r/Appalachia

In a noisy, refrigerated room, Chase Meeks checked a customer’s order before breaking down a large piece of beef. He’s the lead meat-processor and manager of a family-owned butcher shop near Shade in southeast Ohio, appropriately named The Local Butcher.

In Ohio, 17,000 family farms raise beef cattle. But butcher shops are much smaller in number: Across the state there are only around 300 meat processing businesses. Neither Athens nor Meigs county had a butcher until Chase’s family moved their business here from Gallipolis in 2021.

My brother, Kevin (not his real name, I am trying to keep some anonymity), has always been outdoorsy. Growing up, he would wander off into the woods behind my parent’s property and stay out there for hours. He said that being out in nature brought him a lot of peace.

A few months ago, things kind of spiraled for him. He lost his girlfriend, his job, and his apartment within six weeks. He ended up moving back home with me and my parents to try and get back on his feet. It was hard to see him like that, I mean he was never someone I would describe as an eternal optimist, but that little spark he always had was gone. This past spring, I found him sitting at the kitchen table in the middle of the night, he was picking apart a piece of cold pizza, and it was the first time I had seen him almost eat something in days.

I told him maybe he should get back out into nature, take some hikes, or maybe do a solo camping weekend. I said that I had noticed he had seemed down lately and maybe being out in the world could help me get back to himself. In the moment I wasn’t sure if he was really hearing me, but he took a bite of pizza, squeezed my hand, said he loved me and went back to his bedroom.

The next morning, he announced to my parents he was going to hike the Appalachian Trail. My mom was hesitant, but Kevin told her that he knew enough about himself to know that sitting at home in his room, was causing more stress than if he could go out and just be in the place that made him feel most at ease. My dad just said that as long as Kev checked in every few days or so, he didn’t see a problem with it. My dad pointed out that it wasn’t like Kevin didn’t have the experience, he was a Boy Scout turned Eagle Scout turned camping enthusiast.

“People do that hike all the time, Kathleen. If it were dangerous no one would be bragging about it.” I remember him saying those words exactly, I don’t know why they stuck in my head the way they did, but maybe it was the way Kevin seemed to brighten up a little bit after my dad gave his blessing in a sort of round about way.

The next two weeks were spent helping my brother pack what he would need, registering his hike, and buying a plane ticket to Georgia, where he would start his trip. The night he left, our mom was a mess. She kept fussing over him as if he wasn’t a full-grown man, she kept asking him if he had everything he needed, and he just kept assuring her he did and would check in with us once he got to trail head. Looking back now, he seemed genuinely excited, if I had known what would happen, I would never let him leave.

My brother called like he said he would, just as he was beginning his trip. He even sent a photo in our family group chat, that showed him up against a backdrop of purple blue mountains and lush greenery. He had a thumbs up, and his signature slightly off-center smirk. He wrote, “Finally made it. Love you guys, talk when I get better reception.”

Over the next few days Kevin would send a photo or video, usually of his surroundings but occasionally he would send a selfie with the caption “Proof of Life”. But as the days wore on, we stopped getting updates as frequently. What was a text at least once a day, became a text once every three or four days. My dad blamed it on spotty cell reception which made sense, and it wasn’t as if the messages stopped all together and from what I could piece together from his photos and short text bursts he was making good time.

It was around a month and a half into his trip when we realized it had been almost two weeks without any communication from Kevin. We called the authorities, we gave them all the information that we had but based on what we knew it was hard to say he was even missing. As far as the police were concerned, he had gone off grid with the intent of going off grid, sending out search and rescue would cost thousands of dollars and it could be a waste of resources, especially if there was someone else who needed it.

They said they would put a notice out to the Ridgerunners and if they saw Kevin, they were told to tell him to contact us. My mom was furious, but I couldn’t necessarily blame the cops for their response. We had no evidence to support that Kev was anything but content out in the wilderness. A few days later a text came through, just a photo of sunset and the words “Everything is okay here.”

That began the new normal of communication with my brother, there would be long stretches of time where we would hear nothing, just long enough for my mother to start panicking and then we would get a blurry photo and a generic caption like, “Look what I saw today.” Or “Wish you were here.” One night, while going through the photos he had sent, I realized in the background of every shot from before we had called the police, was a black smudge. It was too blurry to properly make it out, and it didn’t seem to be an animal, or something caught moving in the camera lens. But after the first photo he had sent after we thought he was missing, the smudge was gone.

Kevin came home earlier than expected, he also hadn’t told anyone his plans. One night during dinner, there was a loud sharp knock at the door. My dad got up to answer it and there was Kevin. His hair was long and stringy, he had grown a patchy beard over his cheeks and jaw. His lips were dry and cracked, and his gums were coated in a dried layer of blood. He was rail thin, he had lost at least thirty pounds, and he wasn’t a large man to begin with. His clothes were filthy, caked in mud and debris, and his shores looked like they had been worn thin at the sole.

My mother made a sound almost like a yelp and rushed over to him. The smell coming off him made me gag, it smelled like he had smeared rotting meat under his armpits. My dad just looked at him in shock. When he finally spoke, his voice was dry and raspy as if he hadn’t used it in weeks.

“Mom.” That was all he could say before he practically collapsed in her arms.

I won’t bore you guys with everything that happened after that, there was a lot of hugging, some tears and then a very, very long shower, but something didn’t feel right. Kev went to bed pretty much immediately after, he barely even looked at us. The next morning, he ate breakfast with a ferocity that made my skin crawl. He was gulping down huge mouthfuls of food, barely stopping to breath. My mom just kept piling his plate with bacon, eggs, and toast. He stopped only after he had consumed a whole loaf of bread, two packages of bacon and nearly two dozen eggs.

I tried to ask him about the trip, tried to get him to say anything at all really, but all I got were grunts and “uh-huhs” before he lumbered back off to his bedroom. The next few days were more of the same, Kev eating an insane amount of food, sleeping for hours, and then mumbling his way through conversations. It took about a week for him to start communicating like a human being again, but even then it was stilted, awkward, unnatural.

He's been home for almost a month now and something isn’t right. His voice, it changed somehow? It’s still his voice but it’s like there is a second voice buried underneath it, like someone is trying to harmonize while he speaks? He lumbers around the house, like his knees are locked in place, but he refuses to go to the doctors. The worst part is the smell; it still won’t go away. No matter how often or how long he showers he still reeks like death. I could have maybe ignored all of this, maybe blame it on being isolated in the woods for weeks, but after what happened tonight…

I couldn’t sleep, that feeling of fear in my stomach I felt ever since he’s been back hasn’t gone away and honestly, it keeps me up most nights. I was trying to will myself to sleep when I heard the back door creak open. I crept out of my bedroom and down the hall, from my viewpoint I could see into the kitchen through the window into the backyard.

I saw my brother, perched on his hands and knees. He was twitching wildly, like every muscle in his neck and head were spasming. He widened his stance and thrashed his head towards the ground and out of my line of sight. I was worried that maybe he was having some kind of seizure, so I ran out to check on him and that when I saw it. His head was buried deep into the carcass of one of our neighbors’ cats. He was chomping down on its tiny body, blood oozing out between the gaps in his teeth. The thing had clearly been dead for at least a day or so, its body bloated and its eyes were dull and hazy. Kevin reached inside the cat’s body and started to strip off pieces of muscle and tendon, slurping them up the same way he had been eating our mother’s cooking. Pressing his thumb into the thing’s skull, he popped out one of its eyes and tossed it back like a grape.

I ran; I ran back into the house and locked the door behind me. I was about to run back to my bedroom when that smell hit me, that horrible death stench that had been wafting around my brother. I opened the door to his room and inched a few feet inside. Wrapped in his bedding were the decaying bodies of twenty or so animals. Rabbits, mice, squirrels. I tried to run to my parent’s room, to wake them up, to tell the, that we needed to call…someone? As I turned around, I saw Kevin in the kitchen window, his body drenched in blood, he was eyeing me through the glass, his head tilted at an angle that shouldn’t be possible. The vertebrae in his neck strained underneath his skin. He lunged at the window and I screamed

My parents woke up then, they found me in the hallway, sobbing, sweating, shaking with fear. I told them what I saw, and my dad rushed outside to try and…well…I don’t know exactly what he was trying to do but it didn’t matter, my brother was gone. We called the police and they said it sounded like my brother had had some sort of mental crisis. Maybe he had picked up some kind of parasite in the woods that was impacting his brain chemistry.

I know they’re wrong though. Whatever that thing is, it is not my brother. My brother left for the Appalachian Trail and never came back. I think whatever that black smudge was in those photos was something that hunted him, and I think it was successful. Whatever that thing was killed my brother and somehow his body came back home. My brother disappeared but I am terrified he will come back.