Speaker 1: My bigfoot encounter happened in the summer of my eighth year.
We lived on the outskirts of Bates Full, Arkansas, on
a farm. At this age, I spent every minute that
I could outside. On a hot day in July, I
was making my rounds around our place. I spent a
lot of time looking for critters around a big pond
on the northwest corner of our land. Catching frogs and
turtles and snakes was one of my favorite things to do.
It was an ordinary day, really. Birds were chirping and
insects were singing. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until
all the noise from the nearby wildlife stopped. I noticed
it right away. At that moment, I was ankled deep
in the water and mud. I stopped looking for animals,
and I tried to take it all in. It was
like the moon of that place went dark and time
slowed down. But I couldn't figure out why. My dog
moved around in front of me, looking at a huge
oak tree across the fence. We both stared at it
for a minute. Maybe he knew what was there, but
I couldn't see anything. When you look at something long enough,
shapes began to form, and I saw what looked like
a man hiding behind the tree, maybe the outline of
his shoulder and a leg. My dog began to growl.
Something was there. I caught a whiff of a strange
odor that I mistook for the mud I was standing
in walk around in a muddy pond, and all sorts
of smells boil up, but this odor was different. I
walked towards the tree to sea better. At this point,
I was only fifteen or twenty yards away from the tree,
I saw a hand wrap around a branch that was
six feet above the ground. I've never seen anything like
It looked like an FX effect from a horror movie.
I expected to see its face peak around the trunk
because the way it was moving was like it wanted
to look at me, but it never did. I just
stared at that hand. I couldn't take my eyes off
of it. The skin was dark gray, with dark brown,
almost black hair covering all but the fingers. The nails
were long and black. They actually looked perfectly groomed from
that distance, but I'm sure they weren't. The nails looked
like a woman's nails after she has had a manicure.
They were long and symmetrical, and the knuckles were oversized
and obvious. But one thing I knew for sure, I
did not want those hands on me. Its hands were giant,
and it could have completely covered my eight year old head.
Something cracked in the brush grown up around the tree,
and my dog left me sprinting straight to the house
a quarter mile away. I was right behind him, running
hard and barefoot through that field. I made it home
in record time. I never told my folks what I saw.
I probably should have. I was eight years old and
I didn't know what to do. Later in years, I
told one of my friends, and he believes me. He
has had an encounter himself. I also confided in my wife.
She thinks I'm crazy. I know what I saw. I'm
now twenty two years old, and I've had one more
encounter since then. I'll send that at another time. Thanks
for telling my story. I know I can't spell worth
the crap. Dyslexia is my enemy. Oh man, uh No,
I can't spell worth the crap either. I mean sometimes
I even put marquees on these videos and I spell
the word wrong. I should do a spell check, I guess,
but I don't know. I get a little impatient, and
it looks good to me, so I'll let it fly
in dyslexia. Dude, you wrote a good story. I fixed
it up for you. That was a couple of things
I didn't understand, but I got it straight. So it's
a good story. And uh, I know Batesville. I've got
my family has a place over there, close to Grier's
Ferry go through Braatesville every time we go over there.
Love that racetrack over there in Batesville. I've never been
to a racetrack, but I like driving by it, and
every time I drive by it, I think I'm gonna
go to the races here one summer, but I never
have been able to. But anyways, a great story. And dude,
if you get a minute to write that other encounter,
make sure and send it to me. All right, I
appreciate it. Let's go to the next one. Okay, this
story is a paranormal story. I don't know if it's true.
I think it's probably not, but it's a damn good story.
So you know the drill, put that chin strap on
your twope, glue your dentures in because this is a
good one. All right, Let's get going with it. In
nineteen eighty five, I was traveling in the northwest part
of Utah. I was dozing off behind the wheel, so
I opted to pull into a hotel motel for the night.
After I flipped the mattress over for a quick bedbug
check and search the fixtures for video cameras. You never
know about these out of the way places. I flopped
down on the bed. For whatever reason, I couldn't get
the television to work, so I gave up and thumbed
through a small stack of magazines on the nightstand. An
article caught my eye about an old silver mining town.
It stated that a theater company was willing to pay
for new hires to serve as re enactors portraying characters
from the Old West for tourists. With visions of the
movie westwarld in my head. I tore out the article
and shoved it in my duffel bag. What did I care?
I thought might be fun to step out of my
boring life for a while to pretend to be someone else.
After several weeks of phone calls and background checks, I
was offered to job as a saloon of pharaoh dealer.
When I arrived, I noted how exact a replica of
the place was of an old West town. It was
overrun with tourists, but you could easily tell who the
workers were by their old fashioned dress. All I was
dressed for my part, looking like Hugh O'Brien's character in
the John Wayne movie The Shootest. I tried to copy
Hugh O'Brien's cocky arrogance, but thankfully I never had to
defend myself against any soret of losers that lost at
my pharaoh table. The tourists thought my act was a hoop,
and it was all in good fun. Once we closed,
my other duties involved making the rounds and securing the
place for the night. Late one evening, I decided to
stay and enjoy the solitude of the mountains in the
background and the starry skies above. I found myself back
at the saloon with nothing to do, so I sat
at my table and began to practice some new card moves.
There was no smoking loud on the premises, but the
air began to fill with the smell of burning tobacco.
Now I thought my coworkers were pulling a joke, or
that a couple of stray tourists had trespassed onto the
place after hours. There was a distinct sound of boot shuffling,
as if a crowd of invisible line dancers had suddenly
taken the floor. Well. My heart jumped into my mouth
when a player piano roared into life and began pumping
out a saloon worthy rendition of Camptown Ladies. I found
myself face to face with a trio of reenactors, one
portraying a cowboy and two playing miners. They pulled out
chairs at my table and they sat down. Why didn't
recognize them? What did you guys start working here? I asked,
Are you going to deal the cards? Just sit there?
One of the miners demanded, someone is having a big
laugh at my expense, I thought, so I played along
and off the first hand. The three bellowed for drinks.
An actress playing a pretty saloon girl who I didn't recognize,
brought over a tray and set it off to the side.
The three men down their booze in one gulp and
turned their attention back to the game. By then the
bar was filled and every patron was dressed in period clothing,
as was I all night long. The cowboy had been
losing badly. He made a derogatory remark about my Faroh
dealing skills. Thinking this was all play acting, I summoned
my inner Hugh Bryan, and I told him, you have
two ways of leaving this establishment, my friend immediately or dead.
Like Hugh Brian's character. I love watching a beaten man
leave the room. The cowboy shuffled dejectedly across the bar
and made his exit through the swinging doors look out.
Someone yelled A few seconds later as the entire place
dove for cover. The cowboy reappeared in the doorway brandishing
a gun. I heard his blank cartridge whizz by me
as I instinctively raised my own gun and took him
down with one shot to the heart. The cheer went
up throughout the bar as a couple of patrons dragged
the cowboy's body out the exit. I holistered my pistol
and continued the game, And in that moment I really
was Hugh Bryan, and all the characters in the saloon
feared and respected me. I told the two actors playing
the miners that I was shutting down the Faroh table
for the night. They chose not to complain and passively
made their way out the exit. I assumed the other
staff in the bar, detracted by their partying, would close up,
so I made my way out, and as my boots
kicked up the dirt, I thought I saw someone sleeping
on a bench in front of the General's store. It
was the cowboy I had pretended to shoot. Wake up,
I said, as I nudged him, Except he wasn't asleep.
I noted the dry blood across his chest. I turned
and ran back to the saloon to summon help. I
could hear the player piano, but as I entered I
saw the place was deserted. The gravity of the situation
was dawning on me that I had just shot and
killed a man in front of a saloon full of
eye witnesses who had suddenly vanished. I rushed back to
the general store, thinking I could still help the cowboy
if it wasn't too late. But he had gone missing, too,
had my fellow re enactors removed the body. I checked
the blanks in my colt and counted five still in
the cylinder. There were two unaccounted for mine and his.
I searched every inch of that saloon and couldntfideen neither
had someone found the spent cartridges and taken those two
somewhere in panic had occurred to me that I was
being prank. You can't kill people across the room firing
only blanks, and dead bodies don't go missing, and large
groups of rowdy bar patrons don't disappear without a trace.
The next day, I took my coworkers to task, congratulating
them on pulling off such an elaborate hoax. No one
seemed to know what I was talking about. A few
humored be enough to listen as I recounted the events
from the night before. You say you heard music coming
from this piano, asked one of them. He swept his
hand down the keyboard, but the instrument produced no sound.
This piano doesn't have hammers, he continued. It's a prop. Well,
I shook my head. I'm starting to feel somewhere between
foolish and possibly insane. You know your characters based on
a real guy, he added, I had assumed there was
no history behind any of the people that we were
supposed to be portraying. Some cowboy drifter didn't like his cards,
so he and the pharaoh dealer got into it. Continued
the co worker the Pharaoh Dealer shot him dead. The
next night, a gang of cowboys rode into town and
took care of the Pharaoh Dealer. You want to hang
around and see what happens to your character tonight? They
all started laughing at my so called ghost story, real
or imagine? I knew I was know Hugh O'Brien. It
was boring old me that removed my gun belt and
bid my farewells and got the hell out of dodge.
I live in a small town in north Mississippi, right
below the Tennessee state line in Benton County. This person
is my neighbor, one county over. In two thousand and nine,
I was going through a nasty divorce and a custody battle.
My one year old daughter and I had to move
in with my parents. They own thirty eight and after
all of us kids moved out, they converted the barn
into a two bedroom cabin. Growing up, I always had
a weird feeling that I couldn't explain when I would
be in the barn alone feeding or messing with the horses,
even though I never had any paranormal experiences. My daughter
slept in a pack and play because I was unable
to bring her crip with us when we had to
leave our former home. Around three thirty am on this
particular night, I was in that state where you're asleep
but still kind of aware of what's going on around you,
and I heard a voice say, she's waking up. Opened
my eyes and I saw two little twin girl ghosts
who looked to be around eight years old. They wore
antique dresses and their hair was fixed in ringlet curls,
just like a pair of Victorian porcelain dolls. Both of
them were sitting in front of the pack and play
with their legs crossed, looking at my daughter. They must
have realized they were being watched by me as they
took flight and exited the room. It felt like all
the energy left with them. My daughter slept through the
hole encounter, but I was so scared that I just
laid there wide away. I never believed in ghosts until
that night. I don't think they had any ill intent.
I got the feeling that they were behaving like normal
girls around that age, fascinated by the baby. My parents
still continued to experience paranormal activity in the house, though
none of the spirits appeared to be menacing or threatening.
My mother witnessed the ghost of a little boy dressed
in Civil War era clothing and swore as she detected
the scent of a woman's perfume in the hallway. And
my sister once saw the figure of a man dressed
in cowboy clothing. She said he seemed more interested in
tending to his chores than bothering with her. There's a
dark history to the place. It was once burnt to
the ground during the Civil War and rebuilt on the
same site. There were rumors of a family with three
small children buried nearby and on mark graves. It was
assumed that they were bystanders caught in the bloodshed. It's
all kind of tragic when you think about it. A
farm family innocently going about their business until the war
ended up at their front door. And that's the end
of that story. But you know, during the Civil War
where I live, when the Union forces came through here,
they burned in everything, courthouses, churches. You can look at
the historical markers on almost every courthouse in every county
in at least north of Mississippi, I'm guessing North Alabama
and Georgia. It'll say that This courthouse was burned down
during the Civil War and rebuilt in eighteen eighty nine
or eighteen seventy six during the Reconstruction period. But none
of it was pleasant for people in the Southern States.
And nothing about the war was easy. It wasn't just hard,
it was. It was much harder on the soldiers, but
nothing was easy for the whole population down here. And
some people may say, well, they deserved it, blah blah blah.
I'm not saying whether they deserved it or not. I'm
just saying that's a fact. It just wasn't easy living
for people. And a lot of our customs and a
lot of our food and a lot of our language
and the things that the way we live in the
Southern States are marked by that era. And I don't know,
it just came to mind with this story. I've read
a lot about the Reconstruction era, and from customs to
food to in the post slave culture and everything. It's
real interesting stuff. And you kind of find out why
people like I found out why my grandparents ate like
they did that. I'll just tell you a little story.
I remember my grandmother and this is probably from the
reconstruction area posts Civil war and from living through the
Great Depression. But she would cook a batch of biscuits,
and those biscuits would sit on her stove out in
the open for a week until they were all gone.
Now today, if we cook a dozen biscuits and you
eat six, you just throw the rest of them away,
or you give the rest to the dogs, or you
throw we throw them out to the chickens. But they
came up in an era where you did not waste
an ounce of food. You just didn't waste it. You
kept it and you would eat on it all week.
And if you threw throwing something out that was edible
was just absolutely unheard of. And my grandparents wound up
in real good shape later in their life. But they
were born and raised and came up through the Great
Depression by people who were raising families during that time,
and that's how they came about those customs, and they
never let go of them. I just think that's so
fascinating to me. I'm running this story kind of long.
I'm going off on a tangent like I do sometimes
when I get talking. But it's interesting stuff, and I
don't take any particular pride in it. I don't take
I don't look down on it, even though I'm Southern
born and I've lived here all my life. These are
just interesting facts about humanity that really consume me. I
love reading about why we do what we do. It's
interesting stuff. Okay, let's go to another story. I moved
to Parker County, Texas two years ago with my wife
and our three dogs. The property that we purchased and
currently live on is five acres and it's located outside
of Springtown. The property is surrounded by others similar sized properties,
but there are large wooded sections. The back three acres
is open to the neighbor that borders me to the west,
and they have a thick scrub brush on the back
side of their property. The metal barn that was here
when we bought the place sits twenty feet from the
property line and eighty feet from our back door. Now,
I tell you all of this so that you can
get a mental image of how everything is positioned on
the property. When we first moved in during the summer
of twenty twenty one, we were excited to start some
projects and make our place our own. After picking up
one thousand pounds of scrap metal and giving the pasture
a good bush hogging. The back acreage was looking a
lot better than it had when we first moved in.
We made a plan to move my wife's horse from
her grandmother's property to ours once I fixed the fence
that ran down the western property line. One June evening,
after it all cooled down, I started making the necessary
repair to the fence when I heard something moving around
in the brush fifteen yards in front of me. Now
it sounded like a large animal trying to be quiet
but failing miserably. I wasn't concerned, since this part of
Texas has deer and hogs and other wild game, and
that's what could have been making the noises. Thirty minutes
into this episode, with on and off breaking of sticks
and crunching leaves, I started to feel uneasy, like something
was looking right at me or through me. I'm a
big man six foot four and three hundred and twenty
five pounds, and having hunted the woods and swamps of
Mississippi all my life, there's not much that has raised
the hair on the back of my neck. But even so,
something had my nerves on edge. So I quickly finished
the work and walked back to the house. At a
fast pace. After getting into the house and shaking off
the feeling of being watched, I turned on the baseball
game and I was able to rely. Later on, my
wife reminded me that she had to go out of
town for the next few days for work, and she
asked about the fence, and I told her that I
would have it completed, but I didn't mention the incident
that made me nervous. She asked me if I could
clean out the barn while she was gone as well. Well. Naturally,
I waited until the last day before my wife came
home to start this work. There was no electricity running
to the barn, just a floodlight on a pole pointing
toward the south entrance, so I had to get everything
cleaned out during the day while filling my truck bed
up with old water hoses and boxes of bucks and newspapers.
From no telling how long, I worked my way toward
the northwest corner of the barn. That's when I started
to notice a rancid smell. The closer I got to
that corner. After finally getting the wall of boxes cleared out,
I found the source of the smell. There were old
horse blankets covered in gore in what looked to be
an old deer carcass. Well. I thought it was strange,
but stray dogs in codies are opportunistic, and if no
one is bothering them, I guessed that they would take
up shelter in the barn. Well. I gagged a few
times at the smell, and I managed to get all
the terrible smelling horse blankets in the bed of my
truck and on the way to the county dump. And
when I got back home that evening, I got cleaned
up and I let the dogs out to use the
bathroom and get some exercise. It was about thirty minutes
before dusk, and that uneasy feeling that I had of
being watched hit me again. I wasn't the only one
that had an immediate feeling of eyes peering at me
from somewhere. All of my dogs were on alert. They
were looking over toward the barn. The biggest of these
dogs is one hundred and twenty pound Great Pyrenees Retriever mix.
He was a real protective dog, but he was frozen
in that spot, rowling, and his hackles were raised. I
gathered myself and got the dogs back inside, and I
still couldn't shake the feeling that there was something glaring
at me through the windows. The thought crossed my mind
that there might be a big cat in the area,
even though the game warns will tell you that there aren't.
But I hadn't seen any tracks or signs. So after
closing all the blinds, I felt a little better. But
that was until about nine thirty when I heard my
neighbor's dog raising hell. Against my better judgment, I went
to the gun safe and got out my three hundred
blackout AR fifteen, and I racked around in the chamber
and I flipped on the weapon mounted light and I
stepped out the back door. The instant that I pointed
the light toward the barn, there was an ear piercing
howl or growl that vibrated in my chest. Now I'm
not a believer in encryptids or that UFO stuff, So
I started walking toward the barn with my muscle trained
on the entrance. I had only made it ten steps
before this, well, it was this thing. It jumped into
the beam of my light just inside the barn doors.
So I froze in my tracks out of sheer disbelief.
This beast was standing on its hind legs with its
front arms hanging down just above its knees, and it
was black. It's blacker and dark. The next thing I
noticed was the claws on the end of the raccoon
like hands that glistened in my light. They looked long
and dangerous. I slowly raised my rifle, working that light
up the creature, and I saw the ugliest canine face
that I've ever seen in my life, thick, vicious drool
that hung from its yellow, jagged teeth, and suddenly it
looked like the edges of its mouth had turned up
in some sort of a twisted grin. Its eyes reflected
green from the light. I had no idea what I
was looking at, but I knew that thirty rounds of
three hundred blackout probably wasn't enough to take it down
Before it got to me. I got lucky, and it
turned and with one fluid motion, it jumped over the
backset of barn doors and started running into the night.
From the time the creature jumped into the light, from
the time it suddenly turned away and bounded over the
back barn doors and ran off, crashing through the brush,
may have been a total of thirty seconds. I got
a good enough look at it to know that I
was keeping my gun loaded, in lights on, and my
doors locked that night. The next morning, I went out
and measured where I thought the height of the beast was.
My best guess was that it was seven foot tall,
and the barn doors that cleared without effort were even
with my chin. Now I found large canine style prints
all over the dirt floor of the barn. My wife
came home later that day, and I chose not to
tell her about any of the events that happened the
night before. It has been almost two years since that night,
and I haven't seen her or felt the presence of
anything on or around our property since. My best guess
is that the thing had been staying in the barn
while the previous owners had been gone, and I disturbed
it by cleaning everything up. Hopefully I never have another
encounter with anything like this again. Oh man, Hopefully you don't.
And you're going to catch some flight from the audience
for not telling your wife. And there's a lot of
stories that guys will say that they'll say, oh, I
saw this monster, but I never told my wife about it.
It was on our property it was close to the house,
but I never told my wife about it. You know, honestly,
I might not tell my wife because I know that
it would scare her to death. She probably wouldn't want
to live here. So I get it, and I almost
support what you're doing. If you hadn't had any problem,
that's a good deal. But you're going to catch some flight,
So don't read the comments. How about that? Don't read
the comments. To the man who wrote this, I think
was his name, I appreciate the story, man, this was great.
You think you saw a dog man or a werewolf?
What's the difference in a dog man a werewolf? Some
people say, well, the werewolf's change and the dog man don't.
But how do you know when you see a dog
man if it didn't change like an hour before? So
how do you know? How do we know all these things?
I don't know? All right, buddy, thanks for the story.