Speaker 1: Back in October of two thousand and eight, I was
twenty eight and I was in love. I had known
her my entire life, but I didn't realize how I
felt until after she moved away from Ontario, Canada, where
we lived, to British Columbia. By the time I realized
that she'd taken my heart with her, it was too late. Now,
twelve years later, thanks to Facebook, we had reconnected and
she was coming home for a visit. I felt like
I'd waited a lifetime for that day to come. I'll
never forget how beautiful she looked when we met. Time
passed two quickly, and days turned into weeks, and we
spent as much time together as we could. Before we
knew it, she would be leaving in a week, and
I knew I couldn't let her go again, And to
my surprise and great joy, she agreed to stay. Thanksgiving
week of that year, we arrived I did in British
Columbia to get her things and officially move her back home.
We flew in after spending a few days with her friends.
We had a four day drive back home. Everything went
well until the second day of our return trip. We
got lost. How did I make this mistake, I wondered
as I stared out over the landscape. We were almost
out of the mountains by then, but it was getting late.
I thought maybe if I drove a bit longer, we
could make up some ground. It was a thought I
would soon come to regret. Night was falling fast when
I saw a sign that indicated the next town was
sixty kilometers away. Dear God, another sixty kilometers, but I'm
already so tired, I thought. Being the stubborn type, I
pushed on. I can do this, I told myself, like
the little engine that could. No sooner had I formed
that thought than the first rain drive began to fall.
I glanced upwards and whispered, how much more are you
going to put me through? Lord? Ask a stupid question.
I tried to set aside my frustrations. The love of
my life was sleeping comfortably in the next seat to me.
Even though we were lost at the moment, we had
our whole lives ahead of us. I was a lucky man,
and one day we would look back on this night
and smile. Right. Five minutes later, the rain was coming
down pretty steady, and we were no closer to finding
our way back to where we should have been. One second,
we were traveling along the lonely road while the wiper
blades swished away the rain almost as fast as it
blurred my view. And the next a pair of massive
antlers appeared in my path. It was a moose, and
then another, and then another. They were being chased by
something I could never have imagined. I slammed on the brakes,
but there was no time to stop. It was out
of my hands. The tires slid across the wet pavement
and crashed into the animals. The world spun wildly as
my car flipped over and over and over again, landing
on all four wheels. I don't remember being ejected from
the vehicle, but I awoke to find myself lying on
the ground, being pummeled by the driving rain. I had
been knocked out at some point, and breathing hurt, but
not breathing wasn't an option, and I gasped for air
and winced at the pain with each breath, and then
something growled. The memory of the last image before my
foot buried the brake pedal came back to me, and
it growled again, followed by a sort of wailing wah sound.
The pain in shock of the accident was overwhelming, and
as a former hockey player, I wasn't a stranger to
the feeling. No one plays high without breaking something at
some point. But this pain felt like it was coming
from every part of my body. And then I remembered
my girlfriend. No, God, no, I cried. I couldn't pull
myself up, so I had to inch around to the
other side of the car, crawling on my belly. It
was an eternity during which I pleaded with God to
let her be okay. As I rounded the passenger side,
I saw her body on the ground thirty feet away,
with something strange standing over her. At nine feet tall.
The hair covered being looked like an ape man with
shoulders as white as my car. Get away from her.
I screamed at it, leave her alone, please. Through my yelling,
I heard a strange waw wail again. Now I knew
what was making it. The creature went down on all
fours like a gorilla would do, and placed its hands
on my girlfriend's belly and that whah again. Now I
couldn't understand what this thing was doing to my girlfriend.
I just wanted it to get away from her. Leave
her alone, I screamed. I grabbed a piece of broken
fender in tent on throwing it at the beast, but
my arm was broken and it wouldn't do what I
wanted it to do. All I knew was that I
needed to chase this thing away before it hurt my
girlfriend any more than she already was. I wanted to
hurt it. I wanted it to feel the pain I felt.
It stood up and released a long growl before taking
one long hop and landing right next to me, with
the ease of a child setting aside a discarded rag doll.
It scooped me off the pavement, and it set me
on the side of the road. It seemed to realize
that I was hurt, because it didn't drop me. It
placed me. Then it went back over to my girlfriend
and carefully picked her up, cradled her in its arms
like a newborn baby, and brought her over to set
her beside me. I was trembling in pain and fear
as I looked into the face of my girlfriend. She
wasn't awake. Her eyes were half closed in that terrible
way that said there was no one behind them now,
And I turned my gaze back to the creature. We
locked eyes for a moment, and I saw compassion there.
I burst into tears, crying out her name over and over,
unable to bear the physical pain or to understand the
mental anguish. I was angry at the world and frustrated
with my inability to fix this, and all I could
do was cry all the while. The strange ape man
stood over me and patiently waited, and finally it spoke,
not in English or anything like a language I ever
knew or heard. It wasn't yelling now. It knelt down
and placed a hand on her leg and looked back
over at me. Somehow, I think it knew that the
love of my life was gone. Lights were coming from
somewhere in the distance, and darkness fell over me. That
was the last thing I remember until I woke up
in the hospital. Police were all around me, and my
mother had flown in from Ontario along with my brother.
They were in the room. My girlfriend's mother was there too.
An officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police said, sir,
you were in a terrible accident. I want you to
try to be calm now. I looked at my mother,
hoping against hope, as I asked. The only question I
needed to have an answer to is she did she
make it mo The look on my mother's face told
me all I needed to know. I spent the next
three year months recovering my leg required sixty two staples.
My arm, wrist, and several ribs were broken. The official
police report doesn't include the part about the Bigfoot. I
left that out. It wasn't until five years ago that
I shared this with anyone. At that time, I sat
down with both my family and hers, and I told
them everything I had to get it out of my system.
Keeping it hidden was making me sick now, worried that
people would laugh at me, but bundling up inside was worse.
I look back now, I can imagine that the bigfoot
was chasing the moose and they just happened to cross
the road at the same point we were. I don't
harbor any hard feelings toward these creatures. He showed me
empathy by placing my girlfriend beside me one last time. Now,
this story doesn't have a happy ending, but I hope
it will encourage others to share theirs. Keeping it inside
does no good. I've wanted to give up many times
since that awful night. The images and memories are always
with me, but I keep moving forward, trying to live
my life as best I can. I think my girlfriend
would have wanted it this way. I was playing a
game of creek jumping with four of my friends when
I was twelve years old. We lived in Independence, Kentucky,
and creek jumping was a game we played often back then.
It was really just follow the leader, but it involved
jumping over creek, so that's what we called it. We'd
been out in the woods playing our game for over
an hour when we heard something walking somewhere behind us,
like it was following us. We'd gone pretty deep into
the woods, but we figured it with some of the
neighborhood kids who had followed us there well. Figuring that
there was going to be an ambush, we picked up
some sticks and began hitting them on the trees and yelling,
if you want to play, come out and open you
big chickens. Everything went quiet, maybe a little too quiet,
but we were kids, we wouldn't have noticed that. After
a few minutes, we figured that we had chased them off,
and we went back to our game of creek jumping.
Minutes later, we were a little deeper into the woods
when a massive roar rang out that vibrated in our chests.
I grew up in the Kentucky woods, and this was
nothing like anything I'd ever heard. We froze in our
tracks with two of my friends on one side of
the creek and the rest of us on the other,
and we looked up the hill on our side of
the creek to see a nine foot tall nightmare standing
between two trees at the top, shaking and growling at us.
Fear shot through us as one of my buddy's gasped,
what the hell is that? My other buddy on the
other side was so scared that he pee his pants.
Come on, let's get out of here. One of the
other friends yelled from across the creek, and the three
of us on our side sprang into action, and we
jumped across to the other side. As soon as our
feet hit the ground, it let out another ear shattering roar,
and then it snapped the tree off like they were twigs,
and they threw the trees at us. We were panicked
and terrified and ran as fast as we could with
this thing following behind us. Well. No one looked back,
but we could hear it crashing through the trees like
a bulldozer. We didn't stop running until we came to
a country road, where we had to stop and catch
our breath. By then we were all crying. Now I
have to admit I thought I was going to die
that day. We knew it wasn't far behind us, so
we started walking up the road as fast as our
exhausted lungs would allow, and our only hope, we thought,
was if someone came along and gave us a ride.
All the way up that road, it paralleled us, but
we didn't see it. It stayed inside the tree line,
but we could hear it huffing and puffing and tearing
up trees. We finally came to a gas station where
one of my friends called us mother to come and
pick us up. We told her what happened, but she
didn't believe us. When I got home, I told my
mother and father, but they didn't believe me either, and
after that we never spoke about it again. My friends
still don't speak about it, except to admit that it
gave them all nightmares. But we didn't play in the
woods after that. It was another four years before I
stepped foot inside that tree line. One thing I do
know is that that thing wasn't human, and if it
had wanted to kill us, it could have easily caught
us and done just that. My siblings called me Buckshot.
I guess you can tell by that name that I've
spent most of my life in the woods hunting everything
from white tailed deer to turkey, to coyotes and hogs.
Because of that, I've also spent many an early morning
and night listening to the sounds of mother nature. Where
I'm from, coyotes are pretty common and black bears aren't
unheard of. We also have black panthers or black cougars here,
but don't tell the authorities. They ain't figured it out yet.
I know I haven't seen or heard everything, but I've
always been pretty comfortable with my knowledge of Mother Nature.
That's why I was so shook up by what I
heard one night a few weeks back. I was sitting
in my barn taking a rest before heading to the house,
when out of the blue, I heard an extremely loud
roar or I guess you might say it was a yell. Well,
whichever it was, it was something I've never heard before.
I've heard everything that might have come close to it,
but this wasn't any of them. I'm sure of that.
There's something else. I'm sure of. Whatever made that noise
was huge. The sound repeated itself three more times. With
each successive yell, my heart beat a little faster, until
it felt like it was beating out of my chest.
I retreated to the house as quickly as I could,
since then I carry whenever I step outside, especially late
at night, So naturally I told my dad and sister
and nephew about it, and just as naturally, they laughed
and picked fun at me for it. After a week
of being mocked by them, we were all sitting out
in the yard one night, enjoying the evening air. It
was getting to be around eleven forty pm, and I
was half listing for another yell and half hoping I
didn't hear one. Just as my dad opened his mouth
to say something, that loud, bellowing howl came from the
woodline along the backfield of my property. In the daylight,
we could have seen where it came from, but at
night it was too dark. As that sound echoed across
the barnyard, everyone went still. My dad frozen midward, and
his eyes bulged from his face. We all sat looking
at each other as that same sound came from the
bowels of the woods a few more times over the
next several minutes, and no one spoke a word, probably
because no one needed to. That effectively ended our night.
The next night, we regrouped in the barnyard, with everyone
anxious to talk about what happened the night before. As
my dad and siblings discussed the loudness and the possible
source of the sounds, my nephew and I searched the
Internet on our smartphones, looking for animal sounds that might
explain what we'd heard. We searched for several hours, but
we came up empty. Nothing came close to what we'd heard.
Then we stumbled across the site that had bigfoot sounds.
They were remarkably close to what we'd heard. After hearing
those recordings, we all looked at each other and came
to the same collective conclusion that thing roaring in my
woods had to be a bigfoot. A few days after that,
my nephew and I were walking in a field on
my property when he came across an unusual track in
the soil. He called me over to look at it.
What I saw led me to conclude that it was
definitely a bigfoot. The print was very human in appearance,
except that it was six or seven inches wide at
the top and four to five inches wide at the heel.
I could see the toes and the curve of the
arch and the foot. My heart was racing as fast
as it was that first night. I've always believed in
the possibility of their existence, but I never thought I
would actually see a print or hear one yell. A
few nights passed and I was standing out on my
front porch to catch a bit of fresh air before
turning in for the night, and from the woods across
the road from my house, I heard that roar again.
Having heard it several times now, I wasn't so quick
to retreat. It was a little different this time, more
like a squeal of pain with a hint of a
roar in it. Fear gripped me, but I was determined
to stand my ground. My wife heard it and came
outside to see what it was. This was the first
time she'd heard it, and I could see fear and
worry in her eyes as she stood there and shot.
Two nights later, my son and I were out checking
my grapes at eight pm, and I was studying how
many grapes were producing when I heard that familiar sound
in the distance. I marveled at the power it had,
even from so far away. With white eyes, my son
looked at me and he said, is that what you've
been hearing? And I nodded my answer as he turned
to run for the house. Come inside, he called over
his shoulder, and I followed on his heels. A couple
of more days went by with no unusual sounds from
the woods. I had just gotten comfortable with the idea
that we wouldn't hear any more of those yells when
as my wife and I were lying in bed that night,
somewhere between awake and dream land, and a loud bellow
came through our bedroom window and rattled our walls. We
both immediately sat up right in bed and looked around,
neither one knowing what to say. All we could do
was stare at each other when another loud roar shook
the window glass. After that, all was silent for the
rest of the night. It was just enough to keep
either one of us from getting a good night's sleep,
and we spent the rest of the night, sitting up
waiting and listening. By now I was contemplating looking for
more evidence despite my internal struggle between fear and curiosity,
I decided to take a walk along my property line
at the edge of the woods. This time I found
two different sets of prints. One was fifteen inches long
and the other was ten inches. Both were very wide,
and I realized then that I was going to have
to accept that whatever this was, it had chosen to
make my property its home. Judging by the size of
the Prince and the strength of its roar, there wasn't
going to be much I could do about it. I
told my siblings about the Prince the first chance I got.
They all ran over to look at them, but I
could tell that they were struggling with the same internal
battle between curiosity and fear that had me tied at knots.
I've lived on this property for the last six years.
Before that, I left five miles from here. Now I've
lived in this general area my entire thirty one years.
Never have I heard anything like this. I'm sure my
siblings could all say the same. That night, after I
showed my siblings the Prince, we all decided to wait
up to see if we might hear it again. The neighbor,
who was living three houses down, was having a shin
dick that night, and around nine pm the creature in
the woods let loose with a long, bellowing yell, and
the neighbor heard it. How do I know that he
heard it? Not two seconds later all of his friends
started leaving in a hasty manner. The fire went from
lighting up his yard to darkness, and I laughed a bit,
but I understood their fear. So far, it's the last
time I've heard that yell.