The Man Who Shouldn't Have Been on Widow Notch Shelf

The Man Who Shouldn't Have Been on Widow Notch Shelf

Fear spikes when the impossible shows up in a family photo: a six-year-old Canon print sent a small-town sergeant scrambling after a dark figure that appears on a rock shelf sixty feet above a woman and vanishes between frames. Who - or what - could have been standing on Widow Notch where no one could have climbed, and why does it appear only in the middle of three photographs?

In this episode, we follow the sequence of events that began with a trailhead register entry and three drugstore prints, tracking the photograph from a storage unit to the Settlers Fork substation and the Saddleback Range to ask whether the image can be explained by human action or something else. What the sergeant and a retired ranger found at the scene raises a single unsettling question: how did anything get onto that moss-slick granite shelf?

Person: Sharon Lewis Date: November 9, 2017 Location: Widow Notch / Saddleback Range near Settlers Fork, Route 112 Item: Canon point-and-shoot photographs printed on 4x6 paper Investigator: Sergeant Dale Orosco

- Sharon Lewis signed the trailhead register at 11:47 AM and was the only name entered that day. - The camera used was a six-year-old Canon point-and-shoot that records on a physical memory card. - Three frames were taken by a stranger in an orange vest; the unknown figure appears only in the second frame. - The rock shelf (Widow Notch) sits roughly sixty feet above the Forest Service marker and is about eight feet wide. - Retired ranger Carl Hutchins and Sergeant Orosco concluded the shelf could not be reached from below without equipment or leaving marks, none of which were found.

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