We couldn't resist heading out to the woods during Phenomenal Week... Bel, Mike, Matt, Charley, and I all got the gear together and headed back down to our favorite town, Leeds Point. We decided to go back to the house foundation, particularly because Matt had never seen it before.

As soon as we parked the cars and got out, we noticed strange prints following the trail to the house. These prints appeared mostly in threes, and sometimes fours. Unfortunately, we had no eagle scouts with us today, so if anyone can identify these tracks, please E-mail us!

After following and photographing the tracks, we headed out towards the house. It had snowed the night before, making tracking much easier to see than normal. And, since the snow was so recent, we knew that whatever prints we would find were also recent. Once we got to the entrance of the house, we made an interesting discovery. One of the walls of the house had collapsed since our last expedition to the foundation back in November. We were worried that this collapse had been caused by man, so we attempted a little experiment. I had Matt, Mike, and Charley all try to lift the stone by themselves, and then they tried to lift it together. It was too heavy to have been smashed down by a human. The dirt where the wall had once stood was soft, which was interesting to note. The temperature out there was about 19 degrees, so the rest of the ground had been frozen. However, this area was soft, indicating that perhaps this collapse may have been recent - too recent for the ground to have frozen up yet.

So again, I'm left wondering why one of the locations we study is beginning to suddenly fall apart on its own. This foundation has been there for ages, possibly up to 50 years, and yet now, within the past 2 months, a wall has started to fall.

We went off to the waterfront for a little while, and that's when we discovered the track that appeared to have claws. We had been following what looked like a man and a dog walking along the trail. The man's prints stopped, but the dog's prints continued for a little while. Then we found the claw track, and the dog prints stopped. We also noticed that there were no return prints from the man. His trail didn't continue, turn off, or return... so we're not quite sure what happened. Parts of the snow in that area had melted, so it's possible that we just couldn't find it, but we thought it was strange anyway.

We went out to the docks again, but there really wasn't much going on out there. At this point, we were now thoroughly freezing, so we decided to head back to Charley's house for some warmth and a viewing of the NJN documentary "Mother Leeds' 13th Child" from 1973. God, that show is old...

Well, that's our story for Hunt #18. Questions? Comments? E-mail us at [email protected]. Want to join us? Click here for the online application!