Stuff That Scares Me

Broken saplings. Eight to ten feet up. In a row. Through remote timber where the surrounding trees were untouched. A true story of life in Appalachia .  A cow horn, nine feet up in an oak, in woods so quiet you could hear your own heartbeat. Tree structures that matched formations being documented two thousand miles away — by researchers Wallace had never heard of, in forests he had never visited....

The Fox Is Still On Fire, Episode 1: Don't whistle after dark. Where I grew up in  West Virginia, that wasn't advice. It was a rule — and the old people who passed it down couldn't always tell you where it came from. They only knew you followed it. In this  episode, Wallace Cole reads Chapter 1 of his book, The Fox Is Still On Fire, a book of warnings common across Appalachia. What...

The bathroom light was on.  I had turned it off before I went to bed. I know that the way I know my own name. I've turned off the bathroom light in a thousand hotel rooms across this country.  It was on.  And it was moving.  Night Two at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. Six guests in the entire building. Off-season. The week before partial winter closure. In Episode One, I gave ever...

Some land gets sold. Some land gets inherited. Some land gets fought over in court for years. And some land — nobody claims. Not because it's worthless. Because something won't allow it. In Monroe County, West Virginia, a property dispute over an unnamed hollow leads a land surveyor deep into terrain that doesn't appear on any official map. The trail cameras keep losing their SD car...

The Stanley Hotel inspired Stephen King's The Shining . Stephen King stayed in Room 217 and left with a nightmare that became a novel. Jim Carrey stayed in Room 217 and left in the middle of the night — and has never said why. I stayed four nights. Off-season. Mostly alone. This is Episode 1 — Nights One and Two. The staff said things. The hotel said things. Some of it I can explain. Some of...

A search team spent the night in an abandoned fire-watch cabin above Cranberry Wilderness — West Virginia , December 1987. (Based on a True Story) Something circled that cabin for hours. It hit the door twice, hard enough to bow the wood inward. It breathed through the gaps. It dragged something slowly along the outside wall, from one end to the other, the way you drag something when you want the...

Nine experienced hikers entered the northern Ural Mountains in February of 1959.  None of them came back.  Their tent was cut open from the inside. Their bodies were found scattered across the snow — some barefoot, some with catastrophic internal injuries, and all under circumstances that investigators could never fully explain.  In Episode One of Stuff That Scares Me, Wallace Cole begins a deep i...

What could make nine experienced mountaineers cut their way out of a tent and run barefoot into the snow?  In Episode Two of Stuff That Scares Me, Wallace Cole examines the competing explanations behind the DYATLOV PASS incident — avalanche, military testing, infrasound, radiation exposure, and more — and tests each theory against the actual evidence left behind on Dead Mountain.  This episode exp...

Nine experienced hikers fled their tent barefoot into the snow. In Episode Three of Stuff That Scares Me, Wallace Cole reconstructs the final hours of the DYATLOV PASS incident and presents the conclusion he believes the evidence requires. This episode explores: What likely happened inside the tent on the night of February 1st, 1959 Why the hikers cut through the walls instead of using the door Th...