Page 29 of Haunted By the Mountain Man
I did. This time we both heard it, but the words after "Tell Walt" were lost in interference.
"Could be radio frequency bleeding in from somewhere," I said, trying to be objective. "Sometimes recordings pick up cell towers, radio stations..."
"There's no cell service up here. No radio stations in range."
I was adjusting my thermal camera when I saw it—two distinct cold spots had formed near the door. They held their shape for nearly thirty seconds, vaguely human-sized, before dispersing.
"Did you see that?" I asked Shane.
"Could be convection currents from the temperature differential between rooms," he said, but he was gripping my hand tight.
At midnight, all our equipment went haywire simultaneously. EMF detectors screaming, thermal cameras showing rapid temperature fluctuations, audio recorders picking up what sounded like multiple overlapping whispers.
Then, as suddenly as it started, everything went silent.
"Everyone okay?" Kevin's voice, tense over the radio.
Check-ins from all teams confirmed no one was hurt, but everyone had experienced the same phenomena.
"Electromagnetic surge?" Neil suggested. "Old building, maybe something shifted in the structure?"
"At midnight exactly?" Sam's skepticism was clear. "On Halloween?"
"Coincidences happen," Kevin said firmly. "But document everything."
I was reviewing the audio from the surge when I found it. Buried in the cacophony of whispers, two voices stood out. Young. Desperate.
"Not... his... fault..."
"Please... help... him..."
The words were fragmented, distorted, could be pareidolia—our brains creating patterns in random noise. But they were there.
"Shane," I said quietly. "Listen to this."
He did, his face grim. "That could be anything. Wind, our imagination..."
"Or it could be Rebecca and Jimmy trying to tell us Walt's not to blame for their deaths."
"We don't know that's what it's saying. We're interpreting random sounds—"
A loud crash from above made us both freeze. Then footsteps—clear, deliberate, walking across the floor above us.
"Walt's asleep," Shane said, already moving toward the stairs. "His room is on this level."
We found nothing upstairs. No sign of anyone. But in the dust on the floor of what would have been room 237, there were footprints. Old ones, partially obscured, but also... two sets that looked fresh. Smaller than Shane's boots. One set that could be women's shoes, one set that looked like work boots.
"Those weren't here this morning," Shane said with certainty. "I checked this floor for structural damage yesterday."
"Wind could have blown dust around, revealed old prints," I said, but my voice shook slightly.
"Yeah," Shane agreed, but neither of us believed it.
We returned to base camp where the others had gathered, everyone comparing notes and recordings. The evidence was compelling but not conclusive. Everything could be explained by environmental factors, yet the timing, the patterns, the consistency across different types of equipment...
"So what do we tell Walt?" Kim asked quietly. "If these are just building noises and drafts?"
"Or if they're not?" Neil added.
