Speaker 1: In November of nineteen eighty three, my dad and his
friend John decided they wanted both our families to spend
Thanksgiving together in the mountains. I was fifteen years old
that year. My two brothers were thirteen and eleven, and
my sister was only three. The other family, i'll call
them the Smiths, had four boys, ages fifteen, fourteen, thirteen,
and eleven. We had rented two cabins, one for each
family in Mentone, Alabama, and we all drove up from
Birmingham the evening before Thanksgiving Day. I think we're in
a state park, but I don't really know for sure.
The next day we all gathered at the family's cabin
to cook and hang out together. I remember the sound
of football games, so somebody must have had a radio.
The cabins didn't have TV. The dads were smoking a
turkey and a goose and some other stuff outside and
a smoker they'd brought with them. We ate our Thanksgiving
meal around four thirty as the sun was beginning to set.
The meal lasted a few hours, followed by a few
more hours of conversation. I think there might have been
more football on the radio. Eight o'clock we began hearing
a very loud howl or scream combination just outside the
back of the cabin. It had simultaneous high and low
pitches and tones within the same screen. It's not a
sound of human vocal core could recreate. Not that any
of us thought this could be a human, and the
boys all concluded that it was a bear. I knew
what bear sounded like from my elementary school days of
watching after school specials and TV shows like Shazam Shazam.
That guy ran into a bearer mountain lion almost every episode,
soll I also knew what mountain lions sounded like. It
must be hurt, I said, that's not what bears usually
sound like. Well, what else could it be, one of
the Smith boys asked. We all discussed that it didn't
sound feline or canine. There were no cougars in Alabama
at that time, and since then the Florida panther has
migrated north into Alabama, but probably not that far north.
So the only possible feline might have been a bobcat,
and their mating calls are pretty loud, but not as
loud as this thing was. Codies can also make loud sounds,
but this didn't sound like a codey at all. There
are no wolves in Alabama. Alabama black bears are really small,
one hundred and fifty to two hundred pounds, and this
sound was massive. Bears in the Florida Panhandle are much
bigger five to six hundred pounds than Alabama bears, so
I would guess bears and South Alabama may be bigger
than bears in North Alabama, but at least back then,
North Alabama bears as far as I know, or small.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure even the
largest grizzly couldn't have sounded as big as this thing did.
It definitely sounded masculine, even during the high pitched parts
of the scream. It never sounded feminine at all. Some
people have described bigfoot screams as sounded like a woman
being murdered. This one never sounded like a woman. It
was extremely powerful, and I think I remember feeling of vibration,
but my memory could be faulty since this was so
long ago, and also I'm just now realizing what this
thing most likely was thirty seven years after the fact,
and it's all coming back to me in bits and pieces.
The howl growl screams continued for an hour, with only
seconds between each out burst. It sounded like the animal
must be just outside the back of the cabin, up
under the back deck, which was about a story and
a half off the ground. The cabin sat on a
slope so that the front door was almost leveled with
the road, but the back of the cabin was high
off the ground, with terrains sloping down toward a creek
that ran behind it. The area was densely wooded, with
total privacy between the cabins, which were positioned ten yards
from each other, and at the end of the road
a city blocked Down the hill from our cabin was
a camping area where there were a few tents set up.
I mentioned that I was worried whatever was screaming could
be a danger to the campers in the tents. All
the boys were saying, oh, they'll be fine. It was
like this, how a growl scream thing was a normal
occurrence for campers, nothing to worry about. There was a
lot of want to be testosterone in that cabin. I
must admit the thought of it being a bigfoot would
never have occurred to me or any of us at
that time, I had only ever heard of Bigfoot living
in the Pacific Northwest. I had seen the Patterson Gimlin film,
but had never seen or heard of the Legend of
Boggy Creek movie that came out in nineteen seventy two,
since I would have been only three years old at
the time of its release, and nobody I knew ever
talked about Bigfoot until just a few months ago. I
had never heard any Bigfoot stories from Alabama, so the
possibility of Bigfoot never crossed our minds. The only thing
that came close to making any sense to us was
that it must have been a bear. We also heard
wood knocks throughout the hour of hal growl, screaming, but
we didn't connect those sounds with the animal. Why would
we and our repertoire of vast knowledge only and would
hit two pieces of wood together. We assumed the campers
were building a fire or something, but that didn't make
sense either, because the wood knocks were far too loud
and far too close to be anything any campers a
block away could have been doing. Nothing was adding up,
and my brain was all over the place trying to
get a grasp of any of it. I don't recall
any whoops or whistling. But who knows, maybe my brain
just refused to calculate any more variables than it just
couldn't process. At ten pm, the Smiths were ready to
go back to their cabin. We hadn't heard the howl
grouse scream for an hour, and no one seemed concerned
about going outside, so I assumed it must be safe,
or all the adults would be worried. We said goodnight
and invited them to come back for leftovers tomorrow. My
dad walked outside with them as they left, and I
watched as they walked to their cabin. I guess whatever
was out there was either gone or just didn't let
his presence known, as the sixth of them walked back
through the woods rather than along the road. The next morning,
I slept in and when I woke, nobody was in
the cabin, so I took that opportunity to enjoy being alone.
I stayed in bed and I read for a while,
and then I got up and I ate some leftovers.
I figured i'd go for a walk after I ate,
I left a note on the kitchen counter that I
was going for a height, and I went out the
back door and down the stairs off the deck, and
then down the hill to a path along the creek.
I didn't think about the screaming animal from the night before.
I'm sure my mind was too blown to think. So
off I went alone and unarmed, dody doo doody doo,
walking along, not a care in the world, men, tone
in the fall is beautiful. How could there be any
danger here? I saw no wildlife of any kind, not
even fish jumping or birds flying. I didn't hear any
animal sounds or birds singing. It was weirdly quiet, but
it didn't occur to me to be scared or weirded
out by that. I was just glad I didn't run
into any snakes. I walked along the creek for about
an hour, thinking i'd run into members of my family
or the Smith family, but I never did. I walked
back and stopped by the Smith's cabin to see if
they were all there, but I only found the four
Smith boys sitting around the radio listening to a football game.
I walked up to the road to the general store
at the top of the hill to see if I
could find my mother and Missus Smith, but they weren't
there either, and there were no other options for where
they could be, so I bought a coke and I
went back to my family's cabin to eat more leftovers.
The two moms and my little sister came in while
I was making a sandwich, and they joined me for
a late lunch. For some reason, we didn't talk about
the howl grouse screams. We had all just put it
out of our minds. After we ate, the moms went
to the smith's cabin and they left my sister with me.
She and I decided to walk up to the store
and get something sweet. It was after four o'clock at
this point. Twilight was just beginning, but still light enough
that I wasn't concerned about getting too dark before we
could get back to the cabin. The general store was
only half a city block up the road from the cabin,
and I held my sister's hand as we walked slowly
up to the store. The woods on either side of
the dirt road were thick enough that it was really
dark in the woods, but the road was not at
all dark yet. About halfway to the store, I noticed
on the side the road, just inside the woodline, there
was a dark animal three feet high sitting very still
and watching us. At the point I noticed it, we
were almost parallel with it on the road and less
than ten feet away. My brain processed what I saw
as a bear sitting there in the dark, because that's
what we all decided it had to be. After all
that logical analysis the night before, I just went into
full blown cognitive dissonance and had accepted that it was
a bear. But recently it occurred to me that I
didn't see a snout on its face or ears on
the top of its head. I remember knees like a
biped would have squatting down. A sitting bear would not
have bent knees out front. Also, bears don't sit perfectly
still for long periods of time. At the very least,
his head would have moved. This thing had to have
been watching us perfectly still for at least ten minutes
before I saw it, because I had not seen or
heard any movement at any time during our walk. And
if you've ever walked with a three year old, you
know we were walking very slow. Thinking it was a bear,
I calmly and slowly picked up my sister and walked
as fast as I could without running. I didn't want
it to chase us, and it didn't, thank God. I
don't remember a smell. That's the only thing that makes
me question whether it was a bigfoot, But I don't
know what else it could have been. I know the
shape of what I saw was not a bear, and
what I remember could only have been a hairy man
squatting down by a tree. When we got to the store,
I was winded and panicky, but I didn't want my
sister to know there was anything wrong, so I carried
on normally. I let her pick out what she wanted
to eat, and I got us eat something to drink
in a candy bar for myself, and after paying, I
looked for a place to sit inside the store. I
planned to just stay there forever. I was not walking
back to that cabin, no way, after trying to entertain
a three year old for a while. After we finished
our snacks and drinks, I was thinking about buying us
a second round. When the moms and one of my
brothers walked into the store. I told them that I
saw a bearl on the side of the road and
that I was too scared to walk back. They said
they hadn't seen anything, and there was nothing to worry about.
Take note that by this time it was completely dark outside,
and of course they didn't see anything. But I felt
safety in numbers, so my sister and I walked back
with them, and I just didn't think about it. The
Smiths came over for dinner that night, and when we
finished off our Thanksgiving leftovers again at eight pm, we
heard the same screams for an hour, just like the
night before, and again nobody seemed very concerned about it.
I told the boys I'd seen a bear earlier and
it was only three feet tall and it was sitting down.
No big deal. But I stayed inside the cabin with
my sister all the next day and until we left
on Sunday morning. After that, we never went back to mentone.
I take special interest in the stories here in Mississippi.
I was born and raised down here on the coast
near Pascagoula, and now I live on five acres here
in Moss Pointe, Mississippi, in an area known as Helena,
which is out in the country. I've been an outdoorsman
all my life. I'm fifty seven years old and I've
been in the woods since i was a child. My
grandfather had a camp up at Creole Byu, deep in
the Pasca Goula Swamp, just off the Pasca Goula River.
It's only accessible by boat. After his retirement from the
US Navy, we would spend many nights at his camp,
hunting and fishing and just enjoying life. And there wasn't
hardly a weekend that went by that I wasn't with him.
I remember one Saturday morning getting up and going out
of the cabin and setting down by Popaul by the
fire that he already had going around five am, and
he was drinking coffee. He was being unusually quiet. When
I asked what our plans were for the day, he replied,
sh listen. Boy. Off in the distance, I could hear
what sounded like people talking in a foreign voice. It
was pitch black, dark, and it was very still, and
a light fog hung close to the ground. No other
sounds or the usual owls, bugs or frogs could be
heard at all. Only the faint chatter is the only
way I know to explain it. Of voices down in
the swamp behind his camp. We sat and listened for
I guess about another five minutes when I whispered, what
is that Papa, he whispered back to me, it's just
them old harpies arguing over breakfast. The hair stood up
on the back of my neck and I got instant
chicken skin when he said that. But I thought me,
being only twelve years old at the time, I had
often heard him talking about the harpies that lived behind
his camp, but I only thought that he was joking
with me, as he always did. But this time, when
he said that, he was very serious and didn't crack
a smile, I knew he was serious. I can still
see his face in the glow of that campfire, and
hear those voices in my head to this day. I wish,
to this day I would have asked him more about
the things that lived behind the camp and if he
had ever seen them. After he passed away, my father
sould the camp, and since then many other people have
purchased property up there and built more camps, so it's
not nearly as secluded as it used to be. I
still occasionally will ride by there in my boat, and
the property has all grown over and the camp has
fallen in. Apparently nobody ever used the camp or has
rebuilt on the property. I have recently listened to recordings
of what seems to be sisquatch conversations, and the recordings
I have listened to sound very similar to what we
were hearing that morning at my grandfather's camp years ago.
At present, I go camping once every month rain or shines,
lead or snow deep in the DeSoto National Forest, but
I have yet to hear anything like that ever. Again,
do you have any reports of sightings or sounds from
DeSoto Forest? I camp all over the National Forest from
south end up to the north end for the last
two years, and I found no sounds of a big
foot anywhere. I was a young boy when this encounter
took place, but I still think about it. It was
late spring, I was seven years old. My father decided
to take me to our favorite camping area in an
isolated spot deep in the mountains of Trinity County, California.
The campground has since burned in a forest fire and
is no longer in use. Deep in the backwoods forest,
there was a small prairie. Grouse prairie, as it was called,
was an enchanting place. You had to travel up an
old service road and through logging roads to get there.
A small creek came down the mountain and cut through
the prairie, and we had camped there many times and
we were familiar with it. We arrived a little after
ten am and began to set up our camp. Our
dog came along on these camping trips, was big, thick bodied,
black lab and the dog began making his rounds and
scouting the campground and sniffing everything in sight. He was
doing what dogs do. Once camp was up and after lunch,
we went on a quick trek through the woods. Everything
was fine for the first couple of hours until something
changed in the air. The birds went quiet, the dog
became uneasy. We were still aways from the prairie area,
but we trudged ahead, and a bit further down the trail,
the air began to feel heavy and smoky. Our dog
started growling. It wasn't until we made it into the
prairie that the heavy feeling in the air became a
feeling of being watched. And in the middle of that prairie,
even though I felt creeped out, I stopped and I
began taking it all in. It was beautiful. I scanned
the edges of the woods and in one area I
saw a shadow of a large person hiding behind a tree.
Now yelled out to the person. That got my father's attention,
and he turned to see who I was calling to,
but by then the shadow was gone. Then we heard
it running and tearing through the trees. I thought that
was unusual that something would make that kind of noise
going through the woods. The dog's hackles went up and
he pranced around the area, sniffing and growling, but the
rest of the afternoon was uneventful. The next day things
were calm. My dad and I did some target practice
in the morning, and then we went on another hike,
sticking closer to camp this time. We returned around five
pm and began making supper. While we ate, we could
hear crickets and other critters in the distance. It was
calm and it was pleasant. It was the perfect place
to be in that moment. But like a lights which
being flipped, the sounds of the woods went silent. I
could hear the blood even flowing through my ear drums.
It was so quiet. I watched Smoky Low crawl like
a bird dog, creeping up on a covey of birds
over to a thicket of brush by the creek. He
looked like a razorback pig, with all that hair standing
up on his back. He stopped just short of where
the thicket began, and he remained motionless and growling and shaking.
Something was in there. Dogs don't do that for the
hell of it. There was an odor now present about
the area that made me want a gag, and my
father stood up and armed himself with a pistol he
carried in his vest. Smokey burst off into the brush,
growling and huffing. That scared me more than anything. It
let me know there was something in there. Dad moved
to the brush thicket with his pistol in position. He
was almost when Smokey yelped and whimpered off in the brush,
and then a weird roar I had never heard followed.
I will never forget that sound. Smokey was hurt, and
I doubted I would see him again. But what the
hell was he fighting? Was it a bear? Maybe a
big cat? Finally the dog burst from the brush in midair,
and it sailed several feet before hitting the ground, and
it rolled and tried to right itself, but Smokey couldn't
get up. Dad snatched me up by the collar and
he dragged me backwards to the truck. The tailgate was
down and the topper lid was open, and he threw
me in there, all the while calling to the dog
that had finally gotten on its feet and was limping
toward us. Dad stood between the truck and Smoky and
began firing into the brush until his pistol was empty.
Smokey had made it to Dad by then, and by
the collar. Dad drug Smoky and threw him in the
bed of the truck with me, and then he ran
to the cab and came back with a shotgun, and
he fired three more shots into the brush. He was
now out of shells, and Dad slammed the truck bed
shut and then sprinted to the cab. I heard the
truck start, and then I felt the truck lurch forward
and watch gravel slung out behind us, and we took
off out of the campground, leaving all of our stuff there.
There was a stretch of road we needed to traverse
before climbing a hill that would take us out of
the area, and it gave me time to watch out
the back to see this thing step out into the clear.
I could not believe it. There was a creature, taller
than any man I know, and it stood motionless, arms
to its sides, and it watched as we left. I
didn't know what it was back then, but I do now.
It was covered hair and had thick arms and legs.
Now I think my jaw hung open for an hour.
It was the strangest thing I had ever seen. Just
when the truck was about to take me out of
that field of view, I watched it turn and walk
away from the camp and into the creek, and then
there was nothing but dust swirling behind the truck. We
drove for thirty minutes, and finally my father stopped and
came back to check on us. Smoky lay there beside me, panting.
He was hurt. There was no way to know how bad.
To my surprise, Dad said that we would be staying
right there for the night. He wasn't going to leave
all that gear in the woods. It had value, he said,
and we would sleep here and then go back and
get our stuff the next day. We were five hours
from home here, so I guess it made sense. And
I spent that night curled up with my dog in
the front seat of that truck. While Dad never slept.
His pistol now reloaded in his lap and was ready
for use if we had any further trouble. The next morning,
I let Smoky out the door, and I was thrilled
to see that he was walking and sniffing the area
and peeing all over the place. It appeared that he
would make it. Other than him moving a bit slower
than usual, he was going to be okay. Thirty minutes
later we arrived at the camp site. Once again, we
sat in the truck and watched from a distance. Our
gear was strown about and the site looked nothing like
it had the day before, but Dad wanted to wait
and watch and make sure the area was clear. Finally,
he drove on down into the site and he got
out and began gathering our stuff while Smoky and I
stayed put. And while he dragged everything to the truck,
I could see that it was all torn up. Even
the cooler we had hung bear proof lay on the
ground and was broken into several pieces. Once everything was loaded,
we left and I was glad to get out of there.
What a creepy place that area turned out to be
after all those times we had camped there. The next
day was Monday, and Dad called in to the Fish
and Gain people to report the incident. I heard him
tell the person on the phone that a bear had
attacked our camp site. Well, I knew it wasn't a bear,
but I didn't say a word. Later that week, three
men from the agency came to our house and I
listened while they spoke in the living room. They had
visited the site, and I heard them specifically say that
it was not a bear that had torn up our
camp and that they were sure My father knew that. Well,
he didn't know it because he didn't see what I saw.
He was driving. I was about to walk in the
room and tell them what I had seen when I
heard one of the men say, it doesn't matter at
this point what you saw, sir. What matters is that
this will be classified as a bear attack no matter what,
and we would appreciate it if you would leave it
that way and not talk about it to anyone. Well.
I couldn't see my dad in the other room, but
I'm sure he must have had a confused expression on
his face as he told them that he would keep
it quiet. The discussion he had with my mother later
was quite animated. Dad just could not understand what the
hell was going on. But in the end, I suppose
it didn't have a huge impact on his life, not
so much that he would pursue the truth as some
sort of a crusade. Why would he do that if
they didn't want him talking about a bear tearing up
our camp? So what he went on with his life.
For the next few days, I thought about that day
in the woods and everything we had been through. The
image of that creature is still as vivid today as
it was the day had happened. And then there was
the game and fish people and what I overheard them say,
and it stayed on my mind for many days. I
finally decided not to say anything to my father. There
were a few other reasons I kept siling on this,
but mainly what it would have been the point. It's
now over thirty years later, and I'm finally revealing this
thing that I have kept to myself all these years.
It feels good to tell someone, well, to tell many
thousands at one time. If you choose to share this
story in a video, it's finally out. I was chased
out of a campground by a bigfoot. Every word is
the truth. I grew up oblivious to the existence of
Bigfoot until about fifteen years ago. My grandparents live in
a rural part of Mississippi. They live only a few
minutes drive from our house, and I visited them a lot.
On a warm summer morning, I was awakened by a
strange sound coming from the woods that surrounded their house.
It was almost like shotgun blasts from a long way off,
but the sounds were not random. They were in a
series of reports over and over. Even as a kid,
those sounds were peculiar to me, and I listened to
them while I laid in the guest bed where I
always slept, and I noticed the cadence and the rhythm
of the sounds. The knocking eventually stopped, and in just
a few seconds, I heard a series of hair raising,
bone chilling roars blast out of the woods that scared me.
The knocks were one thing that interested me. The roar
meant that it was a monster. The next day, I
went home, but I didn't stop thinking about what I
had heard. Two weeks later, I was back at my
grandfather's house to stay awhile, and my nine year old
mind got curious, so I picked up an aluminum baseball
back from the I went out to the furthest tree
to the creek, and I tore into that tree. I
hit that tree several times so that the sound would carry,
and I kept up a steady rhythm. I did this
for four days, and I got no response from the woods.
I began to think that I had been dreaming the
event that I described earlier. On the fifth day, I
got a response. The shotgun blast sounds started from a
long way off. The knocks matched my cadence, and they
started getting closer each day. I had to go home
that last day, and I wondered what those noises meant.
They were obviously answering my knocks. After church the next week,
we went over to my grandparents' house for dinner. I
didn't even have time to get outside before the knox
started up, not forty yards into the woods, and they
were really loud. Fear washed over me, but I had
to see where this was going. I chose a different
tree closer to the house. I wasn't going closer to
the loud knocks. I wanted to be close to the house,
and I picked a tree at the edge of the yard,
and I swung the bat at the tree attempting to
create the rhythm I had been doing the previous week.
I never finished the series of knocks. A menacing roar
came from the woods, and I heard something big moving
like it was intentionally letting me know that it was
coming my way. It wasn't trying to be quiet. It
sounded like heavy equipment pounding through the woods. And then
it appeared right in front of me. I was nine
years old then and about four foot three tall. The
creature in front of me had to have been eight
feet tall. It was covered in dark, matted hair, and
it stood there, heaving and staring at me. I was
frozen with terror. This caught the attention of some dogs
that lived at my grandparents' neighbor's house. They must have
seen this thing step out into the clear or heard it.
I heard them barking at first, and when I turned
to look, they were running full speed across the field
towards the creature and I. The beast turned to look
at the dogs and instantly started running straight at them
in the field. I could not believe how fast this
thing was running. It closed the distance on those dogs
in a flash, and when the dogs realized what was happening.
They stomped on the brakes and headed straight back to
their house. I never moved. The beast turned back towards me,
and just as fast as he left, he was back
right in front of me. Rage was all I could
see in his face. I don't know if it realized
my fear or took into account that I was just
a kid, and maybe it was confused, but in a
remarkable time of events, its facial expression began to soften.
Its brow raised, and I could see its eyes looking
right at me, and with a slow movement of its
arm in hand, it motioned for me to head back
to the house. I walked slowly backwards the distance to
the house, and I went inside. I stayed with my
grandparents that whole week, but I never went outside, other
than to try to get the house dog outside to
use the restroom. The dog was always nervous and would
not go outside. She would use the carpet next to
the window. She knew something was out there. For the
next three nights, I heard those knocks, and occasionally I
would hear a distant roar, and I didn't sleep well
for all those days. If I remember right, it was
the fourth night that I didn't hear anything from the woods,
no knocks, no screaming from the dark woods. I got
a decent knight. I't sleep that night. As abruptly as
the sounds and encounters had started, they stopped. Joy the
dog started going outside again. I became more at ease
just being out, and things seemed to settle down for
the rest of the week that I was there. I
went home with a memory that I would take with
me the rest of my life. It is several years
later at the time of this writing, and to my knowledge,
nothing else has occurred on my grandfather's property.