Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy nine, I went to a family reunion
with my aunt and uncle in Middle Tennessee. On the
way there, we talked a little about a strange thing
that happened to us while we were out hunting frogs
one night. We heard chatter and huffing, and then it
paced us out of the woods whatever it was. With
that on our minds, we joined the rest of the
men sitting around the front yard at my great uncle's
house where the reunion was taking place. My uncle turned
to my great uncle and he said, tell us about
what you saw that night you were out raccoon hunting.
Right away, my great uncle got a look on us
face that I'd never seen before. It was a mix
of bewilderment and fear, and he turned away like he
didn't hear what my uncle asked him. And then his
son said, go ahead, Dad, tell him what we saw.
You tell them. My great uncle said under his breath,
all right, I'll tell the story, his son said, and
he began. At that time, my dad was sixty seven
years old. He'd spent his whole life out in the woods,
hunting mostly quail and raccoons. That night they were headed
out to the land behind their house, and the property
had recently been sold and the new owner had bulldozed
the old fence line and put in a new wire fence.
They had three dogs, two walkers, and a red bone.
The fence was on an incline that the dogs couldn't
get over, so they had to put them over. The
son handed the twenty two rifle to his dad and
he crossed the fence, and then my great uncle handed
the rifle over and he crossed. Two Up the hill,
twenty five yards from the old fence was a brush pile.
They walked in that direction and then let the dogs
off the leaves, and they began sniffing around the pile.
They had only just begun to smell the awful stench
coming from it when something stood up up in the
middle of that pole and let out a scream so
loud that it knocked them over. It was reddish brown.
It stood eight or nine feet tall, and it was
four feet wide, and the dogs ran right back past them,
and this time they didn't have any trouble clearing that fence.
My uncle and his son stood there face to face
with it for two or three seconds until it quit screaming,
and then it jumped up on top of the wood
pole and it leaped off and it ran up the hill.
They turned and ran in the opposite direction back down
the hill. They didn't have much trouble getting over the
fence either. It was three hundred yards from that fence
back to the house, and neither one stopped running until
they got there, and my uncle said he felt like
his heart was going to explode from the effort. When
they got back to the house, my uncle asked his
son where the rifle was. Well, he didn't know. He
thought maybe he'd dropped it. The next morning, they took
a shotgun and a thirty all six and went back
out to where they crossed the fence, and they found
the twenty two and they got the hell out of there.
Shortly after that, my uncle sold his hounds and he
never went hunting again. Now, I talked to his son
several times after that reunion. I'd always ask him if
they'd ever seen that thing since that night. He said no,
they'd never seen anything, but they did hear that exact
same scream on two different occasions after my great uncle
passed away in nineteen eighty eight, except to go back
to get the rifle the next morning. He never stepped
foot on that property again, and after his death, his
wife sold their place, and his son said he never
went back there again either. My great uncle never liked
to talk about it. He didn't like for people to
know about it. He was always afraid that they would
think he was crazy or that he was a liar.
If we hadn't had our encounter while out hunting frogs,
and my uncle hadn't shared the story with his cousin
uncle's son, who then told them about their incident, he
might have got his wish and taken the story to
his grave. Here's my story, which happened when I was
sixteen years old. Our neighborhood backed onto a large forest
which led right up to the I'm not even going
to try to pronounce this zekea zeka swamp z e kiah,
which we used to explore up to the point back
along the woodlands. I had three brothers, all of whom
lived in the woods, and being the only girl, I
tagged along like a tomboy as best I could. My
oldest brother and three of his friends decided to put
their carpentry skills into practice and spent several weeks building
a treehouse deep in the forest, two miles back from
our neighborhood. All the materials were hauled in by hand
or loaded on motorcycles. I was impressed with a instruction project,
but I was disappointed that it was so high off
the ground. I was afraid of heights. They hammered horizontal
steps going up the tree, and the floor hatch door
was a bit awkward to access, which made entering and
exiting the treehouse a challenge. This was no treehouse for sissies.
It was built solid and even had a small locking
sliding window to block out critters from getting in. Back
in those days, this was the nineteen eighties, all the
young people seemed to roam wild with little or no supervision.
I have no idea how we kept this treehouse a
secret from our parents for so long, but it was
where we all went to smoke cigarettes and drink Boone's
farm or beer. Don't forget the Mad Dog twenty twenty,
MD twenty Mogan David twenty twenty. We called it mad Dog.
Lot of people my age will remember that. Anyway. One
of my friends hear was Debbie. She got the idea
that it might be fun to spend the night in
the treehouse. Besides being afraid of heights, I wasn't overly
king on pitch black woods either, but hey, you're only
a teen once, so I agreed it might be fun.
We lied to our parents and we told them we
were spending the night at the other person's house, and
we packed what we needed for the night to stay
in the treehouse, including sleeping bags, candles, magazines, and food.
We hiked into the woods and settled into the treehouse
before dark. We were grubbing on junk food and talking
about school and things that girls talk about at sixteen,
and we didn't tell anyone we were going to sleep
in the treehouse for fear that someone would try to
spoil the fun for us. We settled in for the night.
It was quiet in the woods, unusually quiet up until
something struck the side of the treehouse. We both stopped
talking and we noticed the smell. All it was like
rotting trash. Oh, you guys, I just have the best
imaginations for a riting trash. Isn't that funny? But I
think when I come up on smells, I always just
naturally laughed. Anyway, She writes, I looked at Debbie and
I wondered what she ate earlier that day, and then
she pinched her nose, and I knew the smell was
coming from outside. And then bang, something hit the treehouse again,
but it was much bigger. We were both very frightened,
and we heard grunting sounds and scraping at the bottom
of the treehouse. We locked the hatch, which was made
of wood and was almost invisible to the eye from outside,
as the boys had made it look like a part
of the flooring from underneath. But the thing wasted no
time in finding it, and it tried to slide it open,
or so it seemed to us. I said directly on
top of the hatch, and Debbie was in a panic.
I was too scared to be in a panic, and
I sat frozen like a statue, and I prayed with
all my heart for this thing to go away. I
kept thinking that we were going to die. This thing
was way too determined to figure out how to get inside.
The trees that supported the treehouse were very substantial, and
you could never imagine someone could actually shake them, and
I could barely get my arms around them, but the
treehouse shook slightly, and then we heard funny sounds. I
don't remember exactly what they were, but they sounded like gibberish.
Maybe there was more than one, we couldn't tell. We
heard the loud footsteps and undergrowth of the leaves and
sticks snapping, and I decided to blow out the candle.
And then I walked over to one of the small windows,
which had a sliding covers, and I tried to peek out,
but it was so dark that I couldn't see. And
I shut the window back and I locked it, and
then it or they started scraping the bottom of the
treehouse again, and this went on for a long time.
After a while, we were both exhausted from fear. Things
started landing on the roof of the treehouse too. Debbie
had big blue eyes and she kept staring at me
with them wide open. We spoke with our eyes, occasionally
closing them tight. We were afraid to speak, and I
wanted them to think that we were asleep. I didn't
know what to do or think. I just wanted to
be in my own bed back home. After several hours
of banging, things hitting the treehouse and shaking and scraping,
things started to quiet down just before sunrise, and then
we heard a loud, roaring growl sound, but unlike anything
else we had heard before, and it felt like it
could easily have pulled the treehouse down and gotten inside
after hearing that, and I knew it was really big,
whatever this thing was. And then it went totally quiet
and everything stop. We waited for a couple of hours
after they left, never speaking a word, until finally I
said that we should take a look outside. By this
time it was seven a m. And I whispered that
we should leave very quietly and leave all of our
stuff there and run like hell. Once we got down
to the ground, she nodded and was softly crying, and
I slid the hatch open and popped my head through
to look as best as I could, and I didn't
see anything, and we went for it and we ran
like hell. And as soon as we got home, we
woke the boys and told them all about our experience.
They called their friends and went back to retrieve our
stuff for us and have a look around. Two of
the boys took rifles. My older brothers said that we
were pretty stupid for going back there for the night,
and we agreed. He was not going to get any
argument from us. They said it was probably a bear
or the goat man, and they teased us for months
following this event, but I knew they believed us. Needless
to say, Debbie and I never went back there again
at night. I moved up north after high school, and
I lost touch with Debbie. I found her on Facebook
a few years later, and we chatted online a bit,
and then one night I messaged her and asked her
if she remembered that night in the treehouse, and I
asked her if she would share what she remembered so
I could fill in some of the blanks. She never replied.
I messaged her three times and I tried to rephrase
my question being careful and considerate, but I got nothing
from her. She never replied back at all. Because I'm
in my seventies now, long past caring about what others
think of me, I'm not sure I ever did. I've
lived much of my life in South Carolina, but in
my forties we bought a place in New Mexico on
the checkerboard, a mix of federal state and counties in
Navajo Zuni and private land. Any major issue out there
brought a real assortment of law enforcement officers. We were
planning to build a cabin and live there for the
two years that it would ultimately take to complete the
renovations on our business location in Charleston. Many of my
neighbors there lived by the tenant that we are all
here because we are not all there. It is a
land of rebels, misfits, and highly independent people. One Navajo
man told me that everyone who lived out there on
our patch of private land were tax dodgers, small time crooks, crazies,
marijuana growers, and fugitives, and then he advised me that
we should move. He was a nice man, and after
that he checked on me from time to time and
became a real friend. Once we settled in, I would
often stay home when my husband went to grants or
gallop for building supplies, so it was not unusual for
me to be out exploring on my four wheeler alone.
I rode all over our fifty acres and out onto
the state and federal land. I was in the woods
a lot by myself, learning the area and getting acquainted
with the flora and the fauna. We do have both
black bears and mountain lions, but I have only seen
mountain lions from time to time. I haven't thought about
these incidents since two thousand and three, but your stories
brought them back to me. It all seems just as
surreal now as it did back then. It was on
one of those occasions undes, when I was home alone,
that it all began. I was clearing brush from around
our camping trailer building a fire pit one day with
my cattle dog. I was quite focused on what I
was doing when I was suddenly overcome by a sense
that I was being watched. I looked around me, but
I saw nothing. We are on a high plateau and
our land is pretty flat, with sparse trees and almost
no bushes. Because at that time cattle grazed on the
subdivided ranch our place was part of, it was reasonable
that I would have been able to see anything out
of place nearby, and I continued working for a few
minutes until an odor came over me. It was a
smell of a poorly tinded garbage dump, with overtones of
dead things and a touch of heaven only knows what else.
I paused at what I was doing and looked at
my dog to see if she was reacting to anything
she could not have done a better point had she
been trained to do it. Now, this was a dog
who regularly chased cows away from our place and had
no fear of large animals. She was, after all, a
blue healer. Her reactions put my senses on high alert,
and I looked around me. First, I looked at our
camper trailer and decided that anything that wanted to get
into it would have no trouble. I then turned to
my old Dodge truck, and I decided that it was
a better choice. When I opened the door, my dog
practically ran over me to get in the truck. That
was not terribly alarming. She loved to drive in the truck,
but she didn't stop there. She got onto the floorboard
and curled up into a tight little ball well. I
was inspired to join her as quickly as possible, and
I locked the doors behind me. I was living in
the hope that the truck would be more secure than
the camper. Also, at that moment, I vowed to carry
a truck key with me from now on, as it
was I was going nowhere. We sat there for ten
minutes before I rolled down the window enough to tell
that the smell was gone, and I got out and
blithely went back to work. My dog chose to stay
in the truck, so I left the door open for her,
and by the time my husband got home, I had
pretty much forgotten about it, and I felt pretty silly
for hiding in the truck just because I smelled something stinky.
After that, my life went back to normal. I still
rode my four wheeler and I hiked all over the
place by myself. I was just happy to be outdoors
and free to roam. My dog had evidently forgotten about
it as well. She was always the first one on
the four wheeler when I would go for a ride,
and always on my heels when I went for a hike.
Five years later, I was heading to a potline at
a friend's place. I was about two miles from my
turn when I came to a curve known for the
seasonal build up of mud or snow. If we made
it through the curve without getting stuck, we'd always give
a short prayer of thanks for doing so. As I
came out of the curve, I saw a large dark
form that my brain tried to twist into the form
of a cow flailing miserably I was unable to accept
that realization, and my mind went to a black bear.
That week, a black bear had broken into a woman's
kitchen and killed her. So black bears was already on
my mind, except bears don't run on three legs, and
this thing did. It loped along beside me between one
hundred and two hundred feet to my left. I couldn't
go any faster than about ten miles per hour on
that road, so it had no trouble pacing me. It
stayed with me until the last thousand feet or so
of gravel. It didn't feel threatening, and it didn't seem
to tire. It just loped along beside me. I told
the woman that the pot luck about it, and one
of them, who had lived out there for decades, called
me several days later and asked me to come over.
She had a medicine man at her place and she
wanted us to talk. He listened to my story, and
he told me that it was one of the elder
brothers and that I need not be afraid of it.
My friend paid him the customary gift of tobacco, and
he went on his way. We'll be going back to
New Mexico in a month or so, and this memory
will not keep me out of the woods. Sadly, my
dog has been gone for years. My walks will be solitary,
and there will be more seat room in the four
wheeler without her. And now I'm going to have to
go have a good cry over my long lost cattle
dog her. That's not the end of the story. But
she's the name of her cattle dog, and I don't
want her to hear this and not think that I
at least attempted to pronounce the name of the cattle dog.
But the name of her dog is I think pittile
a pitie. I'm trying to find it here, p I
T A l e a h. Anybody know what that says.
I don't know, and I didn't want to mispronounce it.
But now that I've gotten to this point in the
story and she has very fond memories of her dog, ma'am,
I'm I'm just I don't want you to feel insulted.
I didn't pronounce your dog's name, or say your dog's name,
but I just don't think I'm pronouncing it right, So
I'm sorry. But the dog's name is Pittile a pital
pittlee okay on with the story. If you're still with me,
I have also seen a UFO. In nineteen eighty nine,
Charleston was ravaged by Hurricane Hugo. The path of the
storm left a wound that would take years to heal.
I was a part of a group of people that
were seekers. The seeking led us to a healing tradition
that has its roots in antiquity, and in parentheses, she says,
it's called reiche r e I k I riky reiki
I don't know. We came together one night to receive
an invitation into the healing form. We met at a
hairdresser's shop to take the class. In the middle of
the evening, I can't remember the hour. We took a
break and we were told to go sit and think
about what we had been told and to make sure
that we wanted to continue. There wasn't a lot of
space for us to spread out inside the shop, and
it was a beautiful, starry night, so my friend and
I went to sit in her car. We'd been sitting
there talking a little and thinking a lot, and when
she said what is that? She was leaning over her
steering wheel, looking up while leaned forward as well, and
I saw nothing. And then I remembered that it was
a beautiful story night, I should at least be able
to see the stars. In fact, they were all around us,
just not directly over us. We got out of the
car and watched as a massive triangular shaped object passed overhead.
And then we got back in the car and we
sat there stunned. Later that evening we checked in on
each other just to make sure we saw what we
thought we saw. The following day, there was an article
in the news and courier about a UFO that had
been seen on a path from Charleston to Columbia. And
beyond the whole experience of seeing something by virtue of
not seeing the stars, something that must have been an
acre in size, still leaves me speechless. My friend and
I talk about this incident once in a while, just
to check in and validate our sanity. Well, those are
my story reason. Thanks for listening, MHM.