Speaker 1: In the late nineteen sixties, my dad purchased twenty acres
of land along the southern coast of Maine, several miles
from any town or our closest neighbors. It was near
a small state park along the Kennebec River, and that
is where I grew up. From the age of three,
I spent a lot of time wandering the deer trails
and jeep trails, and the paths that cut through the
woods surrounding our property, and the houses down the road
that were closer to the state park. Sometimes we would
see as many as twenty deer in our backyard. One
late autumn afternoon in nineteen seventy eight, I went out
back and followed a long jeep trail to a huge
tree that was so tall we could see it from
our backyard. Winter was closing in and I knew it
would soon be too cold to be out climbing trees,
but I wanted one more chance to climb my favorite tree.
I made my way up the jeep trail behind our house,
through a densely forested woods to a deer trail I
knew would take me to the spot, and as I
walked along, I became aware of the sound of my
own breathing. The woods had become unusually quiet and still
in the late afternoon. I approached the tree and began
to climb. I was about halfway up when an uncomfortable
feeling came over me. I felt exposed and vulnerable. It
was a big tree, and even halfway I was pretty
high up, so I looked around from one side to
the other. I couldn't see anything in the light of
the approaching dust, but I could not shake the feeling
that I was being watched. No one lived close enough
to be trespassing on our property, nor had I ever
seen strangers in our woods before. Even so I felt
so uncomfortable that I abandoned my climb and I started
to walk back to the jeep trail. Not far down
the trail, I began to hear something rustling in the
leaves and the dense tree cover beside me. I stopped
to listen, but as soon as I did, it stopped too.
It started walking again, and this time a little faster,
and the leaves began to rustle again. I stopped three
or four times, and each time the sound stopped when
I did, and started again when I started. By now
I was completely unnerved at the time. My only thought was,
what is someone doing up here? I got so scared
that once I got halfway down the trail and I ran.
I ran as fast as I could until I hit
the opening into our back lawn where our garden was planted,
and I was within sight of the house. It didn't
occur to me at the time that the eerie silence,
the spooky feeling of being watched, and the sound of
some unseen something escorting me out of the woods might
be something other than my overactive imagination. Two or three
years later, I discovered a tepee type structure on the
edge of the woods near that same big tree. I
assumed my brothers had built it, but when I asked
them about it, they had no idea what it was.
They thought it looked cool, but figured it was the
work of someone else. Since the woods and brush were
too dense to walk through in that spot, no one
ever pursued it. I never told anyone about the first incident,
and before long I was too busy climbing trees and
exploring the woods again. Now I grew up, and I
eventually moved away. Only recently has it occurred to me
that it might have been something else, that there might
really be something out there. Now I think I might
have interrupted something while it was honeting and they were
letting me know they wanted me out of the way.
I never actually saw anything, but I certainly felt it
and I heard it. That was enough for me, and
I'm glad I trusted my instincts and promptly left the area.
I wish we still own the property. Knowing what I
know now, I'd love to go back and explore a little.
The whole area has been built up quite a bit
since then. I've heard of a few sightings a few
miles west of where our house was, and it makes
me wonder. I'm sixty five years old and I grew
up on a large farm in the corner of northwest Georgia,
which is within spitting distance of Chattanooga. I can see
Lookout Mountain from my childhood bedroom, and I have two
older brothers. One is thirteen years my senior and the
next one is seven years older than me. I was
very much a tomboy as a kid, running through the
woods and fields of our three hundred acre farm. Our
nearest neighbor was a mile away. Daddy raised beef, cattle
and pigs, and we grew tomatoes and beans for sale
at the farmers' markets and cheddingt in Atlna. Every Sunday
afternoon we'd round up whichever cows we had pre selected
to be taken to the sale the following day. This
was one of my favorite memories because it meant time
in the fields and woods, and it was searching for
cows and calves, and they always seemed to know that
they were on the market list, and therefore they would
run away. I say all this just to give you
a bit of context to my Bigfoot story. Growing up
in the late sixties in the early seventies, I had
never heard of bigfoot. I never heard anyone talk of
any wood boogers or the likes in the area. We
had deer and bobcats, and the occasional black bear and
an escaped hog that had gone feral, but nothing more
exotic than that. I had no fear at all of
anything in our expanse of pine and oak forest around
the farm. Our house sat in a small clearing next
to five cleared acres behind our house and a few
more cleared for pig pens and pig barns and cattle
bars and feed lots. Just behind our house was a
few acres of grazing, which was surrounded on three sides
by piny woods. The barns were two hundred yards from
the house. One night in late spring of nineteen sixty seven,
we had several hogs who were farrowing. It was always
at night, it seems, so. My mom and dad and
my brother were at the pig barn tending to the pigs.
My older brother was already away at college. Most of
the time, I'd be right in the midst of the pigs,
because there's nothing cuter than a newborn piglet, in my opinion.
For whatever reason, on this night, I'd been left to
sleep in my bedroom while the others were at the
pig barn. My room had one window which was fairly
low to the ground and it went nearly to the ceiling.
It also had a door to the front porch, which
in warm weather I kept open along with the window
to catch whatever breeze I could. Of course, we didn't
have air conditioning, but on this night I was awakened
by footsteps on the porch, and I looked out through
the screen door, expecting to see one or more of
my family coming back from the pig barns. But what
I saw instead was a big shadow. It was a
huge black shadow standing on the porch five feet or
so from my screen door. It was facing me, but
in the darkness, I couldn't make out any features or details,
just the outline of a hulking body that was so
tall it had to hunch over to fit on the porch.
The ceilings were eight foot tall. There it stood there,
silent except for its loud, moist breathing, which reminded me
of a horse after a long run. I wasn't frightened.
I was just confused. What was this thing? Am I
seeing it? Or am I still asleep and dreaming. I
could hear the squealing of pigs in the distance, so
I knew I was awake. Just as I consider getting
up out of bed to shut the lock on the
wooden door, the shadow took a step off the porch
and I saw it pass by my open window and
head around to the back of the house well. I
jumped up, and I shut and locked the door, and
I pulled down the glass panes of the window. I
thought about running to my parents, but what would I
tell them. So I stayed in my room until they
finally returned, trying to make sense of what I had seen.
I never spoke to them about it, because it would
seem foolish in my family, which tolerated little foolishness, so
I kept the whole story to myself. The following summer,
or maybe the summer after that, my brother got a
copy of a magazine called Field and Stream in the mail,
and on the cover was a still photo of the
Bigfoot from the Patterson Gimlin film. Well. I was transfixed.
There was the shadow that I had seen on my
porch that spring night. This was a real thing, a
true life monster. Heart raced as I tried to put
the pieces together. Could this thing live in our own
piney woods? Surely not? I thought this Bigfoot lived way
out west, not here in Georgia. Over the next few weeks,
I studied the dense pine forest just behind our house,
which stretched for hundreds of acres. My eyes were always
drawn to that tree line, wondering if I might catch
a glimpse one day of what I had seen on
the porch. I never heard it's called, I never smelled it,
never had a rock thrown at me. I wasn't afraid.
I was intrigued. I wondered if it was lonely like
I was. Sometimes I even wondered if it had come
looking for someone or something to relieve some of that loneliness.
I know that sounds crazy. Two cowboys in California had
just discovered a monster in the wilderness, and I was
concerned it might be lonely. Well, I never saw it again,
but I did become a psychologist, maybe out of that
childhood connection to helping the lonely, or maybe not. In
any case, I've always been fascinated with other people's experiences
with Bigfoot, and I truly appreciate the form that you
provide for them to share their stories with the rest
of us. For several years, we lived out in the
country where nothing much ever happened. My life was and
is typical of most people. Our property begins at the
bottom of a hill, with our house on the opposite
end atop of bluff, and the driveway is very steep
and difficult to get up in bad weather. I used
to work with mentally and physically handicapped adults in a classroom.
There was one individual that had several disabilities, and he
took a liking to me. He had surgery that resulted
in complications, and sadly, he passed away the following day.
A few weeks after that, I started noticing some sounds
late at night when I was in the office. I
didn't think anything about it because we lived in the
country and there are lots of sounds that make no sense.
And one night, while I was surfing the net, I
turned around and saw what looked like a see through,
floating white mass with long eyes and a droopy mouth.
It was completely transparent, but it floated right near the door,
and it wasn't moving. Needless to say, it scared me
a bunch. Actually, I thought I had fallen asleep and
I was dreaming. These occurrences started happening more and more
as the weeks went by, and I started talking to
this ghost, but I never got any reply or outward response.
After several weeks, I kept racking my brain trying to
figure out why I was seeing this translucent image more
and more, and then it finally hit me. It was
the ethereal image of this man from my classroom who
had passed away. There was a strange incident that involved
him and me before he died. One day in the classroom,
just weeks before his demise, he walked up behind me
and patted my back. It was like some creepy ripples
spread through my body, and it gave me goosebumps. I
think he actually had physically passed something to me. I
kept talking to this ghostly image that had first appeared
in my office. I directed it to go home. Maybe
this being was waiting for me to recognize it as
my former student and that it was now okay to
pass on to the other side. It never came back again,
but things were soon becoming more interesting. Two weeks later,
I started seeing a progression of images and ghosts going
from my son's room on the north side of a
house to my bedroom, where my now ex was sleeping.
There were all kinds of visuals streaming past. One looked
like a gypsy. The man short and had a typical
hat of the nineteenth century and a heavy wool suit.
And all these images were in gray tones with no
color at all. One night, I got up to go
to the bathroom, and afterward I walked into the living
room to get a drink. There was a white cloud
hovering above a chair. Maybe logic would determine that it
was a reflection through the window, but we always closed
all the curtains before we went to bed. I walked
over and placed my hands around it, and the orb
felt cold and clammy. I was able to press my
hands into something that seemed to be the consistency of
a dense fog. There was a distinct temperature difference around
that chair. One evening, my son came out of his
bedroom and walked down the hallway to the family room,
and he stopped and stared at me for a couple
of minutes. He asked how I got there. He claimed
that he just saw me back in the office sitting
at the well. I'd been in the family room for
well over an hour. We kept hearing bells from somewhere
in the house, and cans would fall off the shelf.
Our little Yorkshire terrier would go into the kitchen and
start growling and barking for no reason. And we coexisted
for several years with these strange spirits. Not everyone was
entertained by these so called phantoms. Some visitors to our house, well,
they never came back. They always felt uneasy. The house
was two years old when we bought it, and the
previous owners were more than happy to move out. They
chose to build another place rather than to tolerate all
the unearthly occupants they never invited to share their living
space in the first place. I think the bluff that
we were living on top of was an Indian burial ground,
and the spirits were coming through me because of a
man who touched my back and sent chills through my body.
He knew he was not long for this world, and
he gave me a part of him to help him
pass on to get to as much needed eternal rest.
Robert A. Baker, a well known skeptic, an author, and
investigator of paranormal events, was fond of saying there are
no haunted places, only haunted people. Anyone who has ever
had a paranormal experience would probably disagree with him, But
I wonder if it's possible that his assertion contains a
grain of truth. Why is it that some residents of
a supposed haunted house can have dozens of paranormal experience
while others living in the same home notice nothing unusual.
It is as simple as varying levels of sensitivity to energy,
which many people believe spirits to be and that same
spiritual energy and intelligence are the actual souls of once
living people. In recent years, electronic equipment can measure environmental
changes such as abnormally high levels of electromagnetic energy, changes
in temperature and barometric pressure, and other common signs of
paranormal activity are becoming popular tools for investigators. Readings from
these machines can help confirm and verify impressions of people
who are experiencing unusual activity. We moved out of that
house a few months later, and since that time, neither
my son nor have I witnessed another ghost. A person
sees things out of the corner of their eyes, but
nothing as real as the experiences like we had. It
was a house and not a home. It was a
great location, but I knew there was something not right
from the time we first saw it, and now we
know what that was.