Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for clicking on this video. Just real quick.
Two of these stories were recorded out of town, not
on my regular recording equipment. That were done on a
little mobile device. But I saw a couple of stories
that my editor had sent over over the email, and
I just read them while I was on the road,
So that's why they sound different. Thank you for being here.
I appreciate you very much. I've got three stories in
this podcast. If two of them sound different, you know why.
All right, here we go. In nineteen sixty nine, in
the summer before we started high school, a few friends
and I would head out on our bicycles every chance
we got to explore the forest in our area. We
lived in Castle Rock. It was a quaint Americana town
situated between Mount Saint Helen's to the east and the
Columbia River leading into the Pacific to the west. We
were fourteen years old then. My friend Randy had a
brand new five speed shwind stingray bike with brake controls
on the handlebars, and the rest of us had hand
me down single speeds with coaster brakes. Randy led most
of the adventures and we tried to keep up. West
of Castle Rock was a two lane road known by
the locals as the West Side Highway. I don't think
any of the locals ever knew the highways number, and
to this day I still don't. In that area was
a wooded place called Whiskey Flats. It got the nickname
because way out there, hidden in the thick brush and
away from the unforgiving eyes of the sheriff and the
game wardens, high schoolers would sneak out there and have keg.
Despite the no trespassing signs posted on both sides of
the highway and our parents' warnings to stay clear of
the area, we hung out there on occasion. We weren't
very good at following directions. We were only fourteen, after all.
I don't think we ever knew who owned the property,
but we knew about the sheriff and the game wardens
patrolling the area for troublemakers and illegal fishing down by
the Calitz River. The thing that kept us away from
the area most of the time, though, was the thought
of us slowly eighth graders accidentally trespassing on a high
school party and getting our butts kicked by the other boys.
Two weeks before school started, the four of us were
riding our bicycles on West Side Highway when in a
moment of bravery, we decided to check out Whiskey Flights.
We looked ahead of and behind us to make sure
there was no traffic coming from either direction that would
catch us and ruin our big plans, and we made
a quick turn past an o trespassing sign and we
rushed down the hillside. The path going down the hill
was loose gravel. We had to ride our brakes all
the way. Randy, who made it to the bottom of
the hill first, was already waiting for us, with a
big grin plastered across his face. We came to a
skid stop next to him and saw what put that
smile there. It was a green and white nineteen fifty
five Ford Sedan with a dark blue nineteen forty seven
Plymouth Sedan, and both of them newly abandoned and ready
to be explored. It wasn't unusual for people to ditch
their old vehicles and Whiskey flights. They just removed the
license plate in the cereal numbers and dump them there,
and someone else would inevitably come by, strip the vehicles
of all the usable parts and leave the frame for
the forest to grow around. We had a good old
time checking out the old vehicles and sitting behind the
driver's wheel and pretending that we owned the world. The
Plymouth had a single brake light in the center of
the trunk with an old sailing ship molded into the
glass lens, which I knew was most likely the Mayflower. Well,
I wanted that lens, and I called DIBs on it,
knowing all I had to do was come back with
some tools and take it off, as if the sedans
themselves weren't neat enough. Once we looked through into the windows,
we saw something that made our jaws drop and our
hearts flutter. There were stacks of Playboy magazines stashed in
the cabs of both cars, where we looked at each
other like we had won the lottery, and did the
only logical thing any fourteen year old boy could have done.
We split into groups of two and checked out the
magazines and both sedans, and we weren't reading any articles.
When we had seen all our eyes could handle, we
switched cars with the other two and looked some more,
and we thought about taking some of the magazines with us,
but we realized some of the high school boys may
have hidden them there, and we thought better of it.
I swear we learned more from those magazines than we
did in all of high school, and by the time
we headed back home we felt enlightened. Those magazines matured us,
and we bike back home and our heads swirling with
glorious images of playboy women, and we decided to go
back to Whiskey Flats on Saturday. We were men now,
and when we came back, we would make it down
to the river, no matter if the high schoolers were
there or not. Saturday came and I packed a screwdriver
in a crescent wrench into an old pillow case, figuring
one of them would help me get the Mayflower lens
off the car, and once again Randy and his Shwin
led the way down the West Side Highway, and as
soon as the coast was clear, we made that quick
turn into Whiskey Flat and we disappeared down the hill.
Randy was yet again waiting at the bottom for the
rest of us, who had to coast cautiously down the
loose gravel. He was wearing a big expression again, but
this time he wasn't smiling. We skidded to a stop
next to him and asked what was going on, but
he was too scared to speak, and instead he pointed
with a shaking hand toward the Plymouth. Maybe part of
me hoped it was some of the high school boys
having their look at the Playboy treasure trove. Maybe his
terrified look was normal for a fourteen year old boy
about to be knocked around by older kids. But when
we turned our heads to see what he was pointing at,
it took us a good minute to wrap our heads
around what we were seeing. It was definitely not high schoolers,
and it was about the furthest thing from a Playboy bunny.
There could possibly be a female bigfoot with a hairless
face and breast had gotten stuck in the door of
the Plymouth. She was at least six feet tall, and
her head jutted out of her torso. The brown hair
under her arms was so long that it looked like
the fringe on a motorcycle jacket, and as she tried
to free her hair from the door latch, she saw us.
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck
stand straight up, and the smart thing to do at
that time was to run, But fear had cemented our
legs in place, and the four of us just stood there,
frozen in shot and stared at this creature. She didn't
appreciate having an audience, and she let us know, and
she let out a blood curdling scream that sounded like
a woman being brutally attacked. It rang through our ears
like hells bells, and it shook us to our core,
and being a mature men that we had become, we
all wed our pants. It was only a matter of
time before she would break free from the latch, and
by the looks of the door, which she had started
to bash and din up like a soda can, Tom
was not on our side. We turned heel and got
out of there as fast as we could, and we
ran our bikes up that gravel hill, and when we
got to the road, we peddled down West Side Highway
faster than any kid ever had in the history of
that area. Back near the safety of our homes, we
agreed to never talk about what we had seen. No
one would believe us anyway, and if our parents found
out that we had been hanging around Whiskey Flats, we
would only get into more trouble. And when I made
it home, I threw my pants in the wash, believed
to see that my mother was still in town grocery shopping,
and relieved I didn't have to explain myself. Now, many
years have passed since that day, and I've long since
moved out of the area. Recently, though, I drove past
the old Whiskey Flats and it's completely gone now, no
downhill to the river and no downhill to the old
abandoned cars. It was all filled with dredge boils from
Mount Saint Helen's eruption and its level with the West
Side Highway now and houses are built all over it.
It would nearly be impossible for a bigfoot to hide
out in that area, now, I knew that, But as
I drove by, I heard that blood curdling scream echoed
through my head, and I felt my hair stand up again.
What would have been a pleasant drive down Memory Lane
was suddenly tainted by a life changing memory that only
seemed to worsen the older I got well, I sped
up and got out of there, trying to put as
much distance between me and that memory as I could,
all the while remembering the feeling of peddling my bike
so fast that I thought I might fly, and that's
when it occurred to me it wasn't the playboys that
stole away my childhood and made us men. That day,
it was a terrifying realization that some monsters are real.
Back in the nineteen nineties, my buddy and I headed
to Paint Creek Lake in southern Ohio, that's where I'm from.
We decided to walk off trail to go fishing in
a honey hole I knew about where nobody else goes.
Usually we would get there by boat, but this time
we were walking, and we walked through a heavily forested
area with only a lantern to light our way. We
made it through the brush along the shoreline, and when
we had gotten as far as we could go, we
heard some dead falls snapping behind us. And we were
in the forest after all. But the normal sounds of
wildlife and nature quickly turned into an explosion of noise
as something massive beat and battered the trees and earth
and the shadows behind us. I couldn't help myself, and
I found a rock and I threw it at the noise.
Everything went abruptly quiet. Friend and I shrugged at each
other and got back to fishing. But a few minutes later,
that same rock came flying past my head. Well. I
turned around to see who had done it, but everything
had gone completely quiet again, and a little light from
our lantern had no chance of penetrating, darkness blanketing the trees. Well,
we stood there, dumb foundain, trying to figure out what
it could possibly be. We were hardly comforted knowing there
was a slim chance it had been a human since
the area around Paint Creek Lake is completely forested with
very few homes. Standing there in the darkness, and knowing
something was out there watching us, so we decided to
end our fishing trip. Early a month later, my dad
and I were fishing out on his pontoon boat at
the same spot. It was early in the morning, around
three or four AM, and a thick fog clung to
the lake, and the fish had finally stopped fighting. We
decided to head home. The front of our boat was
tied to a fallen tree that was half in the
water and half on the shore, and the back of
the boat was anchored. I pulled the anchor and I
started doing my part by pulling the boat toward the tree,
and when my dad started the boat. It was as
if a light switch had been flipped and all hell
broke loose on the bank next to the fallen tree.
The fog was too thick to see what was causing
the commotion, but I could see the rocks and the
twigs flying everywhere. And then we heard something roar, and
the rope in my hand began to vibrate as whatever
was pummeling the old tree like an angry bull on
a rampage. I stood there, frozen at the aggressive fury
that I couldn't see, too taken off guard to consider
what had been happening. My dad yelled at me to
cut the rope, and I was glad to do that,
and there was no way I was getting closer to
that tree than I already was, so I cut it
in a second and we headed back to the dock
as fast as we could. Now that I'm older, I
think it's important to know the truth about what is
in our forests, and looking back on this experience, it
terrifies me to think about what it could have been.
Was it a bigfoot, was it a dog man? Or
could it have been something worse. This event took place
fifteen or so miles south of the Niangua River and
a town so small the only thing in it is
a Rundown post office at an intersection between state highways.
In this part of the state, cows are much more
numerous than people in the fields of crops and livestock
and timber are expansive. It was four years ago in
May that I was visiting my dad's house, shortly after
graduating high school and accompanied by my then girlfriend. We
had planned to stay a few days at his residents
to celebrate and explore all the nearby natural areas. At
the time, he had fifteen or so acres of woods
that bordered the backyard and the shop near the house
that the boys and I would walk through to get
to the fence line of our neighbor's cow pasture to
look at the stars some nights. Between the line of
woods in the backyard and the fence was a small
pond that was home to many frogs that sank throughout
the night, and straight back behind the shop about forty
yards was a pile of debris from a tornado some
years ago that swept through that area and was bulldozed
to that location. This same pile was used by my
dad as a trash pile, and it doubled as a
mountain of bear cans as he was a heavy drinker
at the time. Well, we lived along the US Highway,
close enough that certain semis passed and would rattle the windows,
but far away enough that it was the only vehicle
you could hear with the windows closed. Used well, after
my dad went to sleep, my brothers and I went
about trying to get as much wood as we could
before the sun had totally set, and between the five
of us we managed a pretty sizable stack that would
keep an immense fire blazing throughout the night, and blaze
it did. I pulled my car up on the side
opposite of where my girlfriend and I were sitting in
a kayak on the ground and played old rock tunes
from it. We sat and laughed for hours, tossing around
and shooting the bull and catching up and laughing the
night away. The sounds of the woods were like a
symphony behind me that were full of life and penetrating
the cool air, with the coral sounds of crickets, frogs,
and the occasional owl. It had been a long time
since I had been privileged enough to be present in
this kind of atmosphere living in Kansas City, and I
was just elated the whole night. At two am, my
two younger brothers went inside for a refill of their beverages.
It was just a couple of minutes later, while talking
to my older stepbrother, who was sitting next to me
in a camp chair, that I heard sticks break in
the woods over the music. Hey do you hear that?
I asked my stepbrother, who was staring at his phone.
I don't know what you're talking about, dude, he said,
and he never looked up. I wrote it off as
a deer, seeing so many walk through the backyard in
the mornings, so I continued conversing with him for a
little bit longer. When I noticed the frequency in the
volume of these sticks cracking simply did not add up
to a deer passing through. My experience as a hunter
told me that something wasn't right, and I told my
stepbrother to go turn off the music so I could
hear it better. The first thing I noticed was how
well I could hear these sticks breaking from what sounded
like all the way to the fence, as the woods
had gone silent. The three of us in silence tossing
around ideas as to what could be making such a
racket in the woods at this hour, Bears had been
known to come through the area, and sitting with my
back to the woods, I suddenly became uncomfortable at that thought.
But boy do I wish I could have seen a bear,
as I was not prepared for what came next. It
dawned on me that the sounds were getting closer, close
enough that I could hear individual footfalls on the leaves
and the sticks on the ground, and I froze when
it registered that these steps were being taken on two feet.
I tried not to get ahead of myself, after all,
I had two younger, mischievous brothers that had just gone inside,
Nate and Joe. What the hell are y'all doing out there?
Quit messing around? I called out to the woods behind me.
I shot a grin at Michael, who had finally looked
up from his phone listening to the sounds with concern
on his face. I got no answer from j Nate,
so I called out again, wondering if someone was trespassing
on our property, whoever you are, you need to announce
yourself a warning you and I remember the AK forty
seven that had been used for target practice that day,
was just inside the shop, and then the rustling paused.
It was met with silence, and I thought that maybe
they acknowledged my words. But then the walking continued, except
it was now coming in our direction. My older brother
and I exchanged glances of worry when my two younger
brothers came walking around the corner of the house with
drinks in their hands. Y'all better quit before dad wakes up?
What's going on out here? And when I saw them
and realized that whatever was walking toward us was not familiar,
the potential danger of the situation was starting to set in.
Who the hell was walking in the woods between properties
at two am? Well? My girlfriend, who was sitting right
in front of me, who had been quiet this entire time, asked,
what are we gonna do? Just sit here? Well? I
didn't have an answer, and I was the only person
capable of operating a firearm in the group. Intense anxiety
gripped me, and I thought of what it meant to
possibly pull the trigger on somebody. I must have sat
there for a good minute now. I was petrified, thoughts
racing through my mind when it became apparent that the
footsteps were closing in. Whoever this was was making deliberate
steps with the full intention of walking right up on us,
And I swear to you it must have only been
ten yards or less away. When I stood up out
of the kayak and I shouted as loud as I could, Hello,
who goes there? The footsteps stopped dead, just out of
you from the light of the campfire. The tension in
the air was thick, and so was the silence, only
ever broke by the crackle of the fire. We all
sat there anticipating their next move. We were paralyzed. Just
then they were treated toward the left of our viewing area.
What the hell? I thought? And we all looked at
each other in disbelief, and we listened to the footfalls
go back and forth between our ten o'clock and our
two o'clock. It seemed whoever this was decided they were
going to stay just outside of our field of view,
but just close enough to observe our group. I could
see the look of astonishment creep across the faces of
my siblings, except my younger brother, Nate. Nate, he was brave,
and he grabbed sticks and rocks and whatever he could
find laying on the ground, and he started chucking them
into the woods, shouting at the bastard. I think his
intentions were to taunt the guy into coming out, or
at the very least, this was his attempt to run
them off. But his actions, nor our knowledge of the
figure year's presence, dissuaded them from running away. It simply
moved from left to right, dodging the items that were
being thrown. It was at this pivotal moment that I
was wrestling with the thought of getting the gun and
firing warning shots, when I realized that if this lunatic
was armed, they would have already done what they had
intended to do, so I told my brother to stop
let them get close. It seemed their objective was to
make their presence known but conceal themselves in the trees.
I told my brothers to sit quietly and let this
fellow get close enough while I was waiting in my
car that I then pulled up to the edge of
the tree line. When I thought they were close enough
to be viewed, I would illuminate the woods with my
brides and the perpetrator would come into full view. But
in hindsight, this action seemed kind of strange, but the
result was much more so. I waited there with my
car on and my headlights off. I could hear this
person getting closer and closer, and it occurred to me
that the sight of an operated vehicle near the woods
would have been enough reason to flee in fear of
possibly getting run over. And yet here they were, meandering
ever nearer to the edge. I heard the rustle of
the leaves right in front of the car, some feet
away when I decided to light up their world, and
I shouted profanities as I flipped the switch. And this
is the moment that I would never forget. As it
would turn out, I wasn't close enough to see the
damn thing thing is what it was, because when the
lights came on, I only saw the movement of a
single branch in the trees where it had just been
accompanied by what sounded like a freaking car driving through
the woods as this thing crashed through them, running away
from me. Judging by how loud the snapping was this morning,
munster had to have been a few hundred pounds on me,
and my blood ran cold. My comprehension of what I
thought lived in the woods was immediately defied, and when
the trees were once again quiet, I turned to the
rest of the group, who also had their jaws hanging open.
My two younger brothers were the first to break the silence,
announcing their departure indoors, and they wished us a good night,
and they hurried inside, having no idea what to even
think or feel. My older step brother and my girlfriend
and I sat there trying to wrap our minds around
what took place here, but we stayed out there, unsure
of what to do next. When I heard it come back.
This time it stayed further out in the woods, but
it didn't try to conceal its movements, and my mind
raised as daunting thoughts of revenge made me fearful of
my life, and my girlfriend certainly ran inside for hers.
And then the most unnerving thing happened. The creature walked
out from our ten o'clock all the way to the
trash pile, which was to our four o'clock, and it
stayed concealed by the woods the entire trek there, and
I heard it walking on top of all the beer cans,
seemingly jumping up and down and throwing or kicking cans around. Well,
the size and weight of this thing was fully illustrated
by the crunch of the aluminum beneath its feet. Neither
of us could tell what it was doing or why,
but we got the hell out of there, and when
we went inside we found that our brothers had woken
up our father to tell him what had happened. And
by the end it was just past three, and I
thought my dad was going to be really hiked off,
but he wasn't. He seemed somewhat concerned, but more bewildered
than anything. He knew exactly what it was, having had
his own experiences in the state of Washington, but he
seemed astounded that such a thing would happen in Missouri.
He inquired about the event for a few minutes, and
then he shrugged it off, and then he went back
to bed. I couldn't believe what I had just heard.
Four am rolled around and we were all getting tired,
and I crawled into my makeshift bed on the floor,
and I was almost asleep when it struck me that
my phone was lying on top of the roof of
my car. Well. I was gripped by fear at the
thought of even going out there, but with the rain
in the forecast and the thin wallet, I surely wasn't
going to let that happen. So I stepped through the
front door and I made my way around the corner.
The fire had gone out and the only thing illuminating
the night was a single light on the shop that
was on the side closest to my car, thankfully, and
as I walked across the yard, I noticed that the
woods were still, and I had the distinct feeling that
I was being watched. I grabbed my phone from the
top of the car and made a quick work of
getting back in the looking behind my shoulder every so
often at the dark and the silent abyss of trees,
until rounded the corner and I got inside the house.
The next morning, my older brother and I were up
before everyone else, and we decided to go out back
and do some investigating. We carried the rifle with us
and I told him to stay put and I wanted
him to listen to me jump on the pile of
cans to try and guess the weight of the creature.
And when I arrived at the pile, I was amazed
and frightened by the amount of beer cans and trash
that had been strown about the general area. When I
came back, he told me that whatever had been on
that pile the night before must have been at least
three times my size. At that point in time, I
was five foot eleven, one hundred and sixty five pounds,
and I was not courageous enough to look for prince,
realizing that even a full clip might not protect me
from a creature of that size, and we left it
at that. My love for the woods is not wavered,
and I'm an avid out dorsman, but this event has
cemented itself into my mind, and my view of the
natural world has changed. And since this event, I do
not enter the woods at night anymore, and during the
day I'm very attentive to my surroundings. I have seen
strange structures and smelled unexplained things since then, but those
experiences are just conjecture. This, however, is significant for a
couple of reasons. Whatever this creature is was walking on
two feet and objectively bigger than a human, and most
importantly aware of its utility, and deliberately making its presence
known to us, yet staying just out of sight. What
gets me about this experience compared to the others that
I've heard, is that I did not smell anything, and
it seemed genuinely curious about us, not at all wanting
to be seen. It wasn't deterred by our advances, and
it even came back after a crude attempt to see it. Also,
in hindsight, it might have gone to the trash pile
for food, but the sounds it made while doing so
were very unusual, and I swear to you it was
jumping around like it was deliberately making noise, And the
prospect of something being intelligent and bold enough to do
such a thing is terrifying to me. Now I have
only told very few people about what happened that night
because it is so surreal and outlandish, and I'm pretty
sure no one would believe me. And that's the end
of his email, and that was I just can't believe.
What a good writer, this guy, What a great story.
I'm not going to send anything else and ruin it.
You heard it, You know the story. You make your
own judgments about it. But I thought it was great
and I appreciate the man sending it. Thank you. Okay,
I was going to do another story. But I got
dogs walking around. They want to go outside. I'm tired
of letting them in and out, in and out, in
and out. I've been doing that for two hours while
I recorded this audio. And Betsy, Betsy, why do you
keep going out and in and out? Girl? Can y'all
hear clicking over here? He thinks I'm mad at her.
I'm not mad at her. I kind of am, but
I'm I'm I'm loving on her right now. Anyway. Thank
you for joining me on this podcast. I appreciate it. Hey,
maybe you could hit the thumbs up on this video
if you liked it. This a little button right there,
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Other than that, we'll see you guys on the next one.
Thanks