Speaker 1: I grew up in Colorado and I'm a proud member
of the Muscalero Apache tribe. I grew up hunting elk, deer,
and bear in the mountains, but I've had the privilege
of hunting all over the United States. I served eight
years as an infantryman in the US Army, and I
have three tours in the box. I've seen all sorts
of things that would be hard to explain for anyone,
but I'd like to focus this letter on the events
that happened right here in my home state. Growing up
as a backcountry hunter and fishermen, I always strive to
get off the beaten path. Our elk camp is a
six mile walk, and we hunt even further than that.
My father and grandfather had a lot of stories that
we would talk about around the woodstove in our outfitter tent,
and I would hang on to every word of the
stories because I thought that's just what they were stories
until I got older. One story that sticks out was
one about a cow elk my grandfather shot in a snowstorm.
Grandpa hid her a little further back in the body
than he would have liked, and she ran aways before
they even picked up a blood trail, so they gave
her some time to die. It was easy to track
in the fresh powder, though. They followed the tracks four
hundred yards through the scrub oaks into the back of
a drainage, where they found the end print in the
shape of an elk, and the tracks stopped. What they
saw there scared the hell out of my grandfather. There
were big tracks with long strides that looked like something
walking in bare feet, coming down the ridge and onto
the shelf, and then they went back up the ridge.
Whatever this thing was, it had taken the elk and
carried it back up the ridge. And that's one of
my grandfather's stories. But here's mine. I was hunting with
my father five miles from where the last story took place.
My father was a retired recon marine scout sniper. He
was a Vietnam vet as well as a veteran of
desert storm and other conflicts. The third day of the hunt,
we walked into a large draw. The dad went up
into the black timber and then eventually broke out into
a large boulder field on top. I went up the
other side that overlooked a large meadow surrounded by aspen
and I could see my father one hundred yards from
the top of the ridge and a thousand yards from me.
As the crow flies, he was three hundred feet above
my elevation. Later in the day, I was daydreaming, not
really paying attention to my surroundings, when I heard a
thump to my left, and then I heard the report
of a rifle. Well. I instantly came out of the
days that I was in and I started looking around frantically.
I thought someone was shooting at me. And then there
was another thump. This time I saw the round hit
the ground in the same spot. I looked through my
rifle scope at my dad, who was still in the
same spot, and he was pointing to my left. I
looked over that way and I froze. Fifty yards away
and up that endcline stood a sasquatch. Dad watched it
come in on me. I never noticed it. It was
covered in black and reddish hair, and it looked at
me with a young and curious face with beautiful amber
colored eyes. It was most certainly a female, standing seven
feet tall. She was staring right at me, not in
a threatening way. Maybe she had never seen a person.
We stared at one another for a while, and she
would watch my movements, turning and cocking her head. She
was mimicking me. I finally backed away down the draw
and I met my father at the trail. We didn't
talk about it much, but when I asked him why
he didn't shoot her, he said he wasn't sure his
seven mag had the power that it would take to
put her down in her tracks, that he wanted to
draw my attention to the creature while he had her
in his scope. If she had made an aggressive mood
towards me, he had my back. But instead of shooting
and seeing that she seemed none threatening, he just watched
through the scope as we interacted. I grew up along
the banks of the Wabash River, and even though I'm
a female, I was a bit of a tomboy. I
spent a lot of days by myself fishing and hunting
in the woods across from my house that was about
a block from the river. I'd wander all through the
woods and along the deer trails, looking and listening for
critters or animals. Sometimes I'd just sit on the banks
and watch the waterflow by watching the cranes on the
sandbars et cetera. And one day I saw a pair
of beaver there floating on their backs like they were
so happy with not a care in the world. Do
beavers do that? Do beavers float on their backs? I
guess they do. I've never seen one do it. I
was very quiet so as not to scare them away,
and they played there for ten minutes and then moved on.
So to me, being in the woods or along the river, heck,
even swimming in it almost daily was a common thing.
I never did see or feel anything out of the
way in all the years growing up down there, not
until several years later. It was somewhere around nineteen seventy
six or thereabout, when I lived in the same house,
our old homestead, and I had a family of my
own that I saw them. At the time that this
encounter happened, my husband and three kids were inside watching
TV after we'd eat and supper. I cleaned up the
kitchen and then told my husband that I'd be back
in to watch TV with them all, but that I
had to get the laundry in off the clothesline first
and fold it and put it away. That's how I
did things back then, because even though we had a
clothes dryer. I liked the fresh smell of clothes that
had been hung on the clothesline. Back then, we used
to burn our trash in an old fifty five gallon
used barrel out back in the alley after supper, so
as I started to go outside, I told the kids
to get that chore done. As I was taking the
clothes down from the clothesline, it was summertime and it
was warm outside. As usual, the two oldest kids didn't
want to burn the trash, so they told the youngest
one to do it. He was seven years old and
I was close by, so I wasn't worried about him
lighting the trash. This kid was smart too. He was
a great kid and very reliable. Even so I still
watched him closely. I forgot to mention that the park
was on the next block to the south of my house,
and it had toys for kids to play on, a
boat dock, and a baseball diamond in which many teams played.
This baseball park was complete with a red block concession
stand in which they had all kinds of goodies that
they made and sold there, such as sodas and pizzas
and hot dogs and such. Just all kinds of stuff.
There were also two or three large metal barrels on
the side of the concession stand for people to throw
their trash and half eating food in. Let me say
here that these barrels of trash and half eating goodies
were facing my house to where I could see them
clearly from my backyard. I was taking my laundry down
off the clothes lines, and I had stripped the bedding
and had two lines full of sheets and light blankets
and pillowcases too, that were all moving and blowing in
the light wind. I was grabbing at the clothes trying
to take the clothes pins off and get them back
into the bag, when my youngest son, Shane, who was
supposed to be burning the trash by the road, came
running up to me and he started yanking on my shirt.
He was scared and his eyes were big, and when
I looked at him, I said, what's the matter, and
he whispered to me with his finger to his mouth, shush, mom,
come here, come here with me. I want to show
you something, but you have to be real quiet. He
took my hand and he was shaking, and we walked
back down the alley road where We had been going
to light the trash when he stopped and whispered to
me and pointed to the concession stand, saying, look at them, Mommy,
what are those things? Well? I looked, and I froze
for a second, and I told him, in a hushed voice,
run in the house, hurry up, and tell your daddy
that there are two bigfoot out here. He did like
I told him, and I watched him for a second,
and then I looked back for the bigfoot. I remembered
my mother telling me about my grandfather seeing one of
these things years ago in a holler getting water from
his spring he had in the side of the hill.
But I never believed in them before, so when I
looked at these things, it was almost in disbelief. As
soon as I looked at them the second time, after
my son had left with the house, all sorts of
things were running through my mind, thinking that this was
not happening, that this was not real. And then I
pinched myself and oh, yes, it was real. They were
both huge, and they were covered in dark brown black hair,
and the largest one was all bent over, digging in
the metal barrels of trash of that concession stand. And
he was handing stuff out to the other one, who
I think was a female because she was smaller, I
could tell the big one was a male. And she says, lol,
and not from the obvious method, but rather from looking
at his face and the build of his body. Okay,
I thought she was gonna say something else. He was
way bigger than she was, and the muscles rippled, and
his arms and upper body were huge. But here's the thing.
When I looked at them both. This all happened in
a minute or so because he was so intent on
digging through those trash cans that they did not see
me until I opened up my mouth as I was
looking them, and I uttered, oh shit, they're real. Oh
my god. When I said that, he stood up and
locked eyes with me. I was looking him straight in
the face, even though I was probably a half a
block away, but my eyesight was sharp and very good,
and I was in my twenties at the time, but
I could see them both standing there now, And like
I said, he looked right at me and we locked eyes,
and my mind went wild, as I have stated, and
a thousand thoughts were running through my head. Oh yeah,
he's real. They're real. Oh, look at the size of
those things. How can this be? They really are real?
And then as I was looking in his eyes, I
thought to myself how much he looked like a human
right in the face. He didn't have scary eyes like
they say on TV, and he did not look like
an ape either. To me, he looked so much of
what I had heard of of the Neanderthal men. He
had human eyes, a human nose, and yes, his nose
was very large. His whole head and body was large.
But what I'm saying here is is that his nose
did not look or resemble an ape or a monkey's
now it looked like a human being's nose, although it
was a pretty good sized honker. The only thing that
was sort of out of place was his brow bone,
and it was very large and pronounced. And when he
looked at me, it was as though he had me
in some sort of a mental trance to where I
could not tear my eyes from his until he willed it.
I couldn't leave, and I couldn't look away, and I
couldn't run to the house, which is what I desperately
wanted to do because I was so scared. Yet he
held my gaze for what seemed like a minute, and
it seemed to me that he was picking or scanning
my mind to see what he wanted to see. And
then all at once he motioned to the smaller one,
and then he pointed to the river where the woods
were by the boat dock, and he gave out a whistle,
and she followed his direct command to her. She took
off running, and I could see her from the corner
of my eye. He still held my gaze, and she
was out of sight in just a few steps, and
her steps were huge too, by the way. As soon
as she was out of sight, he let go of
my gaze and he took off running in the same direction.
One thing I did notice was the hair on his
arms hung from the bottom side of his arms, and
they were five or six inches long the hair was
and I thought that looked odd. And then I thought
to myself, Oh my god, what if those things, as
fast as they are, come up that river bank through
the woods to my driveway where I'm standing. What if
they came out of the woods and grabbed me. And
I was so scared then that I ran quickly back
into my yard. But I did have the senses to
think about the laundry in which I had to have
the sheets and betting for my kids back on them
before bedtime. And I must have been so rattled in
my thinking because I should have run right into the
house instead. I grabbed and yanked the rest of the
sheets off the clothesline, and I grabbed my laundry basket,
and I ran as fast as I could into the house,
and I threw down the basket and I locked the
door even through the dead bowl. I was so shaken,
and I ran into the living room where my husband
and two oldest kids were still watching TV. The youngest
one that had seen the Bigfoot too, was sitting there
on the couch, crying his little eyes out because he
said to me, Mommy, they wouldn't listen to me about
the bigfoot and they told me to shut up. Well,
I asked my husband why he had not come outside,
and he told me that it was all just a
bunch of bullshit because there was no such thing as
a bigfoot. I told him what had happened, and then
him and the other kids they just all laughed at
me and my youngest son. They tease Shane so bad.
Over the next few months that he completely blocked it
out of his memory, and he does not even remember
it now. But I'm a diehard, and they could not
make me forget what I had seen and not what
I had felt during this encounter. I know what I saw,
and I have never doubted it in all these forty
six years. My mind as clear as the bell still.
And this may go against many who say Bigfoot looks
like a gorilla, but the two that I saw didn't.
They looked just like what they call a hairy man,
and their hair was not around their eyes and nose,
because his nose looked like w. C. Fields. We moved
to the country even further out away from the river
back in nineteen ninety eight. But we have a little
creek in the woods behind our house now, and I
have seen tracks back there, lots of deer back there,
plenty of water, and my son Shane, has seen barefoot
tracks back by the creek. I cast one of those
footprints once with plaster of Paris, and the next morning
I was going back to get it and take it
up from the sand, and my grandson had already beaten
me to it, even though I gave him orders the
night before to leave it alone, that I would get
it the next morning when I was good and set up.
He got up early and went to get it anyway,
because he was almost twenty years old and that he
didn't have to listen to me any longer. So there
he came with it in a plastic bag and he
handed it to me, and it was all broken up
in pieces. I had to throw it in the trash.
I felt like throwing him in the trash, but you
know how that goes, lol, she says, and then she
winds up and says, thank you so much, Cam for
taking your time to read this, and if you'd like
to have and if you'd like, you have my permission
to tell this story if it meets your specifications. I
was introduced to the world of the paranormal when I
was five years old. I didn't understand it other than
I knew deep inside my gut that it was wrong
and terrifying. In two thousand and four, I had my
fifth daughter at the age of forty and so technically
all her sisters were really old enough that they could
pass as her mother. And when she was eight months old,
Laura had her first epileptic seizure. They're not what folks
think of when you say the word epilepsy. Laura will
make a choking sound and her eyes will roll back,
and she goes limp, becoming pale while her lips turned blue.
That we panic the first time we experienced one of
her seizures is a gross understatement. In twenty thirteen, we
moved from California to Arkansas for a more peaceful life.
We found a large, two story house built in the
eighteen hundreds that used to belong to the town doctor.
It was large and ramble, with pocket doors in the
parlor and a wraparound porch, and it was situated in
a beautiful, quaint old neighborhood. We knew it had recently
become empty because this town is small and gossip is huge,
and we had heard about a murder that had taken
place in the home some eight months earlier. It was
a sad story of an adopted son killing his mother,
and as usual, illegal drugs were involved. Before we could
move in, we needed to do a major cleanup. On
the inside. It smelled of death and cat urine, among
other things. We had to bring in a machine that
removes all the odors out of the oxygen, but the
process was so toxic and no one could enter the
home immediately after the application. Well, I was a lover
of history and antiques, and I didn't want to replace anything,
so the floors were only sanded and re stained and
fresh painted, and we loved it for a little while.
My mother in law and my handicapped nephew lived with us,
and they used both of the downstairs bedrooms. My mother
in law would accuse me of being in her room,
while my nephew would ask about the name of the
cat the cat coming to his door at night. Though
we didn't own a cat and I had no interest
in violating my mother in law's privacy by sneaking into
her bedroom, we considered the source. After a while, the
arrangement started to grate on our nerves. My marriage became
terribly strained. The household seemed to exist under a cloud
of paranoia. I thought my mother in law and husband
were conspiring against me behind my back, and after a
few months of this, I was ready to take my
daughter and leave the state. But unbeknownst to me, my
mother in law got it in her head that my
husband and I were doing the same to her and
if that wasn't bad enough, my husband developed the drinking
problem that began to escalate. One evening, while he was
asleep and I was reading in bed, there was a terrible,
loud crash in my daughter's room. We instantly thought that
she was in the middle of a huge grandma seizure.
I took one giant leap and two steps to throw
open Laura's door, with my husband trailing behind me, and
Laura was standing at her closet door across the room
with a look of sheer terror on her face. And
next to her bed was her wicker dressing table, the
lamp swinging over the edge with a cord still plugged
in behind the dresser. There was a stream of body
powder leading from the dresser to the closet, and furniture
had been cast about the room. We had a family
meeting the next night, where all the rage and emotional
venom that had been building for months finally exploded. We
were realizing that before we had taken up residence in
this house, we had all gotten along fine. Was there
a curse on this place? Once all the adults in
the room had aired their grievances, my husband excused himself
to check on our nephew, and a minute later I
heard him cry out, and by the time we reached
my nephew's room, I was horrified to see my husband
trying to hold upright a loaded down seven foot bookcase
that was threatening to fall on top of my nephew
in his wheelchair. I quickly wheeled my nephew from the room,
and once clear, my husband let the massive bookcase go
crashing to the floor. Well, this was the last straw
the house was trying to kill us, if not literally
by breaking bones, psychologically by turning all of us against
each other. We got my mother in law and nephew
out within a week, but finances kept my husband and
I tethered to the place for another two months. Light
switch is going off and on in apparitions of toddlers
appearing in the hallways and around the doorframes. It's a
long list of crazy things. Every image seemed guaranteed to
play out our worst spheares. We slept a lot at
my mother in laws for those last few weeks. When
you tell a prospective home buyer that a place is haunted,
they usually back away. Tell them there was a murder
in the house, and they will delete your number from
their cell phone. We were lucky enough to sell the
place to a gentleman who didn't believe in ghosts and
had no fear of older crime scenes. From time to
time I check on the real estate listings, and I'm
not surprised to see that our former home was on
the market every few months. Thankfully, the house and all
its secrets are no longer our concern.