Title: I'm a Search and Rescue Officer for the US Forrest Service, I have some stories to tell. — Continued, PART 4.

Author: searchandrescuewoods via reddit (u/searchandrescuewoods)

— PART 4 —

Hey guys! I'm back from my training op, and I  have a lot of really interesting stories to share with you. I've got  enough that I'm going to break them up into two parts, this being the  first. I'd love to put them all in one entry, but I just haven't had a  chance to write them all down yet. I didn't have anything too crazy  happen while I was out there, but we did have one incident with a rookie  that I found relevant. Since I'm sure you guys have been waiting for  these, I'll just get right into the stories. I'll assign each batch of  stories to the person who told them to me.

K.D:  K. D is a vet who's been an SAR officer for about fifteen years. She  specializes in high elevation mountain rescues, and is widely considered  one of the best in her field. She was one of the more enthusiastic  storytellers, and since we were together a fair amount during exercises,  she ended up telling me about four that really stuck with me.

The  first she told me in response to my asking about her most traumatic  calls. She shook her head and told me that really bad calls happen more  frequently on the mountain, since the potential for nasty accidents is  higher. About five years ago, one of the parks she worked at had a  string of disappearances. It was a bad year, she said, one of the worst  on record as far as weather went. They were getting about a foot of new  snow every couple of days, and there were a few avalanches that killed  some climbers. They'd warned people about staying on the mapped areas,  but of course there's always those who don't listen. In one particularly  nasty case, an entire family got wiped out because the father decided  he knew better than the officials, and he took them out into an area  that wasn't safe. They were snowshoeing, and as best K.D could figure,  they'd walked onto a shelf of snow that looked solid, but actually  wasn't. It gave way, and this family went ass over teakettle almost  three hundred feet down a slope. They landed on the rocks at the bottom,  and the parents died instantly. One of the kids did as well, but the  other two survived. One had a broken leg and fractured ribs, the other  was almost unharmed save for some bruising and a sprained ankle. The  uninjured child left his sibling behind and set out to find help. K.D  said the kid didn't make it more than half a mile before a storm  overtook him. Kid stopped to try and get warm, or maybe just to rest,  and ended up freezing to death. They ended up finding the family with  the help of some witnesses who saw them heading out into the wilderness,  and she was the one to find the kid who'd frozen to death looking for  help. She said it had started to snow, just enough to obscure  long-distance vision, but not enough to make searching impossible. She  saw a figure sitting in the snow up ahead, and she got to it as quickly  as possible. She described, in detail, how as she got closer, she  realized first that it was a child, second that they were deceased, and  third that they had frozen in one of the most pitiful positions she's  ever found a corpse in. The kid was sitting upright, with his knees  tucked up against his chest. His arms were curled around them, and his  head was tucked up in his coat. When she moved the coat to look at his  face, she saw that he'd died crying. His face was twisted, and the tears  were frozen on his cheeks. She said it was painfully obvious that the  kid was terrified when he succumbed to hypothermia, and as a mother, it  broke her heart. She told me, repeatedly, that she hopes the father is  burning in hell as we speak.

The  other traumatic story she told me that stood out, in my mind, was one  that happened when she was a rookie. Her team got a report of an  experienced climber who hadn't come home the previous day. His wife was  convinced that something bad had happened, because he'd never failed to  come home on time. They went out looking for him, and had to climb what  sounded like some very technically challenging parts of the mountain.  They got to a relatively flat area, and K.D started seeing blood in the  snow. She followed the trail, and as she went, she started seeing little  bits of tissue. She wasn't sure exactly what body part it had come  from, but the farther she followed it, the more there was. She follows  this blood-and-tissue trail to a sheltered area under a cliff face, and  she finds the climber. She said there was so much blood, more than she'd  ever seen before. He was lying face down, one arm stretched in front of  him, as if he'd died crawling. She looks closer, and sees that he's  been partially disemboweled, which is where the tissue she'd seen had  come from. The guy has an ice pick tucked into a hip holster, and it's  covered in blood. Of course, they'll never be sure exactly what  happened, but she said as best she can figure, this is what went down:  The guy had been attempting to climb up to the next area, and had been  using his ice ax to ascend. He'd probably hit a loose patch, and had  fallen. On the way down, or possibly when he landed, he'd gotten impaled  by the ax, and it had disemboweled him. He'd drug himself along,  tearing pieces of himself out as he went, and had died under the cliff  face. She isn't terribly bothered by gore, but I guess a few of the guys  who came to help her remove the body threw up when they turned him over  and a good portion of his intestines spilled out.

I  mentioned to her that I was interested in hearing about any experiences  she had with people completely disappearing. Her eyes light up, and she  leans in close to me. 'Wanna hear a real doozy?' She asks. She tells me  about how, when she first started, there was a case that got a lot of  attention in the media. A family had been out berry picking in an area  of the forest very close to the entrance of the park. They had two  little boys, both under the age of five, and at some point during the  day, one of them vanishes. There's an absolutely massive search, and  they find absolutely nothing. It's another of those cases where it's  like the kid was never there in the first place. The dogs just sit down  and don't pick up on anything, no trace of the kid is found. The search  goes on for about two months, but is eventually called off. Fast forward  to six months later. The family comes back to place flowers at a  memorial that's been set up there for the kid. They bring their other  son. While they're placing the flowers, they lose sight of the kid for  about three seconds, and in that span of time he vanishes into thin air.  Now obviously, the parents are beyond devastated. It's awful enough to  lose one child, but to lose two is beyond imagining. The search is huge,  one of the largest in state history. There are about three hundred  volunteers combing every inch of this park, looking for the kid. But  again, there's no trace of him. The search goes on for about a week,  with people looking miles from the part of the park he vanished from.  And then, almost two weeks later, a volunteer almost fifteen miles from  the designated search area radios in that he's found the kid. They  assumed that the kid was dead, but the volunteer says he's not only  alive, he's in good shape. K.D and her team go out to recover the kid,  and when they get there, she can't believe that this is the kid that's  been missing. His clothes are clean, there's no dirt on him anywhere,  and he doesn't appear traumatized. The volunteer says he found the kid  sitting on a log, playing with a little twig bundle that's bound  together with some old rope. K.D asks him where he's been, who he was  with for those two weeks, and the kid tells her that he's been with 'the  fuzzy man'. Now K.D firmly believes in Bigfoot, so she gets all excited  and asks what he means by fuzzy. Was he hairy? But the kid says no, he  wasn't hairy. He was a 'fuzzy man', and he describes a man that's  blurry, 'like when you close your eyes but not all the way closed.' He  says the man came out of the trees and took the kid with him deep into  the woods. The kid says he slept in a hollow tree, and the fuzzy man  gave him berries to eat. K.D asks if the man was mean, if he scared the  kid, and the kid says 'no, he wasn't scary. but i didn't like how he  didn't have eyes.' K.D says they get the kid back to headquarters, and a  cop takes him into town to talk to him more about what happened. She's  friends with the cop that talked to him, and she said the kid described  being kept in this tree by the fuzzy man, and given berries whenever he  was hungry. He was allowed to wander around a very specific clearing,  but when he tried to go further, the fuzzy man would 'get mad and yell  real loud even though he didn't have a mouth'. When the kid got scared  at night, the fuzzy man 'made it go brighter' and gave him the twig  bundle. He said the fuzzy man was going to keep him, but he had to let  him go because the kid wasn't 'the right kind.' He either can't or won't  elaborate more on that. The cops are just sort of left scratching their  heads, and the search for his brother is renewed with no results. The  kid has no idea where his brother might be, and they never find him.

The  last story that K.D told me was of something that happened to her when  she got separated from her training group when she was a rookie. They  were learning the basics of high elevation belaying on a well-mapped  side of the mountain, and she had to use the bathroom. She went off  about fifty yards from the group during a meal break, and did her  business. I'll tell the rest exactly as she told it to me' 'So I go to  take a piss, and once I'm done, I start going back to the group. But  I've only gotten about five feet when I realize that I have no idea  where I am. And this wasn't a 'oh, I got turned around' lost. I mean I  had literally no fucking clue where I was. If you'd asked me, I don't  even think I'd have been able to tell you what state we were in. It was  sort of how I imagine people with amnesia feel, you know? You're  completely lost, and you have no idea what to do. So I stood there for a  while, just trying to figure out where the fuck I was and what I was  supposed to do. But the longer I stand there, the more confused and  turned around I get, so I started walking. As I recall, I just picked a  random direction and went for it. And as I'm walking, it's just getting  worse and worse to the point where I have no concept of why I'm on the  mountain in the first place. I'm just trudging through the snow, and  then I start hearing this voice. It's kind of inside my head, almost.  Like if a frog could talk, all low and croaky. And it's telling me over  and over 'it's okay, it's okay, you just need to find something to eat.  Find something to eat and you'll be okay, just keep walking and find  something to eat. Eat. Eat.' So I start looking around for anything that  I can eat, and I swear to god I've never felt that hungry in my whole  life. It was bottomless, and I think I'd have eaten just about anything  you put in front of me right then. I had no concept of time, so I had no  idea how long I'd been out when I hear an actual voice coming toward  me. I go toward it and see one of the other SARs, and he looks fucking  terrified. He's running toward me, asking if I'm okay and what the hell  I'm doing out here. And the scary thing was, as he's running toward me, I  kind of see myself reaching into my belt for my hunting knife. I'm not  even really thinking about what I'm doing, but what I am thinking is  that I have to eat. If I don't eat, I'll never be okay again, so I just  have to eat. He sees me doing that and he backs off right away. He yells  at me to put my knife away, that he's not gonna hurt me, and that kind  of snaps me back. All of a sudden, I know exactly where I am, and I put  the knife away. I run to him and ask him how long I've been gone,  thinking he'll tell me I've been gone for half an hour or so. But he  tells me I've been gone for two fucking days. I've gone over two peaks  and ended up almost on the other side of the mountain, and if I'd kept  going, I would have ended up wandering into about three hundred miles of  wilderness. They'd never have found me. He can't believe I'm not dead,  and of course I don't know what the fuck to think. To me, no time has  passed at all. I don't say anything, I just go back with him to a  rendezvous point and I'm taken back to HQ  to be airlifted to the  hospital. When I get there, they do all kinds of tests, and try to  figure out what happened. As best they can guess, I had some kind of  weird fugue state, which is kind of like amnesia, or a weird seizure  that knocked my brain out of whack. But the truth is that we really  don't know. It's never happened again, but I'll tell you, ever since  then I never go out there alone. People rag on me for making them come  with me when I have to leave the group, but I just tell 'em that  listening to me piss in the snow is better than losing me for two  fucking days on a freezing mountain.'

EW:  The next person I talked to was E.W, a former trainer who now works as  an EMT. He still comes to ops like this to help out, but doesn't work  full-time for us anymore. He specialized in finding lost kids, he just  seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to knowing where they'd gone.  He's a legend among the more senior vets, but he gets embarrassed if you  compliment him on his work. He sat down with me at dinner one evening,  and we ended up swapping stories. Most of them were just casual, but  when we got on the subject of our weirder calls, I mentioned that I'd  had a buddy who'd gone up a set of stairs. He got kind of quiet and  asked me if I'd heard of a little boy who'd disappeared from his park a  few years back. I hadn't, so he told me this story.

They  were out looking for this eleven-year-old boy, Joey, who'd gone missing  near a river. Of course, the first thought was that he'd fallen in and  drowned, but when they brought dogs out, they led SAR officers away from  the river and up into a very densely forested area. When we do searches  for people, we search in a grid pattern, and we search every 'box' of  the grid incredibly thoroughly. What E.W's team noticed right away was  that a very strange pattern was emerging. Dogs in alternating boxes were  picking up Joey's scent, but losing it when they overlapped with  another box. If you think of a checkerboard, Joey's scent was being  picked up in random black squares, but never in red. This, of course,  didn't make any sense, because how could the kid bounce from area to  area without leaving a scent in each place he passed? E.W and his  partner pass into a new box of the grid, and E.W notices a set of stairs  about fifty yards away. He tells his partner that they need to go check  near it, but his partner flat-out refuses. He tells E.W that he's made  it a point never to go near any stairs he sees, and that while it may be  routine, he's not to pretend that it's normal. He tells E.W that he'll  wait in sight while E.W checks. E.W says he was irritated, but he felt  for the guy, and didn't push him on the subject. 'I walked over to the  stairs. They were small, kind of like stairs into a basement. I don't  really feel strongly one way or the other about them, the stairs I mean,  so I wasn't scared or anything. I guess I'm like everyone else, and I  just prefer not to think about them too much. 'Anyway, I went over and I  could see that there was something lying on the bottom step, sort of  curled up. My hear sinks, because of course you always hope for the  best. And we were confident that we'd find this kid alive, because he'd  only been missing for a few hours. But I knew right away that it was  him, and that he was dead. He was curled up in a little ball on the  step, holding his stomach. It looked like he'd been in horrible pain  when he died, but I didn't see any blood, except some on his lips and  chin. I radioed in that I'd found him, and we got his body back to  command. That poor family, they were devastated. The parents couldn't  understand how he'd be dead, 'cause he'd only been gone for such a short  amount of time. And on top of that we didn't have any obvious cause of  death, which just made it worse. I figured he'd probably eaten something  poisonous, since he was holding his stomach when I found him, but I  didn't want to guess. It's hard enough to hear that your kid is dead,  let alone have some stupid SAR guy guessing about what happened. They  took him away, and I went home and tried not to think about it. I hate  finding dead kids, man. I loved this job but it's one of the reasons I  left. I've got two daughters, and the thought of losing them that way  just...' He choked up a little here. I'm not great with emotional stuff  like that, and it's always sort of awkward to see a grown man cry, so I  didn't really know what to do. He pulled himself together eventually,  though, and he kept going. 'We don't always hear back from the coroners  about cause of death. It's not really our job to know, I guess, and  sometimes if they think it's foul play they won't tell us because of  legal bullshit. But I've got a friend who works for the sheriff's  department, and he'll usually pass along any interesting info if I ask.  In this case, though, I actually got a call from him about a week later.  He asks if I remember the kid, and of course I do, and he says some  seriously weird shit is going on. He tells me, 'E.W, man, you're gonna  think I'm crazy, but the coroner has no idea what happened to this kid.  He's never seen anything like it.' My friend goes on to tell me that  when the coroner opened the kid up, he couldn't even believe what he was  seeing. The kid's organs were like swiss cheese. Quarter-sized holes  were punched clean through just about every single organ this kid had,  aside from his heart and lungs. But his colon, his stomach, his kidneys  and even one of his testicles, were full of these clean holes. My friend  said the coroner described it as if someone had taken a hole-punch and  punched holes out of everything, they were so neat. But the kid didn't  have a scratch on him, no entry or exit wounds. The closest anyone there  had ever seen like it was a guy who'd filled himself full of buckshot a  year or so back while cleaning his rifle. No one had a clue what could  possibly have caused it. My friend asked me if I'd ever heard of  anything like it, or if we'd had similar cases in the past. But I'd  never even heard of something like that, and I told him I wasn't going  to be of any help to him. As far as I know, the coroner determined the  cause of death as something like 'massive internal bleeding', but no one  knows what really happened. I've never been able to forget that kid. I  have nightmares about it sometimes. I don't let my kids go into the  woods alone, and when we go together I never let them out of my sight. I  used to love it out here. But that case, and a couple others, just sort  of ruined it for me.' Dinner was over, so we started to clean up and go  back to our cabins. Before we went our separate ways, he put his hand  on my shoulder and looked at me really close. He tells me that there's  bad things out here. Things that don't care if we have families or  lives, or that we can think and feel. He tells me to be careful, and he  walks away. I didn't a chance to talk with him again, but that story  stuck with me.

PB:  By pure coincidence, I got to talk to another vet, P.B who's been in  the SAR field for years. We were