Joseph is a big guy. He always carries a gun and I have never thought of him as scared of anything. But the season he took to camping up in the hill country changed fear in him forever. He left the comforts of our home to escape the chains of family responsibility and he stayed up in the mountains for weeks cooling off during the hot desert summer months.
Joseph met his collection of odd strangers up there. A Poncho Via type that claimed he was a direct decedent of the general that fought the authentic Poncho Via and who was also a privileged Mormon. Fake Poncho wanted to brand Joseph a high priest in the LDS church. Evidently, he received a message from the prophet, Joseph Smith, that big Joseph’s destiny was to keep the church secrets forever. Inadvertently one night, this Poncho Via mountain camper kept one of Joseph’s guns and his sleeping cot.
There was a veteran, Jeff, hooked on LSD with a huge dog that tagged along with him. He wanted to help people recover from addictions by resetting their brains using acid. He believed that acid could trigger a message from GOD telling addicts to stop participating in bad habits and once the addicts experienced this phenomenon they would heed and obey.
There was a lady, Linda, who claimed to have saved herself from fiber myalgia stage four tumors that she swore to have actually pulled real fiber out of. Finally, she decided to fight the disease on her own, so she searched out a shaman in the valley that shared a concoction which immediately cured her.
But, what did he expect? This time Joseph wasn’t playing weekend warrior, instead he was living day after day with the subliminal folks: the people who had no other place to go at night and absolutely no one concerned about them during the day.
Joseph’s new community didn’t scare him one bit. They mulled around camp fires spouting strange stories and weird conspiracy theories, but they all seemed harmless enough. Turns out they were. What scared Joseph for the first time in his life was the night the skin walkers came to camp.
In Navajo culture, a skin-walker is a witch who can turn into, possess, or disguise themselves as an animal to cause harm. In the dead of night, their presence outside of his tent scared the shit out of him.
Joseph said that he woke up unexpectedly; he seemed like he had been sleeping for a long time. The camp was downright quiet. On the trail by his campsite he heard rambling around. Then he heard “the noise,” like a hyena howling right up close to his tent. Next, Joseph listened to claws scratching and stirring about. Suddenly, whatever it was moved away in an instant, and it rutted around on the other side of the campgrounds, howling out the same noise.
“You could hear it moving real fast through bushes. The noise it made scared me the most.” He lay there in his tent completely still, hoping whatever it was would not hear or smell his fear. “I didn’t move for an hour or so until I didn’t hear it anymore.”
Joseph was so still he refused to even reach for his other gun. In the near distance, he listened to another tent dweller ask, “What is that?” At that point the dweller fell silent too. At about 3am Joseph took up his gun and flashlight to search outside the tent for prints, but there was nothing. No prints were apparent when he looked in the morning either.
“This was really weird because it had rained for a few nights and the ground was wet. But, ya know, Skin Walkers are a legend in these hills, I know it was them. I packed up and got the hell out of there.” That one cold and scary night sent fear through Joseph for the first time in his life and he came running back from the hills to the comforts and responsibilities, even the safety, of our family home once again