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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/BoxGoblin on 2024-11-13 01:03:45+00:00.

I ran a successful true-crime podcast called Eidolon. It covered missing-person cases, from legendary stories on Amelia Earhart to relatively unknown cases from the recent news. Recently, I told my 100K plus followers that I was stepping away to focus on other projects, namely my day job as an audio engineer. I told my friends that I was taking a mental health break. All the interviews with grieving parents, friends, and lovers with no closure had chipped away at my soul. I needed to reset, rediscover the beauty in this world, to forget the darkness that lurks beneath its surface.  

But the main reason I shuttered Eidolon, the reason I deleted all my audio files and contact sheets, the reason I promised myself I would never touch the true-crime genre again was due to one person: CharnelSam. According to his scant Patreon profile, Sam was located somewhere in the U.S. and had plenty of discretionary income, donating to various true-crime podcasts via the site. But he gave the most money to mine, having donated over $5,000 to Eidolon for the past two years, usually through regular $200 payments. CharnelSam was my biggest fan. 

My online conversations with Sam were brief and professional. I sent him a nice, personalized “Thank You” message each time he donated and would announce his username at the top of my credits after each episode. Most of the time, my messages went unanswered. But on occasion, he would respond with a single cryptic sentence. It was always the same: 

“Light floods the grateful frame, catching moments gifted by time.”

I had no idea what that meant or what it had to do with my podcast. It might have been part of his online signature, perhaps some famous quote missing an attribution. But if that were the case, why only send the attribution and not an actual message? I never thought much about it. I was just happy to receive such large and consistent donations. If Charnel Sam wanted to send me a cryptic quote now and then, he was more than welcome to do it. But everything changed a few weeks ago when I received this:

Hey Brian. I have some information that I think could help solve the Bertrand Hikers Mystery. 

I’d recently re-aired an episode on the Bertrand Hikers, two teenage girls who mysteriously vanished while hiking in the Bertrand Nature Preserve in northwestern Georgia, an area not far from my home in the Atlanta suburbs. The case was one of my most popular stories and the main one that launched my podcast. The disappearance of Heather Simmons and Alisha Gundersen is one of those local legends that everyone I grew up with knew about but never received much national attention. As such, it was a relatively unknown missing-person case when I recorded my first podcast episode on it. Though the girls were teenagers, they were not the attractive, white, blonde teens that received most of the media’s attention. Heather was slightly overweight for her age, with lots of bushy curly hair. The popular girls at her school picked on her, calling her Shamu. Alisha was pretty but still an outsider in the small town of Bertrand. She was biracial with a white Norwegian father and a Nigerian mother. Her family had recently moved to America from Bergen, Norway, and she spoke broken English. There were kids at school who jokingly referred to her as a dark elf. 

Both girls were 16 at the time of their disappearance. They became friends at Bertrand High, where they shared a homeroom. They played soccer and loved bands like Nirvana and The Smashing Pumpkins. They stayed up late watching John Carpenter movies and binging on popcorn and Kit Kats. They got straight A’s in all their classes. They dressed up as Beetlejuice and Catwoman for Halloween one year. They were inseparable. Alisha was planning to go to Harvard Med and become a dentist when she grew up, and Heather wanted to be a wildlife photographer for National Geographic. More on that later. They weren’t popular at school, but they had loving families, and they always had each other. 

On October 17th, 1998, Heather and Alisha biked from their homes to the Bertrand Nature Preserve, a massive park covering 80 square miles of dense forest that blanketed the low-lying mountains of the Appalachian Foothills. Witnesses at the visitor center saw them arrive around noon that Saturday. They’d told their parents they were just going for a short hike up to Bald Head Rock, a scenic lookout about three miles from the parking lot where they’d chained up their bikes. Tons of people hiked the trail on the weekends, and the girls were planning to be home well before nightfall. In fact, Heather and Alisha were planning to see the movie Practical Magic with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman later that night at 8:00 pm. 

But 8:00 pm came and went, and the girls’ bikes remained untouched in the parking lot. No one had seen them. No one had heard from them. By then, Heather and Alisha’s parents were frantic. They’d already called 911, and a couple of officers had gone out to the Bertrand Nature Preserve to search for the missing teens. All they found were the bikes, still chained up outside the nature center.  

Over the following weeks, a huge search party combed the mountains. Hundreds of volunteers and SAR personnel checked behind every tree, looked within every bush, and turned over every rock, searching for clues. They found nothing!

Eventually, the news reports stopped. The missing posters on telephone polls and outside shops started to fade, fall off, or were even pasted over with fliers advertising local bands or politicians running for upcoming elections. As sad as it was, the case would’ve disappeared into total obscurity were it not for a strange discovery almost two years later.

In 2000, a local Boy Scout troop was camping in the Bertrand Preserve when one of the kids stumbled upon a rusted single-lens reflex (SLR) camera half-buried in the dirt near their campsite. He didn’t know it then, but the boy had just discovered Heather’s most prized possession. She’d taken the camera with her on that fateful day in October two years prior.

When the authorities developed the camera’s film roll, they uncovered a breakdown of that day’s events. The first half of the pictures are known colloquially as The Day Shots. These pictures were all timestamped on October 17th, 1998, likely taken over two to three hours while the girls were on their hike. The photos showed squirrels scurrying among the canopy, alien-like mushrooms growing on the moist ground, and various angles of Alisha hiking up to Bald Head Rock. There were shots of Alisha silhouetted against the afternoon sun and others showing her disappearing into an endless forest. Heather had a good eye for composition, and she knew how to make the most of natural lighting. It’s sad looking at the Day Shots now because you can see the raw talent of a burgeoning artist finding her voice. She would’ve made a great photographer had she come home that day. 

Another thing people noticed was the way Heather captured Alisha’s beauty in the photos, the way she brought out her best friend’s hazel-green eyes, and accentuated her sharp facial bone structure using a juxtaposition of light and shadow. There was already speculation among their classmates that Heather had a crush on Alisha. Some even believed they were a couple, though Alisha had many boyfriends in high school, and there was no evidence the two girls had ever hooked up. Some speculated that Heather may have killed Alisha after she’d rejected Heather’s advances, and then Heather killed herself. But there was no evidence of this from eyewitnesses or the photos themselves.  

What was clear from The Day Shots was that both girls had a zest for life. They were having fun and goofing off. There were even some forced-perspective photos of Heather and Alisha pretending to eat a downed tree. These pictures contradicted one of the authorities’ early theories regarding the girls’ disappearance: that they might have taken their own lives due to depression. It was a reasonable theory, given that both girls were bullied at school and had no real friends outside of each other. But they never left a note, and neither their parents nor their classmates felt they were depressed. 

What really got the authority’s attention was a second set of photos on the roll. They called them–

The Night Shots. 

These photos were timestamped on October 31st, 1998, a full two weeks after the girls were reported missing. They were taken in the middle of the night with a camera flash for 30 minutes. Creepiest of all was the subject matter. The Night Shots were almost entirely random images of the forest: tree limbs, bushes, rocks. There were no signs of civilization in them, just endless darkness beyond the foliage caught in the camera flash. Many of the pictures were out of focus, showing random green and black blurs. The most famous photo was a close-up of what appeared to be the back of Heather’s head. Her curly hair filled the frame. Amongst those bushy strands was a dark red streak: BLOOD. 

The photos on Heather’s camera were never officially released to the public. They remained sealed in evidence until sometime in the late 2000s, possibly ’08 or ’09. That’s when someone leaked them to a now-defunct true crime forum called Missing Inc, and they eventually found their way to Reddit. Once people saw the photos online, the Bertrand Hikers c…

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