I’m a Park Ranger in Appalachia: Smoke Wolves Are Stalking the Woods
I’m not supposed to be telling you this. The park service has its own way of explaining things, lost hikers, animal attacks, and unconfirmed sightings. But those words don’t fit what’s out there. They don’t account for the smell of smoke in the still air, or the way it moves against the wind.
I’ve been a park ranger in the West Virginia Appalachians for twelve years. I’ve dealt with lost hikers, flash floods, and the occasional black bear wandering into campgrounds. But none of that scares me. What scares me are the nights when the air smells faintly like ash and the treeline sways without wind. That’s when I know they’re here.
Smoke Wolves. That’s not their real name; I doubt they have one we could pronounce, but it’s what we call them. No one’s gotten close enough to count their legs or see their eyes for too long. You never get a clean look. Just a shifting, rippling shape in the dark, darker than the rest of the night, with that trailing haze clinging to it like burnt breath.
I can’t stop them, can’t hunt them, trap them, or even wound them. All I can do is try to keep people away long enough to survive another season. The woods don’t belong to us, not out here. Out here, we’re tolerated only until we’re not, then we are just prey.
I’ve filed reports, told my superiors, and was warned by the locals. The forest here is a hunting ground, and I’m little more than a gatekeeper holding back what’s waiting in the dark.
When they reassigned me to the northwestern edge of West Virginia, I thought it was a promotion. A remote post near the Appalachian Trail, a ranger’s cabin all to myself, miles of forest and ridgeline to patrol. Peace and quiet. That’s what I thought I was getting.
I was taking over for Ranger Hale. Officially, he “quit.” Packed up one morning, didn’t even leave a note. The locals don’t buy it. They drop hints between sips of coffee, in the slow drawl of people who know more than they’ll say. Words like “left in the middle of the night” and “should’ve seen the look on him” float around, but never the full story.
The cabin was older than I expected. One room for sleeping, one for everything else. No insulation worth a damn. It still smelled faintly of smoke and old paper. Hale’s things were everywhere, maps with pins and string running between them, hand-sketched drawings of something wolf-shaped but wrong, stacks of books on Appalachian ghost stories and Native legends. In the back, I found a shoebox of photographs. Each had symbols scrawled on the back in red pencil, some kind of warning I couldn’t decipher.
When I met the superintendent, he gave me one piece of advice: “Don’t stir up trouble with ghost stories.” Said it like it was a rule, not a suggestion. The locals were polite enough, but when I mentioned hiking after dark, their faces tightened. More than one told me, quietly, to be careful if the air smelled like smoke. None of them explained why.
The first week, I walked the ridges and hollows just to get a sense of the land. The forest here is dense, the kind that swallows light by mid-afternoon. Even in summer, the understory runs thick with mountain laurel and rhododendron, their twisting branches making the trails feel like tunnels. The air smells green, wet leaves, moss, and the faint tang of woodsmoke that drifts down from nowhere in particular.
From the cabin porch, I can see the slope drop away into a shadowed valley. At dawn, fog moves through it in low, curling streams, never in a straight line. By noon, it’s gone, but the smell of damp ash sometimes lingers, as if a fire burned long ago and never fully died.
The wildlife keeps its distance here. Even the deer freeze longer than they should before bolting, as though they’re listening for something deeper in the trees. On my second night, I heard coyotes yipping far off, but the sound cut out mid-cry. The silence that followed was heavy enough to make the hair on my arms stand up. Just heard a few birds flying through, calling to each other as they left.
Hale’s old maps have been tempting my curiosity. I keep them spread across the small desk in the cabin, lines of string tracing through the terrain like veins. Some routes lead to hand-drawn X’s miles from any official trail. Others stop abruptly, like he’d marked them mid-thought. The superintendent’s warning echoes in my head, but I can’t help thinking of what Hale was trying to uncover before he left. Or before he was made to leave.
It was late on a Thursday when I first noticed. Nothing loud, nothing obvious, just a shift, like the air leaning in. I’d been walking the south trail, that trail runs along a narrow spine before dipping into a low bog. The evening fog had started to creep up the slope earlier than usual, thick enough to bead on my eyelashes.
Somewhere off to my left, leaves rustled in a steady, deliberate pattern, not the scatter of a deer, not the frantic dart of a squirrel. Slow. Heavy. Measured, almost stalking like. I stopped and listened, waiting to hear whatever it was more closely, but the sound stopped with me. The forest went still again.
I looked around, trying to locate the source of the sound. After a few still moments, I continued moving along the trail. About ten minutes later, I came to a small clearing where the fog had pooled like spilled milk. That’s when I noticed them, paw prints. Big and deep, too deep to be any animal native to this area of the country. They looked canine, but longer in the toes, with claw marks that curved inward like hooks. They led out of the fog and vanished at the tree line, no approach path in sight.
When I got back to the cabin, I saw one of Hale’s old photos lying on the desk. I saw it before, but didn’t quite know where the photo was taken. The picture showed a ridge at night, mist trailing over it, and in the corner, just visible in the glare of the flash, two bright red eyes staring straight at the camera. That’s when it hit me, that photo was taken in the same area I was walking through earlier that evening.
The second time I encountered it, I’d been checking the fire roads after a windstorm, clearing downed branches and flagging anything too big for me to move alone. It was just past dusk when I rounded a bend and saw something on the path ahead, thirty yards out, half in shadow. At first, I thought it was a black bear because of its size. It moved low to the ground, the shape hunched forward. But then it moved.
It didn’t walk like a bear. It glided, shoulders swaying in a slow, deliberate rhythm, like a lion creeping towards its prey. Its head low, but eyes fixed directly on me. There was no sound of paws on the gravel trail. No sound at all. Just the wind whispering in the trees, and then even that seemed to fade.
I called out assertively, a reflex, part of the training. “Hey! Hey!”, and clapped my hands together. My voice fell flat, as it didn’t seem to deter it. Its gaze swallowed the air between us. The thing stopped. It didn’t bolt, didn’t even twitch. It just turned its head slightly, like it was listening to something behind me, and in that moment, I realized I could see right through parts of it. Smoke. Not mist, not fog, smoke, curling and shifting, but holding the shape of a predator.
And then, without an explanation, it was gone. The space ahead was empty, the trail bare. When I got back to the cabin that night, I found prints similar to the ones I encountered on the south trail a few days earlier. Only this time, they circled my cabin twice before stopping at my front porch. And just like before, no approach tracks, and no tracks leaving.
I went inside, closed and locked the door. I checked every window, made sure they were locked, and closed the curtains. If there was something still lingering out in the woods, I didn’t want it to be able to see me.
I started digging into everything that Ranger Hale left behind. Old Loure, the photos, the maps, and finally, I stumbled upon a clue. I found a list of locals that Hale had interviewed about the events going on in the woods around him. One name was underlined twice, “Mrs. Evelyn Begay”. I decided then, she was on top of my list as well, and I knew right where to find her. Then I would go to meet with the Superintendent to see if Hale, or anyone else, had filled him in on what’s been going on.
I started to get a headache in the middle of my forehead, directly above my eyes. I looked at the clock, 2:53 am. I had been focused, digging, trying to make sense of things for hours. I needed to rest, eyes heavy with exhaustion. I walked to the bedroom, accidentally bumping the nightstand next to my bed, knocking over the lamp on top, and moving it slightly from its original position. I laid down, reached over, and turned off the light while it still laid sideways and closed my eyes.
The next morning, I awoke to my alarm blaring. 6:25 am. I smashed my hand into it a few times before it stopped. I got up and started a pot of coffee. I was going to need all the caffeine I could get to make it through the day. I walked back into the bedroom to move the nightstand back and set up the lamp. Then I noticed a floorboard had shifted, sticking up on one side. I knelt down to push the board back and noticed manila folders under the floor.
Yellowed with age, each stamped with the state park seal. They weren’t in order, dates jumped around, locations varied, but the pattern was obvious. Incident reports. Missing hikers. Animal attacks with no confirmed species. Several were marked CLOSED in thick red ink, but the typed summaries didn’t match the handwritten notes clipped to them.
One report caught my eye: an early spring disappearance, listed officially as a “probable fall during storm conditions.” The attached note, in the same cramped handwriting on the maps, told a different story: “Tracks too large. Pattern consistent with previous sightings. Multiple witnesses were told to keep quiet. Sup’t ordered suppression.”
Tucked at the back was a memo on letterhead, unsigned but clearly from the Superintendent:
“We are not in the business of chasing ghost stories. Limit public disclosure to weather hazards and known wildlife threats. All other accounts to be logged internally and sealed.”
The Superintendent knew what was going on and was actively covering it up. He didn’t want to lose revenue from campers and hikers if word got out about something attacking and killing people in the forest, people would stop coming.
I stepped outside on the way to my truck, second cup of coffee still steaming in my hand, and I noticed new paw prints. They circled the cabin in a slow, deliberate loop, four-toed, long stride, too big to be coyote, too narrow to be bear. Every few yards, they stopped and turned inward toward the cabin, like something had been pacing me while I slept. I followed them as far as the treeline before they disappeared into the morning mist.
I drove to an old produce stand just off the main road. That’s where I knew I would find Evelyn Begay. She was an older woman in her seventies, she ran a roadside produce stand about ten miles from the trailhead. I’d stopped by a few times before, buying corn and peaches. That morning, when I mentioned the prints circling my cabin, she didn’t ask any questions. She just got quiet.
She told me about what she called Smoke Wolves. Malevolent spirits that take the form of massive, wolf-shaped clouds, dense enough to hold their shape but thin enough to vanish when watched too closely. They don’t hunt like normal predators. They watch first, circling for days, letting the fear wear you down. When they finally move in, their howl isn’t a howl at all, it’s a demonic scream, like someone burning alive.
The only thing that keeps them away, she said, was the sound of rattling chains, an old ward meant to mimic the noise of spirit traps. Said the locals have been using chains for generations to keep themselves safe. Then she told me the part I didn’t want to hear. The Ranger before me, Ranger Hale, didn’t quit. He vanished. Went out one night to check a campsite near the ridge. Never came back. The search party found his truck door hanging open, gear still inside, but no tracks leaving the area. “The wolves,” she said, “ they got him.”
“And they are coming for you, too.”
She told me, “If you want to see another summer, you’ll need to get your hands on chains.” That is the only thing that will protect you. And that, my cabin was sitting in the center of their hunting territory. I needed to leave that area immediately. I thanked her for her time. Driving away, I didn’t believe all of it yet, not fully, but Evelyn’s voice wouldn’t leave my head.
Two nights later, I saw firsthand what she meant. A call came in over the radio, shaky, breaking up, about a hiker found near the ridge, a half-mile out from my cabin. When I got there, the hiker was torn to ribbons. Backpack shredded. Deep gouges in the dirt like claws dragged sideways. And there, scattered in the brush, was an empty can of bear mace, twisted, chewed through. Whatever did this, the mace obviously had no effect on it.
And that’s when it sank in, when I truly believed I was being stalked by Smoke Wovles. And that the entire area around my cabin was their hunting grounds.
The Ranger station had an old service shed that sat half-buried in the slope behind the maintenance yard. There was a good chance of finding chains there. When I arrived at the shed, the doors were swollen shut with dampness, hinges screaming when I pulled them open. The smell hit me first, oil, rust, and the sharp bite of old metal and mildew.
Inside, the place was a graveyard for hardware. Nuts, bolts, chains, rope, and shevles full of old parts and tools. Large chains hung from hooks along the wall, some thick enough to anchor a truck, others smaller chains used for truck tires when it snowed, and some with a small enough gauge to fit in my pocket. I took all I could carry. Coiled heavy lengths for the cabin, lighter ones to keep on me. I tied a few to ropes so I could hang them from the porch and inside the cabin. This way, I could pull on them to make the rattle together from inside the shelter of the cabin walls.
By dusk, I had the place looking less like a Ranger cabin and more like a trapper’s bunker. Chains on the windows, chains across the doorway, a loop hooked to my belt so I could rattle it without thinking. If they were coming, I would be ready.
That night, the air changed. The forest was still and quiet. Not a sound, no crickets, no birds, just dead silence. It pressed in like the moment before a predator strikes. Then came the shapes, sliding through the dark outside my cabin, smoke with edges, wolf-muzzles forming and dissolving in the haze. The first howl hit like a scream through metal, high and splintering. I yanked the rope, chains clattering against the siding. My belt loop rattled as I backed away from the window. The smoke recoiled, then slid closer again.
It went on for hours, pressing against the cabin, pulling back, circling. Every time the chains sang, they faltered. But they kept testing, finding the spots I hadn’t covered. Their red eyes peered at me through the chain-covered windows. I didn’t sleep. I had to keep the sound alive; it was the only thing keeping them at bay. The sky began to glow a light pale blue, and only then did they vanish, into thin air, like smoke being carried off in the wind. Leaving only soot-prints at the door like a calling card.
I left the chains hanging, even the ones that had bitten into the doorframe from pulling too hard on the rope. The soot prints outside had already smudged in the breeze, but the shapes were clear, paws, too large for any normal animal, claws dragging deep. The smell of stale herbs with a hint of something burning lingered in the air.
But I knew that when the sun dipped low again, they’d be back. And this time, maybe they wouldn’t just press against the windows. By that second nightfall, the decision was already weighing on me, stay and wait for them, or take my chances in the forest and try to escape.
I packed whatever I could in a hurry, threw my bag in the truck, and strapped one of the smaller chains across my chest like a bandolier, the rest looped and tied at my belt. The two biggest, heavy and rusted, I attached to the back hitch of the truck. So they dragged behind me when I moved, a sound I prayed would keep them away.
The plan was simple; make it to the old service road two miles south before they cut me off. The woods were starting to get dark, darker than they should have been for that hour. Somewhere in that black, the smoke shifted, just enough to let me know I’d been seen.
The first mile was a blur, tires sinking into the damp earth, the sound of chains dragging behind me like a funeral procession. The forest pressed in, thick with the smell of wet bark and something burnt. Every so often, the air would grow unnaturally still, and I’d catch the curl of smoke in my periphery before it folded back into the dark.
Halfway to the service road, the howls started in high-pitched screams. They came from every direction, circling, weaving in and out of the trees. I rattled the chains until my arms ached, the sound clanging off the truck in sharp bursts. For a few precious seconds, the forest would fall silent. Then, the scrape of claws on stone. Closer.
The road narrowed to a choke point, hemmed in by high mountainside on the left and a straight fall down off a cliff on the right. The smoke pooled thick in the gap ahead, taking shape, first a head, then shoulders, the long body unraveling into the mist behind it. Eyes red like burning coal fixed on me. Its mouth didn’t move, but I heard it anyway
“You can’t rattle those chains forever.”
I punched the gas, heading straight for it, and as it hit the spot where it was standing, smoke surged and broke around me. The service road broke into view. One final rattle, every chain in my hands, and the shapes scattered like ash in the wind. When I looked back, the road was empty.
That was eleven years ago, and I have never been back to that cabin. Rented a small house in town and have been there ever since. I still work as a Park Ranger. I can’t stop them, but I try my best to keep people safe. I put up signs at the trails leading to their territory. “Danger, due to bear activity, the area beyond this sign is closed for travel.” Use an alternate route.
That keeps most people out, but for those who dont turn back, I have hung chains from tree branches along the tail. When the wind blows, they rattle together. That offers some protection. If the wind isn’t blowing, they are on their own.
So if you’re ever hiking the Appalachian trails in West Virginia and notice chains hanging from the trees, you’re not safe. Don’t stop. Don’t look around. Move. fast. And if the Smoke Wolves find you, pray there’s a chain close enough to rattle… and that you have the strength to keep rattling until sunrise.
This has been Pale Lantern Media.
If you’ve smelled ash drifting through still air…If you’ve seen paw prints with no trail leading to them…
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