GOD HATES HEAVY METAL: PREACHERMAN

PREACHERMAN

I visited my girlfriend’s hometown in the Mohawk Valley to film a doc on local legends. The forest near Columbia Center is supposedly haunted by something they call “Preacherman.”  They say if you hear a sermon in the woods at night…don’t respond.

I didn’t listen. And now I can’t.

Since the late 1800s, locals have warned of something lurking in the pines—Preacherman, a hillbilly hobgoblin who whispers sermons into the ears of wicked children. It’s treated like a backwoods bedtime story.
But I know better now.

I came to Columbia Center with Leah, my girlfriend, to stay with her family. I’m from Denver. It’s different here. Columbia Center is one of those places where the barns are older than the roads and the trees seem older than time. 

Driving into town, I realized it wasn’t much of a “center”—just a scatter of colonial homes stitched together by rust and roots.

We passed a battered sign that read “Deaf Child Area.” Standing beneath it were two barefoot boys, maybe eleven. One had a huge bald head, was shaped like a toad—sunburned, shirtless, with tree-trunk legs stuffed into dirty tan shorts—spray-painting a blue dick on the sign. The other, taller and slack-jawed with coke-bottle glasses and a black bowl cut, wore a sleeveless shirt that said “ANDY” in block letters. Locals.

Andy spotted us and tapped his buddy. Both flipped us off.

Leah honked and we laughed. “Welcome to the Center.”

She first told me about the Preacherman like it was nothing—just a joke, a folk tale to scare the local kids out of sneaking into the woods when they were in trouble. But in a place like Columbia Center, where the pines grow thick and the night falls fast, it’s easy to get lost. So the grown-ups came up with a rhyme… something to keep the kids close to home.

If you hear preaching in the woods, don’t respond, don’t respond.
If you hear preaching in the woods, it’s not for you—it’s for the roots.
If you hear preaching late at night,
Don’t look left and don’t look right.
If you answer—even once...
THE PREACHERMAN WILL EAT YOU UP.

But even her drunk uncle Danny stopped laughing when I said I wanted to hike the trails for my documentary. “If you hear preaching,” he said slurringly “don’t look. Don’t respond. It’s not for you. You answer back, you might end up like them kids in the seventies.”

Uncle Danny leaned in with bloodshot eyes. But before he could finish his story, Leah’s mom kicked her brother out so we could get some rest for tomorrow’s camping adventure.

The next day, I packed my gear—Sony shotgun mic, field recorder, GoPro strapped to my chest. Leah and her twelve-year-old brother Matt came with me. We brought food, water, sleeping bags and a tent. Matt brought three knives and a slingshot. A Boy Scout, fearless and sharp. I liked him instantly.

He led us through moss-choked trails, past ancient rock formations and half-rotted hunting stands. Nailed to a stout pine tree overlooking a small pond I spotted an old wooden sign. I drew closer to see a badly misspelled, barely legible warning on an old wooden spray painted in black**:**
If you hear preaching in the woods don’t respond.

As we walked deeper into the pinewoods, the air turned colder. Still. Oppressive.

We found a clearing at sunset and set up camp. I was gathering firewood when something snapped behind me. I turned—light ready, heart hammering. Nothing. Just the trees breathing around me. I felt the wind and swore I heard it whisper.

Back at camp, we roasted hot dogs and ate cheese doodles, my new favorite New York snack. I fiddled with the audio gear, waiting for some sign of the infamous Preacherman.

Then—snap. Louder.

Matt was on his feet, flashlight drawn.

“Come on, you fuckers, I know it’s you!”

Leah and I followed him into the dark, just in time for two shadows to leap from behind a tree.

Matt tripped into me. I fell back, and his flashlight caught the monsters: Andy and the spray-paint kid, who we now learned was fittingly named Cookie.

Leah and I laughed until we couldn’t breathe. Juxtaposed next to each other these two little freaks looked like they formed the number ten. I invited them back to the fire. Matt wasn’t thrilled.

“If Cookie does one fucked-up thing, you’re both gone,” he warned Andy.

Andy nodded, wide-eyed. “Don’t get your pannies in a wad,” he mumbled.

Cookie didn’t speak, just devoured two hot dogs in seconds.

“He can’t hear you,” Andy said. “Cookie’s deaf. Since birth.”

“But he reads lips. Not as dumb as he looks,” Matt added. “But Andy is.”

I cracked a joke about “the Preacherman.” No one laughed.

Cookie’s whole body tensed. His eyes darted from me to the woods behind the fire.

“Did I scare you?” I asked. Cookie didn’t respond. I nudged him, so he looked at me, “did I scare you when I mentioned the Preacherman?”

“No,” he said in a sudden, baritone voice. It was the only thing he said all night.

Matt told me the legend—how the Preacherman comes whispering sermons into children’s ears. How those kids are never seen again.

Then Leah, Andy, and Matt told me the real story, that Uncle Danny never finished.

Back in the late 1970s, nine disabled, incest, or “imperfect” children—born to old founding families—were taken into the woods and left to die as an offering to the Preacherman. The parents went mad or took their own lives. Andy’s dad was one of the kids. One of the lucky ones unlike his brother Robert, who perished.

After that, the fire died down and Andy’s sullen face hung low. I changed the subject by playing back the day’s field audio.

Static. Wind. Crows.

Then—beneath it—a voice.

Not speaking. Preaching. Rhythmic. Layered. In a language I didn’t know, but one that felt like scripture. Slow, rhythmic, rising in a strange pattern. Like something you’re not supposed to hear with human ears. The haunting murmuring made everyone uneasy. 

Leah made me shut it off. So I did. 

But now I had proof of something. A clue. Of what I had no idea--and that’s what gave me goosebumps. The thrill of documenting lore. 

But at what cost?

Andy and Cookie left soon after. I broke out a stash of candy and we all tried to relax. The rest of the night went by without incident, but to say any of us slept well after hearing the recording would have been a lie.

The next morning, I woke up before sunrise. Filmed b-roll. Then I played the audio again. Alone.

I looped it. Sped it up. Slowed it down. Something cold crawled inside me as I listened to this unintelligible language born of dirt and wind. Alone, it sounded even more terrifying. I felt it and something told me, it could feel me too.

Matt and Leah woke up sick. Matt puked into the ashes. Leah looked pale, hollowed out. So we packed up and left. We got back to the house a little after noon. Matt and Leah both went to sleep. I went to work. 

That night, after dinner, I played the audio for Leah’s family. That’s when everything started to go wrong.

Uncle Danny ran from the house in a panic, terrified of the sound and of me. As he slammed the door on his way out, Leah screamed awake. 

I rushed to her room and left the recording bellowing its haunting sermon from my computer.

As I pleaded with Leah to snap out of it, her father became visibly agitated, failing to figure out how to shut off the recording on my computer. Her mom begged me to shut it off. So I did.

Leah stopped screaming, locked herself in the bathroom and threw up for hours. 

Later, Leah asked me to delete it. I didn’t. I couldn’t.She left the room. I fell asleep on the couch.

I awoke to the sound of Leah’s mother in the kitchen making coffee the next morning. She looked haunted. Said she’d dreamed of roots growing through her spine, of crying sap. Her coffee shook in her hand.

Then Leah’s dad screamed. He was holding Matt—alive, but bleeding from the ears. A pencil jammed into his own skull.“I can talk to the trees now,” Matt whispered, over and over.

They rushed him to the hospital.

I went to Leah’s room. She was gone. No note. No text. Just muddy prints and a smear of dirt on her wall.

So I went back into the woods.I shouldn't have.

I entered a forest of pine trees that grew so tall darkness swallowed daylight. The air was wrong. Too cold and too still.  As I was accosted by thick with the stink of sap and rot I heard it. The voice. Preacherman. My gear spiked, then died. 

I trekked onward, following the sound as I called Leah’s name to drown out the dreadful sermon. Then saw them—trees, or maybe people, swaying like they were waiting.

Men fused into trunks. Faces twisted in bark. Andy’s name, visible in block letters on one of the wooden shells.

They weren’t just listening.

They were feeding.

And then I saw him.

Spindly. Towering. Skin like burlap stretched over sticks. No eyes. Just a knot of bark. A mouth that split sideways.

“The roots are thirsty…” he said, without sound—but I heard it in my head.

That’s when I realized: he wasn’t preaching to them. He was feeding the forest.

And the trees were waking up.

The pines—god, the pines—they bent inward like teeth. Their bark split. Arms reached out, wet and wooden, snatching Andy by the skull and pulling him inside. The trunk sealed over like he’d never existed.

I tried to run. I couldn’t.

Two sap-slathered figures held me by the throat. Bark started growing over my legs, up my chest. The sermon vibrated in my spine, telling me to surrender. The sound of the sermon, paralyzed me. My mind was slipping as I saw Leah—her mouth sewn shut with pine needles—in the roots, twitching, alive. 

I wanted to scream. But I couldn’t.

Then, pain. Sharp, wet pain.

Cookie, wild-eyed, barefoot—stabbed a stick into my ear. Then the other. Blood filled my throat. I passed out screaming a scream I could no longer hear.

I woke up deaf like Cookie.
He never hears the sermons.

He saved me.

But the trees are growing closer to town. To the Center.

To the rest of the world, Leah’s still missing. But I know the truth. Her family won’t talk to me. Matt I can only imagine.

At night, I still feel the cadence of that voice. In my chest. In my bones. The Preacherman.

I’ve returned home to Denver. Broken. Adjusting to a world without sound has not been easy. Regret. Pain. Sadness. Loss.  My daily life is trapped inside this vessel of suffering as the world sings on without me. 

If you hike the trails and hear preaching, don’t look toward the sound.

The sermon isn’t for you.

And the trees?

They’re always listening.

Their roots always thirsty.

If you hear preaching in the woods, don’t respond, don’t respond.
If you hear preaching in the woods, it’s not for you—it’s for the roots.
If you hear preaching late at night,
Don’t look left and don’t look right.
If you answer—even once...
THE PREACHERMAN WILL EAT YOU UP.

Art and story by Hal Hefner.
Produced by Catmonkey Studio