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: There's a mile marker about thirty feet off my front bumper,
Speaker 1: and nothing else out here but a gravel turnout, a
Speaker 1: barbed wire fence, and a wall of timber that starts
Speaker 1: at the fence and doesn't stop for a long time,
Speaker 1: the engines still ticking as it cools. The atlas is
Speaker 1: on the passenger seat with about forty sticky notes hanging
Speaker 1: off the edge of it, and every one of those
Speaker 1: notes is a stop we haven't made yet on this
Speaker 1: road trip we're taking today off the map. I want
Speaker 1: to tell you why, and I want to be straight
Speaker 1: with you about where I stand before I do, because
Speaker 1: I've spent close to forty years chasing things that leave
Speaker 1: footprints and not much else, and I've learned that an
Speaker 1: audience deserves to know what the guy talking believes. I
Speaker 1: think there's a real animal out there. I've said that
Speaker 1: on all my shows for years. I also think the
Speaker 1: overwhelming majority of what lands in my inbox isn't that animal.
Speaker 1: It's bears, it's people, it's timber cracking at night. It's
Speaker 1: a hunter who's been awake since four in the morning
Speaker 1: looking at a stump and bad light. And it's a
Speaker 1: certain number of folks having fun with me for sport.
Speaker 1: That's not me being hard on anybody. That's the arithmetic
Speaker 1: of the subject. And if you don't hold both of
Speaker 1: those ideas at once, you end up believing everything or
Speaker 1: believing nothing, and neither one of those is research. So
Speaker 1: here's what today is. Five accounts, five people, five parts
Speaker 1: of the country. First names only, because that was the
Speaker 1: condition attached to most of them, and I don't break
Speaker 1: that for anybody. They came in over about two years.
Speaker 1: One arrived by email with a scan attached. One came
Speaker 1: in an envelope handwritten in pencil. One started as a
Speaker 1: phone call and turned into two thousand words on paper
Speaker 1: a week later. No two of them are shaped alike,
Speaker 1: and they came from people who'd never have ended up
Speaker 1: at the same table in one hundred years. Let's start
Speaker 1: in northwest Montana at three point forty in the morning.
Speaker 1: Ray was sixty one when he wrote to me, and
Speaker 1: he'd been driving commercially since he was twenty three, mostly
Speaker 1: regional work out of eastern Washington, and by that March
Speaker 1: he'd run the same corridor across northwest Montana so many
Speaker 1: times he could tell you where the frost heaves were
Speaker 1: by the sound the trailer made. He worked nights by choice,
Speaker 1: empty roads, closed docks, nobody wanting anything from him between
Speaker 1: midnight and six in the morning. And I want you
Speaker 1: to understand that this is not an outdoors guy. He
Speaker 1: doesn't hunt, he doesn't camp. He told me his relationship
Speaker 1: with nature is a truck stop parking lot with a
Speaker 1: nice view of it. And there's not one line in
Speaker 1: his account about ever having had the slightest interest in
Speaker 1: the subject before that night. Night freight up there in
Speaker 1: late winter is its own discipline. The temperature was sitting
Speaker 1: right around twenty eight degrees, which is the worst number
Speaker 1: on the whole gauge, because a hard freeze at least
Speaker 1: holds still, while twenty eight melts through the day and
Speaker 1: glazes over after dark and puts a film on the
Speaker 1: pavement that gives you nothing at all in a headlight.
Speaker 1: Diesel thickens up, airlines freeze if you don't and your tanks.
Speaker 1: The deer come down to the road salt and stand
Speaker 1: in the ditch with a plow wall of snow behind them,
Speaker 1: and when they finally move they come out of ground.
Speaker 1: Your lights can't reach. That stretch of highway runs between
Speaker 1: two different kinds of country and hasn't got much shoulder
Speaker 1: to spare. North Side falls away into ditch and willow
Speaker 1: and tag alder before it flattens into hayground, and the
Speaker 1: plow leaves a bank along all of it that's standing
Speaker 1: three and four feet high. By march south side, the
Speaker 1: timber comes almost to the fence line and then climbs
Speaker 1: and one hundred yards into that. You're in second growth
Speaker 1: spruce and fir thick enough to slow a man to
Speaker 1: about a mile an hour in daylight. There are stretches
Speaker 1: along there where the only built things inside of eight
Speaker 1: miles or the road the mile posts, and a set
Speaker 1: of railroad tracks running the same drainage. He'd taken to
Speaker 1: counting deer that season, which is the kind of thing
Speaker 1: a man does at three in the morning to stay
Speaker 1: in the game. And he was up to fourteen that night.
Speaker 1: I like that detail more more than almost anything else
Speaker 1: in his account. And here's why. It tells you where
Speaker 1: his eyes were. He wasn't half asleep on the center line.
Speaker 1: He'd spent five hours actively scanning ditch lines, which means
Speaker 1: when something came up out of one, he was already
Speaker 1: looking in the right place. Let me tell you what
Speaker 1: a headlight actually gives a man out there, because it
Speaker 1: matters to everything that follows. Low beams. Put a pool
Speaker 1: of light on the pavement out to sixty or seventy
Speaker 1: yards and pass that. Your picture goes gray and quits
Speaker 1: telling you anything. Color's the first thing to go. Depth
Speaker 1: goes right behind it. What a headlight is genuinely good
Speaker 1: for at that hour is eyes Because nearly everything with
Speaker 1: a spine in that country carries a reflective layer behind
Speaker 1: the retina that throws your own light back at you
Speaker 1: in a hard bright point, And any driver who's run
Speaker 1: those roads long enough learns to pick out a pair
Speaker 1: of them in a ditch a half mile off and
Speaker 1: tell you what he's looking at by the height and
Speaker 1: the spacing and the color of the shine. It came
Speaker 1: up out of the north ditch, and Ray's first answer
Speaker 1: was elk, which is a perfectly good answer, because it
Speaker 1: was tall, and it was that flat, pale gray. Everything
Speaker 1: turns at the outer edge of a beam, and there
Speaker 1: are elk all through that country. He had about two
Speaker 1: seconds of being satisfied with elk. Then it came out
Speaker 1: of the ditch onto the road surface, and it did
Speaker 1: that on two legs. He says it was about seventy
Speaker 1: to one hundred yards away when it cleared the snowbank,
Speaker 1: but that's a rough estimate because there's nothing out there
Speaker 1: to measure anything against. But no matter the distance, he
Speaker 1: watched the crossing from one side to the other, three
Speaker 1: strides to cover the westbound lane. Long ones not hurried.
Speaker 1: The arms swung heavy and close into the body and
Speaker 1: hung lower than he expected, hands down around the top
Speaker 1: of the thigh. Head sat low and forward on a
Speaker 1: shoulder line that ran flat and wide, and he couldn't
Speaker 1: find a neck anywhere in it. And to his credit,
Speaker 1: he immediately added that a headlight at night is a
Speaker 1: poor place to go looking for a neck. He'd watch
Speaker 1: deer and elk on that road for years, and elk
Speaker 1: carries its head way out front on a long neck.
Speaker 1: This had nothing like that. At the center line, it
Speaker 1: turned its head toward the truck while the body kept
Speaker 1: crossing at the same speed, held on him about a second,
Speaker 1: then faced forward again. Finished the lane, went off the
Speaker 1: south shoulder and down into the timber. His hand instinctively
Speaker 1: went for the trailer break, but he stopped himself. He
Speaker 1: had thirty eight thousand pounds of frozen product behind him
Speaker 1: and old ice on both shoulders. A driver who panics
Speaker 1: on a road like that ends up jackknife sideways across
Speaker 1: two lanes before he ever gets around to thinking about
Speaker 1: what he saw, so he eased off the gas pedal
Speaker 1: and let the truck slow itself down instead. He didn't
Speaker 1: see any eye shine. All he saw was a dark
Speaker 1: face with a heavy brow line. The ground. It went
Speaker 1: into climbs away from that shoulder for about a mile
Speaker 1: and a half before it drops over into a drainage
Speaker 1: with a creek at the bottom, and there's no road
Speaker 1: back in there until a forest service two track that
Speaker 1: comes in from the east several miles along, and in
Speaker 1: march that two track is gated and under snow. Four
Speaker 1: or five seconds ditch to timber. He drove eleven more
Speaker 1: miles to a wide spot he knew, pulled off, sat
Speaker 1: there with the truck running, and ate a sandwich he'd
Speaker 1: been saving for the back half of the run. He
Speaker 1: hadn't planned to stop, and he couldn't have told you
Speaker 1: why he did. He checked his mirrors twice while he
Speaker 1: was eating. That's the one thing he did that night.
Speaker 1: He can't explain to himself, because there's nothing to see
Speaker 1: in a west facing mirror eleven miles down the road.
Speaker 1: He never called it in. Anybody who's worked a job
Speaker 1: with the radio already knows why. The first question a
Speaker 1: dispatcher asks about a report like that is whether the
Speaker 1: driver was asleep. The second is whether he'd been drinking.
Speaker 1: Both of those questions go in a file, and both
Speaker 1: of them outlived the story by about a decade. I
Speaker 1: watched the same math run in law enforcement, and it's
Speaker 1: never the strange thing that costs you, it's the paperwork
Speaker 1: the strange thing generates. He slept about five hours at
Speaker 1: the dock, ran an empty back west that afternoon, and
Speaker 1: was home the following night. He didn't say anything to
Speaker 1: anybody for three days. He told his wife three days later,
Speaker 1: and she believed him on the spot, which annoyed him
Speaker 1: because what he wanted was an argument. He got one
Speaker 1: from his brother in law a couple of weeks later
Speaker 1: at a family thing, who told him in front of
Speaker 1: the room that he dozed off and dreamed it. Ray's
Speaker 1: answer was that he'd been awake enough to keep his
Speaker 1: hand off the trailer breake on ice, and I've got
Speaker 1: to say that's a better response than most people manage.
Speaker 1: Then he spent the next few weeks trying to talk
Speaker 1: himself out of it. A man in a heavy coat
Speaker 1: was his first candidate, and it lasted about a day
Speaker 1: because he kept running aground on the height, on the width,
Speaker 1: through the shoulders, and mostly on the fact that a
Speaker 1: man crossing a highway in front of a semi at
Speaker 1: three in the morning does something about it. He runs,
Speaker 1: He throws a hand up at minimum, he looks. This
Speaker 1: acknowledged the truck exactly once and never changed pace. A
Speaker 1: poacher on foot lasted longer, since there'd been talked that
Speaker 1: winter about somebody working the ditches with a spotlight, and
Speaker 1: it died on the same problem because a man out
Speaker 1: there with a rifle sees headlights and gets off the pavement.
Speaker 1: Bear didn't survive ten minutes because black bears crossed low
Speaker 1: and on four legs and in a hurry, and this
Speaker 1: crossed with its head above the level of his hood.
Speaker 1: He also pulled his own logs for that week and
Speaker 1: found ten hours off before the run and a nine
Speaker 1: o'clock start, which put him six and a half hours in.
Speaker 1: He told me he'd have been relieved to find something
Speaker 1: in that log to explain it away, and there wasn't anything.
Speaker 1: He ran that corridor nine more times before he stopped,
Speaker 1: and on every one of those trips he went past
Speaker 1: the guard rail without slowing down. Sixteen days later, he
Speaker 1: came back through in daylight on an empty run and stopped.
Speaker 1: He parked on the wide shoulder with the flashers going,
Speaker 1: and walked back until he found the spot, which he
Speaker 1: located by the guardrail, because the guardrail ends right about
Speaker 1: there and the thing had come out just past the
Speaker 1: end of it. The ditch below it was full of
Speaker 1: tag alder. The snow crust in that ditch had been
Speaker 1: through a melt and a refreeze and sixteen days of
Speaker 1: every animal you can think of, and there was no
Speaker 1: track that he could make out in the mush. What
Speaker 1: was in there was a lane through the alder, a
Speaker 1: gap where the whip stems had been pushed over and
Speaker 1: broken wide enough to walk through most of them at
Speaker 1: about the height of his sternum, with one snapped clean
Speaker 1: and left hanging by the bark. Down in the flattened crust.
Speaker 1: Inside the lane there were depressions he refuses to call prints,
Speaker 1: melted out and rounded off, with no detail left in them,
Speaker 1: and he says he could have laid two of his
Speaker 1: own boots and to end inside a couple of them.
Speaker 1: He stepped the line out, heeled to toe, and came
Speaker 1: up with something over four feet between the two clearest ones.
Speaker 1: He tried to walk that line and made two steps
Speaker 1: before he punched through to his knee and had to
Speaker 1: haul himself out by a fistful of alder. His own
Speaker 1: boots wouldn't carry him anywhere on that crust. He ran
Speaker 1: that road four more years and never saw it again.
Speaker 1: For most of that first year, he came off the
Speaker 1: fuel at that guardrail on every single pass day or night,
Speaker 1: and looked at the alder as long as the headlights
Speaker 1: held it. And somewhere in the second winter he quit
Speaker 1: doing that. The only lasting change he'll admit to is
Speaker 1: that he stopped counting deer because the counting had turned
Speaker 1: into watching for something else, and he didn't care for that,
Speaker 1: so he put audiobooks on and kept his eyes on
Speaker 1: the center line like everybody else. Ask him what it was,
Speaker 1: and he won't answer. He says he can describe what
Speaker 1: crossed the road in front of him, and that naming
Speaker 1: it isn't his job. Four or five seconds through a
Speaker 1: windshield is how most of these come in, and four
Speaker 1: or five seconds is the easiest thing in the world
Speaker 1: to take a part afterward. So let's go the other
Speaker 1: direction entirely. Let's go to a woman who had elevation, optics, daylight,
Speaker 1: and a job that consisted of nothing but looking at
Speaker 1: one piece of country for ten hours a day. And
Speaker 1: noticing when something in it changed. Northern California, August. Her
Speaker 1: name is Nina. The first thing she did was right
Speaker 1: down the time in pencil in a government log book
Speaker 1: before she did anything else at all, eleven fourteen in
Speaker 1: the morning. That's how the account opens. Nina was twenty
Speaker 1: three that summer and in her second season on a
Speaker 1: fire lookout, the first having been on a different peak
Speaker 1: with better road access and worse visibility. She'd finished a
Speaker 1: degree in environmental science. Every field job she wanted required
Speaker 1: experience she didn't have, and somebody told her the lookout
Speaker 1: program was hiring, that the money was bad, and that
Speaker 1: the solitude would turn out to be either the best
Speaker 1: or the worst thing that ever happened to her. If
Speaker 1: you've never been in a staffed lookout, it's a small
Speaker 1: glass room on a mountain with a bed and a
Speaker 1: propane refrigerator and a radio and bolted to a pedestal.
Speaker 1: In the middle of the floor is an Osborne firefinder,
Speaker 1: which is a brass ring marked out in degrees with
Speaker 1: a set of sights on it. You put those sites
Speaker 1: on a column of smoke, and you read a bearing
Speaker 1: off the ring to within a fraction of a degree,
Speaker 1: and a dispatcher who has two bearings from two towers
Speaker 1: has a location. That's the entire art of the job,
Speaker 1: and it hasn't changed in ninety years. The rest of
Speaker 1: the day is weather observations and radio checks and a
Speaker 1: horizon scan every fifteen minutes when the fire danger is up,
Speaker 1: and a great deal of nothing. She wasn't losing her
Speaker 1: mind up there either, and I asked, because it's the
Speaker 1: first thing anybody thinks. She had a rhythm, a stack
Speaker 1: of books, letters she wrote out longhand because the cell
Speaker 1: signal was garbage, and a running feud with the ground
Speaker 1: squirrels under the catwalk that takes up more space in
Speaker 1: those letters than the sighting does. The ground that matters
Speaker 1: is a salvage cut six years off of fire, which
Speaker 1: doesn't look like forest and doesn't look like open country either.
Speaker 1: You've got standing black snags with the bark sloughing off them,
Speaker 1: down logs lying every direction, mans Anita coming back in
Speaker 1: patches to about waste high on a person, and two
Speaker 1: or three long runs where the dirt is bare enough
Speaker 1: that anything crossing it has nowhere to be. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: The near edge sat around six hundred yards from the tower,
Speaker 1: and the far edge closer to a thousand. She scanned
Speaker 1: it more than the rest of her country because smoke
Speaker 1: had come out of there twice that summer, both times
Speaker 1: somebody's abandoned campfire. That peak sat at the end of
Speaker 1: eleven miles of dirt off a paved forest highway, and
Speaker 1: the last two miles were steep enough that she took
Speaker 1: them in low range and a government pick up, and
Speaker 1: she went down for groceries every ten days. The nearest
Speaker 1: year round town was thirty odd miles out. Her regular
Speaker 1: company was a road crew that came through twice a summer,
Speaker 1: and a packer who ran stock up a trail on
Speaker 1: the backside. She caught the movement with her naked eye
Speaker 1: on a routine scan and thought it was a bear.
Speaker 1: Bears were all over that unit, and she'd watch them
Speaker 1: out there more times than she could count, so that's
Speaker 1: where her head went first. What made her pick up
Speaker 1: the binoculars was height, because the man's anita ran waist
Speaker 1: high on a person, and whatever was crossing it was
Speaker 1: clearing that by a long way through the glass. It
Speaker 1: was walking, not standing up to have a look around
Speaker 1: and then dropping back down onto all fours, but walking
Speaker 1: upright left to right across the open ground with its
Speaker 1: arms swinging. And she watched it do that from eleven
Speaker 1: to fourteen until eleven twenty six. She checked her watch
Speaker 1: at the start and again at the end, and wrote
Speaker 1: both times down twelve minutes at six hundred yards through
Speaker 1: eight power binoculars, you get a silhouette. And that's about it.
Speaker 1: She never saw a face, never saw the eyes, never
Speaker 1: saw the hands, and the only thing she can tell
Speaker 1: you about the ends of the arms is that they
Speaker 1: didn't change color. What she did have was the shape
Speaker 1: of it. The color ran the same from head to foot,
Speaker 1: dark brown going to black, and it didn't break anywhere.
Speaker 1: And she'd watched enough bears on that exact ground to
Speaker 1: know a bear on its high legs gives you a
Speaker 1: lighter muzzle and a different texture across the belly. The
Speaker 1: shoulders were the widest part of it, and the width
Speaker 1: came down through the chest without tapering the way she expected,
Speaker 1: and the head sat low and forward. The way it
Speaker 1: moved is the part she keeps coming back to. She'd
Speaker 1: watched timber crews and archaeologists and a fire crew doing
Speaker 1: mop up work that same unit, and people picked their
Speaker 1: way through a salvage cut. They step over down wood
Speaker 1: and look at their feet while they do it. They stop,
Speaker 1: they put a hand on a snag to steady themselves.
Speaker 1: This crossed down logs without breaking stride and without looking down.
Speaker 1: And when it came to one big enough that she
Speaker 1: expected it to go around, it stepped over. And then
Speaker 1: in the middle of watching something she couldn't identify, she
Speaker 1: got off the stool, put the sights of the fire
Speaker 1: finder on it, and took a bearing. That number went
Speaker 1: in the log with everything else, and it's the number
Speaker 1: a crew boss used the next day when she told
Speaker 1: him where to go in around on the eight or
Speaker 1: nine minute market, stopped at a log on the far
Speaker 1: side of the open ground, bent forward at the waist
Speaker 1: with both arms down, and stayed like that close to
Speaker 1: a minute, with movement in the arms the whole time.
Speaker 1: Then it straightened up, and the head came around and
Speaker 1: oriented on the tower and held there. She's the one
Speaker 1: who points out that a lookout on a bare peak
Speaker 1: is the most obvious man made object in that whole landscape,
Speaker 1: and that anything with eyes is going to look at it. Eventually,
Speaker 1: she sat down on the stool anyway and kept the
Speaker 1: binoculars up, and by her count, it stayed on her
Speaker 1: the better part of half a minute before it moved again.
Speaker 1: Then she hit it with the bullhorn. Some towers carry one,
Speaker 1: and hers did, for exactly the situation she thought she had,
Speaker 1: which is people in a closed unit, a siren and
Speaker 1: a voice coming off one hundred feet of steel on
Speaker 1: a bare mountain, carries a long way down a drainage
Speaker 1: and still morning air. And she'd used it twice already
Speaker 1: that summer on vehicles that came around a gate on
Speaker 1: a spur road below the peak, and both times the
Speaker 1: vehicle turned around inside a minute. She gave this two
Speaker 1: blasts of the siren and then her own voice. Nothing
Speaker 1: came back at all. It didn't turn its head, didn't stop,
Speaker 1: didn't change pace. It finished crossing the bare ground, went
Speaker 1: into the standing timber on the north side, and she
Speaker 1: never picked it up again. She called dispatch and reported
Speaker 1: a subject in a closed unit, since that road was
Speaker 1: gated and nobody was supposed to be in there, and
Speaker 1: nobody in the world radio is a dispatcher about an animal.
Speaker 1: In the log book, she wrote unidentified subject bipedal moving
Speaker 1: east across the salvage unit. No response to hale, And
Speaker 1: she wrote that on a page of pencil entries that
Speaker 1: also carries a humidity reading and a smoke check that
Speaker 1: turned out to be dust off a county road. She
Speaker 1: latched the trap door that night. That tower sat on steel,
Speaker 1: with a stair running up through a hatch in the
Speaker 1: floor and a hasp on the hatch for wind, and
Speaker 1: in two seasons she'd never once dropped it. And she
Speaker 1: dropped it that night and every night after until she
Speaker 1: came off the mountain in October. She didn't sleep much
Speaker 1: that night. She had a battery radio up there and
Speaker 1: she left it on, and she wrote in the letter
Speaker 1: to her sister that she ran the generator later into
Speaker 1: the evening than she needed to. A crew boss she
Speaker 1: knew drove up to the gate the next afternoon and
Speaker 1: walked in a little way because she'd asked him to.
Speaker 1: He didn't find anybody camped, didn't find a vehicle, didn't
Speaker 1: find trash. On his way back out, he mentioned the
Speaker 1: way you'd mentioned, whether that a log had been rolled
Speaker 1: out of its bed. She asked how big, and he
Speaker 1: said maybe two and a half feet through and long
Speaker 1: enough that he wouldn't have wanted to mess with it.
Speaker 1: And when she asked whether a bear could do that,
Speaker 1: he told her, bears do it all the time. They're
Speaker 1: after grubbs. They'll turn anything they can get a paw under.
Speaker 1: She said okay and left it alone and never told
Speaker 1: him what she'd spent twelve minutes watching the morning before.
Speaker 1: She was twenty three in her second season, and she
Speaker 1: wanted a third. And that program is small enough that
Speaker 1: the reputation you pick up in year two is the
Speaker 1: one you're still carrying in year six. Then she spent
Speaker 1: the rest of that summer trying to break her own story.
Speaker 1: She started using the bullhorn on animals on purpose, and
Speaker 1: she hit a bear on that same unit about three
Speaker 1: weeks later at roughly the same distance, and it was
Speaker 1: into the timber before the siren finished its first sweep.
Speaker 1: She hit a group of deer on the east side
Speaker 1: and got the same result. She kept that up until
Speaker 1: the season closed and never once got anything out there
Speaker 1: to ignore her. She'd also had the radio in her
Speaker 1: hand twice that first afternoon and set it down both
Speaker 1: times there was another lookout about eleven miles southeast with
Speaker 1: a partial view of that same drainage. What stopped her
Speaker 1: was trying to figure out how to phrase it on
Speaker 1: an open channel that half the forest monitors. That's the
Speaker 1: piece she's still chewing on, and I don't blame her
Speaker 1: a bit. She finished the shift, and the log for
Speaker 1: the rest of that day carries the ordinary entries, another
Speaker 1: scan set in an afternoon weather observation, and a note
Speaker 1: about the wind coming around to the southwest. She came
Speaker 1: back for a third season and a fourth, and both
Speaker 1: times she asked for a different tower on a different district,
Speaker 1: and both times she got it. She has not been
Speaker 1: back to that peak. The letter to her sister runs
Speaker 1: about a page and a half and most of it
Speaker 1: is about the squirrels and a book she was reading
Speaker 1: and a plan the two of them had for October.
Speaker 1: The sighting takes up one paragraph near the bottom of it.
Speaker 1: She photocopied the logbook page at the end of the season,
Speaker 1: and she still has it. And she also still has
Speaker 1: a letter she wrote her sister that same August, before
Speaker 1: the summer was even over. That letter is shorter and
Speaker 1: rougher than anything she'd say. Now, it uses the word
Speaker 1: thing four times, and it doesn't contain a single detail.
Speaker 1: Her later account lacks it contains fewer. Nina has never
Speaker 1: told me what she thinks it was, and she asked
Speaker 1: me not to decide for her, so I won't. The
Speaker 1: next one showed up in an envelope in my po box,
Speaker 1: six pages, handwritten in pencil in the top corner, with
Speaker 1: a line at the bottom of the last page asking
Speaker 1: me not to use his last name because his grandson
Speaker 1: farms that ground. Now his name is Dale. He was
Speaker 1: seventy eight when he wrote it, and what he's describing
Speaker 1: happened in the fall of nineteen seventy three on a
Speaker 1: dairy farm in southwestern Wisconsin. This is the oldest account
Speaker 1: in the episode and the one with the least evidence
Speaker 1: attached to it, and it's also the one I've thought
Speaker 1: about the most. The cows told him first, and if
Speaker 1: you've spent time around livestock, you already know that's how
Speaker 1: it goes, because animals report before people do. Dale had
Speaker 1: thirty one head of cattle in a pasture that ran
Speaker 1: off a ridge down to a fence line at the bottom,
Speaker 1: with standing corn on the far side of the fence,
Speaker 1: and a wooded coolie passed the corn four point thirty
Speaker 1: on a mid October afternoon, and he went down to
Speaker 1: bring them up for the evening milking, the way he
Speaker 1: had twice a day since he was eleven years old,
Speaker 1: and they would not come up the hill. All thirty
Speaker 1: one of them jammed into the northeast corner with their
Speaker 1: heads up and their bodies pointed at the bottom fence line,
Speaker 1: and not one of them moving toward the barn. A
Speaker 1: hol sting at four point thirty in the afternoon has
Speaker 1: exactly one thought in her head, and that thought is
Speaker 1: getting milked. She walks to the barn without being asked,
Speaker 1: and she'll walk past you while you're still fumbling with
Speaker 1: the gate. Dale wrote that he never saw the whole
Speaker 1: herd refuse like that again in all the years he milked.
Speaker 1: Then there was the dog. They had a Border Collie
Speaker 1: cross named Tip who worked those cows every day of
Speaker 1: his life and never needed telling. Dale whistled him down,
Speaker 1: and the dog came about ten feet into the yard
Speaker 1: and stopped, so Dale walked back up the hill, picked
Speaker 1: him up, carried him a third of the way down,
Speaker 1: and set him on his feet, and that dog went
Speaker 1: straight back to the house and got in under the
Speaker 1: porch steps. That's when he went in for the rifle,
Speaker 1: a thirty thirty lever gun that lived by the back
Speaker 1: door for coyotes and for a bull they'd had trouble
Speaker 1: with two summers before. Southwestern Wisconsin is the driftless area,
Speaker 1: which means the glaciers went around on both sides in
Speaker 1: the last ice age and left it uncarved. Instead of
Speaker 1: the flat till plain that covers most of the upper Midwest,
Speaker 1: you've got sandstone ridges and steep wooded coolies and pasture
Speaker 1: standing at angles no tractor ought to be on, with
Speaker 1: springs coming out of the hillsides and a creek in
Speaker 1: every bottom. Farms in there run narrow and long, a
Speaker 1: ridge top, a side hill, a bottom, and a piece
Speaker 1: of timber, and the timber is never more than a
Speaker 1: quarter mile from wherever you're standing. The coolie passed that
Speaker 1: corn ran better than a mile before it opened into
Speaker 1: a river. Valley, mixed hardwood, oak and hickory and walnut
Speaker 1: on the side hills, and almost none of it was
Speaker 1: ever cleared because those side hills are too steep to farm.
Speaker 1: A man could walk from that fence line to the
Speaker 1: river without crossing a road. One more piece of local fact,
Speaker 1: there were no bears in Vernon County in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: The northern third of Wisconsin had them and the southwest didn't,
Speaker 1: and a man could farm those coolies from earth to
Speaker 1: burial without ever seeing one. He walked down the pasture
Speaker 1: with the sun low and the light still good enough
Speaker 1: to read ear tags on the cows. He passed. The
Speaker 1: corn on the other side of the fence was standing
Speaker 1: in dry and about ten days from coming off, and
Speaker 1: it made a wall along the whole bottom of that field.
Speaker 1: He got to the middle of the pasture, forty yards
Speaker 1: or so from the fence, and stopped because something was
Speaker 1: standing at the edge of the corn. He thought it
Speaker 1: was a man, And he went on thinking that for
Speaker 1: a good while. There'd been trouble in that township off Fall,
Speaker 1: with somebody shooting deer off the road at night, and
Speaker 1: his father had been on the telephone about it twice
Speaker 1: that month. So what Dale carried down the hill with
Speaker 1: him was the expectation of a trespasser. He brought the
Speaker 1: rifle up across his chest rather than to his shoulder,
Speaker 1: and he hollered at it, told it that was his corn,
Speaker 1: and asked what it wanted. It didn't answer, and it
Speaker 1: didn't move. The two of them stood there for what
Speaker 1: he guessed was a minute. What he could see was
Speaker 1: that the corn came up to about the middle of
Speaker 1: its and that corn was over his own head by
Speaker 1: better than a foot. The color he compares to a
Speaker 1: wet fence post dark without being black. There was hair
Speaker 1: on it, and the hair broke up the outline along
Speaker 1: the shoulders. The shoulders ran wide enough that his first
Speaker 1: explanation was a big man in a heavy coat with
Speaker 1: the collar turned up, which also accounted in his mind
Speaker 1: for why he couldn't find a neck. And the arms
Speaker 1: hung down in front of the corn, and they hung long.
Speaker 1: Then it turned and went into the corn. It wasn't running,
Speaker 1: and it didn't crash through anything. It went side on
Speaker 1: into the rose, and the corn took it, and he
Speaker 1: heard it moving away through the field for a few seconds,
Speaker 1: and then he didn't. He never fired because he could
Speaker 1: see shoulders in a head, and you don't put a
Speaker 1: round into something with shoulders and a head until you
Speaker 1: know it isn't a man. He gives the credit to
Speaker 1: his father, who drilled it into him at about eight
Speaker 1: years old. He also writes that he's had fifty two
Speaker 1: years to be sorry about that decision, and he isn't
Speaker 1: sorry for not shooting it. He got the cows up,
Speaker 1: which took twenty minutes, with animals that normally moved themselves
Speaker 1: a few head at a time out of that corner.
Speaker 1: Then he milked, and he said nothing about any of
Speaker 1: it at supper Tip. Worked cattle on that place for
Speaker 1: another six years and never refused to whistle again, though
Speaker 1: by Dale's account, he never went down to that bottom
Speaker 1: fence line after that without a person walking ahead of him.
Speaker 1: Dale mentioned it to his father the following spring, and
Speaker 1: his father said the dog was getting old. Next morning,
Speaker 1: the two of them went down together. The fence was
Speaker 1: pushed down woven wire on woodposts, two posts leaning about
Speaker 1: thirty degrees out of plumb toward the pasture side, with
Speaker 1: the wire sagging between them, And they'd set those posts
Speaker 1: themselves four years earlier, and walked that line the week before.
Speaker 1: On the far side, corn was down in a line
Speaker 1: running back toward the coolie stalks pushed over and broken
Speaker 1: at different heights and the line cut across the rows
Speaker 1: at an angle instead of running down one. And there
Speaker 1: was hair on the top wire where the fence was down.
Speaker 1: His father pulled it off with his fingers, a small clump,
Speaker 1: coarse and dark and four or five inches long, And
Speaker 1: he rolled it between his fingers and smelled it and
Speaker 1: said nothing for a while, and then he put it
Speaker 1: in his shirt pocket. That evening he put it in
Speaker 1: the kitchen stove. That part makes me want to put
Speaker 1: my head through a wall. He never explained it at
Speaker 1: the time, and asked about it years afterward. The only
Speaker 1: answer he gave his son was that he didn't want
Speaker 1: it in the house. Before they walked the fence that morning,
Speaker 1: Dale had gone down and pulled three stalks of corn
Speaker 1: from within ten feet of where it had been standing,
Speaker 1: and stood them up against himself. He was five foot ten.
Speaker 1: The ears came in around his chin, and the tassels
Speaker 1: ran better than a foot over his head, which puts
Speaker 1: that corn at seven feet and change and puts the
Speaker 1: chest line of what he saw at the middle of it.
Speaker 1: He worked that arithmetic out and pencil in the margin
Speaker 1: of page four came to something between eight and eight
Speaker 1: and a half feet, and then crossed the figure out
Speaker 1: and wrote underneath it that he might be wrong about
Speaker 1: all of it, and only knows it stood taller than
Speaker 1: any man he ever met. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
Speaker 1: Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Two other
Speaker 1: things happened that fall. The corn came off nine days later,
Speaker 1: and the neighbor running the picker made a comment at
Speaker 1: the end of the day about that field being torn
Speaker 1: up along the coolie side. Dale didn't ask what he
Speaker 1: meant and didn't go look, And in early November he
Speaker 1: took a shovel down to the spring at the head
Speaker 1: of the coolie to clear the outflow before freeze up.
Speaker 1: And there was soft ground all around that spring that
Speaker 1: held the track of everything that came into water, and
Speaker 1: he did the work without looking at it. He decided
Speaker 1: by then he wanted to be done with it, and
Speaker 1: finding something in that mud would have meant not being
Speaker 1: done with it. The picker came through on a Thursday,
Speaker 1: and they hauled corn for two days after that, and
Speaker 1: Dale wrote that he worked the wagons and stayed up
Speaker 1: on the ridge end of the feet the whole time.
Speaker 1: His father brought the heifers up out of the bottom
Speaker 1: pasture in the middle of December that year, a month early,
Speaker 1: without explaining why, and they wintered stock close to the
Speaker 1: barn for three years running. The next summer, they started
Speaker 1: rotating the herd off that bottom field by the first
Speaker 1: week of September and keeping them up top until the
Speaker 1: corn came off, and Dale writes that his father set
Speaker 1: that up without ever discussing it, and that neither of
Speaker 1: them called it what it was. They pulled both leaning
Speaker 1: posts that same week and reset them with new tamped backfill,
Speaker 1: and ran new wire across that whole section, and it
Speaker 1: took the two of them most of a Saturday. Then
Speaker 1: Dale farmed that ground for another thirty one years. Ray
Speaker 1: could quit counting deer, and Nina came off her mountain
Speaker 1: in October, and Dale walked down to that bottom pasture
Speaker 1: twice a day for three decades, put up hay on it,
Speaker 1: and walked that fence line every spring. Because a farm
Speaker 1: doesn't offer you the option of never going back, he
Speaker 1: told his wife in nineteen seventy nine, and nobody else
Speaker 1: for forty years. What changed was a stroke in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 1: His speech came back, scrambled for about three months, and
Speaker 1: when he came out the other side, he had a
Speaker 1: clear sense of how much of what he knew was
Speaker 1: going to leave with him. So he told his granddaughter,
Speaker 1: and she's the one who found this show and told
Speaker 1: him about it, and he wrote it out over four
Speaker 1: evenings in pencil. There's nothing left to test. Fencery strung
Speaker 1: fifty two years ago, hair and a stove the next day,
Speaker 1: father gone, mother gone, wife dead in twenty seventeen. All
Speaker 1: I've got is six pages and a man's word. And
Speaker 1: here's the thing I keep landing on. Across all six
Speaker 1: of those pages, he never once uses the word, not
Speaker 1: one time. The closest he comes is page five, where
Speaker 1: he writes that he knows what people would call it,
Speaker 1: and that he isn't going to three accounts in and
Speaker 1: you've probably noticed the thing they all share, which has
Speaker 1: nothing to do with what anybody saw. Ray never called it.
Speaker 1: In reported the one piece of it that had a
Speaker 1: box to go in, and left out the part that mattered.
Speaker 1: Dale and his father restrung a fence and burned the
Speaker 1: only physical evidence in this entire episode and went back
Speaker 1: to milking. That's not people being timid. That's five different
Speaker 1: people running the same cost benefit problem in five different
Speaker 1: jobs and coming out the same side of it every time.
Speaker 1: And it's the single biggest reason the record on this
Speaker 1: subject is as thin as it is. The fourth one
Speaker 1: ran that same math. And then she got an answer
Speaker 1: back that I haven't been able to put down since
Speaker 1: Central Arkansas, second Saturday of November twenty two feet up
Speaker 1: a white oak. The dough left wrong. That's how Cam's
Speaker 1: account starts. And if you hunt, you already sat up
Speaker 1: a little. She'd been watching her six or seven minutes,
Speaker 1: a mature dough working an oak flat alone and taking
Speaker 1: her time with the acorns, and Cam had already decided
Speaker 1: not to shoot her because she was after a buck
Speaker 1: she'd had on camera twice and she had two weeks
Speaker 1: season left now. Deer leave in a small number of
Speaker 1: very specific ways, and anybody who spent real time in
Speaker 1: a tree knows all of them. A deer that winds
Speaker 1: you blows, which is a hard, wet snort with a
Speaker 1: foot stamp behind it, and then she's gone in three
Speaker 1: bounds with her tail up. A deer that catches movement
Speaker 1: she can't sort out, locks up and stairs and bobs
Speaker 1: her head to change the angle and then she either
Speaker 1: goes back to feeding or leaves loud. This dough picked
Speaker 1: her head up, turned it to look back down the ridge,
Speaker 1: and walked out. It was a stiff legged, fast walk
Speaker 1: with her tail clamp down. She never bounded, she never
Speaker 1: made a sound, and she never looked back. Cam says
Speaker 1: she's seen that particular departure maybe a dozen times, and
Speaker 1: every one of them turned out to be a predator
Speaker 1: working somewhere close. She works as a technician in an
Speaker 1: emergency department in Little Rock, and she hunts public land.
Speaker 1: Public ground means a forest with an open road system
Speaker 1: and ridges running east and west with hardwood flow in between,
Speaker 1: and other people out there, and you don't get to
Speaker 1: pick your neighbors. On a Saturday in November. There are
Speaker 1: trucks at most pull offs, and the closest pull off
Speaker 1: to her tree had two in it that morning when
Speaker 1: she walked past in the dark. She'd gone in at
Speaker 1: five point fifteen with a climbing stand on her back,
Speaker 1: which is a two piece aluminum rig you hug to
Speaker 1: a tree an inch worm up before daylight, and she
Speaker 1: set on a white oak at the edge of the
Speaker 1: flat with a shooting lane to the south and the
Speaker 1: wind quartering out of the northwest into her face. After
Speaker 1: the dough left, it went quiet, and she did what
Speaker 1: she says she always does when it goes quiet, which
Speaker 1: has stop moving entirely and listened in the direction the
Speaker 1: deer had been looking. What she heard was footfalls on
Speaker 1: dry oak leaves, and the cadence had two beats in
Speaker 1: it instead of four. Her first thought was another hunter,
Speaker 1: and her second thought was that somebody was about to
Speaker 1: ruin her morning, and her third was that those steps
Speaker 1: were too far apart. It came up along the bench
Speaker 1: below her left to right, and there's a gap down
Speaker 1: there about thirty feet wide where a straight line wind
Speaker 1: event took out a stand of pines years back, and
Speaker 1: the regrowth hasn't closed in yet. That gap runs roughly
Speaker 1: north and south, and it's open enough at that hour
Speaker 1: to carry direct sun onto whatever standing in it, which
Speaker 1: is the only reason she got color at all. It
Speaker 1: walked into the gap and stopped. From the waist up
Speaker 1: she could see it clearly, and from the waist down
Speaker 1: she had it through brush. It was dark reddish brown
Speaker 1: where the sun caught it, and flat dark everywhere else,
Speaker 1: and the hair on the upper arm was long enough
Speaker 1: that she could see it move when the arm moved.
Speaker 1: The shoulders she compares to a doorway. The head sat
Speaker 1: low and forward, with a peak or a ridge running
Speaker 1: back over the top of it, and she couldn't see
Speaker 1: a neck. She had the face for about two seconds,
Speaker 1: dark skin, flatter than an apse, with hair coming down
Speaker 1: the sides and across the brow. It stood in that
Speaker 1: gap and looked back the way it had come. Then
Speaker 1: it turned its head and looked up the slope. Then
Speaker 1: it looked up but her. She was in a climber
Speaker 1: against the trunk in full camo, with her face covered,
Speaker 1: and she'd been dead still for a minute and a half.
Speaker 1: And it came up to her position in one movement
Speaker 1: and held there. Then it walked out of the gap
Speaker 1: into the timber, and she heard it going eight or
Speaker 1: nine steps, and then she heard nothing at all. She said.
Speaker 1: She thinks she watched it for about forty seconds. She
Speaker 1: had a range finder hanging on her harness the whole
Speaker 1: time and never touched it, and she never touched her
Speaker 1: phone either. What she did instead was stay in that
Speaker 1: tree for two hours and forty minutes, two hours and
Speaker 1: forty minutes of sitting in an aluminum stand in the cold,
Speaker 1: with her legs going numb because the ground between her
Speaker 1: and her truck ran straight through the timber it had
Speaker 1: walked into. She sat up there with an arrow knocked,
Speaker 1: which she says she feels stupid about because she decided
Speaker 1: inside the first ten seconds that she was never drawing
Speaker 1: on that thing under any circumstances, and she can't tell
Speaker 1: you to this day what the arrow was for. She
Speaker 1: spent a good chunk of those two hours running the differential,
Speaker 1: which is what she does at work. Take what's in
Speaker 1: front of you, list everything it could be worst first,
Speaker 1: and knock items off with what you actually have. She
Speaker 1: went through a man in a costume on public land
Speaker 1: in November in a state where several hundred thousand people
Speaker 1: are out in those woods with rifles, and figured you'd
Speaker 1: have to want to die. She went through an escaped exotic,
Speaker 1: which she considered for about a minute because a place
Speaker 1: a couple of counties over had trouble like that years ago.
Speaker 1: And she went through bear. Arkansas has bears, and plenty
Speaker 1: of them. The state held a remnant population through the
Speaker 1: middle of the last century, restocked out of Minnesota and
Speaker 1: Manitoba in the fifties and sixties, and those animals took
Speaker 1: hold in the Washataws and the Ozarks and have been
Speaker 1: hunted under quota for decades. A hunter sitting in oak
Speaker 1: flat in November has every reason to expect one cam
Speaker 1: seen several from stands over the years, and has two
Speaker 1: of them on her own cameras. What killed it for
Speaker 1: her was the shoulders and the fact that a black
Speaker 1: bear on its hind legs takes a few steps and
Speaker 1: comes back down. At ten in the morning, she came down.
Speaker 1: She let the stand down the trunk on a rope
Speaker 1: rather than climbing it down the way she normally would,
Speaker 1: and she carried it out on her back with the
Speaker 1: bow in her hand instead of strapped on. And then
Speaker 1: she walked out the wrong way on purpose. Her truck
Speaker 1: was three quarters of a mile east. She went north
Speaker 1: to a forest road, added a mile and a half
Speaker 1: to her walk, and came back around on gravel where
Speaker 1: she could see a long way in both directions. She
Speaker 1: went back that afternoon with a friend. What she got
Speaker 1: out of the second trip was numbers. She ranged the
Speaker 1: gap from the base of her tree to where she
Speaker 1: saw the creature forty one yards. She had her friend
Speaker 1: stand in the area where she saw it. He was
Speaker 1: six foot one, two hundred and twenty pounds. She climbed
Speaker 1: back up into her stand, looked at him, came down
Speaker 1: and told him that what she'd seen was a great
Speaker 1: deal bigger than him. Based on the comparison, it was
Speaker 1: at least eight feet tall and must have weighed at
Speaker 1: least six hundred pounds. She had two cameras out on
Speaker 1: that ridge since September, one on a scrape about one
Speaker 1: hundred and forty yards northeast of her tree, one on
Speaker 1: a trail junction down the drainage. She pulled both cards
Speaker 1: that afternoon. The junction camera has the dough at seven
Speaker 1: twelve in the morning, moving away tail down in that
Speaker 1: stiff walk. Nothing else on either camera. Two working cameras
Speaker 1: on that ridge, and what she came home with is
Speaker 1: a picture of a dough leaving. Five weeks later, she
Speaker 1: ran into a wildlife officer she knows after standing there
Speaker 1: a while. Working up to it. She gave him a
Speaker 1: heavily edited version of what happened, and she asked him
Speaker 1: if anybody had reported anything similar. He didn't laugh, and
Speaker 1: he didn't get uncomfortable. He asked which ridge she told him.
Speaker 1: He asked what month she told him, and then he
Speaker 1: said she was the third person to bring him something
Speaker 1: off that drainage in about eighteen months, and that he
Speaker 1: had written down a single one of them. She asked
Speaker 1: why not, and he told her there's no box for it,
Speaker 1: no animal, no crime, no violation, no complainant willing to
Speaker 1: be named. And what you'd be creating is a piece
Speaker 1: of paper with somebody's name on it that lives forever
Speaker 1: in a record system. And he'd rather people kept telling
Speaker 1: him things than stop telling him things. I asked her
Speaker 1: to see whether he'd talked to me, and he declined
Speaker 1: politely through her. So that conversation is Cam's word and
Speaker 1: nobody else's. I will say that what he described is
Speaker 1: how a record system works. A report has to go somewhere,
Speaker 1: it gets a number, a classification, and a review, and
Speaker 1: when there's no classification that fits, that piece of paper
Speaker 1: turns into a problem for the officer who wrote it
Speaker 1: and for the person named in it. I watched that
Speaker 1: happen for sixteen years, with things a lot more ordinary
Speaker 1: than this. She told one other person before she told him.
Speaker 1: A nurse she works nights with who hunts the same
Speaker 1: district in a break room at four in the morning
Speaker 1: and never raised it again. Her husband heard it about
Speaker 1: a year later. Her father, who taught her to hunt,
Speaker 1: and who's still in those woods every fall, has never
Speaker 1: heard it and isn't going to And her reason is
Speaker 1: that he'd want to go look. Her friend went back
Speaker 1: up there twice more that season and hunted the flat
Speaker 1: and never saw a thing, and he still gives her
Speaker 1: grief about the walk she made him take out to
Speaker 1: the gravel. She hunted the rest of that season in
Speaker 1: a different county and took a dough off a food
Speaker 1: plot on private ground in December. Both cameras came off
Speaker 1: that ridge in January and went on to ground eleven
Speaker 1: miles away. She still hunts that county, and she will
Speaker 1: not hunt that drainage. And the reason she gives isn't fear.
Speaker 1: It's that she can't concentrate up there anymore. And a
Speaker 1: person who can't concentrate has no business. Twenty two feet
Speaker 1: in the air with a broadhead, four accounts and four
Speaker 1: people standing by themselves, a man alone in a truck,
Speaker 1: a woman alone on a mountain, a farmer alone in
Speaker 1: a pasture, a hunter alone in a tree. That's the
Speaker 1: standard shape of this subject, and it's also the standard
Speaker 1: weakness of it. And every one of those four knows
Speaker 1: that better than you or I do. The last one
Speaker 1: is different. Five men on a job site with the
Speaker 1: equipment running and the lights up. Four of them saw it,
Speaker 1: and I've talked to two of them. West Virginia, January,
Speaker 1: three nights into an ice storm restoration. They've been running
Speaker 1: sixteen hour days for three days. When it walked into
Speaker 1: the light. I need you to understand what stormwork actually is,
Speaker 1: because people picture a guy in a bucket and a
Speaker 1: truck with a flashing light, and that's not it at all.
Speaker 1: A bad ice event lays a half inch of glaze
Speaker 1: on every conductor and every branch on the ridge above
Speaker 1: the line, and a half inch of ice on a
Speaker 1: span of wire, puts hundreds of pounds of load where
Speaker 1: the engineering assumed none, and then the timber starts coming
Speaker 1: down across all of it. Crews come in from three states.
Speaker 1: They stage out of a co op yard, They take
Speaker 1: a map with circuits marked on it, and they work
Speaker 1: until the hour's rules make them stop. They sleep in
Speaker 1: whatever motel still has power, and they eat what somebody
Speaker 1: brings out to them in a cardboard box. Pete's forty
Speaker 1: five and he's been a journeyman lineman since his twenties,
Speaker 1: and that January his crew was working out of a
Speaker 1: motel two counties over from the damage. By the third night,
Speaker 1: they were at the stage where a foreman starts watching
Speaker 1: his men for the kind of mistakes that put people
Speaker 1: in a burn unit. The job that night was a
Speaker 1: broken pole at the bottom of a hollow off a
Speaker 1: right of way at the end of a two track.
Speaker 1: They'd had to chain up to get down, and they
Speaker 1: had a digger derek, a bucket truck, a pickup, a
Speaker 1: generator running, two light towers, and five men. The whole
Speaker 1: ridge was cracking, and that's the part that doesn't come
Speaker 1: across unless you've stood in it. After an ice event,
Speaker 1: the timber lets go all night long. You get a
Speaker 1: report like a rifle shot a half mile off, then
Speaker 1: a closer one, then a whole tree coming down somewhere
Speaker 1: out in the dark, and it runs like that for days.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods big Foot stories. We'll be
Speaker 1: back after these messages By the second night, nobody so
Speaker 1: much as looks up. That circuit fed a set of
Speaker 1: hollows where the houses sit a quarter mile apart along
Speaker 1: a creek, and that country empties out fast once you
Speaker 1: leave the two lane. The nearest occupied structure was better
Speaker 1: than a mile off and had no power in it,
Speaker 1: and the whole area had been dark for three days,
Speaker 1: so there wasn't a porch light or a yard light
Speaker 1: or a road light anywhere on that side of the ridge.
Speaker 1: The only illumination for a long way in any direction
Speaker 1: was two towers the crew had hauled down that two
Speaker 1: track themselves. You should also know what a right of
Speaker 1: way looks like. It's a cleared corridor kept open under
Speaker 1: the conductors and brushed on a cycle so nothing grows
Speaker 1: tall enough to reach the wire, which gives you a
Speaker 1: straight open lane running over the ridges and down through
Speaker 1: the hollows, with timbers standing on both sides. That lane
Speaker 1: is the only reason anybody saw anything enclosed timber. At
Speaker 1: night with light towers burning, a man sees the pole
Speaker 1: he's working on and just about nothing else. Sometime between
Speaker 1: one and two in the morning, the groundman saw at
Speaker 1: first kid named Aaron in his twenties. And the reason
Speaker 1: everybody else looked up isn't that he yelled, It's that
Speaker 1: he stopped working. And nobody stops on a storm job.
Speaker 1: At one in the morning, with the foreman standing right there,
Speaker 1: there was something standing at the outer edge of the light,
Speaker 1: upright at what Pete estimates was fifty five to sixty
Speaker 1: five yards up the cleared right of way, out in
Speaker 1: the middle of it, rather than at the tree line.
Speaker 1: And it never moved toward the timber on either side
Speaker 1: the whole time. He watched a portable tower throws a
Speaker 1: hard white flood aimed down at a work area, and
Speaker 1: the edge of that throw isn't a line, it's a
Speaker 1: fall off. So anything standing at sixty yards is neither
Speaker 1: lit nor in the dark. Your eyes are adjusted to
Speaker 1: the bright ground under the tower rather than to the
Speaker 1: gray past it. Both men describe what they saw in
Speaker 1: those terms as a shape sitting in a bad part
Speaker 1: of the light. What Pete leads with is the arms.
Speaker 1: He'd taken it for a man in a snowmobile suit
Speaker 1: inside the first half second, and then the arms came
Speaker 1: down too far and hung too far off the body,
Speaker 1: and the picture his brain had already built, quit working
Speaker 1: past the arms. What he had was a color and
Speaker 1: a shoulder line, dark all over, with no break anywhere,
Speaker 1: nothing presenting as a face at that range, and a
Speaker 1: shoulder line running flat and wide, with the head sitting
Speaker 1: low into it. He can't tell you whether he was
Speaker 1: looking at hair or at fabric, and he says so,
Speaker 1: and in that light I believe him that the distinction
Speaker 1: wasn't available for with he had a reference lying right
Speaker 1: there on the ground, because a downed pole was out
Speaker 1: on the right of way, not far from it, and
Speaker 1: the shoulders looked to run about a third of a
Speaker 1: section of that pole. That gets him to somewhere around
Speaker 1: three feet across. He told me not to lean on
Speaker 1: that figure, since he was comparing two objects at different
Speaker 1: distances in bad light. Four of the five saw it.
Speaker 1: The fifth was up in the bucket with his back
Speaker 1: turned and his hood up and never turned around. Nobody
Speaker 1: heard anything, because a generator and two light towers and
Speaker 1: an idling truck put out enough noise that a man
Speaker 1: can't hear another man yell. At sixty yards. Nobody called out,
Speaker 1: and nobody grabbed the hand spotlight that was sitting on
Speaker 1: the seat of the pick up twenty feet away, which
Speaker 1: is the one thing Pete would go back and change.
Speaker 1: What happened instead is that Rick said one word, and
Speaker 1: the word was truck, and four men walked to the
Speaker 1: vehicles at a normal walking speed and got in. The
Speaker 1: walking was deliberate. Pete says, it's the hardest thing he's
Speaker 1: ever done on a job site. They sat there about
Speaker 1: twenty minutes. Aaron asked whether they ought to call it in.
Speaker 1: Rick asked him call what in? And that ended the discussion.
Speaker 1: At some point it wasn't at the edge of the
Speaker 1: light anymore, and not one of them saw it ve.
Speaker 1: Then they went back to work because the pole had
Speaker 1: to go in. They set the pole, hung the cross arm,
Speaker 1: pulled the wire, and were back at the motel by
Speaker 1: six in the morning. Pete worked the rest of that
Speaker 1: day with the same four men and nobody said a
Speaker 1: word about it. He drove that night, and he took
Speaker 1: the two track out slower than the ice justified with
Speaker 1: his high beams on the right of way the whole
Speaker 1: way up, and the man in the passenger seat didn't
Speaker 1: mention either. One next morning, on the way back down,
Speaker 1: two of them walked up the right of way to
Speaker 1: where it had been standing, and they found brakes in
Speaker 1: the crust in a line. That right of way had
Speaker 1: about four inches of old snow under a hard ice
Speaker 1: crust from the storm. Their own boots didn't break through
Speaker 1: in a lot of places, and where the crust did give,
Speaker 1: it gave in slabs, which means you get a hole
Speaker 1: with ragged edges instead of an impression of anything. There
Speaker 1: were seven or eight of those in a line, and
Speaker 1: the spacing was long. Pete's five foot eleven with a
Speaker 1: normal stride, and he couldn't match the spacing without lunging.
Speaker 1: Two of the brakes had shape, a rounded front end
Speaker 1: wider than a boot heel, no tread pattern in either one.
Speaker 1: They followed the line as far as it went, which
Speaker 1: wasn't far because it ran north up the right of way,
Speaker 1: and then the ground rose and the crust changed where
Speaker 1: the wind had scoured it, and after eighty feet there
Speaker 1: was nothing left to follow. Neither man went into the
Speaker 1: timber after it, and Pete says nobody made that decision
Speaker 1: out loud. Aaron photographed the breaks with a tape measure
Speaker 1: laid alongside them. They show a hole in an ice
Speaker 1: crust with a tape next to it. The flash blew
Speaker 1: the ice out, so everything comes back a bright white
Speaker 1: field with a dark, ragged void in the middle of it.
Speaker 1: And there's no shape in that void anybody could call
Speaker 1: a footprint. The tape is legible. The void runs about
Speaker 1: seventeen inches on the long axis, and something like seven
Speaker 1: at the widest point. I can make out a slab
Speaker 1: of ice that gives way under weight breaks along its
Speaker 1: own lines rather than along the outline of whatever stood
Speaker 1: on it. Aaron sent them to the crew thread from
Speaker 1: the motel parking lot with two words attached that I'm
Speaker 1: not going to read on the air, and Pete's phone
Speaker 1: has been replaced three times since, and that thread carried
Speaker 1: through every backup. The message went out a little after
Speaker 1: seven in the morning, twelve hours after the sighting, and
Speaker 1: about an hour after they came off shift. Nobody filed anything,
Speaker 1: and there was nowhere to file it if they had.
Speaker 1: Alignment's paperwork on a night like that is an outage report,
Speaker 1: a pole change, a materials list, and a timesheet. Storm
Speaker 1: work is also contract Heavy crews get evaluated, and a
Speaker 1: traveling crew with a reputation for calling in monsters carries
Speaker 1: that reputation into every yard in four states inside a season. Danny,
Speaker 1: the fifth man, the one in the bucket, has heard
Speaker 1: it from all four of them and hasn't moved an
Speaker 1: inch in twelve years he was working. He didn't see anything,
Speaker 1: and he won't hold an opinion about something he didn't see.
Speaker 1: He has also mentioned more than once that he'd have
Speaker 1: had the best look of anybody from thirty five feet
Speaker 1: up with the light below him if he turned around.
Speaker 1: The crew scattered after that storm, the way storm crews do.
Speaker 1: Rick retired about four years ago, Aaron went to a
Speaker 1: different contractor, one of the other two moved to Ohio,
Speaker 1: and Pete's been with the same co op nine years.
Speaker 1: The four of them have discussed it as a group
Speaker 1: exactly twice, once in a motel parking lot and once
Speaker 1: at Rick's retirement, and both times it lasted under five minutes.
Speaker 1: At the retirement, Rick said he thought about it a
Speaker 1: lot over the years and had settled on bear standing bear,
Speaker 1: bad light tired men. West Virginia carries one of the
Speaker 1: denser black bear populations in the eastern half of the country,
Speaker 1: and while January has most of them denned up. They
Speaker 1: do move in a warm stretch or where there's food.
Speaker 1: Pete's answer to Rick is that Rick was on the
Speaker 1: far side of the digger derreck while he was out
Speaker 1: past the front bumper of the pick up forty feet closer.
Speaker 1: Aaron's in his thirties, now still in the trade, and
Speaker 1: he confirms the ascent with no prompting from me. Same night,
Speaker 1: same right of way, same distance within about ten yards,
Speaker 1: same one word from the foreman, same twenty minutes. Sitting
Speaker 1: in the trucks. He adds one thing Pete doesn't have,
Speaker 1: which is that he saw the head move. It turned
Speaker 1: to the left, away from the crew, and then came back,
Speaker 1: and that's the moment he quit thinking about bears. So
Speaker 1: you've got two men twelve years on, agreeing about the
Speaker 1: sequence and the timing and the distances, and disagreeing about
Speaker 1: exactly one thing, which is height. Pete says eight feet.
Speaker 1: Aaron says he has no idea and won't guess. That's
Speaker 1: the five of them. And here's what came out of
Speaker 1: the whole pile. There's no cast, no hair, no film,
Speaker 1: and one photograph of a hole in an ice crust.
Speaker 1: The only physical evidence anybody in this episode ever held
Speaker 1: in their hands went into a kitchen stove in Vernon County, Wisconsin,
Speaker 1: on an evening in October of nineteen seventy three. What
Speaker 1: there is instead is five people, and five different decades
Speaker 1: and five different jobs who all worked out that telling
Speaker 1: somebody would cost them more than it was worth. A
Speaker 1: driver kept it off the radio because dispatchers ask about
Speaker 1: sleep and liquor. A lookout wanted a third season. A
Speaker 1: hunter didn't want to be the woman on the phone
Speaker 1: in a tree stand. A crew of linemen didn't want
Speaker 1: a reputation that travels ahead of them into every yard
Speaker 1: in four states. And a dairyman's father burned the hair
Speaker 1: off a fence wire because he had a milking herd
Speaker 1: and a family and a name at the feed mill.
Speaker 1: Fifty two years after his father shut that stove door,
Speaker 1: a man in southwestern Wisconsin, who milked cows on that
Speaker 1: same ground for another three decades, sat down at a
Speaker 1: kitchen table with a pencil and worked out the height
Speaker 1: of his corn against his own body, and came to
Speaker 1: a figure between eight and eight and a half feet,
Speaker 1: and then crossed his own number out and rode underneath
Speaker 1: it that he might be wrong about all of it.
Speaker 1: Six pages, four evenings, and he never once wrote the word.
Speaker 1: The engines cooled off. And I've got states left on
Speaker 1: that atlas, so we're getting back on the map. And
Speaker 1: if you've got one of these sitting in you, you
Speaker 1: already know where to find me. Keep them coming, ditt