I was blessed with five children, two girls and three boys. All of
my children had odd experiences, but my middle son was the first to have
a sighting. Matthew passed away three years ago due to I'm sorry, I'm
having trouble pronouncing this metastic lung cancer. I think that's right. He turned
forty nine on June twenty and left us thirty two days later. Ma'am,
I'm very sorry to read this. This breaks my heart. My kids are
approaching forty and I just can't imagine. Anyway, Let's move on. Matthew
was five or six around nineteen seventy three or nineteen seventy four, and back
then kids had a lot more freedom than they do today. They went outside
to play in the morning, and they didn't come home until they got hungry
or their moms blew the whistled or yelled for them. That's how it was
in rural southern Maryland where we lived. It was around the time that Matthew
had discovered his love for huckleberries. He would go into the woods and pick
the berries rather than come home for lunch. All the kids played near the
woods, or maybe a dozen yards or so inside the tree line. But
to get to the huckleberries, matt had to go a little deeper than that.
One day, he was picking away and eating berries by the handful when
he began to feel like someone was watching him. There wasn't anyone else around
that he knew of, but the feeling was so strong that it made him
nervous. After a few minutes, he decided he didn't want to be there
anymore, and he came to the house and he told me about it.
I didn't want to dismiss my son's concerns out of hand, but I did
want to reassure him. Matthew wasn't prone to telling stories are exaggerating, and
even at his young age, he was level headed. If he said he
felt like he was being watched, then he felt like he was being watched.
And I told him that it was probably because he had gone into a
part of the woods where the shadows were a little darker than they are on
the edge. That could make things feel scarier for anyone. And then I
told him that he did the right thing by coming and telling me, and
to be careful in the future. The next day, Matthew avoided the woods.
But little boys are what they are and curiosity got the better of him.
By the following day, he had to know who was out there and
if they were still there or if they had moved on. At three o'clock,
he headed out to the woods to find the answers to these questions.
I suggested that he should wait until the next day and leave earlier. The
sun was low enough in the sky to cast long shadows. In the deeper
woods, it would be even darker and the shadows there would feel even more
menacing. Now, Mom, he insisted, I want to go now.
I decided the best thing that I could do was to sit on the balcony
and drink my coffee so I could keep an ear out for him. It
was over half an hour later when he came back out of the woods with
a pail full of berries. Well how'd it go? I ask? Are
you okay? Yeah? But there's somebody out there and they need a bath
really bad. Mom, I thought, oh, good lord, there's a
bomb out there and he could have hurt my boy. I know the word
bum isn't politically correct today, but we didn't call them homeless people back then.
We called them bums. I was worried, afraid, really, I
didn't know what kind of person was living in those woods. I didn't know
if they were dangerous, and I didn't want my son going back there where
he could be hurt. I told him to stay away from the woods for
a while, and whoever was out there would surely move on eventually, and
I would check it out before I allowed him to go back. The next
week, Matthew asked if he could go pick more berries, so I said
I would go with him to make sure the stinky guy was gone. We
went out to the berry patch and matt started filling his bucket. I took
a good look around, and then I hung out for a bit to make
sure that no one showed up. Once I was satisfied that my son would
be safe, I headed back to the house. At the time, I
had a six month old who was taking a nap under a watchful eye of
my twelve year old. I had barely reached the porch when matt came running
out of the woods, sobbing and crying. Every horrible thing in the world
went through my mind, and I ran to my child and I swept him
up in my arms. Immediately I noticed that he smelled like he had rolled
in garbage. I cradled his frightened little face in my hands, and I
asked what happened? It was the hairy man. He hook up through his
tears. He he it's okay, it's okay, calm down, I said,
soothing, What hairy man are you talking about? He came out from
behind a big tree. Matt cried, and he grunted at me, doing
his best to fight the hysteria that was welling up inside him. My son
went on to tell that the man reached out to take his bucket away.
He said the man was covered in hair, but he didn't have a real
face. It was covered in reddish brown hair like mine. I had auburn
hair at the time, only this man's hair was all over him. He
said. The man was big, and then he smelled so bad that it
made him gag. Horrified, I decided I needed to go see this man
for myself. Matt flew into a panic and he begged me not to go.
He growls and hoots like an animal. Mom, he's not human.
Another flood of tears took his breath away, and he had to steady himself
for a second before he added, mom, he's a monster. He's a
man, but he's a monster man. Matthew was so hysterical that I couldn't
go into the woods. It would have been too hard on my son.
So instead I waited for my husband to come home, and I told him
about it. He and our neighbor went to check for a bumb who was
scaring our children, and they searched the whole area and discovered bare footprints that
were eighteen inches long and seven to eight inches wide, but they didn't find
the hairy man. They followed the prince for fifty feet until they disappeared at
the base of a large tree. Other than a few freshly broken branches,
they didn't see any other signs of him. They said the whole area smelled
like a rotten meat, which they attributed to the remains of a dog they
found twenty five feet from where Matthew had been picking berries. The dog had
no midsection and no front legs. My husband said it looked like it had
been chewed off. After that, none of the children in our neighborhood were
allowed in the woods, but several other children backed up Matthew's description of this
thing, and for as long as we lived there, the parents in the
area, stood watch over the kids when they played outside. Was it Bigfoot?
We'll never know for sure. You're welcome to form your own opinion.
We had never heard of bigfoot or sasquatch at that time, so it wasn't
something any of us would have made up. A year after all that happened,
my uncle and my cousin had a visit from something for three nights in
a row. It banged on the door as it walked through the wrap around
porch. But that is a story for another time. Oh that's a that's
a good story. It's a scary story. It's kind of a spooky story,
especially for the kids. I'm very sorry you lost Matthew. That's the
saddest part of this story. And I hated it. I had I kind
of dwelled on that, but I anyway, it's just just kind of sad.
But I'm glad that you shared this memory of Matthew with us. We
all enjoyed it. So thank you man for sending the story. All Right,
you guys are gonna like this story. This is pretty good. I
actually think this is fiction. It's all mourning you now, but it's really
a good story. So y'all hang in there and listen to this one.
See Shahallow State Park runs along the eastern slope of the cattal Desk Prairies.
There's some names in here I'm not gonna be able to pronounce, y'all,
just hang with me long. That land, along with the Kantu Hills that
run from the northern border of South Dakota east of Minnesota and Iowa, was
all formed by glaciers during the last Ice Age. It's a beautiful and mystical
land full of legends and mysteries. Sea Jahalla Creek that runs through the park
is one of the few places in South Dakota that can still support trout,
which makes it very unique. But what makes it even more so is the
red glow that appears to come from it at night. The glow has led
many to believe that the hollow is haunted, and maybe it is. Sicha
is a Sioux word for bad or evil, and there have been many strange
and tragic events over the years there. Back in the nineteen seventy several people
went missing in the hollow under dubious circumstances. Most people will tell you that
a murderer was on the loose, actually a serial killer, but the locals
believe it was something else, something unknown. The natives from the Sistine Wapatan
Reservation to this day swear it was the Big Elder Brother or the Chihatanka that
caused those disappearances. Every year, I spend my rifle deer season sitting in
or stalking the ravines of the hollow in search of a monster buck. The
older season bucks notice stay hidden during that time. Once the duck season begins
and the sounds of the shot guns ring through the hollow, those bucks slipped
even deeper into the wilderness. It's how they got to be monster bucks,
and only the most patient and dedicated hunters can find them. Although it takes
a lot of time to properly scout the ravines, determine the bucks' habits,
and find the best location to intercept their moves, it is good therapy to
be out there where it is peaceful. My mind is alert, but the
normal stresses of life are miles away. There have been rare occasions when I've
had the feeling of being watched, and that feeling of peace was overshadowed by
an eerie silence. But I had always assumed it was a deer watching me,
or maybe even a mountain lion. On two separate occasions, I found
mountain lion tracks following my path in the snow. Now that makes a man
feel vulnerable to realize that he has been stalked by a predator. It is
on those occasions that I began to think that perhaps there is something to those
legends and superstitions. This year, there was a tragedy in the area.
The seventeen year old son of one of our neighbors to the south was out
bow hunting and he didn't return. His bow and phone were found at the
base of his deer stand, and his quiver was missing one arrow. My
family and I participated in the search, and for three days. We were
out from seven a m. Until dark, And since I know the area
so well, I even offered to continue looking during the night. The sheriff
seemed interested, but the man in charge of the search said no. My
father and I went to the location where the bow was found. On the
second day. We found a trackway of disturbed grass and undergrowth, along with
three blood spots before we lost the trail. There was no snow on the
ground, so it was difficult to find any major detail in the tracks,
but they looked much larger than my father's footprints. He wears a size fourteen
boot, so we knew that whoever caused the boy's disappearance was big. We
staked and photographed and marked the location of the blood specimens and brought it back
to the sheriff. A man dressed in slacks and a thin wool dressed coat
took the samples from him. I assumed the strangely dressed men were part of
the Department of Criminal Investigations or some other government law enforcement agency. Their stylish
clothes were not meant for the rugged terrain or the bitter cold of the upper
Midwestern winters. On the third day, one of the searchers came across a
grizzly scene of murder four miles to the north in one of the neighboring drawls
along the creek. The poor boy's remains were a sad sight. He was
apparently torn apart and then partially eaten. The authorities assumed that scavengers had gotten
to the boy after he was The circumstances surrounding his disappearance and death were strange,
but the sheriff called an abrupt halt to the investigation and officially declared that
a large man had abducted and murdered the boy four miles north of the abduction
site. That was the day before rifle season. I didn't let the three
days of searching for the boy keep me from my hunting therapy. I set
out to hike to my spot in the hollow at five am. A fresh
blanket of snow fell the night before, perfect for an opening morning in the
hollow. It takes me some time to a bushwhack into my favorite areas to
hunt, and I take my time and try not to make a racket so
I don't spook the deer. And on this morning I went to a stand
that I had set up two weeks before. I walked in north of the
highway, moving slowly through the oaks and the buck brush of the first ravine,
there was a game trail that I knew the deer herds were using to
move between the ravines. The trail was a foot wide and already filled with
tracks, and I looked closely at all of them. The most were small,
They were likely yearlings. Two sets appeared to be a large dough or
maybe a buck. All of the tracks were fresh. Within fifteen minutes,
I was moving down the ravine in which Jack Standfast used to live. The
old rock foundation of his house was still there, standing a foot higher than
the ground around it. Dad says that some of his neighbors used to set
up their hogs to feed on the abundance of acorns in Jack's ravine. I
believe it's those acorns that draw the deer to the area as well. My
stand was fifteen feet up and attached to an old oak tree near the edge
of the hollow. It gave me a good view of the forest to creek
bottom to my right and the open receded native prairie to my left. The
game cameras that I set up told me that a monster buck that I had
been watching was coming through this area and I was in a likely position to
intercept it. He was an irregular buck with seven points on the right and
six on the left. The seventh point on the right was a drop time.
I swept across the area with my binoculars from right to left, and
I caught a fleeting movement on my left at the edge of the draw.
It was too quick to determine what sort of animal it was. Seconds later,
a loud gunshot rang out. It was of a caliber not generally used
for deer hunting. Normally, hunters in the area don't use anything larger than
a three to eight, but this sounded bigger, something like a three thirty
eight magnum I used for elk hunting out west. Hearing such a report was
odd to me, so I watched to the north. The two more shots
rang out. It was thirty minutes into the season, and those were the
only shots I heard. Normally I would have heard a cacophony of shots as
hunters began firing on deer as soon as they began moving in the morning.
A few seconds later, I saw a man running through the draw one hundred
and fifty yards east of where I was sitting. He looked like he was
wearing a gilly suit. He wasn't wearing any orange, so I hollered at
him to start making noise and announce himself. Wearing orange is a requirement in
South Dakota that saves lives every year. I didn't want him getting shot.
Not all hunters think first and shoot second. The man didn't slow down or
appear to hear me. He ran faster through the trees than I believed anyone
could, and this was with a limp in his gait. It looked like
he was dragging his left leg. I was so focused on the strange man
to my east that I didn't see the man walking in from the north.
He was also not wearing blaze orange, but he was carrying a shotgun.
I decided to talk to him about the safety issue that he was presenting to
him, and to let him know about the other man in the gilly suit.
I thought maybe they knew each other, but it was better to be
safe than sorry. I climbed down the ladder and announced myself. Sir,
I'm a hunter and I'm armed. I called out, I want to talk
to you a minute. Well, thanks for announcing yourself, said a Southern
accent. Have you seen anything strange come by here? I told him about
the man in the gilly suit that I saw run through the creek bottom.
He told me that that was who he was following. I happened to notice
his rifle barrel. He was standing close to me, and it said point
four to sixty Weatherbury magnum. That's a big rifle for deer hunting, I
said, makes my sixty five creed More look like a pea shooter. I'm
not hunting deer, he said. If you want to stay safe, you
should be wearing orange and keep the other hunters from shooting you. I told
him, well, I can't do that. He replied, well, what
are you doing out here anyway? I asked, you're not hunting, and
you're toning a four sixty mag not a week after a murder just north of
here. I'm finding the killer, he quipped, and then added, I
need to get moving. I stepped in his way as someone called out,
Steve, let's go. The trail leads south. Steve, if you're hunting
the killer, you'll need the tracker and someone who knows the hall of the
boot. I'm both of those, and the boy who was killed was a
neighbor and a friend of mine. I said, we got this. Steve
said, I don't want to ruin your hunt. I decided it was best
to step out of his way and let him continue his hunt. I heard
him say, let's go Lewis. As I stood at the base of my
tree and watched the man walking away, I decided I wasn't going to allow
these two individuals to search for the killer alone. If the man in the
Gillie suit was the murderer, I would feel far better seeing his capture or
demise. I stripped off my blaze orange vest and stuffed it into my pack.
Everything else I was wearing was perfect for stalking. I allowed Steve to
get out in front of me a good bit. He and his friend moved
rather quickly to the south, and I moved to the trail which the gilly
suit man used. I knew they would fare far better with me tracking him.
When I found the trail, I didn't find boot prints. I found
barefoot human looking prince. Instead. They were really big, big as the
track's dad and I followed during the search. This had to be the killer
that we tracked. I followed the track and watched Steve and Lewis move into
a ravine, and as I came to the wooded edge, I heard Steve
sayd Whoo, He's a big one, inn'ty Lewis. I snuck forward to
get eyes on them while staying concealed, and Steve was cutting something while Louis
was opening a bag, and then I caught movement of something further past them.
It appeared there was something stalking. It was just below the horizon and
staying behind the trees. It looked like another big guy in a gilly suit,
crouching to make a move on them. I settled my rifle on a
tree branch where I could lean against the trunk, and then I zoomed in
tight and I saw the face of a guy to the south. It was
ugly and semi human, but definitely not a real human. I figured it
had to be the same ugly thing that Steve had dispatched. I knew the
range was three hundred yards maybe a little long, and held the crosshairs directly
on the nose of the beasts and I squeezed the trigger. It fell forward
on its face. Who is that? Steve yelled, one down to your
south, keep your eyes up, I responded. Stephen Lewis went back to
back next to the beast lying on the ground. One I didn't see started
running in from the west and I hollered to the west one target. It
was in front of Steve, and he pulled that big four to sixty Weatherbury
mag and fired. See that A shot went through the shoulder of the beast.
Most rifles were sighted to shoot high between fifty and two hundred and fifty
yards. I recognized that the heavy round gets lobbed to touch hollo, I
hollered to Steve. He reset himself as the beast was getting closer. It
was so fast, and the rifle fired and the beast fell forwards, getting
in the snow. I moved quickly with my rifle at the ready, checking
three hundred and sixty degrees with every few steps, and at the same time
I saw Louis raise his ar and shoot five rounds into the beast that I
had shot. Once I got close, Steve said, thanks for the hand.
You don't mind if I take the head from your kill? Do you?
Well? Not at all? I said, what the hell are those
things? Man? Those are squatches? Steve said, now you know what
killed your neighbor. Nice work. By the way, do you have military
experience? It was a marine, I said, do you mean sysquatch?
I asked, yes, sir, that's what it is. Lewis said,
I've had bad experience with some former Marines, but I'm thankful for you.
Lewis and Steve told me that they were only tracking three of the beasts.
They had been watching the infrared footage for several days until the search was called
off. My world started spinning. In the last hour. I had gone
from hunting therapy to hunter's safety officer, to seeking vengeance for my neighbor and
learning that the legends of the Chihatanka were true. Stephen Lewis beheaded the ugly
creatures and made a call to someone to dispose of the bodies. I asked
them if they'd be willing to make sense of all this for me over coffee
at my house, and they took me up on the offer. I walked
with them to their vehicle and they gave me a ride to mine, and
then they followed me to my house. Now I'm a bachelor with nothing but
cattle, chickens, ducks, and guineas and two bird dogs. So it
was just the three of us at the kitchen table talking while we drained two
pots of coffee. I was mesmerized by their stories. My dogs, Noelle
and Levi. They enjoyed the attention they got from Stephen Lewis. They let
me know that the deer will be out of that area for a couple of
weeks, so I should hunt somewhere else. I learned that they love crappie
fishing, and it just so happened that I had caught my limit of crappie
two weeks ago at Red Iron Lake. I told them we could go out
on the ice, since it was five inches stick, and catch another limit.
They declined because they didn't like the idea of walking on top of a
lake. So I packed three bags of crappie and a cooler and I sent
it with them. They told me they would stay in touch and come back
to do some crappie fishing someday in Steve's boat. I showed them around the
farm after that, and then they went on their way. I haven't told
anyone about these events. I had several neighbors ask who was firing that cannon
On opening day, the father of the dead boy asked me about it.
I told him someone was doing justice, but not to tell anybody. He
hasn't said anything else about it to me. The following weekend was Thanksgiving and
I tagged out. It was the irregular buck I had been tracking in the
hollow, but I found him eight miles to the south of my uncle's property,
nowhere near the area I had tracked him with the game cameras. I
have Stephen Lewis to thank for advising me to look elsewhere. I'll be scouting
the best crappy areas for Steve and Lewis for soft water fishing this season.
Oh it's a Steve Lily story. I actually I knew this before I started
reading this, and this was good. I love this fan fiction that people
write about Steve Lily. By the way, I'm almost done with Steve Lily
sixteen. It's quite long. It's going to be if that thing maybe three
hours long, I'm not sure, but I'm really I'm just taking my time
and trying to do a good job on this number sixteen. I'm trying to
act like a real writer. That's what it is. But I appreciate this
gentleman writing the fan fiction of Steve Lilly. What a compliment to a character
that I dreamed up in my head that so many people enjoy. And he
did a good job. He wrote a great story. It was exciting.
I was like I was getting pumped up as I was reading it. So
thanks to the writer. It was great. Okay, there's two stories that
I read to you. Now, what we're going to do is I was
went to the Woodwalkers Meet and greet in LBL a couple of weeks ago,
actually it was last weekend, and had a great time and made some new
friends and met some really nice people. But there were three or four people,
well, let's see two, maybe three people who I talked him into
letting me put a mic on them, and I recorded their encounter. So
you're going to hear three encounters. I think it's three of people telling their
own story and I think these are fascinating, These are really good. And
then Nioma Finn, my good friend Nioma Finn, she was there. She
told a couple of campfire stories that were spectacular, So I'm going to include
those two. So this video is not ending. It's I don't know how
long it's going to be after this, but it's it's really good. You'
all hang on and listen to these stories by these people. Now for the
Bigfoot Nights out there. These two stories that Nioma tells, they are legend.
They're legend stories, so they may or may not be true. So
nobody accuses me of trying to sneak fiction in as true. Some people have
a bug up their butt about that, so I want to let you know
that. And then the last thing I want to say before we get started
in these camp fire stories is that the reason I've been gone from you haven't
seen a podcast in a couple of weeks is because I'm recording Blood Eagle.
I'm trying to finish it up and do the editings on open In about a
week, maybe maybe seven or eight days, I should have Blood Eagle done.
No, it may be a little longer than that, probably because I'm
I'm going to crappie fishing this weekend. I'm gonna be going for four days,
so it may take a couple more days than ten days. But I've
really got this thing cornered up. I've got most of it recorded, I've
got about half of it edited. So we're going to have another five or
six seven hour audio book coming out. It's Operation Blood Eagle. It's a
wild hunt novel by Da Roberts, and y'all are going to get a kick
out of my German accents. There's a lot of German soldiers and there's German
influence in the story, and I try to do a German accent along with
my do some Spanish accents and stuff like that, so you can listen to
it and probably get a kick out of it. But I don't care.
I ain't afraid to do this stuff. I ain't afraid to try to be
creative. That's just who I am. I'm a creative soul. That's who
I am. You'll either get a kick out of it or you're saying it's
pretty good. I don't think it's very good. But anyway, I just
thought i'd give you a heads up. All right, now, let's go
to these camp fire stories, and I hope y'all can do that. There
won't be an extra or anything. They'll just be a there'll be an end
screen at the end of the video, and if you want to hear more
of my stories, you can just click that video. How about that?
All right, Thank y'all for watching it, and I hope you enjoy these
camp fire stories. So me and my buddy was riding around one night,
just a summer night. I don't know the light of the exact month or
anything like that. I know it was warm outside because there was They're like
weeds and stuff on the side of the road and stuff like that, so
they've gotten kind of kind of high on this road. The weeds did.
So we're riding around and the road we were on is called New Lake Road,
and it's there's there's a new lake and an old lake in the town
that I live in. And we're on the side where the dam is and
it goes up and kind of makes a s curve switch back kind of like
it'll wreck. You'll wreck if you're not if you're going too fast. So
we're coming around there. Of course we're not going I mean probably thirty miles
an hour. Well, we come around and the headlights are painting around this
way to the right, and in the middle of the road there's this,
uh what looks like from where we are as a black dog just sitting in
the middle of the road, and if you're driving, it's looking that way,
like across the road, just sitting there at like attention or something like,
you know, like it's it's got's ears turned to the road and it's
like full attention is across the road. And then as we're getting closer,
I'm thinking, you know, my friend's slowing down and we're not. Nothing's
kind of raised alarm yet and he h he starts slowing down, and the
dog turns and looks at us. But I noticed when it looked at us,
there's there's no eyes there, there was no eyes. There's you can
see like you can see the skin in the skull in the eye sockets,
and it's slick black hair, like real like slick. And it looked at
us, and then it looked back across the road, and it took about
two and a half three little trotting steps and jumped and when it hit the
when it hit the high grass, it just turned to smoke, like it's
half its body was still out of the still in the out of the grass,
I guess, you'd say, And it just it turned to smoke.
And I didn't believe what. I was like, that's crazy. And then
my friend was like, did you just see that? And I was like,
well, what did you see? Cause I'm not gonna like call myself
crazy And he was like, that dog just turned to smoke. And I'm
like, yeah, then we we pretty much got the same same what we
saw then, so we hauled out of there. And it's just I don't,
I mean, it was crazy. It's I don't know how to explain
it. Don't. If I had to guess, it would probably when it
was sitting down on its butt, on its rear end. It probably come
up a little bit above an average man's knee, if I had to guess,
And when it stood up, it was it was probably a medium medium
sized dog, thirty five to forty five ish pounds, maybe in between there
somewhere. It wasn't real big, wasn't muscled up, wasn't I mean,
it just looked like a just like an average sized, average house dog.
And I mean, just the it was. I don't know what I don't
even know what to say it could be, because it's not really I mean,
I've I had a buddy that I worked with and he was he had
some Native American in him. I don't know what you know exactly, but
he was like, I don't really want to talk about that, and I
was like, okay, So I just kind of left it alone. I
didn't really want to know what it was a little bit, I would guess.
And the first time I've really talked about it was on a I don't
remember what which show it was. I remember I was on a show with
Daddy, but I think it was yours. Yeah, Spencer's so you're not
and all that stuff and I wouldn't say I'm not into it. I just
don't. I haven't seen anything. I don't. I mean, I believe
it's there, but I'm not gonna see I can't say. I can't say
if anyone tells me what they've seen, I'm not gonna say, ah,
that you didn't see that, because I mean, who would believe what I
just said. I mean, so I can't discredit anybody for I listened to
what you got to say, and I mean you can tell when somebody's you
know, honest about what they're saying and what there. I mean, hell,
there's with that that happened to me. I can't really say anybody's full
of anything because I don't. I mean, I wasn't there, but I
mean I could see where there. I mean, it would be something out
there. A lot of somethings that we don't know about how we oh this
was about, but just the simplicity. See, I was probably about eight
nineteen or twenty. It was after high school because we were graduated, because
we weren't in school at the time, and I do remember being out of
high school because I think I we had just got off work actually, and
we were just riding around. We weren't drinking, we weren't smoking. I
mean, we were sober, just talking about you know, whatever the world's
problems, I guess you'd say, and we you know, we was just
I guess in the right spot at the wrong time or whatever. But we
was actually talking about it the other day it got brought up. We was
all watching a basketball game and sitting around a fire at uh at his house,
and he brought it up around some of our friends because you know,
we was talking about kind of Bigfoot and stuff like that UFOs and he was
like, what about you remember that time we saw that? And I was
like, yeah, And I don't know, It's just kind of something I
don't really talk about because I know when people hear it, they're like,
you know, people that ain't never seen anything, never been in the woods
never, you know, they don't have family members that have told them stories
about, you know, stuff that I hadn't discovered and stuff like that.
So I just feel like I'd be beating a dead horse or whatever if I
was telling the story, well, according to what you've seen, how would
you measure it? With your dogs? And it was probably in between Honey
and my uh, the the long eared dog over there, Clover, it's
probably in between that size. Not yeah, I wouldn't say any bigger than
it definitely wasn't as big as my German shepherd, but it was. It
was about the size of in between Honey and my other one. But it
was jet black, you said it kind of it was. It was slick.
It was. I actually found a dog that didn't like like almost like
Honey's hair, honestly, but just jet black. And and just you know,
the light was shining off of it. And as we're getting closer,
I'm like looking at it, and I'm I got a good look at it.
He was like I asked him, and he was paying attention more to
the car in the road and if if he was gonna have to turn and
stuff he saw. I mean, he saw everything I saw, but just
not he don't remember everything, but I was. I got a really good
look because when when it jumped across the road, it was a good ten
yards in front of us, and had went took about like I said,
two and a half three little trot steps and jumped and when it's when its
head and front legs hit the grass, and it was like a I don't
know how to explain it. Like you lit a you set a black smoke
bomb down and a black gray Charcoali gray black. Yeah, would you say
i'd kind of had the profile of your drumm and shepherd? I actually yeah
those yeah, those uh yeah, the erect ears and that kind of stature.
But I found a dog online. It's in it some kind of Egyptian
shorthaired dog that it actually looked a lot like I think I actually sent the
picture to you Spencer when we were talking about it. I can't remember,
but yeah, it was it was about that. That's as close as I
found. I can't remember that what kind of breed that dog was. But
this is a true story. Can you hear me now? I mean this
is a true story. It happened to me when I was We l used
to live upon the hill behind the our old school. It's torn down in
uh uh, the small town that we live in. And I was between
like four and a half and the five years old, because I started school
when I was five and and I I still remember it just like it was
to d to day, uh yesterday. You know. I would be lying
in the bed asleep and something would wake me up every night we lived in
that house. S something would wake me up every night. It was about
it was like it looked, uh, it appeared to be about little over
foot tall, had a gesture suit on, and it would just run from
the corner of the corner, corner to corner, just with a hysterical life
and just terrorize me. Every night I would run down the hallway. I
could see it follow me down the hallway to my mom and dad's bedroom and
I'd be lying there between them and it would do the same things, just
just hysterical laughter, just terrorism, and that the whole time that we lived
in that house. And in nineteen eighty five, Stephen King put a book
out Kat's Eye. Has anybody ever seen that book? That movie which the
cats I Stephen King that the Little Girl Drew Barrymore is Moore is the story
in it and that little thing comes out of the wall. That was what
I saw twenty five years before that movie came out, and everybody in my
family knows about it that it's true. I just thought it was really when
I first saw that movie, it was like, you know, apparently he
had seen the same thing. I think I think he saw a lot of
this stuff that he wrote books about. But it's not that long a story,
but it was. It was terrifying to me. Okay, you're recording,
all right, I'm gonna edit all this, all this chatter and stuff.
Okay. I was born and raised eleven eleven years old, nineteen seventy
two. My grandfather had taken me and my friend of mine down to Oakwood
Bottoms. We come from southern Illinois, which would be Murphy'sboro. Oak Wood
Bottoms is probably twelve miles away from that, and it's about another five to
the Mississippi River. The big Muddy River runs right through or right around town.
My grandfather took me down there to go hunting that morning. Everybody in
that part of the world. I was brought up poor, so you got
one gun, so I had a twelve gage shotgwn. I got up early
in that morning. Grandpa took us down and dropped us off. That time
of the year, which would be in August into August, you took sulfur
tablets back in the days, keep the chiggers away, keep everything else off
of you. You could roll around on the ground, it really wouldn't matter.
So he dropped me and my buddy off. We went back in the
bottoms. I was waiting for the sun to come up, and the squirrels
were up there, running around in the tree, and I shot two of
them out of the tree. I just thought I'd just sit there because a
you know, their body will cool off and normally the fleas and stuff like
that to be gone. Within thirty forty minutes. They've kicked back off again,
and I was shooting a twelve gauge with number six shot. And then
I'd been sitting there for a while and I heard a tree fall. Didn't
think a whole lot about it. There's no wind in that part of the
world normal. So I'd left the squirrels just laying there. This thing come
from the backwoods and he was looking at me, and he was looking at
my squirrels, and he started pacing back in between the trees. You know,
eleven years old, you really don't know what to do with that.
And I was like, I have three shots in this gun. It ain't
nothing gonna hurt this thing right here. So I was like, you know
what you want these squirrels. You can have these squirrels. It's not a
biggie and you're just sitting there watching. I'm sitting at the bottom of an
oak tree, sitting there watching. Yes, he did know I was there,
and he was not happy about it. So, yeah, that's fine,
that's fine. He's pacing back and forth, and I was like,
okay, I'm going back my way out of here. So I got up
sitting there looking at me. I start working my way back to the levee.
I get to the levee and I just sit there. You know,
eleven years old, you don't know what to do with that. And uh,
my buddy comes up. I'm trying to tell him what's going on.
Grandpa's supposed to me to say. At ten o'clock he shows up and uh
we go home and he's like, you ain't talking much. I said,
I don't have a lot to say right now. We get home, drop
off my buddy. Now I tell my grandfather about it. Yeah, I
told him what had happened. He didn't question what I was telling him because
I remember my grandfather back years before that had told me that any time you
enter the woods, there's something watching you. And that kind of set on
me. I was like, I don't understand what he's trying to tell me.
So probably he was a knower and not a believer. So the next
day, well, let me go back. He said, I want you
to meet me up here at the house in the morning at six o'clock.
Okay. So I met him up there. He said, bring your hunt
stuff. Okay. He took me back down there, dropped me off at
the exact same place. He said, going out there in the woods to
your squirrel hunting. I'll be here when you come back. So I went
out. When did my squirrel hunting shot? A couple come back up.
What he told me whenever I got to the car was you don't ever let
anything run you out of the woods that you enjoy that much. So even
to this day, like this morning, I'm packing my car up and in
the dark, and that's a whole different experience. You don't get over that.
I had a friend that lives up on the mountain over there from me.
Last year. He called me up at two in the morning. He
said, something's something's up here. He said, to hit the hit the
side of the house, and they just built his house. So I went
back up the hill, got on my four wheeler, grabbed my guns,
went up the hill, went and looked at it, and something grabbed a
tree limb and hit the side of his house with it. And it ain't
like it dropped off out of the forest because there's a roof there and the
overhang. No, this is a actually since I moved to Tennessee, Okay,
And uh so, I said, well, there ain't nothing in this
forest that I know of that can grab a tree limb and beat your house
with an eight foot high Right down the road from me is a old man
that was born and raised in that hollow, and he's eighty years old and
he's a preacher. I said, we're gonna find out answers tomorrow, but
we're gonna have to go down there and talk to him. And we went
down and talked to him and asked him and said, told him what had
happened that the house the night before he goes it happens, I said,
you've lived here eighty years. When it happens, he goes. And that's
where I'm going to end this story. Okay. Are you guys all familiar
with Montgomery Bell State Park in Tennessee, Okay, So I'm sure you've heard
about werewolf springs. Well, let me tell you about the legend of werewolf
springs. Back in the late eighteen hundreds, there was a farmer and he
was headed home. I think he was headed from Burns to somewhere over by
Nashville, and he was going by way of wagon, and he had his
servant with him, and considering the time frame, the servant was probably a
former slave, but nobody has ever confirmed that. For me, I just
know that the man was in the wagon and they was getting late at night,
and they were headed east, and as they were going along, they
began to notice that there was something in the woods around them that sounded like
it was following them. Well, being late at night, they thought they
were being tracked by bandits, and they began to get worried. Well,
they're in a wagon being pulled by a horse, so of course they speed
the horse up a little bit, but whatever's walking in the woods beside them
starts running a little bit, and it's keeping up with them. So they
go a little bit faster, and the faster they go, the more this
thing keeps up with them, and they realize that whatever it is that's following
them can't be human because it's moving as fast as his horses, and there's
no way a human being could be running through the woods that fast. They
get so panicked and so scared that the farmer suddenly jumps off the wagon this
way, and the servant jumps off the wagon that way, and the farmer
rolls in under the bushes. But whatever was following them went with the servant,
and the farmer laid there and listened while the servant was torn to pieces
by a creature he could not identify. It was growling and screaming, and
the servant was begging, God, help me, help me. I can't
take this o me, please, But it tore him to pieces, and
he begged for mercy. He wanted desperately to get away from this thing,
but he couldn't. It was ripping at him, and the farmer could hear
the bones crunching, and he could hear the cries of a servant. There
was nothing he could do, nothing he could do to save the guy,
until finally, with a horrible crunching sound, the servant breathed his last.
The farmer he sat there, and he laid there under the bushes until dawn.
He was too afraid to move. He was afraid if he got out
and tried to run whatever this thing that had killed a servant was gonna come
after him. So he laid there and finally the sun came up and he
got up the nerve and he ran as fast as he could back to town,
and he told everybody something's killed my servant. I don't know what it
was, but it tore him to pieces, and I heard it, and
I can't find anything, and I don't know what to do. So all
the townspeople come out. They search the whole area. They can't find hiding
her hair of the servant. Nothing, no shreds are close, nothing,
it's just gone. Well. Time passes and more people start reporting hearing things
in the woods, until finally a group of the townspeople, and I believe
it's people around Burns, but it may have been Dixon or so. It's
one of those towns in that area, they decided they were going to get
together and they were gonna form a posse. Now, if you're familiar with
Montgomery Bell State Park, at the southern tip of it, there's a it
used to be a farm called the Hall Farm, and there's a spring there
and it's just a little it's not much bigger than that bonfire. It's just
a little hole in the ground, and they they they decide they're gonna there's
a clearing by the spring, and they're gonna gather there because that's pretty close
to where the farmer had his incident. And they all decide they bring a
goat out there, and they they stake a goat there and the clearing and
they all get in the woods around the clearing, and they got their guns
and they douse their lanterns and they sit there in the wait and they wait.
Now it's a kind of a cloudy night, and the clouds drift across
across the moon and things go kind of dark, and then of course they
drift out and it gets a little brighter and they can see the goat,
and then the clouds come across the moon and it gets dark, and then
the clouds drift away and they can see the goat, and the goat's starting
to pull at the stake. And then the clouds come across the moon and
it gets dark and they can hear the goat, and then when it clears
up again, they can see the goat, and the goat's definitely panicking and
it's pulling and it's trying to get away, and suddenly this thing, this
giant, hairy, two legged beast of a thing, jumps into the clearing
and grabs the goat, and all of the farmers, all of the peep
townspeople stand up and they start shooting at this thing. Everyone no, they
emptied all of their rifles into this thing. In the meantime, clouds cover
the moon again, everything goes dark. They finally somebody gets a lantern lit
and they hold it up and the thing is gone. The goat is gone,
and three of the men in the posse are gone and they're never seen
again. Well, word got out about this. People didn't know, you
know, what's what is this? People are talking about it. They are
talking about it in New York, in California. There's some kind of a
monster and people are describing this thing like it's a werewolf. This big game
hunter hears about it, and he decides, well, there's nothing I can't
kill. I've been to Africa and I've shot elephants, and I've shot lions
and tigers in India, and I can do any of this I did.
This is nothing for me. So he comes there and there's a cabin there
on the hall farm. I'm not far from the clear from the spring,
and it's got a clear view of that clearing. And he runs the cabin
for a week. Now. For the first several days, he goes out
and he tracks during the day and he doesn't really see anything. But you
know, he sits there on the front and looking out the front window at
night and he doesn't see anything go by, but he keeps looking. He
keeps thinking something's going to show up. And lo and behold, after about
four or five days, he's sitting there one evening looking out the window and
this tall, walking on two legs, hairy creature walks into the clearing.
The big game Hunter. He's like, well, this is obviously it.
This is something I've never seen before. It's got to be it. He
pulls up his rifle, takes aim, fires dead shot. Now you'd think
it would have dropped it, because this guy's shooting with a big, old,
you know, elephant rifle. But it didn't. All it did was
serve to make this thing angry, and it comes charging at the cabin and
the Big Game Hunter he's he's trapped in the cabin, so all I can
do is climb up into the raptors and he gets as high up in the
raptors as he can, and this thing tears down the door and it comes
inside. And for the whole night, this guy's trapped up in the rafters
and this thing's circling under him, and it's reaching up and it's trying to
grab him, and it's growling and it's hissing at him, and it's the
most horrible looking thing he's ever seen in his life. And he's terrified.
And every now and then he gets just the right angle and he fires,
but it doesn't affect this thing. Whatever this thing is, he can't kill
it. And he's terrified. And he gets down to this last two bullets,
and he knows he's gonna shoot one more time, and if he can't
kill it, the last bullet is for himself. So he takes ay and
he's getting ready to make that final shot at the beast, and about that
time, the sun pops up over the horizon. The beast looks out the
window, looks up at him, and it turns and runs out the door,
seen from again, or seen again by the Big game Hunter. He
immediately climbs down out of the rafters packs up his stuff and he leaves.
He says, I found something I can't kill, and this is it.
Well, of course, this is the story of the werewolf of Werewolf Springs.
Interestingly, there was a little girl before Montgomery Bell became a park that
lived in the Hall farmstead. She had been sent out to the spring to
get a bucket of water, and she never came back. After a couple
hours, all they found was the bucket by the spring. If you're familiar
with the park, there are three lakes there. It's a really nice park.
We're not talking. It's not wood like this. It's not rugged terrain
at all. It's really well manicured. It's beautiful. They've got a golf
course, they've got three nice lakes with a swimming beach, and there's a
really nice convention center there. It's not anything like what you would expect something
like that to be. But to this day people report while walking in the
southern part of that particular park hearing growling and feeling like they've been being tracked
by something and they don't know what it is. On the southernmost, on
the westernmost side of the southernmost Lake, there's a ridge with caves, and
back before it was a park, sometimes the farmers would take dead animals,
dead livestock up there in the caves where it could die and rot, or
not die, but be dead and rot without having to smell the rotting carcass.
And so when they went exploring up there, they found bones of large
animals, as you would expect, but what they couldn't explain where the human
skeletal remains inside those caves. And that, my friends, is the storyory
of the Werewolf of Werewolf Springs. I wish I could tell a story like
that about the background. Has anybody ever heard of the Moss Mountain Massacre?
Anybody here from Arkansas? Anybody anybody know where Conway, Arkansas is? Okay,
that's just not too far from Little Rock. And the Arkansas River runs
right through there, and there's a little island in the middle of the river
that is called beaver Dam Island, and there is I don't know if anybody
if you have ever heard of p Alan Smith. He's a landscape and horticulturist
expert who he used to have and I don't know if he still does,
but he used to have a channel or a show on PBS he owns the
plantation that runs alongside that, And I was looking for something to do for
Halloween one year, and I found the story about that Every year he hosts
a Halloween party to celebrate the ghosts of beaver Dam Island. And of course
that made me have to ask, well, what happened on the island.
So let me tell you. Back in eighteen nineteen, there was a man
named Thomas Nuttle. Now Nuttle is if you know anything about birds, you
may have heard of the Nuttle woodpecker. That bird is named after him.
He was born in England in the late seventeen hundreds early now I had to
be late seventeen hundreds. He was raised and apprentice as a printer in England,
and he got all done with his apprenticeship, was ready to become a
printer, and he realized that that was not what he wanted. He wanted
a life of adventure. So we got on a boat and he came across
the pond and he landed in Philadelphia, where he made friends with the world's
America's foremost botanist. And uh, he didn't. I can't think of the
guy's name. I want to say it was Smith, something but he didn't
have formal training, but he had a lot of knowledge about plants and animals
and in a serious need for adventure. And so this botanist sent him out
and he said, go explore North America, collect unknown plant species and unknown
animal species, bring them back to us, let us, let us examine
them, let us catalog them, and let's get a really good book of
the flora and fauna of North America. So he they all come or he
goes out. And he went out on his first expedition, I believe was
with Lewis and Clark, or Marquette and Juliet, and it can never keep
the two apart. And they go out on an expedition and he sends all
of this stuff back and he becomes very well known. But in eighteen eighteen
twelve, there was a little war between us in England, and he was
still a little too British and he really didn't want to get conscripted by accident.
So he went back to England, and of course we had our little
war, and in eighteen fifteen he came back and right away they said you
need to go back out, and you need to start collecting all this fauna
and Flora. Now I want you to understand, this man, single by
himself, tracked all across Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina,
the Virginia's which would have been just Virginia, then all by himself, collecting
these specimens and sending them back to the University of Pennsylvania to have all of
this stuff cataloged. He was not a squeamish guy, but in eighteen fifteen,
we had just fought a war with England and we didn't have a real
high opinion of the British because a lot of you may not know this,
but we kind of lost that war. In addition to which the areas that
he was about to go explore, which would have been Kentucky, Tennessee on
down through the Louisiana Purchase, there were a lot of French settlers and England
had just finished the Napoleonic Wars, so the French people didn't really have a
high opinion of the British. So when this man is asked to get a
flatboat and go down the Ohio River with a crew of men, none of
them really liked this Thomas Nuttle. They thought he was a little bit of
a you know a prissy boy, and they weren't very nice to him,
and he wasn't very nice to the French. But what he was was very
very good communicating with the native people of the area. In fact, he
had a great relationship with almost every tribe he came through. Now there were
those that they'd get to and they weren't very good. They would have arguments
or they you know, they didn't get along, but most of them he
was able to really develop a good relationship with. Even so by eighteen nineteen,
when they got to the Arkansas River and started up, he had to
still be careful because every tribe was new and he didn't know how they were
going to react. And on top of that, as they were coming down
the Mississippi, right before they started up the Arkansas River, they were all
hit by malaria. So these guys are all sick. They're not feeling really
their best. They're headed up the Arkansas River and they're not sure if they're
going to meet friendly people. They're not real ff thrilled with this prissy guy
that's on the boat complaining about every French person he runs into and how dare
he because he's this prissy British guy and things are falling apart. They get
to Beaver Damn Island and they camp there on the island for the night October
thirty first, eighteen nineteen because they're sick. Some of the people who are
sicker closer to the middle by the fire because it's they're not sure of how
the natives are going to react to them. Those people are sleeping kind of
out. They're all spread out over their silence. Some of them are kind
of tucked under the underbrush, and they're scattered all over the island. They
all fall asleep. October thirty first, eighteen nineteen. Thomas Nuttle wakes up
to a horrific a and he sits up and he looks around and he realizes
that there are these massive, two legged beings and they are ripping his men
to pieces, and he's watching it and he can't believe he's seeing the men.
A man stands up and he's running and screamed, no, no,
no, and he gets his head ripped right off his shoulders. And he's
watching this and he's like, what is happening? Because he knows he can't
do anything, he kind of slides back under the underbrush and he's watching in
horror, waiting for his turn to be ripped to pieces. And he passes
out because he has malaria and he's not feeling good. Finally Don comes the
next morning, and he opens his eyes again and he looks around at the
carnage and this entire or twenty or thirty man expedition, they're just body parts
at this point. They've all been ripped to shreds. Arms and legs and
feet and fingers and toes and eyes and heads. It's everywhere, and there's
blood. It's just a huge blood bath. And he kind of crawls out
to the fire and he's looking around and he's, you know, God,
is somebody anybody alive? And one man kind of moans over in the bushes,
and he crawls over there and he kind of shakes him. And the
guy looks at and me. He says, you're alive. You're alive,
And he says, he says, what happened? He says, I don't
know. I opened my eyes, I stood up, I was going to
go in and help, and something hit me from behind and I just woke
up. I don't know. He finds another guy, same condition, barely
able to speak, battered and beaten beyond belief. Five men survived that night,
five men and at least three of them saw a tall, bipedal,
hairy beast. Multiples attacked them. They continued on their their expedition. They
got to Colorado, they turned around, came back. They went to bi
the Philadelphia and the experts said, you were attacked by bears. To this
day, the attack the Moss Mountain massacre is attributed to bears