Evan Mallory
speaker
161 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Evan Mallory’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Some small, some tall. Some had bones placed carefully in the center. Little ones. And then we saw the tree. It was maybe 50 yards off trail. A big poplar, gnarled and dead. Nailed into the side of it was an old iron horseshoe. Hanging from the horseshoe was a rope, and tied to the rope, no BS, was a deer skull. But the skull had carvings in it.
Weird symbols like spirals and claw marks etched into the bone. Anna wanted to turn around right there, but I was too stubborn. I kept thinking if we just kept going, we'd hit the old trail shelter I remembered from years ago. A small A-frame near the ridgeline where we could get our bearings. So we pushed on. The fog got thicker, the trail got thinner.
At one point I swear we passed the same tree three different times. One with a split trunk and a slash of orange lichen across the side. That's when I started to think maybe we weren't just lost. Maybe something was leading us. Or worse, circling us. When we finally stumbled into the clearing, I almost cried from relief. The old trail shelter was still standing. Barely.
Roof half-caved, moss all over the north wall, and some raccoon poop in the corner. But it was shelter. It was a place. We huddled up inside, ate some protein bars with shaking hands, and tried to get warm. I told Anna to rest while I checked the area. Didn't want to admit I was looking for signs of whatever that thing was. Tracks, fur, anything. But there was nothing. Just the quiet again.
I climbed back into the shelter and must have drifted off, because the next thing I remember is Anna screaming. She was standing outside the shelter, staring at the ground. No, no, no. What is that? What is that? At her feet was a perfect circle of stones. We hadn't made it. It hadn't been there when we arrived. Inside the circle was her boot, one of the ones she was wearing the night before.
It was dry, clean, the laces perfectly tied. She checked her feet. Both boots were on. I've never seen her that pale in my life. She couldn't stop crying. She kept asking me, how did it get that? How did it know? I had no answers. I just knew we couldn't stay. We packed and left that shelter without looking back. But even then, I had the feeling we were still being watched.
Not hunted exactly, more like studied. Like something out there was learning us. By the time we left that shelter, I'd given up on the map. Nothing made sense anymore. The landscape felt like it had folded in on itself. Trees were repeating. I'd walk 30 feet and swear we were back where we started. Even Anna noticed it. She stopped asking if we were going the right way. We both knew we weren't.
i don't think there was a right way any more the fog was thicker than ever rolling low across the forest floor coiling around the trees like it was alive the light never changed morning never really became day There was just this dull gray half-light filtering through bare branches that looked wrong, like we were trapped inside a dream where the sun never quite rose.
We didn't speak much, just walked. Fast, packs bouncing. Every few steps I'd check over my shoulder. And eventually I saw them. Figures, not close, not even fully visible. Just dark shapes slipping between trees up on the ridge, always just out of sight. Too thin to be human, moving too fast, but always upright, always two-legged.
The air started to smell like wet fur and decay, like something had died days ago and never cooled. At one point, Anna gagged and dropped to her knees. Her nose started bleeding.
i pulled her up and we kept moving somewhere around late afternoon if that even means anything in that place we reached a small rocky clearing it looked like a dried-up creek bed maybe twenty feet wide there was a tree in the center completely stripped of bark around it were piles of bones big bones
some looked like deer but others others looked human long pale femurs ribcages jaws but not fresh these had been picked clean arranged even laid in spirals patterns some were buried upright in the dirt like markers anna whispered This isn't random. And she was right. Something had put them here. Something had made this. That's when we heard it again. The clicking. Not from one direction.
From all around us. Then the shriek. Only this time it was louder. Closer. And it didn't echo. It just hit us. Like a pressure wave that made our ears ring and our stomachs flip. Anna clutched my arm and screamed, and I grabbed her and ran. We didn't look back, we just bolted. Branches clawed at our faces. Mud sucked at our shoes. Somewhere behind us, I heard another shriek.
Then another, and another. Higher and higher, all overlapping. They were calling to each other. We tore through the woods until the fog broke and the trees thinned. And suddenly, we were standing on a rocky overlook. Below us, winding like a ribbon through the valley, was the trail. The real trail. Switchbacks and all, and far down near the base of the ridge, was the goddamn parking lot.
We didn't even stop to breathe. We just scrambled down, sliding, grabbing branches, half falling the whole way. At the last switchback, I looked back.
And there it was, standing alone at the edge of the treeline, tall, gaunt, its limbs too long for its frame, legs bent backward, hooves sunk into the dirt, its torso heaved slowly like it was panting, the skin was so thin I could see its ribs rising and falling, and its face, still twisted into that horrific almost human snarl, looked straight at me.
The eyes were clouded, like cataracts, but I felt them lock with mine. Then it opened its mouth, and in my voice it said, Don't leave me. Anna heard it too. I felt her grip my hand tighter. Then more of them stepped out from the trees. Five. Six. Maybe more. All identical, yet slightly off. Wrong in different ways. One with a crooked neck. One with broken antlers. One missing a jaw entirely.
All of them watching. We ran. We reached the car, shaking and filthy, and I barely got the keys in the ignition. As we drove away, I glanced in the rearview mirror. They were still standing there, just watching. We didn't stop driving until we hit Asheville. I didn't sleep for two days. Anna hasn't spoken about it since. She dropped the class we shared and hasn't returned my texts.
I tried reporting it. The ranger I spoke to looked at me like I was insane. said that section of trail had been closed years ago after a wildfire no maintained shelters up there no known campsites i asked him if he'd heard of walker's hollow he paused said that name hadn't been used in decades Then he told me, quietly, that the last time someone reported going up there, it was a rescue mission.
A couple of hikers had gone missing. Their gear was found. Their boots were found. But not them. No bodies, just bones. Arranged in spirals. I'm not saying you have to believe me. But if you're ever on the Appalachian Trail and you see a tree marked with a triangle and a circle inside, turn around. Don't answer the call. And if you hear your own voice echoing from the woods, it's already too late.
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