In June of 2009, 23-year-old environmental studies student Richie Connor set out on a short, lonely hike along the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania.

He was supposed to return in 3 days.

The next time he was seen was exactly a year later.

In the deep forest of Windham, two hikers came across a semic-conscious man tied to an old pine tree.

His body was a continuous map of bruises, cuts, and healed scars.

He did not respond to voices, did not try to escape, did not ask for help.

He just kept repeating one phrase quietly, monotonously.

The first rule is not to scream.

This found hiker was the beginning of a story that revealed one of the darkest secrets of Appalachia.

23-year-old environmental studies student Richie Connor left home at dawn on June 20th.

According to his mother, he was calm and focused, saying he wanted to hike a little further than usual before returning to university work.

The route he chose was simple, a section of the Appalachian Trail in Huntington County near the small town of Mwain’s Fort.

He knew this place.

He had passed it twice before.

At 7:00 20 minutes in the morning, a camera at a gas station near Harrisburg captured Richie buying gas for his burner, an energy bar, and washing it down with coffee from a vending machine.

The footage shows him wearing worn out hiking pants, a gray t-shirt, and a small compass hanging from his backpack.

A few minutes later, the Chevy Cavalier pulls out of the parking lot and heads west.

At about 9:00 in the morning, according to the visitor log, his car appears in the parking lot at the entrance to the Midstate Trail.

In one of the testimonies, another tourist, an elderly man from Altuna, describes how he saw a young man carefully studying a map and checking the coordinates with his handheld GPS every time.

According to him, Richie checked the batteries of his flashlight several times and tied the strap of his backpack.

Everything looked standard, as if he was following a familiar route.

The last confirmed contact occurred in the afternoon.

Two students from Pittsburgh recalled seeing a guy eating a sandwich at the Blue Ridge lookout.

He greeted them with a short nod, looked calm, and quickly packed up and left.

No one paid attention to where he was going.

The trails in the area often branch off, and experienced hikers don’t usually ask for directions.

He was supposed to return in 3 days.

This was the agreement with his parents.

But on the evening of June 23, Richie’s phone was silent.

At 20:00, his mother left him several voicemails.

And around 10:00 in the evening, the line was no longer receiving calls.

At 2:00 in the morning, his parents decided they couldn’t wait any longer.

The next morning, the Huntington County Sheriff’s Office received an official missing person’s report.

The officer on duty immediately notified Rothrock National Park as Richie’s route partially passed through their territory.

By lunchtime, the first search team of rangers and three local volunteers who knew the nearby trails well was assembled.

The search began with a car.

The Chevy Cavalier was parked in the exact spot where Richie had left it.

The car was locked and there were no signs of a break-in.

Inside were an empty water bottle, a road map, and several packages of dried fruit.

In the trunk were a spare jacket, trekking poles, and a set of tools.

Nothing indicated that he was going to disappear for a long time or deviate from the route.

On the first day, we combed the main section of the Midstate Trail to the south, including the branches to Rattlesnake Ridge.

The search dogs picked up the trail quickly, but it broke off at a rocky area.

The next morning, they were led back to the trail where the scent led further into the dense forest, which the locals called the old corridor, through impenetrable thickets and narrow, shallow gullies.

In the evening of the second day, the rangers came across the only thing that could have belonged to Richie, an empty plastic flask.

It was lying in the grass a few miles off the trail in a place where no one usually goes.

There was some dried silt at the bottom.

It looks like the guy had taken water from a puddle rather than a spring, which was strange for an experienced hiker.

On the third day, volunteers from the Juniata Valley joined the search.

A state helicopter surveyed the area for more than 20 m around, but the dense spruce cover almost completely covered the ground.

The pilot said in his report that he saw only an impenetrable coniferous massif and a few old trodden paths.

By the end of the week, search teams had circled the blue slope area, checked gullies, wetlands, and inspected random campsites and abandoned huts that occasionally occur in the Appalachians.

Not a single trace.

Only the dogs stopped several times at the entrance to the old quarry, which the locals called Oldm Quarry.

This place has long been abandoned, overgrown with weeds, and littered with stone fragments.

But the report states that the odor is probably old or faint of indeterminate antiquity.

There was no further confirmation.

The search was doubled with several dozen more volunteers, dog handlers, and an additional helicopter flight.

Temporary rest stops were set up in the forest, and for several days, the area resembled an army operation.

But no trace of clothing, no piece of equipment, no soul prints could be found.

At the end of the seventh day, the coordinator of the operation announced the end of the active phase.

This happened on the evening of June 27th when the last group returned from the slope above the Midstate Trail and reported that the area had been completely searched.

The official story at the time was simple.

Richie could have wandered off the trail, gotten lost in the dense forest, and gone too far to be found.

But those who were searching later recalled something else.

The area where Richie Connor disappeared always seemed too quiet.

Abnormally quiet even for the Appalachians.

And most importantly, it never left any traces.

Not a single one.

If a person had fallen, slipped, broken a leg, something would have been found.

But this time, the forest was silent.

And the longer the silence lasted, the harder it was to believe that he had simply gotten lost.

A year after Richie Connor<unk>’s disappearance, the Huntington County Sheriff’s Office archives listed him as another unsolved case, and the woods he entered and never returned from remained silent.

In May, with spring in full force in the southern Appalachians, two friends, Dave Rogers and Bob Mlan, hiked into the remote Windham Mass, 15 mi south of the route the student had once taken.

Both were experienced hikers who had known the forest for more than 20 years.

They told us that it was not the first time they had gone there.

Every year in this part of the mountains, they checked old hunting trails where bear tracks were occasionally found.

On May 20th at about 11:00 in the morning, they moved off the official routes guided by a compass and old markings left on the trees by previous generations of hunters.

The area was wild.

Sloping slopes, ravines, storm damaged trees, dry leaves crunching underfoot.

According to Dave, the first few hours were nothing out of the ordinary.

The same dense, damp, almost deserted forest.

Around noon, they came to a small natural rise where an old, massive pine tree stood.

Dave walked ahead and as he later testified, noticed something that at first seemed like a pile of garbage or the remains of some equipment.

The pine tree was so thick that even two people could not hug it, and its bark was dark and cracked.

It was against this darkness that he saw the pale body.

At first, they both thought it was a corpse.

The half- naked man was tied to the trunk so tightly that the ropes cut into his skin.

His bony wrists were fixed at chest level, and his legs were wrapped high below his knees.

His hair and beard had fallen off, and his skin was covered with numerous healed cuts, bruises, and dark, dried streaks that looked like traces of old beatings.

Later, an official report stated that the man was alive.

His chest rose slightly, and his breathing was shallow.

Dave recalled being the first to approach and as he put it, called out to him quietly, afraid he was about to die in front of me.

But there was no response.

Only when he touched the man’s shoulder did he flinch and start repeating the phrase monotonously, like a jagged mantra with no end in sight.

The first rule is not to scream.

The words sounded horsearo, almost without voice, with a tremor that could hardly be called a reaction to people.

It sounded like he had been repeating it for hours, days, or even weeks.

Bob, in Dave’s words, just stood there numb.

He looked at the body covered with wounds and scars, and could not believe that he was a living man.

It was only a few minutes later, when the shock wore off a bit, that the two took action.

Dave pulled out a knife, but as he explained to the investigators, he didn’t dare cut the ropes for fear of damaging the body, which seemed extremely fragile.

Meanwhile, Bob took out his phone, but there was no connection in that part of the forest.

The tourists were forced to climb the nearest hill where they usually get at least a weak signal.

At about 12:40, they reached the 911 service.

The dispatcher recorded the message.

A man has been found alive, tied to a tree, in critical condition.

The coordinates of the location were inaccurate.

Dave and Bob passed them on, checking with a compass and old landmarks.

The dispatcher promised to send the nearest Clinton County Sheriff’s Office, which serves Windham Forest.

While they waited for help, the hikers climbed back down to the pine tree and tried to talk to the man.

He did not raise his head, did not move, did not blink.

He would only repeat his phrase.

Dave recalled that he tried to ask if he could hear them, but the answer was the same with the same cold equinimity.

The first rule is no yelling.

The distance to the place was difficult.

Dense thicket, fallen trees, and difficult to pass beams.

Precious time was passing.

After about 40 minutes, the tourists heard the sound of an SUV engine.

It was Deputy Sheriff Michael Stanton.

He had arrived with a paramedic who is protocol to respond to any sighting of a living person in remote areas.

Stanton’s report states that the scene in front of him was one of the worst he had ever seen.

The man was hanging on the ropes as if he had been fixed for a long time and carefully.

The camouflage marks on the bark showed that the knots had been repeatedly tightened or replaced.

It was not an improvisation.

A paramedic made an initial assessment.

He reportedly told the sheriff that the man was in a critical stage of exhaustion with multiple old injuries and signs of severe dehydration.

When the ropes were finally cut, his body literally sagged to the ground as if it had long been unable to support its weight.

Only after he was placed on a stretcher did Stanton recognize the victim’s face.

A few minutes later, he asked Dave to pull out his phone and find a photo of Richie Connor, the hiker who disappeared last year on the internet.

The report stated almost a perfect match.

The victim was immediately evacuated.

Due to the difficulty of the terrain, the helicopter was unable to land, so he was carried out on foot for about 2 hours.

All this time, he kept repeating his phrase without a single pause, without changing his pace.

The paramedic who carried the stretcher part of the way recalled that it sounded like a mental reaction to a fear that has not yet passed.

When they finally reached a point where a medical helicopter could land around 4:00 in the afternoon, Richie was still saying the same thing.

It was as if he didn’t notice the movement, the people, or the fact that he was no longer being held by the ropes.

That day, only one thing became clear to everyone in the Windham Forest.

Someone had been holding him for a long time, and the fact that Richie Connor had survived to this point seemed like a miracle on the verge of happening.

Richie Connor was taken to Grace Memorial Hospital in Harrisburg late in the evening.

The doctors on duty that day noted three main indicators of his condition in their medical reports.

Severe dehydration, critical malnutrition, and deep mental shock.

His skin was unnaturally pale and his wrists were thin with dark roughened rope marks.

The paramedic who accompanied the boy from the forest said that throughout the transfer, the patient repeated the same phrase.

The first rule is not to scream.

This did not change in the hospital.

He whispered it constantly as if trying to hold on to the only reality he knew.

In the ward, he was placed on a separate wing closer to the intensive care team.

Richie was awake but not fully conscious.

He sat leaning on the pillows, swaying slightly back and forth.

All attempts to speak to him elicited the same reaction.

He clutched his shoulders and clenched his fingers as if he was waiting for a blow.

The hospital’s psychologist, Dr.

Nerissa Gray, described it as exhausted automaticity.

She said his behavior was typical of people who have experienced prolonged coercion and punishment for any wrong response.

Detective Mark Thorne arrived at the hospital the next morning.

He had been working on the case of Richie’s disappearance since day one, but what he saw in the room did not remind him of any of the previous cases.

In Thorne’s report, he wrote, “The patient does not respond to the sound of my voice, does not move his eyes, does not change the pace of the repeated phrase.

” Even when the detective called him by name, Richie continued to whisper his rule with each repetition clenching his shoulders as if his body was preparing to strike.

The doctors decided to start a series of short psychological sessions to assess the patients level of consciousness.

Each meeting lasted a few minutes.

During these sessions, Richie hardly changed his behavior.

He sat stiffly, swallowing air in small bursts as if his body was used to living in constant tension.

When the psychologist asked questions, he did not react to the content.

Only sometimes when her voice became louder, the boy would press his lips together and speed up his repetition.

The first rule is not to scream.

On the fifth day, his condition changed slightly.

He finally tried to look up.

This was noticed by a nurse on duty who came to check the drip.

According to the nurse, his eyes looked like he was arguing with someone in his head and then just gave up.

When the nurse asked if he could hear him, Richie paused for the first time, a very short one.

After it, he repeated the phrase again, this time almost without opening his mouth.

The psychologists interpreted this phrase as the key to what he had experienced.

They assumed that the rule had been imposed on him systematically, probably with the use of punishment for violation.

One of the psychologists present at the inter agency meeting noted the one who held him was forming a reflex similar to a conditioned reflex.

This meant that the guy may have been in a situation of control and fear for so long that his brain had fixed the phrase as a way to avoid pain.

The breakthrough happened unexpectedly.

This is evidenced by the recordings of the session which took place in the afternoon when a severe thunderstorm began outside.

Hospital surveillance cameras recorded the moment when a sudden clap of thunder made the guy shudder.

Then he raised his head, which he had not done even once since his hospitalization.

The psychologist sitting across from him said quietly that it was just the weather.

Richie responded by doing something no one expected.

According to protocol, he clasped his fingers together on the armrests as if afraid to let go and exhaled a phrase that he had spoken for the first time in a long time, not in a whisper, but loudly, horsely, sharply, a hiding place in a rock behind a waterfall.

He said these words only once.

After that, his body dropped again, his shoulders hunched, and his breath came out.

He went back to repeating his rule as if nothing had happened.

The psychologist immediately notified Detective Thorne.

The hospital’s log book recorded, “Patient uttered a phrase that may have a connection to the location of his disappearance.

” The boy said nothing else, but it was enough for the investigation to realize that there was a specific location in his memories, and someone really didn’t want him to ever talk about it.

The phrase that Richie had blurted out during the thunderstorm became Detective Mark Thorne’s first concrete reference point for the entire year.

Hiding place in the rock behind the waterfall.

He repeated it that evening as he looked at a map of Huntington County.

Thorne’s report states that he checked all the natural waterfalls within a 10mi radius of where the boy was found, but they simply did not exist.

This area of the Appalachian was not known for its elevation changes or rivers that could create even a small waterfall.

The only place where the word waterfall appeared, at least in an informal form, was on an old technical plan, the Oldm Quarry.

It was there, according to the search protocols of last year, that the dogs lost the trail.

Thorne looked up the archival materials and found details.

In the 60s, an artificial spillway was built on the quarry’s territory to drain groundwater.

Local workers jokingly called it a waterfall, although in reality, it was a concrete pipe from which water flowed down in a thin mud film.

The next morning, Thorne summoned two officers and a county ranger.

All three, according to the detective, agreed without hesitation.

There was no other lead in the case.

They left before 6:00 in the morning.

The road to the quarry ran through a narrow strip of woods, then descended steeply to an old concrete pad that had long since lost its original shape.

Grass was growing through the cracks, and the metal equipment that remained after the facility was closed had been rusting for decades.

According to the report, the quarry looked abandoned, damp, and dead.

The damp airspace had a thick metallic odor, and in some places, the surfaces were covered with oil stains.

Underfoot, stagnant water was squatchching, accumulating in the depressions since the spring rains.

The artificial waterfall was found immediately.

It was a concrete slab embedded in the rock.

The water oozed out in steady drops flowing down in thin streams, creating a monotonous buzzing sound.

The ranger, who had been here before during his rounds, noticed something to the right of the structure.

A narrow natural crack in the rock was visible between the thickets, which was easy to miss if you didn’t know the exact location.

Thorne was the first to approach.

He noted a few details in his notebook.

The stone at the entrance was wet, but the surface had fresh, clear scratches, as if someone had recently squeezed between the walls.

Nearby, there was a trace of a boot sole.

It was not strong, but distinct.

In the report, the detective noted, “The shape resembles a worksheue.

The depth of the impression is shallow.

The ground here was hard, so such a trace would not have appeared by chance.

The ranger assumed that this gap could have previously led to one of the quarry’s drainage corridors.

In the 60s, some of the tunnels were blocked and filled in, but according to him, the rocks here are hollow with old technical passages.

This meant that there could be a cavity behind the crevice or a short compartment inaccessible from the outside.

It was this kind of structure that could have been a hiding place.

Thorne ordered a perimeter search.

Two officers with flashlights walked along the cliff wall, but found no other entrances.

It all came down to this crack, narrow, dark, like a gap in a snake’s mouth.

The detective squeezed one step forward and froze.

A handprint was visible on the stone right at the entrance.

Fuzzy, blurry, but recognizable enough.

Someone had touched the surface to keep their balance or was looking for support in the dark.

The water was slowly running down from the concrete structure, but the print was still there as if it had been made only a few days ago.

He retreated.

In his testimony, the ranger said that the detective turned pale at that moment, even though nothing had happened yet.

Thorne looked like he realized something important is how the officer described the situation.

The concern was heightened by the fact that the entrance was too narrow to immediately see what was waiting inside.

The flashlight illuminated only a few feet of darkness.

Then everything was lost.

The air coming out of the hole was cold and heavy, smelling of old stone and damp soil.

There were no echoes, no sounds, only a faint muffled roar of water behind them.

The officers stepped closer cautiously as if they weren’t sure they had the right to disturb the silence.

Thorne ordered all traces to be recorded.

A note appeared in the log.

Small pebbles trampled on the ground characteristic of recent movement.

This confirmed the main thing.

Someone not only knew about this crack, but used it regularly.

The detective examined the slope above the spillway.

There on one of the collapsed concrete blocks, they noticed a small, almost invisible piece of rope.

It was brightly colored, but faded with time.

The break was fresh.

The edges of the fibers had been cut cleanly, as if the rope had been cut with a sharp object.

Thorne made a note of this and stood silently for several minutes, watching the water run down the concrete gutter.

In his official report, he later described the moment as follows.

It seemed that this waterfall was hiding something long lost in time.

The place looked exactly as the frightened boy might have described it.

A rock, a dark passage, water covering the sound, and the feeling that something was hidden behind it.

All four stood in front of a crevice that led to the unknown, and each realized that there was no turning back now.

Thorne gave the order to prepare the equipment for the entrance.

flashlights, safety harnesses, markers to navigate inside.

His voice, according to the ranger, remained calm, but the detective’s hands were shaking.

He did not hide it.

He said only one thing.

The words passed on from those present.

Whatever was there, someone had already tried to hide it a long time ago.

And now it could no longer remain in the dark.

The passage behind the waterfall was much deeper than expected.

When Thorne and the two officers squeezed through the narrow crack, the flashlights immediately stuck into the darkness, which absorbed the light as if it were alive.

The air inside was cold, stagnant, and full of the smell of damp earth.

Underfoot, the stone was covered with a layer of dust that hadn’t been disturbed in years.

But as soon as they walked a few feet deeper, it became clear someone had come here.

Often the walls of the cave were covered with signs.

These were not random scratches or chaotic graffiti that teenagers sometimes leave in abandoned places.

The lines were straight.

The symbols were repeated.

Some applied several times as if someone had practiced reproducing them to perfection.

Hexog structures, intertwined circles, schematic representations of a deer skull with long, unnaturally curved horns.

All of it looked organized.

You don’t do that by accident, and you don’t do it in a hurry.

It was like marks, someone else’s handwriting, applied with confidence and purpose.

The cave soon expanded into a large cavity.

When the flashlight beam fell on the first object, which stood right in the middle of the room, the officers instinctively turned their heads away.

On an old wooden ammunition box was an open tin can half filled with dried food.

Next to it was a sleeping bag piled in a heap as if it had been thrown in the dark.

In the far corner is another bag rolled up more neatly.

Thorne noted in his report that some of the canned food showed fingerprints on the surface, covered in dust, but not quite old.

People had lived here perhaps recently.

Things were laid out as if this cave was not a temporary hiding place, but a base.

On the second ammo box were several empty plastic containers, pieces of rope, and two metal flasks.

Small objects were scattered nearby, a flashlight tube, energy bar wrappers, a piece of dark fabric, probably once part of a jacket.

But further away, closer to the central wall, was what the officers called an altar.

They did not use this word in the sense of religion, but to indicate the order in which the objects were laid out.

There were several backpacks of different colors and manufacturers, all old, worn, some with knife cuts.

One was ripped open as if the owner had tried to escape, and someone had cut him right on the shoulders.

Next to them were cell phones without batteries.

Most were badly damaged, scratched, and the screen of two was completely broken.

Thorne noted in the report, “All the devices were turned off.

The removed batteries indicate deliberate deprivation of location capability.

These were not the belongings of one person.

It was a collection, things that belonged to those who never returned from their route.

The frozen space was cut by another rectangle of light, the central wall.

Something was attached to it.

Thorne approached it first.

It was a large sheet of transparent polyethylene nailed directly to the stone.

Behind it were dozens of newspaper clippings, printed news from online publications, and fragments from forums where people were discussing the disappearance of tourist Richie Connor.

The articles were circled with a red marker with small, meticulously written comments in the margins.

Search suspended, no trace.

Forest sector closed.

Next to it is a map of the area with lines drawn.

Someone was watching.

Someone was studying.

Someone was enjoying the information about the investigation as if it were part of their own game.

And in the middle, a photograph, a recent one, dated the day before Richie was found.

The photo shows him tied to a pine tree, the same morning or evening, the same view that the tourists saw.

The picture was taken from a distance with good optics.

Someone was not just watching.

Someone was recording the result.

The ranger, he said, took a step back.

One of the officers lowered his flashlight so he wouldn’t have to see it again.

Thorne stood still for several seconds.

In an internal report, he wrote, “This was not a hidden layer.

It was a demonstration, and it was addressed to us.

” The hunter, the one who held Richie, didn’t just hide things in the cave.

He turned the space into an archive.

He turned it into a museum of his own actions.

He wanted to be seen.

He had almost pushed the investigation here, leaving the boy alive and repeating a phrase that indicated the direction.

Thorne felt like he was standing in a room that someone had been preparing for years.

A room where every scratch, every broken lock, every cutout had a meaning, a room where there was a master, and he had just made himself known.

The plastic sheet hanging on the central wall of the cave seemed at first glance to be the end of the find.

But as soon as Thorne pried the nails with a knife, another reality became apparent.

This sheet was not a shield, but a curtain.

Behind it was an area of stone, thickly covered with materials that the intruder had been collecting for years.

The lanterns illuminated not just chaos, but a structure, neat, thoughtful, kept in an order that could only come from a person obsessed with his own work.

There were dozens of newspaper clippings, not just local ones.

Thorne and the officers recognized the logos of publications from Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, and even a few stories from the southern counties of New York.

Most of them were about missing tourists.

The articles were arranged chronologically, not by date of publication, but by date of disappearance.

Some of them had pieces of cloth attached to them, a piece of a blue jacket, a small fragment of red flannel, a thin lace from a hiking boot.

All of this was pinned down with thin metal nails as if they were exhibits in a private museum.

A ranger standing behind Thorne said quietly that he recognized one of the symbols on the clipping the logo of a local rescue group.

This meant that someone had carefully studied the work of the volunteers and seen how they acted in the first hours of the search.

On another section of the wall were several plastic bags with small items, a worn out lighter, a torn map of shelters, and an eagle keychain.

Some of these items had names written on them in black marker.

Thorne made a few notes in his notebook.

Two of these people were still missing in the Appalachian region.

Toward the middle of the wall, the collection became even more personal.

A separate strip was dedicated to one man, Richie Connor.

Newspaper clippings, screenshots from news sites, even anonymous comments from forums where users argued about the reasons for his disappearance.

Several lines were underlined in red.

There were short notes next to them.

Thorne later called them cold mathematical comments.

On a shelf carved in stone was an object that immediately caught my eye.

It was a handsewn journal thick with a dark cover worn at the edges.

There was nothing written on it, not a single name or mark.

But when the detective opened the first page, it became clear that this was the basis of the entire collection.

The handwriting was even.

It was not rushed.

Each entry began with a clearly written date followed by a description of events, emotions, and actions.

But the style was devoid of humanity.

Under Thorne’s entries was a remark.

This is not a diary in the usual sense.

This is a report, an analytical document.

The author’s behavior is completely alienated.

The pages concerning the first objects were damaged by time and humidity.

But the records of recent years were clearly readable.

It was a pattern tracking, observing, capturing, holding, and noting reactions.

No pity, no anger, no fear.

Only a record of what was happening in terms of effectiveness, return, result, phase.

The last page had a date on it a few days before Richie was found.

What the officers read they memorized verbatim because none of them had ever heard anything like it in their entire practice.

The recording read as follows.

Subject number six, Connor R, is complete.

Reaction is below expectations.

Emotional response is minimal.

Experiment terminated.

Subject removed from field and placed in visual area to demonstrate system failure.

Observation of the authorities’s response has begun.

Phase two, zooming in.

The next object should be brighter.

The masterpiece is waiting.

Thorne’s protocol states that after reading it, he paused for a few seconds and did not speak to the officers until the text was copied into his notebook.

For him, it was not just evidence.

It was a signal.

The person who left these notes did not see his actions as a crime.

He saw his work as a creative act with mathematical precision.

And Richie apparently was only part of an experiment that had been going on for a long time.

Thorne looked at the other records.

Several dates matched official missing persons days in neighboring counties.

Some had no matches in police databases.

That meant one thing.

Either these victims were never found or their disappearances were never even reported.

The phrase masterpiece was the most alarming.

It stood on a separate line without a date.

After that, the text in the journal stopped.

All three realized that the person who was here was not hiding.

He was working according to his own plan.

And what was found in this cave was not the end of past crimes, but a preface to the next ones.

After removing all the materials from the cave, Detective Mark Thorne spent several hours pouring over the journal the hunter had left on the stone shelf.

The entries in it were neat, consistent, at times almost pedantic, not emotional, not confused, but rather cold, structured, written by a person who thinks like a technician, not like a criminal in the usual sense.

In the margins, there were notes on route distances, the amount of resources spent, air temperature, and noise levels at night.

Thorne noticed that the perpetrator recorded even minor details when he dimmed the flashlight when he first heard a coyote when the old knife stopped working.

The diary looked more like a field test manual.

Among the pages with notes on subjects and assessments of behavioral reactions, there were several inserts that did not fit into the general tone.

These were ordinary household entries.

The price of gas at the gas station, food costs, repairing an old knife, even short notes about the weather.

One of these pages seemed strange to Thorne.

A small piece of paper was sandwiched between two paragraphs about test observations.

The piece of paper turned out to be a receipt from a Montana fuel gas station.

The receipt was dated July 2009.

The amount was small, but something else was important.

The last four digits of the credit card were 2841.

Thorne immediately entered the numbers into the protocol.

It was the first real trace that could be linked to a specific person.

The criminal was so confident in his stealth that he simply left the receipt between the pages like ordinary trash.

Over the next few hours, the detective obtained permission through the prosecutor’s office to access the bank data.

Card identification revealed a name, Jacob Ryder.

He was listed in the databases as a former survival instructor.

He worked for a private security company called Sierra Security which closed in 2007 after a financial scandal.

After his dismissal, he lived in the small town of Utica, north of Huntington.

His neighbors interviewed later described him in the same way.

A quiet man who did not conflict with anyone, often went into the woods for several days and said he was doing personal training.

No one knew where he worked now.

No one saw any guests in his house.

No one heard the TV or radio playing.

Ryder was on his own, and it seemed logical to the neighbors.

Thorne formed a detention team of county officers.

They arrived at the house early in the morning, a small one-story house with a darkened facade, a grass area, and no outside lights.

No signs of presence, no sound.

The door was locked, but the lock did not look new.

The team entered with a standardized assault procedure.

Inside, they found only emptiness.

Everything in the house was cleaned to sterility.

Surfaces were wiped clean.

No dust on the shelves.

There were no personal photos, no papers, not even bedding.

It seems that the person who lived here had recently moved out, but had taken the time to take absolutely everything.

The only sign of life was the smell of old coffee in the kitchen sink.

It was barely noticeable, but it showed that someone had been here in the last few days.

We checked the garage separately.

There was an old Jeep Cherokee in it.

It looked just like dozens of others in this part of Pennsylvania, but the trunk told us more than the rest of the house.

There were several ropes of different lengths, a set of militarystyle handcuffs, a first aid kit with bandages, tourniquets, and immobilization equipment, two folding saws, rubber gloves, an unburnt roll of adhesive tape.

All the items were clean, folded, and packed as if they were prepared for work rather than for household needs.

The person who owned them was not present.

There were several clean, even footprints on the garage floor.

Thorne said in his report that they looked as if the car had been driven out in a hurry, but at the same time carefully, without scattering the ground, without leaving chaotic lines.

Jacob Ryder drove away, and he did so before the detectives found his lair in the cave.

Even more alarming was the fact that not a single artifact was found in the house that would somehow connect it to the collection in the quarry.

No carvings, no symbols, no trophies.

Ryder had cleared the house to what could be called an empty container.

Thorne was left in no doubt.

What they found in the cave was only a shadow of what was really going on.

The person who lived here had acted in a premeditated, cautious, and technical manner.

He disappeared before the police even got close.

And somewhere in that moment, the detective had a thought that he did not write down in his official protocol, but voiced to a colleague in his words, “Half-heartedly.

” The person who left the diary was not running away.

He was simply moving on to the next stage.

A search of Jacob Ryder’s home, conducted immediately after his trace was found in the diary, did not yield any meaningful results.

The county offices handed over reports with the same wording.

The prints found belonged only to the homeowner.

No criminal profile was found in the database.

No foreign traces or DNA.

Everything indicated that the man lived alone, acted alone, and left no traces except for those that he personally controlled.

Former employees of Sierra Security interviewed by detectives were reticent to recall Ryder.

One of them said that he never drank with the staff.

Another said that he did not attend corporate events and hardly spoke to his colleagues.

According to several employees, he could disappear for several days, explaining it as field training, but never indicated where he was.

He was described as a specialist who had skills in moving quietly, setting traps, creating shelters in the forest, and navigating without maps.

All the testimonies agreed on one thing.

Ryder was a man who lived in the neighborhood, but didn’t seem to exist.

Everyone knew his face, but had no idea about his life.

The police checked his previous addresses, places of work, parking lots where he might have left his car, even abandoned buildings that he had once had access to.

The reports of these raids repeated the phrase, “The area is empty.

” No traces of residence, no new prints, no items that could indicate where he had gone.

Everything was cleared.

It seems that the person did not just run away.

He knew that they would come to him.

The new warrant allowed us to check the forest areas around Uinia.

Dozens of acres were combed by rangers and dog handlers.

But the silence of the forest remained as indifferent as it had been a year ago when Richie disappeared.

It was as if it knew that the man they were looking for had long since gone deeper to a place where he could not be found.

Meanwhile, Richie Connor was undergoing rehabilitation after a long treatment.

Doctors described him as stable but with deep residual fear reactions.

He could speak and move around on his own, but sometimes, especially when he heard loud noises or sudden changes in the weather, his body would suddenly tense up just like it had on that first day in the hospital.

The psychological outbursts were unpredictable.

After one of them, he said that sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night and see a figure standing on the edge of darkness and light.

According to Richie, it looked like it knew where you were, even if you thought you were hiding.

Experts attributed this to the remnants of the trauma, but Richie himself insisted that the feeling was too realistic to be just a dream.

Officially, the case was closed due to a lack of evidence and possible search directions.

This was done almost mechanically as the end of a procedure that had lost its prospects.

Mark Thorne signed the documents, but in his memo, he noted, “The probability of the subject’s reappearance is high.

The risk is uncertain.

” Internally, he was convinced otherwise.

Neither the diary nor the cave hiding place looked like the end.

Everything indicated that Ryder was working on a scheme that he had been pursuing for years.

The inscription phase 2 in the diary did not seem like a threat, but a plan that had already gained momentum.

Sporadic mentions of the forest hunter began to appear on travel forums.

Some people heard the story from a ranger they knew, others from hunters who had allegedly seen a man moving through the forest without a flashlight, without a path, like a shadow.

Some members of the groups claimed to have spent the night in the Appalachian Mountains and felt that someone was watching them.

The police could not confirm any of these accounts, but they all had one thing in common.

They described a man who never approached, but always stood where he could not be seen.

In the sheriff’s department’s records, these stories were labeled unverified reports.

But Thorne read each one.

He was alarmed by the fact that the locations of the rumors coincided with areas where loners had been disappearing for several years in a row.

Writer’s shadow was not in the evidence, but in his silent influence.

People who did not know his name were already creating a legend around him.

Richie Connor avoided the Appalachian, but every night when he fell asleep, the same silence of the forest would reappear in his mind.

He didn’t hear footsteps, didn’t see movement, but he could feel a gaze cold, steady, familiar.

It was the look of a person who knew how to do more than just hide.

He knew how to wait, and she did so with such naturalness as if she were part of the forest itself.

For Detective Thorne, the case was formally over.

For everyone else, it disappeared into the archives, giving way to new investigations.

But a void remained in Appalachia that the protocols could not explain.

A void that reminded them that the man they called the hunter was not lost.

He did not run away.

He simply went back to where he felt at home.

Into the shade of the trees, into the depths of the forest, which has always protected those who know how to disappear into it without a trace.