This email has no name. I think it's a woman, and here's what
she writes. I grew up listening to stories about bigfoot or one of my
earliest childhood memories involves a bigfoot. I remember bits and pieces of the story
myself, but my mother has since filled me in on those parts that are
a bit shady for me. I was five years old at the time and
we were visiting my grandmother and uncle in Kentucky. My uncle decided to take
me to the playground that was nestled into clearing in the woods, and as
we walked under a canopy of trees, we could hear heavy footsteps following us.
The thick vegetation kept us from seeing what it was. Though. We
got to the playground and I got busy playing with some kids. It wasn't
long before a terrible scream started. The other kids turned and ran home the
second they heard it, and I didn't know what it was, so I
just stood there. My uncle ran over and grabbed me and started running,
and he didn't stop until we got back to grandma's house. At the time,
my grandmother had two beautiful Dobermans that I loved dearly. My uncle was
telling her and my mom what happened at the playground, so they sent me
back out to play with the dogs. The backyard was fenced inn but it
butted up to the woods, and I remember being back there playing with the
dogs when I heard something snap in the woods. The trees were moving strangely
in a way I had never seen them do before. And then the dogs
started going crazy. They were running around me and barking and snapping at the
fence, and one of the dogs kept grabbing my arm in its mouth and
it was trying to pull me away, and then I remember a whole section
of fence being ripped away. I woke up a few days later in the
hospital. I saw my grandmother a couple of times after that, and I
would always ask her where the dogs went. A tear would well up in
her eye. But neither she nor anyone else would ever tell me what happened
to those dogs. No one seemed to want to talk about them or what
happened to them that day. Years later, my mother told me that a
large animal that was covered in hair, like a bear, but it stood
on two legs like a man, had killed those dogs. She said it
wasn't like any animals she'd ever seen before, but my dad called it a
bigfoot. The doctors told my parents that I had blocked whatever happened that day
from my mind, and that I needed to remember the events on my own.
I'm now forty five years old, and still today I can't unlock what
happened in my grandmother's backyard. A few years ago. When I was living
in Clarksville, Tennessee, our house backed up to the woods in a neighborhood
not too far from the Cumberland River. We had lived there for three years
when strange things started happening. First, the dogs started going missing from the
backyards of the houses that backed up to the woods, and then we started
hearing strange noises and seeing strange dark figures in the shadows of the trees.
One evening, my two younger kids were playing with the neighbors little girl in
their backyard. They were throwing rocks over the fence and something was throwing them
back. The kids came and told us, but we foolishly thought maybe the
older kids were messing with them. We've been all out in those woods.
There isn't much to them, so we didn't think it could be anything else.
At eleven pm. On another night, my older kids and a few
of their friends came in sight in a huff, like they'd been running.
They were coming back from another friend's home, and my son told me they
were headed back when they started hearing weird screaming noises, like some kind of
animal they'd never heard before. It scared them, so they started moving faster,
and the faster they moved, the faster the screaming noises moved toward them.
Only it moved faster than they did. They said. The street lights
behind them started turning off where the screaming noises were coming from, which could
have been coincidental, it was still strange, and I told him I'd drive
everyone home from now on, and I warned them not to go out late
at night anymore because of all the weird things that were happening in the neighborhood.
A few days after that, as the sun was starting to set,
I told two of my older boys to go put their bikes in the backyard
so they wouldn't get them stolen. A few minutes later, they came inside
screaming, saying that there was something big up against the woods. Well,
naturally, I went out to check on it. Only it wasn't where they
said it was. It was standing at the end of my driveway. Compared
to my neighbors six foot privacy fence, this thing had to be at least
eight feet tall. It had a muscular body, and it was covered in
dark hair, and its hands and feet were huge. It stood there like
a man with a slight stoop, and it was staring at me. I
was so shocked that I couldn't move. All I could do was stand there
and stare back at it. After a minute, I heard one of my
sons calling for me. Now. I turned my head away for only a
second, and when I looked back, the creature was gone. Apparently I
wasn't the only one to notice that something wasn't right. All the men in
the neighborhood, whose houses also backed up to the woods, organized a hunt.
They were determined to find whatever was taking their beloved family pets, and
it went on for a week, but they never found anything. A month
later, one of my older sons and three of his friends thought it would
be fun if we had a game of hiding seeking those woods with them looking
for us. Well. It was daring the day, so we all agreed.
My middle son and I decided to hide behind a huge tree that had
fallen, but the mosquitoes were eating us alive, so as soon as we
saw them pass, we snuck out and we went back to the house to
spray ourselves with bug spray. Two of the boys who were looking for us
the seekers met us there because the mosquitoes were eating them up too. My
son found my stepdaughter and she joined him in looking for us, not realizing
we were all back at the house. We had just decided to go back
out to the woods when we heard my stepdaughter screaming, and moments later she
fell out of the woods and she collapsed. She was white as a ghost
and clearly and shocked, and we picked her up and took her inside.
It was a horrifying few moments as we tried to calm her down and find
out what had happened to my older son. This is one of those moments
that a mother does not want to live through. My neighbor came over along
with two of the other boys. We headed back out to the woods to
find my son, and we had just reached the tree line when we heard
him screaming. Not of nowhere, he ranted us and nearly plowed over us
trying to get away. I had a hard time getting him to calm down
enough to tell us what had happened. He said, he and his sister
thought they saw me and my middle son hiding in a tree, but when
they got closer, a massive, dark, hairy creature stepped out. He
screamed for his sister to run and no matter what she heard, not to
look back, and they both took off running. This thing wasn't running at
all, but it was on them in a few short steps. My son
split off from my stepdaughter and hopes that the creature would chase him. He
looked back over his shoulder to see if it worked, but it was gone.
He kept running though, until all of a sudden, a huge limb
swung out from around a tree and hit him in the head. As he
fell, he saw two big feet, and for a moment he felt a
hand on us back, and just like that, it was gone. Well,
my son lay there for a few minutes and then he got up and
ran home. Days later, being the curious person that I am, I
went to look for footprints. I found one on a slope. It was
the biggest barefoot print I had ever seen. Both of my feet could fit
inside of it. I talked to the owner of that land to see if
he'd ever seen anything strange there. He said he and his friends had bought
it when it was farm land, and they eventually sold it off for housing,
but in the years that they owned it, they'd seen a lot of
strange things. He asked me to let him know if I ever saw anything
else. He wanted to try and find this thing. He also asked me
not to share my story with the media because he thought it might cause more
harm than good. I'm certain he knew what was in those woods. After
that, there were all kinds of stories from people around that neighborhood, hearing
strange screaming and seeing shadows at night. There was one story of a farmer
whose land bordered the river. He saw some people down by the river,
and he realized that they would have had to walk through his crops to get
there. He decided to drive down and let them know that they were on
private property. But once he got there, he realized they weren't people at
all. One really large, hairy beast made a screaming noise like he'd never
heard before. After that incident, everything went silent. It was like it
had been all a bad dream. Maybe they were just passing through or migrating.
And then two years later, I was driving home from a friend's house
late one night when I came on a tall, hairy man beast standing in
the road. At first, I thought I was seeing things, but as
I got closer, it didn't move. I stopped a few feet from it,
and it just stood there, herring at me, like the one had
in my driveway years ago. I blinked and it was gone. I haven't
had any more encounters since that day. I still drive down that road hoping
to see it one more time, but it hasn't happened yet. The encounters
are definitely scary, but I don't think they're out to hurt us. If
they were, I think the human species would be extinct by now. Whoa,
whoa. That's a big statement, man. This woman has had a
lifetime almost of well, it has been a lifetime of bigfoot encounters. Now
that is unreal. It's like I've said this one hundred times. Some people
seem to see these things all the time, and then there's people like me
who never even see a track. I don't know. Maybe I'm just not
lucky, but maybe I am lucky. I don't know. It's a very
very good story. I sincerely appreciate the woman who sent it. Thank you
very much. You wrote a great story. I don't know who the persons.
I don't know the name of the person who wrote this email. I
just have an email address. But this is extremely interesting. It's pretty short,
but it's really good. When I was fourteen, I was with some
of my family at an actual haunted house called Saint Auban's Sanatorium in Radford,
Virginia. The place began its life as a Lutheran boys' school, but bullying
became such a problem that several of its students took their own lives. With
a reputation like that, the school eventually shut down. In nineteen sixteen.
It reopened as a psychiatric infirmary. Although it was supposed to be a better
alternative to the other insane asylums, it too developed a bad reputation. There
were stories of cruel and inhuman treatment of the patients. The stories were rampant
experiments often left them permanently lead disabled or dead. The staff to patient ratio
was outrageous with one staff member for every one hundred and thirty five patients.
Divide that into three shifts with days off, and the number gets a lot
closer to four hundred. In the nineteen nineties, the place was shut down,
and today it's considered one of the most haunted places in the Eastern United
States. And for the price of admission, you two can experience the other
worldly happenings inside its walls. Now can you blame me for being too scared
to go inside? My uncle, who worked security there, stayed outside to
keep me company while everyone else went in. We walked around and talked until
he got a call to go do a walk through. While I was standing
at the ticket booth waiting for my uncle to come back, this guy with
a pale face and dark eyes walked up to me and tapped me on the
shoulder. I guess he was about five foot ten, and he was dressed
in a uniform like the inmates of the asylum would have worn. Do you
know where the bathroom is? He asked? What. I told him,
no, that I had never been inside. He stood there for a second,
staring at me, and then he turned and silently walked away. I
assumed he was an actor hired to add to the creepy factor of the haunted
house. I never gave him another thought. But a few days later we
were all together again, and everyone who went inside was showing off the pictures
that they had taken and talking about the suicide bathroom. It was the place
where the students of the Lutheran's boys' schools would go to commit their final act.
Someone had taken a photograph of a wall of pictures showing the people who
had died in that bathroom. And right there, as clear as he was
when he tapped me on the shoulder, was the guy who asked me where
the bathroom was. Almost a decade it still haunts me now. I can't
help but wonder if the person he'd asked that question of while he was living
had given him the same answer that I did, would it have given him
time to think about it, maybe make a better choice. WHOA, that's
a spooky ghost story. That's a man, that is a that's a short,
little, great little ghost story. I love that. Thanks for the
thanks for the sent Thanks for writing it. To the person who sent it,
I really appreciate it. Here is a skunk Ape story and the writer,
Oh, she didn't say whether I can use her name, so I
won't. I won't say it. My great aunt and uncle had a camp
on the Louisiana side of the Sabine River. Next to them was an old
couple who had a bait house and they had docks. The old couple had
lived there for over sixty years, and although they'd raised their six children in
that house on the river, they'd both been raised in the Honey and Swamp
area, just a short way down the coast. When my grandparents came to
visit, we'd always head out to my aunt and uncle's camp. Between my
aunts and uncles who were still at home, my great aunt and my uncle's
kids, and me and my siblings were the fourteen of us kids and sixteen
adults. Although we were never allowed to swim because of the gators and the
guars, we spent a lot of time fishing on their floating dock made from
barrels lashed together. The five teenage boys took an aluminum boat out to fish.
Late one evening. They headed up river into some of the slews,
and using nothing but cane poles, caught a twelve foot alligator gar. The
women set about cleaning and cooking a mess of fried garballs and fried gar patties
with smothered onions and potatoes, and we ate like hungry hogs, and we
never asked again why we couldn't swim in the river. There was an old
homestead that had been to droyed by a hurricane decades before I was ever born,
and it was used as a garbage dump. We'd go there with the
women in dick for bottles and other treasures in the ashes of the burnt trash.
Early one afternoon, we suddenly heard a horrible, indescribable screaming and growl
that was maybe a half a mile away from us. My great aunt stopped
what she was doing and immediately began to demand that we all head back to
the house. She spoke with enough urgency that we obeyed. It was six
hundred feet through the sand and salt grass and another six hundred feet down the
shell road to the house. The whole way we asked her what had made
that noise, but she never said a word. Once we got back to
the house, her only answer was that she didn't know what it was,
and she didn't want to find out That evening was like any other. The
adults sat around the kitchen table playing Penny Anny poker, while we kids did
what we kid did before technology and cell phones stole that from society. Some
of us were coloring and coloring books, while others read books or magazines,
and by midnight we were all in bed. The floor was a wall to
wall pallette of kids and dogs sleeping peacefully under a gentle breeze pulled in through
the open windows by a large attic fan, and the adults had their own
rooms. At some point in the night, I had to get up and
answer nature's call, and afterward I climbed back into my sleeping bag, and
I was almost asleep when that gentle breeze suddenly carried in the most nauseating smell
I could imagine. I set up and loudly says, what is that smell?
It's burning my eyes. I can't breathe well. My voice carried well
throughout that old house. I wouldn't have been surprised if that elderly couple next
door had heard me. While I was twelve years old at the time,
and I had reached that age where whippings and scare me so much, anymore.
The smell that was being pulled in through the open windows by that big
attic fan began to intensify, and adults began to shout for us kids to
get up and shut the windows. Someone yelled to turn off that fan.
Teenagers started jumping up and slapping the old fashioned wooden sash windows down so fast
and hard that it was a wonder that no one broke class. And then
they sent us back to bed, but the adults stayed up, drinking coffee
and talking quietly until daylight. And when the women started breakfast, the men
went outside to look around. We kids were all told not to go any
further than the area around our camp, the bait camp next door, or
the dot. The men went over to talk to the old couple. They
owned all the land for a mile around the two river houses, and when
the men came back, they sent all the kids outside. I guess thirty
minutes later they called us back in and ordered us to help load up our
cars we were leaving. It seems the skunk apes in the area had been
attracted to the extra people and the food smells created by our small army.
They were known to take children if they could and the older couple told the
men that it had happened in the past, and the couple also said that
they had seen these things and had dealt regularly with their behavior for decades.
The live bait vats and the sheds were rated, and various objects left outside
were destroyed. They would wake up to find their small garden ransacked, and
all the vegetables smashed or half eaten are gone, And then there was that
smell. It was like nothing else they could describe. In the five years
that my uncle had the lease on the count, the older couple had never
once mentioned the skunk apes. He maintained the old house and did any repairs
the older couple needed. He was a good renter, so I guess they
didn't want to lose him. The next year he leased the cabin elsewhere.
Even then in the new cabin on a pumping plant canal, surrounded by other
cabins with a little general store where we could buy sodas and listen to the
music from the jukebox through the outside speakers. I heard that scream one evening.
I shivered in the warm night air, and I hoped it stayed on
the Louisiana side of the River excellent, excellent swamp ape skunk ape story.
Oh, this podcast has had three really really good stories. You guys are
doing such a good job with your story said, I can't tell you how
much I appreciate all the people who's sending these in. It may take me
a while to get to him, but I will get to him. Man.
I really enjoyed doing this podcast and I just love this stuff anyway,
Thank you all for sending the stories, and thank you all for joining me
on this podcast, and I hope that you will join me on the next
one. How yack yet? All Right, you guys have a good week
and we'll see you on the next one. Thanks.