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 something I've learned, after nearly four decades of doing this,
Speaker 1: after all the interviews, the field research, the late nights,
Speaker 1: sitting in places most people wouldn't go in broad daylight,
Speaker 1: I've learned that the stories that stick with you, the
Speaker 1: ones that burrow in and won't let go, They aren't
Speaker 1: the dramatic ones. They aren't the stories where somebody saw
Speaker 1: something for half a second through the trees and went
Speaker 1: home with a good campfire tale. No, the ones that
Speaker 1: keep me up at night are the quiet ones, the
Speaker 1: slow ones, the encounters where something took its time, where
Speaker 1: it watched, where it made a decision about whether or
Speaker 1: not to let you leave. That's what you're about to hear.
Speaker 1: I've been collecting accounts like these for a long time.
Speaker 1: People send them to me, They call, they write long
Speaker 1: emails at two in the morning because they can't sleep,
Speaker 1: and they've never told anyone the full story. And I
Speaker 1: can always tell the difference between someone who's embellishing and
Speaker 1: someone who's still shaking people. In these accounts, they're still shaking,
Speaker 1: some of them decades later. What I've put together here
Speaker 1: are five encounters, five separate people, five different parts of
Speaker 1: this country, five different decades, and every single one of
Speaker 1: them shares something in common. Not the details. The details
Speaker 1: are all different. What they share is the aftermath. Every
Speaker 1: one of these people changed the way they lived because
Speaker 1: of what happened to them. They stopped going to places
Speaker 1: they'd gone their whole lives. They gave up hobbies they'd
Speaker 1: built their identities around. They rearranged their entire relationship with
Speaker 1: the outdoors because something out there showed them in no
Speaker 1: uncertain terms that they were not at the top of
Speaker 1: the food chain. I'm not going to tell you what
Speaker 1: to believe. That's never been what this show is about.
Speaker 1: What I am going to tell you is that these
Speaker 1: people believe it, and after you hear what they went through,
Speaker 1: I think you'll understand why.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Some of these came to me directly emails. Mostly one
Speaker 1: of them came secondhand from a nephew telling me about
Speaker 1: his uncle. I've changed some minor details to protect privacy,
Speaker 1: but the core of every account is exactly as it
Speaker 1: was shared with me. First names only, locations are as
Speaker 1: specific as the witnesses were comfortable with. And I want
Speaker 1: to say this upfront because it matters. None of these
Speaker 1: people came to me looking for attention. Most of them
Speaker 1: specifically asked me not to use their last names. A
Speaker 1: couple of them took months to even agree to let
Speaker 1: me share their stories at all. These aren't people chasing
Speaker 1: cliques or trying to sell a book. These are people
Speaker 1: who went through something they can't explain, and they've been
Speaker 1: carrying it alone for a long time. Our first account
Speaker 1: comes from a man named Dale, out of sequem Washington.
Speaker 1: Dale grew up hunting the Olympic Peninsula. He'd been in
Speaker 1: those mountains his entire life, and one morning in the
Speaker 1: fall of nineteen seventy eight, everything changed in about thirty seconds.
Speaker 1: Here's Dale, Brian. My daughter listens to your show and
Speaker 1: she's been after me about it for months. She says,
Speaker 1: I need to get it out of my system. I
Speaker 1: don't think that's possible, but I told her i'd try
Speaker 1: so here I am. My name's Dale. I'm seventy one now.
Speaker 1: I live in Sequem, Washington, and I've been here most
Speaker 1: of my life. I grew up hunting these mountains. My
Speaker 1: father taught me. His father taught him. That's just what
Speaker 1: you did out here. I started tagging along when I
Speaker 1: was eight years old, and by the time I was sixteen,
Speaker 1: I was going out on my own. I knew those woods.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying that to sound tough. I'm saying it
Speaker 1: because I need you to understand that what happened to
Speaker 1: me in October of nineteen seventy eight wasn't the result
Speaker 1: of some greenhorn wandering into the timber and getting spooked
Speaker 1: by a bear. I was twenty three. It was the
Speaker 1: second week of October ELK season, I'd gone out alone,
Speaker 1: which wasn't unusual for me. I preferred it actually. I
Speaker 1: was hunting a drainage off the Do's wallops, up above
Speaker 1: a creek bottom where I'd seen sign earlier that week.
Speaker 1: There'd been fresh row ubs on the alders and some
Speaker 1: good tracks in the mud along the water. I figured
Speaker 1: i'd get up into a good spot before light and wait.
Speaker 1: I drove in before dawn, parked at a pull off
Speaker 1: i'd used a dozen times, grabbed my rifle, my pack,
Speaker 1: and a thermos, and started hiking in. It was cold,
Speaker 1: low forties, maybe fog sitting in the valley like it
Speaker 1: always does that time of year. You couldn't see more
Speaker 1: than forty or fifty yards in front of you, and
Speaker 1: even that was fuzzy.
Speaker 2: I remember thinking.
Speaker 1: It was going to be one of those mornings where
Speaker 1: you just sit there and listen because the visibility wasn't
Speaker 1: going to do you any favors. I got up to
Speaker 1: my spot about an hour before first light. It was
Speaker 1: a little bench above the creek with some big furs
Speaker 1: behind me and a good view down into the drainage.
Speaker 1: I sat down against a tree, settled in and poured
Speaker 1: a cup of coffee. Everything was quiet, normal quiet, the
Speaker 1: kind where you hear the creek and the drip off
Speaker 1: the branches and nothing else. I sat there for maybe
Speaker 1: forty five minutes. The sky started getting gray, just barely.
Speaker 1: You know that moment where it's not really daylight yet,
Speaker 1: but you can start to make things out, Trees take shape,
Speaker 1: you can see the ground. That's where I was when
Speaker 1: I heard something moving below me.
Speaker 2: It was heavy.
Speaker 1: That was the first thing I noticed. Not a deer,
Speaker 1: not even an elk. I've heard elk moving through brush
Speaker 1: a thousand times. They cracked through it, they snapped things.
Speaker 1: This was different. Whatever was down there was pushing through
Speaker 1: thick stuff, and it sounded like it was doing it slowly, deliberately,
Speaker 1: like it was trying not to make noise, but couldn't
Speaker 1: avoid it because of how big it was. I put
Speaker 1: my coffee down and brought the rifle up across my knees.
Speaker 1: I wasn't alarmed, not yet. I figured it might be
Speaker 1: a bear. We've got black bears all through that country,
Speaker 1: and they'll move through the bottoms early in the morning.
Speaker 1: I just sat there, watching the fog, waiting for whatever
Speaker 1: it was to come into view. And then the smell
Speaker 1: hit me. I've cleaned more elk and deer than I
Speaker 1: could ever count. I've been around dead animals in various
Speaker 1: states of decay. I've smelled bear dens. This wasn't any
Speaker 1: of that. It was something else entirely. It was sharp, organic,
Speaker 1: almost chemical, like if you took the worst body odor
Speaker 1: you've ever encountered and mixed it with wet dog and
Speaker 1: rotten vegetation. It was so strong my eyes watered. I
Speaker 1: remember pulling my collar up over my nose. That's how
Speaker 1: bad it was. Whatever was down there had stopped moving.
Speaker 1: I couldn't hear it anymore, but the smell was getting stronger,
Speaker 1: which told me it hadn't left. It was close, and
Speaker 1: it was still. Then the fog shifted just enough and
Speaker 1: I saw it. It was standing at the base of
Speaker 1: the slope, maybe sixty yards below me, partially behind a
Speaker 1: big hemlock. At first I thought I was looking at
Speaker 1: a man. My first, honest to God thought was that
Speaker 1: some other hunter had come in on the same drainage
Speaker 1: and was standing there in a dark coat. Because the
Speaker 1: shape was upright, two legs, two arms, shoulders, but the
Speaker 1: proportions were way off for a person. I could see
Speaker 1: that even through the fog. The shoulders were too wide,
Speaker 1: way too wide, and the arms hung too far down,
Speaker 1: They hung almost to the knees. The whole body was
Speaker 1: thick in a way that a human body isn't. Not fat,
Speaker 1: not muscular in the way you'd think of a bodybuilder,
Speaker 1: just dense, packed, like every part of it was built
Speaker 1: heavier than it had any right to be. The way
Speaker 1: it stood was wrong too. A man standing still in
Speaker 1: the cold shifts his weight, he moves, he adjusts. This
Speaker 1: thing was rooted, absolutely motionless from the waist down. The
Speaker 1: stillness of it was unnatural. It was the kind of
Speaker 1: stillness that takes effort, or that comes naturally to something
Speaker 1: that's used to standing still for a very long time,
Speaker 1: waiting watching. It was covered in hair, dark brown, almost black,
Speaker 1: and it was matted in places, clumped, wet looking. The
Speaker 1: hair on the shoulders was longer than on the arms.
Speaker 1: It didn't look like fur, not the way a bear's
Speaker 1: coat looks, uniform and groomed. This was more like the
Speaker 1: hair on a neglected animal, uneven, patchy in some spots,
Speaker 1: thick in others. I couldn't see the face clearly, not
Speaker 1: at that distance, not in that fog, but I could
Speaker 1: see the head, and the head is what made my
Speaker 1: hand start shaking, because it wasn't round, it wasn't shaped.
Speaker 2: Like a bear's head.
Speaker 1: It came up to a slight point, like the top
Speaker 1: of the skull was ridged, and the head sat right
Speaker 1: on the shoulders. There was no neck, or if there was,
Speaker 1: it was so thick and short that it just blended
Speaker 1: into the shoulders like they were one piece. I sat
Speaker 1: there with the rifle across my knees and I didn't move.
Speaker 1: I didn't breathe. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you
Speaker 1: that my body wouldn't respond. It was like everything below
Speaker 1: my neck just locked up. I've never felt anything like it.
Speaker 1: I've been in tight spots. I've had close calls in
Speaker 1: the woods. I fell off a cliff face when I
Speaker 1: was nineteen and broke my collar bone, but nothing has
Speaker 1: ever produced the kind of fear I felt in that moment.
Speaker 1: It was primal. That's the only word for it. Something
Speaker 1: in my brain was screaming at me to be still,
Speaker 1: be invisible, don't let it know you're here. It turned
Speaker 1: its head, not toward me, off to the left, and
Speaker 1: when it turned I saw the profile of the face.
Speaker 1: The jaw was massive, just enormous. It jutted forward, not
Speaker 1: like an ape exactly, but close. The brow was heavy
Speaker 1: and sloped, and the skin on the face, the parts
Speaker 1: that weren't covered in hair, was gray, not dark gray,
Speaker 1: not pale, just gray, like old concrete, like something that
Speaker 1: hadn't seen sun in its life. It stood there for
Speaker 1: maybe ten more seconds. I don't know. Time didn't work right.
Speaker 1: It could have been thirty seconds, or it could have
Speaker 1: been five. Then it turned and walked into the fog
Speaker 1: and the brush, and it was gone, just like that.
Speaker 1: No hurry, no sound at all this time, it just
Speaker 1: walked away and disappeared. I didn't move for another twenty minutes.
Speaker 1: I'm not proud of that. I sat there with my
Speaker 1: rifle in my lap, and I shook. My legs were shaking,
Speaker 1: my hands were shaking. My jaw was clenched so tight
Speaker 1: that when I finally forced myself to relax, my teeth ached.
Speaker 1: When I finally stood up, I didn't go down the slope.
Speaker 1: I didn't track it. I turned around and walked straight
Speaker 1: back to my truck. I didn't run, but I wanted to.
Speaker 1: Every cell in my body wanted to. I kept looking
Speaker 1: over my shoulder the whole way back. I'd take ten
Speaker 1: steps and stop and listen. Ten more steps, stop, listen.
Speaker 1: It took me twice as long to hike out as
Speaker 1: it did to hike in. I got to the truck
Speaker 1: and sat there with the engine running and my hands
Speaker 1: on the steering wheel. I couldn't stop looking at the
Speaker 1: tree line. I kept expecting to see it again. Every
Speaker 1: shadow between the firs looked like shoulders, Every dark stump
Speaker 1: looked like something crouching. I sat there for at least
Speaker 1: ten minutes before I could bring myself to put the
Speaker 1: truck in gear. I drove home, and I didn't tell
Speaker 1: my wife what happened. I didn't tell my father, I
Speaker 1: didn't tell anyone. I put the rifle in the safe,
Speaker 1: and I told everyone I was done hunting. My dad
Speaker 1: thought I'd lost my mind. My buddies gave me grief
Speaker 1: about it for years. I let them. I wasn't going
Speaker 1: to explain myself because I knew how it would sound.
Speaker 1: I knew exactly how it would sound. I didn't go
Speaker 1: back into those woods for twenty six years. Twenty six years, Brian,
Speaker 1: I'm not talking about that specific drainage. I mean any woods.
Speaker 1: I didn't hunt, I didn't hike, I didn't go on
Speaker 1: camping trips with my kids. My wife would want to
Speaker 1: do a weekend at a campground somewhere, and I'd find
Speaker 1: a reason not to go. She thought I just didn't
Speaker 1: enjoy it anymore. I let her think that. The truth is,
Speaker 1: I was afraid, a twenty three year old man who'd
Speaker 1: spent his whole life in the mountains, and I was
Speaker 1: afraid to go back because I'd seen something standing in
Speaker 1: that fog that should not have been there, something that
Speaker 1: wasn't a bear, wasn't a man, wasn't anything I could
Speaker 1: make sense of then, and honestly I still can't. I
Speaker 1: finally went on a walk in the woods again when
Speaker 1: my granddaughter was four. She wanted to go on a
Speaker 1: nature walk. She was tugging on my hand and I
Speaker 1: did it for her. But I'll tell you this, it
Speaker 1: wasn't peaceful, it wasn't fun. I spent the whole time
Speaker 1: watching the trees, listening. My granddaughter was pointing at birds
Speaker 1: and picking up rocks, and I was scanning the timber
Speaker 1: like I was on patrol. I'm seventy one years old,
Speaker 1: and I still don't like being in the woods after dark.
Speaker 1: I've had a good life, raised two kids, had a career,
Speaker 1: built a house with my own hands. But there's this
Speaker 1: one thing sitting in the back of everything, this one
Speaker 1: morning in nineteen seventy eight that I've never been able
Speaker 1: to put down. I've tried, Lord knows, I've tried. I've
Speaker 1: told myself it was a bear on its hind legs.
Speaker 1: I've told myself the fog was playing tricks. But I
Speaker 1: know what I saw. I saw a face. I saw
Speaker 1: a gray skin and a jaw that could have crushed
Speaker 1: a fence post. I saw something that looked almost human
Speaker 1: but wasn't. And the way it moved when it left, unhurried, casual,
Speaker 1: like it had somewhere to be, and I was beneath
Speaker 1: its Notice, that's the part that haunts me most. It
Speaker 1: wasn't afraid of me, not even a little bit. Whatever
Speaker 1: I saw that morning was real, it was solid, it
Speaker 1: was alive, and it was something that made me, a
Speaker 1: man who grew up in those mountains, feel like prey.
Speaker 1: I don't know what you do with that, but my
Speaker 1: daughter wanted me to tell somebody, so I'm telling you Dale.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. Twenty six years. That's how long Dale
Speaker 1: stayed out of the woods. A man who grew up
Speaker 1: in those mountains, who learned to hunt before he could drive,
Speaker 1: and one encounter took all of it away from him.
Speaker 1: That's not somebody telling a story for fun. That's somebody
Speaker 1: describing a wound. Our next account takes us across the
Speaker 1: country to the mountains of West Virginia. A woman named
Speaker 1: Karen was twenty four years old in nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: camped alone on a trail she'd hiked dozens of times.
Speaker 1: What happened to her that night and what she saw
Speaker 1: the next morning ended her relationship with the outdoors permanently.
Speaker 1: Here's Karen Brian. I'm writing this because my therapist told
Speaker 1: me it might help. I know that probably sounds dramatic,
Speaker 1: but I've been dealing with this for over thirty years
Speaker 1: and I'm tired of it living only in my head.
Speaker 1: I found your show about six months ago and listen
Speaker 1: to most of your episodes in about two weeks. Some
Speaker 1: of them scared me so badly I had to turn
Speaker 1: them off and come back the next day. But I
Speaker 1: kept coming back because these people were describing things I recognized,
Speaker 1: not the exact same thing, but the feeling, the way
Speaker 1: it sits in your chest afterward, the way you can't
Speaker 1: explain it to anyone without feeling like you're losing credibility.
Speaker 1: My name's Karen. I'm fifty seven. I live in Virginia now,
Speaker 1: but I grew up in Elkins, West Virginia, right on
Speaker 1: the edge of the Monongahela National Forest. My family wasn't
Speaker 1: what you'd call out doorsy, but you didn't have to be.
Speaker 1: The forest was just there. You'd drive ten minutes in
Speaker 1: any direction and you were in it. I started hiking
Speaker 1: in college. I went to Davis and Elkins, so I
Speaker 1: was right there and it became my thing.
Speaker 2: It was how I dealt with stress.
Speaker 1: I'd load up a pack and head out on one
Speaker 1: of the trails for a few hours. Sometimes i'd go
Speaker 1: for a full weekend. In September of nineteen ninety three,
Speaker 1: I was twenty four, I'd graduated and was working at
Speaker 1: a physical therapy clinic in town. I decided to do
Speaker 1: a solo overnight on a trail i'd done several times before.
Speaker 1: It was a loop that took you up into some
Speaker 1: older timber, across a couple of ridges, and back down
Speaker 1: along a creek. Nothing crazy, maybe twelve miles total. I'd
Speaker 1: always felt safe on it. I hiked in on a
Speaker 1: Saturday morning and set up camp in a spot I liked,
Speaker 1: a flat area back in some hard woods, about thirty
Speaker 1: yards off the trail. I spent the afternoon reading and
Speaker 1: walking around, had a fire that night, ate dinner. Everything
Speaker 1: was completely normal. I woke up at around two in
Speaker 1: the morning, and I don't know why. I wasn't cold,
Speaker 1: I didn't have to use the bathroom. My eyes just
Speaker 1: opened and I was immediately wide awake, which is unusual
Speaker 1: for me. I'm a heavy sleeper, always have been. But
Speaker 1: I was awake, like someone had flipped a switch. The
Speaker 1: first thing I noticed was the silence. And I know
Speaker 1: people say that all the time in the stories, so
Speaker 1: let me be specific. The creek I was camped near
Speaker 1: was still running. I could hear that, but there were
Speaker 1: no insects, no frogs, nothing in the underbrush, nothing in
Speaker 1: the canopy. It was September and West Virginia, Bryant. The
Speaker 1: woods at night in September are loud, crickets, katie DIDs,
Speaker 1: tree frogs, all of it, that constant chorus that you
Speaker 1: stop hearing after a while because it's just background noise.
Speaker 1: It was gone, all of it. It was like someone
Speaker 1: had muted every living thing within a quarter mile. I
Speaker 1: lay there in my sleeping bag and I listened. My
Speaker 1: heart was beating hard, and I didn't know why yet.
Speaker 1: I just had this overwhelming feeling that something was wrong.
Speaker 1: Not vague, not gradual. It was instant and absolute, like
Speaker 1: my body knew something my brain hadn't.
Speaker 2: Caught up to. Then I heard breathing, not mine.
Speaker 1: Outside the tent, close, so close that at first I
Speaker 1: thought an animal was pressed right up against the rainfly.
Speaker 1: It was deep, slow breathing in and out, and I
Speaker 1: could hear a slight wheeze on the exhale, like air
Speaker 1: passing through a restricted space. It was rhythmic, patient, There
Speaker 1: was no urgency in it. Whatever was out there wasn't winded,
Speaker 1: wasn't stressed. It was just standing there, breathing like it
Speaker 1: had all the time in the world. And the smell
Speaker 1: came with it, thick, sour like body odor and rotting
Speaker 1: leaves and something else underneath, something animal that I couldn't place.
Speaker 1: It came through the tent fabric. It was inside with me.
Speaker 1: I was breathing it. I stopped breathing myself. I put
Speaker 1: my hand over my mouth because I was terrified it
Speaker 1: could hear me. I lay there, completely rigid, staring up
Speaker 1: at the inside of the tent, and I listened to
Speaker 1: that breathing for what felt like forever. My whole body
Speaker 1: was locked up, every muscle tight. I could feel my
Speaker 1: pulse in my throat, my wrists, behind my eyes. Then
Speaker 1: something touched the tent, not bumped.
Speaker 2: It touched it. I watched the fabric press.
Speaker 1: Inward near the top, on the side closest to my head, slowly,
Speaker 1: like a hand pressing against it. From the outside. The
Speaker 1: shape of it was clear against the nylon. It was
Speaker 1: a hand, a huge hand, fingers spread wide. It pressed
Speaker 1: in far enough that the fabric was almost touching my face,
Speaker 1: and I could feel the heat coming off of whatever
Speaker 1: was on the other side. That's the detail that gets
Speaker 1: me the most even now. The heat, whatever was touching
Speaker 1: my tent was radiating warmth through the nylon, like standing
Speaker 1: next to a wood stove. It was alive. It was
Speaker 1: right there, inches from my face. With nothing but a
Speaker 1: thin sheet of nylon between us. Then the hand moved.
Speaker 1: It slid downward along the wall slowly. I could hear
Speaker 1: the fabric whispering under the pressure, like something feeling the
Speaker 1: shape of what it had found, not trying to get in,
Speaker 1: not tearing at it.
Speaker 2: Just exploring.
Speaker 1: That realization hit me in real time, and it made
Speaker 1: everything worse, because it meant this thing was curious. It
Speaker 1: meant it was thinking. I didn't scream, I didn't move,
Speaker 1: I just lay there. The hand pulled away, the fabric
Speaker 1: settled back into place. I heard movement outside, not footsteps exactly,
Speaker 1: more like a shuffling, a shifting of weight, than nothing.
Speaker 1: Silence again. I don't know how long I waited, an hour, maybe,
Speaker 1: maybe longer. Eventually the insects started up again, slowly, at first,
Speaker 1: a cricket here, a frog there. The woods came back
Speaker 1: to life, and I took that as a sign that
Speaker 1: whatever had been out there was gone. I waited until
Speaker 1: gray light, and then I got out of the tent.
Speaker 1: I won't pretend I wasn't shaking, because I was. My
Speaker 1: hands were trembling so badly I could barely work the zipper.
Speaker 1: I stepped outside and looked around, and everything looked normal, trees, leaves,
Speaker 1: morning fog, nothing out of place except the ground. About
Speaker 1: five feet from my tent. There were impressions in the
Speaker 1: leaf litter, two of them, side by side, where something
Speaker 1: had been standing, and they were enormous. Not prints exactly,
Speaker 1: not in the way you'd see in mud, but compressions,
Speaker 1: like something incredibly heavy had stood in that one spot
Speaker 1: for a long time and packed the leaves and dirt
Speaker 1: down under its weight. I packed up faster than I've
Speaker 1: ever packed in my life. I stuffed everything into my bag,
Speaker 1: without organizing it, without folding anything. I was on the
Speaker 1: trail within ten minutes. I made it about a quarter mile.
Speaker 2: Before I saw it.
Speaker 1: It was off to my right, up slope, maybe eighty
Speaker 1: yards away, standing between two trees watching me. I stopped walking.
Speaker 1: My feet just stopped, like my legs decided independently of
Speaker 1: the rest of me that this was as far as
Speaker 1: we were going. It was tall, very tall. I'm five
Speaker 1: six and I'm used to men being taller than me,
Speaker 1: but this was a different scale. It was easily seven feet,
Speaker 1: probably more. It was hard to judge from that distance,
Speaker 1: and at that angle uphill the build was what got me.
Speaker 2: It looked like a.
Speaker 1: Man, but a man who'd been scaled up and thickened
Speaker 1: in every dimension. The chest was barrel shaped, the stomach wide,
Speaker 1: the legs like tree trunks. There was no definition the
Speaker 1: way a human body has definition, no visible waiste, no tapering.
Speaker 1: It was just massive, from shoulders to hips. It was
Speaker 1: covered in reddish brown hair, not long, flowing hair, short
Speaker 1: and dense, like the coat on a chow. It covered
Speaker 1: everything except the face.
Speaker 2: The face is what I.
Speaker 1: Can't get away from. It was broad, flat, The nose
Speaker 1: was wide and pushed in, not like an ape's nose,
Speaker 1: more like a man's nose that had been broken badly
Speaker 1: and never set right. The mouth was a thin line,
Speaker 1: no lips to speak of, just to slit.
Speaker 2: But the eyes are what held me.
Speaker 1: They were dark, very dark, set deep under that heavy brow,
Speaker 1: and they were looking right at me, not through me,
Speaker 1: at me. There was something behind those eyes. I don't
Speaker 1: mean intelligence exactly, though I think there was intelligence there.
Speaker 1: I mean awareness, recognition. It knew what I was, It
Speaker 1: understood what it was looking at. We stared at each
Speaker 1: other for probably fifteen seconds, maybe twenty, and in those
Speaker 1: seconds I felt something I've never felt before or since.
Speaker 1: I felt observed, not watched, observed, the way a person
Speaker 1: looks at something they're studying. It wasn't aggressive, it wasn't curious,
Speaker 1: the way a dog is curious. It was something else,
Speaker 1: something deliberate, something that made me feel very, very small,
Speaker 1: and very exposed. Then it turned, It turned away from
Speaker 1: me and walked uphill into the timber, and it moved
Speaker 1: with a fluidity that didn't match its size. Nothing that
Speaker 1: big should move that smoothly. It was like watching a
Speaker 1: shadow slide between the trees, three or four strides, and
Speaker 1: it was out of sight, and the only proof it
Speaker 1: had been there was the faint sound of brush snapping
Speaker 1: higher on the ridge. I ran, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: dress it up. I ran the rest of the way
Speaker 1: back to my car. I fell twice, cut my knee
Speaker 1: open on a rock the second time. I didn't stop.
Speaker 1: I threw my pack in the trunk and drove home,
Speaker 1: doing seventy on roads that were meant for forty five.
Speaker 1: When I got home, I sat in the shower for
Speaker 1: over an hour. I scrubbed my arms and hands like
Speaker 1: I was trying to wash something off me that wouldn't
Speaker 1: come off.
Speaker 2: I cried.
Speaker 1: I cried hard, not because I was hurt, because I
Speaker 1: was so relieved to be inside four walls, and because
Speaker 1: I knew deep down that I'd never feel the same
Speaker 1: way about being outside again. I didn't tell anyone what
Speaker 1: happened for almost five years. The first person I told
Speaker 1: was a boyfriend, who laughed at me, and that was
Speaker 1: the last time I mentioned it for another decade. After that,
Speaker 1: I learned to keep it to myself. You learn quickly
Speaker 1: who you can talk to about something like this. The
Speaker 1: answer for most of my life has been nobody. I
Speaker 1: haven't camped, since I haven't hiked alone, since I live
Speaker 1: in Northern Virginia, now near the suburbs, and even here,
Speaker 1: when I drive past a tree line at dusk, my
Speaker 1: hands tightened on the steering wheel and something in my
Speaker 1: chest constricts.
Speaker 2: I hate that.
Speaker 1: I hate that something took the woods away from me.
Speaker 1: Hiking was my piece. It was the thing that kept
Speaker 1: me balanced. It was where I went when the rest
Speaker 1: of the world felt like too much. And one night
Speaker 1: in September of ninety three, that was over, just like that,
Speaker 1: one encounter, one face looking at me through the trees,
Speaker 1: and a piece of who I was got left behind
Speaker 1: on that ridge in West Virginia, my therapist says, writing
Speaker 1: this might give me some closure. I don't know about that,
Speaker 1: but I do know that it happened. It was real.
Speaker 1: It's the most real thing that's ever happened to me,
Speaker 1: and I've spent thirty years wishing it wasn't. Thank you
Speaker 1: for giving people a place to say these things, Karen,
Speaker 1: I want you to think about that for a second
Speaker 1: before we move on to the next email. The hand
Speaker 1: on the tent, the heat coming through the nylon, and
Speaker 1: then seeing it the next morning, standing in the trees,
Speaker 1: watching her with a look she describes as observation, not aggression,
Speaker 1: not curiosity. Observation. That word keeps coming back to me.
Speaker 1: Karen didn't describe something that was startled by a hiker.
Speaker 1: She described something that seemed to be studying one. Our
Speaker 1: third account comes from southeast Ohio. A man named Brent
Speaker 1: and his buddy Cody were riding four wheelers on the
Speaker 1: OHV Trails in the Wayne National Forest in the fall
Speaker 1: of two thousand nine nineteen. They heard something in the
Speaker 1: timber that didn't belong. They kept riding, and when they
Speaker 1: came back the way they'd come the trail wasn't the
Speaker 1: same trail anymore. Here's Brent. My name's Brent, and I
Speaker 1: live outside Athens, Ohio. I'm thirty nine. I run heavy
Speaker 1: equipment for a road construction outfit out of Lancaster, and
Speaker 1: I've been riding the trails down here in the Wayne
Speaker 1: since I was old enough to operate a machine. My
Speaker 1: dad put me on a three wheeler when I was eleven,
Speaker 1: and I've never been off one since. I tell you that,
Speaker 1: so you understand the woods aren't a foreign place to me.
Speaker 1: I'm not a city guy who got turned around. I
Speaker 1: know these hollers and these ridges. I know what's supposed
Speaker 1: to be in them, and I know what isn't. My
Speaker 1: wife told me to write you. She listens to your
Speaker 1: show on her commute. She says I'm different on the
Speaker 1: days I think about it, and she's right I am.
Speaker 1: So I figured i'd put it down once and be
Speaker 1: done with it. October twenty nineteen, Cody and I had
Speaker 1: taken a Saturday to ride. We'd done the Monday Creek
Speaker 1: system probably forty times between us, but we wanted to
Speaker 1: put a long day in before the weather turned. The
Speaker 1: leaves were already mostly off the ridges. The understory was open.
Speaker 1: You could see two hundred yards into the timber in
Speaker 1: places where you couldn't see twenty in July. That's important.
Speaker 1: I want you to picture that the woods were stripped down.
Speaker 1: There wasn't much hiding anything. We left the trailhead a
Speaker 1: little after nine in the morning. Cody was on his Polaris.
Speaker 1: I was on a Honda Foreman that I've owned for
Speaker 1: twelve years. We'd packed lunches and water, and we figured
Speaker 1: we'd be out till four or five o'clock. No reason
Speaker 1: to hurry, just a long, easy day in the woods.
Speaker 1: The first part of the morning was uneventful. We rode
Speaker 1: the lower loops, stopped at the overlook above the creek,
Speaker 1: ate a granola bar. Each joked around normal Saturday. The
Speaker 1: only thing I noticed, and didn't think anything of at
Speaker 1: the time, was that we weren't seeing deer. The wain
Speaker 1: is thick with them. You can't ride a full more
Speaker 1: morning without bumping at least four or five out of
Speaker 1: the brush. We hadn't seen one, hadn't seen a turkey either,
Speaker 1: hadn't even heard a squirrel cutting on a hickory, And
Speaker 1: that time of year. You should be hearing them constantly.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. Around eleven thirty, we worked our way
Speaker 1: up to a section of trail I'll call the Spur
Speaker 1: because I don't want to put the actual name out there.
Speaker 1: It's a narrow two track that runs along the spine
Speaker 1: of a ridge for about three miles before it dead
Speaker 1: ends at an old logging clearing.
Speaker 2: Locals know it.
Speaker 1: It doesn't seem much traffic because the dead end isn't
Speaker 1: worth the ride for most people. We liked it because
Speaker 1: it was quiet and the views off the south side
Speaker 1: were good. We rowed the Spur out to the clearing,
Speaker 1: took a break, drank some water. The clearing itself sits
Speaker 1: in a little saddle between two knobs, with timber on
Speaker 1: three sides and a clear cut on the fourth that's
Speaker 1: grown back into thick brush. It's the kind of place
Speaker 1: where you can hear for a long way because you're
Speaker 1: up high and the wind moves through it pretty good.
Speaker 1: Cody was the one who heard it first. He was
Speaker 1: sitting on his machine eating a sandwich and he held
Speaker 1: up his hand. I was about to ask what was
Speaker 1: up when I heard it too. It came from the
Speaker 1: timber on the north side of the clearing, up the slope,
Speaker 1: maybe three four hundred yards, a long, drawn out call.
Speaker 1: I want to be careful describing it, because I've spent
Speaker 1: a lot of time over the last six years trying
Speaker 1: to put words to it, and none of them are right.
Speaker 1: The closest I can get is to say it was
Speaker 1: a whoop, not a coyote, not an owl, not anything
Speaker 1: I'd ever heard in those woods before. It started low,
Speaker 1: climbed in pitch, held for maybe three seconds, and then
Speaker 1: dropped off. The volume was crazy loud. It carried through
Speaker 1: the trees in a way that could have only come
Speaker 1: out of something that had a chest the size of
Speaker 1: a barrel. Cody and I just looked at each other.
Speaker 1: Neither one of us said a word for about ten seconds.
Speaker 1: Then he said the hell was that? I told him
Speaker 1: I didn't know. We sat there, we listened. After maybe
Speaker 1: a minute, there was a second one, same direction, but closer.
Speaker 1: It had moved, and this one was answered faintly from
Speaker 1: the south side of the clearing behind us, a different voice,
Speaker 1: lower in pitch, shorter like a response. I'm going to
Speaker 1: be straight with you. The hair on my arms went up.
Speaker 1: I had this sudden, very physical feeling that we were
Speaker 1: standing in the middle of something, that something on the
Speaker 1: ridge was talking, and something across the saddle was answering,
Speaker 1: and we were sitting in the gap between the two
Speaker 1: of them. Cody must have felt the same thing, because
Speaker 1: he stood up and put his sandwich back in the
Speaker 1: bag without finishing it.
Speaker 2: He said, let's go. Just like that, let's go.
Speaker 1: We mounted up and started back down the spur the
Speaker 1: way we'd come. I want to point out, because this matters,
Speaker 1: that we'd ridden out the spur maybe forty minutes before,
Speaker 1: we'd been on it the whole way. We knew exactly
Speaker 1: what was on that trail because we'd just driven through it.
Speaker 1: We were maybe a mile back down the spur when
Speaker 1: we came around a bend and Cody, who was in front,
Speaker 1: locked his brakes up. I almost ran into the back
Speaker 1: of his machine. There was a tree across the trail,
Speaker 1: not a small one, a red oak, probably twelve fourteen
Speaker 1: inches at the base, laying directly across the two track
Speaker 1: at a point where the trail was hemmed in on
Speaker 1: both sides by thick brush. There was no way around
Speaker 1: it on a machine, you'd have to either move it
Speaker 1: or turn around. Cody looked back at me and he said,
Speaker 1: that wasn't here. I said, no, it wasn't. We sat
Speaker 1: there on our machines for a few seconds, idling, just
Speaker 1: staring at it. I think we were both trying to
Speaker 1: come up with an explanation that made sense. A tree falls.
Speaker 1: Trees fall in the woods all the time. Maybe a
Speaker 1: gust of wind. Maybe it was rotted at the base
Speaker 1: and we hadn't noticed it on the way out. I
Speaker 1: shut my machine off and got off. Cody did the same.
Speaker 1: We walked up to the tree. The first thing I
Speaker 1: noticed was that the leaves were still green, or what
Speaker 1: passed for green that late in October. They were the
Speaker 1: dried red brown of.
Speaker 2: An oak and fall.
Speaker 1: But they were still attached, and they were still pliable.
Speaker 1: This wasn't a tree that had been laying anywhere for
Speaker 1: any length of time. It had been alive recently. I
Speaker 1: looked at the base. This is the part where I
Speaker 1: felt something turn over in my stomach. There was no
Speaker 1: root ball. The trunk just ended. It wasn't sawed, it
Speaker 1: wasn't chainsawed, It wasn't broken at the base, the way
Speaker 1: a tree breaks when it falls in a storm.
Speaker 2: It was twisted off.
Speaker 1: The end of the trunk was a mess of splintered fiber,
Speaker 1: like somebody had grabbed it and wrenched it back and
Speaker 1: forth until it came apart, and there was no root
Speaker 1: system attached. The tree had been somewhere else, and it
Speaker 1: had been carried or dragged and laid across the trail.
Speaker 1: I looked down. There were drag marks in the dirt,
Speaker 1: two parallel grooves where the trunk had been pulled to
Speaker 1: across the surface of the trail and set down. The
Speaker 1: marks came from the brush on the uphill side and
Speaker 1: stopped exactly where the tree was laying. I stood up
Speaker 1: and I said, Cody, look at this. He came around
Speaker 1: to where I was standing. He looked at the base,
Speaker 1: He looked at the drag marks. He didn't say anything.
Speaker 1: He just turned his head slowly and looked at the
Speaker 1: brush on the uphill.
Speaker 2: Side of the trail.
Speaker 1: And I turned and looked too, and we both stood there,
Speaker 1: side by side, staring into the timber. I didn't see
Speaker 1: anything at first. The understory was open, the trees were
Speaker 1: mostly bare. I was looking for a person. I think
Speaker 1: part of my brain was still trying to sell me
Speaker 1: on the idea that somebody had done this, some kid
Speaker 1: playing a prank some old time, or mad about the trail.
Speaker 1: I was looking for a man. What I saw was
Speaker 1: not a man. It was standing about thirty yards uphill
Speaker 1: behind the trunk of a big white oak. Most of
Speaker 1: it was hidden by the trunk, but I could see
Speaker 1: the shape of one shoulder and the side of a head.
Speaker 1: The shoulder was at a height that didn't make sense
Speaker 1: to me. I tried to estimate it later, and I
Speaker 1: keep coming back to seven and a half feet maybe more.
Speaker 1: The white oak it was standing behind was a mature
Speaker 1: tree three feet through at chest height, and the shoulder
Speaker 1: I was looking at was clearly above the point where
Speaker 1: the first major branch came off that oak.
Speaker 2: The hair was a dark reddish.
Speaker 1: Brown, not black reddish like an Irish setter, but darker
Speaker 1: and thicker. The shoulder was massive. It looked padded with muscle.
Speaker 1: I couldn't see the face clearly because the head was
Speaker 1: angled away, but I could see the back curve of
Speaker 1: the skull. The crown rose to a point, not sharp,
Speaker 1: but sloped like the top of the head came up
Speaker 1: higher in the back than it did in the front.
Speaker 1: Cody saw it at the same time I did. He
Speaker 1: took a step back, not a run, a step like
Speaker 1: his legs weren't quite working yet. The thing knew we'd
Speaker 1: seen it. I could feel that there's a difference between
Speaker 1: watching something that doesn't know you're there and watching something
Speaker 1: that knows you're watching it back, the shoulder shifted, the
Speaker 1: head turned, It stepped out from behind the oak. It
Speaker 1: came out, slow, deliberate, one step, then another. It cleared
Speaker 1: the trunk and stood in full view, and there was
Speaker 1: no longer any question about what we were looking at.
Speaker 1: It was a body shaped roughly like a man. The
Speaker 1: chest was deep, the shoulders were so wide they didn't
Speaker 1: look proportional. The arms hung past the hips and ended
Speaker 1: in hands that were dark and heavy looking. The legs
Speaker 1: were thick, the thighs especially, They were the thighs of
Speaker 1: an animal built for climbing, for moving up these ridges
Speaker 1: in ways no person could. The face is what I
Speaker 1: want to describe, but I'm not sure I can do
Speaker 1: it justice. I only had a few seconds to look
Speaker 1: at it. The skin was a deep gray brown, the
Speaker 1: color of wet creak.
Speaker 2: Stone.
Speaker 1: There wasn't much hair on the face itself, mostly around
Speaker 1: the and along the brow. The brow stuck out like
Speaker 1: a shelf. The eyes underneath were set deep and they
Speaker 1: were dark, and they were locked on us. The nose
Speaker 1: was wide and flat. The mouth was closed, and it
Speaker 1: was a long, lipless line. It took one more step
Speaker 1: toward us, and then it screamed. I want to talk
Speaker 1: about that scream.
Speaker 2: It opened its.
Speaker 1: Mouth and what came out was the loudest sound I've
Speaker 1: ever heard in my life, including jackhammers and dynamite charges
Speaker 1: and diesel engines six feet from my face. It was
Speaker 1: a scream the way a person screams, but scaled up,
Speaker 1: scaled up in a way that shouldn't be possible from
Speaker 1: a living throat. It started high and it stayed high,
Speaker 1: and it went on for what felt like five or
Speaker 1: six seconds without a breath. The trees vibrated. I felt
Speaker 1: it in my teeth, I felt it in the bones
Speaker 1: of my chest. There was rage in it. I don't
Speaker 1: know how else to say that. There was rage and
Speaker 1: there was warning, and there was nothing about it that
Speaker 1: was confused about what it wanted. It wanted us gone.
Speaker 1: Cody and I didn't talk about what to do. We
Speaker 1: didn't have to. We were on our machines and we
Speaker 1: had them started before the sound had finished echoing off
Speaker 1: the opposite ridge. The tree was still across the trail.
Speaker 1: We didn't move it. There was no time. Cody yanked
Speaker 1: his Polaris into reverse and backed up about twenty feet,
Speaker 1: then cut the wheel hard and shoved it down into
Speaker 1: the brush off the lower side of the trail. I
Speaker 1: followed him. We bush whacked our machines down the slope
Speaker 1: through saplings and briar for probably one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: yards before we caught a deer trail running parallel to
Speaker 1: the spur.
Speaker 2: We took the deer trail. I don't know how we
Speaker 2: didn't roll those four wheelers.
Speaker 1: The slope was steep and the ground was loose. I
Speaker 1: remember bouncing off a rock with my front tires hard
Speaker 1: enough that I came up off the seat. I remember
Speaker 1: Cody's machine throwing leaves and dirt in a rooster tail
Speaker 1: in front of me. I remember my throttle hand being
Speaker 1: so tight I couldn't feel my fingers. We didn't stop
Speaker 1: until we hit the main loop three miles down, and
Speaker 1: we didn't stop there for long. We hammered straight for
Speaker 1: the trailhead. When we got back to my truck, Cody
Speaker 1: got off his machine and walked into the gravel parking
Speaker 1: lot and bent over with his hands on his knees.
Speaker 1: He stayed like that for a minute. I sat on
Speaker 1: my Honda and stared at the tree line behind the trailhead,
Speaker 1: and I couldn't bring myself to dismount. I sat on
Speaker 1: that machine for probably five minutes before I could make
Speaker 1: my legs work to get off it. We loaded the
Speaker 1: four wheelers onto the trailer in silence. Cody helped me
Speaker 1: strap them down. Neither of us said a word. When
Speaker 1: we were done, he got in the passenger seat of
Speaker 1: my truck and shut the door, and I got in
Speaker 1: the driver's seat and I started the engine and we
Speaker 1: left about ten minutes down the road. Cody said that
Speaker 1: thing was real. I said yeah. He said, what do
Speaker 1: we do? I said, I don't know. I don't know
Speaker 1: what we do. We didn't tell anybody, not at first.
Speaker 1: I didn't tell my wife for almost a week. When
Speaker 1: I finally did, I told her the short version. I said,
Speaker 1: we saw something in the woods on the spur, and
Speaker 1: it's scared us. Pretty bad, and I'd rather not get
Speaker 1: into specifics. She didn't push. That's one of the things
Speaker 1: I love about her. She knows when to wait. I
Speaker 1: told her the long version. A few months later, on
Speaker 1: a winter night when I couldn't sleep, I sat on
Speaker 1: the edge of the bed and I told her the
Speaker 1: whole thing. She didn't say a word the whole time.
Speaker 1: When I was done, she just put her hand on
Speaker 1: my back and held it there. Cody and I have
Speaker 1: talked about it maybe four times in six years, always
Speaker 1: when nobody else is around. We've never been able to
Speaker 1: come up with anything new to say about it. It happened,
Speaker 1: it was real. We saw what we saw. There's nothing
Speaker 1: else to add. I still ride. I won't ride the Spur,
Speaker 1: I won't ride alone. I won't ride after about two
Speaker 1: in the afternoon in the fall. Those are the rules
Speaker 1: I live by now, and I don't bend them. Cody
Speaker 1: won't ride the Waine at all anymore. He goes up
Speaker 1: to Michigan with his brother in law a couple times
Speaker 1: a year and rides up there. He says he can't
Speaker 1: be in those Ohio hollers anymore. He says they feel
Speaker 1: different to him now. I understand what he means, even
Speaker 1: though I haven't been able to leave them the way
Speaker 1: he has. The thing I think about most isn't the scream,
Speaker 1: even though the scream was the worst part in the moment.
Speaker 1: The thing I think about is the tree. Somebody, something
Speaker 1: picked up a fourteen inch oak and carried it across
Speaker 1: a trail to put it where we'd have to stop.
Speaker 2: That wasn't a random act. That was a plan.
Speaker 1: Whatever it was, it knew we were coming back down
Speaker 1: that spur, and it set a trap, and it waited
Speaker 1: for us to be on foot in the middle of it.
Speaker 1: The only thing that saved us, I think, is that
Speaker 1: we saw it before we'd started moving the tree. If
Speaker 1: we'd had our backs turned working on lifting that trunk,
Speaker 1: I don't know what would have happened. I don't let
Speaker 1: myself think about it for long. Nothing good comes from
Speaker 1: running that scenario out. I'm not a believer in things.
Speaker 1: I want you to understand that I don't go in
Speaker 1: for any of this. But I can't argue with my
Speaker 1: own and I can't argue.
Speaker 2: With Cody's eyes.
Speaker 1: And we both saw the same thing at the same time,
Speaker 1: in broad daylight in October in southeast Ohio. So whatever
Speaker 1: it is, it's there, it's been there, and it's smarter
Speaker 1: than people give it credit for. That's what I needed
Speaker 1: to say. Thank you for letting me get it out.
Speaker 1: Our fourth account didn't come from the person who had
Speaker 1: the encounter. It came from his granddaughter, a woman named Caitlin,
Speaker 1: who's telling me about something that happened to her grandfather Cal.
Speaker 1: In the fall of nineteen seventy two. Cal was a
Speaker 1: trapper in northern Wisconsin. He went to check his line
Speaker 1: one cold morning and found something waiting for him. Cal
Speaker 1: told this story exactly twice in his life, and Caitlin
Speaker 1: is the last person alive who heard it from his
Speaker 1: own mouth. Here's Caitlyn. I want to be upfront that
Speaker 1: this didn't happen to me. This happened to my grandfather
Speaker 1: Cal in nineteen seventy two in northern Wisconsin. He told
Speaker 1: this story exactly twice, once to my grandmother the night
Speaker 1: had happened, and once to me when I was nineteen
Speaker 1: and helping him split firewood the summer before he had
Speaker 1: his first stroke. He passed in two thousand and four.
Speaker 1: I should tell you about that summer afternoon because the
Speaker 1: way he told it matters. It was July two thousand.
Speaker 1: We were splitting cordwood out behind his shed, working through
Speaker 1: a pile of red oak rounds he'd had delivered. He'd
Speaker 1: been quiet most of the afternoon. My grandfather wasn't a
Speaker 1: chatty man under any circumstances, but that day he was
Speaker 1: quieter than usual. I was wedging a knot apart when
Speaker 1: he set his maul down and said, Katie, you remember
Speaker 1: the trap line up off the Bois Brulee. I want
Speaker 1: to tell you something about that. I sat down on
Speaker 1: a round and listened. He told it slow, no drama,
Speaker 1: just the facts.
Speaker 2: As he remembered them.
Speaker 1: He kept his hands busy the whole time, peeling bark
Speaker 1: off a piece of kindling with his thumbnail. The bark
Speaker 1: was coming up in long, thin strips, and he just
Speaker 1: kept pealing while he talked. Stay tuned for more back
Speaker 1: Woods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. By
Speaker 1: the time he was finished, the kindling was bare and
Speaker 1: his lap was full of bark. My grandfather was a trapper.
Speaker 1: He worked at timber jobs through the warm months and
Speaker 1: ran a winter trap line from late October through March.
Speaker 1: He grew up in northern Wisconsin, and he never lived
Speaker 1: more than thirty miles from where he was born. He
Speaker 1: wasn't a big man, five eight maybe one hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy pounds, but he was wiry the way old farmers
Speaker 1: are wiry, hands like leather, four arms, ropy with veins.
Speaker 1: He could work a peevy for ten hours and not
Speaker 1: complain about his back the way younger men did. And
Speaker 1: he wasn't superstitious. He didn't go to church. He didn't
Speaker 1: believe in ghosts. He thought UFO stories were nonsense. If
Speaker 1: you'd asked him in nineteen seventy one whether there were
Speaker 1: any animals in the Wisconsin woods that science hadn't named yet,
Speaker 1: he'd have looked at you like you were simple. In
Speaker 1: October of sex seventy two, he was running a long
Speaker 1: trap line through some state forest land north of the
Speaker 1: Boisbrule River, mostly Fisher and Martin. That year he had
Speaker 1: about thirty sets distributed across maybe twelve miles of country,
Speaker 1: and he checked them on snow shoes once the snow
Speaker 1: got deep. But in late October he was still using
Speaker 1: just his boots and a small pack. The morning this happened,
Speaker 1: he'd left his cabin around four thirty. The plan was
Speaker 1: to walk the southern half of the line that day
Speaker 1: and the northern half the next. It was still full
Speaker 1: dark when he started. He had a kerosene lantern and
Speaker 1: his rifle and the leather sack he carried his sets in.
Speaker 1: He was about a mile in when the sky started
Speaker 1: to gray, and that's when he came up on the
Speaker 1: first set. I want to describe what he told me
Speaker 1: here because it's the part that bothered him most. The
Speaker 1: set was a fissure set. He built it on a
Speaker 1: dead fall, maybe forty yards off a narrow creek. The
Speaker 1: way you build it, you wedge the trap into a
Speaker 1: notch in the log and you set bait above it,
Speaker 1: so the fissure has to come up from load to investigate.
Speaker 1: It's a careful kind of trap. It takes a while
Speaker 1: to build. Right when he walked up to it, the
Speaker 1: trap was gone, not sprung, not bent, not torn off.
Speaker 1: The chain just gone. The chain was still attached to
Speaker 1: the dead fall. The wire stake holding the chain was
Speaker 1: still in the ground, but where the trap should have
Speaker 1: been at the end of that chain, there was nothing.
Speaker 1: The chain was lying limp in the leaves. He told
Speaker 1: me he stood there with his lantern up, just looking.
Speaker 1: A bear can ruin a set, but a bear breaks things.
Speaker 1: They tear at the wood, they twist the chain, they
Speaker 1: leave fur, and they leave tracks. There was none of that.
Speaker 1: The dead fall was untouched. The bait was still there,
Speaker 1: dried and unchewed. The chain had been disconnected from the
Speaker 1: trap cleanly. He walked the area. He couldn't find the
Speaker 1: trap anywhere on the ground. So he stood there in
Speaker 1: the gray light, and he looked up, and about thirty
Speaker 1: feet away, on a low branch of a hemlock, the
Speaker 1: trap was hanging, just hanging there, suspended on a branch,
Speaker 1: maybe ten feet off the ground. He told me he
Speaker 1: had no explanation for it, none. He said it was
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that if he told anyone, they'd
Speaker 1: have called him a liar. So he didn't tell anyone.
Speaker 1: He took the trap down with a long stick, packed
Speaker 1: it back into his sack, and kept walking the line.
Speaker 1: The next set, two miles up the line, was a
Speaker 1: Martin cubby. A cubby is a small wooden box you
Speaker 1: build to enclose the trap so birds don't get caught
Speaker 1: in it. He'd built that particular cubby about three weeks before.
Speaker 1: When he walked up to it, the cubby was still there,
Speaker 1: but it had been turned around. He stopped and looked
Speaker 1: at it for a long time. The cubby was a
Speaker 1: foot and a half square made of cedar boards nailed
Speaker 1: to the side of a maple about waist high. He'd
Speaker 1: nailed it himself, and someone or something had pried it
Speaker 1: off the tree, turned it one hundred and eighty degrees
Speaker 1: and renailed it. The trap was still set, the bait
Speaker 1: was still in place, but the opening of the cubby
Speaker 1: was now facing the tree, which meant nothing could ever
Speaker 1: get into it. The cubby had been disabled in a
Speaker 1: way that took thought, in a way that took fingers,
Speaker 1: in a way that took tools or hands strong enough
Speaker 1: to be tools. He told me his stomach went cold.
Speaker 1: He told me he stood there for probably ten minutes,
Speaker 1: just trying to talk himself into a rational explanation. Maybe
Speaker 1: a person had done it, Maybe somebody from a nearby
Speaker 1: camp had a problem with trappers and was harassing him.
Speaker 1: Except there were no camps nearby. He was on state
Speaker 1: forest land and country that almost nobody used. He hadn't
Speaker 1: seen another human footprint in those woods.
Speaker 2: In two seasons.
Speaker 1: He sat down on a stump and he did something
Speaker 1: he'd never done in twenty years of running trap lines.
Speaker 2: He prayed.
Speaker 1: He told me he hadn't prayed since his confirmation when
Speaker 1: he was a kid. But he sat on that stump
Speaker 1: in the half light, and he said something quiet and short,
Speaker 1: and then he got up and started walking again. The
Speaker 1: third set is the one I want to tell you about.
Speaker 1: The third set was about a half mile further up
Speaker 1: the line, in a flat spot where a small spring
Speaker 1: fed into a tamarack swamp. He'd put a foothold trap
Speaker 1: there for an otter. He had a piece of dried
Speaker 1: fish for bait, and the trap was set in the
Speaker 1: shallow water at the edge of the spring. When he
Speaker 1: walked up, the trap was sprung but empty.
Speaker 2: That was normal.
Speaker 1: Otters can be hard to catch. But on the bank
Speaker 1: above the trap, on the moss, there was a deer,
Speaker 1: a white tailed deer, not full grown, maybe a button
Speaker 1: buck or a yearling dough. It was lying on its side.
Speaker 1: Its body had been arranged, the legs had been folded
Speaker 1: under it, the way a deer folds its legs when
Speaker 1: it beds down. The head was upright balanced on the neck,
Speaker 1: like the deer was alive and looking at the trap.
Speaker 1: There was no blood. The deer was intact, no wounds,
Speaker 1: he could see, no torn flesh, just dead and placed
Speaker 1: there like someone had said up to watch the trap.
Speaker 1: He told me he just stood there. He said, his
Speaker 1: ears started ringing, and he had this feeling all over
Speaker 1: his skin, like he was being looked at from every
Speaker 1: direction at once. He said, he couldn't move for what
Speaker 1: felt like a long time, and then he heard a knock.
Speaker 1: It came from the Tamarack swamp north of it, a
Speaker 1: solid wood on wood sound, like someone striking a tree
Speaker 1: trunk with a piece of hardwood, slow, deliberate. One knock,
Speaker 1: then a pause of maybe ten seconds. Then another knock
Speaker 1: from a different direction east of him this time, then
Speaker 1: ten seconds, then another from due south behind him. Three knocks,
Speaker 1: three positions. He told me he understood the moment he
Speaker 1: heard the third one, that he was inside something, inside
Speaker 1: a circle, inside a perimeter that had been drawn around
Speaker 1: him by things he couldn't see. He didn't run, He
Speaker 1: told me that specifically. I didn't run because I did
Speaker 1: didn't want them to know I was scared. He turned
Speaker 1: and he started walking back the way he'd come, slow, steady,
Speaker 1: lantern up rifle in his other hand. He told me
Speaker 1: that he made it about one hundred yards back down
Speaker 1: the trail, and that's when he saw one, just one,
Speaker 1: standing on a low rise above the trail, in the
Speaker 1: gray dawn, between two big white pines. He said it
Speaker 1: was tall. He gave me a number. He said a
Speaker 1: head and a half taller than him, which would put
Speaker 1: it close to seven and a half feet. But unlike
Speaker 1: what people usually describe, this one was not bulky. It
Speaker 1: was lean. He kept using that word, lean, like a
Speaker 1: man who'd been starved. Long armed, long legged. The body
Speaker 1: was covered in coarse hair that was mostly gray, with
Speaker 1: darker patches around the shoulders and the head. The hair
Speaker 1: was short on the chest and longer on the limbs,
Speaker 1: almost like fringe.
Speaker 2: The face.
Speaker 1: He didn't look at the face long, but he gave
Speaker 1: me what he saw. The skin was light, almost ash colored,
Speaker 1: around the eyes and the mouth, but it darkened along
Speaker 1: the cheekbones and the jaw. The features were narrow, not
Speaker 1: the broad, heavy face you usually hear about. A narrower jaw,
Speaker 1: sharper cheekbones, a longer nose. He said it looked older
Speaker 1: than it should have, like a sick man, looks like
Speaker 1: the bones were too close to the skin. The eyes
Speaker 1: were the color of dirty ice, pale gray, not reflective
Speaker 1: in the lantern light, just pale. It was looking down
Speaker 1: at him. It wasn't moving, it wasn't breathing fast, It
Speaker 1: wasn't doing anything except standing there between those two pines
Speaker 1: and watching him, with its hands at its sides and
Speaker 1: its mouth slightly open. He said, the worst part was
Speaker 1: that it didn't seem dangerous. It seemed tired. It seemed annoyed,
Speaker 1: the way some accounts describe. But underneath the annoyance there
Speaker 1: was something else, something that looked, to my grandfather almost
Speaker 1: like sadness. He said, he had the strangest, most unwelcome thought.
Speaker 1: He thought, this thing has problems of its own, and
Speaker 1: whatever those problems are, I'm one more On top of
Speaker 1: the pile. He kept walking, he didn't stop. He kept
Speaker 1: his eyes on it as long as he could, and
Speaker 1: then the trail bent and the pines were behind him
Speaker 1: and he was out of its sight. He pulled five
Speaker 1: more traps off the line that day. He didn't even
Speaker 1: take the time to coil the chains. He just yanked
Speaker 1: the steaks and threw them in his sack and kept moving.
Speaker 1: He left twenty traps in the woods. He never went
Speaker 1: back for them. He never trapped that drainage again, not
Speaker 1: in seventy three, not in seventy four, not ever. He
Speaker 1: told my grandmother that night. He sat at her kitchen
Speaker 1: table and told her exactly what I'm telling you, And
Speaker 1: he said one thing to her that he repeated to
Speaker 1: me twenty eight years later. He said, Lilah, there's something
Speaker 1: living in those tamaracks that I do not understand, and
Speaker 1: I'm never going to walk into that swamp again.
Speaker 2: She believed him.
Speaker 1: She told me years after he died that she could
Speaker 1: see it in his face. She said, my grandfather had
Speaker 1: come back from the Pacific in nineteen forty six with
Speaker 1: shrapnel in his hip and a look in his eye
Speaker 1: that she'd never seen before. And the only other time
Speaker 1: in her life she'd seen that look was the night
Speaker 1: he came home from the Bois Brute and told her
Speaker 1: about the deer on the moss. He kept trapping for
Speaker 1: another fifteen years. He just moved his line east into
Speaker 1: different country. He never explained to his customers why he
Speaker 1: stopped getting Fisher and Martin out of the Bois Brutal drainage.
Speaker 1: He just changed his territory and that was that. I
Speaker 1: asked him that afternoon in two thousand why he was
Speaker 1: telling me. He looked at me for a long time.
Speaker 1: He had these pale blue eyes and they were filmed
Speaker 1: over with cataracts. At the end, he said, Katie, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to be around forever, and I want one
Speaker 1: person in this family to know what happened up there,
Speaker 1: so you know I'm not crazy. So when you read
Speaker 1: about something like this in a book or hear about
Speaker 1: it on the radio, you don't dismiss it. You think
Speaker 1: about your grandfather standing on that trail in the dawn light,
Speaker 1: and you remember he went back to splitting wood. We
Speaker 1: didn't talk about it again. He died four years later,
Speaker 1: peacefully in his sleep. My grandmother passed a few years later.
Speaker 1: I wanted to send this to you because I think
Speaker 1: cal would have appreciated what you're doing. He wasn't a
Speaker 1: man who needed his story believed by everybody. He just
Speaker 1: needed it told once somewhere by somebody before all of
Speaker 1: us who knew him are gone too. Thank you for listening,
Speaker 1: Caitlin the deer on the moss, the trap hanging in
Speaker 1: the hemlock, the cubby pried off and renailed backwards. Those
Speaker 1: details have a kind of intelligence behind them. It's hard
Speaker 1: to file under the heading of unknown ape. They suggest
Speaker 1: something I'm not sure I have the vocabulary for a
Speaker 1: behavior that's neither animal nor human, but is also not random.
Speaker 1: Cal stood in those woods at dawn and was shown
Speaker 1: in a sequence that something in there had the patience
Speaker 1: and the dexterity to alter his sets in ways that
Speaker 1: required reasoning. And then it let him see one of
Speaker 1: its own, lean, gray, tired looking standing between two pines.
Speaker 1: And then it let him walk out. Our fifth and
Speaker 1: final account comes from northern California. A woman named Marisol
Speaker 1: was thirty three years old in twenty fifteen, working as
Speaker 1: a freelance photographer specializing in remote landscape and astrophotography. She
Speaker 1: was on a solo overnight trip into the Trinity Alps
Speaker 1: wilderness when she set up her camp at a small
Speaker 1: alpine lake and saw something across the water that she's
Speaker 1: been carrying ever since. The way she describes the encounter,
Speaker 1: particularly what she saw through her zoom lens, is one
Speaker 1: of the more haunting accounts I've received in some time.
Speaker 1: Here's Marisol. I'm going to send this and probably regret it.
Speaker 1: I've started writing this four times in the last three
Speaker 1: years and deleted it four times forty three Now. The
Speaker 1: encounter I want to tell you about happened when I
Speaker 1: was thirty three. I don't talk about it in person
Speaker 1: because I can't talk about it in person. The one
Speaker 1: time I tried, I got about two sentences in before
Speaker 1: my throat closed up and I had to leave the room.
Speaker 1: So an email is the only way it's ever going
Speaker 1: to get out of my head and into the world.
Speaker 2: Take it or leave it.
Speaker 1: My name is Marsol. I live in Ashland, Oregon. In
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen, I was a working photographer specializing in landscape
Speaker 1: and astrophotography. I made my living shooting for outdoor brands
Speaker 1: and for a couple of regional publications, and I supplemented
Speaker 1: that with print sales. The work was mostly remote. I'd
Speaker 1: hike into alpine lakes and granite basins and stay for
Speaker 1: one or two nights, shoot at night and at dawn,
Speaker 1: and pack out. I want to be clear that I
Speaker 1: was not new to this. I had ten years of
Speaker 1: solo backcountry experience. By then, I knew how to pick
Speaker 1: a camp site. I knew how to handle bears. I'd
Speaker 1: been charged by a cow l once and stayed calm
Speaker 1: enough to back out without losing any of my gear.
Speaker 1: I was capable. I want that on the record because
Speaker 1: what I'm about to describe is going to make me
Speaker 1: sound like I panicked. And the reason it matters that
Speaker 1: I panicked is because I'm not someone who panics in
Speaker 1: the woods. In late August of twenty fifteen, I went
Speaker 1: into the Trinity Alps Wilderness in northern California for an overnight.
Speaker 1: There's a small lake there I'd been to twice before.
Speaker 1: It sits at maybe seven thousand feet in a granite cirque,
Speaker 1: and from the right angle you can shoot the Milky Way,
Speaker 1: arching directly over the ridge to the south.
Speaker 2: The hike in is about six.
Speaker 1: Miles, all of it on a maintained trail, except for
Speaker 1: the last quarter mile, which is a use trail through Tallus.
Speaker 1: I left the trailhead around two in the afternoon. I
Speaker 1: wanted to get to the lake by five so I
Speaker 1: could set up camp, eat dinner, and have everything ready
Speaker 1: before the stars came out. The hike in was uneventful, hot, dry,
Speaker 1: normal late summer conditions. I passed two backpackers heading out
Speaker 1: on the lower section and didn't see another soul above
Speaker 1: the trail junction.
Speaker 2: Stay tuned for more.
Speaker 1: Backwoods big Foot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: I got to the lake right around five point fifteen.
Speaker 1: The light was that long, gold late afternoon light that
Speaker 1: photographers love, raking across the granite and lighting up the
Speaker 1: eastern wall of the cirque. I dropped my pack at
Speaker 1: my usual site, a flat spot in the lee of
Speaker 1: a boulder, about thirty feet from the water on the
Speaker 1: west side of the lake. The lake itself is small,
Speaker 1: maybe two hundred yards across at the widest point. The
Speaker 1: east shore is talus, and the south end has a
Speaker 1: narrow grassy meadow that runs up into a notch. The
Speaker 1: water is glacier clear. You can see rocks twenty feet down.
Speaker 1: I set my tent up, I filtered water, I got
Speaker 1: dinner started, just a freeze dried meal and a jet boil.
Speaker 1: The whole time I was working, I had a feeling.
Speaker 1: I didn't feel watched exactly.
Speaker 2: I felt accompanied.
Speaker 1: That's the only word I can come up with like
Speaker 1: there was somebody else in the cirque with me, but
Speaker 1: they weren't paying attention to me. They were just there
Speaker 1: doing something else, and I was peripheral. The feeling wasn't threatening.
Speaker 1: It was unsettling because of how mundane it was, like
Speaker 1: when you walk into a coffee shop and there's one
Speaker 1: other person at a table reading. You're not alone, but
Speaker 1: you're not really not alone either. I put my dinner
Speaker 1: aside to rehydrate, and I walked over to the lake
Speaker 1: to dip my hat in the water. It was hot,
Speaker 1: I was sweating from the hike. I knelt down at
Speaker 1: the shore and pushed my hat under, and as I
Speaker 1: was lifting it back out, I caught a smell. I've
Speaker 1: read accounts of this, and I know the standard description
Speaker 1: wet garbage, rotten meat, locker room stink. That's not what
Speaker 1: I smelled. What I smelled was a wet animal, heavy,
Speaker 1: like a barn that hasn't been mucked out. Underneath the
Speaker 1: wet animal smelled, there was something sweeter, almost fruity, like
Speaker 1: the smell that comes off a bear that's been eating
Speaker 1: berries for a month. It wasn't bad exactly, It was
Speaker 1: just intensely organic, intensely alive. I've smelled bears before. This
Speaker 1: was not a bear. The bass note was different, heavier,
Speaker 1: more musk in it.
Speaker 2: I stood up.
Speaker 1: The smell was coming from across the lake. There was
Speaker 1: a faint breeze blowing east to west from the Talis
Speaker 1: side toward me, and it was carrying the smell directly
Speaker 1: across the water. I looked across the lake. I didn't
Speaker 1: see anything at first. The talus on the east shore
Speaker 1: is broken granite the size of refrigerators, with a few
Speaker 1: twisted white bark pines growing out of cracks. The light
Speaker 1: was still good, but the eastern wall was now in shadow,
Speaker 1: which made the talus dark. Then I heard a rock move.
Speaker 1: If you've spent any time in alpine country, you know
Speaker 1: what a moving rock sounds like. Talis settles all the time,
Speaker 1: especially with temperature changes. But this wasn't a set of rock.
Speaker 1: This was a rock being displaced. A heavy, wet thunk,
Speaker 1: followed by a smaller clatter as something else shifted into
Speaker 1: the gap. Then a silence, then another displacement twenty feet
Speaker 1: to the right of the first one, then another. Whatever
Speaker 1: was moving over there was working its way along the
Speaker 1: talus toward the south end of the lake. I went
Speaker 1: back to my pack and got my camera out. I
Speaker 1: had my long zoom on it from earlier in the day,
Speaker 1: a seventy to two hundred. It's not a wild life
Speaker 1: lens by any stretch, but it gets you closer than
Speaker 1: your eyes do. I crouched behind the boulder and brought
Speaker 1: the camera up and looked across the lake. The first
Speaker 1: thing I saw was that the smell had a source.
Speaker 1: There was a depression of bent grass near the south
Speaker 1: end of the lake, right at the shoreline where something
Speaker 1: had been lying down. The grass was still moving back
Speaker 1: into shape. Whatever had been there had stood up and
Speaker 1: walked off recently. The depression was maybe seven feet long
Speaker 1: and three or four feet wide. Long body, a heavy body,
Speaker 1: something that had been resting on its side. I tracked
Speaker 1: the camera north along the talus where the rocks had
Speaker 1: been moving, and I saw it. It was at the
Speaker 1: edge of the talus, just where the rocks meet the
Speaker 1: strip of grass that runs along the lake shore. It
Speaker 1: had come down out of the rocks and was kneeling
Speaker 1: at the water, not standing, kneeling on both knees with
Speaker 1: its back to me. The first thing that registered was
Speaker 1: the size. Even kneeling, it was tall. The shoulders were
Speaker 1: as wide as I am tall. The torso was massive,
Speaker 1: V shaped, narrowing slightly at the hips. The arms were
Speaker 1: longer than a human's Proportionally. When it reached toward the water,
Speaker 1: the hand traveled further than it should have for a
Speaker 1: body that size.
Speaker 2: It was very dark.
Speaker 1: The hair was nearly black, but with a brown undertone
Speaker 1: where the light caught it. It was thick across the
Speaker 1: back and shoulders, and it lay flat, not fluffy, not matted, flat,
Speaker 1: almost groomed looking. There was a kind of mane along
Speaker 1: the upper back that came up to the base of
Speaker 1: the skull, where it joined a dense crest of hair
Speaker 1: on the head. It cupped its hand into the water
Speaker 1: and brought the water up to its mouth. I saw
Speaker 1: this clearly. It used its palm like a bowl, the
Speaker 1: fingers curled up to hold the water in. It drank
Speaker 1: from its own hand, not like a dog or a
Speaker 1: cat or a deer, not lapping, cupping the way a
Speaker 1: person would drink from a stream if they didn't have
Speaker 1: a cup. It did this three times. There was no rush,
Speaker 1: no watchfulness. It was relaxed. It was hydrating after a
Speaker 1: hot afternoon, the same as I had been twenty minutes
Speaker 1: earlier on the other side of the lake. Then it
Speaker 1: lifted its head and turned. It turned its head, only
Speaker 1: not its body, and it looked across the lake, and
Speaker 1: it saw me. The lens was on it. I was
Speaker 1: looking through the eyepiece, and in that moment I was
Speaker 1: looking at a face that filled most of my frame
Speaker 1: at two hundred millimeters across two hundred yards of water.
Speaker 1: The face was dark, not the same dark as the
Speaker 1: body hair, but darker, almost black around the eyes and mouth,
Speaker 1: with the hair receding slightly from the brow ridge so
Speaker 1: I could see the skin clearly. The brow ridge was
Speaker 1: heavy pronounced. It cast a shadow over the eyes from above.
Speaker 1: The cheeks were flat and broad. The nose was wide
Speaker 1: and short, very pushed in, the nostrils opening forward instead
Speaker 1: of downward. The mouth was a thin line. The jaw
Speaker 1: was square and heavy, but unlike a lot of the
Speaker 1: accounts I've read, this one had a chin, a small one,
Speaker 1: but a chin a definite point at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the jaw. The eyes were brown, like a person's eyes.
Speaker 1: They didn't reflect anything, they didn't glow. They were small,
Speaker 1: set deep, but they were intelligent. I want to be
Speaker 1: very clear about what I mean by that. I'm not
Speaker 1: saying they were thoughtful or conscious or whatever else people
Speaker 1: say when they want to elevate an animal. I'm saying
Speaker 1: that when they locked onto mine, through two hundred yards
Speaker 1: of distance and a camera lens, they saw me. They
Speaker 1: registered a person, not a shape, not a moving thing,
Speaker 1: a person, And in the time it took me to
Speaker 1: draw a breath, they had assessed me, decided what I was,
Speaker 1: and decided what to do about me. It just looked
Speaker 1: at me for about ten seconds. It didn't stand, it
Speaker 1: didn't snarl, it didn't run. It just held my eyes
Speaker 1: through the lens. And while it was looking at me,
Speaker 1: the muscles around its mouth shifted. The corners of the
Speaker 1: mouth moved very slightly downward. The brow furrowed. It was
Speaker 1: a frown, a subtle one, the same frown a person
Speaker 1: makes when they realized the line they'd been waiting in
Speaker 1: just got longer because somebody cut in front of them,
Speaker 1: an expression of mild, weary displeasure. Then it stood up.
Speaker 1: I've seen a lot of animals stand up over the years.
Speaker 1: Black bears, elk, moose, mountain goats, None of them stand
Speaker 1: up like this thing did. It went from a kneeling
Speaker 1: position to fully upright in one motion. There was no rocking,
Speaker 1: no leverage, no use of the hands for support. It
Speaker 1: just stood like its legs had hydraulics in them. The
Speaker 1: transition was so smooth that for a second my brain
Speaker 1: couldn't process it as movement. It was just shorter, and
Speaker 1: then it was tall. Standing it was massive. I'm guessing
Speaker 1: eight feet maybe a touch more. The shoulders had to
Speaker 1: be four feet wide. The arms hung past the knees.
Speaker 1: The hands were the size of dinner plates, with thick,
Speaker 1: blunt fingers. There was no neck to speak of. The
Speaker 1: head sat directly on the shoulders. It looked at me
Speaker 1: for a few more seconds while standing. The frown stayed.
Speaker 1: Then it turned very slowly and walked into the talus.
Speaker 1: The walk is the the other thing I have to describe.
Speaker 1: It was bipedal, but the gate was unusual. The legs
Speaker 1: were slightly bent at the knees the entire time, Even midstride,
Speaker 1: the hips swung in a way that human hips don't.
Speaker 1: There was a kind of gliding quality to the motion,
Speaker 1: but underneath the gliding there was incredible weight. I could
Speaker 1: hear the talis shifting under each step, big deep wet thunks,
Speaker 1: the same sound I'd heard earlier when I first noticed
Speaker 1: the rocks moving. Each step was deliberate placed. It wasn't running,
Speaker 1: it wasn't even hurrying. It was moving the way a
Speaker 1: person moves when they're done with an interaction, and walking
Speaker 1: away from it. It went up into the talus, it
Speaker 1: picked its way through the rocks. I watched it through
Speaker 1: the lens until it crested the talis field and went
Speaker 1: over a small ridge into the next basin. The whole
Speaker 1: departure took maybe ninety seconds. I watched all of it,
Speaker 1: and then it was gone. I lowered the camera. My
Speaker 1: hands were shaking, my ears were ringing. The smell was
Speaker 1: still in the air, but it was already getting fainter
Speaker 1: as the breeze pulled it east. I was alone at
Speaker 1: the lake again. I didn't sleep. I packed up my camp.
Speaker 1: I left my freeze dried dinner sitting in the jet
Speaker 1: boil untouched. I broke down my tent and shoved it
Speaker 1: into my pack without rolling it. I got my headlamp
Speaker 1: and at six point twenty in the evening, with the
Speaker 1: sun about to go behind the western ridge, I started
Speaker 1: hiking out. I hiked the six miles back to the
Speaker 1: trailhead in the dark. I tripped at least four times
Speaker 1: on the Talis section. I scraped both palms on the granite.
Speaker 1: I didn't stop. I made it back to my car
Speaker 1: around ten thirty at night, and I sat in the
Speaker 1: driver's seat with the doors locked and the engine running,
Speaker 1: and I cried for about half an hour. Then I
Speaker 1: drove the four hours home to Ashland, and I got
Speaker 1: home at four in the morning, and I got into
Speaker 1: bed with my clothes on, and lay there until the
Speaker 1: sun came up. I never reviewed the photographs I had
Speaker 1: been shooting all afternoon up to the lake. There were
Speaker 1: probably forty the exposures on the card, none of which
Speaker 1: I'd seen yet. I never put the card in my computer.
Speaker 1: I sat on it for two months, and then I
Speaker 1: formatted the card without ever looking at the images. I
Speaker 1: know that sounds insane. I know that anyone who's into
Speaker 1: bigfoot research would tell me I just destroyed evidence. But
Speaker 1: I want to tell you why I did it. I
Speaker 1: knew that if I looked at those photographs and there
Speaker 1: was nothing on the card from across the lake. I
Speaker 1: would start to doubt myself. I would start to wonder
Speaker 1: if I'd hallucinated it, and I would torment myself for
Speaker 1: the rest of my life trying to figure out what
Speaker 1: really happened. And I knew that if I looked at
Speaker 1: the card and there was something on it, my life
Speaker 1: was going to change in ways I didn't want it
Speaker 1: to change. I would have to do something with the image.
Speaker 1: I would have to share it, or hide it or
Speaker 1: destroy it. I would have to make decisions about something
Speaker 1: I wasn't ready to make decisions about. And I knew,
Speaker 1: sitting in my apartment looking at that little SD card
Speaker 1: that whichever it was, I didn't want to know, so
Speaker 1: I formatted it. I haven't done astraphotography since. I haven't
Speaker 1: done remote backcountry photography of any kind. Since I sold
Speaker 1: the long zoom lens. I sold the tent i'd been
Speaker 1: using that night. I switched to studio work and product
Speaker 1: photography and food photography. I shoot in cities now I
Speaker 1: shoot indoors. The view from my apartment window is of
Speaker 1: a parking lot and a fence, and I prefer it
Speaker 1: that way. People in my professional life ask me sometimes
Speaker 1: why I stopped doing wilderness work. It was my whole
Speaker 1: brand for years. I tell them I burned out. I
Speaker 1: tell them I got tired of the travel.
Speaker 2: None of that is true.
Speaker 1: The truth is that I was at a small lake
Speaker 1: in northern California in late August of twenty fifteen, and
Speaker 1: I watched something cut water in its hand and drink
Speaker 1: and then look across at me with a face like
Speaker 1: a tired man who'd.
Speaker 2: Just been interrupted.
Speaker 1: And I have not been able to put a camera
Speaker 1: up to my eye in a wild place since because
Speaker 1: I'm afraid of what might be at the other end
Speaker 1: of the frame. I don't know what it was. I'm
Speaker 1: not telling you it was a bigfoot. I'm not telling
Speaker 1: you it was a sasquatch. I don't know what those
Speaker 1: things are. I don't know if they're real in the
Speaker 1: way that deer are real. I'm telling you what I
Speaker 1: saw and what I smelled, and what it looked like
Speaker 1: and what it did. You can put whatever name you
Speaker 1: want on it. The detail I keep coming back to
Speaker 1: is the chin, that little point at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the jaw. Almost none of the descriptions I've read mentioned
Speaker 1: a chin. They all talk about heavy jaws, and almost
Speaker 1: no chin. This one had a chin. I saw it,
Speaker 1: and I remember thinking in the moment, that's a person's feature.
Speaker 1: That's a feature you see in human faces. And then
Speaker 1: I thought, no, that's a feature you see in some
Speaker 1: human faces, some not all. Whatever I was looking at
Speaker 1: it was different from what other people have seen. It
Speaker 1: was its own thing. It was an individual, and somehow
Speaker 1: that thought, that understanding that I was looking at an
Speaker 1: individual rather than a category, was the most disorienting part
Speaker 1: of the whole encounter. I thought I was alone at
Speaker 1: that lake. I wasn't. I'd been peripheral to whatever it
Speaker 1: had been doing, and it had been peripheral to me.
Speaker 1: And we had each been working through our late afternoon
Speaker 1: when the wind shifted and we had to acknowledge each
Speaker 1: other for ninety seconds, and then it walked away, and
Speaker 1: then I walked away, and we have both gone on
Speaker 1: with the rest of our lives in our own corners
Speaker 1: of the same continent. And only I have ever told
Speaker 1: anyone I'm telling you now, so somebody else knows Marisol
Speaker 1: the chin. I want to start there because I think
Speaker 1: Marisol put her finger on something the wider research community
Speaker 1: has not adequately reckoned with variation. The accounts I've collected
Speaker 1: over almost forty years describe a range of physical features
Speaker 1: that aren't uniform. Some are reddish, some are gray, some
Speaker 1: are nearly black. Some have heavy jaws and almost no chin.
Speaker 1: Some have what witnesses describe as more human like features.
Speaker 1: We talk about the species in singular, like we're talking
Speaker 1: about one animal, But these accounts describe individuals. Faces that
Speaker 1: are different from one another, bodies that are different from
Speaker 1: one another, behaviors that are different from one another. If
Speaker 1: these things are real, and I believe they are, then
Speaker 1: we're not looking at a single template repeated. We're looking
Speaker 1: at a population with variation, with family resemblance with individuals.
Speaker 1: That's a big claim. I'm not making it lightly, but
Speaker 1: you can't ignore five people, five different places across this country.
Speaker 1: None of them know each other, none of them were
Speaker 1: looking for this, none of them wanted it, and every
Speaker 1: single one of them describes something that if you line
Speaker 1: the accounts up side by side, share certain qualities that
Speaker 1: are hard to explain away. The size, the build, the
Speaker 1: way it moved, the intelligence behind the eyes, the smell,
Speaker 1: and that feeling, the one they all describe in their
Speaker 1: own way of being in the presence of something that
Speaker 1: understood exactly what they were and made a choice about
Speaker 1: what to do with that information. That's the part that
Speaker 1: gets me, the choice. These weren't accounts of something charging
Speaker 1: out of the brush and attacking. These were encounters where
Speaker 1: something looked at a human being, considered them, and either
Speaker 1: walked away or stood there long enough to make its
Speaker 1: presence known. That speaks to something. I don't know exactly
Speaker 1: what it speaks to, but it's not the behavior of
Speaker 1: a mindless animal. It's the behavior of something that's aware,
Speaker 1: something that has boundaries, something that on these particular nights
Speaker 1: and mornings, decided to let these particular people walk away
Speaker 1: with a story they'd carry for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 1: These are the accounts that sit with me, the ones
Speaker 1: where the aftermath tells you everything you need to know
Speaker 1: about the encounter itself. You don't have to believe what
Speaker 1: these people saw, You don't have to accept any of it.
Speaker 1: But what you can't do, what I don't think any
Speaker 1: honest person can do, is listen to the way these
Speaker 1: five people describe the way their lives changed and walk
Speaker 1: away thinking they're making it up. There's a cost to
Speaker 1: these experiences a real, measurable cost, and you can hear
Speaker 1: it in every word. If you've had an experience like these,
Speaker 1: if you've been carrying something and you've never had a
Speaker 1: place to put it down, I want you to know
Speaker 1: that this is that place. You can reach me through
Speaker 1: the website or at my email Brian. That's an at
Speaker 1: Paranormalworldproductions dot com, first names only if you want as
Speaker 1: much or as little detail as you're comfortable sharing. And
Speaker 1: I promise you whatever you send me, it won't be
Speaker 1: met with laughter, it won't be met with skepticism. It'll
Speaker 1: be met with the respect it deserves. Because I know
Speaker 1: what it costs to tell these stories. I've been in
Speaker 1: this field long enough to know. Until next time, stay
Speaker 1: safe out there. And if you're in the woods and
Speaker 1: something in your body tells you to pay attention, pay attention.
Speaker 1: These five people will tell you why don't do