Speaker 1: My name is Don and I have lived most of
my life in West Virginia. I have been a hunter
and trapper my whole life, and a hunting god for
twenty four years. I stopped guiding people two years ago
due to my bad legs. I still bow hunt, a
rifle hunt deer and bear, and some small game in Turkey.
I also still run a small trap line some winters
when I can. When I was younger, I had a
few strange things happened to me that I brushed off
and ignored. Starting in twenty fourteen, though things changed. I
used to laugh at the TV shows and joke with
my kids about sasquatch, but that year I decided maybe
it's not so much of a joke after all. My
youngest son was seven years old at the time. In
West Virginia opened an early black powder season near the
end of September. At that time, I was living and
working in an orchard and Upland shooting preserve, and after
work one evening, I took my son on the four
wheeler across the orchard seven hundred yards from my house
and I set up to watch deer come out and
eat apples. This spot was in four hundred acres of
apple trees surrounded by corn and beans, but there was
a ten acre patch of woods in the middle, and
I would usually hunt in that area when it was
just about dark. We still had not seen a single deer,
which I thought was odd, and then seventy five yards
away from the edge of the woods, something let out
the loudest, deepest howl I had ever heard. The sound
ended in a terrifying, guttural roar that I could feel
all the way to my bones. It was like a
lion or a grizzly bear, but much more intense and
much more unnatural. My son looked at me. He was scared.
Straight Dad, what's that, he asked me. I shook my head.
I don't know, but I'm pretty sure we're not armed
for whatever it is, I said, and I looked at
my old Hawking fifty cow black powder rifle. The roar
came a second time, so intense that it seemed to
shake the earth. I got my son up and headed
as fast as possible to the four wheeler, and on
our way out there wheels spinning. That thing hit us
with another roar. When we got back, I got my
son into the safety of the house and I sat
down and listened for it for over an hour. I
never heard it again, but I knew whatever it was
did not want us there. My girlfriend laughed at me
at first, but seeing that I was worried, she helped
me research animals that could have possibly made that sound. Now,
I've spent my life in the outdoors and never heard
anything like this. I heard a lion roar once at
the zoo, but it was nothing compared to that thing
in the woods. Whatever it was must have been big
and rare, because the only sound that came close to
that was a sasquatch scream recorded in Canada. The next morning,
I went to work and my boss, who lived and
worked in the orchard, asked me if I had seen
any deer the night before. I told him that I
had not seen a single deer, which wasn't a lie,
but also wasn't the entire story. He told me he
had been out two nights earlier and didn't see any
deer either, which was strange considering all the apples on
the ground, which usually draws a crowd of deer. And
then he told me something strange happened. Asked him what
it was, and He told me that he heard something
he had never heard before, something he just couldn't explain. Now.
He was a retired US Army ranger, and while he
spent plenty of time in the jungles in his career,
he said that he had never heard to anything like this.
When I told him what I heard, he clammed up.
It was like my confirmation that there was something strange
out there was more than he felt like dealing with.
And he brushed it off as being coyotes, and we
didn't talk about it again. It's been over seven years
and I think about that experience every damn day. And
now when I bow hunt, I carry a handgun. In fact,
I carry while I work now because I'm in the
middle of the woods every day of my life, miles
deep in big hollers and high ridge tops. It never
leaves my mind, and every day I think, Man, I
don't want to meet whatever that was that made that sound,
but I cannot give up these woods. Two years ago,
I moved from the eastern Panhannel back to central West Virginia,
where I grew up. It's much more rural and wooded,
and there have been two sightings in my county years ago.
I heard things here that I never really thought twice about,
But now after what I heard, I kind of lose
sleep over it, thinking how close they may have been
to me. I once asked a DNR officer about them,
and without a bit of humor or sarcasm in his voice,
the officer told me, I can't say they're here, but
I can't say they aren't. In twenty thirteen, I had
a strip of woods. It was five hundred yards long
and one hundred yards wide. A thick forest ran for
several miles behind it, and corn and beans were planted
on either side. One morning, my girlfriend had to go
to work at five am, she drove past the spot
I hunted, about one and a half miles from our house,
and I asked her to drop me off on the way.
I had planned to walk the four hundred yards in
the dark before first light and hunt all day long
until dark. That evening, it was an hour before daybreak
and I was walking through the cornfield using a dim
red light to see the way to my summit climber
stand that I had pre owned days before. I reached
my stand that was pretty high up, maybe twenty feet
and had only been settled in for thirty minutes when
I heard something. The darkness at that hour was so
thick that I could barely see my hand in front
of my face, and I turned my head in the
direction of the sound, and I heard something walking in
the exact same way that I walked in not long before. Well.
I thought it was a heavy footed person because I
could hear its two feet crunching in the leaves on
the ground, and I figured maybe he had seen my
stand and was coming to use it. And then the
footsteps stopped, and it occurred to me how strange it
was that a hunter would be out here in the
pitch dark without a light. My mind started racing. When
I grabbed my hall line and brought it up slowly,
the footsteps started again, the crunching leaves with every step,
and getting closer and closer and coming right at me.
Now I won't lie. I was getting nervous. All I
had was my long bow and four arrows. That's all
I ever hunted with during the bow season. Whatever this
was sounded big, and the closer it got, the heavier
its footsteps sounded. And by the time it got to
my tree, I was positive it was not another hunter,
and then I heard what sounded like heavy breathing at first,
and then I realized it was sniffing the base of
my tree. As if that wasn't scary enough, I heard
its hands running over the white oak bark under me,
and I could hear the bark rustling and drop into
the dry leaves on the ground, like the thing was
scratching an itch or wiping off a scent, or doing
whatever the hell a monster does in the pitch black
darkness with the dry bark of a tree. The sound stopped,
and I heard it take a few steps along the
fence line. I'm pretty sure this thing stepped right over
the barb wire fence and walked away. That was a
five strand fence, putting it nearly five feet high. But
I never heard a single wire rattle. I sat there stockstill,
and I could barely breathe, thanking God that I had
decided to hunt high that morning. I shower with a
scent killing soap, and I washed my clothes and sent
away and my boots and pack and bow and everything else.
I hunt with a scent free. I even use a
cover scent that morning. But whatever was sniffing under my
stand smelled me anyway. It either followed my path or
it was there when I walked in and watched me
the whole time. If I had a bright light, I
probably would have lit it up to see what it was.
But I'm glad I didn't because if I had seen
a bigfoot, I would have been in a world of hell.
There are a few other things that I couldn't make
sense of. While I was hunting and camping in Sleepy
Creek Wildlife Management Area, which covers about twenty three thousand acres,
I set up camp there in the middle of the
forest with my boys and a friend of theirs for
a five day black powder hunt. My youngest son and
I slept in one tent, and my other son and
his friend slept in the other. Our tents were ten
yards apart, with our doors facing each other and a
fire pit between us. It was in the middle of
December and it was a bit cold at that time,
and the leaf litter was frozen and would crunch underfoot.
On the third night, I heard something on two legs
walking behind our tent. My tent backed up against the woods,
so I brushed it off as one of the boys
getting up to the call of nature. I didn't think
anything else about it. But the next morning, when I
got up to start coffee, the boys asked who was
up walking around the night before. Each of them denied it,
and we went about our day without bringing it up again.
On the fourth night, around midnight, I heard those footsteps again.
It walked in a half moon shape around us, back
and forth four times for forty five minutes. It would
move and then stop, and I guess it was watching,
and then it would move and stop again. When I
mentioned it the next morning, none of the boys had
any idea what I was talking about. That night, the
last night of our camp out, I lay awake and
I waited for it, and sure enough, around midnight, it
came back. My oldest son heard it too, and grabbed
a light and walked into the woods a few yards
behind my tent, and he was looking for it, but
he didn't see anything, and after that it never came back.
I think there are things that we can't explain. Most
of the time, I just want someone to give me
a simple explanation so that I can laugh my encounters
off and sleep better at night. But while part of
me wants answers the other partners. I'm better off not knowing.
I don't hunt the same anymore. Whether I'm in the
woods before daylight or after dark, or even during the day,
I feel watched. I look over my shoulder all the time,
expecting to see something looking back. I know it isn't
just in my head, because these things really happened to me.
I used to feel home in the outdoors, but now
I don't know. Howdy howdy, Welcome to the podcast. My
name is Cameron Butner and this is the Dixie Cryptid
What If It's True podcast. All we do is tell
stories that are sent to me by real people. So
if you like that kind of thing, you found your people.
I got an email a couple of maybe a couple
of weeks ago, and the it was a very nice
email and they said they enjoyed the channel all that
jazz and I appreciated the email, but one of the
questions was, how do you have time to write all
these stories? And it struck me that we have a
whole lot of new listeners and I haven't really talked
about this, so that you know that I don't write
these stories. These are emails sent to me years ago.
I asked I wrote the first five stories of this
podcast because there are stories that I remember people had
told me. And after that I ran out of steam
and I said, hey, I can't continue this channel because
I can't write all these stories. If you have a story,
email it to me to dixiecrypt It at gmail dot com.
My email's in the description below, And if you've had
an encounter, send me an email and I'll share it
on the podcast. And that is basically what we've done
for the last six years, and I have thousands left
to do. The material is never ending. People's still send
me stories. Some of the stories you'll hear today go
back to twenty twenty. That's how far behind I am
on some of these stories. So I want to let
you know I don't write these. We do edit them.
We clean them up a little bit. We don't change
the stories. We just make them a little more pleasant
to hear, because not everybody's a writer, and that's cool,
and that's good for you because you don't have to
be a great writer to send a story in and
have it heard on the podcast. You just write it
as best you can. I mean, we edit stories that
have zero punctuation. We edit stories that kind of ramble,
you know, people I do that when I write, I
tend to ramble. I have to go back and go
well that I don't need to write this, I don't
need to include this in the story because it doesn't
have anything to do with the events of the story.
And but some people don't have a lot of time,
and they'll just rattle a story off and email it
to me, and we do every one of them. There
are that probably one percent that we kick out because
we cannot make heads or tails out of them. But
for the most part, we read every story on this channel.
We don't change the stories. We just clean them up
a little bit. So if you're new to the channel
and you're wondering how I write all these I don't.
I go through my email about once, emails my inbox
about once a week, and I pick out ten or
twelve stories and I'll send them to my editor and
she'll clean them up and vet them and make sure
that they and when I say vet that means that
they make heads or tails, that there is a story there.
She sends them back to me. I pay her anyway.
That's the way this channel works. So if you're new
to the channel, now you know what's going on, and
I apologize for not making that clear. A lot of
you who have been listening to the channel for a
long time you know this, but there are some people
who don't. So I'll shut up, quit and run my
mouth about nothing. I can take a thirty second explanation
and turn it into thirty minutes because I'm always trying
to be clear so that people understand. That's basically all
I'm doing. All right. I got two more stories in
this podcast. That first one was awesome. It was so scary,
it just about I don't know. I got about halfway
through it and I was like, man, this is the
way this guy wrote This is so creepy. But we've
got two more. Hang on, here we go. My name
is Dave, and you can use my name. I'm from Maryland.
I love your channel and I listen to it every
day at work. Oh thank you very much. I run
heavy equipment and it's the perfect thing to listen to
all day running dozers and excavators. I could see that
I have to have something in my ear even while
I'll work on a computer all day and I have
to have something running in the background. Sometimes I'll listen
to what's going on. Sometimes I have to pay attention
into what I'm doing. But I get that same thing
with the truck drivers. I got emails all the time
from truck drivers saying our comments. Hey, I'm on the
road all the time. I had one a comment the
other day and a guy said, when I'm away from
my family and I can't talk to anyone, and it's
at two o'clock in the morning, it is so great
to turn on these podcasts and just listen to them.
That is such a great compliment to me. I love those. Anyway,
back to the story, I've had a few paranormal experience
that have turned me from a skeptic to a believer.
My first experience was when I was sixteen and still
living at my parents' house. I had a luvered closet
door at the foot of my bed facing me. One night,
out of the blue, I felt like I was being
watched through the slights. It went on for a few
nights until I decided to hang posters on the door,
but things only got stranger after that. I would wake
up each morning to find the closet cracked open. My
dog chesters. I started refusing to come into my bedroom
and would literally fight and struggle to stay away from it.
A month later, my brother moved out, I moved into
his room. I was excited, to say the least, and
once I moved, CHESTER was suddenly all right going into
my old room. But now I wouldn't enter the new room.
I was on the edge because I trusted my dog,
and I know animal have senses that we don't. The
new closet door was solid oak, and it was lats closed,
and no matter how hard you pulled on it, the
door would not open without turning the knob. But when
I moved in there, that door opened every single night.
No one believed me until my wife, who was my
girlfriend at the time, slept over. She woke me up
in the middle of the night frantically saying it opened.
I just watched it open. My second experience was in
actual ghost sighting. I was driving my Chevy pick up
to my friend's house one night when out of nowhere,
my passenger seat headrest cover flew off and hit my windshield.
At the same time, I saw a ghostly lady on
a crosswalk in front of me. She was wearing a
long dress and I couldn't see her feet, and as
soon as I saw her, I slammed on my brakes,
and as quickly as she appeared, she was gone. My
latest experience is ongoing. I have three kids that all
sleep upstairs. My wife works from home, and she tells
me she hears footsteps upstairs while the kids are in school.
I've heard them too, and it's not typical house creeks
or groans. It sounds like a grown man walking from
room to room. Most nights, my kids come downstairs claiming
that they can hear someone breathing up there, and they
know it's not their siblings. So like any good father,
I listen to them and I try to reassure them.
But the worst part is having to lie and tell
them that there's nothing to be afraid of, when the
reality is that I've seen enough strange things in my
own life to make anyone lose sleep. I'm a thirty
one year old Army veteran with two tours. I'm an
avid hunter and an outdoorsman who walks through the woods
at night for fun. Even thinking about these stories as difficult.
So here I am writing my own experiences. Feeling the
hairs all over my body, stand up and due to
my nature. I do not care what people think. Those
are my experiences, and though I'm not much of a storyteller,
I hope you enjoyed reading them. My name is Jeff,
and when I was deployed, I saw things people shouldn't
have to, and I did things that wake me in
the middle of the night. On my first tour, I
knew fear like no other, and as the years piled
on and the battles continued, I became numb to being
scared of things, or so I thought. I grew up poor.
We spent many hours in the woods up in the
mountains of West Virginia, hunting and fishing for our food.
Unlike today's hunters, we went hunting to survive. That's kind
of training that you can't learn in school. We spent
enough time out there that being in the woods was
like being at home. There wasn't a sound, sign or
smell that we did not recognize. I remember my grandfather
and my dad telling us to stay close to the
camp at night because the man on the mountain was there.
When I was young, I listened to them and I
stayed put. But when I got older, I got smarter
and my cousins would tell us stories of something they
call three toes. I brushed it off as being a
creature in the woods and never believed them. And whenever
I heard people talking about bigfoot, I would think they
were crackpots. I enlisted, and I made my way overseas
for the second time in my life. I was born
into an army family, and being a man of tradition,
I followed in their footsteps. And then when the time
was right, I bought an abandoned house on a small
farm five hundred feet from the I can't pronounce this name,
Nishnabotna Nishnabotna River. All I could think about was the
hunting and fishing that I could do out there, But
never once did I consider why the house had been abandoned.
Thirteen years passed without having seen or heard anything out
of the ordinary. At that house, we had horses and
chickens and goats and cats and dogs. It wasn't unusual
for a deer or turkey to come right up to
the house and nose around for food. And when we
left for work in the morning, they would just stand
there and watch us go. They weren't even bothered to
act a freight or run away. After years of peaceful
living on that property, strange things started to happen. Every
day or two, one or two of our chickens would
wind up missing. I put a lock on the door,
but when I would go out to feed them, that
door would be wide open again. I called the police,
but they found nothing and they couldn't help me. Now,
looking back, that should have been my first warning. A
canary in the coal mine type of thing. The backside
of my land was wooded and ran down to the river,
which always gave us good hunting coverage. But that year
the deer were gone. My trap line was repeatedly empty
and set off or moved. I would reset all the traps,
go out the next day and find the same thing,
empty traps that had been set off or moved. By
that time, we were down to three chickens. My neighbor
came around and he asked me if he could hunt
part of my land. Well. I told him sure, and
that we could walk back there and see where he
wanted to go. I had never been to that end
of my life land, which was near the town swamp.
But when we got there, we saw an old feet
hopper lying on its side. The bottom had been taken out,
and it was full of leaves. While we were out there,
we heard what sounded like a distorted bobcat crawl, and
I decided to head back to my place. We ate dinner,
and then we sat around the burn barrel talking about
whatever and drinking some beer. At seven point thirty pm,
we started to hear something like turkeys. The sound caught
us off guard and kind of spooked us. Well. We
laughed it off and my neighbor went home. And the
next morning, though, I found one of my goats dead
with a broken neck. The veterinarian said that maybe the
horse ran over her, but I wasn't convinced of that,
and I drove all the way to the city and
I bought some night owl cameras, and that night I
left my yard light on. When I went out the
next day, one of the horses had blood on her face.
She was scared. I thought man be a code. He
had been arounded that she had run into it. So
then I decided to keep them in the safety of
the barn at night. After that. One of my dogs
was a red healer named Zip. He would go out
and run the game lines occasionally running into a deer turkey.
We walked south from the highway and got into the
tree line, and Zip was being her usual nosey self,
running around and exploring every inch of the earth with
her nose. It was about four point thirty pm. The
sun was going down over the hill to the west
of me. Zip was to my left, and I happened
to glance down at her as the sound of a
crack came from the distance, not from the sound of
twigs or leaves crunching onderr foot, but the sound of
a thick branch being snapped off the side of a tree. Well.
Zip froze and she turned her head in the direction
of the sound, and I followed her gaze, and I
raised my twelve gage, and by the time I took
the safety off, Zip was gone. The grass was three
feet tall, and I could hear her moving through it,
and she stopped one hundred feet or so away from me,
and I heard her coming back at me full speed,
and when she came into view, she looked terrified, and
she ran behind me with her tail behind her legs,
her body shaking, and she had soiled herself. As I
knelt down and tried to calm her. I heard another crack.
Now I looked in the direction of the noise, and
I checked the area around me, and I raised my shotgun.
I was still on one knee, and I looked left
and right ahead of me, but I saw nothing. The
eerie sensation that I wasn't alone was overpowering, and my
army training kicked in. So I moved forward three steps
and I knelt four three more steps and I knelt,
and then I heard it move sixty feet away, and
as I moved I saw it. It was the same
heighth as me, just over six feet, but it was
wider than any man could have been. I didn't smell anything,
and I didn't hear any tree banging or growling like
you hear about. It just turned and looked at me.
It looked right in my eyes and raised its upper lip.
It did not have things. It just had brown or
yellow teeth. And I heard my dog moving and turned
to see her run away, scared as a chicken. And
by the time I looked back, that thing had disappeared
into the thicket. But I knew it wasn't gone, because
I had that sense that its eyes were on me.
I yelled out to it that I was a hunter
and that I was armed, And then I backed up
and moved slowly away, keeping my eyes on the thicket
the whole time. The sun had set by then, and
the only light I had came from the shadowy orange dusk.
I couldn't see my dog, but I heard her running
through the corn fill behind me, and I heard the
thing tailing me, and I decided to take a shortcut
through the corn The shortcut was a bad idea. It
was five hundred yards of not being able to see
anything but the corner around me, all the while hearing
the thing tailing me the entire way. When I got
to the horse pasture, I saw Zip standing with my
other dogs, along with my horses and goat. She was
looking at me and quivering, waiting on me to come
save them or something. It was a little heartbreaking too,
because I knew that no matter the precautions I took,
none of them would be safe. After that, the peaceful
life on that farm that I had gotten used to
turned into a nightmare. Every night I heard that horse
crying and running from something, and within a short time
all the chickens were gone. One of my dogs disappeared,
and the goats vanished too. That same year, in a
town west of me, the local news channel did a
report of a massive bare footprint in the no and
it was a set of tracks that went on for
three miles. I asked some of the people around me
across the river if they were having the same problem.
They just looked at me like I was crazy and
said there was nothing out there but my imagination. I
got in touch with an old man near my house
on the west bank of the river who didn't laugh
my experiences off. We sat down and talked about what happened,
and I asked him what was out there in the woods.
All he said was leave it alone and it won't
bother you. That wasn't even the scary part. He went
on to tell me that I lived out there longer
than anyone had before. At first I assumed he meant
that the other people moved out and went off to
lift somewhere else. But something in his tone told me
that he meant it was impressive that the property had
not killed me yet. I talked to a buddy of
mine at the local law enforcement agency, and he told
me that the house had been owned and abandoned multiple times,
and nobody stayed long. Like I said, I'm a man
of tradition. I followed in the footsteps of the owners
before me and I left that house too. We moved
back to the city and after what I had experienced
out there, I gave up hunting and camping. To all
you non believers out there, I have a warning for you.
There is something out there and it is not friendly.
All right. Thanks for hanging with me on this podcast.
Those were three really good stories, especially the two Bigfoot stories.
Good grief, man, those are two of the best bigfoot
stories that I think I've read in the last year.
There was nothing really violent about them or anything like that.
They were just spooky, spooky stories. And that's what we
do here. We do spooky, creepy, weird stories that are
written to us by real people. Those are real emails
from real people. I appreciate you listening, and we will
see you guys on the next podcast. Thank you.