Appalachian Horror Stories | Whatever You Hear, Don't Look for It
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Deep in the Appalachian Mountains, there are places that don't show up on any tourist map, places the locals won't talk about, places park employees quietly avoid, and places where the people who go in looking for answers usually come back out with something much worse. In tonight's video, I've got two stories from that part of the world. In the first one, A state wildlife biologist gets assigned to survey a remote hollow where the numbers coming out of the woods have never added up. And when he finally figures out why, he's going to wish he hadn't. And in the second story, a trail worker takes a six-week contract in the most isolated section of a national park. A section the park rotates workers through fast and never explains why.
And by the end of his first month, he's going to understand exactly why nobody ever does that section twice. Both of these men were professionals. Both of them knew those mountains better than almost anyone. And both of them walked away from careers they loved because of what was waiting for them out there. But before we get into it, If you're a fan of scary stories, you're in the right place. Please hit that like button, subscribe, and turn on notifications so you don't miss a story. We post new episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Drop a comment down below and let me know which of tonight's two stories got under your skin the most. And if you'd rather listen on the go or for sleep, follow the Just Creepy Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts.
Alright, let's get into the stories.
For 11 years, I worked as a wildlife biologist for the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, operating out of the Marion Field Office in Smith County. Most of that work would bore you. I aged deer at check stations. I trapped and collared black bears. I sat through public meetings where retired men yelled at me about coyotes. I wrote reports that maybe four people ever read. It was a good job, and I was good at it. And for most of those 11 years, I believed that the woods in my district held nothing I couldn't identify, dart, tag, or explain. I want to be careful about how I tell this, because I know how it sounds. I've spent my whole career being the person on the other side of stories like this one.
Somebody calls the office swearing they saw a mountain lion, and I'm the one who drives out, looks at the tracks, and tells them it was a bobcat and their fear did the rest. I've explained away black panthers, wolves, and one memorable werewolf that turned out to be a mangy coyote with a hairless tail. I know what people see in the woods at night, and I know what their minds do with it. So understand that everything I'm about to describe, I first tried to kill with every explanation I had. I ran it through 11 years of training. The explanations didn't survive. The thing did. This happened in the fall of 2022 in Scott County, Virginia, in a drainage off the Clinch River between Dungannon and Fort Blackmore.
The locals call it Grassy Branch, after the creek that runs through the bottom of it. It's a steep, closed-in hollow, maybe 900 acres of hardwood and rhododendron running back from the river into the flank of the mountain, and almost all of it belongs to one landowner. There's a single gated logging road in, one old clearing about two-thirds of the way up where a homestead used to stand, and past that, nothing. No trails, no leases, nobody hunts it. That last part is what put it on my desk. Chronic wasting disease had been moving through Virginia's deer herd for years by then, and the department was expanding its surveillance zones. If you don't know what chronic wasting disease is, it's a prion disease.
It eats holes in a deer's brain over the course of months. An infected deer loses weight. loses coordination, loses its fear of people, and dies, and there is no cure, and no vaccine and no live test that's practical at scale. The way we tracked it was through numbers. Harvest data, check station samples, roadkill collection, and camera surveys.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:15–10:17
2
What mysterious surveillance anomalies brought a wildlife biologist to Grassy Branch?
10:17–49:41
3
How did camera surveys reveal the unexplained '14 in, 13 out' deer pattern?
49:41–1:06:56
4
What did the repeated background deer photos and corrupted frames actually show?
1:06:56–1:18:47
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Just Creepy: Scary Stories
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