Speaker 1: I'm fifty nine years old and have been an avid
hunter for most of my life. I moved to Florida
in nineteen seventy nine and began my life as a
musician and a faux artist. As a young man, I
was introduced to Florida hunting by a good friend of
mine who has since passed away. This story takes place
in the Three Lakes Wildlife Management Area in Oceola County, Florida.
The year was nineteen ninety five. It was Thanksgiving Day.
We were camping in a public camping ground with good friends.
My friend Jim and I decided to hunt the swamp island,
as we did many times before. It was just another day.
We had to be back at camp before one o'clock
for dinner, so we left the island about twelve o'clock
in the afternoon. Now bear in mind it was gun season.
You're required to wear five hundred inches of orange in
a wildlife management area in Florida. Any person that would
attempt to hunt during rifle season without orange would be
absolutely crazy and a little bit stupid. Jim and I
hunted this island, which is in itself extremely spooky. In fact,
his wife would not even go out there because she
thought there were Indian spirits of some sort, which I
didn't argue with. The walk to the island was in
about two and a half foot of water for about
one hundred and fifty yards in a thick cypress swamp.
I kept this trail cut minimally for accessibility, and I
knew it very well. I had hunted this island dozens
of times alone. It's funny because I'm a grown man,
and still the Boogeyman gives me the willies, if you
know what I'm saying. We all know there are things
out in there that we cannot explain. When I'm in
the woods, I'm always on a alert for anything. We
did not see any deer or pigs during the morning
that I can remember. We left this island to go
back to the vehicle. Upon arrival, I opened my back
window to my Bronco and it made the usual screeching
sound which I could not seem to get rid of.
We loaded our firearms into the back of the truck.
I did this first, and then Jim followed up doing
the same. As Jim loaded his guns in the truck,
I walked out to the road. I looked down the
road for game, only to see this huge, tall, lanky
figure walking diagonally to the other side of the road
into the thick palmadows. I said to my friend Jim,
look at this crazy dude in the gilly suit without
his orange vest on. By description, the hare looked the
same color as buck hair, brown but not too long.
Body was a lanky looking in very tall, very long
arms and wide. It seemed to be a male, and
did not notice us in the road looking at him
because he was walking away at an angle. Jim made
a remark and came to the road and looked at
this thing. I remember saying, what a fool. Just then
another smaller one came out holding what seemed to be
either a baby or a pregnant belly. Now when I
saw this, obviously to me it was a female. She
had jet black hair from head to toe. She had
large breasts and a big belly. My friend Jim said, dang,
that's a gal in his twangy country boy voice. My
next words were those or swamp apes? Man. I want
to tell you, the hair on the back of our
necks was up as high as it could go. Both
of us got freaked out as this female saw us
looking at her and hobbled off into the thick falalmatos
very quickly. She ran very funny because of what she
was carrying, and I distinctly remember it. Jim and I
immediately got into my Bronco and drove down to the spot,
which was about one hundred and fifty yards away. We
got out and started to walk into the pal meadows,
and Jim said to me that he felt like he
was being watched, and he said he was not going in.
I agreed with this completely because I had no interest
in shooting one of these things or getting my butt whip.
I just wanted to see one close up. Just then,
another hunter drove up and got out of his vehicle
and asked us what was walking across the road. He
had been using his scope looking down the road and
back of us when the creatures were walking across. I
didn't know this at the time because it was way
down the road. He said he couldn't tell what they were,
but they didn't look normal as far as their coloration
and the way they were walking. Anyhow, we told the
guy what we saw and what we thought they were.
He kind of snickered and said I'm really not surprised,
and then he left. Meanwhile, Jim and I had to
go back to the camp and tell our families about
this experience. Everybody thought we were crazy, but after a
few hours my wife knew that I was obviously upset
and freaked out. She believed me and she got kind
of freaked out as well. So then I went to
the Czech station and I reported it to the game warden.
Of course, they laughed and asked me if I was
consuming alcohol or had been smoking something. I reported my
sighting to the Florida Bigfoot Research Organization and filed my
sighting online. The following weekend, they did go out with
me to the spot, but we couldn't find any evidence
because of the drought we were experiencing. A few snap
branches in odd trails were all we could find. Ever
since that time, things changed for me as a hunter.
I now carry a firearm pretty much all the time
while hunting. Even with archery, my days in the swamp
are limited because I do not want to run into
a family of bigfoots in the swamp. It was enough
for me that I had seen them once, so I
kind of gave them that place. So My encounter is
not violent, and it really wasn't terrifying, but it did
freak me out. My friend Jim has since passed, and
his wife finally believed what he saw after a few months.
I found your stories on YouTube to be very entertaining
and interesting, though mine does not compare to most that
I've heard. I guess that's a matter of perspective. I reckon.
I still enjoy hunting, but mostly traditional archery in rural areas.
I hope you find this story somewhat entertaining, and I
have enjoyed telling it. This was my special time and
my place in life. Maybe one day I will go
out there again, just to see the old swamp island.
Most of my fondest memories as a growing up in
central Mississippi or centered around hunting and fishing. When I
was big enough to go hunting and fishing, mostly keeping
up with the adults, I got to experience deer camp life. Man.
That was an experience all on its own. When I
was nine, my dad came home with a frosted ear
Walker coonhound puppy. He said he'd paid the owner thirteen
dollars for her, which was the price for registering dog
papers in nineteen eighty one. The guy said he sold
her cheap because frosted eer dogs won't hunt. Boy, was
he wrong. We named her Lady. Dad and I started
training her, and it seemed like no time before we
had a year and a half old dog that would
hammer out coons in just a few minutes. Around the
time I was about eleven or twelve, my sister got married.
I started spending time with her and her new husband,
who it turns out, loved to hunt as much as
me and Dad. So when Dad was at work, I
would go hunting with my brother in law and his friend.
We would hit the corn fields in the river bottoms
and hunt, sometimes until the early morning hours. Back then,
if the landowner saw us hunting, he'd stop and make
conversation just so he could hear that frosted ear walker
echoing through the night air. Those are the memories that
decorate my childhood. One night in the autumn of nineteen
eighty four, Lady and I were heading off on a
hunt with my brother in law and his friend to
some farm land off the Kenneybrew Road in Pocahontas, Mississippi.
We were riding in an early seventies model two wheel
drive Toyota that my brother in law had gotten from
a step dad. It was just an old hunting truck
and it had a lot of issues to prove it.
When we turned lady out on the north side of
Kennerbrew Road, it wasn't long before she struck and took
a small ditch headed south to what we called Kennerbrew.
We jumped in the truck and headed back to the pavement.
A few minutes later, we were standing on the bridge
the lady had just run under and listening to her
run deeper and deeper into the swamp. Suddenly she started
tree barking. My brother in law said, she's a long
way back there. Man. That was trouble, and we knew it.
The area was posted as private, but we were going
to get dad's dog. We walked along the ditch and
had high briars for about fifteen minutes until we came
to the edge of the swamp. We stopped to catch
our breath. Even though it was fall, it was still hot.
We stood listening to lady on the tree for a
minute before we started walking towards her. All of a sudden,
she stopped. We stopped walking and my brother in law said, listen.
It was so quiet we could hear an occasional vehicle
on Highway forty nine. We waited about ten minutes or so,
and then we started call for lady. Several minutes went by,
and we decided we'd better get back to Kinnerbrew Road
in case lady went back to where we turned her out.
But instead of going back the way we came, we
slipped out onto someone's driveway and we went out that way.
As we walked along in the moonlight from deep in
the swamp where we'd last heard lady on the tree,
something screamed. It was like a cross between a pig
squealing and a bull growling all in one. What was that?
I asked, trying not to sound as startled as I was.
American Werewolf in London had come out in nineteen eighty one.
I didn't like scary movies, and my brother in law
knew it. But he's a character, so he quipped, Oh, oh,
that's just the American werewolf from London coming to get you.
We all laughed and kept walking. Finally we got back
to the truck, but there was no dog. We drove
into a sage fill that went all the way to
the edge of the swamp. As soon as we stopped
and turned off the truck, we heard the sound again,
coming from the same area. Nowbody said a word. It
was disturbingly quiet. About thirty seconds went by and it
screamed again, except now it had cut the distance between
us in half. This time it was my brother in
law who asked, what was that. His friend said, I
don't know any animal that makes that kind of noise
and moves that fast. Another thirty or forty seconds passed
and it screamed again. It had to be within five
hundred yards of us. Now we waited another twenty seconds.
This time it was so loud I felt the rumble
in my chest. It couldn't have been more than seventy
five feet from the field. I think I almost passed out.
At that point, my brother in law's friend crouched down
on the floorboard and screamed, get us out of here.
My brother in law, who had been standing beside the truck,
jumped in and fired it up. He had gone limp,
and he said, I melted around the gear shift. The
truck started and then immediately died. Apparently, when I went limp,
I turned off the toggle switch mounted to the gear
shift for the add on twelve fuel pump. He had
to pull me back up in the seat so he
could turn the switch and start the truck again, and
we didn't stop until we were back on the pavement.
We drove around for a while, but we couldn't find lady.
We went home and we told Dad what happened. He
and my brother in law went back at daylight and
called for lady from the bridge. After just a few minutes,
she came out. Dad sure was glad to see her.
We told different people about what had happened that night.
We got told it was a big cat with its
head in a hole. That's why it sounded far away
at first. Then it pulled its head out some and
it would sound like it was moving. Some of the
older people said that they do this to get game
to move. I didn't buy that old tale. It's funny
how sounds can trigger memories. Over the past year and
a half, I've had three shoulder surgeries. While sitting in
my lazy boy with tons of time on my hands,
I started watching a lot of YouTube channels. My daughter
suggested cryptids, and that's how I found your channel I
had binge watched all of your stories when a suggested
channel came up with the most terrifying sounds in the
Canadian woods. When I heard that scream, the hair stood
up on the back of my neck. Every detail of
that fall night when I was twelve came flooding back.
Until then I had simply blocked it out subconsciously. It
must have been what was drawing me to your channel.
Thank you for not using my real name. There are
a lot of people around here who would label me
a crackpot. You are a crackpot. Chan. I'm just kidding, man,
this is a great story. This kind of reminds me
of a story I did. I think it was like
the second or third video I did about a guy
here who told me a story about Bigfoot killing his
best dog, and her name was Belle. Oh Man. This
bigfoot actually got a hold of this dog and impaled
it on a sapling that looked like he had broken
it off just to shove her down on. Apparently, they
don't like dogs, and they especially don't like coon dogs
and coon dogs when you know, when they're in the kennel,
they're just as friendly as they can be. But you
put them on a scent, and you turn them loose
and they start getting after the coons. Man, those things
get vicious and they they will go after since like
that bigfoot leaves behind and heard I've heard story after
story about raccoon dogs doing that. So this was a
great story. I appreciate you spending the time. You wrote
it well and we all enjoy at chan. Thank you, sir.
From a small town in Saline County, Illinois. The event
takes place a few moons ago when I was sixteen.
As a kid and a teenage boy, my friends and
I spent our free time playing in the woods. Somewhere
any place there was a creek to swim in, a
tree or rocks to climb on, we were there. Our
area was full of different legends and lore as well.
Some stories were passed down through generations of the native
people who walked the land before us, and some are
told by our recent ancestors. I assume that some of
the stories I've heard are campfire stories and just for fun,
But for a teenager back then, it didn't matter. We
were fearless and the stories never deterred us. On the contrary,
it made us more eager for adventure. We dreamed of
solving an ancient mystery. My friends and I were a
unique bunch, not that there was anything special about us,
just by how diverse our group was. And still we
always managed to get along and overcome challenges amid all
of our differences. For example, some believed in God while
others were atheists. Some believed in ghosts and spirits while
others didn't. We even went on missions looking for UFOs
and aliens while others refused their existence, but they still
tagged along for the ride. The area around where I
live is heavily mined. One of my friends, Ricky, lived
on some old Mind property. We were all over the
place out there, hiking and riding dirt bikes. A few
miles from his house was an old abandoned Mind drag.
A drag is an enormous piece of equipment. Imagine a
four story building on track with a boom that reaches
three hundred feet. It was once an operating giant, and
now it sat there, resting away. But all we saw
was a jungle gym for big kids. The only challenge
was how to get inside the giant beast. It had
obviously been sealed off to keep would be intruders such
as ourselves out. But after some time, some teamwork and
like of fear of heights and confined spaces, we got inside.
The main objective was to get to the top of
the boom that pulled the massive bucket. There were five
of us and we all wanted to make it to
the end of the main boom. We spent the greater
part of the day climbing and exploring the machine, and
we eventually made it to the end of the boom,
and at the end of the day we discovered more
areas to explore. From the roof, we found a way
down to the engine room. It was through a steel
door and into a vestibule that led to another steel
door and then the engine room. We all climbed in
at once and we shut the outside door behind us,
but we left the inner door open. These are solid
steel doors rested by years of exposure to the weather,
and they're not easy to move. We were about to
head back to the exit hole and we heard a
bang across from us on the adjacent catwalk, and then
clanking of feet on steal as someone ran down some stairs,
across another catwalk and up the other stairs right in
front of us, we heard another solid steel door slam shut.
We were some tough guy teenagers at that point, but
we turned pale and we took off running for our lives.
We couldn't run fast enough to get out, and to
get away, we had to head in the direction in
which we heard this thing running. We had to squeeze
through a small hatch one by one onto a two
man platform, then down a ladder, and from there we
had to descend the machine using the buddy system to
get to the ground. It was not pretty or professional.
Five terrified boys were involved here, but we got it
done and we escaped the Mind Drag safely. Some time later,
Ricky and I were talking about that day and one
of our skeptic friends, Ted, was with us. Ted said
that he thought that we made the whole story up
about what happened at the old Mind Drag. This led
to some debate, and so to prove to Ted that
the story was true, we agreed to take him out there.
To make things scarier, we agreed to go at night
with no flashlights. There was half a moon, and we
knew the land like the back of our hands, so
it really was not a big deal. At least that
is what we thought. We knew a short cut off
an old black top road to save us some walking time,
and we pulled down an old access road, leaving about
a quarter mile walk back to the mind Drag. It
was a qua walk in. None of us talked. The
only sounds were our feet to the ground, and then
we heard something in the bushes a few feet off
the trail, and we stopped to listen. It was out
of place, but the sound stopped and we kept going.
The bushes began to shake again after a few paces,
but this time it was harder and faster. Something was
there less than fifty feet from where we stood, and
we had to see what it was, so we walked
straight to the spot we knew the sound was coming from.
We stopped a few feet from the hedge and we
looked around. Everything became quiet once again, and we were
about to head back to the trail and we heard
a stick snap. We turned and looked back, and a
giant creature stood straight up on the other side and
looked down at us. The only detail that really sticks
out in my mind, besides its height or its glowing
red eyes, and its hairy humanoid silhouette the moonlight. As
this creature rose out of the bushes, I remember it growling.
It was warning us, much like a dog growls low
and deep, letting us know that it meant business. I
don't remember being this afraid ever in my life. I
actually felt sick. All of us stood there looking up
at this thing, and shock paralyzed might be a better word.
But all at once we came to our senses and
we turned and we ran back to our car. Ricky
started the engine and we were about to blaze out
of that place, and Ted yelled stop. Ted wanted to
go back and make sure of what we had just seen.
He explained in an excited tone that maybe it was
our imaginations. We had been talking about ghosts and monsters
for weeks, and his theory was that we saw what
we wanted to see. He even said it could have
been a deer. I knew that I hadn't seen a deer.
It was too big, and I also knew that it
could tear us apart if it wanted to. But Ted
was persuasive, and believe it or not, we agreed to
go back and take another look. The plan was drawn
up on the spot. We would bring whatever we could
find in the trunk for weapons and walk close together
down the trail, and we wouldn't run back to the car.
No matter what. We wouldn't run because somehow, in our
minds we had convinced ourselves what we had seen was
not real. Armed with a false sense of courage, a
baseball bat and a tire iron, we began our journey
back to face our fear ted carried an umbrella. It
was the only thing left in the trunk. After Ricky
and I grabbed the other weapons, we paced back down
the trail, confident that we would not see this thing again.
But it was waiting on us. On the trail, lit
by the moonlight, still way taller and bigger than any
of us, stood the same monster. Once again. We paused
in amazement. No one dared run. We knew we would
forever be called a chicken. There was pride involved here.
So three teenage boys stood in front of an eight
to nine foot tall beast in the dark like we
knew what we were doing. It was a staredown. For
a minute, it didn't appear to be aggressive, which elevated
our confidence. I took a step forward and my buddies
followed me with a step of their own. The second
step I made towards the creature only ten yards away,
was a lunge. I wanted to startle it and see
if it would run. Our weapons were held in front
of us, ready to use. We had made the first move.
Instantly the creature lunched right back at us with a
loud roar that shook my internal organs. At that point,
no one can about being called a chicken. Bravery went
out the window. I'm not sure how we got out
of that without wetting our breeches, but we turned and ran.
The thought kept running through my head what was I thinking?
That thought stays with me to this day. Gravel sprayed
behind the car and we made it out of the
mining area I live. That night, we talked about the
event for days. At that point in my life, the
stories of Bigfoot, the tuttle bottomed monster, boogers in the
woods were all imaginary things I had heard but never
dreamed were true. For years, my buddies and I messed
around in those woods. We always heard strange sounds, wood knocks, whistles,
and other things, and we never thought anything about it.
The truth is we were never once alone in those woods.
The stories are true. These things are real, and they
existed in our world. I saw one, and I even
challenged it. My advice is to not do that. Ever,
it has been several years since this happened, and I
now think the monster had no intention of hurting us.
You would not have ever convinced me of that when
it happened, but I think it wanted us out of there.
It could have been on us in a split second
and killed all three of us quickly, but it didn't.
We finally left the area, and I will assume the
creature got what it wanted. It probably had a big
laugh with its buddies back at the cave, laughing at
the kids who challenged the bigfoot. I just thought it
was a great story. I don't know what else. I've
never heard one where somebody actually challenged a bigfoot. I've
heard them where they take shots at them, but I've
never heard one where a guy actually took a lunge
at a bigfoot. That's an awesome story, Mike. Thank you
for the email. Can't you through it?