He Recorded A Sasquatch Speaking English In The Woods, But When It Noticed Him Recording…

THE TAPE IN THE THROAT

Chapter 1: The Secret Sound

My name is Mark, and for thirty years I’ve carried a secret so dangerous I can barely sleep. Locked inside a fireproof box beneath my feet is the only copy of a digital file that could shatter the world’s understanding of nature, history, and the very idea of what it means to be human. It isn’t a blurry photograph or a plaster cast of a footprint. It’s sound—a single minute of audio that proves everything we believe about the wilderness is a lie.

.

.

.

I’m an outlaw now. I know there are men—government scientists, private collectors, agents with badges and guns—who would erase me just to possess this file. That’s why I have to get this story out, here and now. The evidence I carry isn’t just proof that Sasquatch exists. It proves they think, and worse, that they communicate. For three decades, I was a sound engineer, obsessed with recording the purest ambient noises in the wilds of Appalachia. I went into the woods hunting silence, archiving the soul of the forest: wind through hemlock, the call of an owl, the rush of a mountain creek. I wasn’t looking for monsters. I was looking for the absence of machines.

But in October 1994, my life was annihilated by five seconds of impossible sound. I captured a deep, resonant, distinctly non-human voice. Not a roar or a howl—speech. Structured, guttural, but undeniably English. The moment I heard that tape, I stopped being a scientist and became a panicked custodian of forbidden truth. This creature, this legend, wasn’t just hiding. He was listening, absorbing, and calculating. He was thinking. I kept the secret because I knew the moment it was revealed, the hunters wouldn’t come with cages. They’d come with guns.

Chapter 2: The Oz Effect

I was under contract to a university archive, tasked with capturing the vanishing soundscapes of North America before noise pollution made true silence extinct. That Tuesday, I hiked six miles deep into a restricted section of Nantahala National Forest, North Carolina. Locals called it “the throat”—a natural amphitheater shielded by granite cliffs, perfect for pure recording. I arrived before dawn, set up my Nagra IVS reel-to-reel, a parabolic mic, Sennheiser headphones, and settled into my camouflage blind. For two hours, it was heaven: rustling leaves, trickling creek, birds calling in sequence.

At 8:42 a.m., everything changed. The dawn chorus cut out. Squirrels froze. Even the wind seemed to die. The VU meters dropped to near zero. My headphones went dead silent, save for my own heartbeat thumping like a drum. I checked my gear, convinced something had failed. I turned the gain up, desperate to find the forest again.

That’s when I picked it up—a low, rhythmic spike below 20 hertz. Infrasound. Bass you feel in your bones before you hear it. Nausea washed over me—a primal dread signaling “run.” But I didn’t. I was a technician. I aimed the parabolic dish at the source, forty yards down a foggy ravine. Through the headphones, the sound clarified. It was organic, wet, the sound of massive lungs pushing air through a throat the size of a drainpipe. Deep guttural clicks and pops, heavy breaths, gravel grinding. Not bear, not cougar. Almost subaquatic, like a whale song in mountain air.

Then the chaos organized. The rhythm changed. My hands shook. The voice was deep, vibrating like a cave whisper. It began to form words.

Chapter 3: Hurt, Cold, Stone

At first, I dismissed it as pareidolia—my mind finding patterns in noise. But then it came again, clearer: “Hurt. Leg.” The accent was thick, distorted, as if the speaker was struggling with a tongue too large for its mouth. But the words were unmistakable. It wasn’t mimicking. The tone carried emotional weight. Exhausted, old.

I stared at the spinning reels. A biological entity was speaking English, forty yards away, lost in Appalachian mist. No human vocal cords could produce that sub-bass frequency. No animal understands “stone” or “cold” in human syntax. I was paralyzed, watching the needles dance, the only human on earth witnessing the impossible. The creature was talking to itself, narrating pain.

I should have left. But the scientist in me overrode the survivor. This was the most important recording in history. I had to get closer. I reached for my heavy shoulder-mounted VHS camcorder, checked the tape—twenty minutes left—and made the decision that would ruin my life.

I left the Nagra running in the blind. I crawled through wet leaf litter, agonizing over every snapped twig. The air grew colder, the smell hit—wet dog, sulfur, metallic infection. I paused behind a fallen oak, heart hammering. The voice was louder. “Help. No help.” It was pleading.

I raised my head above the bark. The ravine opened below: a shadowy depression shielded by hemlocks. There, slumped against a mossy boulder, was a shape that made no biological sense. Even sitting, its shoulders were twice the width of a man, covered in dark matted hair. Not a bear. The arms too long, the hands clutching its own leg. It was rocking, self-soothing. I brought the viewfinder to my eye, focused. I was looking at a Sasquatch, speaking to itself in English.

Chapter 4: Iron Bites Deep

I pressed record. The mechanical whir of the tape heads sounded like a chainsaw in the silence, but the creature didn’t react. Through the lens, I saw features that were terrifyingly human—a broad flat nose, deep-set eyes squeezed shut in agony, expressive lips moving in sync with the words. The audio was tinny, but proximity made up for it. I zoomed in on its leg—just above the ankle, rusted metal glinting through fur. A bear trap, chained to a hemlock root, pulled taut.

“Iron bites deep,” it rumbled. The diction was precise. It wasn’t mimicking forest sounds. It was describing reality. Then: “Men, leave iron. Why hate?” My breath hitched. It understood malice. The trap wasn’t nature—it was a deliberate creation of men.

The creature muttered faster, words tumbling: an Appalachian dialect, older, thicker. “Forest mine, river mine, brothers gone, cold, take me.” It was mourning. It knew it was dying in the trap. The sadness was so profound, so human, that tears pricked my eyes. I wasn’t filming a monster. I was filming a prisoner.

I realized then: if they speak, they have culture. If they have culture, they tell stories. And for generations, those stories are about us. We are the monsters in their folklore.

Chapter 5: Little Brother

The creature pulled at the trap, whimpered—a high, keen sound that contrasted horribly with its size. “P told, watch. P said, hide.” It remembered warnings from a parent. This was memory, not instinct.

I shifted my weight, trying to get a better angle. My boot slid on wet moss. A branch snapped—gunshot loud in the amphitheater. The murmuring stopped. The breathing cut off. In the viewfinder, the creature’s head snapped up. Its eyes flew open—wide, white-rimmed, filled with piercing intelligence. It was looking directly at me.

For an eternity, time suspended. The creature scanned the brush with predator’s precision. I stopped breathing, willing my heart to slow. This was the moment: the sacrifice of my peace, my career, my place in the sane world. Every second of footage was a nail in the coffin of my old life. If I released this tape, half the world would call me a fraud. The other half, the half with guns, would believe—and hunt.

The creature slumped back, energy fading. It began to hum—a low, melodic, mournful sound that vibrated in my chest. Not a song, but a soothe. Comforting itself in the face of the unknown.

Then, a miracle: a red squirrel, confused by the stillness, skittered down the hemlock. Prey approaching an apex predator. I held my breath, expecting violence. Instead, the creature stopped humming, turned its massive head, and whispered: “Little brother.” It extended one finger, touched the moss beside its knee. “Run. Iron hides here.” He was warning the squirrel, protecting it. The squirrel chattered and darted away. The Sasquatch watched it go, ancient sadness in his eyes. He looked at his trapped leg, then at the tree, and whispered, “Free.”

Chapter 6: The Verdict

I wanted to help. I could have freed him. I had the tools. But fear kept me glued to the ground, stealing his pain for my archives. The creature began to hum again, a lullaby to itself. Ten minutes later, the sun shifted, a shaft of light pierced the canopy and flared off my lens. The creature traced the angle, looked past the log, through the rhododendrons, and stopped humming. He was looking at the anomaly in his world—the lens.

The miracle was over. He leaned forward, nostrils flaring, triangulating me. He smelled the fear, the electronics, the betrayal. He didn’t roar. He stared into the lens and narrowed his eyes. “Watcher,” he said. The word was a label, an accusation. “You steal shadow.” He understood photography as theft of the soul.

I scrambled backward. The creature grabbed the iron chain, heaved, trying to uproot the tree. “Coward!” he bellowed. I stood up, camera glowing red, and he pointed at me. “Fire waits for you.” It was a curse. He picked up a jagged rock, hurled it at the oak log. It exploded, sending splinters everywhere. I ran, abandoning my expensive gear, crashing through the brush. Behind me, the forest was dismantled—trees snapping, chain thrashing, and his voice: “Come back. Fix. Fix.”

But I ran. I ran until my lungs burned, until his rage faded into the distance. I drove away, clutching the camera, haunted by the word: “Coward.”

Chapter 7: The Burden

Back in my rental cabin, I locked every door, barricaded myself, and watched the tape. The audio rattled the windows. I transcribed every word: “Iron bites deep. Why hate? Little brother. Watcher. You steal shadow. Fix.” I watched his face, the intelligence burning in his eyes, the tears. The man who woke up that morning—a scientist, a nature lover—died in that room. He was replaced by a man burdened with a truth too heavy for one spine.

I realized the paradox: I could be famous, but I would be bringing iron to his doorstep. The valley would be swarmed, the canopy firebombed. They would be hunted, caged, dissected. I burned my notes, erased my existence from the record, became a ghost. I changed my name, took jobs that kept me invisible. I kept the tape as penance, because he told me to “fix.” The only way I could fix was by keeping the silence.

I can no longer walk in the woods. The wind triggers panic attacks. The sight of a squirrel makes me weep. I live in cities, haunted by the knowledge of a parallel civilization hiding in the margins, fearing us, judging us. In that one terrible instance, they begged us for mercy.

I am old now. The fire waits for me. My time is running out. That’s why I’m speaking now—not to the government, not to the press, but to you. I need someone else to know we are not the only ones speaking in the dark. The tape is real. The words were English. And the verdict he passed—“Coward”—was the truest thing ever spoken.

Sound waves never truly disappear. They dissipate, fading into the background static of the universe. But his voice hasn’t faded. It echoes in my dreams. Why hate? I wonder what happened after I drove away. Did his brothers come? Did they find him shackled by our iron, confirming every story they tell their children about the men who live in the light?

I’ll never know. I ran from the answer. But I leave you this warning: when you go into the woods, be careful what you listen for. Past the noise of your own arrogance, you might hear the trees speaking back. And they are not praying. They are judging.

Some secrets aren’t meant to be found. They are meant to be heard, respected, and left in the dark. I possess the proof, but he possessed the humanity. And in the end, that is the only discovery that matters.

The tape remains locked away. Would you destroy it, or release it to the world? The choice is yours.