About this episode

This episode explores the eerie legends and sightings of the Mogollon Monster in Arizona's Tonto National Forest.

You wake up in the Tonto National Forest and the forest is wrong. The crickets stop, the wind dies, and the Mogollon Rim goes into a heavy, suffocating silence that locals call the zone of silence. From Apache “hairy man” stories to Navajo tales of the whistling man that copies human cries, the high country is treated as the territory of a real, flesh and blood guardian that throws stones, crushes wood like cardboard, and screams with a voice that sounds like a woman in mortal fear. Tracks over 18 inches long, the stench of rotting meat on the wind, and boulder sized stones raining into camp all point to something that is not hiding from people, but actively pushing them out. The story walks the rim’s worst hotspots, from the early 1903 white haired wild man near the canyon to Don Davis’s Boy Scout encounter at Tonto Creek and a siege in Chevelon Canyon that drove seasoned elk hunters to abandon all their gear and flee in the dark. As technology moves in, the reports only get sharper: thermal images of massive heat signatures in winter, trucks paced at highway speed on dirt roads, and tribal police now seeing seven-foot figures watching homes near the Fort Apache Reservation. The…

People in this episode

Host: Russ Chamberlin

Topics covered

• folklore
• cryptids
• Mogollon Monster
• true crime
• dark history
• local legends

Keywords

• Mogollon Monster
• Tonto National Forest
• cryptids
• local legends
• Apache stories
• Navajo tales
• dark history

Mentioned in this episode

Places: Tonto National Forest, Mogollon Rim, Apache, Navajo, Fort Apache Reservation, Chevelon Canyon, Tonto Creek

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