Speaker 1: I'm from southeast Texas and my encounter happened on land
bordering the Big Thicket National Preserve along the Netches River.
You described the swamplands of this area in Steve Lilly
Number thirteen. My encounter happened forty miles away in a
small town called Spurger. I've been in the woods hunting
and fishing all my life and never had a strange
occurrence until twenty twenty four. During the deer season. It
was both seasons in December, and I was spending as
much time in the woods as I could. It was
a rare year when it snowed here in our area,
and I wanted to bag a deer. I slept out
into the woods at two PM and started walking to
a big flat that I knew of where I thought
some deer and hogs might be. And when I got there,
the woods were dead silent. I didn't think much of it,
so I just sat down and I waited. Fifteen minutes later,
maybe one hundred yards away, on the other side of
the flat, I caught movement and I READI my Mossberg
Model five hundred. I assumed I was looking at a
hog because it was low to the ground and dark
reddish brown. All of a sudden, this thing stood up
on two legs. It was at least eight feet tall,
and I was petrified. I had always believed in bigfoot
and had listened to your podcast, but I couldn't believe
one was standing right in front of me, only one
hundred yards away. Just when I thought the creature was
about to leave, I heard a loud whoop to my right.
Then I watched the creature in front of me lean
his head back, cup his mouth and whooped back. This
scared the crap out of me, and I started running.
I'm a state qualifier in the one mile run on
the track and in the three point two mile run
across country, but I haven't ever run as fast as
I did in those woods that day. I made it
to my four wheeler and I left, and I have
never been back since. Thanks for listening to my story.
I'm a huge fan. Thank you man. Thank you for
being a fan and sending the letter in. This is
a teenage boy who sent this in. I thought this
was a good story. Thank you very much, sir. All right,
all right, welcome to the podcast. I appreciate you clicking
on the video. I really do appreciate it. Got a
couple of things to say here. First, my brother works
with a man. I was in my brother's office not
too long ago, and this guy said are you Are
you Cam Buckner And I said yeah. He said, you
tell those stories on YouTube and a podcast, don't you.
I said yeah. He said, my grandfather listens to your
podcast as much as he can, really likes it. And
I said, well, what's his name? He told so I
wanted to say hi to Lynn Cornelius. Lynn is a
champion archer. He's about my age, and he's had to
put down shooting a bow because he's got back problems.
And I hear he's gonna have to have his knee
replaced pretty soon. I don't do this hardly ever. I
don't say hi to people like you know, there's I
don't know, I just don't think of it or whatever.
But this man lives right here in my town. I
want to say hi to Lynn. I haven't met Lynn,
but I hope to meet him someday. Anyway, Lynn, thanks
for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate you. Okay.
The other thing I wanted to tell y'all is or
ask you have y'all tried the new hamburger at McDonald's
called the Big Arch. I'm not a big McDonald's fan.
I kind of like their fish sandwiches. I like their
French fries. My wife likes the frape's, the caramel frape.
She's a freak for those things. She loves them. But
she's like me, she doesn't really care for the food.
But I had to try that Big Arch not too
long ago, and it just didn't do anything for me.
I mean, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't that great.
I'm a Burger King guy. I love a double whopper
with cheese. Also like a Wendy's triple Man. That is
a delicious burger. I like five guys. I like hardyseburgers.
I like the Sonic double cheeseburger. But my favorite is
the Burger King Whopper. About once every two years, i'm
real hungry and I get a triple whopper. Oh man,
the more meat the better. Anyway, I was just thinking
the other day while I was eating that Big Arch
and not being very impressed. I wonder what you guys
in the audience like to eat in fast foods. Let
me know in the comments section. What's your favorite fast
food is. I don't eat it much. I usually pick
up something maybe once every two weeks or so. Sometimes
once a week. I'll get something small, the double fishful.
I like to get the fish file at at McDonald's
and get them to put two pieces of fish it.
It's pretty good. Anyway, I'm just rambling. I was just
wondering what y'all thought if y'all tried the big Arch,
if y'all tried the new Whopper, you know, the new Whopper.
The Whopper is new and improved. It's got real mayonnaise
on it now. And they changed their bun, and I
was worried the bun would be dusty, you know, dry
and dusty and fall apart. But it's not. It holds
together pretty good. Probably full of preservatives and things unhealthy
for us, but it was really good. It's better than
it was two months ago. Anyway, let me know what
y'all like in the fast food realm. All right, let's
get on with this podcast. Thanks for indulging my tangent.
I appreciate you. I think I've got three or four
stories in this podcast. All right, here we go. My
first encounter with sasquatch happened in the nineteen seventies when
my family lived in southern Oregon, south of Grant's Pass,
in a heavily wooded area. Our house set on a
little dirt road in the woods at the base of
a large mountain, with some cleared land for hay and
sheep grazing. One evening, my brother and his friend volunteered
to prepare dinner while my mom and I were in
the living room watching TV. Down the short hallway, I
could hear my older brother and his friend talking and
laughing and having a good time. Suddenly they went silent.
My mother called out to them, but got no response.
We exchanged worried looks and quickly went down the hall
to the kitchen to find my brother and his friend
frozen like statues, paralyzed by fear, and staring at the
kitchen window. I turned my head to see what they
were looking at, and in an instant, my life changed.
Looking into the kitchen was a ssquatch. It was tall
enough to look into the window that was eight feet
off the ground, and wide enough that its shoulder extended
past either side of the frame. Its face was twice
the size of a human's and so close to the
window that it fogged the glass with each breath. Its
skin was pale and its hair was gray and white.
Its eyes shifted upward to my mom, who was standing
directly behind me. Its curious stare turned hostile, and it
began to snarl like a dog, its lips thinning and
head lowering and a threatening posture. Its anger was clearly visible,
and what I didn't know at the time was that
my mom had been involved in witchcraft, the bad kind
of witchcraft, the kind that summons dark things into your house. Somehow,
the sysquatch sensed it about her, and it reacted. My
mother was too scared to move. I turned to look
at her, and when I looked back, it had disappeared.
I stepped over to my brother and his friend to
shake their arms, but their muscles were so tense they
barely moved. I looked at my mother again and she
was still frozen. I called out to her, but she
wouldn't respond, so at that point I got a little scared.
The three of them stayed that way for a couple
more minutes before finally snapping out of it. For months
after that event, I had to walk down that little
dirt road alone to catch the school bus every morning.
I was terrified of what I couldn't see, of what
was watching me from the woods. But sometimes I could
hear something else out there keeping pace with me, and
I knew it was that sisquatch. Occasionally I could even
see him out there, his grayish white outline clearly visible
against the darkness of the forest. I saw him many
times afterward, and eventually I grew comfortable with his quiet,
distant presence. I got the impression that he was considerably older,
a loner of sorts, and had taken a liking to
me for some reason. After years of other sightings, I
had the chance to interact with them. I bought a
Native American finger flute at the old trading post in
a nearby town, and one evening just over a month ago,
I visited a spot where they've been coming regularly for
the last few years, right before dark. I was given
a small tour of the area and shown many signs
of their visits. I left the flute lying on the
picnic table on the hilltop and the woods and I
sat in the vista area down below to wait for
the Sasquatches to come and they did. At least four
or five of them showed up that evening. We could
hear their heavy footfalls crunching through the woods, each step muffled,
sometimes breaking branches, along with the unusual knocks, whoops, and
whistles and chirps and grunts and growls as they communicated
with each other. Forty five minutes after after sunset, I
heard the sound of a flute from atop the hill
two hundred yards away. It was faint at first, and
then suddenly loud as one of them started wailing on it.
It was an incredible special thing to witness. I've been
studying and researching them for forty three years now. I've
been blessed to see sixty different sidequatches, and I've been
blessed to hear them dozens of times more than that. Okay,
here's a short little dog story that I got a
few weeks ago. I thought it was really good. When
the van door opened, my four great nephews and nieces
rushed out like a tumbling waterfall. Excitedly, they ran into
the house and yelled in unison, Mom, there's a dog
in the front yard. Can we keep it? Please? Please?
Can we keep it? Before their mom could answer, they
were already petting the most pitiful looking dog you could imagine.
This poor thing was dirty as a mud pie, and
its hair was matted and knotted for months of neglect,
and it smelled like last week's garbage. On closer inspection
by their mom, it was determined that it was a female.
She had crushed all over her eyes and ambled as
if it were her last steps on earth, and with
pleading eyes, all four kids begged their mother to keep
her to them. It wasn't a dirty, stinking dog, it
was a living creature who needed love. They named her Mercy.
She got a good bath and a flee shampoo, and
her hair was blow dried as if she were a queen.
They made a bed for her with blankets, and she
fell asleep. Mercy had had a rough life. Mom took
her to the vet the next day and the news
was not good. She was thirteen years old, probably blind,
and had arthritis in her hips and legs. She also
had an embedded chip she had belonged to someone. The
chip information revealed the family's name and address. They were called,
and after a brief conversation, they asked that the dog
not be returned. They did not want her back. Their
son had been in a terrible car accident and needed
long term care, and caring for Mercy was too much
for them. The poor dog had traveled fifteen miles from
where her owners lived. She had suffered through cold nights
and hunger and thirst, and somehow had stopped at the
right house. Mercy lived two more years. Sophia, the youngest
of the family, would wrap her up and carry her
like a baby. She would sing to her too. The
song went like this, I'm not gonna sing it, Mercy, Mercy.
She likes to go to work, work, work, tork twork.
I wish I could put a tune to that, but
I can't sing. Mercy would be let out in the
backyard to do her business, and as soon as the
door was open, she would run out like a puppy
with new legs. When she was ready, she would walk
back in slower now, as the aches in her legs
reminded her of her advanced years. For those fleeting moments, however,
she remembered her puppy life. Eventually, she could not walk
well and would stumble and lose her balance, and then
she stopped eating, and it was decided to put her
to sleep. There wasn't a dry eye in the house
as she was taken to the vet for the last time.
She was cremated, and her ashes are still with the family.
That old dog couldn't have stumbled upon a more loving
family that day. It's hard to say who was luckier, though,
Mercy or the family who had the joy of loving
her for the final years of her life. Oh what
a good story. I just love these dog stories. Please,
if you have a dog story, send me more. I
know I've got probably a half a dozen left to do.
And you know this isn't really a dog story channel,
but I like throwing them in, so this is good
for me. I don't know. I have a lot of
thoughts on dogs, and I could go on and on
about it, but they really are special animals. They're domesticated animals,
and they absolutely need humans to survive. They need pack leaders.
They're not like coodies or wolves or they are pack animals,
but they need a human to lead them anyway. That's
all I'm gonna say. I love this dog story, and
I'm so glad this family took that dog in. And
it doesn't matter if a dog's old or young. You
can give that dog a good home and a good
life anytime you want so. Great story, great dog story,
Thank you very much. My current position is a federal
swat officer on a specialized response team. It requires intentional
omissions for personal safety and to maintain professional confidentiality. After
fifteen years as a patrol officer and a SWAT operator,
I thought I'd seen it all. I've tracked murderers deep
into the woods. I've searched dope houses where the walls
sweated rot, where mattresses crawled with bed bugs, and the
air tasted like burnt chemicals and mold. I've locked eyes
with men whose souls had already fled, pupils stretched wide,
glassed over, staring straight through me. The physical scars, they're real,
they're etched into my skin, But it's the memories that
stay loud. It was October twenty eight, just after twenty
three hundred hours. The world outside my cruiser was a
mailstrom of wind and rain, the kind that feels like
ice needles on your exposed skin, ord like it always
does with that voice from dispatch, calm, professional reading from
a glowing terminal, like she wasn't about to walk me
into something I'll never forget. Sera nine oh four, respond
to nine to one one, call possible livestock mauling, frantic
elderly male, came the voice from dispatch. Normally I would
chalk it up to a mountain lion, maybe a rogue
black bear. That standard fair in the sticks within My
cell rang and dispatch patched the original nine to one
one audio recording to my phone. And I'll never forget
that voice crackling through the rain. In the static, the
old man was sobbing. He wasn't just afraid, he was broken.
His breath hitched with every word. A sound that drilled
into my bones, that was, he stammered, his voice thin
and ready, like a wire about to snap.
Speaker 2: I've ever seen as black as pitch, eyes like fire,
And the way it moved fast, it was too fast,
like a shadow ripping through the air.
Speaker 1: He trailed off. His voice was brittle, as if speaking
about it was enough to invite it back, as if
the very air around him still vibrated with its presence.
And then a choked, sob raw and desperate.
Speaker 2: God help me, I sound it made.
Speaker 1: I flipped on my emergency lights, the red and blue
glow stuttered across the trees, stretching shadows out like limbs.
I punched the address into my unit's GPS. The ranch
set far outside of town, nestled against the base of
a thick pine ridge, a pocket of isolation that cell
towers barely reached. I drove and the rain intensified, a
solid sheet of cold water, slicing down, clinging to the windshield.
The wind screamed across the highway, a high pitched moan
through the skeletal branches of the trees, like a living
thing in agony. It took fifteen minutes to reach the turnoff.
The old ranch road was little more than a muddy
scar through the woods, winding deeper into the blackness. My
tires slipped more than once, growing in protest, and I
nearly got stuck for good at the final treacherous ben.
When I finally pulled into the property, I turned off
the lights, I killed the engine, and I stepped out.
That's when I felt it static, that deep down, narrow
level alertness. It's one they don't teach you at the academy.
Not the edge of your seat adrenaline of a foot pursuit,
not the sharp fear before a breach. No, this was different.
It crawled under the skin like ice water. It was
a sensation without a source, like the world had gone
just one degree too quiet, effecating vacuum, Like the shadows
were pressing closer than they should, not just dimming the light,
but consuming it whole, like I wasn't alone, And if
you felt it, you know exactly what I mean. Some
officers get stuck with drunks. Others are magnets for DV calls.
Speaker 2: Me.
Speaker 1: I get the ones where something doesn't line up, where
the air feels heavier than it should, and the silence
starts watching you. They call them suspicious circumstances. It's what
they say when something's wrong, but no one wants to
admit how wrong it is. It's a phrase dressed in
sterile intent, meant to keep it clean and measured. But
what it really means is this, You're not gonna like
what you find. No other officer in this valley has
responded to more of these than I have. It's not
a badge of honor, it's a weight. The old ranch
house was dark, a weather beaten shell of timber and
rusted metal that looked like it had been abandoned decades ago.
There was no porch lie, there was no movement. The
only sign of life was the faintest flicker from a
single window. Then the front door creaked open, groaning on
rusted hinges. There stood the old man. He was a wraith,
wrapped in a threadbare wool blanket that clung to him
like wet paper, barely concealing his trembling. His eyes were white.
They were dilated, darting frantically from side to side, like
prey that knew the predator wasn't far off, that it
was still lurking just beyond the periphery of his vision.
They held a haunted, vacant look, as if he'd seen
things no human was meant to see. Come this way,
he said, his voice barely audible over the howl of
the storm. He didn't speak again as he led me,
stumbling rather than past the main barn and through a
thicket of broken fencing and trample brush. It looked like
a herd of stampeding elk hauld pass through the chicken
coop looked like it had been hit by a bomb.
Wooden slats were splintered outward, and jagged edges pointing accusingly
at the stormy sky, as if something enormous had ripped
its way in with a grotesque, unimaginable strength. Feathers bloodied
and matted. It covered the ground in a wide, macabre art,
and inside was carnage. There were dead chickens everywhere, their
small bodies mangled beyond recognition, half eaten. Not the clean
punctures of a bobcat or a blunt trauma of a bear.
These birds had been shredded, torn apart, with deliberate, sadistic cruelty.
I turned to question the old man, but he was
already stumbling, his gaunt frame swaying toward the lamb pin.
That's when the smell hit me. It was a suffocating
wave of rot. It was musty, wet fur, and something else,
something utterly alien and foul. It was sour, like spoiled meat.
My stomach turned, and a burning acid rose in my throat,
and I fought down the urge to vomit. The lamb
pin was worse, far, far worse. The bodies of six
young lambs lay strewn like broken dolls, their tiny limbs
twisted at impossible angles. The air here was even heavier
thicker with that awful, putrid stench. I dropped to one knee,
the cold mud soaking through my uniform pants, to inspect
the ground. There were no signs of a bear or
a cat. The rain had softened the mud, making tracks
easier to read. But what I saw chilled me to
my core, a deep, bone aching dread that bypassed all
my training. There were massive footprints, bipedal undeniably, but with
long clawed toes like a monstrous canine. Some had an
extra unsettling indentation at the heel, like a distorted human print,
overlapping a wolf's, or perhaps a second digit. One track
I estimated was nearly seventeen inches long. It sunk deep,
suggesting an impossible weight over it, a crushing pressure no
animal I knew could exert. Whatever it was, it walked
on two legs, and it was immensely powerful. My heart
hammered against my ribs. The old man, still trembling, pointed
a skeletal finger toward the dense black tree line. It
went that way, he whispered, It went into those pines.
I told him to return to the house and lock
the doors to barricade himself in. He hesitated, his eyes
wide and vacant, staring pain asked me into the impenetrable
darkness it watches, he said, his voice was cracking. It
was a dry rasp. I see it in the tree sometimes,
just the eyes, like fire, like hate. It knows when
you're looking, it knows when you're not. He turned, then,
slow and shuffling, a man utterly defeated, leaving me alone
with storm and the black, silent pines that stretched into infinite,
suffocating voids. I drew my glock nineteen, the familiar weight
of small comfort, and turned on the flashlight. The powerful
beam cut through the oppressive darkness and jagged arcs as
I moved toward the woods, each step deliberate. My boots
sucked into the thick, half frozen mud and moss. Rain
flew sideways, hitting me in the ear and drumming a frantic,
disorienting rhythm on the brim of my hat. The temperature
dropped ten degrees in the span of twenty feet, an
unnatural coal that seeped into my bones. Branches creaked above me,
groaning under the weight of the wind, and pine needles
fell relentlessly like icy rain. The underbrush clawed at my legs,
like unseen hands tangling in my boots. And then I
heard it. It was a growl. It was a low,
resonant growl, not like a dog or a wolf, but deeper.
And it rumbled in my chest, vibrating my ribs like
a sub wolfer, a sound that seemed to come from
the very earth itself, close yet diffused everywhere and nowhere
at once. I pivoted toward the sore, sweeping the flashlight
beam through the trees. There was nothing. Then a flash
of motion to my right, so fast it was almost imperceptible.
A shape. It was tall and broad, slipping between the
ancient pines with horroring speed. I barely caught more than
a blur. I saw long limbs and possibly black fur
hunt shoulders that dwarfed the surrounding trees. It moved with
a fluid, predatory grace that defies its massive size, a
silent apparition in the raging storm. And I swung the
light back and there was nothing. The spot where it
had been was empty. The darkness had swallowed it whole.
Sheriff's office, I called out. My voice sounded small and absurd,
A feeble challenge thrown against something ancient and terrifying. And
then the eyes. They were red and glowing, reflective like
an animal's, but they were wrong, intensely intelligent and focused,
a burning, malevolent gaze that pierced through the rain and
the thick canopy, boring directly into my soul. They hovered
seven maybe eight feet off the ground, twin embers of pure,
unadulterated hate, no blinking, no shifting, just watching, a silent,
unwavering stare that held me rooted to the spot, my
breath catching in my throat. I could feel the heat
radiating from them, an unnatural feeling that made the hair
stand up on my arms and neck. I raised my clock.
My hand was surprisingly steady, despite the tremor in my chest.
The tritium sights glowed faintly green against the impossible red.
And then a shriek, not a howl, not a roar,
something been between something inhuman. It was sharp and filled
with ancient, primal rage. It tore through the woods, vibrating
through the trees, setting off distant coat He is in
a chain reaction of terrified yelps and then silence. This
sound was designed to instill terror, and it worked. Then
it was gone. No sign of retreat, no crashing through
the underbreath, just to absence, a sudden, complete void where
the eyes had been. I stood there for what felt
like an eternity, rain soaking through my vest and my uniform,
and my weapon aimed at a ghost. My muscles ached
from the tension, my eyes strained against the blackness. Every
rational thought I had fled, replaced by a desperate, animalistic
instinct to survive. I backed out, never turning my back,
step by step, my flashlight high its beam, my frail
shield against the dark. Back at my cruiser, I radioed
it in. My voice was tight, trying to sound professional,
but the words felt hollow. Back Up arrived in two
younger deputies, their faces grim with sheared unease, and we
searched the property for hours, but the rain had washed
away what remained. The livestock bodies were still there, horrifyingly real,
but no fresh signs of whatever had done it. It
had simply melted back into the shadows from which it
came back. At the Sheriff's office, we wrote it all down.
We logged in the evidence, sterile, clinical document that could
never convey the true horror. Of that night. I included everything,
knowing it wouldn't matter, knowing it wouldn't change the label
suspicious circumstance, possible livestock mauling. That's all it will ever
be allowed to be.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: I know what I saw, I know what I felt.
But nothing, nothing has ever made me feel so helpless,
so small, and as utterly, terrifyingly insignificant as whatever watched
me from those trees that stormy night. The old man
eventually left for good, the house and the property left
to right and the unyielding embrace of the woods. Locals
say it's cursed. Hunters avoid that stretch of forest now.
Their dogs refuse to enter the tree line, whimpering and
digging at the ground. And sometimes when I'm alone, when
the wind house just right and the darkness presses in,
I think about those eyes, and I wonder if they're
still out there. Okay, thank you guys for listening to
this podcast. I actually had it ready to go yesterday
and it was much shorter, but I got up this
morning and added a couple of stories to it to
make it a little longer. I didn't upload it because
our internet was out. Some truck hit a pole we're
on fiber optic internet. The whole city was out and
they got it fixed pretty quick. This morning, I woke up,
it was good, so I came out and recorded these
two stories or this, yeah, the two stories I added.
Thank you for listening. The next few podcasts will be
just as frequent, but they might be a little shorter
because I'm working on Steve Lilly number twenty, trying to
kind of pour myself into that and get you a
good podcast, a good Steve Lily story out. It's going
pretty good and I think you're gonna enjoy it. I'm
trying to get it out by the end of March,
so hang with me shorter podcast for a week or so,
but after that we'll get right back into the longer podcast.
I guess I never know what I'm gonna do. I
just let the loose ends drag, know what I mean.
How y'all get all right? You guys have a good week,
and we'll see on the next week. Thanks