Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the background of the Skinwalker stories shared in this episode?
Nobody applies to work at a Forest Service relay station because they want to be around people. You apply because you want the opposite. You want four months of solitude in a concrete block building on a ridge in the middle of nowhere, maintaining radio equipment that most of the agency has forgotten exists.
You want to wake up alone and go to sleep alone and spend the hours in between reading gauges and running diagnostics and watching weather roll across a hundred miles of unbroken timber. That's what I wanted. That's what I got. My name is Jesse. I was 29. This was 2020, the summer everything shut down, which made the isolation feel less like a choice and more like the natural state of things.
The relay station was in the Olympic National Forest on the western side of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Not the National Park. The National Forest, which is a different jurisdiction and a different kind of land. The park gets millions of visitors a year. The forest gets a fraction of that, and most of them stay near the roads.
Once you're a few miles into the interior on the west side, into the old growth valleys and the high ridges, you might as well be on another planet. The station sat at about 3,800 feet on a ridgeline called Spur Ridge, between two drainages that fed into the Quinault River system. The building was maybe 20 feet by 30 feet, poured concrete walls, metal roof, one door, two windows.
It housed a bank of radio repeaters that linked the ranger stations in the Quinault and Queets Valleys to the dispatch center in Olympia.
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Chapter 2: What unsettling experiences did Jesse encounter at the relay station?
The equipment was old but functional. My job was to keep it that way. I drove up in early June. The access road was 12 miles of single-lane gravel that climbed from the valley floor through second-growth Douglas Fir into old-growth western red cedar and Sitka spruce, and then into subalpine meadow near the top. The road was gated at mile three. I had the only key besides the district ranger.
The station had a cot, a propane cook stove, a table, a chair, a bookshelf full of paperback westerns that previous occupants had left behind. and a two-way radio for communication with the ranger station in the valley. No internet, no cell service. The nearest person was a trail crew camp about eight miles south by trail, and they were only there intermittently.
The nearest town was Amanda Park, 35 miles by road. I settled in. The work was easy. check the repeaters every morning and evening log the readings run a test signal twice a day report any malfunctions to dispatch the rest of the time was mine i read i hiked the ridge i watched the elk herds move through the meadows below the station
I listen to the rain, which fell almost every day on the west side of the Olympics, sometimes for hours, sometimes for days. I want to talk about the rain because it's relevant. The Olympic Peninsula's west side is a temperate rainforest. It gets over 12 feet of precipitation a year.
The forest at lower elevations is dense and green and dripping, hung with moss and ferns and lichens, the canopy so thick that the forest floor exists in a kind of permanent twilight even at midday. Sound behaves differently in that environment. The rain dampens everything. Footsteps on the forest floor are nearly silent because the ground is afoot of saturated duff and moss.
You can be ten feet from a Roosevelt elk and not hear it move. The rain creates a constant white noise that masks smaller sounds. You learn to listen through it, the way you learn to see through fog. I was good at listening. By the end of my first month, I could distinguish the sound of a branch falling from the sound of an animal stepping on a branch.
I could hear the difference between rain dripping off cedar boughs and rain hitting the metal roof. I could tell when the wind shifted direction by the way the sound of the river changed in the valley below. I'm telling you this because I need you to understand that when I say I heard something that didn't belong, I'm not guessing. I knew those sounds. I knew that forest.
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Chapter 3: How did the smell impact Jesse's perception of his surroundings?
And what I heard in August did not belong there. The first thing that happened wasn't something I heard. It was something I smelled. This was the second week of August. I'd been at the station for about ten weeks. The weather had been dry for almost three weeks, which was unusual for the west side, but not unheard of in late summer. The forest was quieter without the rain. Sounds carried further.
I could hear the river from the ridge, which I couldn't when it was raining. I was on my evening check, sitting at the console logging repeater readings, when I smelled something through the open window. It was sweet and rotten, the way a deer carcass smells about three days after it goes down in warm weather.
heavy and organic and cloying it came in a wave strong for about ten seconds then gone i went outside and looked around the station clearing was about fifty yards in diameter ringed by subalpine fir and mountain hemlock the evening light was golden and the sky was clear I couldn't see anything dead in the clearing or at the treeline. I walked the perimeter. Nothing. The smell was gone.
I went back inside and finished my log. The smell came back the next evening. Same time, same intensity, same duration. About ten seconds of thick, sweet rot, then nothing. This time I was already outside, sitting on the bench by the door eating dinner. I stood up and tried to track it, walking into the wind, but it vanished before I could locate a source. Third evening, same thing.
I started to think there was a carcass somewhere nearby that I couldn't find, maybe in a ravine below the ridge where I couldn't see it. I planned to hike down and look for it the next morning. I didn't have to. On the fourth evening, the smell came and didn't leave. It intensified.
It went from noticeable to overpowering in the space of about a minute until my eyes were watering and I was breathing through my sleeve. And it changed. The sweet rot was still there but there was something under it now. Something sharp and chemical, like burnt hair or scorched plastic.
Two smells layered on top of each other, neither one natural by itself, and together forming something that triggered a physical response I wasn't expecting. I was afraid. I hadn't been afraid. Not of the smell. Not of the isolation. Not of anything. I'd been comfortable and content for ten weeks.
But in that moment, standing on the bench outside the relay station, at 8.15 in the evening, with that smell washing over me...
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Chapter 4: What strange events occurred during Jesse's time in the forest?
I was afraid the way you're afraid when you round a corner and almost step on a rattlesnake. Instant. Chemical. My hands were shaking before my conscious mind had decided there was anything to be afraid of. I went inside. I closed the door. I closed the windows. The smell faded to a faint trace that seeped through the gaps in the door frame. I sat at the console and tried to think.
The rational part of my brain said dead animal, decomposition gases, unusual wind pattern. The other part of my brain, the older part, said something else. The older part said leave. I didn't leave. I had a job to do and a contract to honor. and I wasn't going to drive 35 miles to town because of a bad smell. I told myself that. I believed it. I went to bed. The sound started three nights later.
I woke up around 2 in the morning. The station was dark. No moon that night. Overcast. The kind of Olympic Peninsula darkness that has actual weight to it. I couldn't see the far wall of the room. Something was walking on the roof. The metal roof was corrugated steel on wooden joists. Every sound on it was amplified. Rain sounded like static.
Pine cones falling from overhanging branches sounded like gunshots.
Chapter 5: What happened when Jesse encountered the elk carcass?
What I was hearing was neither of those things. it was the slow measured impact of weight being placed and lifted placed and lifted moving from one end of the roof to the other step step step heavy not a raccoon not a marten not a bird something with significant mass walking across the roof of my station I lay in the cot and listened. The steps went from the south end to the north end.
Then they stopped. Silence for about 30 seconds. Then they came back, north to south. Then they stopped again. Then something leaned over the edge of the roof and looked in the window. I know that's what happened because I heard the creak of the roof edge taking weight, and then the window on the north wall went dark. Not completely dark.
The window was already dark because the night was overcast. But it got darker, as if something large was blocking the faint ambient light that had been coming through. I was lying on my side facing that window. I couldn't see details. I could only see that the window, which had been a slightly lighter rectangle in the dark wall, was now solid black. Something was in front of it.
Something was pressed against it or hovering just outside it. i didn't move i'm not sure i could have moved even if i'd wanted to my body had locked every muscle rigid every joint frozen the fear i'd felt with the smell was nothing compared to this This was the kind of fear that shut systems down.
My breathing went shallow and my vision narrowed and my thoughts reduced to a single repeating loop. Don't move, don't move, don't move. The windows stayed dark for a long time. Minutes. I couldn't count them because my sense of time had collapsed. It could have been two minutes or twenty. I lay there and stared at the blackened window and waited. Then the darkness pulled back.
The window returned to its normal shade of dark grey. I heard the roof edge creak as the weight lifted. Then footsteps on the roof, moving south. Then the sound of something heavy dropping to the ground outside the south wall. Then silence. I didn't get up. I didn't check the window.
I lay on the cot until the grey dawn light came through and the birds started up and the forest sounded alive again. When I went outside, I looked at the ground below the south wall. The soil there was thin and rocky, mostly gravel and exposed root. Not good for tracks.
But the moss on the wall, the thick green carpet of moss that covered the lower two feet of the concrete on the shaded side, had been scraped.
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Chapter 6: What did Jesse discover about the entity stalking him?
Four vertical lines, evenly spaced, running from about six feet high down to the ground. as if something had dragged its fingers down the wall while dropping from the roof i touched one of the lines the moss was shredded not scraped whatever had made the marks had claws or nails or something rigid and sharp enough to tear through moss and score the concrete underneath
I radioed the ranger station. I talked to a woman named Linda who handled communications for the Kino district. I told her I'd had an animal on the roof and asked if there were reports of bears in the area. She checked and said the nearest bear activity report was 14 miles south and three weeks old. She asked if I wanted someone to come up. I said no. She said to call back if it happened again.
I spent that day convincing myself it was a bear. Black bears climb. They're curious. They investigate structures. A bear on the roof of a relay station wasn't common, but it wasn't impossible. The claw marks on the wall supported this theory. The smell could have been a carcass the bear was feeding on. Everything fit if you wanted it to fit. I wanted it to fit. Five days passed without incident.
No smell, no sounds, no roof visitors. I started to relax. I went back to my routine, check repeaters, log readings, read, hike, eat, sleep. The weather turned and the rain came back, steady and gentle, the kind of west side rain that lasts for days without ever getting heavy. The forest went back to its normal, dripping, breathing state. Then I found the elk.
I was hiking a game trail about a mile south of the station, a route I'd walked many times. The trail followed the ridgeline through a stand of old-growth silver fir, trees that were three and four feet in diameter with bark-like cracked gray plates. The understory was huckleberry and salal and sword fern. It was a beautiful stretch of forest.
The elk was about thirty feet off the trail, in a small clearing between two firs. It was a cow elk, full-grown, probably six or seven hundred pounds. It was dead. It was lying on its side with its legs extended, as if it had been running and fallen mid-stride. The eyes were open and clouded. The tongue was out. There was no visible cause of death.
No wounds, no blood, no signs of a predator attack. The hide was intact, the belly was intact, nothing had fed on it. But the head was wrong. The head was turned completely around, not partially, not at an angle.
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Chapter 7: How did the story of the second guest relate to the first?
The cow elk's head was rotated 180 degrees on its neck. so that the chin pointed straight up and the top of the skull pressed against the ground. The neck wasn't broken in the way a neck breaks when it's twisted by force. There was no distortion, no bulging, no visible damage to the skin or muscle.
The head had been rotated smoothly, as if the spine had been unscrewed and turned like a lid on a jar. I stood there for a long time looking at it. I could feel my heartbeat in my throat. The smell hit me then. The same sweet rot from before, but fresher, more intense. Coming from the elk. But the elk didn't look decomposed. It looked like it had died that morning.
The smell was wrong for the state of the body. It was the smell of something much further gone, something that had been dead for weeks, coming from a carcass that couldn't have been more than hours old. I went back to the station. I didn't run, but I walked fast, and I didn't stop. I radioed Linda again. I told her I'd found a dead elk and described the condition.
She was quiet for a moment, then asked me to repeat the part about the head. I repeated it. She said she'd send someone up to take a look but it might be a few days because they were short-staffed. She asked me if I was okay. I said yes. I wasn't. That night I closed the windows and bolted the door and left the propane lantern burning on the table. I didn't want to be in the dark.
I lay on the cot with Louis L'Amour novel open on my chest and I listened to the rain and I tried to read and I couldn't focus on a single sentence. The footsteps came back around midnight. Not on the roof this time. On the ground. Circling the station. Slow, heavy steps, muffled by the wet ground but still audible through the concrete walls. Around and around. I counted twelve complete circuits.
On the thirteenth circuit, the footsteps stopped at the door. The door was solid. Steel frame, steel skin over a wood core, with a deadbolt that I'd thrown from the inside. It was the most secure part of the building. I'd told myself that many times. Something pressed against the door.
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Chapter 8: What final revelations did Jesse and Brooke experience about the Skinwalker?
I could hear the steel flex. not much a fraction of an inch but i heard it creak under pressure the way a car door creaks when you lean against it then a voice jessie you need to come out there's a problem with the repeater my voice My exact voice. Speaking words I'd said a hundred times on the radio when reporting equipment issues. The cadence. The pacing.
The slight flattening of vowels that I'd picked up from living in the Pacific Northwest. Perfect reproduction, except for one thing. The voice was coming from a height of about eight feet. I knew this because the door was 6 feet 8 inches tall and the voice was coming from above the top of the frame.
Whatever was speaking was standing at my door with its mouth at a height that no person could reach without standing on something. And I hadn't heard anything being dragged or placed. I didn't respond. Jesse, I need you out here. The same voice. My voice. But flatter now. The emotional content draining out of it. The way color drains out of a photograph left in the sun.
The words were right, but the life behind them was fading. Jesse. Open. Two words. Stripped down. Like it was losing interest in the performance. The pressure on the door increased. I heard the deadbolt grind in its housing. The steel creaked louder. I was sitting on the cot with my back against the far wall, as far from the door as the room allowed, which was about eighteen feet.
I had a hatchet in my right hand. The hatchet was for splitting kindling. It had a four-inch blade. It was nothing. The pressure stopped. Silence. Then the scraping started on the south wall. The same wall where I'd found the claw marks in the moss. But this time, I could hear it happening in real time.
something was dragging its hand down the concrete slow controlled the sound of hard material on hard material like a knife being drawn across a whetstone it went from high to low then it stopped then it started again from high to low over and over five times six times seven i realized it was reaching up and dragging its hand down the wall repeatedly the way a person drags their fingers along a fence as they walk past it
Casual. Almost playful. Then it stopped. Then the smell came through the walls. I've said the smell was sweet rot and burnt chemicals. That's what it was the other times. This time it was different. This time it was worse. This time the smell had a third component. Something I can only describe as biological wrongness. The smell of a living thing that isn't put together right.
The smell of organs in the wrong places, of fluids mixing that aren't supposed to mix. It was the smell of a body that was functional, but not correct. I gagged. I pulled my shirt over my face. My eyes streamed. The smell lasted about ten minutes. Then it faded. The footsteps moved away from the station, heading north along the ridge. I tracked the sound until I couldn't hear it anymore.
I didn't wait for morning. At 4.15, with the sky still black and the rain coming down steady, I put on my boots and my rain jacket and I opened the door. I had the hatchet in my belt and a headlamp on my forehead, and I walked to the storage shed where I kept the truck. I got in the truck and I drove. The road down was 12 miles of switchbacks and gravel in the dark and the rain.
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