A pair of eyes emerged from the bushes in the darkness. There had recently been a mountain lion sighting in the area, so I raised my rifle and looked through the scope. What I saw wasn’t a mountain lion. It looked like a red wolf.
I lowered the rifle.
That encounter has stayed with me for years, and it opens a new episode of Dark Outdoors®, “The Night I Had a Red Wolf in My Crosshairs.” The episode explores that experience, other strange wild canine encounters and the fascinating story of an animal that once roamed Texas and Louisiana but came perilously close to disappearing forever.
There is another fascinating chapter to this story.
Researchers studying wild canines along the Texas Gulf Coast have discovered animals carrying significant amounts of red wolf ancestry. That raises intriguing questions about whether genetic remnants of the wolves that once inhabited this region have survived within coastal coyote populations.
I explored that story in a video examining Texas coyotes, red wolf genetics and the remarkable possibilities scientists are considering for conserving those genes.
The red wolf (Canis rufus) is one of North America’s great wildlife conservation stories.
Red wolves once occupied portions of the eastern and south-central United States, including Texas and Louisiana. By the 20th century, persecution, habitat changes and hybridization with coyotes helped push them toward extinction in the wild.
A small number of animals were captured along the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast to establish a captive breeding program. Those animals became the foundation for an effort that prevented the red wolf from disappearing completely.
Today, the only recognized wild population exists in eastern North Carolina.
That makes the discovery of red wolf ancestry in Gulf Coast canines especially fascinating. The wolves themselves may have disappeared from Texas, but some of their genetics apparently did not.
What Was in My Crosshairs?
I’m not claiming that the animal I encountered that night was a genetically pure red wolf.
There was no DNA test. I didn’t capture it. I didn’t have a biologist standing beside me.
I can only tell you what happened.
I saw those eyes emerge from the bushes. With a mountain lion recently reported in the area, I raised my rifle. When I got a better look at the animal, what I saw looked like a red wolf.
So I lowered the gun.
Years later, as research began revealing the surprising amount of red wolf ancestry surviving in some Gulf Coast coyotes, encounters like mine became even more interesting.
Could I have encountered an animal carrying substantial red wolf genetics?
I don’t know.
But unlike a lot of mysterious wildlife stories, we now know there really are wild canines along the Texas Gulf Coast carrying genetic echoes of the red wolf.
And that makes this story worth another look.
Hear the Full Story
In the complete Dark Outdoors episode, I tell the story of that night and explore other unusual encounters I’ve had with wild canines over the years.
Listen to “The Night I Had a Red Wolf in My Crosshairs”:
A man walked outside his Texas home and discovered a huge cat inside his chicken coop. It wasn’t a bobcat, and it didn’t look like a mountain lion. The animal he described looked like an African lion.
That encounter is at the center of a new episode of Dark Outdoors®, examining one of the strangest categories of wildlife reports I have investigated over the years: big cats that don’t seem to belong where people are seeing them.
For decades, I have investigated reports of unusual cats in Texas and across the South. Mountain lions are responsible for some of them. Bobcats, especially when seen briefly or under unusual conditions, can account for others. Misidentification is a legitimate part of investigating any unusual wildlife report, and it should always be considered before looking for a more exotic explanation.
But occasionally a report comes along that doesn’t fit comfortably into those categories. The chicken-coop encounter is one of them. The witness described an animal that appeared to be an African lion. That’s an extraordinary claim, and without photographs, DNA or other physical evidence, there is no way to prove exactly what stood inside that coop.
The possibility of an exotic cat appearing in Texas, however, isn’t as impossible as it might initially sound. Texas has a long history of privately held exotic wildlife. Animals escape, and historically some have been deliberately released. In some cases, an exotic animal could potentially survive unnoticed for a period of time, particularly in remote country with abundant cover and prey.
That doesn’t mean every report of an unusual cat is an escaped exotic. It simply means the possibility shouldn’t automatically be dismissed when examining a credible report.
The Giant Tracks
The lion report isn’t the only strange big-cat case I discuss in this episode. I also recount one of my own investigations involving enormous cat tracks that immediately caught my attention because of their size.
Photo by Chester Moore
I’ve spent much of my life around wildlife and studying animal sign, and these tracks appeared far larger than what I expected to find from a native cat in that area. That doesn’t automatically make them evidence of some exotic predator. Tracks can be deceptive. Mud can distort a print, a paw can slip and multiple impressions can overlap.
Those possibilities always have to be considered, but when unusually large tracks begin showing up in the same broader conversation as reports of unusually large cats, the subject becomes much more interesting.
Could Exotic Cats Be Roaming Texas?
Texas is enormous, with millions of acres of forests, swamps, brush country, ranchland and river bottoms where an animal can remain surprisingly difficult to detect. Mountain lions themselves demonstrate how effectively a large predator can move primarily at night, avoid people and cover tremendous distances without being seen by most of the people living around it.
Now consider an escaped exotic cat behaving in much the same way. Could a lion, leopard or another large captive cat survive for some period of time in the wild? Under the right circumstances, it’s certainly possible. The much harder question is whether that possibility explains any particular sighting.
That’s where evidence matters. A witness report can begin an investigation, but tracks, photographs, video, hair, scat or DNA can move a case into an entirely different category.
But unfortunately A.I. has changed this to a large extent because it’s very difficult to believe any photo or video evidence.
The Mystery Cats of the South
Stories of strange cats have circulated through Texas, Louisiana and other parts of the South for generations. Some witnesses report oversized mountain lions. Others describe black cats they call panthers. Still others report animals whose size, coloration or physical appearance doesn’t seem to match any native species.
There is a temptation to put every one of those reports into the same box, but I don’t think that’s useful. Some are undoubtedly misidentifications. Some may involve actual mountain lions appearing in places where people aren’t accustomed to seeing them. Other reports simply don’t contain enough information to reach any conclusion.
Then there are the cases that remain difficult to explain. Those are the ones that have kept me interested in this subject for decades.
Something That Isn’t Supposed to Be There
The goal isn’t to turn every strange animal sighting into a monster story. It’s to investigate what people report and ask the right questions. What did the witness actually see? Does the description match known wildlife? Could an exotic animal have escaped in the area? Are there tracks, photographs, hair, scat or other physical evidence? Have independent witnesses reported something similar?
Those questions are far more interesting than simply declaring every unusual sighting impossible or, on the other extreme, believing every extraordinary claim without evidence. Most wildlife mysteries probably have ordinary explanations.
But every once in a while, somebody walks outside, looks into a chicken coop and sees something that isn’t supposed to be there.
That’s when things get interesting.
Chester Moore
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Deep along the Brazos River, something attacked a calf in the darkness.
The people nearby couldn’t clearly see what was happening.
But they could hear it.
They described multiple animals involved in the attack and, most disturbingly, what sounded like bones breaking as the calf was seemingly pulled apart with astonishing speed.
What happened that night?
I don’t know—and I’m not going to pretend that I do.
In the new Dark Outdoors® episode, “They Could Hear Them Tearing the Calf Apart,” you can hear the account directly from one of the people who was there. The earwitness tells his own story, describing what he heard along the Brazos River that night and why the experience has stayed with him.
The Brazos River runs through some wild Texas country, and there are certainly predators capable of attacking young livestock.
Coyotes immediately come to mind, particularly when multiple animals are described. Bobcats occur throughout Texas, mountain lions are present in parts of the state and feral hogs can attack vulnerable animals and readily scavenge carcasses.
But identifying what could kill something is very different from determining what did.
That’s important here. This was an event experienced primarily through sound, in darkness, during what was apparently a violent and chaotic attack.
We make no assumptions about what was responsible.
What makes the story compelling is the extraordinary nature of what the earwitness describes hearing and how quickly the attack seemed to unfold. In the podcast, you aren’t simply hearing my interpretation of his story. You hear him describe the encounter in his own words.
Strange Things Happen in Predator Country
I’ve spent decades observing wildlife, and I’ve encountered strange examples of predation myself.
Sometimes you find evidence that seems straightforward. Other times you look at tracks, wounds, feeding patterns or the condition of an animal and something doesn’t fit what you expected.
That doesn’t mean a monster did it.
It means you don’t know.
Wild animals don’t always behave according to the simplified descriptions we give them. Predators exploit unusual opportunities, multiple species may visit the same carcass and scavengers can dramatically change a scene after an animal dies.
I’ve seen strange predation in the wild where I couldn’t confidently explain exactly what happened. Experiences like those are one reason I take accounts like this seriously without making extraordinary claims about them.
Hearing Can Be Worse Than Seeing
Anyone who has spent significant time outdoors after dark knows how powerful sound becomes when you can’t see its source. Your mind tries to construct an image from what your ears are telling you.
Now imagine hearing an animal fighting for its life somewhere beyond your ability to see clearly.
Nature isn’t a horror movie. Predators aren’t evil. They kill because that’s how they survive, and predator-prey relationships are fundamental to the natural world.
But that doesn’t make hearing a violent kill in the darkness any less unsettling.
In the full episode, the Brazos River earwitness describes exactly what he remembers hearing. I also examine some of the possibilities and share other unusual predator-prey observations that have left me with questions of my own.
We make no assumptions about what happened along the Brazos River that night. We simply present the account, consider what we know about predators and let the person who experienced it tell you what he heard.
Sometimes there isn’t enough evidence to explain everything that happens in the wild.
And sometimes hearing it is worse than seeing it.
Because the outdoors has a dark side.
Chester Moore
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The phrase conjures images of people living beyond civilization—hidden deep in forests, mountains and other wild places. Online, the term has become associated with everything from strange figures spotted in remote forests to stories that sound more like folklore than documented human behavior.
But the reality may be far more complicated.
In this special episode of Dark Outdoors®, “Law Enforcement Feral Human Encounter,” I explore what the term feral human could actually mean and examine a bizarre account involving law enforcement, a helicopter and thermal imaging in rugged Oklahoma country.
First, I am not suggesting there is some scientifically recognized population of mysterious wild people secretly inhabiting America’s forests.
That’s not what this is about.
For Dark Outdoors, the concept is broader. There are people who deliberately disappear into wilderness areas. There are people living transient lifestyles far beyond normal population centers. There are fugitives, criminals and individuals who simply choose to exist outside the boundaries most of us consider normal society.
Then there are encounters that aren’t so easily categorized.
That’s where things get interesting.
The Oklahoma Thermal Encounter
At the center of this episode is an unusual story from Oklahoma involving law enforcement and a helicopter equipped with thermal imaging.
During the incident, a human figure was detected moving through rugged, isolated country below.
The technology could establish something important: there was a person down there.
What it couldn’t explain was who that person was, what they were doing in such an isolated location or the circumstances that brought them there.
And that is where I think discussions about “feral humans” become more interesting than internet legends.
We don’t have to invent monsters.
Human beings are strange enough.
The complete account—and the details that make this encounter particularly unsettling—are in the podcast.
Our Award-Winning Feral Human Investigation
This isn’t the first time Dark Outdoors has investigated reports of mysterious people living or moving through remote wilderness.
Our Dark Outdoors feral human documentary won Best Video Storytelling from the Press Club of Southeast Texas, and it takes a deeper look at the subject through firsthand accounts and investigation.
The goal isn’t to prove internet folklore or force unexplained encounters into a sensational explanation.
It’s to investigate what people are actually reporting.
Some encounters may have ordinary explanations. Others involve genuinely strange or disturbing human behavior. And occasionally there simply isn’t enough evidence to determine exactly what happened.
The Human Factor
People tend to think about outdoor danger in terms of animals—bears, mountain lions, venomous snakes and feral hogs.
But one of the recurring lessons of Dark Outdoors has been that some of the strangest—and potentially most dangerous—encounters in remote places involve other human beings.
That doesn’t mean every person living in the wilderness is dangerous. There are countless legitimate reasons someone might be deep in the backcountry.
But awareness matters.
If you encounter someone behaving strangely in an isolated area, you don’t have to solve the mystery. Maintain distance, trust your instincts and remove yourself from the situation if something doesn’t feel right.
Hear the Oklahoma Account
So who was the person detected from that helicopter, and what were they doing in the Oklahoma wilderness?
We make no extraordinary claims about the answer.
But the circumstances surrounding the encounter are strange enough to deserve examination.
There is poaching, and then there are wildlife crimes so disturbing they are difficult to comprehend.
Years ago, I traveled to a location where someone had illegally killed a buffalo. The animal had not been taken for meat. Its head had been removed with a chainsaw, and the rest of the massive animal had been left behind to rot.
Seeing something like that changes the way you look at wildlife crime.
That incident is one of several disturbing cases I explore in a new episode of Dark Outdoors, “He Beheaded the Buffalo With a Chainsaw.”
People sometimes use the word “poaching” almost casually. Someone shoots a deer out of season. Someone keeps too many fish. Someone kills an animal without the proper license.
Those are wildlife violations, but after years of covering the outdoors, I have encountered another level of wildlife crime entirely.
These are cases involving people who kill simply to possess a trophy, criminals willing to intimidate the officers investigating them and an international black market capable of turning some of the world’s most magnificent animals into commodities.
The buffalo case was one of my earliest firsthand encounters with that world.
There is something difficult to describe about standing near an enormous animal that has been killed illegally and simply discarded. Whoever did it wanted one thing—the head.
Everything else was waste.
It wasn’t hunting. It wasn’t conservation. And it certainly wasn’t respect for wildlife.
When Game Wardens Become the Targets
One of the things that gets lost in conversations about poaching is the danger faced by the men and women investigating wildlife crimes.
Game wardens often work alone in isolated places, frequently at night and sometimes many miles from immediate backup. They routinely encounter people carrying firearms, and they have to determine whether they are dealing with an ordinary hunter who made a mistake or someone willing to commit much more serious crimes.
In the new Dark Outdoors episode, I discuss one case that has stuck with me for years. It involved shots being fired into a game warden’s home.
On Christmas Eve.
Think about what that means. Someone wasn’t simply trying to avoid getting caught violating a wildlife law. A line had been crossed from wildlife crime into intimidation and violence directed toward the person enforcing those laws.
That is a side of the game warden profession most outdoorsmen will thankfully never experience.
Wildlife Crime Goes Far Beyond Texas
The scale becomes even more disturbing when wildlife trafficking enters the picture.
Wildlife is valuable, sometimes extraordinarily valuable. Rare animals, skins, horns, skulls, teeth, claws and other wildlife parts can move through illegal markets stretching across international borders. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service maintains a specialized law-enforcement presence devoted to combating this kind of trafficking.
And sometimes what investigators discover seems almost unbelievable.
One of the cases I discuss in the podcast involved a coat smuggled into the United States that had been made from jaguar skins.
Not one jaguar.
Five.
That image has never really left me. Jaguars are among the most spectacular predators on Earth. To think of five of them reduced to the material for a single coat says something about the mentality behind the darkest reaches of the wildlife trade.
This Isn’t Hunting
I am a hunter, and I make no apologies about that.
Legal, regulated sport hunting is an important part of wildlife conservation in North America. Hunters provide substantial conservation funding through licenses, permits, excise taxes on firearms and ammunition and direct support of wildlife and habitat programs. Hunting also plays an important role in wildlife management.
But what I am describing here is not hunting.
Poaching is wildlife crime. Killing animals illegally for trophies, money or sheer destruction has nothing to do with the ethical pursuit of game under laws and regulations designed to conserve wildlife.
The distinction becomes especially obvious when an animal is killed merely so someone can cut off its head, when protected wildlife is trafficked for profit or when law-enforcement officers and their families are threatened because someone doesn’t want to face the consequences of his actions.
I have spent much of my life around hunters, anglers, wildlife professionals and conservationists. The people I respect in the hunting community have something in common: respect for the animal matters. Conservation matters. What happens to wildlife tomorrow matters.
Someone who illegally kills a buffalo, removes its head with a chainsaw and leaves the rest of that magnificent animal to rot is operating from an entirely different mindset.
These aren’t hunting stories.
They’re crime stories that happen to involve wildlife.
The Detail I Still Remember
There is another element of the buffalo story that has always stayed with me. It wasn’t simply the brutality of what had been done.
It was the waste.
A buffalo is an enormous animal. Standing there and seeing what remained after someone had taken what they wanted made the crime feel different from reading a citation in a game warden report or hearing about an illegal kill secondhand.
The person responsible apparently saw that animal as little more than a trophy attached to a body that could be discarded.
That is one of the reasons I wanted to tell this story on Dark Outdoors. Wildlife crime can sound abstract until you see the aftermath. Then it becomes very real.
And the deeper you look into these cases, the stranger—and sometimes more dangerous—they become.
There are additional details in the episode about the buffalo case, the threats faced by wildlife officers and some of the bizarre things federal wildlife agents have intercepted that I won’t reveal here.
Listen to “He Beheaded the Buffalo With a Chainsaw” on Dark Outdoors:
The public plays an important role in helping game wardens catch poachers.
In Texas, suspected wildlife, fishing and boating violations can be reported through Operation Game Thief, the state’s wildlife crime-stoppers program.
If you witness a violation, don’t confront the suspect. Observe from a safe distance and gather useful information when it can be done safely—location, vehicle description, license plate, description of the individuals involved and what you witnessed.
Then report it.
Operation Game Thief: 1-800-792-GAME (4263)
Anonymous tips can also be submitted by texting TXOGT followed by the tip information to 847411.
Texas Parks and Wildlife Department says Operation Game Thief dispatchers are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and tipsters may be eligible for rewards when information leads to a conviction.
Wildlife crime doesn’t always happen where a game warden can see it. Sometimes the difference between a poacher getting away and being caught is an outdoorsman, landowner, angler or passerby who decides to make one phone call.
Protecting wildlife isn’t only about protecting animals. Sometimes it means standing against the people who exploit them.
Because the outdoors has a dark side.
Chester Moore
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In 1997, my wife Lisa and I were driving to Pasadena, Texas, to visit a friend when we came upon a scene we would never forget. Police and investigators had converged near a retention pond, and although we knew something serious had happened, we had no idea what we had just driven into.
Laura Smither
We would soon learn that the body of 12-year-old Laura Smither, who had disappeared while jogging near her Friendswood home, had been discovered there that very day. Nearly three decades later, I returned to that moment for a new episode of Dark Outdoors® and began digging into Laura’s case, serial killer William Reece and the disturbing history of the Texas Killing Fields. What I found takes the story far beyond what Lisa and I witnessed that heartbreaking day that still has an impact on both of us.
I’m not going to tell the rest of that story here. I want you to hear it the way it was meant to be told. Listen to the new episode of Dark Outdoors® for our personal connection to the Laura Smither case and a deeper investigation into the Texas Killing Fields.
Follow and subscribe to Dark Outdoors® so you don’t miss what’s coming next—because the outdoors has a dark side.
And the timing of this episode could hardly be more remarkable. Just as it was being released, one of the most infamous chapters in Texas Killing Fields history suddenly produced major news after more than four decades.
Breaking News From the Texas Killing Fields
On Sept. 2, 2026, a Galveston County jury found James Dolphs Elmore Jr. guilty of manslaughter in the death of 16-year-old Laura Miller. The following day, Elmore was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the maximum punishment for the charge.
Miller disappeared in 1984, and her remains were discovered 17 months later in the infamous Calder Road field in League City. She was one of four women whose bodies were found at that location between 1984 and 1991, along with Heidi Fye-Villareal, Audrey Cook and Donna Prudhomme.
The Elmore verdict is historic. More than four decades after Miller disappeared, he became the first person convicted in connection with the death of any of the four women whose bodies were discovered at the Calder Road site.
The development puts new attention on cases that have haunted the Houston-Galveston area for decades. The term “Texas Killing Fields” has been applied more broadly to a string of murders and disappearances involving girls and young women along the Interstate 45 corridor between Houston and Galveston. Authorities have investigated numerous cases in the region, and the evidence has pointed not toward one predator responsible for everything, but potentially multiple killers operating across different periods.
That is one of the things that makes the history of this region so disturbing.
Where Civilization Meets Isolation
The geography itself is part of the story. Interstate 45 runs through heavily populated communities, but not far from the freeway are marshes, bayous, fields, industrial areas, drainage systems and isolated stretches of road. Development and wild country can exist remarkably close together.
For most people, these are simply pieces of the Gulf Coast landscape. For someone with predatory intentions, however, an isolated road or forgotten field can offer something entirely different: access, concealment and a quick route back toward a major highway and millions of people.
That is also why this story belongs on Dark Outdoors®.
We often think of outdoor danger in terms of wildlife. Bears, mountain lions, sharks and venomous snakes command our attention because they represent predators we instinctively understand. Yet some of the darkest stories connected to woods, marshes, trails, rural roads and isolated places involve a very different kind of predator.
Human beings.
The Texas Killing Fields are an extreme example of what can happen along that boundary between civilization and isolation. You don’t necessarily have to travel deep into wilderness to become vulnerable. Sometimes the darkness exists only a few turns off a busy highway.
A Story That Isn’t Over
The conviction of James Elmore is a reminder that even after four decades, investigators and families have not necessarily reached the end of these stories. Advances in forensic science, renewed investigations and people willing to keep asking questions can bring movement to cases that once seemed destined to remain mysteries.
There are still unanswered questions surrounding the Texas Killing Fields, and there are families who have waited decades for answers. The Calder Road cases represent only one part of a much larger and darker history along the I-45 corridor.
For me, though, this story will always lead back to that day in 1997 when Lisa and I drove toward Pasadena and unexpectedly found ourselves on the edge of something terrible. At the time, we didn’t understand what we were seeing or how that moment connected to a much larger story.
Nearly 30 years later, I went back to it.
Hear that story—and much more—in the new episode of Dark Outdoors®.
I’ve spent a large portion of my life going into places most people would consider remote.
I’ve traveled into mountain country looking for wildlife, walked swamps and forests, spent countless hours around Gulf Coast marshes and ventured into isolated areas with cameras, fishing rods and sometimes nothing more than curiosity and a desire to see what was around the next bend.
One thing I’ve learned is that the outdoors usually gives you information before it gives you trouble.
The problem is we’re not always paying attention.
Situational awareness isn’t about walking through the woods afraid of everything that moves. In fact, fear can make you less observant because you’re interpreting every sound as a threat. Awareness means understanding what should be happening around you well enough to notice when something doesn’t fit.
Here are five things I don’t ignore when I’m in remote country.
1. Human Activity That Doesn’t Match the Location
This is probably at the top of my list.
If I’m somewhere genuinely remote and suddenly start seeing an unusual amount of human sign, I pay attention. A few boot tracks aren’t concerning. Neither are ATV tracks in an area where people commonly ride or hunters have access.
It’s the context that matters.
A heavily traveled trail in a place where there shouldn’t be much foot traffic gets my attention. So do repeated vehicle tracks leading into an isolated area, makeshift camps in unusual locations, large amounts of trash or other evidence suggesting people are spending considerable time somewhere that doesn’t seem to have an obvious recreational purpose.
I learned this lesson firsthand when I once stumbled into an area associated with a meth lab.
That changed the way I view human sign in remote places.
I’ve spent much of my career writing about wildlife capable of hurting people, but an encounter with a criminal who thinks you’ve discovered something you shouldn’t have can be far more unpredictable than an encounter with an animal.
I don’t investigate suspicious activity simply because I’m curious. If something genuinely doesn’t look right, creating distance is usually a better option than finding out exactly what is happening.
2. Wildlife Suddenly Acting Differently
Wild animals notice things long before we do.
Anyone who hunts understands this. A deer staring intensely into cover has probably detected something. Birds giving alarm calls might be responding to a predator. Squirrels barking repeatedly aren’t necessarily upset about you.
I pay particular attention when several animals seem focused on the same area.
That doesn’t mean Bigfoot is standing behind the nearest oak tree. There are plenty of perfectly ordinary explanations. A bobcat, coyote, fox, snake, hawk or human can change the behavior of animals around it.
The important thing isn’t immediately identifying what’s causing the reaction. It’s recognizing that something has changed.
People sometimes talk about the woods suddenly becoming completely silent as if it is proof that a major predator is nearby. Nature isn’t quite that simple. Temperature, weather, time of day and countless other factors influence animal and insect activity.
But if I’ve been listening to normal woodland activity and there is an obvious behavioral shift around me, I’m going to notice it.
The animals might know something I don’t.
3. Fresh Predator Sign Where I Didn’t Expect It
Finding a predator track doesn’t automatically mean you’re in danger.
I’ve photographed and studied predators for decades, and one of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming the presence of a predator means an attack is imminent. Most wild predators want absolutely nothing to do with us.
Still, fresh sign deserves attention.
A bear track around a campground means something different than an old track several miles down a trail. Fresh mountain lion sign near a kill deserves considerably more attention than an isolated print. Coyote tracks are common across huge portions of America, but repeated sign around a campsite where food has been left accessible tells you something about animal behavior.
The details matter.
How fresh is the sign? Is there food nearby? Are there cubs or young animals involved? Is the animal repeatedly using the same location? Does it appear to be associating people with food?
I don’t panic when I find predator sign.
I use it as information.
Knowing what’s sharing the country with you allows you to make better decisions about what you do next.
4. Something That Has Been Deliberately Hidden
This one immediately gets my attention.
There is a difference between finding something somebody lost and finding something somebody obviously didn’t want discovered.
An abandoned backpack beside a popular trail might have an innocent explanation. Something carefully concealed deep in brush is different. So are containers, equipment or other objects deliberately hidden in places where they don’t seem to belong.
I don’t start opening things.
There are too many possibilities, and some of them aren’t good.
The object could be related to hunting or someone’s legitimate outdoor activity. It could be old trash. It could also be connected to illegal activity, hazardous material or something authorities would rather have examined without somebody handling it first.
I’ve always had a strong investigative streak. It’s part of what led me into journalism and wildlife work in the first place.
Remote country, however, is not the place to let curiosity override common sense.
If someone went through considerable effort to make sure an object wasn’t easily seen, I don’t assume they were hoping I’d come along and investigate it.
5. My Own Instinct That Something Has Changed
This one is difficult to quantify, but I don’t dismiss it.
People sometimes describe getting a strange feeling in the woods. The hair stands up on the back of their neck. They suddenly feel watched or simply become convinced something isn’t right.
That doesn’t mean anything paranormal is happening.
Our brains constantly process information we’re not consciously concentrating on. Maybe you heard a sound that didn’t register clearly. Perhaps movement occurred at the edge of your peripheral vision. Maybe the normal background noise changed, or you noticed a smell you couldn’t immediately identify.
Sometimes your brain puts those pieces together before your conscious mind does.
I’ve learned not to automatically dismiss that reaction.
At the same time, I don’t let imagination take control. Being alone in darkness can make an ordinary raccoon sound enormous, and exhaustion can make familiar surroundings feel completely different.
The key is using that feeling as a reason to become more observant rather than more frightened.
Stop for a moment and look around. Listen. Check the wind. Look behind you. Pay attention to what wildlife is doing and see whether there is anything tangible that explains why your level of awareness suddenly increased.
Maybe you’ll discover nothing.
That’s fine.
Situational awareness isn’t about proving that danger exists. It’s about noticing potential danger early enough that you still have options.
Pay Attention to What Doesn’t Fit
The outdoors isn’t inherently sinister.
I’ve spent enough time in wild places to know the overwhelming majority of strange sounds, tracks and movements eventually have completely natural explanations. An unexplained scream might be a fox. Eyes glowing beyond the fire could belong to a raccoon. The huge animal crashing through brush might turn out to be an armadillo making considerably more noise than something that size should be capable of producing.
But I’ve also learned not to ignore things simply because I can’t immediately explain them.
The most important outdoor skill isn’t necessarily shooting, tracking, fire building or navigation, although all of those can matter tremendously.
Sometimes it’s simply paying attention.
Notice the trail that shouldn’t have that much traffic. Watch the animals that suddenly become alarmed. Examine the fresh tracks before walking farther. Don’t handle the object somebody obviously tried to conceal, and don’t automatically dismiss the internal warning telling you to pay closer attention.
You don’t have to be afraid of remote country to respect it.
You just have to remember that when you’re miles from the nearest road, noticing something five minutes earlier can make a tremendous difference in what happens next.
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Reports of black panthers have circulated through Texas for generations. From the Pineywoods to South Texas, people have described large, long-tailed black cats crossing roads, slipping through creek bottoms and appearing in places where conventional wildlife wisdom says they shouldn’t exist.
Most of these encounters leave little behind beyond a story. But occasionally a report comes from an experienced outdoorsman who gets a good enough look at the animal to make the account difficult to casually dismiss. My friend David Cleaver had one of those encounters, and what he describes sounds remarkably like one of the most impressive cats on Earth—a black jaguar.
Hear David’s complete firsthand account on the new Dark Outdoors® episode “Black Ghost: A Texas Jaguar Encounter” on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
David is a dedicated outdoorsman and hiker, and I consider him a highly reliable witness. His encounter wasn’t simply a fleeting glimpse of something dark disappearing into the brush. He describes a large black feline whose size, build and overall appearance didn’t match the animals normally encountered in Texas.
The possibility of a jaguar deserves consideration because jaguars aren’t strangers to Texas. They are part of our natural history and once occurred in the state. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department information lists the jaguar as endangered and considers it possibly extirpated in Texas, while acknowledging the possibility of a rare wandering animal arriving from Mexico.
That is a long way from saying jaguars are secretly breeding somewhere in Texas. There is no evidence of that. But an individual jaguar wandering into the state is biologically possible, and jaguars have continued to appear north of Mexico in the American Southwest.
But What About a Black Jaguar?
This is where David’s encounter becomes especially mysterious.
Black jaguars are real. Melanism can produce jaguars that appear almost completely black, although their characteristic rosette pattern can often still be seen under the right lighting.
There is a significant problem, however, with putting one in Texas. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports that melanistic jaguars have never been documented north of Mexico’s Isthmus of Tehuantepec. A black jaguar appearing in Texas would therefore be an extraordinary occurrence requiring extraordinary evidence.
So what are people seeing when they report black panthers in Texas?
There probably isn’t a single answer. Some sightings undoubtedly involve domestic cats, dogs, otters or other animals seen under poor conditions. Mountain lions can also appear extremely dark in certain light, although there is no scientifically documented population of truly black mountain lions.
But that doesn’t mean every report should automatically be discarded.
I’ve investigated unusual wildlife reports for years, and I’ve learned that the important questions are often simple ones: Who saw the animal? How close were they? How long did they see it? What characteristics could they clearly identify? And how experienced is the witness with wildlife?
David Cleaver’s encounter deserves to be considered in that light.
I can’t tell you that David saw a black jaguar. There is no photograph, DNA or other physical evidence that could prove what the animal was. But knowing David and hearing the details of his encounter, I believe he saw something extraordinary.
And considering that jaguars once roamed Texas, the possibility of an occasional big cat appearing where we least expect it is a mystery worth investigating.
I can’t tell you that David saw a black jaguar. There is no photograph, DNA or other physical evidence that could prove what the animal was. But knowing David and hearing the details of his encounter, I believe he saw something extraordinary.
Jaguars once roamed Texas. Whether one of their darkest forms could ever return is another question entirely.
For now, the black ghost remains just that—a mystery.
Chester Moore
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Most people walk into parks, trails and open country looking for something positive.
Maybe it’s a few miles of exercise, a chance to photograph wildlife or simply an opportunity to get away from traffic and noise. Hikers look for overlooks. Hunters notice tracks. Birders watch the trees. Those of us who have spent our lives outdoors develop a habit of looking at the ground for tracks, sheds, feathers and anything else that catches our attention.
Christine Ross was simply walking her dog, Ruca, across Albuquerque’s West Mesa on Feb. 2, 2009, when something caught her attention.
It was a bone protruding from an earthen trail.
Ross photographed it and sent the image to her sister, a registered nurse, who thought it looked like a human femur. Ross contacted the Albuquerque Police Department, and investigators soon confirmed the bone was human.
Then they started searching.
Police searching at the site.
What they eventually uncovered was almost incomprehensible. The skeletal remains of 11 women and an unborn child had been buried in makeshift graves across the mesa.
An ordinary walk outdoors had led directly into what became the largest crime scene in Albuquerque history.
For anyone who hikes, camps, hunts, fishes or explores remote country, there is something particularly disturbing about that.
When a Trail Becomes a Crime Scene
I’ve spent much of my life exploring places most people would consider remote, and one of the things I’ve learned is that wild and undeveloped landscapes can conceal things remarkably well.
Anyone who has tried to follow a blood trail through thick brush understands how quickly something can disappear. Hunters sometimes walk within yards of a downed deer without seeing it. A backpack dropped into thick vegetation can vanish from sight. An abandoned vehicle can sit surprisingly close to a road while trees and brush make it almost invisible.
Now imagine what time can do.
Vegetation grows. Rain moves soil. Wind changes exposed ground. Animals disturb objects and remains. Trails appear and disappear. Development changes access to places that were once isolated.
The outdoors doesn’t care whether something is evidence.
It simply keeps changing.
That’s one reason wilderness and undeveloped areas can become incredibly difficult crime scenes. A person can disappear into country that doesn’t look particularly intimidating on a map and become extraordinarily difficult to locate.
The West Mesa case demonstrates that in the darkest possible way.
They Were Beneath the Landscape
The remains discovered during the West Mesa investigation belonged to Monica Candelaria, Victoria Chavez, Virginia Cloven, Syllannia Edwards, Cinnamon Elks, Doreen Marquez, Julie Nieto, Veronica Romero, Evelyn Salazar, Michelle Valdez and Jamie Barela. Valdez was pregnant, and the remains of her unborn child were recovered with her.
Two of the victims, Syllannia Edwards and Jamie Barela, were only 15 years old.
These women had disappeared years before Christine Ross walked across the mesa with Ruca. Police believe their deaths were homicides, but the person responsible has never been identified.
That means people had undoubtedly passed through the broader landscape without realizing what was there.
I find that aspect of the case almost as disturbing as the discovery itself.
We tend to think that if something terrible happened near a trail, park or outdoor recreation area, somebody would notice. Surely a hiker would see something. Maybe a hunter would stumble across evidence or someone walking a dog would smell or notice something unusual.
Sometimes that happens.
Sometimes it takes years.
Why Remote Places Attract More Than Outdoorsmen
Isolation is one of the things we seek when we go outdoors.
It’s why people backpack into wilderness areas instead of walking around city blocks. It’s why hunters travel deep into national forests and why fishermen launch boats into places where they won’t see another person all morning.
We want solitude.
Unfortunately, there are people who seek isolation for very different reasons.
I’ve written before about the importance of paying attention to unusual human activity in remote country. I once stumbled into an area associated with a meth lab, and that experience permanently changed the way I view certain signs in the woods.
The overwhelming majority of people you encounter outdoors are simply doing the same thing you are. They’re hiking, fishing, hunting, camping, working or enjoying the land.
But criminals understand geography, too.
A secluded road can provide privacy. An isolated trail means fewer witnesses. Undeveloped property can offer places where vehicles aren’t immediately noticed. Deserts, forests and swamps can conceal evidence in ways an urban environment cannot.
That’s not a reason to be frightened every time you enter the woods.
It’s a reason to pay attention.
Hikers Find Things
There’s an interesting reality surrounding outdoor recreation that doesn’t receive much attention.
Hikers, hunters, fishermen and other outdoorsmen sometimes become accidental evidence finders.
Think about where we go.
Hunters deliberately leave established trails and move through brush where most people never walk. Shed hunters spend hours staring at the ground searching for pieces of bone. Anglers follow creeks into isolated areas. Wildlife photographers explore places where animals concentrate. Hikers investigate old trails, overlooks and forgotten roads.
We’re looking at places other people aren’t.
That’s why outdoorsmen occasionally discover abandoned vehicles, clothing, weapons, personal belongings and human remains associated with missing-person and criminal investigations.
Most of the bones you find outdoors will obviously belong to wildlife. Deer remains are common in many areas. So are hogs, livestock and countless smaller animals.
But every once in a while, someone realizes the bone they’re looking at doesn’t belong to an animal.
At that point, everything changes.
Don’t Become the Investigator
If you ever encounter something outdoors that you genuinely believe could be human remains, your job isn’t to solve the mystery.
Don’t start collecting bones.
Don’t rearrange objects so you can photograph them better. Don’t search pockets, move clothing or start digging to see whether anything else is underneath.
Leave the scene as you found it and contact law enforcement.
There are several reasons for this.
First, you may be looking at a crime scene. Objects that appear completely insignificant could have evidentiary value investigators understand better than you do.
Second, where something is located can matter as much as the object itself. Moving evidence destroys information about its original position.
And finally, you don’t know what happened there.
An isolated set of remains could belong to someone who became lost or suffered a medical emergency. It could be a suicide, accident or homicide. Until investigators determine what occurred, treating the location carefully protects both the investigation and the person whose remains you’ve discovered.
Take note of where you are so authorities can find the location, back away and make the call from somewhere safe.
What Else Is Still Out There?
The West Mesa case contains another element that should interest anyone who spends time in wild or undeveloped country.
Investigators have identified additional missing women they believe could potentially be connected to the case.
That raises an obvious and unsettling question.
Could there be another burial site?
Police have conducted searches in other areas during the years since the original discovery, but the murders remain unsolved.
That’s one of the harsh realities of missing-person investigations involving outdoor environments. Searchers can cover enormous areas and still miss something.
I’ve participated in enough outdoor activities to understand how deceptive terrain can be. You can look across an open area and think you can see everything, but depressions, vegetation and changes in elevation create countless blind spots.
Put the same problem into thick timber, mountainous terrain or swamp and the difficulty increases dramatically.
Searching isn’t simply walking through an area and looking around.
Sometimes what you’re searching for is only feet away and still invisible.
A Dog Found What Everyone Else Had Missed
That’s why I keep coming back to Ruca.
A dog walking across the mesa noticed something protruding from the ground.
That one discovery changed everything.
Had Christine Ross taken another route that day, someone else might eventually have found the remains. Development might have exposed them. Weather could have uncovered additional evidence.
But we don’t know when that would have happened.
A memorial to the women of West Mesa.
The landscape had already concealed the victims for years.
Today, the burial area has been transformed. Albuquerque dedicated Women’s Memorial Park there in 2020, creating a place that remembers the women whose remains were discovered beneath the mesa.
Their names deserve to be remembered: Monica Candelaria, Victoria Chavez, Virginia Cloven, Syllannia Edwards, Cinnamon Elks, Doreen Marquez, Julie Nieto, Veronica Romero, Evelyn Salazar, Michelle Valdez and Jamie Barela.
They weren’t simply part of a famous crime scene.
They were people.
Remember This the Next Time You’re on a Trail
I don’t tell stories like West Mesa to make people afraid of parks, trails or wild places.
Quite the opposite. I’ve devoted my life to getting people outdoors.
But I also believe outdoorsmen should understand the environments we enter, including the darker possibilities.
Pay attention to what you see.
If you encounter an abandoned pack in an unusual location, don’t immediately start rummaging through it. If you find clothing or personal belongings scattered somewhere that doesn’t make sense, remember the location. If you discover something that could be human remains, don’t disturb it.
And if you encounter human activity in remote country that seems completely inconsistent with the location, there’s nothing wrong with turning around.
Most strange things we encounter outdoors have innocent explanations. Most bones belong to animals. Most abandoned objects are simply trash somebody should have carried out.
But “most” isn’t “all.”
On Feb. 2, 2009, Christine Ross went outside with her dog for a walk.
Ruca found a bone.
Police eventually found 11 women and an unborn child.
It’s difficult to imagine a darker reminder that sometimes the landscape beneath our hiking boots contains stories we cannot see.
Chester Moore
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Before heading into the Missouri Ozarks for a story, someone familiar with the area gave me a warning I wasn’t expecting. They told me there was something unusual I needed to watch out for in the woods: Bald Knobbers.
I knew the name, but certainly not that version of it. The only Baldknobbers I knew were the famously silly country music and comedy entertainers associated with Branson. But the person who warned me described something much darker—secretive gatherings, strange regalia and people you supposedly didn’t want to encounter in remote areas. I have found no credible evidence that an organized Bald Knobber group exists in Missouri today, but the person had previously given me surprisingly accurate information about secretive organizations. That was enough to send me down the rabbit hole.
I recently explored that warning, the real history of the Bald Knobbers and some of my own experiences with strange gatherings in remote places in a new episode of the Dark Outdoors podcast, “They Warned Me About the Bald Knobbers.”
What I discovered while researching the episode was stranger than the warning itself because the real Bald Knobbers were not folklore.
Secret Meetings in the Ozarks
The Bald Knobbers emerged in southwest Missouri during the 1880s, when parts of the Ozarks were struggling with crime, violence and divisions that remained after the Civil War. The original Taney County movement organized under Nat Kinney and presented itself as an answer to lawlessness.
Their name came from the bald knobs of the Ozarks, including the kind of isolated elevated country where the organization gathered. Snapp’s Bald, north of Kirbyville, is identified as the location of an early meeting.
That outdoor connection immediately interested me.
Historical Bald Knobber photo
Long before someone warned me about people supposedly using Bald Knobber imagery in modern Missouri, real men were gathering secretly in remote Ozarks country.
Whatever motivations existed at the beginning, vigilantism went into very dark territory. The Bald Knobber movement became associated with intimidation and violence, and the Missouri State Archives records Bald Knobber vigilantism that included men being taken from jail and hanged from a tree along Swan Creek.
Then the movement spread.
The Masks
The image most people now associate with the Bald Knobbers largely comes from the Christian County faction.
These men took the imagery to another level. The Missouri State Archives notes that Christian County Bald Knobbers used initiation rites and esoteric signs and wore what were described as hideous masks.
And hideous is an appropriate word.
The surviving imagery depicts dark head coverings with grotesque faces and horns projecting upward. They look more like props from a horror movie than something worn by actual men in nineteenth-century Missouri.
But men really wore them.
Imagine being in an isolated part of the Ozarks after dark and seeing several figures wearing those masks coming toward you. There is nothing paranormal about that scenario. That’s what makes it disturbing.
Strange People in the Woods
This is where the Bald Knobber story intersects with something I’ve investigated repeatedly with Dark Outdoors.
I’ve received accounts of people encountering strangely dressed individuals in remote outdoor locations. Some involve hooded figures. Others involve fires, ceremonies or gatherings that witnesses interpreted as occult activity.
The obvious temptation is to immediately attach a supernatural explanation to these encounters.
History tells us to be careful about doing that.
People have been putting on masks, robes and hoods and gathering away from public view for a very long time.
When my wife and I were first dating and I was still in high school, we were driving down a dark road when we saw what initially appeared to be the woods on fire. As we got closer, we realized what we were actually seeing.
A group of Ku Klux Klansmen was gathered around a burning cross.
We got out of there.
It was frightening, but there was nothing supernatural about it. We had simply driven upon a group of people conducting something they obviously weren’t doing in the middle of town in broad daylight.
That experience has stayed with me when investigating reports of unusual human activity in the outdoors.
The Hood Isn’t Always White
There’s another strange wrinkle involving Klan regalia that illustrates how difficult interpreting these encounters can be.
Most Americans immediately associate the Ku Klux Klan with white robes and pointed white hoods. Historically, however, Klan organizations have also used different-colored robes and markings to signify leadership positions and other roles.
Green, black, purple and other colors have appeared in Klan regalia.
Imagine encountering several people wearing green robes and pointed hoods in the woods without knowing any of that history. What would you think you had encountered?
A cult?
An occult ceremony?
Some strange secret society?
That’s one of the reasons eyewitness accounts of strangely dressed people need to be examined carefully. A witness can accurately describe what they saw while being completely wrong about what it represented.
Old Symbols, New People
This brings me back to the Bald Knobbers.
I found no credible evidence that the nineteenth-century organization somehow survived intact into modern Missouri. I’m not making that claim.
But organizations, subcultures and individuals borrow imagery from the past constantly.
We’ve examined this while investigating reports for Dark Outdoors involving hooded figures and alleged ritual activity. Elements associated with occult movements, fraternal organizations, ancient religious traditions and modern groups sometimes overlap visually without those organizations having any actual relationship to one another.
A robe is a robe. A hood is a hood. A mask is a mask.
The meaning comes from the people wearing it.
So could someone today acquire or manufacture a Bald Knobber-style mask and wear it in the Missouri woods?
Certainly.
Would that make them a Bald Knobber?
No.
But imagine being the person who encounters them.
From Vigilantes to Branson
The other remarkable part of this story is how dramatically the Bald Knobber name changed.
In 1959, the Mabe brothers began performing music and comedy for visitors to Branson. They eventually adopted the Baldknobbers name and deliberately took it in a positive direction, using a piece of Ozarks history as the identity for an entertainment act.
The Baldknobbers helped establish the live entertainment formula that became synonymous with Branson.
That’s the version I knew.
For most of my life, if someone said “Baldknobbers,” I thought of goofy comedy and country music.
Now I think about something else entirely.
What Would You Do?
I still don’t know what was behind the warning I received before heading into the Ozarks.
Maybe it was simply regional folklore that survived long after the original Bald Knobbers disappeared. Maybe somebody had seen people borrowing the imagery. Maybe stories have been repeated and embellished for generations.
I can’t prove otherwise.
But I also know that strange human activity in remote places isn’t something invented for horror movies or paranormal podcasts. History is filled with secret meetings, masked vigilantes, clandestine ceremonies and people deliberately choosing isolated locations where they believed nobody else would see what they were doing.
I’ve unexpectedly encountered something like that myself.
That’s why if I’m walking through the Missouri woods someday and see a black horned mask staring back at me from between the trees, I’m not going to stick around and ask whether the person wearing it can document his historical connection to the Bald Knobbers.
Some mysteries are better investigated from a distance.
Because the outdoors has a dark side.
Chester Moore
Dark Outdoors® investigates terrifying encounters, unsolved mysteries, crime, and dangerous wildlife.
