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: The road trip isn't over. We've still got states left
Speaker 1: on the map and we'll get back on the highway
Speaker 1: soon enough. But over the past several weeks stories have
Speaker 1: been piling up. People from all over the country have
Speaker 1: been sending me their encounters. So this episode we're pulling
Speaker 1: over five people, five states, Michigan, Oklahoma, California, West Virginia,
Speaker 1: and Florida. Let's start in the snow. Wade is in
Speaker 1: his early fifties. Now. He grew up in the Upper
Speaker 1: Peninsula in a family where deer camp wasn't a hobby
Speaker 1: so much as a fixed point on the calendar, the
Speaker 1: same way other families treat Christmas. His grandfather built the
Speaker 1: camp in the sixties, a trailer, a wood stove, a
Speaker 1: hand pump for water, and about eighty acres of mixed
Speaker 1: hardwood and cedar swamp, backing up against county forest land
Speaker 1: that runs for miles without a paved road. In November
Speaker 1: of twenty eleven, Wade went up alone. His dad had
Speaker 1: passed the pre spring, his uncle's knees were shot, and
Speaker 1: his brother couldn't get the time off, So for the
Speaker 1: first time in his life, Wade had the camp to
Speaker 1: himself for opening week. He told me he'd been looking
Speaker 1: forward to it and dreading it. At the same time.
Speaker 1: His dad's coat was still hanging on the nail by
Speaker 1: the door. He left it there. The first two days
Speaker 1: were normal, cold, gray, a few inches of snow on
Speaker 1: the ground, which is what you want. Snow tells you everything.
Speaker 1: He saw a few young does and a small six point.
Speaker 1: He passed on the usual squirrels and jays. He sat
Speaker 1: a blind his father had built on the edge of
Speaker 1: a clear cut that had grown back into thick young
Speaker 1: poplar maybe ten years old, chest high and dense. The
Speaker 1: blind looked out over the cut toward a hard edge
Speaker 1: of mature timber about two hundred yards away. The third
Speaker 1: morning is when it started. Wade got in the blind
Speaker 1: before light, same as always, coffee in a steel thermous
Speaker 1: rifle across his lap, and he told me the first
Speaker 1: thing he noticed wasn't a sound, It was the absence
Speaker 1: of one. Every other morning, the woods had woken up
Speaker 1: around him, chickadees, ravens off in the distance, red squirrels
Speaker 1: running their mouths. That morning, nothing, he said. He actually
Speaker 1: checked his watch because he wondered if he'd somehow gotten
Speaker 1: out there. An hour early, around eight, a doe came
Speaker 1: out of the timber edge on the far side of
Speaker 1: the cut, and she was acting strange. Wade has killed
Speaker 1: a lot of deer. He knows how they move when
Speaker 1: they're feeding, when they're cruising, when they're nervous. This dough
Speaker 1: came out of the woods at a dead run, flat out,
Speaker 1: ears pinned, and she didn't stop or checked back over
Speaker 1: her shoulder, the way a deer will when a coyotes
Speaker 1: pushing it. She ran the full length of the cut,
Speaker 1: passed within forty yards of his blind, and kept going.
Speaker 1: He never saw what she was running from. He sat
Speaker 1: there another twenty minutes. Then, from inside the timber where
Speaker 1: the dough had come from, he heard a single knock.
Speaker 1: He described it as the sound of somebody hitting a
Speaker 1: tree trunk with a baseball bat. His first thought was
Speaker 1: another hunter. It was opening week, and even though his
Speaker 1: family's land was posted guy's wander so he did what
Speaker 1: you do. He called out, said good morning, real loud,
Speaker 1: letting whoever it was know the blind was occupied. Nothing answered.
Speaker 1: About a minute later there was a second knock from
Speaker 1: a different spot, farther north, deeper in. He guessed the
Speaker 1: two spots were one hundred yards apart, And he told
Speaker 1: me the thing that bothered him was the timing. Whatever
Speaker 1: made the first knock would have had to move that
Speaker 1: hundred yards through frozen November woods, through blowdown and brush
Speaker 1: in about a minute without him hearing a single step.
Speaker 1: Wade can't cross his own yard in the snow without
Speaker 1: making noise. He stayed in the blind until almost eleven,
Speaker 1: mostly because he didn't love the idea of walking through
Speaker 1: those woods just then, and he admitted that plainly. When
Speaker 1: he finally got down and started back toward camp, he
Speaker 1: took the logging trail instead of cutting through the timber
Speaker 1: like he usually did. Halfway down the trail, he found
Speaker 1: the track pressed into the snow and the frozen mud
Speaker 1: underneath it, right in the middle of the trail, pointed
Speaker 1: across it like something had crossed in one or two strides.
Speaker 1: He put his own boot next to it. Wade wears
Speaker 1: a size eleven. The track ran past his boot on
Speaker 1: both ends. He guessed seventeen eighteen inches and wide with toes.
Speaker 1: Not a bear track. He's seen a thousand bear tracks.
Speaker 1: Bear tracks show claws and the toes sit in an arc.
Speaker 1: These toes sat in a line like a man's and
Speaker 1: there was no claw mark anywhere. He looked for the
Speaker 1: next track and couldn't find it. On either side of
Speaker 1: the trail. The brush was thick, and he told me
Speaker 1: he stood there for a while doing the math on
Speaker 1: stride length, and then he stopped doing the math because
Speaker 1: he didn't like where it was going. He didn't have
Speaker 1: a camera. This was twenty eleven and his phone was
Speaker 1: a flip phone that lived in the truck. He thought
Speaker 1: about going back for it, and then he thought about
Speaker 1: the mile and a half round trip alone, and he
Speaker 1: just didn't. He's kicked himself about it ever since. I
Speaker 1: told him not to bother half the witnesses I've ever
Speaker 1: talked to have a version of that same regret, and
Speaker 1: I've got one of my own. That afternoon he drove
Speaker 1: into town. He told me he made up a reason,
Speaker 1: said he needed propane. And he did need propane, but
Speaker 1: not badly enough to burn a half day of hunting
Speaker 1: for it. Really, he just wanted to be around people
Speaker 1: for a few hours. He got a burger at the diner,
Speaker 1: talked to the guy at the hardware store about nothing,
Speaker 1: and by the time he headed back, the light was
Speaker 1: already dying. Mid November and the Upper Peninsula dark comes
Speaker 1: down like a lid. The two track into Camp runs
Speaker 1: about three quarters of a mile off the county road,
Speaker 1: and it's tight, cedar and balsam crowding in on both sides,
Speaker 1: branches slapping the mirrors. Wade was maybe halfway in, going
Speaker 1: slow when his headlight swept across a bend and caught
Speaker 1: eye shine off to the right Now, eye shine by
Speaker 1: itself means nothing. Deer, coyote, owl, house cat, They all
Speaker 1: throw light back at you. Wade has seen every kind
Speaker 1: of eye shine those woods produce. What stopped him wasn't
Speaker 1: the shine, It was the height. The two reflections were
Speaker 1: side by side, well back in the trees, and he
Speaker 1: put them at seven feet off the ground. Maybe better.
Speaker 1: He stopped the truck and they didn't move. He sat
Speaker 1: there with his foot on the brake and his high
Speaker 1: beams on, and the eyes just stayed there, steady, not blinking,
Speaker 1: that he could tell at a height where nothing in
Speaker 1: Michigan should have eyes, unless it's standing in the bed
Speaker 1: of a pickup. He told me he thought about a moose.
Speaker 1: Moose are rare down there, but not impossible, and a
Speaker 1: bull's eyes could sit that high. So he did something
Speaker 1: I actually respect. He laid on the horn. A moose
Speaker 1: would have moved, a moose would have crashed off through
Speaker 1: that cedar like a freight train, and you'd hear it
Speaker 1: for one hundred yards. The eyes didn't move, and nothing crashed.
Speaker 1: They just slid backward, smoothly, deeper into the trees and
Speaker 1: dropped out of sight without one single branch breaking that
Speaker 1: he could hear over the engine. Wade drove the rest
Speaker 1: of the way in faster than that road really allows.
Speaker 1: He got the propane hooked up with the truck, headlights
Speaker 1: pointed at the tank, and his rifle leaned against the
Speaker 1: trailer three feet away. That night is the part of
Speaker 1: the story he had the hardest time telling. The camp
Speaker 1: trailer sits in a small clearing, There's a propane light inside,
Speaker 1: and at night the windows are the only lit thing
Speaker 1: for probably six miles in any direction. Wade made dinner,
Speaker 1: had a couple beers, and turned in around ten. Sometime
Speaker 1: after midnight, he woke up to the sound of something
Speaker 1: hitting the trailer. Not a branch falling, he knows that sound.
Speaker 1: This was a thump against the aluminum siding, hard enough
Speaker 1: to feel through the bunk frame. Then a few seconds
Speaker 1: later another one on the other side. He lay there
Speaker 1: and listened to something walk around the trailer two feet.
Speaker 1: He was clear about that, He said, you spend enough
Speaker 1: novembers in the woods, you know four feet from two
Speaker 1: feet in your sleep, And this was two slow and
Speaker 1: heavy crunching the snow with a pause between steps, like
Speaker 1: it was standing on each foot. Then came the smell
Speaker 1: it got in through the vents. He described it as
Speaker 1: a dead deer that somebody had soaked in a wet
Speaker 1: dog and left near an outhouse. It filled the trailer
Speaker 1: and it lingered. Wade had his rifle in the bunk
Speaker 1: with him by then. He never opened the door. He
Speaker 1: never even pulled back the curtain, and he told me
Speaker 1: that with no shame at all. His exact words were,
Speaker 1: whatever was out there, I didn't want it, knowing I
Speaker 1: was awake. The steps eventually moved off. He heard one
Speaker 1: more sound before dawn, a long, moaning howl from way
Speaker 1: back toward the cedar swamp, a sound, he said, started
Speaker 1: low like a cow and climbed into something no cow
Speaker 1: ever made. And then the wood stayed quiet until the
Speaker 1: sky went gray. In the morning, he found tracks in
Speaker 1: the fresh skiff of snow around the trailer, same as
Speaker 1: the one on the trail. They came out of the
Speaker 1: tree line, circled the trailer twice, stopped for a long
Speaker 1: time under the east window, judging by the mess of
Speaker 1: prints there, and went back the way they came. Under
Speaker 1: that east window. The snow was flattened in one spot,
Speaker 1: and the sell which sits about seven feet off the ground.
Speaker 1: Because the trailer's up on blocks had a smear across it,
Speaker 1: he didn't touch it. Wade packed up and left a
Speaker 1: day early. He told his brother he wasn't feeling good,
Speaker 1: which was half true. Here's the part of Wade's story
Speaker 1: that convinced me it was worth including. He didn't stop
Speaker 1: going to deer Camp. He goes every year, and he's
Speaker 1: brought his own kids up there now. But he told
Speaker 1: me two things changed permanently. He's never spent a night
Speaker 1: there alone again, not once in fourteen years. And he
Speaker 1: replaced the curtains on the east window with a piece
Speaker 1: of plywood screwed to the frame. And when his brother
Speaker 1: asked why, he said the window leaked. It took him
Speaker 1: nine years to tell his brother the real reason. His
Speaker 1: brother listened to the whole thing sitting by the wood stove,
Speaker 1: and when Wade finished, his brother got up, got two
Speaker 1: more beers out of the cooler, sat back down, and said,
Speaker 1: so that's why Dad never let us sleep in the
Speaker 1: east bunk. Wade said his stomach dropped when he heard
Speaker 1: that his father had died without ever saying a word
Speaker 1: about it. Whatever the old man knew he took it
Speaker 1: with him, and all he left behind was a rule
Speaker 1: about a bunk that nobody had ever questioned. The brothers
Speaker 1: went through their dad's things at the camp that same weekend,
Speaker 1: really went through them for the first time, and in
Speaker 1: a coffee can on the shelf above the wood stove,
Speaker 1: they found a plaster cast wrapped in a grocery bag.
Speaker 1: It was cracked and badly poured, and about half of
Speaker 1: it had crumbled to powder in the can, but you
Speaker 1: could see toes, five of them in a line on
Speaker 1: a foot that had no business being that wide. There
Speaker 1: was no note, there was no date. There was just
Speaker 1: the cast, sitting eight feet from where the family had
Speaker 1: played yucre every November for forty years. That's where Wade's
Speaker 1: story ends. No resolution like I promised, just a plywood
Speaker 1: window and a dead man's rule that suddenly made sense.
Speaker 1: Let's head south, way south to a chicken yard in Oklahoma.
Speaker 1: Carla and her husband Ray bought forty acres outside of
Speaker 1: a little town in southeastern Oklahoma in twenty fifteen. If
Speaker 1: you know anything about this subject, you know that corner
Speaker 1: of the state has a reputation the Kaimichi Country, the washitaws,
Speaker 1: all those pine ridges and river bottoms running toward Arkansas.
Speaker 1: People have been reporting things down there for over one
Speaker 1: hundred years. Carla and Ray didn't know any of that.
Speaker 1: When they bought the place. They knew the land was cheap,
Speaker 1: the well was good, and Ray could finally have the
Speaker 1: shop building he'd been talking about since Reagan was president.
Speaker 1: Carla was sixty when this started. She wants that known
Speaker 1: because she says people hear her story and assume she's
Speaker 1: some kid who watches too many videos. She raised three children,
Speaker 1: kept books for a trucking company for thirty years, and
Speaker 1: she told me straight out that before all this she
Speaker 1: thought Bigfoot was something people in Washington State made up
Speaker 1: to sell t shirts her words, not mine. The property
Speaker 1: sits at the end of a gravel road, with pasture
Speaker 1: in front and thick timber behind, and a creek cutting
Speaker 1: the back corner. They kept chickens, two dogs, and for
Speaker 1: a while goats. The first year was quiet. The trouble
Speaker 1: started in the fall of twenty seventeen, and it started small,
Speaker 1: the way these long term cases almost always do. The
Speaker 1: first thing was the apples. They had four old apple
Speaker 1: trees near the back fence. Planted by whoever owned the
Speaker 1: place decades before that October, the apples started disappearing, not
Speaker 1: dropping and rotting, disappearing. And here's the detail that made
Speaker 1: me sit up when Carla told it. The apples on
Speaker 1: the low branches stayed. The ones going missing were up
Speaker 1: ten twelve feet where you'd need a ladder. Deer strip
Speaker 1: a tree from the bottom up as far as they
Speaker 1: can reach, and they leave a brows line you can
Speaker 1: measure this was backwards. The tops of those trees got
Speaker 1: cleaned out and the bottom stayed full until eventually the
Speaker 1: bottoms went two. And when they went whole, branches got
Speaker 1: pulled down and snapped, greenwood twisted off, some of it
Speaker 1: left hanging by the bark ray blamed kids. Carla pointed
Speaker 1: out that they were a quarter mile from the nearest neighbor,
Speaker 1: at the end of a road that dead ends at
Speaker 1: their gate, and that no teenager in the history of
Speaker 1: teenagers ever climbed a fence to steal apples off the
Speaker 1: top of a tree and left the easy ones. The
Speaker 1: second thing was the dogs. They had two, a blue
Speaker 1: heeler named Pete and an old lab mix named Biscuit.
Speaker 1: Pete was the kind of dog that ran fence lines
Speaker 1: all day and picked fights with the neighbor's bull through
Speaker 1: the wire. Fearless or too dumb to be scared one
Speaker 1: or the other. Stay tuned for more back Wood's Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. Starting that same October,
Speaker 1: there were nights when Pete wouldn't leave the porch. Carla
Speaker 1: would let them out before bed, and Biscuit would waddle
Speaker 1: out to do her business, but Pete would stand at
Speaker 1: the edge of the porch boards, staring at the tree
Speaker 1: line behind the shop, hackles up from his neck to
Speaker 1: his tail, growling in a register. Carla said she'd never
Speaker 1: heard from him. Some nights. He'd bark himself hoarse at
Speaker 1: that tree line. Other nights, and she said these were worse.
Speaker 1: He wouldn't make a sound at all. He'd just stand there, shaking,
Speaker 1: and then he'd scratch the door to get back in.
Speaker 1: Then in November the chickens started dying. They lost four
Speaker 1: hens over about three weeks, and Carla was careful here
Speaker 1: because she knows what kills chickens in rural Oklahoma. They'd
Speaker 1: lost birds before, to raccoons, to a bobcat once, to hawks.
Speaker 1: Every predator leaves a signature. Raccoons leave a mess, hawks
Speaker 1: leave a pile of feathers. What they found those three
Speaker 1: weeks was different. The coop has a wire run attached
Speaker 1: and the runs covered. Something had peeled the wire up
Speaker 1: along the bottom edge, pulled the staples clean out of
Speaker 1: the frame boards, and folded a section of fencing back
Speaker 1: like the lid on a sardine can. The hens that
Speaker 1: died weren't eaten there. They were just gone with a
Speaker 1: few feathers by the fence line at the back of
Speaker 1: the property forty yards away. Ray being Ray put a
Speaker 1: game camera on the coop. This is where Carla's story
Speaker 1: picks up a pattern I've heard so many times it's
Speaker 1: become a joke in the research community, except nobody laughs.
Speaker 1: The camera worked fine for two weeks and photographed possums,
Speaker 1: a skunk, the dogs, and Ray in his bathrobe. Then
Speaker 1: they had a night with a lot of commotion, Pete
Speaker 1: going insane in the house. A sound from the pasture
Speaker 1: Carla described as a scream, and I'll come back to
Speaker 1: that scream. The next morning, the coop was fine, but
Speaker 1: the camera was face down in the dirt, ten feet
Speaker 1: from the tea post it had been strapped to. The
Speaker 1: strap wasn't broken, it was unbuckled. The card had photos
Speaker 1: up until eleven forty that night, then nothing. The last
Speaker 1: usable frame showed the corner of the coop and along
Speaker 1: the right edge, out of focus, something dark that filled
Speaker 1: the whole side of the picture from top to bottom.
Speaker 1: Could be a shoulder, could be a shadow, could be
Speaker 1: a smudge of nothing. Carla still has it, and she's
Speaker 1: the first to admit it proves absolutely nothing, which, if
Speaker 1: you ask me, is exactly what a real witness says
Speaker 1: about a bad photo. Now the screen. Between that November
Speaker 1: and the following spring, they heard it maybe a dozen times,
Speaker 1: always late, between about eleven and three in the morning,
Speaker 1: Carla said. The first time, she and Ray both sat
Speaker 1: straight up in bed, and Ray, a man who'd worked
Speaker 1: pipeline in four states and didn't rattle, said what in
Speaker 1: the hell is that? It came from the creek bottom.
Speaker 1: She described it as a woman screaming through a bullhorn,
Speaker 1: except it went on too long ten seconds fifteen. A
Speaker 1: human runs out of air. This didn't. And underneath the
Speaker 1: scream there was a low end to it, a chest
Speaker 1: to it that she said she felt in the walls.
Speaker 1: I've heard recordings from that part of the country that
Speaker 1: match her description almost word for word. Mountain lion scream
Speaker 1: and people misjudge them constantly. But a cougar's scream is thin.
Speaker 1: It's an awful sound, but it's a trouble sound. What
Speaker 1: Carla's describing has base in it, and the duration is
Speaker 1: wrong for a cat. I told her that on the phone,
Speaker 1: and she was quiet for a second, and then she said, Honey,
Speaker 1: I didn't need you to tell me it wasn't a cougar.
Speaker 1: I was there fair enough through all of this, understand
Speaker 1: nobody had seen anything. Over eight months. It was apples
Speaker 1: and wire and screams and a dog losing his nerve.
Speaker 1: Ray had half convinced himself it was a bear coming
Speaker 1: up out of the river country, even though the pulled
Speaker 1: staples and the unbuckled strap didn't fit, and even though
Speaker 1: in two years they never found one bear track. The
Speaker 1: sighting happened in June of twenty eighteen, and Carla was
Speaker 1: alone for it. Ray was in Tulsa overnight for a funeral.
Speaker 1: Carla stayed back for the animals. Around ten, she went
Speaker 1: out to close up the chickens later than usual because
Speaker 1: she'd been on the phone with her daughter. She took
Speaker 1: a flashlight and Pete went with her, which she was
Speaker 1: glad of right up until he stopped dead halfway to
Speaker 1: the coop and would not take another step. She heard
Speaker 1: the goats before she saw anything. They had six goats
Speaker 1: then pen next to the shop, and all six were
Speaker 1: bunched in the corner of the pen closest to the house,
Speaker 1: packed together so tight she thought at first something was
Speaker 1: already in the pin with them. She swung the flashlight
Speaker 1: along the shop wall, along the fence out toward the
Speaker 1: burn pile. It was standing at the burn pile thirty
Speaker 1: five maybe forty yards away, five foot three, and she
Speaker 1: said her first thought, her literal first thought, was that
Speaker 1: somebody had parked a car out there, because her mind
Speaker 1: needed the dark shape to be that size in a
Speaker 1: way that made sense. Then it straightened up. It had
Speaker 1: been bent over doing something at the burn pile, and
Speaker 1: it stood up to a height she measured later against
Speaker 1: the t post beside it. The post is six feet.
Speaker 1: She says. It had two feet on the post easy,
Speaker 1: maybe more. The flashlight was one of those cheap plastic jobs,
Speaker 1: and the beam at forty yards was weak, but she
Speaker 1: held it on the thing for what she guesses was
Speaker 1: four or five seconds. Dark hair, reddish, where the light
Speaker 1: caught it, covering everything, shoulders she compared to the front
Speaker 1: end of raised tractor, no neck that she could see.
Speaker 1: It turned its upper body toward her light, the whole
Speaker 1: torso rotating together, and she caught the shine of two
Speaker 1: eyes and the flat of a face, And that's the
Speaker 1: image she can't get rid of, not a snout, a face.
Speaker 1: Then it took three steps and was gone into the dark,
Speaker 1: toward the creek, and she said, the steps are what
Speaker 1: her brain still refuses to file properly. It covered the
Speaker 1: distance from the burn pile to the tree line, which
Speaker 1: she and Ray measured the next day at just over
Speaker 1: twenty yards in those three steps, walking, not running, walking
Speaker 1: with its arms swinging, gone in under two seconds. Karla
Speaker 1: does not remember getting back to the house. She remembers
Speaker 1: being inside with the door locked and Pete pressed against
Speaker 1: her legs, and she remembers that she dropped the flashlight
Speaker 1: somewhere in the yard because she could see it through
Speaker 1: the window, still on, lying in the grass, and there
Speaker 1: was no power on this earth. That was going to
Speaker 1: make her go back out for it. She sat up
Speaker 1: in the recliner until dawn with raised deer rifle across
Speaker 1: her lap, and she'd never fired it in her life.
Speaker 1: At the burn pile the next day, she and Ray
Speaker 1: found what it had been doing. They'd tossed the carcass
Speaker 1: of a hen that had died of ordinary old age
Speaker 1: onto the pile two days before. The carcass was gone
Speaker 1: and pressed into the ash and soft dirt at the
Speaker 1: edge of the pile. There were two partial impressions toes
Speaker 1: and the ball of a foot no heel, like something
Speaker 1: had been crouched there on the balls of its feet.
Speaker 1: Ray photographed them with his phone next to a dollar
Speaker 1: bill for scale. The clearer one, just the front half
Speaker 1: of the foot was wider than the bill was long.
Speaker 1: Here's how Carla's story ends. And I think about this
Speaker 1: ending a lot. They still lived there. They talked about
Speaker 1: selling one time one conversation at the kitchen table, and
Speaker 1: decided against it because, as Ray put it, the thing
Speaker 1: had eight months of chances to hurt something bigger than
Speaker 1: a chicken and never did. So they made adjustments. The
Speaker 1: chickens got a new coop with a concrete footing. The
Speaker 1: goats got sold, not out of fear, Carla insists, but
Speaker 1: I have my doubts. The apples on the high branches
Speaker 1: go missing most Octobers, and they let them go. Calls
Speaker 1: it the tax. The screams still come a few times
Speaker 1: a year, always from the creek when they wake her up. Now,
Speaker 1: she says, she doesn't sit up anymore. She listens until
Speaker 1: it stops, checks that Pete's successor, a healer named Junior,
Speaker 1: is on his rug, and goes back to sleep in
Speaker 1: a house at the end of a dead end road
Speaker 1: in Timber that never fully explained itself. I asked her
Speaker 1: if she ever wanted to see it again. She said no,
Speaker 1: so fast it stepped on the end of my question.
Speaker 1: From a chicken yard in Oklahoma, We're going west and
Speaker 1: uphill into the timber country of northern California for the
Speaker 1: only broad daylight sighting in this episode. Russ spent eleven
Speaker 1: years working timber in northern California. Not a logger exactly.
Speaker 1: He was a timber cruiser, which, if you don't know
Speaker 1: the trade, means he was the guy who walked the
Speaker 1: units before anybody cut anything. Cruisers go into a stand
Speaker 1: of trees with a GPS unit, a diameter tape, and
Speaker 1: a data recorder, and they measure and grade the timber
Speaker 1: so the company knows what it's worth. It's a job
Speaker 1: that puts you alone or nearly alone in some of
Speaker 1: the most remote drainages in the lower forty eight off
Speaker 1: trail all day in country most hikers never touch. I
Speaker 1: want to underline that before we start. Russ is not
Speaker 1: a guy who saw something weird on a camping trip.
Speaker 1: Russ put in something like two thousand working days in
Speaker 1: that timber. He's had every ordinary encounter that country offers.
Speaker 1: He's been bluff charged by a bear, he stepped over rattlesnakes.
Speaker 1: He's found gross sites, which in that part of California
Speaker 1: is the thing cruisers actually fear and had to back
Speaker 1: out quiet and call it in. He knows what the
Speaker 1: woods contain. That's his whole professional value. This happened in
Speaker 1: July of twenty nineteen in a drainage in the Klamath Country.
Speaker 1: He asked me not to name the watershed, and I won't.
Speaker 1: But if you know that region, picture steep ground, Douglas
Speaker 1: Fir and Tannic slopes that run forty percent and a
Speaker 1: creek at the bottom of everything. Russ was working with
Speaker 1: a partner that week, a guy named Felipe. Company policy
Speaker 1: put cruisers in pears in the rough units, but pairs
Speaker 1: in name only. They'd start from the truck together, split
Speaker 1: up to run their own plot lines a few hundred
Speaker 1: yards apart, and meet back up for lunch, and at
Speaker 1: the end of the day they kept in touch on
Speaker 1: handheld radios. The morning was ordinary hot by nine, dusty,
Speaker 1: with flies in your face constantly. Russ ran his line
Speaker 1: down toward the creek, working plot to plot, and he
Speaker 1: told me the first off note of the day was
Speaker 1: so small he almost didn't log it in his memory.
Speaker 1: Around ten thirty, somewhere below him, toward the creek, a
Speaker 1: rock came down the slope, not slid, It came down fast,
Speaker 1: cracking off the trees, a big rock, moving with commitment.
Speaker 1: Of course, rocks roll on steep ground all the time,
Speaker 1: deer kicked them. Loose ground gives way. But the slope
Speaker 1: below him wasn't that steep at that point, and it
Speaker 1: hadn't rained in six weeks and in eleven years he
Speaker 1: developed a sense for the difference between ground letting go
Speaker 1: on its own and ground being disturbed. He stopped and
Speaker 1: listened for the follow up sounds, hoofs, sliding anything. There
Speaker 1: weren't any. He keyed the radio and asked Felipe if
Speaker 1: he was below him. Felipe came back and said he
Speaker 1: was a quarter mile east uphill, eating a granola bar.
Speaker 1: So Russ wrote it off because that's what you do,
Speaker 1: and worked on down. The smell hit him about twenty
Speaker 1: minutes later. Everybody who reports this describes it a little differently,
Speaker 1: and Russ's version was one of the more specific ones
Speaker 1: I've collected. He said it was like walking past the
Speaker 1: open door of a rendering plant, but with something sharp
Speaker 1: underneath it, like ammonia, like a cat box. It came
Speaker 1: in on the air, moving up the drainage, strong enough
Speaker 1: that his first thought was a carcass, a dead bear,
Speaker 1: or a poached elk somewhere close. Users find dead things regularly,
Speaker 1: and part of his brain was already composing the note
Speaker 1: for his end of day report. He said, the smell
Speaker 1: got him looking downhill for a carcass, and that's the
Speaker 1: only reason he was looking exactly where he was looking
Speaker 1: when it stood up. There was a root wad down
Speaker 1: the slope from him, the torn up base of a
Speaker 1: big fur that had gone over in some winter storm,
Speaker 1: dirt and roots standing up like a wall, maybe eight
Speaker 1: feet tall. Russ put the distance at seventy yards, and
Speaker 1: I trust that number more than most witness estimates, because
Speaker 1: judging distance and timber was literally this man's job. Something
Speaker 1: stood up from behind that root wad. He said, it
Speaker 1: rose the way a man stands up out of a squat,
Speaker 1: knees first, then the back straightening, and his mind ran
Speaker 1: through its checklist in about a second and a half. Person, No,
Speaker 1: wrong size. The root wad is eight feet and the
Speaker 1: head and shoulders are showing above it. Bear standing, No,
Speaker 1: And he was firm on this point, because as a
Speaker 1: bear standing has no shoulders to speak of. A bear
Speaker 1: standing is a cone, all its mass low, and it
Speaker 1: wabbles because standing is not what a bear is built
Speaker 1: to do. This thing rose and was still shoulders wider
Speaker 1: than any doorway, a head sitting low between them, dark
Speaker 1: reddish brown hair over everything, sun on it, dust or
Speaker 1: something coming off it when it moved, and it was
Speaker 1: looking at him face on seventy yards eleven in the
Speaker 1: morning full July daylight. Russ told me the truest thing
Speaker 1: anybody has ever told me about these encounters. He said,
Speaker 1: people asked me if I was scared, And the honest
Speaker 1: answer is that the fear came second. The first thing
Speaker 1: was embarrassment, like I'd walked in on something, like I
Speaker 1: was the one who wasn't supposed to be there. They
Speaker 1: looked at each other for a stretch of time he
Speaker 1: can't pin down. He guesses five to eight seconds. He
Speaker 1: never reached for the phone in his chest pocket, never
Speaker 1: reached for the radio, never consciously decided not to. His
Speaker 1: hands just stayed where they were, one of them still
Speaker 1: holding the diameter tape. Then it turned and walked uphill,
Speaker 1: not away down the drainage, which would have been the
Speaker 1: easy line, uphill, quartering away from him across the slope.
Speaker 1: And this is the part of the account that Russ
Speaker 1: gets almost angry telling, because he says nobody understands the
Speaker 1: ground that slope was forty percent covered in blow down
Speaker 1: and brush. Russ crosses ground like that at maybe a
Speaker 1: mile an hour, grabbing trees, picking every step. The thing
Speaker 1: crossed it like the slope was a sidewalk. He watched
Speaker 1: its back the whole way, arms swinging past its knees,
Speaker 1: stepping over a down log that rust later measured at
Speaker 1: thirty four inches, stepping over it the way you or
Speaker 1: I step over a garden hose, without breaking stride and
Speaker 1: without looking down. It crested a bench about one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty yards up and was gone. Total elapsed time
Speaker 1: from stand up to gone under a minute. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: for more back Woods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. The sound was what he mentioned next, or
Speaker 1: the lack of it. A four hundred pound anything moving
Speaker 1: through dry July brush should sound like a truck crash.
Speaker 1: He said. He heard steps, heavy spaced, and few, not crashing.
Speaker 1: He's thought about that for six years, and his best
Speaker 1: explanation is that it knew where to put its feet,
Speaker 1: the way he knew where to put his tape, because
Speaker 1: it worked there too. Russ stood in the same spot
Speaker 1: for a while, he doesn't know how long. Then he
Speaker 1: keyed the radio and told Felipe to meet him at
Speaker 1: the truck, and Felipe, hearing something in his voice, didn't
Speaker 1: ask questions on the air. Before he left the slope.
Speaker 1: He worked his way down to the root wad. It
Speaker 1: took him a while, and he was talking out loud
Speaker 1: the entire descent, narrating his own steps like an idiot. Again,
Speaker 1: his words not mine, because silence suddenly felt like the
Speaker 1: wrong policy. At the root wide, he ran his tape
Speaker 1: up the dirt wall eight feet two inches to the
Speaker 1: top edge. He stood where the thing had stood on
Speaker 1: ground that was actually a shallow depression, sitting lower than
Speaker 1: the wad's base, and did the arithmetic. He's redone a
Speaker 1: thousand times since for the head and shoulders to clear
Speaker 1: that edge from that depression the way he saw them
Speaker 1: clear it, you need a standing height somewhere north of
Speaker 1: eight and a half feet, and that's the conservative version.
Speaker 1: Behind the wad, in the doff and dry dirt, there
Speaker 1: were disturbances, scuffs, pressed places, a heel edge in one
Speaker 1: patch of softer ground, nothing castable, nothing photogenic. He took
Speaker 1: pictures anyway, and they show exactly what pictures of Duff
Speaker 1: always show, which is Duff. When they met at the road,
Speaker 1: Felipe looked at him and said, you saw it too,
Speaker 1: didn't you. It came out in conversation that about forty
Speaker 1: minutes earlier, around the time of the rolling rock, Felipe
Speaker 1: had watched something dark cross a gap in the timber
Speaker 1: two hundred yards below him, moving up right and fast.
Speaker 1: He'd spent the rest of the morning trying to talk
Speaker 1: himself into believing it was a bear. He hadn't radioed
Speaker 1: because and I'm quoting Russ quoting Filipe, I wasn't going
Speaker 1: to be the guy who says bigfoot on the company channel.
Speaker 1: Two professional woodsmen, same morning, same drainage, independent observations, forty
Speaker 1: minutes apart, and both of their first instincts were to
Speaker 1: say nothing. People always ask why there aren't more reports.
Speaker 1: That's why the pressure to not be that guy is
Speaker 1: enormous and its strongest, and exactly the people whose reports
Speaker 1: would carry the most weight. They sat on the tailgate
Speaker 1: and compared notes, and then they made a decision that
Speaker 1: tells you everything about working men. They finished the unit,
Speaker 1: not that day. That day they drove out, but the
Speaker 1: unit had to be cruised, so they came back and
Speaker 1: cruised it together, this time, side by side. Plot lines
Speaker 1: be damned, and they got it done in three long,
Speaker 1: loud days, talking the whole time, letting everything within a
Speaker 1: minth hear them coming. Nothing happened. The smell was there,
Speaker 1: one of the mornings, faint down by the creek, and
Speaker 1: they worked uphill of it and didn't discuss it. Russ
Speaker 1: never filed any report, company or otherwise. There's no paperwork
Speaker 1: on this anywhere. He told his wife that winter over dinner,
Speaker 1: the way you'd confess a debt. She believed him, which
Speaker 1: he says surprised him more than the sighting. He left
Speaker 1: timberwork in twenty twenty two for reasons that had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with what he saw that day. It was
Speaker 1: his knees mostly, and he says he misses it every day.
Speaker 1: I asked him the question I ask everybody. Did it
Speaker 1: change how he felt about the woods? He thought about
Speaker 1: it and said it changed the math eleven years. I
Speaker 1: walked around out there thinking I was the top of
Speaker 1: the food chain, having a look at everything below me.
Speaker 1: Turns out I was the one being looked at as
Speaker 1: lower on the food chain. It never touched me, never
Speaker 1: threatened me, never did anything but stand end up and leave.
Speaker 1: But I used to eat lunch with my back against
Speaker 1: a tree and my eyes closed. I never did that again.
Speaker 1: Philippe still works in the industry. The two of them
Speaker 1: have talked about it exactly twice since, both times more
Speaker 1: than a few beers. In the last time, Felipe told
Speaker 1: him something new. On the morning it happened before the siding,
Speaker 1: before the rock. When they'd first split up at the truck,
Speaker 1: Philippe had found a line of impressions in the dust
Speaker 1: of a skid road coming out of the unit they
Speaker 1: were about to enter. He'd stood over them for a minute,
Speaker 1: and then he'd scuffed them out with his boot and
Speaker 1: gone to work. Russ asked him why in God's name
Speaker 1: he'd wipe them out. Felipe said, because if they were
Speaker 1: still there at the end of the day, I'd have
Speaker 1: had to decide something. Sometimes people hand you a sentence
Speaker 1: that explains the whole phenomenon of underreporting better than any
Speaker 1: study ever could, and the only thing to do is
Speaker 1: let it sit. Now we're going back in time. The
Speaker 1: next story is the oldest one in this episode, and
Speaker 1: it comes out of a hollow in West Virginia from
Speaker 1: a woman who waited sixty six years to tell it.
Speaker 1: Ruth is eighty two years old. What you're about to
Speaker 1: hear happened in the fall of nineteen fifty eight, when
Speaker 1: she was fourteen, in a hollow in central West Virginia.
Speaker 1: She never spoke about it publicly until two years ago.
Speaker 1: Ruth grew up the third of six children on a
Speaker 1: hill farm that had been in her mother's family since
Speaker 1: before the Civil War. When she describes the place, she
Speaker 1: doesn't romanticize it. The farm was work hogs, a milk cow, chickens,
Speaker 1: tobacco on the bottom land, a garden that fed them,
Speaker 1: and a cellar full of jars that got them through winter.
Speaker 1: The house had gotten electricity in the fifties, but the
Speaker 1: light ended at the porch past the yard fence. It
Speaker 1: was nineteen hundred out there, and passed the pasture it
Speaker 1: was seventeen hundred. The ridge behind the farm ran unbroken
Speaker 1: timber for miles, and her father hunted it, and her
Speaker 1: grandfather had hunted it, and the family had names for
Speaker 1: parts of it that appeared on no map. One of
Speaker 1: those names is where this story starts. There was a
Speaker 1: section of the ridge a bench up near the top
Speaker 1: where two hollows came together that the family called the
Speaker 1: yellow Gap, and the rule, unwritten, unexplained, absolute, was that
Speaker 1: you didn't go to the yellow Gap. Her father hunted
Speaker 1: every inch of that ridge except the gap. When Ruth
Speaker 1: was little, she assumed it was a property line. It wasn't.
Speaker 1: The land was theirs. Ruth said her grandmother was the
Speaker 1: only one who'd ever put words near the reason, and
Speaker 1: the words weren't much, She said. Grandma referred exactly twice
Speaker 1: in Ruth's hearing to what walks in the gap? Not
Speaker 1: who what, and both times an adult in the room
Speaker 1: changed the subject with the speed of somebody stepping on
Speaker 1: a spark. Now we're at the fall of nineteen fifty eight.
Speaker 1: It started with the hogs. They kept the hogs in
Speaker 1: a lot down by the barn, and in late September
Speaker 1: something began working on that lot. At night, the hogs
Speaker 1: would go off all at once, that screaming that hogs do, which,
Speaker 1: if you've never heard it as a sound with no
Speaker 1: bottom to it. And her father would come down the
Speaker 1: stairs with the lantern and the shotgun and go out,
Speaker 1: and the hogs would settle, and in the morning there'd
Speaker 1: be nothing to see except the top rail of the
Speaker 1: lot fence, which on three different mornings had been pulled off,
Speaker 1: its posts, not broken, pulled, the nails drawn straight out
Speaker 1: of the wood. Her father blamed a bear at first,
Speaker 1: same as ray, and Oklahoma blamed a bear, same as
Speaker 1: they always blame a bear, and a bear was serious business,
Speaker 1: so he did what men did. In nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 1: he sat up three nights on the barn roof walkway
Speaker 1: with the shotgun and a thermos. Nothing came. The fourth
Speaker 1: night he slept in his bed and the hogs went
Speaker 1: off at two in the morning, and the rail was
Speaker 1: on the ground at daylight. Ruth said that was the
Speaker 1: first time she saw her father look at the ridge
Speaker 1: in a way she didn't have a word for at fourteen,
Speaker 1: and doesn't much like the word she has for it now.
Speaker 1: October came on. The scream started around the middle of
Speaker 1: the month. They came at night from up the ridge,
Speaker 1: from the direction of the gap. And Ruth's description runs
Speaker 1: so close to Carla's that I could read them back
Speaker 1: to back, and you'd think one witness long wailing. A
Speaker 1: woman's scream stretched past what any woman could hold with
Speaker 1: weight underneath it. The first night, the whole family ended
Speaker 1: up in the kitchen, all eight of them, nobody talking,
Speaker 1: her mother holding the baby, and her father standing at
Speaker 1: the window with the light off. The dog, a farm
Speaker 1: collie named Shep, was under the table, and Ruth said
Speaker 1: the sight of him under there frightened her more than
Speaker 1: the sound, because in her whole life she'd never seen
Speaker 1: that dog be behind anybody when there was trouble in
Speaker 1: front of them. The screams came, by her count on
Speaker 1: nine or ten nights, spread across a month. The family
Speaker 1: adapted the way families do. Her mother moved the youngest
Speaker 1: three into one bedroom. Her father started doing the evening
Speaker 1: stock choice before dusk instead of after supper, and he
Speaker 1: took the shotgun to the barn, and he took a
Speaker 1: child with him, always not for help, Ruth understood later,
Speaker 1: but so that there was a runner. Nobody said any
Speaker 1: of this out loud. The chores just rearranged themselves around
Speaker 1: something that officially did not exist. And then there was
Speaker 1: the night at the window. It was the first week
Speaker 1: of November, cold, no snow yet. Ruth shared a room
Speaker 1: with her sister Loretta, who was twelve at the time,
Speaker 1: and the room was on the ground floor, at the
Speaker 1: back corner of the house facing the pasture in the ridge.
Speaker 1: The window was the old kind with single pane glass
Speaker 1: with a hook latch, and the sill sat about five
Speaker 1: feet off the ground. Outside because of the slope. Ruth
Speaker 1: woke up because Loretta was gripping her arm so hard
Speaker 1: that she left marks. Loretta wasn't looking at her, she
Speaker 1: was looking at the window, frozen, not making any sound
Speaker 1: at all, which was not normal at all for Loretta.
Speaker 1: There was a head and shoulders in the window filling it.
Speaker 1: The moon was up and coming from behind the house,
Speaker 1: so what the girl saw was mostly silhouette, a black
Speaker 1: shape against gray pasture. But silhouette tells you plenty. The
Speaker 1: head was wide and came to a slight ridge on top,
Speaker 1: and it sat down in the shoulders with almost no neck,
Speaker 1: and the shoulders ran past the window frame on both sides.
Speaker 1: The window is twenty nine inches wide. Ruth measured it
Speaker 1: as an adult before the house came down twenty nine
Speaker 1: inches and the shoulders ran past both edges. It was
Speaker 1: looking in. She couldn't see its eyes, but she could
Speaker 1: see that the head was angled slightly down, and she
Speaker 1: could hear it breathing through the glass, slow, big, with
Speaker 1: a little rasp on the exhale. And she told me
Speaker 1: that of everything from that night, the sound of it
Speaker 1: is what stayed. Screams from a ridge are one thing
Speaker 1: breath on the other side of a single pane of
Speaker 1: glass is another thing entirely. The girls didn't scream. Ruth
Speaker 1: thinks now that they physically couldn't even if they'd tried.
Speaker 1: Looking back, she said that she thinks that some older
Speaker 1: wiring took over and voted for still and silent and
Speaker 1: still in silent is what they were. She doesn't know
Speaker 1: how long it stood there. At some point the head
Speaker 1: turned a face toward the barn, held there a moment
Speaker 1: like it had heard something, and then the whole shape
Speaker 1: dropped away below the sell and was gone, and the
Speaker 1: moonlit pasture stood there, empty, like nothing had ever interrupted it.
Speaker 1: Loretta got up, crossed the room and hooked the latch,
Speaker 1: that tiny brass hook. Then she got in Ruth's bed,
Speaker 1: and the two of them sat with their backs against
Speaker 1: the headboard until the room went gray, and at first
Speaker 1: light Ruth went and got her father. Here's what her
Speaker 1: father did, and to me, this is the most important
Speaker 1: evidence in the entire account. He went out and looked
Speaker 1: at the ground under the window. He was down there
Speaker 1: a long time, longer than a man needs to look
Speaker 1: at nothing. Then he came in and he told his
Speaker 1: daughters quote it was a bear. It's gone now, and
Speaker 1: you'll not talk about it at the table and scare
Speaker 1: your mother. And then this man who had a farm
Speaker 1: losing money and no spare anything, drove to town that
Speaker 1: same day and came home with hinges and lumber, and
Speaker 1: by dark there were shutters on that window, working shutters
Speaker 1: on the inside, with a drop bar on one window
Speaker 1: of the house, the window his daughter slept behind. They
Speaker 1: never found out what he saw in the dirt. He
Speaker 1: never said, And in that family, in that time, you
Speaker 1: did not press your father. The screams tapered off. By Thanksgiving,
Speaker 1: the hoglight went quiet. Whatever had spent that autumn circling
Speaker 1: their lives moved off or went wherever these things go,
Speaker 1: and the family closed over the episode like water. It
Speaker 1: was never discussed. Ruth says, that's the part modern people
Speaker 1: can't understand. There was no processing, no talking through. There
Speaker 1: was a rule about a gap, and now there were
Speaker 1: shutters on a window, and the family's whole vocabulary for
Speaker 1: the event was those two objects. It's worth noting that
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty eight isn't a random year in this subject.
Speaker 1: That whole stretch of the late fifties produced a wave
Speaker 1: of reports out of the Appalachians and the Ohio Valley,
Speaker 1: most of them buried in small town newspapers under joky headlines.
Speaker 1: Farmers reporting screams, stock acting up, prowlers that left tracks
Speaker 1: nobody could explain. Ruth's family never reported anything, so there's
Speaker 1: no clipping with their name on it. But when she
Speaker 1: told me the season and the year, I went and
Speaker 1: pulled what I had from that region, and her family's
Speaker 1: bad autumn sits inside a documented cluster she had no
Speaker 1: idea existed. That doesn't prove her story. It just means
Speaker 1: that if she invented it, she accidentally invented it into
Speaker 1: exactly the right hole in the historical record. At eighty
Speaker 1: two years old, with nothing to gain, you can decide
Speaker 1: what to do with that. I know what I did
Speaker 1: with it. Loretta died in nineteen ninety one in a
Speaker 1: car accident, and Ruth points out with some bitterness, that
Speaker 1: when she died, the number of living people who'd seen
Speaker 1: the thing in the window went from two to one,
Speaker 1: and the one had never told anybody. The shutters, by
Speaker 1: the way stayed on that window until the house came down.
Speaker 1: Renters lived in the place for a while in the seventies,
Speaker 1: and Ruth heard second hand that they'd asked the family
Speaker 1: why one bedroom had a drop bar on the inside
Speaker 1: of the shutters, like something out of a fort. Nobody
Speaker 1: gave them an answer. When the house was finally bulldozed,
Speaker 1: Ruth was living two states away, and she says part
Speaker 1: of her was glad she didn't have to watch, and
Speaker 1: part of her wishes she'd gone back first and taken
Speaker 1: the bar off that window and kept it. It was
Speaker 1: the only piece of physical evidence her family ever produced,
Speaker 1: and it went into a burn pile with the rest
Speaker 1: of the house. Her father lived to ninety. In his
Speaker 1: last week in a hospital, bed medicated and coming loose
Speaker 1: from the calendar, he talked, stay tuned for more Backwoods
Speaker 1: bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Mostly it
Speaker 1: was scraps, his brothers, the war, a tractor he'd sold
Speaker 1: and regretted. But one afternoon, with Ruth alone in the room,
Speaker 1: he came up out of a doze, found her face
Speaker 1: and was she swears entirely himself for about a minute,
Speaker 1: and he said, I should have told you girls the
Speaker 1: truth about the window. It wasn't fair you seeing that
Speaker 1: and having to carry it like it was nothing. Ruth
Speaker 1: asked him what the truth was. What did he find
Speaker 1: under the window. He looked at her and he said,
Speaker 1: tracks like a man's And then he said the things
Speaker 1: she waited so many years to repeat to anybody. He said,
Speaker 1: my daddy put the name on the yellow Gap in
Speaker 1: nineteen and twelve, after his brother came off the ridge
Speaker 1: without his rifle and never hunted again. We always knew, Ruthie.
Speaker 1: Knowing and saying are different things. He died two days later.
Speaker 1: Ruth told me she decided to start saying it because
Speaker 1: she's eighty two, and she's the last one, and a
Speaker 1: family that kept a secret for over a century deserves
Speaker 1: to have it finally count for something. The farm is gone,
Speaker 1: sold in the eighties, the house bulldozed, the ridge is
Speaker 1: still there. The bench where two hollows come together is
Speaker 1: still there, owned now by a timber company, unposted, unnamed
Speaker 1: on every map. She has never gone back, and she
Speaker 1: asked me to make sure. I said that she never will.
Speaker 1: One story left for this one. We trade the mountains
Speaker 1: for flat water and Cyprus, and we end this episode
Speaker 1: in the river swamps of the Florida Panhandle. Tom is
Speaker 1: a commercial fisherman's son who became a fishing guide, and
Speaker 1: he has spent his entire life on the rivers of
Speaker 1: the Florida Panhandle. He's fifty seven. He grew up in
Speaker 1: a town small enough that he asked me not to
Speaker 1: name it on water. His family has worked for four
Speaker 1: generations in the kind of river swamp country that most
Speaker 1: Americans I've never seen and genuinely cannot picture. Cyprus and
Speaker 1: Tupelo standing in black water, slews that go back for
Speaker 1: miles off the main channel, sandbars, bluff banks, and a
Speaker 1: canopy that closes over some of the creeks so completely
Speaker 1: that noon looks like evening. I want to set the
Speaker 1: ecological table for a second, because Florida gets laughed out
Speaker 1: of this conversation, and it shouldn't. People here skunk ape
Speaker 1: and they picture a guy in a suit at a
Speaker 1: tourist trap. But the river systems of the Panhandle and
Speaker 1: the Big Bend are some of the least trafficked wilderness
Speaker 1: in the Eastern United States. There are flood plain forests
Speaker 1: along those rivers where no human being has a reason
Speaker 1: to go ever, and doesn't. It's thick, it's wet, it's
Speaker 1: loaded with protein year round, deer, hogs, fish, mussels, and turtles,
Speaker 1: and you could easily hide an elephant in it. I'm
Speaker 1: not saying that proves anything lives there. I'm saying the
Speaker 1: argument from habitat which people lean on so hard out West,
Speaker 1: works fine in Florida two. It's just less photogenic. Tom's
Speaker 1: encounter happened in the spring of twenty fourteen, and it
Speaker 1: happened over the course of one night, which makes it
Speaker 1: different from everything else in this episode. The others were moments.
Speaker 1: Tom's was a siege his word. He was catfishing, bush
Speaker 1: hooks and a few trot lines, which, for the uninitiated
Speaker 1: are set lines you baite in the evening and run
Speaker 1: through the night, checking them every few hours. It's legal there,
Speaker 1: it's traditional, and it means being on the river alone
Speaker 1: in the dark, which Tom had done hundreds of times.
Speaker 1: He had a sixteen foot aluminum John boat with a
Speaker 1: tiller out board, a cooler, a headlamp, a spotlight, and
Speaker 1: a thermos. He motored up into a slew system off
Speaker 1: the main river about an hour before dark, set his
Speaker 1: lines along a stretch he'd fished since he was a boy,
Speaker 1: and tied up to wait on a sandbar at the
Speaker 1: mouth of the slough. The first sign came around ten,
Speaker 1: and it came as a smell. Tom's version of it
Speaker 1: was rot and skunk and something like a wet mattress
Speaker 1: drifting to him on air moving down the slough. He'd
Speaker 1: smelled it before twice in his life before that night,
Speaker 1: once as a teenager and once in his thirties. He'd
Speaker 1: caught that same smell on that same river system, and
Speaker 1: both times the old men had a name for it
Speaker 1: that I can't say on this show, and both times
Speaker 1: the response of every adult present was to reel up
Speaker 1: and leave. It was treated like weather. Nobody discussed it
Speaker 1: because there was nothing to discuss. You don't argue with rain.
Speaker 1: The teenage memory is worth thirty seconds because it hangs
Speaker 1: over the whole night. Tom was fifteen, running lines with
Speaker 1: his grandfather in a wooden boat, and the smell came
Speaker 1: down a creek mouth at dusk. His grandfather, a man
Speaker 1: who had pulled bodies out of that river for the
Speaker 1: sheriff and never changed expression doing it, reeled up mid
Speaker 1: bait with a hook still in his hand and said
Speaker 1: we're done. Tom I asked why his grandfather said because
Speaker 1: I'm old and I want my supper. And then he
Speaker 1: ran the outboard wide open the whole way home, which
Speaker 1: he never did because gas cost money. Tom said. The
Speaker 1: old man didn't look at the banks once on that run.
Speaker 1: He looked straight down the river, like a man driving
Speaker 1: through a bad neighborhood with the doors locked. Fifteen year
Speaker 1: old Tom filed it under old men being strange. Fifty
Speaker 1: seven year old Tom does not file it there anymore.
Speaker 1: But Tom was alone this night, and he had two
Speaker 1: hundred dollars of bait in the water, and he was
Speaker 1: a grown man in his own boat on his own river.
Speaker 1: So he stayed. At about ten thirty, something big moved
Speaker 1: in the flooded timber across the slough. He heard water,
Speaker 1: not a splash, water displacement, the deep sloshing wade of
Speaker 1: something heavy walking. And here's the thing. The water in
Speaker 1: that timber runs three to four feet deep. A deer
Speaker 1: doesn't wide that. A deer swims it, and swimming makes
Speaker 1: a completely different sound. A bear might wade the shallow edge,
Speaker 1: but this was moving through the deep stuff. Steady unhurried
Speaker 1: parallel to the sandbar, walking through four feet of water.
Speaker 1: He put the spotlight on the trees and got cypress trunks,
Speaker 1: moving shadows of cypress trunks, and about forty yards back
Speaker 1: for half a second a slice of something dark between
Speaker 1: two trunks that did not have bark on it. Then
Speaker 1: the waiting stopped. Everything went quiet for a while, and
Speaker 1: Tom told me the quiet is when he made his
Speaker 1: first mistake, which was convincing himself it had left. He
Speaker 1: ran his lines at eleven, took a couple of channel
Speaker 1: cats off, rebated, came back to the bar, and as
Speaker 1: he was stepping out of the boat from the timber
Speaker 1: across the slough, something hit the water, a rock, he assumes,
Speaker 1: or a chunk of dead wood, something thrown and thrown hard,
Speaker 1: because it came down out past the middle of the slough,
Speaker 1: thirty yards from the trees, and the splash was a
Speaker 1: big one. Then another a minute later, closer to his boat,
Speaker 1: Then a third close enough that water reached the hull.
Speaker 1: Tom is not a bigfoot guy. I want to keep
Speaker 1: saying that his frame of reference was people. His actual
Speaker 1: fear at that moment was that a person was in
Speaker 1: the timber messing with him, some poacher or meth cook,
Speaker 1: wanting him off. That slew and in his world that's
Speaker 1: a legitimately dangerous situation. So he did what you do
Speaker 1: to a person. He lit the tree line with the
Speaker 1: spotlight and hollered that he was armed, which was true,
Speaker 1: there was an old revolver in the boat box, and
Speaker 1: that he wasn't looking for trouble and would be gone
Speaker 1: at first light. What answered him was not a person.
Speaker 1: He described it the way Carla and Ruth described it,
Speaker 1: So I won't run through it again in full, except
Speaker 1: to say that at a distance of sixty or seventy
Speaker 1: yards across open water, with no other sound in the world,
Speaker 1: the scream took the strength out of his legs. He
Speaker 1: sat down on the gunwale because standing stopped being available.
Speaker 1: It went on, he says, longer than he could have
Speaker 1: held a note under water. And when it stopped, the
Speaker 1: swamp did something he'd never in his life heard it
Speaker 1: do in spring. It stayed silent. No frogs, the frog
Speaker 1: chorus down. There is a wall of sound, ten thousand voices.
Speaker 1: It never stops. It stopped. He sat on his sandbar,
Speaker 1: in a ring of spotlight, surrounded by a swamp holding
Speaker 1: its breath. Tom made a decision then that he defends
Speaker 1: to this day, and I defend it too. The smart move,
Speaker 1: the movie move, is to crank the motor and run.
Speaker 1: But the slew mouth is one hundred and something yards
Speaker 1: of narrow water past the flooded timber where the thing
Speaker 1: was standing, and then it's eleven miles of river in
Speaker 1: the dark. Motors quit john boats hit deadheads and swamp.
Speaker 1: If he ran and anything went wrong, he'd be in
Speaker 1: black water at night, closer to it, with no light
Speaker 1: he could hold and swim with. At the same time,
Speaker 1: the sandbar was open ground with sight lines, so he stayed.
Speaker 1: He pulled the boat up hard, built his little propane
Speaker 1: stove up to have flame and light, put his back
Speaker 1: against the boat with the revolver on his knee and
Speaker 1: the spotlight in his hand, and he waited for daylight.
Speaker 1: His word for the next four hours was siege. And
Speaker 1: I already told you that, but now you know what
Speaker 1: he meant. It circled all night on the far side,
Speaker 1: never crossing the water. He'd hear the waiting start track
Speaker 1: it left along the timber, lose it, pick it up
Speaker 1: again to the right twice more. It threw something once
Speaker 1: from way back in the swamp. There was a crack
Speaker 1: of something enormous, breaking a whole tree, or a limb
Speaker 1: the size of a tree, a gunshot of green wood,
Speaker 1: and at some point in the small hours the worst stretch,
Speaker 1: it went quiet for so long that the frog started
Speaker 1: up again, and Tom's chin was on his chest, And
Speaker 1: then one single waiting step happened, close, close, and upstream
Speaker 1: on his side of the slough. He came off the
Speaker 1: boat onto his feet, with the light up, and swept
Speaker 1: the bar and the brush line behind it, and caught nothing.
Speaker 1: And the frogs had shut off again, and he stood
Speaker 1: there until they came back. That took by his guests
Speaker 1: an hour. He never heard it cross back. Either it
Speaker 1: swam silent, or it had always had a way around,
Speaker 1: or the step was something else entirely, He'll give you
Speaker 1: all three possibilities without ranking them. Dawn on a panhandle
Speaker 1: river comes up gray and sudden. When there was real light,
Speaker 1: the swamp sounded ordinary again, and Tom ran his lines
Speaker 1: one last time, because and this is the most fisherman
Speaker 1: sentence I've ever heard them fish weren't going to unhook themselves,
Speaker 1: and bait costs money. Then he came out of the
Speaker 1: slough as fast as he could as he passed the
Speaker 1: flooded timber. He looked because he had to, and on
Speaker 1: a mud flat at the base of the trees, right
Speaker 1: where the waiting sounds had started ten hours before, there
Speaker 1: was a track line. Six said impressions coming up out
Speaker 1: of the water and into the palmeadows, pressed deep in
Speaker 1: gray mud, wider and longer than any bare human print,
Speaker 1: with a stride between them. He didn't need to get
Speaker 1: out and measure to know he couldn't match. He did
Speaker 1: not stop the boat. He told exactly one person at first,
Speaker 1: his uncle Dewey, his father's last living brother, then in
Speaker 1: his eighties, sitting on a porch with a fan going.
Speaker 1: Tom laid the whole night out, and Dewey rocked and
Speaker 1: listened and didn't interrupt, which was itself unusual. And when
Speaker 1: Tom finished, Dewey said, whereabouts. Tom told him the slew
Speaker 1: and Dewey nodded like a man confirming a price he
Speaker 1: already knew, and said, that's where it got The dogs
Speaker 1: nineteen and fifty three, two bare hounds off a strike
Speaker 1: went up in their hot and neither one ever came out,
Speaker 1: and no man in the party would go in after them.
Speaker 1: Past the Timber, and your granddaddy was in that party,
Speaker 1: and that's the year he quit running dogs. Tom had
Speaker 1: known his whole life that his grandfather didn't keep hounds.
Speaker 1: Every river family kept hounds. He just never once thought
Speaker 1: to ask why his didn't. Tom still guides that river system.
Speaker 1: He'll take clients within a mile of that sleugh He
Speaker 1: has not been up in it since twenty fourteen. And
Speaker 1: when clients ask about it, because it looks fishy as
Speaker 1: hell from the mouth, he tells them at silt's and bad,
Speaker 1: and the fishing's better elsewhere, which is a lie he's
Speaker 1: now told so many times it sounds like the truth,
Speaker 1: even to him. His daddy's generation left when the smell
Speaker 1: came and never explained, and he grew up thinking they
Speaker 1: were superstitious old men. He asked me to end his
Speaker 1: story with this, so I will, he said. Tell your listeners,
Speaker 1: the old men on the river weren't scared, and they
Speaker 1: weren't stupid. They just already had their night on a
Speaker 1: sandbar somewhere, every one of them. And after you've had yours,
Speaker 1: you don't argue with rain. That's five Michigan, Oklahoma, California,
Speaker 1: West Virginia, Florida, a deer camp, a chicken yard, a
Speaker 1: timber unit, a farmhouse window, a sandbar. I'll leave you
Speaker 1: with the pattern, because after four decades I can't help
Speaker 1: seeing it. Five strangers who've never met, spread across two
Speaker 1: thousand miles and fifty eight years, and they keep handing
Speaker 1: me the same details. The high screen with bass under it,
Speaker 1: the smell, the dogs that quit being dogs, the thing
Speaker 1: standing still and watching and then leaving every single time
Speaker 1: without doing the one thing an animal that size could
Speaker 1: so easily do. And the silence afterward, not the swamp silence,
Speaker 1: the human one. The fathers who wouldn't say, the cruisers
Speaker 1: who wouldn't radio, the families that installed shutters instead of sentences.
Speaker 1: Whatever this is. The witnesses behave like people who saw
Speaker 1: an animal, a rare one, a big one, an unclassified one,
Speaker 1: but an animal. Nobody in these five stories reached for magic.
Speaker 1: Neither will I. The road trip picks back up next episode.
Speaker 1: We've got a state waiting on us, and the tank's full.
Speaker 1: Until then, keep your eyes on the tree line. Di