Speaker 1: My name is Kenneth and I live in an area
called Arcla, tex It's where the Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas
state lines meet. I grew up in Texarkana back in
the nineteen sixties, and my family and I love to
go camping in the river bottoms of Little River, Arkansas
in Little River County. I reported this event several years
ago to other reporting agencies or organizations. I went dormant
afterwards due to the ridicule and other family members recanting
from what we experienced this night, So I'm the only
one still holding on to the actual events that took
place in August of nineteen sixty nine when we encountered
a white bigfoot. I was twelve years old when we
had our first encounter on a Friday afternoon at Cottonwood Shoals.
My family and I were excited about going on a
weekend camping trip. My brothers and I got the family
truckloaded with all our gear and when my father got
home from work, there would be no delay in getting
to the woods. As we were leaving, a family member
who lives a couple of houses down stepped out to
the curb and she waved us down. She was my
aunt's mother in law, and she asked us not to
go camping at Cottonwood Shoals. She said that her and
her husband were there a couple of weeks ago and
saw a hairy man peering at them from behind some
brush while she was fishing, and it scared the hell
out of her. She said she had run to get
her husband, who was fishing, and she told him what
had happened. Well, he called her a crazy old one.
Oh man, what a mistake. He called her a crazy
old woman, and then he took her home. My father
told her that we would keep a lookout for this monster,
and that she shouldn't worry about us. I'll be honest,
we were all laughing as we drove away. We don't
laugh anymore. I'm about to tell you why. We arrived
in time to set up camp and have supper. My
three older brothers got their fishing gear and they went
to get a night in of catfishing. It was getting
dark when my mother and younger sister and two younger
brothers crawled into the tent. They were ready to turn
in for the night. My father enjoyed sitting by the
campfire drinking beer and listening to country music on the radio.
I wasn't ready for bed, so I decided to take
a short walk down the road. The moon was bright
enough so that I could see without a flashlight, and
I hadn't walked far from the camp site, and the
hare stood up on the back of my neck. I
felt a current of wind whiz by me. Something had
been thrown at me, and I turned around. I didn't
see anyone. For whatever reason, the woman's story about seeing
the hairy man came to mind, so I ran straight
back to camp. My father asked what had me in
a hurry, and I blew it off, saying that I
was just tired and ready for bed. Once in the tent,
I noticed our dog was acting weird. He was alert
and staring at the wall like it knew something was
out there. Well, I betted down and we slept through
an uneventful night. Saturday was the big day for swimming
and fishing and exploring the area. I was down the
road where my brothers had been catfishing the night before
and had had the place to myself. Behind me across
the road were some pea gravel piles placed there by
the county from that area, I heard noises like weird sounds.
I looked around and I didn't see any birds. This
went on for several minutes. To this day, I've never
heard noises like that before. And I noticed my two
younger brothers playing behind the piles, and all I could
see was the tops of one of their heads. They
both had cotton white hair then, so it was easy
to see it was them, even though all I could
see was the top of their heads. Okay, I thought,
it's just my brothers playing in the gravel piles. As
long as they stay over there and don't bother me
while I'm fishing, that'll be fine. Later in the morning,
I heard my mother calling us to come back to
camp for lunch, so I grabbed up my fishing pole
and I headed back. When I arrived at camp, my
brothers were there. The only way they could have beat
me there was as if they'd had gone straight through
the woods. Well, I told them they needed to stick
to the roads because the woods were full of snakes
and chiggers. They looked at me like I was crazy.
They went on to say that they had not even
left camp all morning. Of course, I thought they were
messing with me. I had seen them playing close to
where I had been fishing. I let it go. We
all had a fun day. By nine point thirty that night,
I was tired and ready for bed. I crawled into
the tent with the others and I was drifting off
when our dogs started acting weird again. We had left
the dog outside to sleep that night, and somehow with
his teeth he had opened the zipper door of the
tent and squeezed inside. He woke everyone up. The dog
came over by me, and it was trembling like it
was cold, but I could see by the whites of
his eyes that he was scared. My mom told me
to close the zipper and let the dog stay in
the tent again. That night, that dog crawled in so
close to me I think he was trying to get
under me. At some point during the night, my mother
me up. She was getting up to go to the
bathroom and a spot behind the tent. A few minutes later,
her screams startled us fully awake. Well. I immediately stood
to look out the tent mesh window, and I saw
my mother running back to the tent with her drawers
still down around her knees. She kept screaming, something's out there.
It's watching me, it's watching me. She made it back
to the tent and was screaming the same thing over
and over to my father. Well, he finally got her
quiet enough to understand what she was even saying, and
then he asked her, what's watching you? By chance? I
began panting the woods, and I saw a large figure
run past our truck. The truck rocked back and forth
as it ran by. This thing was huge. It really
shook me up. And then my mother began to describe
this thing to my father. She said it was a
giant and it looked like an It was covering white hair,
and it had long arms. It was only a few
feet from her when she noticed it. That's when I
told them that I saw something run by the truck
while I was looking out the window. So all the
men walked over to look around in that direction. Beside
the truck were giant tracks, clearly visible in the dust.
My father noticed a dent in the rear fender that
had not been there before. When my mother had started screaming,
she had scared the creature as much as he scared her,
and it ran away. That was my guess. I guess,
not paying attention to what was in front of it,
it ran into the truck and then carried on with
its escape. That's what I thought, but that wasn't the case. Now.
My father was worried. I could see it in his demeanor.
Out of the truck, he pulled a shotgun and he
handed it to my brother to stay and guard while
we packed up camp. We were leaving. This was one
of those times when it took no encouragement for any
of us to pack up camp. It was dark and
hard to see everything, but we started throwing things loosely
into the bed of the truck. We had that camp
site packed up in record time, and then one of
my brothers yelled, out, there it is. He raised the
shotgun and he fired into the darkness, and then my
father yelled out, it's circling the camp. Hurry up, we
gotta go. By this time I was terrified. I know
the rest of my family was too, and we couldn't
get out of there fast enough. Finally, with all of
us in the truck, my father turned the key and
it started, and in a few minutes we were gone.
We made it home in the early morning hours and
We all went straight to bed. It had been an
exhausting night. The next day, our aunt came over to
ask why we were home early. She already knew, but
she wanted to hear about it. We all sat in
the living room comparing notes on what everyone had seen.
Apparently it was the same creature. None of us laugh
at bigfoot stories, now we take them very seriously. This
is not a bigfoot story, but a damn sure creepy one.
You can call me Ray if you want to use
my name. Let me tell you an interesting story that
happened to me. When I was twenty, I had a
friend that worked on a ranch here in Texas, and
I would help the ranch out from time to time.
When the owners were away, we were allowed in the
main ranch house. It was a big log cabin with
a giant game room and a trophy room. The owner
had animals mounted from all over the world. There was
a bar and a nice pool table. The cabin had
a huge walk around porch all the way around. The
cabin was made out of huge logs hauled in from
the mountains. It was an absolutely beautiful place. The house
had a large fenced in yard with motion lights all around.
In state of the art security systems. After work one evening,
we were hanging out and shooting a game of pool
before bed. The ranch dog was in there with us.
It was a huge rock whiler named Cowboy. A little
after dark, the motion lights went off, illuminating the yard
in the pasture. We thought it was a horse that
may have come up to the house, so we continued
playing pool. Some time later, the lights came on again,
but there was nothing out there, and still Cowboy continued
acting strange and he appeared to be watching something out
the window. An hour went by and the motion detector
lights came on again. We heard footsteps on the porch
around the back of the house. After a detailed check,
we couldn't find anything, but it was still getting kind
of creepy. Now we were starting to think that someone
was messing with us, so we had one last game
of pool, and then suddenly the lights came on again
and Cowboy the rockweller started barking ferociously. It really got
our attention, and then we heard footsteps on the porch again.
They were getting close to the side door coming out
of the game room. We walked around to the gun
cabinet and we grabbed rifles, and the huge dog crawled
under the table and he was whimpering. We didn't know
what to think, but that was enough for us. We
packed up and we headed back to town. The next
day we went back, the owner had returned and we
described the events to him, sure that he was going
to say that we were crazy, but surprisingly he didn't,
and then he launched into his story even more weird
than ours. His daughters were riding horses on the back
of the property a few weeks back, and it was
just a normal ride. Later in the day, the girls
came back on the horses at a full gallop and
they were terrified, in almost a panic. They told him
that they were going down through the creek crossing and
the horses got spooked. They looked around, thinking maybe it
was a predator near by making the horses jumpy, but instead,
a short distance down the creek, they saw an old
Indian chief standing in the middle of the creek, and
he was standing on top of the water. He was
dressed in the traditional clothing and headgear that you would
imagine a chief would be dressed in. It scared them
so bad that they ran the horses full speed back
to the cabin. We did some digging and we found
there was an ancient Indian burial ground nearby. After that event,
there would be fresh napped arrowheads found occasionally around our campfires.
I just wanted to share this short event with your audience.
Odd things happen to people all the time. This is
just one of them. I believe it's true. The best
we could figure it was the old Indian chief walking
around on the porch that night that we were shooting pool.
We never stayed there overnight again. Ghosts on the Colorado River.
I was sixteen when I had my first trip down
the Colorado River. The river runs through the Grand Canyon
between Arizona and Nevada, and, in my humble opinion, is
the best way to see the National Park and all
its God intended beauty. The river is two hundred and
fifty miles of glorious water, desert, and red rock. A
great place for a kid to make some good money,
and absolutely nowhere to spend it. I first started running
the river as what they call a swamper. A swamper
is someone who gets a free trip in exchange for
working their way down the river and helping the river guides.
This starts with a day long process to inflate and
rig a two ton boat and load it with enough
provisions to last eighteen people a full week of eating,
surfing turf most nights. That's a lot of heavy lifting,
and I soon became popular due to my strong work
ethic and my strong back, and like most sixteen year
old boys back then, I was happiest when I was
picking up something heavy and flexing for the girls. After
the first trip, I was hooked, and they soon gave
me an actual job, and I was promoted to a
river guide. In training, I started running as often as
I could, gone for months at a time, and making
great money for a sixteen year old kid. By the
end of the season, it was hard to put on
a shirt and put away my sandals and go back
to a boring high school life. A typical trip on
the river was a week long. They were divided up
into two parts, the upper and the lower. The upper
group of passengers would go float for four days and
then helicopter out. At the same time, a new group
for the lower part of the river would helicopter in.
The upper had the best rapids, but the lower had
more intrigue, and I'll get to that later. Passengers were
usually tourists from the big city who had never so
much as set foot on a dirt trail or rock
let alone. Spent four days in the middle of a hot,
stinking desert, and at times US guides would crim and
just we watched them walk around like aliens on a
new planet, just waiting for them to twist or break
an ankle. The area is so remote that hikers regularly
go missing and are never found again. I once even
had a local pilot lean over to me in a
quiet voice and say, Hey, if you ever need to
get rid of a body, just let me know. I
know where we can drop it out of my plane.
No one will ever find it. Needless to say, that
left me speechless. I couldn't tell if he was kidding,
and I wasn't about to dig in and find out.
But I digress. We did our best to protect our passengers,
but I don't think they realized just how dangerous the
trip really was. Between massive rapids that can pin you
against the boulder and drown you, the freezing water that
can quickly put you into hypothermia, and the poisonous wildlife
it was pretty much like walking through a minefield. I
knew guides that had found actual bodies floating in the river.
They just fished them out, wrap them in a tarp,
and drop them off at the next helipad. Now that
I write that, I admit it sounds worse than it
really is. One thing our passengers didn't realize is that
once you start floating down the canyon, it's nearly impossible
to get out. The river passes through some of the
most remote areas of the country, with sheer canyon walls
up to four thousand feet high. There are very few
trails up to the rim, and injured hikers or boaters
typically die before they get help, or if they're lucky,
someone calls a helicopter they pluck them out of the canyon.
That's not as easy as it sounds, because cell phones
don't have a prayer of working here. In the old days,
we had to wait for a commercial airliner to fly
overhead and we'd contact them on the emergency radio channel.
They would then radio the Park Service to arrange for
a helicopter at a predetermined time and place. These days,
satellite phones seemed to work better, but even the narrow
canyon walls can interfere with that signal. With all this said,
the grandeur and the splendor of the canyon is worth
all that risk. My personal favorite is the canyon walls
in the morning light. It is nothing less than breathtaking.
The beauty of this place still captivates me today and
millions who visit. The river passes through Indian reservations, the Navajo,
the Hopi, the Piute, and the Wallapie, among others. This
story is about a night we camped on the Wallapie
side of the river. The trip had gone well up
to this point, and we were at the end of
a four day and our passengers would be helicoptering alphon
Neexis morning. The group was large enough that we had
two boats to float the thirty passengers. These weren't the
typical inflatable boats with oars. These are thirty foot long
and they set two feet off the water. The design
wasn't originally used in World War II to support temporary
bridges over the water. They have a metal frame inside
and they weigh two tons empty. To manage this heavy boat,
there's a twenty five horsepower motor on the back. The
engine is for some propulsion, but mostly for steering the
beasts through the massive rapids. While these boats are quite large,
they don't even compare to the size of the rapids
in the canyon. I've seen many disappear into the rapids
and held my breath as I waited for them to exit.
It was getting laid. On day four, we began looking
for a place to camp. We had lingered long enough
at lunch than we should have. The day was quickly
getting away from us. We passed several other river trips.
Each time we would pause and ask where they were
going to camp, and we quickly found out that our
options were limited. We would have to camp at a
location that was less than ideal. The guy I was
with was very disappointed and even seemed on edge about
the campsite. I was surprised, given that he was a
twenty year veteran who had seen it all, and I'd
never seen him get agitated like that. The campsite was fine,
but it was not great. It was rocky, with limited
space for that many people to place their cots, but
that was okay. The passengers didn't know any different, and
we were not about to tell them. Our predominant feature
of the site was a step and rugged canyon up
above it. To a sixteen year old, it looked like
an nice adventure after dinner if the light held. And
after I finished cleaning up dinner, I told the guy
that I was going to hike or climb up through
the canyon. He strongly discouraged me, and he told me
that there was a Wallapie Indian burial ground just up above.
He simply but firmly said, trust me, you do not
want to go up there. I have to pause and
talk about the Waala Pie. I've come across many Native
Americans in the canyon and surrounding areas, and many are
guides and really great people. The Walla Pie in those
days even used to run their own tours down the river,
and they were always easy to get along with. But
with that said, the history of the Wala Pie is
a bit more colorful. The way the legend goes it
is that during the Indian Wars and the mid to
late eighteen hundreds, the Walla Pie, like most tribes, pushed
back hard against the United States cavalry. Tensions were high
and both began using unsavory tactics. At one point, the
son of a Wallapie chief was kidnapped in Hell for ransom.
For some reason, the negotiations went south and his son
was killed. Since that day, visitors began disappearing on the
reservation and on the river running through it. Most attributed
it to skin walkers and the locals delving into black magic.
I only made it halfway up the canyon before I
got an odd feeling like I shouldn't be there. That feeling,
along with the fading light, made me quickly turn around.
I didn't want to be up there in the dark
with that I shouldn't be here feeling in my gut,
and I quickly turned around and I returned to camp.
I think the other Goud was relieved to see me
come back, and it wasn't until later that night that
he told me the last guy that went up there
couldn't shake a bad feeling. For months. He was convinced
that the spirits of the dead Wallapie were following him around.
He was always looking over his shoulder and he felt
like he was being watched. As you can imagine, that
didn't exactly make me feel any better, and soon after
we all decided to turn in for the night. What
ensued was one of the most restless nights of my life.
It all started shortly before I went to bed. Most
of the guys slept on the boat. I was sleeping
on the front of the boat, nearest to the shore.
I was woken up by the sound of footsteps in
the water. And at first this wasn't a real concern.
Periodically we'd have a sleepless or drunk passenger walking around
at night, exploring or a little bit lost. However, when
I shined my flashlight in the direction of the sound,
I didn't see a thing. This pattern repeated itself all
night long. I must have woken up at least every hour.
It was just before dawn as the first hint of
light entered the canyon that I was nearly shaken out
of my cot. In fact, both boats were violently shaken,
to the point that we all nearly were thrown overboard.
Two boats, nearly six tons fully loaded, were shaken like
a toy. We all jumped up and looked around, and
we looked to see if perhaps river debris had bumped
into us, or maybe something fell off the boat. But
everything looked to be in order, and these were big
boats that were hard to move. Maybe I was dreaming this.
After the initial shok war off, the sleep set in
and everyone went back to bed. I couldn't sleep, though
I'd been on edge all night, and now this happened.
I sat there, staring down into the brown, cloudy water,
and then I saw it. It was something just below
the surface. It was blurry, but something was definitely there.
I leaned in to try to help my eyes focus
in the dim light, and as I stared into the water,
it seemed to draw me in. Two dark spots slowly
solidified to become eyes, piercing eyes that locked into mine,
not like looking at eyes in a picture, but eyes
that moved to meet yours. Something with a consciousness, something
almost like a new awareness, came over me, like it
had been there all along, but I hadn't seen it before.
The nose and the mouth, and the forehead and the
chin all began to take shape. It was a face
of an old Indian man, with weathered skin and deep wrinkles.
He wore a full head dress with feathers and beads.
He appeared proud and defiant, almost royal. I was rattled
by this revelation and shocked, and I jumped back and
when I came back to look, he was gone. Over
the course of the next three summers, I refused to
camp at that site. Some of it was fear from
my experience, but most of it was out of respect,
my new respect for the dead of that place.