Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in, but those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 2: Van Meter.
Speaker 1: The autumn of nineteen o three, a little town and
Speaker 1: a bend of the Raccoon River woke up to find
Speaker 1: something walking its rooftops at one in the morning, a
Speaker 1: winged thing tall as a barn door, with a horn
Speaker 1: on its forehead that threw a beam of light bright
Speaker 1: enough to blind a man through his own window. The
Speaker 1: town doctor put five bullets into it, and it didn't
Speaker 1: so much as flinch. The banker fired buckshot through his
Speaker 1: front glass and found a three toed track.
Speaker 2: In the dirt.
Speaker 1: The next morning, and on the last night, a whole
Speaker 1: posse of farmers chased it out to an abandoned coal
Speaker 1: mine at the edge of town, where two of the
Speaker 1: things came up out of the dark, took a wall
Speaker 1: of gunfire like it was a spring rain, and walked
Speaker 1: back down into the shaft. The men sealed the mine,
Speaker 1: the visit stopped. Nobody ever explained a single second of it.
Speaker 1: That's the Van Meter Visitor, and it's one of the strangest,
Speaker 1: best documented, hardest to laugh off cases in the whole country.
Speaker 1: It's also a story. I've already told you the full thing,
Speaker 1: all five nights, every name, and every shot fired. That
Speaker 1: was way back in episode one seven of the show.
Speaker 1: So if you're new here, or if your memory of
Speaker 1: it is faded, go back and pull up one forty
Speaker 1: seven and give it a listen. It's worth your time.
Speaker 1: I won't do the whole thing justice in a recap,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to try, because that's not what
Speaker 1: tonight is about. Tonight we're parked in Iowa for a
Speaker 1: different reason, because here's the thing nobody tells you about Iowa.
Speaker 2: We've got the visitor, sure, the.
Speaker 1: Wing devil in the coal mine, the one that ends
Speaker 1: up on every cryptid list in America.
Speaker 2: But the visitor is the freak case. The visitor is
Speaker 2: the outlier.
Speaker 1: The thing Iowa actually reports, the thing it's been reporting
Speaker 1: quietly for one hundred years and more. All over the state,
Speaker 1: in the corn and the river timber and the wooded
Speaker 1: bluffs along the Mississippi, is something a lot heavier and
Speaker 1: a lot quieter, and to a man like me, a
Speaker 1: whole lot more believable. Big dark, covered in hair, walking
Speaker 1: on two legs. So forget the wing thing for tonight.
Speaker 1: We're going sasquatch hunting in the Hawkeye State, and we're
Speaker 1: going to take the long way, because Iowa's got more
Speaker 1: dark corners than the postcards.
Speaker 2: Let on.
Speaker 1: People hear Iowa, and they picture corn to the horizon,
Speaker 1: flat open tame, nowhere for anything bigger than a pheasant
Speaker 1: to hide. And if you only ever see Iowa from
Speaker 1: the interstate at seventy miles an hour, you'd believe that.
Speaker 2: You'd be wrong, but you'd believe it.
Speaker 1: The states cut through with river valleys, the des Moines,
Speaker 1: and the raccoon, and the skunk and the cedar, and
Speaker 1: the big Mississippi running the whole eastern edge, and where
Speaker 1: there's river there's bottom land timber thick as a wall,
Speaker 1: the kind of cover you can stand ten feet from
Speaker 1: a man in and never see him. Up in the
Speaker 1: northeast corner, the part folks called the driftless, the glaciers
Speaker 1: that flatten the rest of the state just missed entirely,
Speaker 1: and the country there stayed wild and folded and steep,
Speaker 1: all wooded bluff and hidden draws and cold trout streams
Speaker 1: running through hardwood that's never seen a plow. Yellow River
Speaker 1: State forest, effigy mounds miles of it, and scattered all
Speaker 1: across the rest of the state. In the seams between
Speaker 1: the cornfields are sleughs and creek bottoms and woodlights and
Speaker 1: old quarry ground that nobody walks from one year to
Speaker 1: the next. There's more cover in Iowa than the postcards admit.
Speaker 1: There's more room to hide than anybody driving through would
Speaker 1: ever guess. And in that cover, for as long as
Speaker 1: anybody's kept track, people have been seeing something they can't explain.
Speaker 1: The researchers who catalog these things have logged somewhere around
Speaker 1: seventy eight credible bigfoot reports out of Iowa. That puts
Speaker 1: a flat farm state of all places up in the
Speaker 1: same conversation as Washington and Oregon in California, which is
Speaker 1: not where you'd expect to find it. The reports aren't
Speaker 1: bunched up in one weird county either, They're spread the
Speaker 1: whole width of the state. Humboldt County up in the
Speaker 1: north central part. The pack with nine of them, dubook
Speaker 1: Over on the Mississippi has half a dozen. Dallas County,
Speaker 1: Van Meter's own county, the same ground that gave us
Speaker 1: the wing thing in the mine, has logged its share
Speaker 1: of the tall hairy ones too, same dirt, two different monsters,
Speaker 1: one I'm hard pressed to believe and one I can't shake.
Speaker 1: Almost every one of these sightings happens near water, the rivers,
Speaker 1: the reservoirs, the creek bottoms, which makes sense if you're
Speaker 1: talking about a real animal. A big animal needs to
Speaker 1: drink and needs cover and needs to move without being seen,
Speaker 1: and a river valley gives it all three and one
Speaker 1: ribbon running clear across the state. And none of this
Speaker 1: is new. That's the part people forget the hairy man,
Speaker 1: and the timber didn't show up when somebody coined the
Speaker 1: word bigfoot back in the nineteen fifties. The settlers who
Speaker 1: broke this ground in the eighteen hundreds carried the same
Speaker 1: stories west with them, tales of a wild man in
Speaker 1: the river bottoms, a thing that walked like a person
Speaker 1: and wasn't one, and the native peoples who were here
Speaker 1: long before the settlers had their own names for the
Speaker 1: same shape in the same woods. There's an old account
Speaker 1: out of Southeast Iowa an early settler woman who said
Speaker 1: that when she first came to the country as a girl,
Speaker 1: the hunters and trappers already talked about animals that walked
Speaker 1: upright like men deep back in the timber, already talked
Speaker 1: about it before there were towns, before there were newspapers
Speaker 1: to put it in. Whatever this thing is, it was
Speaker 1: here before we were, and it was being reported before
Speaker 1: any of us.
Speaker 2: Had a word for it.
Speaker 1: So let's go to the most famous one, down in
Speaker 1: the southeast corner where it really started, the fall of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy five, a little town called Lockridge, down in
Speaker 1: Jefferson County, Southeast Iowa, about sixty miles south of Iowa City,
Speaker 1: farm country, gentle hills, wood lots and creek beds, and
Speaker 1: turkey ground. It started with the turkeys. A hunter named
Speaker 1: Lowell Adkins was one chilly October morning and came across
Speaker 1: a scene that didn't add up. Four turkeys dead, partially eaten,
Speaker 1: torn into and left and around them in the dirt tracks,
Speaker 1: big ones roughly ten inches long, from something that walked
Speaker 1: on two feet something that wasn't a coyote and wasn't
Speaker 1: a dog, and wasn't anything Adkins could put a name to.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Four dead turkeys is the kind of thing a man
Speaker 1: could explain a dozen ways if that was all there was.
Speaker 1: But that wasn't all there was. Right around the same time,
Speaker 1: a farmer named Herb Peefer was out at dusk checking
Speaker 1: his birds, and his tractor headlights swung across the edge
Speaker 1: of the woods and lit up something standing there. It
Speaker 1: was harry, it was dark. It walked upright like a man,
Speaker 1: but its face was flat and semient, an ape's face
Speaker 1: on a body Peef put at around five feet tall.
Speaker 1: He didn't stay to study it. He backed off to
Speaker 1: the farmhouse and called the law, and by the time a.
Speaker 2: Deputy rolled out.
Speaker 1: Whatever it was had melted back into the timber and
Speaker 1: was gone. Then it kept happening. Another farmer in the area,
Speaker 1: a woman named Gloria Olsen, started seeing it too, out
Speaker 1: in her cornfields at night, a hairy thing with a
Speaker 1: monkey's face, eyes throwing back the light, prowling the edges
Speaker 1: of her property in the dark. And as the word spread,
Speaker 1: more folks came forward, hunters finding the same odd tracks
Speaker 1: along creek beds, drivers catching a shape crossing a rural
Speaker 1: road in the headlights, the descriptions lining up close enough
Speaker 1: that the thing earned a name, the Lockridge Monster. It
Speaker 1: made the papers, It even found its way into the
Speaker 1: national papers. For one strange autumn, Southeast Iowa had its
Speaker 1: own homegrown sasquatch, and the whole country was watching. Here's
Speaker 1: the part I find the most interesting about it. The
Speaker 1: Lockridge thing didn't fit the mold of what others had
Speaker 1: reported seeing. It was small for a bigfoot, five feet
Speaker 1: not eight, and the tracks were on the small side too,
Speaker 1: maybe half what you'd expect off a full grown sasquatch
Speaker 1: out west. And it ate those turkeys tore into them,
Speaker 1: which doesn't square with the usual idea of a big
Speaker 1: plant eating epe, minding its own business in the brush.
Speaker 1: One researcher who looked at it said flat out that
Speaker 1: the foot was too small and the killing two.
Speaker 2: Out of character to call it bigfoot at all. So
Speaker 2: what was it?
Speaker 1: I don't know, and I like that I don't know
Speaker 1: because it means nobody was forcing the evidence to fit
Speaker 1: a story. Maybe it was a young one, maybe it
Speaker 1: was something else entirely, some other animal we don't have
Speaker 1: a slot for. But you've got multiple farmers separately describing
Speaker 1: the same hairy, upright ape faced thing, and a hunter
Speaker 1: with four dead birds and a line of two footed tracks,
Speaker 1: and a whole town that hung onto the name for
Speaker 1: fifty years. That's not nothing. Towns forget things fast. For
Speaker 1: a piece of country to keep a monster's name alive
Speaker 1: that long enough, people had to see enough of something
Speaker 1: to keep the story warm, and Lockridge wasn't a one thing.
Speaker 1: Folks down in that part of the state, around the
Speaker 1: Skunk River Valley especially, have been telling wildman stories for generations.
Speaker 1: Seven eight feet tall, covered in dark, shaggy hair, walking
Speaker 1: the dense river timber. An old newspaper clipping out of
Speaker 1: that country, described it about as plain as you can
Speaker 1: put it, a furry, scary thing that stands like a man,
Speaker 1: something the locals had been hearing about for fifty years
Speaker 1: before the clipping was ever printed. The sightings down there
Speaker 1: never really stopped. They were still coming in well past
Speaker 1: twenty ten, enough of them that the county conservation man
Speaker 1: went on the record, and even he, a fellow whose
Speaker 1: whole job was to have a sensible explanation, admitted he
Speaker 1: didn't have one. He figured most folks saw something at
Speaker 1: a bad angle and a bad light, but he wouldn't
Speaker 1: say they saw nothing.
Speaker 2: That's southeast Iowa, and.
Speaker 1: Noticed the river timber running through all of it, because
Speaker 1: that piece keeps turning up valley after valley the whole.
Speaker 2: Rest of the night.
Speaker 1: Summer in nineteen seventy six, the track started showing up north,
Speaker 1: up by a town called Dumont. A man came across
Speaker 1: something that stops you when you read it. Big footprints
Speaker 1: running along a gravel road, not one or two, a
Speaker 1: half mile of them, tracks twelve to thirteen inches long,
Speaker 1: five inches wide, with a stride of about six feet
Speaker 1: between them, the kind of stride you can't fake walking
Speaker 1: and can't make running unless your legs are built.
Speaker 2: Different than a man's.
Speaker 1: They came in out of the open country, ran that
Speaker 1: gravel road, and then cut off toward a stretch of
Speaker 1: woods that ran alongside the West Fork River, toward the water,
Speaker 1: toward the cover same pattern, and that August, over by
Speaker 1: the o chay Edden River, a thirteen year old boy
Speaker 1: got a daylight look. It was morning, around nine thirty,
Speaker 1: full light. The boy saw it down at the river,
Speaker 1: a hairy black thing about six feet tall. And the
Speaker 1: detail that stuck with me is what it was doing.
Speaker 1: It had its hands cup together and it was drinking
Speaker 1: from them, lifting water to its mouth with its hands
Speaker 1: the way you or I would at a cold spring,
Speaker 1: not lapping like an animal, drinking like a person. The
Speaker 1: boy left, and when he came back later with his family,
Speaker 1: they found the prince fourteen inches long, narrow at the heel,
Speaker 1: seven inches across the front where the five toes spread,
Speaker 1: a foot shaped like hours, only huge. A boy doesn't
Speaker 1: usually invent the small stuff. He'd have told you it roared,
Speaker 1: it charged, it had red eyes, if he were making
Speaker 1: it up to scare his sister. Instead, he told you
Speaker 1: it cupped its hands and drank from the river on
Speaker 1: a sunny morning. That's not a monster story detail. That's
Speaker 1: a saw an animal detail. And those are the ones
Speaker 1: I leaned toward. And it never stayed in one corner
Speaker 1: or one decade. That's worth saying, plainly, because the easy
Speaker 1: way to dismiss all this is to call it one
Speaker 1: weird town's one weird year. Iowa won't let you. Go
Speaker 1: back to the early seventies, before Lockridge was ever a headline,
Speaker 1: and there's a hunter named Gary who was deep in
Speaker 1: heavy woods and brush near a state park when he
Speaker 1: spotted a strange animal off at about one hundred yards,
Speaker 1: a thing that didn't move or looked like anything he
Speaker 1: could name. Go north and west up to Humboldt County
Speaker 1: in the north central part of the state, and you
Speaker 1: find the county that's logged more of these than any
Speaker 1: other in Iowa. Nine of them in county, in flat
Speaker 1: farm country, where the books say there's nowhere for a
Speaker 1: thing like that to live. Come forward to two thousand
Speaker 1: and six, near a little town called Wellman, where somebody
Speaker 1: reported one out on a dried up riverbank plain daylight,
Speaker 1: walking the cracked mud where the water used to run.
Speaker 1: Every corner of the state. Every decade, anybody's been keeping
Speaker 1: count the same animal over and over. Down in Lee County,
Speaker 1: in the far southeast corner, there's a piece of public
Speaker 1: ground called Shaimeck Forest, thick hardwood, turkey country, the kind
Speaker 1: of woods a man can disappear into, and there's a
Speaker 1: story out of there. I think about more than i'd
Speaker 1: like to. A hunter was out one morning in the
Speaker 1: early season, sitting still waiting, the woods just starting to
Speaker 1: gray up with dawn. The fog was hanging low, the
Speaker 1: way it does and river bottom that time of year,
Speaker 1: and a tall figure came walking out of.
Speaker 2: That fog toward him.
Speaker 1: His first thought was another hunter, a man in a
Speaker 1: gilly suit, one of those camouflage rigs, all hung with
Speaker 1: strips of cloth to break up your outline, because that's
Speaker 1: what it looked like at first, a shaggy man shape
Speaker 1: moving through the trees, A natural enough thing to think
Speaker 1: right up until it got close enough that it stopped
Speaker 1: being a man. It was too big, it was covered
Speaker 1: head to foot in hair, not cloth, and it was
Speaker 1: looking right at him. They locked eyes, both of them froze,
Speaker 1: the hunter and the thing, neither one moving the way
Speaker 1: two animals do when they've surprised each other, and neither
Speaker 1: knows yet how it's going to go. Stay tuned for
Speaker 1: more Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Speaker 1: And the hunter scared, now really scared, brought his gun
Speaker 1: up and worked the safety off, and the thing moved.
Speaker 1: It took a step toward him, one lunge, and the
Speaker 1: hunter's heart must have come up in his throat. But
Speaker 1: then it stopped itself. It turned and it walked away
Speaker 1: into the timber, slow, deliberate, looking back over its shoulder
Speaker 1: at him the whole way, never once taking its eyes
Speaker 1: off the man until the fog closed up and it
Speaker 1: was gone. It chose not to That's what gets me
Speaker 1: about that one.
Speaker 2: It had the man.
Speaker 1: Dead to rights, closed the distance, and then thought better
Speaker 1: of it and left. That's not a movie monster. That's
Speaker 1: an animal making a decision. Now, let me take you
Speaker 1: up to the eastern edge to Dubuke County and a
Speaker 1: young fellow I'll call Cody, because his is the longest
Speaker 1: run of encounters I've come across out of Iowa, and
Speaker 1: because it's the kind of thing that happens to one
Speaker 1: person on one piece of land over and over until
Speaker 1: they can't tell themselves it was nothing.
Speaker 2: Five times.
Speaker 1: Cody had five encounters on his own family's ground over
Speaker 1: the better part of a year, and the first one
Speaker 1: was the one that nearly broke him. He was bowhunting
Speaker 1: up in a tree stand and something came up out
Speaker 1: of the timber and sat down at the base of
Speaker 1: his tree, right under him. A big, hairy man shaped
Speaker 1: thing easing itself down at the foot of his stand,
Speaker 1: close enough that Cody, with a drawn bow and a
Speaker 1: clear shot straight down, sat there and thought about loosing
Speaker 1: an arrow into it. He didn't, and when he tells it,
Speaker 1: the reason he didn't is the part that raises the
Speaker 1: hair on your neck. He didn't shoot because the thing
Speaker 1: under his tree was too much like a man to shoot.
Speaker 1: It left on its own. He climbed down on shaking
Speaker 1: legs and didn't tell a soul. But it wasn't done
Speaker 1: with him. A few months on, he was out crossing
Speaker 1: the property on his four wheeler and rode past a
Speaker 1: thick patch of timber, and the thing was standing at
Speaker 1: the edge of it, watching him go by the way
Speaker 1: a man watches a car pass on a back road.
Speaker 1: Another evening, driving home from work, he caught it slipping
Speaker 1: back into the woods by a telephone pole, and then
Speaker 1: there was the barn. Cody was sitting on his porch
Speaker 1: one evening, just sitting, and he watched the thing walk
Speaker 1: straight through one of the old knockdown barns on the place,
Speaker 1: out in the open, unhurried, and it noticed him sitting there.
Speaker 1: It turned its head and gave him a long look
Speaker 1: across the yard man to think.
Speaker 2: And then it ran.
Speaker 1: And when it ran, it came to a barbed wire fence,
Speaker 1: a five foot fence, the kind you and I would
Speaker 1: have to climb, careful so as not to leave skin
Speaker 1: and trouser on the wire. It cleared it in stride,
Speaker 1: hurtled a five foot fence at a dead run without
Speaker 1: breaking step, and vanished into the trees. I've stood at
Speaker 1: a lot of barbed wire fences in my life. I
Speaker 1: know what it takes to get a body over one
Speaker 1: in a hurry. I've watched deer jumped them, and I've
Speaker 1: watched men try to What Cody describes is neither. It's
Speaker 1: something built different, something with the spring and the casual
Speaker 1: power to take five feet a fence the way we'd
Speaker 1: step off a curb. No light, no horn, no beam
Speaker 1: in the eyes, just a big animal doing a big
Speaker 1: animal thing in front of a kid who'd have rather
Speaker 1: seen anything else on God's Earth. Over in Keokuk County
Speaker 1: in the summer of twenty ten, a woman got a
Speaker 1: nighttime look that came with its own little detail of
Speaker 1: local color. She was home one evening with a friend
Speaker 1: when the dogs went off, not the usual barking, loud
Speaker 1: and frantic. She looked out the window and saw her
Speaker 1: dogs tearing up the long gravel driveway away from the road,
Speaker 1: running like they wanted no part of whatever was behind them.
Speaker 1: And behind them, coming up that same driveway was a tall,
Speaker 1: dark figure. She couldn't put a size to it exactly,
Speaker 1: only that it was bigger than a man, and the
Speaker 1: way she described.
Speaker 2: It has stayed with me.
Speaker 1: She said it was a shadow darker than the shadow
Speaker 1: of a tree, a piece of the dark moving up
Speaker 1: her driveway in the night, blacker than the night around it.
Speaker 1: The next day, she and her friend walked the farm
Speaker 1: and found a footprint, the kind of print that doesn't
Speaker 1: belong to anything that ought to be walking in Iowa farm.
Speaker 1: There's a spot near where she lived that the old
Speaker 1: timers have been calling for longer than anybody can remember.
Speaker 1: Monkey's Den. Nobody put that name there last week. Somebody
Speaker 1: named that ground a long time ago after something, and
Speaker 1: the name stuck the way names only stick when there's
Speaker 1: a reason underneath them. Most of these stories are old,
Speaker 1: or they happened to one person with nothing to show
Speaker 1: for it but a footprint and a bad night's sleep.
Speaker 1: The summer of twenty twenty one was different because somebody
Speaker 1: had a camera. A man named Jeremy was out walking
Speaker 1: with his sister one July morning in a place called
Speaker 1: Whitewater Canyon near the little town of Bernard, over into
Speaker 1: Butte County, rough wooded canyon country, and in the shadows
Speaker 1: of the trees, they saw a big, dark, ape like figure,
Speaker 1: and Jeremy got pictures of it. The photos went up
Speaker 1: online and they went everywhere. Cryptid people and skeptic people
Speaker 1: both poured over them the way they always do, arguing
Speaker 1: pixel by pixel. The image wasn't crisp enough to settle anything,
Speaker 1: and the researchers logged it as the lesser grade of
Speaker 1: report for exactly that reason, a citing they couldn't fully
Speaker 1: stand behind because the picture left a room for doubt
Speaker 1: a man in a suit, some said, A bear at
Speaker 1: a bad angle, said others. Though black bears are about
Speaker 1: as rare as hen's teeth in that part of Iowa. Jeremy,
Speaker 1: by every account, a skeptic himself right up until that morning,
Speaker 1: never backed off it. He knew what he saw, he
Speaker 1: said so, and kept saying so. I can't tell you
Speaker 1: what's in those pictures. Nobody can't, and anybody who says
Speaker 1: different is selling you their certainty. What I can tell
Speaker 1: you is that the canyon he was standing in is
Speaker 1: exact actly the kind of rough wooded river country these
Speaker 1: things turn up in over and over all across this state.
Speaker 1: This next one comes out of that same southeast corner
Speaker 1: near Lockridge, and it's a family story, the kind that
Speaker 1: runs across generations. On one piece of land, a woman
Speaker 1: I'll call her Connie, whose family had been having run
Speaker 1: ends with the same thing or things on their farm
Speaker 1: for decades. They had a name for the big one.
Speaker 1: They called it Big Red. Back in the early to
Speaker 1: middle eighties. Her daughter, I'll call her Tracy, had felt
Speaker 1: for a while like something was keeping tabs on her
Speaker 1: around the place. One day, she was standing out by
Speaker 1: her car, and she felt a hand come to rest
Speaker 1: on her back. She screamed and spun and there was
Speaker 1: a hairy something there close, and then it was gone.
Speaker 1: A family on a remote farm in good Bigfoot country,
Speaker 1: in the heart of the most active corner of the state,
Speaker 1: having repeated encounters with a large animal over many years.
Speaker 2: That happens.
Speaker 1: Animals den up, animals work a territory. A creature smart
Speaker 1: enough and shy enough to go one hundred years without
Speaker 1: giving signs a body is exactly the kind of creature
Speaker 1: that had learned one family's land and keep coming back
Speaker 1: to it. There's a woman I'll call Sharon, who grew
Speaker 1: up on a farm down in the river bottom of
Speaker 1: central Iowa, where a creek cut through the back forty
Speaker 1: before it ran on to join the bigger water. She
Speaker 1: was hanging wash one evening late, the light going long
Speaker 1: in orange, and the dog at her feet went stiff,
Speaker 1: not barking, stiff, hackles up the whole length of its spine,
Speaker 1: a low sound caught in its throat, Staring down at
Speaker 1: the tree lined by the creek. Sharon looked where the
Speaker 1: dog was looking, and there was something standing in the
Speaker 1: gap between two cottonwoods. Watching the house, tall and dark,
Speaker 1: with massive shoulders too wide, its arms way too long,
Speaker 1: standing the way a person stands when they don't want
Speaker 1: to be seen, half behind the trunk, dead still. She
Speaker 1: watched it for maybe four or five seconds, which is
Speaker 1: nothing and is also a lifetime. And then she got
Speaker 1: her hand on the dog's collar and walked backward to
Speaker 1: the house, without ever turning her back on those trees.
Speaker 2: She locked the door.
Speaker 1: She left the wash on the line. In the morning
Speaker 1: it was still there, heavy with dew, and down by
Speaker 1: the creek there were a couple of pressed flat places
Speaker 1: in the tall grass that could have been anything at all.
Speaker 1: She never hung wash that lad Again, that's the whole story,
Speaker 1: A shape in the trees that knew how to hide,
Speaker 1: and a farm dog that wanted no part of it.
Speaker 1: Then there's the one I got from a couple of kids,
Speaker 1: a boy and a girl, and I'll keep the names
Speaker 1: out of it. They were parked out on a gravel
Speaker 1: road one night, down in a low spot where the
Speaker 1: road dips across a slough, timber on both sides, radio
Speaker 1: on low, windows cracked, and the boy hears something hit
Speaker 1: the water, a heavy splash, then another one something big
Speaker 1: out in the dark, crossing the slough, getting closer. They
Speaker 1: could tell the steps weren't a deer. A deer's quick
Speaker 1: and light on four feet. This was slow, heavy, two legs,
Speaker 1: that wet, deliberate sound of something walking upright through standing water,
Speaker 1: coming closer, and the two of them just froze. He
Speaker 1: got the car started, and he says when the headlights
Speaker 1: swung around, they caught something tall standing right at the
Speaker 1: edge of the road, eyes throwing the light back, red
Speaker 1: like a stop sign. Then it was gone into the trees,
Speaker 1: and they were doing fifty on loose gravel, with the
Speaker 1: back end sliding the whole way home. They never told
Speaker 1: their folks where were they going to say they'd been.
Speaker 1: But the boy told that story for years, and he
Speaker 1: told it the same way every time. That's the thing
Speaker 1: I watch for. A liar polishes it up. An honest
Speaker 1: guy just keeps telling the same plane version till the
Speaker 1: day he dies. The one that really gets me is
Speaker 1: the coon hunter, older guy, I'll call him Dale. He'd
Speaker 1: run dogs in the Iowa timber his whole life, decades
Speaker 1: of it, and he knew those woods in the dark
Speaker 1: better than most people know their own house. One fall night,
Speaker 1: He's out with two good dogs, the kind that don't quit,
Speaker 1: that'll tree a coon and ball at it till you
Speaker 1: come knock it down. The dogs hit a track and
Speaker 1: ran it into a stand of timber along the river.
Speaker 1: And then they did something Dale had never seen them do,
Speaker 1: not once in all those years. They came back, both
Speaker 1: of them, quiet tails tucked, shaking, pressed right up against
Speaker 1: his legs, two seasoned dogs that had treat about everything
Speaker 1: that walks in this state, and now they would not
Speaker 1: go back in there, not for anything. And while Dale's
Speaker 1: standing there trying to figure out what's wrong with his
Speaker 1: own dogs, he hears it, something big, moving off through
Speaker 1: the trees, not running, not scared of him, just leaving
Speaker 1: breaking brush a man couldn't break without a running start.
Speaker 1: And under all of it a smell rolling out of
Speaker 1: the woods, hoods that turned his stomach sour, rank, just wrong,
Speaker 1: and he didn't have a word for it. Dale called
Speaker 1: it a night, went home with two good dogs that
Speaker 1: would not hunt that ground again, And for the rest
Speaker 1: of his life he was sure of one thing. Whatever
Speaker 1: was in that timber wasn't a coon, and it wasn't
Speaker 1: a bear, and it wasn't anything he had a name for.
Speaker 1: After a lifetime out there. There's a couple of mushroom
Speaker 1: hunters too, brothers in law. I'll call them Ray and Don.
Speaker 1: They went out one spring morning down in the river
Speaker 1: bottom timber that wet black ground under the dead elms.
Speaker 1: They split up, worked two sides of a draw, called
Speaker 1: out to each other now and then so they didn't
Speaker 1: get lost. And Ray comes around a big dead fall
Speaker 1: and stops. There's a structure, branches, big ones, limbs as
Speaker 1: thick as your leg, leaned up together into a kind
Speaker 1: of lean to and woven through with smaller stuff made
Speaker 1: on purpose. Sitting out there in the middle of the
Speaker 1: timber where nobody had any reason to build a thing,
Speaker 1: And Ray's not a bigfoot guy, wasn't even thinking about it.
Speaker 1: His first thought was some kid built a ford out here,
Speaker 1: except the limbs were too heavy for a kid to lift,
Speaker 1: and there wasn't a track or a trail or a
Speaker 1: beer can anywhere around it. He hollered for dawn, and
Speaker 1: while he's standing there waiting, he gets that feeling, the
Speaker 1: one everybody in these stories describes the same way, like
Speaker 1: he's being watched. He turns a slow circle, and there's
Speaker 1: nothing but the woods had gone dead quiet, no birds, nothing,
Speaker 1: the way it goes quiet when something big is in
Speaker 1: there with you. The two of them walked out of
Speaker 1: that bottom a lot faster than they walked in. Nowither
Speaker 1: one's been back, and Ray still can't tell you who
Speaker 1: stacks limbs like that, that heavy, that far from a road.
Speaker 1: There's a boy I'll call Tyler, first deer camp, twelve
Speaker 1: years old and proud of it, out with his dad
Speaker 1: and his uncles, bunch of tents along a creek. The
Speaker 1: men stayed up late by the fire, and Tyler lying
Speaker 1: in his sleeping bag, listening to everything the way you
Speaker 1: do your first night out when every little sound is huge.
Speaker 1: And after the fire burned down, something started walking the
Speaker 1: edge of camp. Not a deer, he knew deer. This
Speaker 1: was two feet slow, heavy, circling just past the firelight,
Speaker 1: brush popping under it. Then a rock came out of
Speaker 1: the dark and landed in the tents, Then another one.
Speaker 1: His uncle swung a flashlight out into the trees and
Speaker 1: caught nothing but eye shine, low wide up off the ground.
Speaker 1: There then gone. The men sat up the rest of
Speaker 1: the night with rifles across their laps and told the
Speaker 1: kid it was a raccoon. The wind nothing. In the morning,
Speaker 1: they went down to the creek to wash up, and
Speaker 1: there was a print in the soft mud on the
Speaker 1: bank longer than a man's boot by half. Nobody said
Speaker 1: the word out loud, but they packed it up and
Speaker 1: drove home a day early, and Tyler's dad never took
Speaker 1: him back to that creek.
Speaker 2: There's a woman I'll.
Speaker 1: Call Meghan, who used to run one of those old
Speaker 1: rail trails at dusk flat crushed limestone path, the kind
Speaker 1: the state put down on top of an old pulled
Speaker 1: up railroad, timber crowding in on both sides. She ran
Speaker 1: it most evenings and never thought twice about it until
Speaker 1: the evening something started running it with her, often the
Speaker 1: trees to her right keeping pace, heavy footfalls matching her stride,
Speaker 1: slowing down when she slowed, speeding up when she sped up.
Speaker 1: She told herself it was an echo, so she stopped
Speaker 1: to prove it, and the footsteps out in the timber
Speaker 1: took one more step and stopped two a beat behind hers,
Speaker 1: the way something stops when it's following you and gets caught.
Speaker 1: She's standing there in the dark with her heart going,
Speaker 1: and from back in the trees where the steps quit,
Speaker 1: she hears one sharp crack wood on wood, loud, like
Speaker 1: somebody swung a bat into a tree once and then quit.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more backwoods big Foot store. We'll be
Speaker 1: back after these messages. Megan ran the rest of that
Speaker 1: trail faster than she's ever run anything, out to the
Speaker 1: parking lot into her car, and she's never gone back there.
Speaker 1: After the sun starts going down. She doesn't tell the
Speaker 1: story much. When she does, she won't call it anything.
Speaker 1: She just says something ran with her in the trees
Speaker 1: and then knocked on the wood to let her know
Speaker 1: it was there. There's a guy I'll call Earl who
Speaker 1: liked to catfish at night off a sand bar on
Speaker 1: one of the bigger rivers, lantern hissing next to him,
Speaker 1: a couple of lines out in the channel, about as
Speaker 1: peaceful a thing as a man can do, And one
Speaker 1: warm night over on the far bank, something started moving.
Speaker 1: Earl figured deer at first, deer come to water at night,
Speaker 1: But deer don't do what this did. It waded out
Speaker 1: into the river and started coming across toward him, upright
Speaker 1: on two legs, through water that be up past the
Speaker 1: deer's belly. The splash is coming slow and heavy, and
Speaker 1: he could hear it breathing, this wet, low working sound
Speaker 1: out there in the dark, coming closer. So Earl did
Speaker 1: the only smart thing he could come up with. He
Speaker 1: reached over and killed the lantern. And he sat there
Speaker 1: dead still on that sandbar, in the pitch black, listening
Speaker 1: to whatever it was stop out in the middle of
Speaker 1: the river and just stand there in the current breathing.
Speaker 1: He swears he could feel it looking at the spot
Speaker 1: where the light had been. And after a while, a
Speaker 1: long while, it turned around and waited back the way
Speaker 1: it came up the far bank gone. Earle left his
Speaker 1: lines in the water, rolled up his gear by feel
Speaker 1: in the dark, and never night fished that hole again.
Speaker 1: And he'd fished at thirty years. There's a farmer I'll
Speaker 1: call Wendell who learned to trust his cattle before he
Speaker 1: trusted his own eyes. One night, his whole herd bunched
Speaker 1: up tight in the far corner of the pasture, jammed
Speaker 1: into the fence, bawling. Every head turned the same way
Speaker 1: out toward the timber along the creek. Wendell grabbed a
Speaker 1: spotlight and walked out there, figuring coyote, maybe a stray dog.
Speaker 1: Light didn't find anything, but the smell hit him before
Speaker 1: he was even halfway across the field. Rank sour, wet,
Speaker 1: animal stink so thick. He gagged on it, a smell
Speaker 1: with no animal anywhere to go with it. Next morning,
Speaker 1: he went down to the creek line. A section of
Speaker 1: his woven wire fence, good tight fence he'd put up himself,
Speaker 1: was pushed flat to the ground, not cut, not broke,
Speaker 1: pushed over like something heavy just walked through it and
Speaker 1: in the soft ground passed it. There was a track
Speaker 1: up on the top wire snagged up high, higher than
Speaker 1: a man's shoulders. There was a clump of coarse, dark hair.
Speaker 1: Wendell's lost the odd calf over the years, stuff you
Speaker 1: right off to coyotes or bad luck. He keeps that
Speaker 1: hair in a sandwich bag and a kitchen drawer, and
Speaker 1: he doesn't show it around much because he's seen the
Speaker 1: look people give you, and he's a proud man. He'd
Speaker 1: rather keep the hair and his dignity both. And none
Speaker 1: of these ever made it into an official report, not sharing,
Speaker 1: not the mushroom hunters not the kids on the gravel road,
Speaker 1: not the boy at deer camp, not the woman on
Speaker 1: the trail, not Earl on his sandbar, not Wendell and
Speaker 1: his spooked cattle, not Dale and his dogs. No photos,
Speaker 1: no plaster casts, no deputy driving out to take a look.
Speaker 1: Just regular Iowa people who saw or heard or smelled
Speaker 1: something one time and carried it around quietly the rest
Speaker 1: of their lives. And then think about every farm and
Speaker 1: every back road and every patch of river timber in
Speaker 1: the state, all the ones that never get told at
Speaker 1: all because the person's afraid of the look you'll give them.
Speaker 1: That's when you start to get a sense of how
Speaker 1: much of this never makes it into any database anywhere.
Speaker 1: A few quick ones, because they all kind of go
Speaker 1: the same way. There's a semi driver out in Boone County,
Speaker 1: a guy whose whole job is watching the road and
Speaker 1: the fields go by, said he watched a big, upright
Speaker 1: something running flat out across an open field, chasing a deer.
Speaker 1: Out in the open country where there's supposedly nowhere to
Speaker 1: hide and nothing to see. A trucker watched a hairy
Speaker 1: giant run a deer down, and then he had to
Speaker 1: drive on and deliver his load like nothing happened. Up
Speaker 1: by Prodivan in the northeast part of the state, a
Speaker 1: guy out walking with his wife one morning heard two
Speaker 1: heavy knocks come out of the woods, wood on wood,
Speaker 1: loud on purpose. A lifelong country guy who'd hunted his
Speaker 1: whole life, and he'd never heard anything like it, and
Speaker 1: never forgot it.
Speaker 2: And over by Eldridge.
Speaker 1: In Scott County, back in the late eighties, a camper
Speaker 1: saw one seven eight nine feet tall upright harry there
Speaker 1: and then gone one more regular person who went out
Speaker 1: to sleep under the stars and came home with the
Speaker 1: story they'd spend the rest of their life half wishing
Speaker 1: they could forget. Knocks in the timber, a shape running down,
Speaker 1: a deer, a figure standing at the edge of camp.
Speaker 1: None of it floats, none of it glows, all of
Speaker 1: it walks. But Bigfoot and the van meter visitor aren't
Speaker 1: the only weird things people encounter in Iowa. And since
Speaker 1: we've got all night in a full tank, let me
Speaker 1: get off the cryptid road for a minute and show
Speaker 1: you a couple of other things this state has to offer.
Speaker 1: Go to Iowa City, find the Oakland Cemetery and walk
Speaker 1: back into the old part of it until you hit
Speaker 1: the black angel. You can't really miss her. Bronze angel
Speaker 1: somewhere around eight and a half feet tall, standing up
Speaker 1: on a stone base, one wing thrown out to the side,
Speaker 1: head bowed down low over the grave underneath, and the
Speaker 1: whole thing's gone black, not green, the way old bronze
Speaker 1: usually goes black, dark as a burnt match head to
Speaker 1: foot standing over a check name carved in the stone.
Speaker 1: The Feldevert family, the true part of it is sadder
Speaker 1: than any ghost story. A Bohemian immigrant woman named ter
Speaker 1: Resa Feldeverert buried her boy there first. Back in eighteen
Speaker 1: ninety one, a son named Eddie, wanted to be a doctor,
Speaker 1: died of meningitis as a teenager. She marked his grave
Speaker 1: with a stone tree stump cut short, a life cut
Speaker 1: off before it got going. Years later, after she'd lost
Speaker 1: a husband too, she had this big bronze angel made
Speaker 1: by a Czech sculptor to stand over the family plot
Speaker 1: and over her own grave for whenever she'd need it.
Speaker 1: She died in nineteen twenty four, just about broke, no
Speaker 1: family left to even carve her death gear into the stone.
Speaker 1: It's still blank. And here's where the town took over,
Speaker 1: because within a few years of that angel going up,
Speaker 1: the bronz started to darken, which is just what bronze does.
Speaker 1: The metal reacts to the weather and the air. Nothing
Speaker 1: stranger than that, but a black angel in a graveyard.
Speaker 1: That's the kind of thing people build stories around.
Speaker 2: And they did.
Speaker 1: They say, if you touch her, you'll die. They say,
Speaker 1: if you kiss her at midnight on, you've got seven
Speaker 1: years left and not a day more. They say, a
Speaker 1: pregnant woman who walks under that wing loses the baby.
Speaker 1: They say the statue goes a little darker every year,
Speaker 1: one shade for every soul it's taken. They say a
Speaker 1: guy kissed her foot on a dare and caught some
Speaker 1: rare disease that wasted him away. People leave money at
Speaker 1: her feet, flowers, bottles of liquor, set down like offerings
Speaker 1: to something that might be listening. And every Halloween the
Speaker 1: college kids dare each other to put a hand on
Speaker 1: her and tempt the curse, and the cemetery has to
Speaker 1: put on extra eyes to keep them from chipping pieces
Speaker 1: off because over the years people have they've snapped off
Speaker 1: her fingers, broke her thumb painted her worse. Do I
Speaker 1: think she's killed anybody?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 1: The black is chemistry, and the curses are the kind
Speaker 1: of thing a town builds up around anything strange enough
Speaker 1: that it needs explaining. But here's what sticks with me
Speaker 1: on this particular trip. We started the night with a
Speaker 1: wing thing in Van Meter that went black against the
Speaker 1: sky and scared a whole town. And here's another winged figure,
Speaker 1: also gone black, that a whole town decided to be
Speaker 1: scared of. I always got a thing about dark, winged shapes.
Speaker 1: Make of that what you want. Up in Fort Dodge,
Speaker 1: there's a house that's strange for a reason most haunted
Speaker 1: houses aren't, which is that the people who built it
Speaker 1: invited the ghosts in on purpose. It's called the Vincent House,
Speaker 1: oldest building in town, put up back in eighteen seventy
Speaker 1: two by a couple named James and Adeline Swain. And
Speaker 1: the Swains were spiritualists. That was a real movement back then,
Speaker 1: big and respectable people who believed the dead were still
Speaker 1: close by and you could talk to them. They held
Speaker 1: seances in the parlor, welcome spirits and like guests. The
Speaker 1: Swains built that house wanting the other side to come visit,
Speaker 1: so you can imagine what one hundred and fifty years
Speaker 1: of that reputation does to a place. The caretaker today
Speaker 1: will tell you the house never really empt out. As
Speaker 1: far as I could find, there were two deaths in
Speaker 1: it over the years, Helen Vincent and Charles Vincent, who
Speaker 1: owned it after the Swains were gone. Folks claimed to
Speaker 1: have seen both of them, full apparitions, plain as a
Speaker 1: living person, and then the usual stuff, footsteps crossing floors
Speaker 1: with nobody on them, things that end up somewhere other
Speaker 1: than where you set them down. A medium walked through
Speaker 1: once and came out saying she'd counted better than two
Speaker 1: dozen spirits still keeping house in there. Now, let's be honest. Here,
Speaker 1: an old house settles and ticks and breeze drafts through
Speaker 1: gaps one hundred years wide, and once the story's planted,
Speaker 1: a creaking floor joist sounds like a footstep every single time.
Speaker 1: I don't think the dead are filing through the Vincent House.
Speaker 1: But I'll give it the same thing I gave the
Speaker 1: Black Angel. There's a weight to a place when enough people,
Speaker 1: for long enough have agreed to be afraid of it.
Speaker 1: The Swains wanted their house full of the departed. One
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty years on. Many of people in Fort
Speaker 1: Dodge will tell you they got their wish. Here's one
Speaker 1: last one, and this one's more my wheelhouse, because it's
Speaker 1: about a flesh and blood animal that's supposed to be
Speaker 1: gone and just keeps refusing to be cougars, mountain lions, panthers, pumas,
Speaker 1: whatever you grew up calling them.
Speaker 2: Officially, they got wiped.
Speaker 1: Out of Iowa more than one hundred years ago. Hunted out,
Speaker 1: run off, gone, case closed. There are no breeding mountain
Speaker 1: lions in Iowa, the state will tell you, and on
Speaker 1: paper that's true, except people keep seeing them year after year,
Speaker 1: decade after decade. Iowan's turn In reports a big tan
Speaker 1: cat slipping across a country road, standing at the edge
Speaker 1: of a field, screaming in the dark, that awful sound
Speaker 1: a cougar makes like a woman screaming. That'll stand every
Speaker 1: hair on you straight up. Hikers up in the wooded
Speaker 1: bluffs in the north part of the state, Farmers checking
Speaker 1: stock at dusk, drivers catching the long, heavy tail in
Speaker 1: the headlights. Too long for a bobcat, too low and
Speaker 1: lean for any housecat. The official line is that most
Speaker 1: of these are mistakes, big dogs, bobcats, tricks of the light,
Speaker 1: and the real ones are just young males wandering through
Speaker 1: from the Dakotas or Nebraska, passing through nothing that actually
Speaker 1: lives here. Maybe, but it tells you something, doesn't it,
Speaker 1: About how thin that line is between officially gone and
Speaker 1: actually gone. You've got a two hundred pound predator, an
Speaker 1: animal everybody agrees is real, that the state says doesn't
Speaker 1: live here, and people keep seeing it anyway, in the
Speaker 1: same river, timber and wooded bluffs where they keep seeing
Speaker 1: the tall, hairy thing nobody will admit is real at all.
Speaker 1: If a known animal can stay that invisible in this state,
Speaker 1: that hard to pin down, that easy to wave off
Speaker 1: as a mistake, then tell me again why a shy
Speaker 1: one we haven't cataloged yet couldn't do the exact same
Speaker 1: thing in the same woods for the same hundred years.
Speaker 1: That's the part that truly gets me. Not the glowing horns,
Speaker 1: not the curses, just the plain fact that even the
Speaker 1: animals we know about can disappear into Iowa and have
Speaker 1: us all arguing about whether.
Speaker 2: They're really there.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you why I believe the people in these stories,
Speaker 1: and it's got nothing to do with wanting to. I
Speaker 1: spent years on the other side of a badge, taking
Speaker 1: statements from people on what was usually the worst day
Speaker 1: of their life. You learn some things doing that. You
Speaker 1: learn pretty fast the difference between somebody telling you a
Speaker 1: story and somebody telling you what happened to them. The
Speaker 1: liar performs, he's watching your face the whole time to
Speaker 1: see if it's landing, and he reaches for the big,
Speaker 1: dramatic words, and the story gets better every time he
Speaker 1: tells it, more detail, more color, the monster a little
Speaker 1: taller each time. The honest one does the opposite. He's
Speaker 1: not performing for you. He's still half stuck back in
Speaker 1: the moment, and he gives you the small, useless detail
Speaker 1: nobody would bother to make up, the cupped hands at
Speaker 1: the river, the dog that wouldn't go back in the timber,
Speaker 1: the clump of hair up too high on the fence.
Speaker 1: And he tells it the same flat way every time,
Speaker 1: year after year, because he's not building a story, he's
Speaker 1: just reporting the one thing he can't put down. That's
Speaker 1: what I hear in these Iowa accounts, not performances, reports
Speaker 1: from farmers and hunters and truckers and a twelve year
Speaker 1: old kid, people with jobs and reputations and nothing to
Speaker 1: gain by opening their mouths. And that last part matters
Speaker 1: more than anything else, because you've got to ask what
Speaker 1: it costs somebody to tell one of these stories. It
Speaker 1: costs them plenty. It costs them the look, the raised eyebrow,
Speaker 1: the quiet little decision other people make that may be
Speaker 1: old so and so isn't quite right anymore. Nobody signs
Speaker 1: up for that. Nobody in a small town where your
Speaker 1: name is about the only thing you really own, stands
Speaker 1: up and says he saw a hairy giant cross his
Speaker 1: back forty He's either a fool or he actually saw it.
Speaker 1: And most of these people are nobody's fool. They sat
Speaker 1: on it for years, told one person made me.
Speaker 2: Drag it out of them.
Speaker 1: That reluctance that costs they so plainly didn't want to pay.
Speaker 1: That's its own kind of evidence. People lie when there's
Speaker 1: something in it for them. There's nothing in this. There's
Speaker 1: just the ridicule and the truth they couldn't quite swallow.
Speaker 2: So that's the stop.
Speaker 1: That's Iowa, a winged devil and a sealed up coal
Speaker 1: mine that I can't explain and won't try to. That
Speaker 1: one's parked back in episode one forty seven. If you
Speaker 1: want the whole nightmare, a black angel in a graveyard,
Speaker 1: a whole town decided to fear, a big cat that's
Speaker 1: supposed to be gone and won't go, And underneath all
Speaker 1: of it, running quiet through every river, valley and wooded
Speaker 1: bluff and creek bottom in the state. The thing I
Speaker 1: actually came here for, the tall one, the dark one,
Speaker 1: the one that drinks from the river with cupped hands,
Speaker 1: and clears a five foot fence without breaking stride, and
Speaker 1: sits down at the foot of a hunter's tree and
Speaker 1: chooses every single time to just walk away instead of
Speaker 1: doing the worst thing it could so easily do. Seventy
Speaker 1: eight reports in county, farmers and hunters and truckers, and
Speaker 1: a twelve year old kid and a coon hunter's two
Speaker 1: good dogs, all of them describing the same animal, not
Speaker 1: one of them with a thing to gain by it.
Speaker 1: I don't have it figured out. I've got no body,
Speaker 1: no bones, nothing I could set on a table to
Speaker 1: make you believe me. What I've got is a state
Speaker 1: full of level headed people who saw something in the
Speaker 1: timber and never could shake it, and a hunch, after
Speaker 1: almost forty years of chasing this that they weren't all wrong.
Speaker 2: Keep your eyes on.
Speaker 1: The tree line, watch that gap between the cottonwoods where
Speaker 1: the dark sits a little darker than it ought to.
Speaker 1: And next stop down the road, we'll go find out
Speaker 1: what the dark's hiding somewhere else did to Pat