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. 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: Every state on this road trip has given us something.
Speaker 1: Some gave us one good monster and a lot of moonlight.
Speaker 1: Some gave us a single strange night on a single
Speaker 1: strange road. Louisiana is different. Louisiana gives you two. Down here,
Speaker 1: the map itself starts lying to you. Roads that look
Speaker 1: solid on paper turned to shell and gravel and then
Speaker 1: to mud, and then they just stop. And past that
Speaker 1: point there's nothing but water and cypress and seventy shades
Speaker 1: of green that all want to eat your boots. A
Speaker 1: third of this state is wetland. The Atchafalaya Basin alone
Speaker 1: is almost a million acres of river swamp, the biggest
Speaker 1: in North America. And when the sun goes down out there,
Speaker 1: the darkness isn't a color, it's a substance. It has weight.
Speaker 1: You can feel it settle on the back of your
Speaker 1: neck like a wet hand. And in that darkness. Louisiana
Speaker 1: keeps two monsters. The first one is old, older than
Speaker 1: the state, older than the country. It came over on
Speaker 1: ships with exiled French farmers. It survived a forced march
Speaker 1: down the length of a continent, and it settled into
Speaker 1: the Bayous of Acadiana, where it's been scratching at shutters
Speaker 1: and counting beans on doorsteps for two hundred and fifty years.
Speaker 1: The Cajuns call it the rugaroo. Their grandparents called it
Speaker 1: the loop garou. It's a werewolf, but it isn't the
Speaker 1: Hollywood kind. This one comes with Catholic guilt stitched into
Speaker 1: its hide. This one is a curse you can catch.
Speaker 1: The second monster is younger, at least on paper. It
Speaker 1: walked out of the Honey Island Swamp in nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: three and stood up in front of two hunters who
Speaker 1: had every reason to know what a bear looks like.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't a bear. Seven feet tall, gray hair
Speaker 1: hanging off it like Spanish moss, amber eyes, a smell
Speaker 1: that one witness compared to death itself. They call it
Speaker 1: the Honey Island Swamp monster, and some folks call it
Speaker 1: the Cajun Sasquatch, and I have my own opinions about
Speaker 1: which of those names fits better. So Louisiana gets a
Speaker 1: double feature, the Curse in the Blood and the thing
Speaker 1: in the swamp. We're going to give both of them
Speaker 1: their full time on the stand. But before we get
Speaker 1: to any of that, I want to tell you why
Speaker 1: this state sits heavy with me. One of the most
Speaker 1: disturbing encounter stories I ever documented came out of Louisiana
Speaker 1: way back in the early days of Sasquatch Odyssey. A
Speaker 1: witness named Tyler sat down with me and told me
Speaker 1: about a night that took something from him. He was
Speaker 1: out in the woods with his dogs, the way he
Speaker 1: had been one hundred times before, when the dogs jumped
Speaker 1: on something in the tree line, and the woods went loud,
Speaker 1: snarling impact, then a sound he couldn't place, a heavy,
Speaker 1: wet sound, and then silence, which was worse, And then
Speaker 1: his dog came back to him. It came back through
Speaker 1: the air. Something inside that tree line killed one of
Speaker 1: his dogs and threw the body out of the woods
Speaker 1: at him through it like a message, like a warning
Speaker 1: shot that used his own animal as the ammunition. Tyler
Speaker 1: never saw the whole creature. He didn't have to. Whatever
Speaker 1: stood inside that dark had the strength to kill a
Speaker 1: grown dog in seconds, and the intent to deliver it
Speaker 1: back to its owner. And Tyler told me his other
Speaker 1: dogs wouldn't stop shaking for two days, and neither if
Speaker 1: he was honest, did he. I've carried that story for years.
Speaker 1: I think about it every time somebody tells me these
Speaker 1: animals are gentle forest people who braid horse manes and
Speaker 1: leave gifts. Louisiana is where that story lives. So when
Speaker 1: the road trip Odometer rolled over into the Pelican State,
Speaker 1: I knew we weren't going to do a drive by episode.
Speaker 1: We were going to park the truck, get in the boat,
Speaker 1: and go all the way in. Welcome to Louisiana. To
Speaker 1: understand the rugaroo, you have to start about four hundred
Speaker 1: years ago and four thousand miles away. In rural France.
Speaker 1: Medieval and Renaissance France was werewolf country, not in the
Speaker 1: fun way, in the legal way, the French had a
Speaker 1: word for a man who turned into a wolf, loop garu,
Speaker 1: from loop meaning wolf and garu, which traces back through
Speaker 1: Old Frankish to the same root that gives us the
Speaker 1: English word wear wolf. So the name literally says wolf twice.
Speaker 1: And they weren't treating it as a campfire story either.
Speaker 1: In the fifteen hundreds, French courts put people on trial
Speaker 1: for lycanthropy, real trials, real verdicts, real executions. If livestock
Speaker 1: got torn apart, if a child went missing from a village,
Speaker 1: if a house got ransacked in the night, the loo
Speaker 1: garoo was a genuine suspect, and sometimes a genuine neighbor
Speaker 1: burned for it. Fear of the wolf man was woven
Speaker 1: into the fabric of rural French life, right alongside fear
Speaker 1: of witches, and the two legends fed each other in
Speaker 1: plenty of versions. It was a witch who made a
Speaker 1: loop garu in the first place. Either by taking wolf
Speaker 1: form herself or by throwing the curse onto some poor
Speaker 1: soul who crossed her. In the sixteen hundreds, French colonists
Speaker 1: carried the Loop Guru across the Atlantic to Acadia, the
Speaker 1: region we now call Nova Scotia and the Canadian Maritimes.
Speaker 1: The legend rode, along with the language, the faith, and
Speaker 1: the fiddle tunes. And then in seventeen fifty five, the
Speaker 1: British did something that changed the map of North American
Speaker 1: folklore forever. They expelled the Acadians, burned their farms, loaded
Speaker 1: families onto ships, scattered them down the Atlantic coast in
Speaker 1: what the Cajuns still call Legrand de Rangements, the Great Upheaval.
Speaker 1: Thousands of those exiles eventually found their way to the
Speaker 1: one place in North America that still felt French, South Louisiana.
Speaker 1: They settled the Prairies and Bayous west and south of
Speaker 1: New Orleans, in the region we now call Acadiana, and
Speaker 1: over generations, the word Acadian softened in the local mouth
Speaker 1: into Cajun. The wolf came with them, but something happened
Speaker 1: to the word on the way down. Cajun French is
Speaker 1: a living, breathing dialect famous for sanding the corners off
Speaker 1: words until they roll easy. Loop garoo got worked over
Speaker 1: the same way. The el softened, the sound slid together,
Speaker 1: and somewhere in the Bayous the loop garoo became the rugaroo,
Speaker 1: same monster, new name. You will still hear both down there,
Speaker 1: sometimes from the same person in the same sentence, and
Speaker 1: folklorests have collected a half dozen spellings rugaroo, rugaroo, rugaroo,
Speaker 1: Pick your poison. The thing in the story doesn't care
Speaker 1: how you spell it, and the swamp changed the monster too.
Speaker 1: That's the part I find genuinely fascinating, because it's folklore
Speaker 1: doing exactly what folklore does. In France, the loo garoo
Speaker 1: stalked farmland and village lanes. In Louisiana, the rugaroo moved
Speaker 1: into the cypress swamps and the cane fields because that's
Speaker 1: where the dark was. The legend adapted to its habitat,
Speaker 1: like any invasive species. The earliest written traces show up
Speaker 1: in nineteen century Louisiana folklore collections, most famously the work
Speaker 1: of Alsay Fortier, a Louisiana scholar who documented Creole and
Speaker 1: Cajun oral tales in the eighteen nineties and caught the
Speaker 1: Lugaroo alive on the page. By then, it had already
Speaker 1: been prowling the Bayous for over a century, passed parent
Speaker 1: to child, porch to porch in French. Here's where the
Speaker 1: rugaroo stops being a standard werewolf and becomes something much
Speaker 1: more interesting to me as a student of how legends work.
Speaker 1: The rugaroo is a Catholic monster. South Louisiana is one
Speaker 1: of the most deeply Catholic regions in America, and the
Speaker 1: Rugaroo legend is soaked in that faith the way a
Speaker 1: good boudon is soaked in seasoning. The single most famous
Speaker 1: rule of the legend, the one every Cajun kid grew
Speaker 1: up hearing, is this, break the rules of lent, and
Speaker 1: the Rugaroo will come for you. In the older French versions,
Speaker 1: the math was specific failed to observe lent seven years
Speaker 1: in a row, and you don't just get visit by
Speaker 1: the loogaroo, you become one. That's a genuinely brilliant piece
Speaker 1: of moral engineering. Most monsters punish you by eating you.
Speaker 1: The rugaroo punishes you by turning you into the thing
Speaker 1: that eats. Your sin doesn't summon the wolf. Your sin
Speaker 1: is the wolf. The transformation is the sentence, and your
Speaker 1: own hide is the prison. Every fear in that legend
Speaker 1: is doing a job. Keep the fast, go to mass,
Speaker 1: stay out of the swamp at night, behave children, or
Speaker 1: the rugaroo will get you. Generations of Cajun parents deployed
Speaker 1: that monster the way parents everywhere deploy the Boogeyman. Except
Speaker 1: this boogeyman came with the full backing of the parish priest.
Speaker 1: Folklorists like Barry gene Ensilat at the University of Louisiana
Speaker 1: at Lafayette have spent careers documenting how these stories functioned
Speaker 1: as social control in Cajun communities. The rugaroo kept kids
Speaker 1: out of the water at night, kept teenagers home, kept
Speaker 1: the faithful fact a monster with a day job. Now
Speaker 1: let us get into the mechanics, because the Rugaroo comes
Speaker 1: with a rule book, and the rules are strange and
Speaker 1: specific in the way that only genuine folk tradition. Ever,
Speaker 1: is nobody writing a movie would invent rules this crooked.
Speaker 1: They only get this way from two centuries of retelling.
Speaker 1: Rule one, the curse runs one hundred and one days,
Speaker 1: not one hundred, not a year and a day, one
Speaker 1: hundred and one days. In the most common version, a
Speaker 1: person under the Rugaroo curse turns beast by night and
Speaker 1: walks human by day, sickly and gray and hollow eyed
Speaker 1: for one hundred and one days, and there's only one
Speaker 1: way out. Early the rugaroo has to draw the blood
Speaker 1: of another human being. Do that, and the curse jumps.
Speaker 1: It transfers victim to victim, like a supernatural chain letter
Speaker 1: written in blood. The old rugaroo wakes up human and free.
Speaker 1: The new victim inherits the hide rule two. You can't
Speaker 1: talk about it. The freshly cursed can't tell anyone what
Speaker 1: happened to them. In some tellings, speaking of the curse
Speaker 1: means death on the spot. In others it means the
Speaker 1: community will kill you out of fear. Either way, the
Speaker 1: legend seals itself. The cursed man suffers in silence, wastes
Speaker 1: away in front of his family, and nobody ever gets proof,
Speaker 1: which is convenient for a legend and heartbreaking if you
Speaker 1: think about what that story was probably explaining a neighbor
Speaker 1: gone pale and strange and silent, a husband who stopped
Speaker 1: eating and wouldn't say why. Two hundred years ago, in
Speaker 1: a by you community with no doctors, the rugarou was
Speaker 1: sometimes the only diagnosis on offer. Rule three, the thing
Speaker 1: can't count past twelve. This is my favorite rule in
Speaker 1: all of Louisiana folklore, and I say that with love.
Speaker 1: The traditional defense against a rugero is to lay thirteen
Speaker 1: small objects by your door. Thirteen coins, thirteen beans, thirteen pebbles.
Speaker 1: The rugaroo, for all its teeth and hell fire, is
Speaker 1: a compulsive counter, and it can't count past twelve. So
Speaker 1: it stands on your porch all night, counting to twelve,
Speaker 1: losing its place, starting over, counting to twelve, starting over,
Speaker 1: until the sun comes up and the curse drags it home.
Speaker 1: Your entire home security system is one bean more than
Speaker 1: the monster can handle. People still do this. I'm not exaggerating.
Speaker 1: There are households in Terra Bonn and Lafourche parishes today
Speaker 1: with thirteen pennies sitting by the door, and if you ask,
Speaker 1: you'll get a shrug and a smile, and the pennies
Speaker 1: will stay right where they are. Rule four, and this
Speaker 1: one varies what the rugaroo actually looks like. The classic
Speaker 1: description is a man's body with the head of a
Speaker 1: wolf or a big dog, standing upright seven to eight
Speaker 1: feet tall in the taller tillings, covered in dark fur
Speaker 1: with eyes that glow usually red, sometimes amber. But the
Speaker 1: deeper you dig into the old counts the stranger the
Speaker 1: creature gets because the rugaroo of genuine by U folklore
Speaker 1: was a shape shifter in the fullest sense. Forty eight
Speaker 1: era tails and twentieth century collections have the rugarou appearing
Speaker 1: as a huge dog, a hog, a calf, a rabbit,
Speaker 1: even a bird. There's a documented account in a nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy one Louisiana Folklore Society publication where a driver hits
Speaker 1: a calf on the highway at night, gets out of
Speaker 1: the car and finds no calf at all, just an
Speaker 1: uninjured man walking away from the spot where the animal
Speaker 1: went down. That story has stayed with me since I
Speaker 1: first read it. No clause, no howling, just a calf
Speaker 1: that wasn't a calf, and a man walking away in
Speaker 1: the dark who shouldn't have been there. And one more
Speaker 1: piece of the rule book, because it says everything about
Speaker 1: how personal this legend is. In many Cajun tellings, the
Speaker 1: rugarou isn't a stranger. It's someone you know, a jealous neighbor,
Speaker 1: a wronged friend, a member of your own family, carrying
Speaker 1: the curse in silence. When the beast is wounded and
Speaker 1: the blood is drawn, it turns back into a human
Speaker 1: being right in front of you, and you recognize the face.
Speaker 1: The horror of the rugaroo was never really about the wolf.
Speaker 1: It was about the person inside it. Before we get
Speaker 1: to the encounters, I want to show you how deep
Speaker 1: this thing is buried in the culture, because the rugaroo
Speaker 1: isn't museum folklore. It's a living word in a living dialect.
Speaker 1: Down in Tara Bonn and La Forche parishes, when somebody
Speaker 1: spends a night tossing and turning, they say they made
Speaker 1: the rugaroo. All night fair rugaroo. A person who runs
Speaker 1: the roads all night, carousing and causing trouble is out
Speaker 1: making the rugaroo. The monster became a verb. That's what
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty years of storytelling gets you. The
Speaker 1: beast worked its way into the grammar. Huma, Louisiana throws
Speaker 1: the Rugaroo Fest every October, a full festival with the
Speaker 1: costume ball and the Audubon Zoo. In New Orleans had
Speaker 1: It's kept a life size rugaroo glowering at visitors in
Speaker 1: its Louisiana swamp exhibit for decades. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. When
Speaker 1: New Orleans professional basketball team was hunting for a new
Speaker 1: name years back, Rugarus made the short list. The wolf
Speaker 1: almost made the big leagues. But don't let the festival
Speaker 1: floats fool You drive forty five minutes south of Huma,
Speaker 1: past where the oaks quit and the marsh takes over,
Speaker 1: and ask an older trapper about the rugaroo, and watch
Speaker 1: what happens to his face. The smile stays, something behind
Speaker 1: the smile doesn't, because people down there still see things.
Speaker 1: I want to walk you through some rugaroo accounts. Now.
Speaker 1: Some of these are documented in folklore, collections and news coverage.
Speaker 1: Some came to me the way most stories come to me,
Speaker 1: secondhand and first name only, from people who would rather
Speaker 1: eat glass than have their full name attached to a
Speaker 1: werewolf story. I'll let you sort them for yourself. That's
Speaker 1: the deal on this show. I bring you the accounts,
Speaker 1: you bring the verdict. The first one comes from a
Speaker 1: woman I'll call Celeste. Celeste grew up down the Bayou
Speaker 1: in Terrebone Parish, in one of those communities where the
Speaker 1: road and the water run side by side for twenty miles,
Speaker 1: and every house faces the boat instead of the street.
Speaker 1: This was the late nineteen nineties. She was nineteen, working
Speaker 1: an evening shift at a diner up the highway, driving
Speaker 1: home after closing a hand me down oldsmobile with one
Speaker 1: working headlight. The drive home was eleven miles of two
Speaker 1: lane black top, with the bayou on her left and
Speaker 1: cane fields on her right. No street lights passed the
Speaker 1: first mile. She had driven it a thousand times. That night,
Speaker 1: about four miles from home, she caught something in the
Speaker 1: edge of her one good headlight. Two points of light
Speaker 1: low off the shoulder on the cane side. Eyeshine. She
Speaker 1: knew what eyeshine looked like. Deer eyes float high and scatter.
Speaker 1: Dog eyes sit low and track you. These sat about
Speaker 1: four feet off the ground and they kept pace with
Speaker 1: the car. She was doing forty. She watched the eyes
Speaker 1: slide along the tree line at the edge of the
Speaker 1: cane forty miles an hour, smooth, no bobbing, just two
Speaker 1: amber points, gliding through the dark like they were on
Speaker 1: a rail. She sped up to fifty. The eyes stayed
Speaker 1: with her. She could hear the cane breaking over the
Speaker 1: engine and the tires. She could hear it, a ripping,
Speaker 1: thrashing sound of something big shouldering through a wall of
Speaker 1: sugar cane at highway speed. Four miles is a long
Speaker 1: time to be followed, she told me. The worst moment
Speaker 1: was the bridge. There's a little bayou side bridge near
Speaker 1: her family's place, and the cane field ends a quarter
Speaker 1: mile before it. She watched the eyes coming up on
Speaker 1: the end of the cane and she thought it has
Speaker 1: to stop. There's nothing but open ground and then water.
Speaker 1: The eyes reached the end of the field and crossed
Speaker 1: the open ground. She got one look at it under
Speaker 1: the security light at the boat launch by the bridge,
Speaker 1: maybe a second and a half tall, upright, moving in
Speaker 1: long strides that ate the ground, with something wrong about
Speaker 1: the head too long, too forward, like a dog's muzzle
Speaker 1: grafted onto a man's shoulders. It crossed the launch light
Speaker 1: in maybe four strides and dropped down the bank toward
Speaker 1: the water, and was gone before her car reached the bridge.
Speaker 1: Celeste drove the last mile at eighty and sat in
Speaker 1: her daddy's driveway with the doors locked, leaning on the
Speaker 1: horn until the porch light came on. Her grandmother didn't
Speaker 1: laugh at her. That's the detail that stuck with me.
Speaker 1: Her grandmother listened to the whole story at the kitchen table,
Speaker 1: then got up, went to the junk drawer, counted out
Speaker 1: thirteen pennies, and set them on the window sill by
Speaker 1: the front door. Didn't say a word of explanation, didn't
Speaker 1: need to. Celeste told me those pennies were still on
Speaker 1: that window sill when her grandmother passed twenty years later,
Speaker 1: and her mama keeps them there now. I shine. Pacing
Speaker 1: a car along a tree line is a story I've
Speaker 1: heard in Sasquatch reports from thirty states. So is the
Speaker 1: sound of something heavy crashing through cover parallel to a road.
Speaker 1: If you took Celeston's account, change the parish to a
Speaker 1: county in Washington State, and swap the word rugaroo for sasquatch,
Speaker 1: nobody would think twice. The second account is a dog story.
Speaker 1: Dogs don't have folklore. Dogs don't know what a rugaroo is.
Speaker 1: Dogs only know what their nose tells them, and a
Speaker 1: dog's nose doesn't lie for attention. This one comes from
Speaker 1: a man I'll call Remy, a trapper and hog hunter.
Speaker 1: Out of assumption. Parish a fourth generation swamper who ran
Speaker 1: a line of catahula curs that he bred himself. Cattahulas
Speaker 1: are Louisiana's state dog for a reason. They are bred
Speaker 1: to Bay wild hogs, which are three hundred pounds of
Speaker 1: tusk and hate. A good catahula will run into a
Speaker 1: palmetto thicket after a boar that could open it up
Speaker 1: like a letter. These aren't nervous animals. Remy had a
Speaker 1: stretch of swamp he hunted off a pipeline canal, a
Speaker 1: place his family had trapped since his grandfather's day in
Speaker 1: the winter of two thousand and eight. By his telling,
Speaker 1: his dogs quit it, not gradually overnight. He put the
Speaker 1: boat in one morning in January, ran the canal to
Speaker 1: his usual cut, and the dogs wouldn't get out of
Speaker 1: the boat. Three seasoned hog dogs, dogs that normally hit
Speaker 1: the bank before the hull touched mud, sat in the
Speaker 1: bottom of that boat and shook hackles up from neck
Speaker 1: to tail. One of them, his best strike dog, an
Speaker 1: eight year old female who had scars on her from
Speaker 1: boars she had won against, put her head down in
Speaker 1: the bilge water and wouldn't lift it. Remy did what
Speaker 1: a stubborn man does. He grabbed the lead dog's collar
Speaker 1: and set her on the bank himself. She got back
Speaker 1: in the boat. He tried the same cut four times
Speaker 1: over two weeks, same result every time, and it was
Speaker 1: only that cut down the canal. The dog's hunted normal
Speaker 1: a mile up normal that one stretch of woods. They
Speaker 1: refused like it was on fire. The fifth trip, Remy
Speaker 1: went in without them, walked his old trap line about
Speaker 1: three hundred yards, and he said the swamp was silent
Speaker 1: in a way he had never heard it. January, swamp
Speaker 1: isn't quiet. There's ducks working, ibis Kingfisher's fussing squirrels. This
Speaker 1: was nothing. And in the mud beside a slew where
Speaker 1: his grandfather's trap line crossed the water, he found a track.
Speaker 1: It had five toes longer than his rubber boot, which
Speaker 1: was a size twelve, and pressed deeper into that mud
Speaker 1: than his own boot right beside it, and Remy weighed
Speaker 1: about two hundred and twenty pounds with his gear on.
Speaker 1: He never told me it was a rugaroo. Remy was
Speaker 1: raised on rugaroo stories the way all by you kids are.
Speaker 1: And when he stood over that track, the old word
Speaker 1: is the one that came up in his chest. But
Speaker 1: what he described was a barefoot five toed oversized human track,
Speaker 1: sunk deep and swamp mud in a patch of woods
Speaker 1: that three fearless hog dogs refused to enter for two
Speaker 1: weeks straight. He pulled his traps out of that cut
Speaker 1: and never set it again. When his son asked him
Speaker 1: why they didn't hunt Grandpa's line anymore, Remy told him
Speaker 1: the hogs had moved. The dogs knew better. The dogs
Speaker 1: always know better. A nineteen seventy one Louisiana Folklore Society
Speaker 1: publication preserves an account of a motorist driving a highway
Speaker 1: down in the Bayou Country at night who struck a
Speaker 1: calf hard impact. The driver stopped, got out, walked back
Speaker 1: to deal with the animal. There was no calf. There
Speaker 1: was no blood, no hair on the grill, no animal
Speaker 1: dying in the ditch. There was a man uninjured upright
Speaker 1: walking away from the exact spot where the calf went
Speaker 1: down into the dark. And that's where the account ends,
Speaker 1: because the driver didn't follow him. And honestly, I can't
Speaker 1: say that I blame him, And the rugaroo hasn't retired.
Speaker 1: In twenty sixteen, a video shot in a residential neighborhood
Speaker 1: in Huma made the rounds online, showing what appeared to
Speaker 1: be a large, dark figure moving between houses at night.
Speaker 1: Locals dusted off the old word immediately. Was it a
Speaker 1: hoaxer in a suit three days before Halloween? Probably? Was
Speaker 1: it a person of unusual size doing something innocent filmed badly?
Speaker 1: Also possible. I've watched the footage and I won't pretend
Speaker 1: it proves a single thing, but I want you to
Speaker 1: notice what happened around it, because that's the real data.
Speaker 1: A blurry figure walks through a human neighborhood and the
Speaker 1: first word out of the community wasn't prowler, it was rugaroo.
Speaker 1: Two hundred and fifty years after the Acadians landed, the
Speaker 1: wolf is still the default explanation for a big shape
Speaker 1: in the Louisiana Dark legends don't hang on that long
Speaker 1: unless something keeps feeding them. I gotta be honest with you.
Speaker 1: I don't believe in werewolves. I don't believe a human
Speaker 1: being can be cursed into an animal by skipping lent,
Speaker 1: and I don't believe a calf can stand up and
Speaker 1: walk away as a man. I'm an evidence guy forty
Speaker 1: years I've been chasing one animal, and the reason I've
Speaker 1: stayed on it this long is that the sasquatch evidence,
Speaker 1: the tracks, the dermal ridges, the consistent anatomy across a
Speaker 1: century of independent reports, behaves like biology. Werewolf Lord doesn't
Speaker 1: behave like biology. It behaves like theology, which is exactly
Speaker 1: what it is. And I mean no disrespect to either
Speaker 1: field by keeping them separated. But here's my confession. Strip
Speaker 1: the rugaroo legend down to what people actually report seeing.
Speaker 1: Not the curse, not the lent, not the thirteen beans,
Speaker 1: just the raw siding. And what have you got? A tall,
Speaker 1: dark hair covered figure upright on two legs, glowing eyeshine,
Speaker 1: seen at night near water, at the edge of wild country, fast, strong,
Speaker 1: gone before you can be sure. Now go back and
Speaker 1: read the description Harlan Ford gave in nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: or the description a logger named Earl Wittstein gave the
Speaker 1: Rapides Parish Sheriff's office in the year two thousand, or
Speaker 1: any of the fifty seven reports the big Foot Field
Speaker 1: Researchers Organization has logged out of Louisiana, and tell me
Speaker 1: those are different animals. I think French Louisiana has been
Speaker 1: seeing something in its swamps for two and a half centuries.
Speaker 1: And I think that when a Catholic culture with a
Speaker 1: werewolf tradition sees a huge, upright hairy figure in the dark,
Speaker 1: it doesn't reach for the word primate. It reaches for
Speaker 1: the word it brought from France. The rugaroo didn't need
Speaker 1: to exist to be real. It only needed a hide
Speaker 1: to wear. Let me show you the hide. The Honey
Speaker 1: Island Swamp sits in the far southeastern toe of Louisiana
Speaker 1: in Saint Tammany Parish, pinched between the East Pearl and
Speaker 1: West Pearl rivers hard against the Mississippi state line, something
Speaker 1: like seventy thousand acres, and roughly half of it is
Speaker 1: permanently protected wildlife refuge that has never been logged, never
Speaker 1: been drained, never been farmed. Naturalists call it one of
Speaker 1: the most pristine river swamps left in the United States.
Speaker 1: There are no roads through the interior, there are barely trails.
Speaker 1: Access is by boat and then by waiting. The name
Speaker 1: comes from the honeybees that once swarmed an island in
Speaker 1: the swamp, and it's the sweetest thing about the place.
Speaker 1: Everything else out there bites, stings or weights, alligators, cotton mouths,
Speaker 1: wild hogs, black bears, feral dogs. The water is the
Speaker 1: color of steep tea, and you can't see four inches
Speaker 1: into it, And the ground is a negotiation solid here
Speaker 1: gone there, and the cypress and tuppelow close over your
Speaker 1: head until noon looks like dusk. If you sat down
Speaker 1: to design a laboratory for producing monster reports, you couldn't
Speaker 1: improve on Honey Island, And if you sat down to
Speaker 1: design a refuge where a large, smart, wary animal could
Speaker 1: live unphotographed, you couldn't improve on it either. The old
Speaker 1: stories were here before the modern ones. The Choctaw and
Speaker 1: other tribes of the region told of the Latche, a
Speaker 1: flesh eating humanoid thing of the water and the bank,
Speaker 1: and one strand of the legend says it began as
Speaker 1: a lost or abandoned child raised by alligators in the
Speaker 1: deep swamp, which might be the loneliest origin story any
Speaker 1: monster ever got. The Chettamacha and Attakappas peoples spoke of wolfwalkers,
Speaker 1: man eating things caught halfway between human and beast, and
Speaker 1: layered on top of the native accounts, came the French
Speaker 1: with their loop garu, so that by the twentieth century
Speaker 1: the Honey Island Country had monster traditions stacked three deep
Speaker 1: like sediment. Then in August of nineteen sixty three, the
Speaker 1: sediment moved. Harlan Ford wasn't a man built for tall tales.
Speaker 1: Was an air traffic controller with the Federal Aviation Administration,
Speaker 1: a job that selects for calm, precise, unimaginative people, because
Speaker 1: imaginative air traffic controllers kill pilots. He was also a
Speaker 1: lifelong outdoorsman, a hunter, and a private pilot, and he
Speaker 1: used that plane the way serious hunters dream about, flying
Speaker 1: over the Honey Island Country to scout ground nobody else
Speaker 1: could reach. He found a spot so remote that getting
Speaker 1: there meant a boat ride followed by a long walk,
Speaker 1: and to harlan Ford, that was the entire appeal. He
Speaker 1: and his friend Billy Mills set up a camp out there.
Speaker 1: They were hauling gear in when they saw it. Across
Speaker 1: a clearing on all fours, something large was crouched over
Speaker 1: the body of an animal. Both men thought it was
Speaker 1: just a wild animal feeding, and both men drew their weapons,
Speaker 1: expecting bear, And then it did the one thing a
Speaker 1: bear almost never does and a hoax can't fake at
Speaker 1: distance in daylight. It stood up on two legs. It
Speaker 1: came up to something over seven feet by their estimate,
Speaker 1: close to four hundred pounds. It was covered in dingy
Speaker 1: gray hair, longer on the head hanging down. It looked
Speaker 1: at them. Ford would say later that the eyes were
Speaker 1: in amber yellow and that the smell reaching them across
Speaker 1: that clearing was foul enough to note over the ordinary
Speaker 1: rot of a swamp. It held their eyes for a moment,
Speaker 1: then it ran, and two armed experienced hunters stood in
Speaker 1: a clearing in the middle of seventy thousand acres and
Speaker 1: didn't say much of anything for a while. Ford described
Speaker 1: it afterward in plain words. He said it was ugly
Speaker 1: and sinister and like something out of a horror movie.
Speaker 1: And I want to point at that quote, because it
Speaker 1: isn't the language of a man building a legend. Legend
Speaker 1: builders give you fangs and claws and near death escapes.
Speaker 1: Ford gave you ugly Witnesses who are lying, decorate, witnesses
Speaker 1: who are shaken, summarize. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. Here's the other thing
Speaker 1: that matters about nineteen sixty three, Ford and Mills came
Speaker 1: home and told people, and the story got around Slydell.
Speaker 1: But Ford didn't sell anything. He didn't book a tour,
Speaker 1: he didn't write a book. What he did instead is
Speaker 1: what an air traffic controller would do. He started carrying
Speaker 1: a camera into the swamp, and he kept going back
Speaker 1: quietly for more than a decade, trying to turn one
Speaker 1: siding into data. Eleven years later, in nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: Ford and Mills were back in the same country on
Speaker 1: a duck hunting trip when they found the kills wild
Speaker 1: boars dead with their throats torn out, not shot, not
Speaker 1: scavenged in the ordinary way, throats opened, and the carcass
Speaker 1: is too far from the water for an alligator to
Speaker 1: have done the work and left them there, because an
Speaker 1: alligator doesn't kill a boar on dry ground and walk
Speaker 1: away from the meat. The tracks are where this case
Speaker 1: gets complicated. Prince Ford cast in Plaster that year, showed
Speaker 1: a broad foot with either three or four toes, depending
Speaker 1: on which cast and which analyst you ask, with signs
Speaker 1: of webbing between the toes. Ford took the cast to
Speaker 1: the local game warden and to Louisiana State University's Agriculture School,
Speaker 1: and the reported answer was a shrug unidentified. The cast
Speaker 1: made the rounds for decades afterward. Ford went on television
Speaker 1: with the story, appeared on the Old in Search of
Speaker 1: series in nineteen seventy eight, and the Honey Island swamp
Speaker 1: monster went from local whisper to national cryptid. A primate
Speaker 1: foot has five toes, every ape, every monkey, every human.
Speaker 1: A three toed webbed track isn't just an unknown primate,
Speaker 1: It's an anatomical contradiction of everything we know about primate evolution.
Speaker 1: And I've spent too many years defending the legitimate track
Speaker 1: record the five toed mid tarsl break dermal Ridge track
Speaker 1: record to waive that problem them away. Skeptics have argued
Speaker 1: about the authenticity of these casts for years. A herpetologist
Speaker 1: who examined the track morphology reportedly matched the web toe
Speaker 1: pattern to a crocodilion, and a naturalist named John V.
Speaker 1: Dennis spent years working that swamp in the seventies and
Speaker 1: found no tracks and no creature. The investigator Joe Nickel
Speaker 1: went further and argued the whole case fits a familiar
Speaker 1: pattern of swamp beast man folklore serving a community's need
Speaker 1: for stories. So what do I do with Harlan Ford?
Speaker 1: Here's what I do. I separate the sighting from the
Speaker 1: casts because they're separate pieces of evidence eleven years apart,
Speaker 1: and lumping them is lazy. The nineteen seventy four tracks
Speaker 1: have real problems, fine tracks can be misread, and swamps
Speaker 1: are full of overlapping gator and hog and bear sign
Speaker 1: that composits into strangeness. But the nineteen sixty three siding
Speaker 1: is a daylight, close range two witness observation of an upright,
Speaker 1: gray haired seven foot figure by sober men with rifles
Speaker 1: in their hands and reputations to lose, and no three
Speaker 1: toad cast erases that witnesses don't become liars because a
Speaker 1: footprint has the wrong toe count. The sighting stands on
Speaker 1: its own legs, two of them. Harlan Ford died in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty, and after his death the story grew its
Speaker 1: strangest chapter. Going through his belongings, his family found a
Speaker 1: reel of super eight film. On it, a dark figure
Speaker 1: moves upright through the swamp. Ford had apparently captured something
Speaker 1: on one of those quiet camera trips and told almost
Speaker 1: no one. His granddaughter, Dana Hollyfield, has carried the case
Speaker 1: ever since, publishing his documentation, recording interviews with local witnesses
Speaker 1: and putting the footage in front of the public. When
Speaker 1: she was asked the obvious question, why would a man
Speaker 1: sit on film of the very creature he spent a
Speaker 1: decade hunting, Her answer had two parts, and both parts
Speaker 1: sound like the Harlan Ford The record describes he worried
Speaker 1: that publicizing it would send armed crowds into the swamp
Speaker 1: after something that could be mistaken for a man, and
Speaker 1: she said, maybe he learned more out there than anyone realized.
Speaker 1: I have no verdict on the footage. Enhancement of Old
Speaker 1: super eight only takes you so far, and a figure
Speaker 1: in a swamp is a figure in a swamp. But
Speaker 1: I'll say this, a hoaxer films his monster to show people.
Speaker 1: Ford filmed his and put it in a box. Whatever
Speaker 1: that reel is, it wasn't made for an audience. An
Speaker 1: evidence that was never meant to be seen has always
Speaker 1: interested me more than evidence that arrives with the press release.
Speaker 1: Ford may have been the first documented witness, but he
Speaker 1: was a long way from the last a swamp guide
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy three reportedly struck something in the water
Speaker 1: with his boat while running a by you, something big
Speaker 1: enough to jar the hull, and got a look at
Speaker 1: a creature no field guide covered. A local man named
Speaker 1: Ted Williams claimed multiple sightings over the years and believed
Speaker 1: there was more than one of the creatures on the Pearl.
Speaker 1: He said he could have shot them, and never did
Speaker 1: because they never offered him harm. And then one day
Speaker 1: Ted Williams took his boat out into the swamp to
Speaker 1: set trot lines and he never came back. No body,
Speaker 1: no boat wreckage. That settled anything. The swamp keeps its
Speaker 1: own council, and drownings on the Pearl need no monster
Speaker 1: to explain them. But the locals noticed, and the story
Speaker 1: keeps his name in it, and I understand why. And
Speaker 1: then there's Neil Benson, who runs an eco tour operation
Speaker 1: on the Pearl River today, a working swamp man with
Speaker 1: a business and a reputation. He tells of being sixteen
Speaker 1: years old paddling a pirogue away from his duck blind
Speaker 1: when he watched something tall move through the water on
Speaker 1: two legs, unimpeded in a way no creature he knew
Speaker 1: could move. His words on it are about the most
Speaker 1: honest words in this whole file. He doesn't claim it
Speaker 1: was the swamp monster. He doesn't claim to know what
Speaker 1: it was. He says it wasn't a bear, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't like any man he's seen. And he says he
Speaker 1: doesn't care whether people believe him, because he knows what
Speaker 1: he saw that day. Sixty years of that from that
Speaker 1: one swamp, a game warden shrug, a dead man's film reel,
Speaker 1: a missing fisherman, and a tour guide who saw something
Speaker 1: at sixteen that he's still turning over decades later. Oh,
Speaker 1: and the circus train. I can't leave out the circus train.
Speaker 1: One persistent piece of local lore holds that early in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, a traveling circus train derailed near the
Speaker 1: Pearl River and a troop of chimpanzees escaped into the swamp,
Speaker 1: and that the monster is their descendants. It's a wonderful story.
Speaker 1: It's also as far as anyone has ever shown completely undocumented.
Speaker 1: No wreck report, no circus, no chimps. And even if
Speaker 1: you grant every word of it, a chimpanzee is a
Speaker 1: knuckle walking animal. A fraction the size of what Ford described.
Speaker 1: The train story is what a community invents when it
Speaker 1: needs its monster to have a receipt. The swamp never
Speaker 1: provided one. Now, let me widen the lens, because here's
Speaker 1: what the Honey Island headlines tend to bury. The swamp
Speaker 1: monster isn't an isolated case. Louisiana has a statewide sasquatch record,
Speaker 1: and it's deeper than most people, including most Bigfoot people, realize.
Speaker 1: The Bigfoot Field Researchers organization has logged fifty seven reports
Speaker 1: out of Louisiana going back to the nineteen seventies, and
Speaker 1: the geography of those reports tells a story all by itself.
Speaker 1: Rapeed's Parish leads the state with nine Natchitoch's, Grant, Webster
Speaker 1: and Claiborne parishes stack up behind it. Look at those
Speaker 1: parishes on a map, and you're looking at one thing.
Speaker 1: The Kasachi National Forest, six hundred and four thousand acres
Speaker 1: of pine hills, hardwood bottoms, and creek drainages sprawled across
Speaker 1: seven parishes in the central and northern part of the state.
Speaker 1: Researchers who work Louisiana call the country around the Doug
Speaker 1: Demona River ground zero for the state and the Gulf
Speaker 1: Coast Bigfoot Research Organization has worked the at Schafalaya Basin
Speaker 1: and the Sabine River Corridor for years. On top of that,
Speaker 1: notice the pattern reports cluster where the big Timber and
Speaker 1: the Big water meet. Same as Washington, same as Ohio,
Speaker 1: same as every state we visited on this road trip.
Speaker 1: Wherever this animal is reported, it's reported along drainages, and
Speaker 1: Louisiana is nothing but drainages. In late August of the
Speaker 1: year two thousand, a logger named Earl Wittstein was running
Speaker 1: a cutter near Flaggon Creek outside Pineville in Rapeed's Parish
Speaker 1: in the bottom land along Boggy Bayou. Through the brush,
Speaker 1: he made out a large, dark animal and took it
Speaker 1: for a horse, which tells you the size he was
Speaker 1: looking at. He rattled the cutter to move it off.
Speaker 1: It stood up six to seven feet of it on
Speaker 1: two legs, covered in long jet black hair, so much
Speaker 1: hair on the head and face that Witstein couldn't make
Speaker 1: out features. It turned, jumped into Flaggon Creek, swam across
Speaker 1: in an awkward churning way that stuck in his memory,
Speaker 1: and was gone into the timber. Two days later, on
Speaker 1: August twenty fourth, Whitstein was walking a property line with
Speaker 1: a coworker, Carl Dubois near Boggy Bayou, when both men
Speaker 1: saw it again, standing beside a large bush. Witstein hollered
Speaker 1: at it, asked it what it was doing, which is
Speaker 1: about the most lagger response imaginable, and the figure broke
Speaker 1: north and fled. And here's why this case carries weight
Speaker 1: with me. Whitstein did everything a hoaxer never does. He
Speaker 1: reported it to his boss, he reported it to the landowner,
Speaker 1: he reported it to the Rapid's parish sheriff's office on
Speaker 1: the record, and he talked to the local news with
Speaker 1: his name attached. A working lagger in central Louisiana has
Speaker 1: exactly nothing to gain from telling the parish sheriff he
Speaker 1: saw a hair covered giant swim a creek. The sighting
Speaker 1: made the papers, investigators worked the area, tracks were reported,
Speaker 1: and casts were attempted, and the skeptics hoax and the
Speaker 1: case settled into the file the way they all do.
Speaker 1: But two named witnesses, multiple sightings, a police report, and
Speaker 1: a consistent description. That isn't a campfire story. That's testimony,
Speaker 1: a hunter in the National Forest in Naichatoch's Parish on
Speaker 1: stand about thirty five minutes, watches what he takes at
Speaker 1: first glance for a very large man walking through open
Speaker 1: woods sixty to eighty yards out, no hunt or orange
Speaker 1: which the law requires, black haired top to bottom, except
Speaker 1: the legs, which showed white or pale from the ground
Speaker 1: up a foot or more on each leg, like the
Speaker 1: animal had waded through mud or ash. He watched it
Speaker 1: take eight or nine steps through open timber and pass
Speaker 1: out of sight. Another witness driving north of Natchatochis catches
Speaker 1: a figure down in a valley off the right side
Speaker 1: of the road one hundred yards out by a fence
Speaker 1: line where piney woods met a burned patch, tall, black,
Speaker 1: hairy on two feet over six feet even at that
Speaker 1: distance seen for seconds. Reported anyway. A nineteen eighty seven
Speaker 1: report out of Caddo Parish put a creature along black
Speaker 1: by you near Oil City in the state's far northwest corner,
Speaker 1: in the same stretch of country that runs up into
Speaker 1: the Falk Arkansas Territory we covered in a previous stop,
Speaker 1: and that isn't a coincidence. The Boggy Creek country and
Speaker 1: north Louisiana are one connected ecosystem. The state line is
Speaker 1: a human idea, the bottom land doesn't observe it, and
Speaker 1: the reports haven't stopped. Within the last few years, a
Speaker 1: woman in the Lake Charles and Westlake area reported watching
Speaker 1: a large, upright figure on her own property while she
Speaker 1: was cutting grass in broad daylight, in a part of
Speaker 1: the state better known for petrochemical plants than for monsters.
Speaker 1: Researchers working between Georgetown and Gina in twenty nineteen documented
Speaker 1: tree structures and tracks along the Dug Demona drainage. Make
Speaker 1: of tree structures what you will. I remain agnostic on
Speaker 1: stack formations and always have been. But the point stands
Speaker 1: Louisiana produces year after year, quietly the same class of
Speaker 1: report as anywhere in North America fifty seven documented reports.
Speaker 1: Is the floor, not the ceiling. For every witness who
Speaker 1: files with the research organization, my experience says there are
Speaker 1: ten who tell nobody outside of a few friends and
Speaker 1: family around their kitchen table. Dale and Marcus are brothers
Speaker 1: in law who have hog hunted the eastern edge of
Speaker 1: the Atchafalaya Basin together for better than twenty years. Dale
Speaker 1: is the talker Marcus by Dale's description says about nine
Speaker 1: words a season, and I mention that because of how
Speaker 1: this story ends. February, a few years back, they were
Speaker 1: still hunting a ridge of high ground between two sleughs,
Speaker 1: the kind of natural levey that concentrates every animal in
Speaker 1: the basin when the water is up. And the water
Speaker 1: was up late afternoon, gray sky, every thing dripping Dale
Speaker 1: was a head. He came around to blow down and
Speaker 1: stopped because forty yards down the slew edge something was
Speaker 1: crouched at the waterline with its back to him. His
Speaker 1: first thought was bear, and there are bears in the basin,
Speaker 1: so it was a fair thought. It was black, it
Speaker 1: was bulky, and it was doing something at the water
Speaker 1: with its front limbs, a rhythmic pulling motion like a
Speaker 1: man washing clothes. Then Marcus stepped on a limb behind him.
Speaker 1: The thing came up off its haunches, and it kept
Speaker 1: coming up. Dale has told this part the same way
Speaker 1: every time, and the phrasing never changes. It stood up
Speaker 1: like a man getting off a four wheeler. One motion, hips,
Speaker 1: then shoulders, then head, and the head came up level
Speaker 1: with a beard of Spanish moss hanging off a cypress
Speaker 1: limb that Dale went back later and measured with a
Speaker 1: boat pole at just under eight feet. It didn't look
Speaker 1: at them. It turned its head maybe a quarter enough
Speaker 1: to bring one eye around, held that for a break,
Speaker 1: and then walked, didn't run, walked up the sleugh away
Speaker 1: from them on two legs through knee deep February floodwater,
Speaker 1: and the water didn't slow it down at all. Dale said.
Speaker 1: The strides through water like a horse trotting a ditch
Speaker 1: sixty seventy yards. Then it stepped up onto the far
Speaker 1: bank into the palmettos, and the swamp closed behind it.
Speaker 1: The two of them stood there, and Marcus, the man
Speaker 1: of nine words a season, spent one of them. He said, well,
Speaker 1: they walked out. Dale wanted to come back with cameras.
Speaker 1: Marcus said no, and Dale, for reasons he couldn't fully
Speaker 1: lay out for me, didn't argue, and they hunt a
Speaker 1: different ridge. Now. When Dale finished telling me all this,
Speaker 1: he asked me the question every witness eventually asks, the
Speaker 1: one I never have a good answer for. He didn't
Speaker 1: ask what it was. He asked why it wasn't afraid
Speaker 1: of them. I told him the truth, I said, because
Speaker 1: it had no reason to be. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. This
Speaker 1: one came to me from a father named Curtis. Curtis
Speaker 1: and his wife and their two boys twelve and nine
Speaker 1: at the time, had a spring tradition of tent camping
Speaker 1: on family land along the Tickfall River north of the
Speaker 1: Lake country, east of Baton Rouge, pretty ground pines on
Speaker 1: the high side, hardwood bottom along the river. They had
Speaker 1: camped it a dozen times. The kids knew the property
Speaker 1: well enough to run at barefoot. This particular trip, the
Speaker 1: woods were wrong from the first evening, and Curtis said
Speaker 1: it in exactly those words, wrong, no whipper wheels, and
Speaker 1: that river bottom is usually thick with them. The boys
Speaker 1: campfire jokes kept dying out early, even the frogs down
Speaker 1: on the river sounded thin. Around eleven, with the boys
Speaker 1: in their tent and Curtis banking the fire, the walking started. Footfalls,
Speaker 1: not deer. Curtis has hunted his whole life, and he
Speaker 1: wants you to understand he knows dear in leaves, the
Speaker 1: quick four beat scatter of them. This was two feet heavy, deliberate,
Speaker 1: and it was circling. It would move maybe thirty yards
Speaker 1: through the bottom on the river side of camp, stop
Speaker 1: and stand, then move again, always the same distance out,
Speaker 1: maybe sixty or seventy yards. Just passed where the firelight
Speaker 1: died around eleven thirty. His wife whispered that she could
Speaker 1: hear it breathing, and Curtis told her that wasn't possible
Speaker 1: at that range. And then the wind shifted and he
Speaker 1: heard it too, a deep, slow, wet exhale, like a horse,
Speaker 1: but bigger. He's never gotten that sound. Described to his
Speaker 1: own satisfaction, he said, the closest thing is a bellows.
Speaker 1: It circled them for two hours. Curtis sat with his
Speaker 1: back to the fire in a twelve gage across his
Speaker 1: knees and never saw so much as a shadow. Whatever
Speaker 1: it was, it managed to stay in the one place
Speaker 1: he couldn't look every minute for two hours, in the dark,
Speaker 1: in its own living room. At about one in the morning,
Speaker 1: from the riverside, something knocked on wood. One knock, loud, sharp,
Speaker 1: a bat on a tree, sound that rolled up the bottom.
Speaker 1: The footfall stopped, the wood stayed silent for ten minutes,
Speaker 1: and then the whipper wheels started up all at once,
Speaker 1: like somebody threw a switch and the frogs came back
Speaker 1: and the night was just a night again. Curtis got
Speaker 1: his family up at first light Struck camp and told
Speaker 1: the boys the weather was turning. The twelve year old
Speaker 1: looked at him over a tent steak and said, Daddy,
Speaker 1: there isn't a cloud. Curtis said, we're leaving anyway, and
Speaker 1: the boy nodded and pulled the steak, and that was
Speaker 1: the whole conversation. And they haven't tent camped that bottom since.
Speaker 1: Curtis still hunts it daylight only. He put a camera
Speaker 1: on the trail by the river for two seasons and
Speaker 1: got hogs, deer, one bear passing through, and on a
Speaker 1: March night, forty five minutes of the camera pointing at
Speaker 1: nothing while something offscreen breathed against the microphone. He played
Speaker 1: me that audio over the phone. I've heard a lot
Speaker 1: of alleged sasquatch recordings, and most of them are wind
Speaker 1: dogs and wishful thinking. I don't know what's on Curtis's card.
Speaker 1: I know I listened to it twice and then found
Speaker 1: a reason to get off the phone. And I do
Speaker 1: this for a living. Last one, and this is a
Speaker 1: short one junior is in his seventies now, a retired
Speaker 1: pipeline welder from Avoyell's Parish, and he sat on this
Speaker 1: for fifty years because, in his words, a man who
Speaker 1: saw what he saw doesn't tell it while he still
Speaker 1: has to be believed at work. Nineteen seventy three or
Speaker 1: seventy four, He wasn't certain which duck season he was
Speaker 1: nineteen or twenty, running his father's wooden p rogue into
Speaker 1: a break off the Red River backwaters before dawn alone,
Speaker 1: paddle lonely, the way his father taught him, because motors
Speaker 1: spooked the ducks. Black dark fog on the water. He
Speaker 1: was gliding along the edge of the timber when the
Speaker 1: smell hit him. He said it was like a wet
Speaker 1: dog that had rolled in something dead and then slept
Speaker 1: on it. He stopped paddling, and from inside the flooded timber,
Speaker 1: close ten yards maybe less, something stood up out of
Speaker 1: the water. He never saw detail. What he saw was
Speaker 1: a piece of the darkness detach itself and rise, water
Speaker 1: pouring off it, loud in the still air, to a height.
Speaker 1: He could only judge against the trees, and his judgment
Speaker 1: put its head among branches. He knew stood better than
Speaker 1: seven feet over the water line. It didn't vocalize, it
Speaker 1: didn't charge. It took one enormous sucking step deeper into
Speaker 1: the timber, then another, each footfall pulling out of the
Speaker 1: mud with the sound, Junior said, he still hears when
Speaker 1: the house is too quiet. And it walked away from
Speaker 1: him into the break until the sound faded into the fog.
Speaker 1: Junior sat in that pi rogue until sunrise, didn't paddle in,
Speaker 1: didn't paddle out, He just sat there. When the light
Speaker 1: came up, he went and looked. Because he was nineteen
Speaker 1: and stupid, his words not mine. And in the mud
Speaker 1: of a little island in the timber, he found where
Speaker 1: it had been standing, two impressions, side by side, pressed
Speaker 1: down through the leaf mat into the black mud. Each one,
Speaker 1: he said, the length of his forearm from elbow to fingertips.
Speaker 1: He filled them in with the paddle blade before he left.
Speaker 1: I asked him why, and his answer is maybe my
Speaker 1: favorite answer any witness has ever given me on this show.
Speaker 1: He said, because my daddy hunted that break too, and
Speaker 1: he had a heart condition. So here we are, at
Speaker 1: the end of the boat ride. Louisiana handed us two
Speaker 1: monsters tonight. Let's weigh them one at a time. The
Speaker 1: rugaroo as a werewolf, I don't buy, and I doubt
Speaker 1: that surprises anybody who's ridden with me this far on
Speaker 1: the road trip. There's no biology in a curse. There's
Speaker 1: no specimen of a man with a wolf's head, no
Speaker 1: track series, no hair sample, nothing for an evidence. First
Speaker 1: researcher to pup and turn over in his hands. What
Speaker 1: there is, and what I have nothing but respect for
Speaker 1: is one of the richest folk traditions in North America.
Speaker 1: The rugaroo is a masterpiece of cultural engineering. It kept
Speaker 1: the faith, It kept the kids out of the swamp
Speaker 1: at night. It explained the wasting sicknesses nobody had names for,
Speaker 1: and it gave three centuries of Cajun families something to
Speaker 1: huddle against on the porch while the storm came up
Speaker 1: to buy you. Every culture builds a container for its
Speaker 1: fear of the dark. The Cajun's built one of the
Speaker 1: best ever made. That deserves a historian's admiration, and it
Speaker 1: has mine. But folk lore needs fuel. A cautionary tale
Speaker 1: can survive on nothing, sure, But this legend didn't just survive.
Speaker 1: It stayed load bearing in twenty sixteen, a dark shape
Speaker 1: in a human neighborhood got called rugaroo before it got
Speaker 1: called anything else. Celeste's grandmother didn't treat those thirteen pennies
Speaker 1: like acute tree edition, she treated them like equipment. Legends
Speaker 1: hold that kind of grip in a community for one
Speaker 1: of two reasons. Either the storytelling tradition is unusually strong,
Speaker 1: and in South Louisiana it absolutely is, or every generation
Speaker 1: or so, somebody down the bayou actually sees something, a tall, dark,
Speaker 1: upright figure at the edge of the headlights eyeshine at
Speaker 1: the wrong height, something crossing a boat launch in four strides,
Speaker 1: and that's where the two monsters of this episode walk
Speaker 1: into the same shadow. Because Louisiana doesn't just have a
Speaker 1: werewolf legend, Louisiana has fifty seven filed sasquatch reports, a
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three double witness daylight sighting on the Pearl River,
Speaker 1: a two thousand double witness case in Repeats Parish reported
Speaker 1: to a sheriff and a steady, unglamorous drumbeat of hunters
Speaker 1: and loggers and grass cutting homeowners describing the same animal
Speaker 1: that gets described in Washington and Ohio and Arkansas. Strip
Speaker 1: the theology off the Rugaroo, and strip the webbed track
Speaker 1: baggage off the Honey Island swamp Monster. And the witnesses
Speaker 1: in both files are describing one silhouette, big, dark hair covered, bipedal, riverine, nocturnal,
Speaker 1: mostly shy, mostly. I think South Louisiana has hosted a
Speaker 1: flesh and blood animal for as long as people have
Speaker 1: lived there, and I think that animal has worn whatever
Speaker 1: name the local culture had on the shelf. The Choctaws
Speaker 1: shelf said, letishe? The Cajun shelf said, rugaroo. The nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties television shelf said, swamp monster. The shelf changes, the
Speaker 1: silhouette doesn't. Can I prove that? No? You know I can't,
Speaker 1: and you know I won't pretend otherwise, because pretending is
Speaker 1: how this field got in the mess it's in. The
Speaker 1: Honey Island casts are compromised, The Ford film is unverifiable,
Speaker 1: and no Louisiana case has produced the body or the
Speaker 1: bone that this subject needs and has always needed. If
Speaker 1: you want to file the whole state under folklore and
Speaker 1: misidentified black bears, you can build that case, and parts
Speaker 1: of it are strong Bears do stand. Fog does lie?
Speaker 1: Hog hunters do exaggerate. But then I think about Tyler.
Speaker 1: I think about a man standing at a Louisiana tree
Speaker 1: line while his dog came back to him through the air,
Speaker 1: thrown by something that wanted him to know exactly what
Speaker 1: it could do and exactly how little it cared for
Speaker 1: his company. Bears, don't throw your dog back to you, Legends,
Speaker 1: don't throw your dog back to you. Somewhere between the
Speaker 1: curse and the blood and the thing in the swamp,
Speaker 1: there's an animal in that state with hands. The Bayou
Speaker 1: keeps two monsters. I've only ever been hunting one of them.
Speaker 1: Next stop on the road trip, we cross another state line,
Speaker 1: and the woods change again, and so do the stories.
Speaker 1: Until then, keep your fire build up, keep thirteen pennies
Speaker 1: by the door if it makes your grandmother happy, and
Speaker 1: if your dogs won't go into a patch of woods,
Speaker 1: do this show a favor. Listen to the dogs. I'll
Speaker 1: see you down the road. Di Di Di Di