My name is Rick. I live in Indiana. I can't tell you more than that or name the company
I work for or tell you where it's at. There aren't that many quarries around here
that get used the way this one does at night, and I rely on the extra money that I earn
from it. But there was a night. I was trapped down in that quarry with a big foot circling
me, and I had no way out. I run heavy equipment. Loaders, dozers, excavators. I work nights,
weekends, whatever they need. I'm used to bad lighting, weird noises, and being the only
person at a job site. Also, let me clarify. The job I was doing when this happened is technically
my second job, before the same company, so to speak. I do this on nights when I don't
have to work my quarry day job the next day. That way I pick up a nice lot of extra money.
This happened in late October 2022 at an old limestone quarry that's been mostly
enacted for years. During the day it looks like a half-finished hole. Terrorist walls, a pool
of water at the bottom, some scrub trees out on the benches. At night it turns into a place
where certain outfits quietly dump, whatever they can't legally take to the transfer station
by daylight. So, in essence, it's being used as a dump for certain other companies in
the know. But done sort of off the radar if you catch my drift.
My job that night was simple. Take a front-end loader down into the pit and push down and
spread out a handful of fresh loads that had been dumped earlier. Mostly construction debris,
some old furniture, and one load that turned out to be something else entirely. I went in
figuring it would be four or five hours of boring work for some good decent money. Instead
I spent the better part of an hour stuck in a dead loader at the bottom of that hole,
while something very large, I mean a big foot, walked around my machine, and all the
trash piles very much the way an old man would patrol his lawn and start yelling at
kids who get on it. This quarry sits a couple of miles off a country road, down a long gravel
lane with a chain gate. It's shaped like a big bowl cut into the side of a low hill. There's
one main ramp road that spirals down along the wall to the bottom. There are no guardrails,
just some berms of rock here and there. At the lowest bench there's a flat pad and a
shallow pool of water off to one side where the groundwater seeps in.
The outfit I work for has a loader staged down in the pit. It's a mid-size cat with a big
bucket and a cabin close with safety glass and a roll cage. Up top, near the edge, there's
a light tower that we run off of a diesel generator. Lower mast and four metal halide heads. You
set it up at the rim so it throws down a wash into the bowl. There is no permanent power
or wired lights there. There are no buildings aside from a shipping container where they
keep some hoses and some extra fuel drums. At night, the only light is what we bring in.
On this job, the trucking company drops loads all afternoon and into the early evening.
Box trucks, dump trailers, you name it. They all come and they drop mixed stuff. Could
be rubble, pallets, busted up drywall, old mattresses, you name it, they drop it.
Toward the end of the evening, they will radio out that they're done for the night. Then
they send me in with the loader to knock the piles down and push some of it off toward
the water and I'll go around and smooth things out so the next day's loads have room.
But on this particular night, they also brought in a special load and they didn't tell me
much about it, but I found out what it was when I started working it over with the bucket.
This was a Friday late October. I came through the gate about a quarter till 10. It was a
dry and clear night somewhere in the mid-40s. We'd had a light touch of frost the night
before, but there was no wind to speak of. I remember the moon was pretty in silver in
the sky. You could see stars out there if you kill all the artificial lights. I drove
my pickup down to the rim, parked it beside the container, and fired up the generator
and light tower. Once the mast was up and aimed down into the bowl, you could see most
of the bottom like a big stage, pale rock walls, dark piles of trash, and the loader sitting
right where it had been left from the previous night. The light there doesn't fill every corner,
though. There are shadows under the ledges, blind spots behind the piles, and a fair bit
of gloom along the far wall. But once your eyes are just, you can see enough to work.
I grabbed my coffee thermos, walked down the ramp on foot to the loader, which was about
a three minute walk, and climbed in. Check the fuel, just over a half tank, checked the
oil pressure, and there were no obvious leaks. I did all my normal checks, then I turned
the key. The diesel caught real quick, then settled into that low rumble that you can feel
in your spine. I flipped on all the work lights. Two forward head lights, two back at lights.
A couple on the rear pillars. Between that and the tower above, the bottom of the pick
glowed a bright yellow white. It was just me, one machine, and five or six scattered piles
of junk and garbage. The first tower was routine. I took the loader around the bottom, keeping
to a slow pace. You don't want to run fast in a place like that. The ground is uneven,
and the last thing you want is to pop a tire on some rebar or scrap, or to tip your loader.
Up by the base of the ramp there was a pile of demolition debris, broken cinder block,
simbusted two by fours, and ripped up carpet. I took a few passes scooping bucket fools and
pushing them away from the ramp, knocking down any tall points.
Next was a pile of mixed household junk, couches with the guts filling out. I refrigerated
the smell bad when the bucket knocked it over, and black trash bags full of, well who knows
what, just the standard stuff. But the third pile, that's where things changed.
At a glance it looked like more demolition trash, blue tarp over the top, some broken pallets.
When I dropped the bucket edge and bit into it, the tarp ripped, and a different smell hit
me in the cab. Rodding meat, very strong. The kind of smell you get if a deer carcass sits
in a ditch in the sun for a few days. It came through the clothes vents, and it hit the
back of my throat, even with the window shut. I backed off a second, and took a closer look
in the loader lights. Under the tarp there were a lot of plastic tubs and trash bags. Some
had split open. Inside I saw shapes wrapped in clear plastic. Lems and torsos, all bloated,
pale and gray. There were at least half a dozen, maybe more. It looked like either road-killed
deer or if that somebody had been storing or some butcher's shop waste, and it was all
dumped together. It was some kind of meat load that had been sitting somewhere far too long.
I didn't like the smell, but my job wasn't to judge the cargo. My instructions were to
push everything down, spread it out, same as the rest. So I sucked it up, and went back
in with the bucket, trying to break that pile down fast. Every scoop of the bucket dug up
more of that sweet, stinking rotten smell. It came in waves as I lifted and curled and pushed.
I put several bucket loads toward the far corner by the water, trying to get that stuff as
far from the ramp and my working area as I could. I kept moving though, focused on the job,
but that awful smell settled into everything. After I'd knocked the worst of the meat pile
down, I backed the loader away and killed the bucket lights for a second. I wanted to let
the engine idle and cooled down a bit, and that smell had had my head pounding. With the
bucket lights off, the only illumination was the tower overhead, and the two upper headlights
on the loader. The bowl went dimmer, shadows deepened under the ledges. My ears adjusted
to the quieter engine note, and that's when I heard the first rock fall. Sound came from
the upper rim on the opposite side of the pit from the ramp. A clatter of loose rock,
a heavier thud, then silence. In a quarry, that's not unusual. You will get small rock
falls now and then, especially after a frost. I kept one hand on the steering wheel and
listened. Nothing followed. No echo, no second slide. Then from a little further left along
the rim, I heard something else. Two deep thudding impacts pretty close together. It didn't
sound like rock on rock this time, not a rock fall, I mean. It was more like something
heavy stepping on loose stones, and then jumping to bare rock. It was a subtle, but distinct
difference in the sound. I leaned forward, looking up at the rim. The light tower threw
its beam down into the bowl, not up onto the lip, so the very top was mostly just a black
outline, with a little spill catching the first few feet of the slope. For a moment, I
thought I saw movement in that boundary between light and dark. A darker shape up against
the rock. I told myself it was just tree shadows, or my eyes were just adjusting. I clicked
the bucket lights back on, swung the machine around, and went back to work on a different pile
closer to the ramp, partly to put some distance between me and that meat load. The loader's
engine note rose. The bucket clanked, the hydraulics hissed. They were all familiar sounds,
and that calmed me down some. I was midway through, pushing a line of broken drywall toward
the center, when I heard another clatter from above, but this time from behind me. The sound
made me stop dead, bucket down. I put the loader in neutral and lifted my foot off the
pedals. Behind me, up on the slope near the light tower, something rolled down the first
few feet, and then hit the bench below with a muffled thump. Then I heard it, footsteps,
distinct from falling rock. They were heavy, and measured steps on rock and dirt. That wasn't
a deer, and it wasn't some kind of other small animal. This was big and heavy. I turned
in the seat and peered through the rear glass. The rear work lights throw a decent beam,
but there are blind spots. For a few seconds I saw nothing. Then a shape moved across the
top of one of the benches. A dark, upright shape, cutting across a lighter patch of rock, just
inside the spill of the tower lights. It moved, left to right, then disappeared behind
a projection of wall. From that first glance, here's what I can tell you. It was tall,
on two legs, and it moved with the smooth, balanced gate of something comfortable on that
kind of terrain. It wasn't hunched over like a man climbing, and it wasn't looping like
a bear. I sat there with my hand on the gear lever, staring, waiting for it to come back
and to view. The loader's engine idled rough and loud in the cab. But nothing else moved.
So I told myself, "Man, you're just tired. You've been staring into the work lights for
over an hour, and the shadows are playing tricks on you." I told myself. I hadn't really
seen anything, and I almost believed it. I went back to work, trying to get back into the
rhythm, reminding myself at the hundreds and hundreds of nights that I've been out here
alone in the dark and have never seen anyone or anything. But from that point on, I just
couldn't shake the feeling that I wasn't the only thing moving around in that pit. About
twenty minutes later, I went back toward the far corner where I'd pushed the meat pile.
I wanted to flatten those mounds a little more, get them spread so nothing tall stuck up.
And by then, the smell had softened some, or maybe I was getting used to it. Either way,
I eased the loader in, bucket-low, work lights all on. The beams cut across the half-spread
carcasses, glinting on plastic and raw bone. I dropped the bucket and started a push. Half
way through that pass, with the loader pointed directly into that corner, and the engine under
load. I felt a hiccup. Just a momentary stumble in the motor. But I felt it.
"Oh, come on," I said out loud. And I eased off the throttle just a hair. Another few feet,
and another stumble in the engine. This time much worse. And then, with no further warning,
the engine died. The dashlights stayed on. The hydraulics froze where they were. The cab
went from loud to dead quiet, except for the wine of wine down, and the faint click of
relays. Then, complete silence. No engine, no fan, no hydraulics. Just me in a glass and
steel cage, surrounded by mounds of rotten meat, and crushed junk at the bottom of a quarry.
The work lights also went out with the engine. Only the tower beam above remained, shining
down at an angle. It still lit the pit, but my immediate area went almost dark. I could
see light shapes, but no detail. I tried the key again. The starter engaged, and the engine
turned over three or four times, then cuffed and failed. I sat back and decided to wait
30 seconds, maybe a minute. Then I tried again, and got the same result. Now diesel will do
that sometimes if you've got fuel issues or air in the lines. But I'd had no warning,
really. No sputter before the final ones. No low fuel light. This, though, felt like something
else. Maybe something electrical. I found my radio on the seat beside me, and keyed up to
the guy who was supposed to be up there in a pickup truck by the gate, waiting in case
I needed something. But all I got was static. Now I knew the quarry walls weren't blocking
me because I'd been able to use the radio many other nights. I suspected that once again
he had the volume on the radio turned all the way down because he was watching videos
on his phone again. I was reaching for the mic again. When something hit the button,
I felt like a bucket. I don't mean it was like a collision. It felt more like a very hard
shove. It made a dull low sound through the frame. The loader rocked a half inch in front
of me. I froze hand hovering in mid-air. Something on the other side of that bucket was in
contact with it. The bucket was down, the cutting edge resting on the ground. The front
of the loader, including the bucket in front tires, was pointed into the corner where the
wall curved and the meat pile spread out. The light towers being reached that area enough
to give me a usable view, though not as bright as my work lights would have been. In that
wash of light, on the pile directly in front of the bucket, something stepped up. I watched
a leg emerge from behind the bucket's right corner, knee bent, foot placing itself on the
crushed trash. It was bare, dark, and larger than any human foot I've ever seen. The toes
played slightly as it took weight. The hair grew down to the ankle, then thinned out around
the foot itself. Then the rest of it came around into view. It stepped up onto the trash
mound in front of my machine and stood there, part sideways, turned toward the loader cab.
The tower light from above and behind me struck it from the front right, lighting the entire
figure from head to toe. From my seat, through the angled front glass, I saw it clearly.
I put it at around seven and a half to eight feet. It stood taller than the top of the
bucket arms, and about level with the top of the loader cab roof. And the shoulders and the
chest, they were something else too. Massive, muscular. The whole upper body was shaped like
a big thick oil drum. There was no gym built leaners to that build. The limbs were proportionately
long and thick as well. It was like someone took a Mac truck, covered it in dark hair, and
somehow made it stand on two feet. The hair was everywhere long without looking shaggy.
I saw the head in the way it sat down on the shoulders, and I then had an idea for sure of
what was out there. There's not much in this world that has said to stand on two feet.
Have hair everywhere. Is that big and tall? And they say has little to no neck, like what I was seeing.
With the lighting coming down in the shadows cast, I could only see the space where the face
surely was. I could see the highlight of a jawline in the light, and I knew where the eyes were.
But everything else looked strong, wrong, exaggerated, you know? But then it turned its head just a bit,
and I caught a tiny reflection of light from one eye, just a dull flash, but enough that I knew this
was real. It was dark, and the light was playing shadows around me everywhere. But I had no doubt then,
and I have no doubt now as to what was standing there. It was maybe 12 or 13 feet from the front of my
cab, and it was looking directly at me. The expression, if you want to call it that, wasn't what I would call
aggressive. It seemed focused, maybe studying is a better word. It shifted its weight once, and in that
motion I could see the muscles move under the hair. I saw the thigh flexing, the calf tensing, and the
skin bunching slightly over the knee. Then it stepped down off the pile out of my direct line of sight.
For the next 30 to 40 minutes, that's my best estimate, though it sure felt longer.
During that time, it moved around my loader, and the trash piles in a slow, deliberate pattern.
I didn't see it the whole time. Sometimes it would disappear behind piles, or into deeper shadow.
I tracked it by sound then. The cruncher broke in drywall. The crack of a palette underfoot,
plastic tearing. Sometimes I didn't hear anything for several minutes, but I still knew it was out there.
When it was out of sight, I sat perfectly still in the dark cab, the engine dead, one hand on the
key, and the other on the seat beside me, and I was trying not to breathe too loud. I kept
keying the mic on the radio, but the guy up top never answered. Every so often, it would step back
into the light somewhere that I could see it, and it would stop, and pointedly look in my direction.
I wasn't sure if it was making sure I was still there, or letting me know that it was still there.
Maybe it was doing both. The whole time I remember thinking, this is not really happening. No,
any second, a bunch of guys are going to come out, busting their guts, laughing at me.
But that never happened. At one point, it was on the left side, it the loader, between me and the pool
of water. It moved through my side window's arch of view, close enough that I could see the texture of
the hair on its forearms, and the way the water glistened on its feet, where it had just walked through
the shallow part of the pool. It bent over one of the trash bags from the meat load, gripped it with
both hands, and ripped it open in one clean pool. That plastic parted like wet tissue. A lump of meat
wrapped in clear plastic rolled out. It bent over, picked that up, examined it briefly, then set it
back down and moved on to the next piece. There was no frantic tearing, no frenzy like hogs at a
carcass. It was very methodical and very deliberate as it went through the piles. It seemed to be
sampling and testing the piles more than actually feeding. At one point, it came to the rear
ladder of my cab once. I heard the metal creek. I did not turn around. I sat there
frozen, staring dead ahead, watching the dim circle of light on the rock wall. I heard the squeak
in the flex of the metal as more weight came on top of the ladder. Then eased off. The cab door latch
sat inches from my left elbow. It never tried it, thankfully. The closest and the worst was when it came
to right in front of the cab. I was watching the meat pile corner again, trying the key every few minutes.
The engine would crank a couple of times, and it would almost catch, then immediately die.
I knew that each attempt was a risk. There was noise, vibration. But staying there indefinitely
wasn't an option. I had just let go of the key, and silence had fallen again when a shadow blotted
out the light on the front glass. I looked up, and I saw nothing but a dark shape pressed up to
the windshield. For a second, my brain didn't want to acknowledge what it was. Then it leaned back,
just enough for the tower light to catch it. It was staining on the pile directly in front of the
loader again, but this time it was closer. Leamed forward, one hand flat on the top edge of the bucket,
the other resting on the front frame just below the windshield.
You had its face maybe two feet from the glass, angled slightly, so one eye in the
bridge of the nose were in clear profile. From that distance I saw more than I really wanted to see.
I could see that the face had a lot less hair on it than it had everywhere else.
The hairline along the cheeks was irregular. I saw cracks at the corner of its eyes.
The bridge of the nose had a slight bump, like it had been broken sometime in the past.
There was a scar along one side of the upper lip. It was faint, but it was large. It was a lighter
line through all the darker skin than very noticeable. All of that told me one thing, age and where,
that this was not a young creature. This big foot, or whatever it was, had been around long enough
to get hurt and heal, probably more than once. It tilted its head of fraction to the side,
like a person trying to see around the glare on a window. The eye nearest to me tracked
left to right, taking in the full cab interior. I dropped my gaze without meaning to.
Some part of me did not want to make direct eye contact.
And we stayed like that for maybe three or four seconds. I know that doesn't sound like much,
but it felt like such a long time. Then it suddenly withdrew, stepping back down off the trash pile.
The loader's suspension bounced to fraction as the weight shifted away, and suddenly I could see
outside the cab again. I knew I couldn't start the loader with that thing standing on the bucket frame.
If the engine kicked over suddenly and the lights came on right in its face, well, I had no idea
how it would react. Once it moved away to the left again, ripping into a different pile,
I then decided it was time to gamble once more on my machine. I waited until I couldn't see it
through any of the windows, just heard it on the periphery. Then I turned the key, set a prayer,
and held my breath. The starter grabbed. The engine turned over slow once, twice, then finally caught,
coughing, coming to life, and then settling into a rough, but steady idle.
The work lights came back on at once, blasting the pit with bright white.
I immediately throttled down to keep the noise lower, but any hope of being subtle was out the window.
The loader was loud again, and the lights left me exposed. I scanned all arcs of view.
For a few seconds, nothing moved out there except dust moats.
Then from the corner by the water, I saw it again. It was mid-strived, walking away from the meat pile
toward the base of the wall. It wasn't running, but it was making a fast and steady exit from the area.
I put my loader in reverse, lifted the bucket just enough to clear the ground, then backed out of that
corner as smooth and steady as I could, my eyes flicking between mirrors and windows.
I did not try to knock down any more piles. Far as I was concerned, my job was done for the night.
At the midpoint of the pit, I swung the loader into a wide turn and lined up with the ramp.
As I started up, I chanced a glance in the side mirror.
Down in the glow of the tower light at the bottom. The big figures stood there again.
Now between two piles, it was turned and watching me go. It looked much smaller at that distance,
but that shape, it was unmistakable. It stood there until the loader crusted the first turn,
and then I lost sight of it down on the floor. At the top, I parked the loader over by the container,
shut it down and walked over to the light tower. Before I killed the generator, I took one last
look down into the quarry. The bottom was lit. The piles casting shadows like low hills.
At the far edge of the light, near where the ramp met the upper bench, I saw a dark figure step
up onto the ramp road and stopped. It stood there, just inside the edge of the beam,
facing up toward me. I couldn't make out details at that distance, but the outline was the same,
tall, wide, and long armed. I shut off the tower lights. Everything below dropped into black.
I didn't wait any longer than it took for me to crank up my pickup truck. I drove out,
not bothering to close the gate behind me, and I didn't look back. I sped past the goober in his
truck. I saw his head was down. I could tell from the glow of his phone lighting him up. He was
watching videos. Now, normally, I stop and let him know that I'm done, but I figured screw him.
His whole purpose in being there is in case something happens to me. Maybe the loader tips over.
Maybe I have a heart attack or some other accident. Whatever happens, someone is up top to help or
call emergency services. And he couldn't bother to answer the radio when I really needed him.
The first time ever that I needed someone in the middle of the night. So screw that guy.
I tore past him and flipped him the bird. Not that he saw it. He looked up way too late as I passed,
but I didn't care. I did not have to go back to that quarry for three weeks. The schedule just
worked out that way. Now, during those three weeks, I had a long talk with myself about whether or not
I'd go back down into that hole at night. But the thing is, there were ex-wives and there's
child support and some other debt. They all told me I was getting my butt back in that loader and
going back down in that hole at night. The pay was too good not to, and I needed it. I did eventually
tell a co-worker. I told him everything that happened. And I'm talking about a guy who's been in this
business way longer than me. He listened all the way through, nodded, then said, "You know,
you're not the first one to see something down in that hole at night." And he left it at that.
If this were one of those BFRO reports, I'd call it a classic, extended duration siding at close
range. For me personally, all I'm going to say is I had a very bad time, trapped in a metal box with a
dead engine and no one answering the radio. And something that I know was a big foot of some kind
of variety was out there walking around in the hole that I was supposed to be leveling out. I was stuck
as it mosey to about doing whatever it wanted. Now, I have not seen anything down there in that hole
again, but I also haven't had another load of rotting meat either. And I hope I don't.
Oh, side note, I reamed the guy in the truck up top that didn't answer his radio. I reamed him out
good. I told him I had been sitting down there with a cut-off engine for a long time. I made the whole
situation sound much worse than it really was. I just didn't add in the big foot. I told him if he
didn't ever answer that radio again when I'm down there, I would put everything I learned about
boxing from the United States Navy to good use on him. He finally admitted that he had turned down the
radio because he was watching funny videos on YouTube and wanted to hear them. Oh, what irony, YouTube.
And where did I send this? I hope no one's neglecting their work listening to this.
You can call me Rick from Indiana. Well, I have to say, if you ever find yourself in a dark hole
like that and there's something big out there walking around, well, you better hope someone does answer
that radio and listen up. If you're out there listening and you're supposed to be listening for
someone who might need help as in the radio, turn that radio up. Go ahead and turn on the closed
captioning on the YouTube videos, but you answer that call. Well, Sasquad, that is all I have for you
tonight. Until we meet up again, be sure to keep your radio turned up and keep watching the shadows.
And always remember absence of proof is not proof of absence. Thanks for listening.
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