3 Skinwalker Stories That Will Make You Lock Your Doors
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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.
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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the background of the Skinwalker stories shared in this episode?
0:22–2:02
2
What unsettling experiences did Jesse encounter at the relay station?
2:02–4:44
3
How did the smell impact Jesse's perception of his surroundings?
4:44–7:23
4
What strange events occurred during Jesse's time in the forest?
7:23–8:44
5
What happened when Jesse encountered the elk carcass?
8:44–11:26
6
What did Jesse discover about the entity stalking him?
11:26–14:05
7
How did the story of the second guest relate to the first?
14:05–16:23
8
What final revelations did Jesse and Brooke experience about the Skinwalker?
16:23–1:22:43
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Just Creepy: Scary Stories
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2 Hours of Scary Skinwalker Stories | It Wore My Elk's Skin and Waited at the Edge of the Firelight