Hey everyone, welcome back to the channel. If you’re new here, we cover the most disturbing true crime cases and unexplained disappearances that’ll make you question everything you thought you knew about the world around us. I’m uploading every single day, bringing you stories that the mainstream media won’t touch, cases that get buried, testimonies that get dismissed. Before we get into tonight’s absolute nightmare, I need your help.

 We’re pushing hard to hit 1,000 subscribers before the new year. If you enjoy diving deep into the darkness with me, hit that subscribe button right now. It takes two seconds and it means everything. All right, let’s dive into today’s story. Tonight’s story comes from leaked recordings of a Yellowstone park ranger with 15 years of experience.

 A man who thought he’d seen everything the wilderness could throw at him until the summer of 2019. This isn’t speculation. This isn’t urban legend. This is based on internal reports, personal journal entries, and a confession that was never meant to leave the Ranger Station Yellowstone National Park.

 Over 2 million acres of pristine wilderness, geothermal wonders, and deadly beauty. People vanish in national parks every year, but some cases defy all logical explanation. And what you’re about to hear is one of them. David Mitchell, 42 years old, senior park ranger. His voice on the leaked recording is shaky, exhausted, broken. You can hear it in the way he struggles to find words.

 The long pauses where he’s clearly reliving something that shattered him. This isn’t an official report, he says. This can’t be. No one would believe me. And if they did, I don’t know what’s worse. He’d been placed on administrative leave. Something happened in the back country that destroyed his understanding of the wilderness he thought he knew intimately.

 And by the end of this story, you’ll understand why he could never go back. Thursday, July 18th, 2019, 6:45 in the morning. David’s phone rings with a call every ranger dreads. An overdue hiker. 28-year-old Emma Hartley from Denver, experienced backpacker solo hiking the remote Thor region, one of the most isolated areas in the lower 48 states.

The Thorare isn’t like the tourist areas of Yellowstone. There are no geysers, no wooden walkways, no crowds. It’s raw wilderness, the kind of place where you can hike for days without seeing another human being. Emma knew this. She was prepared. She had a satellite communicator and had been checking in daily with her sister like clockwork.

Her last check-in was Wednesday at 7:30 in the evening, and everything was normal. She reported clear weather, good spirits, no problems. When she missed her Thursday morning check-in, her sister didn’t hesitate. She called it in immediately and that’s when David’s nightmare began. David and his partner Tom Whitfield saddled up at first light.

The Thorare isn’t accessible by vehicle. You go in on horseback or on foot, and even on horseback. It’s a 6-hour ride to Emma’s last known position. David had patrolled this area hundreds of times over his 15-year career. He knew every trail, every creek crossing, every campsite.

 The weather was perfect that morning. Clear skies, mild temperatures, ideal search conditions. They made good time, pushing the horses harder than usual, both men feeling that instinctive urgency that comes with search and rescue. They reached Emma’s campsite around 2:15 in the afternoon. And the moment David dismounted, he knew something was catastrophically wrong.

 Emma’s tent was still standing, completely intact. No damage, no signs of weathering or distress. The tent flap was closed properly, zipped from the inside, David called out her name. No response. The forest around them was silent in a way that made his skin crawl. 15 years in these woods, and he’d never experienced silence like that.

 No birds calling, no squirrels chattering, no insects buzzing, just absolute suffocating quiet. Tom felt it, too. David could see it in the way his partner’s hand instinctively moved to the bear spray on his hip. They approached the tent carefully, following protocol, announcing themselves. David unzipped the flap and looked inside.

Emma’s backpack was there, sitting upright, perfectly organized. Her sleeping bag was laid out, still fluffed as if she’d just gotten out of it. Personal items were arranged neatly along the inside wall of the tent. Her satellite communicator was sitting on top of her pack.

 And when David checked it, the device was fully charged, fully functional, no messages, no emergency activations. Outside the tent, 50 yard away, her bear canister was properly hung, food stored exactly as it should be. Emma had done everything right. She was an experienced hiker who knew the rules, knew the dangers, and had taken every precaution. Then David saw the boots.

 They were placed neatly outside the tent entrance, side by side, toes pointing toward the trail. That detail hit him like a physical blow. Her hiking boots, the expensive kind that serious backpackers wear, sitting there empty. He crouched down and looked closer. The socks were still inside the boots, still formed to the shape of her feet, as if she’d just stepped out of them moments ago.

 No one takes off their boots like that in the back country. You don’t walk around in socks. The ground is rough, dangerous, full of sharp rocks and debris. The only reason you’d remove your boots that carefully would be if you were settling into your tent for the night, but Emma’s tent showed no signs that she’d slept in it.

 The sleeping bag was on top of the pad, not inside it. No one had been in that tent since it was set up. Tom radioed for additional search teams while David began documenting the scene, taking photographs, making notes, trying to push down the rising sense of dread in his gut.

 He walked the perimeter of the campsite in expanding circles, looking for tracks for any sign of which direction Emma might have gone. Nothing. The ground around the tent showed only her bootprints from when she’d set up camp, and those prints circled the immediate area, never venturing more than 20 yard from the tent.

 The campfire pit had cold ashes, at least 12 hours old by David’s estimation. She’d had a fire the night before, let it burn down properly, then hadn’t lit another one. Her water filter and bottles were full, unused since she’d last filtered water. Everything pointed to Emma preparing for bed, removing her boots, and then simply vanishing. More rangers arrived by evening, setting up a base camp, establishing search perimeters.

 By the time the sun set, they had eight rangers on site, with more coming in the morning. David volunteered to stay at Emma’s campsite overnight. Sometimes missing hikers get disoriented, wander off, and make their way back to their camp. It was a long shot, but David had seen stranger things in 15 years of search and rescue.

 Tom stayed with him. They set up their own tents 50 ft from Emma’s, kept a fire going, and took turns on watch. David sat by the fire, staring at those empty boots, and wrote in his journal, “Something feels fundamentally wrong here. Not dangerous in the usual sense. Bears weather terrain. This is different.

 The forest feels like it’s watching us. He meant every word. The darkness beyond their fire light felt dense, almost solid, pressing in on them. The silence continued. No owls hooting, no coyotes howling, nothing. just the crackling of their fire and the occasional shift of the horses who seemed nervous, pulling at their tethers, ears flat against their heads.

Friday morning brought search dogs and their handlers flown in by helicopter to a clearing two mi away. David had high hopes for the dogs. They were trained for this, had found dozens of missing hikers over the years. But from the moment the handlers brought them to Emma’s campsite, the dogs behaved strangely.

 They picked up her scent immediately. noses to the ground, pulling at their leads, but they seemed reluctant, hesitant, constantly looking back at their handlers as if seeking reassurance. The scent trail led northeast, deeper into the thoroughare, away from any established trails. David and Tom followed with the handlers, moving through dense forest, across meadows, over rocky outcrops.

 The dogs were good at their job, but something was wrong. One of the dogs, a German Shepherd named Ranger, suddenly stopped dead about 2 mi from Emma’s campsite. The dog planted its feet, refused to move forward, and began whining. A high-pitched sound of distress. The handler tried to coax him forward.

 Ranger pulled backwards so hard he nearly slipped his harness, desperate to retreat. The other dog, a blood hound, continued for another 100 yards before the scent trail simply ended. They were standing in the middle of a meadow, tall grass swaying in the breeze, mountains rising in the distance, and the trail just stopped. No water to break the scent, no rocky terrain, no logical reason.

 Emma’s scent simply ceased to exist. By Friday evening, 24 hours after Emma was reported missing, there were 30 searches in the back country, covering grid patterns, checking every ravine, every cave, every possible place a person could fall or take shelter. David volunteered to stay at the campsite again. Tom agreed to stay with him.

Protocol dictated they should rotate, get rest, but David couldn’t leave. He felt responsible. Felt like if he just stayed alert enough, watched carefully enough, he might understand what happened. As darkness fell, they sat by the fire, not talking much, both lost in their own thoughts. Around 11:00, Tom suddenly sat up straight, his head cocked to one side.

 “You hear that?” he asked. David listened. At first, nothing, just the fire and the darkness. Then he heard it, a low humming sound, so faint he wasn’t sure if it was real or imagined. It seemed to come from the northeast, the same direction the dogs had tracked Emma’s scent. The sound was constant, unwavering, like an electrical transformer or a distant engine.

 But they were miles from any roads, any power lines, any civilization. They checked their equipment, their radios, their satellite phones. Nothing was making that sound. The humming continued for about 20 minutes, then faded away.

 David marked the time in his journal, made a note of the direction, and tried to convince himself it was nothing, just some acoustic quirk of the mountains, but he didn’t believe it. And neither did Tom. Saturday morning, 5:30, David woke to frost covering his sleeping bag. Frost in mid July. Not impossible at this elevation. They were above 8,000 ft, but unusual. Tom was already awake, standing outside his tent, staring into the treeine to the northeast.

 David joined him, and without either of them saying a word, they both heard it. The humming louder now, more distinct, definitely coming from the northeast. David made a decision that would change everything. We need to check that out, he said. Tom hesitated, looked back at the search base camp where the incident commander was probably still asleep.

 We should report it first, Tom said. But David was already packing a daybag, filling water bottles, checking his GPS. “We’ll be quick,” David said. “Just a recon. If we find something, we call it in.” Tom reluctantly agreed, and they set out into the pre-dawn darkness.

 Following the humming, they hiked for what felt like an hour, maybe longer, moving steadily northeast through terrain that grew increasingly strange. The trees seemed older here, more twisted, their bark darker, almost black in places. The underbrush thinned out until they were walking through a forest floor covered only in pine needles, unnaturally clean, as if something had cleared away all the smaller plants.

 David checked his GPS regularly, marking way points, making sure they could find their way back. But the GPS started acting strange, coordinates flickering, jumping around, showing them in locations that made no sense. His compass was worse. The needle spun lazily, refused to settle on north, just rotated slowly like it was caught in some magnetic anomaly. We should head back, Tom said, and the fear in his voice was obvious now.

 But the humming was so loud, so close, and David felt compelled to continue, drawn forward by something he couldn’t name or resist. They emerged into a clearing, and David’s first thought was that they’d stumbled onto some old wildfire scar. The clearing was roughly circular, about 50 ft across, and every blade of grass was dead, not brown, not dried out, but gray, colorless, as if the life had been drained from it.

 The surrounding forest was lush and green, vibrant with summer growth, but inside the clearing, everything was dead. In the center of the clearing, laid flat on the ground, was Emma’s hiking jacket. David recognized it immediately from the photos her sister had provided, bright blue with yellow accents, impossible to miss.

 But there were no tracks leading to the jacket. The dead grass showed no impressions, no path, no sign that anyone had walked into the clearing to place it there. The jacket was just there, centered perfectly, arms spread out as if someone had laid it down with geometric precision.

 The humming was loudest here, seeming to come from the ground itself, vibrating up through their boots. David pulled out his camera and started taking photos while Tom approached the jacket. “David, you need to see this,” Tom called out. And there was something in his voice that made David’s hands shake as he walked forward. Emma’s name was written on the inside tag in permanent marker, exactly as her sister had described.

 Tom reached down to pick up the jacket, touched it, and immediately jerked his hand back like he’d touched a hot stove. “It’s vibrating,” Tom said, and David could see it now, a subtle tremor running through the fabric, barely visible, but definitely there. The jacket was also cold, far colder than it should have been.

 The morning air was cool, but not freezing. Yet, when David touched the jacket himself, it felt like touching ice beneath where the jacket had been lying. The dead grass was flattened in a perfect circle, about 2 ft in diameter, and the grass in that circle was even more colorless than the rest, almost white. Then the humming stopped.

 The silence that followed was absolute total, suffocating. David and Tom stood frozen in the clearing, neither man breathing, and in that silence, the forest felt malevolent, aware, watching. Tom grabbed the jacket, shoved it into a plastic evidence bag, and they both turned to leave.

 That’s when David looked at his watch. It had stopped at 6:47. Tom’s phone was dead. Battery drained from 75% to zero. They practically ran back through the forest following David’s GPS waypoints, except the waypoints were corrupted, showing impossible coordinates. They navigated by instinct, by memory, and somehow found their way back to the search base camp.

 When they arrived, the instant commander looked up from his coffee, surprised. “You guys are up early,” he said. “Why are you back already?” David looked at his watch, frozen at 6:47, then looked at the commander’s watch. It read 6:52. “What time did we leave?” David asked. The commander checked the log. “You signed out at 6:35, 17 minutes ago.” David and Tom looked at each other. They had been gone for over 2 hours. They both knew it.

 They’d hiked for an hour into the forest, spent at least 20 minutes in the clearing, hiked an hour back, but according to everyone else, according to the official record, they’d been gone 17 minutes. David reported the clearing and the jacket to the incident commander, a veteran ranger named Petersonen, who’d been running search operations for 20 years.

 Peterson listened, made notes, and by 8:00, he’d assembled a team to investigate. David led them northeast, following the direction he remembered, trying to retrace their steps. They hiked for 2 hours, covering far more ground than David and Tom had covered that morning. They found nothing.

 No clearing, no dead grass, no sign that any clearing had ever existed in that area. David insisted they keep searching. They spent four more hours combing the area. Nothing. Peterson finally called it off, suggested they head back. On the way back to camp, Peterson walked beside David. The stress of these searches can play tricks on the mind, Peterson said quietly. “You’ve been out here 3 days straight. You need rest.

” David wanted to argue, wanted to grab Petersonen by the shoulders and shake him. Make him understand. But Tom was silent, staring at the ground. And David realized that without the clearing, without physical evidence, they sounded insane. The jacket was sent to the regional lab for analysis. Results came back Monday afternoon. No unusual findings.

Standard synthetic hiking jacket, worn but not damaged. No trace evidence, no signs of animal contact, nothing remarkable. The vibration David and Tom had felt, not mentioned in the report because the lab techs hadn’t observed any vibration. The cold temperature, the jacket was room temperature when examined. David and Tom’s story was quietly noted in the incident report and then quietly dismissed.

By Sunday, David was pulled from active search. Take a few days, Peterson told him. Get some sleep. See your family. It wasn’t a request Tom was allowed to continue, but was reassigned to a different sector away from David. The official search for Emma Hartley continued for two more weeks, expanding in scope, covering over a 100 square miles. They found nothing else.

 No clothing, no equipment, no sign that Emma Hartley had ever existed beyond her abandoned campsite. On August 3rd, 2019, Emma Hartley was officially listed as a missing person, presumed dead due to misadventure in the wilderness. The file was closed, archived, and everyone moved on except David.

 During his mandatory leave, David couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t focus on anything except the clearing and Emma’s jacket and the time that didn’t make sense. He started researching, digging through old reports, looking for anything similar. He found mentions, small things, details that had been noted and dismissed.

 A 1995 report about a hiker who’d been found alive after being missing for 4 days, claiming she’d encountered a dead place in the forest where sound stopped and time felt wrong. A 2003 report about a ranger who’ discovered a clearing full of personal items from multiple missing persons.

 But when he returned with others, the clearing was gone. A 2011 report about malfunctioning equipment in a specific area of the Thorare, compasses spinning, GPS units failing, electronics draining. None of these reports had been followed up on. All had been attributed to equipment failure, stress, or natural phenomena.

 David requested access to the physical archives, the paper files that hadn’t been digitized, stored in the basement of the main administration building. He claimed he was researching for a training manual on search and rescue operations. The archivist, an older woman named Dorothy, who’d worked for the park service for 30 years, led him down to the basement and showed him where the old incident reports were stored. Most of this hasn’t been touched in decades, she said.

 Knock yourself out. David spent three full days in that basement reading through decades of reports, and what he found made his blood run cold. over 40 unexplained disappearances in the greater Thorare region since 1920. 40 people who had vanished without a trace, often leaving behind their belongings, their campsites intact, their lives simply interrupted mid-sentence. The disappearances weren’t consistent in time or exact location.

 Sometimes years would pass with nothing, then three people would vanish in a single summer. The locations varied across a roughly 15-mi area, but always remote, always deep in the back country, always far from established trails. The most chilling discovery was a report from 1983 written by a ranger named William Hodges.

 Hodges had responded to a missing person case, a solo hiker named Robert Chen. And during the search, Hodges claimed to have discovered what he called the Forbidden Zone. His report was detailed, methodical, describing a clearing with dead vegetation, malfunctioning equipment, and a sense of wrongness that he couldn’t articulate.

 Hodges had found items belonging to multiple missing persons in and around the clearing. He’d taken photographs, collected evidence, documented everything properly. He’d returned the next day with a team, and the clearing was gone. His photographs showed only normal forest. His evidence bags contain nothing but ordinary leaves and grass. His report was stamped with a note from his supervisor.

 Officer Hodges has been granted medical leave due to stress related exhaustion. His account cannot be verified and should not be considered reliable testimony. Hodges never returned to active duty. David tracked down his contact information, found an address in Montana, but when he called, a woman answered and told him William Hodges had died in 2006.

 “He never talked about his time at Yellowstone,” she said. “Whenever anyone asked, he’d just get quiet and change the subject.” “David returned to duty in mid August, but he was a different person. His wife noticed, his co-workers noticed, he was distracted, distant, obsessed.

 He started taking unauthorized trips into the back country, telling his wife he was working extended patrols, filing false reports to cover his tracks. He was searching for the clearing for answers, for some way to understand what had happened to Emma. Tom tried to talk to him multiple times. Let it go, David. Emma’s gone. We did everything we could, but David couldn’t let it go. The clearing was out there.

The forbidden zone was real. He just had to find it again. Thursday, September 5th, 2019, David packed 3 days of supplies and headed into the Thorare alone, completely off the books. He brought multiple GPS units, three different cameras, audio recorders, backup batteries, everything he could carry.

 He was determined to document the clearing properly this time to gather evidence that couldn’t be dismissed or explained away. The first day yielded nothing. He hiked 12 mi, covering the area where he thought the clearing should be, expanding his search in ever widening circles. He camped that night in a small meadow, set up his tent, started a fire, and sat watching the stars emerge.

 Around midnight, he heard it. The humming, faint, but unmistakable coming from the east. He grabbed his audio recorder, pressed record, and captured 5 minutes of clear humming before it faded. When he played it back, the sound was there, low and constant, impossible to dismiss as imagination. Friday morning, David followed the humming.

 He hiked east, then northeast, the sound growing gradually louder, leading him through terrain that felt familiar yet alien. The trees were wrong again, twisted and dark. The underbrush disappeared. The air grew colder despite the morning sun. After 4 hours of hiking, he found it. Not the same clearing. Or maybe it was the same clearing, but larger, expanded, groan. This one was roughly 80 ft across.

 The same dead gray grass, the same suffocating silence. In the center of the clearing sat a backpack, and David’s heart nearly stopped. He recognized that backpack. He’d seen it in missing person reports. Trevor Simmons, wildlife photographer, reported missing in July 2017.

 Trevor had been hiking alone in the Thorare, carrying expensive camera equipment, and had simply vanished. The search had lasted 3 weeks. No trace had ever been found. David’s GPS unit was going haywire, coordinates scrambling, showing him simultaneously in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. His cameras displayed visual static on their screens.

 Even though he was pointing them at clear scenery, the humming was intense now, vibrating through his entire body, making his chest feel tight, his head feel fuzzy. He forced himself to approach the backpack, each step feeling like pushing through water. The pack was sitting upright, undamaged, as if Trevor had simply set it down moments ago. David opened it with shaking hands. camera equipment, all there, all undamaged.

 Three cameras, lenses, filters, all meticulously organized. The memory cards were still in the cameras. David removed them, slipped them into his own pack. He found Trevor’s journal in a side pocket, grabbed it. As he backed away from the backpack, he scanned the perimeter of the clearing, and that’s when he saw them.

 Items scattered around the edge of the clearing, partially hidden in the treeine. A water bottle with a carabiner clip. A hiking hat faded by sun. A single boot woman’s size seven. A compass on a lanyard. A stuffsack with a sleeping bag inside. Each item from a different person. A different disappearance. Different years. The clearing was collecting them. Or something in the clearing was collecting them.

 David’s hands were shaking so badly he could barely operate his cameras, but he forced himself to document everything. He photographed the backpack, the scattered items, the dead grass, the tree line. He set up two cameras on tripods around the perimeter, pointed them inward, set them to record video. He set up audio recorders. He retreated to the treeine, found a spot behind a fallen log where he could watch the clearing, and he waited.

 An hour passed, two hours, three. The humming continued, constant, maddening. David’s nose started bleeding around hour four. He wiped the blood away, kept watching. As the sun began to set, something changed. The temperature dropped rapidly. David checked his thermometer, watched it fall from 62° to 32° in less than 15 minutes.

 Frost appeared on the dead grass, spreading outward from the center of the clearing in a perfect circle. The humming intensified, became almost unbearable, and David’s vision started to blur. Through his binoculars, David watched the air above the clearing begin to shimmer.

 Not like heat haze, the opposite, like cold haze, like the air itself was freezing and crystallizing. The dead grass began to move despite there being no wind. It waved and rippled, flowing like water, creating nauseiating patterns that hurt to watch David’s nose bled harder. His ears began to bleed. But he kept watching, kept his binoculars focused on the center of the clearing.

 Something was emerging, not walking, not rising from the ground, simply appearing, becoming visible, as if it had always been there, but was only now choosing to be seen. The thing was roughly human- shaped, arms, legs, torso, head, but the proportions were wrong in ways David’s brain couldn’t process. The limbs were too long, but also too short.

 The torso was too narrow, but also too wide. It was as if he was seeing the thing from multiple angles simultaneously. His brain unable to reconcile what his eyes were reporting. The thing appeared to be made of the same dead grass as the clearing. Or perhaps it was the grass. The clearing itself taking form.

 It moved toward Trevor’s backpack with a fluidity that was deeply wrong. Joints bending in directions that shouldn’t be possible. When it touched the backpack, the pack aged visibly. Colors faded, fabric rotted, straps cracked and split. In seconds, the backpack looked like it had been sitting in the clearing for decades. The thing moved to the next item, the water bottle. Same result.

Rapid decay. Time compressed into moments. It moved around the perimeter, touching each item, aging each one, claiming them. David was filming everything. Though his hands were shaking so violently the footage was nearly useless. His cameras were capturing this. His audio recorders were capturing this. Finally, he’d have proof. Evidence that couldn’t be denied.

The thing finished its circuit of the clearing and stopped. It stood in the center, motionless, and though it had no face that David could see, no eyes, no features at all, he knew with absolute certainty that it was looking at him. The humming stopped. The sudden silence was deafening. David’s ears rang in the absence of the sound that had been drilling into his skull for hours.

 Then he heard something else. Not a sound, not exactly a voice, but inside his head, speaking directly into his thoughts. It didn’t use words. It didn’t use language. But David understood the meaning as clearly as if someone had spoken English directly into his ear. Witness, warning, leave. David didn’t hesitate. He abandoned his cameras, his recorders, everything. He ran.

 He crashed through the forest, branches whipping his face, roots grabbing at his feet. Behind him, he heard trees cracking, massive trunks snapping like twigs. The humming resumed, but it was different now. Angry, aggressive, chasing him. His GPS was useless, spinning wildly. He ran on instinct, on pure terrorfueled adrenaline.

 He ran until his lungs felt like they were tearing until his legs gave out, until he collapsed face first into pine needles and couldn’t get up. He lay there gasping, expecting the thing to appear above him, to touch him, to age him into dust. Nothing happened. The humming faded. The forest sounds returned. Birds called, squirrels chattered, normal sounds, safe sounds. David forced himself to sit up, checked his surroundings. He was at Emma’s original campsite.

 Her tent was still there, exactly as it had been in July. According to his watch, it was Saturday morning, 4:15. He’d been running for 7 hours, though it had felt like minutes. He’d somehow covered miles of rough terrain in the dark and ended up exactly where this nightmare had begun.

 David made it back to civilization Sunday afternoon, stumbling into the ranger station, dehydrated, bloody, scratched, borderline hypothermic. His co-workers rushed to help him, got him water, wrapped him in blankets, called for medical. David tried to explain what happened, where he’d been, what he’d seen. His story was met with concern and carefully neutral expressions. Peterson arrived within an hour.

 “You went into the back country alone, off the books, without telling anyone,” Peterson said. “It wasn’t a question.” “David nodded.” “I found it,” David said. “The clearing. I found Trevor Simmons backpack. I found items from other missing persons I saw.” He trailed off, realizing how he sounded. I set up cameras, David said desperately. I recorded everything. The cameras are still there.

 We can go get them. Peterson sent a team. They helicoptered into the area David described. Searched for 6 hours. Found nothing. No cameras, no clearing, no backpack. David’s GPS track from Friday was corrupted beyond recovery. Just random coordinates scattered across impossible locations. The memory cards he’ taken from Trevor’s cameras were examined. Every file was corrupted, unreadable, nothing but digital noise.

Trevor’s journal was mostly blank pages, the remaining entries illeible, as if the ink had faded to near invisibility. David’s own video footage. The recordings he’d made before he ran showed only static and distorted images, brief flashes of trees and grass, but nothing coherent, nothing that proved anything.

 His audio recordings of the humming were analyzed by technical experts. Their conclusion was that the sound was wind moving through trees combined with David’s own breathing and heartbeat amplified by stress and exhaustion. David was placed on administrative leave with mandatory psychological evaluation.

 The psychiatrist was kind, professional, non-judgmental. She asked about stress, about sleep, about David’s family life, about the toll that search and rescue work takes on the psyche. She diagnosed him with acute stress reaction, possibly PTSD, recommended medication and therapy. His wife was frightened, not of him exactly, but of what he’d become. The obsession had consumed him, transformed him into someone she didn’t recognize.

 Tom stopped returning his calls. His other co-workers were sympathetic, but distant, treating him like he was fragile, broken. The park service offered him options. Medical retirement with full benefits. extended leave, transferred to a different park, a fresh start. What they didn’t offer was belief.

 What they didn’t offer was validation that what he’d experienced was real. Late September, David sat in his home office and made one final recording. This is the recording that would eventually be leaked that forms the basis of this case file. His voice is hollow, defeated, but also resolved. I’m done fighting this, he says. They want to call me crazy. Fine.

 But I know the truth. And maybe that has to be enough. There’s something in the thoroughare. Something that’s been there longer than we have, longer than the park, longer than the rangers, longer than maybe anything we’d recognize as civilization. It takes people. Not all of them. Not every time. But when conditions are right, when someone wanders into the wrong place at the wrong time, when the forbidden zone decides to manifest, it takes them, I don’t know what it is.

 I don’t know if it’s a creature, a phenomenon, some kind of rip in reality itself. I don’t have the education or the vocabulary to explain it. What I know is that it’s real. It’s dangerous, and it’s still out there. David pauses and you can hear him drinking water, gathering his thoughts. I’ve been going through the archived reports, the ones that got dismissed, the ones written by rangers who saw something they couldn’t explain.

 William Hodges in 1983, Janet Torres in 1995, Kevin Louu in 2003, others. We all saw the same thing, more or less. The clearing, the humming, the sense that we were looking at something that shouldn’t exist. We all got dismissed, put on leave, encouraged to retire. The park service doesn’t want this to be real. I understand that. How do you tell the public that there’s a place in Yellowstone where people just vanish? Where something exists that we can’t fight or control or even understand? How do you warn people without causing mass panic? So, they bury it. They call us

stressed, traumatized, unreliable. They file our reports in basements where no one will ever read them, and the disappearances continue. He’s quiet for a long moment, and when he speaks again, his voice is stronger, more urgent.

 If you’re planning to hike the Thorare, the back country, anywhere remote, please listen to your instincts. If something feels wrong, if the forest goes silent in a way that feels unnatural, if you hear humming you can’t source, if you see a clearing with dead grass, get out. Don’t investigate. Don’t try to be brave. Don’t think you’re smarter than whatever’s out there. Just leave.

 Emma Hartley was experienced, prepared, careful, and she’s gone. Trevor Simmons, Robert Chen, dozens of others, all experienced, all prepared, all gone. Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re overreacting. Trust your gut. Your instincts exist for a reason. David’s voice drops almost to a whisper.

 I’ve sent copies of my research, copies of this recording, to several sources, newspapers, documentaries, true crime podcasters, anyone who might listen. Maybe someone smarter than me can make sense of it. Maybe someone with resources, with scientific equipment, can study the Forbidden Zone and figure out what it is. Or maybe this recording will just be another piece of evidence that gets dismissed. Another crazy ranger who couldn’t handle the stress. I don’t know anymore. What I know is that I tried.

 I tried to find Emma. I tried to understand. I tried to warn people. Maybe that’s all I can do. The recording is silent for several seconds and then David speaks his final words. Emma Hartley deserve better. Trevor Simmons deserve better. They all deserve better. I failed them. Don’t let anyone else fail the next one. The recording ends.

David Mitchell retired from the National Park Service in November 2019. His retirement was listed as voluntary. Medical reasons he and his wife divorced in early 2020. His current whereabouts are unknown. Some reports suggest he moved to Alaska, others say Canada. places with even more wilderness, even more isolation.

 Why he’d go deeper into the wild after what he experienced, no one can say. Emma Hartley remains missing. Her case is technically still open, but no active investigation is ongoing. Her family holds out hope, though that hope fades more with each passing year. Trevor Simmons remains missing. His cases cold, inactive, filed away.

 The Thorare region of Yellowstone continues to be one of the most remote and least visited areas in the park. Since 2019, three more people have been reported missing in that general area. Two were never found. One was found alive after 4 days, dehydrated and confused, claiming she’d gotten lost in a fog that appeared out of nowhere.

 She couldn’t explain where she’d been for 4 days. Her GPS showed her covering impossible distances in impossible time frames. She was treated for exposure and released. She refused to speak to reporters and has since moved away from Wyoming. So, let’s talk about what we know for certain.

 Emma Hartley, an experienced hiker, vanished from her campsite, leaving behind all her gear and her boots with her socks still inside them. Her satellite communicator, fully functional, was never activated. Search teams found no trace of her. David Mitchell and Tom Whitfield reported finding a clearing with dead vegetation and Emma’s jacket.

 A clearing that allegedly caused time distortion and equipment malfunction. When others searched for this clearing, it couldn’t be found. David’s subsequent solo expedition resulted in him allegedly discovering more missing person’s items and encountering something he described as beyond human understanding. All his evidence was either lost, destroyed, or corrupted.

David’s career ended, his marriage ended, and he disappeared into isolation. These are facts. Everything else’s interpretation. The skeptical interpretation is straightforward. David Mitchell, after 15 years of stressful search and rescue work, experienced a psychological break.

 The pressure of failing to find Emma Hartley, combined with exhaustion and the isolation of the back country, caused him to have hallucinations or false memories. The time distortion can be explained by stress induced dissociation. The equipment malfunctions can be explained by the remote location and natural magnetic anomalies known to exist in geothermal areas.

 The clearing that disappeared can be explained by David simply being disoriented and unable to retrace his steps accurately. The corrupted evidence can be explained by equipment failure and harsh wilderness conditions. This interpretation is neat, logical, and fits within our understanding of how the human mind works under extreme stress. But there’s another interpretation, one that’s harder to accept, but impossible to completely dismiss.

 Over 40 unexplained disappearances in the Thorare region spanning a century. Multiple ranges across multiple decades reporting similar experiences, similar clearings, similar phenomena, equipment malfunctions in specific areas, time distortions reported by multiple witnesses. The consistency of these reports, despite the reporters having no contact with each other, despite many of these reports being buried in archives where they couldn’t influence later witnesses, William Hodges in 1983 described almost exactly what David Mitchell described in 2019. Despite Hodger’s report never

being digitized or widely circulated, the specificity of the details, the dead grass, the humming, the sense of wrongness, these details repeat across decades of reports. Either we’re dealing with a consistent form of stress induced hallucination that affects park rangers in predictable ways or something genuinely unexplainable exists in the Yellowstone back country.

 The Yellowstone ecosystem sits a top one of the world’s largest active volcanic systems. The ground is riddled with geothermal activity, underground water systems, gas vents, thermal features that appear and disappear. The park experiences hundreds of earthquakes each year, most too small to feel. The landscape is literally alive, shifting, changing, releasing enormous amounts of energy.

 Could some combination of geothermal activity, magnetic anomalies, gas emissions, and other natural phenomena create zones where equipment fails, where perception is distorted, where people become disoriented and lost? Possibly science doesn’t have all the answers about how the human brain responds to certain environmental conditions. There could be natural explanations we haven’t discovered yet.

 Or maybe David Mitchell was telling the truth. Maybe there’s something in the Thorare that we don’t have the framework to understand. Something that exists in the liinal spaces of our reality. Something that predates human presence in North America. Something that the wilderness has always contained, but we’ve only occasionally glimpsed.

 Indigenous peoples have stories about forbidden places, areas where the rules of nature don’t apply, where spirits or entities dwell that are indifferent or hostile to human life. These stories span cultures and continents. They’re usually dismissed as mythology. But maybe mythology is just our attempt to describe things we don’t have the science to explain.

 Maybe the forbidden zone is real, a place that appears and disappears, that exists outside our normal understanding of space and time that takes people for reasons we can’t comprehend. I requested official comment from the National Park Service for this video. My emails went unanswered. My phone calls were redirected.

 When I finally reached someone in the public affairs office, I was told that all information about missing person’s cases is protected for privacy reasons and that they couldn’t comment on personnel matters regarding former employees. I asked specifically about unusual phenomena in the Thorare region.

 I was told that Yellowstone is a wilderness area with inherent dangers and that visitors should always take appropriate precautions. I asked if they had any warnings about specific areas that might be more dangerous than others. I was told to check the park website for current conditions and closures. That was the end of the conversation.

 David Mitchell’s personnel file obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request shows only that he retired in good standing after years of exemplary service. There’s no mention of administrative leave, no mention of psychological evaluation, no mention of the incidents he described in his recording. His file is clean, sanitized, as if the entire nightmare of summer and fall 2019 never happened.

 So, what really happened to Emma Hartley? What did David Mitchell encounter in the Forbidden Zone? Was it a natural phenomenon we don’t yet understand? Some combination of environmental factors that creates dangerous conditions? Was it a psychological break under extreme stress? A mind pushed past its limits by the weight of responsibility and failure? Or was it something else entirely? Something that’s been in those woods since before we named them woods, since before we mapped them and claimed to understand them. The wilderness is

vast. Yellowstone alone is 2.2 million acres. Much of it has never been fully explored, never been mapped in detail. The Thoraphair is one of the most remote areas in the entire lower 48 states. You can stand on certain ridges in the Thorare and see nothing but wilderness in every direction for 50 m.

 No roads, no buildings, no signs of human presence, just trees and mountains and sky. What lives in that vastness? What exists in the places we don’t go? The places we can’t go. The rational part of our mind says nothing, just wildlife and weather and geology. But there’s another part, the part that kept our ancestors alive. The part that knows to fear the dark and the unknown.

 And that part whispers that maybe, just maybe, we don’t know everything about the world we live in. Emma Hartley walked into the Yellowstone back country in July 2019 and never walked out. Her family deserves answers. Her friends deserve closure. David Mitchell’s life was destroyed trying to find those answers, trying to provide that closure, and all he got was dismissal and derision.

 If his story is true, if even a fraction of what he described is accurate, then there are implications we need to confront. If his story is false, if it’s all the product of a stressed mind breaking under pressure, then there are still implications about how we treat our rangers, how we support people who work in high stress environments, how we fail to recognize the signs of psychological trauma until it’s too late.

 Either way, the thoroughare remains, the wilderness remains, and people keep hiking into that vastness, keep pushing into the remote corners of the park, keep testing themselves against nature. Most come back with stories of beauty and adventure. Some don’t come back at all. And a very few come back changed, damaged, telling stories that no one wants to hear about things that shouldn’t exist. The wilderness keeps its secrets. It always has. Maybe that’s how it should be.

Maybe there are some things we’re not meant to understand. Some places we’re not meant to go. Some boundaries we’re not meant to cross. Or maybe we need to push harder, investigate more thoroughly, bring science and resources to bear on these mysteries until we understand them. I don’t have that answer.

 What I have is David Mitchell’s testimony, Emma Hartley’s disappearance, and a long list of people who walked into the wilderness and never came back. If you’re planning to hike in Yellowstone or any remote wilderness area, please be careful. Tell people where you’re going. Carry proper communication devices. Stay on established trails. Take the warnings seriously.

 And if you ever find yourself in a clearing where the grass is dead and gray, where the forest has gone completely silent, where you hear a humming you can’t explain, trust your instincts. Turn around. Walk away. Run if you have to. Don’t be curious. Don’t be brave. Just get out. Because maybe David Mitchell was crazy. Maybe his mind broke and created an elaborate delusion to cope with the trauma of losing Emma.

Or maybe he was the only one sane enough to see the truth and we’re the crazy ones for dismissing him. Remember, we’re pushing to hit 1,000 subscribers before the new year and I need your help to get there. If this story gave you chills, if it made you think, if it made you want to hear more cases like this, hit that subscribe button right now.

 I’m uploading every single day, bringing you the most disturbing true cases that deserve attention. Share this video with someone who loves true crime and unexplained mysteries. Leave a comment telling me what you think happened to Emma Hartley.

 Was David Mitchell telling the truth or did he have a breakdown? I want to hear your theories. Stay safe out there. And remember, the wilderness is beautiful, but it’s not benevolent. It doesn’t care about you. doesn’t care about your plans or your safety or your life. Respect it, fear it, and maybe you’ll make it home. Thanks for watching.

 I’ll see you tomorrow with another case that’ll keep you up at night.