Summary: An astonishingly creepy story by one of the most popular of U.S. Presidents.<br> Any contemporary listener has a ready name for the “goblin” of this story.<br> ⁓The Voice before the Void<br> “A Goblin Story”<br> from The Wilderness Hunter<br> Theodore Roosevelt<br> Frontiersmen are not, as a rule, apt to be very superstitious. They lead lives too hard and practical, and have too little imagination in things spiritual and supernatural. I have heard but few ghost stories while living on the frontier, and these few were of a perfectly commonplace and conventional type.<br> But I once listened to a goblin story which rather impressed me. It was told by a grisled, weather-beaten old mountain hunter, named Bauman, who was born and had passed all his life on the frontier. He must have believed what he said, for he could hardly repress a shudder at certain points of the tale; but he was of German ancestry, and in childhood had doubtless been saturated with all kinds of ghost and goblin lore, so that many fearsome superstitions were latent in his mind; besides, he knew well the stories told by the Indian medicine men in their winter camps, of the snow-walkers, and the spectres, and the formless evil beings that haunt the forest depths, and dog and waylay the lonely wanderer who after nightfall passes through the regions where they lurk; and it may be that when overcome by the horror of the fate that befell his friend, and when oppressed by the awful dread of the unknown, he grew to attribute, both at the time and still more in remembrance, weird and elfin traits to what was merely some abnormally wicked and cunning wild beast; but whether this was so or not, no man can say.<br> When the event occurred Bauman was still a young man, and was trapping<br> with a partner among the mountains dividing the forks of the Salmon from<br> the head of Wisdom River. Not having had much luck, he and his partner<br> determined to go up into a particularly wild and lonely pass through<br> which ran a small stream said to contain many beaver. The pass had<br> an evil reputation because the year before a solitary hunter who<br> had wandered into it was there slain, seemingly by a wild beast, the<br> half-eaten remains being afterwards found by some mining prospectors who<br> had passed his camp only the night before.<br> The memory of this event, however, weighed very lightly with the two<br> trappers, who were as adventurous and hardy as others of their kind.<br> They took their two lean mountain ponies to the foot of the pass, where<br> they left them in an open beaver meadow, the rocky timber-clad ground<br> being from thence onwards impracticable for horses. They then struck out<br> on foot through the vast, gloomy forest, and in about four hours reached<br> a little open glade where they concluded to camp, as signs of game were<br> plenty.<br> There was still an hour or two of daylight left, and after building a<br> brush lean-to and throwing down and opening their packs, they started up<br> stream. The country was very dense and hard to travel through, as there<br> was much down timber, although here and there the sombre woodland was<br> broken by small glades of mountain grass.<br> At dusk they again reached camp. The glade in which it was pitched was<br> not many yards wide, the tall, close-set pines and firs rising round<br> it like a wall. On one side was a little stream, beyond which rose the<br> steep mountain-slopes, covered with the unbroken growth of the evergreen<br> forest.<br> They were surprised to find that during their short absence something,<br> apparently a bear, had visited camp, and had rummaged about among their<br> things, scattering the contents of their packs, and in sheer wantonness<br> destroying their lean-to. The footprints of the beast were quite plain,<br> but at first they paid no particular heed to them,
