Speaker 1: I'm from south central Kentucky. When I was twelve years old,
we lived on a dairy farm across a gravel road
from my cousin's house. At the time, I was raising
some baby chicks that I kept on a high shelf
and a tall shed that paralleled the back of my
cousin's house, and I kept them there to keep any
animals from getting to them. One night, my cousin was
over and we were watching TV when I suddenly realized
I had forgotten to feed my chicks. My mom handed
me a mostly empty box of Quaker oats, and my cousin,
my little sister, who was three years younger than us,
and I went out to feed the chicks. My cousin's
driveway had just recently had a new load of white
gravel poured on it, and the moon was full that
night and we could see just fine without the flashlight,
but I took one with me anyway, so I could
see inside the shed. The shed door was standing half open,
so we walked inside and I flipped on the flashlight.
The shelf where the chicks were on was six feet up.
I had to use the ladder to reach them, but
I wanted to make sure they were out of harm's way,
and as I swung the beam around to face the shelf,
I got the shock of my life. Standing there on
its hind legs with its front paws on the shelf
was a huge white dog like animal, well one of
a screened I couldn't tell which one of us it was,
but that prompted the dog thing to drop down on
all fours. My sister and my cousin took off running
for the house, but I was frozen in place. This
thing was hunched in its back, and it started moving
toward me with one of my baby chicks still in
its mouth. Its face was covered in blood and it snarled,
showing me its teeth. As it moved closer, I could
see red eyes glaring at me, and I knew it
was going to pounce on me, but still I couldn't move. Please,
dear Lord, let me move, my mind, cried, as it
got within five feet of me. Instantly I felt myself
spring into action. My sister and cousin had already reached
the house when I broke into a hard sprint. The
new gravel pulled my feet out from under me, and
I found myself spilling across my cousin's driveway. As I
tried to get up, I looked back and saw that thing,
that monster, standing on its back legs in the moonlight.
It reared its head and screamed a terrifying howl, like
a dying woman, and then it looked at me, and
by then I was back on my feet, and I
took off for the house. I bolted through the screen
door to find my cousin and my sister trying to
explain to my dad what had happened what they saw,
and I tried to tell him too. We wanted him
to go check, but he wouldn't go outside. He insisted
that we didn't see anything, and to tell you the truth,
I think he was afraid. I heard a lot of
stories about men out raccoon hunting when their dogs wouldn't
leave the campfire, and maybe that's what my dad was
thinking of that moment. I don't know what I saw
that night, but if that was what kept good hunting
dogs from leaving the safety of a roaring campfire, it
made perfect sense to me. Two years later, we moved
five miles down the road. We had a big Collie.
Then that dog wasn't afraid of anything, or so we thought.
One summer night, when the moon was full, we heard
it scratching at the door trying to get inside. Daddy
opened the door and that dog almost knocked him down
trying to get past him. About that time, we all
heard the same ungodly scream I recognized from that night
in the shed, and my dad and I stepped outside
to see what it was. The field next to the
house was that same white doglike creature standing on its
hind legs in the moonlight. Dad ushered me inside, where
we watched from the window as that thing dropped down
on all fours and walked away. And the next day
we went to the field to look around. We found
some white hair in the barbed wire fence around it,
but we never saw the creature again. I've since heard
stories of others who have seen it. Though to this
day I think about that monster that killed all of
my baby chicks that night, and it ate most of them.
This encounter took place on October sixth, two thousand and five,
in the desolate desert of southern Utah. My late wife
and I were to meet some friends for a multi
day hiking trip through some slot canyons. For those who
are not familiar with what a slot canyon is, it's
a narrow sandstone canyon formed by water runoff with vertical sides.
By narrow, I mean some areas are several feet wide,
and while others are barely large enough to fit yourself through.
It's common to crawl, climb, and repel your way through,
and sometimes swim scattered pools of standing cold water left
over from the storms. This particular hike we were doing
is well known for having these cold pools of water.
My wife wasn't keen on that part, so she and
I opted to hike in a different way and join
the rest of the group halfway and hike out together.
The very nature of how these canyons are formed is
why you do not want to be in them when
it's raining. Storm water moves swiftly through these canyons and
immediately becomes a deadly flash flood. Often the walls are
sheer and vertical, so there's no climbing out for escape.
In fact, every year people die when entering these places
without concern for the weather. For this, the weather had
been clear for days leading up to our planned departure
and was predicted to be a storm free night. Also,
there is no self service in much of this area,
so you're on your own. Self sufficiency is expected. Our
original route traveled through one slot canyon and met up
with another slot canyon, and carried on further south as
a tributary to a larger reservoir downstream. Looking at a map,
it would look like a capital y where these two
canyons came together. The west entrance is more technical and
takes more time to traverse, while the east entrance is
largely a sandy wash bottom and can be traveled much easier. Basically,
it's like walking on a beach. Just upstream of where
both canyons meet is a clearing wide enough to camp
away from the wash. That was the place where we
planned to meet the others. The main group set off
on October the fifth, with plans to meet us either
late on the sixth or early on the seventh. My
wife and I planned to leave our home and get
to our meeting point all in the same day, so
we set off on the sixth. Getting to the trailhead
for us required a six hour drive, then about eight
miles of hiking. As usual, we were running late, so
By the time we were on foot with our gear
and in motion, it was three o'clock in the afternoon.
The hike was incredible. The two hundred foot wide wash
slowly narrowed as the miles went by, and halfway we
were walking through areas where we could almost touch both sides.
The colors would glow especially strong as the sun lowered,
making some of the hallways glow in ways not thought possible.
It was the golden hour. We were progressing well, spirits
were up, the map had us just about to the confluence.
Suddenly we were rocked by the awful stench of death.
The canyon walls were over four hundred feet tall and
the canyon was ten to fifteen feet wide, and that
stench was so concentrated you could almost feel it. Yet
there was no sign of where it was coming from.
Nothing nothing in sight on the ground up or down
the canyon, and with near vertical walls, we were really confused.
We kept on using our shirts and whatever else to
filter the air as the canyon continued to twist and turn,
and then there it was a full size adult mountain
sheep or ram just a few days dead. I say
a few days because that was the time since the
last storm flooding in this canyon, and the carcass wasn't
covered with runoff debris. It was obvious it had showed
up afterward. Our suspicion was it slipped and fell down
into the canyon from above. The gender was impossible to
determine because the entire abdominal area ribs to pelvis and
all the way to the spine was missing. Not to
say the introls were strewn about in the process of
being devoured or in decomposition. It was outright missing all
of it. The head was turned away and down into
the crevice between the ground and the wall. Once we
identified the source of the stench, we quickly ran past
it to get to fresher air. Just as we were
clear of the odor, we walked right into the confluence.
The joining of three four hundred foot tall large sandstone
hallways was an awesome sight. I stood in the center,
and I looked straight up to see the sky in
the shape of a wy, and I could tell that
we needed to find a spot to camp soon. Luckily,
the clearing where we were camping was just a few
hundred feet away up the west canyon to our surprise,
the West Canyon was wet, meaning it had a small
amount of water flowing through it, so much so that
we were jumping from sand mound to sand mound trying
to keep our feet dry. We weren't concerned with flooding
because we were confident with our weather forecasts, and it's
also common to have water springs or seeps in the
desert canyons. As we walked through a particularly narrow section
along the way, the walls gradually widening to around two
hundred feet with large sandy banks on both sides, and
they were gaining elevations safely away from the wash bottom.
We chose to stay left as we hiked up stream
and found a clearing large enough to camp for the night.
It was about twenty or so feet up from the
wash bottom and about thirty feet away, with small trees
and bushes between to give us a little privacy. After
setting up camp, we had just enough light left to
look around a little. I personally wanted to see if
anyone else was around that we should be aware of,
and just as I hoped, we were alone. It soon
got dark, so we started back to our tent. It
was then we took notice that as we walked along
the wash, our footsteps sounded like a splat splat as
we stepped. I remember jokingly telling my wife that it
would likely wake us up should our friends arrive before
we got up the next morning. Before long, we were
zipped in our tent and down for the night, when
just minutes later, out of the pitch black night, we
were met with an absolutely insane roar coming down through
the canyon. It was of such volume and force that
we were instantly beside ourselves with fear bordering on outright panic.
Everything about it seemed impossible. The sheer capacity to create
such a sustained volume was outside my understanding. Out there.
At worst, maybe you would see a mountain lion or
a black bear on a very rare occasion, but nothing
that would come to the combined guttural roar of an
African lion mixed with that of a silver backed guerrilla.
What still has my head spinning is the duration. It spanned,
almost ten full seconds, with no change and intensity throughout.
Instantly we knew first we were not alone as previously thought,
and second we were definitely not on top of the
food chain. It was then that I took notice of
my wife, who at the time was having an absolute
melt down. She was yelling and squirming around in her
sleeping bag as if she was possessed. It was everything
I could do to get her to try to be silent,
and as I held her down with both arms and
a leg so we could hear. Easier said than done,
but done nonetheless. And there we sat, holding each other
in our tent, whispering and wondering what the hell was happening.
My wife, having grown up on a farm, told me
she had never heard or known of any animal that
could make that kind of sound, except on television. I'm
a city boy, having spent most of my youth mountaineering,
and I've met up with mountain lions, black and brown bear, moose,
wolves and whatnot. And I was absolutely stumped. Neither of
us had a clue what could have made that sound.
So we lay there in dead pitch black silence for
around ten minutes, when I eventually mustard up the nerve
to sit up. Very slowly. My mind kept racing around
for anything that we may have had with us that
could be converted to a weapon of defense. The two
metal bars in my internal frame pack A three inch
pocket knife, tent, poles, a rock. I didn't find anything
that I thought would keep whatever this was off of
us if it attacked. Suddenly, whatever this thing was showed up.
As I sat in the dark, something very large and
very fast ran down the wash toward us from the
upstream at my left, passing in front of us, and
to my right, out and down toward the confluence. And
it did it in seven unmistakable bipedal steps. It was
pitch black, and I stereophonically heard the splights of the
steps that had to have been more than fifteen feet
apart as it ran past me, no more than thirty
feet in front of where I was seated. The creature
made a breathy, gruntle sound, almost matching the pace of
its steps, and had passed through the one hundred and
thirty foot clearing and under three seconds. If we were
scared before, it was nothing compared to how we felt now.
All we could do was sit and wait and wait,
and that is what we did for hours. I don't
remember when we finally fell asleep, but I was sure
wide awake when my wife started packing to leave at
first light. I spent a few minutes looking around in
the daylight, trying to find anything that would give me
an indication of what it could have been. But I
didn't find any footprints, and my wife was making it
clear she was leaving with or without me. I think
it either climbed out of the canyon or it was
stepping in water the entire time. I don't know what
I'm confident with. However, while not having seen anything, I
know what I heard, and that is enough for me
and our friends that we were to meet up with.
They were delayed with minor injuries. There was absolutely no
keeping my wife there a single minute longer than necessary,
and I wasn't about to let her walk out alone.
I left markings in the sand washbottom and put a
note for our friends in the hiking register before informing
the ranger at his station that our friends were still
out there. He said another ranger was making the track
that day and he'd let him know to keep an
eye out. It turned out that our friends were around
six hours behind us when they called. They claimed they
neither heard nor saw anything out of the ordinary during
their entire trip, and that a few nasty blisters were
the reason they decided to leave early. Strangers still They
all say they didn't see any dead animals along the
way either, while I clearly remember taking notice that the
sheep had not changed in any way when we ran
past it again on our way out. We still haven't
told those guys anything about our experience that night. My
father was a logger, a for a stranger, a mechanic,
an iron worker, and a welder. He and I spent
a great deal of time in the woods together. My
father was no stranger to the wilderness. My paternal grandfather
had been a fisherman until he enlisted and went to
fight the Kaiser in World War One. A short time
after arriving in Belgium, a shell explode did three feet
from him and practically ripped him to shreds. But he survived,
and he spent about a year in the hospital in
England until the doctor sent him home to Newfoundland, telling
him that he would never fish again and probably never
work again. He went home and proved the doctors both
right and wrong. He never did fish again. Instead, he
chose to start logging and sawing lumber with the assistance
of his sons. My grandfather's mill was located at the
mouth of a short heavily timbered valley, where they cut
about fifteen to twenty percent of their lumber. They practiced
selective cutting and did a five or six year rotation,
moving to a new area each year. As each son
came of age to work in the mill or the woods.
Grandfather warned them to never, under any circumstances, be caught
in the valley after dark. He never did give a reason,
but Grandfather was star enough in his warning that none
of the brothers ever disregarded his advice. My father told
me that sometimes late in the evening, when they were
doing their post work day maintenance by lantern light, they
would hear strange sounds coming from the valley. There would
be wood knocks and growls and screams, and owl hoots
and whistles, and brush breaking, and occasionally the sound of
an animal dying. None of the brothers ever saw anything,
and Grandfather never admitted to seeing anything, but they all
knew that there was something terrifying in those woods. The
neighbors nearby and in surrounding villages knew that the valley
was occupied by demons, and nobody went there after dark.
The fear lasted up until the nineteen sixties, when I
was a boy, and it was my father who delivered
my warning. The mill had been shut down in nineteen
forty nine due to political issues, and everyone found alternative employment,
but the brothers and grandfather still operated it now and
then for personal use. One day in the early nineteen fifties,
a friend of my grandfather's arrived at the mill with
his horse and slay to go into the valley to
cut some firewood. Well, grandfather was there at that time,
and since it was late in the day, he reminded
his friend to be out of the valley before it
got dark. The friend scoffed at the advice and headed
out anyway. Grandfather finished sawing his lumber around dusk, and
he loaded his trailer and began oiling and greasing the
bearings in the mill, and all of a sudden his
ears picked up the sound of pounding hoofs and a
voice yelling at the horse to go faster. Grandfather looked
up in time to see his friend and the horse
coming tearing out of the valley towing an empty sleigh,
and grandfather intercepted the horse and managed to bring it
to a halt. Both man and horse looked wild, and
it took a while for grandfather to calm them both down.
When his friend regained enough of his composure to speak,
his first words were, I should have listened to you.
He had gotten about halfway through the valley when he
saw an ideal spot for cutting. He gave the horse
some feed and water, and then he went to work.
A couple of times he noted that the horse had
seemed fidgety. He couldn't see anything wrong, so he returned
to his work. He recalled several times hearing something moving
around in the brush, but passed it off as being
a moose or some other form of wildlife, and he
ignored it. By dark, he had a load cut and
was almost ready to head home. He picked up his
gear and was about to secure it with the load
ropes when all hell broke loose. A huge, hairy, manlike
creature burst out of the trees. It was a giant.
It was eight feet tall and probably weighed five hundred pounds, said,
and it was screaming and gnashing its teeth and breaking
off trees as it rushed forward. According to the man,
it probably broke off more wood in a few seconds
than he had cut all afternoon. What scared him. Most
were its eyes. They were glowing red and contained more
pure evil than he had ever encountered in his life.
I'm never going back into that valley again, he swore
to my grandfather, and with that he snapped his reins
and headed home as fast as he could, And he
kept his vow, and he never returned. As a child,
in the nineteen sixties, we used to ride our bicycles
near the mill to play in the shavings and saw
dust in the nearby river. We always had fun, but
we never felt comfortable there. In the evenings, we always
felt like we were being watched, and we always made
sure to be home after dark.