Tonight’s episode takes us deep into the backwoods of northern Alabama, into a summer that officially never happened. In 1983, something came out of the forests around Piney Creek that permanently scarred a rural community and left behind a story still spoken only in whispers. It began with routine livestock killings that didn’t stay routine for long. A prize bull was found torn apart in ways that made no sense, surrounded by tracks that seemed to shift between animal and human. 

Within weeks, farms across miles of countryside were hit, and the sightings followed. Locals described a towering figure that moved upright like a man, covered in thick fur, with a wolfish head and eyes that looked disturbingly human. Fear spread fast, especially after the creature was seen at a nursery window, staring in at an eighteen-month-old child.That moment sparked a hunt that would become one of the most controversial in Alabama history.

Dozens of armed men flooded the woods at dawn, determined to stop whatever was stalking their families and livestock. What they discovered in an abandoned storm cellar wasn’t the simple monster they expected. The creature they cornered was wounded, terrified, and shockingly aware. It spoke. It pleaded. And beneath the blood and matted fur, a silver cross hung around its neck. When the truth finally surfaced, it wasn’t a beast at all, but a missing college student who had been investigating local legends and never made it home. The government arrived within hours. 

Evidence vanished, threats were made, and everyone involved was forced into silence. The official explanation blamed wild dogs and mass hysteria, but years later a different account emerged from someone who claimed to have seen the real file. According to that testimony, the military had been running biological enhancement experiments in underground facilities throughout rural Alabama since the early 1970s. Deep in limestone caves, they discovered a parasitic organism capable of rewriting human DNA and triggering violent, rapid transformations. A containment breach released infected subjects into the woods, and the organism kept spreading.

The most horrifying detail is that victims were said to remain conscious during the change, trapped inside bodies they couldn’t control, forced to witness the violence their transformed selves carried out. The missing student was one of those victims, infected during his research and turned into something caught between man and beast.

And the story doesn’t end there. Similar incidents reportedly surfaced later in nearby counties, and patterns like this have been whispered about across the country under different names. Even now, the abandoned farm where it ended remains sealed, the storm cellar periodically covered in fresh concrete by unknown hands. Locals still report strange howls, impossible tracks, and the kind of disappearances nobody wants to talk about too loudly. 

This episode pieces together a chain of witnesses who risked everything to break decades of silence, revealing a picture far darker than folklore. The suggestion is simple and terrifying: this wasn’t supernatural at all, but human experimentation gone catastrophically wrong, a Cold War nightmare walking loose in the woods.

As you listen, remember that officially none of this happened. No documents exist, no agency acknowledges it, and the story is buried under denial. But in backwoods communities across the South, doors still get locked at sundown, livestock still vanish to something that tears through fencing like paper, and on quiet nights near Piney Creek, people still swear they hear the howls. Not quite wolf, not quite human, but something terrible living in the space between.