Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty five, my mother and I were in
Speaker 1: West Virginia spending time with our grandparents. I spent many
Speaker 1: summers throughout my childhood there. My grandmother and grandfather lived
Speaker 1: on the Cheap River before it was flooded, and they
Speaker 1: had a cabin there with a boat and a dot.
Speaker 1: It was a down in the boondocks kind of rural. Now.
Speaker 1: I loved that cabin. It was small and it slept
Speaker 1: up to eight people in bunk beds. One night, we
Speaker 1: were all sitting on the back porch. There was pitch
Speaker 1: black outside, not even the moon was shining at all
Speaker 1: that night. When the rest of us decided to turn in,
Speaker 1: Mom said she wanted to stay out a little longer
Speaker 1: and enjoy the quiet. A few minutes after we got
Speaker 1: to bed, my mom came running into my grandparents' room screaming,
Speaker 1: there's a bear out there. She said. The bear came
Speaker 1: up to her and put its paws right on her shoulders.
Speaker 1: My grandfather grabbed a shotgun by the bed and went outside,
Speaker 1: ready to defend, but there was nothing there. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't know what put its paws on my mother's shoulders,
Speaker 1: but I don't believe for a second it was a bear.
Speaker 1: If anything, it would have attacked or at least growled
Speaker 1: a her. It really never dawned on me then as
Speaker 1: a child, but now I have to wonder if it
Speaker 1: was not a bigfoot. My friend Bill used to live
Speaker 1: in Eureka on the northern California coast. He was studying
Speaker 1: to become a forest stranger at the local university, and
Speaker 1: he worked to pay his way there. His job was
Speaker 1: as a timber cruiser, which meant he walked miles and
Speaker 1: off in dense and dark forests, and he marked huge
Speaker 1: redwood trees that were to be cut for lumber. In
Speaker 1: each location, a landing was made near a tree falling area,
Speaker 1: and this is where the various types of equipment were stored,
Speaker 1: the huge tractors parked, and where fuel for diesel tractors
Speaker 1: were stored in fifty five gallon drums. A landing was
Speaker 1: usually several acres in size, which had been cut out
Speaker 1: of the thick forest and raised up and then leveled off.
Speaker 1: Everyone except the timber cruiser took the weekends off. Bell
Speaker 1: would work most of the weekends and then much of
Speaker 1: the weekdays according to his class schedule. One Monday, when
Speaker 1: he and the cutting crew showed up at their regular
Speaker 1: early hour. They were astonished to what they found. Three
Speaker 1: of the fifty five gallon metal cans of fuel had
Speaker 1: been picked up and carried to the edge of the
Speaker 1: landing and thrown down the hill. And whatever had thrown
Speaker 1: the metal drums had also managed to throw over the
Speaker 1: locked portable shed full of chainsaws and numerous other tools.
Speaker 1: Bill and the others and the crew were baffled trying
Speaker 1: to comprehend the strength the number of people that it
Speaker 1: would take to pick up, carry and throw these things
Speaker 1: off the edge of the landing. But the most unbelievable
Speaker 1: site was what happened to the heavy equipment. There were
Speaker 1: three D nine cat tractors on the landing, each weighing
Speaker 1: fifty four tons. The D nine is a beast of
Speaker 1: a machine, Yet somehow all three of these huge tractors
Speaker 1: had been lifted and laid onto their side. It was
Speaker 1: absolutely impossible, and they never did get an explanation. What
Speaker 1: do you think did all that damage? In June of
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen, I was visiting my son in his family
Speaker 1: in Lewis County, Washington. At the time, they were living
Speaker 1: in a house on a mountain It was the last
Speaker 1: house on the road. There were several other homes, each
Speaker 1: of them separated by large distances. It was two days
Speaker 1: until I was going back home, and back then I
Speaker 1: lived in Nevada. An hour before sunset, my son and
Speaker 1: I went behind his home to a waterfall a quarter
Speaker 1: of a mile behind the property. We were close to
Speaker 1: our destination when a branch snapped behind us. We stopped
Speaker 1: and looked, but there was nothing there. One hundred feet away, though,
Speaker 1: something growded us from the trees. We got to the waterfall,
Speaker 1: and while we admired the view, I was standing next
Speaker 1: to a tree with a double trunk. We could still
Speaker 1: hear the grouse from the trees, so I looked between
Speaker 1: the trunks and I saw two black hair covered legs
Speaker 1: and tan colored feet walk past us, about twenty feet away.
Speaker 1: They disappeared quickly, and I thought maybe I was seeing
Speaker 1: things All the time. The forest was dead silent. When
Speaker 1: we started to head back, we heard growling coming from
Speaker 1: a pile of branches and stumps from some logging. When
Speaker 1: we arrived at my son's house, he got out his
Speaker 1: thermal viewer. The clear as day, we could see a
Speaker 1: large shape standing on two feet watching us from the trees.
Speaker 1: I went home, and I came back two weeks later
Speaker 1: to help him move as the owners had sold the house,
Speaker 1: and while we were moving his furniture out, I noticed
Speaker 1: a large figure sixty feet away. It was watching us
Speaker 1: from the tree line. I estimated it to be eight
Speaker 1: feet tall, probably four feet wide at the shoulders. It
Speaker 1: had no neck appearance and had arms hanging down to
Speaker 1: its sides. I could not see the hands. It was
Speaker 1: standing in an arch between the trees, which was twelve
Speaker 1: feet wide and had three foot high bushes in front
Speaker 1: of it. This thing left us alone, but it stayed
Speaker 1: there for twenty minutes and it just watched us