Speaker 1: In the summer of two thousand and two, I was
dating a girl from a small town in Missouri whose
family owned a well known apple orchard. She lived in
a house that overlooked the Missouri River on top of
a hill on the Missouri River bluffs. I deer hunted
this area for many years. I always wondered why the
woods were so dead quiet, with no sounds of life
coming from any type of animal. There were a few
times I remember hearing large limbs snapping or sounds of
trees falling over, but I didn't pay much attention to that.
In many years of hunting this property, it was strange
to me that I never killed many deer, especially since
I was hunting on the edge of an apple orchard.
The apple orchard sat directly on top of the Missouri
River bluffs, and there were over one hundred acres of
apple trees and hundreds of acres of woods. There was
an unlimited food supply, a great water source from the river,
high elevated hills, and deep thick woods. You could literally
get lost in if you weren't familiar with the surrounding area.
The next doorland owner, Jesse, who owned the cattle farm,
directly across from the orchard asked me if I had
seen any of his baby calves, because there were several
of them missing, and at the time I thought a
big cat, maybe a mountain lion or something related had
killed them and dragged them into the steep embankments of
the bluffs. I never thought much about it until now.
What happened changed my life forever. It has riddled me
with so much fear that my eyes won't stop tearing
up as I write this story. I have seen more
violent killings working as a Kansas City police officer than
many will see in a lifetime. Many times I have
caught myself tearing up at the sadness I've experienced on
this job. But never in my life have I ever
experienced tears caused by extreme fear again. The year was
two thousand and two, and it still haunts me to
this day. It was a hot summer night with clear skies,
and the orchard was in the midst of its apple season.
I left my girlfriend's house late at night and got
into my vehicle and headed back home to Lexington. I
drove slowly down a gravel road and approached an s
curve the left side of the road was all apple
trees and the right side was cattle. As I began
to round the first part of the S curve, I
saw a large black creature down on all fours facing
the farm. At first, I thought it was a black bear,
even though black bears are uncommon in this area. I
slowed down, and as I got closer, my headlights lit
up the creature fifteen yards away. Its hair reflected off
my headlights and had a sort of a shimmering sparkling
of fact. It stared at me with two large, piercing
green eyes, and then turned and scurried off the gravel
road toward the orchard. As I went into the S curve,
I looked out my driver's side window, and I'll never
forget what I saw till the day I die. It
forever haunts my mind. While looking out my window, the
creature stood upright on two legs, just ten feet from
my vehicle. I was shocked. It was a giant, ape
like creature that towered above my vehicle. He was eight
feet tall and must have weighed eight hundred pounds of
solid muscle. He had black, gray matted hair, long arms
that went to his knees and a face completely covered
with thick, straight hair. I slowly drove by and he
stared right at me, unmoving, like he didn't know I
could see him or didn't care. The entire encounter only
lasted ten seconds, but it was the longest ten seconds
of my life. It scared me so bad that once
I drove past the creature, I downshifted my truck into
second gear and almost killed the clutch. Thank god that
didn't happen, because I would have probably had a heart attack.
When I got back home to Lexington, I told my
parents and my brother what had happened, and to this
day they believed me. Six months ago, I reached out
to Jesse, the owner of the cattle farm. I hadn't
spoken to him in eighteen years, but I asked him
about the missing baby calves again. He told me that
his family had spent a week searching the property for
any signs of them being attacked by big cats, but
he never found evidence of them being killed or dragged away.
They just disappeared and no bones were ever found. Everyone
at the police department has heard my story, and two
of my coworkers have had encounters with this same creature.
One of them had a daytime encounter in the winter
of nineteen ninety four while he was bird hunting near Concordia.
My cousin has had three encounters on a conservation ground
called Baltimore Ben, which is only four miles east of
my sighting on the bluffs. In one of his encounters,
he had to fire a shot at the creature because
it was stalking him while he was squirrel hunting. Thanks
for letting me share my story. I hope whoever is
listing from the Missouri area will come forward with their
own stories. There have to be many more people who
have had these encounters with the elusive creature, and I
look forward to hearing about their experiences. I lived one
mile from the school that I attended. I never had
much fear of the woods, even after my first encounter
with a bigfoot, and I knew my way through them
from the house to the school. There were old logging
roads through there, so they weren't hard to travel through. Well.
One day, it was late in the fall and I
didn't have to babysit my brother that day since he
was at the doctor, so I took a long route
home from school through the woods. I wasn't very far
when I noticed something walking beside me one hundred yards away.
At first I thought it was a bear, and my
heart began to race, But then I realized it was
walking on two legs and had slinked behind a tree.
It was as big and black as the midnight sky,
and it was a bigfoot, and it was much bigger
than the first one I had seen. He was more
powerful looking than the first one, and his hair was
much shorter, kind of like a gorilla. He could not
hide from me, though, and he didn't like that I
noticed him, and he paced a few feet toward me,
and I quickly realized he wasn't as friendly as the
first one that I had encountered. The way he was moving,
you'd have thought he was pissed off at me. My
adrenaline was pumping at that point, and I bolted out
of there. To my horror, he followed right after me.
And I was a fast runner, and I was even
on the track team. I was good, but he had
no problem keeping up with my pace, and he could
have easily overtaken me. So I sped up as fast
as I could go, but this beast just kept right
with me. At that point, I was terrified. I threw
my books and I ran as fast as I could,
not wasting the precious energy to look back at him.
When my heart was thundering in my throat and I
was depleted of oxygen, I couldn't run anymore, and I
looked back and he was gone. Well. I didn't trust this, though,
so I ran on until I got home. I remember
my shaking fingers, rustling with my keys trying to get
in the door. And when I got in, I slammed
the door and I locked it, but I couldn't calm
down because I knew he could still enter, just like
the first one had done. I stayed freaked out all day,
and I never went back through the woods again. I
got in a lot of trouble for ditching those school books,
and I had to pay for them, but I didn't
care going back after them. Ever, that beast let me
know that this was his territory, and in my mind,
he could keep it. I'm a retired school teacher living
in South Mississippi. About twenty years ago, I attended a
teaching Writing to Children workshop taught by a lady from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
She was a professor at the USM at University of
Southern Mississippi. All University of Southern Mississippi is where Brett
Fahr played college football. By the way, but I digress,
pardon me, She recounted this story to participants of the workshop.
This happened in the mid nineteen seventies. She was sixteen
years old. Her dad owned a country gas station and
grocery store just north of Hattiesburg and lux near the river.
I don't remember if it was the Leaf river of
the Bowie Bowie Boie Bowie River, but she and a
friend were hauling a load of trash and her dad's
old standard shift pickup to a place near the river.
They were unloading sacks of trash when they both heard
something walking up the river. They listened as the splashing
got closer, and then they noticed a nasty, putrid odor.
And what they saw next terrified them. A huge, she said,
between eight and nine feet tall, hairy, white creature came
walking with purpose from the banks of the creek up
a slight hill toward them. They jumped into the truck
to leave, and the truck's ball tires were spinning in
the sandy soil allowing the creature to almost reach the
tailgate as her friend was screaming, go, go go, it's
gonna get us. The old truck had no back window,
and the odor from the creature was actually making them nauseated.
The truck's wheels finally gained enough traction to spin out
as she made it back to her dad's station. They
ran inside, panicked and breathlessly telling what they I had seen.
There were several local customers in the store that heard
the girls share the story, and they commented that there
had been several sightings of this creature. It had come
to be called the White Gorilla. They also said that
there had been a number of reports of missing dogs
in the area. She actually wrote a short story recounting
the event, which she entitled the White Gorilla. Oh, I'd
love to read that story. Oh, I'd love to read
that story. And there's a PostScript here. I must say
that this is one of the best workshops I ever
had the opportunity to attend. One of the most difficult
problems children face when staring at a blank page after
being instructed to write a story is what to write about.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard I
don't have anything to write about. Our instructor first had
us think of an experience that left a lasting impression.
She gave us construction paper in Elmer's glue and then
had us tear page and illustrate the experience or memory.
It was after we constructed our illustrations that we began
to write our stories. It totally changed the way that
I taught. I learned how important it was to model
for students writings a process. She taught us how to
teach the process. So I enjoy listening to Dixie Crypti it.
Thank you for providing folks and opportunity to share their experiences.
Yours truly, Robin, and you may use my name, Robin.
Thanks so much for that email. That White Gorilla story
is so good, and again I would love to hear
her short story the White Gorilla. Oh, I bet it's
awesome and it's so cool that you. I don't know
if you still teach anymore. This was twenty twenty two
years ago, and I agree. Sometimes I have a lot
of ideas for stories in my head. I'll sit here
and look at the screen and just ready, quiet, ready
to go, And now I cannot. It may take me
an hour just to do the first sentence. But usually
once you get started, the ideas just start going. They
just start flowing. If there's anybody out there who has
that problem like me and a lot of other people,
just start writing, just start putting words on the paper,
and sometimes it just comes to you. I don't know
what it is about getting in that zone. If you
can get in the zone that the words just come.
Don't worry about the grammar, don't worry about the punctuation,
don't worry about any of that stuff. Just start putting
it on paper. You can go back and correct it.
The most important thing is to get the idea, or
if you're writing one of these stories, get the memories
down on paper so they're in print. Look, people say
videos are forever, they're not. These audio recordings are not forever.
But if you put it in print, print it out
on a piece of paper and start somewhere, that is
more likely to be forever than some of these videos.
All we need is one EMP pulse attack and all
this stuff is wiped out. It's all gone, and that
the chances of that happening in this culture are pretty good.
So everything you've ever seen on video. H you know,
it can disappear, but stuff printed on paper, written on paper,
printed on paper has a better chance of surviving. So
write your thoughts down, write them out. You can go
back and edit them and make them good. Writing's not easy.
She's right, it's it's a daunting task, especially to someone
who doesn't do it. Anyway, that's my encouragement to people
to write. I think you will enjoy it. I think
sometimes you can look back on it and say, oh,
I'm so glad I wrote that. But anyway, that's Those
are my ideas on writing. And thanks for listening to me,
And thanks to Robin for sending this email so good.
Didn't even have to send it to my editor because
she's a writer, and it was written just perfectly. I
had no trouble reading it, so thanks for that, Robin. Okay,
this is a short little pot I wanted to get
something out on Sunday. I usually upload something on Sunday.
I am just hammered with work right now. I've been
working all weekend. I'm going to be busy for the
next month or two with strict, tight deadlines, lots of changes,
lots of extra work, blah blah, blah. It's just the
nature of my business. But so some of these podcasts
that I put out may be short, shorter like this
because I can just knock them out real quick in
the morning, but I appreciate you listening to it. I'll
keep them cranking them out. And I'm also uploading these
archive podcasts. You see a thumbnail that says archive. These
are podcasts that I'm going back four or five six
years and re editing and redoing the sound, taking all
of my useless commentary out of it. It is only stories.
There's no talking. There may be one or two where
I left the talking in it because I think it
was I think it was appropriate to do that. But
on the podcast, if you look on Spotify or Apple,
I've got over one hundred. I think there's like one
hundred and twenty up, but I'm just slowly bringing those
over to YouTube. I think I'm up to twenty or
twenty four. Some of them are shows so short that
I'm putting them together and combining like three or four
archives in one. But if you see those pop up
on your YouTube screen, click on it. If you like
these stories. These are older stories that the newer listeners
probably haven't heard. You can click on them and you
will be amazed at some of the stories I've gotten
through the years. I think you'll be very much entertained
and enjoy what you hear. So okay, thanks for listening
and we'll see you guys on the next podcast. Appreciate
you