All right, here's a story about a creature I've never heard of. Kind
of breezed through this as I pulled it up. But I'm not sure the
writer gives this creature a name. But I'm going to read the story because
it's pretty good. I don't know what we saw. If my daughter hadn't
been with me and seen it too, i'd have chalked it up to imagination.
She was with me, and she did see it. At the time,
we were living in a small town south of Fort Worth, Texas.
My daughter and I were on our way to a larger town to do some
school shopping, have a little mother daughter time. It was close to dusk,
and we drove along the winding road through the farm land around us,
but it was still light enough to see clearly well into the distance. Two
hundred yards ahead of us was a flatbed truck. As we drove along,
what I first assumed was a large black trash bag flew out of the back
of it and went straight up in the air. Most trash when it flies
out the back of a truck will do that, so I gave it very
little thought, and then it started gliding straight toward our little Toyota Corolla.
As it got closer and it grew bigger, I began to realize that this
was no trash bag. It had wings that were spread out, but they
weren't flapping, which made me wonder if this was someone on a glider.
It continued to move even closer, and as it did so, it began
to lose its altitude. Now it was flying so low, and I thought
it was going to land on our car. I was so sure of this
that I quickly closed the window in the sunroof. This thing reminded me of
the creature from the movie Jeepers Creepers, and as low as it was flying
and as close to us as it came, it should have landed on our
are I honestly don't know how it didn't. And as soon as it passed
over us, I looked in the rear view mirror to see where it had
gone, but it wasn't there. I reopened the sunroof and I looked up.
It wasn't over us either. It had disappeared. I looked over at
my daughter and I realized that she was doing the same thing. She turned
all the way around in her seat looking for it. Neither of us said
a word. I wasn't about to stop the car, so I kept my
eyes on the road and kept moving forward. We'd gone a mile or two
before I finally spoke up, did you see that? Oh my god,
what the hell was that thing? My daughter interrupted before I could finish my
question. I don't know, I cried. We were both completely freaked out
by what we'd seen, and neither of us could identify. It didn't look
like a bird, and it didn't fit the description of a moth man.
It appeared to have burlap and leathery wings, and it had a humanoid head.
There was no beat, no feathers, and no glowing eyes. It
was completely blended together, like it was a single entity and not a person
on a glider. If I had been alone, I would have said it
was all my imagination, it was a trick of the sun, or a
product of watching too many scary movies. But I wasn't alone. My daughter
was there too, and neither one of us to this day can explain what
we saw. Oh my gosh, that creature in Jeepers Creepers might be the
scariest imaginary creature Hollywood has ever come up with. And why in the world
did you open that sunroof? This is like a horror movie. It's like
in a horror movie, you always tell the people don't go on that closet,
don't open that door, don't walk down that hall. And this woman
opens her sunroof thinking this thing is on the roof. Lady, are you
crazy? I'm just kidding. I may have opened the sunroof too, I
don't know, but oh, what a creepy story. This was so good.
I really appreciate the person who sent it. Thank you very much.
Hey, guys, welcome to the Dixie Crypted Podcast. I've got six I
think that's right, six stories in this video, and I hope you guys
enjoy it. Three of the stories are the stories that I uploaded last week
that we're in an artificial intelligence voice. I was just kind of playing around
with it, but I promised the people who sent the stories that I would
read them in my own voice, and that's what I've done. So you
may have heard three of these, but there's three you haven't. I don't
know what order they're going to be in, but I hope you enjoy this.
Let's get on with it all, right, here we go. This
is a story from uper why O O Peer from the up of Michigan Upper
Peninsula. This is one of the stories I did in Artificial Intelligence a few
days ago, So I'm gonna be I'm going to drop those three stories in
this podcast. In the mid two thousands, my friend Eli bought a new
video camera. He was around twelve years old and he was eager to put
it to good use. His camera was not nearly the same quality as the
ones on the market today, and it was definitely not user friendly, especially
when filming something without benefit of a second pair of hands. Eli lived way
out in a rural area. There was a clearing nearest home that was overgrown
with tall grass and weeds. He was typical of a country boy his age,
and he wanted to film himself on his four wheeler. Eli set up
his camera on a tripod at a safe distance and jumped on his ATV and
he began doing a series of reckless stunts, the more dangerous the better.
He was a beginner as a budding film director and he didn't always capture him
self perfectly in the frame. But when he was done, he took the
shot footage back to his house to pull it up on his computer and review
his movie making skills. Watching the videos he took that day, something unexpected
appeared in several of the frames, and what he saw shocked him. The
footage showed Eli on his ATV performing several stunts, and suddenly, in the
background, in the dead center, a dark figure walking on two legs rose
up from behind a tree and walked into the forest. It was hesitant in
its movements, as if waiting for Eli's attention to be drawn away so it
could escape undetected. Eli posted it to YouTube and the video got ridiculed and
labeled as a fate. The haters and nonbelievers suggested a number of scenarios on
how Eli used everything from camera angles, a gorilla suit, and even photo
shopping the image. November fifteenth is a holiday in Michigan. It's the opening
day of the state's firearm deer season. Schools close and families get together for
the annual tradition of deer hunting. A friend of ours named Jimmy. He
was a sixteen year old man child who stood six foot two and weighed two
hundred pounds, and he was eager to get out well before daybreak and park
his truck and begin a mile long trek to his deer blind, which was
really more of a shack with windows and a door. Was a shooting house.
He had been regularly placing deer bait in front of it to bring the
deer out. Jimmy was sixty yards from his blind when he heard something off
to his right. What he saw would seriously change his attitude toward hunting in
general. He panned his flashlight in the direction of the disturbance, and he
saw a huge figure moving quickly through the trees. He didn't glimpse any defining
features beyond its enormous, brown haired back. He later described it like a
freight train barreling through the woods. But whatever it was, it freaked him
out. Too scared to run back to his truck, he instead headed to
his blind and quickly locked the door behind him. He dropped to the floor
and hid there until dawn. Once the first rays of sunlight began streaming through
the cracks of the dear blind, Jimmy wrenched open the door and he raced
to his truck as fast as he could, never daring once to stop and
look behind him. No opening morning of deer hunting season was going to ever
bring him anywhere near that place again, even if we agreed to travel back
there with him. Like me, Eli and the rest of our friends,
Jimmy grew up in the sticks, and he swears that what he witnessed wasn't
a bear or like anything he had ever seen before out in those woods,
and for me, I believe him. Here is a story about an unknown
creature. I don't know what this is. You guys are just going to
have to hear the story and decide for yourself, But let's read it.
When I was fourteen, my dad would drive me out to my friend's house
to play airsoft in the woods near Wells, Maine. We would go into
the woods behind the sand pit that was right behind his house, where we'd
built a pretty decent fort that was surrounded by a knee high wall. Inside
the fort, we'd made foxholes and we had a fire pit in the middle.
We had a lot of fun spending nights out there and doing the stupid
things that kids do, like shooting each other with our air guns and throwing
CO two canisters in the fire. On more than one occasion, we spent
the whole night huddled up by the fire. We were freezing and waiting for
the sun to come up and thaw us out. My friend Greg. He
and I had been at the Sea Cadet program together for several years. The
Sea Cadets as a youth program of the Navy that was similar to the Boy's
Scouts. He would later serve several years in the military. He was a
no nonsense person and that kind of guy, and you could trust your life
with him. That's only one reason why I ended up believing him when he
told me the story. On one of the occasions, when we were hanging
out in our fort with a few of our friends, we decided to do
a night maneuver operation. At that age, darkness was our friend, or
so we thought. Darkness is never your friend, though. It creeps over
the woods and it puts an extra blanket of protection on those things that can
hurt you, while leaving mere humans more vulnerable and in greater danger. During
our operation, my squad was in charge of guarding the fort while Greg and
his squad spread out and they went around the sandpit and then circled back to
try to lay waste to our defense. It was just me and my other
friend and we were sitting there waiting for quite a while. We knew it
would take Greg and his squad a little time to circle around the sand pit.
I was in the forward foxhole, but something drew my attention to the
rear. I looked back, and I saw what looked like a human being
crawling over the knee wall at the back of the fort. It was too
dark to make out who it was, but when it stood up, I
decided that it couldn't beat Greg. It didn't look right. Its arms were
too long for its body, and as I watched, it stood there and
silently watched back. I didn't move or speak a word, and neither did
this thing. Eventually, it dropped back down on all fours, and it
silently moved off into the woods. I never once believed it was Greg.
It didn't match his silhouette, and nor did I think it was any of
the other kids that we were out there with. That's why I never raised
my air gun and shot at it. Several long minutes later, we heard
Greg in his group walking down the path from the sand pit. The game
continued, and I pushed the incident to the back of my mind. Sometime
later, Greg came to me with a drawing he'd made it was a black
humanoid figure with what looked like dreadlocks hanging off the back of its head.
He said he'd seen it in the woods. Well I didn't believe him,
but Greg wasn't the kind of makeup stories, and besides, I was reminded
of something I'd seen crawling over the knee wall. How could I deny Greg's
story when I had one of my own. I asked him then if he
or any of the others were trying to pull a prank on us that night,
and he swore that it wasn't him or anyone else in his group.
Over the years, I've asked him several more times, thinking maybe with time
he would admit it was a joke. But he's never changed his story,
and neither has he ever changed his story about the thing he drew in the
pit picture. I don't know what lives around Wells Main. It's an isolated
spot with places that only ten people in a hundred would ever explore. The
forests go for miles. I live in Michigan now and I work with the
Coast Guard. I don't get back there much, but sometimes late at night,
when I'm alone, I can't help but wonder what I saw crawl over
the knee wall that night, and if it was the same thing Gregg had
drawn in that picture, Oh my gosh, what a creepy story. This
was so good. Thank you. Let's see the writer's name is Landed,
and he said it was okay to use his name. This was a great
story. I can almost see that in my mind, this kind of creepy
thing coming coming over a knee wall and kind of moving around and then going
back. Is that creep y'all out as much as it does me? Who
that's weird? Thanks Landing for the story. You to man. The woman
who sent this email is anonymous. And this is another one of the stories
that was in the AI version I put out a few days ago. So
I'm going to redo it in my voice because it's a pretty cool story.
All right. Here we go. Not long ago, my husband and I
purchased a small log cabin that sits on ten and a half acres of land
in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We're working to restore the property and bring
it back to its former glory. It faces a small pond and we can
see a few neighbors in that direction. Other than that, we are surrounded
by densely forested state owned land. It's isolated, but it's the kind of
seclusion that induces peace and tranquility. I was sitting out on the open porch
enjoying the tall glass of iced tea one day when I saw something directly ahead
of me that looked like a massive iridescent bubble floating about fifteen feet off the
ground. It was moving slowly into the thick forest and changing shapes and configuration
as it was doing so, I wasn't sure what I was looking at.
After watching it for several minutes and marveling at how beautiful it looked, I
chalked it up to being some sort of weird natural phenomenon and I went back
inside. Later, we were putting together our log bedroom set in the small
back bedroom when I was overwhelmed with a feeling of being watched and it raised
goose bumps all over my body. I looked out the two side by side
windows and I saw a gray, human looking creature with a large elongated head.
It had two black oval eyes and no eyelids, staring back at me
where it snows should have been. It had two small slits, but I
couldn't see its mouth. We had a hundred gallon propane tank right outside the
window that wasn't hooked up yet, and the creature was standing behind it.
The tank was four and a half feet tall. The being had its long
fingers stretched out across the tank, and it was craning its neck to look
over the tank so it could watch me. The second we made eye contact,
it ducked down behind the tank and out of sight. I ran to
the window, but it was gone. It was mid morning on a clear
day. There was no way I must took what I was seeing. I
reached the window in plenty of time to see any human that might have been
out there before, they could have disappeared into the woods. But this thing,
it was gone. I've never had an experience like this before. It
isn't a story that I share with anyone who knows me. I wasn't frightened
by what I saw. In fact, I was probably as curious about it
as it was about me. But I sure would like to know what it
was. Does anyone in your audience have any ideas? Okay, here's the
last story that I did and the artificial intelligence voice cloning thing I wanted to
do it my own voice, and here it is. There is no name
for this email. Might have an email address, but not a name,
so I don't know if that ever matters to y'all. Probably not, but
always feel like I need to say it. So whatever, anybody, here's
what this person writes. It's a bigfoot story. I've always had a recurring
dream where I was being pursued by what I don't know. Always managed to
out run it and wake up before whatever it was had me cornered. It
was really unsettling. I couldn't remember if any of my friends were in the
dream. Maybe they were the ones who got caught while I was escaping.
It's like the joke when you're in the water with a buddy and a shark
attacks. You know you don't have to outswim the shark, just the other
guy. One week end, a couple of my friends and I were hiking.
It was autumn and the ground was heavy with fallen leaves, the kind
that drive quickly and crunch under your feet as you make your way down the
trail. Sometimes you can't tell the sounds of the outdoors from the sounds of
your friends as they laugh at dumb jokes and struggle to maintain a heart healthy
walking pace through the woods, and we were oblivious to everything else. We
hike for hours, so we stopped by a tree for a rest. It
was getting dark and we didn't have the energy to make the long trek back
to the car, so we decided to just stay there for the night.
We told more dumb jokes and we laughed until we each started to drop off
to sleep. But that was when I heard something rustling around out in the
dark. I grabbed my flashlight out of my backpack and I swept the light
being back and forth into the darkness. But I didn't see anything, and
the noise stopped, which only put me on edge. I made one more
sweep of the area with my flashlight and that's when I saw it. It
looked like something half human on all fours with its high end up in the
air. I couldn't tell if it was wearing a black suit or if its
entire body was covered with coarse hair. I flashed my light back at my
friends just to see if any of them were awake and seeing what I was
seeing, they were still snoozing and totally unaware. Suddenly I heard this horrible,
demonic roar, like something out of that movie The Conjuring. I spun
around with my flashlight. There it was some sort of animal who was standing
upright on two legs like a man. I ran my light up its body
all the way to its head. It must have been eight feet tall.
My friends were now wide awake and scrambling, every man for himself as we
ran back to the trail. After ten minutes of total panic, we finally
ran out of breath and I sat down by a big rock. We realized
we'd left our wallets behind with our hiking gear, so we voted to wait
until daybreak took go back. I kept aiming the flashlight into the night,
but it appeared that our monster friend hadn't followed us. Maybe he was as
afraid of us as we were of him. We could only hope. When
the sun came up, we went back and recovered our things. Our backpacks
smell like sewage. When we got back to the car, I threw everybody's
gear in the truck and I left my backpack outside in the rain for weeks
before I finally broke down and took everything to the laundry map. I didn't
want to contaminate my own washer. It goes without saying that no one believed
our story, but at least I knew that unlike my dream, in real
life, all of us got away. Okay, that's the last story I
did in the AI voice that I cloned on that little trial subscription that I
did with an AI voiceover website or whatever it is. I think there's great
possibility with AI, and look y'all, we have to roll with the times,
especially as a creator. But I don't think the AI is there yet.
Obviously they they can't totally replicate the human emotion that goes into reading one
of these stories. Now, you know, I've heard narrators before. I'm
talking about audiobooks and even on some YouTube channels, not YouTube channels that do
what we do, these creepy stories and things. But like i'd like to
give you some examples, but I don't want to talk about I don't want
to talk bad about other YouTube channels because they're actually pretty good. I think
to be able to make a story come to life, a human needs to
get into the story. You can just be reading words. You have to
be able to comprehend what you're reading and know where the story is going,
and be able to emphasize specific words and sentences and pauses and things like that.
Now, Hell, guys, look, I am absolutely no expert in
this, and I've said it a hundred times. I'm not a good voice
actor or narrator. But I can read these stories pretty good. And I'm
quite average or below average on audiobook stuff, so I kind of consider myself
a proficient what's the word vocal reader? You know, I'm I'm fairly proficient
at that. I don't do voices very well. I don't do I actually
auditioned for an audiobook just randomly on ACX, and the guy wrote me back.
It was kind of a it wasn't a horror thing, but it was
it's kind of a dark, kind of a dark theme to the book.
And it was a set of short stories, is what it was. And
he wrote me back and he said, you just you are not able to
sound menacing or dark? Are you? You can't do it. It's like
your personality, you can't. And I don't know, I don't I'm not
sure what he meant. But a few weeks later I was listening to some
other audio book narrators and I finally got what he said, and I don't
know, even if it's a scary story. Sometimes I read it kind of
in a happy voice. But that's the way I feel all the time.
I'm always happy, so my voice and my reading it kind of comes through
in my reading. Anyway. I'm just rambling on. But talking about the
AI, I want to let you know I'm not going to use that for
anything on this podcast. I think there's a place for it, and I
think if we give the AI creators to the people who are programming this stuff
another year or two to really refine what they've done, probably in the future
ninety percent of the audio books you listen to will just be people copying and
entering text into some software and allowing the software to read the book. They'll
take the MP three files that they get from that and they'll upload them as
audio books. I think that's what's coming, and I don't think that's necessarily
a good or bad thing. It's just the way technology is taking us.
So you have to be you know, we have to be able to adapt,
especially as creators and listeners and lovers of the spoken story, to kind
of adapt to that. But I have a feeling in the next couple of
years, you may not be able to tell if the reader or narrator is
a machine or a person. And some people say that scary, and some
people say it's I don't know, it's pretty cool. I think it's pretty
cool. So I guess that's about all I have to say for that.
There was something else on my mind I was gonna say, and it's completely
gone, squirrel. I'll tell you one thing about this AI. What the
cloning service did was it took my voice, my tenor and my bass and
the way my voice sounds, and they put a Midwestern accent on it.
And all my life I've been you know, people who live in the South.
When they're around other people who don't have our accent, some of us
are a little, i don't know, maybe a little self conscious. Some
people aren't, but some people are. I've never been really self conscious,
but I'm aware that my accent is different because well, I'll tell you,
when you're around people like from California or not necessarily up north. Yeah,
sometimes up north they'll comment on your accent. They'll they'll they're not laughing at
you, but they're kind of laughing with you. And I have a customer
in California, and one of the secretaries told me, they said, when
you call sometimes we get we put you on speakerphone, and we have people
that will stand around just to listen to your accent. And I'm like what,
and she goes, oh, yeah, we love it. We love
your accent. We don't know anyone who talks like you do anyway. All
that to say, they put a Midwestern accent on my clone. And I
have never been so happy in my life to have the Southern accent that I
really can't shake. Listening to my voice in a Midwestern accent makes me cringe.
And it's sixty years old, and it's the first time I've ever thought
about it, but it's true. I like my Southern accent. I think
I'm gonna keep it. Come on, y'all, all right, let's go
to another story. No name with this email, but it don't matter,
because here we go. I'm originally from the cornfields of southwestern Ohio. I've
never considered myself to be superstitious or even a believer in the phenomenon of sasquatch.
This was my attitude when I moved to a rural southeastern town twenty one
miles from the banks of the Ohio River. I do a lot of catfishing
on those banks and quite a bit of deer hunting. Two On the first
day of deer season in twenty twenty one, I was invited to a hunt
on a private parcel of land and shade a small town near my home.
There were two of us hunting that day. We got into the woods at
three pm. They were alive with the wildlife activity. Birds were singing and
squirrels were chattering, and an occasional rabbit, startled by our arrival, skittered
off into the underbrush. I settled into my ground blind three hundred yards up
a ridge from my partner, and I got comfortable. It was a kind
of peaceful afternoon. Anyone who loves being in the outdoors lifts four. At
four fifty, the sun was beginning to set and dusk was falling. In
the distance, I heard a faint whoop come from directly ahead of me down
the valley. I guessed it was about one hundred and thirty yards away.
At that moment, a deer came crashing through the brush, and it was
panting and its mouth hung open, and she looked like she'd been running for
her life. I decided to put my range finders on her to see if
I could locate exactly what had that poor girl so distraught. As I lifted
range finder, the world went still and the deer was frozen in place.
Silence swept through the valley and washed over the ridge, bringing the hairs on
my arms to stand up. It was as if all the energy around me
was being pulled out and drawn to one spot thirty yards away, at the
fence line, there was something moving coming toward me, like a bulldozer crashing
through the woods. It stepped from the tree line and dropped to all fours,
and in one motion it had the dough in its grip. And in
all of my thirty five years, I've never seen anything with such power and
such force, and one single effort move and snap a deer's neck. The
shock of what I was wittinges seeing left me weak and terrified, and I
struggled to control my nerves as it laid its kill on the frozen ground and
raised its head to lock eyes with me. It glared at me with a
malevolent anger, telling me with a look that I was trespassing in its territory.
My response was to unstrap the holster on my four sixty Smith and Wesson
and unzet my blind and run. I left my bow behind, I left
everything behind. The fear kicked in my body, and I went in to
overdrive. Even as a varsity football player, I had never run as fast
as I did that day. I made it fifty yards when I heard it
coming every fifteen to twenty seconds. That led out an unholy growl, telling
me it was there and pushing me to run even faster. By the time
I got to my friend's blind, he was already running ahead of me.
I saw my truck in the distance, and I managed to get the keys
out of my pocket and hit the automatic start button. As my friend reached
the truck, I hit the unlocked button as well, and I was right
behind him. In that last second before I got in, I turned in
and saw it forty yards away. I didn't waste another second. I threw
the truck in dry and I pushed all five hundred and fifty horsepower that Cummins
engine for all it was worth. We didn't slow down until we hit the
main road. I'd be a liar if I said there wasn't tears in my
eyes. My only thought was that I was never going to see my son
again. From what I could see, the creature was covered in long,
shaggy gray hair, and its head was semicne shape, and the skin where
I could see it was dark and resembled tanned leather. I'd say it was
nine feet tall with shoulders that were four feet wide, and if I had
to guess its weight, I'd say it was eight hundred pounds. Its arms
hung down past its knees, and its biceps were enormous. It was not
lacking muscle mass by any means. I learned a lesson that day. There
are things in this world that are beyond the realm of thought and belief of
most people. Maybe they don't want to believe, maybe it's fear of ridicule
fule, But I can tell you this bigfoot exists in southeast Ohio, and
they will hunt you, they will prey on you, and they are the
ultimate apex predator. I went into the woods that day as a hunter,
and I came out as the hunted oh Man. That is like the uh,
that's like the ultimate Bigfoot story. This guy was chased. There's a
lot of people who are gonna come in. They're gonna say, well,
he wasn't trying to kill you. If he'd wanted to catch you. Heiter
caught you. You got out because he let you out. But you know,
I always think that's a bunch of bull because you never know what's going
on in these situations. Maybe it was a slow bigfoot. Maybe maybe they
are just chasing people out. But maybe they aren't the apex predator. Maybe
we are the apex predator. Just ask Steve Lily. Anyway, this was
a great story, and it's um it's always cool to read these stories where
there's a face to face, almost violent encounter and everybody loves he's including me,
and I appreciate the man who sent it. I don't have his name,
I've got his email address. It's really good, you know. If
this is real, man, what an experience. I don't think i'd ever
be the same. Thank you for the story. All right, I think
that I'll wind it up. Thank you all for hanging with me on this
podcast. I hope you enjoyed it and come back for the next one.
Maybe you could click the subscribe button, maybe you could click the notification button.
You all know how to do that, but it doesn't hurt to remind
you. If you enjoyed this podcast, come on back for another one,
because I sure have a hell of a lot of fun doing it, and
I hope you enjoyed listening to it. All right, we'll see you all
on the next one. Thanks,