Speaker 1: My first contact was Sasquatch was when I was twelve
years old. I was playing in the deep woods one
hundred yards from my back door. Back in those days,
there weren't a lot of expensive toys to occupy my time,
so I was playing army all by myself. I was
in a location where there was an ovular ovular ovular.
I can't pronounce that word. I was in a location
where there was an ovular ovular ring of trees, and
when they shed their needles, they made an ovular build
up around their bases. Inside this shape, there was also
a pile of dried needles that made a nice cushy spot.
Anybody new to this podcast, there are some words that
I can't pronounce, so I just throw something out there
and look for people in the common section to correct me,
because I know you will. But the word is ov
u la r ovuler. I think that's maybe that's what
it is. Anyway, Sorry to get hung up on that.
Back to the story. I was playing soldier there and
decided I needed to do a quick hid and cover,
and I dove into this bed of needles like I
had many times before, but this time I startled a
large animal when I landed, something big and heavy took
off and ran away. It felt like thunder in the ground,
even on that bed of needles, and I felt every
step it took vibrating through the earth. I had never
heard about sasquatch, but at that moment, all I could
think was that I had snuck up on some kind
of a giant and then it ran away. My second
contact was during a hunting trip with my brother. At
that time, I was thirty years old, and we were
hunting in the hills of North Goldendale, Washington, near the
Yakima Indian Reservation border. We had been hunting for about
an hour when I broke into a large clearing where
the sun had started to shine. There was a big stump,
so I sat and leaned against it with my rifle
in my lap to watch the clearing. But the sun
was so warm, and I was so tired from working
the graveyard shift the night before that I soon fell asleep.
I must have napped for an hour, and when I woke,
my eyes focused across the clearing at the timberline, and
there it was a bigfoot in a squatted position, and
he was studying me as soon as it noticed that
I was awake. It stood up, and it turned and
it walked away. I was so stunned that I didn't
even get up to try to follow it. It was
two minutes later when my brother called my name and
asked if I had seen anything. I sure as hell did,
I felt like saying, but instead I laughed and I
said I hadn't. The third contact happened while I was
hunting in the hills of the Columbia River. I was
watching a ravine that was filled with scrub oak trees.
It was bushy at the top but open in the ravine.
I was sitting there and I heard a noise coming
down the ravine, like an entire herd of deer was
headed my way. I got ready to pick a target,
but no deer ever came. Instead, a stampede of gray
squirrels raced through the treetops like Satan himself was on
their heels. At one point, when the stampede passed by me,
there was an intense stinky horse sweat body odor smell
that filled the area. When the stampede passed me, so
did the smell. Never saw anything, but I did feel
like that I was not alone. My fourth contact happened
when I took my grandson camping on the side of
mountain near in the White Pass. The first evening, I
heard a sasquatch call. It was impressive how much air
of this thing's lungs could load. His below lasted for
twenty full seconds. I tried to emulate it, but I
ran out of air after about eight seconds. My fifth
contact happened when I took my wife camping in the
White Pass. The first day we were there, we walked
along the rocky beach of the river that we were
camping next to. The river. Rock was not easy to
walk on, but was apparently great for making Okay, here's
another word, Carns Cairns Cairns. Never heard that word before
in my life. These are man made piles of flat stones.
There were two at the time. I added a small
rock at the top of one stack, and the next
morning the stacks had all been leveled. I think Bigfoot
walked through there and said, not today, hippie, y'all seeing
those videos where people are not those down, I think
they're funny. The second night we were there, a sasquatch
came into our camp while we were sleeping, ran a
finger along the side of our tent, right against my
wife's back, startled her awake, but she didn't tell me
until we were home from the camping trip. And the
sixth and final encounter who six in his life? Unbelievable.
The sixth and final account encounter was when my wife
and I were camped in the upper click atat Valley.
This time I had taken gifts. I had taken silk flowers, marbles,
a large plastic toy soldier, and a box of apples. Unfortunately,
I became ill the first night there and decided that
we needed to sleep in my pickup truck. The apples
were left in the bed of my pickup truck. My
wife's little yapper Mutt was along with us, and I
had the windows down a couple of inches for Fini.
We heard nothing the entire night, and the dog never
barked or growled once. But the next morning the entire
box was gone. The debris on the forest floor prevented
me from seeing any tracks, but we were the only
campers for miles. I think a sly bigfoot was laughing
at us while he ate the apples throughout the night.
Oh that's a good story. I don't know I guess
I'm jealous of these people that have encounter after encounter
after encounter. They see them all the time. I can't
even see a footprint. I never see anything. What is
it about me that keeps me from seeing a bigfoot?
I want to see a bigfoot. Everybody else sees them.
Everybody that writes me sees them and encounters them, some
people multiple times through their lives. Not me. I know
I'm kind of acting like a baby, but I kind
of feel a little pissed about it. Anyway, I'm glad
y'all see bigfoot, but I'm not glad. I don't so
how yak gat? Anyway, this was a very good story,
well put together, and I appreciate the writers sending it
because it is very interesting. Thank you. This was an
ongoing encounter that went on for a month or two.
This event happened in nineteen ninety four in the Midwest.
I worked nights doing custodial work, and my family lived
out in the country. Wasn't all that remote, just a
rural part of a small town. Each time I arrived
home and got out of my car after work, I
started noticing lights in the sky. They seemed lower and
brighter than the other stars and much closer. It was
a bright white light, but I also saw blue and
red flashes with pulsating lights. The light didn't move across
the sky like an airplane, or I would have just
assumed that it was that and I would have moved on.
There were at least two, sometimes up to four of them,
spaced out in different directions. The lights seemed to be
observing somehow. When I saw them, it was like they
moved in closer to me, zooming in on my location.
They would remain in the same spot for hours and
then drift away slowly, but sometimes it was as if
they shut the light off. Stars don't do that. We
had an outdoor barn light on a pole in the backyard.
When these lights in the sky appeared, the backyard light
would get brighter, as if someone was slowly turning up
the intensity. I noticed that if a car went down
the road, the light would gradually dim back to normal,
and then when the car was gone, the light would
gradually intensify again. The barn light would be so bright
that it looked like early morning, right before the sun
came up. When I went inside, every lamp or electronic
device the stereo, the numbers on the digital alarm clock,
and anything with the light got more intense, just like
the barn light, and then would slowly go back to normal.
The lights would all be in sinc and would all
do it at the same time. I got an uneasy
feeling while this went on. I felt like whatever was
causing this was waiting for me to come home. One night,
I waited in my car and sunk down in my seat.
I just waited and watched for the lights to intensify.
Now this freaked me out, so I waited for the
lights dim when the car went up the road, and
then ran for the house and hid behind the recliner
for a few hours. I did this for several nights.
Of course, no one else in the house saw anything,
and I started to think I was losing it. I
was no longer curious as to what was causing this.
I just wanted it to go away. I would come
home and walk in and turn off the lamp my
family had left on for me, and I'd find my
way through through the dark. I felt like something or
someone was looking for me, and paranoia started to set in.
During this time, I also had trouble sleeping. Several times
I had sleep paralysis. I'd be in that state in
between sleep and awaken. I couldn't move my body. The
only thing I could move was my eyes. I didn't
see a thing, but I felt this terrible dread and
uneasiness come over me. I couldn't speak at all, even
my tongue was numb. Eventually I was able to force
a word out. If I forced the name of Jesus out,
it would stop. The light shows seemed to escalate over time.
One night, while making my way to my bedroom in
the dark, I walked past the door to my parents' room,
which was open. Out there window, I saw what looked
like search lights, like the extremely bright white light you
see on a police helicopter searching for someone on the
It was shining the light back and forth across the driveway,
then the yard, and then into their window. But I
knew there was no helicopter. There was only a low
rumble that went on all night, like the gentle rumble
of an air conditioner kicking on, but deeper and so
heavy you could feel the vibration of it. I hid
in my bed until I eventually fell asleep. That next morning,
after my family had all left for work, I could
still hear that low rumble. After a while, whatever it
was finally left and the rumbling sound drifted above the clouds.
I saw nothing outside, but I had the TV on
the morning news, and while I was watching out the
screen door, the TV turned off. Well that was it
for me. I was totally freaked out, and I drove
to my boyfriend's apartment that weekend. While hanging out with him,
I swore I still heard the low rumble above the
clouds above apartment, as if it was following me. I
was a basket case for a while. One morning, my
mother got up and found me crouched behind the reclining
chair hiding from the lights. Eventually I had to start
ignoring the blinking lights in the sky or I was
going to be committed. I have no doubt about that.
I started going inside when I got home, not looking up,
and straight to bed or doing sit ups until I
was so exhausted and I had to go to sleep.
To my relief, my then boyfriend and now husband saw
the lights too. One time, he flipped one off from
his car while he was driving, and in front of
our eyes it literally shut off. We both saw that happen.
Even today, I occasionally noticed the blinking lights every now
and then, but I ignore them. I live in a
different state. Now, I decided it was not just me.
They were watching and observing. They were waiting for someone
to notice them. My husband is the only other person
who has heard this entire story. I didn't dare share
all of it with others, and we all know why.
Oh wow, that's kind of scary. I'm assuming she shared
the whole story with us. I've heard of stories like this.
I've gotten stories like this where people are just tormented
by something and they never know what it was. My
thought and always goes to well, like she said, I'm
just repeating what she said. I'm not accusing her of
this or diagnosing this problem that she was just paranoid.
But this letter seems perfectly legible. It doesn't wander all
over the place. Seems like a person who has their
thoughts together and that who knows what they saw. It's scary.
I'm glad to find out that this is eased up
quite a bit. A lot of people will say, you've
probably been visited by whatever these things are, and you know,
the longer time goes on, the more evidence. We just
saw videos on the news of some kind of craft
flying over the top of the ocean and the I
can't even remember where it was, somewhere in the Middle East.
I think I believe the Americans shot a hellfire missile
at it and hit it, and the missile just like
either went through it and a couple of three little
pieces broke off of this whatever this UFO was, but
they didn't fall in the water. They just kept going
with the craft. I know hundreds of people have seen
this video, and I don't even know if you haven't
seen it, what to tell you to search for. I
just kind of flipped through these shorts a lot of
times and it popped up, and I thought, man, that's crazy. Anyway,
here's what I'm getting at. This stuff is becoming more
and more and more evidence, much more than Bigfoot. There's
one hundred times more evidence for paranormal beings from another realm,
another planet. There's one hundred times more evidence of that
than there is for Bigfoot. And people aren't interested, at
least on this channel as much as in these UFO stories.
But it really intrigues me because it seems more real
because there's more evidence. And I know people say, hell,
there's pictures and videos of Bigfoot all over the place.
Ninety nine percent of are hoaxes, and they're obviously hoaxes.
But this stuff, right hear, these lights and these crafts
flying around and under the ocean, in the ocean, we
got videos of all these things by military. The people
in the federal government are coming out and saying it's real.
It's everywhere. So what is all this stuff? Some people
say it's demonic. Can't Why would a demon you a
UFO to try it? Just doesn't None of that make sense.
I'm not saying I know what it is, but I'm
saying there's a lot of stuff. If you just use
critical thinking skills, you can rule out a lot of
things that people think it is. This was an interesting story,
and I'm glad to hear that she is doing better
and not as tormented as she was. Thank you for
sharing the whole story. I assume it's the whole story.
Thank you for sharing it with us. Thank you to
the writer. In two thousand and two, I was freshly divorced.
I had very little money, and the time I spent
with my children was precious. I wound up doing a
lot of things outdoors in order to tire them out
and get them away from their computers. My kids had
a limited time to spend in the hot weather of
central Florida, so I used to take them for bike
rides at the local park. One time, we were two
miles into the park on our bikes when my daughter
started sobbing and yelling are we going now? Daddy? Can
we go now? She kept it up until we turned
around and headed back to the parking lot. My son
and I were concerned and a bit overheated, but we
still giggled at her with her theatrical shouts. I was
a bit upset to end the ride so early, but
looking back, who knows what was really going on or
if she had seen something that scared her. In twenty fifteen,
I was riding my bike alone in the same part,
enjoying being outdoors and having the place to myself. An
hour into my ride, I had gotten about six miles
in when the rain shower started. I was peddling through
sugar sand and it was burning the heck out of
my legs, so I decided to get off my bike
and walk instead. I got to a place that I
had passed on the way in. It was off the
beaten path and had legs and swamps and a clear
path along the power lines. I decided to leave my
bike and look around the swamps and the wetland for
a bit. The rain was tapering off, but it was steady,
and it made the whole area look like it was
in the shadows. To my left or swamps, and on
my right was a saturated open field that led to
the lake, with a power line in between the two.
I walked along the power line path and I heard
the distinct sound of something plunking away at bicycle spokes.
It's a metallic sound that I knew from my children's
bikes and mine when I was a kid. The sound
stopped about twenty five feet from me, right where I
had left my bike, and I stopped walking. There was
no other sound but the rain. In Florida, if you're
near the swamps, there always seems to be frogs and
other critters making a fuss, but at that moment, there
was nothing. I stood there for a moment listening, and
I heard someone whisper was almost unintelligible. It sounded like
a little girl's voice talking to someone. She was asking
a question. Now I was confused. I was not in
a place where a child should be, and even if
there were other people, I would have seen them. I
waited another moment, and then I said hello again. I
heard more whispers from this little girl's voice. This time
I heard her clearly, and she asked, when are we
going to leave? I was really confused. I couldn't see anything.
The voice was coming from directly in front of me,
but there was nothing there. It was just a little
girl's distressed voice, pleading to go home. I'm always comfortable
in the forest, but I was starting to get a
bit freaked out. And then the girl's voice screamed, are
we going home now? Daddy? The end of her sentence
built up to a high pitched scream that made my
gut hurt. I was stunned and scared. My first instinct
was to get the heck out of there, but for
some reason, my mouth betrayed me, and again I said hello.
I took a step forward and betrayed my feet. This time,
whatever was with me in the woods shot away from
me at a speed that was supernatural, like it had
been attached to a cable and was being pulled away,
shooting across the wet, boggy Florida wetlands. I stood there
with my head reeling, thinking I was about to throw up.
I stayed where I was for ten minutes, collecting my
thoughts about what I had just experienced. I had seen
nothing but the voice and the scream and the metallic
sound of the bicycle spokes were stuck in my head.
I eventually gathered myself and headed to the parking lot
without any other incident. Oh man, that's kind of spooky.
I don't know. This may sound weird, but it's kind
of intriguing to me. I don't think there was anything
there that he felt was after him, but he was.
I don't know. What do you guys think? What was
he hearing? A lot of people say ghosts or demonic
I tend to go that route. I don't. I'm a
Bible believer, and I believe, you know, we're either here
or we're with the Lord and the only thing left
on earth or living humans and demons. And I don't know.
I could be wrong about all that. I don't make
real y'all know, I never talk about spiritual stuff or
political stuff too much. Never political stuff. Good Lord, man,
what a world we live in with this political junk,
but this supernatural stuff, spiritual stuff. Sometimes it perplexes me.
And I was talking to my wife the other day
about it was nothing about this, but what I've learned
in my life is that usually with big problems or
big incidents, there's always the one thing. People try to
complicate it and spread it out and make it about
a bunch of things. It's usually the one thing. But
here's what I'm getting at. I think the one things
the one thing is in these type situations is that
it's probably a demonic presence somewhere that you've encountered. It's
just my opinion. I'm not making a categorical statement or
a singular statement. That's just what I think it is.
And it kind of goes along with my one thing theory.
There's always that one thing. Anyway, I thought i'd share
my thoughts with you on that. I'm not sure why
I did, but I just kind of popped in my head,
so I thought i'd say it. So there you go.
Thank you to the writer for sending the story. It
was really good, really good, kind of spooky, but very intriguing.
Thank you. I grew up in the wild and wonderful
state of West by God, Virginia. Now I live in Kentucky,
just across the Big Sandy River. I don't know if
I believe in cryptids, aliens, or anything ghost related, but
I am one hundred percent sure that I believe in
shadow people because I encountered one when I was eight
years old. This happened in a small town in West
Virginia named Fort Gay and Wayne County. We lived in
an old, two bedroom, one bath house rented to my
family by a man named Frank. He owned dozens of
rental homes and hundreds of acres of property in our
little town. According to several neighbors and other town residents.
In the nineteen fifties, Frank used our house to meet
with some other men in town to drink, gamble, and
do things that were publicly frowned upon back in those
days in a small religious town. One night, back in
the nineteen sixties, Frank and his friends were drinking and
playing poker. Someone accused another of cheating at cards. Tempers flared,
somebody pulled a gun and blew a man's brains out
right there in that very house. My big sister and
I had to share the second bedroom, which wasn't a
problem since we were just little kids at the time.
My aunt and uncle hadn't seen our new place yet
and they were coming to spend the weekend with us
in the new house. My mom set up our room
for them, and that meant one of us had to
sleep on the couch and the other got to sleep
with Mom and dad. I don't know if you remember
sleeping with your parents at this age, but I absolutely
dreaded it. Always got stuck between them and got pinned
down by the covers. Plus I had to listen to
my dad's snoring and sleep talking. I had been lying
in bed with them for about an hour or so.
My parents were already fast asleep, and the house was
dead quiet. I was burning up under those covers as usual,
and I was wishing like crazy. I had used the
bathroom before I went to bed, because my eyeballs were floating.
I dreaded going because I knew I had to crawl
over one of my parents and take the chance of
waking my dad, who was definitely not someone you wanted
to disturb out of a deep sleep. I decided my
best option was to dig out from under the covers
and crawl over my mother. What happened after that was
a pure nightmare, fuel especially for an eight year old kid.
I began the task of trying to get over my
mother without making too much noise and avoiding waking my
dad at all costs. I had my right leg flung
over my mom, looking for the floor with my toes,
and holding onto the bedpost with my left arm, when
all of a sudden, the worst most hair raising feeling
came over me and went up and down my spine.
Every hair on my neck and body stood on end.
I could feel a presence behind me at the bedroom doorway,
and I could feel something was there and that its
eyes were on me. My mind started racing and my
heart started pounding, and I was completely frozen in that
awkward position. I didn't want to, but I knew I
had to look at the dark doorway. I turned my head,
praying that it would be just my sister. I couldn't
have been more wrong. I can only describe it as
a shadow person. It had the basic form and size
of a human, but it was featureless. It had no
discernible face. When I say it was black, I mean
it was darker than the darkest corners of the room.
It was highlighted by the hallway light that my mom
had left on for anyone who might get up in
the middle of the night, which made it seem even darker.
It was a shadow, but deeper and darker than a shadow,
like black silk or a black hole. Many people who
suffer from a CONDUCTIONH call sleep paralysis often report seeing
a shadowy man they called the hat man. This thing
did seem to be wearing a hat, but I was
completely awake, and this was not a case of sleep paralysis.
This thing didn't move or speak a word. It was
just standing there, peeking around the doorway at me. To
say that I almost had a heart attack would be
a severe understatement. I didn't know what to do. Should
I scream and wake my parents in hopes they would
see what I'm seeing? No? Instead, I slowly slipped back
over my mother, and I slid under the covers and
I pulled them completely over my head. I didn't dare
peek out or try to look at this thing again.
I just knew if I pull those covers down, that
thing would be closer right at the foot of the bed,
or worse, face to face with me. At this point,
I completely forgot about needing to go to the bathroom,
and honestly, I don't know how, oh I didn't wet
myself After I saw what I saw. I was stuck
there under the covers, afraid to move, afraid to look again,
heart pounding in fear. I don't know when, but at
some point I must have finally fallen asleep, probably out
of exhaustion. When I woke up, that experience and the
fear of it were still fresh on my mind. Now.
I could hear my parents, sister, my aunt in the
kitchen getting breakfast ready, and I was glad I was
still alive to wake up at all. I jumped out
of bed and ran with all I had to the
safety of my family in the kitchen, and I told
my parents everything. Of course, they chalked it up to
a bad dream by a kid with a wild imagination.
We lived in that house for four years, and everyone
in my family would eventually go on to have weird experiences,
which are stories for another day. Something about that old,
creepy house just never did feel right to me. I
believe something evil was living there. I'm an adult man,
I'm a husband and a father now. But I will
swear to my grave that this was real and was
not a dream or my imagination. I've never had anything
like that happen to me since, and I pray that
it never does again. I wouldn't wish something like that
on anyone, not even on my worst enemy. Oh what
a great story. Man. I didn't read this. I zip
a lot of these up and I send these to
Rebecca and Rebecca Lee Wesson, who, by the way, is
a great author and has books out on Amazon. Look
up for Rebecca Lee Wesson. She's editing all these stories
that you hear. But what I was going to say is,
I don't know if this guy wrote this this well
or or if Rebecca put her magic on it. But man,
it was just so fun to read and so well
put together. I don't know. It's probably not going to
go down in historical literature by any stretch. But sometimes
the stories are great, but the way they're written is, oh, man,
it just sets them off. He doesn't say whether to
give his name or not, but he lives in Kentucky,
born in West Virginia. I got this story a while back.
I hope he hears this because man, what a great story.
Thank you so much for sending this. If anybody else
has stories about the paranormal or whatever, I have a
lot of them to do right now. I've just got
a big backlog. But if you send me a really
good one, I'm liable to pull it up and just
do it right away. So I really appreciate you all
sending these stories. They're so fun to read, and anyway,
I appreciate it. Thanks to the writer Ghost of Tula
by Shane Brown. I remember being a little kid and
Mama walking around videoing anything and everything she could. She
would use that camera all day. She said that she
never had anything that neat before. I think she believed
that she would have each moment forever. When she hit
the record button. That camera was huge and it hurt
your shoulder to hold it propped up for a minute.
I guess it didn't bother her. She gleamed with it.
She was getting something new and recording her babies. Recently,
I watched a video of us at my grandmother's house
having lunch one day. Leanne and Billy Ray were fighting
while Mama was in the background frying chicken and bacon biscuits.
Dad was leaned back in a chair, watching everyone. Mama
threw the camera on him and asked him about the
ghost story from a call he got the night before
while he was on duty at the fire station. A
dad was wearing a navy blue Firebuster shirt, and he
leaned his head down and his eyes got big. He
twisted the sides of his ear with a finger and
a thumb as he chuckled. Then he shivered. He told
the story of what he saw that night on a call.
I don't believe him as surely as I study every
word that he said. I didn't believe in ghosts at
nine years old. Now Webster says that ghosts are the
soul of a dead person, thought of his living in
an unseen world or his appearing to the living people.
Webster can't describe what I know, but he is close.
Maybe Webster is telling me I know a soul that
still lives that it's appearing to me. I think I
know his feelings too. From spending time at Tula, I'm
starting to know instead of only wondering. At forty three,
I don't know if I truly believe in ghosts yet
or not. I've never seen one. I have never considered
for one second that my eyes witnessed a ghostly motion.
But I feel things. I wonder if ghosts can make
you feel things. If they can, then I believe in them.
That's something that happens to me often, especially at Tula
or somewhere my father frequented. I am sitting on the
docks of Tula right now, and it's almost haunting. Not
a scary haunting, but a gut wrenching one. Crickets are calling,
and the bullfrogs are loud. They echo off the trees
and through my body. There's a white cloud of fogs
sitting on this pond as its glow dances from the moonlight.
The moon's cast is wrapped in a fog, which shows
the pond's general shape. The moon's light runs about six
or seven feet to the bank and up the trees
into their tops as it shines up the back end
of the sky. The white fog just sits in a gloom.
It doesn't move, and neither do I. There's a presence here,
present makes me want to write stories. Maybe this is
the presence that makes me want to be like my dad.
I'm not for sure yet, but I like both of
those thoughts. I know I'll never be the writer that
he was. I'm okay with that, But if I can
be a writer with a connection to him, that it's
all worth the sacrifice. There's a presence over me and
under me. I feel it in both of my sides too.
It's the truck I got to pick out from my
dad one day when he said he wanted to pick
up with air conditioning, a CD player and powered windows,
as he sent me in mom to Tupelo to buy it.
It's the presence that I feel when I'm asleep at
the old tool of store he owned that's been renovated
into an apartment. It's the store he wrote about in Joe,
where the protagonist would pick up his workers. But the
feeling down on the pond at Tula is more powerful
than any I've ever felt. It's a feeling where I
start to believe in ghosts. I don't see it, but
I believe it. All Right, here's the story I got.
I'm gonna call this fiction because it just feels like
it's fiction, but I guess it could be true. The
writer did not say if it's true, and I'm calling
it fiction, and the writer gets upset with me, just don't.
It just just feels fictiony the way it's written and
the story in itself. However, it's a really good story,
so let's duteous. Nineteen months ago, I awoke from a coma,
unable to move, speak, or even see what was happening
around me. I had a vague awareness of who I was.
I had a family, a job, a portfolio, and a name.
I knew something terrible had happened to me, but I
couldn't remember what it was. I remember remembered the frantic
and helpless sensation of trying to escape and then being
thrown through the air. I remembered a great crippling fear,
but the details were beyond me. I searched the darkness
in my head, but it was useless, like looking through
foggy glass. I knew the facts of my life and
what had happened to me were on the other side,
but I couldn't see them. I couldn't see them yet.
I could hear the voices in the distance, and the
footsteps approaching and fading away, and I could hear the
slow beep of a heart monitor as it started to
pick up speed. The footsteps approached me again, and they
ran away, summoning a doctor and a team. He's away,
Get the team here, a woman said in an excited voice.
There were multiple footsteps in the room now, each set
hurried and shuffling around the bed. The team was talking
about me in hush voices, though I didn't understand the
medical terms they used. One of them was instructed to
notify my family, Jonathan, I remembered my name was Jonathan.
That felt like a wind. It was a minuscule maybe,
but a win. Nonetheless, the sudden burst of energy after
what felt like an endless idle rest put a strain
on me, and I fell back to sleep. And when
I woke, I heard hush voices again. This time I
recognized one of them. It was my wife. Her name
was Madison. That's another win, I told myself. She was
reading from the Book of Proverbs. I fell in love
with her all over again. It was the voice I
needed to hear. My eyes opened in the room erupted
in excitement. I could make out colors and the details
of my surroundings. I was unable to move my head,
but able to turn my line of sight. I could
see a woman to my right, and I studied her
features and her long gray hair and her familiar smile.
It was my Madison. She was older. Now now I
was confused. A young man and two younger women stood
beside her, one of them holding a baby. They were
my children, but they had grown one at a time.
They came to the bedside and hugged me. They told
me they loved me, and they missed me. I realized
then that I must have been in a coma for
some time and kept alive by machines. But for how long.
I had no clue. My family had grown up without me,
and the realization was overwhelming, and I had a thousand questions.
This routine went on for days, deep sleep for hours,
and awake for a few minutes. Day in and day out,
the medical team would tug on my leg and bend it,
shine a flashlight in my eyes, and stick needles in
my right foot and fingers. There was a brace around
my neck and back, preventing me from moving, and at
one point the doctors told me that my left leg
had been so severely damaged they had had to remove
it to save my life. Well. I was devastated. The
realization about my leg sparked something in me, like an
approaching siren. I had a memory, not in images, but
in sound. It was a roar, and it terrified and
confused me. It was real. It was too real, like
it approached, and it faded back into the darkness of
my mind. I hoped it would stay there. That was
wishful thinking. I would soon find out. My improvement was
marked by tiny daily successes, and in time I gathered
enough air in my lungs to push out the words
thank you to Madison. Within a minute, the room was
filled with medical personnel checking my statistics, and soon my
hands and right leg regained feeling and to move them,
and I finally could speak fluently again. Communication with my
wife was what I wanted the most. I learned I
had been comatose for five years and four months. Brain
trauma was the cause, and I was lucky to be
alive at all. Five years had gone by. I had
been gone all that time. My son Nathan was now
seventeen and in his junior year of high school. He
was playing football and he was quite good at it.
My daughter Susie was a mother and in college, while
my youngest daughter, Brittany was twelve years old. I had
missed so much, and I hadn't seen my son playball,
I didn't walk my daughter down the aisle, and I
had missed my grandchild's birth. I missed BRIT's first days
of school. By then I remembered who I was. I
was a Harvard graduate with a PhD in business, a
chief financial officer for a fortune five hundred company. We
had a home in Upstate, New York, a penthouse apartment
in New York City, and a vacation home in the Keys.
My wife broke the news to me that my life
as I remembered it was over. I had lost my job.
My family was forced to sell our house up state
and the wood in the Keys. They kept the penthouse
in the city and sub leased it to a guy
who took over my position at work. They had moved
to North Carolina and had been living off our life savings.
At one point, two gentlemen came to see me, one
from the Forestry Department and the other from the police department.
They asked me questions for hours about what happened and
what I remembered. I couldn't recall anything from the incident.
They showed me pictures of a campsite that had been ravaged,
a tenth that was torn to pieces, and a backpack
with a metal frame bent completely in half. They presented
photographs taken by the hikers who found me. The picture
showed me in a blood soaked sweatshirt and my head
looking like it had been hit with a sledgehammer. There
were other pictures of me from when I arrived at
the hospital, my chest and my shoulder full of strange
scratches and scars. I had four deep lacerations on my chest,
spaced two inches apart, and one deep laceration on the
back of my shoulder below my neck. A photograph of
my left leg had multiple lacerations, as if something massive
had grabbed onto it and sunk its claws through the
skin and muscle. I looked at the pictures objectively, having
no recollection of any of this, nor any explanation for
how it happened. After over a year of therapy, both
mental and physical, I was sent home. It wasn't my
home though. It was a small place and a quiet
subdivision with no sidewalks, But there was a porch where
I could sit and read and look at pictures of
my family and see what I had missed over the
last five years while I tried to get my mind
in better shape. We attended most of my son's football
games during his senior year, and I got to see
him take his girlfriend a homecoming. My life was coming
back together. My walking improved with the prosthetic leg I
had been fitted with, and I was working on my
dance moves for Brittany's father daughter dance at school. When
Thanksgiving rolled around, my brother in law, Jeremy, came to
visit us. He burst into tears and apologies when he
saw me. I had to sit down. Seeing his face
brought back a float of memories. I should have been there,
I should have stayed, he said, over and over again.
You had to go home, I said, suddenly remembering he
and I had planned a week long vacation to hike
a section of the Appalachian Trail, with the goal of
completing the entire trail within the next several years. We
left my car at the end where we would finish
our trek and took his car to the trailhead where
we would begin. We arrived late the first evening, just
a half hour before dark, and decided to put some
miles on the boots before we called it a night.
We hiked several hours before setting up camp and turning in,
and we slept like two tired puppies before the sun's
light and singing birds woke us up. The next morning.
We planned to hike sixteen to twenty miles that day
and had one hell of a pace going. The beauty
was breathtaking, and the birds were singing, and the deer
were plentiful and unbothered by our presence. As evening approached,
the sounds of nature began to die down, and the
satisfaction we had from our hard work that day slowly
gave way to an unsettling awareness that we were not alone.
Something was stalking us in the woods. We called out
that we were armed, though we didn't have anything other
than pocket knives and hatchets. We decided that it must
have been a couple of locals with a shine operation
or a marijuana grove nearby, and we were being chaperoned.
We stopped for the night and pitched our tent, wondering
if our chaperones had gone home or if they had
stayed nearby to patrol through the night. As we settled in,
small pebbles began to hit our tent, and we did
our best to ignore it and we tried to sleep.
The next morning, Jeremy got a call that his mother
had been rushed to the hospital. I told him to
head on back and that I would continue onto my
car so he wouldn't have to backtrack and waste time.
He tore down the trail like a cat with its
tail on fire, and I packed up and headed out
in the other direction. The better part of the day
was uneventful, with no sign of our chaperones from the
night before, but later that evening they came back. I
remembered walking to the last possible minute before pitching my
tent and climbing into sleep. After that, there was nothing.
My next memory was waking up in the hospital. Over
the next several months, I spent countless hours browsing the
TV and the Internet for anything that sparked my interest,
as I had more time than anything else. I stumbled
upon a Bigfoot documentary and found it to be very
interesting until they played a recording of the creature's roar.
I felt my knees bend to my chest and I
lay sideways on the couch, holding myself like a terrified child,
and then I remembered everything. I had just climbed into
my sleeping bag when rocks were pelted into the side
of the tent again. I was growing frustrated at the
thought of losing another night of sleep to the locals
and their pranks. They poked the side of the tent,
even touching my arm or time or two, and they
prodded me through the side of the tent. I could
see a figure standing in the moonlight. By then, I
was fed up. I wanted to teach those clowns a lesson,
so I grabbed my hatchet. When one of them prodded
me again, I swung it with all my might. I
struck his hand with the backside of the hatchet. I
realized that whatever had been pestering me was not human.
It roared like a freight train, and it grabbed the
tent and it ripped it out from over the top
of me. I jumped to my feet, ready to bolt
down the trail, but something grabbed me by the shoulder
and leg and lifted me above its head. And then,
with the force of a car crash, I was thrown
against a tree on the other side of the trail,
and everything went black. I have no idea what attacked
me or why. I have my suspicions, but I have
no evidence. Part of me wished I didn't remember what
happened along for the time when the details were beyond me,
when I was in the dark, and when the facts
of my life and what had happened to me were
on the other side of the foggy glass. But now
I could see clearly something terrible had happened to me.
Lying there on the couch in the safety of our
new home, I felt the frantic and helpless sensation of
trying to escape. I relived the fear, the great crippling fear,
and I knew that my nineteen month old recovery was
only just the beginning. How about we wind this podcast
down with a dog story. I asked for them a
couple of months ago, and I've got six or eight
that people have sent. I've done one, I've got a
few to do, and I'm going to just drop them
in periodically in a podcast, and then after this story,
I'm going to put two archives at the end of
this to give the video a little more length and
for people who haven't heard these stories to enjoy. So
let's get into this dog story. I really like this one.
I'm a cat lover, but I've enjoyed the company of
more dogs than cats in my life, some of the
best friendships anyone can ever enjoy, or with the pups
and kitties that'll allow us to come near. My first
love was a hound dog named Joe. He was dark
brown with black markings. My mom called him Hines fifty seven.
That meant he was a mutt. In all these years,
I've never forgotten Joe, and I've often used his name
to answer the old question, which was your favorite pet?
I love that dog, and I can remember hugging his neck,
But he used to infuriate me because he wouldn't allow
me to go down the driveway to the street. If
I started toward the street, he stood sideways in front
of me, and if I tried to move around him,
he just moved with me. Eventually I'd get mad at
him or crying. This brought my mother and grandmother out
to see why I was upset. Either way, I ended
up getting my butt busted for going on the street
when I wasn't supposed to, and I was made to
stay on the back porch for the rest of the day.
I never stayed mad at Joe for long. After all,
he was just looking after me. He died when I
was five years old, just before I started school. I
was devastated. His passing taught me what death was and
the permanence of it. His leaving may have left a
hole in my heart, but my heart was bigger and
warmer for having known him. I've been listening to you
for quite a few months now, and I want to
thank you for your stories. I love your even toned
voice and your comforting comments about your readers and the
authors of the stories you read. Thank you for sharing
my little story and memory of my first true love,
Joe the hind fifty seven of the Hound, Well, you're welcome.
Thank you for that nice paragraph there at the end
of your at the end of your story. But that's
a great dog story. You know. Dog stories are just good. Uh,
they don't have to be long. Obviously, this was a short,
little story, but I felt it. I felt she's thought
about what this dog did for her life all the
way back before she would turn five years old. She
remembers that dog was keeping her, trying to keep her
out of that street. And they're smart that way. They're
put in our lives for a reason. Just another great
dog story. And I want to tell the writer. She
doesn't leave her name, but hopefully she'll hear this and
this is this is a great story, so thank you.