122. Appalachian Trail Horror: Strange Encounters, Feral People, Mysterious Lights, and more
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The Appalachian Mountains stretch like a spine across the eastern United States. From the deep, humid woods of Alabama and Georgia, all the way north to the cold, silent forests at the edge of Maine, and beyond that into the darker wilds of Canada. They're beautiful, verdant, alive.

But they're also old. Parts of these mountains began forming over a billion years ago, and the range as we know it took shape around 260 million years ago. If you were to climb one of its many peaks and stand alone in the quiet wind, you could place your hand on rock that's half a billion years old. Rock that has watched. Rock that has waited.

You might know the line from the old John Denver song, "Life is old there, older than the trees, younger than the mountains." It's more than just a lyric. These mountains were here before trees even existed, before the land crawled with life. And yet today, they teem with it: hazy forests, hidden hollows, and things that whisper just beyond the trail.

Many believe these mountains hold ancient secrets that have been there long before humans. Secrets that we could never understand, but secrets that we occasionally come into contact with. Because cutting through these mountains is the Appalachian Trail, a trail that around 3 million people visit annually, but only a small handful of people finish. You see, the whole trail is almost 3,000 miles long, traveling through 14 states,

It starts at the foot of Springer Mountain in Georgia, and it ends up in the cool, crisp air of Maine. And it acts as an entry point to the mysteries of these mountains.

This is Heart Starts Pounding, and I'm your host, Kaylin Moore. Today, I want to take you with me through parts of the trail and show you some of the secrets of the mountains. We're going to encounter tales of feral people, a creature that's been lurking in the woods for hundreds of years, and some mysterious lights that no one can make any sense of. But we need to be careful where we step. Out here, the forest watches, and sometimes it remembers you.

Before we take our first step, though, I did want to shout out another listener this week.

Kristof, who sent me pictures from a time he went caving in a very haunted section of Owl Mountain in Poland. It made me think a lot of Appalachia, actually, because I talked about this in a bonus episode I did one month, but some people believe that the most haunted parts of Appalachia are actually in the massive tunnel and cave systems below the ground. For centuries, people have heard Taminak,

That is, little creatures that knock and tap on the cave walls, oftentimes before disasters. If you're new to Patreon or Apple subscriptions, or if you're still enjoying your free trial from Binge Week last week, you can check out that episode from October of 2024. All right, let's begin our hike.

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Our journey starts on the part of the trail where the sun shines through the trees and large fields are full of flowers. We're in Michaux State Park in the Pennsylvania section of the trail. It's peaceful here, even though it's a more populated part of the trail. The air feels impossibly fresh. It doesn't make sense that a beautiful place like this would be the scene of abject horror. But that's what happened almost 40 years ago.

On May 12th, 1988, 32-year-old Claudia Brenner headed into the Appalachian wilderness with her girlfriend, 29-year-old Rebecca Wright.

Claudia was excited about this trip. She and Rebecca had enjoyed hiking and camping together ever since they had met and fallen in love three years earlier at Virginia Tech. The Appalachian Trail was sort of the ultimate outdoorsy adventure for them. Their plan was to do a two-day hiking loop in the Pennsylvania section of the trail and camp along the way. The first night, the girls set up a camp close to a shelter.

Now, camping on the trail is facilitated by a network of shelters, which are usually wooden structures with three walls and a slanted, lean-to kind of roof. They don't have many amenities, just a shelf with a logbook and a pen so those passing through can record their stay and connect with other hikers.

Most of these shelters are near a water source and an outhouse, so some hikers choose to set up camp near the shelters and use those facilities, which is what the girls chose to do. It seems like that night was pretty uneventful, but the next morning, Rebecca had gone to the shelter to look for the logbook while Claudia stayed back at their camp, when all of a sudden, she heard someone running towards her out of the woods.

It was Rebecca, and she looked rattled, panicked, and she was checking over her shoulder like someone was following her. Claudia stood up and asked her what was wrong. What happened? Rebecca told her that she was going to use the bathroom near the shelter, but when she opened the door, there was a man in there.

He was unusually tall and shockingly thin, with wild, scraggly hair on his head and his chin. His cheeks were so hollow that it made his lips pucker out like a fish, and he had small, beady eyes deeply set in their sockets. Also, he was completely naked. But as Rebecca registered what was happening and tried to leave immediately, the man approached her with a wicked grin, and he asked her for a cigarette.

She could also tell that he was aroused and it made her wonder if he had been waiting in there for her.

Luckily, she was able to run away. And after that, the women packed up their camp and left, walking swiftly through the forest as it thickened and the trail became more narrow. They were so anxious that they didn't stop again until they needed to check their map about an hour later. By that point, they figured they were far enough away from the shelter that they could relax a little. They focused on getting their bearings and they could hear the thick brush pulsing around them with animal chatter and the low thrum of nature.

But then Claudia heard another sound, an unnatural one. It was the sound of someone stepping on leaves. She whipped around to see a man emerging from the trees, tall, gaunt, with sunken cheeks and wild hair. It was the same man. He had followed them. Only this time he was fully clothed. And not only that, on his right shoulder, there was a leather strap that connected to a .22 caliber rifle.

He approached the women who had nowhere to go. There was no one else around, nothing but miles of trees until the next shelter. So maybe that instinct, not fight, not flight, but freeze set in.

He told them that they seemed lost, likely referring to the map that they were holding, but the women didn't want to make small talk with him. It's not entirely clear how long this interaction lasted, but at some point, Claudia and Rebecca were able to get away from the man and continued on their hike. They walked at an elevated pace until they got to the next shelter, the sense of eyes on their backs the entire time.

They soon found their next camping site by the mid to late afternoon and a small sense of relief washed over them. The area was calm and beautiful. There were tall trees besides a small babbling brook of cool, clear water. No people around, so Rebecca and Claudia could actually enjoy each other's company in private. They spent the afternoon basking in the warm spring sun, sitting by the river in each other's arms and laughing. It was perfect.

They didn't know that just beyond the tree line, a pair of eyes had locked in on them. It was the man. Just then, a gunshot rang out through the meadow.

and Claudia's right arm above her elbow exploded. She looked down to see blood and torn flesh, but her brain couldn't make sense of what she was seeing or what she had heard. Rebecca knew instantly, though, and before she could scream out, he's got a gun, Claudia was hit again. Bullets rang out one after the other, and Rebecca shouted for Claudia to go run behind a tree. By that point, Claudia had been struck multiple times, including on the top of her head,

But by following Rebecca's advice, she was able to duck out of the way of the oncoming bullets. And after what felt like forever, the bullets stopped. And the two women waited a moment before they tried escaping,

Both of them had been hit really badly. By that point, Rebecca couldn't carry herself out of the forest. Claudia tried picking her up, but quickly realized that she wouldn't be able to carry her out of the forest. So she did the only thing she could think of. She made her girlfriend as comfortable as possible, told her she'd be right back, and then ran to go get help.

For four miles, Claudia ran, soaked in blood, through the tangled brush and mountain laurel as it got darker and darker. The whole time, she was worried that the strange man would find her, but the need to get help for Rebecca carried her the entire way. Eventually, she was picked up by two men on Shippensburg Road, and she guided them to where her girlfriend was. But by that time, Rebecca had passed away from her injuries.

Police searched the area looking for a man who fit the description Claudia was able to give them. And eventually he was found hiding out in a Mennonite community in Pennsylvania.

Because the community didn't watch TV or listen to the radio, they had no idea that the man who walked onto their compound was wanted for murder and attempted murder. And I can't imagine what they must have felt as police swarmed their farms and hauled him away. His name was Stephen Roy Carr, and he was a 29-year-old man who lived in a cave along the Appalachian Trail.

Some locals described him as being what they call in the area, a feral person of the Appalachian Mountains. Lore of feral people varies in the region. Some people believe that during the Great Depression, some people couldn't afford to live in society, so they built their own secret societies in the mountains.

and now after generations of living in the wilderness they're less like people and more like animals others believe that feral people are an entirely different species of person ones who have evolved to survive in the caves and forests of appalachia i'm not sure

I'm not sure exactly where that leaves Steven, but he was a man who preferred the caves of Appalachia over living in society. He preferred being alone, and he seemed to hyperfixate on female hikers on the trail, making advances towards them, and then retaliating when they didn't accept.

Claudia would survive her wounds and be able to tell her story in court at the trial for Rebecca's murder. And one of the saddest things I learned while researching about this case, other than the young woman's death, is that Stephen's defense attorney, Michael George, tried to convince the judge that Stephen had every right to fire at the women because they were putting their gay relationship on display.

The attorney hoped that the conservative small-town judge would see Stephen as a rational man, driven to do something irrational because of the women's behavior. But Judge Oscar Spicer didn't see Stephen as that at all. He recognized that Stephen was a monster. There was no other way to put it. And he was a threat to the community, and so he sentenced him to life in prison where he remains to this day.

Rebecca and Claudia's story is devastating, and it's not the only violent tragedy that's happened on the Appalachian Trail. I will say, murder rates on the trail are low. Twelve people have been murdered there since 1974. The most recent victim was in 2019, and it was a hiker named Ronald S. Sanchez Jr.,

He was an army vet who used hiking to alleviate some of his PTSD symptoms that developed after he served three tours in Iraq. He was killed on a section of the Virginia Trail by a man who had previously stabbed a 30-year-old woman in the area. Ronald was with three other campers when the attacker wandered into their campsite and started threatening them. And when Ronald confronted the man to protect the people he was with, he was stabbed repeatedly.

But even though these kinds of horrors are rare, the publication The Trek reported that something like 40% of hikers said that a strange person made them feel unsafe on or near the trail. And many hikers bring protection like pepper spray or dogs with them. And this really stuck out to me. Because if murder is so rare on the trail, then why do so many people feel unsafe?

Why do so many people look over their shoulders while they walk through the woods?

Well, according to some that live in the area, it's not just the people you have to be worried about. They say there's something supernatural in the old mountains of Appalachia. And those eyes you feel on your back might be something otherworldly watching you from the trees. So let's walk on the trail a little further into the woods, shall we? We're taking a two-day hike south to South Mountain in Maryland.

where the trees start to get closer to one another and the canopy thickens over your head, where the last shelter is far behind you and you haven't seen another person in about 10 miles. The path in front of you gets darker, the birds hush. You pass an old marker so covered in moss and worn by time and elements that it's impossible to read. This makes you shudder.

It's a sign of civilization, but it also reminds you that this place can consume civilization. You look at your map and get your bearings, and you feel your stomach flip. You've been warned about this section by other hikers and locals alike. They whispered to you in a quiet, urgent tone to tread carefully, watch your step, and be ready to run at any moment.

Tips like these are easy to find. Forums online are full of information. Some contain sweet anecdotes about how to actually do the hike, but some detail the more unsettling things that hikers encountered in the shadows of the footpath. Like this one story from Reddit from around 2019. The user has since deleted their name, but it was from a thread titled,

"What are your creepiest stories/encounters on this trail?" And they wrote, "Not me, but my husband. I was off trail injured by this point. He was hiking and saw a deer cut perfectly in half on the trail, but only the back half was left.

He said it looked like it was cut with a laser. It was so precise. No blood drops, no jagged cuts or anything. Just the back half of a doe left perfectly in the middle of the trail. These kinds of strange, indescribable horrors aren't unheard of. In fact, there's enough of them that communities along the Appalachian Trail tend to have a lot of rules about how to stay safe.

Children are warned about going out on Fridays because eerie things are said to happen that day. And if it's grim and stormy, people stay at home because bad weather means unlucky forces are around. I talked about some of the other rules in our first Appalachian Horror episode. Don't look in the trees. If you heard something, know you didn't. But there's one rule that locals know that doesn't get talked about enough.

don't go near a certain patch of highway near the South Mountain in Maryland because you're not going to like what you find there. A long time ago, around the year 1900, a 30-year-old man named William had to do some errands in a Maryland town called Boonesboro. Boonesboro is by the foot of South Mountain, a peak on the Appalachian Trail.

William lived just a short walk from town, which was a good thing because he didn't wrap up his errands until 10 o'clock that evening. And it was dark by the time he headed home to his wife and family in their cabin on a hill. His route took him along a roadway with no lights to guide him except for the stars twinkling in the endless sky above.

The wooded road loomed in front of him, completely dark and eerily quiet. As William passed by the foot of South Mountain, he saw something. It was in the road up ahead and stood out from the rest of the murky night. He tried to focus his eyes on its dark outline when he noticed two red eyes glowing back at him.

It was a silhouette of an enormous animal. It looked like a dog, but it was far bigger than any canine he had ever seen. It was quieter, too. All it did was stand there, like a rigid, monstrous statue in the middle of the road blocking his path. William's mind raced, ruled by fear and instinct rather than any kind of logic. Before he knew what he was doing, he grabbed a rock and chucked it at the creature.

He did this over and over and over again, picking up what he could find to throw at the dog and try to scare it away. But the animal didn't move. Nothing that William threw actually hit it. Everything seemed to fall back to the earth like it had just passed straight through it.

William's fear curdled in his stomach, but he kept attacking. He even ran towards the dog, intent on shoving it out of his path. As he got close, he saw the animal was black as the night around it, with a red, vibrant mouth that hung open in a snarl. He swung his fists, but he didn't hit anything. His blows just sailed through the air, passing through the dog just like the stones had.

It was as if the creature didn't exist at all. And then on the road in front of him, something extraordinary happened. The animal was growing. It swelled in size, getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it blocked the entire roadway. And all William could do was stand there in total shock, watching this supernatural fiend inflate. And then all of a sudden, the dog snarled.

bared its teeth, and then vanished, leaving William alone and shaking on an empty mountain highway. Around that same time in the year 1900, hundreds of people saw this exact same creature that William encountered on a certain stretch of highway near the South Mountain in Maryland. It eventually earned the name the Snarly Yowl, sometimes called the Snarly Yowl.

Everyone who saw it reported the same thing, a massive black dog with a red mouth and a formidable snarl. Locals who saw it always spotted it at various points along the same route. It came down a narrow mountain path

crossed the National Pike Highway, went down another hill, crossed a stream, and then disappeared into a canyon. It was almost like it was patrolling the highway pass, like some sort of otherworldly guardian caught in a time loop.

At the time, some thought it was a new species of animal that lived nearby, but they realized that that didn't really make sense, mostly because it left no evidence of its existence. No tracks, no hair, nothing. And those who encountered it claimed that when they threw things at it, just like William had done, those things just went through its entire body instead of hitting it.

For a few years, the creature was spotted frequently. But then the sightings all but stopped. Though there have been a few sightings throughout the years. In 1975, there was a bus of kids returning from a field trip in Washington. During the ride home, the driver noticed a black dog standing off to the side of the road. He slowed down to pass it, but in the rear view, he could see the dog sprinting towards the bus at an unnaturally fast speed.

So the driver sped up, but no matter how fast he went, the dog was faster. And eventually, it overtook the bus. And then it stopped right in front of it. The driver slammed on the brakes, bracing himself for what was to come. The kids all screamed as they screeched to a halt. Then there was the sound of two distinct thuds as the front and back tires rolled over the dog.

The driver was horrified and got out to see what the damage was. He peered down under the front to look at the tires, but there was nothing there. No guts, no tufts of fur, no sign that he had just hit an animal. And when the driver looked up, he saw an impossible sight. Standing there in the road up ahead, baring its teeth, was the black dog.

It was very much alive and completely unharmed. It stood there for a few moments, let out a haunting yowl, and then vanished into thin air. And the legend of the Snarly Yowl very much remains in the area today.

It's said to appear in front of cars, sometimes standing upright on its back legs. But it's never hit by vehicles, since they always just go right through it. It can also run very fast, faster than a horse going at a full sprint.

Some consider the Snarley Yow a bad omen. They say if you see it three times, you'll die. Some have also suggested hikers of the Appalachian Trail squeeze their eyes shut while walking through the area. You just don't want to risk the creature crossing your path three times. In variations of its lore, it also makes a yowling noise, hence the name Snarley Yow. And as you walk through the forest with your eyes closed, you may hear its scream in the distance.

And if you do, the only option you have is to squeeze your eyes even tighter. No one exactly knows where the creature comes from. Some believe it's as ancient as the area it inhabits. But others think that German immigrants maybe brought the creature to the states in the 1700s when they settled the area. They were the first ones to actually see it, after all. And from what I've researched, I actually haven't found any legends of the snarly yowl from the Native American tribes in the area.

So maybe it did somehow come over with the Germans and now it's forever cursed to stalk the land. There are plenty of legends in Germany at the time about a black dog with glowing red eyes. But maybe you believe that this is just a legend. And as you walk through South Mountain where the yowl stalks, you won't look over your shoulder. You won't turn your head when you hear a terrifying otherworldly howl.

But you will come to a sign on the summit eventually. And when you brush away the dirt and leaves, you'll read four words that the locals don't want you to ignore. Beware the snarly yow. More after the break.

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For our last story, I want to tell you about one of the trail's eeriest unsolved mysteries. But first, you need to go even further into the woods. We are heading to Boone, North Carolina. You hurry down an ever-darkening meandering trail. The terrain goes up an incline and soon you're not walking but almost climbing. Your legs ache as you navigate rocky outcrops and densely wooded cliffs, but you keep going because night is coming.

You were hoping to reach the next shelter before dusk, but the sun is vanishing fast, and soon it's gone completely. An inky blackness descends around you. So you walk on in darkness for hours, trudging through the most desolate part of the trail in the middle of the night, with only the stars above lighting your way.

When all of a sudden, you're out of the woods, standing on top of a mountain lookout. Out in front of you are looming, shadowy mountain ridges. And that's when you see something that makes your heart flutter. A flurry of quivering lights peppering the mountains and sky. Not stars, no. Some of them appear to be on the mountain. They're something else entirely.

These are what's known as the Brown Mountain Lights, a mystery that still haunts the Appalachian Mountains to this day. A few decades ago, Dr. Daniel B. Kaden was driving down the dark roads near this very mountain. Dr. Kaden was an astronomy professor at Appalachian State University, and that night, he wanted

He wanted to go look for a strange phenomenon in the sky that one of his students had told him about. See, Dr. Caden had heard about these mysterious lights that would appear over Boone, North Carolina, and were only seen from Brown Mountain. But he had chalked it up to local Appalachian legend. He didn't grow up in Appalachia, so maybe he didn't know that it's the kind of place where the legends are sometimes true.

So for years, he never thought too hard about these lights. Until one day, a student in his Intro to Astronomy course claimed that he had seen the lights himself and that they were very real. There's no way, Dr. Caden thought. So on his way home that night, he had decided to make a detour. The unplanned stop was Wiseman's View, an observation area that looked out over a gorge at the edge of the Appalachian Trail.

So he got out of his car and he stood at the gorge, staring up at the sky for about an hour.

The lights from Boone polluted a little bit of the atmosphere, which hid some of the stars, but for the most part, it was a beautiful view. But nothing about it felt paranormal. Nothing in the sky really looked out of place. Maybe the student had mistaken some of the visible planets for unexplainable lights. This would make a great lesson come next week, he thought. When he was finally ready to leave, he started to turn away. But before he could,

he saw something that made him freeze. There was a bright flash in the sky as a circle of light lit up over the city, bigger than a star but smaller than the moon and brighter than both. It lasted a few seconds and then it vanished again. After this, Dr. Caden became infatuated with what he had seen and he spent years trying to get to the bottom of it. To do so, he installed two cameras overlooking Brown Mountain

He figured if he was going to prove that something was going on, he would need to catch it on camera. That way, there'd be no question that it was just a glitch. And one night in 2016, he actually captured a grainy shot of the phenomenon. I've seen this picture, and it's kind of amazing. It shows a dark mountain range, a horizon of lights from the surrounding communities, and there, too high to be a city light, but too low to be the stars,

there's a bright flash that appears. It hovers for a few seconds, and then it vanishes. Even though this photo was significant, Dr. Caden was by no means the first person to see the brown mountain lights. People have been spotting these lights around the mountains for over two centuries. Most people describe them as star-like dots, but what's strange is they kind of act differently for everyone.

Sometimes the lights move slowly and other times they explode like fireworks. That is, if they're seen at all, these lights rarely appear. And only a few people have been in the right spot at the right time to witness their ethereal, mysterious beauty. But no one, including Dr. Caden, has ever been able to fully explain their existence. Though I will say from my research, many have tried over the years.

In 1913, a local paper ran an article that stated, "Much has been said in the papers about the mysterious light which can be seen from certain points in Burke County. A light which arises from nowhere so far as the natural eye can discern, is visible for a time and then passes out. It has been observed for years by many Burke people and finally so much interest was aroused that the government was importuned to send an expert to pass on the mystery."

The article goes on to explain how the expert, what kind of expert it was is never explained, declared that it was light from the train. And then he took off. That conclusion drove locals up the wall. There was no way it was just lights from the train. And another article from 1927 proclaims that the mystery had finally been solved. The light, according to the geologist that was interviewed, was light from the train.

Locals were quick to point out that the lights did not behave like train lights. They moved erratically and were sometimes seen above the mountains. Also, the people had the train schedules and they knew the lights were seen even at times that the train wasn't operating through the mountain. The geologists explained that those times it must have just been car lights. But in 1913, when the first article ran, there would have been hardly any cars in the area.

I even found another article from 1967 that suggested the lights were just a mirage. And once again, the locals were not happy with this answer. They did not want to hear that they had just been making this up. There are other theories, of course. Some think the lights are caused by natural gases from the mountain or a specific kind of lightning, maybe ball lightning.

But here's the thing about the lights. They've been around for far longer than electricity and train lights. They've been around for so long that like much of the strange happenings in the area, they've cemented themselves in folklore. And the stories about them are rich and representative of the people in the area. For instance, the Cherokee people think they know where the lights come from.

There's a bit of indigenous lore from the tribe that speaks of a violent battle long ago between the Cherokees and another tribe in the mountains. After the carnage was over, the mothers, widows, and sisters of the men who died marched into the darkness. They carried torches and had tears in their eyes as they hunted for the bodies of the fallen.

Those lights are an echo of their path, they say, which was filled with so much anguish that their spirits are still imprinted on the mountain hundreds of years later.

To this day, we still don't know what causes the brown mountain lights. Though explanations seem to change with the times. In the 1960s, they were largely thought to be aliens, and a local man named Ralph Lael claimed he had telepathic communication with the lights. According to him, aliens from a planet called Pee-Wam would abduct him and take him throughout space, teaching him how to save Earth.

Others believe that they're ball lightning. Some still think it's a reflection of train and car lights. Others think it's a ball of gas that spontaneously combusts like will-o'-wisps over a bog. But we just don't know, and we may never know.

And as you're walking on the trail, trying to think to yourself what the lights could possibly be, before you know it, you're at another shelter. People are setting up their tents and sitting by the fire, cracking beers and chatting. You all start sharing stories about what you've seen and heard on the trail. You're adding to the local tapestry of legends about this place. It's mystery, it's horror, it's magic. And you start to forget where these stories come from. You

you start thinking of them as legends and something inside of you relaxes. Maybe there's nothing to fear on the trail. Maybe these are all just tales people have been sharing with each other around campfires for centuries. And just then, you hear something whistle in the tree above you.

That's all I have for you today on Hearts Arts Pounding. Please let me know if you've ever hiked the Appalachian Trail and what stories and legends you've heard. If so, you can find a form to reach out to me at heartsartspounding.com or you can drop a comment wherever you listen. Spotify and YouTube both have comments. We will be back next week for a very dark story. One of stalking, of paranoia, and one where the truth is very hard to make sense of.

Join me here for that one next week. And until then, stay curious.

Heart Starts Pounding is written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Heart Starts Pounding is also produced by Matt Brown. Additional research and writing by Kate Murdoch. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, Ben Jaffe, and our listener, Christine, who helped me out with a little bit of Portuguese. Have a case request or a heart pounding story? Check out heartstartspounding.com.

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