 Before we get into the video today, I just want to give a quick shout out to one of our sponsors, Gnostic TV. Gnostic TV is ancient wisdom reimagined. This is a Netflix for those who are spiritually curious and want a place to go where there is no censorship. I personally am doing a whole series on Gnostic TV called The Esoteric Explorer where I am providing exclusive content to Gnostic. Gnostic TV is a host to all sorts of different content creators, many of whom are your old favorites. If you would like to check out Gnostic TV, there is a link down in the description box below. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Esoteric Atlanta. My name is Bryce, and boy, do I have a story for you today. This story is not a deep dive. It's not research that I've done. This is a legit story from my own personal life, something that happened about six or seven years ago, a crazy, crazy thing that happened six or seven years ago, and I finally, this weekend, feel like I might have gotten some answers as to what actually happened to me, my boyfriend, and one of our friends. Now, this story might be a story of a skinwalker. That is what we are led to believe at this moment. But I need to recap what happened for you guys to understand why we came to this conclusion. So this past weekend, my boyfriend and I went up to North Georgia to watch our friend, Jessica Jones, the cryptid huntress here on YouTube speak at a Bigfoot convention, where this convention was being held as an area in North Georgia that we frequent a lot. In fact, my boyfriend in a previous life had lands up there. And when I say previous life, I meant before he met me. He owned land in Tiger, Georgia, which is very near Clayton, Georgia. It is in the heart of Appalachia. So we're up there all the time. We love to hike. We love to go up there just to be in the woods, be one with nature, since we spend most of our time here in the city. Now, when we go hiking, we tend to go to trails or areas of the Appalachians that not many people frequent. In fact, we rarely go to the touristy spots. So where this situation happened to us happened in a very, very desolate location, which makes the story even weirder. But let's go back to this weekend. On Friday morning, March 15th, 2024, I got up super early to do my yoga practice and pack up. My boyfriend was at our local shawla, our own shawla. He was teaching a class, and once he was done, we were going to jump in his truck and head up to the mountains. Our plan was to get there a little bit early before check-in for our hotel so that we can hit some of the trails before checking in and meeting up with Jessica Jones later that afternoon. That Saturday, the next day, March 16th, I was going to go to the convention with Jessica to watch her speak. Meanwhile, my boyfriend was going to go way off trail to one of his secret locations to spend the day in the woods. We were going to meet up Saturday afternoon to all go on a hike together so my boyfriend could show Jessica some of these secret locations that he goes to. If you are new to this channel, both myself and my boyfriend are used to paranormal phenomenon. We are both magnets for the supernatural. We're both RH negative. He's seen me get attacked by spirits. He himself has also had his own UFO encounters on military bases since he grew up on military bases as a child. So for us, things in the paranormal world are not super weird. In fact, they're pretty, pretty normal. But nonetheless, on Friday morning, March 15th, I was packing up, getting all of our stuff ready to go. When he gets home from work and as I'm packing up, I am listening to these stories of weird phenomenon that happened in the Appalachian Mountains. Now many of you do know that I am doing a series on Gnostic TV over the strange, the high strangeness of the Appalachians and I'm also quite interested in the topic as well. So it's no skin off my back to listen to these stories. Well, as we were listening, I was listening, getting everything ready to go, some stories came up about people experiencing strange humans in the mountains. Now we've covered feral people on this channel before and this is not what I'm speaking of. I'm not talking about feral people. I'm talking about people that just randomly appear in the Appalachian Mountains and they don't look like they belong there. For example, in this one story, this guy talked about his girlfriend and him were out hiking in the Appalachian Mountains, on the Appalachian Trail and all of a sudden they ran across a younger girl who was in the depth of the mountain in a sundress and a headlamp. So she had this one item, this headlamp that indicated she was hiking but she was not dressed for the trail. You don't wear a sundress when you're hiking in the Appalachians. Well, they said something to her in passing and she responded very oddly and so the boyfriend decided that he was going to follow her for a little bit and so he followed her down the trail and as he followed the strange girl he saw her shapeshift into a skin walker. He ran back to his girlfriend and they got in the car and they left immediately. Well, as I'm listening to the story, I run into the front room and I tell my boyfriend to listen to it because we had the same experience. Let's get back to the timeline though. So we recognize that after we listen to this TikTok that we've also had the same experience and not only that, but we go on to realize that there are hundreds and hundreds of stories of people having the same experience that we had had six to seven years prior. Well, Friday progresses, we get into the car to head up to Clayton, Georgia, where this conference is and we decide to listen to a series on the Ashley Madison fiasco. Totally kind of forgetting about the whole skin walker story and our own experiences. Again, paranormal phenomenon is nothing new to us so we just kind of laughed it off like, well, we must have experienced a skin walker and we go about our day. We get up to Clayton, Georgia and it's raining outside so we can't hit the trails yet. So we go, we get some lunch and we're finally able to check into our hotel. We check into our hotel, we drop our bags off and by this time it's like two, two 30 in the afternoon. So we decide that because Jessica is gonna be getting there in a few hours, we're just gonna go do like a little trail, nothing too aggressive, one of the more touristy trails just to allow our dog the chance to kind of stretch his legs and run. So we go and we do part of the Bertram Trail. We were gone for like an hour. We come back, Jessica gets in, she's staying at the same hotel as us. She checks in, I go over to her room, her son and her, then come with me over to our hotel room so that she can meet my boyfriend and eat our dog. Well, Jessica, AKA the Cryptocountress here on YouTube, her channel will be tagged down below. She hits it off with my boyfriend right away. I mean, we met on Zoom. We just had not met in person. So we're all sitting in our hotel room and we're starting to talk about crazy stories. Of course, Jessica is a Bigfoot locator. She does field research into Bigfoot. So she's sharing some of her stuff that she never shared on camera with us in our hotel room and we're just hitting it off, talking about all these experiences, that paranormal experiences that we have had. And I mentioned something about the fact that we had heard a TikTok this morning about this phenomenon of people seeing random people and the appellations, not feral people, but people that look like they come from a city and they'll have like one item on them that signifies that they are hiking, but they won't be dressed appropriately for the trails. And I said that in this TikTok, it seemed that this was an actual skin walker, a shape shifter. And so I proceed to tell Jessica the story of what happened to us, myself, my boyfriend and our friend, Josh McKay, who does my opening music here on this channel, the story that happened like six or seven years ago. Now, my friends, this was long before I even thought about having a YouTube channel. So let me back up about what happened to us, okay? So as I said, we like to go up there and we like to go on trails that are not populated by many people. And in fact, this one particular trail that we do a lot where this phenomenon happened is way off the beaten path. We like this trail because the end of the trail ends at one of the rivers here in Georgia and there's usually like a beach front so we can hike down to the river. In the summertime especially, we can pack a bag, we can bring towels, we can bring food, we can just kind of spend the day at the river and then hike back up once the sun starts to set and leave. Now again, this is not a trail that's frequented by many, many people. And in fact, to get to this trail is quite a trek. You take the main road up, you turn out a church, you're on a paved road and then you turn onto a gravel road. Once the gravel road ends, you turn onto a dirt road and this dirt road is rough terrain. My car wouldn't make it, Josh's car won't make it. So normally when Josh meets us up there, he meets us at the church, gets to my boyfriend's truck with us before we get to the trail. It takes a while, again, the terrain is really, really rough and as you're going down the gravel road before you get to the dirt road, you start to see less and less and less housing. By the time you get to the dirt road, there are no houses anywhere. In fact, we have never seen anybody else back there. But you keep going down, you keep going down, you keep going down miles and miles and miles down this dirt road. The road and the terrain are so rough that you can only really go about five to 10 miles an hour max, just to get over all the puddles and all the terrain. And in fact, many times we've had to actually stop the car and go and move stuff off the road in order to keep going. This is not a trail that you could just walk to, right? You have to drive there. If you were to walk to the trail, that would be a hike in itself. Once you get to the end of the road, you're out of dead end, you park your car and then you have to hike down a very steep mountain. Now the trail itself leading down to the river is a hard trail. It's not something that an amateur hiker is going to do. It's not something that someone who is elderly or out of shape is going to do. In fact, in order to do this trail, you have to be aware that especially when you're leaving the trail, you basically have to climb up a mountain side that if you're with somebody and they get injured, they hurt their, spraying their ankle or break their leg, you are gonna have to be responsible for carrying them up the mountain. It's not a place where you could just leave somebody who's injured, climb up the mountain, drive off and get help to come back because it's gonna take you a long time to get back up the mountain. It's gonna take even more time to get the car out of the terrain onto the main road to find help. And you definitely, definitely do not want to leave somebody on that trail overnight because where this trail is, there are no city lights. You don't have cell phone reception. Once the sun goes down, it is pitch black dark. And even though we have to be concerned about phenomenons like Bigfoot and Feral People, the real concern about leaving someone overnight is the wild animals. So if someone you're with were to get injured, you have to be fit enough to not only climb up the mountain, but you also have to be able to help carry your friend, your partner up the mountain too. So this is not, this is not a trail that beginner hikers are gonna wanna take. Again, it's not in a populated area. It's not, there's no park rangers. It's literally the only people who know about this particular trail are locals. And as I've said, we've been doing this trail for almost 10 years now. And never have I ever seen anybody else on this trail. It's always just been us, just us using this trail. Now, once you get to the river, you'll see kayakers and whitewater rafters will go by their drop point is way down the river and you can just kind of wave to them. The other side of the river is technically South Carolina. And so across the river, there are no beaches. It is a steep cut into a mountain. So there's no one ever on the other side. It is just you on the Georgia side. So this one day about six or seven years ago as I'm telling Jessica this story about six or seven years ago, my boyfriend, myself and our friend, Josh McKay. Again, the guy who does the music for this channel decide that we're going to take a day trip up to this particular spot in the mountains. We've done this many, many, many times. We agreed to meet Josh. He doesn't live in Atlanta. He lives in Athens, Georgia. So we meet at the church, this little church that's right on the road. You turn off before you get to the gravel road and then get to the dirt road. So we meet at the church so Josh can park his car. His car is not gonna make it. It's a city car, just like my car. So it's not gonna make it down the terrain. So Josh gets into the truck with my boyfriend and myself and we start our trip into the mountains. We finally get to the head of the mountain. We unload the car. We put our backpacks on. We've got our towels in our backpack. We're gonna spend a day at the river. We've got food. We've got bathing suits. We've got a little curtain to hang up over a branch so we can change. And we go, we head down, down the mountain to the river. We spend the whole day on the river laughing, having a great time, swimming. You know, I want to make something clear. Even though we ourselves are people who will drink every now and again, socially, we never drink at this river location for all the reasons that I explained earlier. When we're done, when the sun starts to set and we know we need to beat the sun out of the mountains because once the sun sets, it's pitch black dark, we know we have to go up a huge mountain to get back to the car. And then we've got to drive the car over rough terrain to get back into the city. So we never drink. We never do anything that would disorient us while we're on the river. It's just typical food, typical water bottles, all that kind of stuff where we're swimming and we're just having a great time out on the river. Again, our cell phones don't even work. You don't get the reception. So it starts to become dust. So we pack our bags up and we head back up the mountain to get to our car. We have to climb up literally some places of this trail are so steep. You're literally climbing to get up to the top of the mountain back to the trailhead. By the time you get up to the part where it's flat to get to the trailhead where our car is parked, you're usually pretty gross, pretty sweaty. We had been swimming. We are a mess. But by the time you get up the top part of the mountain, you're just relieved that the hard part is over and you've only got a mile before you get to your car and you can leave. So we're walking and we're laughing and we're talking about it. And all of a sudden, up ahead comes this woman. This woman starts to walk towards us. Now, this was so strange, this interaction we had with this woman that we have spoken about it many times since. Laughed about how weird it was. That was super weird. My boyfriend and I will talk about it when we see Josh. He'll mention it from time to time. That was really weird. Like, where did that woman come from? Now, what we neglected to explain to each other was what the woman looked like. And so, this was what was so weird. Friday night, as I was recapping this story to Jessica and telling her how we heard these TikToks and people having the exact same experience we had, I started to explain what the woman looked like. And in the past six or seven years, we've never asked each other. My boyfriend's never asked me what she looked like. Josh has never asked us what she looked like. We just all assumed that we were seeing the same woman. We all agree that she was barefoot and we all agree that she had a walking stick. But what I saw was an elderly woman. I saw a woman who was probably in her late 50s, early 60s, maybe even closer to mid 60s, a woman who was closer to my mother's age. Again, she was not a feral person. She was not a mountain person. She actually looked like a Sunday school teacher. She was dressed in an outfit that you would wear to church or to teach a kindergarten class. Her hair was cut in kind of the middle-aged, helmet, Karen-esque haircut and she had makeup on. She was not fat but not thin. She just kind of had that more matronly body. Like she didn't have boobs, she had bosoms. You know what I'm saying? Like she looked like she could have been my mother or a friend of mine's mother and she had a walking stick. Now as in she was barefoot. Now this is strange too. Now we know that feral people run barefoot but again, this was not a feral person. Feral people look like wild animals. She looked like someone that could be your Sunday school teacher but she was barefoot. And that's something that all three of us noticed right away because you just don't go barefoot in Appalachia. I mean, I have scratches all over my legs just from a hike we took on Saturday. You're walking through sticker bushes, especially on trails like this particular trail that isn't taken by many people. You are walking through rough terrain. You always want to have shoes on. We've also gotten the issue with poisonous snakes. You want to make sure our wasp nest. You're not stepping on something that could sting you. You want to make sure that your foot is protected. So it was very strange that she did not have shoes on especially as someone who doesn't look like they're from these parts of Appalachia. So she's walking towards us. We all say hello. She doesn't even acknowledge us. She just stares right ahead and keeps on walking. And if we had not moved, she would have tried to walk through us. We all turn, all three of us turn to watch her because it was such a weird interaction. And we watch her as she keeps walking into the woods. Now, where this trail goes to the river, it goes and then it turns and goes down the mountain to the river. She walked past the turn and kept going into the woods, off trail, totally off trail. Now, we all kind of watched her for a moment and thought, well, that's strange. And we just kind of shrugged, turned around and kept walking to the car. Well, once we got to the car, we realized there were no other cars around. Where did this woman come from? There's no way, again, I'm telling you, there is no way she walked there from the main road, especially barefoot. If she had walked from the main road barefoot, she would have been a hot mess by the time she passed us on the trail. She would have been sweaty. She would have been gross. She would have had mud on her. She had none of that. She looked like she had just taken a damn shower. So we get into the car and we're like, that was really, really weird. And we turn around and we start heading back to civilization, basically. And we just kind of brushed it off. Like maybe there's a house close by. We just haven't noticed. There has to be a logical reason as to why this woman who ignored us, didn't even acknowledge we were there, was walking through the woods in Sunday school clothes, barefoot with a walking stick, and then passed the trail and walked even further into the woods off trail. Like there has to be a, she seemed to know where she was going. So obviously she's fine. It was just very, very strange. So all these years go by. And again, occasionally we'll bring it up. Like that was really weird. Like I remember it like it was yesterday. It was so freaking strange. And the fact that she made no eye contact with us and just really just pretended like we weren't even there. It was just a very weird thing. Well remember, as I recently said, we didn't compare notes about what she looked like. We just said she was barefoot. We all saw her barefoot and with the walking stick. We all acknowledged that she was not dressed as somebody who would be hiking. You're not gonna wear your best clothes, hiking and Appalachia. You're gonna wear clothes that you're cool with them getting dirty and perhaps getting ripped. Like I have a whole drawer full of clothes that I wear to Appalachia because I don't care. These are clothes I don't care if they get ripped or dirty because that's gonna happen, especially when you're going on trails that are not monitored by a park where there's no park rangers and they're not frequented like by many people. As I'm retelling this story to Jessica, comparing it to the TikToks we had heard earlier that day, I mentioned that she was an older woman. My boyfriend looks at me and he goes, no, she wasn't. And I looked at my boyfriend and I said, yeah, she was. She looked like she was my mother's age. He goes, no, she was like 20. And I looked at him and I said, no, she had gray hair. She gray styled hair and he goes, no, she was really young. And I said, well, she had a Sunday school outfit on, like a top and a bottom that looked like a Sunday school teacher. He goes, no, it was a sundress. Like what a 20-year-old would wear. And I said, well, she was like pleasantly plump. She wasn't skinny, but she wasn't fat, but she was thick. And he goes, no, she was really skinny and her hair was pulled in the ponytail and swear to God, she was like 20 years old. So we're looking at each other in the hotel on Friday, all of a sudden I can feel the color draining from my face. We were both realizing that this entity, this being that we saw, we saw two totally different people. I saw an older woman that was around my mother's age. He saw a young girl who was almost like a child in a sundress. The only thing we had compared were the fact that she didn't have shoes on and had a hiking stick. Well, Jessica then informs us that this is normal. When these beings show themselves, they usually show themselves in different forms to different people. It's just, we had never thought all this time, my boyfriend thought that I saw a young girl and all this time I thought that he had seen an older woman. After Jessica left that night, we decided to try to call Josh. Now, we had very poor cell phone reception so we could not get through to him, but we left a message to see what he saw. Who did he see? What did this person look like to him? We know he remembers cause we bring it up all the time about how strange it was. And this just confirmed to us more that what we saw was a shape-shifting skin walker, just like all the other stories from TikTok. The only thing is we didn't follow it. We turned to watch it walk off, again, the entity that I perceived to be an older woman, the entity my boyfriend perceived to be a young woman. We watched it walk off trail deep into the woods, but we never followed it. Instead, we turned around and went back to our car. If we had followed it, just like all these other stories on TikTok, we probably would have seen it shape-shift into a skin walker and who knows if we would even be alive today to tell the story. After recapping all of this to Jessica and figuring out that we had, after all these years had seen two totally different beings, I absolutely know that's what that was. There was no car, there was no car there that a normal person would have driven a car there. There was no signs of anybody being at the trailhead but us. There's also been many, many times where our friend Josh has gone out there or we've gone out there and there have been weird things left on our car. And one time Josh opened up his driver's side door and rocks had been stacked on his driver's seat. There was a time I went down there and the same thing had happened. There was a formation of rocks at the bottom of the trail where it was obvious people had not been down there in a really long time. I don't believe that we were being stalked by a skin walker. I think that if we were being stalked by a skin walker, we would have felt differently about this odd encounter. I also think we would have had more than one or two experiences with weird phenomenon if we were being stalked by one. I just think we happened to cross one's path. And I think that this skin walker recognized us as people who can see beyond the veil. And so the skin walker did what it could to shift into a human being or what we perceive to be a human being so we wouldn't question it. So we wouldn't follow it. But just like most entities from different dimensions, it did not realize that it needed to have shoes on nor did it realize it needed to have appropriate clothes on for us not to think it was strange. I'm not afraid to go back to this trail. Again, this happened six or seven years ago and we've been back to that trail many, many hundreds of times since and had wonderful, fantastic days on the beach down there. And I will do it again in a heartbeat. I just know now that if I pass a strange person in the woods that maybe only has one article with them that signifies hiking but otherwise dressed as if they are from the city, not to question it just to let it keep going. Cause it's no doubt in my mind that these paranormal creatures do exist and they do live out in the Appalachian mountains. They say that curiosity killed the cat and I myself do know that I will never be following a stranger human or otherwise into the woods. That Saturday, the convention went well and then that Saturday evening, Jessica myself, my boyfriend, Jessica's son and our dog went to one of my boyfriend's locations off trail. We hiked deep into Appalachia, way off the beaten path. And as we were coming back, trying to get back to the car before sunset, I had a voice in my head say, if the mountain wants you to stay, you're not getting off this mountain. Now I kept this voice to myself. I didn't say anything to Todd or Jessica as we were leaving cause I didn't want to manifest it. Definitely wanted to get off of the mountains by the time the sun set so we could be back to civilization. And once we were off, I did text that to Jessica. I was like, it felt like something was warning me like you don't want to be in certain areas of this woods because if you get too deep into the woods, the mountains not gonna let you leave. Now again, I'm not afraid to go back to the trail that we were on where we saw the skin walker but I do feel like us hearing that story, realizing what had happened all those years earlier and then having that voice in my head the next day was definitely a warning that there are certain boundaries to where we go in this vast mountain range of Appalachia. And I know that man versus nature, nature always wins. So I will be respectful of my boundaries and just stay on the trails that I know I could stay on. All right you guys, let me know down in the comment section below if you have had any weird stuff happen to you in the woods whether in Appalachia or the Rockies or the Pyrenees, wherever you are in the world, let me know if you've had some weird situations like that happen. It's eerie when you realize like this, I mean, obviously six to seven years later I still remember this like it was yesterday I could draw all this woman that we saw. And so I'm curious to hear your stories. We've got so much to talk about this week. Jessica is coming back on the channel so we can recap some of the Bigfoot convention and talk about cryptids. We've got so many chose plans for you guys. This is my favorite thing to talk about is paranormal phenomenon. So I cannot wait to go deeper into some of these stories with you all. All right you guys, I hope you're having a wonderful day and I will talk to you soon.