Speaker 1: I grew up in a small rural community in eastern Tennessee.
Were located on I seventy five, equal distance between Knoxville
and the Kentucky state line. Although I don't remember the
exact years of these encounters, I'm now fifty six, I
must have been around fourteen or fifteen when the first
incident occurred. My mom and dad were friends with a
family that lived up the road from us. They had
several boys, the youngest of them being about my age.
When we were at their house, we would hang out
with the boy who was my age and his two
brothers who were a little bit older. We'd swim and
hunt and hike and do whatever we thought was fun
to do at any given moment. Meanwhile, my dad had
a drinking buddy and my mom had a friend to
talk to. One day, their youngest son and I were
out wandering around the mountain above his house and doing
what teenage boys do when we came across an abandoned
strip mine. We were walking along what had once been
a road, and we came to a pile of dirt
that was twelve feet high. It had deliberately been placed
there to keep vehicles out these days, it wouldn't have
stopped at ATV, but back then ATVs were unheard of.
We were fifteen feet from the roadblock when my buddy
told me to go on ahead. Had to take a dump. Yes,
that's the way people do it. If you gotta go,
you gotta go, and you just go right there in
the woods. I've done it many times since. I had
no desire to watch that. I kept walking. About the
time I put my foot on a huge pile of dirt,
something on the other side of it roared. It was
a kind of loud, tooth rattling, angry roar that told
me that this thing was big and it was pissed.
I passed. My buddy was running with his pants still
around his knees, and I jumped over the bank from
the road and didn't stop till I got back to
his house a mile away. My buddy did a pretty
good job of keeping pace, even with his pants not
quite fastened. No one wanted to believe us when we
told our story. We never did see anything, so in truth,
it could have been a bear, and this area isn't
known for bears, though, and I've hunted and searched for
gensing in these mountains all my life, and I've never
once seen any sign of a bear, not once. But
we didn't see anything, so a bear can't be ruled
out entirely. And I can't speak for my buddy, but
I never ventured back up there again. It was a
couple of years after that, and some twenty five miles away,
when I was out Genseeng hunting one morning with two
of my dad's brothers. One was my age, maybe sixteen
or seventeen at the time, and the other was a
few years younger. We were allowed to go into the
woods by ourselves, but the only weapons we carried would
have been something to dig the gensen with and maybe
a pocket knife. The area we were in was called Clenchmore. Now.
I don't remember if we had much luck that day,
but we were on our way back to their house,
my Mama and Papa's house as a crow flies. It
wasn't that far, but we were going to have to
walk almost a mile further down the little creek that
we were following and cross a bridge to our left,
and then turned back in the direction from where we
were coming. On the opposite ridge. I argued that we
should go up the ridge and down the other side,
and then we'd be home in half the time. My
younger uncle was all for that, but my older uncle
said that it would put several more ridges between us
and home, thus making the walk a lot longer. Today,
I know he was right, but on that day I
could not be persuaded to follow that stream any further.
My older uncle was just as determined to stay his course,
and after a few more minutes of arguing, we kept
on walking down the creek while my younger uncle and
I started up the small dry wash that fed the
water off the ridge into the creek. After a rain.
On that day, there hadn't been any rain, so it
was dry and climbing up the wash from rock to
rock was pretty easy. We made it one hundred yards
up that ridge when the same thing happened again. That
happened to be and my friend, something big and angry,
roared at us. It sounded like it was maybe fifty
feet ahead of us, but we never saw anything, and
then again we didn't stop to look. We just turned
and did our best not to break our necks as
we flew back down the wash. My older uncle was
several hundred feet down the creek when we caught up
with him. His distance us and the creek splashing and
gurgling alongside him drowned out any chance of him hearing
what we had heard, and we told him about it,
but he just laughed and called us liars. He said
we made it up because we realized that he was
right and didn't want to own up to it. Again.
I admit that it could have been a bear, but again,
that area is not known for bears, and all my
years I've never seen a single track or any sign
of a bear in that area. So was it a bigfoot?
I don't know, but if it was, he probably got
a good life both times as he watched us running
for our lives, just as an afterthought. When I was
very young, my papa owned a farm where he grew
enough food to raise a very large family, and he
and my mama had fourteen kids and my dad was
the oldest boy. The farm probably wasn't as large as
I remember it. I was only ten or eleven when
they sold it and moved up the road, but as
a child it felt like it was huge. Beside the
normal crops, they raised a large garden and canned most
of it for later use. Papa raised pigs and chickens,
and he had a couple of horses. He even owned
a mule that my dad used for plowing. On the side,
I think he and my dad made a bit of
shine to make ends meat. The farm bordered a river
on one side, but past the river was miles and
miles of wilderness. As for their side of the river,
except for an occasional house, there wasn't much across an
old swing bridge that isn't there anymore, was a small
settlement of fifteen houses in a church. There were no
stores outside of one little place that sold bare essentials,
and the entire area was sparsely populated. On the farm,
we kids would often venture out towards the back of
the house to play, and when we'd get a little
too close to the woods, my ever watchful Mama would
stick her head out the back door and warn us
not to go into those woods. That old harry man,
I'll get you, she'd say, that old harry man. And
I always wondered where the idea of a hairy man
came from. I never thought to ask until it was
too late to do so. On a summer weekend in
two thousand and nine, three twenty something men hiked into
the Colorado Rockies for a week of backpacking. I was
good friends with one of those men. All three were
in good shape, so a week at those elevations was easy.
The hike was uneventful and fun for the first two days.
They woke from their second night at camp at an
elevation of ninety five hundred feet. The small fire was
warm and the coffee was good. The unusual thick fog
surrounded the area. They had been in the mountains all
their lives and not seen a fog. This thick visibility
was only ten feet. The plan was to wait out
the fog and hope it dissipated so they could continue
their hike until the fog lifted. They agreed that none
of them would venture beyond the small radius of the tents.
One of the men needed to relieve himself after coffee.
He told his mates he was walking just beyond the
tent and for them to keep talking so he could
find his way back just in case. Minutes passed and
the men called for their friend. They walked in the
direction he had walked, and their friend had vanished. Within
an hour, visibility had improved, but the third man was gone.
They searched for him as best as two men could
in that terrain, and through the morning they climbed to
an elevation they thought they might have achieve a cellular signal.
They called nine to one one for help, and they
continued their search, combing the area for hours. They found nothing,
so they backtracked past the last two nights camp sites
and finally back to their vehicles late the next day.
When they met up with the search team, they were
discouraged to hear their friend was still missing. The next day,
fifty miles away as the crow flies, and probably one
hundred and fifty if he had walked it, the man
was found by state police walking a dirt road away
from the area. He was confused and disoriented. He was
unsure of his location and had no idea how he
had got there. Otherwise, he was in good health, no
exposure to the elements. It's just that he was a
blank on what had happened last month. I asked my friend,
who was his hiking partner on that trip, if he
had talked to the lost man since this episode. He
responded with a hearty yes. They were best friends and
they talked all the time, I asked the obvious question,
had he figured out what had happened that week? He
had not, and to this day doesn't understand or remember
how he made it to that mountain dirt road so
far away. I asked my friend what he thought. He
only shrugged and told me that no human could walk
that distance in the mountains during the timeframe that he
was missing. He went on to say, they all agreed
that it would remain a mystery. There is an explanation, though,
but you would have to believe in alien abductions for
it to work. My encounter took place in the Arkansas
National Forest of northwest Arkansas. But before I tell you
my story, I'd like to give you some background about myself.
My family roots run deep, deep in the Ozark Mountains
of northwest Arkansas, but I was born and raised in Houston, Texas,
and I was raised as a NASA brat. My father,
in his youth, as his father and his father before that,
lived and worked on the land just outside of Goshen, Arkansas,
just a few minutes drive east of Fayetteville. My father
seek to life outside of the farm life and was
known to read his share of science fiction novels. As
a teenager, he was fascinated with anything outer space. He
later attended the University of Arkansas in Fayettville and he
acquired a PhD in geology. He then moved to Pasadena,
California to do graduate studies, and a short time later
he took a job at NASA as a scientist at
the Johnson Space Center in Houston. During the Apollo missions.
One of his early tasks was to study the moon
rocks that were brought back. He would sometimes sneak me
into his NASA lab, located on the top story of
the NASA building that made space food, amongst other things.
His office was in Building thirty one. In his lab
was in Building thirty four. If I remember all this correctly,
the building next door to his lab was where the
Saturn rockets were constructed. Upon one visit, I actually saw
the moon rock's first hand. So having lived the Apollo
mission's first hand, it gave me an open mind to
the unknown. As a teenager growing up in the outside
suburbs of Houston, I was also able to make my
way into the great outdoors. I was a boy scout
and we would take numerous camping trips throughout Texas, the
hill country and the piney woods alike. My mother's parents
owned a ranch in northeast Texas and it was a
frequent family destination for holidays and sometimes just for a
family vacation. I learned how to fish, hunt and pitch
a tent in basic survival skills at the early age. Now,
I would often take tracks into the woods by myself,
without a care in the world. Thinking back on certain
events that happened back then, I now look back on
it with a different viewpoint, mostly because what I'm about
to tell you is my later experience in the Ozark
National Forest at night, and it has profoundly changed the
way I look at my life. I moved to northwest
Arkansas in two thousand and four. I was burnt out
with the status quo of what Texas life had for me,
and I was looking for a change. My parents had
since divorced, and my brother and mother had moved to
Rai's Mill, Arkansas. They had already run into the hills,
and now it was my turn. Their house, along with
the small house behind, is on several acres of land.
There was once a mill there, hence the name Ray's Mill.
That spot was where the Union Army during the Civil
War was stationed during the Battle of Prairie Grove. My
brother has even unearthed the cannonball on their land. Shortly
after I moved to northwest Arkansas, I would frequently fish
at a small local lake just down from Ray's Mill,
and I would often park my truck a short walking
distance from the dam and then walk up and over
the dam, and then fish from the dam bank on
a later visit, hoping I would have better luck bagging
some brim I began to work my way off the
dam and into some thick brush and trees to get
to the larger boulder protruding over the lake's bank. As
I approached the tree line, I began have an eerie
feeling came over me out of nowhere. Now I've been
in the woods alone many times before and have never
felt the jeepers creepers. I quickly grabbed my ride and
reel along with my tackle box, and I made it
back to my truck. I've not been back to Lincoln
Lake since a year later, around two thousand and six,
I was working and living in Springdale. I was forty
five minutes from my mom's I had just gone into
business for myself, and I was single and I lived alone.
I would often get bored and I was known to
take drives throughout the mountains and sometimes even at night.
I had an older model Chevy Suburban four wheel drive
that I had jazzed up with some awesome stereo speakers.
I found that late night cruises while listening to some
tunes was quite soothing. I would often take cruises to
my mother's and stop in to say hello and rob
her a refrigerator. One late night, I decided I need
to get out for a cruise. I was going to
head to moms. I started down the freeway and then
exited off onto Highway sixteen. It's a two lane highway
that resembles a roller coaster. I continue down Highway sixteen
twenty miles and then I turned left onto Weddington Blacktop.
It was County Road thirty three, and then it would
just be another ten miles or so before turning off
to get to Molms. I crossed the Illinois River Bridge
and made a sharp curve to the left. It went
up a steep hill and then entered the Ozark National Forest.
It was dark, only my headlights lighting up what little
road that had constant turning of my truck to stay
in the unstraightened winding road ahead of me. No shoulders
on this highway, not like Texas road that I was
used to driving, and very little in the way of
road stripping. There were tall trees to my left. At
the time, there was no cell service. I was smack
dab in the middle of nowhere. It was paradise, I thought.
The road began to wind sharply downhill and to the left,
and I could now see the beginnings of water to
the left of me. As the road leveled off, I
had reached Weddington Lake, and as I began to climb
up the next hill, I remembered there was a small
pall off lookout to my left and I needed to
go to the bathroom. I pulled my suburban over across
the incoming lane and onto the lookout shoulder, and I
left my motor running along with my headlights. I stepped out,
leaving my truck door open, and I began to relieve myself.
To the right of me, there was somewhat of a
cliff overseeing a small pond on the opposite side of
the lake, which was to my left, and I found
myself fixated on that rich top. Then I had this
overwhelming feeling come over me. The hairs on the back
of my neck began to stand up, and goose bumps
were running down my arms, and a strong feeling that
someone or something was watching me. I was standing outside
of a lit up truck, smack dab in the middle
of nowhere, and I was a sitting duck. I whipped
it back into my pants before oh oh, gotch okay,
I'll leave that in. I whipped it back into my
past before finishing and threw it in and I burnt
rubber up the hill. Eventually, I shook it off as nothing. Man,
You've just got all kind of innue windows in this story.
Some years later, I had married and had become a daddy.
My family and I went hiking through the same lake,
but on the other side. We eventually made it to
a rock covered enclosure and the parks and recreation had built.
Some years back, those same eerie feelings came back. Something
wasn't right. I kept it to myself and we finished
our day of fun. A short time later, I found
myself researching bigfoot sightings in Arkansas, and guess what a
sighting had been documented in that same area just prior
to my roadside event. Also read of a sighting of
a red headed bigfoot digging in the sand underneath the
bridge along the Illinois River, and come to find out,
sightings had been documented all over this area, dating back years.
I then began to think of my childhood, and then
the things began to add up, like the time my
grandmother would tell my brother and I as kids not
to venture back into certain parts of the wooded areas,
the times grandpa's bird dogs would go into a barking
frenzy in the middle of the night and he would
step outside shooting a shotgun into the air. I can't
adventure into the woods much anymore, certainly not alone, and
certainly not at night. I'm a believer, So say what
you will when you know you know. When I was
a kid back in the nineteen seventies, we were packed
up every summer and sent to a two week church
camp seventy five miles from my home. Our age determined
the camp that we would be sent to, but we
were all sent to camp. One of the last summers
I went, I was about twelve or thirteen at the
time my cabin went on an overnight camp out to
a summit that overlooked a valley. It was very bucolic,
had the usual campfire with roasted marshmallows and spooky stories.
There was one about an old hermit with a missing
hand that he'd replaced with a claw. I no longer
remember the gory details, but it ended with the customary
and he still walks these hills today. I think I
told that story to my granddaughters about a month ago
when we were camping. That's a real common spooky ghost story. Anyway,
our camp counselor was a master at the craft of storytelling,
and by the time he was done, we were all spooked,
even though we tried to act like we weren't. So,
with the old hermit's claw embedded deeply in our psyches,
we headed off to bed in our pup tennis to
try to get some sleep, with the counselor calling Sweet
Dreams Boys. Later that night, we heard the sounds of
thunder in the distance, but it was just the beginning.
The wee hours of the night, maybe two am or so,
we began to hear scuffling noises around our little campsite.
There were eight to ten of us kids and one
counselor in five tents. The scuffling turned into growls, and
the growls became a hermit with a missing hand, and
we were all terrified. Some of the kids and the
other tents were asking what is that. The counselor continued
to sleep blissfully as our terror escalated to the point
that we were too afraid to even peek out of
our tents. We could now hear sniffing and snorting sounds
by our tents, followed by more growling. I was too
terrified to make so much as a sound, even as
the fat kid with whom I was sharing a tent,
was making his best effort to crawl underneath me. I
envisioned a hermit's claw tearing through the fabric as my
tent mat crushed me against the side of the tent. Next,
we heard stuff being rummaged through and things being dragged
off the back. Kid and I were sure it was
the other kids being dragged out of their tents, and
we held our breath in anticipation of our turn. Suddenly,
a loud thunderclap exploded overhead, and the entire camp erupted
with a resounding scream. My tent mate crawled over me,
digging his knee into my back as he tried to
escape our tent. It might not have been so bad
if I wasn't a little skinny kid even for my age.
We knew the one handed hermit would be waiting for
us as we exited the tent, but panic was in
control now, and we soon found ourselves standing together with
the other kids in the middle of the camp, just
in time for the clouds to burst and soak us
in buckets of rain. The thunder and the screaming were
finally enough to wake up the counselor, who struggled to
restore some form of sanity to our fear stricken group.
Our marauders turned out to be wild dogs, none of
whom I'm sure was wearing a claw, but they managed
to drag away all of our food. Some of us
had left our clothes outside our tents and had gone
to be in our skivies. The wind had blown them away,
leaving most of us in nothing more than our t
shirts and underwear. Well. We were forced to walk two
hours down a trail to the state highway that led
back to the main camp in the pouring rain. We
finally got there about six am, just in time for
the other campers to wake up and see our befuddled
parade of mud splattered kids plot into sight. We were
the laughing stock of the camp, but we were too
exhausted and relieved care we ended up sleeping through most
of the day. What sticks out in my mind is
the long trudge down the state highway with nine other kids,
most of us dressed in only our underwear, as that
damn storytelling camp counselor tried to get us to sing
camp songs. In our minds, it was his fault for
telling us the story in the first place. Somehow we
saw that as the source of all our sorrows. We
really just needed a scapegoat to blame for what was
a truly scary and miserable overnight camp, and he was
the logical choice. These days, whenever I find myself tempted
to scare the kids with a good camp for our story,
I remind myself that should something weird happen in the
middle of the night, those kids are gonna hate me
for the rest of mill for the rest of their lives.
Oh man, that was really good, I know. It wasn't
a bigfoot story, but it was great. It's like I said,
we were camping three weeks or a month ago, and
I was telling my granddaughters too. I've got one that's
I see, she's nine or ten, and another who's four
or five. They're little bitty girls, and I was telling
them that same story, the guy with the hook. Of course,
I got to the punchline and their eyes were biggest
golf balls, and I said, I'm just kidding. That wasn't
really a real story. Oh, Papa, we knew that. We
knew that. And I was thinking, yeah, like you really
knew that. But they slept all night and they curled
up to their daddy and the camper and everything was good.
But the campfire stories, especially at these summer camps, are
always awesome. Whether they scare you or not, they're just
great memories.