Here's a story from Dale, or an email from Dale with the story in
it. Here's what Dale writes. I watch your videos and I decided to
share my own. It was the fall of nineteen seventy three. I lived
in a small town called Floyd, Arkansas. There was a group of guys
I hung around with and we hunted and fished and camped, and we rode
dirt bikes together. And we did this the whole time we were growing up.
We had a game that we played on our dirt bikes, an advanced
version of follow the Leader. And one day in the late summer, I
was the leader. I went up into that area that was about as remote
as any area around. As I topped the climb on White Rock Mountain,
I discovered an old town. Were old ruins of several buildings, even the
false front of an old saloon with one old swinging door still hanging on the
rusty inges. The other guys caught up with me, and we were all
staring in disbelief. We couldn't believe what we had found. We found one
old cabin that was well preserved and decided that it would be cool to fix
it up use it for deer camp and we spent the next couple of weeks
hauling building materials up the side of the steep slopes, and when deer season
finally rolled around, all six of us had our gear loaded on our bikes
and headed up the mountain to our new camp. We arrived at the old
cabin a few hours before dark, and we busied ourselves gathering firewood for the
old fireplace. We spent the rest of the night playing poker and telling lies
about our hunting skills. Around midnight, all the guys were asleep in their
sleeping bags on the floor in front of the fireplace, except me and my
buddy Big We were the oldest of the group, and we quietly talked about
where we would position the rest of the guys at daylight. Around one am,
Big Steve told me that he was going to get some sleep. I
told him I was right behind him. After I threw a couple of more
pieces of wood on the fire, Steve had begun snoring. As I stared
at the flames and enjoyed the feeling of being there with my best friends on
this hunt. All of a sudden, all hell broke loose. It sounded
like the old cabin was going to fall down around us. It sounded like
boulders were hitting the walls in the roof, and the whole cabin started shaking.
Steve leaped up out of his bag and grabbed a shotgun off the wall
pigs. I already had my Marlin lever action in my hand and my big
spotlight in the other. Big Steve was scared, and he asked me what
the hell was going on. We positioned ourselves in front of the door and
we pulled the door open and turned on the big light. The whole cabin
was surrounded by a ring of huge red eyes. All of them looked like
they were ten feet off the ground. I slammed the door shut and yelled
at Steve to get everyone up and get their gear packed while I guarded the
door. And after everyone was ready, one of the guys volunteered to strap
the gear on the bikes and start all the bikes while the rest of us
stood with our rifles and shotguns pointed at the red eyes that surrounded us.
I told them that this is what we're gonna do, and on my count,
everyone but Big Steve and I are going to open fire with everything you
have and then jump on your bikes and haul ass out of here, Steve
and I'll cover you as long as we can. As the bikes roared down
the dark path, Big Steve and I emptied our weapons into the dark and
as soon as we ran out of Ammo, we jumped on our bikes and
we flew down the path after the rest of the guys. We never went
back there, and we never told anyone what happened to us on that mountain
that night. We didn't even know what to call him. The Boggy Creek
Monster came out shortly after that. All we knew was that we had been
run off the mountain by monsters. Who was going to believe a bunch of
high school boys with a story like that? Very good story, Dale,
I loved it. Thanks for sending it, man. I hope this is
true because whoo, what a memory and what an adventure. I appreciate the
story, buddy. Thanks. Let's see, this man doesn't say whether to
use his name, so I won't, But here's what he writes. This
is pretty cool. Back in the nineteen seventies and eighties here in East Texas,
bigfoot stories were just that. There were stories, and they always took
place in the Pacific Northwest. There was no way we could expect to see
one here or even look for signs of them. When we did see things
that we could explain, Bigfoot was the last thing on our mind. I've
walked uncountable miles through the woods. My company owned over five thousand acres of
land in the Natchez River bottom. It was always flooded in the winter,
and it had to be cruised before the end of the year. We'd always
wait as long as we could for the river to crawl back into its banks,
but it never did. One day, our supervisor said that he would
cruise it if someone would volunteer to go with him. That meant waiting in
water that would likely be chess deep. Like a fool, I said I
would go. We mapped out our plan when we got there before heading out
in the water that was already knee deep. We crossed sloughs that were necked
deep at times, and by the time we got within a quarter a mile
of our turnaround point, the water was only knee deep. Again. There
were no trees in the huge flat except for some small tupelo gum trees and
bottom whellows. We were looking for marketable sized trees to measure. At the
spot that we were to turn north. We turned around and were surveying our
surroundings when something roared at us. Now I've heard lions at the zoo,
but nothing living that I knew of had a roar that loud. It was
like a train horn if you were standing right next to it. Whatever this
was, it lasted a good three or four seconds before tapering off for another
two seconds more. I was standing behind my supervisor, so I got a
good view of the hair on the back of his neck, and it was
standing straight up. You could have gone all day without doing that, he
said, in a quiet voice that made me think he might be struggling to
keep his composure, and then he added, if that wasn't you, I'd
suggest you get your knife out and get it open. We didn't waste any
time getting out of there. Surrounded by hundreds of yards of knee deep water.
You'd have thought that we'd have seen something, but we never did.
We didn't hear anything else either. We worked our way through half a mile
of water without stopping. We were working our way west to get back to
the road. Halfway there, a six foot long white oak that was six
inches in diameter hit the ground between us. At the time, we were
in too much of a hurry to give it any real fault. And it
wasn't until years later when I heard stories of bigfoot throwing logs and limbs and
rocks at people that I looked back and I remembered the one detail that stood
out for me. That tree was broke off at both ends. We never
finished cruising that section. Management found a way for us to fill our quota
elsewhere. I don't know what was out there screaming at us or throwing trees
at us, but I have my ideas. You'll have to decide for yourself.
We had a thirty five hundred acre company hunting club in that same river
bottom. To the west of that place, My wife and my twelve year
old son were in deer stands on a pipeline once when my son saw something
huge standing on the edge of the pipeline. He pointed it out to his
mom and they watched it as it crouched low to the ground and crossed the
pipeline. It was on the other side and it stood upright again, and
then it walked into the woods. Then I had a friend whose wife had
a stand over the hill from where my wife and son had their encounter.
A few weeks before that, she claimed she saw a bear. It was
the last time that she came out there hunting. I also know of an
older man who had a stand in that same area, and he saw something
once that he never talked about whatever it was, though it ended his deer
hunting. He would come out to camp with us, but he would never
leave the campsite. In the nineteen ninety s, at the same hunting club,
I would set trotlines in the slews and backwaters during the winter months.
The bottoms, of course, were flooded and the water was cold enough to
use soap as bait. It was February and the temperature was dropping into the
twenties at night, and if I caught a mud cat, i'd throw it
in the live well on my boat and use it to bait my lines.
I generally left the boat sitting in the water, but something started rating it
for the mud cats. I was sure it was raccoons, so I figured
i'd keep them out by placing a couple of bricks on the lid at night,
but that didn't work. Each day, I'd find the bricks in the
bottom of the boat, and the live bait would be gone. Raccoons are
crafty devils, but I still doubt that they were the culprits. I figured
the best way to keep them out was to bring a cinder block down and
put it on the lid. That day, I caught some more mud cats
and I placed them in the live well and I set the cinder block on
top. Problem solved, I thought, But the next day the cinder block
was sitting in the middle of the road. I was baffled by what could
have done that, so I began to investigate. And that was when I
found muddy, human looking tracks in my boat. I didn't look at them
and say to myself, man, maybe these are bigfoot tracks. They looked
like very large human tracks, and I figured maybe they belonged to someone living
off the land. That made perfect sense to me until I ran my boat
across that flooded flat and I saw the tracks coming out of the water over
the next ridge and back into the water. Now that got my attention,
and I stopped running the trot lines and I started going around the ridges and
following the tracks. I followed them until whoever or whatever this was, swam
the river and went up the bank on the opposite side. Man. I
thought that must be one crazy man to be swimming in this cold water.
I had to reconcile it some way. I didn't want to ruin my fishing.
In twenty and eighteen, I went to a bigfoot seminar that featured some
famous keynote speakers. Bobo and Cliff from Finding Bigfoot might have been two of
them. There was another speaker there who interested me more. He talked about
having similar encounters at his fish camp on the Sabine River. I ask him
point blank what the footprints look like, and to my surprise, he described
them as being very human like, but much bigger. Now I may never
have seen a bigfoot, but the things I have seen and heard in East
Texas has convinced me that they exist and that they live in Southeast Texas.
Sometimes it isn't what we see in the woods that matters. I've hunted all
my life. I'll probably keep right on hunting until I'm too old and crippled
to get myself out there. To be honest, I have never seen anything
that I couldn't explain. I can't say the same for the things I've heard.
There are always going to be dead trees that fall over, And then
there are the smaller critters that make noises outside of their own chatter. Squirrels
drop nuts, and raccoons and rabbits scurry around and make scratching sounds. Even
deer can make a lot of noises. I know that every hunter knows that,
and anyone who knows anything about the woods knows what silence means. Usually
that means a predator is nearby. It could be any kind of predator,
depending on where you are. In my neck of the woods, it means
bears. So I can explain most of the sounds I hear when I'm sitting
twenty five feet up a tree in my deer stand. The first time I
began to think there might be something out there in the woods that I didn't
know about was years ago, during a shotgun season. It was one of
those frosty late fall mornings when every step I took walking out to my stand
was accompanied by the crunch of frozen grass and sticks and acorn shells and leaves.
It was take a step and wait all the way in. Stalking in
is generally the best policy but when there's frost on the ground, it always
sounds twice as loud, no matter how nimble footage you try to be.
I got up in my stand just as the sun was breaking over the horizon,
and I took a long, deep breath of cool air. There's nothing
quite like being alone in the woods. At least I thought I was alone.
I was looking out over a meadow, waiting for that trophy book that
I knew was going to step out and give me a perfect shot, when
I happened to notice this tree in the woods on the other side that looked
like it was rocking back and forth. It was a tall tree, and
I couldn't swear to it, but judging by its height, I'm guessing it
must have had at least a little girth to it. But that thing was
rocking back and forth like it was nothing more than a sapling. And then
I heard it crack. And there's a sound that a dead tree makes when
it snaps. It's different from a healthy, live tree. This wasn't that
sound. The tree I watched sway back and forth, then topple over like
it was nothing was green and alive. I had a lot of questions running
through my mind at that moment. I've since come up with a lot of
answers. Time does things to our memories. You forget things, you remember
things wrong. Sometimes you add things that weren't there. And the farther you
move from that moment, the more likely your memory is to be unreliable.
And this was a good thirty years ago. So I can't say, or
I won't say, what pushed that tree. Over All I know is it
left me with a lot of questions. A year later, I was sitting
in that same stand when I heard a loud grunt from somewhere below me that
I also couldn't explain. It wasn't a deer snorting or any other animal that
I knew For one thing, it sounded larger than anything I'd ever heard before.
I wriggled around in my stand and tried to see as far around the
tree as possible from both sides. I was limited on how far I could
see, but I still managed to look quite a ways around. There was
nothing out of the ordinary that I could see. But it was at that
moment that I recognized a dead silence that comes with a predator's presence. Not
even the bugs were chirping that was followed by footsteps through the leaf matter that
littered the forest floor. I could tell it was on two feet, so
I immediately thought that maybe another hunter was coming through. That didn't make sense
because I was on my uncle's property and I knew darn good and well that
I was the only person who had permission to be there, and if it
was another hunter, he was trespassing. So I called out, hey,
you down there, you got permission to be out here. I didn't get
an answer, and the footsteps stopped. Hey, I yelled again. Still,
I didn't get a reply. I said as quiet and as still as
I could for several long minutes, waiting for someone to acknowledge me, and
hoping it was my uncle. After what must have been five minutes or more,
I heard the footsteps again. They were moving away from me now,
and I figured whoever it was they must have thought they'd been caught. They
decided to move out and avoid a confrontation. I settled back into watching the
meadow and had almost forgotten about that person when three distinct knocks that I recognized
as being wood on wood echoed through the woods from somewhere behind me. What
the hell, I mumble to myself as I swiveled around and tried to get
a look in the direction of those knocks. What kind of game was this
guy playing with me? Anyway? But before I could even finish the thought,
another distinct set of knocks came from the other side of the meadow,
and I spun my head around so fast it almost made me dizzy, and
for a minute I expected to look over at a tree line across the way
and see a horde of marauders pouring out. Another round of knocks from my
side of the meadow had me spinning around again, and then another, and
then another, and this went on for a good half hour. I don't
know if it was because I couldn't identify who or what was doing it,
or if it was something else altogether. I only know that I began to
feel sick right about then. Things quieted down a bit, and I stayed
up in the stand for a while to get a grip on myself before climbing
down and packing up and heading out. I didn't finish hunting that day,
and I never hunted that spot again. Years later, I was squirrel hunting
on another fall day. It was earlier in the year, and it was
a lot warmer. Squirrel hunting hadn't been on my agenda that morning when I
got up, but I managed to get done with all my honey dews a
little early, and it was such a pretty day I couldn't help myself.
The sun was already beginning to set in the west when I began to feel
like someone was watching me. I stopped at my tracks, and I felt
the skin on the back of my neck crawl and prickle, and my heart
began to beat a little faster from the increased adrenaline flow. I looked around
me, scanning closely to see if maybe a deer had snuck up on me
and was checking me out, or maybe a coyote or some other critter.
Late afternoon shadows cut deep into the foliage, forming a million pockets for curious
eyes to look out from, and I couldn't see anything unusual, so after
a minute, I started walking again. This time I heard footsteps that didn't
belong to me. They were so nearly perfectly timed to my own steps that
at first I thought it was an echo. But there was always one more
step that I hadn't taken. When I stopped, I listened carefully. I
was able to pinpoint the sound as coming from somewhere to my left, and
I stopped and I scanned the forest. The night was moving in and the
shadows were getting darker, and the undergrowth was too dense to make out anything.
I decided that it would be a good idea not to take my time.
I didn't want to run and trigger any kind of predator instinct, but
I didn't want to lose any of the quickly fading daylight either, and I
cursed my for not grabbing a flashlight or a headlamp before I left the house.
The steps continued, with me speeding up as I sped up, slowing
down as I slowed down. Now, I looked at my watch, and
I calculated that I had maybe fifteen minutes of daylight left if I hurried,
and I'd be at the edge of the pasture leading to the house in ten
minutes. I just needed to keep calm and keep walking. When I started
seeing bits and pieces of the field between the woods and my house, I
began to feel easier. I even slowed my pace. I figured if whatever
was following me had not attacked me yet, it wasn't going to and I
stepped into what was left of that daylight with a huge sigh of relief,
and I glanced one time over my shoulder, ten feet from the tree line,
and at that moment I was hit by a loud scream that radiated through
me like a shock wave. Logic and reason left me as I broke into
a dead run across that field. I don't even remember stopping to open the
gate to the fence that surrounded the house. Maybe I jumped over it,
I don't know. I took the steps up into the porch too at a
time and slammed so hard into the front door that I thought I cracked the
glass in the windowpane. I had shut the door, and I was leaning
hard against it, trying to catch my breath when I looked down at my
dog. And maybe it was my imagination, and maybe I was projecting my
own emotions on that dog. I'll never know for sure, but when he
looked up at me, I was certain that he was as scared as I
was. Looking back, it may have been a panther, the biggest damn
panther that ever walked on two feet. But it might have been, or
it could have been some other animal that naturally lives in those woods. I
never saw anything to indicate one way or the other. There's a reason God
gave us five senses. If we had to rely solely on our eyesight,
we might already be extinct as a species. I've hunted a million times on
that land since that day, and I've never had another issue. I've heard
tree knocks and tree falls, and occasional footsteps that sound by pedal and an
occasional loud huff. And when I do, I quietly leave the woods and
let whatever is out there do whatever it does. I don't need to see
it. I don't think I want to, all right, I think that's
gonna wind this podcast up. Thank you for listening. A little bit of
announcement. After this podcast releases, I am going to be gone for about
a week, and here's what I'm doing. I've got to go get some
work done on my truck tomorrow, which is Tuesday. I don't know when
I'm going to post this, but it's Tuesday. I'm actually going out of
town to get it done. I'll be back Wednesday. At that point,
I'm shutting my phone off, I'm getting off the internet, and i'm going
to finish the next two chapters of Steve Lilly, and then I'm going to
record finish recording Blood Eagle, so you guys will shut the hell up and
quit asking me where is Steve. I'm joking. I'm just joking with y'all.
I feel so so lucky that y'all like those stories and you like Da
Roberts books. Da is such a good writer, So I'm going to work
on that. So you're I can only do one thing at a time,
so you're gonna have to do without a podcast for about a week before I
get one or two or all those things done. In the week, I'm
kind of taking a hiatus from the podcast and doing these emails that people send
in. So in the next couple of weeks, I can't project a day
because I don't know how long it's going to take me to get all that
done. There's a lot of work. Recording audio books takes a lot of
time. I mean, they're hard to read because you're talking NonStop for like
an hour or two hours at a time, and then if the chapter is
forty five minutes or an hour, it takes about three hours to edit that
chapter to get it right, get the sound right, get all my screw
ups out of it. So they take a long time. I get about
three or four chapters done a day on a good day. I think that
Blood Ego book may have twenty eight chapters. So you do the math.
But that's what I'm doing. I want to let you know I may take
a break and just throw up a single story here and there, because I
love doing these email stories. They're the best. They're just the best,
and I love it when people send these in. And I've made a promise
to you and I'm going to try to get to all of them. And
that's what I'm doing. So I thought i'd make that announcement. That's only
two and a half minutes to do that. Usually it would take me like
eight. All Right, thank y'all for watching, and we'll see you soon
on the Dixiecrypted podcast. I appreciate you. See you on the next one.