So, I'm from the beautiful small town of Princeton, Indiana. It's grown
a bit in recent years, but back when I was seventeen the time when
this encounter happened, it was still a typical small town America kind of place.
I grew up in a hunting and fishing family. We were taught how
to live off the land and respect life at an early age. My dad
took each of us kids squirrel hunting at the young age of ten. He
taught us proper gun handling and safety and the best techniques for hunting. I
did pretty well on my first outing, but my brother Gary not so much.
Dad said he had never been aimed at so much in his life.
Every time he turned around, he was staring down the barrel of Gary's gun.
That probably wouldn't have bothered him nearly so much if it hadn't been for
my brother's evil grin. And for me, hunting was a man's ride of
passage. I had my dad and older brother as examples of everything a hunter
should be, and I was bound and determined to meet their standards, and
it was not easy. The first squirrel that I ever killed was on a
hunt with my dad, and it was the biggest thrill of my life until
I had to feel dress it. Mom's awesome fried squirrel biscuits and gravy didn't
quite taste the same. That night, as I stared down at my plate
of food, all I could see was that little squirrel staring back up at
me while I was pulling its guts out. Finally, Dad leaned over and
he said, God provided our food, and it's wrong to kill anything you're
not going to eat. Those were Dad's standard, So I tried to ignore
the tiny little Alvin in the chipmunk's voice whispering from my plate, telling me
all about his wife and kids, and I finished off every bite. Over
the years, I toughened up a bit and it became a little less bothersome,
until eventually I couldn't hear Alvin talking at all. Every year, I'd
get more and more excited waiting for August, when squirrel season would begin.
On the first day of the season. The year I was seventeen, I
called my best buddy to go with me. He was busy, so I
asked my dad and my older brother. They were both working. I wasn't
about to risk being shot at by my other brother so I decided to man
up and go alone. This is something I never did, but I saw
this as my path to manhood laid out before me. The night before,
I told Mom and Dad where I'd be hunting. It was a great spot
down by the river and known to be the home of lots of squirrels.
Then I cleaned my rifle, a birthday present from my dad that I was
especially proud of, and I gathered my gear and did my best fall asleep.
It seemed like my head had just hit the pillow when the alarm sounded.
Feeling a little groggy but anxious to get out there and hunt me some
squirrels, I jumped out of bed and threw on my clothes and grabbed my
gear, and I headed out, wolfing down a peanut butter and jelly sandwich
as I drove. I needed to be in the woods and settle down before
sunrise or the squirrels might see me. I went down the old winding road
across the creaky bridge, and I parked by an oil well in the field.
The sky was beginning to pale and I could see a light fog rising
off the river. I walked a short distance across the field and into the
woods along the river with my gun in hand, and I was covered in
skeeter dope. It was a beautiful morning, despite the fact that the fog
gave everything a slightly creepy feeling. The waist high grass was covered in dew
as I quietly made my way down to my hunting spot, making sure be
very very quiet so as not to spook the squirrels. My dad my brother
were like squirrel hunting ninjas in the woods, capable of walking right up behind
a person without breaking a twig. I moved more like a squirrel hunting bull,
breaking twigs and crunching leaves with every step. I came to a fallen
tree about four feet in diameter that had fallen away from the river and into
the field. As I approached it, trying to figure out how I was
going to get over it or around it, I stepped on a small branch
that snapped like a rifle shot. Well. I cursed under my breath as
the sound echoed through the fog. A nearby beaver slapped his tail on the
water in protest, and I jumped a little at the loud splash it made,
But I was mentally prepared for run ends with most any animal that morning,
I just wasn't prepared for what happened next. I watched as the angry
beaver swam off and was about to resume my journey when I caught movement out
of the corner of my eye. I froze as I watched what looked to
be a grall hooded cobra rising up from behind a tree not more than six
feet in front of me. As my eyes focused in the low light,
reality set in. This was a no snake, and it continued to rise
until it was at eye level with me. Its neck was long, with
two large golf ball sized shiny black eyes perched on top. It did not
make a sound or blink. It just stared at me. My mouth went
dry as the adrenaline pumped through my veins, and I tried to rationalize what
I was seeing. But all I could think of was a story my brother
in law had once told me. He and some friends were out in the
country one night having a party when he had to answer nature's call at the
edge of a cornfield, he came face to face with a classic, big
headed, large black eyed, gray alien wearing a silver jumpsuit. My brother
in law jumped and the alien jumped, and each ran back in the direction
from which they came. My brother in law told his friends about it,
but they all accused him of just being drunk in anger. He insisted they
come and see. When they finally went out there, they found seven to
eight inch long, three toed tracks like a chicken would mate. They tried
following the tracks toward the neighbor's field, but it started raining, so they
gave up. The next morning, the sheriff showed up, accusing them of
making a big circle in the neighbor's cornfield. With that story running through my
head, I couldn't help but compare the alien my brother in law described with
the alien that was currently staring at me from the other side of the fallen
tree. This wasn't a classic gray though. It was more like the alien
in Close Encounters of the Third kind. I wondered, should I whistle that
tune to protect myself? I slowly took the safety off my gun. I
didn't point it at the creature for fear of making things worse, but at
least I would be ready if I needed it. In response, it began
to rock from side to side as it moved a little closer to me.
Fear was setting in and I felt beads of sweat trickle down my face.
Why doesn't it speak, I wondered, Maybe it's telepathic. After what felt
like a millennium, it turned its head. I didn't expect this, and
I caught my breath Anticipating the worst. It was staring at me from its
left eye. Now, my knees grew weak and my stomach churned a little
as I saw the protrusion on its face. It looked just like a bill.
In fact, it looked just like the bill of a sand crane.
I exhaled in relief as I saw the alien before me for what it really
was. It was a sand crane. Just as I was beginning to laugh
at myself, the beaver slapped the water again, getting one more startled jump
out of my already jangled nerves. That was enough for me. I had
manned up and had gone hunting alone, but I didn't enjoy it. I
put the gun on safety and turned and left the alien sand crane still standing
behind the tree. I walked back to my car, ignoring the squirrel that
was barking at me. I was too shaky to even shoot. He probably
knew that, and I'm sure if I could still hear Old Alvan's voice,
he was probably making fun of me. I didn't care. I was kind
of laughing at me too. The next weekend, I went hunting with my
brother and had a great time. The story is all true, as best
as I can remember it. I've had three encounters with Bigfoot in my life,
one at the age of five, the second at the age of eight,
and then another at thirty two. I am currently forty two years old.
Two of these encounters are face to face encounters, and one of them
was an incredibly eerie experience that, looking back, was a sound encounter.
I went away to college on the East Coast, and I lived there still.
My encounter pushed me to take anthropology as one of my majors, to
try to figure out what I saw as a kid. My other major was
history, and I told people the anthropology was to answer the why question in
history. It is not true. Did it help, sure, but it
was not the full reason. I am now a reference librarian at a public
library. When people come to me with what would be thought of as a
crazy research question, I'm the last person to question them the first seventeen years
of my life. I grew up in southern Humboldt County, California, in
the town of Riodell, and when I was a bit older, we lived
in Scotia. These two towns reside side by side along the Eel River and
were sustained by the logging industry. The way she spells this river is ee
l Eel. I don't know. To live in the town of Scotia,
you had to work for the lumber company. Work whistles told you when to
wake up and go to lunch or when it was time to go home,
and as a kid, you knew it was time to head home when the
four point thirty pm whistle went off, because the dads were headed home for
dinner and would usually be ready soon after. I'm the oldest of four kids.
My mother was deaf, and we used the American sign lang, which
is our form of communication in the home. We didn't have much money growing
up, so when we did go on vacation, it was to go camping
with my mother's parents on a bit of land about an hour and a half
from Riodell. The town is called Edersburg and is next to the King Range
Mountains. The year was nineteen eighty one, and my grandparents, my mother
and my father, and my sister who was two at the time. I
was age five, and we would all pile into a nineteen sixty four white
station wagon and head out there for a week to enjoy the small creeks and
the sounds of the wilderness. My grandpa had friends who were kind enough to
let us camp on that piece of land from the nineteen fifties through the early
nineteen nineties. Just as a side note, we stopped in the early nineties
because of the elle marijuana grows by the Mexican cartels in the area and that
made camping too dangerous. My family would set up in the same place every
year. My sister and I would play in the forest the entire time.
In the area, the forest wind was comforting, the rain made me want
to just fall asleep. The sounds of the animals were soothing. I never
saw any black bears in the area. We did see a small cougar once
and it hurt us kids and it ran away. The area had a small
creek that my grandparents enjoyed fly fishing in. There was a huge cast iron
dark blue colored eighteen nineties range that my parents would put the camp stove one
two to do the cooking, and finally a large nineteen sixties army surplus tent
that would fit all six of us with army cots. The front flaps would
be tied back and the would be zip closed to keep the flies and the
gnats out. The first thing my sister and I wanted to do was go
swimming. We were not very good swimmers at the time, so we would
just drag ourselves along the bottom of the creek with our hands while we floated
on the surface. We were never allowed family because we signed to each other
if we were I don't remember us being so the only noise coming from the
camp was us two kids. We also had a habit of banging rocks together
to see if we could find different ocean snails in them. The area was
heavy with fossils and the river rocks. We had a lot of fun trying
to see what type we could find. After quite a few nights at the
camping spot, it was time to go to bed, had gotten dark and
the night sounds had already started to fill the air. My parents made sure
the fire was just embers, and we all went into the tent to lie
down to sleep. We all enjoyed a breeze coming into the tent, so
we kept the screens zipped but the flaps open. Now I also remember the
backflap open. That was a type of roll down window that tied at the
bottom, but would still have zipped netting to keep the bugs out. I
fell asleep quickly, and I slept for a long time. When I woke
up in the middle of the night, I could see a dark brown,
furry creature squatted next to the embers. I remember looking over my shoulder and
seeing everyone in their cots. My sister was next to me asleep, and
so was the rest of my family. I looked back outside and I could
see this creature playing with a stick and drawing in the embers. I saw
really dark eyes and hands like mine, and I remember thinking that this creature
was really furry, except for a bit on its upper chest near its neck,
and its face and its palms. It was so absorbed in playing in
the embers of the fire that it didn't see me watching it. The creature
was intent on playing and would try to catch the end of the marshmallow sticks
on fire. The creature was smaller in size, about the size of my
father, so it was about six feet tall. Looking back, I think
it was a teenager or even a juvenile. Its chest was flat, so
it wasn't a female, and I remember thinking it was odd to see something
out there and just closed my eyes and I went back to sleep. The
next morning, I got up and my parents were signing back and forth to
each other about large footprints that were in the dirt around the campfire. My
father saw us kids coming out of the tent and he walked over to the
footprints and he kicked dirt over him. I didn't say anything to my parents
at the time because I thought they would think I was just imagining things.
Years later, I asked if anyone saw anything, and no one said they
did. My second encounter that stuck with me happened in Pepperwood, California.
I was eight years old. My sister would have been five years old.
It is a plot of land right at the beginning of the avenue of the
Giants. When the trees open up to farmland. My family would go to
a friend's farm and help them plant weed and harvest on the weekends. It
was a way to help my parents keep some extra food on the table,
but also to let us kids play outside. To this day, there's nothing
to me that is as fun as a game of hide and seek or tag
in a fully grown cornfield at night. This farm had an upper and lower
field. The upper field had mostly corn and the lower field was things like
squashing tomatoes. This lower field backed onto the Eel River and had a band
of woods before hitting the river bar. In between the two fields was a
strip of dense red woods, and it was long enough to run the length
of the fields, but wide enough that you couldn't see straight through to the
lower field. There was a small shaded dirt area that they would park the
tractors and disc harrows and the wagons. On one of these summer days,
my sister and I were making a log cabin out of sticks. It was
late afternoon and my parents were in the lower field planning squash seeds. We
were playing in the turnaround area and built it high enough that we could squat
in it and were able to put a bunch of more sticks to make a
roof. We were singing a bunch of songs that we had just learned in
Bluebirds, part of the Campfire Girls, and we were having a fun time.
My little sister got tired and said that she was going down next to
Paw and Maul and lie down on the softly tilled dirt. We both liked
the softly tilled dirt, especially when it had been worn by the sun all
day. I said I was going to play by myself for a little while
longer. Well, I was there humming to myself for about ten minutes or
so, and I was piling dirt up on the clay cabin when I noticed
that the woods went absolutely quiet. There was no wind, no bird sounds,
not even the sound of flies or nights buzzing. I looked around and
I saw that the woods were starting to get dark. The redwoods get dark
and cold quickly because of the amount of tree canopy, but this seemed darker
than usual. I started to look through the cracks of the cabin to see
if I could see anything, and I spun slowly on my knees and looked
three hundred and sixty degrees around me. I didn't see anything, but I
could feel someone or something watching me, and my body instantly went cold.
I remember thinking, don't run. I was afraid of whatever was watching me
would chase me, so I crawled out of the cabin, and instead of
running, I skipped toward my parents. You were reading an email from a
woman who has never skipped in my entire life. But it was the only
thing I could think of doing without making whatever was watching me chase after me.
I went and sat on the wagon and I just stared at the ground
for a bit, just trying to calm down. This didn't last very long,
because about five minutes after I sat down, I heard a whoop,
whoop. The sound started low and it got high sounding, and it echoed
all over the farm area. My father's sister and I looked around trying to
find the sound. Mama saw us looking around and she signed what. Papa
got my mama's attention by waving at her and told her that we all heard
a sound. My Papa looked nervous, and he told us kids it was
an owl. I never heard owls make sounds like that before, and we
heard them all the time. This was so loud that we heard it in
our chests. Papa called us kids over to be near to him in the
rows and made me start poking the holes to plant the seeds, while my
sister followed behind and threw a few seeds in, and Papa put fish meal
on the seeds and covered them. When we finished that row, we left
for the day. I don't know what was watching me, but it was
an encounter with something that still gives me nightmares. My last encounter was in
two thousand and nine. Those of you who live in Humboldt County know how
hard it is to always have a reliable plane ride from San Francisco to McKinleyville.
I was trying to fly north from San Francisco after an early morning flight
from Boston because my grandmother had died. The flight was hard enough emotionally,
but when the flight north was canceled due to fog, so I had to
get a rental car. It was a four tourists. It was the last
minute, so now I had a four hour ride ahead of me. On
top of the very early morning flight from Boston the weekend humble was exhausting and
heartbreaking. Now I then had to get up at one am to drive to
San Francisco to catch my six am flight back to Boston. The beginning of
the ride south was fine. There were clear skies and not much fog except
a few in the lower depths next to the rivers. There were no cars
going or coming, and I was truly alone on the road until I hit
the straightaway. Just before coming to Leytonville. I could see something big squatting
on the right hand side of the road. First, I had no idea
what I was looking at, but as I slowed down to stop next to
it, the creature turned its upper body and it looked at me. I
got a glimpse of red eye shine as I stopped next to it. My
eyes got wide and my mouth fell open. My thought was, oh my
god, I'm not really crazy. This is what I saw when I was
a kid. My next thought was, don't show teeth. Teeth mean aggression.
So I closed my mouth and tried to smile the best I could without
showing my teeth, and I waved at the creature. The creature kept looking
at me, and then down at the road, and then back at me,
and then further down the road, and it did not respond to me
when I waved at it. I sat there debating with myself if I should
get out of the car to try to speak with it. The anthropologist in
me was freaking out excited. The child that saw the creature felt excited,
and all of me wanted to get out of the car and say something to
this creature that I had begun to think I had made up in my mind.
The creature was dark brown. The windows were up, so there was
no smell. The eyes and face reminded me of a human. The eye
color was dark black, but then again it was dark. The nose was
flat, the chest was broad like a bodybuilder, but the hair looked fine.
The creature was squatty and was still as tall as the car I was
driving. Logic kicked in and I remembered that I needed to make it to
the airport one time, and I didn't have the money to be rebuked,
so I didn't get out of the car, and I waved goodbye. The
creature began to stand up. I began to drive, and I tapped the
brakes and looked behind me. The creature was crossing the road and I could
only see as high as the creature's hip in the red brake lights. My
guess is the creature was between seven and eight feet tall. Thirty yards further
down the road was a slight right in the highway. Along the side of
that dep there was a cluster of ferns and about five deer. That's when
it hit me what the bigfoot was looking at. He was looking at dinner.
This is when I felt a chill run down my spine. While I
personally don't think bigfoot are very aggressive in the Pacific Northwest, I'm pretty sure
the need to get to the airport saved me for making a terrible mistake.
I kept driving until I got to Yukaya and found the first open gas station
and told the attendant I needed a bathroom key. I thought better of telling
this attendant I had just seen a bigfoot, and I went and stood in
the beat up, dimly lit bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror.
On one hand, I was thrilled that I could finally verify to myself what
I saw when I was five years old. But on the other is when
I realized I had been in the city way too long. I'd forgotten the
very thing that kept me alive all those years growing up in Humboldt County,
and that was to always be careful in the woods. Needless to say,
my mind was racing for days afterward, I got to the airport on time,
and I wanted to tell people, Hey, I just saw a bigfoot.
However, I also wanted to get back to Boston, and I'm pretty
sure I would have been committed at the time if I'd started telling people what
I saw. Oh, that's so funny. As a side note, I
don't know why when I saw the creature, I was never afraid. I've
only ever been afraid when an animal makes an aggressive stance toward me, and
neither one of these did that.