Scary True Stories Told In The Rain | Ep. 494

Scary Stories and Rain

This episode features a compilation of unsettling true stories ranging from personal encounters with predators to historical unsolved myster

Key takeaways

• A hiker warns against exploring the woods near Pittsfield, Massachusetts, due to a disturbing, unidentified wooden idol found in an abandoned cabin.
• An encounter with a mountain lion at a residential window highlights the dangers of wildlife reclaiming urban spaces during lockdowns.

Main topics

• Unexplained phenomena in Massachusetts woods
• Wildlife encounters during lockdown

Notable quotes

Please do not go hiking in the woods around Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Conclusion

A collection of cautionary tales designed to evoke fear and suspense t

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hey, welcome to Scary Stories and Rain. Do you want to listen ad-free? Just subscribe on Spotify for $2.99 a month. Now turn out the lights, enjoy the stories, and enjoy the rain. Speaker 1 (0:16) What you are about to hear is a warning. I beg you. I implore you. Please do not go hiking in the woods around Pittsfield, Massachusetts. I know those woods like the back of my hand. I was playing with my little brother among those trees when I was still in single-digit ages. So trust me when I say that something has been changing out there. And not for the better. I first noticed something was horribly wrong during a hike a few weeks back. In early spring, birds migrate from the warmer southern climates to their northern territories. En masse. Thousands upon thousands of tiny songbirds occupy the trees around Mount Greylock during the month of March, each singing a sweet, chirpy song that is, in reality, a bellowed war cry, a call for challengers to step up and knock them off their perch. Yet as I trudged through the previous winter's leaf litter, I couldn't hear a single thing. No birds or any other animals, for that matter, seemed to still call the forest home. This made me nervous for two reasons. One, animals have an uncanny ability to detect dangers that are imperceptible to humans. Their sense of smell, hearing, and general atmospherics are far superior to our own. If the wildlife had fled the area in such a hurry, or at least refused to return, that could mean something awful was about to happen. And two, areas of woodland turn exceptionally quiet when there is a large predator around. Wood pigeons will become deathly quiet and still, hoping a black bear or mountain lion will just pass them by. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. But either way, it would be hideously unsafe of me to wander around while one was prowling the area. So naturally, I started making my way back towards my car when something real peculiar happened. I feel I should remind you at this point that I had been playing in the woods around Mount Greylock since I was like 7 or 8 years old. But thanks to our bikes, we had a pretty large area to roam when it came to those long summer breaks. The point being, I know those woods really well. But some way, somehow, I managed to get lost. It first came to my attention that I had managed to get myself turned around when I felt my head begin to throb with a dull ache. I stopped walking for a moment, rubbing my eyes and the bridge of my nose to try and massage away the ache. But when I opened my eyes again and looked around, I felt a faint flash of panic running through me. I did not recognize my surroundings, and I cannot understate how jarring that was for me. To be somewhere I had been visiting all my life, only for it to feel utterly foreign to me. I actually had to take a moment to take out my compass, just to try and get a bearing of where I was headed. But to my surprise, the compass needle kept slowly moving around. Even when I got it to sit still on a supposed bearing, it slowly began creeping around again. Speaker 1 (4:09) Now, this was much less of a problem than it might appear. Sure, it was unnerving, but there are ways around a faulty compass. Like for one, moss mostly grows on the north side of a tree, the side that gets the most sunlight. So that provided an easy way of determining which way was north. At least, it usually would. Because as I inspected various tree trunks, I realized the sun was hanging in the southern portion of the sky. That, or the moss in the area grew mostly on the south section of the tree trunks. I get that it's not entirely out of the question, but that was yet another detail that just seemed to fry my brain. Nothing made sense. And the less it did, the more the feeling of pure panic began to bubble up in my chest. But to panic in that situation, in any kind of situation, is to welcome defeat, degradation, and death. I kept myself calm, told myself there was a rational explanation for everything that was occurring, and walked off in the direction I was almost sure the nearest highway was. It was then I came across something I had never, ever seen in those woods before. Something that seemed so out of place that it was frankly terrifying. In all the years I had spent roaming those woods with my brother as a kid, I had never seen anything like the old, run-down cabin that stood before me. And I mean, it was old. As in, there was no way it could have been built any later than like 1979. Speaker 1 (6:05) So just how me and my brother had missed this place was utterly beyond me. The obvious thing to do was to knock on the cabin door, see if anyone was home, and as much as I might find it humiliating, ask for directions. But as I walked closer and closer towards the rustic front door, I felt the most unusual sensation. I put it down to general tiredness. Maybe my blood sugar was low. I'm not entirely sure. But for whatever reason, each footstep that took me closer to the cabin seemed more and more difficult. By the time I was actually bringing a closed fist up to knock on that old wooden door, it felt like something was physically repelling me from it, whispering directly into my brain, Leave this place and never return. Don't look back. Never look back. When I finally knocked, the door creaked open slightly, revealing the dilapidation behind it. Whatever bolts or locks that were on the door had long since been worn away, and the inside was just as run down and rotten as the outside was. It was evidently abandoned, but there was a curious order to the furniture that led me to believe that, every so often, The cabin did actually receive some visitors, aside from me, but something in the corner of the cabin drew my attention. I saw what I am about to attempt to describe is, quite frankly, indescribable. I know it was a wooden idol of some kind. A small statuette sat atop a stone altar. But, and I appreciate this, is intensely confusing. I could not make sense of what I was looking at. It was like my brain was completely incapable of computing the information my eyes were feeding it. And with that, my headache returned again, along with a kind of anxiety so crushing that I felt like I was going to have a panic attack. Don't ask me how I know, but that wooden idol, a mess of twigs and vines and moss, was a representation of pure, unfiltered evil. And I ran from it. I'm not in the least bit ashamed to admit that I ran like a scared child from that cabin. And into the night. The night. You heard that right. When I walked into the cabin, it was still daylight. I couldn't have been there for more than a couple of minutes, at least. That's what it felt like. Only when I burst through that wooden door, it was pitch black outside. I ran until I found the highway, ran until I found my car, and drove like a madman until I was safely back at home. I haven't been able to bring myself to talk about what happened to me that day. Until now. I tried to tell a hunting buddy of mine once, but the words just wouldn't seem to come out. But please, if you're hearing this, heed my warning. And do not go hiking in the woods around Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Speaker 1 (9:55) I have been reading a lot of stories recently about how Mother Nature is basically reclaiming the land since this whole lockdown thing went into place. In particular, one story that's come out of the UK which talks about how a giant herd of wild goats has essentially taken over a small Welsh town. It's pretty charming, detailing how these rare Kashmiri goats have seized the opportunity. that's been presented by people staying indoors, to roam down from the hills, to wander around neighborhoods, devouring the contents of flower boxes and front gardens alike. There are also those stories about the swans returning to the canals out in Venice Beach, but you can go read up on them yourself, as I've got a point to get onto here. So a little side note. Has anyone else noticed how nice the weather has gotten since the lockdown started? It's been so frustrating. Shut indoors while the weather went from gray and windy to warm and sunny in like what must have been a matter of days. In all of my life, I've honestly never seen spring slam into winter with such a dramatic transition. It's been tough on my little girl too. She's been dying to get out to the local park to play on the jungle gyms. And telling her no, not to mention explaining why, has been harder and harder as the weeks have gone by. I can't tell her the truth, because I know it would absolutely terrify her. Breaking down that there are little creatures living inside of us, waiting to be transmitted to someone she loves, like Pap-Pap or Nana, which could end their lives. How do you even say that crap to a child without them totally freaking out? So, our story starts with birdwatching. I know, super boring. But try telling that to my daughter. She burned through all her DVDs and favorite YouTube channels in like a week. And despite some of them having palpable rewatch value to them, she quickly grew tired of staring at the screen for hours on end. And it got way, way worse when we started having to tell her no about going to the park. It seems like once you hold something out of reach of a kid, it's all they want from then on. The forbidden thing. Anyway, I found a happy compromise with her, in that if she stayed inside, she could look at the garden all she wanted. And the bonus was, that if she stayed super still and quiet, that all kinds of birds and other critters would wander into the garden for her to look at. And you know what? It actually got kind of fun after a while. I finished an old Native Birds of the Upper American East Coast, that I'm pretty sure was my grandpa's at one point, and we got to work ticking off each one we saw, working our way through the book as common and rarely seen birds alike landed among the flower beds of our backyard. Speaker 1 (13:19) One evening, I'd swear, I saw something larger moving among the trees at the back of our yard. But I figured it was just a trick of the light. Maybe a neighbor's dog moving against their back fence, casting shadows into ours. But a few days later, I discovered it wasn't just my imagination. I was doing some laundry upstairs while my daughter busied herself with bird watching. I had ordered a cheap pair of kids binoculars from Amazon, and those things really had paid for themselves by the evening of the day they arrived. My kid was obsessed with them. She had them practically strapped to her face for the entire day, looking at everything and anything up close, and being amazed at the results. So she was only too happy to sit in front of the patio window doors and for hours checking out the wildlife at close range through her new binoculars. And thankfully, because having to keep an eye on her day in day out was meaning housework was mounting up, and at the top of the list was laundry. So I'm working through the piles of dirty clothes, calling down to her every so often to see how she's doing, and everything seems to be going fine. Every so often, I would rush down when she claimed to have spotted a new kind of bird in our garden. Often I would have to point out that it was one we had seen before. But once or twice we actually locked eyes with a lesser spotted woodpecker. A bird we most definitely had not spotted before. Only when I heard her cry out, Kitty, I figured she must have gotten bored of watching for birds. At first, I was a little worried. The last thing I wanted was for my little girl to witness a full-on bird murder in our own backyard. But I was quietly reassured by the fact that all the neighborhood cats were fat and spoiled. They wouldn't be finessing at backyard birds anytime soon. That was for