History WebOriginal / SearchAndRescueWoods

* EveryoneKnowsMorse: The man on top of the tower in "Radio" communications his messages through semaphore. Luckily, the SAR officer recognises it and is able to translate his message.

* EldritchLocation: The woods are played up to be this, alongside the town where the missing boy scouts lived in "Anniversary".

* DaylightHorror: the majority of the strange things the narrator experiences are seen in the daytime, while out on a search patrol. Played to interesting effect off the narrator's [[ConditionedToAcceptHorror slightly jaded attitude]] toward the mundane horrors a search and rescue team member experiences.

* LongTitle: The stories were posted on {{Website/Reddit}} under the title "I'm a Search and Rescue Officer for the US Forest Service, I have some stories to tell". {{Podcast/The Nosleep Podcast}} shortened it to "Search and Rescue".

In addition to the core SAR stories, Hammond also wrote several additional companion pieces that, while not always being set in the woods or featuring the main SAR officer, expand upon the lore of the world featured in the stories. These include: [[https://pastebin.com/qS7Ak9ze "The Tunnel"]], [[https://pastebin.com/Wkh2JVqC "Late Night"]], [[https://pastebin.com/DFJptCcp "Anniversary"]], [[https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/4lmvn7/molten/ "Molten"]], and [[https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/4qxrma/radio/ "Radio"]].

* AnimalisticAbomination: The [[Wendigo deer-like creature]] the SAR officer saw standing behind his friend when he went camping as a kid, and the strange man that takes impossibly long steps and yowls like a cougar.

* AnimalisticAbomination: The [[TheWendigo deer-like creature]] the SAR officer saw standing behind his friend when he went camping as a kid, and the strange man that takes impossibly long steps and yowls like a cougar.

* AnimalisticAbomination: The deer-like creature the SAR officer saw standing behind his friend when he went camping as a kid, and the strange man that takes impossibly long steps and yowls like a cougar.

* AdultFear: Most of the stories contain death or injury of children, sometimes due to the mistakes of parents, other times due to supernatural forces.

** In "Mountain", the narrator recalls how, in a night with a couple friends at a cabin within said woods, he sees a man wearing cargo shorts and a tank top crawling towards the cabin from the treeline looking in pain and anguish, and the narrator thinks about helping the man, up until the narrator sees that [[HumanoidAbomination his shirt is mingled with his skin, his legs a conjoined mess stretching back past the tree line, his neck elongated and contorted so that the head hangs upside down and his face frozen and warped into a sorrowful expression.]] He opts to go for the gun instead and almost shoots it before he comes back to find it gone.

* UncannyValley: Many of the encounters aren't overtly impossible or horrifying so much as strange and subtly wrong, like the backflipping man and the man with the too-large face. One story about TheBlank mentioned that "something" was off about him - and the teller realized it's because the breaths it was taking were like it was being done by someone who was putting conscious effort into aping the movement.

* UncannyValley: Many of the encounters aren't overtly impossible or horrifying so much as strange and subtly wrong, like the backflipping man and the man with the too-large face.[[invoked]]

* InfantImmortality: Horribly subverted in multiple tales, many of which are especially unsettling because they're so plausible.

* AlienGeometries: The flights of stairs that spontaneously appear in the middle of the parks, sometimes upside-down in gravity-defying ways, that serve no clear purpose and everyone just accepts and goes out of their way to ignore. Actually trying to climb the steps will, at best, cause you to zone out while realising that everything around you has gone dead silent, which somehow causes the person you were looking for to become permanently lost, and at worst causes random parts of your body to inexplicably vanish into thin air, leaving you to bleed out from the trauma this causes.

* EveryoneKnowsMorse: The man on top of the tower in "Radio" communications his messages through semaphore. Luckily the SAR officer knows this and is able to translate his message.

* AnimalisticAbomination: The deer-like creature the SAR officer saw standing behind his friend when he went camping as a kid alongside the strange man that takes impossibly long steps and yowls like a cougar.

* WouldHurtAChild: Many of the woodland entities target children.

* AlienGeometries: The flights of stairs that spontaneously appear in the middle of the parks, sometimes upside-down in gravity-defying ways, that serve no clear purpose and everyone just accepts and goes out of their way to ignore. Actually trying to climb the steps will, at best, cause you to zone out while realizing that everything around you has gone dead silent, which somehow causes the person you were looking for to become permanently lost, and at worst causes random parts of your body to inexplicably vanish into thin air, leaving you to bleed out from the trauma this causes.

* ArcWords: "Don't touch them. Don't look at them. Don't go up them.", uttered not only by the protagonist but also a multitude of his fellow SAR officers.

* BodyInABreadbox: Victims of the forest are found under the ground, inside rocks, and floating twenty feet in the air. [[BuriedAlive Sometimes still alive.]] And of course in those stairs.

* ConditionedToAcceptHorror: The officer's slightly jaded reactions to everyday accidents in his field such as missing children, forest fires, and ripped-up animal carcasses can come across as {{Jerkass}} behavior to some. In his defense, he's used to seeing horrors on an everyday basis and does show unease and horror against unnatural accidents and events.
* DaylightHorror: the majority of the strange things the narrator experiences are seen in the daytime, while out on a search patrol. Played to interesting effect off the narrator's [[ConditionedToAcceptHorror slightly jaded attitude]] toward the mundane horrors a search and rescue team member experiences. Deaths and injuries, hostile weather, animal attacks... these are a fact of life to the narrator. It's the things that ''don't make sense'' that bother him.

* ConditionedToAcceptHorror: The officer's slightly jaded reactions to everyday accidents in his field such as missing children, forest fires, and ripped-up animal carcasses can come across as {{Jerkass}} behavior to some. In his defense, he's used to seeing horrors on an everyday basis and does show unease and horror against unnatural accidents such as [[BodyInABreadbox the man stuck inside a rock (and still alive)]] and the kid with thousands of holes in his body.