It is 6:14 p.m. on a Thursday. You’re hiking along the Forbes Trail, nestled deep in the Appalachian Mountains somewhere along the Westmoreland-Somerset County lines. It is 19 minutes until sunset, and you have just over a mile to go, mostly uphill, before you are out of the deep forest and in the clearing.

The mountain range, which stretches from Maine to Georgia and is documented to be one of the oldest in the country, shares characteristics across the approximately 420 counties. It is rugged, often mist-covered with deep hollers and rugged peaks that cling to a rich tapestry of folklore — folklore that is a mix of generational stories and superstitions that came from the Scots-Irish, a variety of native American tribes, and African Americans who have carved out often isolated lives in this region.

Your heart starts to race as the clearing gets within reach because if you grew up in any part of Appalachia, your elders have warned that if you find yourself in the woods after dark, that is not a good thing. And no matter what, never, ever, whistle.

The legend goes, the folklore varying in each little community in the thousands of miles that make up the Appalachian Mountains region, that you should never whistle after the sun sets in the woods or you will draw supernatural attention from someone or something you do not want to encounter.

Whistling at night in the woods is a tale that has been passed down for generations, usually by an elder with a warning about someone they knew who never made it out of the woods. These tales have caused the young and the old to avoid waking ancient spirits. It is also advised never to respond or run if one hears a whistle, but instead to ignore it, state your intentions out loud, and leave the area calmly.

Everybody loves a good ghost story, whether you believe in them or not. Because of their age and isolation, the Appalachian Mountains have had plenty of them passed along through the ages — stories like the Appalachian Whistle that endured for centuries. It is one of many folk tales prevalent in American culture that go beyond the boundaries of the people who call this mountain range home.

Clay Newcomb is a seventh-generation Arkansan, storyteller and the host of “Bear Grease,” a widely popular podcast filled with rich recalls of communities and traditions. A prolific publisher, writer and cinematographer, he is uniquely connected to the art of storytelling and folklore. He focuses on forgotten history that is highly relevant to the people who remain connected to their roots.

Newcomb said something about this time of year, after the harvest, as the days grow longer, that draws us toward stories and folklore with a supernatural dimension.

“It goes back to our roots as an agrarian society, a time of harvest, which we are still culturally attached to. So in the fall, we might be thinking about those things and telling those stories when the days are shorter, you’re home quicker, you’re in the house, you’re sitting around in the fire, you’re probably celebrating your wins and losses on your harvest, and there’s something nostalgic about it that we love to remain attached to,” he said.

He’s not wrong, and we’ve seen that not just around the fall season but year-round. It is part of why podcasting has grown so exponentially in the past decade: people have grown impatient with quick four-minute legacy news stories to explain something and are drawn toward something longer and more meaningful, something that doesn’t just inform us but also entertains us.

Newcomb says that success in life comes from being able to connect to the values of your culture: “The most ancient possible way to connect people to those values is through an oral story. It’s not even the written word. It’s not a video program. It is people sitting around a fire telling a story,” he said.

American stories carry a value system; they always do. It is parabolic, and there’s a lot of hidden meaning inside stories. The ones that persist long enough to become folklore sometimes carry the values of the people who interpreted that story for the first time.