He Paid $12 for an Abandoned Mountain Tunnel—Then Discovered a Secret Buried Inside

He Paid Twelve Dollars for a Forgotten Mountain Tunnel—Then Found a Buried Secret No One Was Supposed to See

Ethan Cole bought the tunnel because he was out of better options and almost out of pride.

The county auction was held in a squat brick building in the middle of Redstone, Colorado, a mountain town that had once lived off silver, timber, and the stubborn belief that bad winters could be beaten by hard work. By the time Ethan showed up, Redstone mostly lived off tourists in expensive parkas and city people who liked the idea of “rustic” as long as it came with heated floors and Wi-Fi.

Ethan had neither.

He stood in the back of the room in a faded denim jacket, work boots dusted white from the late-March snow, hands shoved into his pockets so nobody would see how hard they were shaking. He told himself the shaking was from the cold. It wasn’t. It was from losing everything too fast for a man to understand it.

Six months earlier he’d had a welding shop on the edge of town. It wasn’t much, but it was his. He fixed ranch gates, trailer frames, plow blades, broken snowmobile parts, and whatever else folks dragged in. Then the highway contract he was counting on went to a bigger outfit in Denver. Two late payments turned into four. The bank called. The shop was gone by Christmas.

Since then he’d been living in a one-room trailer with a leaking roof, doing odd jobs for cash, pretending things were temporary when deep down he’d started to fear this was what the rest of his life looked like.

At the auction, parcels went cheap and fast. A storage lot. A strip of scrub land. A condemned shed. Then the woman at the front adjusted her glasses and read from a clipboard.

“Parcel seventy-four,” she said. “Black Hollow eastern access tract. Abandoned rail tunnel entrance, one point two acres. Condemned. No utilities. No legal roadway improvements. Hazard designation on file.”

A few people snorted.

One old rancher muttered, “Might as well sell a bear den.”

The woman looked up. “Opening bid is twelve dollars to satisfy delinquent recording fee.”

Nobody raised a hand.

Ethan had heard of Black Hollow Tunnel all his life. Every kid in Redstone had. It cut into Granite Ridge just north of town, a relic from the mining days. The original rail line had run straight into the mountain to haul ore from the old Monarch works on the western slope. Then there was a collapse in the 1930s—maybe an accident, maybe dynamite, depending on which old-timer you asked. After that, the tunnel was sealed, half forgotten, and left to the stories.

Some said miners were buried in there.

Some said smugglers used it during Prohibition.

Some said people heard metal clanging inside on windless nights.

Ethan never believed ghost stories. He believed in cheap land.

Twelve dollars for a piece of mountain. Twelve dollars for something the bank couldn’t take because nobody else wanted it. Twelve dollars for a place to store scrap, maybe sleep if things got worse. He’d lived through worse than rumors.

Before he could talk himself out of it, he raised his hand.

The woman blinked. “Twelve dollars.”

Nobody answered.

“Do I hear fifteen?”

Silence.

The rancher laughed once under his breath.

“Sold,” she said, and brought the gavel down.

That was it. Twelve dollars, seven crumpled singles and a five from Ethan’s wallet, and Black Hollow Tunnel belonged to him.

When he stepped outside with the receipt in his hand, the mountain air hit his face sharp and clean. For the first time in months, he felt something close to satisfaction.

It didn’t last long.

A voice behind him said, “You really bought that death trap?”

Ethan turned. Clayton Voss stood on the courthouse steps in a camel coat that probably cost more than Ethan’s trailer. He was around Ethan’s age, maybe a few years younger, but carried himself with the easy confidence of a man born into money and taught to expect the world to move aside when he walked through it.

His grandfather had owned half the mining claims in the county. His father had turned those holdings into Voss Mineral & Land, which now bought up old property, leased scenic acreage to developers, and treated Redstone like a board game.

Clayton smiled, but there was no humor in it.

“Couldn’t resist a bargain,” Ethan said.

Clayton looked at the receipt in Ethan’s hand. “Black Hollow is useless. Unsafe. The county’s been trying to unload it forever.”

“Guess I’m helping them out.”

“Guess you are.”

Clayton kept smiling, but his eyes had gone flat. “Tell you what. I’ll buy it off you right now. Hundred bucks.”

Ethan almost laughed. “That’s generous.”

“I’m in a generous mood.”

Ethan folded the receipt and slid it into his jacket pocket. “I’m not selling.”

Clayton’s smile disappeared like a light going out.

“It’s a hole in a mountain, Ethan.”

“Then you shouldn’t want it.”

For a second the only sound between them was wind rattling the flag over the courthouse roof.

Then Clayton gave a small shrug. “Suit yourself.”

He walked off toward a black truck parked at the curb, polished so clean it reflected the snowbanks. Ethan watched him go and felt the first small, cold stir of suspicion.

Men like Clayton Voss did not offer a hundred dollars for useless holes in mountains.

That afternoon Ethan drove up to Black Hollow in his rust-red Ford pickup. The road was little more than an old mining cut etched into the ridge, full of ruts, meltwater, and broken shale. Pines crowded the slopes. Patchy snow still clung to the north-facing shadows. The sky above the peaks was clear enough to hurt your eyes.

The entrance to the tunnel sat in a shallow notch of rock, framed by crumbling stonework blackened with age. A sagging chain-link gate hung off one hinge. A weather-bleached sign leaned sideways nearby.

UNSAFE ENTRY PROHIBITED

One corner of the sign had been chewed away by rust.

Ethan killed the engine and stepped out. The world felt quiet in that high-country way, where even silence had depth. He walked toward the entrance and looked into the darkness beyond the bent gate. Cold air drifted from inside, carrying the smell of wet stone, old iron, and something else—faint, earthy, not quite rotten, not quite clean.

The tunnel mouth was wider than he’d expected. Old tracks still ran into the dark, swallowed after twenty feet by shadow. Water dripped somewhere deep inside with the slow patience of a clock.

He stood there for a long moment, hands on his hips, the receipt in his pocket crackling when the wind moved his jacket.

“Twelve bucks,” he muttered. “What the hell did I just buy?”

He spent the next week clearing the entrance.

It gave him something to do besides think.

He hauled away the broken chain-link, stacked loose stone, cut brush, and dragged rusted junk out of the weeds around the portal: a bent ore cart wheel, rotten ties, a splintered warning barricade. He found a flat area where he could park his truck and maybe someday set a steel shipping container for tools. Work made sense. Work always had.

The town, naturally, noticed.

At Rusty’s Diner on Main Street, men at the counter asked whether Ethan had found any ghosts yet. One woman asked if he’d bought the tunnel to hide a moonshine still. Somebody else asked whether he planned to move in permanently and become the local mountain man.

Ethan gave back what he got. That was easier than explaining there was something stubborn and personal about saving a thing the whole county had written off. Maybe he and the tunnel had that in common.

On the fourth day, a woman came up the trail while he was using a pry bar on a rotted timber at the entrance.

She was bundled in a green coat with a knit cap pulled low over dark hair, and she carried herself like someone used to mountain roads and not impressed by mud. Ethan recognized her when she got close.

Nora Bennett.

Most people in town knew Nora as the woman who ran the historical room above the library and wrote occasional features for the Redstone Ledger when the regular editor got lazy. She was smart, sharp-tongued when she wanted to be, and had a habit of looking at things like she was measuring them against some private standard. Ethan had always liked that about her, though he’d only spoken to her a handful of times.

She stopped a few feet away and looked past him into the tunnel.

“So it’s true,” she said. “You actually bought Black Hollow.”

“That seems to be the current rumor.”

“I heard you paid twelve dollars.”

“I overbid.”

That got the smallest smile out of her.

She nodded toward the entrance. “Mind if I take a look?”

“As long as you don’t sue me if the mountain falls on you.”

She stepped closer. “You know this place has a file in the historical archive?”

“Of course it does.”

“Three boxes, actually. Accident reports, maps, newspaper clippings. Half of it contradicts the other half.”

“That sounds about right for Redstone history.”

Nora looked at him. “You know Clayton Voss asked me last year whether the town had any records on Black Hollow?”

Ethan straightened. “Why?”

“He didn’t say. He tried to sound casual, which is exactly how men sound when they’re very much not casual.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That records existed, and if he wanted to see them, he could fill out a request like everybody else.” She paused. “He never did.”

Ethan glanced into the tunnel again. The darkness felt different now, heavier somehow.

“Come by the archive tomorrow,” Nora said. “I’ll show you what we’ve got.”

“I thought historians liked dead things more than live idiots with pry bars.”

“Generally true,” she said. “But now I’m curious.”

The next morning Ethan went to the library.

The historical room above it smelled like dust, old paper, and sun-warmed wood. Shelves lined the walls. Photographs of stern-faced miners, early trains, and snow-buried streets hung in mismatched frames. Nora had already pulled three archive boxes and laid them open on a long table.

For two hours they went through them.

Black Hollow Tunnel, Ethan learned, had been blasted through Granite Ridge between 1908 and 1911 to connect the eastern rail spur to the Monarch extraction camp on the west side. It cut travel time by nearly a day and made fortunes for men who already had too much money.

Then came the collapse in October 1937.

Officially, it was caused by structural failure after heavy rain.

Unofficially, several clippings hinted at an explosion.

Seven workers were listed as missing.

No bodies were ever recovered.

The tunnel was closed, hearings were held, blame shifted, compensation was delayed, and after that the whole thing faded into the messy graveyard of local memory.

Nora slid a yellowed ledger sheet toward Ethan.

“Look at the names,” she said.

He bent over the page.

Merritt, Alvarez, Sloan, Pike, Donnelly, Cole—

His finger stopped.

Cole.

“Thomas Cole,” Nora read quietly. “Age twenty-nine. Labor foreman.”

Ethan stared at the name as if the paper might explain itself.

“My grandfather’s name was Thomas Cole.”

Nora’s eyes lifted. “Your father ever mention him?”

“Never knew him. Dad said his own father walked off when he was little. That’s all.”

Nora looked back down at the page. “This says Thomas Cole was among the men missing after the collapse.”

Ethan leaned back slowly.

His father, Jack Cole, had died three years earlier in a hospital room in Denver from a bad heart and forty years of carrying anger like a spare organ. He never talked much about family, and Ethan had long ago stopped asking. But now something ugly and sharp opened inside him.

Walked off.

Or buried.

Nora gently turned another file toward him. “There’s more.”

It was a typed statement from a surviving clerk, dated two weeks after the collapse. Most of it was dull—shift records, loading figures, times and names. But one sentence near the bottom had been underlined in faded pencil sometime decades ago.

Mr. Abram Voss instructed all remaining personnel that discussion of the event beyond official notice would result in immediate dismissal.

Ethan looked up. “Abram Voss?”

“Clayton’s grandfather.”

Ethan gave a quiet, humorless laugh. “Of course he was.”

Nora folded her hands. “I can’t prove anything from these papers. But if I were you, I’d be asking why the Voss family keeps sniffing around a condemned tunnel tied to an old collapse.”

“I was already asking.”

“Ask louder.”

That afternoon Ethan went back to Black Hollow with a stronger flashlight, a hard hat, and a sledgehammer.

He didn’t go far at first. The tunnel floor was muddy in spots, firm in others. The original rail tracks ran straight for about sixty yards before disappearing beneath fallen rock. Heavy timber sets supported parts of the ceiling, though many were split and black with rot. Water trickled down one wall in a silver thread.

The air inside was colder than outside, but not dead. It moved faintly over his face.

That bothered him.

Collapsed tunnels didn’t breathe unless they opened somewhere else.

He stood still and listened.

Drip.

Drip.

Then, very faintly, a hollow metallic sound somewhere beyond the rockfall ahead.

Not a ghost. Not clanging chains. Just the small sharp ping of water striking metal.

Ethan’s pulse kicked up.

He moved closer to the collapse. Tons of shattered stone filled the tunnel floor to ceiling, but along the right wall, behind a leaning timber, he found a narrow black seam he hadn’t noticed before. A gap no wider than his shoulders, hidden behind debris. Cold air leaked through it.

He swept his flashlight into the crack.

Not a dead end.

A passage.

He spent the next three days widening it.

At night somebody cut the straps on the tarp covering his tools.

The morning after that, he found fresh tire tracks near the entrance that weren’t his.

He drove straight into town and found Deputy Luis Ortega fueling his cruiser behind the sheriff’s office.

Luis had gone to school with Ethan. He’d been one of those solid guys every small town had—steady, decent, hard to rattle. He listened without interrupting while Ethan described the tracks and the tampered tarp.

Luis rubbed the back of his neck. “Could be kids.”

“Kids driving a new truck up a mining road in March?”

Luis didn’t answer right away, which was answer enough.

“You got anyone specific in mind?” he asked finally.

“Clayton Voss.”

Luis exhaled. “That name again.”

“He tried to buy the tunnel the day I got it.”

“Doesn’t make vandalism.”

“No. But it makes motive.”

Luis looked tired suddenly. “I’ll take a drive up there later. But unless I catch somebody in the act, there’s not much I can do.”

Ethan nodded once. “Yeah. I know.”

Luis put the fuel cap back on. “Just don’t go getting yourself buried in that mountain trying to prove a point.”

Ethan almost said, It’s not about a point anymore.

Instead he said, “No promises.”

By Friday he had opened the side gap enough to slip through.

The passage beyond angled away from the main tunnel at a shallow slope. Its walls were lined with old brick in places and bare cut stone in others. Electrical conduit clung to one side, rusted and broken. There had once been lights in there, maintenance access of some kind.

Ten yards in, the passage opened into a small chamber.

Ethan stopped dead.

The room was almost perfectly intact.

A steel control panel stood against one wall, dials clouded with age. A mine telephone box hung crooked beside it. On a table beneath a layer of dust lay a lantern, a stack of stained papers, and a tin lunch pail. On the far wall was a map of Black Hollow Tunnel and the western works, pinned beneath cracked glass.

And painted directly across the map in thick, dark letters were four words:

DO NOT TRUST VOSS

Ethan stared at them until the beam of his flashlight trembled in his hand.

The paint looked old. So did the dust on everything else. Nobody had staged this recently. Nobody had even been here in decades.

He moved slowly to the table and opened the lunch pail.

Inside was a notebook wrapped in oilcloth.

The first pages were damp-stiff but legible. Written in a precise hand across the top of the first page were the words:

WALTER PIKE
SECTION ENGINEER
IF FOUND, TAKE TO THE SHERIFF OR THE TIMES IN DENVER

Ethan sat down hard on an overturned crate and started reading.

Walter Pike’s notes were part engineering log, part confession, part desperate warning. The entries began two weeks before the collapse and grew more urgent with each page.

Abram Voss, Pike wrote, had been using the Black Hollow line after official closure to move undeclared ore and bullion out of Monarch holdings ahead of federal inspection. Several workers discovered the shipments. One of them was foreman Thomas Cole. Another was Manuel Alvarez. They threatened to go public unless wages long withheld from the men were paid.

Pike wrote that Voss ordered a sealed freight locomotive brought into a western holding chamber off the main line. The chamber contained the hidden shipments—gold, cash, and ledgers showing years of theft from payroll and taxes. Pike said Voss intended to remove it quietly before winter.

Then came the entry dated October 11, 1937.

He has gone mad. Cole confronted him. There was shouting near the west switch. Mr. Voss said no man in this valley would destroy him. I heard him order the powder set on east charges “if they will not keep sense.”

The next pages grew shaky.

Explosion. Tunnel lost between stations 2 and 3. Men trapped west side. Smoke heavy. I got into service chamber. Heard screaming. Cole was alive after the blast. So was Donnelly. God forgive us all.

Ethan had to stop reading for a moment. The room felt too small. The air too thin.

When he went on, Pike wrote that he was hiding because Voss believed all witnesses were dead. Pike had a key to the western blast door and the ledgers from the freight chamber. He planned to get out through an emergency shaft, but rockfall had sealed it. He had little food. If he failed, he begged whoever found his notes to expose the truth.

The last page was short.

If the chamber still stands, it will prove all of it. The key is hidden where the map shows the water line. Tell Mrs. Cole that Thomas did not run. He died trying to stop a devil.

Ethan sat motionless, Walter Pike’s words burning in his mind.

His grandfather hadn’t abandoned the family.

He’d been murdered in a mountain and buried under a lie.

Ethan got up and crossed to the wall map. A blue line marked drainage pipes running beneath the service room. Near one corner Pike had drawn a small X by hand.

Ethan took the sledgehammer and struck the brick beneath the X.

On the third hit a section broke away. Something metallic dropped into the rubble.

A key.

Old brass. Heavy. Stamped with the number 4.

He stood in the dust with the key in his hand, feeling the mountain shift under his life.

Everything his father had believed about his own father had been false. Every Voss sign in town, every polished truck, every piece of that family’s standing in Redstone suddenly looked different to him.

Not built.

Buried over.

He drove straight to Nora’s house after dark.

She let him in wearing a flannel shirt and socks, her hair loose around her shoulders, surprise on her face until she saw Ethan’s expression.

“What happened?”

He handed her the notebook.

By midnight they were still at her kitchen table, reading every page twice.

Nora looked pale by the time she finished. “If this is real—”

“It’s real.”

“I know it’s old. I know it’s convincing. I’m saying if the chamber still exists and the evidence is still there—”

“It changes everything.”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “It really might.”

He told her about the key.

Nora sat back, eyes fixed on the notebook. “Now we know why Clayton wanted the tunnel.”

“He knows.”

“He suspects. Maybe his father told him family stories. Maybe he’s seen records we haven’t. But he wouldn’t have offered to buy it so fast if he wasn’t scared of something being found.”

Ethan stared through the window into the dark yard. “I’m going back in tomorrow.”

Nora’s answer came before he looked at her.

“I’m coming with you.”

He almost smiled despite himself. “You own hiking boots?”

“I own common sense, which is why you need me there.”

The next morning they returned to Black Hollow together.

Nora brought two cameras, archive gloves, a notebook, and a look that said she intended to document every inch of the place before anyone else got a chance to rewrite it.

They found the western holding chamber on the map. It lay beyond the main collapse and another half mile west of it, accessible only through the maintenance passage if Pike’s notes were accurate. Past the service room, the side route continued as a narrow utility corridor descending deeper into the mountain.

It was slow going. In some places they had to crawl under fallen conduit. In others the floor dropped away into sumps full of black water. Old pipes ran overhead, dripping steadily. The deeper they went, the less the mountain felt abandoned. The air moved with purpose. Somewhere ahead, hidden water rushed through stone.

“Listen,” Nora whispered at one point.

Ethan heard it too.

A steady far-off roar.

Not wind.

Water.

The corridor finally ended at a steel door set into a concrete frame. Rust furred the edges, but the wheel lock still held. Faded stencil letters on the door read:

WEST SERVICE ACCESS – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

Ethan took out Pike’s key.

For one ugly second it jammed. He swore under his breath and forced himself to breathe. Then the tumblers shifted with a deep internal clunk.

He turned the wheel.

The door opened inward with a scream of metal.

Their flashlight beams cut into an enormous dark space beyond.

The western chamber wasn’t a room.

It was a cavern.

Natural stone rose high overhead in wet black arches. An underground river cut through one side, churning white around boulders before vanishing into another tunnel. The old rail line ran across the cavern floor on a trestle of timber and iron. And fifty yards ahead, half hidden under a curtain of mineral deposits and hanging chains, sat a locomotive and two freight cars.

Nora inhaled sharply.

“Oh my God.”

The train looked like it had been driven into the mountain and forgotten by time itself. Rust streaked the boiler. Mineral drips had crusted over the wheels. One freight door hung partly open. Another was sealed with iron bars. Beside the rail line stood a small platform and a shack-like office built into the rock wall.

Ethan felt the hair rise on his arms.

This was it. The secret buried in the mountain.

Proof that Walter Pike had died telling the truth.

They moved carefully across the trestle. Water thundered below. Rust flakes crackled under their boots.

Inside the office they found more records—moldering payroll books, shipping manifests, a company safe punched open long ago, and a leather document tube sealed with wax. Nora photographed everything before touching it. Ethan opened the tube with shaking hands.

Inside were property maps, mineral-right amendments, and signed transfer drafts.

Nora took one look and pressed her hand to her mouth.

“These were never filed,” she said.

“What are they?”

“Settlement deeds.” Her voice had gone tight with disbelief. “Abram Voss drafted private compensation transfers for the seven men who discovered the theft. Not enough to ruin him, but enough to keep them quiet. Land shares. Water rights. Future royalties on the western mineral seam.”

Ethan stared at her. “Meaning?”

“Meaning he knew they had legal leverage. Meaning the families of those men were supposed to receive a portion of the western holdings.” She looked up slowly. “If these are valid and suppressed, the Voss family’s claim to part of Granite Ridge could be fraudulent.”

Ethan laughed once in utter disbelief. “So my grandfather got buried and robbed.”

“Along with the others.”

They searched the first freight car.

Inside were wooden crates stamped with old federal mint markings, some broken open to reveal rows of cloth-wrapped gold coins gone dull with age. Another crate held bundles of currency turned brown but still bound. The hidden shipments were real.

But it was the second freight car that changed Ethan.

The door was jammed halfway. He forced it wider with a length of pipe.

His flashlight found old tools, blasting powder boxes turned soft with time, and something else along the rear wall—human shapes beneath collapsed tarps and timber.

He froze.

Nora’s hand touched his arm and then gripped hard.

There were bones there. More than one set. Hard hats. Boot leather gone to strips. A belt buckle. A rusted pocket watch chain still looped around a rib cage.

The air left Ethan in a rush.

He knew before he stepped closer.

Some things a man feels in his blood.

He knelt beside the nearest remains and carefully lifted the pocket watch from the dust. On the back, barely visible under corrosion, were engraved initials.

T.C.

Thomas Cole.

For a long moment Ethan couldn’t hear anything but the blood pounding in his ears and the underground river below the trestle.

His grandfather had been here the whole time. Thirty feet from the fortune that bought another family’s legacy. Eighty-nine years in the dark while his own son grew up thinking he’d been abandoned.

Nora crouched beside him, tears bright in her eyes but not falling. “Ethan…”

He swallowed once and set the watch in his palm like something holy.

“He didn’t leave,” Ethan said.

“No.”

“My dad built his whole life around that lie.”

Nora didn’t say anything. There was nothing to say.

He stood up slowly, all the grief in him changing shape. It was no longer hollow. It was sharp.

“We take pictures,” he said. “We call Luis. We bring the state in. We burn the Voss name down to the foundations if we have to.”

They almost made it out.

They had photographed the train, the office, the deeds, the coins, the remains, and half of Pike’s mapped route when Ethan heard the sound above the water.

Footsteps.

More than one pair.

He killed his flashlight instantly and pulled Nora into the shadow of the freight car.

Voices carried across the cavern.

“You said he’d be alone.”

“That was the plan.”

Clayton Voss.

Ethan felt Nora stiffen beside him.

Another man said, “We just grab the papers and go.”

“No,” Clayton snapped. “No loose ends.”

Ethan leaned just enough to look around the edge of the freight car.

Clayton stood on the trestle entrance with two men in work jackets and headlamps. One of them carried a pry bar. The other had a pistol low in his right hand.

For one terrible second Ethan thought about charging them. Then the man with the pistol lifted it slightly and Ethan’s survival instinct cut through the rage.

He put his mouth near Nora’s ear. “When I move, run for the office.”

Her whisper was fierce. “Absolutely not.”

He looked at her. In the dark, her face was pale and set like stone.

Then a boot scraped on the metal grating and Clayton called into the cavern, “Ethan. I know you’re here.”

The river roared.

Clayton stepped farther onto the trestle. “You should’ve sold me the tunnel.”

Ethan stood up from behind the freight car before they could flank him.

“Should’ve told the truth eighty years ago,” he called back.

Clayton’s head tilted. “You think you understand anything down here?”

“I understand enough.”

One of Clayton’s men started toward Ethan, but Clayton held out an arm.

“There are families built on stories,” Clayton said. “You tear those stories down and all you get is wreckage.”

Ethan took a step forward. “Funny. My family already got the wreckage.”

Clayton’s expression hardened. “You don’t get to lecture me about family. You bought a liability. That’s all. Hand over what you found.”

Nora stepped out beside Ethan, camera in hand.

Clayton’s jaw tightened. “You brought her?”

“She brought herself,” Nora said. “And I photographed enough to bury you.”

The man with the pistol moved instantly.

Ethan lunged the same second the gun came up.

The shot exploded through the cavern, deafening in the enclosed dark. The bullet sparked off iron behind him. Ethan hit the gunman low, driving him sideways into the trestle railing. Metal shrieked. The gun skidded across the grating toward the river gap.

Clayton shouted. Nora swung her camera like a rock and smashed it into the second man’s face. He reeled back cursing.

Then the whole trestle shuddered.

The shot had hit one of the old support braces.

A deep cracking noise rolled through the cavern.

“Move!” Ethan yelled.