Web Original / Search and Rescue Woods

Don't touch them. Don't look at them. Don't go up them. ^Note Art by Luckaz Godlewski.

I'm a Search and Rescue Officer for the US Forest Service, I have some stories to tell.

Search and Rescue Woods is an eight-part Creepypasta by Kerry Hammond, published on Reddit under the username searchandrescuewoods. It was originally posted to the Nosleep subreddit in August of 2015, with its final update being in December of that year.

The story follows the experiences of its narrator, an unnamed SAR officer working in a national forest, as he recalls stories of supernatural happenings, strange disappearances, and mysterious staircases in the middle of the woods.

The first part can be read here.

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: "The Tunnel", "Late Night", "Anniversary", "Molten", and "Radio".

All eight parts (alongside "Late Night", "Anniversary", "Molten", and "Radio") were featured on The Nosleep Podcast.

A television adaption based on ideas from the series aired as a part of Channel Zero in early 2018 under the title "Butcher's Block." Some fans were disappointed by how little it resembled the original stories.

Hammond had plans to turn the series into a novel and even created a Tumblr dedicated to tracking her progress on it. However, to allow the Channel Zero adaptation to be made, she had to sign the rights of the series over to the creators of the show. Subsequently, she lost publishing rights to her work and abandoned the book.

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This series provides examples of:

• Alien Geometries: The flights of stairs that spontaneously appear in the middle of the parks, sometimes upside-down in gravity-defying ways. 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.
• Allegory: Some readers interpreted "Radio" as an extended message that there would be more SAR stories. There were, but Hammond didn't say whether it was an allegory or not.
• And I Must Scream: Seems to be the case with at least some of the Boy Scouts in "Anniversary". One appears to be stuck inside a tree, and another is somehow stuck in the earth with just the top of their head above ground.
• Animalistic Abomination: 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.
• Arc Words: "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.
• Big Bad: It appears the faceless man is one, with the implication that he lures hikers and campers in with his vaguely human features. Horrifically, a man painting on a ladder has the faceless man ask where he can find campgrounds in a national park-meaning not only It Can Think, can mimic human speech, but the painter also just gave the faceless man the location of new victims.
• Black Eyes of Evil: In the first entry, a lost woman complains of a "big man with black eyes" following her.
• The Blank: One characteristic of a recurring creature throughout the series. He's also described as being able to conjure up a face when necessary, and inhumanly exaggerating his movements.
• Body Horror: All over the place, but seen the most graphically in "Anniversary", which gives us lovely images such as this:
  a boy walking upside down through the air, almost twenty feet off the ground, carrying his own spine in his arms like a baby.
• Body in a Breadbox: Victims of the forest are found under the ground, inside rocks and trees, and floating twenty feet in the air. Sometimes still alive. And of course on those stairs.
  • In a rare non-human example, the officer and his friend are called to investigate a terrible smell. The cause turns out to be a whale, of all things, in the middle of the woods. How it got there is never explained.
• Chrome Champion: The man the SAR officer's friend's daughter sees outside the window in "Molten" is loosely described by her as a man with a face half-melted and covered completely in shiny metal.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: 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. 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.
• The Conspiracy: It's implied that the higher ups in the search and rescue program know a lot more about what's going on in the woods than they're willing to talk about. At best, it's a "what you don't know can't hurt you" kind of thing.
• Death by Falling Over: An old man being found dead is explained by "Old people fall all the time, it's no big deal". They try not to think too hard about the fact that he fell on soft ground with nothing to hit his head on, or how severe the damage was.
• Don't Go Into the Woods: The theme of the entire work.
• Eerily Out-of-Place Object: The staircases would be perfectly common were they inside houses rather than merely stuck hundreds of miles out into the middle of nowhere.
• Eldritch Abomination: All of the surreal, incomprehensible cryptids described by the narrator qualify as this to some degree or other, especially in later stories.
• Eldritch Location: The woods are played up to be this, alongside the town where the missing Boy Scouts lived in "Anniversary".
• Everyone Knows Morse: The man on top of the tower in "Radio" communicates his messages through semaphore. Luckily, the SAR officer recognizes it and is able to translate his message.
• Fooled by the Sound: One of the supernatural creatures in the Park tries to lure the narrator closer by making the sound of a crying baby. He notices just in time that the cry loops, like it's a recording and backs off.
• Ghost Town: The town where the missing boy scouts lived in "Anniversary" becomes this after all the strange sightings on the anniversary of their disappearances caused the townsfolk to flee, never to return. The area is so notorious builders refuse to tear it down and not even squatters will live in those houses.
• Hell Is That Noise: Used several times throughout the series to chilling effect.
• Humanoid Abomination: The humanoid creature(s?) that appear throughout the series certainly aren't human, but are trying to be. Not that they're very good at it.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Very few of the events are overtly impossible - even some of the strangest could be chalked up to things like hoaxes, murders, freak accidents, and strange people doing strange things in the woods. The ones that defy explanation, however, gradually begin to push this possibility more and more into the realm of Scully Syndrome.
• Mood Whiplash: One of the only lighthearted stories, involving a coworker's encounter with a moose, is placed right before what the author describes as "by far, the scariest thing that's happened to me."
• No Name Given: No characters, not even the narrator, are given names. The narrator's fellow SAR officers are given initials when he talks about them.
• Nothing Is Scarier: All over the place. Much of the stories' horror comes from the fact that almost none of the terrifying things that happen can be satisfyingly explained.
• Realism-Induced Horror: While the most of the stories have a supernatural angle to them, there are just as many that involve the very real dangers of hiking and camping: falling off embankments, exposure to the elements, being attacked by a wild animal, etc.
• Surreal Horror: The nature of the Supernatural goings on in the series are capricious at best and downright utterly bizarre at worst. This is not helped by the fact that the eldritch horrors the woods harbour are content simply being weird if they're not kidnapping, murdering or doing god knows what to people.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: The emergency broadcast messages in "Late Night" offer a few of these.
  please avoid going between levels of your house stay where you are your children are not outside they are upstairs in bed
  don't look outside it's not them
  they are not your children
• Uncanny Valley: 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 The Blank 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.
• Voice Changeling: One episode recounts how the narrator hears a crying child, and he notices that it's the exact same sequence of sounds every time he hears it.
• Wendigo: An acquaintance of the author relates her experience of being lost on a mountain and subject to a primal desire for food over an inexplicable two day fugue state. Another SAR worker recounts a childhood run in with a tall, antlered creature while camping on Native American land with his family.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: A fellow officers response to the idea that implausible deaths in the park (such as drowning on dry land) might be murder is "But why go out of the way to do it like that? Why not just stab 'em and be done with it?"
• Wild Wilderness: The series takes place in an unnamed national park in the United States in an area with "hundreds of miles of thick forest."
• Would Hurt a Child: Many of the woodland entities have no qualms killing children, and some even target children specifically.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Some of the forest monsters try this trick to lure victims into an ambush, the Voice Changeling listed above mimicked the sound of a missing girl in distress to try and bait the narrator and a colleague, before they realise the unnatural nature of the distress calls and book it.
  • In "Mountain", the narrator recalls how, in a night with a couple friends at a cabin within said woods, she 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 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. She opts to go for the gun instead and almost shoots it before she comes back to find it gone.