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 1: On the morning of December twentieth, eighteen seventy nine, a
Speaker 1: cree trapper named swift Runner stood on a scaffold in
Speaker 1: Alberta and waited in the cold because the hangman had
Speaker 1: forgotten the straps and had to go back for them.
Speaker 1: He'd already confessed, he'd already walked the police out to
Speaker 1: a clearing in the bush and shown them what was
Speaker 1: left of his family. His explanation never changed through four
Speaker 1: months of custody. Something came into him that winter, and
Speaker 1: it made him hungry in a way that food couldn't answer.
Speaker 1: The men who tried him didn't believe in that thing,
Speaker 1: and the men who guarded him did, and both groups agreed.
Speaker 1: On the physical facts. There was a camp twenty five
Speaker 1: miles from a post that was handing out rations. There
Speaker 1: was a cooking pot, and there were bones cracked open
Speaker 1: at the ends. And there was one man who walked
Speaker 1: out of those woods in the spring heavier than he
Speaker 1: went in, go north out of Duluth in January, and
Speaker 1: the state began subtracting things from the landscape until there's
Speaker 1: very little left to look at. The traffic thens first,
Speaker 1: then the towns, which reduced to a rhythm of gas
Speaker 1: station and church and bar with twenty minutes of nothing
Speaker 1: between them. The hardwoods have already dropped everything they had,
Speaker 1: so the color goes next. And after that you're looking
Speaker 1: at jack pine and black spruce and tamarack standing dead,
Speaker 1: looking in the cold, which they aren't. Three million acres
Speaker 1: of national forests cover the top third of this state,
Speaker 1: and inside the superior there's a piece of country larger
Speaker 1: than a million acres where the law won't let you
Speaker 1: run a motor. Add the state land and the county land,
Speaker 1: and the tribal land, and the peat bog that nobody
Speaker 1: ever found a use for, and you've arranged a piece
Speaker 1: of North America where a person on foot in February
Speaker 1: is genuinely alone in a way that's difficult to accomplish
Speaker 1: anywhere else. In the lower forty eight. The record low
Speaker 1: here was sixty below, set at Tower in February of
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six, and international falls went to the trouble
Speaker 1: of trademarking the phrase ice box of the nation. At
Speaker 1: forty below, the exposed skin on your face begins taking damage.
Speaker 1: Inside of ten minutes, steel turns brittle enough to snap,
Speaker 1: diesel thickens into jelly in the tank, and the moisture
Speaker 1: in your breath crystallizes in front of your face with
Speaker 1: a faint hiss that Arctic peoples have their own words for.
Speaker 1: The cold isn't the part that gets people, though. What
Speaker 1: gets people is what the cold does to sound. At
Speaker 1: that temperature, the insects are gone, and the frogs are gone,
Speaker 1: and most of the birds have left for the season.
Speaker 1: The leaves came down months ago, so there's nothing left
Speaker 1: on the branches for the wind to move, and on
Speaker 1: a still night, the wind itself lies down. What remains
Speaker 1: isn't silence in the ordinary sense, because ordinary silence still
Speaker 1: has a floor of small noises underneath it. This is
Speaker 1: closer to a pressure against the ear, an absence you
Speaker 1: can feel physically, and it does something to a person's
Speaker 1: hearing that anybody who stood in it will describe the
Speaker 1: same way. Then a tree cracks somewhere out in the dark,
Speaker 1: hard and flat, like a rifle shot, which is nothing
Speaker 1: more than the sap freezing and splitting the trunk from
Speaker 1: the inside, and every single person who's ever stood in
Speaker 1: that turns toward the sound before they've decided to. That
Speaker 1: reflex is where this whole subject begins. And the people
Speaker 1: who lived in this country for thousands of years before
Speaker 1: us built something enormous on top of it. The Windigo
Speaker 1: doesn't belong in a cryptid roundup. It comes out of
Speaker 1: the traditions of living Algonquian speaking peoples, and in northern
Speaker 1: Minnesota that means primarily the Anishinabe, the people also called
Speaker 1: Ojibwe or Chippewa, who have seven federally recognized nations inside
Speaker 1: this state at Red Lake, White Earth, Leech Lake, bois Fort,
Speaker 1: Grand Portage, Fondu Loc, and Millilocks. Those are governments with
Speaker 1: citizens who are alive right now, and the being we're
Speaker 1: discussing is part of a body of teaching that some
Speaker 1: of those citizens take entirely seriously. What the old accounts
Speaker 1: described bears almost no resemblance to what we see today.
Speaker 1: Basil Johnston, the Ajibwe writer who spent his life putting
Speaker 1: this material into English so that it would survive, described
Speaker 1: something starving rather than something bloated. The skin is drawn
Speaker 1: tight over the bones, and the complexion has gone the
Speaker 1: gray of a corpse. The eyes have sunk back into
Speaker 1: the sockets. The lips are ragged and bloody because the
Speaker 1: thing has been chewing them. The flesh is breaking down
Speaker 1: while it walks, and the smell of that moves with it.
Speaker 1: There are no antlers in any of it. The antlered
Speaker 1: deer skull that appears on merchandise and in horror films
Speaker 1: and in a certain very popular survival video game came
Speaker 1: out of concept art produced within the last twenty years,
Speaker 1: and it's almost completely buried the older description in the
Speaker 1: public imagination, which is a shame because what's underneath the
Speaker 1: antlers is considerably worse. The reason it's worse comes down
Speaker 1: to how the thing is built. This is a monster
Speaker 1: whose entire nature is hunger, and rather than making it fat,
Speaker 1: the tradition made it a skeleton. A number of Ojibwe
Speaker 1: and cretellings add a detail that locks the whole idea
Speaker 1: into place, which is that it grows in proportion to
Speaker 1: whatever it consumes. It kills a man and becomes larger
Speaker 1: by exactly the amount that man would have satisfied. The
Speaker 1: ratio never improves, and the arithmetic never breaks in its favor.
Speaker 1: It's never one bite closer to full than it was
Speaker 1: when it started, and it will never be for as
Speaker 1: long as it exists. The part of the teaching that
Speaker 1: changes how those woods feel at night is that the
Speaker 1: wind to go isn't only something out there in the timber.
Speaker 1: It is something A person can become starve long enough
Speaker 1: in a closed camp in February, put yourself ahead of
Speaker 1: the people around you. Often enough, eat the wrong thing
Speaker 1: when there's nothing else, And the tradition holds that you're
Speaker 1: already walking that road, and the road runs one direction
Speaker 1: only nobody in that country has ever been afraid of
Speaker 1: a costume. What they were afraid of was a process,
Speaker 1: and they'd watched it work. The oldest complaint out of
Speaker 1: the Northern Woods, older than any written record of it,
Speaker 1: is that something out there knows your name. Ray ran
Speaker 1: a trap line in Kochichin County for the better part
Speaker 1: of thirty years, and the February that ended his use
Speaker 1: of one particular section came somewhere in the middle nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: He was working by snowshoe, about four miles in from
Speaker 1: the nearest road, on a line nobody ran but him.
Speaker 1: When somebody said his name out through the spruce. It
Speaker 1: wasn't shouted. It arrived at the volume of a man
Speaker 1: standing one hundred yards off talking to someone next to him,
Speaker 1: and after a few seconds it came again. Ray answered
Speaker 1: out loud, and he was already moving toward it before
Speaker 1: any part of his brain had signed off on that decision.
Speaker 1: He covered forty yards through knee deep snow before he
Speaker 1: stopped because a question had finally caught up to him,
Speaker 1: and the question was who out here could possibly know
Speaker 1: his name. He turned around, finished his sets in the dark,
Speaker 1: and never worked that section of line and again in
Speaker 1: the remaining years he trapped. Marlus grew up outside Black
Speaker 1: Duck and was nineteen the January she cut the corner
Speaker 1: of a tamarack swamp on a shortcut she'd been using
Speaker 1: since she was small enough to need help over the fence.
Speaker 1: Somewhere ahead of her in the tamarak, a child was crying.
Speaker 1: It wasn't screaming, but the worn out, hitching sound a
Speaker 1: kid makes after they've been at it a long time,
Speaker 1: and a running out of air, and Marley's went in
Speaker 1: after it without hesitating. She got sixty yards before the
Speaker 1: ground softened under the snow and she had to start
Speaker 1: choosing her footing. And in all that distance, the crying
Speaker 1: never came one foot closer. It held the same volume
Speaker 1: and the same bearing ahead of her the entire time,
Speaker 1: and when she moved, it moved. She stopped walking, and
Speaker 1: it cried for another ten seconds and then quit. In
Speaker 1: the middle of a breath. She backed out of that swamp,
Speaker 1: facing the direction she'd come from. She's in her sixties now,
Speaker 1: and she's never used the shortcut since. Two men named
Speaker 1: Dale and Ron trapped together up near Little Fork through
Speaker 1: the eighties and theirs is the account that gives me
Speaker 1: the most difficulty, Because there were two of them and
Speaker 1: four inches of new snow on the ground. They'd split
Speaker 1: it a fork and were working parallel sets a quarter
Speaker 1: mile apart when Dale heard his brother calling him and
Speaker 1: started over, and Ron heard Dale calling him and did
Speaker 1: the same. They met in the middle of the timber
Speaker 1: and stood there, asking each other what the matter was.
Speaker 1: And then they looked down at the ground, which held
Speaker 1: nothing at all in any direction except the two trails
Speaker 1: they'd just made walking in. They pulled the line and
Speaker 1: went home a day early. It wasn't two men hearing
Speaker 1: one sound out in that timber. It was two men,
Speaker 1: each hearing a different name and a voice each of
Speaker 1: them had known his whole life. They spent every Christmas
Speaker 1: break of her childhood at a family cabin on the
Speaker 1: Big Fork River, which meant long, empty days with very
Speaker 1: little to do outdoors. And she was eleven the winter
Speaker 1: somebody started calling her in from the yard. It was
Speaker 1: her mother's voice coming from the direction of the cabin,
Speaker 1: using her name, telling her to come inside. And it
Speaker 1: happened twice in a single week. Both times she went in,
Speaker 1: and both times her mother was sitting at the table
Speaker 1: with a book and hadn't spoken. The second time, her
Speaker 1: mother put the book down and asked exactly where in
Speaker 1: the yard Fay had been standing, and then went out
Speaker 1: and stood in that spot herself for a while with
Speaker 1: her arms crossed. Fay watched her through the window. Nothing
Speaker 1: was ever said about it afterward, and the family kept
Speaker 1: going out there every December until the place was sold.
Speaker 1: She's in her fifties now with the family of her own,
Speaker 1: and what she will point out is that she wasn't
Speaker 1: frightened at the time, not once, because it was her
Speaker 1: mother's voice and she was eleven years old. The fear
Speaker 1: showed up about thirty years late, and it hasn't gone
Speaker 1: anywhere since. Joel snowmobiles out of the Bamigi area and
Speaker 1: what happened to him happened inside a wall of engine
Speaker 1: noise rather than in the silence where these things usually arrive.
Speaker 1: He was running a groom trail at night, alone machine
Speaker 1: at speed, helmet on when somebody spoke to him close
Speaker 1: off his right shoulder, and he couldn't make out a
Speaker 1: word of it. The thing he keeps returning to is
Speaker 1: that it didn't come over the engine noise it came
Speaker 1: through it. He shut the machine down in the middle
Speaker 1: of the trail and pulled the helmet off and stood
Speaker 1: there in the dark for a full minute with his
Speaker 1: ears still ringing, and there was nothing. He started up
Speaker 1: when another mile and it happened again. He finished that
Speaker 1: ride wide open and didn't stop for anything. Owen guides
Speaker 1: fishing in the summer and does close to nothing in
Speaker 1: the winter, which is how he came to be walking
Speaker 1: a section line off a county road in January with
Speaker 1: no particular destination. Something said a word to him that
Speaker 1: he couldn't identify, and when he tries to describe the voice,
Speaker 1: the word he lands on is trying. It didn't sound
Speaker 1: like a person, and it didn't sound like an animal either.
Speaker 1: It sounded like something doing and impression of a person
Speaker 1: and not being very good at it, the way a
Speaker 1: parrot can catch the shape and rhythm of a sentence,
Speaker 1: while every individual sound inside it comes out wrong. He
Speaker 1: stood in that section line and waited for it to
Speaker 1: try again, and it never did, and he walked back
Speaker 1: to the road at a pace he isn't proud of.
Speaker 1: Wayne fished a dark house on a lake. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to name alone out on the ice at night,
Speaker 1: jigging pike through a square hole, cutting the floor, when
Speaker 1: somebody outside the shack said the words come here. It
Speaker 1: was clear enough to carry over the water noise coming
Speaker 1: up through the hole, and it was close enough that
Speaker 1: his first thought was one of the three or four
Speaker 1: neighbors who had houses out on that ice. The word
Speaker 1: he uses about it's polite. It sounded polite to him.
Speaker 1: He opened the door onto open snow under a moon,
Speaker 1: which up there gives you a very long way to
Speaker 1: see in every direction. And there was nobody out there
Speaker 1: at all, no shack door swinging shut, no boot track
Speaker 1: anywhere between him and the far shore. Wayne fished another
Speaker 1: twenty minutes on principle, and nothing else happened. He's been
Speaker 1: going out on that same lake for forty years and
Speaker 1: it's never happened again. Lonnie kept a wheelhouse on a
Speaker 1: lake north of Deer River and was sleeping out there
Speaker 1: alone in the middle of January when he woke around
Speaker 1: two in the morning because something was walking on the ice.
Speaker 1: Anybody who spent a night on a frozen lake knows
Speaker 1: that sound and can't mistake it. A crunch of snow
Speaker 1: over ice with a hollow underneath it, and this came
Speaker 1: from the east side, passed the shack about forty feet out,
Speaker 1: and continued west. What he did while it went by
Speaker 1: is the detail that convinces me he was awake and
Speaker 1: paying attention, because he counted the steps and he noted
Speaker 1: that the interval between them was long. In the morning,
Speaker 1: he walked the same line and counted his own stride
Speaker 1: against it to be sure. The wind had come up
Speaker 1: overnight and put drift across everything, and there was no
Speaker 1: track to be found on that whole side of the lake.
Speaker 1: Everything in that catalog, the voices and the names, and
Speaker 1: the thing walking past a shack at two in the morning,
Speaker 1: has a much older and much heavier case sitting underneath it,
Speaker 1: and that case ended on the scaffold. At Fort Saskatchewan.
Speaker 1: Swift Runner was a large man and a cree hunter,
Speaker 1: and the mounted police knew his face because he'd guided
Speaker 1: for them at one point. By eighteen seventy eight, that
Speaker 1: relationship had come apart, and the accounts from the period
Speaker 1: describe heavy drinking and violence and say that the police
Speaker 1: let him go and that his own people pushed him
Speaker 1: out as well. Those accounts are the impressions of colonial
Speaker 1: officers written down about a man they later hanged, and
Speaker 1: they should be weighed accordingly. But there what survives that fall.
Speaker 1: He took his family into the bush north of Fort
Speaker 1: Saskatchewan to winter, and the sources can't agree on who
Speaker 1: went with him. There was a wife, there was either
Speaker 1: his mother or his mother in law. There was a brother,
Speaker 1: and there were five children or six, depending on which
Speaker 1: account you're reading. Most summaries settle on eight people in total.
Speaker 1: In the spring, one man walked out. He came into
Speaker 1: the mission at Saint Albert and reported that his family
Speaker 1: had starved, and what ruined him was his his own body,
Speaker 1: because he wasn't starved. Stay tuned for more backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. He was in good condition,
Speaker 1: and every man at that mission had seen what people
Speaker 1: look like coming off a hard winter in that country.
Speaker 1: Somebody then worked out the second problem with his account,
Speaker 1: which was that his camp had been twenty five miles
Speaker 1: from a post that had food in it and was
Speaker 1: actively issuing rations. Twenty five miles through that country and
Speaker 1: winter is a serious undertaking and not something to dismiss,
Speaker 1: but for a man of his reputation on snowshoes. It
Speaker 1: was a trip rather than a wall. They arrested him
Speaker 1: in May, and he took a police party back to
Speaker 1: the site himself. What came out of that clearing included
Speaker 1: human bones with the ends broken open, which is what
Speaker 1: a person does to get at the marrow, along with
Speaker 1: hair and a cooking pot and remains in and around
Speaker 1: the fire. He never fought the charge at any point.
Speaker 1: What he told them was that something had entered him
Speaker 1: during that one, that it hadn't been swift Runner doing
Speaker 1: those things, and that once it had hold of him,
Speaker 1: the hunger didn't stop. The court had no framework for
Speaker 1: a statement like that, and made no attempt to build one.
Speaker 1: He was convicted in August and sentenced to hang in December.
Speaker 1: Nobody at that fort had ever conducted an execution, and
Speaker 1: the old army pensioner they hired for it forgot the
Speaker 1: straps needed to pinion the prisoner's arms and had to
Speaker 1: go back for them, which left swift Runner standing on
Speaker 1: the trap in the December cold, with nothing to do
Speaker 1: but wait. Offered a chance to speak, he admitted his guilt,
Speaker 1: thanked his jailers for having treated him decently and complained
Speaker 1: about being made to stand out there. That last piece
Speaker 1: is the one I can't put down, because it's not
Speaker 1: the behavior of a man performing a legend for an audience.
Speaker 1: It's the behavior of a man who's cold. Sound is
Speaker 1: only half of what people bring out of that country.
Speaker 1: The other half arrives without any sound at all. Delores
Speaker 1: grew up on the Red Lake, and what happened to
Speaker 1: her at fourteen was ordinary enough in her family that
Speaker 1: nobody in it ever treated the event as a story
Speaker 1: worth telling. She was walking a plowed road about a
Speaker 1: mile from her aunt's place in late December, in that
Speaker 1: flat three in the afternoon light, where the sun has
Speaker 1: already given up for the day, and across a field
Speaker 1: of unbroken snow. Off her right side there was a
Speaker 1: tree line, and something in that tree line had her.
Speaker 1: She didn't look at it. She'd been taught not to look,
Speaker 1: and not to run, to hold exactly the same walking
Speaker 1: pace she'd been holding, to get inside, and then to
Speaker 1: say out loud to an adult what had happened. And
Speaker 1: she did all four of those things in order. Asked
Speaker 1: much later what she believed had been standing there, she
Speaker 1: said that her grandmother would have told her not to
Speaker 1: ask that question out of doors, and she left it there.
Speaker 1: Anski's a groomed loop in the Chippewa National Forest most
Speaker 1: weekends of the winter, and her version of the same
Speaker 1: experience is entirely modern. She came around a bend into
Speaker 1: a long, straight section of trail and found that she
Speaker 1: couldn't make herself continue down, with no sound anywhere and
Speaker 1: nothing visible in the timber. The comparison she reaches for
Speaker 1: is skiing into a room where an argument stopped half
Speaker 1: a second before the door opened. She stood in her
Speaker 1: own tracks long enough to feel ridiculous about it, and
Speaker 1: then skied the section anyway, and the feeling ended abruptly
Speaker 1: about two hundred yards along the way it would if
Speaker 1: she'd crossed a chalk line drawn on the ground. She's
Speaker 1: done that loop something over one hundred times since it's
Speaker 1: happened twice more in the same stretch, both times. In February,
Speaker 1: Tom hunts near Effie and spent forty minutes one afternoon
Speaker 1: in a stand unable to make himself turn around, which
Speaker 1: is a difficult thing for a grown man with a
Speaker 1: rifle across his lap to admit to anybody he worked
Speaker 1: at it the entire time and couldn't get his own
Speaker 1: neck to do it. And when he finally managed it,
Speaker 1: there was nothing behind him but timber. He climbed down
Speaker 1: and walked out in the dark, and he says the
Speaker 1: walkout was worse than the forty minutes intruction Dolores was
Speaker 1: given as a small child. Are the same instruction that
Speaker 1: turn up in communities from Manitoba to Michigan that had
Speaker 1: no way at all of comparing notes with one another.
Speaker 1: Don't look at it, don't run from it, keep your pace,
Speaker 1: get indoors, and tell somebody out loud what happened to you.
Speaker 1: Del ran a beagle out of a place near keller
Speaker 1: Her for nine years and had never once had that
Speaker 1: dog refuse him anything. On a cold December morning, at
Speaker 1: the edge of a cutover, the dog came off the tailgate,
Speaker 1: took about four steps toward the tree line, put its
Speaker 1: ears down, backed up, and got underneath the truck where
Speaker 1: it stayed. Dell walked that tree line himself and found
Speaker 1: nothing at all, no tracks and no blood, and no
Speaker 1: bed and no carcass, and nothing on the wind he
Speaker 1: could pick up. He stood out there in the cold
Speaker 1: for a couple of minutes, loaded the dog, and drove home.
Speaker 1: That beagle worked another five seasons and never did it again.
Speaker 1: And in the nine years before that morning, it had
Speaker 1: run bear wolf and everything else that country had to
Speaker 1: offer with without once putting its ears down. Gordon hunted
Speaker 1: out of a shack near Big Fork with his brother
Speaker 1: and his brother's boys, and the morning in question fell
Speaker 1: in the second week of November, sometime in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen nineties, with eight inches on the ground and the
Speaker 1: nights running below zero. He was up before light, standing
Speaker 1: outside in the cold with a cup of coffee, when
Speaker 1: he saw a figure at the edge of the yard,
Speaker 1: past the woodpile, thirty five yards off, in that gray
Speaker 1: that's neither dark nor morning. At first he thought it
Speaker 1: was a man, a very tall, very thin man, and
Speaker 1: what bothered him was the proportion of the thing, because
Speaker 1: the arms hung too low, and the head sat forward
Speaker 1: on the shoulders instead of stacked on top of them.
Speaker 1: He never saw a face, and says he didn't want one.
Speaker 1: He went inside for a rifle, which took eight or
Speaker 1: nine seconds, and when he came back out, the yard
Speaker 1: was empty and he couldn't find a track. Though four
Speaker 1: hunters had been walking through that snow for a week
Speaker 1: and had beaten it to slush. He's never once claimed
Speaker 1: it was anything in particular, and he doesn't enjoy being asked.
Speaker 1: He simply never hunted out of that camp again, and
Speaker 1: when his brother's boys were old enough to take it over,
Speaker 1: he signed his share to them and didn't explain himself.
Speaker 1: Lyle drove a log truck for years on a hall
Speaker 1: road out of the Big Fork Country, and one morning,
Speaker 1: at the top of a shift, his headlights put a
Speaker 1: figure in the ditch line ahead of him. What he
Speaker 1: registered first wasn't the shape of it, but the height
Speaker 1: against the brush, because he knew that ditch, and he
Speaker 1: knew exactly what four feet of aldar looked like from
Speaker 1: the cab, and whatever was standing in it looked a
Speaker 1: great deal taller than a man. He didn't slow down.
Speaker 1: Somewhere around one hundred yards out he decided to hold
Speaker 1: his speed and look straight through the windshield, and that's
Speaker 1: what he did, and he went by it. He ran
Speaker 1: that road for another eleven years without ever seeing it again.
Speaker 1: Kenny and Dave kept a shack on state land east
Speaker 1: of Northolm. It was February and both of them were
Speaker 1: inside with a propane lantern going. When Dave looked up
Speaker 1: and found a face in the glass, Kenny didn't see it.
Speaker 1: What Kenny saw was his brother come up out of
Speaker 1: the chair, and Kenny was through the door about eight
Speaker 1: seconds behind him, into an empty yard with fresh snow
Speaker 1: that had fallen that afternoon, and there was no track
Speaker 1: underneath that window. That detail cuts in both directions, and
Speaker 1: it cuts harder against the story than for it, because
Speaker 1: no track in fresh snow is the strongest possible evidence
Speaker 1: that nobody was standing there. Dave was sitting in a
Speaker 1: lit cabin at night looking at a black pane of
Speaker 1: glass which functions as a mirror, and the most likely
Speaker 1: thing Dave saw in that window was Dave. He never
Speaker 1: slept in the shack again. They sold it four years later,
Speaker 1: and neither brother has ever shifted a single detail of
Speaker 1: the account in either direction. From November through April, pat
Speaker 1: is the only living soul on a resort property built
Speaker 1: to hold two hundred people. On a February morning, she
Speaker 1: was walking the shoreline path down to check the boat
Speaker 1: house when she saw something standing between two of the
Speaker 1: clothes cabins about halfway along the row, and what caught
Speaker 1: her was the stillness of it, because deer don't hold
Speaker 1: like that, and a person can't. She watched it for
Speaker 1: what she puts at fifteen or twenty seconds before it
Speaker 1: went out between the buildings, and she never saw it
Speaker 1: take a step. She finished her rounds that morning and
Speaker 1: she checked the boat house, and she's kept that job
Speaker 1: through every winter since. What she changed is that she
Speaker 1: stopped walking the shoreline path in the dark and started
Speaker 1: waiting for full light, which in February cost her about
Speaker 1: two hours of the working day and which she's never
Speaker 1: once complained about. Artists was walking a shoreline road on
Speaker 1: the north side in February when a smell came across it,
Speaker 1: thick enough to stop her walking cold. That deep strip
Speaker 1: scent out of the air, which is the piece that
Speaker 1: people from warmer country don't understand, because at twenty below
Speaker 1: there's almost nothing to smell at all. The molecules that
Speaker 1: carry oders stop moving, wood smoke will carry, and diesel
Speaker 1: will carry, and very little else does cross that road.
Speaker 1: She put somewhere between a wet dog and a dead animal,
Speaker 1: with something underneath both that she's never been able to name.
Speaker 1: It lasted about eight seconds, and then it was entirely gone,
Speaker 1: the way it would go if something had moved through
Speaker 1: and kept moving. She never saw anything and never heard anything,
Speaker 1: and she turned around and walked home at a good clip.
Speaker 1: And what she remembers most clearly is being angry rather
Speaker 1: than frightened, because she'd been enjoying the walk. The Big
Speaker 1: Bog up in Beltrome County is the largest peat bog
Speaker 1: in the lower forty eight and doesn't resemble anywhere else
Speaker 1: in this country. And in winter you can cross it
Speaker 1: on foot, which is the only season the ground will
Speaker 1: hold you. Sig grew up Rising with his family and
Speaker 1: had crossed that bog many times before the afternoon he
Speaker 1: saw a shape out on it, three hundred yards off upright,
Speaker 1: traveling in the same direction he was. What stayed with
Speaker 1: him afterward wasn't the shape at all, but the speed,
Speaker 1: because he says, it didn't look like it was moving
Speaker 1: fast while it was covering ground faster than the way
Speaker 1: it appeared to move. And he's never once been able
Speaker 1: to say that sentence in a way that satisfied anybody,
Speaker 1: including himself. I've heard that same complaint enough times now
Speaker 1: that I've started keeping it as its own category. And
Speaker 1: it's not a description of a creature, it's a description
Speaker 1: of movement that won't reconcile. Orville spent four seasons on
Speaker 1: a fire tower in the Superior, back when the States
Speaker 1: still staffed them, which meant a hundred feet of open
Speaker 1: steel and a glass cab and nothing to do for
Speaker 1: hours at a stretch. But look at country. What he
Speaker 1: saw he saw in daylight in October with binoculars at
Speaker 1: a range he puts around six hundred yards moving along
Speaker 1: the far edge of a burned scar where the regrowth
Speaker 1: was still low enough that nothing could hide in it.
Speaker 1: It was upright, and it was dark, and it covered
Speaker 1: the open ground without ever changing pace. He watched it
Speaker 1: for something close to two minutes, which is an eternity
Speaker 1: compared with what most people get, and he called it
Speaker 1: in on the radio. Man on the other end asked
Speaker 1: him whether it was a bear, and he said no.
Speaker 1: The man asked him what it was, and he didn't
Speaker 1: answer that question then and he still can't answer it now.
Speaker 1: He wrote the sighting in the tower log time, weather, direction, distance.
Speaker 1: He's often wondered what happened to those logs when the
Speaker 1: towers went out of service, and whether the entry is
Speaker 1: still sitting in a box in a record's office in
Speaker 1: Saint Paul with his handwriting on it, filed between a
Speaker 1: lightning strike and a smoke report. Most of the road
Speaker 1: accounts in this state arrive around four in the morning,
Speaker 1: and Marv plowed county roads out of Boudette long enough
Speaker 1: to have been out in a great many of them.
Speaker 1: He had the blade down in blowing snow, with the
Speaker 1: headlights going and the amber rotating on the roof of
Speaker 1: the cab, which he's the first to point out is
Speaker 1: a lighting situation that makes everything look like something. There
Speaker 1: was a figure standing in the road two hundred feet
Speaker 1: ahead of him and slightly off center, and Marv laid
Speaker 1: on the horn out of pure irritation because his first
Speaker 1: thought was a drunk walking home from somewhere. By the
Speaker 1: time he reached the spot, the road was empty and
Speaker 1: the snow on both shoulders was clean. He will also
Speaker 1: tell you that clean is a very strong word to
Speaker 1: use at four in the morning and blowing snow with
Speaker 1: a plow blade, throwing a wall of it off your
Speaker 1: right side. He's told that story perhaps six times and
Speaker 1: thirty years, and he likes it less every time he
Speaker 1: tells it. Verna kept a place on a lake outside
Speaker 1: Cook and eventually gave up sleeping in the back bedroom
Speaker 1: of it. For three nights running in February. Something worked
Speaker 1: to the outside of that wall, not knocking, but dragging
Speaker 1: at about waste height, moving slowly from one end of
Speaker 1: the room to the other and then back again. And
Speaker 1: it took long enough that she was able to time
Speaker 1: it against the clock on the nightstand, at roughly twenty
Speaker 1: seconds in each direction. Between passes, there was a pause
Speaker 1: of a minute or two, and then it would start over.
Speaker 1: She never once looked out. On the third night, she
Speaker 1: carried a quilt to the front room and slept there,
Speaker 1: and it didn't happen in the front room, and it
Speaker 1: never happened in the back bedroom again either. The wall
Speaker 1: was cedar shake, and in the morning there was nothing
Speaker 1: on it, and nothing in the snow along that side
Speaker 1: of the house apart from the drip line off the eve.
Speaker 1: What she's never gotten past in thirty years of thinking
Speaker 1: about it is the pause, because whatever was out there
Speaker 1: stopped for a full minute between passes and then began
Speaker 1: again twenty seconds down and twenty seconds back like something
Speaker 1: working a problem. The reports that come in loudest and
Speaker 1: most often now are the ones about screaming, and they
Speaker 1: cluster in the Superior National Forest and the Boundary Waters,
Speaker 1: which is the emptiest country the state has. Sam and
Speaker 1: West were winter camping in the Boundary Waters in early
Speaker 1: March on a lake I'm not going to name because
Speaker 1: I don't want fifty people driving out there to look
Speaker 1: for it. At two in the morning, something started low
Speaker 1: and climbed, and what came out of the dark was
Speaker 1: a scream that ran considerably longer than a lung ought
Speaker 1: to allow, and never broke anywhere for a breath, two
Speaker 1: hundred to three hundred yards out. Then it did it
Speaker 1: again from a different position. Neither of them slept, and
Speaker 1: they were packed and on the ice at first light.
Speaker 1: Andrea snowshoes out of the ely area alone and doesn't
Speaker 1: frighten easily. And hers was a single scream, close in
Speaker 1: the trees rather than across water. On a February afternoon,
Speaker 1: on a trail she'd done many times. Her body turned
Speaker 1: before her mind did. She stood in the trail about
Speaker 1: a minute and then went back out the way she'd come,
Speaker 1: which took her forty minutes, and she will tell you
Speaker 1: that every one of those forty minutes was awful. She
Speaker 1: hasn't stopped snowshoeing, but she has stopped doing that trail alone.
Speaker 1: Nick was on the gun Flint trail in December, outside
Speaker 1: a rented cabin at night, pulling wood off the pile,
Speaker 1: when something started up out across the lake ice. And
Speaker 1: the way it comes out when he describes it's two
Speaker 1: sounds fighting. There was a lower part and a higher
Speaker 1: part happening simultaneously out of the same source, which a
Speaker 1: couple of animals cong genuinely do, in which most people
Speaker 1: never hear once in their lives. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. He
Speaker 1: got the wood, and he took his time about it,
Speaker 1: deliberately because he didn't want to be a man who
Speaker 1: runs from a noise. He came back inside with about
Speaker 1: a third of what he'd gone out for. The one
Speaker 1: that bothers tear of most isn't the loudest thing she's heard,
Speaker 1: and she works seasonally around voyagers, so she's heard a
Speaker 1: great deal. She heard a scream she would have written
Speaker 1: off entirely, and then ninety seconds later, she heard it again,
Speaker 1: from a different direction and a great deal farther away.
Speaker 1: Her difficulty isn't the sound itself, but the distance covered
Speaker 1: in ninety seconds at night in winter across country she
Speaker 1: knows on foot and is crossed in daylight with a
Speaker 1: pack on. What links those four accounts isn't the volume.
Speaker 1: It's that every one of those people had spent years
Speaker 1: in that country before it happened, and had a working
Speaker 1: inventory of what lives there and what each thing says
Speaker 1: sounds like in the dark. Sam and West had winter
Speaker 1: camp the boundary waters better than a dozen times. Andrea
Speaker 1: has snowshoot out of Ely for most of two decades.
Speaker 1: Nick grew up on that shore. Tara works in it
Speaker 1: for a living. Four people with a full catalog in
Speaker 1: their heads, and all four of them came back out
Speaker 1: saying the same thing, which is that whatever they heard
Speaker 1: wasn't in the catalog. The mistake made most often in
Speaker 1: Minnesota material is filing whindgo reports and sasquatch reports in
Speaker 1: the same drawer, so that a hairy biped seen near
Speaker 1: a deer camp gets called a wind to go by
Speaker 1: half the internet. The tradition itself never makes that error.
Speaker 1: A Nishinabe tradition carries a separate being for the hairy
Speaker 1: man of the woods, and the name that comes up
Speaker 1: in Ojibwe Mowen is Bogwaji and Nini, which parses roughly
Speaker 1: as wilderness man or man of the wild place. It's
Speaker 1: not a wind to go, and it doesn't eat anybody.
Speaker 1: It's not made by cannibalism or by greed, and it
Speaker 1: carries none of the famine wait at all. In most tellings,
Speaker 1: it's simply another kind of person living out there who
Speaker 1: would prefer that you kept walking. When people in this
Speaker 1: state report a large hair covered animal that walks upright,
Speaker 1: the traditional framework here already has a place to put that,
Speaker 1: and it's not the wind goes place, which matters because
Speaker 1: Minnesota has a sasquatch record that almost nobody outside the
Speaker 1: state ever discusses. Reamer sits in Cass County, with about
Speaker 1: four hundred people in it, an hour north of Brainerd,
Speaker 1: ringed by woods and marsh, and it came up out
Speaker 1: of the logging boom in the early nineteen hundreds when
Speaker 1: Willow River was still virgin pine and camps were going
Speaker 1: in all through it. The man who founded the place
Speaker 1: was named William, and he served as the first postmaster
Speaker 1: and ran the general store. And he described finding tracks
Speaker 1: that were much bigger than a man's and sunk deep
Speaker 1: into the earth. Local accounts run back to the late
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, and what's interesting about the old Reamer material
Speaker 1: is how little fear is in it. People described whole
Speaker 1: families of them, including young ones. People asked one another
Speaker 1: whether they'd seen it lately, in the same tone they
Speaker 1: would use about the weather. There was a stretch of
Speaker 1: shoreline on Big Sand Lake that folks left alone, not
Speaker 1: because anybody thought it was dangerous, but because that was
Speaker 1: where they nested, and you gave them their peace. Sightings
Speaker 1: around ream were thinned out through the twenties and thirties
Speaker 1: as the forest came down, which is either a statement
Speaker 1: about habitat or a statement about how many people were
Speaker 1: left in those woods to see anything at all, and
Speaker 1: I don't know which. In October of two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: a trail camera on hunting land north of town caught something.
Speaker 1: The man who owned the land, Tim assumed a friend
Speaker 1: was playing a joke on him, and then established that
Speaker 1: nobody who might have done it knew where that camera
Speaker 1: had been set. A city council member named Mark had
Speaker 1: grown up on the town's history, went back through the
Speaker 1: sighting records realized that no town in North America had
Speaker 1: ever actually claimed to be the creature home and trademarked
Speaker 1: the phrase home of Bigfoot. Animal Planet came and filmed.
Speaker 1: The first Bigfoot Days ran in twenty sixteen and drew
Speaker 1: thousands of people. There's now a gas station called Bigfoot
Speaker 1: Gas and gifts with plaster casts of prints found in
Speaker 1: the area, and the cafe sells Bigfoot burgers. That's tourism.
Speaker 1: And I have nothing bad to say about a small
Speaker 1: town in the north Woods finding something it can sell
Speaker 1: in order to keep a main street alive. Marcus stated
Speaker 1: publicly that he's skeptical and not entirely a believer, and
Speaker 1: that what he values is what the whole business has
Speaker 1: done for the town, which is an unusually straight thing
Speaker 1: for a man in his position to say out loud.
Speaker 1: None of it touches the older accounts which were being
Speaker 1: told in that country long before there was anything in
Speaker 1: rumor to sell. Vigus over in Ottertail County runs on
Speaker 1: testimony rather than marketing. The Vigos trails are minimum maintenance
Speaker 1: roads and dirt tracks winding through hilly, heavily wooded back country,
Speaker 1: carrying local names like the Lost Highway, and they've been
Speaker 1: where teenagers go at night for as long as anybody
Speaker 1: can remember, which means they've collected the entire standard freight
Speaker 1: of glowing headstones and handprints on car windows, and somebody's
Speaker 1: cousin chased by a cult. Sitting on top of all
Speaker 1: of that is the hairy Man. The earliest talk local
Speaker 1: historians can trace runs back to the late nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: and nobody has ever identified a first sighting or explained
Speaker 1: why the stories began when they did. But the reports
Speaker 1: picked up sharply through the seventies and never entirely stopped.
Speaker 1: The descriptions are consistent enough to be worth something. Running
Speaker 1: to a large, hair covered, biped dark put anywhere between
Speaker 1: six and eight feet depending on who's telling it, occasionally
Speaker 1: with a smell attached that people can't describe and can't forget.
Speaker 1: The regional newspaper went out and did the work on
Speaker 1: this at one point and reported contact with roughly a
Speaker 1: dozen people from the area who described run ends, and
Speaker 1: a local weekly doing legwork inside its own community is
Speaker 1: worth more to me than one hundred anonymous database entries.
Speaker 1: The account that has stayed in circulation locally belongs to Cheryl,
Speaker 1: who was twelve years old in nineteen seventy two and
Speaker 1: out on those trails at night on a snowmobile with
Speaker 1: their cousin, Joe Lynn, when the headlight hit a figure
Speaker 1: on the trail in front of them. Two children on
Speaker 1: a snowmobile at night in winter get a very good
Speaker 1: and very close look at something standing in a headlight
Speaker 1: beam on a track with nothing else moving on it,
Speaker 1: and then spend the next fifty years being asked about
Speaker 1: it by people who weren't there. Cheryl has never embellished
Speaker 1: it and has never taken any of it back. A
Speaker 1: man named Mike out of Morehead has done more leg
Speaker 1: work on Minnesota sidings than anybody else in the state.
Speaker 1: He had his own as a boy from the back
Speaker 1: seat of his parents' car near Strawberry Lake on the
Speaker 1: White Earth Reservation north of Detroit Lakes, and he sat
Speaker 1: there stunned without saying anything for a while, and when
Speaker 1: he finally told his parents, they didn't take it seriously.
Speaker 1: He graduated high school in nineteen eighty six, started collecting
Speaker 1: accounts and eventually put them into a book called The
Speaker 1: Sasquatch in Minnesota. The line of his that I find
Speaker 1: most interesting concerns what the record looked like when he began,
Speaker 1: because he says the published sources at the time listed
Speaker 1: something like nine sidings in the entire state. Nine in
Speaker 1: a state carrying three million acres of national forest. That's
Speaker 1: not a statement about how many of these things are
Speaker 1: out there. It's a statement about how reporting works, because
Speaker 1: what ends up in a database is never what happened.
Speaker 1: It's what happened and then got told to somebody, and
Speaker 1: then got told to somebody who wrote it down and
Speaker 1: then survived. In law enforcement, we called the gap between
Speaker 1: crimes committed and crimes reported the dark figure, and in
Speaker 1: some categories it's enormous. Whatever the dark figure is for
Speaker 1: a man in a Taska county who saw something at
Speaker 1: the edge of a field and then considered his job
Speaker 1: and his marriage, it's not small. Dennis runs a plow
Speaker 1: room and spends a great deal of winter out on ice,
Speaker 1: and in January he came across a line of prints
Speaker 1: crossing a lake in the open where the snow had
Speaker 1: drifted about four inches over glare ice. They were bare
Speaker 1: feet or something like feet, and they ran in a
Speaker 1: single line, with one directly ahead of the next, rather
Speaker 1: than in the side by side pattern a walking person
Speaker 1: leaves behind. He paced the stride out and made it
Speaker 1: well over four feet. He didn't photograph it, and he's
Speaker 1: been asked about that one hundred times since, and his
Speaker 1: answer is that he was on the clock and it
Speaker 1: didn't occur to him until later. He followed the line
Speaker 1: with his eyes as far as he could see it,
Speaker 1: which was most of the way to the far shore,
Speaker 1: and it never turned and never wandered. Whatever had crossed
Speaker 1: that lake had come out of the timber on one
Speaker 1: side and gone into the timber on the other, and
Speaker 1: hadn't stopped anywhere in between to look at anything. Ken
Speaker 1: and his wife ran a small resort operation on the
Speaker 1: Iron Range and spent one October dealing with something that
Speaker 1: had taken an interest in their garbage, which isn't unusual
Speaker 1: in itself, because bears do that every year, and every
Speaker 1: resort in that country has a bear story. What was
Speaker 1: unusual is that whatever it was didn't tear anything. A
Speaker 1: bear proof bin carries a two stage latch that has
Speaker 1: to be lifted and then rotated, and it takes people
Speaker 1: a couple of attempts, and bears defeat those by force,
Speaker 1: which leaves bent metal and claw gouges and a bin
Speaker 1: lying on its side. THEIRS was opened three times over
Speaker 1: nine days, with the latch worked properly, the lid up,
Speaker 1: the contents taken, and the bin standing exactly where it
Speaker 1: had been left. Ken bought a padlock and that ended it.
Speaker 1: What he comes back to is that there was no
Speaker 1: other occupied structure within two miles, that it was October,
Speaker 1: with the seasonal traffic long gone, and that whatever came
Speaker 1: in walked past an unlocked shed holding a chainsaw and
Speaker 1: a generator on three separate nights in order to take garbage.
Speaker 1: Curtis and his son Aaron hunt northeast of Grand Rapids,
Speaker 1: and THEIRS is an account about sound rather than sight.
Speaker 1: At last light, with both of them in a stand,
Speaker 1: something large began moving through frozen brush close by on
Speaker 1: two legs and in a straight line. Deer stop constantly
Speaker 1: four steps, and then standing and listening, and then four more.
Speaker 1: And every hunter knows that rhythm well enough to identify
Speaker 1: it in their sleep. This didn't stop. It held a
Speaker 1: walking pace on a consistent bearing for a long time,
Speaker 1: then quit entirely, then produced nothing at all for several minutes,
Speaker 1: then went back out the same way it had come in.
Speaker 1: Neither of them ever saw a thing. They sat in
Speaker 1: that stand until full dark, because neither one wanted to
Speaker 1: be the first down the ladder, and then they climbed
Speaker 1: out and walked the four hundred yards to the truck together,
Speaker 1: without either of them saying anything about it until they
Speaker 1: were inside with the door shut. Not every report in
Speaker 1: this state arrives in the cold. Nathan's comes off the
Speaker 1: water in the Leech Lake Country from a canoe in
Speaker 1: shirt sleeve weather. While he was rising a bed at
Speaker 1: the far end, where nobody else was working, something started
Speaker 1: moving through the rice off to his left, not walking
Speaker 1: the shoreline, but out in the water and in the
Speaker 1: rice itself, which is chest deep muck and the worst
Speaker 1: possible place for anything heavy to be. What stayed with
Speaker 1: him afterward is that it wasn't waiting, It was pushing through.
Speaker 1: He pulled out and finished the day on a different bed,
Speaker 1: and when he mentioned it at the landing, an older
Speaker 1: man told him which end of that lake not to Rice,
Speaker 1: and Nathan took it for a joke right up until
Speaker 1: he understood it hadn't been offered as one. Rick and
Speaker 1: his brother in law were fishing walleye off a shoreline
Speaker 1: break on Lake Vermilion in June at dusk, close enough
Speaker 1: to the bank to hear what was on it, when
Speaker 1: something began pacing them, holding position on the bank at
Speaker 1: the same speed they were moving, and when they moved,
Speaker 1: it moved, and when they stopped, it stopped, with a
Speaker 1: couple of seconds of brush settling afterward, and then nothing
Speaker 1: at all. They ran that pattern for about a quarter
Speaker 1: mile of shoreline before rick brother in law reeled in
Speaker 1: and said he was finished, and Rick, who says he
Speaker 1: was roughly four seconds from saying the same thing himself,
Speaker 1: started the motor. What neither of them mentioned until the
Speaker 1: drive home was that the pacing had started well before
Speaker 1: either of them noticed it, because they'd both been listening
Speaker 1: to it for some while and had each assumed the
Speaker 1: other had already accounted for it. They fished that lake
Speaker 1: the following week and the week after and simply went
Speaker 1: out deeper. Josh and Eric camp in the Chippewa National
Speaker 1: Forest and theirs is the wood knock, which is the
Speaker 1: most common report in this field nationally, and the one
Speaker 1: I trust least. There was a single knock, distant, like
Speaker 1: a bat striking a tree trunk, and then a few
Speaker 1: minutes later another one from somewhere else entirely, and Josh
Speaker 1: picked up a length of dead birch and hit a
Speaker 1: trunk twice. Two came back at the same interval he'd used.
Speaker 1: Josh knocked a third time and got a third answer,
Speaker 1: and then Eric took the birch out of his hand
Speaker 1: and put it on the ground. Believes to this day
Speaker 1: that somebody was playing with them, and Josh doesn't, and
Speaker 1: the two of them have argued about it every year since,
Speaker 1: without either one moving an inch. Vern spent twenty two
Speaker 1: years driving the same stretch of Iron Range Highway and
Speaker 1: got exactly one road crossing out of all of it.
Speaker 1: His headlights caught something upright, coming up out of the
Speaker 1: left ditch and crossing in front of him, and he
Speaker 1: got on the brakes and it cleared both lanes and
Speaker 1: what felt to him like three steps, and he was
Speaker 1: into the far shoulder before he'd finished processing what was
Speaker 1: in his windshield. He didn't stop. He thought about turning
Speaker 1: around for about a mile and then decided he would
Speaker 1: rather not know, and he drove the remaining eighteen minutes
Speaker 1: to his house, doing well under the limit with both
Speaker 1: hands on the wheel. Whatever he saw, he saw it
Speaker 1: before he had any chance to want to. Kelly camp's
Speaker 1: in the Superior National Forest, and one night something hit
Speaker 1: the lake, maybe thirty feet off the shoreline near her camp,
Speaker 1: and several minutes later another one came in closer. She
Speaker 1: called out, and it stopped. Kelly sat up the rest
Speaker 1: of that night with the fire built high, and didn't
Speaker 1: hear another sound. Randy hunts out of Black Duck and
Speaker 1: found a structure. Three young aspen had been bent over
Speaker 1: and leaned into one another at the tops in a
Speaker 1: rough cone, in a stand where nothing else was down
Speaker 1: and the bases were still rooted and still alive. The
Speaker 1: bend sat high enough that he couldn't reach it standing
Speaker 1: on the ground. He stood underneath it and reached up
Speaker 1: with both arms and came nowhere near the bend, and
Speaker 1: Randy is a shade over six feet. He left it standing.
Speaker 1: He thought about cutting one to look at the brake,
Speaker 1: and decided it wasn't his to cut Tanya was at
Speaker 1: a lake camp in the Superior National Forest in October
Speaker 1: when her head lamp swept the tree line and caught
Speaker 1: reflection two points together, holding steady, and what she fixed
Speaker 1: on was the height, which she puts around seven feet
Speaker 1: off flat ground she'd walked that same afternoon. The color
Speaker 1: is the part she keeps returning to because it came
Speaker 1: back a dull red rather than the greenish whited deer
Speaker 1: the and she'd swept that same tree line with that
Speaker 1: same headlamp every night that week. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. She
Speaker 1: held the beam on it for account of about five
Speaker 1: then the two points went out together and didn't come back.
Speaker 1: Shane runs bear bait north of Hill City, which means
Speaker 1: a barrel chain to a tree, and a barrel chain
Speaker 1: to a tree is a very particular kind of evidence
Speaker 1: because it's a controlled setup with a known weight. He
Speaker 1: came in one August afternoon to refresh it and found
Speaker 1: the barrel forty yards off the tree, lying on its
Speaker 1: side in the brush with the chain unbroken. It had
Speaker 1: been worked off the tree rather than torn off, which
Speaker 1: takes both time and hands. He'd been running bait in
Speaker 1: that country for eleven years and had seen barrels chewed
Speaker 1: rolled and stood on end, and he'd never once seen
Speaker 1: a chain worked off a tree and left lying hole
Speaker 1: in the leaves. The bait was gone, rather than scattered
Speaker 1: around the barrel the way a bear leaves, it hung
Speaker 1: the barrel and hunted that site for two more seasons
Speaker 1: without anything else happening there, And he still runs bear bait,
Speaker 1: and he no longer tells that particular story at the bar.
Speaker 1: Trina lived on a gravel road outside Reamer and waited
Speaker 1: at the end of the driveway with her children for
Speaker 1: the school bus, which in December means standing in the dark.
Speaker 1: One morning, there was something at the tree line across
Speaker 1: the road, and she got both kids into the car
Speaker 1: and sat there with the doors locked and the engine running,
Speaker 1: and watched it until the bus arrived, which she estimates
Speaker 1: at six or seven minutes, and it didn't move once
Speaker 1: in all that time. When the bus pulled up, its
Speaker 1: headlights swung across that tree line and there was nothing
Speaker 1: in them. She drove her children to school herself for
Speaker 1: the remainder of that winter, and took a fair amount
Speaker 1: of grief for it from her husband, who stood at
Speaker 1: the end of that same driveway with her every morning
Speaker 1: for a week afterward and never saw a thing. The
Speaker 1: following spring, he cleared the brush on their side of
Speaker 1: the road back forty feet without being asked and without
Speaker 1: ever saying why. Bud hunted the same forty acres northwest
Speaker 1: of Rimer for better than thirty years and found the
Speaker 1: thing that ended it, which was a deer, or at
Speaker 1: least what was left of one, wedged in the crotch
Speaker 1: of a maple about nine feet off the ground. What
Speaker 1: Bud fixed on was the absence of everything else, because
Speaker 1: there was no claw damage anywhere on the bark going up,
Speaker 1: no drag trail coming in through the leaf litter, and
Speaker 1: no blood at all underneath the tree. Whatever put that
Speaker 1: deer up there had carried it in off the ground
Speaker 1: and lifted it into the crotch, and had done it
Speaker 1: without leaving a mark on the trunk. He hunted a
Speaker 1: different piece of ground the following fall. He still owns
Speaker 1: that forty acres and he's never sold it, but he's
Speaker 1: never hunted it again either. Gary was moose hunting up
Speaker 1: near the gun flint years ago when he got the whistles,
Speaker 1: and the first thing he will say about them is
Speaker 1: that they weren't a bird, and he'd been in that
Speaker 1: country his entire life. It was three notes, descending clean
Speaker 1: out of the black spruce off to his right. He
Speaker 1: whistled back, she now describes as the single stupidest thing
Speaker 1: he's ever done in the woods, and it answered him
Speaker 1: with the same three notes from closer in. He didn't
Speaker 1: whistle a third time. He walked out to the road
Speaker 1: and sat in his truck for a while, and then
Speaker 1: drove into Grand Morey and had a cheeseburger, which is
Speaker 1: a detail he includes every time he tells it. Ronda's
Speaker 1: is the account I'd close on because it's the report
Speaker 1: this state produces more often than any other. She was
Speaker 1: at a cabin near the edge of the Chippewa National
Speaker 1: Forest during a February cold snap, and went out at
Speaker 1: first light to find a line of tracks that came
Speaker 1: out of the tree line, crossed the yard, walked up
Speaker 1: to within ten feet of the back window, stopped there,
Speaker 1: and then turned around and went back out the way
Speaker 1: it had come. The tracks aren't the part that stayed
Speaker 1: with her. What stayed with her is that she'd been
Speaker 1: up in the night, standing at the sink with the
Speaker 1: kitchen light on, looking out at nothing. The historical core
Speaker 1: of all this isn't in dispute and needs nothing supernatural
Speaker 1: in order to be terrible. People starved to death in
Speaker 1: these woods by the family, and some of those families
Speaker 1: ate each other, and that's written down in trading post
Speaker 1: journals and missionary letters and court records across the whole
Speaker 1: northern band of the continent. Some of the survivors were
Speaker 1: killed afterward by their own people, sometimes under a framework
Speaker 1: that named exactly what they'd turned into, and sometimes as
Speaker 1: a flat decision about a person who could no longer
Speaker 1: be trusted around children. The teaching that grew on top
Speaker 1: of all that, the taboo, and the insistence that the
Speaker 1: appetite doesn't leave when the snow does, came from people
Speaker 1: who'd watched the sequence run more than once and needed
Speaker 1: it to stop running. That's the thing the merchandise gets wrong,
Speaker 1: and it gets it wrong in a way that makes
Speaker 1: the story smaller. A monster that eats people for no
Speaker 1: reason is a costume. A monster that starts as somebody
Speaker 1: you know in a camp you're sitting in during a
Speaker 1: winter you're already halfway through. Is a different proposition entirely,
Speaker 1: and the people who built it understood p decisely what
Speaker 1: they were building. Swift Runners Camp was twenty five miles
Speaker 1: from a post with food in it. He walked out
Speaker 1: of those woods in good condition in the spring, and
Speaker 1: the physical facts in that clearing are not a matter
Speaker 1: of anybody's belief. Somebody cracked those bones open. The rest
Speaker 1: of what we have is what people bring out of
Speaker 1: that country and hand over quietly, usually years later, usually
Speaker 1: to somebody they trust, and almost always with the same
Speaker 1: request attached, which is that you not use their last name.
Speaker 1: Ray never worked that section again. Marlus won't use the shortcut.
Speaker 1: Faya's fifty years passed a voice in a yard, and
Speaker 1: it still gets her. At two in the morning, Verna
Speaker 1: gave up a bedroom. Bud gave up forty acres he
Speaker 1: still owns. Gordon signed his share of a hunting camp
Speaker 1: over to his brother's boys and never explained it. And
Speaker 1: Dave sold a shack he'd kept for twenty years. And
Speaker 1: Andrea walks the same trails she always did, and no
Speaker 1: longer walks that one by herself, not one of those people.
Speaker 1: Game thing by telling it. There's one more thing. Go
Speaker 1: back through the swift Runner sources, and you'll find his
Speaker 1: name in every one of them. In four or five spellings.
Speaker 1: You'll find the judge's name. You'll find the name of
Speaker 1: the guard who spoke Kree and talked with him for
Speaker 1: four months, and the name of the old pensioner who
Speaker 1: forgot the straps. The names of the children are not there.
Speaker 1: They aren't in the newspaper coverage, not in the police summaries,
Speaker 1: not in the true crime retellings, not in the podcast versions,
Speaker 1: and not in this one, because I looked for two
Speaker 1: days and couldn't find them. There were six children, or
Speaker 1: there were five, since the sources can't agree even on that.
Speaker 1: There was a woman who was his wife, and there
Speaker 1: was a woman who was either his mother or his
Speaker 1: mother in law, and there was a brother. Eight people
Speaker 1: more or less, and the more or less is the
Speaker 1: entire point. The tradition holds that the wind to go
Speaker 1: eats its own family, is never satisfied, and grows in
Speaker 1: exact proportion to what it takes. Whatever happened in that
Speaker 1: camp during the winter of eighteen seventy eight, the record
Speaker 1: we assembled afterward did precisely the same thing. It ate
Speaker 1: the family and kept the man, and it's been feeding
Speaker 1: him to audiences for one hundred and forty seven years,
Speaker 1: and he's still the only person in that clearing whose
Speaker 1: name anybody remembers. Next stop, we head south and east,
Speaker 1: but just in case, you should bring a coat anyway,
Speaker 1: Di Bo