Speaker 1: I want to start by saying that I have never
had an eyewitness encounter. I guess that means I'm not
a true believer in bigfoot. I'm here to learn more
information about other people's encounters, but I do have an
open mind about their existence, and I've heard personally encounters
from people that I trust with all my being. I
am an avid hiker in East Tennessee and I've hiked
all the trails in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
I've logged more than thirty five hundred miles in the
back country. Many of these miles were solow now I've
had hundreds of barren wild boar encounters. I'm not easily spooked,
nor do I feel uneasy being alone in the woods.
But I will admit though, that one incident left me
feeling a bit weird. I was hiking a trail in
the Great Smoky Mountains near treemont In towns and Tennessee
in of twenty nineteen. It was an unusually warm morning
and the wind was blowing. I could tell a storm
was coming, but I thought I could get a ten
mile hike in before it got here. The trail I
was hiking with steep there was a good sized creek
I would have to cross that was about knee deep.
I was keeping a close eye on the weather and
making pretty good time. At about three quarters of a
mile from my turnaround point, I heard brush breaking above
me on the side of the mountain. Well, it sounded
more than one of something or someone was walking, not running.
I stopped to listen, but the wind picked up so
I couldn't hear anything. When the wind died down, I
heard brush breaking again. The side of the mountain was
covered with rhododendron, so I couldn't see more than thirty
yards up the mountain side. The wind picked up again
and I headed on, thinking it was probably a bear,
a hog, a deer, or maybe even a person. But
by the time I reached the turnaround and started back
down the trail, the weather was getting worse, and when
I reached the spot where I had heard the brush
breaking earlier, I heard what sounded like people talking gibberish.
I thought, okay, it was people breaking brush on the
mountain side. That's no big deal. I've heard this gibberish before,
and most times I will eventually meet with a group
of people somewhere on the trail. But as I came
around the bend in the trail where my mind said
I should have seen people, there was no one there,
and I stopped again to listen. The wind began to
pick up again, but I could faintly hear the gibberish.
I waited a minute for the wind to die down again,
and when I did, I could hear the gibberish much clearer.
Even so, it was like listening to a conversation that
was just far enough away not to be able to
make out the words, but it was close enough that
I felt like I should have been able to. I
was puzzled at the point where I turned around. There
is an old man way or unmaintained trail that goes
to an old fire tower site. I thought maybe someone
had tried to follow it and gotten turned around. Most
people go there in the winter months because it's so overgrown.
I thought that maybe I should yell at them to
let them know where the trail was. This whole time,
the wind was gusting at twenty miles an hour in
my face. If I yelled at that point, no one
would hear me anyway, so I waited for a break
when I could hear the gibberish again, and I yelled hey.
The second I did that, the jibberish stopped. The distance
I was covering was ten yards up and down the trail.
I was facing up the mountain side with my right
up the trail and my left down the trail. There
was a small creek behind me that was little more
than a trickle, and as soon as the gibberish stopped,
I heard movement to my right up the mountain side,
I moved that direction, looking up the hill, I was
thinking I should bark like a dog. I've done this
many times while hiking, and it has always successfully scared
the crap out of people. I have a hell hound
sounding park. That's a good prank. I'm sorry, y'all. As
soon as I did, I heard something to my left,
something coming through the tree canopy, and a rock landed
in the creek behind me. I could hear more than
one of whoever or whatever this was up there moving
above me. That rock made me mad, and I thought
these knuckleheads were throwing rocks at me. I moved down
the trail to where the rock landed. The water was
still muddy there. I picked up the rock and threw
it back, yelling, stopped throwing rocks at me. I was
looking up the hillside to my right, near where I
had just been. I heard a whistle and I quickly
ran back over to try to catch the culprit, and
the brush right above where I had just been standing
exploded with a loud crash. I turned and ran back
that direction. As soon as I did, something loud crashed
through the brush to my right again and around the
bind from where I was. Something had crossed the trail
from the creek and was headed up the mountain side.
I ran up the trail as fast as I could
to try to see what it was, but I wasn't
fast enough. I couldn't see any tracks, but the hillside
was alive with activity. Brush was breaking like crazy, and
I could tell it was moving. I've always thought that
should I ever come across something I couldn't explain or see,
that I would try and track it down. But that
was not the case. I didn't want to follow this thing,
nor could I have kept up with it if I
had wanted to. I remember standing there thinking that I
had just been played. I didn't know which way was up.
For a moment, something inside me said that I should
move on down the trail. So I did, and from
then on I didn't see anything. I guess it could
have been people. If so, they were very good at
disorienting a body. I guess I'll never know, but whatever
it was, it could whistle and throw rocks. Every time
I'm hiking alone now and I hear the gibberish ahead
of me, I think about that incident, and I think
to myself, here we go again. It was a hot
June night in that old trailer my ex husband and
I were living in behind my parents' house. It was
still and quiet that night, with no air conditioning. We
had windows open in hopes of catching a breeze if
one should happen by. I was on the couch listening
to the buzz of the light bulb glowing overhead. Now,
I asked my husband, can you hear this? Hear what?
He said, listen? I said, it's so quiet out that
I can hear the light bulb glowing. He listened for
a minute and agreed that he could hear it too.
My parents taught me to be aware of my surroundings,
and one of the things they always said to look
for was when it got real quiet. It meant one
of two things, either there was a predator nearby or
there was a big storm brewing. Mack's husband, being a
city boy, I thought it was something he needed to know.
Even with the windows open that night, we couldn't hear
crickets or tree frogs or anything else, only that light
bulb buzzing. At the time, we had a permanent house
guest named Tony. He was fifteen years old, and he
was one of those situations where he came to visit
and the store and made a career out of it.
I knew his parents, and they lived back in the county,
six miles away. Now. I don't know how they felt
about him moving in with us, or if they even
knew about it, but he stayed for months. Tony had
a crush on my friend Becky, and that night he'd
taken his motorcycle to see her. Becky lived way out
on a gravel road that went through the swamp and
passed my grandfather's house and through a whole lot of woods,
with maybe only one or two other houses in between.
It was about as isolated as a person could get,
and driving down to her house at night, even in
a car was enough to give a person the creeps.
He hadn't been gone long when I noticed how quiet
it had gotten. A few minutes passed and I heard
Tony's motorcycle barreling back up the road and down our driveway.
He wasn't slowing down for the turn or when he
approached our trailer, and through the window I could see
his light tracing his path. He jumped off his bike
and he threw it down without shutting off the engine
of the light, and a second later the door burst
open and he fell through onto the floor, where he
curled up in a fetal position. He was shaking and
whimpering like a baby. Well. I jumped up and got
down beside him, and I was trying my best to
find out what was wrong, but he couldn't talk. I
could tell he was going going into shock, and I
was about to slap him to try and bring him
out of it when he finally responded to yelling at me,
saying what's wrong. Tears streamed down his face as he
told us what happened in a quivering voice. He said
he was on his way back from Becky's and had
made it past Grandfather's house, where the road dipped into
a steep hill heading into the swamp. His motorcycle was
beginning to shimmy on the loose gravel With all that vibrating,
his light was jumping all over, but he still managed
to see something huge standing on the old wooden bridge
at the bottom of the hill. It was big enough
that he thought about turning around and heading back the
other way, and if he thought his motorcycle would make
it back up that steep hill, he probably would have.
As he got closer to the thing, he made up
his mind to gun the engine and pass it wide open.
A little closer, and he was able to make out
that it had a body like a bear, but a
face of a man. It was too late to turn
back now, so he opened the throttle up and he
went speeding by. And that's when it gave out a
big yell, and it reached out and tried to grab him.
I saw his fingers in its nails. He sobbed thanked
the good Lord that it didn't catch him. Well, I
didn't know what to say. All I could do was
listen and try to comfort him. He wasn't drinking, and
Tony didn't use drugs. He spent that night sleeping at
the foot of our bed, and several times he woke
me up whimpering like a baby. I never once called
him crazy or accused him of telling us a tall tale.
I really do believe he saw something that night and
it gave him the scare of a lifetime. That night,
as I lay there between my broken sleep, I remembered
what my sister told me after I had gone to
see the Legend of Boggy Creek. They showed the Patterson
Gimlin film that night too, and after I finished telling
her all about out the movie, she told me that
our grandfather had seen something back in the nineteen thirties
when he was going through the gravel pits. He described
it as having the body of a bear, but the
face of a man. I never told anyone what my
sister told me about our grandfather. There was no way
Tony could have known, but he described that thing the
same way my grandfather did. He said it was the
body of a bear and the face of a man.
A few months passed and my husband and I separated.
It was October and I was eight and a half
months pregnant. Tony had gone back home by then, so
it was just me living in the trailer. My friend
Becky had come to stay the night with me. We
were bored stiff. That was back when you could only
get three major networks on the television. I've always been active,
and having a baby didn't slow me down. So we
decided we'd head over to visit some friends who rented
a space in a field my mom and dad owned.
It was eleven o'clock that night and I didn't have
any gas in my car, but we didn't care. We
took out walking without a flashlight or any form or protection.
We were going down that same gravel road that led
to the bridge where Tony had his incident, but we
weren't thinking about that. We had to go down to
the swamp and then take a left after passing my
brother's driveway, but before the bridge that took us up
over a hill and into the field where their house was.
It was the weekend, so we knew they would be awake.
The night was very nice and the weather was perfect.
We passed my parents' house laughing and talking and having
a good time, and then we passed my brother's driveway,
still acting like a couple of kids, and shortly after that,
I heard something in the woods beside me. It was
matching every step we made. We were on the gravel
and making the sounds feet make on gravel, but this
was lunching dead leaves and breaking twigs out in the woods.
I reached over and I touched Becky's arm to stop her.
Do you hear that? I asked? What She said, Oh,
it's nothing, I said. After listening for a second, we
started walking again. Up ahead, we could see the bridge
in the moonlight. I heard it again, so I stopped
and asked again, did you hear that? Becky? This time
she had heard it. Yes, she said, we need to
get running, I yelled. We took off, running back up
the road, with me being eight and a half months pregnant,
waddling like a penguin. We got as far as my
brother's driveway and I said, come on, let's get to
the house. Well, his driveway was steep, as the hill
Tony had to go down that night, but my brother's
driveway was straight up, and somehow we made it to
his door and we began banging and yelling to be
let in. It was midnight by then, and he was
and exactly jumping for joy at the sight of us.
We told him we were out walking and that something
was stalking us, and we begged him to take us home.
He could have shot fired us through his eyes that
he was so mad, but I didn't care. It was
the first time I'd ever been frightened while out walking
at night. Two weeks later, I gave birth to a
healthy seven pound, fourteen ounce twenty one and a half
inch son. I lost touch with Tony for years, and
then one day at the grocery store, I ran into him.
I asked him if he remembered that incident on the bridge.
He said he did, but that he didn't like to
talk about it. And then I asked if he would
listen to a vocal I'd captured on my phone. He
held it to his ear and he listened, and I
watched his muscles draw up and tighten, and his eyes
were wide and his teeth were clenched. He was reacting.
He was having a flashback to that night. He made
a vulgar statement about how much it was scaring him
to hear that sound, before lifting his hand up and
staring at it. I saw its hands and its fingers,
he said, in a shaky voice, I even saw its
fingernails in nineteen seventy six when I was saying I
can't even get my mouth to work here. In nineteen
seventy eight, when I was eight years old, we went
to one of those old fashioned fire breathing Pentecostal church
meetings that scared me to the core. The church was new,
and so was the building. It was mostly blocked with
no paint or air conditioning. No place on Earth ever
feels so close to Hell is the inside of a
church building on a hot summer day, when the preacher
is spewing fire and brimstone with every verse he quotes.
The man at the pulpit that day was an older
evangelist who was speaking on the future events and the
end times. He had me on the edge of my sea,
not knowing whether to run or hide or sit and listen.
My dad's belt held me firm. I guess his primary
subject was the second Coming of Christ, but he talked
about things that no one could have known back then
everything we have today. He touched on even how folks
would act, and then he said it would be like
unto the days of Noah, and there would be monsters
and rumors of monsters. If he was trying to scare me,
he was about as successful as a man can be.
And I've never forgotten his sermon all these years later.
And I understand now how Satan wants to be God,
so he tries to create things like God, but he
never quite gets it right because he lacks the ability
to give things a soul, and that's how bloodlines get tainted.
There is one area called the Green Swamp where I
like to hunt. Back when I was eighteen, I hunted
there alone quite a bit. This morning, I was out
on a powder grade close to the northern fence line.
I'd walked several miles and I decided it was time
to have a rest. I found a spot where I
could look out over at least one hundred acres of
cleared land, where the palm meadows were coming back through
the charred earth and were about a foot high. Bay
Head swamps are pretty dry, most the only half an
inch of water or so. I was looking out over
the landscape when I saw what I took to be
an otter. I've had a lot of years to think
about that, and I've come to realize that no otter
that far away could ever look that big and where
he was heading. There was no major water source for miles,
but I was pretty sure there were deep fire breaks
cut with the big turnplows in that direction. They create
ditches and they're up to two feet deep on one side.
At the time, I wrote about what I saw, and
I put it down as an otter that looked more
like a sea lion doing a watermelon crawl at a
pretty good pace. Now that I realized it couldn't have
been an otter, I've tried to figure out what it was.
No pig would crawl like that for over one hundred yards.
I guess I'll never know what it was. I had
another incident a mile from there while I was hunting
with my brother in law. It was an afternoon hunt
with me and the stand on one side of the
road and him on the other. Between the heat and
the mosquitoes. I wasn't having much fun and he was
a good mile away, so I started thinking about riding
home when something screamed so loud it darn near made
me fill my pants. It sounded like some lady was
out there getting killed. A million thoughts went through my
mind as I climbed down out of that stand. Should
I get down and help her? I thought it wasn't
my fault that she was out there in the middle
of nowhere. While my mind was telling me that I
ought to be brave and go help that poor woman,
my feet were already carrying me to my truck. I
was half a mile from it when I realized whatever
was making that sound was not human and it was
only about fifty yards away from me. Now, I kicked
my eighteen year old legs into overdrive and I got
myself back to the truck. Of course, my brother in
law didn't hear it, so I had to endure a
lot of teasing from him over it. This area has
had a lot of sightings and a lot of people
have come out to investigate. These woods have it all
from old river basins and swamp to sand hill pines,
so I'm not surprised. Once I was fishing on the
east side of Crescent Lake in Florida when we started
hearing a loud noise coming from the bank, and we
looked up in time to see a huge ten point
buck jump into the water at full speed. He had
at least a two mile swim ahead of him, and
he wasn't wasting time getting there. We didn't think much
of it until the next year, when we learned that
he'd come out of the water at the other end
and ran several ran through several neighborhoods, and then he
went right on downtown. Considering how far he swam to
get there in the three or four miles of running
he did. Once he got out, I think something must
have spooked him pretty bad. I'm just glad whatever it
was didn't come out of the woods and come after us.
After thirty years of connecting the dots and applying them
to what that evangelist said that day, I have some
theories on what bigfoot and dog men and even aliens are.
I believe they will all tie into the time of
the rapture. For now, I believe no Christian can be
hurt by them. But as we get closer and closer
to the end of days, we will see more and
more of them, and I truly believe Christians at least
will all come to realize how truly demonic some of
these creatures are. Well, I don't know. I better just
hold my tongue on these Pentecostal charismatic evangelist man, they
get so carried away. I've actually heard some of them
one time when I was I was I was twelve
or thirteen, and I went to a private school in Memphis.
At that time, bussing had started, and my dad he
hated it. He did not want us kids riding the
bus halfway across Memphis just to go to another school
because it was a political cultural thing to do, which
I had nothing to do with that. I just went
wherever my folks told me to go. So we went
to a private school. Well, at that time, all the
private schools in Memphis were just loaded up with people.
You couldn't get into one, and so they got us
into a school that was just the first one they
could find to get us into. And it was a
good school. I liked going to school there, but we
was a It was a church school. It was a
school started by a local charismatic church. I think it
was the Assemblies of God denomination, and we would have
these assemblies on Wednesday. I think they called it chapel.
I was not a particularly religious person. I wasn't raised
in a religious home, and I'm not religious now. I
remember the speaking in tongues thing and all the kids
who went to church there. They went to church and
the school. Many at the end of these services, they
would have these I think they call them altar calls,
and these kids would start jibber jabbering and stuff like that,
and I remember thinking, I want to see if I
can do that. So you would go into another room.
It was like a prayer room. And I'm not criticizing
any of this. I'm just so please, don't think that's
where I'm going. But I thought I'd go in there,
and I actually tried it two or three times. I
even went on Wednesday night to the church services to
see what it was all about with some friends, and
I would go into the prayer room and I tried
and tried and tried to do that jibber jabber language
and I couldn't do it. And finally, this uh, this
evangelist that was in town. I would say his name,
but he was a he was an ex professional football
player and he had turned evangelist and he was in
that charismatic movement and he came around. He was going
around talking to people and he was like touching them
and they would start shaking and they were talking tongues
and all this stuff, and he was coming to me
and I was like, all right, man, here we go
and we'll get to do this. And he got in
front of me and he he prayed and he kind
of kind of popped me on the head and nothing.
And he goes, you're gonna you're gonna speak in tongues.
Do you really want to speak in tongues? I'm like, yeah, yeah,
I want to. He tapped me on the head again
and nothing. I just sat there and looked at him.
He goes, can you feel it? Is it coming? Is
the Holy Spirit gonna consume you? And I'm like, I
don't think so. And he moved on to another per
and there were four or five of us guys there
that kind of hung around together, and it was the
same one with all of us, and I just thought
it was funny. But I'm not criticizing it. I've just
never talked in tongues. There's some people who are not
in charismatic denominations who believe that the people that do
speak in tongues that it's genuine. I don't really know.
I really don't know, and I don't quite understand the
purpose of it. I know that it's a thing that
happened in the Book of Acts, and my personal belief
is that it went on in the early Church and
it was there to be a sign for other people
to know that Christians were set apart. There's a whole
theology behind all of the gifts, the gifts of the
Holy Spirit that people would just eat me alive explaining
it to me. And I'm not getting into a religious
discussion here, but that was my experience with a career
evangelist and I've always looked back on it and kind
of laughed at it. He couldn't get me to talk
in tones. But this was a great story. And I
don't know about the end of times. I don't think
anybody knows anything. There's a lot of theories around about
how it's all going to go down, but I don't
think any of us really know. I think we just
need to look for the one who came and paid
the debt for us, and that's good enough. I think
that's good enough. John, Thank you for that story. It
was awesome.