My name is Stacy, and I grew up in a little holler near the
North Carolina Tennessee border in North Georgia. My childhood home is at the dead
end of an old dirt road, ten miles from town and surrounded by mountain
wilderness. At least three hundred uninhabited acres wraps around the backside of my parents'
property, bordered by mountains, a good sized creek, and several small springs.
The area is home to a variety of wildlife, and several generations of
family have lived in this area over the span of decades. Most of the
current inhabitants of the neighborhood are my relatives. It's a beautiful and peaceful and
remote A good bit of the area is densely forested, with a few old
fields near the creek, and largely untouched by man since the nineteen forties.
There are still remnants of a barn and a couple of old farmsteads built in
the eighteen hundreds, so long unlived in that they never had electricity, complete
with rock and mud daubed chimneys. They are a testament to the skill of
the old natives and mountaineers that settled this area of the Appalachian Foothills long ago.
I guess you could tell I'm proud to be from this area. But
enough about that, I'll get on with my story and tell you about my
first strange experience with Bigfoot. It was late fall nineteen ninety eight. I
was nineteen years old. It was dark thirty one night, and I had
stepped out onto the porch to smoke a cigarette. The air was cool,
but there were still a few stray crickets, hollering, and other soft sounds
of the usual night creatures that I was familiar with hearing at the time.
I'd been outside a couple of minutes when I noticed a sudden silence. Moments
later, I heard it. I'm guessing maybe a quarter mile away at most.
It was a sound unlike anything I had ever heard. It was a
low, rumbling growl that rose to a deep, loud roar. It sounded
almost human, but much too loud and way too deep to be human.
In my mind, it sounded both like man and beast, and it made
the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and it gave me
goosebumps, and it still does when I think about it. It seemed to
go on for a good ten seconds or more before dropping off, and it
echoed across the countryside from one of the high ridges south of my parents' place.
One thing I could tell for sure, this thing was big, and
it was mad. A few seconds after the terrible hollering ended, every animal
within a mile in all directions commenced to raising all kinds of a ruckus.
I thought, what in the hell was that? In my mind, I
was running through every type of creature I could think of, trying to figure
out exactly what I had just heard. At that time in my life,
I didn't really believe in bigfoot, nor had I given it much thought,
but the thought entered my mind that maybe, just maybe a bigfoot was what
I heard, because nothing else I could think of could make a sound like
that. Could that have been a bigfoot? Do they really exist? I
thought to myself. Even though I could tell it wasn't close enough to get
me, I still felt really scared and went inside For the rest of the
night, and for several nights afterward, I felt nervous going out after dark
for a cigarette. Time went on, and for the most part I forgot
about the incident, and twenty years later just up the road from my parents'
house, I had an experience that answered the questions I had in my mind
that night, all those years ago. At the time, I had a
teenager and a toddler, and we all went to visit my parents, as
we often did a couple of times a week we lived in town, and
very much enjoyed going to their home, not only to spend time with my
parents, but to escape the traffic and enjoy being near nature. We'd go
on hikes through the woods, fishing at the creek and seeing the many deer,
turkey and whatnot right there in the backyard. This was not one of
those days. Though. My father and I have never had a good relationship,
and he could be pretty cantankerous at times, and this particular evening he
was being rather difficult, to put it, Miley, and made a few
comments that really stuck in my crawl. We loaded up in my old jeep
and we left. It was right about dark. My daughter had fallen asleep
in her nana's lap. She was sleeping peacefully in the car seat when we
left out. When we started up the road, my son and now were
discussing the evening's events, and I was blowing off a little steam, making
quite a speech about what I thought of the situation. I was actually into
trying to make a point, so much so that I briefly mentioned what I
saw to my left about thirty feet from the road down in an embankment.
As it was walking up from the woods. I saw the creature and interrupted
myself in mid speech, saying, and there's a bigfoot. And I continued
on with the speech that I was making as I did a double take.
Looking back over my shoulder to the left, I saw the creature step backward
and ease behind a tree, turning its upper body as if to hide behind
the tree, but I could still see its shoulder sticking out on both sides
as it stood at this point perfectly still. I slowly turned my head back
towards the road in front of me in disbelief, and I finally stopped ranting
about the fresh straights of the visit. By this time, I was fifty
feet past where I had seen the creature and almost back to the paved road.
The gravity of what I had just seen began to set in, and
at this point I fell completely stunned. For a split second, I thought
about going back to get a better look. But the realization that this thing
was not only huge, but it saw me made me push the accelerator harder
and haul my tail out of there. It was eight feet tall and it
was four feet wide. It had no neck. Everything just sloped out at
almost a forty five degree angle from the head to the shoulders, but no
indentation where the neck should be. It was muscular, like a well built
man, but the arms were a little longer in proportion to the rest of
the body. The moon glowed that night and back lit the hairy chest,
so I couldn't see its face, but I could very clearly see the silhouette
and that it was covered in short, dark fur or hair. It walked
upright on two legs like a human. Seeing the creature in my distracted moment
seemed almost as natural as seeing a deer, a bear, or any other
kind of animal. That is until I really began to process what had just
happened, And from that moment on, I still have a hard time believing
that I really saw it, even though I saw it plain as day.
So that's my encounter with the bigfoot, and this story is true. I
saw it. I've never gone into the woods even one time since without thinking
about that night and the fact that they're real and they're out there. This
was the summer of nineteen seventy five. I was twenty three. My boyfriend
and I had planned to spend all summer camping out on Mount Hook in the
mountainous Lower Cascade Range in Washington State, out of the little Bavarian village of
Leavenworth, Washington. We had heard there was gold found there in the nineteen
fifties, but the prospector died before he could claim the spot where he discovered
the gold. Since then, there have been many people who hiked up the
mountain in hopes of finding that gold vein, but all had given up.
We hiked up to the snow line into fifteen foot deep snow drifts, which
made walking extremely hard to travel on foot carrying heavy packs. We went down
the mountain to get out of the snow and found an abandoned camp site with
a small creek. Whoever abandoned it left four wooden structures partially completed. One
had a steel fifty five gallon drum with a locking lid, which was buried
in the ground up to the brim. The steel lid had been torn off
and the contents that were inside were scattered all over the place. Some of
the cans had been twisted in half. It must have taken extreme strength to
rip open a steel drum with a massive steel locking lid like that. That
was the first sign that there may be something weird going on in this area.
We settled on one cabin that was farther away from the other three.
It had only three sides, but it was the most complete wooden structure and
was made well and very sturdy. We scrounged up some heavy plastic sheeting,
which was enough to cover the full missing side. We also found pots and
pans left behind by those who had abandoned the camp site. After about a
week, we ran out of supplies, so we hiked out to replenish our
food. We spent several weeks up there and came down once a week for
more supplies, and every time we got back to our cabin, something had
come in and trashed our camp, making quite a mess. But strangely it
it didn't damage the plastic like a bear would have. You'd think that would
discourage us, but it didn't. The last week we were there, we
discovered what looked like gold. We broke camp and headed down the mountain,
excited about our discovery. Right away we began hearing noises. We thought it
must be a bear or a deer, so we put it out of our
minds. Then a rock flew by our heads, which startled us, and
we began to wonder what was going on. Soon after that, a large
branch landed right beside us. Almost immediately we heard a very loud, horrific
and deep guttural roar. The vibrations hit our chest before we heard anything.
The roar was deeper than a base and raised in pitch. The creature followed
us down the mountain, letting out blood curdling roars each time. We'd take
off, running, half sliding down the mountain, only stomping again when he
would let out another roar. It was so close we should have been able
to see it, but we couldn't. Then, to our shock and horror,
we heard another one roar below us, which made us shiver with fear.
They were hurting us to where they wanted us to go. We changed
our direction and were able to get back down to our van. Needless to
stay, we high tailed it out of there. Never to return. Once
you hear that roar no known animal makes, it will give you nightmares for
the rest of your life. The people who built the campsite must have encountered
these creatures too, and that is why they left. Now, when I
go into the woods, I always think, is there one of those creatures
out there? I know deep down that we had encountered a bigfoot. Until
this experience, I was a die hard skeptic, but not anymore. I
can still remember the exact date of my first encounter. It was January twenty
eight, twenty nineteen. It was ten thirty at night, and I was
taking my son's friend home. The two of us crammed into my cheap little
Toyota. Outside it was drizzling and cold, and we were cruising along a
slick clay dirt road. We pulled up behind a truck that was moving much
slower than we were. The truck eventually turned left, and I was following
right behind, creeping along as not to end up in one of the six
foot deep ditches that ran parallel with both sides of the road. I was
barely gaining traction in the mud through the dark and the rain and the glare
of the headlight. Something appeared to be standing on the left side of the
road. What happened so fast? But it cleared the ditch in one stride
and stepped in the path of my car before going down on all fours,
where it then sprang over the ditch on the opposite side before it vanished into
the night. It was so close that I could see the red clay in
its auburn colored hair. Had my little four cylinder Toyota been traveling any faster,
I would have hit it. It wasn't big and broad at all.
I remembered it as more tall and lanky, like a teenager who's growing too
fast and hasn't filled out or mastered the movement of its own body. Its
arms were unusually long, and they hung way down, almost to its knees.
I think my brain took a good thirty seconds to process what had just
happened. I didn't hit the brakes or pull over for fear of getting stuck
in the mud, or more likely I was putting a safe distance between us
and whatever that thing was. And when I finally did stop, I looked
over at the fifteen year old with me. Did he see something too?
Could he corroborate my story. I'm never walking into these woods again at night,
he muttered. I needed to hear his assessment to prove I wasn't seeing
things. I just saw something seven feet tall across the road in front of
us, and it was covered in hair and walking like a man. Well,
that just about covers it, I reaffirmed. We lived fifteen miles out
of town. I've been in tree stands at five am filming deer on grass
patches since I was ten years old. Now, I love nature in the
outdoors, and my son's buddies had grown up in these same woods that I
was raised to be a survivalist, and we're both very familiar with all the
wildlife in our area. When we pulled up at the house, he looked
at me and he said, when you get home, run inside, but
call to let me know that you made it. I knew he meant well,
but I was really thinking, dude, I've got to dry five miles
of slick dirt roads with no shoulders back to my house in the middle of
the night, and I basically just saw the freaking Boogeyman. Of course I
made it, or I wouldn't be telling the story now I ran inside and
locked my door for the first time in a long while, and for three
days I was afraid to leave my house at night. I assumed that whatever
I saw was stalking the woods, and then it probably prefers the area because
it isn't highly populated. I figured that after living in this close proximity to
humans, they don't appear to mean any harm because I have meat on my
bones and would make a nice snack if it wanted to eat me. Now,
I've done tons of research since then, and I've had one other encounter.
Each incident made me fear the woods when I formerly used to consider it
a safe haven. I believe every sisquatch legend, myth, or fable is
built on a kernel of truth. I used to think they lived in California,
far away from northwest Florida, where I live, not too far from
Panama City. I honestly don't care one way or the other if people believe
me or not. I saw what I saw with my own baby brown eyes.
We did go back the next morning once the weather broke, and of
course there were no tracks at all. I think the only reason it came
into view that night is because the truck ahead of me was loud, and
once it passed by, the creature stepped out, not realizing my quiet little
toyota was lagging right behind. A few seconds either way, and we would
have never seen it. And that in itself is unnerving to me. I
believe the government is aware of their existence and for the most part, know
where the colonies are located. They've dedicated so many thousands of acres across America
to our national forest where the highest concentration of these animals reside. Are they
a critically endangered species? And would the government dare shut down all logging and
mining in the name of not destroying their natural habitat. Meanwhile, thousands of
people continued to go missing without a trace every year in works and forests,
while the government continues to deny, deny, deny,