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Hey, welcome back to the podcast. I really hope you enjoy this episode and if you'd like to hear more stories like these with a different background sound, please check the description to check out my other two podcasts and if you want to get rid of all of the ads, you can subscribe for just 2.99amonth. Last thing, I really appreciate you being here and I'd really love if you would follow the podcast and come back again soon. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoy. To understand my story you sort of have to know a tiny bit about trespassing laws in our country in that we don't have any. So long as you're respectful and non destructive, you can walk over any hills you like and in my case, camp on any beach of your choosing. So long as once you leave the area is how you found it. I used to love camping. When I was little our family would go multiple times a year with a large group of my parents, friends and their kids. On average There were maybe 10 of us at a time, which was a bit of a logistical challenge since we always headed out to this one really remote beach on the coast. Actually, we weren't the only ones. There's always yachts bobbing just off the short with people in them and other campers lining up and down the beach. Most of them also had children or teenagers, so it wasn't a wild party scene. It was very much an informal family holiday spot. There was even a small building with toilets and showers installed nearby, even though this was in the middle of nowhere. I guess the local council must have figured it out and got sick of people peeing behind bushes. We took a trip up in spring 2011. I am really bad with time, but I know this because I got my dog in winter 2010 after picking her out that November from the shelter as a birthday gift from me to me as I paid her adoption fee. Let me tell you a little bit about my Parmesan. Parmesan came to me as a six month old puppy who had been rescued from a dog fighting situation. We are not entirely sure what breed she is exactly, but my best guess is a lurcher Staffie mix. She is a wonderfully well tempered dog with people and most dogs, but you absolutely do not threaten her. She'll have you. So by the time of this camping trip I had had Parmesan for a few months. She had never come camping with us before, but as far as my family are concerned, dogs go on camping trips. So when we all piled into the car she came Too. Unusually, though, none of the family friends could make it, so it was only me, my sister, my dad and my mom. I wasn't that attached to the other kids. I would rather play with my dog and I'd still have my sister. The drive took about six hours and because we had left a bit later, although I don't remember why we had left later than normal, we arrived at sunset. Not a good time to be building a tent, but we had expected to arrive to other campers already set up and the beach illuminated by campfires. The beach was empty. In spite of this, my parents started taking stuff out and trying to build the tent. They asked us to fetch some of the lighter bags from the boot of the car. While they sat pointing a flashlight at the sand to see properly. I rolled down the window of the car for Parmesan before getting out. It was pretty hot for that time of year and I wanted her to have some fresh air. Always got to be looking out for my furry little homie. As we're fumbling about in the dark on a beach in the middle of nowhere, it's pretty spooky. The only road that led to this beach was circular and had a bridge over the water, meaning you could basically circle around the beach like a big O shape if you felt like it. I wasn't really paying any attention to the road. I was complaining that I was tired as kids are. After maybe 15 minutes of my dad trying to nail the tent into the sand, my mom is asking him, have he seen that car drive around? It's been a few times now. My dad kinda shrugged her off. He's sort of like that. I don't know if he said anything back to her, but after a few more minutes, a car pulled up next to ours on the road and someone got out. It was maybe 15 or 20ft from the cars to where we were and the light was pretty low except for the torches. We weren't expecting to see anyone else out here at this point, and I think my mom said it must be the security. I don't know why a random beach would have security. I think what she meant was the Wildlife Trust or something, as they do occasionally come down to do their nosey checkups. The guy was walking pretty unevenly. He must have been intoxicated because he had that stagger to him. There was absolutely no way this guy was sober. Cool, a junkie. Not an unusual find, but it's rare to see them in the wild. As he walked into flashlight range, we realized he was carrying a large knife maybe 15 inches. Although I was small at the time so maybe my sense of scale was off. I don't like my dad, but credit to him, once he saw this, he got up immediately holding onto the camping mallet and put us all behind him. The man began to shout wildly at us that we cannot camp here and he was just letting us know. My dad tried to initially be a bit low key with the guy and told him that was fine, we would leave, but this didn't work. He kept coming closer to us, so my dad started shouting and the man shouted back. My sister and I were crying. I remember shaking. I was utterly terrified as I'm sure anyone would be in that situation. It really did seem like this guy and my dad were going to fight. And I'm going to be honest, I didn't fancy my dad's chances. While it's grim to consider, I am absolutely convinced this man would have killed my dad and possibly us as well once he was done, as I don't think my mother would have had the common sense to run with us. I love her, but she has always put my dad in her relationship with him above us. This isn't how it went down. A bolt from the black, like a wolf descending on its prey, took us all by surprise. Most of all the man with the knife. In that moment, Parmesan was the apex prey predator large canines represent in nature. She got him good by the arm and clamped down hard, ripping his jacket and shredding the skin underneath. He dropped the knife as it was in the arm. She bit, he kicked her, he punched her and eventually got her off. He grabbed the knife from the sand and ran back to his car and drove off. Parmesan did not follow. She stayed with us, her mouth covered in blood. As quickly as we could, we all gathered our things and all got back in the car, all pretty shook up by the incident. I looked Parmesan over. She was okay, but the car's window was much more open than I had left it. We think what happened was when the shouting started, she must have put her paws up on the gap I had left for her. As it was an old car and had those roll down windows and not electric. We think she must have been able to hit it with her paws to force it down enough to squeeze out. This is not the end of my story. We were all pretty scared and since we had the dog with us, we couldn't book a hotel for the night. My parents decided to just drive home so we could all feel safe. But first we had to drive into the nearest town for gas as we were kind of low. I spent that time trying to clean up Parmesan. I had always loved dogs, but what she had just done blew my mind. As we drove into town, we came across a gas station, but it looked closed. My dad drove up closer to get a better look and stuck his head out the window to get a better look at the sign. My mom asked him what on earth he was doing and he told her he was trying to see when it opens. My heart sank. Parked in the corner behind a van, so we hadn't seen him at first was the man with the knife. He was sitting on the back of his car using some tissue paper to clean up his arm. It looked pretty bad. Without stopping to refuel or look anywhere else in town, my dad drove us right out of there. He decided to go to the next town over. But the next town over was 60 miles away. He didn't have that much gas. We realized as we began driving we were going to run out. That's fine, dad said. We had aaa. They would come tow us home or at least get us somewhere. Acceptable for the night. Better than staying in the last town. After driving for maybe five minutes, lights flash us from behind another car. The same car the man had been driving. It was him following us. The next half hour was one of the worst half hours of my life. I had a complete and utter breakdown, as did everyone really. I could tell my parents were trying to keep it under wraps so it wouldn't upset us. But we were not that little. We were both double digits. We knew how dangerous this situation was. My dad turned off the radio and the man followed us for 55 miles before he peeled away onto another road. Our fuel meter was on the big red E for the last 10 miles we were driving on fumes. I don't really believe in God, but if he does exist, this seemed like one of his miracles. Once we got there, we drove into a gas station and refilled to a full tank before driving the rest of the way home. My sister and I slept in the car. After that, I only woke up once. We made it all the way home, just grateful that nothing worse had happened. After that, after getting some sleep, my mom phoned the non emergency line for the police and reported what happened. They never got back to us after that, but apparently the woman she spoke to said they may wish to in the future as he matched the description given of a suspect wanted in relation to a murder charge. No idea if he actually Was that guy or just a random psycho? As I said, they never got back to us. So what's the takeaway? Other than crazy man on the beach? Well, for me it's that I love Parmesan. I love dogs. She's still with us now, old as the hills and twice as grizzled as one of my mom's friends likes to joke. I don't know why she did what she did that day. I could not tell you what her thought process was. What I do know is that this poor dog was born into an environment where they abused and neglected her, only to be rescued and taken to a shelter where her mother and siblings all found homes before her. Despite how badly people had treated her, when I took her home, she forgave but not forgot. I think the saying is I never trust a person who doesn't like a dog, but I always trust a dog when they don't like a person. They have a very good understanding of human body language and I think she must have understood how dangerous this guy was. If you're able to please adopt, you might find yourself in a situation like mine someday. Hopefully not. I promise you, if you're willing to save a four legged friend's life, they will pay you back tenfold. If they're able to without a thought for their own safety. I paid $78 for Parmesan's adoption fee, which is a lot when you're a kid, but it chills me to my bones knowing if I hadn't been so insistent on getting a dog, I might be dead. The worst thing I ever bought off the market. Hands down. This coffee machine I bought using Facebook Marketplace. The thing was an absolute steal, so I expected it to have a few flaws or whatever, but man, it was barely functioning by the time UPS delivered it to my house. Yet still it was made in Italy and it would do for making my coffee for the time being. But over the next couple of days I started to hear something weird going on in the machine. A kind of low ticking noise that I had never heard any other coffee machine make before. I could have just called a repair guy, but I figured I would just buy a new one come next paycheck. So I just ignored the problem and figured I would throw the coffee machine in the trash once the new one arrived. Then one morning I am making coffee when I could have sworn I saw something moving on the top of the machine. I just put it down to a sleepy brain and drank my coffee. But the thought kept bothering me as I went about my Morning. So I finally decided to actually take a look inside the machine. It took me a little while, but I finally got the outer casing off. Yet when I pulled it off to reveal the machine's guts, I screamed. I swear I could have cracked the kitchen windows. Inside the coffee machine was the biggest nest of cockroaches I have ever seen in my life. To this day, the little buggers absolutely disgust me. And seeing so many of them in something I had been using to drink my coffee. The thought makes me want to throw up. Even after all this time. As soon as I screamed and dropped the lid onto the kitchen counter next to the machine, they all got spooked and scattered in every direction. Just a storm of skittering legs that I swear had me literally traumatized for like a week afterward, I just bailed. My husband had to deal with pretty much everything, but you can bet that I was infinitely grateful for it. Getting roach eggs in the house meant that we needed to have the whole kitchen fumigated. But it was a small price to pay to get those evil little things out of my kitchen. Still, with the few hundred that we had to spend on exterminators turned out to be the most expensive coffee machine I ever bought. Don't try to cheap it out people, because sometimes you get what you pay for with a nest of cockroaches throwing thrown in as a creepy crawly freebie. I feel like every neighborhood has a family of absolute psychos. Almost everyone I have spoken to about this sort of thing seems to remember one group of absolute wrongans, be it from their childhoods or from their current lives. And if there's one thing I have learned from their collective memories and stories, it's that whenever there's a family like that around, it's only a matter of time before something comes to a head or something finally boils over. And that's exactly what happened with the psycho family that lived in the neighborhood when I was a kid. The only thing is, most of the people I've spoken to said the breaking point came came with some kind of family argument or confrontation with neighbors spilled out into the streets outside. Police were called, arrests were made. Usually a for sale sign or two went up in the aftermath. But I almost wish my story was that simple or ended that relatively amicably. Because what happened in my case is something that haunts me to this day, with possibilities and ramifications that I find genuinely terrifying. I grew up in 70s Britain in a pretty small town in a place called Wiltshire. We were quite a small Community. Everyone knew everyone and consequently everyone knew everyone's business too. There was this one boy called Lewis and he was the only child of the Prestige family. A very peculiar family name if ever there was one. But that's not the reason I'll never forget it. The Prestige family were peculiar by name and peculiar by nature too. But then peculiar seems like entirely the wrong word to use. Peculiar makes you think of something quaint and adorably abnormal. But there was nothing adorable about the Prestige family. They were just weird. Scarily weird too. I think one of my earliest memories of Lewis is during an assembly in primary school. It's about 8 in the morning. All the kids in the school are sat in the main hall and it's deathly quiet. Apart from our headmaster making announcements and the soft sobs of young Lewis. He did not stop crying for the entire assembly. And it didn't just remain this quiet weeping either. His tears built in pitch and intensity until he was wailing so loud that a teacher had to remove him altogether. I remember feeling really sorry for him, but as time went on, it was just something you sort of got used to. They were the weird family in our town and since they didn't get into any serious confrontations outside of their own family units, people just sort of let them be. The next serious incident I remember was years later in secondary school when the schoolyard suddenly became abuzz with people gossiping over something. People were crowding around the school gates looking at something, some of them laughing, some of them just gawping at the sight of a lad dressed entirely in his school uniform except for one crucial piece of it, his trousers. It turned out to be Louis. From what I heard, he had been basically pushed out of the car by, we assumed to be his dad. And rumors went flying around that Lewis hadn't been quite ready to leave the house when his dad was ready to take him to school that morning, instead of waiting for him to put on his school trousers, Lewis's dad just drug him to the car and took him to school with no pants on, basically to teach him a lesson to be ready on time. I'm not entirely sure how true the reasoning was, but I do know that I witnessed Louis having to walk into school in nothing but his school jumper, his shoes and his underwear with my own eyes. I am also not entirely sure how Louis was still allowed to live with his evidently abusive parents either. Again, rumors went around that they had had a visit from social workers, but this I believe, because for a while there seemed to be little in the Way of serious incidents coming out of the Prestige household. Obviously the visit from child welfare services had been enough to shake them up into changing their ways, or so it seemed. Now all this came to a head when I was 15, maybe just over a year before we all left secondary school and bid farewell to compulsory education for good. One morning, Lewis turns up to school in his own clothes, a pair of pumps and a colorful jumper. He gets pulled aside by a teacher who I think at that point was well aware of the situation at home. And Lewis says something quietly to him before the pair of them disappear into the building which housed the main office. The next thing I know, apart from the shoes he was wearing, Lewis has an entirely new school uniform. New blazer, new tie, new jumper, everything. And from that day on, he seemed like an almost entirely new person too. He didn't get dropped off at school by his parents anymore. He seemed more confident and open, more talkative with other kids. He even started playing football with us at lunchtime, something he had never done before. We actually got quite pally with him for a while and on more than one occasion he invited us back home with him to play. We politely declined, of course, thinking of some made up excuse to not have to go around the Prestige house. But still things seemed to be making a vast improvement. Emphasis on seemed though, because after a long holiday weekend, Louis failed to turn up to school at all. This didn't have anyone talking about it too much. Kids were routinely off on the odd one or two days with illness, but Louis went an entire week without showing up for school. And that really did get us talking. I don't know if it was because I was so young and naive or. Or just didn't connect the dots, but I didn't think there was any link between all the police activity around our town and Louis not being in school. But one Saturday afternoon, my mom and dad called me into the kitchen and asked me if I had been around Lewis's house at all recently. I told them no, but that I had been invited at one point. And when I said that, my mom gave my dad this look that seemed to be a weird mix of horror and relief, like I had dodged a bullet or something. Not long after that, I got word through some friends of mine that there had been a brutal double murder in town, that someone had been arrested for it too. Our little town barely had any crime at all. I think the most serious thing to happen for decades at that point was. Was a car theft. So the idea that there had been a single murder let Alone two just set the town alight. And there was much speculation over who the killer was and how the killings had come about. Looking back on it now, I can see why the adults might want to shield us from the whole thing. And it was only a few years later than I realized why the police had made such an effort to keep the identity of the murderer a secret. It's like that when a murderer is under the age of 18, when they are a minor, their identity is kept secret for as long as possible. But that's only really possible with the media, because it did not take long before the residents of our town figured out what happened. And it was bound to trickle down to us sooner or later. The reason Louis parents didn't seem to be around anymore, the reason he was so happy and confident and carefree, was because Louis had killed them. He had finally rid himself of the people that had made his life hell. I get that. But the fact that a kid killing his own parents could make him so happy, that is something I have never been able to truly understand. The horrible thing was looking back on the event years later and sort of piecing together the puzzle. For example, the day he came to school in his own clothes was probably the morning he had killed them. And since he had gotten blood on his school uniform, he had to dispose of it. All the times he had invited us back to his place to watch TV or play football, his parents would have been dead in the upstairs bedroom, assuming that's where he had killed them. If we had gone around, maybe we would have been able to smell them or see flies buzzing around the bedroom door or something. We were all just one little spur of the moment. Yes, from finding out, finding their bodies. Maybe if that was the case, then Louis would have killed us too. I'm kinda weird about social media these days. I used to be really into Facebook when I first moved to college. It kept me in touch with my friends and family back home. And it was nice feeling like I wasn't so far away from them. Building up a collection of photos, checking into places, sharing every little detail of my life so that everyone could see how great I was doing. My entire world was online for all to see. And because I'm dumb, I was pretty liberal about my privacy setting too. So one day I get this message request from someone I have never heard of before. It just said hey. I checked their profile to see if they were in the same class as me or something. But it turned out we had no mutuals and they lived on the other side of the country. So as you can imagine, I am pretty confused as to why they are messaging me, but I'm also curious so I just reply hey, do we know each other? I don't know what I was expecting him to say when I saw that he was typing a reply and I remember thinking that maybe he was looking for someone with the same name as me or something. But then his response pops up and all it's saying said was I'm going to kill you with the cowboy emoji on the end. I stare at the message for a few seconds, not scared at all. Just like what the heck. I then take another look at the guy's profile, seeing a bunch more pictures of him wielding knives in the woods somewhere. I mean, that was at least a little intimidating. But what really got me were all these rants that he had posted about how much his life sucked, how unfair things were, and how he would love to take it out on someone who deserved it. And then the videos that were unplayable because they had been removed by Facebook admins but still had captions like that chainsaw goes through his neck like butter. Crying, laughing face. That's when I started to worry. It didn't seem like this guy was just having fun playing a prank on a stranger by trying to scare them. He seemed legit crazy and seriously angry. That nutcase could have been studying every one of my statuses, picture posts and check ins for weeks before he decided to message me. He could have screenshotted all my stuff too, so it didn't matter if I blocked him or not. He had my name, my school where I hung out, the names of my friends and family, everything. I thought maybe I was just making a big deal out of nothing at the time, but later on I could barely sleep thinking about it. How horrifying a thought it was that he could have been driving across the country as I lay there in bed, having just picked a person at random to kill and being crazy or angry enough to actually do it. You can call me paranoid all you like, but I just couldn't get this guy out of my head. Like the idea of him hunting me down or whatever was unnerving enough. I mean, he had enough info on me to be able to ambush me at a dozen different places that I just couldn't avoid because they were school or grocery shopping or just my dorm room. But what had me freaked out is that the creep might have been able to learn so much about me and I was dumb or vain enough to let it happen in the first place I knew the Internet was full of crazies. I just didn't expect it to reach out and touch me in the way that it did. If I didn't make it clear already, I did actually block the guy, but some weird grim curiosity had me unblocking his account one day so I could sort of check up on him and make sure he wasn't about to do anything too nuts. There were no rants, no threatening statuses, just a long series of photo posts that made me think he had taken up photography or something. I'm scrolling through them when I start to get this familiar feeling from looking at that scenery. I couldn't be 100% sure, but I'd swear a lot of the pictures he had taken were of things that were around the town I was living in. There were no street signs or anything, nothing to actually confirm he had actually driven across the country. But if he wasn't taking pictures in the town that looked remarkably similar to mine, then I could have been in a lot of trouble. I expected that guy to jump me for weeks after. Like I was a complete nervous wreck. It messed with my sleep, I lost a bunch of weight, being in an almost constant state of anxiety for the better part of a month. He didn't find me. Nothing happened as a result, thankfully. But just knowing that he could pretty much come and get me anytime he liked got to me in ways I never even imagined it ever could. We put ourselves on Front street in a big way with social media and there could be literally anybody out there just lurking on our profiles. So like I said, now I am kinda weird and cautious about social media. I don't put too much out there. I don't use my real name, I run the strictest privacy settings possible and I really recommend that you do too. When I was a kid growing up in North Carolina, I was a member of the Boy Scouts of America. I know it might seem corny, but my time in the Boy Scouts honestly made for some of the fondest memories of my childhood. And as much as my friends these days like to make jokes about the deviant pro proclivities of my former scoutmasters, nothing remotely weird or unsavory ever happened with any of them. There was a lot of fishing, camping, field craft and community service. Just some good old fashioned wholesomeness that gave my parents a break from me from time to time. Well, all except for this one time. So one summer my Scout troop goes on this big camping trip along up into the Smokies. For those unfamiliar with the term the Smokies, or Great Smoky Mountains, are a part of the greater Appalachian Mountains and are also home to the Great Smoky Mountains national park, one of the most highly visited national parks in the country. The name Smokies comes from the natural fog that often hangs over the mountaintops, appearing as large smoke plumes from a distance, and originate from organic compounds that are exhaled by the local vegetation. But excuse the high school science lesson. I'll get on with it. So we're up in the Smokies having a good time, when one night while sitting around the campfire after dinner, one of our Scoutmasters decides to tell us a creepy campfire tale. He starts telling us the story of Udlunta, which is the Cherokee name meaning spear finger or one with the pointed spear. Spearfinger supposedly lived in the western part of North Carolina, right up in the Smoky Mountains where we were camped at the time, and her name referred to the long, slender, sharp finger on her right hand, which she used to slice up her child victims whose livers she ate raw. As legend has it, she apparently clutched the stony skin on her right hand tightly because her heart was actually hidden in her palm there. Our Scoutmaster goes on to tell us how, because Spearfinger's skin was made of stone, she was invulnerable to the arrows of the Cherokee, and her footsteps sounded like thunder as she walked along the mountainside. Whenever her deep voice rumbled around the hillsides, it would scatter, scare all the birds away, a warning sign to those she was hunting as she sang her favorite song, ue la na siku, or liver. I eat it. Spearfinger was also said to be able to take on the appearance of her child victim's family members, often taking the form of a kindly old woman to trick her victims into feeling safe around her. She would lull the child to sleep, running her fingers through their hair to calm them, before stabbing her pointed finger through the back of the neck or through the heart. She would then tear out the livers of her victims before feasting on them, leaving her mouth covered with fresh blood. Needless to say, by the time our Scoutmaster had finished telling us the story, we are all completely and utterly terrified and only managed to stop freaking out once he had gotten out his old guitar and sang us a few songs. But that night, while back in my tent with a buddy of mine, I found myself totally unable to sleep. I kept imagining that if I did, Spearfinger would come rip my tent open and stab me in the heart with her long, sharp, stony finger, all before tearing out my liver and eating it. Then, right as I was about to drift off to sleep, a bright light lit up one side of my tent. I was completely frozen in fear for a moment, whispering for my sleeping buddy to wake up, but I was totally unable to rouse him. I carried on staring at the side of the tent, wondering where the bright light was coming from, as it seemed way too intense to be from someone's torch. Then I just about let out a whimper of fear when I heard a hissing sound and saw a shadow passing over the fabric of my tent. I called out to them, asking who was there, but no one said a thing in response. There was just another faint hissing sound as the figure seemed to creep closer and closer to my tent. Then I saw the figure raise a hand and I almost choked in terror when I saw a single long pointed finger and a hissing voice whisper. Ue la nasiku. I screamed, ripping my way through the front flap of my tent and tearing around the campsite screaming, it's Spear Finger. It's Spear Finger. She's come to eat my liver. Please don't let her eat my liver. I expected the rest of the camp to start screaming too, to burst out of their tents in terror, or to maybe just stay inside them in the hopes that Spearfinger might pass them over. And don't get me wrong, there were a couple of other cries of fear that accompanied my own, but the sound that made me slow to a stop and peer around in confusion was the sound of laughter. When I looked, I saw another one of the Scouts, this kid named Devin, and he was just about doubled over in hysterics with a long, slender twig tied to one finger. I must have been boiling with rage at the time, but Devin just thought that it was extra funny, waving the long wooden twig at me and making the same hissing sound again before bursting into laughter. I swear that was probably the most scared and embarrassed I ever was during my entire childhood. And all because that little punk Devin decided to pull a prank on me. Ever since then, I have never been able to hear the words Smoky Mountains without remembering that Boy Scout camping trip. Even if it does make me kinda smile these days. But what doesn't make me smile is seeing liver in the deli section of a grocery store. Because all I think about sometimes is the idea of Spearfinger hushing a child to sleep, stroking their hair, singing them a little lullaby with the voice of their grandma or favorite aunt, all before ripping out their liver and feasting on it with her stony skinned lips drenched with dark Fresh blood. Geraldine Largay kept a detailed record of her journey along the Appalachian Trail during the summer of 2013 in a small black notebook. Due to her pace, she had adopted the trail name Inchworm. But for a slow walker, she had still managed to cover an immense distance, hiking almost a thousand miles from Harper's Ferry in West Virginia with a close friend of hers named Jane Lee. George Largay, Geraldine's husband of 42 years, was driving ahead of them, arranging care packages and supply pickups for them, occasionally ferrying them to motels for the relief of a hot shower or a night in a soft bed. But on June 30, as Jane and Geraldine reached New Hampshire, Jane was forced into an early end for her adventure due to a family emergency. But Geraldine insisted on continuing the hike. The trail was almost at an end, and she would not give up so easily. Jane would later say that Geraldine had a poor sense of direction, had taken a wrong turn on the trail more than once, and would become flustered whenever she made such mistakes. Then, while she was all alone, Geraldine ended up taking another wrong turn up in Maine, wandering into terrain so wild that it is used by the state's National Guard for military training. She kept riding after she lost her way, even as her food supply dwindled along with her hopes of being found. She ended up waiting nearly a month in the Maine woods for help that would never come. Geraldine had left the trail in one of its most rugged sections, with thick underbrush and fir trees packed so tightly that the landscape became a maze of greenery. You step off the trail a little, then turn around, and it's very difficult to see where the path is, reported a volunteer who spends time doing trail maintenance. The area. If you didn't know which way the trail was, you could easily walk in circles for hours. Knowing she was hopelessly lost, Geraldine sought high ground in the hopes of getting a signal on her cell phone. Lost since yesterday, she texted her husband off trail three or four miles. Call police for what to do, please. She tried over and over to send messages, but none went through. In some trouble, another text to George Read got off trail to go to the bathroom. Now lost, she asked him to call the Appalachian Mountain Club to see if a trail maintainer could help her. But again, the message was never received. Around July 23, she set up her tent atop sticks and pine needles under a canopy of hemlock trees so thick that they obscured her from rescuers searching from the air. She tied a shiny silver blanket between two trees, possibly to attract attention, but the foliage was simply too dense for the blankets to be seen from the air. Geraldine was scheduled to meet her husband on July 23rd in Wyman Township, but she never showed. The following day, George reported her missing. Multiple agencies and volunteers would take part in a search for her, using horses and helicopters to traverse the tough terrain. Agonizingly, it would turn out that Geraldine was less than a mile from the trail itself, close enough that in all likelihood, searchers had probably passed by her campsite without actually realizing it. Infuriatingly, the rescuers were bombarded with a number of false tips regarding the missing woman's whereabouts. Some purported that she had been murdered and strung up in the trees, saying they had seen her with sketchy looking men who might have intended to harm her, while others suggesting that she had fallen in a river and drowned. A number of psychics called to report Victoria visions of her, including one who incorrectly insisted that she had broken her ankle. Others injected a kind of social justice warrior agenda into the situation, contending that Geraldine had been spotted at a women's shelter in Tennessee. This actually diverted valuable resources away from the search with accusations that her husband was a batterer, when in reality he had he had never laid a finger on her for the entirety of their marriage. Her last entry reflected a strikingly graceful acceptance of what was coming. When you find my body, please call my husband, George, and my daughter Carrie, she wrote. It will be the greatest kindness for them to know that I am dead and where you found me, no matter how many years from now. It would be two years before a logging company surveyor stumbled upon her campsite and remains, solving a mystery that had been tormenting her family and defied teams of experienced searchers. Mrs. Largay, a retired nurse from Tennessee, had survived nearly a month on her own, longer than many old backwoods hands thought possible before dying of exposure and starvation. Her dead body was found on October 14, 2015, still inside her sleeping bag in a campsite she kept tidy until the day she passed away. Around her lay her final few belongings, including a blue and white bandana, a rosary, birthday candles, lighters, dental floss, a sewing kit, and two water bottles, one still containing water. Two weeks after she was found, Geraldine's family visited the area in which she tragically lost her life. They left a white wooden cross decorated with messages etched in black marker. One, written in a child's handwriting, said, I wish you were here. It is quite simply terror inducing that even in a country as populous and settled as the United States, a person can still go missing on a simple mountain trail and vanish almost without a trace, only to be found months later having starved to death in a country where there is such abundance of sustenance and civilization, Humankind has tamed more and more of America since the nation's founding, but it seems that some particular areas of the country will always be wild. My name is Honey, I am almost 30 and I use Instagram to share pictures of my art. Alright, I know what you're thinking. Honey is a weird name, so please don't tell me what I already know. No, it's not a nickname. My parents are from California and they are like uber hippies. So go figure. As you can probably guess, I grew up in this really overly loving peacenik environment, which I am sure sounds cool at first, but let's just say it left me wholly unprepared to deal with some of the darker things in life. Needless to say, I really struggled with my mental health in mid to late 20s. I don't want to totally blame my parents for that. I think they did the best they could, but they seriously didn't help with their just fill your heart with love bullcrap when what I needed was actual therapy and antidepressants. I did get access to professional help in the end, but what really helped me keep it together in the meantime was my art. Before I started to suffer with depression and stuff, I used to paint and draw some pretty basic stuff. Landscapes, portraits, floral displays, stuff like that. But when I started to really suffer, I let out all my stress, anxiety and sadness onto paper. And as weird as it sounds, that's when my art really started to flourish. It was probably the only silver lining to ever come out of my poor mental health. The more I posted my newer darker art on Instagram, the more attention it got. My follower count shot up. I got offers of commissions. I actually managed to hook up with a T shirt merch company and make a few sales that way too. Like I drew this pizza demon thing one time and that's made me a few hundred bucks from people wanting that thing on a T shirt too. But when I saw dark I really do mean I started drawing some really messed up stuff. The pizza demon thing was probably the lightest hearted thing I put out there in that time. And even then people said it was super messed up. So as you might imagine, my new followers included some pretty messed up pieces. People too. I don't say that to be rude or mean either. I say that because one of them in particular made my life pretty difficult. So I get a DM off this guy who says he's really loved my work and wanted a piece commissioned. Of course I say yes, so he follows up by asking what my rates are. I had no idea what I was doing in terms of dollar amounts at the time, so when I quoted him like 80 bucks for a picture, he started explaining that I needed to value my art more, how my work was just as valuable as any other, and how I should be charging a whole bunch more for my art. I had no idea what to up my amount to, so I kind of threw out a few ballpark figures before the guy makes my jaw hit the floor when he offers me a straight grand for an A3 sized P picture of whatever I wanted to draw or paint. I couldn't believe it. $1,000 for a picture, which was way more money than I had ever made in my whole life. I got to work straight away and within a week I had poured my heart and soul out onto paper, sent it off, and got my money via PayPal. Having that kind of affirmation actually lifted my mood to the highest it had been in months. I felt valued, like I could contribute something to the world. I was still dealing with my demons, but when I learned I could actually profit from them, that I could make use of something that plagued me, it was a great feeling. I stayed in touch with the guy. I had never been so grateful to anyone in my life until that point, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't think I'd be able to get more money out of him if he wanted something else commissioned. We used to talk back and forth a fair bit and he shared that he too was an artist. I asked him what kind of artist he was and he told me that he worked in some very unusual mediums. Naturally this only got me all the more curious as I got super dark with my art too, but he seemed pretty timid to talk about it. I get that people can be shy about showing off their artwork. I was pretty shy too at one point, but this guy needed some serious coaxing in order to show me anything. When he finally agreed to show me anything, he told me he would only do it via one of those self destructing messages that Insta now does. I didn't question anything. Like I knew he'd send one of those self destructing pictures maybe so he could pretend his intellectual property or something. I was a little confused as to why he didn't seem to trust me, but hey, I pretty much adored this guy. So like I said, I didn't ask too many questions. I waited patiently for him to send me a picture of some of his work. It took a minute or two, but he sends me this three second self destructing picture that I was honestly super excited to see by that point. But when I actually saw what it was, even if it was for a real brief time, I really, really wished I hadn't. It looked like a goat's head in a jar of some kind, and the fluid it was floating in looked sort of greenish black, and I'm pretty sure it was formaldehyde. But it wasn't just that. The guy had opted to make a few little additions to the goat's head. Additions that I could not all catch because of how quick the picture flashed before my eyes. But they were horrible. It looked like he had carved the lips away so that all the creature's teeth were showing and on each one was carved or written a little symbol. Symbol. I am also pretty sure he had either chemically changed the creature's eyes or replaced them entirely with a kind of metal or semi precious stone. They had this weird glint to them. Like I said, there wasn't enough time for me to drink the whole thing in, but there was plenty more about the creature's head that had been messed with. It wasn't the details which really got me, it was the idea that the corpse of an animal had been so horribly disrespected just so he could try to make some kind of art out of it. I had questions, a lot of questions, but the first thing I had to ask him was if it was really real or just some kind of mock up. He told me it was very, very real, that he had gotten a hold of a goat's head from a butcher, preserved it, and then basically surgically edited the whole thing over time, mostly using dental tools apparently for the sake of precision. I personally thought the whole thing was a disgrace. I'm vegan and I tried to stay as ethical as possible, but at the same time I didn't want to go imposing my own worldview on the guy, especially since I liked him so much. I also didn't want to offend him. So I told him his work was interesting and jaw dropping, then asked if he worked with ink and paper or any variation on that. He told me no, that he only worked with skulls, how they were the capsule that held all the hopes and dreams and fears and needs of the once living creature they belonged to, and that working with them was kind of sacred. I didn't really know what to say to that he was right in a way. He sounded absolutely crazy for saying it out loud, but I couldn't entirely refute his point. It was like talking to some kind of insane genius. Not long after, he asked me if I thought he was cruel to work in such a medium. I told him people might find his work provocative, maybe even objectionable, but that it was fascinating nevertheless. Then he asked if I wanted to see more. Unlike the first time, there was no doubt in me that I most definitely did not want to see any more of this guy's work. But like I said before, I also really didn't want to offend him, so what could I do? It took me much longer to reply to his message that time, but in the end I told him sure, and he replied saying he would use another self destructing message again. I waited a minute or two for the message to come through, and when it did I opened up the message thread and tapped the little reveal message thing with some reluctance. The first time around for that goat's head thing, I at least had some degree of curiosity, but that time I was just plain horrified by what I saw. It was a monkey's head, or at least it looked like it was some kind of primate. And if I thought the goat's head had received some disturbing additions, this latest one turned out to be a thousand times worse. It was so bad I only caught the briefest glimpse of it and had to just look away and lock my phone screen to get away from it. I was a little more confrontational with him after that, telling him that this one was considerably more disturbing than the first and that I thought I was maybe too sensitive to see any more of his work. He asks why and I broke it down to him that I had been vegan for a few years, that I was a real animal lover, and although I could stomach the goat's head thing, I really couldn't handle the monkey as it looked far too human to me. That's when he replied to me, it's interesting you should say that, and goes on to explain that it's his dream to work with a human skull, how he has put up a few ads on 4chan and stuff asking if anyone would be willing to donate their head should they die, but hadn't gotten any replies when he told me he was getting really impatient and that he was worried he wouldn't get a chance to realize his dream. The whole exchange had reached peak creepiness by that point, as you can imagine, and it was fast getting to the point when I was reaching for that block option as I just didn't feel safe talking to him anymore. So by the time he actually messaged me another self destructing message asking if I would be willing to help him get a hold of a human head, I just noped out of there and stopped replying to him. Like I am not sure he was actually asking me to like kill someone with him or for him, but just the idea of going about procuring an actual human head. No. But I couldn't bring myself to block him. Like he was a potential source of sales after all and I could make a lot of money from the guy if I kept him interested in my work. I try not to think about it, but I get these really bad feelings from time to time. Like what if he catches on to the fact that I just ignore him? And what if he decides that it's my head that he would like to use to complete his magnum opus? I try to be very careful with what I post now, making sure it's only ever pictures of my art and that the handful of landscape photos I had posted on my profile have been deleted. Just so whoever it is can't get an idea of where I live. Because if they do work out where I'm at, there's just no way I'd be able to go around feeling safe. Not which someone whose ambition it is to work with severed human heads knowing where I lay mine at night.