There are sounds you expect to hear while sitting on a deer stand in East Texas. A squirrel cutting through dry leaves can sound much larger than it really is. A distant crow can break the silence, and a whitetail moving cautiously through the timber might offer only the occasional crunch of leaves or snap of a twig.
A human voice is different.
Several years ago, a friend of mine was deer hunting from a stand in East Texas on a still fall afternoon. It was the kind of quiet day when sounds carry through the woods and a hunter’s ears become tuned to everything happening around him. Then he heard a voice.
It wasn’t a scream or someone calling for help, and it wasn’t a distant sound that vaguely resembled someone talking. He clearly heard two words: “Feels good.”
That was it. He listened for more, but nothing followed. He never saw anyone, never discovered where the voice originated and, as far as I know, never found an explanation for what he heard.
There is something uniquely unsettling about hearing recognizable speech when you believe you are alone, and the wilderness has a long history of strange voices.
Voices Where There Shouldn’t Be Voices
Ask enough hunters, hikers and people who spend serious time outdoors and eventually you’ll hear stories about strange sounds. Some are easily explained.
Foxes can produce vocalizations that sound remarkably strange to someone unfamiliar with them. Bobcats can make sounds that seem completely out of proportion to the animal producing them, and cougars are famous for screams that can sound disturbingly human. Owls have probably frightened countless people who didn’t know what they were hearing.
Then there are birds. Ravens, crows and several other species are capable of producing an impressive range of sounds. Mockingbirds reproduce sounds from their environment, and some birds kept around people can mimic human speech.
But hearing something that sounds almost human is one thing. Hearing recognizable words is another.
My friend didn’t tell me he heard something that reminded him of somebody speaking. He heard “Feels good.” That distinction is what makes the encounter so interesting.
And his isn’t the only strange account involving voices I’ve encountered in the East Texas woods.
I recently interviewed someone who described two separate experiences in Big Thicket National Preserve involving sounds that seemed distinctly vocal. On both occasions, the person reported hearing what sounded like clear, harmonized female singing-type voices coming from the middle of the woods.
That’s an important distinction. This wasn’t described simply as a scream, howl or distant animal call that sounded vaguely human. The witness described the sounds as female voices and, even more strangely, as sounding harmonized.
Whatever produced those sounds remains unknown. There could be a perfectly natural explanation, but hearing what sounds like multiple female voices singing together in an isolated stretch of the Big Thicket is the kind of experience that gets your attention, especially when it happens twice.
The Woods Can Play Tricks With Sound
There are perfectly natural reasons why a voice might seem to come from an impossible location. Sound behaves differently depending on terrain, vegetation, wind, temperature and atmospheric conditions. Under the right circumstances, voices and other noises can travel surprising distances.
Anyone who has spent time around water knows something about this phenomenon. A conversation taking place far across a lake can sometimes sound strangely close, and similar things can happen in the woods. A hunter on another property, someone working near a distant road or a person hidden by thick vegetation might have spoken those words. The conditions that afternoon might simply have carried them directly toward the deer stand.
There’s another possibility. The human brain is extraordinarily good at finding recognizable patterns in confusing information. We see faces in clouds and shapes in shadows, and we can interpret random or unfamiliar sounds as speech. This phenomenon is known as auditory pareidolia.
Perhaps two unrelated sounds occurred close enough together that my friend’s brain interpreted them as familiar words. Perhaps distant human activity or some combination of natural sounds produced what the witness in the Big Thicket interpreted as harmonized voices.
Those are possibilities worth considering. They also illustrate why unexplained outdoor encounters should remain unexplained when the evidence doesn’t allow us to go any further.
Sometimes we simply don’t know.
Don’t Answer Too Quickly
Stories about mysterious voices in wilderness areas aren’t new. Folklore from numerous cultures contains warnings about voices heard in forests, mountains and other lonely places. Sometimes the voice calls someone’s name. Sometimes it sounds like a person the listener knows. And in some traditions, the warning is remarkably simple: Don’t answer it.
I find those traditions fascinating, but I’m cautious about attaching supernatural explanations to experiences simply because we can’t immediately explain them. There is also a very real reason to exercise caution when you hear a human voice in a remote place.
It might actually be a human.
Most people encountered outdoors pose no threat whatsoever, and someone calling out could be lost, injured or genuinely need assistance. But isolated places can also attract people for reasons that have nothing to do with hunting, hiking or enjoying nature.
I’ve investigated enough strange and sometimes dangerous things connected to the outdoors to believe awareness matters more than curiosity. If you hear an unidentified voice somewhere deep in the woods, stop and listen before walking toward it. Try to determine its direction and distance and listen for additional voices, vehicles, footsteps or movement. Pay attention to whether the voice sounds distressed or whether something about the situation simply doesn’t make sense.
If someone appears to genuinely need emergency assistance, contact authorities when possible and give them the best location information you have. There is a tremendous difference between helping someone in trouble and blindly following a strange sound deeper into unfamiliar territory.
Two Words in East Texas
I don’t know what my friend heard that fall afternoon. Maybe another hunter was somewhere beyond his view. Maybe someone was talking much farther away and unusual conditions carried those two words through the East Texas timber. Maybe an animal produced a combination of sounds his brain interpreted as speech.
Those are all reasonable possibilities, but none of them changes his experience. He was sitting alone on a deer stand on a quiet fall afternoon when a voice came from somewhere he couldn’t identify.
“Feels good.”
Then the woods went quiet again. No person appeared, there was no second sentence and there was no explanation.
The same fundamental mystery hangs over those reports from the Big Thicket. Somewhere among that maze of hardwood bottoms, pine forests, bayous and thick vegetation, a person twice heard what sounded like female voices singing in harmony. We can offer possibilities, but possibilities aren’t answers.
The outdoors contains plenty of things that can frighten us, and most of them have names: mountain lions, bears, venomous snakes, dangerous people, weather and exposure.
The unknown is different.
Sometimes it doesn’t charge from the brush or leave tracks in the mud. Sometimes it sounds like a voice coming from a place where no voice should be.
Chester Moore
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