A (0:06)

Welcome to the Otherworld, Patreon. I'm your host, Jack Wagner. This episode that you're about to hear is a really interesting one and a very unique one that I've been working on for a long time. I know I say that a lot, but the truth is there are quite a bit of episodes that I have been tinkering with over the last couple years that have never come out, and I'm finally just releasing them. This is one of those episodes and I think you're all going to really like. Comes from a guy named Chris, who is apparently also nicknamed Goose, as you will hear to him, as you will hear in him referred to in this episode a couple times. Chris is from Canada and is a very avid fisherman, the type of fisherman who is regularly driving very far into the wilderness. And then after parking his car, hiking multiple hours after that before he even gets to the spot where he does the fishing, he goes to great lengths to access these spots where there's absolutely no possible way another fisherman or even another person would be out there or anywhere close to. Was during one of these trips that he finds some signs that he might not be alone out there after all, which opens up a big mystery for Chris. Chris eventually posts about this experience online, and one of his friends, who comes from a local First Nation, reached out to say that he thinks he knows exactly what it was that Chris encountered out there. And he explained that it has something to do with with beliefs and ceremonies that are typically kept secret and far away from outsiders. This episode was incredibly interesting and dives into indigenous practices that are kept secret. In fact, part of the challenge of making this episode is that so much of the information about this topic cannot be shared. But what we were able to learn and include in the episode is really incredible and ties into some previous episodes of Otherworld. So this one is a little bit supernatural, it's a little bit historical, a little bit in between those two. And ultimately I think this is a story about two old friends with different sets of beliefs reconnecting in a very unusual way. You're about to hear a preview of this episode. If you want to hear the entire thing and all the other bonus episodes, you could sign up for Our patreon@patreon.com Otherworld this episode is called the Little People and you're listening to the Otherworld Patreon.

B (3:38)

My name is Chris. I live in Vancouver, bc, was born and raised in this area and grew up like just doing outdoor stuff. Hiking, mountain biking and fly fishing were kind of the big Ones and those are things that I just like have never stopped doing or even like taken a short break from just whole life always been into that stuff for work. I am an outreach worker in the downtown east side of Vancouver, which is sort of epicenter for like toxic drug crisis, all kinds of issues and like, yeah, I do that and I also do some research assistant stuff at the University of British Columbia in linguistics. So I go to this area to fly fish and kind of specifically to this more remote part of the valley to get away from everybody. It's sort of like, it's as far as you can go up this road and then you hike for a couple hours, three hours to get into this specific area. Like if you were to leave Vancouver, it would take you about 90 minutes to get to the town and then from there it would be about another two hours on like a logging road. And then from that point the specific region was about a three or three and a half hour hike from where I parked my car. And I typically do that like two days a week, more if I can. But like it's, yeah, it's a bit of a drive and like a pretty hectic, you know, distance to get in there. Specifically the area that I was fishing, it requires that you cross the river. Times like you kind of have to like hopscotch across the river in order to get to this, this section and crossing the river is like, is pretty, pretty involved. I'm like a big strong boy and I can barely do it. It's pretty raging in most spots. Lots of like white water, deep sections, weird like holes and whirlpools. All kinds of stuff you can get mixed up in. It's out there. So this area in particular is, is not that far from like a major city. So you're talking about like a two hour drive from a major city. And it's territory that's still, that's still like stewarded and looked after by a first nation up here. And it was never land that was like ceded in a treaty. It was never purchased and it was definitely never like given away. It was just land that was stol by, by settlers. But the, the nation who, who occupies that territory does like an amazing job of stewarding the natural resources and kind of just like taking care of the land. So I'd left my house at about 4:30 in the morning, which is normal for me when I go to fish this area and driven for however long, three hours roughly to get to the trailhead and then from there I'd hiked in for, like, I had hiked in and fished all day long. And then on my way out is when things got kind of weird on the drive in. I didn't see anybody. There was snow on the ground, like, more or less the whole way in. And there were no tire tracks like mine were the first. First tracks in. Fishing had been, like, kind of slow. Wasn't a great day. It was really cold, kind of around 2 degrees Celsius. I'm not sure what that is in Fahrenheit, but cold enough that. That it's, like, uncomfortable after a full day of being out there. And. Yeah, fished for maybe five hours or so, five or six hours, and then. And then hiked back out. So I was. I fished all day and was on my way out back to my car and was walking along the west shore of the. Of the river and came across some wolf tracks, which is not uncommon at all up there. They're. They're everywhere. There's, like, a huge population of them. And they were mixed in with elk tracks, which also is not unusual to see up there. Like, it's. It's not even uncommon to see the two of them together. There's tons of both of them up there. And then mixed in with all of the animal tracks, there was a single, like, human footprint, roughly the size of, like, my own foot. Not, you know, just like a barefoot. No, no, you know, footwear of any kind on it. And that just sort of like, arrested me. Like, I just stopped dead and was just, like, staring at this footprint. Like, what the heck? Like, I. I had walked through this part, this section earlier and had noticed, like, the wolf and the elk tracks, but there were no human footprints. And the more I looked, the more of them I began to find, including some that were, like, roughly 3 inches in length, like a. A baby, like an infant. And those were all mixed in with, like, the animal tracks. Some on top of the others, human footprints on top of other human footprints, and like, all of varying sizes, like, from. From like a. Whatever I wear, like a size 12 shoe. And I remember some of them were, like, the same size as my. My boots, and other ones were just tiny. And they were in, like, a rough Circle, maybe 50 meters across, like, huge. Thousands and thousands of these footprints. I still don't. Don't really know how to kind of explain what it looked like. It. It looked like there had been a mosh pit on the. On the banks of this river. Like, it. It was just. It was that shredded. It was that torn up, and it was kind of Like a sandy or like muddy area with like a few rocks scattered in and it had just been like all, all kind of churned up. I couldn't speak to the number of, of like individual footprints. It could have been like five different, different sets of footprints or like 50. It was, it was kind of impossible for me to know just the sheer number of them was, was hard to kind of pick them apart. Yeah. I'm not sure how long it would have taken like, like for me to make that sort of dent and like tear up the, the ground in that fashion would, would take ages, like an hour of going as hard as possible. I'm not a, I'm not an expert on baby baby feet, but like the, the reason that that stood out to me so much more than these other like the regular size footprints was like, okay, well maybe, maybe somebody was, was in this area, took their, their boots off or whatever and went went for a swim in November. I don't know. But no one would do that with a child. No one would let a child, you know, like recreate in that kind of weather in like a super dangerous area. But certainly like a baby baby. Like not, not even like a toddler. Yeah. Yeah. Bare feet. No. No like, you know, footwear of any kind. No. No footprints surrounding that circle that had any kind of like tread on them other than my own. And it had snow. It had been snowing all day. Whatever had happened, had happened in the time that I had been fishing and like in between then in my, my walk back to my car because there were like fresh prints in the snow all over. And then there were a couple like sets of them sort of trailed off straight into the, the woods. Like there were a number of sets of tracks, although not the baby tracks. These were like the tracks that led into the woods away from this circle of churned up earth were like more, more of like an average person sized feet. And there were I think five different paths, like five different sets of tracks leading from the circle straight out into the woods. And the, the woods in this area specifically, like this part of the river valley. The canyon walls are like very steep and rocky. I've literally seen mountain goats above where I was like, like directly. So I can't see there being like a habitation of some sort in there. Even just to get out of like the valley bottom would be really, really difficult. Like I, I, there's no way I could do it. And these footprints just went straight into, into the woods. Like there's no, there's no roads up there. There's no. No, like, resource extraction. There's no mining, no logging, nothing. Just. Just wilderness from there to, like, I don't know, Alaska. The tracks went straight and that's when I just sort of got fairly creeped out and kind of hightailed it back to my car. But, yeah, I ran it over in my mind just over and over again. Like, why would anybody be out here? It's near freezing. It's snowing. It's peak grizzly bear season as well. They're. They're large. Large, like, grizzly bear population in this area as well. And, like, to have a baby, A baby out there just seems, like, profoundly irresponsible. But, yeah, I got back to my car and just, like, could not make heads or tails of what I had seen. I'm not a dude who typically, like, believes or, like, gives much credence to, like, paranormal things. I've never believed in, like, ghosts or anything like that. And I just, like, could not. Could not reason it away. It just didn't make any sense to me, especially just the number of them and, like, the. The size of the circle and, like, how torn up the ground was and stuff. Like, it was. It was almost like. Yeah. I don't know how to explain it.