Transcript
Ben (0:03)
This episode of Haunted Cosmos is brought to you by Indigo Sundry Soap, Gray Toad Tallow, the Kingsridge elderberries, forged beer company Stone Crop Wealth Advisors and our supporters at patreon.com.
Brian (1:18)
The high deserts of the western United States are funny places. In a single day, the weather might move from warm in the morning to to boiling hot at noon to snowing into the night. Trees are scant. It's mostly just chaparral and clay that moves fluidly from gray to red and then back to gray again. The gray clay is the worst of it. It makes the whole world lose its color, but that is the most of what's there. The hard dirt and limestone could make one think they were walking on the surface of some lifeless planet if it wasn't for that chaparral. Those bushes of wood that look almost petrified are sharp and hard themselves. They join in with the chorus, the whole landscape singing its constant overture of death, an overture that sings death to any who dare to venture into its barren domain. The deserts of America are no forgiving place. They blanket the better part of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada, and something about this landscape tends to shape the people who settle there. Coming from a place filled with trees, one might be surprised at their own claustrophobia. Under the wide skies of Utah and Nevada's basin, or Arizona and New Mexico, Mexico's tabletop plateaus, all the air seems too much, too dry and too thin. In a twist of irony, the vast, thin atmosphere can feel like it's pressing down on you, coming for you. The whole region bears the mark of death, quiet, salty and alkaline, eager to take, to desiccate, to grind to dust and blow away. The desert is a knife that never stops cutting, is a hardened prairie mother who cares only for her own, refusing to nurse any other who might seek for nourishment. Of course, people have carved out plenty of livelihoods here from the native Indians with their lanyards of scalps who ran their horses all along the mesas and valleys well into the American age. To the willful Mormons who landed in the heat of the Salt Lake Valley. No better place to go. Now sure, most of those people, western or otherwise, only made their homes in the desert to eventually realize that what they'd actually made were their graves. But even then, the hot hills of iron ore didn't take them without giving something back. For it is in these most despairing places that we find traces of the Old West's great romance. The boxy timber frame downtowns replete with saloons and general stores, the prairie houses left alone and abandoned in clefts of mountain shadows, the buried remains of cowboys and Indians and lawmen fighting for a piece of the elusive wealth hidden deep in the unyielding ground. Yes, the desert wants to kill you, but at least it will make you feel immortalized first. One can't help but wonder why such places exist. Places where the sun feels closer and the threat of a sudden blizzard in the heat of autumn feels closer still. Places where the fine crimson sands invade everything and bite at the eyes of the squinting wanderer looking for his way home. Places where one's only company may be a coyote howling at the moon a dozen miles away. Places where a great number of other darker, less than things might actually be keeping you much closer company than you would care to think. These places feel almost incomplete, or perhaps too complete. One senses that it is not a lack of vitality in resources that gives the desert its sense of nearly transcendental wonderful, but rather an abundance of both that used to be. It is as if the overwhelming brown peppered with such dark green fauna, is masking a history of richness so vast that even its first pages might shock us. It's that mystical feeling of being surrounded by so much space that yet feels concentrated on whatever single point you happen to occupy by rocks that should not care about anything but seem nonetheless to bear down on you with whatever gaze they have, with a malicious curiosity. And it is this rich and deadly ethos, this spare tapestry of desert and sky, that gives us a rich well of legend from which to draw. Whether the chicken of supernatural power or the egg of human interaction with it came first doesn't really matter. The fact is, along with the death and life of the desert landscape comes a great measure of strangeness. And if the stories are to be believed, the rough, shod, sandpaper slopes of Mount Wilson outside of Pioche, Nevada, are home to some of the most potent strangeness of all. Welcome to haunted Cosmos. In 1996, business mogul and futurist Robert Bigelow made two large acquisitions for his National Institute for Discovery Science Skinwalker Ranch in northern Utah and Mount Wilson Ranch in Pioche, Nevada. His reason for purchasing the two properties were similar alleged paranormal activity at both locations. Wanting to devote a large portion of the NIDS research efforts towards investigations into the paranormal, he jumped at the opportunity to study two similar, but also distinctly different places where similar tales of strangeness had been told. The peculiarity of Mount Wilson Ranch, however, is a puzzle to us. The former owners of Skinwalker Ranch Before Bigelow, the Shermans had gone on television requesting help for their supernatural problems, which is how Bigelow found out about it. It was in those circles, already mainstream. But Mount Wilson Ranch was different. To this day, nobody knows for sure why Bigelow purchased it or how he knew that it also had a proclivity for high strangeness. Some have posited that it is because of how close the ranch is to Area 51 and the Nevada test range. Others have claimed that Bigelow had insider knowledge with someone deep in the government actually telling him about happenings there. Ultimately, we do not know what it was that brought Bigelow's attention to this place. After all, it had just been an old west tourist hotel, a less than glory dude ranch for decades prior to his purchase. What we do know, however, is what he thought he would find once he started investigating. Via whatever source. Bigelow was convinced that some type of extraterrestrial craft was buried on the grounds of the ranch somewhere. Additionally, he believed that the ranch and Mount Wilson itself were riddled with secret tunnels dug by. Well, dug by someone or something. That is anyone's guess. Initially, the testing did not yield much. But as was the case with Skinwalker Ranch, that eventually began to change. The team started having encounters with forces beyond their reckoning. Malfunctioning equipment that seemed to fail without any apparent cause. Tools and sensors moved to different locations, despite everyone testifying to keeping things as they had been. Orbs floating through the trees and UFOs flying in the sky. Apparently anomalous magnetic readings from underground. The things that ought to still shock us but somehow don't anymore, began plaguing the NIDS team at Mount Wilson on a seemingly daily basis. And yet, in the midst of this excitement, there still stood a melancholy Bigelow. He was most certainly interested in these smaller events that struck the team. But he was also very disappointed. He had purchased the property because of his belief in buried mysteries, but he was not seeming to have any luck in finding them. All of the orbs in the world could not shift his single minded focus from this desire. That is, not until one fateful night spent in an extra room on the ranch. As I said, the ranch had been a sort of novelty hotel, an old west resort before NIDS moved in. There's a small block of what looks to be a western Main street, plucked right out of Tombstone from Wyatt Earp's day and placed on the ranch. There's a saloon and a general store. There are restaurants and multiple hotels. But these had been added supposedly after the ranch experienced whatever it was that attracted Bigelow. For that reason, and for the sake of investigational efficiency, he and the team neglected to study any of these buildings. They were content to use them for housing and offices and little else. It is said that Bigelow slept in one of these many rooms on an ordinary early spring night in the early 2000s. It was not anything special. Two twin beds sat atop some thin, dark green carpet from the 80s, and rustic themed beadboard rose halfway up the wall around the entire perimeter of the room. White and beige paisley wallpaper plastered the wall over the beadboard, ultimately joining with the popcorn ceiling. To top it off, it was dusty in sections. Even in the heyday of the resort, this room was not the most popular, and it had that old desert smell, lending the room an overall impression of dryness. It looked like the kind of place that had been frozen in time for so long one might expect the bed sheets to crumble into dust when touched. It was also incredibly dark. To be sure, this darkness could largely be blamed on the area the ranch was nestled in. It was a dark region of the world to begin with. There's even an astronomical observatory on the other side of the same mountain. But something about this room. Maybe it was the dark carpet with the thick window curtains made it feel darker than mere dark at night. If one was not careful, they might sleep in well past the sunrise and wake up in the middle of the day, only to judge by the light in the room that it was still night. But whatever factors of decor might be given in explanation for its darkness, the room still seemed too dark, like it had some quality of its own that transcended everything else man might consider when made into the void. Bigelow fell asleep quickly and sank into the bed unmoved for hours, a very deep dream world that he could not remember after the fact. But at some point in the night he woke in a daze, confused. As he labored through blinking heavy eyelids, he found that he could just make out the features of the room. His eyes were so adjusted, and there was just enough moon and starlight peeking in through the gap in the curtains that the room sort of shimmered in a muted silver. His sleepy eyes couldn't make out the sharpness of the room's features at first, but that soon changed. Before he knew it, he was awake. Or at least he was mostly awake. But just when he wondered at how odd it was to randomly wake in the dead of night from the best sleep he'd had in years for no apparent reason. He noticed something in the peripheral vision to his left. It was a shadow. Not a shadow cast by the scant light coming in from outside. It was just a shadow, a shadow standing on its own without belonging to anything else. At first he thought it was up against the wall in the room's corner, but after turning his head and propping himself up just a bit on his elbows, he realized that wasn't it. It was closer to him. He knew it because he squinted and strained his eyes enough to confirm that he could not see the wall or anything else behind it. It was very close to him, this darkness that seemed to be a mass in and of itself. It stretched all the way to the floor and lingered there like a pillar that existed before the room was even built. Faintly, he began to hear a croaking sound. Not loud like a frog, but low and rough, like an elderly person's last breath drawn out in a gravelly rattle. A breath released, but never followed by the intake of another. It just continued on and on, and as it continued, it got louder. The gravelly character to it faded out, but the deep clicking sound only grew. It sounded to Bigelow's still foggy mind that the sound was coming from above him. He wondered if it was something in the ceiling that had woken him up. But as he traced the block of darkness from floor to ceiling, he received the horror of his life. The shadow was what was making the sound. This thing, this being made of the dark was standing over him, tall enough to have to crouch and double over. At the ceiling. At the apex of the terrifying thing, he saw the outline of what looked like a face, a grotesque thing of impenetrable night. It had antlers on its head, antlers made of the same darkness as the rest of the thing hanging around its neck. His eyes traced the outline of dried up things that looked like bladders and native charms. Just as his mind began to draw the shape into one coherent figure, he was struck by the most putrid smell he'd ever encountered. It shocked him until he was fully awake and aware. No more guessing. He gasped at the fullness of the thing before him. The shadow that was no shadow, the shadow whose very being was shadow. It was a giant native shaman figure, doubled over by the height of the room and glaring down at him through the buck skull mask that it wore. The bladders and bird skeletons about him brushed together and sounded like the essence of the dryness of the desert itself, the arid life sucker of the west. But all of these Things were drowned out by the eyes. Eyes of menace and malice, recklessly hateful eyes, glaring red and pulsating in their glow back towards him through the skull. He reeled and tried to bury himself deep into the bed as the creature finally opened its mouth. A maw that was somehow even more black, even more of an empty void met his gaze as it widened far beyond what was natural. The jaw unhinged like a snake, and the eyes bulged. The clicking, croaking noise was deafening now, like rusty gears cranking on a pinion. His heart raced in a breakneck thunder. His chest heaved in the dry air in terror. And just before the lunging, gaping mouth of the shaman swallowed him up into its void, the image dissolved. And the thing, whatever it was, was gone. Bigelow, covered in sweat and still trying to catch his breath, began pinching himself and getting up and walking around. He was trying to wake himself up from what he was sure must have been a dream, the worst nightmare he'd ever had. But it was no dream. He never woke up any more than he had already awoken. He had not been paralyzed by anything other than his own fear. Whatever the shadow shaman was, it was something he had really seen. From that day on, he longed to leave the ranch. He longed to sell it. Right then, right in that moment. Still shaking with the lingering terror of what he had endured, he began to mumble to himself, I have to get out of here. So he did. The ranch was sold by Bigelow himself to its current owner. But that owner has discovered since that Bigelow was not idle in the final days of his ownership. In 2023, a small team of investigators consisting of a YouTube creator, a journalist, and an ex CIA operative arrived on the grounds of Mount Wilson Ranch to try and determine what it was that Bigelow saw in the place for them, just as it had been for nids. The investigation began slowly, eventually following the trail of breadcrumbs that was Bigelow's conviction, that something was buried somewhere on the ranch. They started to scan large swaths of the ranch using LiDAR. Once they studied the results, things began to heat up. The scans in one area showed the presence of caverns or voids beneath the surface somewhere. These voids, though, were not just random blotches of loose soil. They were in straight lines. Nature doesn't tend to occur in straight lines, and the team posited that these cavities could actually be the leftovers from a tunnel system made by Bigelow, or perhaps even someone before him. With this idea in mind, they began to dig around the area of a large void, which led to one of these slender tunnel voids. As they did, they discovered just how busy NIDS had been in their final hours on the ranch. The excavator began by picking up bucketfuls of loose dirt and rock, but that changed almost immediately once they broke beneath the surface. Metal sheeting, old sliding gates and security fences, even entire utility trucks were pulled up from the dirt by the digger. Even still, they had not reached the level of the supposed void yet. They continued to dig in the area, the ground above the void being too tough for the excavator to get through, and pulled more and more of the NIDS equipment up from their graves. What would have caused Bigelow and the NIDS team to pile so much of their equipment underground and bury it? Why not leave it all standing? The new investigative team were plagued by these questions, but they'd run out of daylight. Answers or just more questions would have to wait until the next day. Two of the researchers, Paul Biben and Andy Bustamente, decided on a whim to take one twin bed each in the string of rooms closest to the day's action. Neither of them knew that the room they had chosen was the very same room that proved to chase Robert Bigelow off of the ranch before totally settling in. Though the ranch's owner, a man named Jeff, informed them of the story, they gave each other a sideways glance of excitement. This was just the kind of thing they were there for, and began setting up sensory equipment in the room in order to see if anything happened while they slept. And right when Paul turned on the thermal camera, he gasped slightly at what he saw. He frantically waved Andy over, nearly unable to speak, and pointed at the screen. He had not even had the chance to press record on the thermal device yet, just recording the screen through the cameras behind him. Right in the corner of the camera's frame, which corresponded to the bedside table on the left side of the far bed, the one Bigelow slept in, stood the thermal signature of a man. Only this was not an ordinary man. Where Andy and Paul's body heat had been picked up by the camera as bright red, this figure was a cold, dark blue. It was some kind of unman, frozen there in the ether and invisible to the naked eye. The figure was stooped slightly over the bed as if it studied the pillow, and where the body was dark blue with coal. The face was vantablack, utterly devoid of any heat whatsoever, just a black circle belonging to some faceless thing stalking the room still after so many years. The two men shook with shock and excitement at what they saw for long moments before words finally escaped their mouths. They shouted about hitting record about what the heck the thing was about there being something there that seemed to sink all the heat into itself. Without giving anything back in the few seconds they excitedly shouted, though the figure vanished, the wall behind where the pillar of black cold figure had melted back into its usual warm orange. The figure was gone. But there was no question it had been there moments before. Waiting, Watching. Hunting. There are countless places in the world like this. Places where the boundary between seen and unseen seem to overlap with special frequency and strength. These are thin places. Like our old friend Skinwalker Ranch here in Utah. This episode is a tribute to those places. From Utah to Pioche, Nevada, and well beyond. Join us as we explore the places they don't want you to know about.