From the unexplained to the mundane, join us on our journey to the French.
Hello and welcome to Journey to the French, where Halloween is not a single day of the year, but a four day activity on Fridays leading up.
We are your, I don't know, Halloweeny hosts. That sounds about right. I don't know, we're recording in September. It's not quite the spirits yet.
I'm in the spirit, I have to say.
There we go. Okay. But she is not doing the intro.
We are your host Taylor and Chelsea here today, bringing you into the Halloween festivities, spirits and mood that encapsulates this entire month.
We've done a lot of episodes in the past around Halloween. We have a playlist actually that we'll be adding to for just our Halloween episodes and Halloween music.
And this is going to be a lot in the spirit of like once a year, we seem to do kind of a folklore creature feature.
Or this week, we are going to be looking at the bogeyman or the bogeyman from Times Immemorial of English lore to Scare and Frighten the Children.
We're going to go through the history of it, how it takes shape around the world.
And we're going to finish off with some sort of sightings that I think can fall into this category of bogeyman.
I love sighting. Okay, I'm sighting.
Yeah. And without much more, let's just get into this.
Chelsea, when you hear the term bogeyman, and sorry, I'm just going to have to put this here. We're millennials, so we have to put our millennial creds in here.
This is the Simpsons quote.
Mom!
Lisa! What's up?
I know it's absurd, but I dreamed the bogeyman was after me and he's-
Bogeyman! You nailed the window shut! I'll get the gun!
Art, I don't want to alarm you, but there may be a bogeyman or bogeyman in the house.
When you hear the term bogeyman, what does that make you think?
You know, I've been thinking about this because I knew this is what you're doing.
And bogeyman, I don't know what I think of with the bogeyman. It's just like-
It's amorphous, correct? It doesn't have necessarily a shape associated with it.
It's not a thing.
It's more a term than anything else.
Yeah, bogeyman, it's not like a guy. It's not like a cryptid. It's just like-
Amorphous.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it's a catch-all scary thing.
Okay, good. I wasn't wrong in thinking that.
Oh, yeah, that's more or less what it is. And it falls into actually like a category of folklore that I'm going to get into.
But let's look at the actual history of it. I always said bogeyman, and when you actually see it written down as B-O-G-E-Y-M-A-N.
So it's like bogeyman, but I always said bogeyman.
Well, there's actually like culturally within English, you'll see it referred to as bogeyman, bogeyman, or bogeyman.
Like, just kind of-
Oh.
That's where you're from. There's more to it than that, too.
But the word actually comes from Middle English. It's bogey, or bogey, B-U-G-G-E, or B-O-G-G-E, which means for Middle English, frightening specter.
There's also in Welsh the term B-W-G, which means goblin.
So bogeyman. I've also heard it described as the bogeyman, because the person who would basically come around during the Black Plague and pick up corpses would be the bogeyman.
Okay.
But that was more anecdotal than actually etymologically correct in my mind.
The term itself originates at the latest, the 15th century, and there's definitely stories that are older, but they're oral stories, so we don't really know how far back they go.
The reason they use bogey or bogey, because it means terror or like scarecrows, and it's also for people who play D&D, the term bugbear shares the exact same root of bogey being the terrible bear is basically where it comes from.
They are originally also meaning an imaginary demon in the form of a bear that eats small children.
Oh, okay.
Bear actually has a very different root than we fully understand.
Yeah, I was just thinking like, bear that looks like a human.
So the descriptions that you'll get on a lot of these are very greatly.
So descriptions of the bogeyman vary across cultures, yet there are often commonalities between them.
These may include having claws or talons or sharp teeth.
The nature of the creature also varies from culture to culture.
Some are described as having certain animal features such as horns, hooves, and bug-like appearances.
Personality traits of bogeymen most easily divide the species into three categories.
The kind that punish misbehaving children, the kind that is more prone to violence, and the kind that protects the innocent.
They all operate in the same way in that they all exist to teach young children lessons,
and the large majority of bogeymen just function to frighten children with potential punishment, not actually to inflict much damage.
The more vicious bogeymen are said to steal the children at night and even eat them or to commit some other violence.
And the last category is those who protect people and only punish those guilty regardless of age.
There's a lot more like protecting people than I would have thought would be in there.
This is because this is a category of folklore out there that's not meant to just encapsulate bogeymen.
It's meant to like be a catch-all for a certain thing.
And this is more or less, I have kind of characteristics of this group that I'm just about at, but we'll get too soon.
And this myth has worldwide prevalence.
Like pretty much every culture has something that is bogeyman-like.
Okay, I can see it.
It's difficult to find the original source of the legends because of this, because it clearly has to go back pretty darn far.
Bogeymen were first referenced as hobgoblins in the 16th century,
and many believe that they were made to torment humans while some only played simple pranks and others were more foul in nature.
So when I was looking at this, there's basically five characteristics of things that fall into a bogeyman archetype.
So first, and this is my favorite, all of these seem to come out of more or less lazy parenting tactics.
At some point, the kid just asks why too much, so you just have to come up with something that scares them.
Why? Because the bogeyman, that's why.
Yeah.
And the biggest part is these monsters are meant to influence a child's behavior.
One common theme among the different versions of the bogeyman is the emphasis on child behavior.
The bogeyman is often used as a cautionary figure to encourage children to behave or obey their parents and avoid misbehaving or being disobedient.
I find it super interesting because they're going to fall into like, hatch-all creatures that are just like, don't misbehave at all.
And then there's some that are super specific about things that they want you to do or not, which we'll get into.
Okay.
The second commonality, fear and frightening appearance.
The bogeyman is typically depicted as frightening and menacing figure,
so they all seem to have certain frightening characteristics about them that are meant to invoke fear in children
and serve as deterrents for engaging in undesirable behavior.
Not necessarily implicit or stated about them though, because like we said, bogeymen, you don't really know what they look like,
but you do know that you're supposed to be scared of them.
So then your mind like, makes up like, what's the scare of you?
Generally, they'll be a nighttime threat.
This is a common theme in association with this, as many versions of bogeymen are said to come out at night,
lurking in the shadows to target children whom misbehave or disobey their parents.
Fourth characteristic that it shares, it's parental authority.
The bogeyman's stories often reinforce the authority of parents or older figures in the child's life.
Parents invoke the bogeyman as a means to control and discipline their children,
emphasizing the consequences of misbehavior and the importance of listening to parental instruction.
And fifth, these things usually have a cultural significance.
The bogeyman reflects the cultural values, beliefs, and fears of a particular society or community.
The specific characteristics, appearance, and actions of the bogeyman can be influenced by cultural traditions,
historical events, and local folklore.
These common themes highlight the universal need for parents and societies to instill discipline, obedience, and caution to children.
And again, it's so parents can be a little lazier with explanations for things.
You have to tie your shoes, because if you don't, the bogeyman will get you when you're trying to run away and trip.
Got a lovely, easy parent.
Yeah, it serves as a tool to convey these messages and shape children's behavior.
Despite the variations in appearance and folklore, the underlying purpose of the bogeyman remains consistent across different cultures.
And there are some, especially from Western culture, that fall into kind of bigger groups, like the bogeyman, but like more distinct for their region.
First one is the sac man, which is a variant in Latin America, common in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay, and Brazil,
as well as both Portugal and Spain.
He very easily referred to as el hombre del costo, or el hombre de la bolsa, el hombre del saco, or in Portuguese, o homem do saco.
All of them meaning the sac man or the bag man.
Yep.
There is el coco, and it's a monster common to many Spanish-seeking countries.
The cucafera monster is equivalent to certain parts of Catalonia.
What, when is this?
Cucafera, or el coco, which I really hope they don't make a movie, like a scary movie called El Coco,
in the future, because man, is Paramount going to get that confused with their movie Coco.
In Spain, parents will sing lullabies or tell rhymes to children, warning them that if they do not sleep, el coco will come to get them.
And the rhyme originates in the 17th century and has evolved over the years, but still retains the original meaning.
Coconuts received that name because the hairy brown face created by the coconut shell.
Shells three indentations reminded the Portuguese sailor of el coco.
Latin America also has el coco, although its folklore is usually quite different, commonly mixed with native beliefs,
and because of cultural context, sometimes more related to the bogeyman of the United States.
However, the term el coco is also used in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries such as Bolivia, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, and Venezuela.
Although there is more usually called el coco as in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Uruguay, Padema, and Argentina.
Among Mexican Americans, el cookie, I think, I can't quite pronounce that, is portrayed as an evil monster that hides under children's bed at night
in key depths or eats the children that do not obey his or her parents or go to sleep when it's time to do so.
However, the Spanish American bogeyman does not resemble the shapeless or hairy monster of Spain.
Social Sciences Professor Manuel Medrano, this popular legend describes el cookie as a small humanoid with glowing red eyes that hides in closets or under the bed.
God, they took that a little far.
There is also a cuka in Brazilian folklore, a similar character called cuka is depicted as a female humanoid alligator or an old lady with a sack.
There is a famous lullaby parent sing to their children that the cuka will come to get them and make a soup or soap out of them if they do not sleep.
Which you know, puts kids right to sleep.
Yeah, oh yeah.
There is the babau, which is central and eastern Mediterranean areas, children who misbehave are threatened with a creature called the babau or baobao or baby or boo boo, something along those lines.
In Italy, the babau is also called la umoniro or black man, which kind of gives me hints of black Peter there.
Yep.
And in Italy, he is portrayed as a tall man wearing a heavy black coat with black hood or hat, which hides his face.
Sometimes parents will knock loudly under the table, pretending that someone is knocking at the door and say something.
Like here comes the black man.
He must know that there's a child here who doesn't want to drink his soup.
Oh no.
It is also featured in widespread nursery rhymes in Italy.
One of them in English called lullaby lullaby.
Oh, who do I give this child to?
I will give him to the boogeyman who's going to keep him for a whole year.
Luomo Niro is not supposed to eat or harm children, but instead takes them away to a mysterious and frightening place.
And then returns them after a year.
Yes, because you know that's just good parenting right there.
Of course.
There's the butzmann in German folklore, which there's dozens of versions of this, because you know like German has so many of its little subcultures there and different sub-German languages.
Yeah.
They generally have the various appearance of a no man animal monster, ghost or devil.
They're sometimes said to appear at very specific places.
These figures are called many different names.
They fall under the category of butzmann, which can be gnome-like or other demonic or ghostly appearance.
Other examples include the boo-man and the der schwarzmann, the black man.
A lot of them are black men, an inhuman creature who chides in the dark corners under the bed or in the closet and it carries away children.
The figure is part of the children's game, who is afraid of the boogeyman.
Okay.
Do you think that the blackness is a part of maybe like shadow people?
I think it has to more so, Jude, just because like one of the major characteristics of all of these is it's night.
So you know, something's scarier at night when it's dark.
Yeah.
Okay.
These things are all over the world.
I just wanted to grab a few from around.
Some of them get into more specific details and some are just-
More specific.
I feel like those were specific.
And it's so weird that like you said at the beginning, ours is so general for like just the spooky thing.
These ones are really specific.
Yeah.
And like even more specific here, like the Inuit culture has a shapeshifter called the Igerac,
which is said to kidnap children, hide them away and abandon them.
If the children can convince the Igerac to let them go, they can use a nook-shook to find their way home.
And when they in Inuit mythology, there is also the Calipeluit, which I'm probably not pronouncing correctly.
We've talked about the Calipeluit.
Yes.
And this one has a very specific purpose.
It's a human-like creature with long fingernails, green skin and long hair that live in the sea.
They carry babies and children away in their parkas.
If children disobey their parents and wander off alone close to water,
the Calipeluit adopt the children and bring them to live with them underwater.
You'll find a lot of them are just water-based because people don't want children playing around water unattended.
Yeah.
So it's the same idea of like, how else do we convince children not to go them?
They are not rational.
We must be equally as irrational.
Yes, apparently just the potentiality of drowning just is lost on children,
but water-based monsters are not.
Yes.
For their mortality is not fully understood at that point.
We must terrify them instead.
The most specific one I could find actually comes from French Canada, so Quebec.
It is called Bonhomme Sept Heures.
I probably said that horribly, but in English it means the seven o'clock man.
Children are cautioned to go to bed by 7 p.m. or else the seven o'clock man will take them.
Is that bedtime in French Canada?
I guess.
One man that we've seen before technically falls in this category as a bogeyman is Spring-Heeled Jack in parts of English.
Really?
I guess everyone would be a bogeyman though that we've covered, including Bill Moore.
Bill Moore may in fact be a bogeyman.
I don't know who that was.
Yes.
That was just a generic joke with two generic names attached.
There's also another one in Britain called Jenny Green Teeth who will drag you into ponds and bogs.
Jenny Green Teeth.
That sounds like something a bully would say.
In Haiti there is the Mets-Minoui, the master of midnight, and it is depicted as a skinny, extremely tall man who walks around late at night and eats those on the street.
The story is told to children to deter them from going out late.
I believe this one showed up in a Christmas episode and I actually do think that technically Krampus would fall into this category too.
Yeah, it all would.
It all would fall under.
But in Iceland, Grylla, a female troll who is said to take and eat misbehaving children on Christmas Eve, is more or less their bogeyman.
Despite supposedly having been dead for some time, she is also the mother of the Yule lads that we've talked about in an episode.
That's weird.
Okay.
In Indonesia, there is the Wewe Gombele and it is a benevolent ghost which takes away children mistreated by their parents and she keeps the children in her nest atop a palm tree and takes care of the children until the parents decide to amend their ways.
If they truly want their children back, Wewe Gombele will return them.
That's a nice one and it seems to completely contradict why the bogeyman exists.
But bogeyman will get you and then the bogeyman comes and rescues the kids.
They're like, you stop talking about the bogeyman and then I'll give your kids back.
In Iraq, there is the Salua, a half witch, half demon ghoul that is used by parents to scare naughty children.
And she is briefly mentioned in the original 1001 Nights and is known in some other Persian Gulf countries as well.
In Sicily, there is the Marabeka.
It is a malevolent water monster from mythology that is said to reside in the wells and reservoirs and to come up and drag children that play too close to the water.
In Nepal, there is a popular bogeyman like figure called the Haugujie and among the noir people the Gurumapa.
And it is a mythical ape-like creature who is said to enjoy devouring children.
An incetral catmandu at Itzimbahal in front of the Badrukali Temple is a plaque associated with the Gurumapa.
Something that's come up before in Russia is the Baba Yaga, which is basically a catch-all witch who acts as a deterrent.
In Saudi Arabia, there is the Abu Shalalah and it is a bogeyman-like creature said by parents to come to eat children who are disobedient by not going to sleep on time or not completing their homework.
What was the name of that again?
It is really hard to say Abu Shalalah.
They use that one Abu Shalalah.
This one's pretty terrifying.
In Serbia, they have the Bok and it is an animal-like mythic creature in Serbian folklore.
Bok is described as hiding in dark places, holes or abandoned houses waiting to grab, carry away and devour its victims and it can be scared away by light and noise.
In South Africa, the Tokoloshe is a dwarfish creature, Shtoza and Zulu mythology said to be summoned by Sangomas, a traditional healer of the region.
It wanders around causing mischief and frightening children.
It is also described to have a small muscular hairy witch familiar with an unusually large penis which visits women in their dreams and sexually assaults them.
In South Korea, there is the Netbeg grandfather and it is an old imaginary man employed by adults to frighten children into obedience and it is said that he kidnapped spoiled misbehaving children to take them away to the mountains where they will never be seen again.
In Switzerland, they have the Bulma or Bugh and it has an important role in springtime traditions and the figure is a symbol of winter and death in the annual Seshah Slaten.
I probably absolutely butchered that ceremony in Zurich.
A figure of the Bugh is Burt so that's one of those like burning festivals that they have.
In Syria, I love this one, the Bogeyman.
Parents warned at bedtime to go to sleep or King Richard the Lionheart will get them.
This is an image of an English King Richard the first. This is due to things that he did during the third crusade.
Yeah, I would assume so.
And the last one I have on this category is in Vietnam, the Ong Bhabi is a creature often used by adults to scare children if they disobey.
It is described as having nine straps and twelve eyes.
Straps?
Yeah, that really confused me.
I might have to look more into that one at some point, but yeah, it's something that is prevalent like all over the world with different categories and different ways of describing and keeping children in check.
And so more specific than we get here.
Yeah, but we can't have a Halloween episode where we're talking about a folklore like creature without getting into sightings.
And although we don't quite have a great or agreed upon description of what the Bogeyman looks like,
this creature in my mind is more or less what people could accept as a Bogeyman.
If you like if I saw the Bogeyman, I would know it.
You would just know.
That was the Bogeyman.
This cryptid or sighted creature is called the Crawler. It also generally goes by the name the Rake.
Okay.
Chelsea, have you heard of either of these?
I've heard of crawlers.
Okay, so there is an entire subreddit devoted just to this creature. It's called Crawler Sightings.
It has a brief description of what people say it looks like. It has pale skin, long legs, and a tall, thin body.
And they're generally around eight feet tall when standing.
Okay.
There are stories of this throughout America and has inspired many cultural phenomenon such as Wendigo's, the Rake and Slenderman.
Yes, that's what I'm thinking of. It sounds like Slenderman.
So we're just going to go through a few sightings of this and let's suspend our disbelief for some time and just hear some of these stories.
This was posted because Reddit doesn't tell you the specific day.
This was posted at the beginning of September 2023 by a user by the name of MoopiCats.
Title.
What could be at the trailer park my mom manages?
So my mom is a property manager of a local trailer park.
The maintenance man and his assistant were doing a scope of the park at around 1.30 a.m.
when they saw a strange thing on the roof of a trailer.
Originally, they thought it was a mountain line until it stood up on two legs.
The creature was paper white, his arms hung below his knees, and it was able to jump from trailer top to trailer top.
But the weirdest thing it was doing was calling the names of the tenants inside of the trailers.
They continued following it until it jumped over a tall fence and was off in the night.
My mom would have thought that they were just messing with her if it wasn't for the fact that four tenants called my mom the next morning to report something jumping on their roof.
I've considered it being the rake or a flesh pedestrian, but there are problems with it being either one of those. Please help.
And if it helps, this is in Montana.
So the rake is the same thing as a crawler?
More or less.
Okay.
There are some different descriptions because I've also heard the Fresno monster described as a rake, which would be a significantly different creature than what we're talking about here.
Yeah, it would be.
Next post.
It was posted in likely early August by a user deleted at this point.
And the post is called was told to post this year.
Wife and I just saw a tall weight creature.
We worked in Honowalt, Tennessee, and we're coming home from work driving up a road called Natchez Trace.
A few hours ago, 1.30ish a.m.
Whatever it was, it was tall and fast as hell.
I've never seen anything move as fast.
It jumped completely over the road and the weirdest part was it stopped and we could see it looking at us from the tree line.
It had almost human looking eyes, but bigger.
It was standing and we could see its eyes, but it was definitely trying to stay out of sight.
It didn't really look like what I could imagine a big foot would look like.
Maybe more slender, but it moved too quickly to get an accurate description, of course.
Seems to be how it goes with strange sightings.
It's extra strange because when I was a kid, my grandparents and I witnessed a white creature messing with our chicken coop.
It was also tall and fast.
Now we're sitting at home freaked the fuck out.
Anybody ever seen anything like that?
Ugh, that gives me the creeps.
Next posted, this will be near January by user nail picker suenite, name of the post creeper sighting in Arca-Saw's Wachita's.
Last summer, my boyfriend and I were camping in the Wachita Forest off the Winona scenic route.
We drove through a gorgeous spillway to a creek site where we had set out our camp and were laying in the hammock for the night.
Next thing I know, our dog is growling.
The deep growl I've never heard her make so it caught my attention.
I look in the direction that she's growling in and I see this weird humanoid.
It's a figure just casually walking in the woods around 10 to 20 feet away from us.
It's light gray, maybe white color, 7-ish feet tall, very skinny and had an abnormally large head.
Our dog barks and catches its attention.
It stops for a good 20 seconds and looks at us, then carries on its way.
Needless to say, we immediately packed everything up.
We haven't taken anything recreational that night, though I sort of wish we had now.
I don't know what I saw, but it scared the shit out of me and I'm so curious if we were the only ones to have ever seen this anything like that out there.
I always love Reddit because they go and post it there without like maybe scrolling a little bit through all the other comments and people seeing things exactly like this.
Yeah, there's two things that you'll always get is people who are very like not aware of everything else going on in the subreddit.
And then people with just like very credible things to write with the worst usernames.
Oh yeah, okay, these are really creepy.
Yeah, next one here from the beginning of August, posted by Lavender Latte Oatmeal.
This is titled A Call From My Sister. This one is super creepy.
Oh no.
My older sister is a through hiker and goes backpacking often.
We grew up in Appalachia in a very remote area.
Growing up poor, we spent a lot of time camping and now that we're older, she lives closer to home and regularly goes camping with my parents.
We've had our fair share of barren wildcat encounters, but nothing like this has ever happened before.
Today, I called out of work with a stomach bug.
I woke up from a nap and my sister texted me asking if she could give me a call.
I lived about five hours away, so I immediately said yes, fearing it was an emergency.
When I answered, I could hear her footsteps very fast and her hurried breath in the phone.
She said that she was in a ridge taking photos of a cave system she found near a large rock formation.
When she made it to a clearing, she heard a man call her name.
It echoed through the woods. It was then that she reached out to me.
While I was talking to her, I could hear my dad's voice in the background.
She said that she was still an hour from her camp and when she said she was alone, I felt the iciest feeling down my neck.
I asked her what the man's voice sounded like.
She paused and said it sounded like several voices at the same time, but the loudest sounded like dad.
I stayed with her on the phone all the while hearing something that was trying to sound like my dad.
He's a lifetime smoker and very tall, so he has a low booming voice that I have always found comforting up until now.
When she got to the campsite, I told her that I was hearing it the entire time and thought he was there with her.
She laughed and thought I was trying to tease her, but once she believed me, we were both rightfully spooked after that.
My dad is very much alive and well. I posted this to another subreddit and was told to go here.
How she can protect herself while she's alone in her tent tonight.
I told her to sleep in her car. It's the end of that one.
That's super creepy and she didn't actually have a sighting?
No, but that makes it even more boogie man like, does it not?
Yes, but that is something that we covered associated with Bigfoot.
Paranormal Bigfoot, yeah.
Next one here, posted by Hatori Hanzo-Steel at the beginning of September.
Titled, looked like a person.
Hello all, upon discovering the sub, I am reminded of an encounter I had in April of this year at John Bryant State Park in Yellow Springs, Ohio, at the South Gorge Bridge.
It's a relatively new addition to the park.
One day in April, my boyfriend and I were walking down this trail towards the bridge.
About halfway down, I see a woman, white woman Bob Cut.
She was wearing a yellow sweater and a black vest. She was crawling out of the water and up towards the bridge.
She full was on all fours and came up and out and crossed the bridge.
She was not wet.
That's easy.
By the time we got to the bridge, she had already crossed and down the trail.
She turned and saw us and I waved, but her face was completely expressionless.
Once we had crossed the bridge, we got further and further down the trail until I realized that we hadn't run into her at all.
She was not that far ahead of us.
We should have seen her or passed her.
She was just gone.
Upon realizing this, the hair on my body stood on end and the entire sound of the park went completely silent.
I stopped my boyfriend and pointed out the silence.
The wind stopped.
The bugs stopped.
Hell, the sound of the water fucking stopped.
They need to get the fuck out.
This is a trail and park I have piked multiple times in the last three years.
I've spent an entire day at this park hiking the entire thing. I've never had an encounter like this.
We turned around and left.
Once we got back to the bridge, the sounds gradually returned, but I have never ever in my life had an experience quite like that.
I post this here because I am uncertain of what I saw.
The woman was skinny and short and with the history of the region, I just assumed it to be a ghost.
But the silence of the woods and the fact that I saw her crawl out of the water makes me wonder, maybe this is what I saw.
It looked like a person, even though I could tell she was not.
She seemed to be retreating back into the woods.
Just spooked me.
I have several other stories pertaining to strange things happening in the woods in central Ohio,
but I have never seen a creature quite fit the description of a crawler.
That gave me goosebumps. That's so creepy.
I feel like I wouldn't wave.
I feel like I wouldn't wave if I saw that happen.
Well, and especially, she's like, I thought it was just a ghost, so I waved at her.
Yeah, I mean, I can't imagine seeing anything. I mean, I don't even wave at people in the woods.
Next up here, posted by Frisco Soa nine months ago, so that would make it the beginning of 2023.
What did we see last night? It's the name of the post.
My girlfriend and I are renting a cabin in West Virginia.
On Thursday, a nasty ice storm came through and knocked out the power.
It has been out ever since.
The whole county is dark and will be for a while.
The animals are acting bold. Last night, my girlfriend and I walked out to the end of the long driveway to get something out of the car.
Her dog started staring at the edge of the field and went towards it.
He is young, so he gets distracted and does sometimes wander.
He doesn't run away, but you will look up and see him behind the house or something.
Anyways, my girlfriend runs to him and starts to bring him back.
When I spot something at the edge of the field, it's what the dog was looking at.
I see it run across the road and into the field.
It was very low to the ground and pale in color.
It's too fast and dark to make out what it is.
I assume it's a coyote.
So I call out to her, hey, there's something over there. Get back here.
And she walks back to me by the car.
From there, we hold the light and shine it over the direction.
I see its eyes looking at us.
Then I see more sets of eyes, probably about seven in total.
They are shifting up and below the hill in the field,
adding and peeking out to see us.
At this point, we still think it's coyotes.
So I keep the light on them while she gets what she needs from the car.
The thing is, I kept my light and my eyes on them the whole time and they seem to stand up suddenly.
Their eyes shine would rise up as if they stood up on their back legs.
Their eyes went from one to two feet off the ground to easily five to six feet.
I did not mention this to her and I just said coyotes, let's go inside.
Throughout the night, we would have to go outside to put gas in the generator as the power was still off.
She held the flashlight and I filled up the generator.
She is shining the light around, keeping an eye out for anything,
as well as keeping the dog with us.
She spots two sets of eyes about a hundred yards away at the bottom of the hill.
The house sits on.
She said something's down there.
I say, coyotes are deer and she says, whatever it is, it just doubled in size.
And sure enough, I look and these things are rising up and back down like the ones earlier.
We have coyotes here.
Everything about the event screams coyotes to me, but I cannot fathom how they stood up like that.
I saw it across the road and although I did not get a good look at it, it was not a deer.
It was fast and low to the ground.
It did not bound and jump like the deer do.
I've been thinking about this all day like it had to be a coyote, but then how did it get so tall?
It was eye shine, right?
It appears to be eye shine because they didn't really describe any of the shape to it.
Okay, I guess it would be eye shine, which is fucking creepy.
I can't imagine seeing that.
And the last one I have for us today, Chelsea, you're going to like the name of this one.
It's posted 11 months ago, so it seems like October of 2022 by outrageous Silver 622.
Mimic experience possible crawler in the Canadian Rockies.
Last year I moved out west to Alberta to take a government job in the Rocky Mountains, working for a national park.
My job involves working hands on in the park and in some ways is similar to being a bylaw officer.
The reason that this is relevant is because I spend a lot of time with my boots quite literally on the ground,
getting paid to drive back and forth over the continental divide.
I know the park and its surroundings like the back of my hand at this point.
I am highly aware of the animals that the plants that live here and I am comfortable in the back country maybe more than I ever have been
and I know what kind of things one can expect to encounter at least for us and where.
It was a beautiful sunny day in about mid June this year.
Spring had finally begun and the weather was starting to get nice.
It was about 15 degrees Celsius, 60 Fahrenheit.
And I had an unexpected day off of work.
My girlfriend had a half day and so I got the bright idea of picking her up from work and taking her to an area called the Spray Valley.
I wasn't really up for a big hike that day, but I read online that there was some viewpoint along Highway 742
that offered an amazing view of Mount Assiniboine, the most prominent mountain in that part of the Rockies.
And so I thought it might be a good place to drive to and check out for something to do.
The easiest way to get to the valley, if you're already in the mountains, is to take 742 from the town of Canmore following it over White Men's Gap.
And pass that traverses the saddle between two large peaks.
As soon as we get up to the elevation it was pretty apparent that the spring had sprung to a way lesser extent up there.
There was still some lingering snow on the slopes, though the road was clear.
We were shocked to see mountain goats licking the salt from the trail in front of us, which is totally unheard of at such low elevations,
as they're typically high up in the subalpine and alpine areas where there are no roads.
Late snowmelt will do this as there's just no way for them to be in their usual habitat when it's inundated with snowpack.
This becomes important later.
Calling 742 a highway is pretty damn generous.
It's really just a gravel two-lane road snaking deep into the backcountry.
The whole area around the spray valley has a reputation for being less tourist-family-friendly and can be somewhat dangerous to reach depending on the weather up the pass.
It's way more remote than most car-accessible areas adjacent, and often have harsher conditions.
As a result, it sees way fewer people than any of the nearby parks, and that day was no exception, especially given the winter that was hanging on to some extent at altitude.
When we noticed as we got further away and further away from the comparatively busy section of the pass, we weren't really seeing anybody at all.
We drove for an hour and change, and soon we went from passing a couple of cars every 15 or so minutes to literally being the only ones on the road.
The parking lots in the roadside day use areas were completely empty when we arrived at the viewpoint.
I threw it in park at the edge of the road, and we got out of the truck.
What struck me most was just how quiet things were.
Aside from the sound of birds and our own voices, we were well and truly alone.
The valley was long and wide, with the mountains at a reasonable distance from the highway in both directions.
There wasn't much opportunity for an echo.
We had a long shot of visibility in each direction down the highway, and there were clearly nobody around.
Moreover, all the cars we had passed on the way had kicked up a lot of dirt from the gravel on the dry valley floor, which can be quite arid due to the rain shadow of the peaks around.
There wasn't a speck of it to be seen.
No dust clouds, no sound, no approaching cars, and when I say we were alone, I mean that every sense confirmed this fact.
I had downloaded the area on Google Maps before we lost cell signal, and so I opened it up to check what was nearby.
There were a couple of alpine trailheads in either direction, probably unusable with the snow sticking around, and a closed seasonal helipad about 2 kilometers across a canyon.
No wonder the lack of crowds.
We spent 10 to 15 minutes admiring the view and took some pictures.
Walked over to a pond at the edge of the road and sat there for a bit while my girlfriend or Herbalist admired some of the plans,
noting how much smaller and earlier they were in the growing season than the plants that are part of the Rockies.
Before long, we noticed across the pond about 100 feet from the highway there was a small outbuilding.
Even though the spray valley has much less infrastructure than other areas due to the low volume of visitors,
it still does have some facilities like bathrooms and trailheads, and so we assumed that's what it was.
Curious about what trailhead it was, we walked back to the truck and cruised back towards the parking lot.
We had just seen a minute or so before we had parked.
I pulled in, and once again, this lot was empty. No cars, no dust, not even any obviously disturbed gravel from 4x4 tires or anything like that.
I remember this clearly because I was kind of reveling in how alone we were, since I'm used to wrangling tourists and giving out citations.
I got to the truck and suddenly I was hit with a familiar sense of unease.
Other outdoorsmen will know what I mean.
I've spoken to hunters, wardens, guides, and other people who get it too.
What I mean is that usually I just know when there's a bear around.
I don't think it's anything supernatural, my guess is that I can smell some or something and don't realise it consciously.
I had this sense of visualist wash over me, and so I reached into the center console and grabbed my bear spray and attached it to my belt.
I stopped for a minute.
My girlfriend's close by while I listened to see if I could hear anything.
I couldn't.
So we approached the beginning of the trail.
It was a long, even, clear cut, grassy area and it reminded me more of the type of double track trails you'd see in the flatlands than a mountain trailhead.
It was so wide that the park had actually placed a couple of granite slabs in front of it to keep people from taking motor vehicles down it.
We read the map on the sign and we both took a few pictures of our surroundings standing on the slabs.
And suddenly we heard a sharp crack about 20-25 feet away from us, in the forest to our right.
The forest was thick, dense, mossy, and surprisingly damp for a valley that was dry enough for dust clouds to hang in the air for minutes after a vehicle passed by.
There was just about zero visibility between the first few trees.
The crack itself immediately concerned me because it sounded to me like the type of crack you'd get from breaking in half one of the first pieces of wood you'd put on a fresh campfire.
Bigger than kindling, a decent sized branch from the sound.
And so whatever made the noises needed to have some weight to have broken something that large.
I immediately put myself between my girlfriend and the forest and we called out to see if anybody was there.
I heard nothing and so assumed it was an animal.
I started yelling the typical stuff we're taught to yell when a bear is around in the backcountry.
As you're intentionally socialized with the rubber bullets to run when confronted.
I clapped five times in quick succession.
About seven seconds passed and something in the forest 20-25 feet away clapped back twice.
No!
Slowly and deliberately at me.
It's not even mimicking. It's like sarcastic.
Yeah, I have large thick palms. I measured them as I was writing this all down to get an idea of how big my hands actually are.
Spread wide.
If I were about to clap they're eight by five inches and they have a distinctive sound because of the size of whatever it was that clapped at sounded extremely similar.
So something at least my size was physically clapping at us.
Or something was able to mimic the sound I made perfectly.
I mentioned before that due to the width of the valley there wasn't really any room for the type of echo you might get in a narrow gully or up on the pass.
Also, echoes have that natural shimmering reverb that decays over time as the sound waves bounce back at you.
What we heard certainly did not. It was real clapping in real time.
It took about two seconds flat for me to go from standing next to the sign to half dragging half carrying my girl from back to the truck.
We paused with our backs against the vehicle straining to see into the woods and from across the parking lot trying to hear what we could hear.
I don't remember what I yelled but I yelled something to let whatever was standing over there that it wasn't welcome.
And we got into the truck and I peeled out.
My girlfriend was very upset. I was pretty shaken myself and I wasn't really keen on being in the back country anymore.
The whole drive back towards the pass we felt off as if we were being watched and even though it was a warm sunny day the atmosphere was hostile and weird.
We stopped at a picnic area by the spray lakes further up the valley to see if we could make it a pallet cleanser.
But I just couldn't relax and was quite on edge the whole time.
We still talk about it frequently and everybody I've spoken to with serious back country experiences equally puzzled by what I experienced.
A few of the friends I have interested in the paranormal have noted the crawler-like creatures and Sasquatches are both known to mimic people.
There's no sign of another human being within 25 plus kilometers in any given direction from where we were at that day and possibly further.
No noise, no dust, no cars, no bikes, no voices, no footsteps, no reason for anybody to be there so early in the season with the snow still on the slopes.
I can't help but think whatever we disturbed was trying to communicate with us but I'm very glad we didn't stick around to find out what it wanted.
Curious or malevolent as it may have been.
And that's where I'm going to leave this episode off.
That was in the crawler group?
Yeah, there's definitely some interchange because these are not scientific things.
There's definitely interlude between different groups.
You see some of them mimicking from Sasquatch sightings and a few other things as well.
But I just thought those were really good stories that have Boogie Man work because in them.
Especially because some of them have no sighting to go with them which makes it creepier because your imagination can run wild with it.
And that's how we see the Boogie Man but those gave me the creeps and that's all a part of a good Halloween episode.
And with that, I have been Taylor here with Chelsea.
We are Journey to the Fringe.
Thank you all for listening and we'll see you next week.
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