Speaker 1: My brother in law and his wife live in East Texas,
out in what we affectionately call the Boonies. I guess
boondocks would be the technical term. They live in a
farmhouse on top of a hill, looking down into an
open meadow with pine woods beyond that. It's beautiful and
it's peaceful there, well, it used to be. Last fall,
my husband and I went to their home so my
husband could help his brother with some carpentry work. This
is not my forte, so I decided to take the mule.
I think that's the term for a four wheel type
vehicle that you can haul stuff with, although I think
I would have preferred an actual mule because the mechanical
one I rode was about as smooth as taking a
spin and a washing machine, not that I've ever done that.
I took some trash bag so that I could gather
pine needles to use my chicken coop and garden. After
an hour of bouncing up and down on that hard seat,
I found a great spot to gather up some pine needles.
It was at the back of their property, where there
are a lot of trees in a creek that zig
zags back and forth across the property. It was a
beautiful fall day. The only thing I was concerned about
at this time was watching for snakes as I gathered
the pine needles, and I love listening to the birds
seeing as I went about my work. I had gathered
a lot of pine needles and loaded them on the mule,
and I was still wishing it was the four legged
kind of mule. I decided to walk for a little
while before I bounced back to the house, thinking maybe
I could somehow use one of the bags as a cushion.
I'd been walking for about a half an hour and
had come to a washed out area that made sandy
high banks on each side. The banks were fifteen feet tall.
There were several rocks exposed from the creek flooding, I guess,
and some of the rocks were really pretty, so I
amused myself by digging around and looking for neat rocks.
Now I had been doing this for a while when
I noticed everything got real quiet. It was then that
I heard a rustling coming from the top of one
of the banks. I couldn't see anything from where I was,
so I just froze, waiting to see what was going
to happen. And then I smelled it. It was horrible smell.
It was the worst thing I've ever smelled in my life.
It was a combination of cat poop, smelly old mop water,
and skunk that had been dead in the road for
a while. And then the rustling stopped. I was getting
nervous now, thinking it was a wild hog, because I've
heard they can be mean. I decided just to stay
still and hope it would go away, not that my
legs would have worked right then anyway. And then I
heard the oddest sound. It sounded like someone clucking like
a chicken. It was comical and amusing, and I wondered
what in the world was going on. A million things
flashed through your mind. I began to think that I
was going to be murdered by a mad clown that
thinks he's a chicken. I leaned up against the bank
and still hoping it would go away, and then a
rifle shot rang out, and it sounded like a cannon,
and it was followed by a big thud, and then
I heard voices. There were men's voices talking. I was
thinking that it was the hunters and they had shot
the hog, and one of them said, damn, good shot.
You got that, Sorry devil, Steve, You're one crazy son
of a gun. I can't believe that stupid chicken dance
of your still works. And then one said to get
the head. And I heard a chopping noise and a
thud and a thunk and a thud, and something came
rolling down the bank and it was the head. It
was a huge, ugly, hairy but it wasn't a hog.
All I could do was stand there frozen, thinking, there
really are bigfoot creatures in these woods. No, it can't be.
I must be having a stroke, I thought. I was
jerked back to reality by someone saying, you go get it.
You're the one that dropped it. The next thing I know,
here comes a man scrambling down the bank with a
burlap sack. In kind of a Southern voice. He said,
excuse me, ma'am. I didn't mean to startle you, dear,
but I really do need to get that head that
I dropped. He came over and he shook my hand,
introducing himself as Steve Lily. He gave me his thanks
and said they were sorry to have bothered me. He
picked up the head and put it in the sack,
and then he tipped his hat and he said, well
by now, and he climbed back up the bank. And
that's how I met Bigfoot and the hero named Steve
Lily that apparently saved me from a Bigfoot. It's been
seventeen years since this incident took place. Until recently, we
had not discussed what happened to the five of us
while camping at Bailey Cove Campground. It always felt like
a taboo subject to bring up. This past Mother's Day
in twenty twenty one, we were able to get all
of our adult kids to travel home to celebrate their mother.
We had a great visit with everyone, and one of
the big topics of discussion was our upcoming camping trip
into the Sierra Nevadas. Later that evening, we were all
out on the patio talking about the upcoming camping trip
when my youngest spoke up and said, hopefully we don't
have any unwelcome visitors this time. Everyone laughed, and then
my oldest spoke out, Hey, Dad, what do you really
think happened to us that time on Shasta Late Oh Man,
I thought to myself, please let this be going in
the direction that I I have wanted it to go.
For the last seventeen years. What trip does Shasta Lak
are you talking about? I ask Dad? Everyone said, are
you talking about the Bailey Cove campground trip? Yes? That trip,
said everyone. I glanced at my son and daughter in
laws and saw a bit of confusion in their faces.
So I said, let's talk about it, but maybe we
should start at the beginning, so folks here that weren't
present at the time can better understand what happened. The
next ninety minutes was great. I started off the conversation
and we all took turns telling what we remembered happening.
I think it was good therapy for all of us
to talk about it. September tenth, two thousand and four,
would forever change our young family and the belief that
only four legged creatures live in the wilderness. Our family
had a summer routine of two camping trips each year.
September approached in two thousand and four, we had not
been able to go camping yet. It had been a
busy summer. My wife mentioned that she wanted to plan
a quick camping trip to Shasta Lake for the following weekend. Well.
I thought it was great idea because I had the
next Saturday through Monday off from work. We just needed
to decide what campground we wanted to use. My wife
suggested Bailey Cove Campground because it was only a twenty
minute drive. Now I was able to get the reservations
with no problems. We arrived at Bailey Cove Campground and
checked in with the park ranger, who told us not
many folks were there and we could choose our own campsite.
We got the trailer backed onto the pad. Not long
after we were cooking hot dogs over the campfire, and
then we got the kids ready for bed and tucked in. Afterward,
I joined my wife out by the fire pit. We
stayed up for another couple of hours, enjoyed the evening.
Once the flames had died down, I doused the coals
with water, and by eleven thirty PM we were all asleep.
At some point in the middle of the night, a
loud cracking sound woke me. A large branch was snapped
off a nearby a tree. It was loud and I
could hardly believe I was the only person awake. I
thought about shaking my wife away, but it was quiet outside. Now,
maybe I had imagined that loud noise. I lay there
on my back with my eyes wide open and listening,
and all I could hear was my heart beating. And
then I thought that was no sound at all. I
must have dreamed it. It was freakishly quiet though there
were no crickets, no breeze, no traffic sounds. It was
almost suffocating. That's the only way I can describe it.
And then I heard the sound of footsteps on pine
needles and twigs. Whatever it was, it was toward us.
My imagination was starting to mess with me too many
CSI Las Vegas episodes with a crazed killer on the loose.
I guess it was most likely a deer. I thought
maybe a bear or a raccoon. So I closed my
eyes and I think I fell back to sleep. But
what happened next is when things got real. My eyes
opened with a loud, crunching sound of something walking on
the crushed rock that surrounded the asphalt pad, and I
sat straight up. I noticed that my wife and son
were now moving and confused. One of the kids asked
about the sounds. It's probably a bear, I said. Whatever
was outside started walking slowly back and forth in the
crushed rock, I could tell it was heavy. My wife's
white knuckle grasp on my arm was intense. She finally
spoke up and said, it sounds like person walking, not
a bear. That's exactly what I thought, but I played
it off again as a bear, and through the mesh
screen we couldn't see anything moving. Now. Finally, I said,
whoever's outside, you need to leave now. I'm armed and
we're about to call the police. That only woke up
our two daughters and the youngest one immediately since the
tension of the situation, and she started crying. I told
my wife to call nine to one one, and she
asked me if I was really armed, and I told
her to know that I had left the handgun locked
up in the truck. Whatever was out there ignored my
demands anyway, and the pacing increased. There was no cell
service where we were. I couldn't believe how close we
were to civilization with no cell service. You know, twenty
years later, nothing's really changed. It was two thirty am
at this point and all five of us were in
the die in Nette area. I double checked to make
sure the flimsy camper door was locked, and I grabbed
the flashlight I called out again, and the pacing back
and forth stopped. One of the kids said, Dad, you
should go outside and check to see if it's still there. Well,
I didn't know what to say. I had to figure
out a reply that made me sound like the protector
of the family, but gave me any excuse for not
going outside. I was about to speak when something or
someone tried to open the door. Everyone freaked out, and
the screaming inside the camper was deafening. I have never
felt such fear in my life. I felt certain we
were all going to die a horrible death. I really
did feel powerless. Whatever was outside was now grunting and
breathing heavy. Feeling like my next move was going to
save us, I started zipping up all the windows actually,
like that would protect us. Next, a loud slap from
the side of the camper happened. It was near the
back and on the same side as the door. One
of the kids yelled at Dad, do something. I didn't
know what to do. There's not a worse feeling as
a father when you can't protect your loved ones. The
next thing this monster did was a slap dead center
on the roof of the camper. And then it scraped
its fingers across the top, like fingernails across the chalkboard.
Screams for help came from all of us inside the camper.
My ears were ringing from the extreme decibel levels coming
from everyone's cries. And then I heard footsteps in the
crush rock again. I tried to get everyone to quiet
down so I could listen. It was relatively quiet except
for the heavy breathing and sniffing from inside the camper.
I thought I heard a couple of small branches break
and few faint footsteps heading up the steep hill. Maybe
it was leaving. Everything was silent for five minutes, and
I told my wife what I wanted to do next.
My plan was to run to the pickup and drive
off as quickly as possible with the trailer in tow,
and get to the ranger station and then go from there. No,
I had not unhooked the trailer from the truck. She
liked the plan, and we explained to the kids what
we were about to do. Trying to quietly open the
camper door wasn't going as planned. Usually the thing just
swung open at the slightest turn of the handle, but
it didn't this time, so I turned the knob fully
down to the open position and gave the door a
pop with my right shoulder. The door popped open and
flew out of my grip, smashing into the side of
the camper. I rolled out onto the asphalt, and I
sprinted like an Olympic hurdler, jumping over the fire pit
and a chain or two as I headed around the
front of the truck. Just as I got to the
truck door, a blood curdling scream blew up the night.
It was so deafening and long that it made my
insides churn. It scared me so bad that I dropped
the keys. I finally found them, and I fumbled to
get the correct key and get it into the walk.
I was doing all of this in the dark. Then
the next scream came. You could not tell where this
monster was. It sounded like it was coming from every direction.
The truck started and I threw it into drive and
floored the gas and I went forward a foot or two,
and then the tires began to spin. That's when I
remembered the wheels on the trailer were choked. I put
the truck in reverse and backed up a little, and
then put it back into drive and said, hold on, guys,
and I pushed the gas pedal to the floor. The
truck shuddered and the trailer launched into the air like
a kid jumping a BMX bike. And in the glow
of the tail lights, I could see that the trailer
was still behind the truck. And I kept the hammer
down as best as I could on the narrow road.
And when we got near the ranger station, I pulled
to the side and then ran back to get my family.
The door on the camper flew open, almost hitting me
in the face. You've never seen a wife and three
young kids sprint so quickly, and they dove into the cabin.
I yelled to my wife to get behind the wheel
and lock the doors while I unhooked the trailer, and
in thirty seconds I was back at the truck and
I met my oldest daughter's crying face at the window
as she unlocked the door. Let's get the hell out
of here, I said. As I slammed the door shut.
My wife fish tailed up the road for two hundred feet.
We climbed the winding road faster than any vehicle should
be allowed. The crying now was because we had escaped
whatever it was that had terrified us. What should have
been a twenty three minute drive home took much less time.
Our youngest daughter, who was and still is the family's
back seat driver from hell, chimed up and said, Dad,
it's okay that she's going fast. We just want to
get home. We made it home in ready and pulled
into our driveway just minutes after four am. Everyone rushed
into the house, and I locked up the truck and
headed for the front door. Once in the house, everyone
had their pillows and blankets from their beds on the
living room floor. Everyone laid there with their eyes wide open.
I asked if anyone wanted to talk about what we
had just experienced. Nobody said a word. That was fine
with me. I didn't want to talk about it anyway.
Everyone eventually dozed off. It was the phone that woke
the next morning at eight o'clock. It was the park ranger.
She seemed concerned. Our camper trailer was left in the
middle of the park road and our campsite was in
total disarray. I apologized, and I told her that I'd
be there soon to clean everything up. As I backed
up the truck, to the tent trailer. I saw the
ranger was there waiting, and I told her I'd have
our mess cleaned up within twenty minutes and be gone.
She didn't seem too concerned about the mess, but more
concerned about why we left so quick. She mentioned that
the other family in the campground had packed up too
and left before she arrived at seven thirty am. She
said that they were supposed to have stayed another five
days and she hadn't been able to contact them by phone.
I told her that we had had a couple of
bears the night before, and they were not the normal
friendly type we usually see while camping here. I pretty
much kept it at that, and our camp site well,
isn't really that bad. One of the older lounge chairs
was completely bent, and one of the large air mattresses
that I had blown up before dinner had been ripped
in half. I was five minutes from being finished with
loading up when the ranger's truck pulled up alongside mine.
She commented on how quickly I had loaded up. I
felt like she was trying to get me to talk
about what happened. I continued throwing stuff in the back
of the truck, and I started to cover it up
with a tart. I was just about to say goodbye
when she asked me where the iron grate insert for
the campfire pit was. Well, I didn't know where it was.
It was there last night, I said, when we had
our campfire. Well, it's missing. Now. If you can't find it,
we're going to have to bill you for a replacement.
She said, go ahead and bail me. I said, because
I'm not looking for it. And I jumped in the
truck and I left. The ranger called the house the
next afternoon to let me know that the firepit grate
had been found. It was two hundred feet away from
our camp site. She made a big deal on how
strange it was for that to have happened, and she
asked me what really happened, And I told her those
bears were just a couple of real pranksters, I guess,
and I said goodbye and I hung up. After I
hung up, I wondered about the things that had happened
that could not be explained. The heaviness of the bipedal steps,
the slap on the middle of the roof that was
eight feet tall, and the turning of the doorknob on
the trailer, ignoring the threat of being shot, the sustained guttural,
ear piercing screams and the howls, and the feeling of
immense dread and shock I had. Why did that other
family leave five days early? Did they have a visit
as well? I'm sure they heard the insanely loud screams
maybe most of all, How does a fifty pound, one
inch thick iron grate travel two hundred feet up a hill?
I don't think a bear would do that. Well, that's
my story, and it feels good to write this down
and share our story with people who won't judge us
as freaks. This event really happened, And even though I've
injected a little humor here and there, it was absolutely
nothing funny when this happened. Maybe the humor I used
is a self protection mechanism that helped me pin this
on paper. He says, I'm a truck driver and I've
driven all over and I've seen a lot, but there's
one piece of road from Coos, Texas, over to Conrod,
Texas that I'll never drive again, not after what I
saw that night. I was driving the highway when something
hit the road with a boom. There was a full moon,
so I could see it was there, but it wasn't
until I got a ways down the road that my
headlights hit the body of a two hundred pound pig
with its back quarter chewed off. I was just beginning
to register what I was looking at when something jumped
up out of the ditch and crossed both lanes in
one step. I was pulling a flat bed with a
load of lumber, and I'd just come around the corner,
so I was only going five miles per hour. The
ditch there was about six feet deep. When it stood
up on two legs, I nearly lost control of my bowels.
Even standing down in the ditch, there was at least
four or five feet of upper body clearly above the roadway.
It was covered in long, shaggy red hair with arms
that reached down to its knees. It meandered along like
it didn't even care I was there, swinging its arms
and walking with a weird gait. I will never forget.
The only words I can find to describe it are
werewolf on steroids. Not long after that, I moved to
Buena Buena, Buna, Buna, Texas. My next door. Neighbor's dad
had passed away and left him his truck. I was
parked behind the trailer I was living in, and we
were using it for part storage. One night, I heard
a bunch of rattling out there, and I assumed it
was my neighbor digging some parts out until I smelled
an odor coming through my window air conditioner that was
like a rotten skunk sweat running through a backup sewer.
I know this guy was probably scared, but oh man,
the the way you guys described these smells are just awesome.
They're just awesome. Uh. He said. It burned his eyes,
and it burned his nose. It even burned my throat.
It was out there for three or four minutes. The
smell was so bad and so strong that I couldn't
even take a breath. Worse yet, I was afraid to
move and attract the attention of whatever was out there.
Because the windows in those little house trailers aren't more
than a sixteenth of an inch thick. It wouldn't have
taken much to peel that window open like a sardine can,
and I wasn't about to be a sardine. The next morning,
I went out and walked around the trailer to see
if I could find anything that might tell me what
had been there the night I keep thinking about this. Ooh,
I'm sorry, y'all. I'm just gonna leave this in because
I gotta move on. Okay, where was I? The next morning,
I went out and walked around the trailer to see
if I could find anything that might tell me what
had been out there the night before. Under the kitchen window,
I found a footprint. I've never seen one like it before.
It had three toes with long claw indentions in the dirt.
The size of it sent a shiver down my spine.
I took a picture of it, but I don't know
where it's at. It could be on a computer I
have that's broken right now, or maybe a on an
old cell phone. Either way, it's probably lost forever. My
trailer was just off of ninety six, heading out of town,
and there were just a few houses and then nothing
but forest. My two neighbors, the guy down the road,
and I all owned dogs. I had three, and my
neighbors each had dogs, and the guy down the road
had two pit bulls. Three weeks after I found the footprint,
every one of those dogs, except my little rat terrier
was found dead. Not too long after that, I had
gone over to visit my friend and his wife. They
lived about fifty yards over from my trailer, off the
main road. I got there at eight o'clock, so it
was already dark when I stepped through their French doors
into the deck for a cigarette. I was scanning the
tree line about twenty feet away when I saw a
pair of red eyes staring back at me. They had
to be nine feet off the ground. I stared at
it for what felt like in a turity, but was
probably only a few seconds, and then I turned around
and went back inside right away. My friend asked me
why I came back in so quickly. I didn't know
what to say, so I told him I forgot my lighter.
We went back out together with a couple of beers,
but the eyes were gone by then. I can't help
but wonder why I have these encounters. The first time
I saw one was north of Roanokee, Virginia. After that,
I didn't go outside at night for a long time.
After the incidents in Buena or Buna, a medicine man
and a healer told me that I had great powers
and that's why I see them. They're drawn to me
for healing. The worst part is the dark forces and
the demons, but that story is for another time. Oh
to the writer, what a great story. You really do
seem to attract these things. I mean, I counted one
to three encounters in your lifetime. And you know there's
people like me who never see anything. So I'm a
little jealous in a way. And you might say, well,
think about what you wish for, But I really do
wish I could see one. I do. I'm not lying.
I really wish I could see one. But thank you
for writing this. We had to edit it a little bit,
but it wound up being just a fantastic story to
share it and I really appreciate the man taking the
time to write it down and send it to me.
Thank you, sir,