Speaker 1: I've been interested in bigfoot for a long time, but
it wasn't until the last few years that I had
the free time to be able to travel and see
some good locations myself. I'm from the Midwest. We can't
match Oregon, Washington, or Ohio, but there are a few
spots that are known to have activity. One such place
was in the state Forest, about four hours from me,
and so late in September I decided to spend a
few days checking it out. On arriving, I set up
in the main campground. This is a relatively isolated area
and mostly draws trout fishermen to fish the local streams.
There were a couple of fishermen camping with RVs, but
otherwise I had the place to myself. At mid afternoon,
I set out driving some of the forest roads in
my truck, just getting the feel of the area. When
I came to a parking spot for a couple of
mile long hiking tree trail, I decided to get out
and stretch my legs and check out the walk in
campground that was supposed to be back in there. It
was cool in the woods and I walked along quietly,
just watching for animals and enjoying being out, not really
expecting anything. But as I got close to the campground
off in the woods a few hundred yards to the south,
that was a loud wood knock. I couldn't believe it.
I actually heard a wood knock, and on my first hike,
it was very loud and clear. I would describe it
as ringing almost. It sounded like hard, hard dead wood,
no bark, very clear. I stopped dead in my tracks
and listened for a good fifteen minutes, but there was
nothing more. I didn't have my little baseball battle long
and I wasn't about to start screaming like I was
on TV. So after a while I just continued into
the campground and looked around a little. I waited a
while more. Still there was nothing, and then I got
to thinking again I actually heard a wood knock. It's
impossible to describe how exciting it was to actually hear
one for myself. I knew I had to come back.
That night. At dusk, I came walking down the trail again.
This time I had my little baseball bat and of
course some flashlights. It was a lot spookier this time,
but I got all the way to the campground without
hearing anything, and I sat down on a bench and
I listened for a while. It was all very quiet.
Finally I got up off the bench and went to
a nearby tree and gave it a good wat. It
kind of echoed for a second. I dropped the bat
and cut my hands around my ears to listen. After
about fifteen to twenty seconds, there was a quiet, single
I'm not sure how to describe it, a soft crunch,
like a single careful footstep on a soft rotten log.
Just that one soft, deliberate sound, like something saying quietly, Hey,
you don't have to shout. I'm right over here. The
hairs on my neck stood up. Wasn't very far away
at all. I waited a few minutes and made another knock,
more quietly this time, but there was no response. After
listening a while more, I headed back to my truck.
I'm sure you'll understand that I spent a lot of
time shouting my flashlight around into the woods and back
behind me on the way out. This was all that
happened on that first visit, but it was enough to
get me fired up to come back again the next spring.
It was just amazing to go to a place reputed
to have activity and then actually experience it myself. I
have no proof of what might have made the wood knock,
but I will say I did not see any other
people in this back area for the entire three days
that I was there, and my thinking was, when did
a human ever make just one single knock? So the
next June I was raring to goeh. I packed up
my camping gear and headed back, hoping that I would
have some more excitement. But little did I know what
was coming this time. I drove right to the trail
parking lot. It was only late morning, and I figured
i'd go set up camp after walking the trail once first.
I tried to drive quietly the last half a mile
and made as little noise as I could, shutting the
door when I got out. Hopefully I could surprise something
and maybe hear another would not. I sat out, and
before I was even one hundred yards down the trail,
there was a huge loud crack. It was a sound
to my left up on the ridge. I almost jumped
out of my skin. It was so loud. It sounded
like a whole tree being snapped like a pencil. My
hair stood up and my stomach jumped up into my throat.
I felt like I needed to be running, like right now.
And there up on the ridge, I caught just a
glimpse of something, something behind me the bushes. I could
see the sun glinting off the shiny black fur through
the holes between the leaves, and it was moving off
into heavier cover. I only saw it for a second,
no identifiable shape, but roughly three to four feet high
and a little less in width. It took me a
couple of minutes to calm down, But wow, did I
just get bluff charged. I heard nothing before or after
the tree crack. There were no sticks falling, no thuds
or other noises. But what had I seen? I was
absolutely elated. Whatever that was, it wasn't a human, and
it wasn't a deer, and that is the only bigger
animal that should be around the DNR. Information online was
clear there were no bears in this whole corner of
the state. And if it wasn't a bear, black shiny fur,
you know, if I had to say from my gut
what I saw any animal in the world, I would
say from its color, size and the way it moved
that it was something like a big chimpanzee and talk
about classic bigfoot behavior breaking a tree and warning me
and slinking off into the heavy brush. After I recovered,
I continued down the trail. When I got to the campground,
I was surprised to see a man and his young
son setting up camp. I walked over to talk, and
I found out they had parked at the other end
of the trail and walked in, and they arrived about
a half an hour before me. They hadn't seen anything
strange on their way here. Let me give you the
lay of the land here, because it's relevant. There's this
long trail with parking at both ends and a campground
in the middle. To the south, where last year's would
not came from, is nothing, no trails know anything. And
to the north from the campground there's a draw or
a ravine that runs up the ridge and twists to
the west. So the head of that ravine is up
in the woods there behind the ridgetop on the west
and the end I came in from. I'm thinking, what
if the man and his son came walking down the
trail and there's a young bigfoot near the campground who
sees them coming, so not to be seen himself. He
has to run into the woods to the north, even
though where he really wants to go is to the south,
where there are thick woods and where my wood knock
came from. So he works his way up the draw
to get away from the campground and then turns south,
intending to cross over the top of the ridge and
come down the hill across the trail and then make
his way into the woods to the south. Only when
he is coming down from the ridge top, dang, there's
another human in the way. So he's ticked off and
instinctively cracks the tree at me and SLINKs back into cover.
It made a lot of sense, I thought, And that's
all that happened on that trip. But let me tell
you that was enough. I have never been I'm so
startled or scared as I was when that loud noise
made me think I was about to be attacked or
squashed by something. My next visit was great too. I
tried some gifting and had interesting results, but it's not
directly relevant to the story, so I'll pass over that.
One last spring, I again returned ready to try a
few new things. But I did have a new piece
of information I had found online. The DNR now said
a few isolated black bears had been seen in this
quarter of the state, presumably just passing through. I went
to have a talk with the local ranger. After telling
my story, we narrowed down the exact time I had
been there, and he said that that month, the month
when I experienced the tree cracking incident, a couple other
hiking parties had reported seeing a black bear right along
that specific trail. Furthermore, the very next month, mister bear
wandered out into the highway and got himself killed by
a car. He had then been stuffed and was on
display at the county museum. I could even go see him.
A little more. Research taught me that bears do occasionally
crack trees while engaging in scent related behavior, although my
experience was not typical at all, and when I visited
mister bear he proved to be a little on the
small side, which would be about right, But he was
more of a cinnamon brown, not really a shiny black
unless they both looked the same glinting in the bright sun.
Apparently my bigfoot was the bigfoot that wasn't, Although to
be fair, yes, what I saw was probably a bear,
but where no bears were supposed to be doing something
bears don't really do in exactly that way, and possibly
changing color a bit in the process. There starting to
be an awful lot of coincidences there. I want to
share with you my brother's encounter with a sasquatch that
happened around nineteen ninety near a town called Gary's Creek,
which is near Fayetteville, North Carolina. I've always been fascinated
with Bigfoot ever since I was a kid of seven
or eight. I even went with my friend one night
to see Sasquatch The Legend of Bigfoot at a local theater,
and that movie scared the heck out of both of us.
I recently rewatched the movie and I had to laugh
because I could hardly believe I was ever scared of
this chunk of geese. Oh what a way to describe
a movie, a chunk of cheese. My family also knew
of my fascination. I believe my dad was interested too,
because every time there was a Bigfoot documentary on TV,
he was right there watching it with my brother and I.
My parents even gave me a copy of Peter Burns's
Bigfoot Book for my day one year, and I must
have read it a hundred times. The following incident happened
around the year nineteen ninety. I was chatting with my
mother on the phone, and she asked how I enjoyed
a recent camping trip that I had taken with some friends.
I made a joke about how we didn't see bigfoot,
but we did have a great time regardless, to which
she replied, well, your brother would be happy to learn that.
When I asked her what she meant, she seemed surprised
that he'd never told me. When I pressed her, she
informed me that Larry, my brother, had an extraordinary bigfoot
encounter a few years back. I was rather pod that
Larry hadn't told me about this. He knew of my
lifelong interest in this subject. I hung up with my
mother and immediately called Larry, what's the big idea of
being Harry hold out with the news of an encounter
that you never told me about. He guessed correct that
Mom had told me. He said he would go ahead
and tell me, but to not ask any questions. Well,
I thought that was strange, but I went along out
of love and respect for my brother. And then he
told me this story Larry was working as a delivery
man for a local branch of a nationwide pizza chain.
He was tasked to deliver some pizzas to a college
fraternity house. Larry's car was in the shop at the time,
so he was driving his boss's pickup truck. He delivered
the pizzas and was driving back through Gray's Creek, North Carolina,
on a road with overhanging oak trees. Bocephus was playing
on the radio, he said, and the windows were down
and he was enjoying the cool evening air. He heard
a loud bang in the bed of the truck. He
slammed on the brakes while looking in the rear view
mirror and could see something black up against the rear window.
When he got to a full stop, he saw something
flailing around and it managed to work its way to
the open tailgate and roll out of the truck bed.
Larry sat there, stunned, looking in the rear view mirror,
trying to figure out what this thing was. He stood
up on two feet and it grew to seven feet tall.
He tilted the mirror to see its face. Larry focused
on the thing's face to see it looking right back
at him. The face was human like and had a murderous,
hate filled expression, and then it roared. Larry ain't no dummy.
He turned and stomped on the gas because he knew
that if this thing got its hands on him, it
would absolutely tear him apart. Larry says he has no
recollection of driving back to the pizza joint, just that
the next thing he knew that he was getting out
of the truck and his knees buckled and he would
have fallen flat had he not managed to catch himself
on the door's arm rest. He said he stayed squatted
and gulping for air for several minutes, and then he
went in trying to look like he was okay. Larry's
boss looked at him and he knew something was wrong.
He was pale and his eyes were big and wide open.
Apparently Larry looked so bad that his boss drove him
home that minute. He has no memory of the ride
home or talking with his boss on the ride. My
mother walked to Larry back to his room so he
could lay down while my dad and Larry's boss looked
at the truck. The part of the bed sides near
the rear window were crumpled downwards, and there was blood
in the bed, as well as some tufts of hair.
They both picked up on the bad odor as well.
Our father said it was a horrible smell. Mom and
Dad sat up with Larry all night. He was obviously
in a state of shock. They wanted to take him
to the hospital, but Larry insisted that he was okay.
He related his story to both my and dad a
little while after, and they both believed him. My parents
are not gullible people. They're well grounded and not prone
to believe everything they hear. Trust me on that one.
A year later, Mom and Dad, my wife and I
and Larry and his family were vacationing together and I
was excited that I get to ask him about his
experience face to face. I sat down with a notepad
and a pen. I was even planning to record the
conversation with a new app on my phone. He looked
at both and said, no way, I don't want you
submitting this to any bigfoot organization, and furthermore, this is
going to be the last time we talk about this.
You got it. I agreed and asked some questions that
help fill in the blanks in the account. I have
a bit more to tell you about my brother. When
he was relating what happened to me during our vacation,
I saw both fear in his eyes and goosebumps rose
on his arms more than once, and you can't fake that.
What really hammered things home for me is the fact
that my brother is a formal Special Forces operator and
he served a tour over in the Sandbox. He just
does not get rattled. To speak for myself, I never
heard of a sasquatch dropping from a tree into a
truck before. From Larry's report, he had a hunch it
just lost its grip and somehow fell into the bed
of the truck. I'd be willing to bet the sasquatch
trackways people find that abruptly end is because these things
take to the trees