The MYSTERY of the Stairs in the Woods

you know at some point it would make sense to invest in an actual candle hello everybody uh once again we are back for another spooky video and this time it will be a little different i have come down with something uh potentially the couf probably not it might be the couf this one is going to be more of a read-along i'd rather you go in rather blind to what the subject is but i'll have you know it is about the stairs in the woods and more specifically stories relating to a specific search and rescue ranger and his encounters with them i want to say before i begin thank you all for watching uh i'll try to get through this with my sore throat and we'll see how it goes patreon thinks will be at the end as usual but once again just thank you guys for watching to get some context for this it is a line of stories told from the reddit thread i'm a search and rescue officer for the u.s forest service i have some stories to tell which the link to the original post will be in the description below but uh he talks throughout the story about when to go's and missing kids cases and other creepy stuff that i may cover in the future but for now i just want to highlight the parts about the stairs in the woods so in the first sections the first time he mentions it so i'll just start there this is the last one i'll tell and it's probably the weirdest story i have now i don't know if this is true in every search and rescue unit but in mine it's sort of an unspoken regular thing we run into you can try asking about it with other search and rescue officers but even if they know what you're talking about they probably won't say anything about it we've been told not to talk about it by our superiors and at this point we've all gotten so used to it that it doesn't even seem weird anymore on just about every case that we're really far out into the wilderness i'm talking 30 or 40 miles at some point we'll find a staircase in the middle of the woods it's almost like if you took the stairs in your house cut them out and put them in the forest i asked about it the first time i saw some and the other officer just told me not to worry about it that it was normal everyone i asked said the same thing and i wanted to check them out but i was told very empathetically that i should never go near any of them i just sort of ignore them now when i run into them because it happened so frequently one of my first jobs as a trainee was a search op for a four-year-old that had gotten separated from his mom this was one of those cases where we knew we were going to find him because the dogs were on a strong scent trail and we saw clear signs that he was in the area we ended up finding him in a berry patch about half a mile from where he'd been last seen kid wasn't even aware that he'd wandered that far one of the vets brought him back which i was glad for because i'm really not good with kids and i find it hard to talk to them and keep them company as my trainer and i are heading back she decides to take me on a detour to show me one of the hot spots where we tend to find missing people it's a natural dip in the land near a popular trail and people will usually move downhill because it's easier we hike out there it's a few miles away and we get there in about an hour or so as we're walking around the area and she's pointing out places she's found people in the past i see something in the distance this area we're in is about eight miles from the main parking area but there's back roads you can take to get closer if you don't want to hike that far but we're on a state protected land which means that there can't be any kind of commercial or residential development out here the most you'll ever see as a fire tower or make sure or makeshift shelter that homeless people think they can get away with building but i can see from here that whatever this thing is has straight edges and if there's one thing you can learn quickly it's that nature rarely makes straight lines i point it out but she doesn't say anything she just hangs back and lets me wander over and check it out i get within about 20 feet of it and all the hair on the back of my neck stands up it's a staircase in the middle of the woods in the proper context it would literally be the most benign thing ever it's just a normal staircase with beige carpet and about 10 steps tall but instead of being in a house where it obviously should be it's out here in the middle of the woods the sides aren't carpeted obviously and i can see the what it's made of it's almost like a video game glitch where the house has failed to load completely in the stairs are the only thing visible i stand there and it's like my brain is working overtime to try to make sense of what i'm seeing my trainer comes and stands next to me she just stands there casually looking at it as if it's the least interesting thing in the world i asked her what this thing is doing here and she just chuckles get used to it rookie you're going to see a lot of them i start to move closer but she grabs my arm hard i wouldn't do that she says her voice is casual but her grip is tight and i just stand there looking at her you're going to see them all the time but don't go near them don't touch them don't go up them just ignore them i started to ask her about it but something in the way she's looking at me tells me it's best if i don't we end up moving on and the subject doesn't come up again for the rest of my training she was right though i'd say about every fifth call i go on i end up running across a set of stairs sometimes they're relatively close to the path maybe within two or three miles sometimes they're 20 30 miles out literally in the middle of nowhere and i only find them during the broadest searches or training weekends they're usually in good condition but sometimes it looks like they've been out there for months for months all different kinds all different sizes the biggest i ever saw looked like they came out of a turn of the century mansion and were at least 10 feet wide with steps leading up at least 15 or 20 feet i've tried talking about it with people but they just give me the same response my trainer did it's normal don't worry about it they're not a big deal but don't go close to them or up them when trainees ask about it now i give them the same response i don't really know what else to tell them i'm really hoping someday i get a better answer but it hasn't happened yet in the next store the search and rescue officer is talking about an interaction that his friend had with the staircase and the author says this my buddy has been a search and rescue officer for about seven years he started when he was a junior in college and he had a very similar experience when he first encountered the stairs his trainer told him almost the same thing mine did which was never to go near touch or ascend them for the first year he did just that but apparently his curiosity got the better of him and on one call he broke away from the line and went to go check a set of them out he said they were about 10 miles from the path where a teenage girl had vanished and the dogs were following ascent he was on his own lagging behind the main group when he saw a set of stairs off to his left they look like they were from a new house because the carpeting was pristine and white he said that as he got closer he didn't feel any different or hear any weird noises he was expecting something to happen like bleeding from his ears or collapsing but he got right up next to them and didn't feel a thing the only thing he said that was odd was that there was absolutely no debris on the steps no dirt leaves dust or anything and there didn't appear to be any signs of animal or insect activity in the immediate area which he found strange it was less like things were avoiding them and more like they just happened to be in a relatively barren part of the forest he touched the stairs and didn't feel anything except the sort of sticky feeling you get from new carpet making sure his radio was on he slowly climbed the stairs he said it was terrifying because the way they'd been stigmatized he wasn't really sure what was going to happen to him he joked that half of him expected to be teleported to some other dimension and the other half of him was watching for a ufo to come swooping down but he got to the top with little event and he stood there looking around but he said the longer he stood on the top step the more he felt like he was doing something very very wrong he described it as a feeling you'd get if you were in a part of a government building that you had no business being in as if someone was going to come and arrest you or shoot you in the back of the head at any second he tried to brush it off but the feeling got stronger and stronger and that's when he realized that he couldn't hear anything the sounds of the forest were gone and he couldn't hear his own breathing it was like some kind of weird awful tinnitus but more oppressive he climbed back down to rejoin the search and didn't mention what he'd done but he said the weirdest part came after his trainer was waiting back at the welcome center after the search ended for the day and he cornered my buddy before he could leave he said his trainer had this look of intense anger and he asked what was wrong you went up them didn't you my buddy said it wasn't frazer's question he asked how his trainer knew and the trainer just shook his head because we didn't find her the dogs lost her scent my buddy asked what that had to do with anything the trainer asked how long he'd been on the stairs my buddy said no more than a minute the trainer gave him this really awful almost dead-eyed look and told him that if he ever went up another set of stairs again he'd be fired immediately the trainer walked away and i guess he's never answered any of the questions my buddies asked about him since now i don't want to give too much of it away especially with what comes later but it is my fear that these stairs in the woods are a sort of inter-dimensional construct sort of as if there are different layers or parallel universes existing together and the stairs sort of act as passageways between them as we get into more details later i'll explain how this makes sense but my idea moving forward is that they're not just not of the woods but not of this dimension itself the next story opens with an introduction from the author which i'll begin to read the next person i talked to was ew 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 sick 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 complimented 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 to the subject of weirder calls i mentioned that i had a buddy who gone up a set of stairs he got kind of quiet and asked me if i heard of a little boy who disappeared from the park a few years back i hadn't so he told me this story they were out looking for this 11 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 search and rescue 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 ew's team noticed right away was that the very strange pattern was emerging dogs and alternating boxes were picking up joey's scent but losing it when they overlapped with another box if you think of it like 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 one area to another area without leaving ascent in each place he passed ew and his partner ew and his partner pass into a new box of the grid and ew notice a set of stairs about 50 yards away he tells his partner that they need to check near it but his partner flat out refuses he tells ew that he's made it a point to never go any stairs he sees and that while it may be routine he's not to pretend that it's normal he tells ew that he'll wait inside while ew checks ew says he was irritated but he fell 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 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 heart 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 for 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 because 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 probably eaten something poisonous since he was holding the 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 search and rescue 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 love 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 bit 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 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 issues 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 asked if i remember the kid and of course i do and he says some seriously weird stuff is going on he tells me ew 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 believe what he was seeing the kids organs were like swiss cheese quarter side's 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 had ever seen was a guy who'd filled himself with a buckshot a year or so back while cleaning his rifle rifle okay no one had a clue what could possibly have caused it my friend asked me if i'd heard anything like it or if we did similar cases in the past but i 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 they go together i never let them out of my sight i used to love it out here but that case and a couple of 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 we can think and feel he tells me to be careful and he walks away i didn't have a chance to talk to him again but that story stuck with me so here we have a story of a child's organs being essentially stripped away hole by hole assumingly whenever he comes into contact with the staircase this goes back to the theory i mentioned before about the stairs being gateways into alternate planes or at least a different realm sort of where the spirit of the woods and stuff like that come from the other stories i'm not mentioning detail uh various cryptids monsters that our search and rescue officer runs into so my idea here is that the woods are kind of bleeding over with these supernatural entities and these stairs may be a way in and out in our next story we're going to see more explanation about it but again this further supports the idea that the stairs act as gateways immediately after the previous story he leads into another experience that he's had with another search and rescue veteran by pure coincidence i got to talk to another vet pb who's been in the search and rescue field for years we were partnered on a grid sweep during the training exercise and we were chatting casually about how we liked the job what kind of things we'd seen and the like at one point we passed an old set of stairs though these were probably from an old fire lookout given the area that we were in i sort of casually mentioned that i was curious about the stairs and then i wish i knew more about them he got kind of quiet and looked like he wanted to tell me something but wasn't sure if he should finally he told me to turn my radio off obviously this is something we're never ever supposed to do but i did and he did the same about seven years ago he tells me he was out on a call with a rookie they were in the area of a park that's had a lot of strange reports and events disappearances stories about lights in the forest odd noises things like that the rookie was totally spooked kept going on and on about things in the woods according to pb the guy wouldn't stop talking about the goat man just on and on goat man this goat man that finally i told him that there was plenty else to be afraid of out here that was very real that he'd better get over this thing with a goat man the rookie wanted to know what kind of things i was talking about and i just told him to shut up and walk we crested a little ridge and there was a staircase about 10 yards ahead the rookie stops dead in his tracks and just stands there looking at them i tell him see that's something you should be afraid of the rookie asks me what these are doing out here and for some reason i just open up and tell them the truth or what i've been told is the truth i could have gotten a lot of trouble for doing what i did and i could have gotten in trouble for repeating it to you but you're a nice kid and i want you to stop looking into this quit while you're ahead so i'll tell you what i know under the condition that you never breathe a word of this to the supes i told him i wouldn't say a word and he double checked that our radios are off when i first started out we were a little less tight-lipped about them and other things that happened out here we warned people before they were even hired that there was weird things going on i guess the forest service was tired of such a massive turnover rate and they wanted people to know what they were getting into so they started having people sign these agreements that they wouldn't go to the media about what was going on the forest service didn't want to scare people away so the last thing they needed were spooked rookies running off to the media with stories of ghosts and haunted stairs but eventually they found the agreements weren't necessary people not only didn't want to talk about what they saw but they wouldn't a few times media tried to talk to people when kids or hikers would disappear and no one would say a word i can't really explain it i guess we just don't really want to admit anything is wrong this is our job and to be out in the woods every single day we don't need to be spooked and the best way to avoid that is to pretend like everything's okay so i'll tell you everything i can think of and after that i'm done talking about it for good and i expect you not to bring it up around me ever the stairs have been out here as long as the parks have existed we have records going back decades describing them sometimes people go up them and nothing happens other times look i really don't like talking about this but sometimes really bad things happen i saw one guy get his hand sliced clean off when he got to the top step he reached out to touch a tree branch and it happened so fast one second his hand was there the next it was gone completely clean wound and we never found the hand that guy almost died another time a woman touched one of the stairs and a blood vessel in her brain exploded literally exploded like a water balloon she sort of stumbled down and came over to me and all she got out was i think something is wrong with me she dropped like a sack of flour dead before she hit the ground i'll never forget the way the blood leaked into the inside of her eye before she died i watched it turn red i watched it happen and there wasn't a single thing i could do to help we warn people not to go anywhere near them but there's always at least one idiot who does and even if nothing happens to them something bad always happens kids go missing as kids go missing as we're on their trail sometimes dies the next day cut in half completely safe part in the park i don't know why but something bad always happens i don't know exactly what i don't know exactly why they're out here but it doesn't matter they're here and if we were smart we tell our new officers exactly what they're capable of we were both quiet for a little while i was afraid to talk because i wasn't sure if he was done he looked like he wanted to say something else finally he spoke up again have you ever noticed that you can't find the same one twice i nodded expecting him to continue but he just stayed quiet walking alongside me and eventually he started a story about the biggest deer he'd ever seen in the park i didn't bring up the subject again and i didn't press him for any more stories he dropped out of the op the next day apparently he left before the sun came up he said he was sick none of us have heard from him since he left so this further goes into the idea that the stairs themselves are a supernatural gateway like the man who reached his hand out and it was supposedly sliced off or went into nowhere could have been his hand going through to another dimension or a spiritual plane same with the child who was curled up on the staircase and began sort of dissolving almost dissolving into another reality here we have a slightly shorter update from the author one of the vets at the training off reads no sleep and you recognize my stories he knows me pretty well and we swapped stories before he asked if he could share something he's noticed about the stairs and some thoughts he had i'm really glad you decided to share these i think it's important that people be aware of what's out there especially since the forest service is doing such a good job of covering it all up i asked him what he meant what do you mean what do i mean the lack of any kind of media attention no coverage of missing kids or bodies found miles away from where they got lost in the first place david paul leads his right on the head the forest service is doing everything they can to keep people coming here even if it isn't safe i mean to be fair it's not like these things happen every day but the numbers add up and it's worth looking into especially the stairs i was surprised you didn't mention the flipped ones i didn't know what he was talking about i couldn't remember him ever even i couldn't remember him ever talking about something like that he seemed somewhat incredulous dude i can't believe you've been on this long without seeing them no one told you about them i shrugged and asked them to elaborate well there's the normal stairs the ones that pop up when you're ways out i know you know about them sometimes i've run across ones that are flipped upside down i guess it would be like if you had a dollhouse and the stairs were a separate piece now take that flip it upside down so the top step is stuck in the dirt and put it out in the woods they're like that i don't see them as often but they're odd to say the least makes me think of footage taken after a tornado when houses are all blown apart and random things are left standing like chimneys and garden walls those ones freak me out more than the normal ones because i can't really write those off as easily i don't scare very easily most of us work out here but that idea stuck with me and it bothered me i'm going to try to find out more about them so again this goes into the idea of flipped realities what is very creepy about this if you could imagine the upright staircase as being a gateway into a different or separate plane of existence then what would the upside down staircases be a gateway into perhaps one is a gateway in and the other is a gateway out or i'm not sure let me know what you think in another story the search and rescue officer is detailing a camping trip he has with fellow officers when he gets to this point i switched the topic to the stairs a little later and there was a definite shift in enthusiasm no one spoke up at first there's a real stigma around discussing them even when we're away from work but i broke the ice with a story of my own and the guy who told the story about the faceless man told this one i'll be it very quietly a couple years ago i was camping with my girlfriend we were at about two miles from the road at this site i know we went to bed that night but we couldn't sleep because no it was because we kept hearing that grinding noise my brother used to grind his teeth in his sleep and it kind of reminds me of that my girlfriend was freaking out but i just kept telling her to ignore it because i've heard it before and you just have to ignore it it goes away eventually you guys know what i mean we all knew what he meant so eventually i got her to go to sleep but i woke up probably two hours later because something was just off i rolled over and she wasn't there and i kind of freaked out because he thought for a second and then he took a very long drink anyway i ran out of the tent calling her name but i didn't have to go far she was standing at the edge of the camp looking at something in the trees and i could see she was really pale the fire was low but the bright but bright enough to see her anyway so i ran up to see what she was going on and she was dead asleep but her eyes were open she had this real spaced out look you know so i put my arm around her to leave her back but she wouldn't move she just said really quietly something like i have to go now eddie i have to go it's here i was like you're just sleepwalking come back to bed but she wouldn't budge she kept standing there and saying that she had to go and i looked where she was looking and there was a staircase right there about 15 yards away gray one concrete she started to walk toward it but i yanked her back and that woke her up she looked at me like i was out of my mind and she asked what she was doing out of the tent i didn't tell her anything i just told her she was sleepwalking the grinding was gone so she just went back to the tent with me and fell asleep again i don't know i don't i just don't like thinking about it you know and we all knew you guys remember that kid with i can't remember what was some kind of brain issue not downs but something like it someone else mentioned well i got to read the report he gave when they found him a week after he went missing and it was so weird beyond belief i mean you have to take it with a grain of salt because who knows what that kid actually thinks is real but some of the stuff i don't think he could have made up like what well first of all he talked about the stairs he said he'd been watching his dad build a fire and the stairs came up to him and he had to go up them or something bad would happen the cops should the cops couldn't really understand what he was talking about after that because he just kept saying like the campfire over and over and he kept mentioning sounds but he couldn't say what sounds just that it was loud and he covered his ear so he couldn't hear them but the thing i remember most is that they asked him where exactly he gone and he just said he was right there he kept pointing at himself and they said they thought that man he never left he said he wasn't scared because the stairs were there and he said they'd talk to him but not like people talk like i said it was really convoluted and hard to understand and i have a feeling the cops didn't take most of it down they ended up just saying that the kid had some kind of amnesia or fugue and that they didn't think foul play was involved doesn't really explain why they came back a week later perfectly fine without a speck of dirt on him and well fed but hey well the cop says goes so we see here in the beginning of the story there is a woman who seems almost possessed to go out to the stairs and the second one we see a child that did go the stairs and said that it was like the campfire over and over and says that there were great sounds now one of the stories that didn't have to do with the stairs search and rescue officer mentions that there was a great loud sound that approached him on one of his times out and i think it's related to this the boy saw something absolutely incomprehensible specifically when he said like the campfire not only that but he talked about loud noises and kept saying that he was right here and pointing towards his chest this seems like a very lovecraftian or dare i say biblical creature that is completely indescribable by any sense of the modern realm finally i'll read the final mention of the staircase in the search and rescue thread this will be my final update for now things have deteriorated here to a degree that i didn't foresee i didn't know how much writing about the things that are happening out here would affect every single part of my life and maybe that was stupid to me maybe i should have considered it more seriously but honestly i just thought i was writing about things that a few people would want to hear i didn't think it would get this much attention people ask me about the stairs now it doesn't happen every day but when it does happen i never really know what to say my bosses know someone's talking about them and i'm sure that if they know the higher-ups know and i can tell you that they aren't happy about it i've been formally told that i am not to speak a word about them to anyone anymore which is part of the reason this has to be my final update i can't risk my job for this as much as it's been wonderful to get a lot of these things off my mind i still do love my work and i need to be out here if anything my being aware of what's really going on is enough reason to stick it out i may not be able to tell people that they're out there but if i see them i can direct traffic away to somewhere safer after this he goes on to discuss other stories but as far as this thread goes that is the final mention of the stairs so final thoughts on it it seems that the stairs are a supernatural entity that appear and disappear at random throughout the woods it is my belief that these are crossovers into dimensions of creatures that reside in the woods such as that of the windigo or the dogman and things like that which are all also mentioned throughout the stories not only that but it seems that the forest service knows about these and try to keep the public quiet on them obviously to both keep it out of media eye but to continue the revenue for the park services i know the author said that there is a book in the works and i hope that comes to fruition because i'd be very interesting to read but for right now make of that what you will come to your own conclusions and please let me know what you think thank you all so much for watching it really does mean a lot i know this is a little bit more low effort than things i normally do but it really means a lot to see all the support so i want to go ahead and thank my patrons of huntsman and above thank you eddie shoemaker thank you kayla thank you pef thank you benjamin allen and thank you tim free love and thank you to all the other patrons who are a part on every tier it really does mean a lot new video later this week probably and short story the first of the month so look forward to that and thank you guys for everything so peace out bye

Channel: Wendigoon

Views: 1,431,847

Keywords: Halloween, horror, scary, spooky, scary video, dark web video, scary woods video, cryptid, urban legend, caught on camera, real life horror story, top 10 scariest

Id: mOQ8tQXGLbg

Length: 31min 47sec (1907 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Saucy-Rosssi]

the dumbest thing i’ve ever seen, people will believe anything

[u/Nine_Eye_Ron]

It’s for looking