Speaker 1: Here's a story from Matt, and this is really, really
a good story, he writes. I'm sixty one years old.
I'm a retired twenty seven year law enforcement officer. I
served ten years in the United States Army Reserves, ending
with the rank of staff sergeant. I've only told one
other person this story, and that was my younger brother.
I live in West Virginia and I have most of
my life. In nineteen seventy three, my brother, my cousin,
my uncle, and a guy my uncle worked with at
the time and I went on a camping fishing trip
to Cranberry Glades, located in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. This
area is vast and heavily forested. No motorized vehicles are
allowed into the camp area, so we hiked about a
mile into the camping area to set up our camp.
At the time, I was fourteen years old, and like
most teenage boys, I was adventurous and not afraid to explore.
On the third day of our trip, after breakfast, I
decided I wanted to hike one of the many trails
that ran throughout the area instead of going fishing with
the others. The trails are marked, and some go on
for miles. My uncle told me to stay on the
trail and don't go so far, so I headed out.
I walked the trail for at least two hours, taking
in the sights and sounds of nature. I came upon
a meadow that I think was about a half acre
in size, and out of the corner of my eye,
I saw something big move across the meadow near the
tree line. I stopped and I tried to identify what
I saw moving. I walked a little further into the meadow,
gazing at a group of pine trees where I saw
the movement. I stood silently staring, and then I saw
something move again about twenty yards from me to my left.
I peered into the group of trees and behind a
large pine, I saw a reddish brown hairy coat and
it was barely visible through the brush. My first thought was,
oh God, it's a black bear. My heart jumped. I
thought of turning and running back to camp, but I
stayed there looking. I was too curious. I heard a
deep vocal ooh, and then I saw it turn behind
the trees and I saw this huge, long, hairy arm
making a tossing motion in my direction, and a tree
limb came hurtling towards me. It landed about ten feet
to my left. I began to shake. This limb was
about five feet long and about eight inches around, and
then I heard that sound again. Ooh. I bolted back
towards the camp site, running faster than I ever have
run in my life. I was crying and I was praying.
I ran to the point where I collapsed from exhaust fust.
I was on my hands and knees, gasping heavily for air,
and my inner voice kept telling me to keep running.
So I gathered as much strength as I could, and
I got back on my feet and I ran back
to the camp. When I arrived, the others had not
made it back from fishing yet. I sat at the
picnic table, panting hard, and I was still crying. A
few hours later, the rest of the guys returned. My
uncle looked at me and said, are you sick. You're
pale as a ghost boy. I said yes, just to
avoid talking about what I had countered on the trail,
and then I went to my tent and I laid down.
That evening, I laid in my sleeping bag as my
mind replayed the event over and over. My brother slept
next to me. Finally I had to relieve myself, but
I was too afraid to get out of the tent. Later,
with great hesitation, I got up and slowly and as
quietly as possible, exited my tent. I didn't go far,
just a short distance behind my tent, and just as
I finished and started to get back in the tent,
I heard off in the distance that sound again. Ooh wow.
I dove back into the tent and I started shaking.
I didn't want to wake my little brother because I
didn't want him to be afraid. So I sat there
shaking until daylight, listening and hoping I would not hear
that sound again. I stayed at camp the last two days,
never venturing out again. My uncle kept asking me why
I didn't want to leave the camp site. I just
told him that I wasn't feeling well. I was never
so glad when we returned home, and it wasn't until
about a year later that I told my brother what
had happened. He said that he knew at the time
of the camping trip that something had scared me. I
had never heard of bigfoot until I was about eighteen
years old. That's when I saw the famous film I'm
Showing the Creature, and I started to shake as I watched.
I had to leave the theater, and to this day,
when I think back on it, I get chills. Well
that's my one and only encounter. Thanks for letting me vent, Sincerely, Matt.
A long time ago, when I was eleven, a friend
and I were fishing down at the creek. It was
getting late and about time to pack up and get home.
I got a bite, so I threw my bait a
few more times. My buddy was all packed up and
said that he would wait for me on the trail
up the hill. A few more casts and no bites,
so I was ready to get out of there. Something
picked me up. Its arm was covered in thick hair,
like a shaggy dog. I thought it was someone in
a gorilla suit playing a prank on me. He put
me over his right shoulder your dad would when you
were little, and he started walking into the woods. I
wasn't scared. I wasn't going to let whoever this was
get a kick out of me being afraid, holding onto
his head with my left hand as he held my
legs to his chest. I relaxed and enjoyed the ride.
When the shock of the whole thing wore off, I
looked to the ground and saw the hair covered its
whole body. This wasn't a gorilla suit, and I was
very high off the ground. After several minutes of walking
in the woods, I started to wonder who was doing
this and where we were going. It was getting dark
and didn't look like we were headed towards my house.
We rounded the corner of the hillside and I saw
three more of these creatures. One looked like a mother,
and there were two smaller ones about my size. He
put me down on the ground in a small new
or entrance into a pile of trees. It was open
in the middle. It almost looked like the trees had
fallen that way, but after being inside, I knew this
structure had been built. It was a hideout. The ground
was covered in long grass. It felt comfortable in there,
almost a warm, welcoming feel to it. The thing that
had taken me entered the structure and sat down looking
back out the opening. The mother started feeding us all
some berries and some kind of root. None of it
was very good. It was dark now. The creatures began
to settle in the middle of the hideout, and they
all laid down and went to sleep. I was glad
to see this. I waited a few more minutes, then
climbed out of the tangle brush pile and started home
in the pitch black. It took all night to find
my way out of the woods woods, and when I
finally made it home, it was just getting daylight. When
I walked into our yard, I saw several men standing
there talking to my father. The police were there too.
They were relieved to see me and started asking questions.
The evening before, my buddy had gone back to find
me when I had not shown up on the trail.
He found my fishing gear lying on the bank. He
rushed to get my father, and they returned to look
for me in the woods. The men now standing in
our yard were gathering at my house to go hunt
for me again. Some of them had tracking dogs. I
told my dad and the police what had happened. One
of the policemen looked at my father and said that
he believed me. The crowd dispersed and we went inside
and my mother fed me. The rest of the day
was hard to remember. After that, no one ever asked
me about it again, not my dad, my mom, or
the police. It was so long ago that it seems
like a dream, but I know it happened. I don't
think my dad ever believed me, and there is still
this nagging feeling all these years later that it really
was a prank. I also wonder if there was something
they knew and were not telling me. But what I
know for sure is that something picked me up that
day and carried me through the woods for a long time.
I don't know what it was, but I think I do.
Here's an email from a woman who goes by the
handle of camping Turtle. She didn't want her real name revealed,
but she got She said I could use the camping
Turtle handle, which I think is really neat Here's what
she writes, and this is a kind of a spooky story.
I wanted to write to you after months of listening
to your channel on YouTube and give you my own
unsettling accounts of the two run ends I believe are Bigfoot.
After talking to my younger sister, she agreed that I
should tell you my stories. I grew up in a
religious family and there were six of us kids We
lived on a lake not even a half a mile
from the state line of Michigan, just inside Indiana. The
lake even then was fairly well developed, and since my
father had grown up there, he wanted us to enjoy
our childhood in much of the same manner that he had.
The lake at that time was surrounded by farm fields
and enough country to not feel too much like suburbia.
There were plenty of dirt roads around those parts, and
then houses on the outer roads were not boxed in
one on top of the other. My father kept an
old washing machine tub as a live well down along
the edge of the lake near the shore we loved
to fish. Out of all of us kids, I could
spend the entire day on the water or the shoreline,
drowning worms and keeping my line perpetually wet. When it
got too hot, a simple quick dip would cool me
off and I would go right back to fishing. Pretty
funny for a girl, some would say. Back then, we
hadn't gotten central air yet, and when summer came creeping
with the humidity, there wasn't a spot I would rather
be than in my parents' bedroom, playing a card or
board game on their massive bed with either my dad
or one of my sisters or brothers. The windows faced
the lake, and by putting a box fan in one
and opening the other, we had cool, fresh air running
through the room. I was six and a half at
the time, and my little sister was four. My younger
sister and I were sitting on the bed playing checkers
when I specifically remember a feeling of fear come over me.
I glanced up toward the window and two huge red
eyes were clearly staring at us. The eyes moved from
my sister to me, and I heard and felt a
very low growl. I urgently whispered to Nicky, there's a
monster in the window. She looked over and screamed, and
together in a tangle of arms and knees and legs,
went running out of the bedroom door, screaming for my mother.
By the time my mom went to look, the eyes
were gone. It's probably just a raccoon, she said, no, Mom,
it wasn't. They were too big to be a raccoon's eyes.
We told her. She said it had probably been a
boat out on the water, and it just looked like
a pair of eyes. When we told her we saw
it blink, she hushed us up gently put us to
bed in the middle of the bedroom that we shared
with a sister who was just a bit older than me.
We had seen lots of wildlife by then, because we
were always scouring the woods and fields bringing home this
animal or that. Even one time I brought home a
baby raccoon. Daddy made us put that one back, and
our uncle cautioned us not to steal baby wildlife because
oftentimes they would die if taken away from their mothers.
It wasn't until I was in my mid twenties that
I became familiar with what is known as bigfoot. When
I did, that memory came flooding back. Now that I
suspected what the eyes were, I measured the height of
where we saw the eyes, and it was between eight
and nine feet off the ground. When I was thirty one,
I started bowl hunting, and I fell in love with
the sport. By then I had been married for just
a little over a decade and had three sons of
my own. I'm not trying to toot my own, but
I was damn good at it. I would practice the
entire day after getting my chores done, and more than
one arrogant man lost a twenty dollar bill when they
would bet me that they could outshoot me. But I
won't go into that right here. One afternoon during the season,
my husband dropped me at my stand. I loved the solitude.
The woods are a calming place for me, a place
to unwind from the pressures of motherhood and my responsibilities
on the farm. I sat there most of the afternoon
watching fox kits playing as the sun went down, and
even though I hadn't seen a deer, I felt like
it had been a good day in the woods. Suddenly,
the fox kits all looked in one direction at one time.
They were looking past me as if they saw something
behind my stand. I assumed it was a deer or
maybe another fox. I never heard anything. The wind was
in my face. At the edge of that corn field,
just in the tree line. The kits bobbed their heads
from side to side and then up and down, and
then quickly moved in the direction of their den, which
was only a few yards away. I waited, and in
the last embers of light from the sun, I scanned
the now darkened interior of the woods. Again. I saw
and heard nothing. The lights from the exit point on
the toll road came on and were now illuminating all
the way down to where I would cross the short
forty five yards to the cornfield from my stand. I
had waited to come down until total dark so as
not to have my stand blown and to give any
deer that might be moving after legal shooting light a
chance to recede back into the woods. So I moved quietly,
making sure to take my steps carefully and roll my
foot and not make any noise. I felt rushed all
of a sudden, like I should be moving quicker and
get out of there. I can't tell you for sure
what it was, just a sudden fear that I had
not experienced before. While I was in the woods. I
began making my way down the edge of the field,
keeping myself closer to the corn than the actual woods.
I suddenly heard something paralleling me in the woodline, and
when I stopped, it would stop. This cornfield was huge.
I had to go down to where the field was
sliced in half with a track large enough to drive
down and cross eastward the entire one hundred and twenty
five yards to get to where I knew my husband
had parked. The second time I stopped, I had knocked
an arrow. My hands were shaking, but at this point
I knew not to run and stay as calm as possible,
even though my body wanted to cook taters and get
out of there. I got to the cutout area and
turned to take a quick glance back. A silhouette stood
on the path I had just come from, approximately thirty
five yards behind me. I have never been in fear
so bad that I could literally feel my blood turned
to ice. My heartbeat felt very loud in my ears.
I don't know if it was the Holy Spirit or what,
but for some reason I yelled, Guardian of the woods,
descendant of Esau and Kane, leave this place in the
name of Jesus Christ, and do not come back. I
felt its grunt, long and drawn out in my chest,
and it slipped with one step back into the woods.
I ran all the way to the car and screamed
at my husband, why didn't you come get me from
my stand. He looked at me, perplexed and said he
hadn't wanted to leave the boys alone in the car.
It wasn't until weeks later he finally got me to
tell him what happened. I refused to go back into
those woods, and I didn't really want him to go either.
I did, however, go the next next year and every
year until about five years ago, when my health began
to worsen. I now am too frail of health to
do much camping or hunting, and I can't walk very
well anymore. My sister once commented that a lot of
people who have these encounters are in bad health. I
was born with osteogenesis imperfecta. It's called the Brital bone disorder.
We were called the children of Glass. At fourteen, I
had surgery at the Shriner's Hospital to have installed two
titanium steel rods to correct severe twisting and scoliosis of
my spine. I have never let my health issues affect
me much, and often relocate and dislocate joints and fix
in secure splints for fractures that I don't deem doctor
visit worthy. I'll tell you what, mister Crypton. If I
get these old knees replaced before hunting season in the fall,
I will be back in the woods. Here's a short
email from April and Alabama. Here's what she writes. Hey,
my name is April. I want to tell you about
my encounter it's not much, but it left me wondering.
My girlfriends and I had been to the movies and
we were making our way back home. It was probably
ten or eleven o'clock at night. We came up on
a hill and then it dipped down into a curve,
and as we approached the curve, my friend's headlights hit
the figure of something crouched down like it was eating something,
and then it turned and looked towards us. We could
clearly see the eyes shine. It stood up on two
legs and it walked into the woods like a human.
Did you see that? We all said at the same time.
It was not a bear. We don't have bears around here.
And when we passed the point where the creature was standing,
aw what he was interested in. A dead possum was
laying in the road. It was eating roadkill. All the
way home we were trying to figure out what we
had just seen. It was scary but exciting all at
the same time. We are convinced that we saw Bigfoot
that night. I have been infatuated with Bigfoot ever since
I was born in nineteen forty eight, and I grew
up in Bapton, Rouge Louisiana, Louisiana, Louise Earner yep. I
was a city kid, However, my dad was a country boy,
raised in the woods in Pride, Louisiana. He was born
in nineteen twenty six, the oldest of seven kids. He
plowed the family garden with an old mule. I remember
that this mule liked to eat leftover rice and gravy.
My father had to wait until the mule finished eating
and quickly grab the bowl. The mule would paw at
it when it was empty. He learned to hunt and
fish as a way to put food on the table
because store bought meat was something they couldn't afford. They
raised chickens and they had a milk cow, but that
was it. Everything else came from the garden except for
staple goods like seasonings and flour. His father would give
him two shotgun shells and tell him to bring back
two of something squirrels, doves, rabbits, and don't miss. Those
shells aren't cheap. When he was seventeen, just after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor, he dropped out of school and
enlisted in the Navy to later become a radio operator
on board the uss Coopahee, a tanker that had been
converted into an aircraft carrier. As well as other training,
he was taught the expert use of the M one rifle.
That knowledge stayed with him all of his life, and
he passed it on to meat. That is the way
he taught me to handle a gun and hunt. When
I was about ten years old, I had inherited my
mother's four to ten bolt action Ranger brand shotgun, and
I was an excellent shot. By the time I was eleven.
He hunted with an L. C. Smith twelve gage double
barrel shotgun. My oldest son now has both of them.
Most of our hunting was small game on private or
family property until he joined the Old miss Hunting Club
in nineteen sixty five, when I was about sixteen years old.
He had gained a fondness for deer hunting. The club
hunted the Raca Ro Sea Recourse Point area on the
Mississippi River north of Morganza, Louisiana. There were twenty three
thousand acres of land in that lease, mostly river bottom land,
with several kinds of oaks, hickory trees, pecan, sweet gums,
and almost no pines. It was prime deer hunting. I
hunted with my four to ten, and I had strict
rules that went with the use of that gun. No
playing with it, clean it after I took it out,
whether I had fired it or not, and if I
wasn't hunting, it stayed put up. We spent many weekends
at the least hunting squirrels, rabbits, and of course deer.
The club had about two hundred and fifty members and
there were five camps. Ours was the largest camp, built
by expert carpenters who were members. Luckily, not all of
the members liked the camp, so there was always room
in the bunk house style bedroom. There were six sets
of bunks along either wall and a walkway down the middle.
The only other room was the kitchen that had one
eating table that would seed about eight people. The rest
of us would sit in folding chairs or wherever we
could when the camp was full of hunters. There was
no electricity, so the camp was lighted with coleman land
and the stove was fuelled by propane. There were ice
chests everywhere, mostly full of beer and lunch meat for sandwiches,
and there was an outhouse. Nights were filled with the
old men drinking beer and playing bou rat that's a
Cajun card game. I wasn't interested in either, so I
usually went to bed early, dreaming about the coming hunt
the next morning. One weekend, one of the members went
to another camp to play cards, leaving his son at
our camp. His name was Poncho Roxy. His name, Oh
my gosh, his name was Poncho and that was his nickname,
and he was about my age, and we struck up
a friendship. Neither one of us was interested in watching
a bunch of old men drink and play cards, so
we decided to walk to the other camp just to
pass the time. The other camp was five miles down
a moonlit gravel road. I didn't feel the need to
take a gun. There had never been any sightings of predators.
There was nothing out there to fear, just deer, squirrels
and rabbits, or so we thought. So off we went,
without a flashlight, but carrying a six inch blade case
skinning knife that stayed in my pocket all the time.
Like most young boys, we cut up and laughed and
talked about all sorts of things, girls, cars, hunting, and
so on. The night was bright with moonlight and The
road was easy to see, so we didn't have any worries.
We walked about a mile when we heard footsteps off
in the woods beside us. These were thick woods, not
easy to walk through in broad daylight, much less in
the dark. There were lots of briers and vines that
would easily trip someone up. But someone or something was
keeping up with our pace on the clear road. We
stopped to listen, and so did whatever that was. We
started walking again, and so did this person or animal.
We talked and we walked and tried to decide what
it was. A hunting dog that was lost, No, it
would have come to us looking for food or friendship.
Was it a deer, now they're not that noisy when
they walked. Could have been a cow. There's lots of
those free ranging out here, But it sounded like it
was walking on two legs. Maybe one of the guys
from the camp about to jump out and scare us.
But if that was the case, they would have already
done that. Once again, we stopped and it stopped. We walked,
and it walked. We stopped, and it stopped, and on
and on. Now I wished that I had brought my
gun or at least a light. I needed a weapon.
My skinning knife was not much of a weapon, but
it's all I had. I decided to stop and cut
down a sapling and sharpened the end. That way I
could at least keep some distance between me and whatever
this was. Pancho said, just what do you think you're
going to do with this sharp stick? And I said,
if it attacks, I'm going to stab it and run
with the spear in my hand. So try to keep up.
I don't know if whatever it was understood what I
was planning, but it stopped following us. We continued walking
the rest of the five miles to the other camp
with no further problems, and when we got there, his
dad was still playing cards and would be for a while.
We didn't tell him what happened, and he said that
we must have been nuts or really bored to walk
that far in the dark, and that we should start
our walk home and that he would pick us up
when he drove back. We were mischievous boys, and as
we heard him coming, we walked off into the road
and he drove right by us. He was some kind
of mad, having to wait for us to walk all
the way back after that night. I never saw Poncho again.
A month after this happened, I heard on a Loaan
TV station that a towboat pilot was shining the Mississippi
River bank at night and had seen a large, dark
bipedal creature walking away from the river's edge in that
same area. As a footnote, I now actively look for
sasquatch and had a sighting about a year ago. It
was in the Casatchee National Forest north of Alexandra, Louisiana.
It was about seven feet tall, covered in four inch
long black hair. It was slender built, so I believe
that it was a juvenile. Unfortunately, it was only a
three second profile sighting. I got to watch it cross
the road I was on, about one hundred yards away.
I immediately went to see where it had gone, but
the ground was so hard that I couldn't find any tracks.
My search will continue as long as I am able.