Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety six, twenty years after graduating from college,
Roger reconnected with a former roommate in an adjacent state.
His friend had always been interested in ghosts and had
joined a ghost hunting club. He invited Roger to join
his club on a hunt in Beaver Creek State Park
in Ohio. Roger was excited to go. There are no
cities in the area, only a few small towns. The
woods are thick, and they're famous among ghost hunters for
a variety of alleged haunted places. On the weekend of
the excursion, Roger packed a sleeping bag and drove from
southwest Michigan to Beaver Creek State Park to meet up
with the group. He had never had a paranormal experience
in his life. While his former college roommate was sensitive
and could detect changes in the ambience when ghosts were around,
Roger was as insensitive as they come. He is a
scientist by profession and was a skeptic of the group,
they pitched their tents and ate their dinner and cooked
over a campfire, and the group relaxed with the preparatory
chores for ghost hunting. There were a couple of techies
among the group. One fellow wielded an EMF meter, which
supposedly spikes when paranormal forces are nearby. However, it will
also detect electrical lines in a building. Another fellow was
handed a digital thermometer, because ghosts allegedly create coal spots
as they suck up the thermal energy to fuel their activity.
There were several polaroid cameras in the group, as well
as a few electronic cameras. Orbs that many don't see
with the neked eye can often be captured on camera,
though naysayers attribute them to lights scattered by dust, fog,
or even insects. There was also an infrared video camera
in the group, which was rare and expensive in nineteen
ninety six. The infrared camera detects heat sources and displays
these in false color, in this case orange. Somewhere in
the group there was an electronic voice phenomenon recorder. It
creates a background of white noise over which recordings are made,
and playbacks often include faint, ghostly voices answering questions or
worse yet, threatening intruders. Deniers say that such voices are
caused by auditory periodolia. Now paradolia is when the brain
is presented with something that can't quite figure out, and
it interprets it as a common object. This is the
phenomenon behind people seeing faces in burnt toast and hearing
music voices when a fan is running. The white noise
creates interference that confuses the brain into generating words from
what is otherwise and nonsensical input. The group was camped
along the edge of the forest, and as they sat
around the campfire, eating marshmallows and exchanging stories and waiting
for dark, they heard a noise in the nearby woods.
Out of nowhere, a man broke through the clearing and
then he asked if we had heard or seen anything.
We just heard you, they said. He reached into his
pocket and pulled out a business card with information about
his bigfoot hunting club. So, not to be outdone, Roger's
friend pulled a business card from his pocket with information
about his ghost hunting group. The interloper explained that Beaver
Creek State Park is a hotbed of bigfoot activity, and
the officers of the ghost hunting club said the area
was also well known for its hauntings. The tracker wished
us luck and proceeded to his group camp several spots
away from us. After he was out of earshot, several
of the ghost hunting group joked about the crazy bigfoot hunters,
but they were self aware enough to comment that his
group was probably laughing about the silly ghost hunters. Well,
darkness fell and the fires were put out, and the
group assembled for the hunt. The first order of business
was to visit a lock where supposedly the face of
a woman is visible in the window of one of
the buildings. She was buried somewhere in the embankment along
one of the locks, which is allegedly haunted. Afterward, they
drove to the area haunted by Simon Kenton, a man
captured by the natives and held near another lock. He escaped,
but his spirit is supposed to appear near the lock,
and Kenton's ghost is also reported to haunt several other
areas in Ohio, separated by hundreds of miles. His spirit
apparently gets around. The moon had not risen and it
was pitch black in the dense forest. The group walked
through unbroken, brushy terrain without trails. Roger felt a hard,
flat rock under his foot, and he stopped abruptly and
looked ahead with his flashlight and saw that he had
come to an abandoned lock with a drop off twelve
feet straight down just under his feet. He was lucky
not to have become one of the ghosts of Beaver Creek.
The group carefully returned to their cars and drove to
find the ghost of gangster pretty Boy Floyd. Word had
it that he did not like being called pretty boy,
and that calling him by that name might rile his spirit,
but no amount of insults got him to show up
that night. The night had been uneventful up until that point.
There was lots of speculation, several cases of things people
heard or may have heard, but mostly quiet until they
arrived at the cemetery. It was large for a private cemetery,
with maybe seventy five graves, many of them dating back
to the early eighteen hundreds, and some of them were
more recent. There was a little moonlight by now, but
not much. People were looking for orbs when the fellow
with the infrared VCR excitedly whispered to the group, come
here and look. His display showed light reflected from tombstones.
Moths could be easily identified, but the air above the
cemetery contained a number of bright rubber band shaped images,
expanding and contracting from about two feet around to six
feet long, floating and moving just over the group's head.
One suddenly expanded and dove into a grave mound and
it was gone. Another dove into a headstone and it vanished.
Another emanated from a different grave and joined the group
floating along. These shapes were clearly not insects, dust, or
lens flares, and Roger could provide no logical explanation. The
group watched this display for thirty minutes before calling it
a night, and they arrived back at camp at three am. Fortunately,
they saw no signs of bigfoot. Roger was almost swallowed
by a dry canal, which taught him a lesson about
wandering off the path in the forest late at night,
and he saw paranormal activity for which he had no explanation. Now,
Roger's a little old now to be driving hundreds of
miles and staying up most of the night to hunt ghost,
but he still remains mystified. By that night. In the
cemetery in the backwoods of Ohio, I worked in a
restricted area in the Nevada Desert. The place was to
be perfectly candid, full of strangeness, like clockwork, something weird,
what happened all too often. I spent six years at
this place, working exclusively at night, training to be an
excellent observer and reporter. Learning to track individuals and estimate
ranges at night quickly taught me how the mind can
distort details even when the memory is fresh. Even unwitting
observers tend to exaggerate details unless they discipline their minds
as the brain struggles to fill the gaps. Knowing about
these breaches and our being, I learned to cut fat
from the reporting and deliver frank, unexaggerated facts. On my
first night out there, during my orientation of the area,
several of our security patrols got into a chase with
a small ball of bright shining light. It was the
size of a vehicle headlight, but interestingly, it did not
seem to illuminate the desert around it. It didn't pose
a recognizable threat. It just ran along the edge of
the perimeter before taking a thirty degree turn to the
left and shooting off into the darkness over a stretch
of terrain impossible for our military vehicles to follow at
such high speeds. I watched the race ensue from a
hilltop looking down a long part of our vast perimeter.
Years later, a partner and I were posted on what
we called an exterior patrol. These were patrols on the
outermost perimeter that intercepted anyone who inadvertently or purposefully approached
our location. We often got lost ATV riders or dirt
bike riders who'd be in for a shock of their
lives as a heavily armed patrol intercepted them and escorted
them away. Anyone who has served around aircraft in the
military has heard the old tales about grimlins, the tiny
creatures allegedly attracted to aircraft and bombs, often blamed for
all manner of mishaps. Personally, I was not a believer,
but that night, something strange really happened. It was one
point thirty on a very still, quiet desert evening. My
partner and I had just part near a hot pad
full of ordnance waiting to be loaded onto an aircraft
when we heard a clear, distinct whistle. By then, I'd
spent several years working twelve hour night shifts and was
familiar with the wildlife in the area, so this whistle
stood out as more than peculiar, but since neither of
us had been trained to jump to a fantastic conclusions,
we decided it was likely an odd bird and we
ignored it. Shortly after that, we heard the whistle again,
and we decided to check it out. We got out
of the vehicles and approached the hot pad, hearing the
whistle once again, only this time from within the tall,
stacked rows of ordnance. It had sort of a melodic tone,
well within the range of what I would expect a
bird to be capable of producing, yet extremely peculiar. At
the same time, the whistle kept sounding like it was
moving deeper within the ordinance, either fleeing from us as
we approached, or perhaps luring us in. By this point,
weird had become a workable staple, and this ranked extremely
low on the scale of strangeness, so we didn't think
much of it. It was nothing more than a curious
diversion for two very bored troopers, so I told my
partner to move along the perimeter of the hot pad
towards the rear while I plunged into the rows of
stacked equipment to investigate on my own. I figured if
it was an animal, I would inevitably flush it out
the other side and my partner would get a very
clear view of it through night vision, and then settled
the mystery. As I moved along the rose, with the
whistling continued always ahead of me. I cleared the rose
on the other side of where my partner had been waiting,
but he had seen nothing exit the pad. Much to
our surprise, we heard the whistle again, this time from
a small way into the desert. Whatever it was had
slept right past my partner, unheard and unseen. He shrugged
it off as yet another strange peculiarity of our work environment.
Until we returned to our vehicle, we heard the whistle
again from the hot pad. It wasn't a particularly scary situation.
It was just perplexing, and it called to mind the
rumors of grimlins that loved to play pranks on air
crews and bomb guy since World War II. We remained
in the area just to make sure this thing wasn't
a threat to the equipment, but eventually the whistling stopped
and the night remained quiet. A year before I received
my honorable discharge, I was once more on an exterior
patrol where most of the weird stuff happened. A patrol
in the inner perimeter reported they had spotted vehicle headlights
on a nearby mountain. Now this wasn't a strange occurrence.
People would inadvertently wander into our outermost security perimeters from
time to time without realizing it. Most of the time,
we just sat quietly and observed, and only moved to
intercept if they were heading straight for us. It was
best not to draw attention to ourselves or our location.
My partner and I drove to a bluff from which
we could observe the approaching headlights and quickly move to
intercept them if we needed to. Upon arriving, I verified
the headlights. They were clearly visible about two miles away
on the gentle slope of a nearby mountain. In the
night vision, I could even see the headlights bouncing up
and down, illuminating the ground sporadically, the way a truck
would on a bumpy road. It began to draw near
enough to cause some concern. We started thinking we'd soon
have to move to a blocking position, and then the
headlights suddenly went out. Knowing the terrain, I understood that
the vehicle had yet to enter a series of waddies
where it could have slipped out of sight. So the
headlight suddenly going dark made my alarm bells ring. Clearly
it was somebody who knew what he was approaching and
did not want to be seen. We would occasionally get
curious ofvilians coming too close looking for a thrill or
for alien spacecraft, but our greatest concern was intelligence gathering
by foreign agents. We called in asking for a powerful
infrared camera mounted on a tall to begin scanning the mountain.
While it got to work, I used our own thermals
a night vision, quickly moving to a blocking position. The
situation had become a legitimate security concern. We received back
up from a canine unit, and several patrols had taken
up positions on high ground to observe the desert and
gain a better vantage point. For a few long minutes,
we saw and heard nothing, and the dog did not
indicate once that it had detected anything. And then suddenly,
over the radio, one of the inner patrols called out
a bright colored light directly at our three o'clock, several
hundred meters away, moving slowly toward us. We turned to
our attention in that direction, yet we saw and heard nothing,
despite the desert being relatively flat with nothing blocking our view.
Shortly after that, a second patrol called out a second light,
this time at our twelve o'clock, several hundred meters away
and moving toward us as well. Once more, we saw
and heard absolutely nothing, and the dog never once detected anything.
Shortly after the second call, a panic patrolman called out
a third light, this time to our nine o'clock, and
again we couldn't see it. At this point I felt
a bit of fear. Something invisible and soundless was moving
toward our position. My security commander requested that I switch
radio channels where we could talk openly and clearly. I
remember his words to this day, Hey, Bud, Yeah, I
don't know what's going on, but I can see them
and they're coming straight at you. That was unsettling, to
say the least, and I immediately ordered the guys with
me to ready their weapons. My partner had attached an
M two three grenade launcher, and I ordered him to
stick one in the barrel. If these things coming at
us were vehicles, they were threatening to run over us.
The three of us faced to our threes nine and twelves,
but the dog along with this handler on the nine position.
Still we heard and saw nothing. The dog wasn't picking
up anything. Another panic call came over the radio from
a patrolman saying the lights were almost on top of us.
We waited, We prepared for the action to break out
at any second, when I realized the lights should have
been on top of us by now, and not only that,
it had been several minutes since we had heard a
single radio call. The other guys all seemed to be
thinking the same thing, so I called over the radio
back to security control and got no response. We tried
our backup channel and all three of our radios, but
got nothing. We waited and watched for another minute until
I found only made a command decision to head back
to the vehicles, deciding it was more important to re
establish radio contact than to sit in the desert trying
to find ghosts. Now, this is where time got weird.
When we finally re established radio contact a long while later,
we were told to immediately head to our security control
center and meet our commander. I can't go into details
of the briefing, but to make a long story short,
he confirmed the lights, confirmed that everyone had seen them
converge on our position, and that we had been out
of radio contact for much longer than we realized. Not minutes,
he clarified it was nearly an hour. Not long before
I left the military, we held training exercises every night
to keep our tracking and facility assault skills sharp in
case we ever had to track down in an intruder
or retake a facility from a hostile force. This would
typically last half an hour to several hours if it
were a true manhaunt exercise, which was by far my favorite.
On this particular night, however, we undertook a fairly simple
facility assault exercise, using a training structure specifically made for this.
Given the sensitive nature of the materials we guarded, our
policy was to have a fifteen man assault force ready
and actively retaking a structure within five minutes of an alarm,
no matter where the alarm was. Part of this assault
included the actual assault team, which would clear the facility
and exterior security to watch the team's back. This included
two separate machine gun teams who would set up on
overwatched positions somewhere they could see large swaths of the
desert around us. In case, the bad guys were planning
to ambush our assault team from behind out in the
dark desert night. This night's exercise went by the numbers.
Our assault team was ready to penetrate within two and
a half minutes of alarm activation when suddenly one of
our overwatching its called in that they had two individuals
on their thermal imaging. The individuals were lying prone fifty
meters behind us out in the desert, and their heat
signature was clear as day against the cool desert ground.
Nothing stops or recapture assault, so the exterior security repositioned
while the assault team prepared to make entry. When our commander,
who was supervising the training, called an immediate halt to
the exercise. I was the onseen commander of responding forces.
He called me over and told me in a deathly
serious tone, I don't have any guys out there, and
this is real world, and then he barked orders for
a sweeping element to be formed. We initiated a real
world's security penetration, which created an absolute crap storm of
consequences for our poor security controller, who had to immediately
notify all manner of military and federal authorities. Then we
set up a sweeping element consisting of twelve individuals arranged
in a long line. Our plan was to push toward
the contacts out in the desert and flush them out.
Our overwatching patrol, who had originally spotted the individuals on
their thermals, were our only eyes on the potential hostiles.
Let me tell you nothing feels worse than advancing toward
two potential hostiles you can't see, knowing you are a
perfectly silhouetted target. We'd been trained to walk chest forward
so that if we took around, it would strike the
plate on our armored vest, and as I had numerous
times before in my career, I found myself praying that
whoever this was would shoot center mass like a good boy.
I suppose if this had been a Hollywood film, we
would have been moving quickly through the desert, gung ho
and ready for a fight. But real life is different.
We had a saying slow is smooth, and smooth as
fast it meant. We moved with purpose, but carefully, valuing
accuracy and mobility over haste. You can't hit the broad
side of a barn if you're rushing like an idiot,
especially when it's a nighttime in the wilderness, and you
can't see what you're supposed to be engaging, and that
was also our problem. We couldn't see what we were
after the terrain heavily favored the two individuals hiding in it,
and it was thick with bushes and tumbleweeds. Only our
overwatching machine gun team with the high ground had a
clear line of sight to them. Even our thermals were
useless because of all the vegetation in the way. As
we moved toward the targets, our o watch patrol reported
that the two individuals had lain on the ground and
were slowly sliding backward, reacting to our movements. The handheld
thermals at the time were good, but from that distance
they could only make out a vague man like shape
and provided few clear details. Aside from the fact that
the figures clearly had two arms and two legs, there
was no way to tell whether they were carrying equipment,
if they were armed, or who or what they might be.
I got nervous when our overwatch called out that we
were only twenty meters away and yet we still couldn't
see a thing. And then the figures suddenly disappeared. They
didn't run or cross somewhere that blocked the line of
sight to the thermal unit or disguised their heat signature.
They just straight up disappeared. They blinked right out of existence.
As far as the heat sensitive thermal unit was concerned.
The news hit the sweeping l like a lightning bolt,
but we pressed on nonetheless. When we finally reached the
exact location where our overwatch had last spotted the individuals,
our own thermals confirmed residual heat on the ground from
two warm bodies having been pressed against it for several minutes.
Whatever or whomever the machine gun team had spotted was real.
We spent the rest of the night conducting an exhaustive
search but found nothing. None of our perimeter alarms had
ever been triggered, and we had three different alarm systems
forming a wall of detection that was completely impenetrable. Surprisingly,
we were never officially debriefed on the incident, and the
Air Force Office of Special Investigations wasn't contacted either. As
far as I'm aware, It's almost as if everyone in
a vast chain of responsibility ignored what happened after it
was reported. Now, this was incredibly perplexing to me, to
say the least. Now, back in the early two thousands,
ELKED funding request showed the military was interested in pursuing
technology to create life like hologround projections, which could in
turn be used for psychological warfare. The document explicitly stated
that things such as religious events could be staged to confuse, confound,
and terrify the enemy. Now, while I can't find this document,
I did find a twenty seventeen document from the US
Army Research Laboratory touching on the use of holography on
the future battlefield. I believe that at least some of
the events we experienced were tests of classified psychological warfare weapons.
The practice is not new to the military, which has
routinely used its own troops, either wittingly or unwittingly, to
test news and non lethal weapons. And who better to
test these things on than the people responsible for providing
security for some of the most important materials in the nation,
And in my opinion, this explains many UFO sightings and
the like experienced around military facilities. I also say this
was some personal proof that this technology already exists. One night,
while approaching our work site, I very clearly saw for
two or three seconds a massive American flag projected onto
the side of a nearby mountain. The image was not
just massive insize, spanning the entire side of the mountain
facing US, but also crystal clear, as if an actual
enormous American flag had been draped over the mountain side.
It wasn't faded or diluted as a projection tends to
be when projection reaches along dists. This to me seem
like an active demonstration of a very secret holographic projecting technology.
I'm okay with that explanation. I prefer non paranormal explanations,
since more often than not, what seems paranormal to someone
is just their senses deceiving them. Now, trust me, I've
seen the phenomenon at work many times, and I know
just how bad eyewitnesses are. However, there are other genuine
events that I cannot rationally explain. Could I buy that
some sort of secret US dealth tech was being tested
against us by two individuals on that night, and that
it can somehow defeat total body thermal radiation? Sure, I guess.
But can I believe that these individuals then easily evaded
an attire security sweep and exited the area with a
highly trained team just meters away. That's a lot harder
for me to swallow. I'm also unable to explain my
missing time that night with the lights so long ago. Sadly,
as my events occurred in a highly restricted area while
serving in the military, I'd appreciate my identity being kept confidential.
I am still under a thirty year non disclosure contract,
and believe me, I take my duty to my country seriously,
and that includes keeping its secrets. My name is Sam Carter,
and I didn't kill my friends. I know that's how
this starts for everyone like me, But if you're still reading,
you're the kind of person who at least lets the
story finish before deciding. That's all I'm asking. You need
to understand something before I tell you about that night.
Me and Lena. We weren't supposed to exist in the
same world. I grew up in foster care, house to house,
name to name, never stayed long enough anywhere to feel
like I belonged. I learned early not to get attached
to anything you couldn't carry in a trash bag. By
the time I aged out and was emancipated, I knew
how to work, how to keep my head down, and
how not to expect anything good to last. Lena was
the opposite of that in every way. Her dad. People
around her called him the old King, money stack so
high it didn't even look real anymore. Land and wells
and trucks and men working under him and all that.
Lena grew up in a world where doors opened before
she touched them. I grew up in one where they
stayed locked. We met anyway didn't make sense to anyone else,
but it didn't matter to us. He hated me. Her
father didn't even try to hide it to him. I
was exactly what I looked like, nothing from nowhere, no
business day, next to his daughter. He told her that
more than once, and he told me once to But
Lena didn't care. That was the thing about her. When
she chose something, she chose it all the way. So
we had plans, real plans, not just talk. I was
saving for a ring, even had the ring picked out.
I was just waiting for the right moment. The trip
to Broken Bowl was supposed to be good for all
of us, one last quiet weekend before life started pulling
everybody in different directions. Mark was talking about moving to Dallas.
Jesse wanted to start real estate classes. Caleb and Torre
were still new enough in love that they acted like
the rest of us disappeared when they looked at each other.
And Lena. Lena just wanted peace for a little while.
No family pressure, no fighting with her dad, no expectations,
just woods, music, few beers, and a few nights where
she could pretend life was simple. Three years ago, the
six of us went out to the cabin near Broken Bow, Oklahoma.
There were three couples a weekend that was supposed to
be nothing more than a break from everything. The first
day felt perfect. The cabin sat deep in the trees
near a shallow creek with cold water running over smooth stones.
There was an old fire pit in front and a
stack of chopped wood and a rested horseshoe nailed above
the porch door. The place looked old enough to have
stories already living inside it. We spent most of the
first afternoon hiking trails behind the cabin, taking pictures and
throwing rocks in the creek. Mark and Jess kept sneaking
off from the group every chance they got. Caleb and
Torre stayed close together the whole time. Their hands locked
like they were scared of getting separated, and Lena stayed
beside me. She was always beside me. At one point
we stopped near a clearing where the trees opened up
just enough for sunlight to hit the ground. There were
BlackBerry bushes growing there, and Lena started picking them off
the branches and tossing them at me. I remember thinking,
I've never seen her look more relaxed. That's the part
that hurts the most now, knowing she was happy before
all of this happened. Later that evening, we cooked outside,
and we drank too much, and we played music through
a cheap speaker. Everybody loosened up after dark, just danced
barefoot of the dirt, and Mark tried singing old country
songs horribly on purpose. Even Lena laughed hard enough. She
snorted once and got embarrassed about it. I'd give anything
to hear that sound again. But sometime after midnight things changed.
First it was footsteps. They were heavy out beyond the firelight.
They weren't quick, they weren't nervous or slow. They were measured.
Lena heard it before anyone else. She looked toward the trees,
and whispered saying, that's not right. I told her it
was probably a deer. I was lying. The next morning
we found trash ripped apart outside the cabin. Wasn't scattered
like raccoons got into it. It was just torn apart,
and one of the coolers had deep scratches across the lid,
four long grooves carved through the plastic. They were deep
and they were clean. That afternoon we hiked farther down
the creek. That's where we found the tracks. They were huge,
they were wide. They were wrong. Mark joked about Bigfoot.
Nobody really laughed, because standing there, looking at those prints
in the mud, something deep inside of all of us
already knew we were not alone out there. On the
second night, it circled us, slow and deliberate, like it
was learning us, and then it hit the wall hard
enough to shake the whole cabin. Nobody slept after that.
We sat in the living room pretending to watch movies
while every sound outside made us jump. At one point,
Caleb swore he saw something move between the trees near
the porch light. Said it was tall. It was too tall.
We should have left, but we didn't. The third night,
that's when they came. The door didn't break, it came
off the hinges. It stood there. It was tall. It's
too tall, too wide, too calm, and it wasn't alone.
You could feel the others outside moving and waiting. The
smell hit us first. It was wet fur, like something
rotten and mixed with mud, like something had lived underground
too long. Mark ran straight at it and he didn't
even think. He grabbed the fireplace poker and he swung
it hard, and the thing caught it out of the air,
like it knew what he was trying to do before
he did it. And then it hit him once. Mark
flew sideways into the wall, hard enough to crack the
wood behind him. Jes screamed. Something came through the window
behind her, and glass exploded across the room. There was
a second, one smaller than the first, but faster, and
it grabbed her around the waist and dragged her backward
through the broken window frame. I could still hear her
screaming Mark's name out in the trees, and then there
was nothing. Everything fell apart after that, screaming and running
and furniture breaking and things crashing in the walls. Caleb
stabbed one with a hunting knife near the kitchen. I
know he hit it. I saw the blade go in.
The thing barely reacted. It just looked down at him,
almost confused. And then it grabbed Caleb by the throat
with one hand and lifted him off the floor. Tory
tried to pull him free. Another came from nowhere and
slammed her across the counter so hard dishes exploded everywhere.
There were too many of them, and that's what people
don't understand. This wasn't one creature. There were shapes moving
past every window, more sounds outside, heavy footsteps circling the cabin.
They were watching and waiting, like they were coordinated. I
grabbed Lena and ran toward the back bedroom. I shoved
the window open, and cold air rushed inside, and I
started helping her through. And something grabbed her and she
screamed my name, and I caught her wrist and I
held on. I held on with everything I had, and
it pulled and I was pulling back, and then another
one grabbed her legs, two of them, pulling her away
from me. I remember seeing her fingers slipped through mine.
I remember her crying. I remember blood covering both of
our hands, and I felt her skin tear under my fingers.
I told her not to let go, and she didn't.
I let go, or maybe I just wasn't strong enough.
The last thing I saw before they dragged her into
the dark was her reaching back towards me, still trying
to hold on. They found me the next morning, a
mile from the cabin. I was barefoot and covered in blood.
Most of it wasn't mine. They said I killed them,
said I sniped, made it all up. I just stopped arguing.
It didn't matter until recently. Three years and two months
after that night, they found a body three hundred and
sixty seven miles away. At first, they weren't even sure
it was Lena. There wasn't much left to identify, not
enough for anyone to say it out loud. And then
the DNA came back and it was her. And there
was something else, something they didn't expect, something they couldn't explain,
evidence that she had given birth three years. Do you
understand what I'm telling you. Lena didn't die that night.
She was alive for a long time after they took her,
and she wasn't alone. Last week, her father came to
see me first time since the trial. He sat out
across from me like he didn't recognize me anymore, didn't
say a word, just play something on the table. It
was her ring, the one I gave her, the one
she was wearing that night, and he looked at me
and for the first time he didn't look angry. He said,
I don't think you did this, and then he left.
So now I'm writing you because if there were more
than one of them, and there were, then this isn't over.
They don't just kill you, They take you. And whatever
took Lena kept her and something out there is still
alive because of it. Okay, I've selected a couple of
stories that are about five minutes long each from the vault.
They were done about five years ago, and I thank
you guys. If you're new to the podcast, she'll enjoy them.
So here we go. When I was five years old,
my brother and I would stay with my grandmother during
the summer Hot Springs, Arkansas. I slept on a pull
out couch in the living room. This event happened when
I was four years old in nineteen seventy nine. I'm
forty five years old now, and people might say this
event was a child's imagination, but I know what I
saw was real, and to this day, I still believe
it was real. Every time this occurred, it was well
past midnight when everyone was sleeping, including me. The first time,
it was as if I felt something watching me in
my brain woke me up. The second time this happened,
I was convinced it was waking me up with telepathy.
Now I can't be sure why I woke up, but
that's how it felt. In the middle of the night,
I would wake up and look out the front door.
I know I didn't wake up because of any noise,
and there was no reason for me to wake up,
which is why I mentioned telepathy. Every time I woke up,
I always looked straight at the door. The door had
three little windows in it. I never saw a face,
but it had long, silky hair covering it. It reminded
me of cousin it. The hair was light colored and
it never moved. The first time, I stared at this
thing for almost a minute, and then I ran to
my grandmother's room and told her that something was watching
me at the door. I don't know how long the
time was between those occurrences, but the second time it happened.
I felt myself waking up, and before I opened my
eyes this time, I knew it was happening again. As
I opened my eyes, there it was. I looked again
for a few moments and ran to my grandmother and
told her that the thing was back looking at me.
I know my grandparents never went to investigate because they
thought it was my imagination. On the third occurrence, I
did not spend time looking at it. As soon as
I saw it, I just booked it to Grandma's room.
After some time, Grandpa placed the door with one without
little windows. Well. I was happy about that, but there
was a window right behind the pullout couch. That made
me more afraid because in my mind, that thing would
now be directly behind me and closer to me. However,
it never happened again. It was only those three times.
The years went by, and I have listened to other
people's stories, but none ever described a bigfoot that looked
like mine. My grandmother told me that because my dad
lived in the area, it might have been him. I
knew it wasn't him, but I asked him anyway. He
told me that he would never scare me like that.
I then knew for sure that it wasn't him. After
reading one person's account, she justified my story by saying
Bigfoot tends to walk around the house at night and
look in the windows. Well, I shared that with my
husband and I said, see, not everyone believes in Bigfoot,
but he believes that I believe. I've always wanted to
share my story with the bigfoot community, but none ever
felt right until today when I stumbled across your YouTube channel.
I may not have submitted my story if it wasn't
for the fact of how the man described how Bigfoot looked.
The way he described the hair was the closest anyone
has come to My own story, and it was set
in Arkansas. It was the story of the eight year
old boy whose dad worked at night, and after dinner
he went outside to sit on the porch while his
mom and sister were inside doing the dishes, and by
the light of the kitchen window, he saw a frog
and looked up to see Bigfoot at the fence line.
His sister came out and then his mom pulled them
back in the house. So there you have it. That's
my story, and I have never told anyone outside my family.
My name is Holly and I now live in Michigan,
which has a ton of Bigfoot stories all its own.
A few years ago, my wife and I were living
in Laneville, Texas, which is located twelve miles south of
Henderson on farm to market Route two twenty five. My
wife loves gardens, and we always had a chicken pin.
Our adult children enjoy the garden produce and the fresh
eggs from our hens. We lived this way for many years,
and we had moved there in nineteen eighty one and
had no intention of ever going back to the big city.
The event that I'm writing about happened in twenty fifteen,
and it signaled the end of our chicken business. Each morning,
I would walk down to the chicken pin that was
one hundred and fifty feet behind our house. After I
fed the chickens and checked their water, I headed back
to the house to eat my own breakfast. I had guns,
but I never carried one around our own property. At
that time, we had a terrier named Buffy, who went
everywhere we did, and in her whole life, had never
shown any inclination to be afraid of anything. But on
this day, I was in the middle of my chores
when Buffy stopped dead still. She was fixed on something
beyond the tree line behind the chicken pen, and the
hair on her neck and back stood straight up. Buffy
was frozen in place and didn't move a single muscle,
and I shifted my gaze to the tree line, and
what I saw caught my breath. I knew I was
looking at something I had never seen before. This thing
apparently had been walking just outside the tree line, and
it stopped when we did. It seemed to be the
size of a wolf. Its hide was light gray, and
there wasn't a single hair on its body. Its rear
legs made it appear as though it could easily walk
on all fours or stand upright like a man. The
tail was the same length of its body, and from
where I stood, it looked like a dog until it turned,
revealing the head that looked more like a feeline than
a canine, with a similar short, pointed ears. The eyes
were something unworldly. They were bright blue, and the thing
just bored into us with them for about fifteen seconds,
showing no sign of fear, and they then turned and
walked to the woods and out of sight. I tried
to make sense of what I had just witnessed. As
I hurried and tossed the chicken feed into the pen,
I realized Buffy had already tailed it back to the
house ahead of me. Over breakfast, I told my wife
about the encounter, and from that day on where Buffy
would not go near the chicken pin unless she was
with me, and even then she stayed behind me, always
watching the woods. I did too. It's strange how random
things can suddenly make sense once you see a connection.
A few weeks later, a feral dog got into the
pen and was trying to kill a chicken. I was
going to gather eggs, and ever since the strange encounter
that day, I had begun carrying a rifle with me.
I shot the dog and got a shovel and dug
a hole behind the pen. The dog was the size
of a large collie and must have weighed eighty five pounds.
I had to drag the carcass to the hole and
roll it in, and after burying the dog and securing
the pin, I went back to the house and that
was the end of it, or so we thought. Two
days later, while feeding the chickens, I noticed something odd
behind the pen, and I walked around to have a
look see, and what I found was a hole two
feet across right where I had buried the dead dog,
and the carcass was gone. There were no drag marks,
so whatever it was, it was big enough to pull
the body up out of the dirt and carry it
off without leaving a trail. I searched all over the
back of our property and never found anything that would
suggest some sort of scavenger was at work. My wife
and I were the only ones who knew what I
had buried back there. The next morning, when I went
to feed the chickens, it looked like a crime scene.
They were all dead and their headless remained scattered about
the pen. The rooster had been tossed twenty feet from
the ground into the top of a presimoned tree. Oddly,
given the scale of the carnage, there was not a
single drop of blood anywhere. The gate was latched, and
there was no hole in the fence or signs of
something that had gained entry by digging under the fence.
But the killer had left some evidence behind the pen
were footprints and deep gouges made by three long claws
we estimated to be two and a half inches long.
I drove over to my neighbor's house and I asked
him to have a look at the tracks. That he
was an expert hunter who was born and raised in
the area, but even he was stumped at his suggestion.
We called a friend of his who was a constable
and another longtime resident. He looked at the tracks, and
he examined the dead chickens, and he made a once
over of the pen and noted the dead rooster still
dangling in the tree. His advice to us was to
not go out of the house at night without a
gun until we found out what this chicken killer was.
And when I revealed what Buffy and I had experienced,
he nodded his head and never questioned a single word.
From then on until the day we moved away, I
carried a gun everywhere I went on the property. We
did not replace our chickens.