I've never asked anyone to believe what I'm about to say. I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. I'm only documenting what happened as accurately as I can remember it. I still don't know exactly what I experienced, and I'm still trying to understand it.
January 12, 2023, approximately 3:00 to 5:00 PM
At the time, I was living alone on a mountain in Hoodsport, Washington. I had been clearing a path through the woods to a place where I planned to build an outbuilding. A spring-fed stream runs through that part of the property, and I wanted to redirect some of the water into a low spot to create a small pool in front of it.
While working, I noticed something unusual near the base of a tree I'd previously cut down. There was a hole in the ground, roughly two feet across. Looking into it, I could see what appeared to be a horizontal tunnel disappearing beneath the hillside. I remember thinking it looked like the entrance to a cave, but I didn't pay much attention to it. I dug a shallow ditch and redirected the stream toward the depression about 15 feet away from that opening.
As the water reached the depression, the ground suddenly gave way. A hole opened almost instantly. Water poured into it like a waterfall disappearing underground. A rush of stale, musty air came out, followed by insects flying from inside. Whatever was beneath the ground was much larger than I'd realized. I stood there staring into it.
Something about it immediately made me uneasy. It wasn't that I thought an animal was inside. I didn't hear anything, and I didn't see anything looking back at me. It was simply a feeling I couldn't explain, strong enough that I stopped what I was doing and started filling the opening back in with logs, rocks, and dirt. I didn't want the water disappearing into it anymore.
By the time I finished, it was getting late, so I decided to walk upstream to a place I called my sanctuary. It was one of my favorite places on the property. There were small waterfalls, and I'd been building a natural pool there. Whenever I needed to clear my head, that's where I'd go.
As I stood up from rinsing my hands, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Something black darted between the trees uphill from me. At first, I dismissed it. I figured it could have been almost anything. A trick of my peripheral vision. An animal moving through the brush.
Then I looked forward. I wasn't looking at one thing anymore. Scattered through the trees around me were what I can only describe as translucent humanoid figures. They weren't solid, and they weren't invisible either. The closest comparison I can make is the cloaking effect from the Predator movies, where something bends the light around itself. They had that same shimmering, distorted appearance, except this wasn't a movie. I was standing in the middle of the forest looking at them.
This wasn't the first time I'd seen something like it. The previous winter, while watching a cabin farther down the mountain, I'd seen a similar translucent figure along with a pulsating green orb that I encountered at least four different times. Those encounters had felt calm. That's another story. Whatever I'd experienced then hadn't made me feel threatened. This was different.
I couldn't explain why. Nothing had approached me. Nothing had attacked me. But every instinct I had was telling me something wasn't right. About that time, my dog suddenly became alert. Her ears stood up. Her tail went rigid. Then she took off into the woods, chasing something in the same direction we'd just come from.
My first thought wasn't that she was chasing whatever I was seeing. I assumed she'd picked up the scent of a cougar or a bear. Living out there, that was the logical explanation. I drew my 1911 and watched where she'd disappeared. She ran straight back toward the area where I'd uncovered the cave, and I waited to see if anything would come back out.
Nothing did.
She eventually returned, but the feeling I'd had hadn't gone anywhere. The entire area felt different. It's difficult to explain because there wasn't anything I could point to and say, "That's why." There was no sound, no smell, no obvious danger. It was just an overwhelming sense that I didn't belong there anymore. For the first time since I'd moved onto the property, my sanctuary didn't feel like a sanctuary. I decided it was time to go home.
If you catch yourself wondering why I wasn't completely freaking out about these figures, it's because experiences like this haven't been entirely unfamiliar throughout my life. I hadn't seen anything quite like this except for the previous winter, but the paranormal wasn't new to me. I have multiple stories from this mountain alone. I don't know whether any of them are connected, but explaining all of them here would turn this into a novel.
Shortly before I saw the translucent figures, I had also seen what appeared to be a large woman's head. It was translucent as well, but that's probably another story.
I left my sanctuary and walked back toward the RV. The farther I got from the creek, the more I tried to convince myself there had to be a reasonable explanation for what I'd just seen. I wanted it to be my eyes playing tricks on me. I wanted it to be anything that fit within the way I understood the world. By the time I got home, I still didn't have an answer, but I also wasn't ready to jump to conclusions.
I went inside and settled in for the evening like I normally would. I tried to put everything out of my mind and move on with my night, but I couldn't shake the feeling that had followed me back from the sanctuary. It wasn't panic. It wasn't even fear, exactly. It was simply the feeling that something wasn't right. The kind of feeling you can't explain because nothing around you appears out of place, yet every instinct tells you to pay attention.
Later that evening, I opened the window behind my couch and sat there smoking. It was the only window that wasn't covered. The rest of the RV had already been sealed up for winter, so it was my only view outside.
The first thing I heard was a loud crack from the trees just to the right of that window. It wasn't a small branch. It sounded substantial enough that it immediately caught my attention. I stopped and listened, expecting to hear an animal moving afterward, but everything became quiet again.
A few minutes later, I heard another branch break. Then another. As the night went on, it kept happening. The sounds came every few minutes, sometimes four to six times within ten minutes, and continued for hours. What stood out to me wasn't just that branches were breaking. It was that they were breaking within roughly a fifty-foot radius around my RV.
As the sounds continued, they seemed to be getting closer to the RV. I remember thinking that if whatever was making them was actually moving through the trees, maybe a gunshot would scare it away. I fired a single round into the hillside to the left of the RV, where the branch breaking seemed to be happening at that moment. I listened, expecting the sounds to move away or stop altogether.
They didn't.
If anything changed, I couldn't tell.
Living alone in the mountains, I was used to hearing trees, animals, and all kinds of strange noises. I kept trying to explain it away. Maybe branches were collapsing under their own weight. Maybe deer were moving through the timber. Maybe I was connecting unrelated events because of what had happened earlier that day.
Then I started hearing tapping on the outside of the RV. It sounded like something metallic striking the exterior. The tapping continued on and off throughout the night while branches kept breaking in the woods around me. I sat there listening, trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for either one, but nothing I thought of fit what I was hearing.
I didn't have power at the time. Inside the RV, it was completely dark. None of my flashlights were working, and the only view I had outside was through the open window behind my couch.
I decided to try recording it. I grabbed my phone, but instead of recording, it started glitching. It wouldn't function correctly, then it shut itself off. I remember being angry because the one thing I wanted was a recording of what was happening outside, and suddenly my phone wasn't cooperating.
At the time, I didn't think that meant anything. I didn't assume it was connected to what was happening outside. Looking back, I can't say whether it was a coincidence or not. I only know what happened.
I kept looking through that one open window, expecting to finally see a deer, a bear, or anything that would explain what I was hearing. I never saw anything. The branch breaking continued, the tapping continued, and by morning, I was no closer to understanding either one than I had been when they started.
By the following morning, I was exhausted. I hadn't slept, and I was relieved to see daylight. Everything looked normal again. The trees stood where they'd always stood. The creek was still running. Nothing appeared disturbed. In the light of day, the previous night almost felt ridiculous. It's amazing how quickly your mind can begin explaining away something that seemed impossible only a few hours earlier.
I walked the property to see if I could find what had been making all the noise. Throughout the night, I'd heard branches breaking every few minutes. The first crack had come from the trees just to the right of the window where I'd been smoking.
I found broken branches about two inches thick that were still partially attached to the tree and still covered with green needles. They weren't dead branches or little twigs. When I reached the place where I'd heard the first break, I turned and looked back toward the RV. From there, I could see the exact window where I'd been smoking.
As I stood there, I noticed something else. The tree beside the one with the broken branches had what looked like the face of an angry man formed into it. It appeared to have a scar above its left eye. What caught my attention was that it was facing directly toward the same window with a clear line of sight.
I took several pictures of it. When I went back inside, I created an image of the man's face on my laptop and placed it over the photograph of the tree. When I lined up the two images, the features matched. The face I created was perfectly symmetrical, and it still lined up with what I was seeing in the tree. To me, that didn't resemble ordinary pareidolia. Pareidolia usually depends on vague shapes and suggestion. This seemed much more exact.
Outside that window, I had several barrels stacked together. They blocked most of the lower view from inside the RV, but there was a gap near the top, about a foot high, where I could still see into the woods. Standing next to those broken branches, I realized they lined up almost perfectly with that opening. I went back inside and looked through the gap above the barrels. The broken branches were sitting almost exactly in that line of sight.
I don't know whether any of that meant anything. It could have been a coincidence. I only know it stood out enough that I still remember it.
Over the days that followed, I couldn't shake the feeling that something had changed. I wasn't looking for monsters, and I wasn't trying to convince myself that something extraordinary had happened. I simply no longer experienced that mountain the way I always had before. Every unfamiliar sound caught my attention. Every movement in the woods made me stop and look. Most of the time, there was nothing there, but the feeling that something was different never completely went away.
Eventually, I stopped going outside. It wasn't because of the weather. It was because I genuinely believed there was something outside that I didn't understand. I didn't know what I'd seen. I didn't know whether it posed any danger. I didn't know whether bullets would matter if I encountered it again. I wasn't willing to walk back into those woods until I understood more about what I'd experienced.
I spent nearly three weeks inside the RV trying to find anyone describing what I'd witnessed. I searched every combination of words I could think of until I eventually found videos of people describing translucent figures in the woods that looked remarkably similar to what I'd seen. Many of them compared the appearance to the cloaking effect from the Predator movies. Others referred to them as the "Glimmer Man."
That search eventually led me to discussions surrounding Missing 411. I noticed people repeatedly talking about national forests, cave systems, and unexplained disappearances. That caught my attention because I lived alone on a heavily wooded mountain within the Olympic National Forest, and I had just uncovered what appeared to be some kind of underground cave or tunnel system beneath my property.
Whether any of those claims were true, I had no way of knowing. I only knew that parts of what people were describing sounded disturbingly familiar.
While all of this was happening, I left comments beneath several of those YouTube videos describing what I was experiencing in real time. Those comments are still there today from January 2023. They don't prove what happened, but they do show that I was documenting my experience while it was happening.
Because I wasn't leaving the RV, I eventually had to improvise just to get water. I tied a shoestring to a cup, lowered it out the window, scooped snow from outside, and pulled it back in so my animals and I would have drinking water without stepping outside.
When I finally did step outside again, I saw something that has stayed with me ever since.
There was a circle scratched all the way around the RV. It continued beneath my truck instead of going around it.
There were no tracks anywhere.
From that point on, I started documenting as much as I could. I didn't trust memory alone to preserve the details. Every strange event, every photograph, and every observation became part of the same question I'd been trying to answer since the day the cave collapsed.
The following weeks weren't as active, but strange things continued to happen.
Even after everything had quieted down, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being watched. It became strong enough that I eventually found myself talking out loud into the forest. I wasn't yelling or demanding anything. I was trying to make peace with whatever might have been out there, if anything was out there at all.
One day, I walked back to the sanctuary. Near the water, I noticed a branch shaped like a small tree standing upright in the ground. It had been pushed into the soil deeply enough that it remained standing on its own, almost as though it had been intentionally planted.
That immediately caught my attention because I had recently started planting a garden around the property. My first impression, whether justified or not, was that it felt almost childlike, as though something had seen what I was doing and was imitating it.
I realize how that sounds, and I don't present it as fact. I'm only describing the impression I had at the time.
Before accepting that idea, I tried to find a more ordinary explanation. I looked above the area to see whether a branch could have simply fallen and landed upright. I couldn't find a realistic way that could have happened. There weren't any branches directly overhead, and the location didn't make sense for one to fall there naturally.
I knelt down and pulled the branch out of the ground to see how firmly it was embedded. It took considerably more force than I expected. The soil was rocky and muddy beside the creek. It wasn't the kind of ground where I would expect a branch to bury itself simply by falling.
After examining it, I placed it back exactly where I had found it. I left everything I discovered in place.
As time went on, I started noticing other branches, or pieces of branches, appearing in my garden beds. Individually, none of them proved anything. A branch in a garden isn't extraordinary by itself. What stood out to me was where they appeared. They didn't seem to belong where I found them, and I couldn't come up with a satisfying explanation for how they had gotten there.
I'm not saying some unknown creature placed those branches there. I'm also not saying I can explain them. All I can honestly say is that, at the time, my intuition kept telling me they had been intentionally placed.
I repeatedly tried to come up with ordinary explanations first. I wanted those explanations. I simply couldn't find one that satisfied me.