Speaker 1: My name is Kim, and I don't mind if you
use my name. I don't have a Bigfoot story, but
I do have one that is just as strange. I
live in a small rural town in Tennessee. I have
an experience that I've been hesitant to share since it
happened in nineteen ninety four, when I was eighteen years old.
Today I'm forty seven, and since this happened, I've only
told maybe three people since the incident. I'm not sure
if the three people I told even believe me, because
I still have trouble believing it myself. It was after
I had graduated high school. I had a boyfriend who
lived on a well traveled highway between our small town
in Perry County and the bigger town we all commuted
to in Lewis County for shopping and eating. He used
to always claim in high school that he had seen
aliens in Ufo on a daily basis. Well, I thought
he was crazy and had been smoking too much. Weaed
on a summer evening in nineteen ninety four, I made
a visit to his house to watch his new satellite
dish that his parents had just installed. Well, this was
back when the satellites were as big as a swimming pool.
I was sitting on the couch enjoying the thousands of
channels from all over the world when my boyfriend came
in and calmly said, Kim, come here, I want to
show you something. We walked out onto the porch into
the front yard and I looked at him and I said,
what is it. He pointed up to the top of
one of the trees in his backyard and he said,
just look at that. Five hundred feet away. I saw
a large, dark, circular disk right at the top of
the trees. There were yellowish looking lights that blinked in
a sequence, starting from the left of the object to
the right, and then around again. I heard any noise,
no motor, no hum. It was absolutely silent. It was
the size of a basketball court, and it sat in
a perfectly still position, with just the movement of the
sequencing lights that seemed to chase each other from left
to right. Well, I was stunned into silence. I knew,
deep down, whatever was controlling that object was observing us.
I never thought I would react that way if I
ever got lucky enough to see one of these things.
I always pictured myself before it happened that if I
had ever seen one, I would be ecstatic and excited,
but I wasn't. I looked at him one more time,
not believing my eyes, and I asked him, like a dummy,
what is that? Even though I already knew what it was,
thinking there might be a logical explanation. All he said
was to UFO. I knew whatever it was, it was
not to be there. And then, for some odd reason,
I felt the strong urge to calmly go back in
the house, sit down, and continue to watch TV. And
that's exactly what I did, I guess. Fifteen minutes went
by and my boyfriend came back in and he went
to his room and he shut the door. Well, I
got up from the couch and I walked outside to leave.
I looked for the object while I walked back to
my car, and it was gone. After that, we never
spoke about it again, and to this day, I couldnot
figure out why why would we not mention it to
each other. I know what I saw was real, I
was awake, and I was not on drugs or alcohol.
But for some reason, I've always questioned myself as to
why I reacted the way I did and why he
reacted the way he did. It was just a rare experience,
and I don't know if there was a higher power
involved pushing me to react the way I did. Well.
We eventually broke up and he moved to Utah. I
heard recently of another sighting on that road about five
years ago, while a girl I know was driving on
that highway. I know this was a short story, but
I thought I would share it. I thought maybe someone
out there listening may appreciate it. It may have been
through something similar. I enjoy listening to your podcast every
morning while I get up and get ready for work.
Keep doing what you do. You're doing a great job.
And she says, thank you, Kim, Thank you Kim for
the story. You did a great job writing this. That's
the biggest compliment, not that I'm doing a good job,
but you guys do a great job writing these. This
was an interesting story. I love these UFO stories. Okay,
fair warning. This story has a lot of places, has
a lot of places that have spanned names and French
names that I may get wrong, so get ready for
a laugh. But I just can't pronounce them because I've
never heard some of them before Nielma edited this. She goes,
there wasn't really much to do to it because the
person is a talented writer, and so this should be
a good story. And I'm reading this cold, so just
hang on to your weaves, all right. Here we go.
It's a bigfoot story. Growing up in the nineteen seventies
in the small town of Monroe, Louisiana, we heard all
kinds of stories about the history of the town and
that region of northeast Louisiana. For a sleepy little town
nestled in the curves of the Wachita River, the Bayous,
and the swamps, you would never guess that it had
been a place of habitation for several cultures going back
nearly six thousand years now. I spent a lot of
time sitting around and listening to my grandfather and one
or two uncles as they told stories of things that
they encountered on hunting trips, or why working around the
family farm, or the stories of what other relatives had
experienced in the bayou and swamp country around Monroe. As
a kid, I enjoyed all the stories, even if I
didn't quite believe them or thought there might have been
a bit of leg pulling going on. This syria had
been settled and lived in for thousands of years by
Native Americans, with the oldest mound complex found in the
Western Hemisphere and it dates back fifty four hundred years
and it's found in the northwestern part of Monroe at
the Watson Breaks site. The Poverty Point World Heritage Site,
which is the largest known earthworks in North America, is
only a fifty minute drive to the east. Another facet
of the local history was the Spanish colonial past pastad
do watchitall? That was stor I think it was. That
means post watchitall. I think that was started in seventeen
and renamed after the Spanish governor Estevan miro As Fort
Mirou in seventeen ninety one when the fort was constructed.
As the settlement expanded with French and Americans moving into
the area, the settlement would be renamed Monroe in eighteen
twenty after the arrival of the steamboat James Monroe. The
town was also part of the Vicksburg Campaign as a
supply depot and hospital during the Civil War. Some of
the stories told to me growing up were from the
Spanish and later American settlers and also from the earlier
Native American people. There were stories of giant, hairy manlike
creatures who lived in the deepest part of the swamps
and who did not tolerate trespassers. There were beings who
could change their shapes to look like animals, and other
stories were about people who would disappear out in the
swamps with never a tree to be found. Of course,
there were plenty of ghost stories around the Old Garden district,
and Monroe had more than its share of haunt houses.
I experienced a few of these things in some of
those two hundred year old homes that I can't explain.
But those are stories for another time. By the way,
if you ever feel like writing those stories, brother, please
send them in because I'll get them. I'll get them
on the podcast. Back to the story. In nineteen seventy five,
I had my own close encounter with a bigfoot out
along the Watchtaw River among those ancient Spanish moss draped
trees and waterways. My mom and I had gone on
one of the periodic camping trips our Baptist Church put
together for our congregation in the late summer of that year.
This particular camping trip was to Moon Lake, north of Monroe.
This area is adjacent to the Black Bayou National Wildlife
Refuse that has a long history of the range things
happening and sightings of strange creatures. If you had a
canoe or a flat bottom aluminum boat, you could go
out on the switchbacks of the watch Taw River and
eventually you would cross over the Black Bayou itself or
by you Dissard, I think I pronounced that right, Disiard.
The further up the side by us you went, the
thicker the curtains of moss hanging from the trees would
grow until you could see only a few yards in
any direction. Now, back in the nineteen seventies, the area
around Moon Lake was still fairly wild and undeveloped, and
it was by you territory, with only a few scattered
houses and trailers off the old State Road five point
fifty three as the crow flies. It was only about
five miles from my dad's house, but that short fifteen
minute drive would take you from the civilized comforts of
town living to another world of moss, drape, tree and dabble,
sunlight and foggy swamps inhabited by alligators. And other creatures.
Our church used a camp at the lake for family
weekend getaways and for some retreats. The camp was on
the east side of the lake, between the road and
the main body of the lake, with the river making
the northern boundary. It was an old camp, but it
was well maintained, and the main camp was clear and level,
but surrounded by old trees and bushes. On this weekend,
families had started arriving late Friday afternoon, with the rest
coming in early Saturday morning to set up their tents
and personal camp sites within the larger camping area. As
each family arrived, more of the kids I knew would
be running around and playing tiger chase or hide and seek,
And during one particular wild run through the camp, I
missed seeing a tent rope that caught me right across
my face, and I proudly wore that diagonal rope burn
across my face for several days and enjoyed my badge
of honor. Saturday progressed and we moved to exploring the
area outside of the campgrounds, which included walking aways up
the shallow river banks, skipping rocks across the slow moving current,
and looking for arrowheads. We didn't find anything, but we
had a grand time poking around in the soft soil,
and we made a full day of it. At dusk,
everyone was called in for dinner and visiting, and my
friends and I group together for a dinner of hot
dogs and chips and beans and potato salad. And while
we were eating, we noticed the dogs that some of
the families had brought with them were tracking around the
campground and occasionally whining. And since we were among the
trees and therefore more to the north and west, the
setting sun made a long and broken shadow between the
trunks and the hanging moss, it made it difficult to
see what the dogs were reacting too. It did not
make much of an impression on me at the time,
and as soon as we finished eating, we ran back
into the woods for an evening edition of hide and seek.
After about an hour, we went back and picked up
some flashlights so that we could continue our game until
our parents would eventually call us in for the night.
And we gathered back together and we stood talking at
the edge of the clearing, and a small stick was
thrown into our group from the area just outside the
lantern light. Well, we thought it was one of the
other kids, so we started trying to find them, but
we never saw anyone, but every couple of minutes another
stick would be thrown from the trees. Eventually, we started
concentrating our flashlights in one beam and swinging them back
and forth, and we tried throwing sticks and small rocks
back to the trees to see if we could flush
out whoever it was, but we didn't have any success.
After another ten minutes of this, we still didn't see anything,
and then another stick came flying out of the trees.
This time it came from higher up. We swung the
flashlight beams up about ten feet and at first we
didn't see anything but a curt of Spanish moss hanging
from a branch close to the tree trunk, and then
a face pushed out of the moss. Our first thought
was one of the kids had climbed up the trunk,
but on closer inspection, though, we realized that the face
was not entirely human. After a stunned a few seconds,
a body that was fully ten to eleven feet tall,
covered in shaggy brown hair, stepped out from the tree
trunk and moss less than twenty feet away from us.
We started yelling and running back to the camp, while
whatever this was disappeared at a loping run back to
the north. The adults who came r at our yelling
listened to our hurried description and then took off in pursuit.
They too, caught a few glimpses as the bigfoot ran
through the undergrowth and then dove into the river to
make its escape. When the adults came back to camp,
every family packed up and left that night without another
word being said about the events of that night, And
for several years after that event, you would hear stories
of strange happenings around the Moonlake area. Whoo, that's a
There was a lot of lead up to the actual
apex of that story, but it was all important because
you kind of get a feel for the area and
why they were there and what was going on in
the mood of the kids playing, and then the this
face pushes through Spanish moss. If you could see me,
I've got my shoulders all scrunched up behind my head
because it's given me the creeps. Man, what a great story.
I love that story. I appreciate the writer and regarding
the houses and whatever happened in the haunted houses that
you claim was a time for another story. I would
appreciate getting those from you. I'll be glad to put
them on the intern. I'll be glad to put them
on the podcast, because, dude, you know how to tell
a story. Anyway, Thank you for sending it. I really
do appreciate it. When I was growing up in South
Carolina in the nineteen fifties, we never heard stories about
encounters with Bigfoot or families of Bigfoot. When I had
my first encounter, I didn't know what they were or
what to call them. I think my dad must have
known something about them, but he never talked about it.
We lived on a farm deep in the country, somewhere
between Honia Path and Greenwood. We kept all kinds of livestock, chickens, hogs,
and a few cows and a couple of goats. Along
with them, we had dogs and cats, and there was
no grass around the house because the hogs and the
chickens and the other animals roamed freely about eating everything
in sight, not to mention the damage that we three
girls could do. Now, Mom and Dad didn't have any sons,
but my sisters and I were just as tough and
wild as any boys could be. Dad worked our little
farm while holding down a job at the fabric mill,
and were shoals. They wove and printed the fabric and
then shipped it off to various other places to be
made into clothes and such. And at that time they
were printing camouflage material, and that meant the deer hunters
around there always had cheap, misprinted cameo cloth to take
home to their wives so they could make them into
hunting clothes. I remember one hot Saturday afternoon in the summer.
Dad was busy with the cows and Mom asked me
to run to the store for her to pick a
few items up. It was a little corner store set
on an intersection in the middle of nowhere. Normally, my
older sister would go with me, but she wasn't feeling
well that day, and my younger sister was still too little.
The store was only a half mile away and there
were almost never any cars on the road, but I
was old enough to know betther than to talk to strangers.
Even if there had been a car, it was likely
to be someone we knew. Now. That was back when
cochs were and nickel and snicker bars were three cents.
I took my time getting to the store. I remember
a turtle that needed poking with a stick, A few
insects were begging for inspections, and I couldn't resist the
wildflowers that were in full bloom. But I eventually got
there and handed my list over to the storekeeper. It
wasn't a long list, but there was enough on it
to tell me that Mama was getting ready to bake
us a cake. It was hot that day. I knew
I would practically have to run back to keep the
butter from melting. Well. I liked running before a ten
year old, I was pretty fast, well on that day,
I was determined to break my old record. Lucky for me,
I thought I had wasted enough time getting there that
the sun was beginning to sink behind the trees to
the west. The shadows were getting longer, but that meant
the trip home wouldn't be quite so hot as the
walk there. I had just about reached the long dirt
drive that led to our farmhouse when I noticed an
awful dead smell that wasn't there earlier. It seemed to
be coming in wiffs on the breeze from somewhere inside
the tree line. Now, those woods are thick with pines,
and so thick that it was almost like night once
you got past the outer boundary. We never ventured in there. Ever.
Dad used to tell us that there might be bears
in there. Well, we never saw one, but if Dad
said they were there, we believed it. We didn't need
to play in those old woods anyway. There was more
than enough space to play in the sunlight or under
the big shape trees on the farm. As I turned
to head up the drive, that smell got stronger, and
I shifted my groceries from one arm to the other.
The rattle of that paper bag muffled another noise that
I was sure didn't come from me. It was a
crackling sound like sticks breaking somewhere beyond the trees. And
then I caught a glimpse of something moving to my right,
just inside the tree line. I assured myself that I
was hearing squirrels or birds and letting my imagination make
giants out of shadows. I was making good time, but
I couldn't seem to outrun the sun. I was sure
it was dropping faster than usual that afternoon, and even
though the fear was starting to creep in. I had
to slow down. It was still pretty hot and humid,
and I was getting tired. The house came into view,
and so did something else. I didn't quite understand what
I was looking at. I just knew that something tall
and dark was st at the edge of the trees
ahead of me. There was an embankment there that went
up the right side of the drive, and the tall
trees came to a point at the top of it.
That was where the taller, slender, black, hairy figure stepped out.
I could see its face clearly. It was almost human,
but not quite. I had seen pictures of monkeys, but
this thing didn't have a snout or a nose that
protruded like one. Its ears were small, and it had
a pronounced brow line, with deep set eyes that looked
black or very dark brown. The hair on its body
was kind of long, but more so on its arms
and around its head. It didn't really have a neck,
but its arms were long and almost to its knees.
Or maybe they just looked that way because it was
stooped a little. I thought it was smiling at me,
but it was such a creepy looking grin and it
made its wide mouth almost sinister. I don't think it
was trying to scare me, but it sure was doing
a good job of it. In an effort to figure
out what I was looking at, I took a few
steps closer to it, and in turn, it took another
step down the embankment, and then I took another step,
and it took another until it was all the way
to the bottom. That's when I stopped, and I started screaming.
My kids have a high pitched scream that runs right
through you out there in the country. It really traveled.
It was enough to bring Dad running with his double
barrel shotgun. I never thought of my dad as being
small until I compared him to the monster. It must
have been twice my dad's height. The creature went back
up the embankment, and it looked like it dissipated into
the dark forest. And to this day, I'm not sure
if my dad ever saw it. He had a confused
look on his face, and I never heard him shoot.
Either he didn't see it or he was afraid of
shooting me by accident. He stood there and waited as
I ran to him, and then we both went inside.
I don't know what I was looking at that day,
but I do now. I'll never know what he wanted.
Maybe he smelled what was in the bag and he
was hungry. I doubt anyone really knows what they are
or how they managed to hide so well for their size.
But what I do know now is that I do
believe in Bigfoot.