Speaker 1: I started coon hunting with hounds about twenty five years ago.
I used to hunt in a lot of places I
had never been to during the daylight. I used to
hunt by myself, but sometimes I would ride four wheelers
with a couple of old men who couldn't get around
too good anymore. Occasionally I would have to leave them
and walk to the dogs if we couldn't get the
four wheelers to the tree. On this particular night, the
dogs treed in an area we didn't usually wind up in.
We don't have vast tracks of wilderness down here, but
this place is about two miles from any road, though
the railroad tracks do run through it. At the time
this happened, logging had just started, so most of this
area was still covered in big hardwood timber that's all
gone now. Me and the old boys went to get
the dogs, and in the process I got us turned around.
It was summertime and most of the slews were almost dry.
They were just heavy and thick mud. I found one
that was heading in the directions that I wanted to go,
so I took it. Almost immediately. I noticed a set
of large barefoot tracks that had been made not too
long ago. Sunk deep into the ground. I can't say
one hundred percent for sure that Bigfoot made them, but
who would be walking barefoot in a cottonmouth infested river bottom.
After a little while, I knew where I was, and
I stayed in the old slow bed. We followed the
tracks right up to the gas line that ran through
the bottoms, which is about seventy five yards wide. The
tracks didn't lead into the gas line, which told me
that whatever had made them had left the slow bed
and stayed in the woods. When we made it back
to the truck, I asked one of the old boys
what he thought of the tracks. He said, it was
just some dope d during around. I said the hell
it was, They replied, now, don't you go start bogger
hunting on me. Well, I never mentioned it again. I
still hunt and trap in that area, and I haven't
seen anything else. But I've been hunting a few times
when what I'll describe is a feeling of dread would
come over me. Both times I tailed it out of
there and I left. So I don't know if it
was my imagination or what. I have some friends who
used to hunt some hardwood over by the river. One
day one of them asked me if I'd ever heard
crows call after dark. I said I hadn't ever heard that.
He said every time they turned their dogs loose, when
they would strike and start working in a track, the
crows would start calling back and forth, pitch black dark.
Here in Arkansas, timber is a big deal. I can
tell you lots of coon hunters have had encounters, but
none of them would ever admit to it. I've known
guys who refuse to go coon hunting alone. They'll never
say why, but I have a good idea why they
don't go. This is a horned house story, and it's
pretty good. My mother's family has had a farm for
over two hundred years. In the original will, it states
that the property can be added to, but it cannot
be sold. It has passed from family member to family
member and can only go to those in my mother's bloodline.
The house was built in eighteen sixty. It's a brick
structure and it has three stories. Through the front door
is a large entry way in an oak stairway, and
past that as a long haul with rooms on each
side and a kitchen at the end. The second floor
is full of bedrooms and The third floor used to
be an old ballroom. Every room has a fireplace, though
over the years, as electricity and farnesses and plumbing were installed,
they'd been blocked off with decorative iron plates. There's a
wrap around porch and a large summer kitchen on the
back of the house. Six spirits still call this beautiful
historical house home, and with the exception of two of them,
they are all relatives. Of the two that are not.
One was a wagon accident survivor and brought to the
house where he died, and the other was a visitor
who had suddenly dropped dead from what was suspected to
be a heart attack. One of the spirits in this
house is my maternal grandfather, and although Grandpa chewed tobacco,
he did not like smoking. He especially disliked it when
women smoked. He was old fashioned that way. My mother,
who used to smoke even as an adult, would never
smoke in front of him, and never did until the
day he died in this house. After he passed away,
she decided to keep the place rather than pass a
along to another relative. Since she and my dad did
not have any sons, it was mostly me and my mother,
My dad and a couple of hired hands who worked
it and kept it in shape. My sisters were not
interested in staying at the house and could not wait
until they could leave and move to town. Two thousand
and five, my dad passed away. My oldest sister decided
to take mom to her house for a few days,
and my two younger sisters were all staying with friends,
so that left me alone. Now, I've never been afraid
to stay there by myself, even to this day, but
I decided to call some friends to come and maybe
play cards and watch movies with me. That night, four
of us were sitting around the kitchen table, and at
that time we all smoked. We were playing cards, talking
and smoking when suddenly the cigarette was slapped out of
my hand by something unseen. Not a second later, across
the table, my friend's cigarette went flying from her hand too,
and an ashtray flew off the table. My friends were
completely stunned, and the look on their faces was one
of horror. I jumped up, picked up cigarettes, and I
put them in the sink, while my friend screamed and
ran out the door. My friend, who had her cigarette
slapped away, had a red mark on her cheek. She
said that she felt the hand slap her. She was
in hysterics. I got her to calm down and told
her that we could play cards in the summer kitchen,
but they wanted nothing to do with that, and they
got in their cars and left. I walked back into
the house and said, loudie, thanks like grandpa. I swear
I heard him laughing. And to this day, no one
has smoked in this house since. And when those same
friends stopped by, it's only during the daytime, and they
refused to come inside. My wife and I started spending
the weekends with her father after her mother passed away.
My wife had told me in the past that she
had experiences with bigfoot on her parents' property, but I
told her that she was full of it. But the
more time we spent there, the more I started talking
to the locals, and it was apparently common knowledge that
a family of bigfoot was living in the woods, and
it was a hush hush subject. At night, I sit
outside on the back porch and listened to the sounds
of the woods. Between the frogs and the toads and
crickets and other wildlife, it's pretty noisy. I noticed that
every night around nine thirty, I hear what sounds like
a drum roll on the trees, followed by a series
of tree knockings that comes in threes. As soon as
the knocking comes, the wildlife goes quiet. It's too quiet.
I've heard howling and screaming, and one night, right on
the other side of the tree line, I heard a
whooping sound and multiple other strains vocalizations. I became curious
about this because I always listened to your stories. I
wanted to see a bigfoot. So one weekend, my friend
Richie and I decided to go camping and see what
we could find. And as soon as we got into
the woods, we noticed tree brakes wooden structures, which excited us.
We set up our camp and decided to explore. We
followed the directions that the tree breaks pointed to, and
it led us deep into the woods, farther than I
had ever been. Eventually we came across the fallen tree
with a bundle of jagged stems that were about two
foot long. They were all equal in length, and they
were lying neatly pointing to the left. There were no
people out there, so who would put the stems there?
We went in the direction they pointed, and we ended
up in a ravine with a stream running through it.
The next sign we found was a big X. Now
I don't know what this means, but that's where we
found the tracks. They were almost human, measuring thirteen inches.
And as soon as we found the tracks, we started
hearing crunching in the earth and the branches breaking. We
didn't see what was making the sound, but it sounded big.
We picked up our pace, chopping through the thick vegetation
with our machetes, and eventually we found our camp and
everything was good, but we felt like we were being watched.
Forty yards away, we noticed something crouched down in the
bushes and it was watching us, and we pretended not
to notice it. Nighttime came and we heard walking in
the woods around the perimeter of our camp from four
different positions, and then we heard a loud whoop followed
by a tree knock. It was too close for comfort.
I turned on my night vision binoculars and I scanned
the area and I noticed something was peaking around a
tree at me. It would look and hide, and then
look and hide. This went on for an hour and
then it was gone all night. We heard by Peter
footsteps all around our camp. As you can guess, we
didn't sleep that night, and when the sun came up,
everything was normal again, and we got even more curious.
We went to the tree where the thing had been
watching us and found footprints just like the ones we
saw the day before. There was a little hole where
it looked like it was digging for some reason, but
we didn't know why. We jumped into our hammocks when
it got dark, and we waited, and once again, footsteps
were all around our camp. And then I heard a
rabbit scream. I thought maybe an owl had gotten it,
so I shrugged it off. And then around three thirty am,
I heard footsteps in the camp and then I heard
the sound of someone urinating. It was the longest pea
I'd ever heard. Richie, is that you? I whispered no reply,
so I asked a little louder, and I heard him
move into his sleeping bag. He was silent and frozen
in fear. I turned my night vision on to see
what scared him, and I couldn't believe my eyes. There
were five of them right there in our camp, less
than twenty feet away from us. A female was lying
on the ground eating the giant millipedes that infested the
woods there, and the smaller one was crouched down next
to her, And on the hill were three big males,
one of whom was holding a rabbit by its head.
One of the males saw me looking at them and
made a come on motion with his arm, as if
he was rushing the female to leave. I turned around
in my hammock, and I hoped that they would not
kill us. They hung around the camp until sun came up.
I stayed in fear all night. Richie crapped on himself.
I'm going to go back again and offer them some
food to see if they're peace or not. I know
I'm taking a chance in doing this, but I'm a
thrill seeker. I served six years in the seventh Special Forces,
in three and a half years in Afghanistan. I've never
felt the sensation I felt in those woods, not even
in a firefight. I have to go back, oh man.
I think it's a pretty good conclusion that they're not
They're not aggressive or violent. They were right there besides you,
and they didn't do anything to you. I hear you.
If you want to go back, go back. If You're
a thrill seeker and adrenaline junkie, and if that was
more excitement than an actual firefight and combat, dude, you
have a high threshold for excitement. But I thought this
was a great story. And I know it may sound strange,
but there are you know, there's only about twenty percent
of the stories I get where people actually see them
have an encounter, a visual encounter. It's like they're within
eyesight and they can see. So's It's very interesting. It's
a unique story, and I appreciate the writer for sending it.
This story was told to me in a smoky little
bar in Nashville, Tennessee, by an old man. His name
was Samuel, and he appreciated the beer that I bought him.
I could tell by his old, worn hat and tattered
flannel shirt scuffed up shoes that he was barely getting by.
I left him sitting at the bar and found a
table in the back. I was hungry and I wanted
to get something to eat, maybe a burger, since there
weren't a lot of choices in that type of place.
The waitress soon came over to take my order. She
was a portly but pleasant woman with a great smile.
Before I ordered, I asked her what the story was
on the old gent sitting at the bar. She told
me that Samuel was a once a month regular, coming
in a few days after he had gotten a Social
Security check and had paid his bills. She explained that
he lived in a rooming house up the road a
piece and didn't have a pot to piss in. When
Samuel came in each month, he would only order one
beer and snack on the free peanuts if they were
out on the bar. Ill ordered some burgers and fries
and another beer. Now she was turning to walk away,
I asked her to get Samuel whatever he wanted to
eat and another beer. She smiled and then turned and
went to the bar, where she talked softly to the
old man. After she left to go to the kitchen,
Samuel got off his stool and walked back to my
table to thank me again. I told him it was
no problem, and I asked him to join me. He
nodded and smiled. I noticed that he had a sparkle
in his eyes, unlike most his age. My guess was
that he was as hungry as I was, because we
both sat eating in silence. After whard. We sipped on
our beers, and I told him that my name was
Jim and that I was from Louisville. I had just
returned from Florida after working six months on hurricane damaged houses.
Samuel told me that he was born and raised in
the hills of North Carolina until he was twenty one.
He said that he would love those mountains until his
last breath. The most beautiful wild place on earth, he said.
I had to ask him, if he loved it so much,
why he left off to war. Maybe no work there.
His posture changed. He bowed his head slightly and slowly
shook it. No. I saw his new demeanor, and I
knew I should have left the subject alone, but I
didn't ask him why. Samuel laid his hands down on
the table to stop them from shaking. As he began
to speak. He said he had not told anyone the
reason he left, but since he was old now and
I had been kind to him, he would share a
story with me. His words came softly, well thought out.
I could tell that there was something that weighed deeply
on his mind, if not also in his heart. His
family had a farm at the bottom of the hollow,
about ten miles out of Greenville. There were three kids.
They were all boys who worked alongside mom and pop
in the fields and gardens and with the livestock. They
never had a lot, but they didn't know it. They
hardly ever missed church or twice a month visit to
their grandparents several ridges over. They hunted and fished and
trapped to help put food on the table. Jobs were
scarce back then, so when a neighbor boy from two
hollows over told Samuel that an out of town logging
company was hiring, he was all for it. So he
told his family of his plans, and he promised to
send money if they hired him. He was hired on
and jumped onto the old flatbed truck with a couple
of other fellas. He was no experienced logger, but he
was good with firearms. One day, the foreman was target
practicing with his twelve gauge double barrel he had. Samuel
tossed short sticks in the air as far as he could,
and then he tried to blow them apart. The foreman
caught Samuel with his head turned slightly snickering, and raised
his voice and asked him if he thought he could
do better. The foreman reloaded handed Samuel the gun after
five blown apart sticks. He had had enough of Samuel
not missing, and he told him to be at his
office in the morning, that he had another job waiting
for him, because he was definitely not a logger. It
turned out that the new job was as deputy for
the company, essentially providing armed security when needed. Samuel was
happy with the new position, but he was also gullible.
He found himself, along with other armed deputies, assisting the
bosses with the removal of folks from the mountains who
refused to move, even though the company held the deeds
to their land. Word had a way of soaring through
the ridges and hollows like a swift winged sparrow, and
people quit talking to Samuel. His own family asked him
to not return to the farm. If he saw someone
he knew, they would cross to the other side of
the road. It was shunning mountain style. Way up in
the mountains. In a very secluded hollow about five miles
from his parents lived the Praders. The clan was run
by an elderly woman known as Mammy Prader. There were
no roads to their cabin only mule trails. People guessed
that there were fourteen or more of them living in
that one big cabin that hardly came down off the
mountain except to get things that they could not make
or hunt things like cloth and salt and snuff for
old Mammy. The Praders had owned those eighteen hundred acres
since before the Civil War, was uncut forest with trees
so tall, some six or seven feet through the trunks.
It was the boss's third attempt to evict them. The
last two attempts ended with deputies taking fire from all directions,
but that day the Boss came with a big crew.
They had an ace in the hole. Riding in front
on the mule with the deputy was a six year
old girl in a plain flower sack dress. Jenny Prater
had been kidnapped from the ant that she was staying
with for a few days, right out of the front yard,
and Jenny was Mammy's great grandchild. This bothered Samuel using
a child as leverage, but the company was all that
he had then and speaking up about it could cost
him his job. He and his team rode their mules
right up to the front porch of the cabin. The
whole family was either sitting on the steps and wooden
barrels or stumps. Samuel counted twelve people that he could
see nodding, including Mammy, who sat in a big homemade
rocking chair on the front porch. The boss pulled up
some papers and waved them in front of the old lady.
He told her this was company land now and that
they had to leave. He reached over and rubbed little
Jenny's head. She began to cry. Piercing anger shot from
the old lady's eyes. She told the boss that they
would leave, but he had to let them pray together
once more. He told her to have at it, but
don't be all damn day, he said. Before they prayed,
he had the deputies collect the prader's guns and put
them in a pile. The odd thing was there was
no resistance. Some were even smiling. Some of them helped
Mammy off the porch, and all of them stood in
a half circle in unison. They tilted their heads back
and the most god awful, strange cry came out of
their mouths. It was a high pitched noise made using
their tongue. It was almost a fast paced chant, and
as quickly as it started it ended. They all sat down,
each of them smiling. Out of nowhere, a pumpkin sized
boulder flew into the boss's mule, and then another crashed
through the tree tops and hit the officer on the
far right. Samuel couldn't shoot, couldn't see anything in the
dark forest. A mule braid as two large hairy arms
twisted its head and broke its neck. Shots rang out
from the bosses and deputies, but to no effect. Huge
hairy beasts were everywhere, ripping apart men and mules. Samuel
turned to look at his boss and watched as a
hairy ape beast wrapped its hues hands around his neck,
squeezing his head. Fell to the ground, and Samuel vomited
onto the bloody earth. Samuel's turn came. He saw a
beast reaching for him that stopped in its tracks, growl,
and then there were clicking noises. It was coming from
Old Mammy. The yard was soaked with blood. Everyone was dead,
man and mule. The family had moved to the porch,
and Samuel counted eleven creatures as they started carrying or
dragging body parts back into the deep woods. Mammy Praterer
stood up and told Samuel that he was a token.
They always had to leave a token. He was to
leave that country and never return or speak of what
had happened. Samuel had tears in his eyes by the
time he finished his story. I sat there for a time,
silent and nodding. I wasn't sure what to say, but
I didn't dare be respectful toward him. After a while,
I thanked him for his company, and I stood up
and shook his hand and left him fifty dollars. I
couldn't drive fast enough to get back home to Louisville.
I'm not sure if I believed a story or not,
but that night, and for many nights after, I had
nightmares about it.