For decades, a ranger who worked the mountains of the early Great Smoky Mountains National Park carried a secret about what he encountered on a remote ridge. Now, in his old age, he has told the full story of events that he says changed him forever. The year was 1928, and Arledge Fosmer was a 39-year-old ranger working a remote post on a ridge the old-timers called Horfrost Knob. His partner was a 27-year-old East Tennessean named Corwin Folk, a recent newlywed who carried a Bible in his coat pocket.
The two men were responsible for walking the lines, watching for fire, and keeping track of what was out there. The cabin they used had a dark history. It was built in the 1870s by a Confederate veteran named Mercer Threep, who died there in the early 1890s and was not found for nearly a year. The men who found him reported that the door had been barred from the inside.
Old Mercer was found sitting in a chair facing the door, with his service revolver empty across his lap. Six bullet holes were in the door, all at chest height. For three weeks, the rangers’ work was routine. Then, on a Tuesday evening in late September, they heard something from a cove below the ridge.
Both men froze. It was a long, rising howl, clearly a wolf. The gray wolves had been gone from the southern Appalachians since the 1890s, and the red wolf had not been heard in the Smokies in a generation. Nobody had an easy explanation for it.
The howl came again on Friday night, closer than before. Fosmer walked down into the cove alone the next day, looking for sign of the animal. He found nothing. No tracks, no scat, no fur.
He studied the soft mud along the creek, the kind of ground that would have preserved any impression, and found no trace of a dog, wolf, or coyote. He did notice that the birds in the cove were quiet and moving fast, as if they were passing through rather than feeding. He told Corwin what he had found, and Corwin confessed he had seen something himself. The evening before, while getting water at the spring, he had seen a tall man-shaped figure standing still in the laurel, watching the cabin.
When he called out, it did not respond. When he looked again, it was gone. The howls continued over the following days, each one closer. On a trip to the supply post at the bottom of the valley, Fosmer told the storekeeper, Rupert Haskins, what they had been hearing.
Haskins warned him to get his partner and come down off that mountain. He told Fosmer about a timber cruiser who vanished from the same ridge in 1911, never found, and about a young surveyor’s hand from 1919 who was found at the bottom of the cove, sitting against a tree, smiling. The young man never spoke again. Fosmer thanked the storekeeper but went back up.
That evening, Corwin told him there was a track in the mud at the spring. Fosmer went down to look with a lantern. The track was the size of the palm of his hand with fingers spread. It looked like a wolf’s track, but impossibly large and with a strange fifth mark behind the pad.
It was the only track. There was no second print, no scuff, no bent reed. That night, they barred the door. Corwin read from the Bible for nearly two hours, his voice shaking.
Around midnight, the howl came from directly outside the cabin, about 20 feet from the north wall. Fosmer said that underneath the wolf voice was another voice, as if something behind the howl was laughing. Then there was absolute silence, followed by the sound of low, slow breathing right outside the door. Corwin whispered not to fire, saying that if Fosmer missed, it would know where they were.
Fosmer watched the door and saw the latch twitch up a quarter of an inch, then drop back down. The breathing moved away and circled the cabin before going down the slope into the trees. Neither man slept. At first light, they packed quickly and left the cabin.
On the trail down, they heard a voice calling Fosmer’s name from up the slope behind them. It was the voice of his mother, who had died in 1917. Then the voice changed, becoming the voice of the widow woman in Asheville he had been writing to. Then it became the voice of Corwin’s wife, Lurleen, calling for him.
Corwin turned off the trail and started climbing toward the voice. Fosmer grabbed him and told him his wife was two valleys away in Cosby, not on that mountain. Corwin looked at him with wet eyes and said he knew. He said, “But what if she is?
” Then he pulled away and kept climbing. The voice led them over the back of the knob into a cove Fosmer had never seen before. The trees there were bare, as if it were winter, although the surrounding ridges were still green and turning gold. The ground was gray, and hundreds of pale, knobbed things stuck up out of it like mushrooms.
Fosmer later said he was grateful he never went down to see what they were. At the bottom of the cove, they saw a tall shape. It was standing upright, perfectly still, facing away. It was taller than a man, thin to an impossible degree, and gray like wet stone.
Its arms were too long, and its head sat cocked to one side. Fosmer found he could not raise his rifle. He could not move. The shape turned its head all the way around on its neck, slowly, without turning its body.
The face, Fosmer said, was something his mind had mercifully taken away from him. He could remember that it had eyes in the wrong places and a mouth that was already smiling. The thing opened its mouth and made the howl. This close, it was less a sound than a pressure, felt in the eyes and the teeth.
Fosmer said he knew that if he heard the words under the howl clearly, he would never walk off that mountain in his own mind. He pulled the brass whistle from around his neck and blew three short blasts, the signal for help on the ranger lines. The sound broke something. The light flickered.
The bare trees seemed, for half a breath, to have leaves. The shape snapped its head back to the front and jerked. Fosmer grabbed Corwin and hauled him over the lip of the cove. They fell and ran down the slope, with Fosmer dropping his Winchester somewhere and not going back for it.
They reached the supply post around one in the afternoon. Haskins took one look at them, sat them in the back room, and made coffee. Corwin did not speak for two hours. Fosmer told the storekeeper everything.
When he was done, Haskins nodded and said that they had both come down, which he called more than most men did. He advised Fosmer not to keep telling the story, saying the ones who keep telling it go back up the mountain in their heads, and the mountain sometimes follows a man home. Fosmer never worked on Horfrost Knob again. He said the cabin was moved off the ridge in 1931, officially because the water source had gone bad.
He also heard that three different rangers had refused to take the overnight post up there. Corwin Folk went home to his wife and took a job at a mill in Cosby. He changed, becoming quieter. His hair had streaks of white in it at 27.
His wife told Fosmer that Corwin could no longer sleep in the dark, so she left a lamp burning in the kitchen all night. In the spring of 1932, the two men went fishing together. Corwin told him the voice called him every night. He said it knew Lurleen’s name, although he had never once spoken her name while in those mountains.
Two grown men held hands on the bank of a creek as the sun went down. Fosmer told him to leave Cosby, but Corwin said there was no place on earth he could go where it would not find him, and he would rather be in his own house when it came. Corwin died in the autumn of 1933. He was walking home from the mill and stepped off the shoulder of the road, where a truck hit him.
The driver never stopped. The sheriff wrote it up as an accident. Fosmer suspected Corwin had finally answered a call. Fosmer never married the widow in Asheville.
He wrote to her that he was not the same man and believed he could not make her happy. She married a banker two years later and lived a long life. Fosmer continued working the park for another 28 years, retiring in 1957. He swore he never went back to Horfrost Knob or the cove on its backside, and he never blew a whistle in those mountains again.
In his old age, he revealed that he still heard the howl on certain autumn nights, very faint, in the wall behind his bedroom headboard. He said the other voice underneath the wolf voice had been getting easier to understand over the last few years. Last November, he heard what he was almost sure was his own name.
He said he did not know what he would do when the words became clear.