I was a truck driver in April of two thousand and five driving a dedicated
run from Mira Loma, California, to Northern California, delivering frozen food to
Walmart stores. I was traveling east on Interstate eighty up and over Donner's Summit
and into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Close to the Nevada border. There's two
lanes going east and two lanes going west, with a four foot concrete center
divider in the middle that separates the two lanes. I was traveling east in
the far right lane when I noticed, about one hundred yards ahead and approaching
fast, something brown in the middle of the road. As I got closer,
I saw that it was hairy and standing on top of the center divider.
When I was only twenty five yards away, it stepped off the center
divider and in two strides was standing on the shoulder of the road. When
I passed it, I thought it was a dude in a monkey suit at
first, but there's no good argument in my head that it wasn't. First,
it was too tall and way too big to be a guy in a
monkey suit. The way it moved and looked was pure power. It was
definitely proportionate to its size and weight. Have you ever watched a video of
a silver back guerrilla run across its enclosure? Well, I wouldn't want to
be standing in front of that big bastard. It would be like standing in
front of my truck. Neither way, You'll be in a world of hurt.
That's how powerful this thing looked. When I passed it, I got
a better look at it. I only saw the right side profile and outer
shoulders and back of the shoulders. Its skin was black, and the hair
was long off the shoulders and a little thin in the back, and it
had reddish brown hair. It was so tall that I could see it for
a brief second from my driver's seat looking out across the passenger side window.
I didn't see its face or even notice its head. I used to tell
anyone who would listen that I had seen a bigfoot, but the reaction from
people deterred me from that after a while. It would be like cutting a
big fart during a job interview. People think you're crazy, so I don't
tell anyone anymore. Y'all ever seen the movie Step Brothers. It's kind of
a corny, cheesy movie, but they do that in the movie and it
is so so funny. Anyway, back to the story, I'm not even
sure if what I saw was a real bigfoot. Hell, it really could
have been a dude in a monkey suit. I was once asked, do
you wish you could have seen it up close? And my answer was hell,
no, I was safe in the care of my freightliner. My driver
mentor told me that you're going to see some weird, scary things on the
road, and he was right. Thanks for your channeling the hours of entertainment
when I binge listened to Dixie Cryptid oh Man, thanks for binge listening.
Truck drivers, I've said it before, that's who's in my mind when I'm
recording these I can see them driving down these highways and roads and delivering their
freight at night and there's just nothing to do, and all the lights are
shining in their face from the dash, and all they're left with is their
thoughts. And it's really good to listen to some things that will entertain you
and make the time go by. By the way, on the spriaker app,
I have found several good podcasts. I'm gonna give you a couple of
names of them, y'all can write them down or bookmark. I don't know,
just try to remember what I'm saying. But I like true crime podcasts.
And there's a podcast my wife and I've been listening to that's really good.
It's called now, can't you remember the name of it? Campfire true
Crime. I think it is. If you go to the spreaker app,
if you download the Spreaker s p r e a k k e R s
p r e a k e R Spreaker app from the Place store or your
Apple store and look up Campfire true Crime or true crime Campfire. It's one
of it's one of the others. It's one of the other, but uh,
it's really good. It's two women who narrate crime episodes and they're funny
and they give this funny commentary and they find the weirdest things. There's another
one called Morbidology. The woman who it's a true crime podcast and the woman
who does it is she's got a strange accent, like she has an Irish
accent, but she's tried to correct it. Maybe she hasn't, and I'm
just never heard this accent before, but it's really pretty. She has a
beautiful voice, and her recordings are flawless. They're not like mine where I
go off on these tangents like this and from a Bigfoot story talking about true
crime podcasts squirrel, But it's anyway. I want to let y'all know that
it just popped in my mind. Go to Spreaker, check out some of
their true crime podcasts, and I think you'll be happy. It's great listening,
especially for the truck drivers. You guys would love this stuff. It's
some of the most odd true crime stuff I've ever heard. And there's I'll
tell you. I have some other ones I listen to, and I'll tell
you some more as time goes on. But this writer of this email,
his name is Tony. He said, you can use my name. I
don't give a damn what people think now and then this is the very first
sentence he says, So here's my story. So Tony, thanks for sending
this email. That's a cool story. I love these drive by It's kind
of like a drive by a bigfoot story. Appreciate you, buddy. All
right, here's a Bigfoot story you guys are gonna love. It's not very
long, but it's really good. The writer says, I'm a retired Navy
chief and I have visited over one hundred countries, and I've circumnavigated the world
three times, twice by sea and once by air. Oh man, that's
awesome. In nineteen eighty three, I had just moved back to the outer
Banks of North Carolina. I was stationed at Little Creek, Virginia. In
July, my brother in law asked my family if we wanted to go on
a fishing vacation in Canada for a week. I took ten days leave and
my wife and two children, Ben and Cindy, all piled into my nineteen
seventy three Vega GT pulling my fourteen foot aluminum boat and motor, and we
drove to I can't pronounce this name, Senatorayate terre Quebec, Canada. Correct
me in the comments. I know you will. The last three hundred miles
of the trip was on a gravel road and the car I was driving didn't
have air conditioning. It made for a long, hard drive. When we
got there, we rented two cabins for four adults and five children and we
settled in and began our fishing holiday. Fishing the lakes was great, and
we were having a great time. On the third day, my brother in
law asked if I'd like to go sturgeon fishing on the river that fed the
lake. Any type of fishing is just my game, so I said,
heck, yeah, let's go for this excursion. We rented a twenty five
foot boat with a wide beam because the water was so swift. We took
my nephews Stevie and Mike, and we left my son behind because he was
too young. We got on the river about twenty one hundred hours and man
was that water moving. It was so fast that we had to use two
anchors to hold the boat. I was in the stern and my brother in
law Tom was in the bow, and all night long we could hear fish
breaking water all around us. The fish were strong and the challenge was great.
I had just broken a deep sea rod with a thirty pound test line
on it. I changed tackle and immediately hooked him to a monster. And
after a battle, I landed an eighteen pound sturgeon. And if you've ever
caught a large sturgeon, you know how they fight. From that point and
for an hour, the fish stopped biting. I was leaning back and relaxing
while the others fished. I had pulled in my line so one of my
nephews could have a better chance of catching a fish. Now, when a
fish jumps, there are two different sounds, one when he breaks the water
and one when he re enters the water. I realized that someone was throwing
large rocks at the boat because it was just the sound of a rock entering
the water with a KerPlunk. I said as much to my brother in law,
and he said he noticed it too, but he wasn't positive, so
he didn't say anything. And then he said, hand me my rifle,
hoping it was a prankster. It would scare him away. And my nephew
Mike said, in a terrified voice, we don't have a rifle, Uncle
ben Well. I had brought a large sick Sell flashlight with us, so
standing up in the bow, I held the flashlight up in the air and
I swept the bank a large head with the glowing eyes duck behind the bushes.
We immediately pulled up the anchors and lines and got the hell out of
there. And while we traveled back to the dock, my brother in law,
who had been there numerous times, remembered an incident that apparently came to
mine after seeing this creature. A few years back, he and some of
his friends had found a mature male black bear dead near their cabins. Its
legs were in weird positions, like they had been broken or dislocated, and
what was more terrifying was that its head had been twisted one hundred and eighty
degrees and rested on its back, its neck broken and its head hanging free.
Well, the story heightened the fear that we were going through at that
moment, and I told him to get us back to the dock as fast
as he could. The following day, we went back to the place where
the encounter occurred, and the bushes that duck behind were seven feet high.
That sent a chill down my spine. We never knew what it was,
but whatever it was, it was over seven feet tall. The next day,
my engine blew in the Vega, so all nine of us climbed into
my brother in laws nineteen sixty four, reconditioned to Chevy and paula two door,
and we drove to their home in New Jersey. That in itself was
a great adventure. Well, cam that just about does it. Maybe I'll
tell you about my next bigfoot encounter that we may have had at our home
in North Carolina. You can use this and all the names if you wish.
Thanks for all you do, Ben Well, Ben, thank you for
the story. That's a great that's a scary story that reminds me of a
that reminds me of a documentary. I think I saw it on I don't
maybe the History Channel anyway. I think they were in Alaska. These guys
were fishing off the bank in Alaska, and this huge grizzly bear was standing
in the water. I may have told this before, and not normally I
would say if I have stopped me, but you can't stop me because I'm
recording it, so you got to listen to it. These guys were fishing
and they saw this huge grizzly bear, uh, just kind of wandering around
on the bank, maybe looking for some scraps to eat. I don't know,
but they were watching the grizzly bear. Suddenly the grizzly bear lifts up
on its hind legs and turns behind it, and then it runs like hell
away down the bank and back up into the woods. And about then they
say they saw a bigfoot walk out and stand on the bank, and they
watched it for several minutes. Anyway, I don't remember the rest of the
story, but what I know is the grizzly bear is the apex predator in
grizzly bear country, and this grizzly bear ran like crazy when this bigfoot walked
out on the bank, or he knew it was coming and he tailed it
out of there, because I guess he knew he was in danger. Anyway,
the story about the bear with its head twisted back and dead and its
legs broken reminded me of that story. So if Bigfoot is real and they're
that bad, bears are scared of them. That's my take on it.
Everything is afraid of these things. So anyway, Ben, thanks for the
story. Hope I didn't mess it up there with that last little anecdote,
but it just came to mind, and you know me, if I think
about it, I say it. You just got to deal with it.
All right, Let's go to another story. All right. This is a
story I got in my email inbox probably a year or two ago. I've
kind of held it. I don't know why I've held it, but Anyway,
I came across it again and I want to share it with you,
guys. I do not know if it's true, but it's a good story
and the writer is a very good writer. And here's what he writes.
My name is Robert, and I'm a thirty seven year old homeless man living
on the streets of skid Row near the Arch District in Los Angeles. At
thirty seven, I may still be a young man, but looking at me,
you would think I was closer to sixty. My hair is prematurely gray,
and my skin is weathered and wrinkled from years of drug and alcohol abuse
and from the rigors of living on the streets for the last seven years.
This, however, was not always the case. I was once a promising
young executive working for a prominent advertising firm and had just bought a new townhouse
on the West Side, and I was engaged to be married to the girl
of my dreams. This was ten years ago, and in some ways it
seems like just yesterday, and others it seems more like a lifetime ago.
It was my twenty seventh birthday, and I had much to celebrate. I
was heading an ad campaign for a new client, which launched earlier in the
week and by all indications, was a huge success. Escrow had closed on
my new townhouse. It wasn't exactly new, but it was new to me
and I was set to move in the next week. Tanya, my fiancee,
had the next two weeks off for spring break, and this worked out
per because she was eager to start moving our belongings from our apartment to our
new townhouse. Tanya was working on her PhD in psychology at UCLA and still
had two semesters left before graduating, and Tanya had arranged a surprise birthday party
for me. She pretended to forget that it was my birthday and told me
that we had to attend her friend's art show at a loft in the Arch
district. My friend Phil accidentally let the cat out of the bag one day
while we were at lunch. He told me to tell Tanya that he couldn't
make it to the party because he had to go out of town on business.
Apparently he didn't know it was supposed to be a surprise party and he
felt bad about it, but I told him not to worry. I already
suspected something was up when Tanya never mentioned anything about my birthday. She wasn't
the type of person to forget those things. I assured Phil that I would
act totally surprised when the time came On the night of my twenty seventh birthday,
both Tanya and I were running late because most of our clothes had already
been packed in boxes and preparation for the move. Tanya seemed a bit frantic,
saying that we had to be there by seven thirty. So I played
the part of the ignorant boyfriend and I asked Tanya, why don't we have
to be there by seven thirty, and all she said was hurry up and
get ready. By seven point fifteen, we were dressed and in the car.
Luckily, traffic was light that evening, and it took us about fifteen
minutes to drive from the West Side to the Arch district. Apparently there was
some type of event going on in Little Tokyo, which resulted in congested traffic
and made it nearly impossible to find parking in the adjacent Arch district. All
the parking structures were full and there wasn't a single spot available on the street.
And I could see that Tanya was getting anxious as we kept driving around
the block. I told her that I could drop her off and I would
find parking a little further south and walk back to the Arch District to meet
her. She insisted on staying with me, and saying that it was a
little rough down that way and that I would need her protection. Well.
We both laughed a bit as we proceeded to drive south of the Arch District.
This actually was a pretty rough part of town, made up of mostly
old warehouses. There were plenty of homeless people in the area. We finally
found our parking spot near an old rundown building next to a liquor store.
I felt fairly safe parking there because there were plenty of nice cars parked around
us. They were all doing the same as us, parking in the area
and walking back to Little Tokyo or to the Art District. As soon as
we got out of the car, we were struck by the overpowering smell of
urine. We were half a block away away from a homeless encampment, and
there were a few intimidating people in the area. A light rain started to
fall, so I looked in the back seat and luckily my niece left her
Dora the Explorer umbrella from the last time I drove her to school, and
we both shared the space under it as we walked north toward the Arch District.
As we walked past the liquor store, a homeless man standing on the
sidewalk was staring directly at us. I was thinking of stopping to give the
man a couple of bucks, but Tanya pulled my arm to keep me walking.
She said that normally I would stop and help someone in need, but
there's something about that man that's making me feel uneasy. Because we're already late
too. We picked up our pace a bit as I glanced behind us,
and the man by the liquor store was walking toward us, and when he
saw me look back, I heard him yell something. His pace quickened,
so we started walking faster. He began yelling and began running. I told
Tanya to run, and as we headed down the street, I looked back
again and the man was still chasing us. I yelled at Tanya to make
a turn at the next alley because I knew it led to a much busier
street and we would be much safer around the other people. But halfway down
the alley, Tanya tripped and fell to her knees, and I stopped to
help her back up, and as I looked back, the man had turned
the corner and was at the mouth of the alley. We made a sprint
toward the end of the alley, but Tanya was limping, and I told
Tanya to keep going and not look back. I gave her just a small
push to get her going, and if she could make it to the end
of the alley and out into the street, she would be safe. I
picked up a bottle from the ground and turned to confront the man, and
as I did, I heard the sickening sound of breaks screeching, followed by
a dull thud, and as I looked up the alley, I could only
see the side of a red sedan stopped on the street at the end of
the alley, and I screamed out Tanya's name, and a moment later I
heard my own voice echoed strangely in the alley, and I dropped the bottle
and ran to the end of the alley, and there lying on the pavement
was Tanya. I quickly ran to her and cradled her in my arms,
but it was no use Tanya was gone. That moment marked the turning point
in my life. I was never quite the same person after that. I
soon turned to alcohol to fill the void left in my life, but that
didn't help. I began using drugs and that seemed to help me forget,
but only temporarily. I began missing more and more days of work, until
eventually they had to let me go, and with no source of income,
I soon lost my townhouse. Without Tanya to share the townhouse with me,
it didn't seem to matter much anyway. I stayed with friends here there,
but being constantly drunk or high, I soon wore out my welcome and I
lived in my car for a time until it was repossessed. The next thing
you know, I'm living out on the street. I don't know why I
chose this area to live, perhaps being close to the place where Tanya died
it seemed fitting. The first few years of living on the street was difficult,
and in the beginning I tried to maintain some sense of self dignity.
I would bathe regularly at the Union Rescue Mission, and I washed my clothes
once a week at the laundromat, and I tried to stay at a motel
whenever I could. But after a while, though, it just seemed easier
to let myself go. There is a sort of freedom when you're no longer
concerned with cleanliness or personal hygiene. The only thing that concerned me was getting
high. I applied for disability a couple of years ago, and each month
the government sends me a check. The checks are mail to the liquor store,
where the owner is kind enough to receive the checks and cash them for
me. Between the disability checks and occasionally panhandling, I have enough to keep
myself drunk or high most of the time. Yesterday was my thirty seventh birthday,
exactly ten years to the day that my life changed forever, and somehow
I relived the worst day of my life, not just metaphorically, but I
actually relived it. And when I woke up, I knew it was the
tenth anniversary of that tragic day, and I will never be able to forget
it because it will always fall on my birthday. On this particular birthday,
I wanted so hard to forget, so I started drinking for the moment I
woke I drank all morning until around noon, and then I fell asleep on
a bus bench. I slept all day until I was awakened by light rainfall.
This is just perfect, I thought to myself, What an appropriate way
to cap off my birthday. I picked up my bottle of vodka to take
a swig when I saw the bottle was empty. Damn, I really need
a drink, I thought. I started walking to the liquor store when I
noticed a girl who looked exactly like Tanya. Wait a minute, that is
Tanya and she's walking with me, I thought, I mean twenty seven year
old me. She was walking with twenty seven year old me. A couple
were walking down the street right past me under an umbrella, and I was
in shock and all I could do was stare at them. I don't know
how, but somehow it was ten years ago. It was witnessing the events
of my twenty seventh birthday. This was my chance. If I could alter
the course of events over the next few minutes, I could get a second
chance at life that was taken away from me. And I called out to
them, but they started walking away faster. I didn't have much time.
I started running and yelling out for them to come back, and when they
saw me running, they started to run, and I kept desperately trying to
call them back. When they turned into an alley. Oh no, I
thought, it's happening all over again. And I ran down to the entrance
of the alley and I stopped. I didn't want them to see me running
after them, but it was too late. And I heard that sickening sound
of break screeching in that awful dull thud, and I yelled out Tanya's name,
but I already knew what had happened. The next thing I knew,
I woke up on the bus bench. It was the morning after my thirty
seventh birthday. Was that all a bad dream? It seemed so real?
I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, and as I looked down at
the bench I was sleeping, one lying next to an empty bottle of vodka
was a Dora the Explorer umbrella? Was it a bizarre coincidence? Is it
also odd that this is the first time in many years that I don't have
the urge to drink or get high, none at all. In fact,
I have decided that I'm going to clean myself up, buy some fresh clothes,
and get a haircut. I know the mission has some resources to help
find jobs for people willing to work. Maybe I'm getting a second chance after
all. Wasn't that last story good? I think it's fiction. I think
it is, but it may not be. And it's a you know,
I'm a believer in the Bible and in Jesus, and maybe sometimes God uses
these kind of experiences to wake someone up or to get them to accept what
has happened in their life and accept the suffering that goes along with being a
believer. Anyway, I just thought it was a great story. It was
written really well, and if it's true, I hope this guy's life has
taking a better turn. And if it's fiction, to the writer, you
have a great imagination and you should keep writing. I really appreciate it.
Anyway, thank you all for listening to this podcast. It wasn't as long
as some of the others, but you know, that last story, there
was no need to do another one. That was just It's kind of a
moving little story. I don't know. Maybe I'm a little emotional after reading
that, but I thought it was good. Okay, I'm going to end
this podcast now. Thanks for listening. We'll see you guys on the next one.