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: My granddad died on a Thursday morning in March of
Speaker 1: twenty and nineteen, and he took sixty years of silence
Speaker 1: with him, almost all of it. Anyway. He'd cracked the
Speaker 1: door open for me over the last decade of his life,
Speaker 1: told me things he'd never told another living soul except
Speaker 1: his brother Vernon. And I've been sitting on all of
Speaker 1: it since the funeral. I'm not sitting on it anymore.
Speaker 1: My name's Caleb. I'm thirty four. I lived just outside
Speaker 1: of Hazzard, Kentucky, and I need to tell you what
Speaker 1: happened on the ridge behind my granddad's tobacco farm, because
Speaker 1: he can't tell it himself, and it deserves to be heard.
Speaker 1: He earned that much. His name was Harold. Everybody called
Speaker 1: him that, Not Hal, not Harry, just Harold. He was
Speaker 1: born in nineteen thirty three in Perry County, Kentucky, grew
Speaker 1: up harder than most people today could even imagine, and
Speaker 1: spent his whole life working tobacco, raising cattle, and keeping
Speaker 1: a piece of land that had been in our family
Speaker 1: since before the Civil War. He was about five foot ten,
Speaker 1: built like a cinder block, and had hands that looked
Speaker 1: like they'd been carved out of hickory root. He didn't
Speaker 1: go past eighth grade in school, but he was one
Speaker 1: of the sharpest people I've ever known. He could tell
Speaker 1: you what the weather was going to do three days
Speaker 1: out just by watching the way the crows flew in
Speaker 1: the evening. He could look at a cow and tell
Speaker 1: you within a day or two when she'd calve. He
Speaker 1: knew that land better than anyone alive. Every hollow every spring,
Speaker 1: every deer trail, every rock shell. That's what makes what
Speaker 1: happened to him so unsettling, because whatever was on that
Speaker 1: ridge behind his farm, it didn't belong to any world
Speaker 1: he understood. Let me set the geography for you, because
Speaker 1: it matters. Granddad's farm sat in a narrow valley along
Speaker 1: a creek called Pigeon Roost, which fed into the North
Speaker 1: Fork of the Kentucky River. The bottom land was maybe
Speaker 1: sixty acres of workable ground, tobacco, corn, a little hay,
Speaker 1: and it was hemmed in on both sides by steep,
Speaker 1: heavily wooded ridges. The one to the east behind the
Speaker 1: house was the one that mattered. Locals just called it
Speaker 1: Briar Ridge, though I've never found that name on any map.
Speaker 1: It climbed up maybe seven or eight hundred feet from
Speaker 1: the creek, bottom thick with cedar and poplar and oak,
Speaker 1: choked with laurel thickets so dense you'd have to crawl
Speaker 1: on your hands and knees to get through some of them.
Speaker 1: There was one old logging road that switched backed up
Speaker 1: to the top, but it hadn't been maintained since the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties and was more gully than road. By the
Speaker 1: time I was a kid, Beyond that ridge there was nothing,
Speaker 1: no houses, no roads, no power lines, just miles and
Speaker 1: miles of unbroken timber rolling all the way into Nott
Speaker 1: County wild country, the kind of ground where a man
Speaker 1: could walk for two days and never cross a fence line.
Speaker 1: Granddad's house sat about three hundred yards from the base
Speaker 1: of that ridge. Between the house and the tree line,
Speaker 1: there was a lower pasture where he kept a few
Speaker 1: head of cattle, a tobacco barn, a corn crib, and
Speaker 1: an old board fence that had been there in one
Speaker 1: form or another since his daddy's time. The creek ran
Speaker 1: along the north edge of the property, and there was
Speaker 1: a crossing, just a shallow spot with flat rocks, where
Speaker 1: the cattle would go to water, and where Granddad would
Speaker 1: cross if he ever needed to get to the lower
Speaker 1: hollow on the other side. I'm telling you all of
Speaker 1: this because I want you to understand the layout. The
Speaker 1: house was not remote by Appalachian standards. It was maybe
Speaker 1: four miles from the nearest paved road, and there were
Speaker 1: a few other families scattered along Pigeon Roost, though nobody
Speaker 1: was what you'd call close, but that ridge behind the farm,
Speaker 1: that was another world entirely now. Granddad told me these
Speaker 1: things across many conversations over many years, mostly when I
Speaker 1: was in my late teens and twenties. He'd bring it
Speaker 1: up on his own terms, usually late in the evening
Speaker 1: when we were sitting on the porch or when we'd
Speaker 1: be out in the truck together. He never told the
Speaker 1: whole thing start to finish. It came in pieces, and
Speaker 1: sometimes he'd contradict himself on details dates exactly which year
Speaker 1: something happened. But the core of it never changed, not once,
Speaker 1: and the look on his face when he talked about
Speaker 1: it never changed either. It was the look of a
Speaker 1: man who had seen something that had rearranged his understanding
Speaker 1: of the world, and who had never fully put it
Speaker 1: back together. I should tell you a little more about
Speaker 1: Granddad before I get into the meat of this, because
Speaker 1: I think you need to know the kind of man
Speaker 1: he was to understand what this cost him. He was
Speaker 1: a man of routine and order. He ate the same
Speaker 1: breakfast every morning, two eggs over easy, a biscuit with
Speaker 1: butter and sorghum, and black coffee strong enough to strip paint.
Speaker 1: He read his Bible every night before bed, not in
Speaker 1: a showy way, just quietly, the same way he did everything.
Speaker 1: He kept his tools clean and hung on pegs in
Speaker 1: the barn, in the exact same arrangement his father had used.
Speaker 1: He didn't drink except for a little moonshine on Christmas Eve,
Speaker 1: and he didn't gamble, and he didn't chase women. He
Speaker 1: went to church every Sunday morning at the Pigeon Roost
Speaker 1: Regular Baptist Church, wearing the same brown suit he'd bought
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty eight. He was a man who had
Speaker 1: organized his life around predictability and hard work, and when
Speaker 1: something came along that didn't fit into that system, it
Speaker 1: shook him in ways that I don't think he ever
Speaker 1: fully recovered from. My grandmother was the opposite in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways. Doris was talkative, warm, superstitious in the
Speaker 1: way that mountain women of her generation tended to be.
Speaker 1: She'd throw salt over her shoulder, she wouldn't let you
Speaker 1: open an umbrella indoors, and she believed absolutely in signs
Speaker 1: and poort tents. She grew up hearing stories about hats
Speaker 1: and jacktails and things that lived in the deep woods,
Speaker 1: and she took them all at face value. I think
Speaker 1: that's part of why Granddad didn't share more with her
Speaker 1: in the early years. He knew she'd believe him, and
Speaker 1: he was afraid that her belief would make it more
Speaker 1: real than he was ready for it to be. He
Speaker 1: told me it started in the fall of nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 1: He would have been twenty nine years old. He and
Speaker 1: Doris had been married about seven years by then, and
Speaker 1: they had three kids, my dad who was five, my
Speaker 1: uncle Roy, who was three, and my aunt Linda, who
Speaker 1: was still a baby. It was late October and Granddad
Speaker 1: was finishing up the last of the tobacco harvest. If
Speaker 1: you know anything about Burley tobacco, you know that's a
Speaker 1: brutal stretch of work. You're cutting, spearing, hanging, and stripping
Speaker 1: from sun up to well pass dark, and by the
Speaker 1: end of it, your hands are black with gum and
Speaker 1: your back feels like it's been beaten with a pipe.
Speaker 1: Granddad was working that hard, and he was tired, and
Speaker 1: that's important because for a long time afterward he tried
Speaker 1: to tell himself that what he was seeing was just
Speaker 1: exhaustion playing tricks on him. The first thing he noticed
Speaker 1: wasn't dramatic. He came out one morning to check the
Speaker 1: cattle in the lower pasture and found that three fence
Speaker 1: posts along the back line, the ones closest to the ridge,
Speaker 1: had been pushed loose, not broken or knocked over, pushed.
Speaker 1: They were leaning inward toward the pasture at about a
Speaker 1: forty five degree angle, and the dirt around the base
Speaker 1: of each one was disturbed, like something had grabbed them
Speaker 1: and just shoved. He figured a bear had done it.
Speaker 1: They had black bears in that country, always had, and
Speaker 1: a bear leaning on a fence post could certainly push
Speaker 1: it over. He didn't think much of it. He tamped
Speaker 1: the posts back in, restrung the wire, and went on
Speaker 1: about his business. But then it happened again about two
Speaker 1: weeks later, same section of fence, same three posts, and
Speaker 1: two more Besides. This time one of the posts had
Speaker 1: actually been pulled clean out of the ground and was
Speaker 1: lying in the grass about ten feet from where it
Speaker 1: had stood. Granddad told me that was the first time
Speaker 1: he felt a little prickle at the back of his neck.
Speaker 1: Because a bear doesn't pull a post out of the
Speaker 1: ground and carry it somewhere. A bear pushes leans rubs.
Speaker 1: It doesn't grip and yank, but again he told himself
Speaker 1: it had to be a bear, because what else was there.
Speaker 1: He reset the posts, this time sinking the deeper and
Speaker 1: tamping the dirt harder, and he started watching that back
Speaker 1: fence line more carefully around the same time, and he
Speaker 1: couldn't pin down exactly which came first. His mule started
Speaker 1: acting wrong. Granddad had an old sorrow mule named Jack
Speaker 1: that he used for plowing and hauling and just about
Speaker 1: everything else. Jack was the most unflappable animal he'd ever owned.
Speaker 1: He said that mule wouldn't spook if you set off
Speaker 1: a stick of dynamite next to him. But that fall
Speaker 1: Jack started refusing to go near the tree line. Granddad
Speaker 1: would try to ride him up to the back pasture,
Speaker 1: and Jack would plant his feet and lock his legs
Speaker 1: and would not go. His ears would lay flat, and
Speaker 1: he'd roll his eyes until you could see the whites,
Speaker 1: and he'd make this low groaning sound that Granddad said
Speaker 1: he'd never heard from a mule before, or since it
Speaker 1: wasn't a bray, it was deeper, more guttural, like the
Speaker 1: sound was coming from somewhere in his chest rather than
Speaker 1: his throat. Granddad said he finally gave up trying to
Speaker 1: force the issue and would just tie Jack off off
Speaker 1: at the tobacco barn and walked the rest of the
Speaker 1: way on foot. Then came the Prince. The first frost
Speaker 1: of the season came on November third, nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 1: Granddad remembered the date because it was a Saturday and
Speaker 1: he'd been planning to strip tobacco that morning, but decided
Speaker 1: to check on a heifer that was close to calving
Speaker 1: before he started. He walked out to the lower pasture
Speaker 1: at first light, and there in the frost, running in
Speaker 1: a line from the tree line to the creek crossing
Speaker 1: and back again were footprints. They were bare, no shoe,
Speaker 1: no boot, barefoot prints pressed deep into the frost covered ground,
Speaker 1: and they were enormous. Granddad said. He put his own
Speaker 1: boot down next to one, and the print was half
Speaker 1: again as long and nearly twice as wide. He wore
Speaker 1: a size ten. He described the Prince as looking almost human,
Speaker 1: with distinct toes and a heel, but the proportions were wrong.
Speaker 1: The toes were thicker and more splayed, like they were
Speaker 1: designed for gripping uneven ground, and the stride between Prince
Speaker 1: was annoying. Five feet or more. The prince sank deep,
Speaker 1: too deeper than his boots did, which meant whatever left
Speaker 1: them was far heavier than he was. He squatted there
Speaker 1: in the cold and studied those tracks for a long time.
Speaker 1: He told me he counted fourteen of them going down
Speaker 1: to the creek and fourteen coming back, each one perfectly placed,
Speaker 1: like whatever made them knew exactly where it was stepping.
Speaker 1: There was no wandering, no scuffing, no dragging, just deliberate,
Speaker 1: purposeful steps down to the water and then back up
Speaker 1: toward the ridge. He followed them to the tree line
Speaker 1: and lost them in the leaves and dead fall. He
Speaker 1: went back to the house and didn't say a word
Speaker 1: to my grandmother. He wasn't ready to say it out
Speaker 1: loud because he didn't know what he'd be saying. That
Speaker 1: was the beginning. Over the next few weeks, more things happened,
Speaker 1: small things that kept piling up. He found a place
Speaker 1: along the creek where something had turned over. Rocks in
Speaker 1: the water, big rocks the kind you'd need both hands
Speaker 1: and a good bit of strength to flow lip, and the
Speaker 1: craw dads underneath had been scooped out. There was a
Speaker 1: muddy handprint on one of the rocks that he said
Speaker 1: made him go cold all over. It was a hand,
Speaker 1: clearly a hand with four fingers and a thumb, but
Speaker 1: the span of it was wider than any human hand
Speaker 1: he'd ever seen, and the fingers were thicker, more like
Speaker 1: fat sausages pressed into the mud. He thought about taking
Speaker 1: a picture of it, but he didn't own a camera,
Speaker 1: and by the time he got back from town the
Speaker 1: next day, rain had washed it away. The smell came
Speaker 1: around the same time. Granddad described it as something between
Speaker 1: a wet dog that had rolled in a gut pile
Speaker 1: and a skunk that had crawled into a hot compost
Speaker 1: heap and died. It wasn't constant. It came in waves,
Speaker 1: usually near the creek crossing or along the back fence line,
Speaker 1: and it was strongest in the evenings. He said, you
Speaker 1: couldn't mistake it for anything natural that belonged on that farm.
Speaker 1: He'd dressed deer, he'd scraped hides, he'd cleaned out chicken
Speaker 1: coops in August, and nothing in his experience compared to this.
Speaker 1: It had a thickness to it, he said, like it
Speaker 1: coated the inside of your nose. And wouldn't let go.
Speaker 1: He'd catch a whiff of it and his stomach would
Speaker 1: turn and he'd know that something had been through there recently,
Speaker 1: maybe within the hour. The evening he saw the figure
Speaker 1: on the ridge was November twenty first, nineteen sixty two,
Speaker 1: a Wednesday. He remembered it specifically because President Kennedy was
Speaker 1: going to be in Texas later that week, and he
Speaker 1: and my grandmother had been listening to the news about
Speaker 1: the trip on the radio. That morning, he went out
Speaker 1: around four point thirty to check on that same heifer.
Speaker 1: She still hadn't calved, and he was getting worried, And
Speaker 1: as he came around the side of the tobacco barn,
Speaker 1: he happened to look up toward the ridge. The sun
Speaker 1: was already behind the mountain, so the ridgeline was back
Speaker 1: lit with that thin orange light you get in late
Speaker 1: autumn when the days have gotten short, and standing right
Speaker 1: up there at the top, maybe four hundred yards away,
Speaker 1: was a figure. Granddad told me he stopped walking and
Speaker 1: just stared. The figure was standing between two cedar trees,
Speaker 1: partially screened by the branches, and it was tall, not
Speaker 1: just tall the way a big man is tall. Tall
Speaker 1: in a way that was wrong. He said it had
Speaker 1: to be over seven feet, maybe closer to eight, because
Speaker 1: the lower branches of those seedars were well above head
Speaker 1: height for a normal person, and this thing's shoulders were
Speaker 1: up among them. It was dark in color, he couldn't
Speaker 1: tell if that was hair or skin or clothing, and
Speaker 1: it was standing absolutely perfectly still, not shifting its weight,
Speaker 1: not moving its head, not swaying the way a living
Speaker 1: thing does when it's standing in one place. It was
Speaker 1: like it had been carved out of the ridge line itself.
Speaker 1: He watched it for what he guessed was about two minutes,
Speaker 1: though he admitted it could have been less. Time does
Speaker 1: strange things when you're scared. He said. The figure never moved,
Speaker 1: not even a little, and he never saw it blink
Speaker 1: or turn or adjust. It was just there, standing facing
Speaker 1: down hill, facing him. Stay tuned for more Backwoods bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. He couldn't make out
Speaker 1: features at that distance, not in that light, but he
Speaker 1: said the shape of it was unmistakable. It was built
Speaker 1: like a man, but heavier, thicker, with shoulders that seemed
Speaker 1: impossibly wide, and a head that sat forward on its
Speaker 1: neck like it was hunched or crouching slightly, even while
Speaker 1: standing upright, he told me, and I'll never forget the
Speaker 1: way he said it, Caleb. It looked like somebody had
Speaker 1: taken a man and just made him more, more of everything,
Speaker 1: more height, more shoulders, more weight, like God had started
Speaker 1: making a person and didn't know when to stop. He
Speaker 1: backed up slowly until he was behind the tobacco barn,
Speaker 1: and then he turned and walked fast back to the house.
Speaker 1: He didn't run, because some instinct told him that running
Speaker 1: would be the wrong thing to do. He locked the
Speaker 1: doors that night, which was something he never did. My
Speaker 1: grandmother asked him why, and he told her he'd seen
Speaker 1: a bear on the ridge and didn't want to take
Speaker 1: any chances. She accepted that without question. Bears were part
Speaker 1: of life up there. Now, Brian, I want to pause
Speaker 1: here and tell you something about my granddad's character, because
Speaker 1: it matters for understanding why this story played out the
Speaker 1: way it did. Harold was not a fearful man. He
Speaker 1: grew up during the Depression in one of the poorest
Speaker 1: counties in the poorest state in the country. He worked
Speaker 1: underground in the coal mines for two years. When he
Speaker 1: was barely seventeen before he decided he'd rather starve on
Speaker 1: the farm than die in a hole. He hunted alone
Speaker 1: in those mountains his entire life, slept on the ground
Speaker 1: in weather that would kill most people, and once killed
Speaker 1: a copperhead with his bare hands because he didn't have
Speaker 1: time to find a stick. The man was hard in
Speaker 1: ways that don't exist anymore. So when I tell you
Speaker 1: that something on that ridge scared him, genuinely, deeply scared him,
Speaker 1: I need you to understand what that means. It means
Speaker 1: something fundamental about the world he thought he knew had
Speaker 1: shifted underneath him, and he couldn't get his footing back.
Speaker 1: He didn't see the figure again for several weeks after that,
Speaker 1: but the other activity continued. In early December, he started
Speaker 1: hearing things at night. The first time was a sound
Speaker 1: that woke him out of a dead sleep. He described
Speaker 1: it as a single, sharp crack that echoed off the ridges.
Speaker 1: Not a gunshot, not a tree falling, but something striking
Speaker 1: wood against wood, like someone had taken a baseball bat
Speaker 1: and swung it as hard as they could against the
Speaker 1: trunk of a tree. It was loud enough that it
Speaker 1: rattled the glass in the bedroom window. He lay there
Speaker 1: in the dark and listened, and about thirty seconds later
Speaker 1: it came again from the same direction up on the ridge.
Speaker 1: Then nothing. He waited for an hour, maybe more, and
Speaker 1: didn't hear it again that night, but it came back.
Speaker 1: Over the next several weeks, he'd hear those knocks at
Speaker 1: irregular intervals, sometimes two or three nights in a row.
Speaker 1: Some times nothing for a week, then a string of them.
Speaker 1: They weren't always the same. Some were single strikes, that hard,
Speaker 1: flat crack of wood on wood. Others came in patterns,
Speaker 1: two quick knocks, a pause, then a third. Sometimes they
Speaker 1: seemed to come from directly above on the ridge, and
Speaker 1: other times from farther away, off to the north or south,
Speaker 1: like whatever was making them was moving along the spine
Speaker 1: of the mountain. Twice he heard what sounded like an answer,
Speaker 1: a knock from one direction followed by one from a
Speaker 1: different direction, entirely miles apart, as if two of whatever
Speaker 1: they were were talking to each other across the dark.
Speaker 1: One night in mid December, he heard something different. He'd
Speaker 1: gone out to the porch to smoke before bed. He
Speaker 1: was a pipe smoker. Granddad always had a bent stem
Speaker 1: brier going, and the night was clear and cold and
Speaker 1: perfectly still. No wind, no crickets that time of year,
Speaker 1: just that dense mountain silence that presses in on you.
Speaker 1: He was standing there, looking out toward the ridge, and
Speaker 1: from somewhere up in the timber came a sound that
Speaker 1: he said made every hair on his body stand up.
Speaker 1: It started low, almost below the range of hearing, like
Speaker 1: a vibration in the ground, more than a sound in
Speaker 1: the air. Then it climbed. It rose in pitch over
Speaker 1: the course of maybe ten seconds, into a long, sustained
Speaker 1: whale that he said was like nothing that had ever
Speaker 1: come out of any animal he'd encountered in his life.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a coyote, it wasn't a bobcat. It wasn't
Speaker 1: an owl or a fox, or a screech of any
Speaker 1: kind he could identify, He told me. It sounded like
Speaker 1: a woman screaming through a drain pipe, distorted and hollow
Speaker 1: and impossibly loud. It held that pitch for what felt
Speaker 1: like forever, and then it broke apart at the end,
Speaker 1: kind of stuttered and warbled and dropped back down into
Speaker 1: a series of low, grunting hoofs that faded into silence.
Speaker 1: He said. The dogs they had, two hounds, Blue and Rascal,
Speaker 1: were under the porch before the sound even reached its peak.
Speaker 1: They didn't bark, they didn't growl. They just crawled under
Speaker 1: there and pressed themselves against the foundation of the house
Speaker 1: and wouldn't come out until the next morning. That scared
Speaker 1: Granddad almost more than the sound itself, because those dogs
Speaker 1: would tree a bear or chase a bobcat without hesitation.
Speaker 1: They were hunting dogs, bred and trained to be aggressive,
Speaker 1: and whatever made that sound had reduced them to trembling,
Speaker 1: whimpering lumps. Christmas came and went, and things quieted down
Speaker 1: for a while. January and February of sixty three were
Speaker 1: brutally cold. Granddad said they had ice on the inside
Speaker 1: of the windows for weeks at a time, and whatever
Speaker 1: was on the ridge seemed to have moved on or
Speaker 1: hunkered down. He started to relax a little. He told
Speaker 1: himself he'd been letting his imagination get the better of him,
Speaker 1: that there was a rational explanation for all of it. Bears,
Speaker 1: maybe a mountain lion passing through weather playing tricks with sound,
Speaker 1: He almost convinced himself. Then spring came It was late March,
Speaker 1: maybe early April, of nineteen sixty three, and the first
Speaker 1: warm days had started to open things up. Granddad was
Speaker 1: out working on the fence line again, getting ready for
Speaker 1: the season, and he noticed something that stopped him in
Speaker 1: his tracks. Along the edge of the tree line, just
Speaker 1: inside the timber, several small trees, saplings maybe two or
Speaker 1: three inches in diameter, had been twisted and broken, not chopped,
Speaker 1: not cut, twisted. The trunks had been grabbed and torqued
Speaker 1: until the wood fibers separated, leaving the broken ends frayed
Speaker 1: and spiraled like someone ringing a dish rag. He said.
Speaker 1: A couple of them had been bent over and woven
Speaker 1: between other trees, creating what looked almost like a marker
Speaker 1: or a boundary. He didn't know what to make of it,
Speaker 1: and he didn't touch any of it. He just backed
Speaker 1: away and went about his business. That spring and summer
Speaker 1: were relatively quiet. He'd find odd things here and there,
Speaker 1: a dead rabbit left on a fence post near the
Speaker 1: back pasture, a pile of large stone stacked in the
Speaker 1: creek bed that hadn't been there before, but nothing that
Speaker 1: made him lose sleep. It was as if whatever lived
Speaker 1: up on that ridge operated on a seasonal rhythm, pulling
Speaker 1: back during the warmer months and becoming active again when
Speaker 1: the weather turned, and sure enough, when fall came around again,
Speaker 1: it all started back up. The autumn of nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: three was when things got worse. Granddad came home from
Speaker 1: church one Sunday in October to find that something had
Speaker 1: thrown rocks onto the roof of the barn. Big rocks too.
Speaker 1: He climbed up on a ladder and collected five of them,
Speaker 1: and the smallest was the size of a man's fist,
Speaker 1: while the biggest was nearly the size of a cantelope.
Speaker 1: They dented the tin roof and cracked one of the
Speaker 1: boards underneath. He looked at the angle, looked at the
Speaker 1: tree line, and figured they'd been thrown from the edge
Speaker 1: of the woods, which was over one hundred yards away.
Speaker 1: He tried to throw one of those rocks that far himself,
Speaker 1: using every bit of strength he had, and he couldn't
Speaker 1: get it more than about sixty yards. Whatever had thrown
Speaker 1: them had done it with the ease of a kid
Speaker 1: skipping pebbles. That November nineteen sixty three was also when
Speaker 1: the circling happened. This was the story Grandad had the
Speaker 1: hardest time telling. I could see it in the way
Speaker 1: his hands moved when he talked about it. He'd gripped
Speaker 1: the arm of his chair and his knuckles would go white,
Speaker 1: even forty years after the fact. It was a weak night,
Speaker 1: middle of the month. He and my grandmother had gone
Speaker 1: to bed early, and the kids were all asleep. The
Speaker 1: dogs were on the porch, which was where they usually
Speaker 1: slept unless the weather was too bad. Granddad woke up
Speaker 1: sometime around two in the morning. He couldn't say exactly
Speaker 1: what woke him, just a feeling, that primitive sense that
Speaker 1: something is wrong, and he lay there in the dark
Speaker 1: and listened. At first he thought he was imagining things.
Speaker 1: Then he heard it. Footsteps, slow heavy footsteps outside the house,
Speaker 1: on the bare ground between the house and the garden.
Speaker 1: Not an animal walking out, the random pattering footfalls of
Speaker 1: a deer or a dog. These were bipedaled, deliberate steps,
Speaker 1: one after another, with a rhythm that was unmistakably two legged,
Speaker 1: and they were circling, moving along the outside of the
Speaker 1: house in a slow, steady orbit, past the bedroom window,
Speaker 1: around the front, past the porch, down the side, around
Speaker 1: the back, and then past the bedroom window again. Granddad
Speaker 1: lay there and tracked the sound as it went around, once, twice,
Speaker 1: three times. He said, each footfall had a weight to
Speaker 1: it that he could feel in the floor joists. Not pounding,
Speaker 1: not stomping, just heavy, the way a very large man
Speaker 1: might walk if he was trying to be quiet, but
Speaker 1: couldn't help the sheer mass of his body pressing into
Speaker 1: the earth. And with the footsteps came the smell, that
Speaker 1: same rotten, musky, gut churning stench seeping in through the
Speaker 1: cracks around the windows and under the door. He told
Speaker 1: me the worst part wasn't the footsteps. The worst part
Speaker 1: was the dog's They were under the porch. He could
Speaker 1: hear them underneath the floorboards, and they were completely silent.
Speaker 1: Not a whimper, not a growl, not even the sound
Speaker 1: of breathing. Those dogs, who would have fought a bear
Speaker 1: to the death if one had come onto the porch,
Speaker 1: were hiding in absolute silence while something walked circles around
Speaker 1: the house where their family slept. Granddad said he reached
Speaker 1: over and got a shotgun from beside the bed. It
Speaker 1: was a twelve gage Remington, and he always kept it
Speaker 1: loaded with double aut buckshot. He thought about getting up,
Speaker 1: He thought about going to the window and looking out.
Speaker 1: He thought about going to the door and stepping onto
Speaker 1: the porch and confronting whatever was out there, and he
Speaker 1: couldn't do it. He told me that was the only
Speaker 1: time in his life he was truly paralyzed by fear.
Speaker 1: Not the normal kind of fear that makes your heart
Speaker 1: race and your muscles tighten. This was something deeper, something primal,
Speaker 1: like his body was telling him in a language older
Speaker 1: than words, that going out there would be a mistake.
Speaker 1: He would survive. So he lay there in the dark,
Speaker 1: gripping that shotgun, and he listened to the footsteps circle
Speaker 1: the house for what he estimated was about forty five minutes.
Speaker 1: Then they stopped, not gradually, not fading into the distance,
Speaker 1: they just stopped. One moment there was the sound of
Speaker 1: that slow, heavy tread passing beneath the bedroom window, and
Speaker 1: the next there was nothing, just silence. Granddad lay there
Speaker 1: for another hour, maybe two, before he finally got up
Speaker 1: and went to the window. There was nothing outside that
Speaker 1: he could see. The moon was out and the yard
Speaker 1: was empty. The dogs didn't come out from under the
Speaker 1: porch until well after sunrise. He never told my grandmother
Speaker 1: about that night, not then, not ever. She went to
Speaker 1: her grave in twenty twelve without knowing what had walked
Speaker 1: around her house while she slept. He kept it from
Speaker 1: her because he knew it would have terrified her beyond
Speaker 1: any comfort he could offer, and because he was ashamed,
Speaker 1: ashamed that he'd there and done nothing. That was the
Speaker 1: word he used with me, ashamed. I told him there
Speaker 1: was nothing to be ashamed of. That whatever instinct kept
Speaker 1: him in that bed probably saved his life. And he
Speaker 1: just looked at me with those old tired eyes and nodded,
Speaker 1: but I could tell he didn't fully believe it. After
Speaker 1: that night, things shifted. The activity didn't stop, but it
Speaker 1: changed character. It was as if whatever was out there
Speaker 1: had been testing boundaries, pushing in a little closer each
Speaker 1: time to see what the response would be, and when
Speaker 1: there was no response, it settled into a kind of routine.
Speaker 1: Over the next several years, from nineteen sixty three through
Speaker 1: about nineteen sixty nine, Granddad experienced things on that farm
Speaker 1: that he could never explain, and he eventually stopped trying.
Speaker 1: I should mention that Granddad started keeping a kind of
Speaker 1: record around this time. He didn't call it a journal.
Speaker 1: He would have been embarrassed by that word. But he
Speaker 1: had a little spiral bound notebook that he kept in
Speaker 1: the drawer of his beds table, and he jot down
Speaker 1: dates in short descriptions. November fourteenth, knocks from ridge, three sets,
Speaker 1: December tewod smell a creek strong, things like that. He
Speaker 1: showed it to me once, and the entries were sparse
Speaker 1: and matter of fact, the way a farmer might record
Speaker 1: rainfall or planting dates. No emotion, no speculation, just data.
Speaker 1: He burned that notebook about a year before he died.
Speaker 1: I wish he hadn't, but I understand why he did.
Speaker 1: He didn't want anyone finding it after he was gone
Speaker 1: and thinking he'd lost his mind. The sounds continued. The
Speaker 1: wood knocks became almost commonplace, and he learned to tell
Speaker 1: the difference between the sharp, aggressive ones and the softer,
Speaker 1: more exploratory taps that sometimes came from trees right at
Speaker 1: the edge of the pasture. One night, he heard a
Speaker 1: series of sounds from the ridge that he described as
Speaker 1: two heavy stones being clapped together in a deliberate rhythm,
Speaker 1: not fast, not random, but spaced and purposeful, like someone
Speaker 1: tapping out a code. Another time, he heard what sounded
Speaker 1: like a tree being pushed over, the slow crack and
Speaker 1: groan of a trunk giving way, followed by the crash
Speaker 1: of it hitting the ground. But when he went to
Speaker 1: investigate the next morning, he couldn't find a single downed
Speaker 1: tree anywhere in the area where the sound had come from.
Speaker 1: The vocalizations were the worst. They didn't happen often, maybe
Speaker 1: three or four times a year at most, but when
Speaker 1: they did, they were unlike anything else. Each one was different,
Speaker 1: which is part of what made them so unsettling. One night,
Speaker 1: he heard a rapid series of grunting barks, sharp percussive exhalations,
Speaker 1: almost like a very large dog trying to cough, that
Speaker 1: seemed to come from right at the tree line, maybe
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty yards from the house. Another time,
Speaker 1: it was a sound he described as chattering, like teeth
Speaker 1: clicking together very fast, mixed with a low, rumbling murmur
Speaker 1: that rose and fell, like someone talking in a language
Speaker 1: he couldn't understand. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. He told me that
Speaker 1: one made his blood go cold because it sounded almost
Speaker 1: like speech, not words he could make out, not English
Speaker 1: or anything he recognized, but the cadence and the inflection
Speaker 1: were so close to human conversation that his brain kept
Speaker 1: trying to resolve it into something meaningful and couldn't. But
Speaker 1: the worst vocalization, the one he told me about only once,
Speaker 1: and the one that I could tell had burrowed deepest
Speaker 1: into him, happened in the fall of nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 1: He was out in the barn just after dark, finishing
Speaker 1: up some chore or another, and from the ridge came
Speaker 1: a scream that he said, split the night wide open.
Speaker 1: It was louder than the first one he'd heard by
Speaker 1: a lot. It started on a pitch so deep that
Speaker 1: it was more sensation than sound, like standing too close
Speaker 1: to a bass drum, And then it climbed through every
Speaker 1: register of human hearing and kept going into something that hurt.
Speaker 1: Not in his ear, he said, it hurt in his
Speaker 1: teeth and in his chest, like the sound was vibrating
Speaker 1: his rib cage. It held at that peak for what
Speaker 1: felt like an eternity, raw and ragged and furious, and
Speaker 1: then it collapsed into a series of long sobbing moans
Speaker 1: that descended in pitch until they were almost below hearing again,
Speaker 1: and then silence. He said, the entire valley went quiet
Speaker 1: after that. No frogs, no insects, no night birds. Everything
Speaker 1: that lived in that hollow had heard it and gone still.
Speaker 1: He described it to me this way. You ever heard
Speaker 1: a train whistle far off at night, and the way
Speaker 1: it sort of grabs something inside? You imagine that, but
Speaker 1: instead of a train, it's something alive, and instead of
Speaker 1: far off, it's right up there on that ridge looking
Speaker 1: down at you, and the sound it's making isn't anything
Speaker 1: that's supposed to exist in this world. He said that
Speaker 1: was the closest he could get to describing it, and
Speaker 1: he wasn't satisfied with the comparison. Now, let me tell
Speaker 1: you about the second time he saw one of them
Speaker 1: up close, because this was different from the figure on
Speaker 1: the ridge. This was nineteen sixty six, early autumn, and
Speaker 1: he was walking back from the creek crossing at dusk.
Speaker 1: He'd been checking the water level because they'd had a
Speaker 1: dry spell and the cattle needed to be able to cross.
Speaker 1: The sun was just about gone, and the light in
Speaker 1: the hollow was that deep blue gray that comes right
Speaker 1: before full dark, where you can still see shapes, but
Speaker 1: the color has been drained out of everything. He came
Speaker 1: around to bend in the path where the trail passes
Speaker 1: through a thick stand of poplar, and he saw it.
Speaker 1: It was standing about forty yards ahead of him, at
Speaker 1: the edge of the tree line where the poplar gives
Speaker 1: way to open pasture. It was facing away from him,
Speaker 1: slightly turned to one side, and it was standing in
Speaker 1: a half crouch with one arm extended, like it had
Speaker 1: been reaching for something on a low branch. When it
Speaker 1: hurt him, and he said the instant his boot cracked
Speaker 1: a dry stick. Its whole body went rigid, like a
Speaker 1: current had run through it. It turned its upper body
Speaker 1: toward him without moving its feet, twisting at the waist
Speaker 1: in a way that he said looked wrong for something
Speaker 1: that big. This time, he was close enough to see details,
Speaker 1: and he described them to me with a precision that
Speaker 1: told me he'd replayed this moment in his mind a
Speaker 1: thousand times. It was covered in hair, not fur. He
Speaker 1: was very specific about that distinction. Hair It hung down
Speaker 1: and matted uneven lengths, longer on the arms and shoulders,
Speaker 1: and shorter on the face and chest. The color was
Speaker 1: dark reddish brown, like old barnwood that's been weathered by
Speaker 1: years of rain. It was tall, he estimated seven and
Speaker 1: a half feet, maybe a little more, and it was
Speaker 1: built thick, much thicker than any man. The shoulders were enormous,
Speaker 1: sloping down from a neck that was almost non existent,
Speaker 1: like the head just sat directly on top of that
Speaker 1: massive torso. The arms were long, longer in proportion than
Speaker 1: a human's, and the hands and he paused every time
Speaker 1: he got to this part. The hands were the thing
Speaker 1: that convinced him it wasn't a bear or any other
Speaker 1: animal he could explain. They were hands, broad, thick, with
Speaker 1: stubby fingers and an obvious thumb, and they were lighter
Speaker 1: in color than the rest of the body, with skin
Speaker 1: that looked rough and calloused, like the palm of a
Speaker 1: working man's hand, scaled up to something impossible. The face
Speaker 1: was what haunted him. He could see it in profile
Speaker 1: and then full on as it turned toward him. He said.
Speaker 1: The features were flat, a heavy brow ridge that jutted
Speaker 1: out over deep set eyes, a broad, flat nose with
Speaker 1: wide nostrils, and a jaw that was massive and square.
Speaker 1: The mouth was closed, and the lips were thin and dark.
Speaker 1: The skin on the face was darker than the rest
Speaker 1: of the body, almost black, and relatively free of hair
Speaker 1: except around the jawline and the temples. The eyes caught
Speaker 1: what little light there was, and they weren't the blank,
Speaker 1: reflective eyes of an animal. They were set under that
Speaker 1: brow ridge with an expression that he struggled to articulate.
Speaker 1: He said, it wasn't ang, It wasn't scared. It was
Speaker 1: considering me like I was something it had to make
Speaker 1: a decision about. They looked at each other for what
Speaker 1: Granddad guessed was about five seconds, though he said it
Speaker 1: felt like five minutes. Then the creature straightened up to
Speaker 1: its full height, and he said, the casual power in
Speaker 1: that motion, the effortless way it went from a crouch
Speaker 1: to standing, made him understand on a gut level that
Speaker 1: he was in the presence of something that could kill
Speaker 1: him as easily as he could step on an ant.
Speaker 1: It turned away from him, took two long strides into
Speaker 1: the timber, and was gone, not running, not crashing through brush.
Speaker 1: It moved between the trees with a fluidity that something
Speaker 1: that large had no business having, and within seconds it
Speaker 1: was as if it had never been there at all.
Speaker 1: Granddad walked home on legs, he said, felt like they
Speaker 1: were made of water. He sat on the porch for
Speaker 1: an hour before he could go inside, and that night,
Speaker 1: for the first time, he told my grandmother that he'd
Speaker 1: seen something in the wood hoods that he couldn't explain.
Speaker 1: He didn't call it bigfoot, he didn't call it a sasquatch.
Speaker 1: He said he'd seen a booger. That was the word
Speaker 1: people in that part of Kentucky used for anything strange
Speaker 1: or unexplained in the woods, something big and dark and
Speaker 1: not quite right. A booger. And my grandmother god rest Her,
Speaker 1: looked at him and said, Harold, my daddy saw one
Speaker 1: of those when he was a boy up on Pine Mountain.
Speaker 1: I always wondered if they were still around. And that
Speaker 1: was that. She didn't question him, didn't laugh, didn't tell
Speaker 1: him he was crazy. She just accepted it the way
Speaker 1: Mountain people have always accepted the things that live in
Speaker 1: the spaces between what we know and what we don't.
Speaker 1: Granddad told me that his great uncle Fess, who'd been
Speaker 1: born in the eighteen seventies, used to tell stories about
Speaker 1: the boogers when the family gathered for holidays, Old Fess
Speaker 1: would sit by the fire and talk about the tall,
Speaker 1: hairy wild men that lived back in the deepest hollows
Speaker 1: and the highest ridges, and the adults half listen, and
Speaker 1: the children would be terrified. Granddad said he'd always assumed
Speaker 1: those were just stories, the same way you'd assume any
Speaker 1: old man's tales were embellished or invented. But after what
Speaker 1: he'd seen, he went back through his memory and re
Speaker 1: examined every one of those stories, and he realized that
Speaker 1: Old Fess hadn't been telling fairy tales. He'd been trying
Speaker 1: to warn them. The years between nineteen sixty six and
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine brought more of the same, though Granddad
Speaker 1: said there were stretches, sometimes months at a time, when
Speaker 1: nothing happened and he'd almost forget. Then something would start
Speaker 1: up again and it would all come rushing back. I'll
Speaker 1: share some of the incidents he told me about, because
Speaker 1: each one adds another layer to what was happening on
Speaker 1: that ridge. In the spring of nineteen sixty seven, he
Speaker 1: found a deer carcass in the lower pasture, about sixty
Speaker 1: yards from the back fence. It hadn't been shot, and
Speaker 1: it hadn't been killed by a predator in any way,
Speaker 1: he recognized the deer, a yearling dough had been pulled apart.
Speaker 1: He used those words, specifically, pulled apart. The legs had
Speaker 1: been separated from the body, not cut or bitten, but
Speaker 1: wrenched at the joints until they came free. The rib
Speaker 1: cage was caved in, and there was surprisingly little blood
Speaker 1: on the ground, as if the killing had happened somewhere
Speaker 1: else and the remains had been carried to the pasture
Speaker 1: and left there. He couldn't figure out why an animal
Speaker 1: would do that, kill something, carry it to an open field,
Speaker 1: and leave it, unless it was a message. That same summer,
Speaker 1: his neighbor Roscoe, who had a small farm about two
Speaker 1: miles up the creek, mentioned to Grandad that he'd been
Speaker 1: having trouble with something getting into his chicken coop at night.
Speaker 1: Not a fox, not a raccoon, not a weasel. Those
Speaker 1: animals leave specific signs, and Roscoe knew every one of them.
Speaker 1: Whatever was getting into his coop was pulling the wire
Speaker 1: mesh off the frame, with its hands, reaching in and
Speaker 1: taking chickens to two and three at a time. The
Speaker 1: wire was bent outward with finger shaped impressions pressed into
Speaker 1: the mesh. Roscoe was a practical man who didn't traffic
Speaker 1: in nonsense, and he told Grandad he was starting to
Speaker 1: wonder if somebody was stealing his chickens, because no animal
Speaker 1: he knew of had hands. Granddad listened to Roscoe and
Speaker 1: kept his mouth shut, but he knew what was doing it.
Speaker 1: In the fall of sixty seven, the rock throwing escalated.
Speaker 1: Granddad was out in the yard one evening working on
Speaker 1: his truck when a stone about the size of an
Speaker 1: egg landed in the dirt about ten feet from where
Speaker 1: he was standing. It didn't fall straight down. It came
Speaker 1: in on an arc from the direction of the ridge,
Speaker 1: and it hit hard enough to leave a divot. He
Speaker 1: stood there and looked toward the tree line, and then
Speaker 1: another one came closer, this time landing maybe six feet away.
Speaker 1: He said it wasn't thrown with the intent to hit him.
Speaker 1: The aim was too deliberate for that. If it had
Speaker 1: wanted to hit him, it would have. It was throwing
Speaker 1: near him, getting his tension, reminding him it was there.
Speaker 1: He picked up his wrench and went inside. There was
Speaker 1: a night in the winter of sixty seven, or maybe
Speaker 1: it was early sixty eight. Granddad wasn't sure when he
Speaker 1: was awakened by the sound of something heavy pressing against
Speaker 1: the side of the house. Not knocking, not scratching, not hitting,
Speaker 1: pressing like a massive weight was leaning into the exterior
Speaker 1: wall of the bedroom. He could hear the boards creak
Speaker 1: and the framing flex and he lay there in bed
Speaker 1: and felt the wall bow inward just slightly, just enough
Speaker 1: to notice. It lasted maybe thirty seconds, and then the
Speaker 1: pressure released and he heard two soft footsteps moving away.
Speaker 1: He didn't get up, He just lay there with his
Speaker 1: hand on the shotgun and waited for morning. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, two things happened that pushed Grandad closer to
Speaker 1: a decision he'd been putting off for years. The first
Speaker 1: was that he saw one of them again, and this
Speaker 1: time it was different because there were two. It was
Speaker 1: a saturdy day morning in October, and he'd gotten up
Speaker 1: early to walk the ridge line. He'd been doing that
Speaker 1: occasionally over the years, not looking for trouble, just trying
Speaker 1: to understand the territory better, trying to figure out where
Speaker 1: the trails were, where they went, where they came from.
Speaker 1: He'd found paths through the timber that were too wide
Speaker 1: and too well worn to be deer trails, but didn't
Speaker 1: match any human track he'd ever seen. He'd found places
Speaker 1: where the underbrush had been broken down in wide swaths,
Speaker 1: as if something large had pushed through it repeatedly, and
Speaker 1: he'd found sleeping areas, flat spots on the ground where
Speaker 1: the leaves had been compressed into oval depressions about seven
Speaker 1: feet long, surrounded by bent over saplings that formed a
Speaker 1: rough enclosure, almost like a nest. That morning, he was
Speaker 1: moving along a game trail near the top of the
Speaker 1: ridge when he heard something moving through the brush below
Speaker 1: him and to his left. He stopped and crouched behind
Speaker 1: a fallen log, and through a gap in the laurel,
Speaker 1: he saw them, two of them, walking single file along
Speaker 1: the slope, about eighty yards downhill. They were moving at
Speaker 1: a steady pace, not hurrying, but not dawdling, covering ground
Speaker 1: the way experienced hikers do, smooth rhythmic efficient. The one
Speaker 1: in front was the larger of the two, and it
Speaker 1: matched the description of the creature he'd seen near the
Speaker 1: creek crossing in sixty six. Dark reddish brown, massive shoulders,
Speaker 1: long arms, swinging with each stride. The one behind was smaller,
Speaker 1: maybe six feet tall or a little more, and lighter
Speaker 1: in color, more of a tawny brown, almost blonde in
Speaker 1: the patches where the early morning light filtered through the
Speaker 1: canopy and caught it. The smaller one moved differently, too.
Speaker 1: Where the larger one had that fluid, powerful gait, the
Speaker 1: smaller one was quicker, more agile, picking its way over
Speaker 1: rocks and roots with a nimbleness that the bigger one
Speaker 1: didn't bother with. Granddad said, the way they moved together
Speaker 1: reminded him of a mother and a half grown child,
Speaker 1: or maybe an older brother and a younger one. There
Speaker 1: was a familiarity in the way the smaller one stayed
Speaker 1: close to the larger one, matching its pace, occasionally reaching
Speaker 1: out and touching its back or arm as they walked.
Speaker 1: There was a relationship there, a bond, and seeing that
Speaker 1: was what changed things for Grandad in a way he
Speaker 1: couldn't fully explain. Up until that moment, he'd been dealing
Speaker 1: with something unknown, something frightening, something that existed in the
Speaker 1: dark and the margins. But watching those two walk together
Speaker 1: through the timber, he said, it hit him like a
Speaker 1: fist in the chest. These weren't monsters. They were a family.
Speaker 1: They had lives and routines and relationships, and the ridge
Speaker 1: behind his farm wasn't his territory that they were intruding on.
Speaker 1: It was their home that he happened to live next to.
Speaker 1: He said that realization didn't make him less afraid. If anything,
Speaker 1: it made him more so, because it meant this wasn't
Speaker 1: a temporary problem. It wasn't one animal passing through. They
Speaker 1: lived there. They'd probably lived there longer than his family
Speaker 1: had owned that farm, and they were going to keep
Speaker 1: living there after he was gone. The question was whether
Speaker 1: he could share a valley with something like that, and
Speaker 1: the answer, which took him another year to fully accept,
Speaker 1: was no. I want to tell you about a couple
Speaker 1: of incidents from the same period that Grandad shared with
Speaker 1: me separately, because they add to the picture. Sometime in
Speaker 1: the summer of sixty eight, he thought it was July,
Speaker 1: but he couldn't be sure. He was working in the
Speaker 1: tobacco patch on a hot afternoon when he heard a
Speaker 1: commotion from the direction of the barn. He walked over
Speaker 1: and found that something had gotten into the feed room.
Speaker 1: The door which he kept latched with a heavy iron hook,
Speaker 1: had been forced open, not just unlatched forced. The hook
Speaker 1: was still attached to the doorframe, but the wood around
Speaker 1: the screws had been splintered outward, like something had simply
Speaker 1: pulled the door open with enough force to rip the
Speaker 1: hardware free. Inside, a fifty pound bag of sweet feed
Speaker 1: had been dragged off the shelf and torn open, and
Speaker 1: there was feed scattered all over the floor. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: from more back Woods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. But here's the part that got to him.
Speaker 1: There were handprints in the spilled grain on the shelf
Speaker 1: where the bag had sat, clear unmistakable handprints pressed into
Speaker 1: the layer of dust and feed residue. They were enormous,
Speaker 1: and the pattern of fingers showed that whatever had grabbed
Speaker 1: that bag had used both hands, reaching over the top
Speaker 1: and gripping it the way you or I might grab
Speaker 1: a heavy box off a high shelf. He said. The
Speaker 1: thumb prints were on the near side and the fingerprints
Speaker 1: wrapped over the top, and the span from thumb to
Speaker 1: the outside finger was close to twelve inches. He cleaned
Speaker 1: up the mess and replaced the latch with a heavier one.
Speaker 1: It was never broken into again. He didn't know if
Speaker 1: that meant the new latch held or if whatever had
Speaker 1: broken in just decided it wasn't worth the trouble. There
Speaker 1: was also the matter of the garden. My grandmother kept
Speaker 1: a large vegetable garden on the south side of the house. Tomatoes, beans, corn, potatoes, squash,
Speaker 1: the usual Kentucky garden. Starting in sixty seven or sixty eight,
Speaker 1: she began noticing that produce was disappearing, not the way
Speaker 1: a deer or a groundhog takes things. Deer brows, they nibble,
Speaker 1: they leave half eaten plants. This was different. Whole tomatoes
Speaker 1: would be pulled off the vine, ears of corn would
Speaker 1: be snapped off the stalk, and the husks would be
Speaker 1: found peeled back and discarded. A few rows over with
Speaker 1: the kernels eaten. Clean squash would be missing, entirely, pulled
Speaker 1: right off the ground. My grandmother blamed it on raccoons,
Speaker 1: and granddad let her believe that, but he knew better.
Speaker 1: Raccoons don't peel corn husks neatly and stack them. Raccoons
Speaker 1: don't select only the ripe tomatoes and leave the green
Speaker 1: ones on the vine. One morning, he found a single
Speaker 1: footprint at the edge of the garden, pressed deep into
Speaker 1: the soft dirt between two rows of beans. It was bare,
Speaker 1: it was enormous, and it pointed toward the ridge. He
Speaker 1: smoothed the dirt over it before my grandmother saw it,
Speaker 1: and never said a word. The second thing that happened
Speaker 1: in sixty eight was the incident with the calves. In November,
Speaker 1: two of his calves went missing from the lower pasture,
Speaker 1: not one, two taken on the same night. There were
Speaker 1: no drag marks, no blood, no signs of a struggle.
Speaker 1: The calves were simply gone. Those calves weighed somewhere around
Speaker 1: three hundred pounds apiece, and something had taken them out
Speaker 1: of a fenced pasture without leaving a trace. A mountain
Speaker 1: lion might take one calf, but it would leave blood
Speaker 1: in drag marks. A bear would make a mess, A
Speaker 1: pack of wild dogs would leave signs everywhere. Nothing granddad
Speaker 1: knew of could pick up a three hundred pound calf
Speaker 1: and carry it away clean. Nothing natural anyway. He lost
Speaker 1: two more calves over the next year, both in late autumn,
Speaker 1: both from the lower pasture. He never found a trace
Speaker 1: of any of them. By nineteen sixty nine, he'd made
Speaker 1: up his mind. He went to a man named Earl,
Speaker 1: who owned the propertying Granddad's to the east, the property
Speaker 1: that included the lower slopes of Briar Ridge, and asked
Speaker 1: if Earl wanted to sell. Earl did. Granddad bought fifty
Speaker 1: acres of timberland from Earle, not because he wanted it,
Speaker 1: but because he wanted a buffer between his farm and
Speaker 1: whatever was up on that ridge. That didn't work the
Speaker 1: way he'd hoped, because the buffer was just more of
Speaker 1: their territory. So in the fall of nineteen seventy, Granddad
Speaker 1: made the decision that he'd been wrestling with for years.
Speaker 1: He sold the back forty, the lower pasture, the section
Speaker 1: nearest the ridge, the tobacco barn that sat back there,
Speaker 1: and the fence line that had given him so much trouble.
Speaker 1: He sold it to a man from Breathitt County who
Speaker 1: wanted to run cattle, and he never told the man
Speaker 1: why he was selling. He moved his own cattle operation
Speaker 1: to the front pasture, closer to the house and farther
Speaker 1: from the ridge, and he consolidated his tobacco acreage to
Speaker 1: the fields on the west side of the property. Away
Speaker 1: from the timberline. Granddad told me that selling that land
Speaker 1: was one of the hardest things he ever did. That
Speaker 1: back acreage had been in our family for over one
Speaker 1: hundred years. His grandfather had cleared it, his father had
Speaker 1: worked it, and he'd planned to hand it down to
Speaker 1: his own sons. Letting it go felt like a betrayal
Speaker 1: of everyone who'd come before him, and he carried that
Speaker 1: guilt for the rest of his life. But he also
Speaker 1: carried the memory of those footsteps circling his house at
Speaker 1: two in the morning, and the memory of those enormous hands,
Speaker 1: and the memory of that scream that vibrated in his chest.
Speaker 1: And he decided that guilt was something he could live with.
Speaker 1: What he couldn't live with was the feeling that he
Speaker 1: was raising his children in the shadow of something that
Speaker 1: knew they were there and could reach them any time
Speaker 1: it chose. The man from Breethitt County lasted about two
Speaker 1: years before he sold the property to someone else, who
Speaker 1: sold it again a few years later. Granddad never asked
Speaker 1: any of them why they left. He said he didn't
Speaker 1: need to. After the sale, the activity around Grandad's house
Speaker 1: dropped off significantly. It didn't stop entirely. He'd still hear
Speaker 1: the occasional knock on a quiet night, still catch a
Speaker 1: whiff of that smell near the creek crossing now and then,
Speaker 1: and once in the mid seventies he found a set
Speaker 1: of those enormous footprints in the mud along the creek bank.
Speaker 1: But the intense, weeks long periods of activity that had
Speaker 1: characterized the sixties were over. Whatever lived on that ridge
Speaker 1: had gotten the message, or maybe it had simply shifted
Speaker 1: its range to match the new boundary. Granddad didn't venture
Speaker 1: into the back acreage after the sail. He said there
Speaker 1: was no reason to, and I suspect the truth was
Speaker 1: he didn't want to know what he'd find. There were
Speaker 1: a few more incidents over the years that he mentioned
Speaker 1: to me in passing almost as afterthoughts. In nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: eight or seventy nine, he was coon hunting with Blues
Speaker 1: Replacement a hound named Duke along the creek bottom north
Speaker 1: of the property. It was a cold, clear night in
Speaker 1: November and Duke had tried something, or so Granddad thought.
Speaker 1: The dog was barking steadily, that rhythmic baying that hounds
Speaker 1: do when they've got something cornered up above them, and
Speaker 1: Granddad was working his way through the brush with a
Speaker 1: lantern to find the tree. He got close enough to
Speaker 1: see Duke at the base of a big white oak,
Speaker 1: and the dog was looking up and baying. But the
Speaker 1: way his tail was tucked and his body was pressed
Speaker 1: low to the ground told Grandad that something wasn't right.
Speaker 1: A dog that's tree. A coon is excited, confident, proud
Speaker 1: of itself. Duke looked terrified. Granddad shone the lantern up
Speaker 1: into the tree and couldn't see anything. He swept the
Speaker 1: beam around through the branches. Nothing, no eye, shine, no shape,
Speaker 1: no movement. Duke kept barking, but his bark was changing,
Speaker 1: getting more frantic, and then he suddenly stopped, turned and
Speaker 1: bolted past Grandad into the darkness, heading back toward the
Speaker 1: house as fast as he could run. And in the
Speaker 1: silence that followed, Granddad heard breathing, not his own, not
Speaker 1: the dog's. It came from somewhere up in the canopy
Speaker 1: of that oak, maybe thirty feet above him, and it
Speaker 1: was slow and deep, the kind of deliberate, measured breathing
Speaker 1: you'd hear from something very large that was trying to
Speaker 1: be quiet and not quite managing it. Each exhale had
Speaker 1: a faint rattle to it, a wet, congested quality, and
Speaker 1: the inhale was a long, controlled draw through the nostrils
Speaker 1: that he could hear clearly because the night was that still.
Speaker 1: He didn't look up again. He turned around, walked back
Speaker 1: to the house, and he never coon hunted along that
Speaker 1: creek bottom again. Duke wouldn't go near that stretch of
Speaker 1: timber for the rest of his life, and Granddad didn't
Speaker 1: blame him. The last thing that happened, and this one
Speaker 1: he told me about only a few months before he died,
Speaker 1: when his health was failing, and I think he wanted
Speaker 1: to get everything out before it was too late, was
Speaker 1: from nineteen eighty two. He'd been driving his truck along
Speaker 1: the gravel road that ran past the old back acreage,
Speaker 1: heading to a neighbor's place to borrow a piece of equipment.
Speaker 1: It was early morning, just after first light, and there
Speaker 1: was fog in the low places, the way there always
Speaker 1: is in those hollows in autumn. As he came around
Speaker 1: a curve, his headlights swept across the road and caught
Speaker 1: something crossing from one side to the other, maybe one
Speaker 1: hundred yards ahead. It was one of them, moving at
Speaker 1: a fast walk, upright, arm swinging, covering the distance from
Speaker 1: the tree line on one side of the road to
Speaker 1: the timber on the other in about four strides. It
Speaker 1: was big, taller than the one he'd seen near the
Speaker 1: creek in sixty six, he thought, though it was hard
Speaker 1: to judge through the fog, and at that distance it
Speaker 1: was dark, almost black, and the headlights reflected off the
Speaker 1: hair on its back and shoulders in a way that
Speaker 1: made it look oily or wet. It never turned to
Speaker 1: look at the truck. It never broke stride or hesitated.
Speaker 1: It just crossed the road like the truck wasn't there,
Speaker 1: like Grandad wasn't there, Like the road itself was an
Speaker 1: inconvenience in its daily routine, and nothing more. And then
Speaker 1: it stepped into the fog and the trees on the
Speaker 1: other side and was gone. Granddad said he sat there
Speaker 1: in the truck for a full five minutes before he
Speaker 1: could make himself drive forward. When he got to the
Speaker 1: spot where it had crossed, he stopped and looked at
Speaker 1: the road, and there in the damp gravel were two footprints,
Speaker 1: each one sunk deep enough that water was already seeping
Speaker 1: into them from below. He didn't get out, he didn't
Speaker 1: measure them. He just looked, and then he drove on.
Speaker 1: That was the last time he ever saw one. Seventeen
Speaker 1: years had passed since the sale of the back acreage,
Speaker 1: and there it still was, walking across the road at
Speaker 1: dawn like it owned the world, which Grandad said it
Speaker 1: probably did. He told me that what struck him hardest
Speaker 1: about that last sighting wasn't the size, or the speed,
Speaker 1: or even the indifference. It was how healthy the thing looked.
Speaker 1: The hair was thick and dark, the stride was long
Speaker 1: and confident, and the body moved with a kind of effortless,
Speaker 1: mechanical grace that told him these creatures weren't struggling out there.
Speaker 1: They weren't starving, they weren't hiding in desperation. They were
Speaker 1: thriving whatever they ate, wherever they sheltered. However, they survived
Speaker 1: the winters and the summers and the decades. They had
Speaker 1: it figured out. They'd had it figured out for longer
Speaker 1: than any person alive could fathom, and that fact, more
Speaker 1: than anything, is what made Granddad finally accept that these
Speaker 1: weren't things that would eventually go away. They were permanent.
Speaker 1: They were woven into those mountains the same way the
Speaker 1: sandstone and the coal seams were, and nothing any human
Speaker 1: being did or didn't do was going to change that.
Speaker 1: He didn't talk about any of this for years. It
Speaker 1: was locked up inside him, and I think he assumed
Speaker 1: it would stay there. My dad and his siblings grew
Speaker 1: up on that farm through the seventies and eighties without
Speaker 1: any idea what their father had experienced. They knew the
Speaker 1: back forty had been sold, but Granddad told them the
Speaker 1: soil was played out and it wasn't worth the taxes anymore.
Speaker 1: They had no reason to question that. Kids don't question
Speaker 1: the decisions their parents make about land. But there were
Speaker 1: small things my dad told me once, years after Granddad
Speaker 1: shared all of this with me, that he remembered as
Speaker 1: a boy being told never to go past the tobacco
Speaker 1: barn by himself. Every kid on every farm in Kentucky
Speaker 1: was given boundaries, so that didn't seem unusual, but my
Speaker 1: dad said Granddad was fierce about it in a way
Speaker 1: that went beyond normal caution. If my dad or Uncle
Speaker 1: Roy wandered too close to the back fence line, Granddad
Speaker 1: would come get them with a look on his face
Speaker 1: that my dad described as something close to panic, not anger,
Speaker 1: not the irritation of a parent whose kid had wandered off.
Speaker 1: Something sharper than that, something that looked like real fear.
Speaker 1: My dad said he only saw that look a handful
Speaker 1: of times in his life, and it was always connected
Speaker 1: to the back end of the property. My aunt Linda
Speaker 1: told me something similar. She remembered being about eight or
Speaker 1: nine years old, so this would have been around nineteen seventy.
Speaker 1: Near the creek crossing. One afternoon, she said she heard
Speaker 1: a sound from the woods that scared her, though she
Speaker 1: couldn't describe what it was, just that it was deep
Speaker 1: and loud and didn't sound like any animal she knew.
Speaker 1: She ran back to the house and told Granddad, and
Speaker 1: he didn't question her, didn't tell her it was nothing,
Speaker 1: didn't dismiss it the way adults usually dismiss a child's fear.
Speaker 1: He just said, don't go down there anymore, and that
Speaker 1: was it. She never went back to the creek crossing alone.
Speaker 1: There was another piece of family history that Granddad shared
Speaker 1: with me, and I think it matters. I mentioned his
Speaker 1: great uncle Fess and the old stories about boogers. Well,
Speaker 1: Granddad eventually did some asking around in the family quietly
Speaker 1: without explaining why, and he found out that the stories
Speaker 1: went back further than fess his own grandfather, a man
Speaker 1: named Jeremiah, had homesteaded that property in the eighteen sixties
Speaker 1: after coming back from the Civil War, and according to
Speaker 1: family legend, Jeremiah had chosen that particular hollow specifically because
Speaker 1: it had good water and rich bottomland, but he'd always
Speaker 1: warned his children about the old ones on the ridge.
Speaker 1: Granddad didn't know exactly what Jeremiah meant by that, and
Speaker 1: by the time he started asking, everyone who might have
Speaker 1: known was long dead. But the implication was clear. Whatever
Speaker 1: lived on Briar Ridge had been there when the first
Speaker 1: member of our family arrived, and it had been a
Speaker 1: known enough presence that the man who built the farm
Speaker 1: had taken it into account. Granddad also told me about
Speaker 1: a conversation he had with an old woman named Effie,
Speaker 1: who lived about ten miles up the river and was
Speaker 1: known locally as something of a folk healer and storyteller.
Speaker 1: This would have been in the early seventies, not long
Speaker 1: after Granddad had sold the back acreage. He'd gone to
Speaker 1: see Effie about something else entirely. I think my grandmother
Speaker 1: needed a remedy for a skin rash, the way mountain
Speaker 1: people still relied on herbal medicine even when there were
Speaker 1: doctors available. And while he was there, he asked her
Speaker 1: carefully whether she'd ever heard tell of large, hairy creatures
Speaker 1: in the hills around Perry County. Effie looked at him
Speaker 1: for a long time, he said, and then she told
Speaker 1: him something that stayed with him. She said her own grandmother,
Speaker 1: who'd been a full blooded Cherokee, had told her that
Speaker 1: the old people called those creatures something that translated roughly
Speaker 1: to the watchers or the ones who stay hidden. She
Speaker 1: said they'd been in these mountains since the beginning, and
Speaker 1: that they weren't animals and they weren't people. They were
Speaker 1: something in between, something that belonged to the mountains, the
Speaker 1: way the mountains belonged to the earth, and the best
Speaker 1: thing any person could do was leave them alone and
Speaker 1: be grateful that they mostly chose to leave us alone.
Speaker 1: In return, Granddad said that conversation was the closest he
Speaker 1: ever came to an explanation that satisfied him. He first
Speaker 1: opened up to me when I was about sixteen, in
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight. We were sitting on the porch
Speaker 1: one evening in late October. It was dusk and the
Speaker 1: light was doing that same thin gold thing on the
Speaker 1: ridge that he described from that first sighting. Stay tuned
Speaker 1: from four back Woods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. And he said, out of nowhere, you see
Speaker 1: that ridge line up there, Caleb, I said, I did,
Speaker 1: And he said, there's things that live on that ridge
Speaker 1: that don't have a name. I've seen them with my
Speaker 1: own eyes, and they're as real as you and me,
Speaker 1: and they've been there longer than any of us. That
Speaker 1: was the first time. Over the next eleven years until
Speaker 1: his death, he told me the rest, bit by bit,
Speaker 1: piece by piece, always on his own terms. He never
Speaker 1: used the word bigfoot, He never used the word sasquatch.
Speaker 1: He called them boogers, or sometimes the things on the ridge,
Speaker 1: or sometimes just them. He didn't want to fit his
Speaker 1: experience into somebody else's framework. He didn't want it turned
Speaker 1: into entertainment or reduced to some blurry photograph argument on
Speaker 1: the internet. He'd seen what he'd seen, and he'd lived
Speaker 1: with the weight of it for forty years, and he
Speaker 1: wasn't interested in having it dissected or debated by people
Speaker 1: who hadn't been there. When I asked him if he'd
Speaker 1: ever been tempted to tell someone official, he shook his
Speaker 1: head and said, who'd have believed me? And what good
Speaker 1: would it have done. You can't catch them, you can't
Speaker 1: kill them, and if you go looking for them, you're
Speaker 1: just asking for trouble. They were there first. All a
Speaker 1: man can do is keep his distance and mind his
Speaker 1: own business. Then he paused, and this is the part
Speaker 1: I think about the most. But I'll tell you this, Caleb.
Speaker 1: They knew everything about us. They knew when we got
Speaker 1: up and when we went to bed. They knew which
Speaker 1: fields we worked and which ones we didn't. They knew
Speaker 1: the dog's names better than we did, because they'd watch
Speaker 1: those dogs every night of their lives. We were living
Speaker 1: right next to something that understood us completely, and we
Speaker 1: didn't understand the first thing about it. That's what kept
Speaker 1: me up at night. Not the size of them, not
Speaker 1: the sounds, not any of that. It was the knowing
Speaker 1: they knew us, and we didn't have the slightest idea
Speaker 1: what they were. He died on March seventh, twenty nineteen
Speaker 1: in his bed in the same house where he'd heard
Speaker 1: those footsteps circle all those years before. My dad and
Speaker 1: my uncle and my aunt were all there, and none
Speaker 1: of them knew about the boogers on the ridge. He'd
Speaker 1: only told me, and I found out later one of
Speaker 1: his brothers, my great uncle Vernon, who'd had his own
Speaker 1: experiences on a different piece of property about fifteen miles away,
Speaker 1: but had kept them equally quiet. Vernon died in twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: so I can't ask him about it now. I still
Speaker 1: go out to the farm. My dad owns the house
Speaker 1: and the remaining acreage, and we use it mostly for
Speaker 1: hunting and as a family gathering place. The back forty
Speaker 1: that Granddad sold has changed hands several more times and
Speaker 1: is largely grown over now. The fields are full of
Speaker 1: brush and young timber, and the old tobacco barn collapsed
Speaker 1: sometime in the nineties. The ridge behind it looks exactly
Speaker 1: the same as it always has, dense, dark, wild. I've
Speaker 1: stood at the edge of that tree line on autumn
Speaker 1: evenings and looked up at the ridge, and I felt
Speaker 1: something looking back. I know how that sounds, and I
Speaker 1: don't care. There's a quality to that gaze that's different
Speaker 1: from the normal feeling of being in the woods. It's
Speaker 1: not the paranoia of a deer hunter being watched by
Speaker 1: a bird. It's the specific, weighted attention of intelligence, and
Speaker 1: it comes from somewhere up in that timber, and it's
Speaker 1: as patient and constant as the mountain itself. I haven't
Speaker 1: seen one. I haven't heard the screams or the knocks.
Speaker 1: I haven't found the prince. Maybe they've moved deeper into
Speaker 1: the hills as the years have passed, or maybe they're
Speaker 1: still there and I just haven't been in the right
Speaker 1: place at the right time. But I believe my granddad.
Speaker 1: I believe him with everything I have, because he was
Speaker 1: the most honest and practical man I've ever known, and
Speaker 1: because the fear I saw in his eyes when he
Speaker 1: talked about those things was not the kind of fear
Speaker 1: a person in vents. It was the residue of genuine
Speaker 1: bone deep in camp with something that didn't belong in
Speaker 1: any book he'd ever read or any world he'd been
Speaker 1: taught to expect. I don't know what they are. Granddad
Speaker 1: didn't know either, and he'd spent more time thinking about
Speaker 1: it than anyone. He didn't think they were apes. He
Speaker 1: told me that several times. He said. Apes don't throw
Speaker 1: rocks on purpose, apes don't circle a house in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night, and apes don't look at you
Speaker 1: with the kind of intelligence he'd seen in those deep
Speaker 1: set eyes near the creek crossing. He thought they were
Speaker 1: something else, something older, something that had been living in
Speaker 1: these mountains since long before our family or anybody else
Speaker 1: had settled here, something that had learned to stay hidden,
Speaker 1: not because it was stupid, but because it was smart
Speaker 1: enough to know that being found would be the end
Speaker 1: of it. They're smarter than us about the things that matter,
Speaker 1: he told me. Once they know how to live without
Speaker 1: being seen, we can't even imagine that. I want to
Speaker 1: add one more thing, and then I'll let this go.
Speaker 1: In twenty seventeen, two years before Granddad died, I was
Speaker 1: visiting him at the farm. It was late October and
Speaker 1: the trees were that brilliant orange and red that Eastern
Speaker 1: Kentucky does better than anywhere else on earth. I'd brought
Speaker 1: my wife and our daughter, who was three at the time.
Speaker 1: We were all sitting on the porch, Granddad in his chair,
Speaker 1: my daughter in his lap, and he was pointing out
Speaker 1: the different trees on the ridge and telling her their names, oak, poplar, cedar, hickory.
Speaker 1: She was repeating them back to him in her little voice,
Speaker 1: and he was smiling, and it was one of those
Speaker 1: perfect moments that you hold on to after someone is gone.
Speaker 1: Then a sound came from the ridge. It was faint,
Speaker 1: distant and brief, a single low whoop that rose and
Speaker 1: fell over the course of about two seconds. It could
Speaker 1: have been anything, a bird, maybe win through a hollow tree.
Speaker 1: But Granddad's face changed, the smile dropped away, and for
Speaker 1: just a moment, I saw the young man he'd been
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty two, standing in the frost, looking at
Speaker 1: prints that shouldn't exist. He looked at me over my
Speaker 1: daughter's head, and his eyes were saying something that his
Speaker 1: mouth wouldn't form. Then the moment passed. He kissed my
Speaker 1: daughter on the top of her head and said, that's
Speaker 1: just an old owl, sweetheart, nothing to worry about. But
Speaker 1: his hand was shaking. I saw it. And when I
Speaker 1: looked at the ridge, that darkening wall of timber rising
Speaker 1: up behind everything we loved, I understood something that my
Speaker 1: granddad had understood for half a century. There are things
Speaker 1: in these old mountains that we live alongside every day
Speaker 1: without ever seeing, And they've been watching us with patient,
Speaker 1: unknowable eyes since before we had a name for this place.
Speaker 1: And they'll still be there long after the last of
Speaker 1: us has turned to dust and the last tobacco barn
Speaker 1: has fallen and the last fence post has rotted back
Speaker 1: into the earth. Whatever they are, they were there first,
Speaker 1: and they know it. Thank you for reading this, Brian.
Speaker 1: I trust you to do right by my granddad's memory.
Speaker 1: He deserved better than to carry this alone for so long,
Speaker 1: and maybe sharing it will give some other family in
Speaker 1: these hills the courage to talk about what they've seen,
Speaker 1: because I promise you we aren't the only ones. Caleb Hazard, Kentucky,
Speaker 1: di the