Date: 2009-05-25
From: Dismal Creek Falls

To: Pearisburg, VA
Miles today: 22.6
Weather: light rain

So I am really debating about telling you guys this story. It is a good story, but if you are my mom or my grandmother or anybody along those lines that are really going to worry about me if you read this, please stop here. Now I know that is not fair because having said that I know you can¢t stop reading. That is why I am debating about telling you guys about what I am about to tell you. However, since this story is all that we talked and thought about all day today and since this is a journal, I kind of feel obligated to at least mention it. Well here goes... There are multiple stories about this, but here are the two most common versions that I have heard. After I write this I am going to go look it up on the internet to see if I can find the full story, but I did not want to before I wrote this so that I wouldn¢t taint the story that I have been thinking about all day. Also I feel that like all good stories it is best to allow it to constantly change. So back in 1981, a man from around the area that we are hiking in now killed a couple sleeping in Wapiti Shelter or at least that is what we believed. Therefore we stopped early yesterday at Dismal Creek Falls to spend the night because we did not want to stay in the same shelter that people were murdered. We later ran into a friend that stayed at the shelter and we told him that we stayed at the Falls and he immediately commented that wow you guys are brave, do you know what happened there? We followed up by telling him that we had heard that the murders took place in the shelter and thus he was the brave one. Hence the two versions of the story, but either way two people were murdered. Story one, they never caught the guy who did the killings. Evidently it was completely random and nobody knows why. However, twenty years later the same man comes back and kills two more people at the shelter. Somebody witnessed the incident followed him in his truck and the killer got scared, ran off the road, and later died of complications from the incident. The police went ahead and convicted him for the previous murders as well, but for all that we know they could still be unrelated, so the original killer could still be out there. This is the story that Blue Sky read in a national news paper and the story that Jr. had heard before. Now for the story that I heard and Doc, who apparently caught the story on Dateline, confirmed. It said that the original murderer turned himself in. He was a prisoner who did his time and got out early and only two weeks after he was released from jail, he went back to the shelter and killed two more people. Regardless of which version of the story people believe, everybody agrees that there was no apparent motive for the murders and that they were completely random ¢ the hikers just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This isn¢t the most comforting thing for us to sit here and think about all day as we are hiking. The whole day, I was thinking about what I would do? Would I end up being the hero of the story or just the first person shot for standing up and trying to protect everybody else. Either way it will never happen and this type of thinking is just not healthy. Tonight I am thinking about getting a Hotel room and watching Deliverance, the Blair Witch Project, and every other horror movie that I can think about that involves hikers and the woods just to get it out of the way (that is a joke by the way). I hope I didn¢t scare anybody. Please don¢t worry about me. I am far safer out here than I ever would be just driving around Macon in a car. "The one who finds his life will lose it, and the one who loses his life for my sake will find it." - Jesus, Matthew 10:39