The Murker
Piper Callahan, YouTube Channel: Unseen Signals
Part I: The Fog Comes First
They always say it comes from the woods.
But woods are just bones. Trees snap and grow again. Dirt forgets your name. What comes out of it, though, that remembers.
The locals of Dunfield Hollow didn’t give it a name. Not really. They had stories, sure, kids dared each other to walk into the mist and not flinch, old men swore they’d seen the lights again last week. But no one wanted to name what lived in the fog, because naming meant believing, and believing meant it could hear you.
They just called it “The Murker.”
Not a monster. Not a ghost. A presence. A… curtain in the air. One that came with static and wrongness, the kind that made dogs howl at empty fields and babies cry in their sleep. One moment the path was clear. The next, the fog would roll in, not a gentle mist, but wet with the smell of spores and damp earth. Cold, but sweating. And everything, everything, got quieter.
Except your own heartbeat.
Entry Log 001: Emory Knox
The camera flickered. Click. Hiss. Then stabilized.
Emory Knox looked straight into the lens. Brown eyes, narrowed. Thirty-two, stubble thick around a cigarette half smoked. The room behind him was a motel, cheap, ugly, and perfect. The sort of place built for bad nights and worse secrets.
“I’m not here to prove Bigfoot exists,” he began. “I’m here to find out what’s stopping us from seeing him.”
He paused. His fingers tapped the table beside his laptop, quick, anxious. “There’s a fog,” he said. “Shows up in every hotspot. You can’t film through it. You don’t remember it clearly. Loch Ness, West Virginia, the Pine Barrens, hell, even Skinwalker Ranch. Same distortion. Same static. Same hum behind your teeth.”
His hand went to a small notebook. He flipped it open and held up a page. On it: blurry screenshots of famous cryptid footage, side by side. Each had the same shimmer on the left edge.
“I think it’s not them,” Emory whispered. “It’s it. Something covering for them. Feeding off our uncertainty. Something older.”
He killed the feed.
Later that Night…
Emory awoke to buzzing.
Not his phone. Not the neon light outside the window. This came from inside the room, inside his skull. A soft, crackling hum, like a TV left on in a closet you didn’t know you had.
The air had changed.
He stood, heart hammering. Breath fogged the air. The heater was off. He hadn’t turned it off. And the window, closed tight earlier, now stood open a crack.
Outside, fog slid through the parking lot like a spilled ghost, thick and unnatural. It pooled against the glass. And though no wind blew… it pulsed.
Like lungs.
He stepped back. A shadow flickered at the edge of his vision, tall, thin, too tall. It vanished when he turned.
His laptop screen turned on by itself.
Lines of his own notes now scrambled. One phrase repeated over and over in glitching font:
DO NOT LOOK AT IT DIRECTLY DO NOT LOOK AT IT DIRECTLY DO NOT LOOK AT IT DIRECTLY
A Childhood Memory
Emory hadn’t remembered the shed in his grandfather’s backyard for twenty years.
Now, in the motel's dim light, it came back. He’d been five. The fog had rolled in that day too, though the adults said it was just morning dew. Something had stood behind the shed.
He hadn’t seen it, but the dog had.
Old Chester, the hound that never barked, had whined until his throat bled, eyes white, tail between his legs. He was taken to Grandpaw’s farm two weeks later. Refused food. Refused water. Just stared at the wall and whimpered.
The last thing Emory remembered was the smell. Like ozone and wet earth.
His mother had never let him play back there again.
Part II: Emory’s Last Known Location
The next day, Emory parked his rented Jeep on the gravel shoulder outside Meadow’s Edge, a dying town clinging to the Appalachians like a secret no one wanted to tell.
The fog was already there.
Not a blanket. Not the drifting kind you see in movies. This fog pulsed. It clung, as if trying to remember the shape of things. Trees flickered in and out of full form. A fencepost split into three and settled back to one. The road behind him already looked like it had never existed.
He hit record.
“Location: Meadow’s Edge, West Virginia. Sightings: 17. Documented footage: 0. Known patterns: static distortion, light scatter, localized amnesia, and the presence of... the Murker.”
His voice faltered. The words felt too sharp, like they’d cut something.
Camera Log: Distortion Begins
Emory walked into the fog.
It swallowed his ankles first, then his knees. Cold, not bitter, but wet, like walking into someone's breath. His handheld camera stuttered, then refocused. Shapes moved. Birds went silent. No insects. Just the sound of his boots and the breath in his chest—and even that sounded like it was coming from behind him.
He aimed the camera at the trees.
They shimmered.
Just for a second, one seemed to bend... not from the wind, but toward him.
Flash of Memory
A sharp pulse lit the fog. Just for a blink.
And in that blink
A face. Pressed against the inside of the air. Like a thumb behind skin. Mouth open. Not screaming, mouthing. Saying something. To him.
He staggered back.
Behind him, the trees were wrong. Not where they had been. The fog had rearranged the forest.
Emory tried to turn off the camera. The button wouldn’t respond.
And somewhere ahead, deeper in the fog, came a sound.
Click. Click. Click.
Not mechanical. Organic. Like teeth.
From His Journal: Found Later, Pages Torn
"It’s not just hiding the cryptids. It is one.
The Murker isn’t cover
It’s hunger, it’s fear.
The fear you feel in the fog isn’t yours.
It’s remembered into you."
Part III: Case File: EMK-03-A
Recovered by: Piper Callahan, Channel: Unseen Signals
"This case gave me nightmares. I don’t say that lightly."
Piper, Intro to Missing in the Fog: The Disappearance of Emory Knox
Case File: EMK-03-A
Subject: Emory Knox
Status: Missing 19 days
Last Known Location: Meadow’s Edge, West Virginia
Recovered Items: Jeep (engine cold), camera (data corrupted), notebook (water damage), field recorder (intact)
Notes: Weather report confirmed no fog present in the area during his disappearance.
Transcript: “I Found the Murker Tape” Unseen Signals Ep. 71
[0:00 – 0:42]
(Soft static. Piper Callahan sits in frame, voice tight.)
“I wasn’t going to post this. But it’s been sitting on my hard drive like it’s watching me. I got this footage from a guy in West Virginia. He says his brother was part of the search party that found Emory’s gear. Says they weren’t allowed to speak about what they saw. Says they saw faces in the fog. Not just one. Dozens.”
[2:18 – 2:51]
(Piper plays a corrupted clip from Emory’s final footage. Trees flicker. A clicking sound. Emory’s voice whispers something unintelligible. Then, a loud breath…not his.)
Piper: “I ran this through software. Slowed it down. There’s a phrase hidden in the background hiss.”
(Plays it again, slowed 300%)
“Don’t look at it directly. Don’t look at it directly.”
Forum Post: r/UnsolvedNightmares
User: SeeThruGlass93
“My cousin disappeared in 2014, camping near Dunfield Hollow. They said she went missing in clear weather. Her tent was zipped. Her boots were there. But her journal was found days later… three miles off the trail. It had one sentence in the middle of a blank page:
‘It watches through the fog. It doesn’t move, so the world moves around it.’”
Incident Report: Meadow’s Edge Sheriff’s Office [Unofficial Copy]
Date: [Redacted]
Witness: Deputy Harold M.
“When I walked into the woods, I felt like my ears had popped. Like pressure. I kept seeing flickers. I lost sight of Johnson, but I heard his radio say, ‘It’s not a forest anymore. It’s looking at me.’ Then the fog cleared and Johnson was gone. No prints. No body.”
Piper’s Final Clip in Ep. 71
(Camera shaky. Piper is filming her screen late at night. Reflected in the dark monitor is a faint shape behind her. She doesn’t notice.)
“If anyone else has Emory’s footage, send it to me. I think this thing, The Murker, it’s not covering up the cryptids. It is a cryptid.
And now I think it’s starting to notice the ones watching it.”
[Video ends. Comments disabled.]
Oh my stars, this is awesome. I love this. The investigation structure, the details, this is brilliant. 💗🙌💗
I love a good cryptid tale, and this one does not disappoint! I would def watch this if it were a movie.