Speaker 1: I grew up at a time when there were lots
of wild spaces, unused areas that maybe four or five
adults would venture into over the course of a year,
possibly local government folks or state or federal environmental professionals.
Maybe a rancher or a farmer or fisherman or a hunter.
But by and large these areas saw a few humans.
If you are from that era, you know exactly what
I mean. In many ways, at least for kids and teens,
it was a simpler time, even though there were wars
going on. The Civil rights movement was beginning to grow
full steam. There were riots and the sort of mayhem
that we still see on TV and phones today. But
being country kids without social media permeating every aspect of
our life, we were essentially free from much of society's
troubles and free just to be kids. This place is
in the far Midwest, some would call it the near West.
I grew up here in a small town and had
many friends whose parents owned farms or ranches. This was
a time when, even as eight to twelve year olds,
we would ride our bikes miles and miles from home
to places that were interesting in our young minds. And
we had no fear of anything bad happening to us.
In fact, most of our parents would think we were
sick or ill if we were hanging out inside the
house for more than an hour or two. Even when
the weather was bad, we were always out and about
and we would explore, build forks, play hide and seek
as well as fish, and eventually hunt together in these locations.
One place in particular that was a favorite because it
backed up against my friends Terry and Dale's ranch was
on Blueberry Lane. Blueberry Lane was about three and a
half miles long and teed off the local county highway.
Blueberry Lane crossed Silver Creek at about the two mile mark,
and it extended for another mile before dead ending in
a mix of pine and post oak and open grassland,
and that eventually led into another large ranch in state
and federal land that was all forested Near the county
highway in the first mile of Blueberry Lane. My friends
folks would pasture cattle and had a few alfalfa fields
on their ranch, but for the most part it was
open grassland and large pines and oaks. Along Silver Creek
was a gallery forest of trembling aspen, some large old
gnarled pines. Some box elder volunteered mulberry trees, elderberry bushes,
wild roses, occasionally wild crab apples and thorn apples. The
brush was thick unless they would run cattle in there
from time to time and it would get knocked down again.
This was a place when there were still lots of
open spaces, lonely unused areas that for kids our age
was absolutely paradise. Where Blueberry Lane crossed Silver Creek, there
was an old cement bridge with no side railing. We
called it Hodges Bridge, and that spanned the forty foot creek.
I don't know why it was called Hodge's Bridge. It
was just part of the local laura. I guess that's
what we called it, and all the kids knew exactly
what we were talking about when we spoke of it.
I think it was built during the CCC days. For
those in your audience who actually know what that was,
there was also an old stream gauging station in a
twelve by fifteen foot building with a white clapboard siding
and no windows, sitting next to the creek. It was
on a poured concrete subwall that was exposed on the
creek side. There was also an old outhouse with a
four paned French window on the creek side. We always
thought it was funny it was a loo with a view.
The county or some agency would come out and mow
around the small lawn there once or twice a year
to keep the brush down, but like I said, almost
no adults would ever be seen there. The old outhouse
was always a haven for yellow jackets and snakes, so
we gave that a wide berth. I don't ever remember
using it. We would visit this place pretty regularly in
the years between my eighth and fourteenth birthday, mostly in
spring and summer when the creek was really rolling from
the snow melt or the storms. We would take our
bb and pellet guns and eventually twenty two to plink
and target shoote and then shotguns down there in later
years to hunt grouse in the fall. There were huge
roosts of cliff swallows under the bridge too, and I
swear that is where my interest in birds and my
eventual career choice was made at a young age. There
was also a huge sandy cut bank with a National
Geographic Worthy Bank Swallow Colony in it. All that has
now gone from floods, but oh what magic there was
during those formative years. What was odd, and I didn't
realize it until years later, was the stream gauging building.
I think it was the second time we had ventured
down there. We had ridden up to the bridge on
our bikes, intently focusing on the water and the birds,
the frogs, fish, etc. When Dale said would you look
at that? We hardly paid any attention, but he persisted
and we all looked up. On the side out of
the building facing us were huge muddy hand prints. At
the time, we joked that they had been made by
a giant, and they were all around the building. They
were at least twelve inches long from the heel of
the hand to the fingertips. We speculated that it was
some older kids or high schoolers doing some initiation or
playing games, and did not give it another thought. There
was no talk, at least that I remember, about Bigfoot
or Sosquatch in that country. To play along, we went
down every time we were there and got muddy hands
and put our own signature on the white clapboard siding
and the exposed cement. We never really paid that much
attention to it. But over the preceding six or so
years into my adolescence, there would be fresher prints, and
we would draw the outlines of large hands with mud,
including continuing to place our own hand size marks on
the building. It became a rich for us, and that
is how the place became known as the Handhouse. I
became a teenager and we rarely ventured there again, occasionally
for beer parties at night, but we never saw or
heard anything, at least nothing that we thought was scary
or to be concerned about. We also hunted and fished
that entire area, and I don't remember ever feeling like
I was being watched or saw anything like many people describe,
just thereing the occasional bear and other wildlife. But the
last time I was there during those years, I was
eighteen and there were new handprints on the building. Rolled
forward forty five years and I had gone on to
become an environmental professional and worked around the country and
in fact around the world in my early government career
and then consulting business. I had come full circle and
was now working the last few years of my career
for an agency in my home county. It was two
thousand and three and amazingly, I had an assignment to
go out on Blueberry Lane to the old gaging station.
There was a request to inspect it and possibly do
restoration on the building. It was still functional, but it
had been retrofitted many years earlier, and they wanted some
newer equipment installed and wanted to know if the building
was still sound. So there I was, with a young
novice we'll call him Brad at my side, going out
to look at the old place. I regaled Brad with
my childhood's stories and told him about the handhouse and
how it got its name. He eyed me cautiously, thinking
I was laying out a tall tail on him. I
finally got to go inside the small building after all
this time, and was amazed how well it had survived
the years. The timber was still sound, and they had
redone the roof about fifteen years earlier. But on balance,
the old real eight quarter two by six studs were
in great shape and there were little signs of aging.
And to my surprise, even the old outhouse was still
standing and still had yellow jackets and snakes, but it
had been partially grown over with Virginia creeper, wild grapes
and wild roses. They had put a new door on
it at some point, and the four pane French windows
had somehow survived our rock throwing in bb guns and
the generations of kids that had surely come after us.
And Brad asked, so did you ever use this, pointing
at the outhouse, I said, hell, no, too many yellow
jackets and snakes. He chuckled and decided to go use
the bushes. I walked around the building and looked at it,
trying to see if there were any remnants of recent
handprints on the old paint, but I saw none. The
paint on the outside of the building had started to peel,
so we he got a local paint guy to come
out with a small crew and strip it, treat it,
prime it, and repaint it. In three days, it looked
brand new for an eighty plus year old building. The
day it had been painted, Brad decided that he'd like
to stay out there for the night after hearing all
the stories, and it was well, peaceful, magical in some ways.
To my old nostalgic mind, it sort of looked the same.
The bridge was still there, and the creek channel had
shifted a few times at some point, taking that sand
bank where all the bank'swallows were. The trees had changed
a little, with some dying and falling over into the creek,
as well as the shrubs being thicker in places. There
were a few more houses and people out that way now,
but my friend Dale had since taken over the ranch
and his brother Terry had gone on to work in
the movie industry. Their ranch was still the same. The
area had been chained some, but was still a lie
like it was when we were kids. There was more trash. Sadly,
we never left stuff out there, even as young kids.
At worst we would burn our candy and gum wrappers
and potato chip bags or our bait curtons. We never
left the glass pop bottles eventually beer out there. We
always took that stuff back home. Why trash a place
where you like to be Anyway, I went home that
night and I told Brad i'd be out early, about
five thirty am that next morning to pick him up,
and I'd bring my fly rod too. We would see
if we could put a limit of rainbows in Brookies.
Before we got on the clock, he had brought a
sleeping bag and some extra sandwiches and water for his
evening meal, and I told him some good places to
go to try fishing, as he'd also brought his fly
rod after seeing some good sized trout the previous two days.
And then I left and I wished him a good evening.
I rolled out of bed at four thirty am the
next morning. It was a half hour drive to Blueberry Lane.
I turned down the lane in the early dim light
and had my window down, listening to the birds sing
their morning sonnets. I got about a half mile down
the road, and even in the dim light, I could
see a figure running down the road towards me. As
I got closer, it was Brad. He was in his
cross trainers and shorts and no shirt. He was wild
eyed and stuttering. He kept yelling, get me out of here,
Get me out of here. They came back, man, they
came back. I poured him some coffee from my thermos
and turned on the heater in the truck. He was
a complete mess. I said, calm down, kid, what are
you talking about? Who came back? Were there people down
there bucking you last night? I started to get mad.
It seemed like a symptom of our society today. People people.
Brad said, yeah, if you want to call them people,
I'd call them effing monsters. Man. They were huge, Harry,
effing monsters, bigfoot, sisquatch, whatever. Man. They were huge and pissed.
I could not understand what the kid was talking about.
This had to be a prank. I said, are you
okay with driving back down there? I want to see
what happened. I've got my forty five ride here under
the seat if we have any trouble, and he instantly
fired back, is it loaded? I looked at him and said, yes,
What good is a gun if it isn't loaded? And
he said okay, But I don't want to hang there, man,
And if you don't mind, I'm staying in the truck.
I said okay, wondering what this kid had been smoking.
I then proceeded to slowly drive almost creek down to
the handhouse and let him unload whatever was eating him.
The next five minutes, Brad relayed what had happened. He
said he heard noises and then grunting and growling outside
the building at about two thirty am. He just thought
it was a bear or maybe even some cows. He
had slept with the door closed to keep out the bugs,
and then at about three thirty am, it all started rustling,
heavy breathing, and chatter, and then hard slaps on the
outside of the building. This continued periodically for an hour
or more until he couldn't take it any longer. He
decided to go out and confront whoever this was. He said.
He started yelling at the people from inside the building
and then ran outside with his flashlight. He said that
he heard crashing in the brush and woods, and then
saw an immense figure about twenty yards away walking across
the bridge in the dim moonlight. He yelled again and
it growled or yelled back at him, and then it
threw a stone in his direction. He heard another one closer,
and in his panic state, he said, it seemed as
if he would get cut off from the handhouse. He
had one option, the outhouse. He fled into the outhouse
and slammed the door. He said within seconds he heard
them outside and they started banging on the outhouse and
shaking it, growling and chattering. He said that he was
in there for maybe ten minutes and then made the
mistake of looking up at the French paned window. There,
he said, staring back at him was a monster. Its breath,
briefly fogging the glass as it exhaled. He said he
remembered things fading to black and falling, and thinks he
passed out from fear. In his total panic, he did
not realize the shaking had disrupted the jackets and they
had begun to attack him and woke him up by
stinging him. It gets cold here even in the summer,
so they were not fully charged, but they had done
some damage. He said. He came to and bolted out
of the outhouse, screaming at the top of his lungs,
and had run up Blueberry Lane in his shorts where
I had met him. Now, in the early light, I
could see the swollen stings on his face, in his back,
and his legs, probably thirty or more angry red growing welts.
He was a mess. As I pulled up to the handhouse,
I rolled down my window to listen. I heard nothing.
Brad said, please close the windows. Man, just grab my
stuff and let's get out of here. I don't want
to be here. Man, you got that, and then uttered
a lengthy string of colorful metaphors. I rolled up the
window and got out with my pistol, and then I
walked to steps and I stopped. My mouth dropped. There
was the hand house covered in large, twelve to fourteen
inch muddy handprints, just as I had seen it over
forty years earlier. I slowly walked around the building, and
it was truly covered. There were kids, pranksters, bigfoot, whatever,
claiming the newly painted building, like tagging it with graffiti.
Were they mad at Brad for staying the night. I
didn't even believe in these things, and here the evidence
was again staring me in the face. I took Brad's
things to the truck and he said let's go. I said,
hang on for a second. I was curious now, and
I walked back out onto the bridge. I had been
in this place over two hundred times in my youth
and only saw the handprints, and never thought for a
second something larger than life had created them. I stood
there for probably five minutes, and I could hear Brad
demanding that we leave. The water was making its usual sounds,
the birds were doing their early morning calls. It was,
by all accounts, another gorgeous morning. Nothing seemed abnormal. I
took one step back towards the truck and I heard
a guttural growl over the sound of the creek on
the far side. I stopped, I turned back, and then
one of the most hair raising howls, screams, whatever you
want to call it, I have ever heard in my
life blasted from the same area. It literally shook me
with its force. Brad went absolutely nuts. I thought he
was going to jump out and start running again. I
turned and I was in the truck and spinning the
tire so fast I don't even remember running. I drove
up Blueberry Lane without saying a word, my own mind
spinning and trying to get my head around what had
just happened. We returned to the office and Brad asked
me to drive him over to his apartment. I said nothing,
and I drove him there, and then I said, I'll
see you back at work. He just gave me an odd,
blank look. I drove back to work and thought about
calling Dale. I went to the local diner and had
a good cup of coffee and tried to logically think
through the events of the day. That was not a prankster,
and it was not a recording. I've done a bunch
of playback recordings in my work, and there's always a
fake quality and bleed to the audio. Was it a bigfoot?
As a professional biologist, I'm not sure what to say.
What else has a hand that size with an opposable thumb.
It would make a noise that loud. I have never
seen one of these creatures. I've talked to two people,
not including Brad, who have they seem credible. One was
another professional biologist. I drove back to the office and
opened by email. There was an email from Brad. He
had resigned. I guess I should not have been surprised.
In the following two years, I made trips out there
with Dale and we'd see new hand prints, and he
said he always knew that they were there, even when
we were kids. I said, why the hell didn't you
say anything? He said his dad and his grandpa had
told him and Terry not to say anything. If you
don't bother them, then they won't bother you. I said,
even with the hunting and fishing and shooting, He said
he figured that they understood that we weren't trying to
hurt them, and they just watched us from a distance,
and they kind of liked kids. I guess maybe they
thought we were funny or interesting. And every now and
then they would leave their mark on the Handhouse. We
never saw any tracks. I always thought that was as
odd as the hand Prince. We saw the handprints, but
not the other. Maybe they always used the bridge. I
am long since retired now and still have a hard
time wrapping the professional side of me around this event.
Since this all came together, I've actually wanted to lay
eyes on one of these creatures, and maybe someday before
I'm too old, they will give me that opportunity. And
just for your information, the Handhouse is still there.