Speaker 1: The stories you will hear are from real people with
real experiences with the unknown. Welcome to the Dixie Cryptid
What If It's True? Podcast? All right, here we go.
Speaker 2: My name is Bernard. I'm a sixty five year old
retired all filled worker from South Mississippi. I've lived my
entire life in a small town about an hour south
of Jackson, Mississippi, called Bogacheetah. Bogacheetah is Chocktaw for Big Creek.
Many Native American tribes settled here in the late eighteen hundreds,
and many property owners discover burial mounds on their properties here.
My family farmed all the land we owned, and as children,
we would spend the summer searching for arrowheads after or
the fields were plowed. We probably found hundreds of them altogether,
and we still occasionally find them today. Once I graduated
high school, I set out to make a living in
the Gulf of Mexico all Patch. Looking back, I wish
I had continued to farm and kept up with my
family's dairy farm business. The hard manual labor of drilling
rigs took a toll on my body, but it allowed
me to provide for my family and lived for the
most part, an upper middle class life. Years ago, when
my son was seventeen years old, I called home to
check on him, as I did daily, and while I
was away at work, my mother and my sister looked
after him. On this day, he asked if he and
a friend could take a bigfoot researcher onto my property.
Apparently his buddy had seen a creature across the road
and enter an area of my property the week prior.
His friend reported the sighting to the BFRO and a
man wanted to take a look around. Well, I laughed,
and I told him that he could go and do
whatever they needed to do. I had spent the majority
of my life in those woods and never saw a
sign of a strange creature being there. The old men
in my town would tell tales of skunk apes that
lived in the Bogacheta River swamps, and a few years earlier,
a preacher's daughters said the creature jumped from a tree
and slapped her car late one night. I didn't know
if any of these stories were a fact, but I
later found out for myself that it was all too real.
The years passed, and fast forward to twenty twenty three,
I have a ten year old grandson who has become
the center of my universe. I wanted to spend all
the time I could with him and a couple of
COVID mandates. Later, I decided to retire and enjoy my
golden years. My son and grandson loved deer hunt. Knowing this,
I spent months preparing deer plots and getting them set
up to have good places to hunt for the upcoming season.
A few weeks before opening day, I started to notice
that hogs were destroying one of our plots near the
river swamp. I went to my local feed store and
bought a hay ring, a net wire, a spring loaded
swing gate. I took these items in my welding machine
and fabricated an indestructible hog trap to try and lessen
the population of these pests. We kill and eat these
hogs all the time. Now I knew I had takers
for any that I would catch, because properly cooked, they
were fine eating. I placed the trap beside the food
plot and attached the trigger wire for the spring gate
to a bucket of corn inside, and once those pigs
moved that bucket, the gates would close and they would
be trapped. My years in the oil field afforded me
some of the finer redneck things in life. Afore wheel
drive pickup and a side by side and an arsenal
of gun from pistols to some automatic ar style rifles.
With many Wi Fi game cameras. I had one camera
that had seen better days. It would take and send
me pictures just fine during the day, but had lost
its ability to flash and take pictures at night, so
it was the perfect candidate to watch my hog trap.
It would send me pictures the next morning to let
me know if the trap had been sprung and if
I had any hogs to go and remove. I set
the trap up on Friday afternoon, and by early evening
I got a picture showing me I had four hogs
in the trap. The next morning, my son and I
pulled up to the trap just as the sun peeked out,
but we were greeted with an empty trap. The gate
was closed and there was no damage or holes dug
under it. This trap was anchored to the ground using
six t posts, each with four fence tie wires fastening
the trap, and all of them were intact. We found
hair on the top end of the net wire, which
was at my eye level and I'm six foot two.
Some of the hair was dark, it was almost black
like the hogs I had seen in the photos, but
some of the hair was long and light brown. After
handling it, the smell on my hand was enough to
make a maggot gag. It smelled like a crab house
on a tuna boat. Oh man, that's a classic. We
reset the trap and headed back home, and just like clockwork,
when it was early evening, I received another photo telling
me there were more hogs in the trap. But the
next day I awoke to the photo from my game
cam of a hog sitting on top of my empty
sprung hog trap. I was baffled, how were these hogs
getting out? Again? We reset the trap and around four
pm we arrived and found the empty trap with more
hair stuck to the wire. This time, we took more
time to investigate, and we noticed the grass was beaten
down in a path leading from the woods. Well this
got me thinking was someone coming in and taking these hogs?
I pondered on this the rest of the night. If
someone was taking them, then how were they doing it.
There was no blood inside the trap or around it,
and the hogs aren't exactly cooperative, so picking even a
small one up and handing it over to another person
outside the trap would be damn near impossible. I decided
to go back the next day and set the trap
and then get into my box doAnd with my thermal
scope equipped ar ten and see what I could see.
A few hours later, two large hogs entered my trap
and the gate shut. Now I had the bait and
I was going to wait and see if anything took it.
Night came and I scanned the woodline with my thermal.
Around ten PM, I heard what sounded like whistles coming
from the woods where the grass trail had led. I
pulled up my thermal again and I saw heat signals
moving through the trees, and after a couple of minutes
I saw what sort of resembled a human emerged from
the tree line and walked toward the trout. When he
got there, he had his hands at waste level, with
his palms straight out. I tried to figure out why
he was standing like that when I realized he was
so tall that his hands were resting on the net
wire of the trout. The large hogs immediately went to
the opposite side of the troup, but I could see
that the top of their backs were just above this
thing's knee. It wasn't but a few seconds later that
I heard another series of whistles, and two more large
figures emerged from the woods and walked to the trap.
Once they arrived, the first creature gingerly climbed over into
the trap and grabbed one of the hogs, and within
seconds its loud squealing stop and it was handed over
to one of the creatures on the outside of the trap.
The second hog was silenced and handed over, and the
creature climbed back out and walked with the others back
into the woods. Well, I couldn't believe my eyes. I
stayed up watching until the batteries and my thermal died,
and then I lay down on the floor of my
box stand and I tried to sleep, but there was
no way I was climbing down until after daylight. About
an hour after daybreak, I climbed down and walked to
my truck, and I called my son and I told
him what I had seen, and he wanted to go
back that night to see for himself, and that's what
we did, and the exact same thing happened again, only
this time three hogs were trapped, and instead of two
additional figures emerging from the woods, there were three. My
son watched in silence through my thermal binoculars while I
watched through my scope. After what we had witnessed, we
both agreed that we weren't climbing down until daybreak, and
when we climbed down that morning, we walked out to
the trap. Those things have to be nearly ten feet tall, dad,
my son said. Just as he said it, we heard
something near the woods. A second later, a boar hog
with its nose to the ground, ran out. I quickly
shouldered my rifle and took it down, and my son
and I walked over to it. It was over two
hundred pounds. We had about a half a mile to
walk to the truck, so we decided to leave it
beside a tree stump at the base of our box
stand and then come back with the side by side
to haul it out. We got back home, loaded up
the side by side and came straight back to remove
the boar. But when we got there, it was gone.
There were no drag marks, no pack of codes tearing
into it. It was just gone. That's when my son
noticed a pile of twenty or so pecans sitting on
top of a tree stump. Each of them I'm perfectly shelled. Wow,
they left us some pecans, Dad, my son said. I
asked him what he meant. He explained that last dear
season he had been sitting in that stand eating pecans
and throwing the shells out the window onto the ground.
So the bigfoot must have assumed that would be a
good trade pecinds for pigs. My son collected the gifted pekins,
and from their smell, he didn't eat them, but he
took them with us. Nonetheless, we didn't set the trap again,
and a few days later I brought a trailer and
removed it in preparation for deer season. In Mississippi, youth
deer season opens a few days earlier than rifle season
for all ages. Opening morning, I took my grandson just
after daylight. A six point buck and a doe walked out,
and my grandson is a crack shot with a rifle,
and before I could blink, he shot the buck and
then the dough with a Savage Youth Model two forty three.
We climbed down to assess his first kills of the season,
and when I told him we had two to skin,
he told me, no, Pap Paul, just one. Let's take
the buck and leave the dough for them, you know,
the big feats. Well, how could I argue with that.
We loaded the buck, pulled the dough over near our stand,
and left and we got home and skinned his trophy,
and later that day we loaded up the corn to
take to a nearby feeder. My grandson asked if we
could ride to see if they had taken his gift,
and when we got there, we saw that they had
not only that, but on the stump laid a beautiful fox,
squirrel tail and a large Indian spearhead. It's not like
an arrowhead, it's bigger, and something we searched and searched
for as children, but we never found them. My grandson
was rightfully excited, and quite frankly, I was too, And
when I got him home, he told us father about it.
Those things won't forget anything. My son said, what do
you mean, I asked him, This isn't the first time
my son has been down there near the swamp. Don't
you remember me taking him squirrel hunting down there last year.
They were watching him harvest squirrels, and I bet they've
been around so long that they remember you searching all
that area for arrowheads. My son's words replayed in my
head the rest of that day. How long have these
things been watching us? How many of them are there?
Since that day, we have continued to hunt and gift.
I recently put the hog trap back down there, and
I reseid it a couple of times a week for them.
I hope those hogs are feeding their group, maybe they're
young ones. Also hope that our friendship with them and
kindness carry on. Maybe when I'm gone, they will keep
a watchful eye over my son and grandson and other
generations to come. Thank you for reading my letter, Signed
Bernard Oh. I just love that story. That's a story
from my home state. He's quite a few miles south
of me. I live in the north part of the state,
and this man lives south of Jackson, Bogacheetah. I've never
I don't think I've ever been there, but I enjoyed
reading this story so much, not just because it's from
my state, but this man knows how to tell a story.
He knows how to recount the thing Lily, Lily, what
are you barking at? Lily? She thinks she's a junk
yard dog. Anyway, The point is I love this story.
I wanted to say one thing. I am real busy
with work now, but it's only going to last about
another week. If you're commenting and you're noticing, I'm not
letting you know that I read your comment like with
a heart, or with a thumbs up, or with a reply.
It's just because I'm trying to Lily, Lily, She's every
time I talk to her, she just keeps barking. Anyway.
I'm just busy trying to put keep podcasts coming out
because I love doing these I love doing these stories,
and uh, I just don't have time to go through
the comment section. But I will for the last three
or four videos, the last three or four short videos
I've done, I will go back and read the comments,
and I've kind of scanned through them a couple of times.
But I'm working ten eleven hours a day, and uh,
when that day's over, I just go in. I don't
want to even look at my phone or my computer
or anything. So I want to let you know that
thanks for listening to this podcast. I certainly appreciate you.
Let me go over here and see. Uh, she's probably
barking out a butterfly or a spider. I don't know.
She's she thinks she's pretty tough, and she'll she'll see
a butterfly. Sometimes she'll chase chicken feathers around the yard
and she'll bark at them. She's just a yacht She's
a junk yard dog, that's all I'm saying. All Right, y'all,
have a great weekend or week coming up. I appreciate you,
and we'll see you on the next one. Thanks.