Speaker 1: Back in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties, my mother's
family lived on a small form in North Alabama. My
grandfather worked in the coal mines, but he owned the farm,
so they didn't have to live in the camp. A
small spring fed creek that ran along the north edge
of the property provided water for the family, the animals,
and for washing. Sometime around the summer of nineteen fifty
there was a drought, which in North Alabama means it
didn't rain for two weeks and that creek almost dried up.
They had to install a hand pump on the spring
to get enough water to keep the farm going. Everybody
and everything was hot, drumpy, and thirsty that summer. It
was an area where electric lights were still considered a
modern convenience and air conditioning was unheard of. With no breeze,
the world baked on under a hot, still glaze of
sweat and dust. To alleviate some of their misery, they'd
eat dinner early and then go out and sit on
the front porch to give the house time to cool off.
Before bed, they drag a big oscillating floor fan up
to the screen door and sit and talk while doing
the sort of light chores that could be accomplished while
sitting in a rocking chair. Socks and clothes were mended,
and peas were shelled until the sun went down, and
then it was time for bed. That's when the screaming started.
Somewhere in the woods across the creek. Something was screaming
like a woman who was being strangled. Those were interspersed
with long, mournful howls loud enough to hurt your ear drums.
In the gloom of the dusk, they could vaguely see
the trees shaking in the distance and hear something stomping
on what sounded like two feet through the thick growth
around the spring, but they never saw an anni. As
soon as the racket would start, the farm animals would
stampede to the other end of the pasture as far
from the spring as they could get. They wanted nothing
to do with whatever was over there making that noise.
Our neighbor owns six big hounds trained to hunt raccoons.
Raccoon hounds can be mean, and these dogs were vicious
animals that weren't afraid of anything. They tore off across
the creek to hunt down and kill whatever was making
the noise and shaking the trees. Six dogs went, but
only four came back. Of those four, one had its
back ripped open so badly they had to put it
out of its misery. That was when the men knew
that they had to act. My grandfather, my two oldest uncles,
the neighbor, and his sons loaded their shotguns and rifles
and went to see what this thing was. They found
the two dead dogs ripped into pieces and thrown up
into the tree, but they didn't find what killed them.
The next night, the screaming returned with a vengeance. The
dogs were put on chains and the children were kept inside.
It screamed until after midnight, while everyone stayed in their
homes and hoped that whatever it was would eventually go
back to where it came from. The men didn't want
to see if it was going to return. The following night,
they were already in the woods with their guns loaded
for bore and waiting for it. That night, they stalked
that thing and hunting it down, and they killed it
and buried it somewhere in the woods. Everyone in that
hunting party is dead now. When I was a child,
I asked, but none of them ever told me what
they killed that night. It is conceivable that it was
a panther. Panthers, or so i've read, can sound like
a woman screaming, and since panthers or a protected species,
shooting one would have been illegal, they would have had
a good reason to shoot it. Shovel and shut up
about it. But do panthers shake trees when they walked?
Do they sound like someone stomping around on two legs?
Do they throw bodies of dogs into the trees? Honestly,
have no idea what those men killed that night, and
now that they're all gone, we'll probably never know.
Speaker 2: The rescue, the jogger ran into the road just a
few yards in front of her car. If she'd been
on the highway, she'd have never been able to stop
in time. Fortunately, she wasn't traveling very fast on the
gravel and managed to avoid him. A quick glance across
the field from whence he came revealed the source of
his panic. A massive doglike creature was running straight for them.
She recognized it immediately. The man opened the passenger door
and was sliding into the seat next to her. Even
as she was saying, get in, mister tailed from her
rear tires. As the creature hit the road, a long,
ear shattering screech echoed through the cars. The thing's claws
left four deep trails down the back quarter panel. It's
following us, she said, looking in a rear view mirror.
Reaching down, she pulled an air horn from under her seat,
rolled down her window, stuck it out, and squeezed the trigger. Ah.
The jogger moaned at the sound. Sorry, she muttered, it's
just that they hate loud noises. Taking advantage of her
captive audience and the fact that he had to be
a believer, she went on, I suggest, if you plan
on continuing to jog, you get yourself one of these
and take it with you. And get a flashlight too.
It has to be a bright one, at least fifteen
hundred lumens. They hate bright light as much as they
hate loud noises. Using them could give you the chance
you need to get away. She checked the rear view
mirror again. Inside it looks like he's gone, she said, reassuringly.
Another thing, though, she thought to add, they can disguise
themselves as humans. She didn't bother to look at her
passenger when she said that, she knew she sounded crazy,
but when he said nothing, she continued, Look as crazy
as that sounds, these things are smart. I've seen them
dressed in human clothing before. Sometimes if you don't look
directly at them, or if you only get a glimpse,
they actually look like people. I swear you could walk
right past one on the street, and maybe only for
a minute or two, they look completely human. As she spoke,
she saw it out of the corner of her eye.
It was too late, but she flinched anyway as the
long hair covered arm reached across her face, grabbed her
head by the other side, and quickly snapped her neck.
The car careened out of control, spun rolled, landed on
its side, and slid for several yards along the ditch
before coming to rest on its roof. The creature in
jogger's apparel quickly kicked out the front windshield, and, dragging
the body behind it, ran into the field where the
other one was waiting somewhere off in the woods. They
had their meal, reveling and a feeling of intense satisfaction
at the knowledge that this woman would never sound one
of those horns or shine one of her flashlights at
them again. Yeah. You can laugh at my story if
you want. But I've been a deputy in this county
for thirty years, and all the craziest calls I ever
took were at that woman's house in the last five.
She wasn't from around here. She was one of those
city people looking for an escape. Thought she'd found it too,
Just her and her dogs, a lazy old fat cat
that spent all its time sitting in her front living
room window, and a dozen or so chickens. But things
started happening, and I started getting called out there pretty regular.
The last time I was there, she told me she'd
figured out how to keep them away. And when we
found her car out there in the gravel road, the
airhorn was lying in the ditch by it, and her
flashlight was still sitting between the seats. Her front window
was broken out. We never did find the body, but
the drag mark's clearly indicated someone or something had taken her.
So this is what I think happened. Maybe I'm wrong,
but maybe I'm right. The wife and I put a
bit on her farmhouse just the other day. It's prime
property and worth a lot more than it's being sold for.
I couldn't pass up the opportunity. That's why I'm on
my way to the store right now to get myself
an airhorn in a good bright flashlight. Fifteen hundred lumens
are better, I think she told me.
Speaker 1: Okay, one last story. Hey, before I get into this story,
I got in trouble last night. I'll put out a
podcast yesterday and I spent ten or fifteen minutes talking
about how great the Smoky Mountain Bigfoot conference was, and
apparently my wife listened to it and mentioned to me
last night that you didn't even mention me, And I said, well,
you really don't. You know, you kind of like to
be behind the scenes. I know, but I wanted you
to tell everybody how nice they were and how much
I appreciated them coming to talk to me and my wife.
April says thank you to everyone that visited our booth
and was so nice to her. She was the little, short,
gray headed girl in the middle between Naoma and Nance.
If you guys didn't know who she was, I think
a lot of people thought she was Nioma, and a
lot of people thought Naoma was my wife, and a
lot of people thought Nance was my wife. But no,
it was the girl in the middle with the black
T shirt on and the totally gray hair, which I
absolutely love. Heck, I'm just glad that woman likes me.
I'm a lucky man. Okay, let's get into this story.
This person wants to be anonymous. Here's what they write.
My first encounter with what I respectfully call the old
Ones occurred in nineteen eighty one, when I was sixteen
years old. I've always loved driving onto our farm and
parking the truck and taking long hikes through the woods.
On this occasion, I came to a wide intersection of
two of our farm roads. I turned on to the
left fork to get a drink from the spring thirty
yards down the path. As I headed down to the ford,
I noticed footprints. My first thought was, now, who in
the thundered nation is down here barefoot? And then I
realized two things. First was the size I've worn the
same size eleven and a half shoes since I was
twelve years old. These prints were half again as big,
easily eighteen or twenty. The second was the gate from
the heel of one print to the toe of the
opposite print was nearly six feet. I followed them down
to the water and stopped. They continued in the same
unbroken gate up the opposite side, and disappeared where the
road leveled off again. I got my water and then
debated whether or not to follow. My better judgment said no,
and I returned to my trek back to the truck.
In the ensuing years, there have been several incidents, particularly
when walking out on an afternoon of deer hunting at
what we call good dark. Several times, when leaving my stand,
I knew I was being followed. Whatever it was, it
stayed far enough away to be disguised by the dusk,
but close enough to be felt. I detected no hostility
towards me, just as presence and an overwhelming sense of
you've had your fun and now it's time to leave.
In January of twenty and thirteen, I was forty eight
years old, married and we had kids, and I was
living and working eighty miles from my hometown. I had
been to visit my mother and was driving back home
as the daylight was just beginning to fade. As I
rounded a curve, I saw about one hundred yards in
front of me a massive dark object crouched in the road,
right on the double yellow line. It moved to my
right about thirty feet in three steps, and was against
a brush line, trying to blend in. I watched it
in amazement. It was approximately nine feet tall, with at
least four foot shoulder span. It was covered in dark hair,
and I estimated it to weigh around nine hundred pounds.
Its face was very much like a gorilla. It was
dark and leathery, with a broad, flat nose. Its eyes
were the most intense yellow green I've ever seen, and
were space six inches apart. As I approached him, he
threw his left arm across his chest, as if to
instinctively ward off a blow. I suppose he believed I
was about to hit him. I rounded the curve and
kept going, passing within thirty feet of him. By the
spring of twenty sixteen, we have moved back to our hometown,
and the kids were all familiar with my encounter. One
Saturday afternoon in April or May, my youngest son came
to the house, ashing and shaking all over. I saw it, Dad,
I really saw it, he exclaimed. I asked him what
he had seen, and with eyes wide and full of wonder,
he said, I saw the bigfoot. I asked him to
show me where, and so we went into the backyard
and he showed me the tree the creature had peered around.
We estimated it to be around nine feet tall. We
also found and took pictures of several very large footprints.
Since then, my son has seen what he calls Rocky
several times in the backyard. In February of last year,
twenty twenty, my friend Mike and I were in my
backyard and found tracks. They came across the face of
the tree line, stopped, and then faced to my house.
They then turned and went into the bushes. After Mike left,
I went inside and told my son and daughter about
seeing the tracks, without the least prompting. My son smiled
and said, yeah, I saw Rocky yesterday. I was playing
in the sideyard and bent over to pick up a stick,
and as I stood up, there were two fur covered
tree trunks in front of me. When I straightened up,
there was Rocky facing me twenty feet away. He chuffed
at me and stepped into the bushes. Well. I was
amazed I had gotten into my story only far enough
to say Mike and I found tracks. He had described
what we had seen to the last detail. Mike and
I have been chuffed at several times on the farm.
In March, we had a visual of what I believed
to be a mated couple on the shoreline of a
large pond. Within a few yards of where they were standing,
we found two bedding sites where they had slept. A
few weeks later we had another sighting of the same
pair about a quarter mile away, standing in a tree
line watching us. It's now mid June and I must
admit i'd like to see them again. I'd like to
see them soon.