Skinwalker Horror Stories for a Scary Summer Night
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What personal experience sparked the story about Skinwalkers?
My wife and I have been married 31 years, and in 31 years, I have made exactly one decision that I would give anything to take back. I want to tell you about it while I still remember it right, because I've noticed lately that when I tell it, Carol fills in pieces I've started to lose, and one day there won't be anybody left who was there. This was a handful of summers ago, July. Carol and I had a truck camper, one of those slide-in campers that rides in the bed of a pickup, and we'd had it about four years and we loved it. We're not RV park people. The whole point of the thing for us was getting away from hookups and reservations and neighbors. We'd pick a national forest, find a road, drive it until we liked a spot, and stay there.
We'd done it all over Arizona and New Mexico and never had a problem worse than a flat tire. That July we went up on the Mogollon Rim, east of Payson. If you don't know the Rim, it's this enormous escarpment that runs across Arizona, a 2,000-foot wall where the low desert ends and the high country starts, and on top of it there's pine forest that goes on for miles and miles, and in summer everybody from Phoenix runs up there to get out of the heat.
What events led to the couple's camping trip on the Mogollon Rim?
The popular spots along the Rim Road get crowded, lakes and overlooks, people everywhere. So we did what we always did, which was get away from all that. We took a forest road heading off into the country east and south of the main corridor, and then we took a worse road off of that one, and we drove washboard and rock for a long while until the trees opened into a little park, a meadow, with a good flat spot and no sign anybody had camped there in a year. That was our kind of spot. We set up on a Saturday afternoon planning to stay through the following weekend. We had our dog with us, Tucker, a chocolate lab, nine years old, the best dog I've ever owned. I need you to remember Tucker because this is partly his story.
The first two days were the vacation we'd planned. I want to say that plainly because everything after is going to sound like we should have seen it coming and we couldn't have. Saturday evening, an all-day Sunday, and most of Monday were nothing but good. We sat in our chairs. Carol read her books. I did a little work on my elk calls because I had a tag that fall and I like to practice. We cooked good food. Tucker ran himself stupid in the meadow chasing whatever he could scare up. It was cool at night, sweatshirt weather, after weeks of 110 down in the valley, and we slept with the windows cracked and the screens in. and I remember lying there Sunday night listening to the forest and feeling that there was no luckier man in Arizona.
I want to give you a little more of those first days, partly because they matter to the story, and partly because they're the last completely good days of that part of our life, and I like visiting them. Sunday morning, Carol made pancakes on the camper stove, which was a production in that little galley, and which she did anyway because camp pancakes were a tradition going back to when our kids were small, and we ate them outside with the meadow steaming off its dew, and Tucker sat between our chairs doing his routine where he doesn't beg, he just exists very intensely in your direction. Sunday afternoon I walked the meadow's edge with him and found elk sign everywhere, old rubs, a shed antler half grown over, and I remember being pleased about the unit and thinking about fall.
Monday morning we drove out exploring and found an old cabin foundation and a spring, and Carol picked through the grass around the foundation finding square nails and bits of purple glass, which is her favorite thing in the world to do, and we ate lunch on the tailgate. I'm telling you this so you understand what we were. Two people in their 60s who had done this a hundred times, who knew what we were doing, who were having the exact trip we'd had a hundred times before. Nothing was off. Nothing felt watched. Whatever came later did not announce itself in those first days, and I've gone back through them so many times looking, and there's nothing to find.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What personal experience sparked the story about Skinwalkers?
0:22–1:35
2
What events led to the couple's camping trip on the Mogollon Rim?
1:35–5:02
3
How did the presence of the dead elk raise concerns during the camping trip?
5:02–6:51
4
What unusual occurrences happened after the couple discovered the dead elk?
6:51–8:57
5
How did the couple's dog, Tucker, react to the strange happenings?
8:57–10:52
6
What did the family experience during the reunion that raised alarm?
10:52–13:55
7
What were the events leading up to the encounter with the tall figure?
13:55–16:54
8
How did the family cope with the aftermath of the unsettling events?
16:54–1:41:26
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