There Are 7 Rules To Survive The Appalachian Trail... (From A Park Ranger)

Seven rules for the Appalachian woods after dark. You have seen them on every list, sold as the old knowledge of the hollows. I asked one question at each rule: who said this first. Three of them are older than this country. Three were built recently and dressed up as old. And the seventh is not folklore at all. It has a date, a place, and a nine year old boy. I am not from those mountains. Thirty two seasons in the mountain West, the last fifteen running search and rescue. I handed two of these rules to people at trailheads for years, and I had one of them badly wrong. THE RULES, AND HOW OLD EACH ONE REALLY IS 1. STOP WHISTLING AFTER DARK Oldest source: the standard North Carolina folklore collection, seven volumes, has a whistling taboo. It belongs to sailors, entry 3467. Verdict: not from these mountains. No ban on whistling in the Appalachian woods written down before 1990. What really happens: a night inversion bends sound down, 3 to 4 decibels. Cold air does not carry sound better. Three blasts, then count to sixty out loud. 2. WHEN THE WOODS GO SILENT, LEAVE Oldest source: none. No collection has it. Verdict: the birds are real, the order is invented. Katydids go silent in 34 milliseconds, but only for bat range sound. What really happens: cold air pools in the bottom. The same cold that shuts off the insects makes the night sound enormous. One weather event, two mysteries. 3. SOMEONE CALLS YOUR NAME. DON'T ANSWER Oldest source: Campbell, 1900. Childe Rowland, 1890. Mooney on the Little People: they must not go out. Verdict: old warning, new scene. Nobody in those sources is called by name from the treeline. What really happens: auditory pareidolia. In one test 32 percent pressed the button for a song that was never played. 4. LEAVE THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE TREES ALONE Oldest source: Thorpe, 1851, and the Cherokee Fire-carrier in Mooney. Verdict: genuinely old. The famous Brown Mountain case attached to it is not. Nobody can find a reference that clearly predates electricity. What really happens: at night your depth perception goes. A porch bulb across a valley looks like a camp behind the next trunk. 5. KEEP WALKING FROM A SCREAM Oldest source: none. Born in the last twenty years. Verdict: new, and its reason is wrong twice. No breeding cougar population in the East since the 1920s. The red fox is the documented screamer. What really happens: a shout carries about 98 meters in conifer, 135 in hardwood. A cry you can hear is close. Take the bearing, note the hour, walk out and call it in. 6. EAT NOTHING YOU ARE OFFERED Oldest source: a catalogued folklore motif. Childe Rowland, 1890: bite no bit, drink no drop. Verdict: the oldest rule on this subject. On the lists it was quietly replaced by a house where no house belongs, which cannot be older than graded roads. 7. WHEN YOU ARE LOST, SIT DOWN Oldest source: February 1981, Palomar Mountain, California. A search for a nine year old boy, and the tracker who built Hug a Tree after it. Verdict: not folklore. Search doctrine, and the only rule with a name attached. What really happens: in a model fitted to 65 real searches, staying put came out at three thousandths. Almost nobody stops. WHERE THE LIST CAME FROM August 2015, a board built for fiction. Kerry Hammond posted a series as a search and rescue officer with stories to tell, then published it under her own name, and Syfy put it on television in February 2018. She wrote fiction and said so. Other people took her name off it. The Cherokee rules for those mountains are written down, in Mooney, 1900, and free to read. Nobody opens it. Every case on this channel starts with a record somebody kept when there was no reason to keep it. #appalachianfolklore #parkranger