My name is Michael, and my story happened in two and thirteen in the
little town of Miami, Oklahoma. I was driving a delivery truck for a
company based out of Carol, Iowa, along with my ride along and his
name is Josh. It was three thirty a m. And we had just
finished our route and we were headed back to the warehouse where we were running
trucks out of an old abandoned BF Goodrich plant. From our last stop,
we pulled out on a street when a thin, pale man dressed in black
with a wide brim black hat began dancing across the street right in front of
the truck. It was creepy and it caused me to stop. He stopped
halfway across the street and he looked up at us from that brim of his
hat, and then he continued his creepy little dance across the street. When
he reached the sidewalk, he dropped down to sit with his legs crossed,
and he sat there looking like he was comfortable. I couldn't see him anymore
because of the height of the truck. What's he doing, I asked,
He's looking right at me with that weird smile. The damn thing is weird.
Let's get the hell out of here, said Josh. We got back
to the warehouse and started talking about it as we unloaded the trailer. We
agreed that the old, creepy, pale man looked like the old man from
the Poultergeist movies with the skill to looking face in the big yellow teeth.
You know, the old man who said you're all gonna die after we get
finished here. Let's go back and see if he's still there, said Josh.
Sounds good to me, I said. We drove back after work,
and of course the old man was gone, and we drove around the adjacent
blocks, but we never saw him again. Josh was still freaked out,
so I drove him home and I dropped him off and I headed back to
my house. Three years went by and Josh had left the company. I
didn't see him for years, and then I ran into him and we talked
and we caught up with each other, and then the topic of that old
man in that dark coat and black hat came up. The sight of that
old man still creeps me out. Josh said, I've had nightmares about that
night. That old man spooked me. Well, we set our goodbyes,
and I never saw Josh alive again. Not long after that, Josh tragically
passed away from a strange illness. I too think about that night sometimes and
how it scared him so bad. I watched a program last year about paranormal
incidents and one of the stories was about a man in all black clothing and
he wore a wide brim black hat, and he's been seen in many places
across the country. People call him the hat Man, and they warned that
he is an evil entity. I wonder if anyone listing has any knowledge of
the hat Man. Hey, y'all, welcome to another podcast. My name's
Cameron Buckner. This is a Dixie cryptod podcast, also known as the what
If It's True? Podcast out on the podcast network. That means you can
find me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google podcast Stitcher. iHeart any podcast
app. If you search for what If It's True Podcast, it'll be rought
up there at the top. Thanks for joining me. Hope you liked that
first story. Let's get on with some more all right, here we go.
I had an encounter in twenty twenty was something that shook the foundations of
my knowledge of the outdoors. And what resides beyond our walls of masonry and
wood, and my world caved in. The ridicule I received from friends and
family overseeing a swamp lucky didn't bother me as much as it probably would have
others. It was my mom's cancer that broke me after two years of something
I hope neither you or any of your listeners ever have to go through.
My mother broke through and has been cancer free for almost a year. During
that period, however, I didn't do any fishing or honey, and while
the rest of the world was in the throes of madness with the virus,
I was stressed to my breaking point, making road trips up Stake to hospitals.
When I finally got my freedom, I went back into the woods.
I waited until November, when the twenty twenty two deer season opened. The
day before, I had placed my Nyline pop up blind in an area that
I hadn't hunted. It had been untouched since the two seventeen season. That
day, I headed out with my head lamp and a small pack with water
and some junk food. I had a single shot two forty three and a
thirty eight Special in my pocket. I had started lugging that revolver as a
deterrent against people during all those long miles of taking my mother to her doctor
appointments and surgeries and multiple chemotherapy treatments. It has become second nature to put
it in my pocket now when I leave the house. I got into the
tent well before daylight, and I sat down on a bucket and I listened
to the dark silence of the pre dawn. Sitting there alone in the gloom,
I started to get a bad feeling. I pulled out my phone to
check for messages. I had placed it on silent, so I wouldn't have
heard any of it if any had come through that little bit of light inside.
The blind set off a series of events. First and began to hoot,
and then a second owl joined in. Pretty soon it was a whole
flock of owls. And although this was normal for that patch of the woods,
I've heard it many times, but that morning something was different. It
sounded like a pack of code. He's joined in. After that, it
was the awfulesh racket you can imagine, just before sunrise, and at that
moment the blind lurched forward with me in it. I couldn't understand what was
going on. Were those codies out there fighting in the dark. I was
disoriented and I was shook up and confused. In an effort to make it
all stop, I shouted, get the hell out of here. It was
already bad, but it was about to get worse. The hoots and howls
and snarls, everything got louder. The blind was shaking violently, and in
the chaos, I dropped my phone and the light from the screen illuminated the
corner of the blind where it looked like something had a hold of it.
So without thinking, I pulled my revolver and I fired two quick shots into
that corner. It left my ears ringing, so I couldn't hear anything for
a couple of minutes, but the tent shaking had stopped. I don't know
if there was ever a moment in all my thirty five years when I was
more afraid that weight for daylight was worse than sitting in the surgical waiting room
when my mother was having one of her lungs removed. I was lathered in
sweat, sitting there in a blind with my rifle on my lap. It
was loaded and cocked. My hand shook as I replaced the two spent thirty
eight cartridges and my handgun. When it finally got light enough out to see
properly, I crawled out of that blind as cautiously as I could, handgun
at the ready. I forced myself up onto my feet and stuffed the pistol
into my pocket and did a hasty skip out of there with my cane in
one hand and my rifle in the other. I left the little pack behind.
I left the deer calls, the dough yeurine, the slim gems,
and that pop up blind right there where they sat, to hell with all
that it could rot. For all I cared, And I had no intention
of searching for blood, footprints or anything, and I have no desire to
go back and do so now. I could have shot Et and left him
lying there, but I wouldn't have known, nor do I still care to
know. I'm shaking right now even as I write this. A lot of
stuff has fallen into place since that last encounter. When I first started hunting
the creek way back in my teens, I found a dead fox in a
fork of a tree directly behind my ladder stand. Peanut butter Bates would go
missing without explanation every time I'd put them out. I think the fox was
a warning to keep me out of the area. And when physical ailments prevented
me from hunting the area for a few years, no one else bothered going
back in there. And then I suddenly showed up again. I know what
nature does to wounded and sickly animals. I'm a crippled A predator would target
me first, but I'm a mean cripple. And that morning, whatever was
outside my blind found that out. I'm not saying it was a sasquatch,
but I never knew a flock of owls or code. He used to call
that kind of a nightmare. And meanwhile, if anyone is ever bumping around
in the Nine Runs and finds a dilapidated dear blind with a pack and a
bucket seat, know this. I wish you the best of luck, and
I hope you make it out without issues. And if by some chance you
have your foundations rocked by something that you're having trouble explaining, remember that you're
not alone. You've got at least one person who believes there are things out
there that other people scoff at at the mention of I'm from the North Texas
area near the Red River, about sixty five miles north of Dallas, and
I've lived there most of my life. One of my major hobbies, besides
playing the guitar, is bow hunting for mature trophy deer. And when I
say bow hunting, I mean with a recurve bow with no sights. I
have bow hunting now for forty years, and while I have experienced many different
things in the woods that are rarely seen or experienced with known wildlife, the
experiences that follow defy any type of conventional explanation. Now, I've taken multiple
book deer over the years, which means they are older and more savvy animals
that are difficult to hunt, and since I hunt with a recurve, I
have to get extremely close to seal the deal, and as a result,
I have to use all my knowledge of the woods, the animals, and
the wind behavior to get a chance at a big mature buck. Only relay
this to illustrate that I'm experienced with the woods and the animals that reside there.
I must add that over my hunting career, I have seen and heard
all of the known animals native to Texas Oklahoma, Kansas, and Colorado,
so I'm very familiar with the habits and vocalizations of the indigenous species. Ironically,
I have never killed a deer with a rifle, not that I have
anything against that, It's just not my thing. I have earlier experiences,
and some as recent as the fall of twenty twenty two in other locations,
but I chose to send these series of occurrences that took place over a fifteen
year period at my farm in south central Oklahoma. As for my thoughts on
Bigfoot, based upon the Patterson Gimblin film, along with all the historic reports
from the indigenous Native Americans, I feel that the creatures must exist. However,
I had always believed that they were probably very few roaming North Texas and
Oklahoma. I'd heard of the contemporary reports of the sightings in our area prior
to the Internet, and the published reports were extremely rare, so I had
the mindset that I was more likely to get struck by lightning than encounter a
bigfoot in this region of the country. In recent years, I have found
more and more reports on the Internet of sightings in North Texas and South Oklahoma.
Again, I kept these thoughts well in the back of my mind while
out in the woods. This is an occurrence and observation in Coal County,
Oklahoma. In two thousand and four, I purchased a property in Coal County
for investment and for bow hunting. The rural two hundred and seventy acre property
was wild and isolated and with one hundred and seventy to one hundred and eighty
acres of woods, with the remainder intillable acres in pasture. The woods were
not what you typically think of. While it did have oaks and ash trees,
it was stick with brush. It also had large numbers of coin and
per cemon trees, along with several acres of dewberries. All of the neighboring
farms consisted of similar mix of woods and pasture. Two and the property was
located off of Gravel County Road and then one had to turn down a one
mile gravel two track road shared by myself and a neighboring landowner to get to
our normal light gate, and from the gate, it was another two thirds
of a mile down to another gravel drive which entered the woods at the foot
of a large wooded hill. In order to get to the barn on my
place. There was a good white tailed deer population, along with hogs and
codys and bibecats and turkeys. I even saw a badger on the property one
year. The first two years that I hunted there, I would make the
one point five hour drive from my home in Texas, leaving well before daylight
to get into the woods before sun up, hunting until after dark, I
would walk out and then make the one and a half hour drive home and
would get up and do it all over again the next day. I tried
using a tent to stay overnight a few times, but that usually took too
much time to set up and take down over a weekend hunt. For most
of the two thousand six hunting season, I put up a pop up line
in the bed of my truck and I slept in that with my sleeping bag.
This made for some chilly nights in November and December, when the night
temperatures would be in the low twenties. In two thousand and eight, I
put a small twelve by twenty foot metal prefab cabin on it. Since it
was only eighty nine miles one way from my home in Texas. There was
no electricity or running water in the cabin. However, I had a propane
stove for heat, along with two hundred and seventy acres of bathroom. In
the barn, I kept my tractor and implements, and I would drive up
a couple of times per month in the spring and summer to shred and take
care of the place with the coach of early fall, and I would put
in small food plots for the deer. A power line ran through the place
about five or six hundred yards right away across the property. On the large
wooded hill where my cabin was, I kept a three quarter mile tractor track
where I could drive my tractor through the woods, and when hunting, I
could walk through the extremely brushy woods. Shortly after buying the place, several
times a year when I would go up to work or hunt, there would
be leg sized to chess sized diameter trees across the road to the cabin and
across the tractor paths in the woods. For the first few years I didn't
think too much about it. However, I would have to move at least
a couple of dozen or so trees every year out of those primitive roads and
through my woods or on or up to the cabin. Almost every trip that
I made up there, I would find three to six of these down trees
across the road driving into the cabin, or in my track or track in
the woods. And then one year I came to the realization that the same
percentage of treefall did not seem to be occurring off the roads in the actual
woods. Even commented to my wife that statistically speaking, that all the trees
that fell seemed to all fall in the roads one weekend, and upon my
return the next weekend, there would be multiple trees down across the pass,
despite their not being a storm or high winds in the area prior to my
arrival. It was rare, but I would hear a large tree falling in
the woods while I was hunting, but never the amount that seemed to be
down across the pass that I used to travel through my woods. I also
observed that the bases or stumps of a lot of the down trees were not
in the ground, and many of the trees did not have the associated stumps
even near the actual down tree. I learned from some Bigfoot reports that they
would sometimes placed trees and roads to discourage intrusion by humans my mental wheels began
to slow the gain traction, as too, could I actually have these creatures
ranging across my property. In all the animal tracks that I routinely observed on
this place, I had never found a bigfoot track. I must mention,
though, that on various areas on my place I had set aside three different
five to fifteen acre areas of sanctuaries for the animals, where I never intruded
unless I had to enter to recover a deer. These areas were really thick
with brush, and the intention was that these areas would be where the game
would feel safe without encountering the scent of a human, so that they would
hopefully stay on my property when spook alarmed, or just to serve as a
safe betting area. In the middle of November of twenty eleven, I was
hunting in a tree stand that I had placed fifty yards down from the ridge
top of the same large hill that my cabin was on. The stand was
twenty yards inside the tree line along the power line right of way. This
morning was overcast with fog with occasional short bouts of mist. At a thirty
am, a loud scream or a drawn out shriek sounded five hundred yards from
my position. Now. The screaming continued on and off for twenty minutes and
came from my bottom land, which contained twenty acres of an extremely thick brushy
area that I had set aside as a sanctuary bedding area for the deer.
The scream sounded just like a woman screaming for her life, and they would
last thirty seconds to a minute in length. This went on for twenty minutes.
Even as far away as they seemed to be from me, they were
still very loud, and the sounds made the hair on the back of my
neck stand up. And as I sat in my tree stand, I was
going through the mental debate as to getting down and going there to possibly see
what it was, or to hold tight my tree stand, but the staying
put option prevailed. I've heard cougars and bibcats, both in the wild and
vocalizing on TV, but this was nothing like that, And while I could
believe a cougar might pass through the area, I had never heard that sound
coming from any animal. Later that afternoon, after the fog and mist were
long gone, I cautiously went down to where I thought the sounds came from,
but I could not find any tracks or sign that might indicate what had
made the noise. On June eighteen, twenty nineteen, at the age of
sixty five, I had what is called the widow Maker heart attack. At
five foot nine and one hundred and fifty two pounds, I ended up with
two stints in a ballooning dilation procedure on the third artery in my The recovery
from this was tough, and I predicted that I would not see my seventieth
birthday. However, I told my wife that no matter if it finished me
off, I was going to spend as much time in the woods that fall
as my body would allow. Well. I was wrong, though at the
time of this riding, I have celebrated my seventieth birthday a few weeks back.
So after four months of recovery in the fall of two thousand nineteen,
on Friday November eight I went up for a three day hunt. There was
a large timber thick brushy area on the northwest side of the large timbered hill
where my cabin was located, and despite owning and hunting the property since two
thousand and four, I had never thoroughly explored or scouted this twenty or so
acres that lay west of my cabin after my morning hunt on Saturday the ninth,
in another area of the farm. On my way back to my cabin,
I passed by the edge of this area west to my cabin. As
I walked along the tractor track adjacent to the area, I discovered some encouraging
buck sign including a large buck rub on a cedar tree the size of my
thigh. A few feet from this rub was a curious collection of three to
four large tree branches or trunks lying in the fork of another tree. The
branches were four to six inches in diameter, and they had been placed horizontally
in the fort and then pushed downward on both sides to form a chevron pattern.
And with a number of branches and the symmetry of the pattern, it
appeared to me that they had been brought there and deliberately placed in the fort
by someone. After thoroughly exploring and scouting this area, I ended up hanging
a stand thirty yards west of the rub and the old tree stack. In
the fall of twenty eighteen, I had been told by some of my Amish
neighbors that several break ends had occurred in the area and I should keep watch
for suspicious activity. Since I never carried or even took a firem with me,
I decided to buy a nine millimeter pistol for security. I probably should
have had one with me all those years prior to this. Also, I
sold a place in twenty eighteen to a neighbor and he was nice enough to
give me hunting rights there as long as he owned it. I subsequently bought
another place one mile from Red River and only seventeen miles from my home.
It is just as wild as my previous place, but I have no plans
for a cabin on that place yet. Now back to Saturday, November nine,
twenty nineteen. I turned into bed about nine thirty pm that night after
exploring the area west of my cabin and hanging a stand and I will soon
sound asleep due to the news of the break ends the previous year, and
when I went to bed, I would place my nine millimeter pistol on my
dresser next to the bed, along with a flashlight. My extended cab truck
was parked next to the west side of my cabin with close access to the
cabin door, which was located in the southwest corner of the cabin. At
two fifteen am that night, I was suddenly awakened by a loud sound of
something dragging across the small porch on the cabin. Before I could get awake,
this dragging sound was immediately followed by an extremely loud bang or blow on
the cabin door. It was so loud that I thought the lock metal door
might actually bust open. At the sound of this crash, I set up
in bed and grabbed my pistol and flashlight, leaving the flashlight off but ready
just in case. I was now totally awakened. On high alert. I
sat there pointing the pistol at the door, along with the flashlight pointing at
the door. If something reached the door, I planned to click on the
flashlight and send around from my pistol. A few seconds passed and I heard
it again, dragging or shuffling on the porch, giving me the impression that
whoever or whatever it was had left the porch and moved west. I continued
to sit there on the bed in the dark with my pistol and light for
what seemed like a good five minutes, and I listened closely hearing nothing else,
I got up and looked out the curtain on the cabin window facing my
truck, but I didn't see anything. I went back to bed, and
I was surprised to be able to go back to sleep. Despite replaying the
strange currents in my mind, I could not shake the possible conclusion that a
bigfoot had just slapped my cabin door. If a human trespasser had been out
there prowling around, they would have seen my truck, and they would have
certainly not wanted for me to know that they were out there. Next morning,
I got up as usual, well before daylight, and I went out
to hunt the newsstand west of my cabin. The whole time were playing the
events from the night before. When I returned to the cabin later that morning,
I carefully examined the screen door and the metal door on the cabin,
but I couldn't find anything on the doors of the porch to show any indication
of anyone or anything messing with it. However, on the ground a few
feet from the porch was a spot where the grass had been dug up,
exposing the bare earth. This area was roughly rectangular, twenty two inches long
and eight to ten feet wide. It did not appear to be a scrape
from a buck, and it was not there the previous afternoon. Was it
connected to the two fifteen am bang on the door. Despite not finding any
tracks or sign, I still couldn't escape the thought that it must have been
a big foot, what with finding all the trees down through the years and
finding the strange tree structure, and my invading a new area of the day
before, not to mention the screaming several years earlier, combined with the quantity
of wild game and what was the dragging sound on the porch. However,
in the new area, the oaks were really dropping acorns, and I had
a great time hunting in the area over several weeks, sometimes seeing as many
as seventeen bucks in a set dining on these acorns, while the giant buck
that I imagine made the big rub never appeared. I had fun hunting that
area through December up through mid January when bowseason ended. Nothing else occurred during
these later hunts after the night of the bang, but I packed my pistol
to the stand with me and kept it handy at night in the cabin.
The only thing that did continue were the down trees on my roads and trackways,
and they can still. While I never experienced the visual sighting or found
any tracks, I believe that all the weird stuff was due to a bigfoot
or multiple creatures that probably passed through my place to do the same thing that
I was there for. They were hunting for game. On a side note,
you hear from any reports that most of these creatures hide and try to
stay away from human contact. Also, they will often discourage humans from being
in their area. Most wild animals are shy, yet curious, and I
believe these shy creatures would also be curious since they possibly possess higher intelligence.
I have to also think that, perhaps a couple of hundred years ago,
that they too could have experienced similar genocide as the Native Americans who succumbed to
all the European diseases for which they carry no immunity, and this too would
contribute to the creature's desire to stay away from humans. And that's the end
of the email. The man's name is Wayne. This is not a you
know, one of these exciting bigfoot attacks or I killed a bigfoot type stories.
But I enjoyed this story and I wanted to get it to you because
this man is very reflective and he's methodic and how he thinks about this stuff,
and he's listed a lot of anecdotal I guess you'd call it evidence that
to him makes perfect sense that this could possibly be a bigfoot. It's it's
a smart email anyway. I just wanted you guys to hear it because I
think there are a lot of people who own property that may see things that
normally you wouldn't see on a piece of property like this, like the trees
down tree structures like he described near that big rub on a cedar tree.
I've never seen a rub six And I think he said that rub that he
found on that cedar tree was a six inch round trunk. Good grief,
that must be that must be a moose of a deer. This is kind
of a fred bear hunter. He's probably very keen on everything going on in
the woods. You can tell by the way he writes and how he explains
this stuff that he's a recurved primitive bow hunter. Those guys spend a lot
of time, I mean a lot of time in the woods. They do
a lot of stalking. They're just really good hunters, and it kind of
hearkens back to again primitive hunting techniques that I've always envied. I've never I
think I could do it, probably if I was younger. I don't know
if I'm patient enough to do that, but I think I could physically do
it in that I think I could be quiet enough and observant enough to do
it. I just never had the patience. I was like, you know,
I want to take a compound bow and just let that thing go,
or squeeze off around from my rifle, collect my deer, and get back
home and watch football. So I'm not really, you know, one of
your hardcore rawhide type hunters, but this guy is, and so he knows
what he's talking about, and he's got other stuff, and Wayne, I'd
love to hear your other experiences. Again, this is all anecdotal stuff,
but it's very interesting to me. When I was eight, I started spending
my summers with my grandparents. There was only about a ten mile drive between
both sets on either side of the North Carolina Tennessee state line, so I
split my summer between them and various aunts and uncles in the area. Mom
and Dad popped in every few weeks to make sure my grandparents hadn't lost their
minds taking care of me. People in that area know and understand about buggers.
My grandparents were no exception. When you spend your life pulling roots and
hunting game and guying herbs in those hills, you learn where the buggers live.
They seemed to be territorial. They know their boundaries, and they respect
their neighbor's turf. All those summers I spent growing up there taught me these
things as well. My grandfather and I decided to go for a hike up
the creek it fed into a river that ran through town. An older cousin
came with us. My grandfather was a big man. He stood six foot
three anyway two hundred and fifty pounds. He was strong as a mule and
tough as they come. He was a World War two marine corvette who fought
the Japanese, but inside he was a teddy bear, especially when it came
to his family. Since our hikes were actually hunting trips in disguise, we
were all armed. As we worked our way up the creek. It was
a beautiful day. There weren't many clouds in the sky, and an ice
breeze was blowing down the creek bed into our faces. We knew we had
the down wind advantage for anything we might come across upstream, And as we
proceeded up the creek, we started getting whiffs of a foul odor. Now
and then it happened whenever the wind shifted directions to the right. Grandpa slowed
us down, and he put his finger to his lips, and he led
us quietly onward. The creek made its own noise, which helped to cover
the sound of us walking, and every now and then Grandpa would stop,
he'd take in several long, deep breaths, and then he'd look around.
He was trying to detect any sense in the air. We had traveled an
hour from the house when we came to a hard right bend in the river.
Now I called us a river because at that point in the creek it
had widened to a small, shallow river. As we made that curve,
Grandpa suddenly stopped us before dropping down to his knee and looking up to the
hill to our left. After what felt like an eternity, he took a
small step back to my cousin and pointed up the ridge. I followed his
finger to where he was pointing as my cousin raised his twenty two rifle to
his shoulder and fired, and fifty yards away a rabbit took one hop forward
and tumbled down the hill four or five feet. Great shot, cousin,
I said. Grandpa gave him a pat on the shoulder before telling him to
head up there and collect his game, And with the big grin, he
turned to me and said, the next one's years. My cousin brought the
rabbit back and dropped it into Grandpa's hip bag, and we continued up the
creek. Another half hour passed and we were approaching another bend in the river.
Over the years, this bend had carved out a swimming hole that was
thirty yards in circumference. Grandpa said, we ought to take a break and
go for a swim when we got there. It had been a hot day
and we were two young boys. He didn't get an argument from us.
The swimming hole was bowl shaped, with a current that swirled along the left
bank and followed it to two large rocks where it spilled out and continued on
down the hill to where we were. All around it were large rocks that
added to the picturesque quality of the scene. We got closer and we heard
some kind of noise coming from the other side of the two big rocks.
Grandpa stopped immediately. He turned and whispered to us to stay where we were,
and then he crept up to the edge of the rocks and he peered
in, and then he backed up for a second, and he looked again,
and another second passed before he turned in motion for us to come up
to where he was. We moved as quietly as we could, and from
the other side of the rocks, we could hear the sounds of splashing and
squeals of what sounded like children laughing. I got a surprise for you,
Grandpa whispered, so quietly that we could barely hear him. I don't be
scared. I slowly look around this rock into that swimming hole right away.
My cousin backed up in motioned for me to go first. We moved up
to the rock and we looked around. What I saw there changed my view
of things for the rest of my life. Two little boogers were swimming and
playing in the water. Now I had already seen one of these things the
day it stole my Grandpa's pie. But there was something about that second sighting
that changed things. Maybe it was the confirmation that I wasn't crazy for seeing
it the first time, or maybe it was the nature of their activity,
being so human like. I just can't explain it. I had only watched
them for a second or two when one of them began to sniff the air,
and then it looked straight at me. Immediately the second one turned and
looked too, and they both let out a very loud yell that sounded something
like a cougar and a chimpanzee mixed. I jumped back and would have fallen
if Grandpa hadn't have caught me, and we heard them go up the hillside
on the other side of the swimming hole. We entered the swimming hole area
and listened to them breaking branches and knocking down trees as they went. They
were moving so fast. I never saw anything moved that fast before. I
looked at my grandfather and he and my cousin began to laugh, and I
gasped out, stunned. What are you laughing at? I wanted to say
more, but I couldn't bring myself to speak. Grandpa said that the one
we saw was the one that was stealing the pie the week before, and
the one with him was his sister. I was trying to speak, but
my mouth and my brain wouldn't connect. I was eight years old at the
time, and I was having trouble processing what had just happened. And Grandpa
and my cousin were still laughing, and Grandpa asked if we still wanted to
go for a swim. My cousin had seen them before, so he wasn't
as shaken up as I was. I couldn't stop trembling, and I began
to feel dizzy, to the point that I was falling down. My grandfather
caught me and he helped me sit down. He could see that I was
scared and then shocked. It wasn't funny anymore. They both quit laughing and
started trying to calm me down, but all I could hear was that loud,
weird yell echoing in my head. Grandpa handed me the canteen and I
dropped it. He picked it up and put his arm around my shoulders and
he gave me a hug, and then he quietly explained that we just saw
the children of the family of Boogers that lived up there. He said they
wouldn't hurt me, and eventually I began to calm down and I was able
to take a drink. I told him I didn't feel like swimming and I
just wanted to go home. He understood, and he asked my cousin to
lead us back down the hill. We had a good iron half walk ahead
of us. We all stood up to leave, and another loud, growling
yell came from above us, where the two young buggers had run off to.
Grandpa spun around and dropped down to one knee. He raised his rifle
to his shoulder and began to scan the hillside. Then he quickly removed the
clip in his rifle and replaced it with one from his pouch, And once
he chambered around, he raised the rifle back up and he scanned the hill
again. My cousin was the first to see it. He pointed up the
hill and a little to the right, unless than two hundred feet away from
us stood a larger, scarier looking version of the two young ones we'd seen
swimming. Grandpa set his sights on it, but he didn't fire. I
was frozen in fear. This thing was so much bigger, than the first
two. Even partially hidden behind a tree, he looked intimidating. He looked
from one to the other of us before fixing his gaze on Grandpa, and
for what felt like an hour, we all stood there in a face off.
It was only thirty seconds or so. My cousin whispered into my ear
that this was the father of the two that were swimming. It didn't growl
or yell, It just stood there looking at us. Finally, Grandpa lowered
his rifle and he stood up. After scanning our immediate area. He told
my cousin to take the rabbit eye of the pouch and walked forward, holding
it in front of him, lay it on the rock that was directly in
front of my grandfather. While my cousin did as he was told, I
moved closer to my grandfather, and as I bumped into him, he put
his hand on my shoulder and he said, we're gonna be okay. Even
as Grandpa spoke, that creature turned his gazed on me, and it sent
a chill down my spine. Grandpa told my cousin to lead the way back
down the hill. He said not to run, but don't go slow either.
I was in the middle, with Grandpa taking up the rear. He
kept his rifle in a ready position and instructed us to do the same,
but do not shoot at anything. That was the longest walk of my life,
all around us on both sides, all the way back up the ridge.
We heard noises in the woods, and they escorted us all the way
back to the upper edge of the garden at Grandpa's house. We never saw
them, but they made sure that we knew they were there. We were
halfway down to the garden when the large mail let out a not so loud
growling yell. Grandpa stopped and turned around wave at the neighbors. Boys,
he told us and say goodbye. Well, we all waved, and my
grandfather and my cousin called out their goodbyes. I couldn't speak a word,
and then Grandpa chuckled and he said, well, boy, how do you
like our neighbors. I didn't say anything. I was just glad to be
out of those woods and home. I went in the house and went in
the bathroom and took a shower. After I got cleaned up and had some
fresh clothes on, Grandma came in with a cup of her homemade hot chocolate.
She put her arm around me and handing me the cup. It smells
so good, and it was made with dark chocolate and sugar and cream with
a little love. It was the best cup of hot chocolate I had ever
tasted. She never said anything, She just held me in her arms as
I sipped at my drink. After a while, she began to hum a
Bible song to herself, and sometime after that I drifted off to sleep in
her arms. I appreciate you listening thus far to this Mississippi redneck recite stories
from real people, claiming they have real experiences. I've always enjoyed reading other
people's stories. I hope you're enjoying it too. If you did and you
think it's worth it, give me a thumbs up. Maybe hit the subscribe
button, leave a comment if you want to, and come back. Mainly
come back for the next podcast. I appreciate you, and we'll see you
guys on the next one. Thanks.