Muse

Well, hey there, family. Old Gods of Appalachia is on a short break before the final story arc of season six begins and will return on July 30th, 2026. But we can't leave our family hanging for too long, so we have a special treat for y'all. A story from some cousins who spin their tails in the dark of night, a little podcast called Spooked. It's full of spirit and magic and as hosted by our good friend, Glenn Washington, And Spooked features true-life supernatural stories told firsthand by people who can barely believe it happened themselves. And every story has an original score. So come with us, family, and explore a little place called Dismal Falls.

They say out of sight is out of mind. But I have wandered countless times to meet with those I cannot see, for they are still in mind to me. You're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned. You've crossed over to Spooked. as a kid my grandfather had a shotgun he brought it out twice every year once as the clock turned over on new year's eve he'd run out to the porch and blast into the sky plow plow plow plow plow

Now, Granddaddy, Granddaddy, you said whatever goes up has got to come down.

Nah, not on New Year's Day, baby. The other time was the night before Halloween when Detroit, thousands of fires erupted the moment the sun set over the horizon, the city's rage blazing orange and red and gold. Devil's Night. And I watch granddaddy get his gun Set up his folding chair on the porch And sit smoking his cigarette Stroking the barrel I get back up in the house now baby Take care of your grandmama All around us Detroit burns And hiding behind the bars on our windows Looking out into the darkness past granddaddy I see shadows running on the sidewalk Hooded figures wearing batman superman donald duck mask carrying torches gasoline containers some pausing to consider our home then hearing the cock of his gun barrel before deciding to move on and if he's gonna stay up to protect us i'm gonna stay up to protect him all night long if i have to and i try Watching, watching shadows, fires, police cars I try Then first light presses me awake My face sleep-mashed against the window I jump up, scared Open the front door And see my granddaddy Still sitting sentry on the porch Still holding his shotgun Pulling the dregs from his last cigarettes His pack of super-long menthol cools Empty you keep your granny safe like i asked you yes sir good boy granddaddy weren't you scared then for just an instant his eyes flash hot he looks at me like he's seeing something else Someone else I already paid the fire once baby I won't pay it again Before he says it I never knew how his sister had passed I didn't understand that it wasn't an accident I didn't know that someone had meant to burn his black family From their home in the middle of the night And how every person that crawled out of that inferno long ago Took something of the flame with them I didn't understand that he's been battling a different fire for a very long time Then the burn passes from his eyes and he's almost my grandfather again And I need him back from that place he just went Granddaddy Granddaddy, can I have just a little bit of ice cream But my cornflakes He looks at me all the way then Baby

You could have a lot of ice cream in there

if you don't tell your grandmama. Spook starts. Now.

Thank you.

on this spooked road we know full well that things are never as they seem that people are often fighting invisible battles against unseen forces we know all of this but still there's a different type of magic to being in the wild that highlights the mystery of everything and we do not see. Our next storyteller, Chuck. Chuck comes face to face with his unknown. Deep in the Appalachian wilderness, a place called Dismal Falls. Spoot.

my name is chuck i've been hanging out in the woods since i was really young kind of been out there ever since between backpacking tours and wilderness therapy ended up making it what i do for a living at this point so this happened in 2015 it was summertime and the the camp that we were working out of our main base camp from what i understand it was an old christian summer camp i'm not sure uh the details but it was pretty old camp a lot of the cabins that we used uh had been kind of redone a little bit. And then of course we had the, uh, horse stables and we had, I want to say like probably 15 or 16 of them, older horses, a lot of them. And, uh, the horses were actually essentially in therapy as well. The kids would work with them for part of their therapy. And then the horses were also being rehabilitated from abusive homes at the same time. at night you would hear down by the stables the donkey his name was stanley it was a mini donkey and he would start going off at night down there i don't know if anybody out there has ever heard a donkey uh freaking out but it can be kind of kind of weird a little bit scary but he would do that pretty consistently and then usually the next day when we would go down to do horses first thing we do is groom them and when you go to groom them their their manes and tails would be just completely in knots even if we had brushed them the day before the horses would be in poor shape so at the time i really didn't think a lot of it but i would have kids going like look at this like i didn't do this i'd be like okay like what's your point they'd be like we were the last group here like i didn't do this and i'm like well maybe miss ann did it you know like it's yeah it's not part of my it's not part of my pay grade right now to worry about the horse's mains i don't know a whole ton about horses but i do remember growing up my great grandma would talk about that happening and she said it meant there was a witch on your farm i guess it was because she would go out and every single day the uh the manes and the tails on the livestock were tangled up it was like somebody had gone out and just went haywire on these animals

and they'd be skittish and they would be jumpy and they just were not in a good mood at all that was one of the few things she ever talked about was she she said i swear there's a witch out here. And she would, I mean, she'd say it all the time. From the first time it happened, down by the horse stable I mean, I definitely thought of that. I remembered her saying that immediately. That damn witch. But I was like, well, you know, if it happens a couple of times, whatever. It's not a big deal. You're like, well, it's coyotes or something like that. But with how consistently it happened there, I did start to wonder a little bit about that. I'd heard about Dismal Falls. I'd read about it. i read about it initially on a photography website and i saw pictures of it and i was like that's a beautiful waterfall like i want to get out there and go see this and i got linked over to a book called land of waterfalls and this is by a guy named jim bob tensley he wrote it in 88 and he wrote it about transylvania county mainly which is the land of waterfalls as they call it There's tons of waterfalls out there, charted, uncharted. There's some that don't even have names. And he describes it as one of the most foreboding places in the southern Appalachians. I was mainly reading to get directions. I just wanted to know how to get out there. Decided I was going to go check it out the next day. And so I drove up and I parked there at the base camp and started my hike up there. it's almost like a tunnel made out of rhododendron and mountain laurels that are so low to the ground that they're almost over your head very thick to get through you're kind of on hands and knees and that goes on for for some time then you pop out of that it opens up a little bit for you and you're still going up a really steep grade pretty blind you can't see a whole lot you come around this corner and on your left side there's this really large boulder I mean it's got to be the size of a house it's it's a big boulder so I took note of that and kept on moving and not too long after that you come to this point where the trail splits into two at that point I stopped and got my map out i was not sure which way to go 100 the lower route that stayed pretty flat according to the map would go to the dismal wall but the other trail that goes i mean it from where i was at

it looked like it went straight uphill um that's the one that goes to the waterfall i mean it's it is really steep so i start the climb up that way i get probably about halfway up it and just felt like I was being watched I got that just that pit of your your stomach feeling and hair on the back of my neck kind of stood up and weirdly enough my nose actually started bleeding right then too I kind of turned around to where this kind of sense was coming from and all i could see was just this foot and part of a robe disappear into the rhododendron thicket just caught a glimpse of it at the time i mean we had been we had been out the night before i was dehydrated a little bit kind of tired and a little bit hungover and so i was like i was like i'm definitely seeing things like i should take a break and i'm thinking i'm like well, how is that possible? Because I didn't hear anything. And with how thick the leaf litter is there, you can hear anything. It was quiet. It's very quiet out there. So I'm thinking about all this and it's just, it's getting me flustered. So I'm just like, all right, I'm going to keep going. Kept on moving. And eventually I got to the top of this hill that I've been climbing and I crest is over the top of it and there's a tree there the tree has got a rope coming down from it that goes to another tree and that tree has a rope and then from there it kind of puts you down in the rhododendron by the banks of dismal falls it's just a big long bridal veil really really pretty waterfall it drops 40 feet with a nice cascade and then it hits it hits down and it just runs down this i mean it's got to be a couple hundred feet of uh just slick rock so i hike in go sit at the bottom of the falls i sat down to just chill out have some water look at the falls water was nice and cool so i'm enjoying that i was chewing on some mint i'm feeling good i'm feeling really good um i'm not even stressing on the the foot not too long after i got there and kind of had settled in i get that that feeling again like i was being watched and kind of as i have this feeling i hear what sounded like a voice so I turn and look and up at the very top of the cascade there's a woman

standing on top of the waterfall I could see her plain as day she had kind of curly gray hair bowed down to her shoulders I would say she was in her 80s and was wearing a cloak a black one or at least a dark colored one it seemed to be in spectacular condition for somebody who runs around the woods in it and that's about all I could make out from where I was but no sooner had I looked at her she turns and walks off into the rhododendron bushes and then she's out of sight at this point i'm i'm more confused and curious than scared i'm 6'2 and i weigh like 240 i'm a big dude like i'm not i'm not intimidated but i'm trying to trying to think like why somebody would be up there i didn't even know you could go up there so i decide i decide well i'm gonna go up there too i'm gonna go figure this out on my own so i throw my stuff in my bag and start making my way up this uh slick rock next to the bridal veil now it took me it took me close to an hour to navigate through all this this slick rock this stuff is pretty serious it's kind of tough to to navigate and I'm trying to catch my breath and then I hear from the bottom of the falls this time it was definitely a voice I heard it really clearly and it just said hey and so I turn and look and now she is at the bottom of the falls where I had just been now i'm trying to figure out how she would have gotten down there past me when i was coming up because i couldn't find any other trails something's not right here and i was like this person's following me what my brain and body said was get out of there dude like we don't need to be here like let's get out of here already had my pack on so i just kind of stepped off of the bridle veil, and I just kind of went crashing through the bushes until I finally found the trail that I'd come in on. So I scramble up those rope assists, crest back over the ridge, and so now I'm heading back down. I mean, I'm trucking pretty hard downhill back toward that split in the trail where I saw the foot initially. so i blow past that point and i'm running pretty much full speed down this hill and i come back to that point where where the big boulder is that big house size rock and of course now it's on my

right side and as i come around this blind corner around this rock she's standing right there in the trail in front of me and I almost ran smack into her I took a tumble to avoid hitting her hit the ground pretty hard it winded me pretty good when I came to a stop I had basically rolled kind of up against this this rock so I'm rolled up against my back's against the rock and I'm kind of sitting up and she is standing over top of me just looking at me no expression on her face it all and her eyes were they were so white blue that they were almost white like the irises they almost blended right into the whites of her eyes the rest of her was really old looking but her eyes were very very youthful looking just piercing scared me to death we could stare at each other for a second felt like an eternity like time slowed down a little bit I break contact break eye contact with her and kind of roll get my feet under me and I take off and she just kind of watched me she watched me get my feet under me and go now I'm really running I mean I'm terrified at this point the to tell myself like this is all like you're making this up like there's nothing weird going on here even though i'm in a dead sprint running from something finally get right about down closer to base camp and uh slowed down checked behind me stopped didn't hear anything i figured i was not being followed and so i just continued my walk i got to a point in the trail where there's this down tree and I cross over this log come around a corner and there's a bobcat sitting in the middle of the trail ears were not moving eyes were not moving not a whisker flinched and that's very that's very uh out of character for that animal I mean I've been in the woods for a long time over 15 years and i've only ever seen one actual wild bobcat you're lucky to ever see one much less one sitting just in the trail looking at you so i stop and i'm staring at this this cat and i notice the eyes they weren't like cat eyes the pupils they weren't slitted wasn't the same shape i mean they were shaped like human eyes the the pupils were i mean almost dead white like very very light blue almost dead white so i knew right away as soon as i saw that cat's eyes

i was like oh that's her right there and it was i was terrified i was looking this thing dead in its eyes and it's kind of looking at me and I knew I felt it like deep down in my being that she could do whatever she wanted to to me I was at her mercy so I started talking to her I was like look I was like you got a beautiful mountain here I was like well I will never go back to your waterfall just like just please let me go like just let me go I didn't even speak that out loud that was just something i thought and uh no sooner had i thought that this this bobcat turned walked off the trail let me go after that did take some time to process it but really that's when it all kind of clicked for me right there it sunk in for me and i was like whoa whoa hold on a second it's just like it's like yeah that was really really weird like i think i ran into a witch um i don't know that's kind of just it was very organic in the way that it just like my brain automatically was like yep so i mean an experience like that it humbles you a lot especially in that in the position that i was in i mean you're you're a big bad guide like i have squared up with i've punched a bear in the jaw I'm not intimidated by a lot of things, but sure enough, yeah, it humbled me a lot. Because that was probably one of the few times in my life where I felt truly helpless when I was laying up against that wall looking at this, what seemed to be like an 80-year-old woman. This was an old witch, and I think she's been there for a long time. Longer than 80 years, I would think. I think she's much older than that. And I think that's just, that's where she, that's where she lives. That's her stomping ground. And it's way out of the way for a reason. So, I mean, when I go out in the woods, like I'm picking up trash, I'm taking care of the woods. And I think she saw that. I think she was kind of like letting me know that she was there. Like she's making her presence known more than anything else. And yeah, really, that's what I got from it for the most part. because like I said I mean she could have done whatever she wanted to while I was laid up against that rock wall it sounds crazy but I think she I think she stopped me on that trail to judge my character she decided for whatever reason not to not to harm me and just to see if you know if I was worthy enough to be in her woods and I think she determined that I must have been

thank you chuck for coming from those woods and bringing your story back with you if you listeners decide to go exploring please bring a friend original score was by clay xavier he was produced by greta weber

You

now spooksters we walk this path together spook season six have you told someone shared these stories with the people in your life let me ask you do you have a story of your own a story no one will believe a story you might even be afraid to tell tell me spook at snap judgment.org because there is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener let us know spooked at snap judgment.org and tell the dark side you spooked with some spooked gear the t-shirt of your dreams available right now at snap judgment.org and remember if you like your storytelling under the bright light of day get the amazing stupendous snap judgment podcast It's Storytelling with the Plippi. Spook was created by the team that's drawn toward the dark heart of the forest. Except for Mark Ristich, who still doesn't understand you can't wear flip-flops in the woods. There's Anna Sussman, Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrick, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Davy Kim, Renzo Gorio, Teo Ducat, Marissa Dodge, Zoe Ferrigno, Tiffany DeLiza, Ann Ford, Doug Stewart, and Isaiah Sims. The Spook theme song is by Pat McEaly Miller. My name is from Washington. Understand, there is always a fork in the road. Whether you see it or not Whether you are careful or clever Or inspired or blind You only know You have wandered from the path After it is far too late to turn back So be prepared Teach your children so they will know The oldest and simplest weapon Against the eternal dark Never Ever Never ever Turn out

the lights.

You