All right, We're just going to do one story in this podcast. It's
a fairly long story. I don't know how long the podcast will be.
But the writer, he gives me several names that I could use, and
he's worried that his name will be connected to someone in the area and someone
would recognize it. So I'm not going to use any name at all.
But here's what he writes. And I think this is an interesting story.
It may sound strange that a skeptic like me would write to you about an
experience that could have been a sasquatch. Regarding my skepticism, I can't help
but feel that a complete lack of concrete, irrefutable physical evidence is suspicious.
Now, don't get me wrong, I would be thrilled to learn that we
shared this earth with another mysterious primate. But again, I have serious doubts.
I spent my childhood enchanted by stories of the unknown, and I cut
my teeth on Sunday afternoon reruns of In Search of And I had seen the
Patterson Gimblin film dozens of time by my fifth birthday. Having learned to read
at an early age, I was even aware of the Bauman's story at that
age. I bear in mind that I grew up in the seventies when the
Bigfoot phenomenon was hitting its stride. Bigfoot was everywhere, IVEN saw him fight
the six million dollar Man. I suppose years spent in the woods with no
experiences of my own allowed my grown up common sense to overtake my sense of
wonder, and I hadn't thought about this subject for years until I found your
channel a few days ago. After watching several episodes of your podcast, my
wife and I began to talk about weird experiences from our past. It was
during this talk that memory came letting back, and I related a story to
my wife that astonished her. We've been together more than fifteen years, and
this was the first time she had ever heard anything about it from me or
my family. I almost think that somehow this memory was being blocked from my
conscious mind to some degree. So enough about me, let's get on with
my story. I was born and raised in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. If
that sounds familiar, you may know it from the John Prine classic about a
small town named Paradise that was turned upside down by strip mining. I lived
most of my childhood a few miles down the Green River from Paradise, on
the edge of a small town called Martwick. It was also displaced by strip
mining. I lived in a rural, heavily wooded area that was adjacent to
hundreds of acres of desolate and uninhabited mine lands. It was like paradise to
a young kid like me. I spent countless days trucking across this rural wonderland.
We got to the back porch and Mom and Dad were sitting there waiting
for us. We walked up the backsteps and showed off the projects that we
had worked on during the week, and we sat down to join them.
After a few minutes, Dad stated that he was going to slop the hogs
that we were raising at the edge of the woods behind the house. We
didn't have a huge piece of property, and we didn't necessarily need it for
meat, but Dad liked to expose the kids to different ways of life that
he remembered from his youth. Mom or I usually took to this chore,
but probably due to my wearing my Sunday best clothes and it being so dark,
Dad decided that he was going to do the task this evening. He
grabbed up a five gallon bucket and he headed toward the woods, and the
woodlines started thirty yards from the back porch and fell into a steep ravine.
The pigpen was about twenty feet into the woods, situated right where the hill
began to descend, and as the edge of the woods was grown up into
a thicket, one had to go several yards left to the edge of our
property to enter the woods where the undergrowth was thinner, and then we went
back to the right to get to the pig pen. We watched Dad walk
down the backyard and disappear into the woods, and it wasn't long before we
heard Petunia starting to oint and even squeal a little. My sister and I
had named the hog and we were playing with it, much to Dad's disapproval.
Like most animals, it wasn't unusual for her to get excited at feeding
time. However, the intensity of it seemed unusual to us back on the
porch. The squealing stopped shortly and we imagined that she must be a hog
heaven ears deep and putred leftovers. A moment later, we could hear the
most got awful thrashing of something or something coming right through the thick, not
far from the pigpen, and to our utter disbelief, the figure of my
father came bursting from the thicket at a dead sprint, heading back to the
porch, while all three of us on the porch, We're watching this in
slack jawed shock. My father is not a particularly excitable man, nor was
he ever one to adopt an overly macho persona. He was just a plain,
ordinary man from ordinary country stock who just seemed to have that John Wayne,
a man's got to do what he's got to do sort of attitude.
My dad had been a star athlete in high school, and I don't think
I had ever seen him run before. He'd worked all day and at his
own pace if something needed to be done, but he wasn't into exercise.
Well now here. He was running so fast that he was tripping over his
own feet coming up the backyard, and as he drew near the porch,
we could see his face. It was as white as a sheet, and
we were freaking out. Mom started calling out to him, asking him what
was going on, but he never answered that. He never slowed down,
and he jumped up onto the edge of the porch, and he continued into
the house as fast as he could go. This happened so quickly that we
didn't have time to react, and by the time we had started to stand
up and go see what was wrong, he emerged on the back porch with
a twelve gate shotgun in his hand, and by this point all four of
us were terrified. Mom was pleading with him in hushed tones to explain what
was wrong, and he just kneeling there against the porch post shotgun across his
knee, invisibly shaking and staring at the woods. Eventually she just stopped asking,
and we sat there with him in silence. What else could we do?
Something had happened in the woods, and he was so obviously shaken,
and looking back, I don't know if he was able to form the words
well. This behavior went on for several minutes, until it started getting so
dark that it would have been hard for us to see anything if it had
emerged from the woods, and he finally seemed to ease up a tiny bit,
and he started relating what had happened. He had entered the woods and
cut back to the right to reach the pin. He wasn't paying that much
attention to anything, and as he entered the area of the pin, where
the woods were thicker and the thicket grew up all around, he realized it
was darker than he thought. He couldn't see much at all. At first.
He had noticed the pig's agitation, but he didn't think much of it.
He was dumping out the slop when it occurred to him that the pig
wasn't coming to the trough. It was scrunched up against the wall of the
pin where he was standing. His eyes were starting to adjust to the darkness
when he looked up from the trough and he saw it, and standing opposite
him across the pen was a large, upright figure and it was covered in
dark hair. His first thought was, it's a bear. It was common
in the area for people to report seeing things that had been rendered extinct to
the area for years, such as panthers and bears, and the light and
things like that were generally laughed at and seldom backed by any evidence. He
didn't have any better explanation. That was the first thing he thought. He
stood there, frozen by fear briefly when he realized that this thing was reaching
into the pen for the pig with its arms extended toward it. At that
point, he turned and ran for it. We spent a very uncomfortable night
at our house, and I don't think any of us slept much that night.
It was weeks before I could go back into the woods to play,
and I promised the hog was slopped in the daylight. From that point forward,
we were going through hard finding ancial times, and Dad was drinking a
lot more than I ever had seen him drink before. He was drinking that
night, but I didn't think to excess, and by the time he reached
the porch there was no trace of intoxication left in him, and he didn't
drink again for the rest of that night. Oddly, I don't remember Dad
or Mom ever speaking of it again. I don't know if I would call
it shame. He just didn't seem comfortable with the level of vulnerability he had
shown in front of us. I was terrified, and I don't know what
was worse, a creature in the woods out back or seeing my dad scared.
The other night, as I sat with my wife, I tried to
reason it out. I would love to be able to explain it away,
but I can't. My wife suggested that maybe he might have staged the whole
thing for me while I was eating up with all things bigfoot at the time,
and I was walking toward the woods with a camera seven days a week.
I can't accept that either. Though, First, he did seem to
delight in feeding whatever curiosity was fueling my young brain at any given time,
I have a hard time believing he would go to such extremes for that reason,
though. And second, if he had talked to mom and my sister
beforehand, I don't think all three of them could have pulled it off that
seamlessly. My sister is a notoriously poor liar. A most important, I
know what real fear looks like. Almost get chills now thinking about it.
I had never, nor have I since, seen my father in that state.
In closing, I just want to say how much I've enjoyed watching your
channel on YouTube these last few days. I thought this story would fit perfectly.
It does fits perfectly, honestly, if it doesn't get used, I
feel better having aired these feelings after all these years. And also, I
love your chickens. There's some sort of zen I achieve watching the chickens walk
around and pecking for feet in the yard and sometimes I just I just drift
off to sleep while I'm watching. By the way, folks, I'm gonna
be putting more videos of these chickens up pretty soon. I was gonna film
them today, but it's raining outside and I don't want to get my camera
gear out in the rain and mess it up. So maybe tomorrow. The
weather's turning pretty. It's today is April the third, and we've got seventy
and eighty degree days forecast for the next ten days, so they'll be a
pretty day in there. And then I'll also put the GoPro on and only
three dogs now go for a walk. We only have three dogs left.
My two older dogs have passed away, so there's not much action. They're
little dogs and they don't really show up well on camera. But I'll do
that. I'll ride a bike every day. I don't know why I'm talking
about all this, but he mentioned the chickens, and people have been sending
me emails, where's the chickens, where's the chickens. We've got all the
chickens, just it's just been so nasty outside. I don't want to film
him. I don't want to get out in it. Anyway, that's that's
that. Back to the story. This was a great story, and I
was thinking as I was reading it, my father's face and his body,
body language, and his disposition were in my mind as I was reading the
story, and I could I could absolutely connect with this writer thinking what my
dad would look like scared. I never saw him scared ever, not once,
and so I don't really know what he would look like scared. But
if I saw him running and tripping over his feet trying to get back to
the house away from something, you know, he comes back out with a
shotgun in his hand and just sits there beside us, ready to defend the
house, and never said a word. I can see where that would affect
a young boy quite quite a bit. I don't know, It's just a
little nuance, but I'm just I'm still thinking about my dad and what he
would have looked like, and how I would have reacted, and how exactly
like this man I would have thought about it the rest of my life.
That would be one of the premiere memories I would ever have of my father.
But this was a wonderful story. It's the only one in this podcast,
and I hope you guys enjoyed it, and we'll probably see you tomorrow
with another one. All right, thanks a lot, see you next time.