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: On the night of April twenty first, nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: a seventeen year old kid named Bill Bartlett was driving
Speaker 1: north on Farm Street in Dover, Massachusetts in a Volkswagon
Speaker 1: with two of his friends. It was around ten thirty.
Speaker 1: The road out there is narrow and dark, the kind
Speaker 1: of old New England lane that has been following the
Speaker 1: same path since colonial farmers first laid stones along its edges.
Speaker 1: Those stone walls still run beside the pavement today, low
Speaker 1: and gray and half swallowed by brush. And they mattered
Speaker 1: to this story because what Bill Bartlett saw that night
Speaker 1: was climbing on one of them. His headlights swept across
Speaker 1: the wall on the left side of the road, and
Speaker 1: something was there. At first, his brain did what every
Speaker 1: witness's brain does in the first half second and filed
Speaker 1: it under something ordinary, a dog or a cat or
Speaker 1: some animal picking its way along the top of the stones.
Speaker 1: Then the detail started landing, and none of them fit
Speaker 1: anything he had ever seen. The head enormous. Bartlet would
Speaker 1: later compare it to a watermelon, and every sketch he
Speaker 1: ever drew shows the same thing, a huge, oversized skull
Speaker 1: ballooning out of a body that looked too frail to
Speaker 1: carry it. The eyes glowed orange in the headlights, two
Speaker 1: lit coals set into that big smooth head, and there
Speaker 1: was nothing else on the face. There was no nose
Speaker 1: that he could see, no mouth, no ears, nothing on
Speaker 1: that big smooth face but the eyes. The body was
Speaker 1: maybe three and a half to four feet tall, and
Speaker 1: thin in a way that went past skinny into something else.
Speaker 1: The arms and legs were long and spindly, and the
Speaker 1: fingers were long, too, wrapped around the rocks of the
Speaker 1: wall the way a climber grips a hold. The skin
Speaker 1: was hairless, a pale peach or tan color, and Bartlet
Speaker 1: said the texture looked rough, like wet sand paper. It
Speaker 1: was not walking along the wall so much as creeping
Speaker 1: along it carefully, deliberately, its long fingers curling over the stones.
Speaker 1: The whole sighting lasted just a few seconds. That's how
Speaker 1: these things almost always go. People who've never taken a
Speaker 1: witness statement tend to think a few seconds as nothing,
Speaker 1: But I can tell you that a few seconds under
Speaker 1: headlights at close range is plenty of time for a
Speaker 1: person to register size, shape, color, posture, and movement. A
Speaker 1: person can pull a lot of detail out of a
Speaker 1: two second event, especially when the thing they're looking at
Speaker 1: scares them, and Bartlett was definitely scared. He kept driving.
Speaker 1: His friends, Mike Mazaka and Andy Brody, had been talking
Speaker 1: and looking elsewhere and never saw it. When Bill started
Speaker 1: telling them about what had just been on the wall,
Speaker 1: they thought he was joking, and when they realized he
Speaker 1: wasn't joking, they turned around and drove back. The wall
Speaker 1: was empty. Whatever had been there, was gone into the
Speaker 1: dark trees behind it. Here's the part of the story
Speaker 1: that has always stuck with me. Bartlett drove home shaken,
Speaker 1: and his father saw his face when he walked in.
Speaker 1: This wasn't a kid running into the house yelling about
Speaker 1: a monster to get attention. His dad described him as
Speaker 1: visibly upset, pale, rattled, and Bill Bartlett sat down that
Speaker 1: same night while it was fresh, and drew what he'd seen.
Speaker 1: He was a talented artist even then, and he'd go
Speaker 1: on to become a professional painter whose work hangs in
Speaker 1: serious galleries. The sketch he made that night survives in
Speaker 1: the margin. He wrote a sentence that I think about
Speaker 1: a lot because of how young and earnest and defensive
Speaker 1: it is. He wrote that he swore on a stack
Speaker 1: of bibles that he saw that creature. He was seventeen
Speaker 1: years old, with no camera, no physical evidence, and no
Speaker 1: backup from his friends who'd been looking the wrong way,
Speaker 1: And all he had to offer the world was a drawing,
Speaker 1: a shaken face his father never forgot, and a sentence
Speaker 1: begging somebody to believe him. If the story ended there,
Speaker 1: it would be a curiosity. One teenager on one dark road,
Speaker 1: seeing one weird shape on a wall. But it didn't
Speaker 1: end there, because a couple of hours later, and about
Speaker 1: a mile away, a fifteen year old boy walking home
Speaker 1: from his girlfriend's house met the same thing face to face,
Speaker 1: and the following night, on a different road, a girl
Speaker 1: who'd never spoken to either of those boys saw it
Speaker 1: crouched by a bridge. Three sidings across two nights, all
Speaker 1: inside roughly two square miles of one of the wealthiest, quietest,
Speaker 1: most heavily wooded towns in eastern Massachusetts. That's the case
Speaker 1: that came to be called the Dover Demon, and it
Speaker 1: has never been explained. Welcome back to the road trip.
Speaker 1: This has stopped number twenty one, and we've crossed into Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: a state most people don't associate with monsters at all.
Speaker 1: They think of Boston, Harvard, the Red Sox, Plymouth, Rock,
Speaker 1: maybe the Witch Hysteria and Salem. What they don't realize
Speaker 1: is that Massachusetts is one of the most densely folk
Speaker 1: lord patches of ground in America, and that beneath the
Speaker 1: college towns and the commuter rail lines, this state is
Speaker 1: still shockingly wooded, still full of swamps and glacial hills
Speaker 1: and forgotten hollows and still producing reports of things that
Speaker 1: shouldn't exist. Massachusetts is going to give us two stories tonight,
Speaker 1: and the shape of this episode is worth laying out
Speaker 1: before we get rolling. The first half belongs to the
Speaker 1: Dover Demon, which I consider one of the five or
Speaker 1: six strongest short window cryptid cases in American history, and
Speaker 1: I'll explain exactly why I rank it that high. The
Speaker 1: second half is going to take us south and west
Speaker 1: into the swamps, because Massachusetts has a sasquatch problem that
Speaker 1: almost nobody outside New England talks about. Centered on a
Speaker 1: five thousand acre wetland. The Wampanoag people named the place
Speaker 1: where the spirits dwell. Locals call it the Hockamock, and
Speaker 1: it sits at the heart of a region researchers have
Speaker 1: been calling the Bridgewater Triangle for almost fifty years, one
Speaker 1: state with two very different monsters and one investigator, a
Speaker 1: young researcher named Lauren Coleman, who ended up naming both
Speaker 1: the Dover Demon and the Bridgewater Triangle. Dover comes first,
Speaker 1: and then we head to the swamp. Dover, Massachusetts sits
Speaker 1: about fifteen miles southwest of Boston, and in nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: it was what it still is today, one of the
Speaker 1: richest small towns in the state, a place of horse
Speaker 1: farms and stone walls and old money houses set back
Speaker 1: behind trees. The population then was around five thousand people,
Speaker 1: and the town was so quiet that the police department's
Speaker 1: overnight log mostly consisted of loose dogs and cars parked
Speaker 1: where they shouldn't be. That matters for two reasons. The
Speaker 1: first is that Dover isn't a place with a monster tradition.
Speaker 1: Nobody in Dover was primed to see anything. There was
Speaker 1: no legend circulating, no local beast. The kids grew up
Speaker 1: hearing about no cultural template, waiting for a sighting to
Speaker 1: fill it. When the Dover demon showed up, it showed
Speaker 1: up in a vacuum, which is unusual. Most cryptid flaps
Speaker 1: happen in places that already have a story running, and
Speaker 1: skeptics rightly point out that expectation shapes perception. Dover had
Speaker 1: no expectation. These kids weren't looking for anything. The second
Speaker 1: reason it matters is the terrain. People hear eastern Massachusetts
Speaker 1: and picture suburbs, but Dover in the seventies was and
Speaker 1: largely still is a town of deep woods, wetlands, and
Speaker 1: huge undeveloped parcels cut through by the Charles River and
Speaker 1: dotted with places like noah n A woodlands six hundred
Speaker 1: acres of forest and old mill ponds. There's more cover
Speaker 1: in that town than in plenty of places out west
Speaker 1: where nobody would blink at a strange animal report. Whatever
Speaker 1: moved through Dover on those two April nights had somewhere
Speaker 1: to come from and somewhere to go. So let's go
Speaker 1: back to that first night, because Bill Bartlett was only
Speaker 1: the beginning. John Baxter was fifteen years old and around midnight,
Speaker 1: an hour and a half or so after Bartlett's siding,
Speaker 1: he was walking home from his girlfriend's house. Her name
Speaker 1: was Kathy Cronin, and she lived down at the south
Speaker 1: end of Miller's Hill Road, which is about a mile
Speaker 1: from where Bartlett saw the creature on the wall. Baxter
Speaker 1: had no car, so he was doing what teenagers did
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy seven, hoofing it home alone in the
Speaker 1: dark through one of the most wooded stretches of town.
Speaker 1: He was walking up the road when he saw a
Speaker 1: figure coming toward him. It was short and in the dark.
Speaker 1: He assumed it was a kid he knew from the neighborhood,
Speaker 1: a boy who was small for his age. Baxter did
Speaker 1: the normal thing. He called out to it. He said
Speaker 1: the kid's name and asked what he was doing out
Speaker 1: this late the figure stopped. Baxter kept walking toward it,
Speaker 1: and it stood there in the dark and didn't answer him,
Speaker 1: and the distance closed until they were maybe fifteen or
Speaker 1: twenty feet apart. Baxter stopped too. He said later that
Speaker 1: he couldn't make out a face, just the shape of
Speaker 1: it standing in the road, and something about the proportions
Speaker 1: of that shape had started ringing alarm bells in the
Speaker 1: back of his skull. He asked who it was and
Speaker 1: got nothing back but the shape standing there, And when
Speaker 1: he took one more step toward it, the figure bolted.
Speaker 1: It went left off the road down a shallow gully
Speaker 1: into the trees, moving fast. And here's where John Baxter
Speaker 1: did the thing that separates teenage boys from every other
Speaker 1: category of witness in the historical record. He followed it.
Speaker 1: He scrambled down the slope into the gully after it
Speaker 1: crossed the low, wet ground at the bottom, and stopped,
Speaker 1: And when he looked up the far slope. The thing
Speaker 1: was standing about thirty feet away next to a tree,
Speaker 1: and it was looking back at him. The moon gave
Speaker 1: him enough light to see the silhouette clearly, and what
Speaker 1: he described matches Bartlett's creature in every meaningful particular, even
Speaker 1: though Baxter knew nothing about Bartlett and wouldn't hear about
Speaker 1: the farm street sighting for days. A large head shaped,
Speaker 1: in his words, like a figure eight, the big skull
Speaker 1: ballooning above a narrow neck, A thin body with long limbs,
Speaker 1: long fingers wrapped around the trunk of the tree, and
Speaker 1: long toes. And this is the detail that has always
Speaker 1: made the hair on my arms stand up, because it's
Speaker 1: exactly the kind of thing a hoaxer would never invent,
Speaker 1: and a scared kid would never think to add, Baxter said.
Speaker 1: Its feet were molded around the top of a rock.
Speaker 1: The toes curled over the stone the way your fingers
Speaker 1: curl over a railing. The thing gripped the rock with
Speaker 1: its feet while it stood there on the slope, holding
Speaker 1: the tree, watching him. Baxter stared at it, it stared
Speaker 1: at him, and then the fifteen year old Bravado ran
Speaker 1: out all at once, and he backed up the gully
Speaker 1: with his heart slamming, got to the road and walked fast,
Speaker 1: in his words, feeling very uneasy, until a car came along.
Speaker 1: A couple driving pass saw a teenager flagging them down
Speaker 1: at midnight, looking like he'd seen a ghost, and they
Speaker 1: picked him up and drove him the rest of the
Speaker 1: way home. That made two sightings in one night, a
Speaker 1: mile apart from two teenage boys who hadn't spoken to
Speaker 1: each other describing the same impossible animal. And the next
Speaker 1: night it happened again. April twenty second, nineteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: a little after midnight, Abby Brabham, fifteen years old, was
Speaker 1: riding in a car driven by Will Tainter, who was eighteen.
Speaker 1: They were on Springdale Avenue, a couple of miles from
Speaker 1: the first two sidings, heading toward Abbey's house. Springdale runs
Speaker 1: through low wet ground out there, and it crosses a
Speaker 1: little bridge over a brook, and as the headlights came
Speaker 1: up on that bridge, Abby saw something crouched on the
Speaker 1: left side of the road. It was down on all fours,
Speaker 1: low to the pavement at the edge of the bridge,
Speaker 1: and her first thought, like Bartlet's, reached for something normal.
Speaker 1: Her mind offered up a large dog maybe, or some
Speaker 1: animal hunched over. Then the headlights hit it square and
Speaker 1: the normal explanations died. The body was thin and hairless,
Speaker 1: tan colored, with that same oversized head, no tail, and
Speaker 1: she was specific about that because Aille would have given
Speaker 1: her somewhere to put the thing in her mental catalog
Speaker 1: of animals. And there was no tale to be found,
Speaker 1: and the eyes glowed. But where Bill Bartlett had seen orange,
Speaker 1: Abby Brabham saw green, two bright green points of light
Speaker 1: in the headlights, and the thing didn't run. It just
Speaker 1: crouched there by the bridge as the car passed, and
Speaker 1: she watched it until it slid out of view behind them.
Speaker 1: She was frightened enough that she was still upset when
Speaker 1: she got home. Will caught only a glimpse, a fraction
Speaker 1: of a second of something tan and crouched with a
Speaker 1: big head. But what little he did see matched what
Speaker 1: Abby described. Skeptics have tried to point to that eye
Speaker 1: colored discrepancy as evidence against the case, but honestly, I
Speaker 1: think it does the opposite of what they wanted to do.
Speaker 1: When investigators later interviewed these witnesses separately without letting them
Speaker 1: compare notes, somebody told Abby Brabham that the boy who
Speaker 1: saw it the night before described orange eyes. This is
Speaker 1: a classic interview pressure point. A witness who is making
Speaker 1: it up or a witness who is unconsciously conforming her
Speaker 1: story to someone else's folds right there. She says something like, well,
Speaker 1: I mean maybe they were orange. It was dark. I
Speaker 1: was scared I could be wrong. I've watched that exact
Speaker 1: thing happen across an interview table more times than I
Speaker 1: can count. People want their stories to match. Agreement feels safe.
Speaker 1: Abby Brabham didn't fold. She dug in. She said the
Speaker 1: eyes she saw were green, and she held that line
Speaker 1: under direct challenge and she never budged on it for
Speaker 1: the rest of her life. That isn't what fabrication looks like.
Speaker 1: Fabrication converges. Honest witnesses diverge on the small stuff because
Speaker 1: they're each reporting their own imperfect slice of a real event,
Speaker 1: filtered through different angles, different light, different headlights, different frightened
Speaker 1: teenage nervous systems stay tuned from more back woods bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. A pair of glowing
Speaker 1: eyes can read differently depending on the angle of reflection
Speaker 1: and the light source hitting them, and anyone who's caught
Speaker 1: animal eyeshine on a trail camera knows the same animal
Speaker 1: can throw back orange, green, or white, depending on the geometry.
Speaker 1: Four witnesses and three sightings, twenty five and a half
Speaker 1: hours from start to finish, and then nothing. The Dover
Speaker 1: Demon appeared on the night of April twenty first, was
Speaker 1: seen twice more, and was never credibly reported again, at
Speaker 1: least not on the record. It came out of nowhere,
Speaker 1: crossed the paths of four teenagers in one small patch
Speaker 1: of one small town, and vanished off the face of
Speaker 1: the earth. Now here's where this case separates itself from
Speaker 1: ninety percent of the stories we cover on this road trip,
Speaker 1: because the Dover Demon got investigated fast by serious people
Speaker 1: while the trail was still warm. Word of the sighting
Speaker 1: spread through the town's teenagers first, and within days it
Speaker 1: reached a then young researcher named Lauren Coleman, who happened
Speaker 1: to be living in the area. Coleman would go on
Speaker 1: to become probably the most famous cryptozoologist in America, the
Speaker 1: man who founded the International Cryptozoology Museum up in Portland, Maine.
Speaker 1: But in nineteen seventy seven, He was a young investigator
Speaker 1: with a background in social work and psychiatric research, which meant,
Speaker 1: whatever you think of his conclusions, that he knew how
Speaker 1: to interview people. Coleman pulled in help two experienced investigators
Speaker 1: from the UFO research world, Joseph Nyman and Ed Fogg,
Speaker 1: and Walter Webb, who was the assistant director of the
Speaker 1: Hayden Planetarium in Boston, a hard nosed scientific type who'd
Speaker 1: spent years politely dismantling flying saucer reports. This wasn't a
Speaker 1: team of true believers looking for a monster. This was
Speaker 1: a team that included professional debunkers. They interviewed the witnesses separately.
Speaker 1: They had them draw the creature independently. They talked to
Speaker 1: the parents, the teacher, there's the police, and the file
Speaker 1: they assembled is the reason this case still stands up
Speaker 1: half a century later. The independent drawings matched big, bulbous head,
Speaker 1: thin neck, spindly limbs, long digits, no facial features except
Speaker 1: the eyes. Kids who hadn't compared notes produced the same anatomy.
Speaker 1: The character references were unanimous, and I mean unanimous in
Speaker 1: a way you almost never get. The Dover police chief,
Speaker 1: a man named Carl Sheridan, knew Bill Bartlett personally and
Speaker 1: called him a reliable witness, a good kid from a
Speaker 1: solid family. Teachers at the high school vouched for Baxter
Speaker 1: and Brabham. Bartlett's own father, a respected member of the community,
Speaker 1: put his credibility behind his son's story and never wavered.
Speaker 1: In a town that's small and that wealthy, where reputation
Speaker 1: was currency, four teenagers stapled their names to a monster siding,
Speaker 1: and their whole adult community stood behind their honesty, even
Speaker 1: while scratching their head about what they saw and the
Speaker 1: timeline held. Investigators walked the locations, checked, the distances checked,
Speaker 1: the sight lines, checked, the light conditions. Nothing in the
Speaker 1: physical geography contradicted any of the accounts. The gully Baxter
Speaker 1: described as real and where he said it was. The
Speaker 1: wall on Farm Street is real, The bridge on Springdale
Speaker 1: Avenue is real. Coleman gave the thing its name, borrowing
Speaker 1: the demon from a note a police officer had scribbled,
Speaker 1: and the Dover Demon entered the record. The Boston Papers
Speaker 1: picked it up, then the wire services, and for a
Speaker 1: few weeks in the spring of nineteen seventy seven, a
Speaker 1: town that prided itself on nothing ever happening was fielding
Speaker 1: calls from reporters around the world. Then the noise died
Speaker 1: down and the witnesses went on with their lives, and
Speaker 1: not one of them ever cashed in. Bill Bartlett became
Speaker 1: a successful professional artist, his paintings sell and real galleries
Speaker 1: for real money. For decades, interviewers have tracked down every
Speaker 1: few years to ask about the creature, and his answer
Speaker 1: has stayed the same, and his tone has stayed the same.
Speaker 1: He saw it, he can't tell you what it was.
Speaker 1: He's a little tired of being the Dover Demon guy
Speaker 1: when he'd rather be known for his art. And he
Speaker 1: said more than once that if he could take that
Speaker 1: night back and just be a painter, he might. That
Speaker 1: isn't the posture of a man protecting a profitable lie.
Speaker 1: There was never a book, never a movie deal, never
Speaker 1: a Dover Demon festival. With Bartlett selling autographs at a
Speaker 1: folding table. Four witnesses across fifty years collected exactly zero dollars.
Speaker 1: People lie for reasons, and the big four are money, attention, status,
Speaker 1: and escape. Strip All four away. Watch the story stay
Speaker 1: stable across five decades and four separate mouths, and what
Speaker 1: you're left with is the most uncomfortable conclusion available, which
Speaker 1: is that these kids told the truth about what they experienced.
Speaker 1: So the honest question isn't whether they saw something. The
Speaker 1: honest question is what they saw and the answer to
Speaker 1: that question is that nobody knows. After fifty years of
Speaker 1: people trying to file this thing under known animals and
Speaker 1: teenage pranks, none of it has ever stuck to the case,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to waste your time relitigating it.
Speaker 1: The witnesses were solid, the investigation was solid, and the
Speaker 1: creature fits nothing in the catalog. That's the file. I'd
Speaker 1: rather spend our remaining time in Dover on what happened after,
Speaker 1: because the afterlife of this case is a story all
Speaker 1: by itself. The papers came first, the local coverage went regional,
Speaker 1: The regional coverage hit the wire services, and within weeks,
Speaker 1: a town of five thousand people that prided itself on
Speaker 1: nothing ever happening was fielding calls from reporters on other continents.
Speaker 1: The town mostly hated it. Dover was and is a
Speaker 1: place of old money and quiet reputations, and having your
Speaker 1: zip code attached to a monster was not the kind
Speaker 1: of press anybody there wanted. Officials answered questions. Politely, residents
Speaker 1: rolled their eyes for the cameras, and everyone waited for
Speaker 1: it to blow over. It never blew over, It just
Speaker 1: changed shape. The dover demon settled into the town's bloodstream,
Speaker 1: the way these things do, half embarrassment and half mascot.
Speaker 1: The high school senior started painting it on the big
Speaker 1: rock in town, and the tradition stuck for years. Kids
Speaker 1: dared each other to walk Farm Street at night out
Speaker 1: of town. Cousins made spooky noises at Thanksgiving. Every round
Speaker 1: numbered anniversary, a Boston reporter would drive out, take a
Speaker 1: picture of the stone wall and track down the witnesses
Speaker 1: to ask if they still stood by it, And every
Speaker 1: round numbered anniversary, the answer came back the same. They
Speaker 1: stood by it. Baxter stood by it. Brabham held her
Speaker 1: green eyes to the end. Bartlett, the reluctant one, kept
Speaker 1: telling interviewers the same two things in the same tired tone,
Speaker 1: that he saw exactly what he said he saw, and
Speaker 1: that he'd be perfectly happy never talking about it again.
Speaker 1: And then the case did something almost no American cryptid
Speaker 1: has ever done. It went international, and I mean genuinely
Speaker 1: international in the strangest possible direction. The Dover Demon became
Speaker 1: famous in Japan. I'm not entirely sure anyone can explain why,
Speaker 1: but somewhere in the eighties and nineties, Japanese paranormal publishing
Speaker 1: fell in love with this case, and the creature started
Speaker 1: showing up in their monster encyclopedias alongside their own homegrown spirits,
Speaker 1: and toy companies made figures of it, and it worked
Speaker 1: its way into manga and video games, and to this
Speaker 1: day there are people on the other side of the
Speaker 1: planet who know the name of a stone wall in
Speaker 1: a small Massachusetts town because of what a seventeen year
Speaker 1: old said he saw there one April night. Bartlett has
Speaker 1: talked about opening mail from Japanese fans with a kind
Speaker 1: of baffled resignation. A painter in New England whose most
Speaker 1: famous image is a pencil sketch he made at his
Speaker 1: parents' kitchen table while his hands were still shaking. That
Speaker 1: sketch survived, by the way the original drawings from that
Speaker 1: week ended up preserved through Lorn Coleman, and material from
Speaker 1: the case sits today in his International Cryptozoology Museum up
Speaker 1: in Portland, Maine, where the Dover Demon holds a place
Speaker 1: of honor. As one of the crown jewels of the
Speaker 1: whole field. Coleman has investigated strange reports for sixty years
Speaker 1: on every continent that produces them, and when he ranks
Speaker 1: his own career, this little twenty six hour case from
Speaker 1: a wealthy Boston suburb sits at or near the top
Speaker 1: of the list of things he can't explain. He interviewed
Speaker 1: those kids himself days after it happened, with professional skeptics
Speaker 1: beside him, and he walked away convinced, and he has
Speaker 1: stayed convinced for half a century. Here's the part I
Speaker 1: find genuinely strange, though stranger in some ways than the
Speaker 1: creature itself. It never came back. That's unusual in ways
Speaker 1: worth spelling out, because almost every case we visited on
Speaker 1: this road trip has a long tail. Mothman had thirteen
Speaker 1: months of sightings. The falc Monster kept showing up for decades.
Speaker 1: Lake monsters rack up hundreds of reports across generations. That's
Speaker 1: the normal shape of these things, a slow accumulation, a
Speaker 1: legend that keeps feeding. The Dover Demon refused to follow
Speaker 1: the pattern. It appeared on the night of April twenty first,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, was seen three times by four teenagers
Speaker 1: inside about twenty six hours, and then it was done.
Speaker 1: There's no credible sighting before that night, and no credible
Speaker 1: sighting since. Fifty years of teenagers driving farm Street at
Speaker 1: midnight hoping to see it, fifty years of anniversary articles
Speaker 1: inviting anyone with a story to come forward, and the
Speaker 1: record has stayed exactly where those four kids left it.
Speaker 1: I've turned that over a lot, and I keep landing
Speaker 1: in the same place. Whatever moved through Dover that weekend
Speaker 1: wasn't living there. It was passing through. Something crossed two
Speaker 1: square miles of one town on two spring nights, got
Speaker 1: by four kids who happened to be out late, and
Speaker 1: continued on to wherever it was going. And the only
Speaker 1: reason we know it existed at all is a stone wall,
Speaker 1: a gully and a bridge that happened to have witnesses
Speaker 1: on them at the wrong moment. That thought doesn't resolve anything.
Speaker 1: It makes it worse, honestly, because a resident monster is
Speaker 1: a mystery with an address, and a transient one is
Speaker 1: a mystery with a road. If it was passing through Dover,
Speaker 1: it came from somewhere and it went somewhere, which brings
Speaker 1: me to the question that's going to carry us into
Speaker 1: the second half of this episode. If something unknown can
Speaker 1: spend a weekend in the manicured suburbs fifteen miles from
Speaker 1: Boston and never be explained, what's living in the parts
Speaker 1: of Massachusetts that were never manicured at all? Because this
Speaker 1: state has a place like that, a big one, and
Speaker 1: unlike Dover, the reports out of it never stopped. Now
Speaker 1: we need to talk about the other thing, because here's
Speaker 1: what almost nobody outside New England knows about Massachusetts. About
Speaker 1: forty miles south of that stone wall on Farm Street,
Speaker 1: the neat colonial towns give way to something much older
Speaker 1: and much darker, a low water logged country of cedar
Speaker 1: swamp and river bottom that the first English settlers considered cursed,
Speaker 1: and the Wampa Noag people who lived there for thousands
Speaker 1: of years before them, regarded as a spirit place and
Speaker 1: out of that country. For at least a century, and
Speaker 1: by some accounts much longer, people have been reporting something
Speaker 1: walking on two legs that isn't four feet tall and fragile.
Speaker 1: It's seven to eight feet tall, covered in dark hair,
Speaker 1: and built like a wall. Massachusetts, of all places, has
Speaker 1: a sasquatch history, and it's a good one, and it's
Speaker 1: centered on the Hockamock Swamp. The Hackamock sprawls across roughly
Speaker 1: five to six thousand acres in the southeastern part of
Speaker 1: the state, touching the towns of Bridgewater, West, Bridgewater, Easton, Raynham, Norton,
Speaker 1: and Taunton. The name comes from the Wampa nowag and
Speaker 1: is usually translated as the place where spirits dwell, and
Speaker 1: depending on who you ask, that translation was either a
Speaker 1: description of sacred ground or a warning. The English settlers,
Speaker 1: subtle as ever, just called it the Devil's Swamp. It's
Speaker 1: a genuinely difficult piece of terrain, Atlantic white cedar, bog
Speaker 1: red maple swamp, flooded thickets, quaking mats of vegetation floating
Speaker 1: over black water cut through by the town, and snake rivers.
Speaker 1: Even today, with highways literally crossing over it on causeways,
Speaker 1: there are interior sections of the Hackamack that see essentially
Speaker 1: no human traffic because there's no dry way in Archaeologists
Speaker 1: have pulled artifacts out of its edges going back nine
Speaker 1: thousand years, including a burial site on Grassy Island where,
Speaker 1: according to a persistent and disputed account from the excavation
Speaker 1: red ochre in the graves defied explanation, and the site
Speaker 1: flooded before it could be fully documented. The swamp keeps things.
Speaker 1: That's its reputation, and it has earned it. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies, that same Lauren Coleman, fresh off naming the
Speaker 1: Dover Demon, drew a rough triangle on a map of
Speaker 1: southeastern Massachusetts with its points at Abington, Freetown, and Rehoboth,
Speaker 1: taking in the Hackamack at its center, and called it
Speaker 1: the Bridgewater Triangle because the density of unexplained reports inside
Speaker 1: that two hundred square mile area was unlike anything else
Speaker 1: in New England. People reported ghost lights over the swamp,
Speaker 1: giant birds, phantom black dogs, and running through all of it.
Speaker 1: Decade after decade, the Hairy Giant. The road trip has
Speaker 1: taken us to a lot of Bigfoot country. And I
Speaker 1: know what some of you are thinking, because I thought
Speaker 1: it too before I dug into this. Massachusetts is the
Speaker 1: sixth most densely populated state in the country. How does
Speaker 1: an eight foot primate live forty minutes from Boston? That
Speaker 1: question deserves a real answer, and I'll give it one.
Speaker 1: But first I want to lay out what people have
Speaker 1: actually reported. Starting with the spring of Massachusetts town mobilized
Speaker 1: armed police officers to hunt something they couldn't catch. The
Speaker 1: documented record starts for our purposes in the spring of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy in Bridgewater. That April, residence on the edge
Speaker 1: of the swamp began calling the Bridgewater police about a bear.
Speaker 1: That was the word everyone used, because that was the
Speaker 1: only word available, But the descriptions, as they often do,
Speaker 1: seemed to be of something else. The thing people were
Speaker 1: seeing was huge, dark and walking upright, not rearing up
Speaker 1: the way a black bear does for a few seconds
Speaker 1: to look around, but walking covering ground on two legs.
Speaker 1: Farmers reported livestock agitated in the night. Residents reported something
Speaker 1: enormous moving along tree lines at dusk. One report described
Speaker 1: it dragging what looked like the carcass of an animal.
Speaker 1: Black bears in southeastern Massachusetts in nineteen seventy were essentially
Speaker 1: non existent. The state's small recovering bear population was way
Speaker 1: out west in the Berkshires. Stay tuned for more backwoods
Speaker 1: Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. A bear
Speaker 1: in Bridgewater would have been remarkable on its own, but
Speaker 1: the police took the call seriously because the callers were
Speaker 1: farmers and homeowners, not pranksters, and the department did what
Speaker 1: departments do. They organized a search. Officers with shotguns and
Speaker 1: dogs went into the edges of the Hackamak. By some
Speaker 1: accounts a helicopter was involved. They found nothing they could
Speaker 1: catch or shoot, and the official file, such as it
Speaker 1: was closed with a shrug. But one story from that
Speaker 1: spring survived inside the department and leaked out over the years,
Speaker 1: and it has become a cornerstone of Bridgewater Triangle lore.
Speaker 1: An officer parked in his cruiser at night on the
Speaker 1: outskirts near the swamp reportedly felt the back end of
Speaker 1: the car move. Something had lifted or shoved the rear
Speaker 1: of a full sized nineteen seventy police sedan, and when
Speaker 1: the officer got the car turned around, his headlights caught
Speaker 1: something big and covered in dark hair, going over the
Speaker 1: embankment and into the trees. That story's department legend rather
Speaker 1: than a filed report. And I spent enough years around
Speaker 1: a police precinct to know that cops stories grow in
Speaker 1: the retelling like everybody else's. But I'll tell you what
Speaker 1: makes me hesitate before throwing it out. Cops don't usually
Speaker 1: make up stories that make them sound scared. The culture
Speaker 1: punishes it. A patrol officer inventing a tale in which
Speaker 1: he sits in his cruiser while something man handles it
Speaker 1: and then watches it walk away is inventing a story
Speaker 1: that costs him standing in the locker room. The stories
Speaker 1: cops fabricate tend to make them the hero. This one
Speaker 1: makes the officer a witness frozen, and that's the shape.
Speaker 1: True stories more often. Take the nineteen seventy flap faded
Speaker 1: the way flaps do, and then eight years later the
Speaker 1: Hackamack produced its most important witness, a man whose name
Speaker 1: is on the record and who spent the rest of
Speaker 1: his life on this subject. Joseph Dandroddy was in his
Speaker 1: early twenties in the winter of nineteen seventy eight, and
Speaker 1: he was walking near the Clay Banks, an area along
Speaker 1: the shore of Lake Nippannicket on the western edge of
Speaker 1: the swamp and Bridgewater. The nip, as locals call it,
Speaker 1: is a big shallow pond ringed by wetland, and the
Speaker 1: clay Banks were a spot where local kids rode dirt
Speaker 1: bikes and hung around. Deandrote told this story consistently for
Speaker 1: four decades, to newspapers, to documentary crews, to anyone who asked,
Speaker 1: and it never inflated, which is worth noting because he
Speaker 1: had every opportunity to grow it, and he never did.
Speaker 1: He was standing near the brush line facing the water
Speaker 1: when he got a feeling he struggled his whole life
Speaker 1: to put into words. He described it as something like
Speaker 1: a voice that wasn't a voice, an instruction arriving in
Speaker 1: his body telling him to turn around. Slowly. He turned around,
Speaker 1: and walking away from him toward the water through the
Speaker 1: brush was a figure he estimated at well over six
Speaker 1: feet tall, covered head to heel in dark brown hair.
Speaker 1: It was on two legs, and he watched it take
Speaker 1: step after step in a slow, heavy, deliberate walk, arm swinging,
Speaker 1: until it passed out of sight into the swamp. He
Speaker 1: described the walk as like a drunken monkey, clumsy looking
Speaker 1: but unhurried, a thing moving through its own backyard with
Speaker 1: nowhere it needed to be. He didn't chase it. He
Speaker 1: left fast, and he spent a portion of the years
Speaker 1: that followed being laughed at by exactly the people you'd expect.
Speaker 1: And instead of dropping it, he leaned in deandrode founded
Speaker 1: a local research group and spent decades collecting reports from
Speaker 1: other Triangle witnesses. And because he was a known named,
Speaker 1: findable man who planted his flag, people came to him
Speaker 1: with stories they'd never have told a stranger or a newspaper.
Speaker 1: He became the keeper of the Hackamock file. When he passed,
Speaker 1: the region lost its central clearinghouse for this phenomenon, and
Speaker 1: I'd bet a large number of encounters died untold with him.
Speaker 1: One of the reports that came to him, though, made
Speaker 1: it into the record on its own because the witness
Speaker 1: was willing to talk, and his account is, for my money,
Speaker 1: the single best piece of the Massachusetts Sasquatch file. His
Speaker 1: name was John Baker, and he was a fur trapper.
Speaker 1: Baker was a professional. He trapped the waterways of the
Speaker 1: Hackamock for years, muskrat and the like, which meant he
Speaker 1: was out in the swamp constantly at night in winter,
Speaker 1: alone in a canoe. In terms of witness quality, that
Speaker 1: resume is about as good as this subject ever gets.
Speaker 1: This is a man whose income depended on reading animal
Speaker 1: sign correctly, who knew every splash, every wake, every sound
Speaker 1: the swamp made at two in the morning in January,
Speaker 1: because he'd heard them all a thousand times, deer crossing water,
Speaker 1: otter sliding off a bank, the slap of a beavertail,
Speaker 1: the difference between a stick snapping under a raccoon and
Speaker 1: a branch breaking under a deer. That library lived in
Speaker 1: his ears. One winter night in the early nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: Baker was running his canoe up a the waterway and
Speaker 1: the deep interior of the swamp when he heard something
Speaker 1: coming through the brush along the bank, not moving away
Speaker 1: from him, moving with him, parallel tracking the canoe, And
Speaker 1: it was big, and the sounds were wrong. The stride
Speaker 1: cadence was wrong for a deer, the mass behind each
Speaker 1: footfall was wrong for anything. Then it entered the water
Speaker 1: behind him. He heard the surge as something heavy came
Speaker 1: off the bank, and he felt the wake hit the canoe,
Speaker 1: an actual pressure wave, rocking the hull. And he turned
Speaker 1: and saw in the dark a bulk in the water
Speaker 1: near him that he described as huge and hair covered.
Speaker 1: He put his paddle in and drove for open water,
Speaker 1: and the thing didn't follow past a certain point, and
Speaker 1: what stayed with him, the detail he repeated for the
Speaker 1: rest of his life was the smell that hung over
Speaker 1: that stretch of water, a skunklike musky reek, dense enough
Speaker 1: to taste. If you've been with this show for any
Speaker 1: length of time, that detail just rang a bell because
Speaker 1: you've heard it from one hundred witnesses in twenty states
Speaker 1: who never heard of John Baker. The sulfur skunk wet
Speaker 1: dog stench is one of the most consistent threads in
Speaker 1: North American sasquatch reports, and here it's in a Massachusetts
Speaker 1: Cedar swamp in the mouth of a fur trapper who
Speaker 1: knew exactly what actual skunk smell like and said this
Speaker 1: was something else. Baker's summary of the encounter was the
Speaker 1: summary of a professional, and it's the kind of statement
Speaker 1: I built this entire show around. He said he knew
Speaker 1: every animal that lived in that swamp, and whatever was
Speaker 1: in the water with him that night wasn't one of them.
Speaker 1: A trapper, a named repeat witness, and a police search
Speaker 1: with armed officers. That's a real file, and it didn't
Speaker 1: stop in the eighties. There's one more documented report from
Speaker 1: the classic era, and it isn't a sasquatch report at all,
Speaker 1: but it belongs here because it tells you what kind
Speaker 1: of witnesses this swamp has been burning through for generations.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy one, a police sergeant named Thomas Downey
Speaker 1: was driving home through Easton along the edge of the
Speaker 1: Hockamack near a rise that and I'm not making this up,
Speaker 1: had been known locally as bird Hill since long before
Speaker 1: he was born. It was night as he came up
Speaker 1: on the swamp edge, something rose from the trees beside
Speaker 1: the road, and Sergeant Downey described a bird, black, standing
Speaker 1: roughly six feet tall, that spread wings he estimated at
Speaker 1: eight to twelve feet across, and flapped away over the swamp.
Speaker 1: There's no bird in New England with a twelve foot wingspan.
Speaker 1: There's no bird in the fossil record of New England
Speaker 1: within the span of human habitation with a twelve foot wingspan.
Speaker 1: Downey knew that, and he reported it anyway, a sworn
Speaker 1: officer putting a career's worth of credibility behind an impossible animal.
Speaker 1: And he took the ribbing that followed, colleagues calling him
Speaker 1: the birdman, and he never withdrew a word of it.
Speaker 1: I bring up Downey for the same reason I brought
Speaker 1: up the eye color argument in Dover. Witness quality is
Speaker 1: the spine of this entire subject, and the Bridgewater Triangle's
Speaker 1: witness roster is bizarrely strong. A police sergeant, a professional trapper,
Speaker 1: a department's worth of officers in nineteen seventy farmers with
Speaker 1: mortgages and reputations. These aren't attention seekers, and most of
Speaker 1: them paid a social price for talking. And they talked anyway,
Speaker 1: and the things they described kept clustering around the same
Speaker 1: few thousand acres of flooded cedar. The file kept growing
Speaker 1: through the nineties, mostly in fragments that never reached a newspaper.
Speaker 1: Deer hunters coming out of the swamp edges in Raynham
Speaker 1: and West Bridgewater with stories of wood knocks answering their calls.
Speaker 1: A pair of teenagers in nineteen ninety eight who found
Speaker 1: a line of barefoot tracks crossing a cranberry bog margin
Speaker 1: in Norton. Each print sunk deeper into the wet sand
Speaker 1: than their own boots sank spaced so far apart the
Speaker 1: boys had to jump to match the stride. And who
Speaker 1: told their fathers and whose fathers walked out, looked and
Speaker 1: said nothing all the way home. A utility crew clearing
Speaker 1: brush along a right of way through the swamp's northern edge,
Speaker 1: and the mid two thousands who down tools and left
Speaker 1: a job unfinished after something screamed at them from cover
Speaker 1: close enough to move the brush, and whose foreman logged
Speaker 1: the stoppage as equipment trouble because there was no box
Speaker 1: on the form. For the truth, none of that is proof.
Speaker 1: Every piece of it is hearsay by any standard I
Speaker 1: was ever trained on. But hearsay that repeats itself for
Speaker 1: one hundred years across unconnected mouths, stops being noise at
Speaker 1: some point and starts being signal. And deciding where that
Speaker 1: point sits is the whole game we play on this show.
Speaker 1: Before I give you the modern encounters, I need to
Speaker 1: widen the map, because the Hackamock is the heart of
Speaker 1: Massachusetts Sasquatch Country, but it isn't the whole body. Southeast
Speaker 1: of the swamp sits the Freetown Fall River State Forest,
Speaker 1: more than five thousand acres of scrub, oak and ledge
Speaker 1: at the southern point of Coleman's Triangle, a forest with
Speaker 1: its own long and genuinely dark history that could carry
Speaker 1: an episode by itself, and a steady trickle of reports
Speaker 1: of screams, wood knocks, and upright figures going back decades
Speaker 1: and out at the other end of the state in
Speaker 1: the Berkshires, October Mountain State Forest covers over sixteen thousand
Speaker 1: acres of high hardwood ridge, the largest state forest in Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: and it has produced its own cluster of sighting since
Speaker 1: at least the nineteen eighties, including a well circulated account
Speaker 1: from nineteen eighty three of campers who watched a tall,
Speaker 1: upright figure with glowing eyeshine move near their site and
Speaker 1: were convinced enough to leave the mountain in the dark
Speaker 1: rather than stay the night. Berkshire researchers have collected track
Speaker 1: fines and vocalization reports off that mountain ever since, and
Speaker 1: the terrain argument rights itself because October Mountain connects into
Speaker 1: the Appalachian Spine, into Vermont's Green Mountains and New York's
Speaker 1: ta Conics, a continuous forested corridor running the length of
Speaker 1: the Eastern seaboard. So when we ask how an eight
Speaker 1: foot primate lives in the sixth most densely populated state,
Speaker 1: the map itself answers back. Massachusetts is over sixty percent forested,
Speaker 1: a number nobody believes. The first time they hear it.
Speaker 1: This state was almost completely cleared for farming by the
Speaker 1: eighteen fifties, and then the farms died and the forest
Speaker 1: took it all back, And today Massachusetts has more woodland
Speaker 1: than it has had at any point since before the
Speaker 1: Civil War. The people are packed into the eastern corridor
Speaker 1: and the valley towns in between, and out west are
Speaker 1: hundreds of square miles of regrown forest, swamp nobody can
Speaker 1: walk into, and mountain ridges that connect to wilderness running
Speaker 1: from Georgia to Canada. Anything that moves at night and
Speaker 1: avoids roads has more cover in Massachusetts right now than
Speaker 1: it had one hundred and fifty years ago. The first
Speaker 1: modern account comes out of the Freetown State Forest from
Speaker 1: a bow hunter, alcohol Marcus, and it was collected by
Speaker 1: a regional researcher in twenty fifteen, about a year after
Speaker 1: it happened. Marcus was hunting deer from a climbing stand
Speaker 1: in October of twenty fourteen, set up before dawn on
Speaker 1: the edge of a ledge overlooking a run between a
Speaker 1: swamp bottom and an oak flat. He'd hunted that forest
Speaker 1: for over twenty years. He knew it. In the dark,
Speaker 1: the morning started normally gray light coming up, squirrels starting
Speaker 1: their racket, a couple of dos filtering through out of range.
Speaker 1: Around eight, everything shut off. He described it the way
Speaker 1: witnesses always describe it, and the consistency of this detail
Speaker 1: across the country is itself data. The birds stopped, and
Speaker 1: the squirrels stopped with them, and the woods went to
Speaker 1: a silence he could feel on his skin, and Marcus,
Speaker 1: twenty years in that forest, couldn't remember a single morning
Speaker 1: that had ever done that. Then from the swamp bottom
Speaker 1: below the ledge came a sound he ranked as the
Speaker 1: worst he's ever heard. He called it a screw, but
Speaker 1: said the word was inadequate. It started low like a
Speaker 1: bull and rose into something almost human and held there
Speaker 1: longer than human lungs could. He actually felt it vibrate
Speaker 1: in the aluminum of the stand. It did it twice.
Speaker 1: After the second one, he heard movement in the bottom,
Speaker 1: heavy bipedal, unhurried footfalls with real weight behind them and
Speaker 1: long gaps between them, the cadence of something with a
Speaker 1: stride far longer than a man's moving away. But he
Speaker 1: never saw it. What he'll say is this. He climbed
Speaker 1: down an hour later, when the birds came back, walked
Speaker 1: the bottom, and found in a strip of soft black
Speaker 1: muck a single partial impression the front half of something
Speaker 1: step five toe marks across a front pad wider than
Speaker 1: both his boots side by side. He had no camera
Speaker 1: and his phone was dead from the cold, and he's
Speaker 1: been sick about it ever since. He hunted that ledge
Speaker 1: for two decades. He's never been back. The second account
Speaker 1: puts us back on the Hakamack itself on the water,
Speaker 1: and it's the most recent one in tonight's file. It
Speaker 1: comes from a man I'll call Paul, a middle school teacher,
Speaker 1: an amateur wildlife photographer from Taunton, and it happened in
Speaker 1: May of twenty twenty one on the Town River where
Speaker 1: it winds through the swamp's interior. Paul had been paddling
Speaker 1: that river for years a kayak and a camera, mostly
Speaker 1: chasing birds. The Hakamack at dawn in May is a
Speaker 1: photographer's dream missed on the water. Heron's working the shallows,
Speaker 1: the whole swamp waking up in layers of sound, and
Speaker 1: Paul knew the rhythm of it well enough that he
Speaker 1: timed his launches to be deep inside the swamp when
Speaker 1: the light broke that morning, he came around a bend
Speaker 1: where the river squeezes between two stands of flooded maple,
Speaker 1: and something was crouched at the waterline on the left bank,
Speaker 1: maybe eighty feet ahead. His first thought was a bear,
Speaker 1: and unlike nineteen seventy, that's a reasonable first option now
Speaker 1: because black bears have finally started drifting back into southeastern
Speaker 1: Massachusetts in small numbers. So Paul did what a wildlife
Speaker 1: photographer does when he thinks he's about to get the
Speaker 1: picture of his life. He stopped paddling, let the kayak drift,
Speaker 1: and stayed absolutely still. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. The shape was hunched
Speaker 1: at the edge of the water with one arm down,
Speaker 1: and Paul watched the arm move, and the motion is
Speaker 1: the detail he can't let go of because he spent
Speaker 1: years watching animals feed, and this was not just another
Speaker 1: known animal feeding. The hand was in the river, moving slowly, deliberately,
Speaker 1: the way a man feels along the bottom of a
Speaker 1: creek for a crawfish or a lost lure, feeling rather
Speaker 1: than pawing. Then the current carried the kayak a few
Speaker 1: feet further than Paul wanted it to, and the thing's
Speaker 1: head came up and around and it looked at him.
Speaker 1: The face was dark and mostly featureless at that distance
Speaker 1: in the light, but the head was massive, and there
Speaker 1: was no muzzle, no snout, and when it rose out
Speaker 1: of its crouch, it kept rising until it stood upright
Speaker 1: on the bank on two legs. The thing's head was
Speaker 1: up in branches. He'd have needed to jump to touch
Speaker 1: from a standing position on that bank. It didn't scream,
Speaker 1: and it didn't charge. It took two steps back from
Speaker 1: the water, turned and walked into the flooded maples, and
Speaker 1: Paul sat in his kayak in the middle of the
Speaker 1: town river and listened to it weighed away, each step
Speaker 1: a deep pull and slosh of black water, until the
Speaker 1: sound faded into the interior where no boat can follow.
Speaker 1: The camera was on his chest the entire time, strapped, charged, capped.
Speaker 1: He never touched it. When the researcher who collected his
Speaker 1: account asked the obvious question, Paul gave the answer, I've
Speaker 1: heard from more witnesses than I can count, and I
Speaker 1: want everyone yelling at their speakers right now to sit
Speaker 1: with it, because it's the most human sentence in this
Speaker 1: whole episode. He said that raising the camp never once
Speaker 1: occurred to him, that every part of him was fully
Speaker 1: occupied with being still, and that some very old part
Speaker 1: of his brain had taken the wheel, and that part
Speaker 1: had zero interest in photography. People who've never been in
Speaker 1: front of something like this laugh at the missing photo.
Speaker 1: The people who have never do. I can tell you
Speaker 1: from my own personal experience from the summer of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four, I stood ten feet away from one of
Speaker 1: these creatures as it crossed the trail in front of me,
Speaker 1: with my iPhone in my pocket. I never once thought
Speaker 1: about trying to take a photo of it. Paul still
Speaker 1: paddles the Hockomock, which might surprise you. He says the
Speaker 1: swamp feels different now that he catches himself reading every
Speaker 1: bank twice, and that he hasn't gone past that bend
Speaker 1: at dawn since he teaches science. By the way, he's
Speaker 1: the guy in his building who's supposed to have the
Speaker 1: tidy answer, and he'll tell you straight that he doesn't
Speaker 1: have one. That he knows what black bears look like
Speaker 1: and what people in suits look like, and what he
Speaker 1: saw was neither, and that he's done arguing about it
Speaker 1: with people who weren't in the boat. The third account
Speaker 1: comes from October Mountain, from a family, and it's the
Speaker 1: one I'd put in front of a jury if I
Speaker 1: ever had to argue this subject in a courtroom. In
Speaker 1: August of twenty eighteen, a couple from the Springfield area
Speaker 1: took their two kids camping off one of the October
Speaker 1: Mountain forest roads at a primitive site near a beaver pond.
Speaker 1: Mom was a middle school English teacher. Dad worked utility
Speaker 1: line maintenance, a man who spent his working life in
Speaker 1: the woods along power cuts. The first night was ordinary.
Speaker 1: The second night, around eleven, with the kids asleep in
Speaker 1: the tent and the parents sitting at the fire, rock
Speaker 1: started landing in the beaver pond. They weren't rolling down
Speaker 1: the bank into the water, they were landing in it,
Speaker 1: arcing out of the dark tree line on the far
Speaker 1: side and hitting the water with deep, spaced, deliberate splashes.
Speaker 1: The father grabbed the big flashlight and swept the far
Speaker 1: bank and caught nothing but trunks. They sat there working
Speaker 1: through the checklist. Kids from another site a bear knocking
Speaker 1: stones off a ledge, and the checklist was still running
Speaker 1: when a rock the size of a soft ball came
Speaker 1: out of the darkness on their side of the pond
Speaker 1: and landed ten feet from the fire. The far side
Speaker 1: had been one hundred yards away. This came from behind them.
Speaker 1: The mother got the kids up and into the truck,
Speaker 1: while the father stood with the light. And he told
Speaker 1: the researcher who took the report that what happened next
Speaker 1: is the reason he agreed to talk at all. From
Speaker 1: the slope above the camp site, close inside fifty yards,
Speaker 1: something exhaled. He called it a huff, the sound a
Speaker 1: horse makes, but deeper and bigger, a chest emptying blast
Speaker 1: of air. And it came with a smell rolling down
Speaker 1: the slope. And here's that thread again. The smell was
Speaker 1: skunk and wet dog and something rotten underneath. And this
Speaker 1: is a lineman who smelled every dead thing a right
Speaker 1: of way can hold. He didn't sweep the light up
Speaker 1: the slope. He's been honest about that in a way
Speaker 1: I respect completely. He said he understood that the light
Speaker 1: would show him something, and he understood in that moment
Speaker 1: that seeing it would help no one. He backed his
Speaker 1: way to the truck with the beam on the ground,
Speaker 1: they drove out with the tent still standing. He came
Speaker 1: back the next afternoon with his brother. The tent was untouched,
Speaker 1: the camp was untouched. On the muddy margin of the
Speaker 1: beaver pond, pressed deep, they found tracks. He measured one,
Speaker 1: and it was over seventeen inches heel to toe. The
Speaker 1: family still camps, just never there and never again on
Speaker 1: that mountain. The fourth account is a winter story, and
Speaker 1: I'm including it because the Hackamock in winter is when
Speaker 1: this swamp changes its rules. The flooded interior that keeps
Speaker 1: people out all year freezes into a highway for a
Speaker 1: few weeks. In January. Anything can walk anywhere in the Hackamack,
Speaker 1: and so can we. And in January of twenty eleven,
Speaker 1: a random man in his fifties I'll call Walt, was
Speaker 1: ice fishing on Lake nip Nicket, the same pond where
Speaker 1: Joseph had his sighting thirty three years earlier. Walt fished
Speaker 1: the Nip every winter of his life. He liked it
Speaker 1: at night, tip ups in a lantern and a bucket,
Speaker 1: because the pond was quiet and the crappy bit after
Speaker 1: dark that night the ice was thick and clean. A
Speaker 1: week of hard cold with no snow on it, and
Speaker 1: sound carried the way it only carries across bear ice,
Speaker 1: which matters because this hole encounter happened in Walt's ears
Speaker 1: before it ever reached his eyes. Around nine, he heard
Speaker 1: the ice boom out toward the middle of the pond.
Speaker 1: Ice booms all the time, and every ice fisherman knows
Speaker 1: the vocabulary. The long zipper cracks, the whale sounds, the
Speaker 1: shotgun pops of a cold snap tightening the sheet. Walt
Speaker 1: didn't look up from his tip up. Then it boomed again, closer,
Speaker 1: and again closer still, and he realized the booms were
Speaker 1: coming in a line, evenly spaced, walking toward the western shore,
Speaker 1: and that under each boom was a softer sound, a
Speaker 1: crunch and squeak the sound weight makes on hard ice.
Speaker 1: His lantern through maybe forty feet of light at the
Speaker 1: edge of it. Out on the dark ice between him
Speaker 1: and the swamp shore, something crossed left to right. He said.
Speaker 1: It was tall, and it was black against the gray
Speaker 1: of the ice. He said it never turned toward him
Speaker 1: and never broke stride. Each footfall boomed the sheet hard
Speaker 1: enough that he felt it through his boots and through
Speaker 1: the overturned bucket he was sitting on. He estimated its
Speaker 1: height based on an object every nip fisherman knows. There's
Speaker 1: an orange ice safety sign on a post off the
Speaker 1: west launch, and he swears the thing's shoulders passed above
Speaker 1: where he knew the top of that sign to be,
Speaker 1: and the sign top sits over seven feet off the ice.
Speaker 1: It crossed his forty feet of lantern light in what
Speaker 1: he figures was four strides went off the pond at
Speaker 1: the cedar line, and the booming stopped and the crunch
Speaker 1: of frozen swamp. Matt took over, fading west into the interior,
Speaker 1: into the part of the hackamock that's only reachable in
Speaker 1: January by whatever's willing to walk there. Walt pulled his
Speaker 1: tip ups by lantern light and left his five gallon
Speaker 1: bucket of gears sitting on the ice and never went
Speaker 1: back for it. He fished the nip again, because he's
Speaker 1: not the kind of man who gives up his pond.
Speaker 1: But he fishes it in daylight now, and when the
Speaker 1: ice booms in a line, any line, he packs up,
Speaker 1: and he doesn't much care who's watching him do it.
Speaker 1: The last account is the one that ties the whole
Speaker 1: episode together, and it comes from the edge of the
Speaker 1: hackamock itself, from a random man in his seventies. I'll
Speaker 1: call Eddie, whose property backs up against the swamp and
Speaker 1: whose family has farmed that ground since the forties. Eddie's
Speaker 1: story isn't one encounter, It's sixty years of small ones.
Speaker 1: And that's exactly what real long term habituation reports look
Speaker 1: like everywhere else in the country. As a boy in
Speaker 1: the sixties, he heard what his grandfather called the swamp,
Speaker 1: hollering screams from the antia on summer nights that the
Speaker 1: old man refused to discuss beyond telling the kids to
Speaker 1: stay off the mats after dark. In nineteen seventy, when
Speaker 1: the police were hunting the Bridgewater Bear, Eddie was a teenager,
Speaker 1: and he remembers his grandfather's reaction to the newspaper, which
Speaker 1: wasn't curiosity. The old man read the story, folded the paper,
Speaker 1: and said the police were wasting their time because you
Speaker 1: can't catch what lives in the middle. Over the decades
Speaker 1: since Eddie's file of oddities grew the way a farm's
Speaker 1: file grows, fence posts along the swamp side found snapped
Speaker 1: off at chest high a hog gone in the seventies
Speaker 1: with a section of penrail lifted out of its brackets
Speaker 1: and laid in the grass, corn pulled in a way
Speaker 1: he insists no raccoon or deer pulls it. Whole stalks
Speaker 1: stripped and stacked. Apple trees on the swamp line cleaned
Speaker 1: of fruit to a height of eight feet in a
Speaker 1: single night, while the lower branches went untouched, which is
Speaker 1: backwards from every deer that ever lived, and three times
Speaker 1: across sixty years, at dusk or dawn at distance, a dark,
Speaker 1: upright figure standing at the scene where his fields meet
Speaker 1: the cedar, standing still long enough to be sure of
Speaker 1: gone the moment his attention hardened on it. Eddie has
Speaker 1: never reported anything. He told his story only because DEANDROTI
Speaker 1: before he passed, vouched for the researcher who asked, and
Speaker 1: he told it flat, without decoration, the way old farmers
Speaker 1: talk about weather. When the researcher asked him the obvious
Speaker 1: question whether he was afraid of it, Eddie thought about
Speaker 1: it for a while and then he said no. And
Speaker 1: then he qualified the no in a sentence, I want
Speaker 1: to leave hanging in the air. He said it was
Speaker 1: there before his family got there, and it never once
Speaker 1: bothered them any worse than the weather did. And the
Speaker 1: swamp is a big place, and everything in it minds
Speaker 1: its own business except people. So what do we do
Speaker 1: with Massachusetts? I came into this state expecting a light stop, honestly,
Speaker 1: one weird little roadside case from the seventies, a quick
Speaker 1: tour on the highway. Instead, we found two of the
Speaker 1: most stubborn files in the whole Eastern catalog. And I
Speaker 1: want to close by putting them side by side, because
Speaker 1: the contrast is the lesson. The Dover Demon is a
Speaker 1: knife blade of a case twenty six hours, four named teenagers,
Speaker 1: one wealthy town, professional investigation while the trail was hot,
Speaker 1: and then silence forever after. It's the best documented cryptid
Speaker 1: flash in American history, precisely because it's so small there's
Speaker 1: nowhere for error to hide in it. Four corroborated witnesses
Speaker 1: that their own police chief vouched for saw something unclassified
Speaker 1: working the stone walls of Dover, Massachusetts, across one spring
Speaker 1: weekend in nineteen seventy seven, and it was never seen again.
Speaker 1: And that's the entire case, sealed and stable for fifty years.
Speaker 1: The Hackamock file is the opposite shape. It isn't a knife,
Speaker 1: It's a sediment. One hundred years of farmers and trappers
Speaker 1: and cops and hunters and teachers and families laying down
Speaker 1: thin layers of the same report over the same ground, upright,
Speaker 1: hair covered, enormous trailing that smell. A trapper in a
Speaker 1: canoe in the eighties, a kayaker on the same water,
Speaker 1: forty years later, an ice fisherman on the same pond
Speaker 1: where Dandrode stood, none of them known to each other,
Speaker 1: all of them describing pieces of the same animal. Sediment
Speaker 1: isn't judged a layer at a time. You judge the column,
Speaker 1: and the column under Southeastern Massachusetts runs deep and reads consistent.
Speaker 1: Here's the thing I can't stop turning over, and then
Speaker 1: I'll let you go. The Wampanoag named that swamp the
Speaker 1: place where spirits dwell a very long time before the
Speaker 1: first English boots sank into it, before bridgewater existed, before
Speaker 1: police cruisers, before Lauren Coleman drew his triangle. Every generation
Speaker 1: since has arrived certain that the old stories were superstition,
Speaker 1: and every generation has ended up adding a layer of
Speaker 1: its own names. Change devil Swamp, the Bridgewater, bear the
Speaker 1: Triangle Bigfoot. The reports don't Somewhere in the middle of
Speaker 1: five thousand flooded acres that no road reaches and no
Speaker 1: search has ever penetrated, forty minutes from Boston, there's ground
Speaker 1: no living person has stood on. Eddie's grandfather said, you
Speaker 1: can't catch what lives in the middle. Nobody ever has.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't swim in the nip after dark either, and
Speaker 1: now I suppose I wouldn't fish it after dark in January.
Speaker 1: That's Massachusetts. The road trip rolls on, and the next
Speaker 1: state line is waiting. M BA