Birds Don't Call At Night

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While the military is a mixing pot of different personality types, it should be no surprise that many of the men who serve are the rough and rugged types, the kind of guys who would rather spend their weekends out in the woods than doing anything else.

One of the reasons people in the military seem to bump into, shall we say, odd things, is because they are often deployed to places where civilized people don't tend to go.

But even places back home in the U.S.

are just as remote.

The Appalachian Mountains, for instance.

I once saw a map of all the locations where people have gone missing in the United States.

And overlaid on top of that map was another kind of map, a map of all the cave systems in the U.S.

Both pieces of information seemed to coincide, the location of the cave systems and missing persons.

Maybe some people just got hurt and couldn't get themselves back out.

Or maybe, the map clearly implies, it was something

that hurt them.

What you're about to hear are two stories from two veterans.

One a Marine who served in Iraq, the other who served during the 1980s and was possibly a soldier, although his branch of service was not stated.

Both of these men grew up in the woods, and both of these men, after encountering something terrifying, say that they don't enjoy the woods like they used to.

These are true stories of two veterans who believe that they were maliciously stalked and hunted by something massive that could mimic the sounds of other animals.

I'm Luke Lamana,

and this is Wartime Stories.

That's the oldest trick in the book.

Try to make us think they're injured cubs.

All right, how are we moving in?

Just like always.

All right, all right, you go that way.

I'm gonna go this way.

Hey, uh, before we break off,

yeah,

what's up?

Something uh feel off about this to you?

Yeah,

you feel that way, too?

I just thought maybe it's because we haven't been out here in a while.

Well, maybe they changed their tactics.

I don't know.

Well, we've come this far.

Let's just go.

This first story was posted online by a U.S.

Marine with the handle, that one guy, Brian.

After setting out into the woods one evening, looking to hunt down a pack of coyotes, Brian, alongside another fellow Marine, suddenly realized that the coyote sounds they had been following weren't being made by coyotes.

He writes,

My story begins after my first tour in Iraq.

I view myself as a very tough person, but it isn't hard to find someone tougher than me.

I grew up in an area where the high desert begins to turn into the forest.

This is as close as you can get to being in the woods without actually being in the woods.

Lots of trees, but very little running or standing water.

I spent much of my youth exploring this area, so much so most people would see it as walking into their living room.

As one can expect, there were two things that I wanted to do when I got home on leave.

Drink some booze with old friends and go back into those woods.

There was always something new to find, like where Native Americans had chiseled out some of their arrows, just random things like that.

Well, one night on leave, my best friend and I went out to hunt down some coyotes that had been terrorizing local ranches, something he and I were well known for.

I forgot to mention my best friend was also a Marine.

I called him Boot at the time because he just got out of boot camp.

We'd already determined where this pack liked to hunt at night.

Coyotes are nocturnal and like to make lots of yipping noises, so they are easier to hunt at night.

I won't get into too many details for hunting coyotes for protection reasons.

So we are getting close to their den, and we can tell because they start the old trick any predator makes, the whole pretend I'm a cub or injured rabbit shtick.

We start our typical closing in tactic.

However, while we are doing so, we're having a convo that that is something along the lines of

this is different.

I make the assumption that it's because we haven't been out here in a while and that they may have changed some of their tactics since our last hunt.

So we continue on.

Nothing changes as we get closer.

And as we get to within about 25 yards of the coyote den, We both realize that this is clearly not what it seems.

So we make a decision to go communication silent, move back out of the grove of trees this den is,

and wait for movement.

I can't remember the amount of time that passed, but it was under an hour.

The memory is a bit foggy, but the first thing I remember is my friend calling me by my last name.

Something I was used to being in the military, but it was weird, coming from someone I grew up with.

A couple of minutes later, we saw movement.

We called it out to each other.

It emerged from the trees.

What I saw was a man, but he was as tall as the trees, which were about 7 to 10 feet in height.

I'm terrified at this point, and I don't know if it was PTSD or just plain old fear, but I aimed in and shot it.

I waited for it to take a few steps and fall down.

But it didn't.

It just kept walking.

My friend fires, and the same thing happens.

At this point, we go into battle mode and keep firing, intent on killing it.

Our thought was that it was trying to lure us because it knew how we hunted and tried to use it against us.

It just stops and turns perpendicular to our positions and walks off.

Now, I was using a 308 and my friend was using a 3006.

This thing should have dropped after the first five rounds, but it didn't.

We considered chasing it, but then realized that whatever it takes to kill it, we just didn't have it.

We did a tactical retreat for about a quarter mile, then just booked it home.

We found the actual coyote den a week later, about 10 miles on the opposite side of the town that we lived in.

Whatever this thing was,

it had clearly been hunting us for a very long time time to lead us that far in the wrong direction and had planned accordingly

because it even knew how to leave feces and urine from different members of a coyote pack.

My friend and I still hunt if needed,

but we always talk about that one time we

were the hunted.

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Hey, over here.

You young whipper snapper, you come all the way through that holler.

Yes, ma'am.

Is that all right?

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to trespass or nothing.

Boy, don't you ever go through there.

Ever.

There was a reason they went and blocked that road.

Oh,

why is that, ma'am?

Ah.

Well, it's best you come up on the porch and set for a spell, boy.

I'm gonna tell you the story.

Now, whether you believe me or not, ain't my business.

But if you ask around,

other people can tell you.

Come on, then.

You're too young for lightning, but I'll get you some lemonade.

While massive bipedal hominids roaming the forests of North America are often considered to be curious, gentle animals, Brian's story isn't the only one that exposes the creature's more predatory nature.

This next story, set against the backdrop of Tennessee's Walden Ridge Trail, gives further insight into the uncanny mimicking abilities of these elusive cryptids.

The author, an unidentified veteran who we'll refer to as Mark, recalls a harrowing encounter he had with a creature known locally as the Whistling Jack.

He writes,

This is a true story.

I have never told this story to anyone before now, for reasons that will be obvious after you hear it.

This story takes place over several time periods.

I am 53 years old.

I grew up in a small community on the southern end of Waldens Ridge in eastern Tennessee.

Waldens Ridge is a flat plateau that spans most of Tennessee from south to north on the east side of the Sequatchee Valley.

Growing up, I lived in a small community there, only a little over 200 people.

We just called it the mountain.

The community was surrounded on all sides by forest bordering the Prentice Cooper Game Reserve.

As a kid, we would ride our bikes all over the trails and old dirt roads out on that mountain.

Hiking, hunting, and just exploring the woods were among the most popular of our hobbies.

In 1976, when I was 12, I had an old mini-bike.

This took me even further into the woods.

There was this one old dirt track we discovered that begins my story.

It was an old road.

The two parallel ruts forming it could have only been formed by wagon wheels and maybe deepened by the old Model T or its contemporary rivals.

I rode down this old road alone one afternoon, and as I exited the other end back into an uninhabited area, an old lady called to me from her front porch.

I knew this old lady's name, but I will use no real names here to protect their anonymity.

This lady asked me, did you come all the way through that holler, the hollow?

Yes, ma'am, I replied.

And she said, Boy, you don't ever go through there.

There's a reason why they block that road.

Now she had me curious.

I asked, why?

She says, sit down, boy.

I'm going to tell you a story.

Whether you believe it or not ain't my business, but if you ask around, other people can tell you.

And this is the first time that I had ever heard about whistling jack.

I always thought the name sounded silly, but you have to understand these were the same kind of people that called a species of quail a bobwhite because of its unique call, or called a yellow perch a sunfish because of its bright yellow belly.

It all makes a kind of sense when you learn about these things.

The old lady I was talking to had lived in that community all her life.

Her family had lived there for generations, since shortly after Boone and Crockett had settled Tennessee.

Her story, that she told me, took place in the early 1900s, before World War I.

In those days, people here rode horses and carried guns.

It was still a wild area.

This was long before the TVA, Tennis Valley Authority, had brought electricity to these hills.

There were two families.

For the sake of the story, we will call them the Smiths and the Browns.

The Smith family and the Brown family had small farms on opposite sides of the hollow.

On Saturday, a couple of times a month, the boys of the two families would get together at one farm or the other and play cards, drink some moonshine, homebrew, homemade wine, and generally have some fun.

One fateful Saturday, the socializing went on well past midnight.

This was not something that ever happened, as they were normally the type to go to bed early and rise at dawn.

Well, it was around 1 a.m.

when the Brown boys climbed on their horses and started down into the hollow on their way home.

The trail they followed to the bottom of the hollow crossed the small creek at the bottom of a sandbar overlooked by a large boulder.

As they started to cross the creek this particular night, they heard a bird call from the top of the boulder.

The innocent sound, for some reason, panicked the horses.

All but one of them bolted across the creek and up the trail as fast as they could gallop.

The youngest brother was thrown from his horse as it reared in panic.

The one thing it may have saved his life was the fact that his lantern fell in the sand and it did not break or go out.

Further up the trail, as his brothers got their mounts under control, they then heard six rapid shots from a 45.

They forced their horses to go back down to the creek.

When they arrived at the grisly scene before them, they saw their kid brother on his knees in the sand by the lantern, trying to load his gun, dropping some of the bullets from his shaking hands.

A few feet from him was his dead horse, bleeding from its throat.

I shot it, he said.

You know I never missed this close.

It took them a while to get the story out of him.

But he said that when he had been thrown from his horse, he looked up in time to see two large red eyes on top of the boulder.

It whistled again as it then jumped for his horse.

It all happened so fast he barely had time to unload his revolver into it in a quick succession of shots before it was on his horse taking it to the ground.

It was big, it ran stooped over on two legs, it was dark, shaggy, and stank.

The quick shots of the pistol were not enough to save the horse, but he knew he had hit it as it gave a hissing growl and ran off into the woods.

They had heard enough.

Scared and now wary, they loaded him onto one of the boys' horses and rode home as fast as they could.

The next morning, just after dawn, all the boys and their father took their guns and went back down the trail to the creek with the intention of hunting this thing down and recovering the youngest son's saddle and gear off the horse.

They were all experienced hunters and trackers.

Despite this, when they got to the creek crossing, the horse was gone.

All the gear, saddle, bridle, rifle pouch were gone as well.

The sand had been brushed clean, like it had been swept with a pine branch.

Even the blood was partially covered.

No tracks could be found, and no trace of the horse or its gear, except the blood mixed in the sand.

Something about the way she gripped my arm when she said this,

the look on her face, made me believe her.

I told her I would not go back down there.

I meant it.

I rode the long way around the highway to get home.

And little did I know at the time that

my story

had not quite ended.

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Probably chocolate and peanut butter.

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Well

probably time to get going.

Dancy whiskey.

Wait,

is that a a Bob White?

They're not supposed to be calling this late at night.

What in the...

All right.

It's time to get out of here.

13 years later, I was 25.

After four years in the military and a brief, failed marriage, I was back on the mountain for a while.

Depression soon had me roaming the woods again.

When I wasn't working, the woods brought me peace.

And there was one spot in particular.

Just a couple of hundred yards from the top of a line of sandstone cliffs along the bluff on the western side of the mountain, there was an old-growth pine grove.

I don't know if you've ever been in an old growth pine grove in the forest.

The massive pine trees just seem to radiate a peaceful, quiet feeling.

The thick canopy they provide inhibits undergrowth, so instead of crunchy, dead leaves, you will have a carpet of fallen pine needles that cushion and silence your steps.

It is common to find lush beds of moss in these places too.

This place was several miles from that hollow I told you about before on the other side of the plateau.

Foolishly, I had spent the afternoon, evening, and well into the night hiking along the bottom of the cliffs.

I had a small backpack, a little food, a couple of drinks, among other things, and a couple of flashlights in case I found a cave I wanted to look into.

I also carried my old Winchester Model 97 12 gauge, good, solid shotgun.

It would hold five rounds in the magazine and one more in the chamber if you were that careless.

I should have known better than to be out there after dark.

There were a lot of factors involved that got me there at that moment.

Sometime around midnight, I had been sitting in a nice spot where I could see the lights from the valley miles away, having a few sips of bourbon, thinking about things, just enjoying the peace and quiet.

As I packed my stuff to go home, I heard a bobwhite call a couple of hundred yards below me along the heavily wooded slope.

It seemed perfectly normal for about two or three seconds, and then I froze in mid-movement.

If it would have been a whipperwill, or any of the normal nightbirds, it would not have even phased me.

But I knew that a bobwhite bobwhite was a quail

and quails are not nocturnal birds

as if this was not puzzling enough I heard another bob white answer from along the slope to the north at about my elevation

then the first one called back from below me

and now I I knew that it had moved closer.

I have never been one to scare easily, but this was too strange.

I stuffed my last things in my backpack, slung it over my shoulders, grabbed my gun, and started up towards the cliffs.

There was a nice moon, so I did not use a flashlight.

I didn't want a light to give away my position.

But as I eased through the brush, trying to be as quiet as possible, I got some electrical tape out of my backpack and began taping one of my flashlights to the tubular magazine under the barrel of my shotgun.

The calls of the strange bobwhites were still sounding from time to time, always answering each other, always getting closer, no matter how quickly and quietly I moved.

Now I was starting to get scared.

I, who had always known my way around in the forest, always knew what the denizens of my woods would do, how they would react.

was out of my experience pool here.

This moment is when that story came back to me.

The story that that strange old lady had told me 13 years earlier.

I began to believe I knew what was tracking me.

And yes, I was being tracked.

I could feel it.

With this realization came a plan.

By this time, the bobwites were really close.

I could now hear their steps trying to mirror mine.

They were big, heavy sounding steps.

Once in a while I would stop and I would hear them take a step or two before they stopped as well.

I would not be hunted so easily.

I knew where I was.

Directly atop the cliff above me is where the pine grove grew, just about 500 feet from the cliff.

At the bottom of this cliff at this point, there would be a deep crevice.

Crack formed from thousands of years of rain and the ice forming in the massive layers of sandstone and slowly spreading it.

It formed an inverted V.

about four feet wide at the bottom, at the base of the cliff going back about 30 feet.

Along the left-handed side of the inner crevice, the layered stone being pulled apart over time had made a ledge that rose from the rear of the crevice to an opening at the top just big enough for someone my size to squeeze through.

Once through, you would be on a ledge 30 feet or so up the cliff face.

The overhanging layer of rock left just enough room to crawl along the ledge on your belly for about 40 or 50 feet.

Then it opened up into a rock slide that you could climb to the top.

The entire cliff cliff was between 80 to 100 feet from bottom to top at this spot.

I got there as quickly and quietly as I could manage.

This took maybe only one or two minutes, but under the circumstances it seemed like time stretched on forever.

Then I was in the crevice.

I was soon on the ledge at the top of the crevice.

I had pushed my backpack and gun in front of me to get through the tight space.

I was not taking time for stealth now.

I was crawling and dragging and pushing my things to get to the rock slide.

Almost free.

As I got to the slide and began to climb, I re-slung my backpack, strapped my gun over my shoulder, and went up on all fours.

I could hear something shuffling around at the bottom of the cliff outside the crevice that I'd crawled in through.

I didn't know why they didn't go in.

I wasn't about to sit around thinking about it.

I kept climbing.

Once I hit the top, I ran to the grove, all the way to the middle of it.

I leaned against one of the massive old pines in the middle of the grove and dropped my backpack, sat my gun down, and took a bottle from my bag.

I needed a drink.

I took a swig of bourbon as I realized my hands were shaking and I was dribbling it everywhere.

Then I heard footsteps

and a bobwhite.

I have no idea to this day how they got to the top of the cliff that quickly.

The cliff stretched for over a half mile south and about a mile and a half to the north.

It was a a sheer cliff face in both directions.

That tight crawl through the crevice was the only way up here.

But there they were.

I could now hear their steps clearly.

Long steps, longer than a man's gate.

They were coming.

I dropped the bottle.

I grabbed my gun, switched on the light as I raised it.

I pumped around into the chamber.

took another from my pocket and slid it in the magazine to replace it.

They came closer and closer.

Then they stopped at the edge of the grove, just deep enough in the brush to hide from my light.

They were quiet, but I kept my light trained on the spot where I'd heard the last sound.

Why did they stop?

They had run me down.

Why did they not come up?

I could see the light beam shaking slightly.

Fear had filled my blood with adrenaline.

My heart was thundering in my ears.

Then they moved.

I could hear the long steps moving, one going each way.

They were circling me.

Panicked, I swung my gun back and forth, waiting for a shot.

They circled all the way around to the other side of the grove, away from the cliff, and met up again.

It was as if they were looking for a place where they could come at me, unseen.

My gun was pointing at the spot where I thought they were.

And I had had enough.

I fired, pumped the gun, and fired again.

Then I heard a scream.

Excuse me, but I almost wet myself just then.

I do not know if I can describe this to you adequately.

It was not a scream of pain so much as an angry, hateful sound.

It was a scream like a chimp makes on TV, except deeper and throatier.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck.

Then I heard them crashing through the brush, away from me, across the plateau, deeper into the woods.

They just left.

After some length of time, I have no idea how long, it had been silent for a while.

I could sense that they were gone.

It occurred to me to check my watch.

I didn't do this at first because it would mean lowering my gun, but eventually I had to know how long it would be until dawn.

When I looked at my watch, it was 3.18 a.m.

roughly two and a half hours until daylight.

I stayed there and waited.

As soon as it was light enough that I could see well enough not to be ambushed, I left and I ran home.

In 28 years, I have not set foot in the woods there.

I hike in the woods, camp, and fish, but I have not hunted since then.

As a matter of fact, About two months after that night, I moved way down in Alabama to a small industrial town and took a job.

I stayed there for about 25 years until early 2015.

In late 2014, a relative passed away and left us a place in the Sequatchee Valley near the mountain where I grew up.

I can see the cliffs just a few miles from my front porch, but I would never go there.

But I don't think that is quite the end of this story.

The house I live in sits on the edge of a 32-acre wooded property in the middle of a small community at the foot of that mountain.

It seems a lot of animals use these 32 acres as a way stop between the mountain forest and the woods along the Sequatchee River that runs down the middle of the valley.

When we moved in, my daughter was already living here.

She had a big old dog named Buddy.

Buddy was a big, tough dog.

He'd been known to take on a coyote more than once here to protect his turf.

A week or so after I moved in, I had become one of Buddy's best friends.

He no longer barked or growled at me when I came home.

Here's where it gets strange.

Sometimes at night he would get really excited, barking and howling enough to get me outside with my rifle.

I never saw anything except Buddy when I would go out there.

He would bark, looking at the woods, every so often glancing over his shoulder at me, like checking that I was still there, then back at the woods barking.

I never saw anything and would end up bringing him in and letting him sleep on the rug so I could get some rest.

This went on for three weeks, until one night when he started his warning barking routine, I went out out and heard it.

My light would not penetrate far enough into the thick brush to see it, but I heard it.

Long, heavy steps going back into the woods away from us.

I swear my blood ran cold.

I have not heard those footsteps again since that night.

Buddy still had restless nights from time to time for the next couple of years.

but I never again heard the footsteps in the brush.

All of the research I've done into local folktales and accounts of this thing leads me to believe it is either some type of Sasquatch or skunk ape.

The accounts always describe a very large, foul-smelling, bipedal, powerful, apish creature.

The only detail that differs from accounts of other aggressive Sasquatch encounters is the signature whistling call.

In all honesty, at this point, I cannot claim to have actually seen anything.

I know what I heard and what I've experienced,

but I have not seen anything

yet.

Hey guys, hope you enjoyed hearing these terrifyingly true stories.

Thank you for watching and commenting.

And for those of you who have already gone and listened to my brand new podcast,

I owe you another huge thank you.

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Here's a sneak preview of one of the new episodes.

Nye was speechless.

He couldn't even think up a convincing lie.

Panicked and in fear for his life, he confessed to everything.

He told the Cubans all about the plot and who was behind it.

and begged the man to spare his life.

Lucky for Nye, he wasn't killed.

A month later, the revolutionaries kicked him out of Cuba and sent him back to the U.S.

with his tail between his legs.

Looking back, Nye realized that the plan had always been doomed to fail.

It wasn't well thought out, it was easily exposable, and it suffered from a heavy dose of American arrogance.

Who were they to play spy games on Castro's home turf when he had half the country under his power and more Cubans converting to his cause every day?

Nye had never even made it into the same room with Castro.

The whole mission was a complete and utter failure.

Nye Snafu made his superiors at the FBI and their counterparts at the CIA take a step back.

They realized that assassinating Fidel Castro was going to be more difficult than they had thought.

His government might be young, but Castro knew how to protect himself, and his inner circle was fiercely loyal.

If they wanted this man dead, they would need to get creative.

Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke Lamana.

Executive produced by Mr.

Bollin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt.

Written by Jake Howard and myself.

Audio editing and sound design by me, Cole Lacascio, and Witt Lacascio.

Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stiddam.

Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan.

Mixed and mastered by Brendan Kane.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone.

Production coordination by Avery Siegel.

Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden.

Artwork by Jessica Clongson-Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picada.

If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com.

Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.

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Hey, it's Luke, the host of Wartime Stories.

As many of you know, Mr.

Ballin and Ballin Studios have been a huge help in bringing this podcast to life.

And if you'd like to believe you are something of a storytelling connoisseur, then you need to check out Mr.

Balin's podcast, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious.

Each week, Mr.

Balin weaves gripping tales of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious, diving into true crime, unsolved mysteries, and paranormal events that keep you on the edge of your seat.

Mr.

Balin's podcast, Strange, Dark, and Mysterious, is available on all podcast platforms, and it is free, just like ours.

There are hundreds of episodes available to binge right now with new episodes twice a week.

Go listen to the Mr.

Bollin podcast today.