Speaker 1: I live in rural Tennessee, and I was raised in
a multicultural family with Irish and Native American Cherokee roots.
Growing up, I heard many stories about wild things in
the world. I didn't pay much attention to them until
I started having my own experiences. Once, when I was
a young child, I was in the cemetery of the
church where all my family had been laid to rest.
When I saw a young girl playing among the tombstones.
I knew she wasn't alive, but I wasn't scared. Not
long after that, my great uncle told me about a
time that he encountered a wild man nine feet tall,
and he was covered in hair. He moved so fast
that he could vanish one second and reappear the next
and possibly far away. I was playing outside once when
I heard a high pitched scream coming from the tall
grass across the road. I didn't know what it was,
but I knew it was big, and I took off running.
My father said it was probably the panther known to
live in the area. Needless to say, I was cautious
about being outside alone after that. Well, life went on
and I grew up, and now I have kids of
my own. It was a fall night, one where you
know your hear codes all around. I didn't worry because
we had great dogs that kept us safe, and I
was inside with all the windows open. My children were
tuck safely in bed, and I was watching my favorite show.
The next thing I knew, something started talking outside my window.
It sounded straight out of National Geographic like orangutang speaking
gibberish back and forth to one another. I quickly shut
and locked all the windows and went to bed that night,
my heart filled with fear, not knowing what was outside
my house. The next day, I visited my sister, who
told me it was probably just owls mating, since it
was that season. That eased my worries for a while,
until one night I heard what sounded like a horse
breathing into one of my open windows. The window was
ten feet off the ground. I rushed over and shut
the window, knowing no owl on earth had breath that heavy.
About a year ago, I went on a walk to
my friend's house a country mile away. On one side
of the road was a pasture with grazing cows, but
on the other side was a dense, dark wall of
trees so thick and dark you couldn't see into them.
I was walking, I noticed the sound of the brush
and the leaves crunching underfoot of something just inside the trees.
At first, I thought it was one of my dogs
trying to stay quiet while stalking a rabbit or a squirrel.
That was until I realized whatever it was, it was
keeping pace with me. When I stopped, it stopped, and
when I walked, it walked. I got scared, and I
picked up my pace, and I heard it following me
the whole way. It's footsteps weren't light like a dog's.
They were heavy, like something much bigger, taller than me.
When I finally got to the clearing before my friend's property,
I sprinted across the open field all the way to
her house. Like everything else in my life, the more
strange things that happen, the more I get used to them.
I believe some of us are like beacons in the night,
and we can't control what is drawn to us. My
kids and I don't go on walks at dusk anymore,
and I rarely leave my windows open at night. I
don't know if it's because I've become more cautious of
what's hanging around my family, or because of the logging
in the forest around our home, but we don't experience
nearly as many any strange things as we used to.
In the summer of nineteen seventy one in southern Kentucky,
my dad was in the living room with his family
when a twelve foot tall bigfoot suddenly appeared in the
front window, so large that it blocked all the light.
It ran off when his dad jumped up and ran
outside with his rifle in his hands. Well a little
while later, noise erupted from the barn, and my dad
ran outside and headed toward it, wondering what was going on,
And on the way he passed a giant footprint and
the mud. Then he decided to stop and wait and
see if this thing would come out. The noise settled
for a moment and then picked up quickly again. As
it burst outside, my dad ran back toward the house,
shouting to his family that it was coming back. It
let out an ear splitting scream just as he made
it inside, and then turned worse and headed for the woods.
Nobody talked about it after that. It wasn't until I
began talking about bigfoot that they finally told me the story.
I had often played in those woods as a kid.
More than a few times I heard strange noises and
knocks nearby. Now that I know what they saw, I
wait for the day that I can see one myself.
I experienced something with my brother by my side, and
neither of us will ever forget it. I was eleven
years old in the summer of nineteen fifty one, and
we had recently moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana. Our dad
was assigned to a small neighbor group there as a
supply officer. We were cut from the cloth of the
nineteen fifties. We were told to get out and play
and not come back until dark thirty. My brother and
I lived wild and free, or at least as far
as our minds and muscles would take us. Lake Charles
was surrounded by swamps of varying densities and darkness. My
brother and I found the remnants of a narrow gage
railroad track the week before, and we were held bent
for leather to follow it. We knew it was not
in use due to the rust on the rails in
the poor condition of the endless trustle so with our
sack lunches tuck securely in our belts, and our daisy
red Rider BB guns loaded up, we took off on
our adventure. Some well meaning older people warned us to
mind the gators, but their words of wisdom went right
over our heads because we couldn't think of anything an
alligator would tell us that we would have to mind. Hell,
we barely minded our own parents. We carefully walked the tracks,
and then the trustle, then the tracks, going deeper and
deeper into the swamp. Occasionally we would shoot at water
moccasin swimming away away from us, And the further we went,
the more we wondered who would run a railroad through
such a precarious trestle, and to what end? The tracks
turned south and came upon an eastern berm. Nestled next
to the berm were the remnants of an old rice mill.
Most of the brick walls were still standing, forming a
large square enclosure, and the floor was covered with brackish water.
There were snakes of plenty to shoot, and that we
did with much gusto. The pool of water erupted into
a violent frenzy, and it scared me so bad it
took two years off my life. A portion of one
of the brick walls had come down, allowing a ten
foot long alligator to slip in during the high tide event,
trapping it there. My brother was of the opinion that
he was going to kill this thing and drag it
back to the house and stuff it need. I remind you,
Daisy does not make high pur bb guns. The gator
sank to eye level, all the water around it began
to vibrate from a deep throated sound that it started
to make. Our limited knowledge of this creature left us amazed.
Little did we know it was calling for reinforcements. During
this commotion, we heard another terrifying sound in the distance,
a loud, promal roar, nothing like the sound of gator makes.
There was crashing and splashing coming toward us, and with
our collective valor, my brother and I hauled our butts
back the way we came. But before we ever got
out of the swamp, we heard the confrontation, the likes
of nothing we had ever heard before or since. We
never saw the creature that came to challenge the alligator,
nor did we know why. The following weekend we screwed
up the courage to go back and see what happened
in that pit. We were apprehensive about going back, but
youth has no shortage of stupid. The rice meal was
in shambles, mud and blood had been splattered at least
eight feet up the wall. There were tufts of reddish
brown hair caught up in some places of the wall,
and the head of the alligator was in the corner
of the room where it was shallow. It looked like
something had grabbed the upper and lower jaws and ripped
its mouth apart. That would not have killed the gator,
but it sure made it impotent as a killing machine.
The neck appeared to have been separated by a series
of bites. That alligator had been every bit of ten
feet long when we saw it, but besides the head,
the rest of it was missing. That had to be
at least four hundred pounds of meat and bone. We
never went back into the swamp that far again. We
mentioned in passing a little of what we experienced to
our friends whose family lived on a houseboat and the
Caucasou River. He casually mentioned there was a swamp man
creature back in there, and we'd best not do that again.
Thank you for letting me get this off my mind.
I have never told a single soul of this event,
though my brother told everyone who would listen. Of course,
in Lake Charles, he was preaching to the choir. When
I was twelve years old, a friend and I were
messing around on the watch Tall River in Oklahoma, where
I'm from, running with my full blooded German shepherd and
shooting at cans and different things with our bebee guns.
We started thinking we were being messed with by some
friends who must have followed us down the river, because
rocks and sticks started being thrown at us. At one point,
a boulder went right over our heads and landed in
the river. We couldn't see who was doing it, and
when we yelled at whoever it was, we got no answer.
The whole time, the dog was acting skittish, which was
unusual for him, so we finally decided to get out
of there, and we took the road instead of walking
through the wheat field the same way we came in.
We made it to the railroad tracks six hundred feet
from the river when we looked back and got the
biggest surprise of our lives. Right behind us was a
bigfoot crouched in the tall brush. My friend and I
couldn't move. We just stared as it slowly stood upright,
towering over the branches of the trees around it. But
our legs started working again in a hurry and we
got out of There. Must have been a week later
along the same river that a farmer reported seeing a
huge black creature walking upright like a man. I joined
the army at seventeen, and I became a paratrooper right
out of high school. In April of nineteen ninety three,
I was part of a training exercise at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas,
on the border of Oklahoma. We were conducting patrols on
the Devil's Backbone, an area with rugged rocky cliffs. It
was a clear and chilly night, and by training, our
senses were on high alert. It's amazing how sharp they
become when you spend lots of time outdoors. Sight, smell,
and hearing all become sharper. At two in the morning,
we heard a blood curdling scream as animal as it
was humid, and it echoed through the woods below the
Backbone and had all of our heads turning. We started
whispering to each other trying to figure out what it was.
When it screamed again, and then the knocking started, like
something was hitting trees with a giant baseball bat. We
never figured out what it was, but the experience stayed
with me. I know there's something out there, and I
have to believe it was a sasquatch or a dog man.
I'm a retired master who deployed three times to Iraq
during the Iraq War and the Global War on Terror,
and I served my country for twenty seven years. I
love watching and listening to your channel. Thanks mister Buckner
for reading my story. You're welcome, sir, appreciate everything you
did for us here in the United States. We do
appreciate you, and what a good story. Thanks. When I
was six years old, my parents built a house on
family land. For several nights after we moved in, I
heard steps outside. They were heavy, four steps past my
window and then four steps back. When I was six
years old, I knew it wasn't normal, and in the
morning I would look for footprints, but the ground was
always too hard. This happened every night until I finally
told my parents. One night, I waited for the steps
and I told my dad, who went out and he checked.
He didn't see it anything, And after that I never
heard the steps again. Often saw trees crossed in the
woods behind the house, and I would look for an
explanation of how they became bent like that, but I
never could find anything. This was years before I heard
about Bigfoot or sosquatch, and long before the Patterson Gimlin film.
I always wished I had looked out the window, and
I was too afraid. Even to this day, fifty five
years later, I won't look out a window at night.
I'm afraid i'll see something looking back at me. Back
in the nineteen sixties, we lived in the woods of
Georgia in a place called aChn. It was wild back then,
just four or five old log cabins without houses. We
would fill a tub with water and put it over
the wood heater, and that's how we bathed. We were
poor growing up, but I look back and I know
those were the good old days. One morning, Mama wanted
me to walk with her down to the little pond
by the house was overgrown with bushes and trees. As
we turned off the road toward the pond, I saw
some huge dog tracks. Right then Mama grabbed my arm
and she said don't move. Seventy five feet from the
water's edge stood an eight foot long black panther, hissing
at us. My hair stood up at thing's legs were
as tall as mine, and all I had to defend
ourselves with was two cane poles. Mama told me, don't
turn you back on him, and don't run. His legs
were as big as mine, and I had already made
up my mind that I could hit that cat a
hundred times before you could take me down. But then
he turned, and he ran along the pone's edge and
leapt over a fallen tree, and he was gone. My
uncle Daniel lived down the road, and the next day
I told him what happened. He said he'd seen him
years earlier, but didn't tell us because he didn't want
to scare any of us. I told him I was
going to catch that cat. My uncle gave me one
of his old bear traps, and I took it back
to the pond, and every day after school I checked
on it. On the third day, I saw the trap
was clamped shut, with a half inch cloth stuck in
it and black hair and some meat caught inside. I
showed it to the game warden who said there was
no black panthers in Georgia. I thought that man was
full of it. Almost got eaten by one. I couldn't
believe he was a game. Warning didn't know about him.
Those cats would howl behind our house at night. Sounded
like teenage girls getting murdered. I'd shoot in their direction
to quiet them down, and it would work for a
few hours, but they always picked back up after a
little while. Always wondered why I'd find little wooden crosses
tied together with vines in the woods, or why we'd
find rocks stacked on the banister of the back porch.
It makes me wonder what else was out there running
with that panther. Sometimes I'd be home alone at night
and I'd hear things hitting the house. I think I
was only seventeen then, and it scared me because I
thought it might be that panther trying to get in well.
About a year later, I was coming home with Daddy
and right at the pond, the panther ran across the
road with two smaller cats, all solid black. And then
three months after that, Daddy asked me to get my
bike and go to Uncle Daniel's for some coffee. I
didn't want to ride through that branch that early because
it was really foggy, but I made it to his
cabin in one piece. I knocked on the door a
couple of times, but he didn't answer, so I gave
the door a good shove. It opened just enough for
me to see inside, and even though he didn't have
any lights, I saw his feet in the bed. I
called out and started pushed my way in. When I
finally got through, I saw his face and his shoulder
were missing. I set the grass on fire. Leaving his cabin,
I got back to the house screaming for my dad,
telling him that Uncle Daniel was dead. And when he
rushed back to his cabin, I stayed outside and looked around.
I found those panther tracks outside, right below a window
with the screen torn out. Years later, in nineteen eighty two,
I was bowhunting at the Sansavia Management Area. I parked
my truck about one hundred yards down an old logging road.
I took my eight foot tree standing bow, and I
set up down the road. I was sitting in my
stand when I looked to my left and I saw
two doughs heading my way. I waited for him. But
when they got near me, they froze. They were so
close I could see their eyelashes, but they weren't looking
at me. They were focused on my truck. Just as
I started to draw back, they bolted and I heard
the most pissed off growl I'd ever heard sound through
those woods, coming from near my truck. I'd never heard
something so deep and angry in my life. Then I
heard trees breaking logs five to eight inches snapping. I
heard a growl again as it crossed the road, moving
away from me, and I got the nerve to leave
my stand. I held my ladder in front of me
the whole way, thinking I might need to fight my
way out. I made it out okay, though, but the
growl scared me so bad it burned into my brain.
Thanks for letting me vent. You really are a good storyteller,
and he signs off, well, thank you. You're a good storyteller.
You wrote it. All I did was just read it. Man,
You're a good storyteller. But I sure appreciate the story, brother,
Thank you. Okay, here's a story about dogs. You know.
I asked for dog story while back. I've been dropping
one here and there, let's read a good dog story.
I think y'all are like this. Watching your chickens amuses
me and it brings to mine. An experience that happened
when my wife and I just moved to Bradenton, Florida.
We needed a place to park and live in our
converted step vand we found a newspaper ad for caretakers
to watch over Honest Bob's Orange Grove while they were
up north in New Jersey at the zoo where they
always took their animals during the summer. The couple had
two African lion cubs, a chimpanzee named Timmy, a cougar
named Dusty, and several show doverman pincers, which they displayed
at the zoo. It's so happened that a lot of
circus and zoo people wintered in the same area with
their animals. It was nothing to hear lines roar and
elephants trumpeting and a cougar snarl and Timmy doing his
chimp sounds and jumping around. Then there was an occasional
wild board that would come into the grove rooting around
early in the morning. We were happy there and life
was really good. We had our jobs to go to
during the day and would come home to the grove,
as we called it. The couple soon took off with
their menagerie of animals in tow, and we would come
home and shoe the chickens out of a fenced in
area that had a small flatbed trailer in it. Then
we would let out our dogs out of a smaller,
high fenced kennel area so they could roam and move around.
As luck would have it, The one chicken that the
woman cherished was a white Chinese silky, which we promptly
named Phyllis, after my wife's mother, who had the same shape.
One evening, we came home and we shewed the chickens
out of the enclosed yard and turned the dog's loose
in it. My dog was named Dog. He was a
fifty pound German short hair pointer. My wife's dog was
named Ben. He was a mix of New Founlin and
black lab and he weighed in at eighty pounds. We
came out later and found both of them lying down.
They were looking guilty. Phillis, the Chinese silky chicken, was
lying dead nearby. Ben had this look on his face
like chicken, I don't know nothing about no chicken, all
the while sitting there with the white feather sticking out
of his big mouth. It was something like you'd see
in an old cartoon. Dog would occasionally glance at Ben
and his partner in crime, chiding him for not wiping
the feathers off before we came out. We decided the
prize chicken had committed suicide, as it had hidden under
the trailer until we were gone and then left itself
to the mercy of Beavis and butt Head. Every morning
we would be up before daylight, and before heading off
to work, we would put the dogs in the high
fence pen. One evening, we came home to find the
rooster dead in the pen with the dogs. It was
stiff and it looked like it had been running around
with them with no place to go. The fence was
at least six feet high. We finally figured out that
he had roosted in a tree above the kennel, and
when he woke up, he flew to the ground and
he landed and the dog pin. Now, I like chickens.
I grew up around chickens, and I love eggs and
fried chicken. But the way these two met their demise
was a bit disturbing, even to me. Although this story
has nothing to do with cryptids, I hope it gave
you a life. Two chickens were indeed harmed in this story.
In fact, they were terminated. I have several Bigfoot stories
for you, as well as a ghost story and a
demon story, and lots of UFO experiences. I look forward
to relating them to you and your listeners. I was
born deep in the Appalachian Mountains in southern West by God,
Virginia in nineteen forty nine and had an amazing childhood.
We grew up wild and free. My cousin Eddie and
I ran those mountains like we owned them. We both
carried large hunting knives from the age of six or
seven and only came home when we got hungry. I
think the Bigfoots watched over us as we explored. Oh
that was a good dog story. I mean it wasn't
a sweet sentimental stories. These dogs are killers, chicken killers.
When we first got chickens, our dog Roxy, she snuck
in the pen and she killed a couple of these.
Y'all ever see these chickens with her every real skinny,
tall necks and have strange looking feathers on their heads.
We bought two of them, a little one and a
big one. They were grown up. They were, you know,
either adolescent or adult chickens, but nobody would buy them
because they were so ugly. So we bought them and
brought them home, and we kept them separate from the
other chickens because there's always the pecking order, you know,
you kind of have to slowly introduce new hens into
the flock so the other hens won't pick on them.
So we had them in a little I don't know,
I think I made just this little wire cage with
a top on it, just to keep them in the
pen with the other chickens so they could get used
to them. And you know, after a while you turn
them loose and they fin for themselves. But little o'
Roxy worked her way in that wire chicken wire get up,
I did, and she killed both of those chickens, and
they were laying dead in there. I knew she did it,
and she was acting like she had nothing to do
with it. She'd walk up and she'd see that little
pen and then she'd kind of walk away and like
not even look at it. It's funny how dogs will
know when they're in trouble, and they'll they're just like us.
They'll act like they didn't do anything. But that's what
that story reminded me of. Anyway, I thought that was
a good dog story. I really appreciate it. Lived in
a house for forty four years in upstate New York
along the Susquehanna. I think that's how you pronounce it,
Susquehanna River. It's a beautiful old Victorian on the side
of a hill. The front overlooks a dying small town
across the river. In the back faces a hillside a
thick forest. I came upon this place when I was
in the market. The long winding driveway was a plus
because we like our privacy. The place had already been emptied.
When I spoke to the owner, whom I knew from work.
He couldn't wait to sell the place, and he kept
lowering the price until I couldn't say no. This was
nineteen seventy nine. Later I found out why he was
so anxious to sell. Whenever we'd get to talking at work,
he would ask me if anything weird ever happened to
me there. I finally asked him what he was referring to,
and he began telling me that his wife wouldn't stay
there because of the noises she heard at night. One time,
he and his buddies were sitting around a campfire. They
heard the noises too, and their pit bull ran scared
back to the house. He finally admitted that he thought
it was bigfoot, and I thought he was pulling my leg.
I had lived there for decades, and it wasn't until
two thousand and four that something finally happened. On a
hot summer afternoon, a fire station pickup came zooming up
the driveway after getting a report of a fire on
our back hill. I'd been outside and I'd not seen
any trace of a fire, so he drove back down.
Fifteen minutes later, he came back up after driving to
the opposite hill to get a better view. He said
he saw a glowing ball that looked like a fire.
He looked around my property, but once again we didn't
see any flames. My kids and I spent a lot
of time up in the woods on our back hill.
One day, not far from our house, there was a
stand of about thirty saplings twenty feet tall, all bent
at forty five degree angles. It was clearly intentional, but
we had no explanation for it. We would often hear
what we thought was drumming from different spots, sometimes close
and sometimes far off. One summer night, my daughter came
into my bed because she said she heard something throwing
stones on the driveway. In the fall of two thousand
and five, my German shepherd and I were inside. I
had my music blasting while I was cleaning, when out
of nowhere, there was a loud bang on the side
of the house. My dog barked and ran to the window.
I turned down the music and I looked, but I
didn't see anything. It didn't hit me until I happened
U point your channel what these things could have possibly been.
I started doing a little research, looked at the BFRO
and found an actual sighting on my hill a half
mile down the road. I'm now convinced that there was
a group of Bigfoot, maybe not always present, but perhaps
a stopover on their migration. I no longer live there.
My wonderful kids have grown, and I've downsized to a
cabin that borders the state land. Obviously, I have proven
I can coexist with the wild world, though I'm glad
I was oblivious to the Bigfoot activity when it was happening.
All right, that was eight stories. I hope you guys
enjoyed that. I'm going to put an archived story or
two behind this, so there's still a little bit more
to go on the podcast if you want to stick
around and listen to some of these older stories that
are excellent. They're just all the stories I do are
really good. I don't know how you guys write them
so well and have such odd experiences. It is so
fascinating to me. But I give all the credit to you.
Like I told a person who wrote in the story
in this podcast, all I do is read them. None
of this stuff happened to me. You all are sharing
your stories with the rest of the world, is what
you're doing, and I'm just reading them, so I sure
appreciate it. Here comes a couple of stories from the vault,
and then the podcast will end after I guess maybe
I don't know second story. Hope you guys have a
good weekend and we'll see on the next one. Thanks.
Back in nineteen eighty four, my family lived on a
farm on the edge of town in the heart of Kentucky.
The house sat on a hilltop with a big black
barn behind it and a long, narrow valley beyond that.
The house set well above the roadway and even higher
above the valley. The valley set even lower and was
surrounded by woods. I was sixteen and feeling pretty low.
My girlfriend had just called me on the phone and
broken up with me after two months. She didn't even
give me a reason. It was February, but the weather
was beginning to show signs of spring after a long winter.
The temperature was somewhat in the mid forties and there
were only a few patches of snow here and there.
I needed to get away and think, so I headed
for my favorite spot, and for me, that was the woods.
I spent a great deal of time there, and sometimes
with friends, but usually alone. My father had left my
mother when I was young, so the male role models
in my life were my two uncles. They taught me
to hunt and fish, and to appreciate the beauty and
wonder of nature. In those woods, there were a couple
of great guys. Looking back, I really missed those times
that we spent together. I walked down to the bottom
of the valley, like I generally did, I was deep
in thought about why my girl would break up with me,
and I wasn't paying attention when I heard I heard
a thumping sound. It was something solid hitting the grass
covered ground. I looked around and saw a rock about
twenty feet from me rolling uphill. I figured it was
either my sister or my brother playing a trick on me,
so I turned to look back the way I came,
expecting to see one of them, and I scanned around looking,
but they weren't there. As I turned to my left,
still looking for my siblings, I saw a twenty foot
patch of snow with four human shaped footprints in it.
It was a little unnerving to see the footprints because first,
whoever made these prints wasn't wearing shoes. It wasn't freezing out,
but it was still cold. Walking in the snow would
have made it feel even colder. Second, these prints were huge.
I walked over and compared them to my boot. They
were nearly twice as long as my foot and much wider,
and the stride was a lot longer than I could
have made. I was still examining the footprints when I
heard another rock hit the ground and I turned in
the direction of the sound, and I saw the rock
twenty feet away rolling downhill. This time it was bigger
than the first, roughly the size of my fist, and
I knew immediately it couldn't have been my brother or sister.
I was far older and stronger than them, and I
doubt I could have thrown it from any possible hiding spots.
I then thought it might have been one of my
friends who lived close, and I knew Tommy was out
of town visiting relatives, and Scotty had been in bed
all week with a bad case of the flu. They
were the only ones who ever came over, so I
looked around again. Who was throwing rocks at me? The
tracks probably should have sent me running home, but I
honestly thought someone was playing a prank on me. My
uncles taught me that tracks made in the snow will
expand when they melt, so I figured it was just
a joke. I walked forward with a lot of confidence.
You better knock it off. I'm throw rocks too, I said.
Another rock was chucked at me. This time I saw
it in mid flight, so I knew it was coming
from the left corner of the woods, near the property line.
It was two hundred feet from me, and I thought,
whoever was throwing these rocks must have a pretty good arm.
Another rock landed ten feet to my right. I was
getting angry now, so I walked over and picked it
up before it stopped rolling. It was a little bigger
than I would have normally wanted to throw, but in
my frustration, I threw it back. Then I screamed an
insult at whoever this was for good measure. My throw
was way off the mark. It hit the ground well
short of the tree line, so I looked around for
another rock to throw. I found a few in the
grass between the patches of snow, so I picked one
up that fit my hand better. This time. It hit
a tree just inside the woodline. Then I saw a
movement eighty feet to my left in the nearest section
of trees. It was a lot closer to me than
where the rocks were coming from. I only got a glimpse,
maybe four or five seconds at most. Most of it
was obscured by the thick brush and trees. I saw
a dark upper portion of a massive right shoulder blade
and a huge moving arm about seven feet off the ground. Also,
I saw what looked like thick legs as it ran
behind a tree. It was completely covered in reddish hair
that bounced as it disappeared into the trees. I was
nearly awe struck. Its movements were so graceful and fluid.
It was completely different from how a deer or a
human would move. Now I knew immediately it wasn't a
bear or a cougar. It was too large. Both bears
and cougars are extremely rare in Kentucky, and neither of
them throw rocks. I barely had time to register what
I was seeing when another rock landed five feet from me.
It came from the same direction as the others. Then
I heard heavy footfalls in the woods from that same direction.
There were definitely more than one of them. To say
I wasn't terrified would be a bold faced lie. I
knew I had to get out of there. I was
alone and unarmed. The nearest house was over half a
mile away, on the other side of the valley and
flanked by thick trees. I knew the elderly couple who
lived there. They were nice people, but they wouldn't have
been able to hear me even if they were outside,
which they rarely were. My house was over three quarters
of a mile away, and my mom and siblings had
been inside watching TV when I left. At that moment,
I forgot all about my girlfriend. Survival was my priority.
I wanted to run, but I remembered what my uncles
had told me about predators. Never turn your back on them,
and running will kick in their instinct to chase. Fear
turned into anger as I picked up as many rocks
as I could find and started throwing them back towards
the woods as fast as I could. I at least
a string of obscenities and foul language as I did,
all the while moving backwards a few dozen paces at
a time. Years later, during my time in the military,
I learned to call that a tactical retreat. More rocks
are being thrown back at me now, and from two
different directions. I switched targets back and forth as I
slowly made my way back down the valley. Locked in
combat with an unseen enemy, I was out numbered and
out gun but I kept throwing and moving and cussing
and cursing. I doubted the cussing helped me, but it
made me feel braver. It was probably only five minutes
before I felt the hill under my feet, but it
felt like hours. That meant I was closer to the
relative safety of home, and by now those creatures had
stopped throwing rocks at me. My accuracy had dropped off
dramatically by then, anyway, and I scanned the woods once
more for movement and listened for sounds. I didn't see
or hear anything, and exhausted and sweating like i'd run
a marathon, I took off my coat and stood there
for another five minutes before I felt it was safe
enough to turn and high tailor at home. I didn't
tell my mother and siblings what had happened. I didn't
want to scare them. The next day I told one
of my uncles, who brought his shotgun over and slipped
down into the valley with me to retrace my steps.
I showed him the tracks in the snow. There were
huge gouges in the hard dirt where the rocks and landed.
We walked into the woodline where I had seen the
one running. That's where I compared the s and height
of the trees to the spot where I saw the
shoulder and the arm. This thing must have been massive,
but we didn't find any tracks there. We left the area,
but not before I noticed that my uncle was being
unusually quiet. After we got back to the house and
well away from my mom, he told me that he'd
had a strange experience there many years before. My eldest
uncle served in Vietnam. He's a quiet man who rarely
shows his emotions or gets upset. When he came home
from the war, he couldn't wait to get back into
his beloved woods where he could hunt and fish. And
then he finally got the chance. It was a bittersweet experience.
It isn't an easy transition from life of daily combat
back to a peaceful civilian existence. The woods of Kentucky
looked nothing like the jungles of Southeast Asia, but the
impressive feeling of the dense vegetation and the limited visibility
are similar. It took him quite a while to get
over the nagging fear of someone waiting behind every bush
to kill him. Slowly he worked his way back to
his favorite fishing spots, and once he was comfortable, he
began to hunt again. One day, he was out hunting
squirrels alone with his twenty two rifle. He was also
carrying a revolver in his hip holster. He walked for
hours and saw a few squirrels that they were too
small to trouble with. When he decided to take a break,
he sat down under a large tree on top of
a heavily wooded ridgeline. From there, he had a clear
view down into the nearby holler. He'd been sitting there
for about ten minutes when he saw movement below. He
only saw bushes moving, but he suspected it was a deer.
It was too early for deer season, but knowing that
paths might help him decide where to build a stand later,
he decided to go down check it out. He got
up and slowly made his way down to the holler.
The trees and underbrush made it impossible to get a
clear view of whatever was moving around, but he found
a little path that had made Whatever it was, he
knew it wasn't a deer. It looked almost like a
small bulldozer had made the path, like six deer had
walked inside by side. He never seen them move that way,
and plus the vegetation look like it had been smashed
aside and pulled out of the way. He didn't find
any tracks, but it was clear that something heavy had
walked through here. He told me he should have left
right then and there, but he was young, and curiosity
got the better of him. He moved forward, pondering what
kind of critter could make such a path. Was it
a bear? No, Black bears aren't much whiter than a deer. Besides,
he'd never seen a bear in this part of the state.
Cougars and mountain lions came to mind, but he quickly
ruled them out as well. Suddenly there was a loud crash,
like a tree breaking under a great strain, and it
echoed across the holler. Then the woods grew early quiet.
There were no birds chirping, no bees buzzing, no squirrels
or any other animals making any sounds. Alarmed, and reverting
back to his military training, he quickly veered off the
trail and hid down among the tall grass on his belly.
He lay there in the silence for several minutes, wondering
if his mind was playing tricks on him. He was
about to move away when he heard a sound that
I was familiar with. First there was a thump several
yards away, and then another one a little closer. He
looked up over the tall grass and he saw a
rock coming in his direction. He crawled away, hoping that
that would throw his attacker off his position, and it
almost worked. The next rock landed farther away, but it
was adjusting for his movement. He decided that this thing
must be a human. He couldn't think of anything else
in Kentucky that could throw rocks. With his rifle and pistol,
my uncle felt reasonably assured that he was safe, so
he stood up and he called out. He doesn't remember
what he said, but it was something to the effect
of asking them not to throw rocks at him, but
no one answered. He then told them that he was armed,
and he expected to get an answer, or at least
hear them leave, but he got neither. He began to
make his way out of there. Like me, He walked backwards,
with his eyes skinning for threats. He moved quickly. It
was too late to worry about being quiet. Whatever it was,
it knew exactly where he was. Another rock hit the
ground his feet and bounced into his right leg. It
didn't hurt him, but it startled him greatly. He didn't
lose his cool. He pulled his rifle up and scanned
the area. In a quick three sixty. He was still
convinced it was people, so he threatened to shoot if
another rock was thrown. Well, something moved in the bushes,
but he couldn't see what it was. It had to
be a human. He wasn't prepared to accept any other alternative.
He kept backing up and moving his head from side
to side, and then an incredibly loud growl broke the
silence and reverberated through his chest. He said he'd never
heard anything like it before or since. At this point,
my uncle knew two things. It was very close and
it wasn't. Human instinct kicked in. He fired into the bushes,
shifted position, chambered another round, and then he fired again.
He doubted he hid anything, but he was hoping to
scare it off. And then another rock flew at him.
It landed a little further away than the last, but
that was enough. He turned and bolted for a nearby
grove of trees. It didn't offer much shelter, but it
was better than nothing. He pulled at his pistol and
sat there for maybe an hour, waiting for another confrontation.
His nerves were on edge. He's not a religious man,
but he said. He did a lot of praying that day,
but nothing more happened, and soon the sounds of the
woods were turned to normal, as if nothing had ever happened.
He was feeling foolish, and he made his way back
to the ridge and looked over the area one more time.
He didn't see anything unusual and gladly went home empty handed.
He didn't tell anyone else about his experience for a
long time. He didn't think anyone would believe him. He
told his brother later, he told me. In a way,
my uncle and I bonded that day. We both had
a strange experience that we couldn't explain. At least, he'd
been armed with throwing rocks back at something that's throwing
rocks at me. Probably wasn't very smart, but it seemed
like my best option at the time. Fortunately, neither of
us has seen anything since. Now that I'm older and
perhaps a bit wiser, I don't think that whatever was
throwing rocks at us was trying to hurt us. I
think it was warning us to get out of the area.
At least that's my two cents worth. You can believe
whatever you choose to believe. In the summer of nineteen
ninety four, my husband and I bought a brand new
home and one of the many housing subdivisions being built
in the Sacramento Valley during the nineteen nineties housing boom.
The area had originally been mostly farmland and floodplains, and
there were dozens of subdivisions being built, and each subdivision
displayed beautifully decorated home plans. The homes were much more
affordable then, so we applied for a first time buyer
loan and crossed our fingers. The loan process seemed to
take forever, but when we were approved, we got to
pick out our very own flooring style and upgraded the
kitchen appliances, which was so nice since the apartment we
lived in had no dishwasher or self cleaning oven. We
moved our family, which consisted of the two of us,
our four year old son, and our future baby girl,
who was due in mid August, and we were happy
to have accomplished so much in a relatively short amount
of time. The house was on a dead end street
since the owner of the property behind the subdivision did
not want to sell any of his property, which would
have allowed for the street to go through and join
up with other subdivisions. There was still a lot of
open land and homes in various stages of construction, and
our neighbors had kids about the same age as our son,
and he made new friends and all the kids played
on the street since there was no traffic during the
day while most people were at work. Unfortunately, my husband
was not able to find a job in Sacramento right away,
so he would stay with his mom back in the
Bay Area during the work week, and then he would
drive back to the valley to check in on us
so we could do our grocery shopping and other errands.
At that time, we only had one car and I
was left stranded until he was back from the Bay Area.
It was a long commute, but my husband was so
happy to buy us the house that he was willing
to commute with the hope that he would find a
job in the valley soon enough and stop commuting. It
was a whole year before he was hired at one
of the local auto body shops. When our daughter was born,
my husband was able to take a week off from
work to be with us and enjoy our new baby girl,
and then he went back to work and to his
commute he would get up at three am and make
his coffee and get his overnight bag and leave at
three thirty am so he could be at work by
six thirty am. Back then, he was the bread winner,
so we really needed him to keep that job, even
if it was one hundred miles away. I would normally
get up with him and spend a few minutes with
him before he would be off. I would go back
to bed and try to sleep before the baby would
wake up to nurse. Around five thirty am. I would
feed her in bed and lay her between me and
our four year old son, and the three of us
would snuggle and sleep until around eight thirty before we
started our day. We were so spoiled. On this Monday,
after he left for his commute, I felt uneasy and
I felt scared, but I didn't know why. I I
had to go back to our bedroom and lay down,
thinking that the baby would be up soon enough to nurse,
so maybe it would be better just to lay back down.
I fell asleep and I had a horrible nightmare. I
dreamt that our sun was missing, and that we were
running to different streets looking for him and calling his name.
I woke up suddenly and I was relieved that it
was just a horrible dream. And my boy was fast
asleep next to me, and the baby was still in
her bacinet next to the bed. I turned over on
my side facing the bacinet, and I saw a bright
light coming in between the window blinds, and thinking out loud,
I said, is it morning already? The light was coming
in between the blinds and it was so bright, but
the rest of the room looked dark. There was a
bright light on the wall next to the window, and
I looked up to see where the light was coming from,
and to my horror, just above the bacinet was an
alien gray's face. It was just the head, no upper body, legs,
or arms. The head was dark in color, very round,
ending in a pointed chin, and there were small slits
for his mouth and nostrils. But the eyes, the eyes
were large and almond shape and very shiny black, and
it had some sort of glass lamp on the top
of its head. The light on the wall was coming
from this lamp. The being was looking down at the
baby in the basinette. Oh my god, I couldn't speak.
My heart started pounding so hard that I started trembling uncontrollably.
It saw me, and it scowled at me when it
realized I was looking at it, and it moved towards me,
and I started screaming and swinging my arms and kicking,
and I remember that I set out loud. Oh my god,
I'm going to lose my mind. I felt that I
could not take the fact that this creature was there,
and it was just there in the room above my
baby bassinette in the house. It floated from its original
position above the basinette to just above my face, and
I remember seeing this light blue fog build up in
front of my face, and then, in a dreamlike manner,
I remember a sound like pigeons mate, like a cooing sound.
I remember feeling that whoever was talking to me was
stern and was telling me that it was for our
own good. When I woke up again, it was still
dark out, but it was around six am, and the
blankets were perfectly made around the bed like nothing had happened,
and everything felt still. My son was asleep next to me,
and the baby was in her basinette, and I got
out of bed and turned all the lights on in
the room and the rest of the house, and I
checked all the rooms in the house, and I checked
the locks on the front door and the lock in
the backyard sliding glass door, and everything was just like
I had left it. After my husband had left for work,
I decided to stay up and just start my day.
In fact, I got in the shower, even though that
was not my usual time to shower. When I was
washing my hair, there was a sore spot on the
top of my head. There was no blood, no bump,
just very sore. I got dressed and I went to
the kitchen and I had some coffee. While having my coffee,
I was trying to make sense of all those events. Now.
I remember the nightmare that I had woken up from
and how relieved I had felt that it had just
been a bad dream. But then that thing was there,
and I couldn't decide if it had been another bad
dream or if that second part was real. It didn't
make sense. But how can a bad dream as scary
as that could be, was still making me afraid. My
son was up at nine am, and I kept checking
in on the baby, and she kept sleeping. She should
have been and up once to nurse, but no she wasn't.
And I called my sister, and I told her about
my weird dream, and I started crying because it seemed
like it had been real, but I kept thinking that
it couldn't be real. I checked on the baby and
she had no fever, no rash, but she did not
wake up to nurse until two pm that afternoon, and
by then I was sore and engorged with milk. As
the day progressed, I became anxious, and before it was evening,
I called my sister asking if she could come over
and pick us up. I didn't want to be there
alone with the kids. When it was night again, she
came over and took us to her apartment. My sister
wasn't sure what to make of this whole thing. I
was just grateful that I didn't have to be alone
in the house. We stayed in her kids room that night,
and I remember feeling very scared because I didn't know
if it would happen again. But I put both kids
in me under the twin bed we were supposed to
sleep on, but we slept under the bed. I called
my husband and told him about my bad dream, but
he thought it was just stressed from being left alone
so many nights and taking care of the kids in
the house. My husband picked us up from my sister's
place and drove us back to our house. That evening,
I tried to go about my normal routine, making dinner,
bathing the kids before bed, and watching a movie. And
then it was time for me and my husband to
go to bed, so I put both kids in the
bed between us, and I put a large toy sword
next to me in the bed. I was terrified that
it would come back, that I would wake up, and
that face would be there looking back at me when
I opened my eyes. I knew there was nothing I
could do to protect us, and that made me more
frightened than anything. My husband continued to commute for another
six months, so I was still alone in the evening,
and that was the worst part. For weeks, every night,
I would stay up just until I could see daylight
before I felt safe to fall asleep. I would leave
the TV on in the bedroom, lights on, and fight
sleep until I would see the early sunlight peek through
the windows. I didn't feel safe until around early spring,
when the morning light starts just a bit earlier each morning.
I went on like this for three years, every winter,
and for years I was terrified to look out any
window in the evenings. I would close all the blinds
in the house at night and leave some lights on
before going to bed. My husband would just tell me
that it had been a bad dream, and after a
few months he didn't like me to talk about it.
My daughter was only three months old when this happened.
She doesn't have any strange scars or ill effects from
the experience. I no longer fear the winter nights, but
I know that it was not a dream. Regarding the
description of the creature I saw, in the book titled
Operation Trojan Horse, there is a description of an et
that has been described wearing some type of light attached
to or on the top of its head,