incidents Around the House by Josh Mallerman. Grab yourself a copy and head over to the free tier on Patreon, where we're gonna announce when we're meeting to chat about the book. Okay, let me stop yapping and let our summer vacation begin.

• 4:08Kaelyn Moore?

  The other day I was browsing Reddit when I noticed something really strange that I want to tell you about. So there's a bunch of people in Appalachia who have all reported seeing the same creature in the woods, and it's something that none of them can explain. It started with this story that I read. This comes from user AppalachianBaby four years ago. They write, "In 2007, I was DD, I was stone cold sober, for my boyfriend and friends. He and I went back to his parents' house in southern West Virginia. His parents were out of town and he was so drunk, so I put him to bed and went back outside to have a smoke. Typical house up in a holler, sitting at the bottom of the mountain with about a half acre fenced in running up the hillside. Now, I hadn't turned a light on and it was

• 4:51Kaelyn Moore?

  typical Appalachia dark outside. I sat down on a porch swing, I lit up, and all of a sudden, I heard what sounded like a woman being absolutely bloody murdered about 100 feet away from me. I threw my cigarette and got into the house quick. I turned on the porch light and a floodlight, and I saw what can only be described as a huge black panther running back and forth inside of the fence, absolutely screaming and screeching its head off, because I guess it thought it was trapped in the fence once it jumped in. I watched it until it figured out how to get out and it jumped back over and ran up the mountain. I think only one person has ever truly believed me when I've told them this story."

• 5:34Kaelyn Moore?

  Now, I started reading the replies on that story, and I noticed that people started jumping in saying that they also had an experience with this kind of panther creature, or they knew someone who had. And also, no one believed them when they told this story. Actually, people would reassure them that there were no panthers in Appalachia, yet they knew what they had seen with their own eyes. Here's another story I found from someone who has since deleted their profile. They wrote, "I 1,000% believe you. I am actually in southwest Virginia, about an hour or so outside of Romanoke. I live in the middle of nowhere, and I too was doing the same thing as you. But it was like 5:30 in the morning and I was about to leave for work. This was in the middle of winter and it was..."

• 6:17Kaelyn Moore?

  Still pitch black outside. After smoking about half of my cigarette, I heard the exact same noise and every inch of my body was covered in chills. Horrifying, especially being outside on my back porch, basically in the middle of the woods by myself. I threw my cigarette and ran into the house to finish getting ready as fast as I could. I couldn't find my flashlight during this, so I couldn't shine it to see what was going on. But after explaining this situation to my elderly neighbor that evening after work, I was told that the same thing happened to her about 20 years before my incident. There's actually a story local to me called "The Woman at Panther Rock", where a woman was brutally attacked by a panther and succumbed to her injuries

• 7:01Kaelyn Moore?

  on this very large boulder that sits by the road on the way to my house. My neighbor is really into folklore and she claims that whatever this beast is, it's probably still alive today. I never go outside at night by myself anymore at my house. I make my boyfriend go with me, or I bring my 9mm if it's an emergency. And these comments just keep going. Another person wrote, "I grew up in the Appalachia part of Pennsylvania, and I am certain I witnessed one of these creatures stalking through a neighbor's pasture. It had a remarkably lengthy tail and it cleared a five-foot fence with effortless grace. Though I only caught a glimpse of its backside, we used the surrounding tree line for scale, and the creature was undeniably the size of a mountain lion."

• 7:46Kaelyn Moore?

  After speaking with local old timers, some claimed that cougars could on very rare occasions be born with jet-black fur. However, my own research suggests that a melanistic mountain lion, one that's all black, has never been scientifically verified in the wild. Now, these stories sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole. I didn't think there were panthers or cougars in Appalachia, so I looked it up, and I was right, there's not. There's no cougars, there's no panthers, there's no other large black cats in Appalachia. Yet, this thread goes on and on and on with people claiming to have seen the same type of large black cat that makes this horrible screeching sound. So I kept looking into this mystery because now I was really intrigued.

• 8:31Kaelyn Moore?

  And I realized that there were all of these threads of people who were annoyed because they too had seen this big black cat. But they were actually told by the government that they hadn't. That's right. The US Fish and Wildlife Service kept making statements repeating that there are no large black cats in Appalachia at this time. They kept insisting that what people were seeing were either bears or house cats. Now, people in the region felt like they were being gaslit because there was no way that what they were seeing was just a house cat. I mean, people knew that this creature was much bigger than that. But how could this be? How could so many people say they're seeing the same thing when official reports keep reiterating that they're not?

• 9:14Kaelyn Moore?

  Well, that's what I want to talk to you about today because the more I read, the more I realized that some of the locals know that this is not just a big black cat in the backwoods. But it's actually a strange type of creature that's been in the Appalachian forests longer than people have. They call it the Wampus Cat. And the more I read about this Wampus Cat, the more I realized that there was a strange human-like quality to it that people often describe. Like, here's another story of a local Appalachian woman in North Carolina who has encountered the Wampus Cat on multiple occasions. And she knows a bit more about its backstory.

• 9:55Kaelyn Moore?

  She writes, six years ago, "I am a stable, relatively successful mother and wife living in the deep south, right on the coast. I have spent my entire life in this particular beach community. If you travel just a few miles inland from the ocean, you find yourself deep in the rural countryside. My mother's family has deep roots here, and my father is Sioux. His mother relocated him here as a young boy to move him away from the reservation. For as long as I can recall, my maternal relatives have encountered the Wampus Cat. The folklore changes depending on the region, but the local lore claims

• 10:33Kaelyn Moore?

  that the cat was once a woman, a Cherokee woman, who surreptitiously followed the men to a restricted ritual involving the chief and a shaman. She utilized a mountain lion's pelt as a shroud, but when she was discovered, the shaman cursed her to remain in that form forever. Now she haunts people, though her motivations remain a mystery."

• 10:55Kaelyn Moore?

  However, this entity trails me and my kin, and it always has. We have become so accustomed to her presence that we simply anticipate her arrival whenever we move houses, during transition seasons, or when we're struggling with our emotions. Back in the 1980s, my mother had a particularly difficult day being picked on at school, and she was heading home on her bicycle along a dirt path weeping. The sun was beginning to dip, though it wasn't dark yet, and suddenly she heard a piercing shriek from behind. I've heard it myself. It resembles an eagle's cry, but it carries the deep guttural rasp of a cougar.

• 11:37Kaelyn Moore?

  She glanced back, and she spotted a massive, dark-furred beast. It moved in a knuckle-walking gait, similar to a gorilla. It was crouched low in the rear with its chest held high, supported by its arms. She pedaled furiously until she reached safety. When she recounted the sight to her mother, my grandmother, she simply remarked, "That's just the wampus cat," and then they left it at that. I grew up with a father who was deeply superstitious and would practically dive for cover whenever we heard those screams in the night, while my mother and grandmother would just casually note that the cat was back again. I have lived my whole life viewing this as perfectly ordinary.

• 12:19Kaelyn Moore?

  Even after getting married, my husband and I would be near the tree line, and we would hear that wail, watching the dry leaves stir as something tracked our movements. It stayed at a distance, and I had to realize that, for outsiders, this was terrifying. But for me, it was about as noteworthy as spotting a cardinal in a tree. It's a break from the routine, sure, but for me, it's not anything shocking. The closest I ever got to this thing was during high school. My friend, her boyfriend, and I were on the porch, taking in the humid night air and the fireflies. A massive, hairy beast the size of a gorilla charged towards the porch and let out a hellish scream. I might be used to the creature, but I don't want it just five feet from me.

• 13:04Kaelyn Moore?

  We retreated into her room and I heard it pacing beneath her window for an hour. It was growling, hissing, and thrashing in the bushes, acting generally irritable. And eventually, it moved on. The night went quiet and we slept, but I still hear it every so often. It's just a reality of living here. This region is thick with ghosts. I grew up near the Fort Fisher site and many other places marked by history and tragedy. I have too many strange stories to share in just one sitting, but that's the gist of it. And then this user went on to end her story with, "I hope this was informative and stay indoors after dark on the Carolina coast if you're faint of heart."

• 13:49Kaelyn Moore?

  Now, the Wampus Cat is typically described as being dark colored, about the size of a mountain lion or cougar, and also, a little odd. Sometimes it'll get up on its hind legs and it'll walk like a human. Other times, it'll shriek like a woman being murdered. Sometimes its large yellow eyes will just follow you from the brush. The name comes from the word "catowampus", which is a local, old-timey word that means askew or off-kilter. In parts of eastern Tennessee, the Wampus Cat isn't classified as an animal at all. It's actually a spirit, something older and stranger than zoology can ever explain. It's a creature of the earth, almost tied to the land itself, they say.

• 14:34Kaelyn Moore?

  And the belief that runs through these communities goes like this. If you hear the Wampus Cat scream, someone nearby is going to die. They'll be dead and buried within three days. Now, some versions of this legend are even more specific. They say that if you hear the cry three times, it's going to be one of your loved ones who will pass away. Parents will tell their children, plain as anything, "Do not stray past the tree line after dark because the Wampus Cat will get you." And the origin story of the Wampus Cat is really what the woman in the story described. A Cherokee woman one day became curious. Serious about the men's sacred hunting ceremonies. As a woman, she was forbidden to witness these rituals.

• 15:16Kaelyn Moore?

  So she disguised herself under a mountain lion's skin and creeped close enough to watch one night. She hid amongst the brush, holding her breath so that she didn't even make a single sound. But before she knew it, her tribe's medicine man was behind her, pulling her up by her hair. For her punishment, the medicine man bound the animal's skin to her body permanently, fusing woman and cat together at the bone. She was forever trapped, half-human, half-mountain lion, and cast out of the village and doomed to roam the Appalachian Mountains alone forever, crying out in a voice that she could no longer fully control. One of the earliest written accounts of the wampus cat actually is from Knoxville, Tennessee in 1918.

• 15:59Kaelyn Moore?

  The city sits in a valley cradled by the Great Smokies to the east and the Cumberland Plateau to the west. In the fall of 1918, something started killing livestock across the north side of town, really brutally. Wild dogs in Fountain City were found with their hearts and livers ripped clean out of their bodies. A mule was mutilated in Whittle Springs. Chickens were found torn to pieces, like every single feather had been meticulously plucked from their body. Now, whatever was doing the killing, nobody could catch it. A zoologist at the University of Tennessee examined the remains of some of the animals and couldn't identify what the predator was from the wounds. The Knoxville newspapers finally put a name to this creature.

• 16:41Kaelyn Moore?

  It was a name that people had been passing around word of mouth in Appalachia for generations. The wampus cat. They described the creature as dark-colored with white spots, a very long tail, and able to jump 12 feet in a single bound. On Thanksgiving morning, 1918, roughly 75 men, all armed with shotguns, rifles, and a handful of bows and arrows, fanned out across the North Knoxville Hills to capture this creature once and for all. A hundred-dollar reward was posted for anyone who could bring in the carcass. But nobody ever claimed that reward. The creature was never found. The killings eventually stopped on their own, but the name stuck. And it wasn't the last time that the Wampus Cat would terrify locals either.

• 17:24Kaelyn Moore?

  In 1929, witnesses in Knox County reported an upright walking cat that left strange tracks and howled in a way that didn't match any known animal. And then in 1964, a group of hunters near Knoxville described something with luminous eyes and a scream again, unlike anything they had ever heard. As recently as 2016, a resident in Pleasant County, West Virginia, told a Travel Channel show that he had been losing pigs to a creature that he had first seen as a child. A jet black monster with glowing eyes and a high pitched, cat-like hiss.

• 18:02Kaelyn Moore?

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• 18:47Kaelyn Moore?

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• 19:05Kaelyn Moore?

  So what is the official response to all of the claims every year from people who claim they've been seeing this big black cat? Well, like I said, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service admitted that cougars did used to live on the East Coast. However, the last confirmed wild eastern cougar was killed in Maine in 1938, and they were officially declared extinct in 2018. And mountain lions don't carry the gene for a black coat, so it's probably not those either. So when biologists review the thousands, yes, thousands of black panther sightings that are reported across Appalachia every year, the answer they give is always the same. These things are either black bears that are seen moving quickly, they're large dogs.

• 19:48Kaelyn Moore?

  Sometimes they say that they're bobcats in low light, or house cats that were photographed without size reference. They're literally telling people who see this thing that they're out of their minds. And this, at least to me, seems to be a trend in Appalachia. People today seeing and hearing the same things that people hundreds of years ago also saw, and they're still being told that they're imagining things. I mean, maybe some of you guys can relate to this. I know some of you live in areas that have local legends and folkloric creatures like this. Let me know if there are in the comments wherever you listen. But this kind of all brings me to the next strange thing that's happening in the Appalachian woods that I want to tell you about.

• 20:27Kaelyn Moore?

  And this one starts with a story from Reddit user Ranch1874, who wrote this post a year ago. My uncle, my mom's brother, has had a farm in southeast West Virginia since the 70s, long before I came into this world. Mom is the oldest of five, and my uncle built a bunch of houses on the farm so family could use it whenever. Some lived there, and others, like my family, visited often. My mom and older sister and I would go for weeks on end to spend time with family, and I always loved it because I have a ton of cousins and was the baby for a long time. So mostly, I would tag along with my cousins, and I felt extremely safe, like it was my happy place.

• 21:09Kaelyn Moore?

  I don't really remember anything totally out of the ordinary when I was really little, other than... I remember an imaginary friend whom I exclusively played with at the farm, nowhere else. And we moved extensively for dad's job, so I've lived in many different places. What I remember after age five was suddenly being old enough to not have to have someone walk me to and from houses, which I thought was so cool. So I started exploring. My uncles liked to bow hunt and had taken me a few times not too far into the woods. So I was able to go back on my own and find little tree platforms that they had built to hunt from. I thought that they were cool little tree houses.

• 21:50Kaelyn Moore?

  It was the winter. I wanted to be out in the snow and explore, so I found my way up the mountain. That is what I called it, but it was probably more like a massive hill. I wandered into the trees and I couldn't find the spot I was looking for. And I got pretty frustrated with my eight-year-old self. So I sat down by a creek to catch my breath and figure out where I was. I couldn't have been sitting there more than about three minutes when something let out a scream. I can only describe as blood curdling. I thought that it was a fox, most likely, until I heard another voice crying, just weeping and wailing, and the sorrow was palpable. My cousins had always told scary stories about Appalachia,

• 22:34Kaelyn Moore?

  and I figured that they had followed me into the woods and were trying to scare me. I called out, saying, "Okay, guys, this isn't funny. Okay, I'm going home now. Enough." And I followed my footprints in the snow as fast as I could back to the farm. The screaming and crying didn't stop, though. They stayed consistent as I moved, which made me really convinced that it had to be my cousins. I finally made my way back to the main house, my uncle's house, which was the biggest on the property, invisible from the edge of the woods. And I absolutely booked it, ran full speed to get to the kitchen door. I remember getting through the door and slamming it behind me because I was a combination of terrified and also annoyed that my cousins were playing a prank on me.

• 23:17Kaelyn Moore?

  Well, wouldn't you know, every family member was accounted for in the living room slash kitchen area. The older male cousins and my uncles were in the kitchen, putting their snow boots and coats on to come look for me because I had apparently been gone for several hours and they were worried. According to my mom, I was white faced and my hands were covered in scratches through my mittens. I guess I must have fallen or something. They were so worried I had disappeared. I should add that I set off from my aunts to walk to my uncles and had decided to take a detour and didn't tell anyone. Oops, I was eight years old. I didn't really think about how that might be bad. My mom said that it looked like I had seen a ghost.

• 23:59Kaelyn Moore?

  I asked if anyone had come out to the woods to look for me and they said, no, they'd been looking in the other houses, but they were just about to come look in the woods because they saw that my footprints were heading straight into the forest. I told them about where I went and what I heard. And my uncle, whose property it was, said, oh, I think you probably ran into the witch. I'm over here thinking like, oh, some lady lives in the woods and I probably stumbled near her cottage. Nope, the witch was just what they called the unknown entity that roamed the woods, screaming, crying, and mimicking people's voices. No one had a straight answer about possible folklore or anything like that,

• 24:40Kaelyn Moore?

  but all my older cousins had their own experiences with other things happening to them over the years. Scared the living daylights out of me. And while I've been back to the farm over the years, I can tell you I have never once set foot near the woods or the tree line since, even as an adult. I'm grateful my family didn't think I had lost my mind, but they said a general rule is to never be in the woods alone. So I listened, but oof, the Appalachia woods has some wild stuff. Now, I will say, it seems like nearly everyone in Appalachia has a story about a witch. I mean, my grandfather, who grew up there, has a story about a witch that lived in the woods behind his house. It's a well-known thing in the region.

• 25:23Kaelyn Moore?

  You don't go into the woods because that's where things you don't understand live. Well, one thing I noticed is that a lot of the stories you hear today about Appalachia, the witches in the woods, the voices- That sound like someone you know, a lot of them originate from one witch story. She's an ancient witch known as Spearfinger. Her story originates from the Great Smoky Mountains, which rise along the Tennessee-North Carolina border like a wall of blue haze. That's actually where the name comes from, the Cherokee word for "the place of the blue smoke." The Smoky Mountains are among the most biodiverse forests on the earth. Old-growth cove hardwoods, 200 species of birds, a fog that crawls through the valleys in the

• 26:06Kaelyn Moore?

  early morning and doesn't burn off till well past noon. The Cherokee lived in the shadow of these mountains for more than a thousand years, in the overhilled towns of Chota and Timotley, along the Little Tennessee River. In those mountains, the Cherokee told stories of something that wore a familiar face and called to you from that very mist, a monster that they named and feared. They called her Spearfinger. Spearfinger was an ogress, once called "a terrible woman monster," whose food was human livers. In her natural form, she looked like an old woman, stooped and frail, but her entire body, every inch of skin, was as hard as rock. Arrows would bounce off of her, spears shattered on contact.

• 26:51Kaelyn Moore?

  The Cherokee would sometimes refer to her as "stone dress," because nothing could pierce her. On her right hand, she had a single finger sharpened to a point made of bone or stone. It was hard as obsidian and long as a spearhead, and that's what gave her the name Spearfinger. And she could become anyone: a grandmother from a neighboring village, an aunt that you hadn't seen since last winter, a friend's mother waving from the trail with a warm smile. She would find children alone at the edge of the woods, picking berries or gathering chestnuts, and she would call to them in a voice that they recognized and trusted. "Come, my grandchildren. Come to your granny and let granny braid your hair."

• 27:34Kaelyn Moore?

  And the child would come, because why wouldn't you? She looked like someone safe. She would then sit the child down, begin combing their hair, gently, lovingly humming. And while the child relaxed into the familiar comfort of her touch, she would slip that stone finger into their side and quickly steal their liver. Her victims often didn't even know that they had been stabbed because there was no wound. She wouldn't leave a mark on the skin, so there was no blood and also no pain, nothing at all. The child would just stand up, thank the kind old woman, walk home, eat dinner and then go to sleep. They would feel completely fine, but then, over the next couple of days, they would begin to weaken, just a little at first.

• 28:17Kaelyn Moore?

  Tire more easily, their appetite would go away. And then they'd start growing pale, they'd get thin. And then eventually they would die because Spearfinger had stolen the thing from their body that had given them their life force. And this witch had a song. Hunters alone on the mountain at dusk would sometimes hear it drifting through the trees, low, almost like she was singing to herself. Liver, I eat it. Liver, I eat it. Now, you can see in the story of Spearfinger, some of the blueprint for other Appalachian legends. I mean, how many times have you heard this story? Someone is alone in the woods, deep in the smokies, when they hear a voice, specifically the voice of someone they know. A mother calling their name or a friend saying, "Come here."

• 29:02Kaelyn Moore?

  And the advice that follows these stories from people who grew up in these mountains, who grew up in Appalachia, is always the same. Do not answer this voice. Do not follow it into the forest. Turn around and walk the other way as fast as you can. Because whoever is calling to you is not the person that it sounds like. And that's exactly what Spearfinger does. She speaks to you from the forest in a voice that draws you in.

• 29:31Kaelyn Moore?

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• 30:14Kaelyn Moore?

  value, built on a reputation for quality and reliability. So when it's time for your next Toyota, you could trade in for more. From a great deal today to a great value tomorrow. A Toyota is right for you. Shop toyota.com for deals and details, or stop by your local Toyota dealer today. Toyota, let's go places. The fact is, hundreds of years ago, people were hearing voices calling to them from the woods, and they're still hearing those things today. So whether it's Spearfinger herself, or if Spearfinger was just the name that the Cherokee gave to the voice calling to them from the woods, it seems like something is out there. And that actually made me think of this story that I found. This author writes,

• 30:55Kaelyn Moore?

  "This happened to me in January of 2019 in western North Carolina, around the small town of Silva. I was participating in a week-long program to get certified as a first responder for wilderness first aid and rescue. I'm studying to become a forester, and it's important to know how to keep people alive in the woods when things go wrong. There are two primary locations in the complex: a classroom with some bathrooms, and a kitchen where we spent most of the day in class and eight meals. There is a group of one-room cabins on the top of a steep hill directly north of the classroom where we would sleep. An important thing to note about the cabins is the heating system. Each cabin has a small but powerful radiator that makes the cabin feel like a sauna if

• 31:40Kaelyn Moore?

  left on for too long. Since it was January in the Appalachians, it was pretty chilly outside at night, so the heat was needed. To strike a balance between boiling in our beds and getting hypothermia, we would turn on the radiator and leave a window open so that warm and cold air could circulate and create a reasonable temperature. The radiator and the open window were at the front of the cabin, next to the door, and my bed was directly across from the window." This incident happened on the fifth day of my time there. My boyfriend and I, who was also enrolled in the program with me, had settled down for the night in the cabin that we shared with one other person. We had gone to sleep as normal and we were sleeping soundly on two bunks that we had pushed together

• 32:25Kaelyn Moore?

  so we could sleep next to each other. Sometime during the night, I was woken up by some shuffling on the other side of the room near the window. I heard my boyfriend say in a complaining voice, "Can't we close the window?" I wake up feeling frozen. I woke up a little bit more and I sat up in bed groggily, about to answer him when I heard another voice say, "If we close the window, it'll get too hot and we'll wake up sweaty." I snapped awake and froze where I was sitting. The voice that responded was my voice. There's something very strange and wrong in hearing your voice repeated back at you. In the dark, I looked down next to me where I saw my boyfriend sleeping soundly.

• 33:09Kaelyn Moore?

  At this point, a mortal dread had a tight grip on my chest and I forced myself to not move or even blink. I was focused intently on the place near the window, fearfully anticipating more of my own words. I heard more shuffling outside the window and my same words were repeated. "If we close the window, it'll get too hot and we'll wake up sweaty." Followed quickly by my boyfriend's voice again. "Can't we close this window? I wake up feeling frozen." In the last repetition of my boyfriend's words, there was this unevenness in the enunciation, like raising and lowering the pitch slightly, like, "Can't we close the window?"

• 33:50Speaker 02

  I wake up feeling frozen.

• 33:52Kaelyn Moore?

  I remained frozen in my bed, feeling my hand fall asleep in my propped up position. I sat there for what felt like 15 or 20 minutes, listening to whatever it was shuffling around in front of our window, separated from me by some 10 feet in window mesh. Eventually, the shuffling became more frequent and a weird mumbling sound came from outside the window with no real words being said, or at least none that I could hear. could make out. This particular behavior didn't last long before the shuffling sound moved to the left of the window to the door, where a scratching sound began to manifest. As the sound moved, I saw the silhouette of a medium height, like five foot six figure,

• 34:34Kaelyn Moore?

  that moved uncannily, like when a baby animal tries to walk for the first time, but isn't quite strong enough to stand up correctly. It sounded like someone was scraping some dry sticks against the wood of the door, not aggressively, but kind of like an impatient dog asking to be let in. This scratching slowly moved around the cabin, stopping when it reached the wall that I was closest to. My ears were straining to hear anything that might indicate further action, but all I could hear were footsteps on dry leaves. The footsteps eventually moved away from the cabin and down the other side of the hill, and then didn't return for the rest of the

• 35:13Kaelyn Moore?

  night. I stayed unmoving from my position for at least another half hour before my body readjusted itself slightly, letting blood finally flow back into my asleep limbs. I was wide awake until my boyfriend's and the other roommate's alarms went off sometime before dawn to get ready for the day, which felt like maybe two hours, but I couldn't be certain because I didn't have a clock. My boyfriend was surprised that I was awake before him, as I'm typically a later sleeper, but I just told him his alarm woke me up and I tried to act somewhat normally. We got up and got ready for our day, but I refused to leave the cabin until the sun began to peek over the mountains. For the rest of the week, I was on edge, and I felt like there were eyes on me whenever

• 35:55Kaelyn Moore?

  it was relatively dark out, though I'm not sure how much of that was just paranoia. The day after the incident, I realized that the lines that were repeated to me by the voice were part of a conversation that my boyfriend and I had earlier in the week, and I came to the conclusion that whatever it was, had been outside of our cabin and heard us talking. This terrified me, and I also realized that it had likely been lurking there in the following nights as well, without us realizing it, and it might do so again in the remaining nights. As far as I can tell, it never did. I guess I'm asking for advice in addition to getting this off my chest, as this winter I will have to return to the same location to renew

• 36:39Kaelyn Moore?

  my certification. And I want to know as much as I can. So hopefully I can avoid another encounter. If there is an entity that exists in my area, I'd be glad to hear about it and what I can do, if anything, to avoid it. My advice to this poster, as well as to anyone who hears anything coming from the woods of Appalachia is simple. Run, leave, and do not return. I hope that helps. But what do you guys think? Is there really a witch in the woods that's calling to people mimicking the voices of those that they know? Or is it something else? I'm very curious to hear what all of you think. And I also am curious, I'm serious about if there's any legends that you grew up with. Are there

• 37:21Kaelyn Moore?

  any local lore of other creatures in your area? Are you guys seeing black cats out there that the government is telling you don't exist? You know, I want to hear about it. You can leave me comments wherever you listen. And remember, the Appalachian Mountains are 480 million years old. They were here before the Atlantic Ocean existed, and they keep generating the same shapes of fear. Something at the tree line that looks almost right. A voice in the fog that calls your name. A face you trust that belongs to something you absolutely should not. That is all I have for you today. If you want to hear more scary tales from Appalachia, I'm going to be over on the High Council tier on Patreon, reading some more of those, some of the ones that didn't make it into the episode. I actually

• 38:04Kaelyn Moore?

  have a couple more that I think you guys will like. You can join me over there. Each week we have a little after show where I give more context on the episode and sometimes read some more scary stories that didn't make it in. Would love to have you there. That is all I have for you this week. We are, of course, getting started on our dark summer journey together, and I cannot wait to show you what else we have for dark summer this year. Join me here next time. And until then, stay curious.

• 38:35Kaelyn Moore?

  Heart Stars Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs. Heart Stars Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Sound design and mix by Redrum Creative. Video editing by Creative Step. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jurnigan, the team at WME. Have a heart pounding story or a case request, check out hearts stars pounding.com.

• 38:57Kaelyn Moore?

  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/hartstartspounding. Well, whatever you do, stay curious.