The house in the woods east of Lebanon, Missouri, June fifth, nineteen
eighty five. In the summer of nineteen eighty five, we found the house
in the woods. My friend and I decided to backpack into the woods near
his home in the Missouri countryside. We were both armed. I was a
twelve gate shotgun and Rich with a rugor ten twenty two semi auto twenty two
caliber rifle. We figured on shooting a squirrel or two while we were hiking.
We must have walked a few miles when we cut across this old,
overgrown trail in the woods. It was still early in the day and we
hadn't had any luck with the squirrels, so we thought we might explore the
trail. That was the entire point of the expedition anyway, to check out
the land in the area. We had never gone into the woods on that
land, since it was pretty tangled up. It was not an easy place
to hike, but we figured that deer and squirrels would be plentiful. We
weren't sure who the land belonged to, but everyone in the area thought it
was a government land. There was no conservation signs or signs to warn off
trespassers. It was just a four strand barbed wire fence that had seen better
days. That was all the imitation a couple of curious country kids needed.
We both had backpacks and a couple of blowney sandwiches, apiece and two canteens
of water, our army surplus ponchos in case it rained, and a first
aid kit. Ritchie's mom insisted on the first aid kit. We both had
our deer hunting camouflage and we wore Booney style military hats. When we first
cut the trail, I asked Rich if he had ever seen a gate or
a road on the land anywhere. Said he couldn't remember seeing anything like that,
so we figured it might have been an old logging trail from the fifties.
We noticed the trail to the left went up hill, so we thought
we'd start that way. I remember noticing the place was eerily quiet, but
I assumed Rich and I made so much noise that we scared the animals off.
We'd gone about a half a mile on this old road when we found
an old plow and we decided to check it out. It was really old,
and it was completely rusted and wooden. Handles mostly rotted away. The
left side handle was broken off about a foot from the end. It was
the type of plow you pulled behind a mule or a horse, not the
one you pulled with a tractor. And besides being old, it looked pretty
good and it must have been in excellent condition when it got left here.
Richie said that we should return with his dad's pickup and drag it to his
house. It was clearly an antique. All we munched on a baloney sandwich
and drank a little water. I noticed that it was still quiet. Rich
realized it too, and we started to look around a bit. The woods
were thick with a lot of brambles and undergrowth, but the only sound beside
us was the wind, and it was spooky. We again started up the
trail when we heard the sound up ahead in the trees. It was a
sort of a grunt or a snort, and I looked at rich and he
smiled and said he thought it was a buck. It wasn't deer season,
so we decided to look and see if it was a big enough buck to
come back when the time came. So we walked another half a mile or
so without seeing the buck. When we saw something in the tall grass ahead.
It looked like a car, and when we got closer you could tell
it was an old junk car. The body had rusted over and no paint
remained on the thing. The interior seats had rotted away, leaving only the
metal springs, and none of the glass was intact. Looks like Grandpa's old
Chevy, I said, yeah, but older, said Rich. Grandpa's Chevy
was a fifty three and it was still in excellent shape. Rich was right,
though this one did look older. The doors were still in place,
and when we lifted the old hood, the engine was still there. All
the old hoses and stuff were long since gone, though it was just an
old rust heap. We heard that grunt or snort again, but only this
time it was behind us and closer now. I grabbed the shotgun and turned
to look, but we couldn't see a dang thing. The tangles were so
thick that it could have been fifty feet away and we would have never seen
it go on, Get yelled Rich. We figured we'd hear the sounds of
a deer running off through the woods, but we only heard the wind.
This is starting to give me the creeps, Rich, I said, this
place is too quiet. Oh, come on, he replied, let's go
a little further and see what we find. We found the plow and now
the car. Maybe there's an old homestead around here. I shrugged, and
we started up the trail, and neither of us were talking, and by
an unspoken agreement, I watched one side of the road while Rich watched the
other side. We hadn't gone more than a quarter of a mile when we
saw a house through the trees ahead. It was an old two story place,
and the paint was gone and the glass was missing from all the windows.
The front porch roof hung almost to the ground, and the front door
hung off at an angle. Another old, rusted car was in the tall
grass near the house. It was an old ford by the look of it.
The barn had fallen in on itself years ago, and there weren't any
telephone poles around here, and that meant they'd abandoned this place before there was
electricity in the area, which was in the forties. According to my dad,
the place looked like it could have been older than that, though Rich
started toward the house and I grabbed his arm. You aren't planning on going
in that thing, are you? I asked him, Well, sure,
he said, Lord knows what we might find in there. They left behind
a plow in two cars. It's no telling what else might be in there.
Reluctantly I followed him. The porch was pretty rotted and we had to
watch our footing to get in the door. The place was a wreck and
one of those old wood cook stoves was in the kitchen. There was a
basin, but there was no faucet. Must be an old well with a
pump around here somewhere, I said quietly. Rich nodded and kept poking around.
There were a few pieces of old furniture, but it was all broken
and rotted. The old cook stove was in pretty good shape, but I
bet it weighed four or five hundred pounds. That stove was solid cast iron.
In one room we saw animal scat. It was pretty big and in
big piles. What kind of animal dropped that? I asked, that's way
too big for a coon or a coyote. Well, it must be a
cow or something, Rich said, maybe a horse. Well I wasn't convinced,
but I didn't argue. I couldn't think of a thing that could do
that and still fit in the door of the house. It also smelled funny.
It wasn't like deer scatter or horse apples. I took out my honting
knife and I poked into one of the piles and in the scat with some
hair and what looked like a tooth. Hey, rich this is a meat
eater. You see this tooth and there's hair in it too. Well,
I heard there were bears in the woods around here. That must be it,
said rich shotgun or no shotgun. A bear was not something I wanted
to run into. I only had squirrel shot, not slugs, and all
I would do was make it mad. And the twenty two wasn't much better.
My dad always said you could not run a bear anyway. Come on,
let's get out of here. I think it's the best. We head
toward home. Not yet, let's check upstairs first. Oh man, I
don't think that's a good idea. This place looks like it could collapse.
We might fall through the floor, I said. Now, this old place
is pretty solid. The porch is shot, but the floors feel solid enough.
Besides, it'll only take a minute, said rich Well slowly. I
followed him up the old steep stairs. Unfortunately, he was right, they
did feel pretty solid. Once up the stairs, we both started looking around.
The furniture up there was all gone. There was more scat up there,
and it looked about the same as the stuff downstairs. Hey, come
check this out, called rich In the next room we saw what looked to
be a nest, only it was bigger. It was made of long grass
and leaves and woven with tree branches. There was more scat in this room,
but none in the nest. There were a few bones in it,
though, and it looked like a rabbit or a squirrel, some kind of
small game. O'Neil to look at the bones. And we heard a grunt
or snort again, and this time it was right outside the house and it
was loud. It sounded angry, and then something hit the side of the
house hard enough that we felt the floor shake. What the hell was that,
I yelled, I don't know, but it don't sound friendly, said
rich A pointed the shotgun out the window and let fly around. The loud
boom of the twelve gage prompted another snort or grunt, and then there was
a growl and we heard something crashing off through the tall grass and into the
trees. We both took the stairs as fast as we could, and we
jumped out of the living room window and we ran down the road past the
old cars, and we didn't stop until we reached the old plow. And
when we got there, we stopped to catch our breath. What in the
hell was that? I asked, gulping air down. Not only knows,
man, Rich replied, but whatever it was, it sure didn't take too
kindly to us being up in that old house. I was just about to
open my mouth to reply when I rock the size of a bowling ball flew
out of the trees and slammed into the plow blade right next to us,
and it bounced up and it knocked Ritchie off the plow where he was sitting
on the handle. Right then came the most horrendous roar from the trees.
It sounded like a lion or something like it, but it was just inside
the tree line. The roar lasted for a good ten seconds, and while
it was roaring, I couldn't do anything but stare at the tree line where
the sound was coming from. And when it stopped, I grabbed Rich and
pulled him to his feet. Can you walk, I asked, Hell,
no, I can't walk, he replied, I'm going to run. The
noise came from the trees about that time, as if something was tearing up
the brush. Limbs were breaking and cracking, and Rich leveled IS twenty two
at the area and fired off three rounds. The sharp crack of the rounds
going off must have scared it, because the sound stopped and we could hear
something tearing off through the trees. We took off like rabbits down the trail,
heading for the spot where we could cut a trail, and it didn't
take long to make it, and we stopped there because neither of us was
in any hurry to go into those trees. We would have to go through
the woods for a few miles to get home. We listened for any sounds
or signs of whatever we'd heard back at the plow, and after a couple
of minutes, when we hadn't heard anything, we decided to go for it.
We heard a sound from back toward the plow as we entered the trees,
and it sounded like someone banging wood against wood, and at not three
times, and we heard it again after a few seconds, only from the
other side of us, deeper into the trees. By this point, we
were so scared that we couldn't even talked to each other. I've been in
out of the woods my entire life and never experienced anything like this. Neither
had Rich and we kept up a quick pace in the thick underbrush, and
we hadn't gone far when we heard that roar again, and it was close.
I turned to point my twelve gage in that direction and I fired off
around and the boom of the shotgun was almost deafening in the thick woods.
Instead of running off like before, it roared again and started throwing tree branches
at us. Rich and I got a pretty good look at it, but
just for a few seconds, and it was about ten yards away and looked
like a giant man, only he was covered in black hair from head to
foot. The face looked more like a gorilla than a man, with black
skin and not much of a neck, and the head looked pointed, and
it was not a cone or anything. It was just like it sloped backwards
to the back of its head. It was kind of like the hood on
a poncho. And it was big too. It must have been close to
seven feet tall and had a massive chest and arms like a bodybuilder. Rich
fired at it with the twenty two, and we're sure he hit it because
it grunted and disappeared into the trees. There wasn't any sound of it running
off, so we knew it had just taken cover. And we started getting
branches tossed at us from the other side about that time, and without even
looking, I fired off the shotgun that way and we heard whatever it was
crashing into the thicker trees. Rich and I decided that it would be a
good idea to move faster. And this went on for quite a bit,
with one side tossing rocks or sticks until we fired off our guns and then
it would come from the other side. They're trying to get us to run
out of ammo, Rich yelled, well, I knew he was right,
and it was working. I was down to five rounds left for the shotgun,
and Rich had two more magazines for the twenty two. We were pretty
close to panicking. We knew we had to be close to the fence where
we first came into this property, so we decided to make a break for
it. I fired one way and he fired the other and we started running,
and instead of them running away, it sounded like they were running after
us. Looking back at it now, I think they knew that we were
close to getting away, and the undergrowth was stick and we knew that they
could be right on top of us before we could see them, so we
just started firing blind well. He emptied the magazine in the twenty two and
I was pumping in my fourth round into the chamber when we saw the fence.
Richie dove over it and came up to his feet. I wasn't much
of a jumper, so I got ready to climb through or over, and
the crashing was right behind us, so I tossed the shotgun over the fence
to rich and he shouldered it and aimed behind me, and I could see
the look of terror on his face. I grabbed the fence started over,
and that's when I felt something tug at the back of my shirt. It
only tugged for a second, and rich fired the shotgun right over my shoulder
and I planted my foot and I flipped over the fence. I reached for
the twenty two and pulled it off the ground and got to my feet and
rich fired off my last ground in the shotgun, and we took off down
the gravel road as fast as possible. We could still hear them crashing through
the trees beside the road. Rich and I switched guns while we ran,
and we loaded his last magazine into the twenty two. And the things in
the trees kept getting closer, and we were still more than a mile from
Rich's house, and we knew there was no way we were gonna make it.
We were already exhausted and almost out of AMMO. And then we heard
a horn. One of Rich's neighbors was coming up the road in his pickup.
The sounds in the tree stopped as the truck caught up with us,
leaned out his window and he smiled at us. You boys want to ride?
He asked, well, yeah, We shouted and jumped into the pickup
bed. Mister Bridges dropped us off in front of richest house, and we
thanked him profusely and he waved it us and he drove away. The wood
stopped down the road from Rich's house, so we were safe. We didn't
hear or see anything. Rich's parents were gone to town, so we went
inside and cleaned the guns. We were both still shaking, and I went
to the refrigerator to get a coke and Rich gasp I spun around and said,
what is it? Man? Look at your back. I pulled off
my shirt and looked, and across the back were four slashes side by side
that had been the tug. I felt before I crossed the fence, there
were slashes across the fabric, but it hadn't reached my skin. We locked
all the doors and reloaded the guns, and Rich went and got the Marland
thirty thirty and he loaded it and I loaded slugs into the twelve gage and
we spent the rest of the afternoon watching the tree line through the windows.
Every night after that, for two weeks you could hear strange screams coming from
the woods. Rich's dogs went nuts one night, barking at something, and
then they heard it yelp. Rich's dad went outside to see what happened,
but nothing was there, and they never found the dog. Two nights later,
one of their cows got attacked and killed. They found it partially eaten
and torn up pretty good the next day, and whatever had killed it,
it had broken one of its legs and its neck. A couple of times.
Something even tried to get into the house, but it ran off when
Rich's dad turned on the lights and grabbed his rifle. But by the end
of two weeks, everything had returned to normal and they no longer heard the
screams. And we told Rich's dad what had happened in the woods. He
just laughed at us. He thought that our imaginations had run away with us,
and since he didn't believe us, he never told anyone else until I
decided to write this. Rich and I didn't talk about it much later.
After both of us joined the army, we drifted apart. Last I heard
Rich lived out of state with his wife and kids. I'm not sure where.
His parents sold their farm and moved to New Mexico in nineteen ninety six.
And as crazy as this all sounds, I promise you this is true.
The only thing I changed was the names of the people involved, because
I didn't want to reveal their names without their permission, and I had no
idea how to find them to ask. I never returned to those woods again,
not even with Rich or with better weapons. I'm not sure that I
would go back there even now. It scares me that bad and I don't
get scared easily. And even though that was almost twenty years ago, I
remember it like it was yesterday, and if I lived to be one hundred,
I will never forget it. Whatever those things were, they lived in
that old house, and I honestly feel they were trying to kill us.
I often wonder if they didn't kill the people who lived in that house all
those years ago. One of those old cast iron stoves wasn't something people in
those days would toss aside. They were expensive to buy, and that was
one in good shape, even in nineteen eighty five. If we didn't have
our guns, I think that neither of us would have made it out of
the woods alive. And that thing I saw that day was no bear.
Bears don't have hands or walk on two legs, and whatever it was,
it damn sure wasn't friendly. I've read about the legends of Bigfoot. That
is the only thing that fits what we saw. And if it was Bigfoot,
it sure wasn't some gentle giant of the woods like some people try to
make it out to be. This thing was dangerous, and I think that
the only thing that kept it at bay were our guns. I still say
they were trying to make us run out of AMMO that day. We wouldn't
have made it home if mister Bridges hadn't come along. We were lucky that
day. I guess that's why I don't want to go back. Why in
the world would I push my luck.