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This is the first transcript of the new season. I'm going to be uploading the written transcripts for each episode of season 2 here for those who would like to read them. Opening The year is 1889. You’re sitting around a campfire after a long day of logging. The sweat has finally dried off your brow and the smell of smoke and beans fills the air. You’ve only been on the job for a few weeks, having moved to northern Wisconsin to escape the city life that had become too busy to bear. Lost in your own thoughts, you don’t even notice when someone new joins the circle sitting around your fire. The sound of a match striking pulls you into the moment and you look up to see the man lighting a cigarette, tossing the used match into the fire as he looks over at you. “So, you’re the new kid, eh?” “Yeah.” “The kid from New York?” You nod and look back at the fire. “Hopefully you’ll last longer than the last greenhorn we had. I could smell his momma’s milk pouring off him. Just try not to get yourself killed and keep an eye out for the hodag.” You perk up. “Hodag?” “A terrible beast. Long, sharp claws like a lion. Horns like a bull. Its tail is enough to make the ground quake and it loves fresh meat. It’s got spike all down its back, and it’d just as soon kill ya as look at ya. Just don’t wander off alone after dark in these parts.” That’s how the story of the hodag started. A tale told around the campfire at logging camps in the 19th century. But if not for one man in the 1890’s, it might stayed as nothing more than a tale, lost to time and forgotten by all but a few. Welcome to season 2 of The Long Way Home. I’m your host, Josh “Bearheart” Hawk, and as we start a new year, I’ve got some amazing things coming your way. If you’ve been listening for a while, you might notice there’s a new format for this season and I’m a little more organized. My goal this year is to give you something to listen to on those dark, lonely nights as you travel down dirt roads in the middle of nowhere or work your way along a desolate freeway. The destination isn’t really important, it’s all about the journey, and the journey is made so much better when you take the long way home. Opening Mile We all love a good legend. Some of the best memories I have of my childhood involve sitting around a fire, or maybe in the living room by the light of a candle as some relative or friend recounted the story of a ghost or monster that supposedly stalked some small town in rural Ohio. My mom used to live by the “Haunted Ohio” book series that Chris Woodyard wrote, using the stories of hauntings to find places to take us on moonlit nights. We’d pile in the Chevy Astro van, alongside one of her friends and their kids, and head off in search of ghosts and demons. But my favorite stories always revolved around monsters. Bigfoot was a personal favorite. The thought of some large, ape-like man walking around the woods and messing with campers was intriguing. I think it was more about the idea that a creature like that would be real, tangible. It wasn’t like ghosts that only showed up in pictures, it was something that I could potentially really run into. As I grew older, I found myself constantly on the lookout for new cryptids to learn about. Whether it was the Loch Ness Monster, Mothman or Ohio’s own version of bigfoot, the grassman, I was hooked on finding these mysterious creatures. Then, as the internet age entered its heyday, some of the legendary creatures I’d sought became a little less real. Questions about the most famous bigfoot video, the Patterson-Gimlin film, were raised and the possibility of that footage being a hoax went mainstream. Faked footprints came out of the woodwork, and bigfoot wasn’t quite so big in my mind. Then there was the famous Loch Ness Monster picture, the one where you could clearly see the head of some animal popping out of the loch in black and white. That turned out to be nothing more than a fraud as well. As sites like YouTube picked up steam, more and more hoaxes took hold. Not only were people finding out about hoaxes from decades prior, they were also actively creating them in the modern day. You couldn’t trust anything you saw online, and before long my hope for any of these amazing monsters being real died. But hoaxes are nothing new. People have been lying about things like monsters and ghosts for centuries, mostly for fame or notoriety, but also aiming for a laugh or two at the expense of their friends or family. And that’s where Eugene Shephard comes in. Eugene was a land surveyor in the 1800’s, making his living helping logging companies to determine what logs they could use on a parcel of land, and what was nothing more than a waste. He was intimately familiar with lumberjacks and their stories, having spent a considerable amount of time in the camps, and he was also a well-known prankster. It was 1893 when Eugene gathered a group of men together and hatched a plan. The story of the hodag was well known to many at the time, though it was really only shared by lumberjacks, and Eugene thought he could have some fun with it. He was apparently somewhat skilled in the art of taxidermy, at least skilled enough to put together a decent facsimile of what a hodag might look like using a log and some parts from a few animals. Gathering some men around his creation, he had several photographs taken as if they had just finished a hunt, with some kind of rather strange creature at the center of the group. The creature was posed on a log, and the men were standing around it with pitchforks and guns pointed as if preparing to finish it off. One of the men is laying down at the feet of the beast, as though he had been slain in the attempt. By modern standards the photo looks rather goofy, but it was enough to capture the attention of the newspapers. The story spread like wildfire, with Mr. Shephard telling anyone who would listen of the brave and daring mission to take down a monster that had been stalking the woods of Wisconsin. There was even a rumor of dynamite being needed to finish the thing off. As much fun as the prank was, the hype eventually died down and things went more or less back to normal for everyone. They’d all had their fun, gotten a few laughs and made the papers, but Eugene wasn’t done. Three years later, in 1896, he would once again grab headlines, this time nationwide, when he reported that he’d caught a hodag alive. The beast was supposedly locked in the shed near his house, caged and secured. He was even offering the public a chance to glimpse the creature for a fee. People came from far and wide, and he told them all how he’d tracked the hodag to its den, sealing it behind some large rocks before going for the help of another group of men. When they had enough help, they doused a sponge in chloroform, attaching it to the end of a pole and easing the pole into a small opening in the den until it was close enough for the fumes to knock the creature unconscious. Removing the rocks, the men loaded the hodag into a wagon and brought it to Eugene’s shed where it was locked away. After telling the captivated crowd this story, he would lead them back and give each person a chance to peer through a hole in the wall and see the monster. The thing would even move about and make noises, seemingly agitated when the crowd grew too loud. As the news traveled around the country, it caught the eye of several in the scientific community and other interested parties who began asking for a closer look. These individuals could only be held at bay for so long, and eventually Eugene had to come clean and admit he’d hoaxed the whole thing. In reality, he’d created another facsimile and enlisted his sons to help make the thing move and add some noises of their own to the mix. While some people were understandably upset at being lied to, the town of Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where Eugene lived, saw the publicity as an opportunity. Over the next few decades, the town would embrace the legend and the hoax, building it into their towns story and eventually erecting a statue of the hodag in front of their visitor center. For Eugene’s part, he would spend the next couple of decades continuing his land surveys and opening a resort in Rhineland before passing away in 1923. Gas Stop It’s kind of funny when you think about how a hoax could be the basis for a booming tourism industry, but that’s exactly what the hodag is. The legend itself was around before Eugene Shephard, but it was kind of a local thing and limited mostly to loggers as one of the many stories they would tell. The legend tied into the story of Paul Bunyon in a way, focusing on an ox. One version involves the ox wandering away from camp, and another tells of what happens when the ox dies. From The Republican, a newspaper based in Wauseon, Ohio, the best story I found on the origins of the hodag was written in the November 15, 1929 edition: “Once upon a time there was an ox which had led an unusually hard life at the hands of his various drivers up in the north woods of Wisconsin. Among lumberjacks it is believed that the hide of an ox is invulnerable to everything but the profanity of its drivers. When the animal dies, its customary burial ceremony is cremation, and it requires seven years of continuous fire to reduce to ashes all the profanity which had accumulated in its body during its lifetime. So when this particular ox died, a brush fire was built around its body and kept going for seven years to obliterate all the curses which had been heaped upon it in English, French, Irish, Scandinavian and German while it had toiled in the lumber camps. At the end of the seventh year the fire was allowed to die down but instead of there being left no trace of the ox, out of the heap of ashes, there rose, phoenix-like, a fearsome creature, such as is pictured above, which exhaled an obnoxious odor and the swish of whose tail made the earth tremble.” That beast wouldn’t be one you’d want to run into in the middle of the woods, day or night. My guess is that the tale itself was probably more of a warning about treating the animals around camp with respect. Oxen, and later on horses, carried a lot of the load in lumber camps, and they needed to be treated right because replacing them was difficult and no man wanted to have to pull logs and equipment around on his own. Well, no man except maybe Paul Bunyon. I mentioned him a minute ago, and while he is only loosely tied to the story of the hodag, he was an idol among lumberjacks. There’s not really any proof he existed as a real person, though it wouldn’t be completely out of the realm of possibility that a large man could have been the basis for the legend. A lot of you out there probably envision someone like a giant when you hear the name Paul Bunyon, but in actuality he was reported to have been closer to 8 feet tall and 300 pounds. While that may be well above average, especially for the mid to late 19th century, the tallest man ever recorded was 8 foot 11 inches tall and someone being over 7 feet tall isn’t really unheard of. But the fun of Paul Bunyon was in the tales of him and his lumber camp. It was said that he ruled with an iron fist over as many as 3000 men at his largest lumber camp. They said his yell broke the branches off trees and he was a heavy smoker, smoking a bushel of tobacco at a time out of a giant pipe. My favorite tale that I found of his camp involved running out of beans. It was the middle of the winter, and the camp was dealing with the biggest snowfall anyone had ever seen. The camp cook braved the cold weather and deep snow alongside a giant blue ox, presumably the same big blue ox known as Paul Bunyon’s side-kick babe, and made his way to the nearest town to get more beans to feed the men. The trip was over 100 miles one way, and they had to cross a frozen river and lake both going and coming back. It was on the trip back when trouble set in, with the spring thaw apparently happening in a matter of hours with the temperature going from well below freezing to nearly a hundred degrees. That dramatic change would have been bad enough, but the cook and the ox just happened to be in the middle of the lake when it thawed and they both plunged below the surface. Thankfully for the cook, the ox was large enough that he could stand on its head and keep himself just above water. He’d be stranded there until at least nightfall when Paul Bunyon would show up and save him. You’d think that would be the end of it, but old Paul wasn’t thrilled at the loss of what was supposed to be the camp’s main source of food. The loggers, unsurprisingly, refused to work without something to eat and Paul needed a plan before things got out of hand. Thinking quick, he had his men dam up the little river that flowed out of the lake and then build campfires all around the now thawed body of water. It might’ve seemed pointless, but apparently it was enough to get the lake boiling and cook the beans, along with the remains of babe. For the rest of the summer, the cook would feed the men hot soup from the lake and the camp was saved for another year. Part of me feels like some of the 19th century lumberjacks might’ve been decent authors had they been born in a different time or place. The Last Mile So we’ve talked about the hodag, and jumped into the legend of Paul Bunyon. That’s the kind of stuff you can expect with season 2 of The Long Way Home. I’ve got a ton of Legends and Tales to dive into, as well as some other just random stuff that’ll come as we move along the road, and I hope you’ll stick around for future trips. Like I said at the beginning, my goal for this season is to focus on stories and the kinds of things I’d like to hear when out driving late at night, or even as something to listen to while cooking, cleaning or playing games. I think the world has been spinning so much faster than it used to in recent years, and taking some time to slow down and just share some really cool stories is just what we all could use a little more of. Make sure you’re following me on whatever platform you might be listening on so you don’t miss new episodes as they drop, and check out my books on Amazon or joshbearheartlegendsandtales.com. I want to thank you all for listening and I’ll see you on the next road trip!

Hospitals for children should not exist. I should probably explain a bit more than that though. A person who has not even experienced life, who’s never had their first love, never fallen behind on their mortgage and all the other good and bad experiences life has to offer shouldn’t have to face death. That anyone could imagine a world where innocents suffer is beyond comprehension, and if there is a being that allows all the suffering, I only hope I get to face them one day. See, it’s my job to ferry their souls. I’ll never forget the first one. She was only 4, and her parents were inconsolable as she lay taking her final breaths. I’d been hovering for weeks, waiting on the day to come. The doctors and nurses had been in and out, running tests and doing everything in their power, but there was never truly any hope. I didn’t want this assignment either, it was forced on me by my boss. At first, I thought it was a joke of some kind, that he was just getting me back for the prank I’d pulled on him the year prior. No one wants this kind of job, but someone has to do it. I only have to focus on one area, and there’s only a couple of hospitals where I spend the majority of my time. I’m not allowed to set foot outside the walls of these places, but there’s enough going on within to keep me busy most days. I wander the halls, peeking into rooms where families wait, hoping beyond hope their child will be able to leave. And many do get to walk out. Some leave after a few days, never needing to return, some recover in a few weeks or months. The rest are the ones I watch closely. I never know when their moment is. People think there is some kind of schedule or date they are destined to die, but in reality it’s all random chance. There’s been a few over the decades that I thought were doomed, only to see them get better. There’s also been more than there should have been that appeared to be recovering, only to take a turn and close their eyes for the final time. You might wonder what it’s like to die. I can’t honestly answer that question, as I’ve never died, but I can provide some idea based on my observations of those I’ve ferried. Most of them take some time to fully realize what’s happened. They look around the room, some try to interact with their loved ones who are sitting there crying. The worst ones for me are the young children, usually those under 10, who will try to hug their parents and get their attention, not realizing it’s their body laying just feet away. Fear usually takes over when they first see me. I’m not exactly the nicest-looking being. I have to comfort them, tell them it’s going to be OK. Sometimes they run, not realizing there is nowhere to go. The soul can’t exist very far from where the body died. It’s tethered to the location in some way. They hit the limit, most often just down the hallway from their room, and they’re snapped right back to where they started. This isn’t unique to children, even adults fall apart when they realize their life is really over. I’ve seen some of the most religious people you can think of fall to the ground and cry for hours. People who had spoken to their family only minutes prior about how they were ready to leave, afraid of what comes after when it’s actually time to pay the piper. Through all of this, I wait. I’ve got all the time in the universe, after all, so I wait for them to come to grips with what’s happened. Sometimes, I even ferry other souls as those who weren’t ready figure out this is real. When I’m not actively helping someone, I spend a lot of time walking the halls of the buildings that act as my prison. I know this particular assignment is only temporary, though that term is a lot different for me than it is for mortals. I was given the job the day the first hospital went up, and I’ll be here until the walls are crumbling. Yes, there will be souls still here long after the buildings cease operation. I know of others like me, wandering the halls of buildings long since abandoned. They wait for the souls of those who still cannot accept what’s happened. It’s our job, after all. So, why share this? Why reveal myself now? Because something’s happening, something I can’t explain and I don’t know what to do about it. The number of souls I’ve had to ferry over the past few months has increased, nearly doubling. I’ve been trying to find a common thread, but I keep coming up short. And it’s not just children you know are going to die, it’s those who seem perfectly healthy, in for routine checkups or broken bones. They’ll come in, seemingly alright, and within hours they’re being admitted and dying. My first thought was some kind of disease, but the doctors and nurses haven’t been able to pinpoint anything. The children themselves aren’t much help either. I’ve asked several of them if they remember anything odd, but none can point to anything in particular. So far, the only common, or at least seemingly common theme seems to be related to the time they arrive. Most of them seem to be initially arriving early in the afternoon, and only on certain days of the week. They are registered and see the nurse, with no problems. It’s only after they see the doctor that the issues seem to arise. I’ve tried to follow some of them around, waiting in the lobby for new arrivals and keeping up with them as they go through the process, but I do have others to keep an eye on and I find myself called to the rooms of those who’ve slipped away more often than not. By the time I return to the child I was following, they’ve either been released or it’s too late. The worst part of it is that there is never a cause of death mentioned. I do my best to follow up, visiting the morgue and glancing at what paperwork I can, but it’s always listed as ‘undetermined’. Now that I think of it, most of the ones I’ve checked might even have the same doctor listed, but that could just be a coincidence. After all, the doctor who signs the death certificate isn’t necessarily the doctor they saw when they arrived. I feel so helpless in this situation. I can’t really do anything, and even if I figure it out, it’s not like I can tell anyone. Well, anyone alive. If it is a doctor doing it, I can only hope they are caught before it’s too late. I’ve ferried those who were killed in the past, and it’s never something I do willingly. When they know their life has been ‘cut short’ it’s much harder to convince them to come with me. They don’t understand that sticking around isn’t really an option, at least not as a way to get retribution. There’s one child here, even now, that was murdered by someone he knew. I’ve spent years trying to get him to move on, but he refuses to go. He thinks his parents let it happen, and even when I told him the man was caught and killed for his crime it didn't help. Several of these recent cases have been the same, even as I try to explain they likely weren’t killed. They refuse to leave and I’m running out of options. If something doesn’t give soon, I’m afraid the hospital is going to be overrun with souls, and a place like this should never have more dead than living.

I didn't post about this the first time, but I need a place to vent and maybe even have a conversation or two. Last June (2024) my son wound up sick in the hospital thanks to pneumonia. His body had a bad reaction to the infection, and his chest filled up with fluid. They were able to get the majority of the fluid out, but there was some scarring that we were told would be going away over time. A couple months ago, a follow up visit showed there was more scarring than before. It wasn't going away, it was spreading. Last week, he went through surgery to remove it. The surgeon said it was the worst case he'd seen in 15 years. We thought we were gonna lose him, or at best he would lose a lung. As I sit here, 3 days after the surgery, I'm finding myself happy and still scared. I'm happy because he made it through, keeping his lung (minus a tiny bit of it that came off with the scar tissue), and he is on a accelerated road to recovery that none of use (including the surgeon) would have imagined possible a week ago. Even so, part of me is terrified that this is all some kind of dream. Like I'm gonna wake up in the waiting room and find out he's still in surgery. This is mostly due to the track record things seem to have in my life. I've rarely been blessed with anything positive that didn't turn out to be a bad thing in disguise. Besides that, the past few years have been just one hit after another. I mean, I got laid off, wound up in the hospital with a spider bite that nearly killed me, then everything with my son's health. Not to mention just how far off I've been on making any kind of income from writing or YouTube. I don't even know anymore. This situation, the past couple of months of worry about my son, has just really eaten away at me. Here's hoping that his improving health will be a sign of things to come.