Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky.
Speaker 2: Are you ready, because.
Speaker 1: Once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: The first thing you ought to know about Kansas is
Speaker 1: that it isn't solid. People look at that state and
Speaker 1: they see flat. They see wheat and wind and a
Speaker 1: horizon you could lay a level against, and they figure
Speaker 1: there's nothing under it but more of the same dirt
Speaker 1: all the way down, dependable as a church floor. That's
Speaker 1: the picture in their heads when they drive across it
Speaker 1: on the interstate at eighty miles an hour with the
Speaker 1: crew set and the radio low, a flat and empty
Speaker 1: and finished place. They can't get through fast enough. They're
Speaker 1: wrong about the empty, and they're wrong about the solid.
Speaker 1: Under a lot of central Kansas, there's salt, a bed
Speaker 1: of it, ancient, laid down when a shallow Permian sea
Speaker 1: sat over the middle of the continent and dried up
Speaker 1: and came back and dried up again, leaving rock salt
Speaker 1: hundreds of feet thick in places. Geologists call the biggest
Speaker 1: of those layers, the Hutchinson Salt. It's been down there
Speaker 1: a quarter of a billion years, give or take, minding
Speaker 1: its own business in the dark.
Speaker 2: Salt dissolves.
Speaker 1: Water moves through the rock slow as patience, and it
Speaker 1: finds the salt, and it carries the salt away grain
Speaker 1: by grain, and it leaves a hollow behind a room,
Speaker 1: a space where solid rock used to be, and now
Speaker 1: there's nothing but water and the weight of everything sitting
Speaker 1: on top. And one day the weight wins, the roof
Speaker 1: comes down, and it doesn't always come down slow. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the ground over one of those dissolved rooms just lets
Speaker 1: go all at once, and a circle of pasture or
Speaker 1: wheat or county road drops into a hole that was
Speaker 1: waiting underneath the whole time. You could be standing on
Speaker 1: it right now and not know. The farmer who plowed
Speaker 1: that field for forty years didn't know. That's the country
Speaker 1: we're driving through today. And it's a strange stage to
Speaker 1: set a monster on, because the monster in this story
Speaker 1: is almost beside the point. The real horror here isn't
Speaker 1: a thing with a face, it's the floor. Here's a date,
Speaker 1: because a date makes a thing real, and this one
Speaker 1: is real. March of eighteen seventy nine, Mead County, Southwest Kansas,
Speaker 1: a mile and a half southeast of the little town
Speaker 1: of Mead, on the east side of Crooked Creek. Sometime
Speaker 1: between the third of the month and the eighteenth, a
Speaker 1: circular piece of ground one hundred and fifty to two
Speaker 1: hundred feet across simply dropped out of the world. Where
Speaker 1: there'd been prairie, There was now a pit filling with water.
Speaker 1: They call it the Mead Salt Sink, and it sits
Speaker 1: right alongside a fault line that runs through the country there,
Speaker 1: the Crooked Creek Fault, and the geologists who studied it
Speaker 1: figured that water had crept down along that fracture century
Speaker 1: after century and eaten the salt below until the ceiling failed.
Speaker 1: Nobody saw it fall, And that's the part that gets
Speaker 1: me a piece of Kansas. The size of a town
Speaker 1: square disappeared into the earth, and the only witnesses were
Speaker 1: the cattle and the wind. And by the time a
Speaker 1: man rode out to look, the job was already finished
Speaker 1: and the water was already rising. Go a little west
Speaker 1: and a little further back in folks memory, and you
Speaker 1: come to a place in Clark County they named Saint
Speaker 1: Jacob's Well. It's a round pool sitting at the bottom
Speaker 1: of a much bigger sink called Big Basin. And Big
Speaker 1: Basin is a mile across Rim to Rim, a bowl
Speaker 1: pressed into the high plains by the same slow chemistry,
Speaker 1: salt and gypsum going to liquid somewhere far below. The
Speaker 1: well itself never goes dry. The country around it can
Speaker 1: crack from drought, the creeks can quit, the cattle can
Speaker 1: stand around panting with their tongues out, and that pool
Speaker 1: just sits there, full and dark and fed from somewhere
Speaker 1: you can't see. The old story the cowboys told was
Speaker 1: that it had no bottom. That they tied their ropes
Speaker 1: together and lowered them, and never once touched anything down there.
Speaker 1: They were wrong about the no bottom. It does have one,
Speaker 1: But I understand why a man on horseback in eighteen something,
Speaker 1: looking down into water that stayed full while his whole
Speaker 1: world dried to powder, would decide the hole went clear
Speaker 1: through to somewhere else. Aren't even the big ones. Down
Speaker 1: in Clark County, there's a feature the geologists call the
Speaker 1: Ashland Inglewood Basin, and it's the largest of its kind
Speaker 1: in the state, a vast, shallow bowl pressed into the
Speaker 1: high plains, as much as twelve miles across and five
Speaker 1: hundred feet below the level of the country around it.
Speaker 1: Twelve miles is wide enough that you can't see the
Speaker 1: far rim from the near one, wide enough that a
Speaker 1: man standing in the bottom of it might never know
Speaker 1: he was standing in a hole at all. Might take
Speaker 1: the rising ground on every horizon for ordinary hills. That's
Speaker 1: what the salt does at full scale. It doesn't always
Speaker 1: make a neat round pit you can fence off and
Speaker 1: warn the children away from. Sometimes it eats a piece
Speaker 1: of country the size of a township and leaves the
Speaker 1: survivors farming the floor of it, calling it home, never
Speaker 1: once looking up to wonder why all the land leans
Speaker 1: toward the middle. And it kept happening all over that
Speaker 1: part of the state, right up into living memory. Nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty six, Wallas County, way out west near Sharon Springs.
Speaker 1: A rancher was riding his land and saw a strange
Speaker 1: cloud of dust hanging over a spot where no dust
Speaker 1: ought to be, and he rode toward it, and the
Speaker 1: ground had collapsed. A fresh sink raw edged the dirt,
Speaker 1: still settling that cloud of dust the only announcement the
Speaker 1: earth had bothered to make before it opened. They sent
Speaker 1: a geologist out from the survey, a fellow named Moore,
Speaker 1: and he looked it over and noted that there was
Speaker 1: another old collapse nearby that folks called the old maid Pool,
Speaker 1: and that one was so old nobody could say when
Speaker 1: it had formed, decades back, at least maybe centuries. The
Speaker 1: land out there has been quietly falling in on itself
Speaker 1: for longer than there's been anybody around to write it down.
Speaker 1: There's a modern one too. Drive Interstate seventy across Russell
Speaker 1: County over the old Gorham oil field, and you are
Speaker 1: driving across salt that is dissolving under the pavement right now.
Speaker 1: The highway sinks there. It sinks slow, but it sinks,
Speaker 1: and the state has to come back and build the
Speaker 1: road up again and again because the ground underneath won't
Speaker 1: hold still. Men in trucks fighting a hole that isn't
Speaker 1: done forming yet, a hole that is the same age
Speaker 1: as the dinosaurs, and in no hurry at all, and
Speaker 1: they've measured it, which is the thing. This isn't folklore.
Speaker 1: Since the late nineteen seventies, the State Survey has gone
Speaker 1: out with seismic gear to map the hollows under the roads,
Speaker 1: and the method they settled on tells you something all
Speaker 1: by itself. To send a sharp enough pulse down into
Speaker 1: the rock, they drilled boreholes and fired rifles straight down
Speaker 1: into them, heavy rounds into the earth, and they listened
Speaker 1: with their instruments to how the shot came back, and
Speaker 1: the way it came back drew them a picture of
Speaker 1: the rooms down there, the salt gone to water, the
Speaker 1: voids waiting under a pavement that a quarter of a
Speaker 1: million cars cross every year. Men firing guns into the
Speaker 1: ground to learn how empty it is beneath an interstate
Speaker 1: highway that is not a campfire story, that is an
Speaker 1: engineering report, and the report says the ground is full
Speaker 1: of holes. The survey people will tell you there are
Speaker 1: more than one hundred known areas of land subsidence in
Speaker 1: Kansas tied to that salt going away, more than one hundred.
Speaker 1: And those are only the ones somebody noticed, only the
Speaker 1: ones that fell where a road or a town or
Speaker 1: a man's fence happened to be paying attention. So when
Speaker 1: I tell you a story about something living in a
Speaker 1: Kansas sinkhole, I want you to start from there, from
Speaker 1: a state that is very slowly eating itself from the inside,
Speaker 1: opening rooms in the dark, dropping the ceiling without warning,
Speaker 1: and saying nothing about it but a little dust on
Speaker 1: the wind, Which brings us to Enman. Inman sits in
Speaker 1: Macpherson County, right in the belly of the state, a
Speaker 1: quiet Mennonite farming town where the families have worked the
Speaker 1: same sections of ground since the eighteen seventies. Good plain people,
Speaker 1: the kind who don't go in for tall tales as
Speaker 1: a rule, Wo'd rather you didn't make a fuss, who
Speaker 1: keep their heads down and their fields clean. Just southeast
Speaker 1: of town, out about four miles, there's a low patch
Speaker 1: of country that used to be a whole lot wetter.
Speaker 2: Than it is now.
Speaker 1: There was a lake out there once, inmand Lake, which
Speaker 1: has the distinction of being the largest natural lake in Kansas,
Speaker 1: which tells you something about Kansas. Over the years, the
Speaker 1: water shrank back, and what got left behind was the
Speaker 1: lake and a scatter of deep, low spots full of
Speaker 1: water sink holes, and the biggest of them, the local
Speaker 1: people called, with the flat practicality of farm folks, the
Speaker 1: Big Sinkhole. Here's the thing about the Big sinkhole, and
Speaker 1: everything strange about this story runs straight through it. It
Speaker 1: is not a deep place. People hear the word sinkhole
Speaker 1: and picture a shaft going down into the planet. But
Speaker 1: go out there and look, and you'll find a pond,
Speaker 1: a wide, muddy bowl that gets maybe fifteen feet at
Speaker 1: the center after a hard rain, and a good deal
Speaker 1: less than that the rest of the time. There have
Speaker 1: been years it dried down to four or five feet.
Speaker 1: Years you could walk across the bottom of it in
Speaker 1: your boots and find fresh water clams in the muck
Speaker 1: and not one single fish. A shallow, drying, fishless pond
Speaker 1: in the middle of a Wheat county. That's what was
Speaker 1: really out there, and the descriptions that came out of
Speaker 1: it ran a good deal bigger. The strangeness out there
Speaker 1: is older than the town's interest in it. Long before
Speaker 1: anybody named a monster, the tribes who knew this country
Speaker 1: had their own water and their own.
Speaker 2: Things in it.
Speaker 1: The Arapaho spoke of a horned serpent, the Heatica be it,
Speaker 1: the salk and the fox, and the Potawatami carried stories
Speaker 1: of a giant serpent, a man eater, a thing that
Speaker 1: lived in the deep water and was not to be
Speaker 1: trifled with. You find versions of that creature all across
Speaker 1: the middle of the continent, in nation after nation. A
Speaker 1: long thing in dark water that takes what it wants
Speaker 1: different names on the same shape. And if people don't
Speaker 1: carry the same warning across that many languages and that
Speaker 1: many generations, for no reason at all, there's a deeper
Speaker 1: old fact under even that one the geology hands us
Speaker 1: for free. The reason there's salt under Kansas is that
Speaker 1: an actual sea sat over it, back in the Permian
Speaker 1: and before that, and after that, other seas came and went,
Speaker 1: and those seas were full of long swimming things mosasaurs
Speaker 1: and plesiosaurs, forty foot reptiles with mouths full of teeth,
Speaker 1: cruising over what is now wheat. They're gone, every one
Speaker 1: of them, dead a tremendously long time, and turned to stone.
Speaker 1: And we dig their bones out of the Kansas chalk
Speaker 1: by the wagon load and stand them up in museums.
Speaker 1: Western Kansas is built out of those bones. There's a
Speaker 1: band of pale rock out there, the Smoky Hill chalk,
Speaker 1: soft white stone that erodes into spires and bad lands,
Speaker 1: and it's packed with the dead of that sea. Mosasaurs
Speaker 1: thirty and forty feet long, all muscle and jaw plesiosaurs
Speaker 1: with necks like a question mark and a barrel for
Speaker 1: a body, fish the size of a rowboat, with smaller
Speaker 1: fish still sitting inside their stomachs, swallowed whole the day
Speaker 1: they died and turned to stone. Mid meal flying reptiles
Speaker 1: with wingspans whiter than a barn door. Kids out there
Speaker 1: grow up finding sharp teeth in the dirt of their
Speaker 1: own yards, and a rancher mending fence will turn up
Speaker 1: a vertebrae the size of a dinner plate and think
Speaker 1: nothing of it, Toss it in the truck, set it
Speaker 1: on a shelf in the barn next to the baling wire.
Speaker 1: The bones are so common they're almost dull. The sea
Speaker 1: is gone, but the seas dead are everywhere, worked right
Speaker 1: into the soil. A man plows, and the rock a
Speaker 1: town stands on. But a man standing at the edge
Speaker 1: of a dark pond, A man who knows in his
Speaker 1: gut that this whole country used to be ocean doesn't
Speaker 1: always do the math the museum way. Sometimes he does
Speaker 1: it the old way, the way that asks a more
Speaker 1: interesting question, what if not all of them left? It's
Speaker 1: not a crazy question if you've spent your life on
Speaker 1: that ground. You plow up the vertebra of a sea
Speaker 1: reptile in the spring and set it on the shelf
Speaker 1: in the barn. You water your stock at a sinkhole
Speaker 1: pond fed from a source you can't see. And the
Speaker 1: oldest people in your country have warned about a long
Speaker 1: thing in the deep water since before your town had
Speaker 1: a name. Put those three facts in a row, and
Speaker 1: the conclusion practically draws itself.
Speaker 2: True or not. The sea was here, The sea was
Speaker 2: full of long things.
Speaker 1: The water never entirely left, so why would all the
Speaker 1: long things have gone with it? A man doesn't need
Speaker 1: a degree to run that arithmetic. He just needs to
Speaker 1: be standing at the edge of dark water at dusk
Speaker 1: with a fish on the line and a cold smell
Speaker 1: coming up off the surface, and the arithmetic runs itself,
Speaker 1: and he reels up early and stays away from that
Speaker 1: spot for a good while after. In the nineteen twenties,
Speaker 1: fishermen out at the inmand Water started saying they'd seen
Speaker 1: something and it wasn't a fish, something long and much
Speaker 1: bigger than any fish that are supposed to be out there.
Speaker 1: The reports were thin, and they didn't travel far. Farm
Speaker 1: gossip and bait shop talk, the kind of thing you
Speaker 1: mentioned to your brother in law once and then never
Speaker 1: bring up again because of the look he gives you.
Speaker 1: It sat that way for thirty years, a low rumor
Speaker 1: in the mud, and then came a dry year and
Speaker 1: two young men with a rifle, and everything changed. The
Speaker 1: summer of nineteen fifty two was a drought summer. The
Speaker 1: country was parched. The big sinkhole was drawn down, low
Speaker 1: and muddy and warm, and out there fishing it the
Speaker 1: way they'd fished it for years were two young Mennonite men.
Speaker 1: Their names were Albert Neufeld and George Raeger. These weren't
Speaker 1: carnival barkers, and they weren't a couple of drifters looking
Speaker 1: to get their picture in the paper. They were church
Speaker 1: going farm boys from a community that prizes humility and
Speaker 1: distrusts attention, a community that would sooner you said nothing
Speaker 1: than said too much. If you set out to pick
Speaker 1: the two least likely people in the state of Kansas
Speaker 1: to invent a sea monster, could do a lot worse
Speaker 1: than a pair of young Mennonites out fishing on a Tuesday.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. The way they described it, the water
Speaker 1: moved and broke open, and what came up out of
Speaker 1: that shallow, muddy pond was long, pale, and it was
Speaker 1: thick as the tire off an automobile, and it was
Speaker 1: nothing either of them had seen before. Albert had a rifle,
Speaker 1: a twenty two, and he did what a farm boy
Speaker 1: does when something that size comes up out of the
Speaker 1: water he's standing next to.
Speaker 2: He shot it.
Speaker 1: The story says he fired more than once from up
Speaker 1: on a bridge nearby, putting rounds into the thing. It
Speaker 1: didn't care. The creature didn't thrash, flee, or die. It
Speaker 1: just took the bullets the way deep water takes a
Speaker 1: thrown stone. The two of them came back to town with that,
Speaker 1: and you can imagine the dinner table, the careful way
Speaker 1: you'd have to say it, the quiet on the far
Speaker 1: end while your father decided whether to be angry or afraid.
Speaker 1: But other people had seen it too. A couple of
Speaker 1: inman men never named in the tellings, had reported a
Speaker 1: thing in that water before the no feled boy ever
Speaker 1: raised his rifle. And once Albert and George said their peace,
Speaker 1: the dam broke, and it all came out, every half buried,
Speaker 1: sighting every fisherman who'd kept his mouth shut for thirty
Speaker 1: years because of the look he knew he'd get. The
Speaker 1: pond had a reputation. Now the pond had a name
Speaker 1: in it. They called it sinkhole Sam. The descriptions, once
Speaker 1: they started flowing, did what descriptions always do, which is grow,
Speaker 1: so that fifteen feet became twenty, and twenty became thirty.
Speaker 1: Somebody said it had a tail with a fluke on it,
Speaker 1: like a whale. Somebody said it had a face, and
Speaker 1: worse that the face was grinning a wide grin that
Speaker 1: wasn't a snake's grin, a non snake like grin. What
Speaker 1: did that man see that made him reach past every
Speaker 1: animal he'd ever known and land on the word grin?
Speaker 1: Albert Neufeld's own told it best years later. He said
Speaker 1: his father used to laugh about the whole business and
Speaker 1: say that the more people who claimed to see sinkhole Sam,
Speaker 1: the bigger sinkhole Sam got. Which is the wisest thing
Speaker 1: anybody ever said about a monster. And it's a farmer
Speaker 1: who said it about his own father's monster with a
Speaker 1: straight face and a fly rod.
Speaker 2: In his hand.
Speaker 1: But look at what the joke quietly admits, It admits
Speaker 1: there was a hymn. The argument in that family was
Speaker 1: never whether Albert saw something. It was only ever about
Speaker 1: how big. Here's where a small town fish story turns
Speaker 1: into a circus. And the man who was responsible. His
Speaker 1: name was Ernest Alva Dewey, and he wrote a column
Speaker 1: for the Selena Journal. Before that, he'd been a publicist
Speaker 1: for a traveling circus, which is the kind of detail
Speaker 1: that explains a man's whole career, and his particular sport
Speaker 1: was making gentle fun of country superstition. He'd already done
Speaker 1: it with flying saucers. When the saucer panic was on
Speaker 1: and people were watching the sky and losing sleep, he
Speaker 1: wrote that the lights folks kept seeing were just a
Speaker 1: creature called the ball tailed snickele hoopis migrating across the
Speaker 1: country harmless. Fond of pranks, he made it up on
Speaker 1: the spot and ran it in the paper with a
Speaker 1: straight face. That was his whole game. So when word
Speaker 1: reached him that the good people of McPherson County had
Speaker 1: themselves a lake monster, Dewey came running with his pen out.
Speaker 1: He drove to Inman and he announced in print that
Speaker 1: he'd brought along a man of science to settle the matter,
Speaker 1: a distinguished doctor by the name of Erasmus P.
Speaker 2: Quaddle Bomb.
Speaker 1: You will not find doctor Quadlebaum's credentials anywhere, because doctor
Speaker 1: Quaddlebaum did not exist. Dewey invented him the way he
Speaker 1: invented everything. And then he had this invented doctor perform
Speaker 1: hours of rigorous examination at the sinkhole and deliver a verdict.
Speaker 2: And the verdict was.
Speaker 1: That sinkhole Sam was no snake at all. Sinkhle Sam,
Speaker 1: the doctor determined was a foup and Girkle. A foop
Speaker 1: and Girkle, explained, was the most thoroughly extinct creature ever
Speaker 1: to live on the Kansas Plains, a beast that dwelt
Speaker 1: in underground caverns, which conveniently explained how a thirty foot
Speaker 1: animal could live in a pond.
Speaker 2: You could wade across the.
Speaker 1: Foup and Gircle, he assured his readers, was a vegetarian
Speaker 1: and not very bright, so the fishermen and swimmers of
Speaker 1: Inman had nothing to fear. He ran it around Thanksgiving
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifty two, and he thought it was hilarious,
Speaker 1: and it probably was. And here's the thing Dewey did
Speaker 1: not count on. It didn't kill the monster, it fed it.
Speaker 1: The column went out, and instead of laughing the whole
Speaker 1: thing off, the country came to look. Mill Penner, whose
Speaker 1: family had farmed that very section of land since eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy four, wrote about it later. He described coming home
Speaker 1: from church one Sunday and finding his road lined with automobiles,
Speaker 1: DeSotos and Chevies and nash Ramblers parked nose to tail
Speaker 1: along the edge of the big sinkhole full of people
Speaker 1: who'd driven out from who knows how far, with binoculars
Speaker 1: and boxes cameras, hoping to catch the Foop and Girkle surfacing.
Speaker 1: A neighbor had reported a thirty footer earlier that week,
Speaker 1: and the crowd had come for it. The Pinner family
Speaker 1: plain farm people came home to a traffic jam of
Speaker 1: monster hunters in the yard and had to do their
Speaker 1: Sunday around it. The story spread coast to coast. The
Speaker 1: Inman folks started getting telephone calls from strangers in.
Speaker 2: Far away states.
Speaker 1: A satirical column meant to make the legend smaller, had
Speaker 1: handed it a megaphone and a national tour. And that's
Speaker 1: the trap, the thing I keep circling, the reason I
Speaker 1: half resent old Dewey, even as I tipped my hat
Speaker 1: to him. He buried the truth under a joke. He
Speaker 1: took two sober young men who saw something they couldn't name,
Speaker 1: and put bullets into it, and he wrapped them in
Speaker 1: a made up doctor and a made up animal and
Speaker 1: a punchline, so that for seventy years afterward, anybody who
Speaker 1: heard the words sink hole Sam heard foop and Girkle
Speaker 1: right behind it, and laughed and moved on.
Speaker 2: But take the joke away.
Speaker 1: Set Dewey's whole circus off to the side, and look
Speaker 1: at what's left underneath. You're left with a drought summer,
Speaker 1: a shallow pond, and a long, pale thing that took
Speaker 1: a rifle without flinching. You're left with thirty years of
Speaker 1: fisherman who'd seen it before anybody made it funny. You're
Speaker 1: left with the oldest peoples in that country warning about
Speaker 1: exactly this a long thing in dark water, for as
Speaker 1: long as anybody had been keeping warnings. The joke is loud,
Speaker 1: but the joke isn't The evidence, and the evidence, what
Speaker 1: little there is of it, was never funny at all.
Speaker 1: The trouble with Sinkhole Sam is that you can't put
Speaker 1: your hands on him. There's no body, there's no good photograph,
Speaker 1: no track you can pour plaster into, no tuft of
Speaker 1: pale hide caught on a fence wire. He lives in
Speaker 1: the testimony, and the testimony is old and secondhand and
Speaker 1: tangled up in a newspaper man's gag. There's another kind
Speaker 1: of report, though, the smaller kind, the kind that doesn't
Speaker 1: make the paper because there's nothing in it but a
Speaker 1: man and an animal and a feeling. There was a
Speaker 1: farmer out pasted Inman, an older fellow named Walt, who
Speaker 1: ran a few head of cattle on ground that included
Speaker 1: one of the low sinkhole ponds, not the big sinkhole,
Speaker 1: a smaller one, the sort that scattered all through that country,
Speaker 1: a wet eye in the middle of a pasture. Walt's
Speaker 1: cattle wouldn't drink from it. Now, cattle are creatures of
Speaker 1: pure habit. A cow will walk a quarter mile to
Speaker 1: drink from the same trampled spot it drank from yesterday,
Speaker 1: in a straight line every day of its dumb, contented life.
Speaker 1: Walt's herd had drunk from that pond for years, and
Speaker 1: then one season they stopped. They'd file out to water,
Speaker 1: and they'd halt a good way short of it, and
Speaker 1: they'd stand and they would not go down to the edge,
Speaker 1: no matter how hot the day. He had to run
Speaker 1: a line out and fill a tank for them on
Speaker 1: the far side of the field. Because the animals had
Speaker 1: decided all together, with no discussion. You or I could
Speaker 1: hear that the pond was off limits. Walt said he
Speaker 1: never saw anything in that water, not once. He said,
Speaker 1: the only thing he ever saw was a place in
Speaker 1: the mud at the low end, where the bank was
Speaker 1: pushed down and smeared out wide like something heavy had
Speaker 1: come up and gone back, and grass laid flat in
Speaker 1: a track leading to the lip of the water, and
Speaker 1: then nothing, because a track that leads into a pond
Speaker 1: just ends. He filled the tank, and he didn't go
Speaker 1: look close. He was seventy years old, and he buried
Speaker 1: a lot of his curiosity by them let the cattle
Speaker 1: have their opinion. He figured cattle weren't usually wrong about
Speaker 1: the things that mattered to cattle. That's the report I
Speaker 1: believe more than any thirty foot grinning serpent, because what
Speaker 1: does a man have to gain from it. There's no
Speaker 1: monster in it. There's just a pond, his animals quit,
Speaker 1: and a smear of pushed down mud, and an old
Speaker 1: man's good sense telling him to fill the tank and
Speaker 1: mind his business. You hear that same shape over and
Speaker 1: over once you start asking a pond that goes wrong.
Speaker 1: Nothing dramatic about it, just wrong. There was a woman, Ruth,
Speaker 1: who's people farmed in that part of the county, and
Speaker 1: she told about being a girl and being told flatly
Speaker 1: every summer of her childhood to stay away from the sinkholes,
Speaker 1: not because you'd drown, though you could. Her grandmother had
Speaker 1: a different reason, and would never quite say it. Stay
Speaker 1: back from the low water, don't play at the edges,
Speaker 1: don't go down where the bank is soft. The grandmother
Speaker 1: said it the way you'd warn a child off a
Speaker 1: hot stove, no.
Speaker 2: Debate in it.
Speaker 1: And Ruth said the old woman would get a particular
Speaker 1: set to her jaw when one of the kids drifted
Speaker 1: toward the wet ground, and that was the end of
Speaker 1: the afternoon. They'd all be marched home. Ruth never got
Speaker 1: a reason out of her. Only the rule, hard as
Speaker 1: a fence post, handed down without a story attached. Stay
Speaker 1: away from the sinkholes. I think about that grandmother a lot.
Speaker 1: A reason got lost somewhere up the line, and only
Speaker 1: the fear survived, passed hand to hand, a warning worn
Speaker 1: so smooth by use that nobody could read what was
Speaker 1: carved on it anymore. But somebody once knew why. Somebody
Speaker 1: started that rule for a reason they thought was good
Speaker 1: enough to make their grandchildren afraid. And there was a
Speaker 1: boy years on, a teenager named Cody, who went out
Speaker 1: to one of those ponds at dusk to fish where
Speaker 1: his dad had told him not to, because that's what
Speaker 1: teenagers are for. He didn't catch anything. The water was dead,
Speaker 1: he said, no rises, no bugs, the kind of still
Speaker 1: that a pond doesn't usually hold at dusk in summer.
Speaker 1: And while he sat there, a smell came across the
Speaker 1: water that he couldn't place. Thick and organic, a low
Speaker 1: tide reek a long way from any tide, and under
Speaker 1: it something else, a cold mineral smell, like the breath
Speaker 1: that comes up out of a cellar or a cave.
Speaker 1: And the still water out in the middle, the part
Speaker 1: he couldn't see well in the failing light, made one
Speaker 1: slow heave, not a splash, and not a jump, but
Speaker 1: a heave like something turning over far down, and the
Speaker 1: whole surface lifting an inch to let it. He didn't
Speaker 1: to see it. Twice he left his ride and drove
Speaker 1: home and told his dad, and his dad didn't yell
Speaker 1: at him for fishing where he wasn't supposed to, which
Speaker 1: Cody said scared him worse than the pond had, because
Speaker 1: his dad always yelled, And that night he just listened
Speaker 1: and got quiet and went and locked the door. A
Speaker 1: woman named Carol kept two horses on a place with
Speaker 1: a sink pond at the corner of the lot, and
Speaker 1: the horses, which had grazed that corner for years started
Speaker 1: refusing it. They'd take the field down to nothing and
Speaker 1: leave the grass tall around that pond, a ring of
Speaker 1: untouched green they would not step into, And when the
Speaker 1: wind came off the water a certain way, the horses
Speaker 1: would throw their heads up and prick their ears, and
Speaker 1: drift to the far fence and stand there, bunched and watching.
Speaker 1: Carol never saw a thing. She moved the horses to
Speaker 1: another pasture because she got tired of fighting them about it.
Speaker 1: And she said the grass around that pond grew waist
Speaker 1: high that summer, the only tall grass on the whole place,
Speaker 1: a green ring nothing would eat, marking the one spot
Speaker 1: the animals had all agreed to leave to whatever they
Speaker 1: figured was using it. None of these will hold up
Speaker 1: first names, no county lines, no proof, and a man
Speaker 1: could invent every one of them at a bar. I
Speaker 1: know that I've spent a career taking statements, and I
Speaker 1: know exactly how much weight you can hang on A
Speaker 1: fellow named Walt telling you as cows acted funny. But
Speaker 1: run them together and a shape comes out of them,
Speaker 1: the same way the shape comes out of all those
Speaker 1: tribal serpents in all those languages. Water that animals refuse,
Speaker 1: mud push down where nothing should push it, a rule
Speaker 1: against the low places, older than the reason for it,
Speaker 1: a smell coming up from underground, and every so often,
Speaker 1: at the worst possible light, the water lifting for something
Speaker 1: you never quite see, the monster stays under And that's
Speaker 1: the whole horror of him. Sinkhole Sam is the thing
Speaker 1: you don't get to look at. You only get to
Speaker 1: look at what he leaves. And what he leaves is
Speaker 1: a smear in the mud, and a heard of frightened animals,
Speaker 1: and a grandmother's voice telling you to come away from
Speaker 1: the edge. If Sam were only Inman, he'd be a
Speaker 1: one pond curiosity and we could close the book. But
Speaker 1: he doesn't stay in Inman. And that's the part nobody tells.
Speaker 1: Run a line about fifty miles south and west of
Speaker 1: the big sinkhole, and you come to Kingman County and
Speaker 1: to Kingman State Lake, And in the autumn of nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven, the same shape came up out of the
Speaker 1: water there. Now Kingman's Lake isn't a natural sink the
Speaker 1: way Edmonds is. It's man made dug out of a
Speaker 1: marsh alongside the Neneska River. So the underground cavern theory
Speaker 1: and the whole foup and girkle business none of that fits.
Speaker 1: This is a different body of water with a different history.
Speaker 1: And still it came October of sixty seven. The story
Speaker 1: got loose that a serpent had come up out of
Speaker 1: that lake and taken a calf, not nibbled at it,
Speaker 1: but taken it. The telling had the thing twenty feet long,
Speaker 1: big enough that a man swore you couldn't drive a
Speaker 1: tractor safely over a creature. That's and it had killed
Speaker 1: a calf and dragged the carcass down into the lake
Speaker 1: and eaten it. A calf is a couple hundred pounds
Speaker 1: of livestock pulled off the bank and into the water
Speaker 1: by something nobody could see. And here's the difference between
Speaker 1: Kingmen and Enman, the difference that makes my law dog
Speaker 1: instincts sit up. At Kingman, there was a body that
Speaker 1: went missing. There was allegedly a dead calf, and then
Speaker 1: no dead calf. That's not a fisherman squinting at a ripple.
Speaker 1: That's a missing animal, which is a thing a rancher counts,
Speaker 1: a thing that costs money, a thing that leaves a
Speaker 1: hole in a herd. You can point at. The county
Speaker 1: got worked up about it, the way counties do. Through
Speaker 1: the back half of the nineteen sixties, men went out
Speaker 1: after the Kingman, Serpent, the calf killer, organized hunts, trudging
Speaker 1: the marsh edges with guns, the whole Midwestern jaws of it,
Speaker 1: wheat instead of ocean. They never found it, of course,
Speaker 1: they never found it. You don't find the thing that
Speaker 1: lives where the water meets the dark. You find the
Speaker 1: place it was, and the thing it took, and the
Speaker 1: flattened reeds where it went back down. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: The two of them line up in a way I
Speaker 1: don't love. Enman nineteen fifty two, A long, pale thing
Speaker 1: that ate bullets. Kingman nineteen sixty seven, A long thing
Speaker 1: that ate a calf and left no carcass. Fifty miles apart,
Speaker 1: fifteen years apart, different water, different origin, and the same
Speaker 1: shape coming up out of it. The cryptid crowd, the believers,
Speaker 1: they've got an answer for that, And I'll give it
Speaker 1: to you, because it's the kind of answer that's almost
Speaker 1: too good. They say the sinkholes connect, They say, all
Speaker 1: that dissolving salt, all those rooms eaten out of the
Speaker 1: Kansas underground, all that water finding its way through fault
Speaker 1: and fracture. It isn't separate ponds at all, but one
Speaker 1: dark plumbing system, flooded and lightless and running under the
Speaker 1: whole region, so that a thing living down in it
Speaker 1: could come up at Inman one decade and Kingman the next,
Speaker 1: and never once cross open ground where a man could
Speaker 1: see it travel.
Speaker 2: It just swims under the.
Speaker 1: Wheat and surfaces where it pleases, and goes back down
Speaker 1: into a country we've barely mapped, because most of it
Speaker 1: is solid rock, with the salt eaten out and water
Speaker 1: standing in the gaps. I don't believe that, because I'm
Speaker 1: not in the business of selling you a thirty foot
Speaker 1: worm that commutes between counties through underground rivers.
Speaker 2: But I'll tell you what I do believe.
Speaker 1: I believe the ground out there is hollow in ways
Speaker 1: we don't fully understand, And the survey says as much
Speaker 1: more than one hundred subsidence areas salt going to water
Speaker 1: in the dark rooms opening up that nobody planned for.
Speaker 1: I believe in area that can swallow a piece of
Speaker 1: itself between the third and the eighteenth of March is
Speaker 1: one with a great deal of space under it. And
Speaker 1: I believe that when people who live on top of
Speaker 1: hollow ground keep seeing the same long shape come up
Speaker 1: out of the deepest water decade after decade, I'm not
Speaker 1: comfortable laughing the way Dewey laughed. Something's wrong with that water.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you what. I can only tell you
Speaker 1: that the cattle agree with me. And here's where I
Speaker 1: have to complicate this whole drive, because if you think
Speaker 1: the only strange thing in Kansas lives underwater, you haven't
Speaker 1: been paying attention to what people see standing up. The
Speaker 1: serpent at least makes a kind of sense. There was
Speaker 1: a sea, there's a hollow under the ground, there's deep
Speaker 1: water that animals avoid, and you can build a story
Speaker 1: out of geology if you squint. The serpent stays in
Speaker 1: its lane, it stays wet. You can decide where it
Speaker 1: lives and then decide not to go there. But the
Speaker 1: other thing people report in Kansas doesn't stay anywhere. It walks,
Speaker 1: it crosses roads, it stands at the tree line at
Speaker 1: the back of a field and watches a man the
Speaker 1: way a man watches a deer, and it leaves the
Speaker 1: one thing sinkhole. Sam never has the decency to leave.
Speaker 2: It leaves tracks.
Speaker 1: Kansas is bigfoot country, and I know how that sounds.
Speaker 1: I know you're picturing rainforest and mountains and not a
Speaker 1: single wheat field. But run a river through any flat
Speaker 1: country and you've got a green corridor, bottom land, timber,
Speaker 1: cottonwood and willow and brush so thick you can't see
Speaker 1: ten feet, water and cover and game, a highway of
Speaker 1: forest running right through the middle of all that open
Speaker 1: The Mairee Designa, the Nao show the Ninniska, the same
Speaker 1: river they dug Kingman's Lake out beside. The plains aren't empty.
Speaker 1: They've got veins in them, and things travel veins. People
Speaker 1: forget that a river is a road. They look at
Speaker 1: the open country on either side and call it a barrier,
Speaker 1: when the water and the timber along it are the
Speaker 1: opposite of a barrier. The one path a big, shy
Speaker 1: animal can move along for one hundred miles and never
Speaker 1: break cover, never cross a headlight, never show itself to
Speaker 1: the open ground the way the wheat would force it
Speaker 1: to follow the green line on a Kansas map, the
Speaker 1: cottonwood and the brush tracing every creek and river across
Speaker 1: all that emptiness, and you've drawn the exact map of
Speaker 1: where the reports cluster. They don't cluster in the wheat,
Speaker 1: they cluster on the water. Same as the serpent. Whatever
Speaker 1: Kansas hides, it hides where the trees meet the water,
Speaker 1: and it moves at night along the rivers. And it's
Speaker 1: been doing that since before old Chef knocked down his
Speaker 1: first fence. The serpent is what comes up out of
Speaker 1: the low places. The other thing is what comes down
Speaker 1: out of the timber. And the people who've met the
Speaker 1: second one don't laugh about it anymore than the people
Speaker 1: who've met the first. And this goes back further than
Speaker 1: you may think. Eighteen sixty nine, Crawford County, Southeast Kansas,
Speaker 1: just a few years after the Civil War, before half
Speaker 1: these towns had a proper main street, something started raiding
Speaker 1: the farms. It knocked down fences, it turned livestock loose,
Speaker 1: It tore up the grain fields and ate its fill.
Speaker 1: And it came back and the people got nervous. They
Speaker 1: went after it counts say as many as sixty citizens
Speaker 1: turned out and chased the thing through the fields, and
Speaker 1: they saw it well enough in daylight to describe it.
Speaker 1: A witness name Tremble gave the description that survives, and
Speaker 1: it's the one that stops people cold even now because
Speaker 1: of what he said and what he wouldn't do. The creature,
Speaker 1: Tremble said, had so near a resemblance to a human
Speaker 1: form that the men were unwilling to shoot it. Sixty
Speaker 1: armed men one hundred and fifty years ago chasing a
Speaker 1: thing that had been robbing them blind, with every reason
Speaker 1: in the world and the law and the whole community
Speaker 1: behind them to put it down, and they couldn't do it.
Speaker 1: They wouldn't pull the trigger because it looked too much
Speaker 1: like a man, stooped and hairy and long armed, walking
Speaker 1: up on two legs and then dropping to all fours
Speaker 1: when it ran, and yet enough like a person in
Speaker 1: the face or the carriage or the eyes that sixty
Speaker 1: angry farmers lowered their guns rather than commit what would
Speaker 1: feel to a man like murder.
Speaker 2: They called it.
Speaker 1: Old Chef, and Old Chef is the oldest written bigfoot
Speaker 1: report in the state, and it sets the pattern that
Speaker 1: every report after it just repeats, big and hairy and
Speaker 1: upright and too human to shoot. Around the same era.
Speaker 1: Up in Washington County, in the far north, people told
Speaker 1: of a wild man, a gorilla in the woods, shaggy,
Speaker 1: passed all reason, walking on all fours, and then standing
Speaker 1: up to walk like a man, and once again the
Speaker 1: same catch in the throat, nobody wanting to shoot it
Speaker 1: because it looked too much like.
Speaker 2: One of us.
Speaker 1: Two corners of the state decades apart, strangers to each other,
Speaker 1: and the same animal, and the same hesitation, and the
Speaker 1: same reason for the hesitation. October of nineteen ninety nine,
Speaker 1: Lynn County, Eastern Kansas. The bottom land along the Mare
Speaker 1: de Signor River country so swampy and thick it barely
Speaker 1: belongs in the same state as the wheat. A bow
Speaker 1: hunter named Chad was out before dawn with his uncle,
Speaker 1: the two of them up in portable tree stands over
Speaker 1: a stretch of bottoms. About an hour into a cold
Speaker 1: morning hunt, the uncle heard splashing, and the two of
Speaker 1: them sat there and watched something come through the swamp
Speaker 1: that was not a deer and not a man seven
Speaker 1: feet tall maybe eight, covered in black hair, matted with mud,
Speaker 1: a head that came to a point at the top,
Speaker 1: and long arms that swung as it moved, and it
Speaker 1: was wading through the water picking at something working at
Speaker 1: the surface, feeding, with no idea it had an audience.
Speaker 1: The two hunters didn't move. Chad said later they were
Speaker 1: frozen in place out of fear that the only reason
Speaker 1: it didn't know they were there was that they'd locked
Speaker 1: up solid in their stands. And then it turned and
Speaker 1: it made eye contact, and it looked right at the
Speaker 1: two of them up in the trees and held that look,
Speaker 1: and then it went over a rise and was gone.
Speaker 1: The Bigfoot Researcher's Organization rated their encounter Class A their
Speaker 1: top tier, the kind they reserved for clear sightings by
Speaker 1: credible people at close range. He witnesses with daylight coming on,
Speaker 1: and a bow hunter who knows every animal in those
Speaker 1: woods by its gate at fifty yards telling you the
Speaker 1: thing he watched wade through the mare des Signa wasn't
Speaker 1: anything he'd seen before. Go back to nineteen eighty four
Speaker 1: Sedgwick County, which is Wichitas County, not exactly the deep Woods.
Speaker 2: A woman and her.
Speaker 1: Young daughter were walking a dark country lane and something
Speaker 1: paced them, staying off in the dark alongside, matching their
Speaker 1: every step the two made at home, and what she
Speaker 1: carried away from it was the certainty that the thing
Speaker 1: in the dark had been keeping pace on purpose, following them,
Speaker 1: not just passing through. February of twenty fifteen, the western
Speaker 1: edge of Kansas City, just past midnight, a retired police
Speaker 1: officer on his way home saw a large, hairy beast
Speaker 1: run across the road in front of his car. He
Speaker 1: was close five feet maybe, and his headlights and another
Speaker 1: car's headlights lit it up as it crossed, and he
Speaker 1: only caught the back of it going away, but he
Speaker 1: clocked the size, big as a horse or an elk,
Speaker 1: and the hair two or three inches long, wavy, near
Speaker 1: to curley in places, a dirty blonde color lighter than brown.
Speaker 1: A retired officer reporting a thing he knows will get
Speaker 1: him laughed at putting it on the record anyway, because
Speaker 1: he saw what he saw, and old habits about telling
Speaker 1: the truth die hard. December of twenty twenty, Miami County,
Speaker 1: about twenty miles west of Kansas City, a man named
Speaker 1: Paul out hunting after dark and heavy timber. He heard
Speaker 1: coyotes going that ordinary wild racket, and then a smell
Speaker 1: rolled over him, a stench he couldn't place and couldn't stand.
Speaker 1: And then the coyotes quit all at once, and the
Speaker 1: woods went silent, and into that silence came the sound
Speaker 1: of something big moving through the timber, limbs breaking, and
Speaker 1: then a whole tree coming down. He didn't see it,
Speaker 1: and he didn't need to see it. The smell and
Speaker 1: the silence and the breaking wood told him everything. His
Speaker 1: eyes were too dark to confirm, and he got out
Speaker 1: of there. And then March of twenty twenty five, last spring,
Speaker 1: twelve miles north of Topeka and Jackson County, two men
Speaker 1: out at dusk and a side by side running a
Speaker 1: rural road. One of them, a man named Warren, noticed
Speaker 1: movement out in a field and arm swinging, and figured
Speaker 1: at first it was something mechanical, a piece of farm equipment.
Speaker 1: Maybe they stopped at the fence line, and it wasn't equipment.
Speaker 1: It was tall seven and a half to eight and
Speaker 1: a half feet, the same coned head and the same
Speaker 1: black hair, and the same long swinging arms as every
Speaker 1: account before it, going back to old Chef Warren hollered
Speaker 1: at it and tried to make it stop, but it
Speaker 1: kept walking. It turned its head and looked back at
Speaker 1: them mid stride, rotating at the waist and shoulders and
Speaker 1: turning its head just enough to glance at them. And
Speaker 1: then it kept walking at the exact same pace toward
Speaker 1: a grove of trees, and was gone. The researcher who
Speaker 1: worked that case went out and measured, and she came
Speaker 1: within sixty yard guards of where the thing had stood,
Speaker 1: and found a depression pressed into the grass seventeen and
Speaker 1: a half inches by seven, and ran a three dimensional
Speaker 1: scan of it that she said suggested a heel.
Speaker 2: And a toe.
Speaker 1: And it isn't only the close encounters. The whole back
Speaker 1: catalog of that state runs heavy with them. Coffee County
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy four, Montgomery County in nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: Geary County in nineteen eighty, Crawford County again in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty two, the same county as old Chef. More than
Speaker 1: a century later, the thing still working the same ground. Bourbon, Riley, Sumner, Neoshow, Douglas, Shawnee, Miami,
Speaker 1: Celine County after county after county, a scatter of reports
Speaker 1: so even across the map that you stop thinking of
Speaker 1: it as a hotspot and start thinking of it as
Speaker 1: a residency. Something lives there, spread, thin and quiet and careful,
Speaker 1: but there. The researchers came to take it seriously enough
Speaker 1: that in twenty thirteen, a tw television crew, the Finding
Speaker 1: Bigfoot people off the Animal Planet channel, came to Wichita
Speaker 1: to work a case a large footprint somebody had found
Speaker 1: pressed into the ice near a flood control channel. The
Speaker 1: locals call the big Ditch, a footprint in the ice
Speaker 1: in the middle of a city, big enough to bring
Speaker 1: a film crew across the country. A Kansas City investigator
Speaker 1: named Carter Bouchard, whom I've interviewed on my other podcast
Speaker 1: Sasquatch Odyssey several times, has spent years on this interviewing
Speaker 1: witnesses and walking riverbanks and running expeditions through the bottomland counties.
Speaker 1: A sober man doing patient, unglamorous work on a thing
Speaker 1: most people won't say out loud at a dinner party.
Speaker 1: And under the famous cases, there's the ordinary traffic, the
Speaker 1: reports that never make a headline. Two friends fishing a
Speaker 1: creek outside some small town near eleven at night, passing
Speaker 1: the time by knocking two sticks together to break the
Speaker 1: boredom and getting an answer back out of the dark timber.
Speaker 1: A knock returned, then another closing in until they reeled
Speaker 1: up and left the fish biting. A pair of turkey
Speaker 1: hunters crawling into a field at five in the morning,
Speaker 1: who heard sounds they only placed later after they'd heard
Speaker 1: recordings of what other people had heard. A man driving
Speaker 1: home from Council Grove with a coffee and a pack
Speaker 1: of cigarettes just after daybreak, the fog lifting in patches,
Speaker 1: who slowed for something crossing the road that the fog
Speaker 1: wouldn't let him fully see, and that walked upright into
Speaker 1: the gray and was gone. A family that's kept a
Speaker 1: cabin on the Neosho River for twenty five years, running
Speaker 1: limb lines for catfish the way they always have. Who'll
Speaker 1: tell you the woods out there go a particular kind
Speaker 1: of wrong after dark, and who keep going anyway because
Speaker 1: it's their cabin and their river. And a man doesn't
Speaker 1: surrender his catfish to a thing he can't even prove
Speaker 1: is real. County after county, a century and a half
Speaker 1: of the same animal described the same way by people
Speaker 1: who'd never met and had nothing to gain. Old chef
Speaker 1: knocked down fences in eighteen sixty nine, and Warren watched
Speaker 1: the same thing look back at him over its shoulder
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty five. And whatever it is, it has
Speaker 1: been walking the green veins of this flat, empty state
Speaker 1: the whole time, all one hundred and fifty years of it.
Speaker 1: And it leaves a track seventeen inches long, and it
Speaker 1: is in no hurry at all, and it does not
Speaker 1: run from us. It just looks back and keeps the
Speaker 1: same pace and goes over the hill. There's another kind still,
Speaker 1: the ones with no last name and no mappen, the
Speaker 1: ones told to me in driveways and feed stores and
Speaker 1: across truck hoods. The ones I can't prove and won't
Speaker 1: pretend I can take them for what they are. I
Speaker 1: find the shape of them too consistent to leave out.
Speaker 1: There was a man named Dale who farmed a section
Speaker 1: with a creek running through the back of it, timber along.
Speaker 2: The water the way there always is.
Speaker 1: His dog wouldn't go past a certain point along that creek.
Speaker 1: A good dog, a working dog, the kind that'll go
Speaker 1: any where you point it. And it would get to
Speaker 1: one bend in the timber and stop and lower its
Speaker 1: head and growl low and back up, and no amount
Speaker 1: of coaxing would put it past that bend. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: Dale walked the bend himself one evening to settle the matter,
Speaker 1: and found the trees twisted, green limbs, wrist thick, bent
Speaker 1: and broken and woven together across the path at about
Speaker 1: the height of his own head, a kind of mess
Speaker 1: that no wind makes, because wind breaks things downward in
Speaker 1: a way, and these were turned and bent across on
Speaker 1: purpose by something with hands and a reason. He left
Speaker 1: it the way he found it, and took the dog home,
Speaker 1: and he started carrying a rifle to the back of
Speaker 1: his own land, which he told me he'd never once
Speaker 1: done in thirty years of farming it. There was a
Speaker 1: woman named Brenda whose porch light caught eyeshine at the
Speaker 1: edge of her yard, up high, too high. She figured
Speaker 1: a deer at first, but deer eyes sit lower, and
Speaker 1: deer to stand still that long. And this stood at
Speaker 1: the tree line, at the height of a man's head
Speaker 1: and a foot more, two points of reflected light, steady
Speaker 1: in the dark for a long minute, while she stood
Speaker 1: frozen with her hand on the door. Then the eyeeshine
Speaker 1: went out. It turned its head away, she said, and
Speaker 1: the shine just stopped. And she heard one heavy footfall
Speaker 1: in the leaves, and then nothing, and she went in
Speaker 1: and locked up and didn't sleep. She never saw a body.
Speaker 1: She saw two lights at the wrong height, and then
Speaker 1: she heard the weight of the thing take one step,
Speaker 1: and that was plenty. There was a trucker, a fellow
Speaker 1: named Ray, who pulled into a rest stop along a
Speaker 1: Kansas Highway to sleep in his cab the way truckers do,
Speaker 1: and woke in the dark to the whole truck rocking,
Speaker 1: not wind, a steady push and release, like something leaning
Speaker 1: on the trailer and stepping away and leaning again, walking
Speaker 1: the length of his rig with a hand on it.
Speaker 1: He lay there in his bunk and didn't turn on
Speaker 1: a light and didn't look, just lay still and listen
Speaker 1: to whatever it was, walk the length of his truck
Speaker 1: and feel its way along the side of it. And
Speaker 1: then the rocking stopped, and he heard the gravel crunch
Speaker 1: off toward the dark at the edge of the lot.
Speaker 1: He waited until full daylight to climb out the mud
Speaker 1: along his trailer had hand smears in it, he said,
Speaker 1: up high, longer than his own hand by half. He
Speaker 1: didn't report it, he told me at a counter over
Speaker 1: coffee a year later, and made me promise not to
Speaker 1: use his last name, Which is the only reason you're
Speaker 1: getting it at all, because a man who's afraid of
Speaker 1: being laughed at is usually a man telling the truth.
Speaker 1: There was a hired man named Junior who worked a
Speaker 1: place with a hog operation, and the hogs went off
Speaker 1: one night, the whole barn of them screaming, which is
Speaker 1: a sound that'll put you on your feet out of
Speaker 1: a dead sleep. He went out with a light and
Speaker 1: found the hogs piled in the far corner of the pen,
Speaker 1: climbing over each other to get away from the fence.
Speaker 1: And along the fence in the wet ground were tracks
Speaker 1: pressed deep, longer than his boot and wider the toes spread,
Speaker 1: coming up out of the creek bottom and going back
Speaker 1: down into it. He counted them, with the light shaking
Speaker 1: in his hand. Whatever it was had walked the length
Speaker 1: of that hog fence in the dark, close enough to
Speaker 1: reach through, and the hogs had known it was there
Speaker 1: long before he did. The same way Walt's cattle knew
Speaker 1: about the pond the same way Carol's horses knew the
Speaker 1: same way Dale's dog knew about the bend in the creek.
Speaker 1: The animals always know first, and that's the part nobody likes.
Speaker 1: By the time it gets to us, by the time
Speaker 1: a man comes out with a light, it's already had
Speaker 1: its look and gone back to the water. And there
Speaker 1: was a girl, Hannah twelve or thirteen, who was out
Speaker 1: at the family pond at dusk. And this is the
Speaker 1: one that ties the whole drive back together for me,
Speaker 1: because Hannah's pond was a sinkhole pond, one of those
Speaker 1: low wet eyes in the pasture. Hannah went down to
Speaker 1: it to call the dogs in and stopped because the
Speaker 1: water smelled wrong, that cellar smell, that cold mineral breath.
Speaker 1: And then she saw the thing at the edge of
Speaker 1: the timber across the water, tall and dark and standing
Speaker 1: watching the same pond. She was watching the serpent's water
Speaker 1: and the timber's animal sharing a bank at dusk, and
Speaker 1: a girl standing between the two of them with her
Speaker 1: dogs whining at her heels. She didn't pick which one
Speaker 1: to be afraid of. She ran from both. She told
Speaker 1: it to me years later, grown, and she still couldn't
Speaker 1: say which one she'd been closer to, the thing in
Speaker 1: the trees or the thing in the water, And she
Speaker 1: wasn't at all certain they were two separate things. That's
Speaker 1: the one that stays with me, because what if they aren't.
Speaker 1: What if the warning the arapahoe carried, the rule Ruth's
Speaker 1: grandmother handed down with no reason attached, the hesitation that
Speaker 1: made sixty armed men lower their guns at Old Chef.
Speaker 1: What if all of it is the same warning worn
Speaker 1: into different shapes by different people on the same hollow ground.
Speaker 1: Stay away from the low water, don't shoot the thing
Speaker 1: that looks like a man, Come away from the edge.
Speaker 1: Maybe those are two animals, the wet one and the
Speaker 1: dry one. Probably they are, Or maybe there are two
Speaker 1: faces of one old fact about that country, which is
Speaker 1: that it is not as empty as it pretends and
Speaker 1: not as solid as it looks, And that the people
Speaker 1: who've lived on it longest have always known to keep
Speaker 1: their children back from certain places, and have always known
Speaker 1: better than to ask too loudly, what's keeping the pond
Speaker 1: so dark? There's a detail I saved, and I saved
Speaker 1: it because it knots the two threads together so neatly.
Speaker 1: I almost don't trust it, and I'll let you decide.
Speaker 1: Kingman County, the same county where the serpent took the
Speaker 1: calf in sixty seven. Somewhere in the records there's a
Speaker 1: bigfoot report out of that same county, a thing seen
Speaker 1: at a bridge standing on the west bank of the water,
Speaker 1: just north of where you cross wooded, right there at
Speaker 1: the crossing, and open farm ground all around. A man
Speaker 1: came over the bridge, and there it was, down by
Speaker 1: the water where the timber meets the creek. A bridge
Speaker 1: with water under it and timber on the bank is
Speaker 1: the exact seam where this whole story lives. The serpent
Speaker 1: comes up out of the water on one side of
Speaker 1: that seam, and the tall thing comes down out of
Speaker 1: the trees on the other, and a bridge is just
Speaker 1: the narrow place where a person crosses over the top
Speaker 1: of both of them and prays, nothing's home. Albert Neufeld
Speaker 1: took his shots at Sinkle Sam from a bridge back
Speaker 1: at the very start of all this. The young Mennite
Speaker 1: stood on a bridge over the Big Sinkle and fired
Speaker 1: down into the water at the long pale thing. A
Speaker 1: man on a bridge with the water below him, firing
Speaker 1: at what came up. And in another county, another man
Speaker 1: crosses another bridge and finds the other thing waiting at
Speaker 1: the bank. We build bridges to get over the water
Speaker 1: without touching it. And that's the whole point of a bridge,
Speaker 1: an admission, if you think about it, that there are
Speaker 1: places a person isn't meant to step down into low places,
Speaker 1: dark water, soft banks, And so we throw a span
Speaker 1: across and hurry over the top, and tell ourselves were
Speaker 1: only saving our boots. But the old people weren't saving
Speaker 1: their boots. Ruth's grandmother wasn't worried about wet socks. There's
Speaker 1: a reason under the rule that got lost on the
Speaker 1: way down to us. And the reason is older than inman,
Speaker 1: and older than the territory, and maybe older than the
Speaker 1: salt going to water in the dark. And it comes
Speaker 1: down to the same handful of things every culture that
Speaker 1: ever lived on hollow ground worked out on its own.
Speaker 1: Stay back from the low water, don't go down where
Speaker 1: the bank is soft, and whatever you do when something
Speaker 1: comes up out of it or down out of the
Speaker 1: trees toward it and it turns its head and looks
Speaker 1: at you the way a man looks at a thing
Speaker 1: that isn't a threat. You do not get to find
Speaker 1: out what it is. You back up, you fill the
Speaker 1: tank on the far side of the field. You take
Speaker 1: your children home. I don't believe in the foop and gircle.
Speaker 1: I don't believe a thirty foot grinning worm commutes between
Speaker 1: counties through flooded salt caverns under the wheat. I'm an
Speaker 1: evidence man, and the evidence isn't there. But I believe
Speaker 1: the ground out there is hollow. The survey proved it
Speaker 1: with seismographs and rifle shots fired down boreholes more than
Speaker 1: one hundred places where the salt has gone to water
Speaker 1: and the rooms are waiting, and the dust comes up
Speaker 1: on the wind as the only warning you'll ever get.
Speaker 1: I believe the cattle won't drink. I believe a retired
Speaker 1: cop saw something cross a road, and a bow hunter
Speaker 1: watched something way to swamp, and a girl at a
Speaker 1: sinkhole pond at dusk had to choose which fear to
Speaker 1: run from, and ran from both. I believe sixty men
Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty nine lowered their rifles for a reason.
Speaker 1: They couldn't have explained, and that the reason was good.
Speaker 1: And I believe that the next time you're driving across Kansas,
Speaker 1: you should take one good look at the dark water
Speaker 1: sitting in the low spots off the side of the road,
Speaker 1: the ponds that stay full when everything else dries out,
Speaker 1: the ones with no fish in them, the ones the
Speaker 1: cattle stand back front. Look at them, and then look
Speaker 1: at the tree line behind them. And then do the
Speaker 1: smart thing, the thing every grandmother on that hollow ground
Speaker 1: would tell you to do. Keep driving and don't stop
Speaker 1: at the bridge. Di