Episode 3: What Did You See?

November 25, 2019·36 min·3 clips

Amy describes a creature with taloned claws, patchy gray fur, and solid black eyes she encountered in the cave.

The episode opens with Graham Anderson addressing online discussion about comments Buddha Klein made on his and Amy's podcast, Armchair Treasure Hunter. Some listeners believe the comments suggest the entire disappearance was staged as a hoax. Graham counters that Buddha and Amy were habitually sarcastic and presents other absurd claims they made on air as context. Graham then introduces a new figure: Doug Funny, a man Buddha and Amy encountered in the wilderness during their treasure hunt. Graham provides background on a Reddit user called DougFunny2, who in 2015 created a subreddit called Finding Doug Funny for treasure hunters, which was later completely deleted with no explanation. Buddha believed the hiker they encountered was the same person. Doug is described as resembling BTK killer Dennis Rader — a regular suburban type with an unsettling vibe. Around the campfire that night, Doug tells Buddha and Amy about wilderness folklore: hide-behinds, stick Indians, and man o' woods — beings that follow you just out of sight. He then dismisses these as logger superstition before joking that the only defense is alcohol. Amy is immediately suspicious of Doug, while Buddha is energized by meeting another treasure hunter. No recording survives of the rest of Doug's conversation that night, leaving Amy as the sole source for what follows. Amy then recounts the night they followed Doug to a cave. Inside, she heard Buddha calling from deeper in the cave but never got closer despite walking toward his voice. At the far end of the cave she turned back, and his voice began sounding panicked. Turning around, she encountered a creature: tall and stretched with too-long limbs, twisted taloned hands, patchy dark grayish fur, pale gray skin with white splotches, solid black eyes, and a mouth of teeth and tongue that smelled of decay. She ran toward the cave entrance and heard Buddha's voice outside telling her to run. Emerging from the cave into the rain, she eventually followed lights through the forest to a clearing where she found both backpacks on the ground before a flash of blue. After the cave sequence, the episode includes a listener voicemail from a woman who believes Buddha was abducted by aliens and that Amy's memory was wiped. Another caller, Greg, who knew Buddha and Amy from the Austin comedy scene, claims Buddha once outlined a scheme to fake an alien abduction at a party. Finally, an anonymous caller identifying himself as a former intelligence officer claims he was involved in the 1965 Kecksburg, Pennsylvania incident — the crash and retrieval of an unidentified object — and that innocent people like Buddha were harmed as a result.

As heard by us

A ghost story that keeps testing legend against the tape.

The Subjective Truth folds a hide-behind legend, a half-heard tape, and the tension around Buddha and Amy into a grim little knot. It works because the serialized-fiction tone stays steady: the folklore feels rooted in logger chatter, yet the mystery is allowed room to breathe.

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Why you'd press play

You get a missing-tape paranormal mystery wrapped in a hide-behind legend and uneasy banter.

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