Speaker 1: It was late summer of two thousand and nine in
a small Minnesota town north of the Twin Cities. I
was staying in my buddy John's house on ten acres
of forested land. We were just seventeen at the time.
John's dad built a million dollar home on that plot
of land, with more rooms and doors and windows than
you could count. He even had a gun room. John's
parents were out of town on vacation in Mexico, and
his sister was at a friend's house for the week.
So John came and picked me up in his maroon
Grandmarquee and we went to his house. Nothing was out
of the ordinary, but I remember when I got out
of the car, I smelled something rank in the air.
I don't really know how to describe this smell, but
it made me sick to my stomach. John said there
was probably a dead animal somewhere, not to worry about it. Inside,
threw a couple of steaks on the grill and enjoyed
the view from his million dollar back patio, which faced
the vast wilderness and the ponds surrounded by trees. Now
I could hear the frogs sounding out different calls, but
otherwise there was no noise but the gentle breeze and
the leaves, But there was that smell again. It was
so bad that I had to go inside to find
a handkerchief to put over my face so I could breathe.
It didn't work very well, but I was thankful that
it helped it a little. By the time we finished eating,
there was nothing left but bones on the plate. It
was dark enough that you couldn't see an inch into
the tree line at the edge of John's thick, beautiful
golf course green lawn. We looked at the steak bones
on our plate and decided the only rational thing to
do was to see who could throw them further in
the woods. So we chunked them as hard as we could,
and we listened to the rustling of them falling through
the trees. We heard them hit the ground, but what
we didn't expect were the noises that came after that.
It sounded like a bear crashing through the trees. The
bears are rare in Minnesota, but they are here, make
no mistake. John and I decided to get out there
and go for a drive so that whatever was crashing
through the trees wouldn't be tempted to come and check
us out. We brought the grill in, we hopped in
the car, and we sped out of there as quickly
as we could. We drove around for about an hour,
listening to loud music, and made the same trip over
the same roads until it was pitch black outside. It
was about the sixth time that we had made that
loop when I started getting a funny feeling. It was
a sense of anxiety that I'd never felt. Adrenaline immediately
started coursing through my veins. I felt like I was
being watched by something big. I stopped listening to the
music and I was looking straight ahead. John was barely
paying attention other than he was going straight. I saw
a huge figure walk across the road. I couldn't see
its face, but I saw the shine of its eyes.
That some bitch had to be ten or eleven feet tall,
and its arms were unnaturally long to be a human
in a suit or a bear. It was walking on
two legs, but it walked more like an ape than
a human, and its feet were massive and flat, and
I could see the muscles rippling through its thick, red
gray fur. I felt fear like I had never felt
before in my life, and every hair on my body
stood straight up. It was like I had been struck
by lightning. I remember trying to scream, and I couldn't
breathe John never saw what crossed the road, even though
he came a foot from hitting it with his car,
But he noticed that something was wrong with me, and
he slapped me across the chest, which made me catch
my breath. What the hell's going on with you, he asked.
It was a bigfoot, I managed to get out. Yad
knew me as the craziest, most fearless person he had
ever met. He knew I never backed down from any
challenge or any dare, anything that was stupid and could
result in broken bones or death. But there I was,
his fearless friend, scared straight and barely able to speak.
My fight or flight response was always fight first, and
asked questions later. But I won't lie though I was
all flight that night. He slammed on the brakes and
spun the car around to go back to where I
saw what scared me, and we drove a little until
I could see footprints out the window, and John turned
his car so the headlights pointed into the trees. In
the light from the headlights. I saw the creature standing
behind a tree, and it was holding on to a
tall branch. If I didn't know what I was looking for,
I would have never have seen it right away. I
lost my breath and all my hair stood up again.
I felt like it was radiating anger straight at me.
John asked if I saw it, but all I could
do was point, So we rolled down his window and
stuck his head out, and he called out to it,
but the creature didn't move. And then he opened up
his door and got out and whooped into the forest,
and right then a loud, angry growled like I had
never heard before in my life, came right back at
him from the woods. John saw the creature as it
raised its hand in the air and threw a large
rock at the car, busting the headlight on his side.
He jumped back in the car and popped it in
reverse and kicked up rocks and gravel in the road
as he peeled out of there. We got back to
his house, pulled the car in the garage, and assessed
the damage. Then we started hearing banging on the house
and screams coming from outside, just like we heard on
the road well. We looked at each other and headed
to the gun room in the basement. John retrieved us
both a gun and a rifle, and the banging got
louder and more intense, and the screams were becoming deafening.
We headed upstairs to the ground floor and went out
the front door with our weapons pointed. John went left
and I went right. We were going to meet up
in the back of the house, and if we saw
this creature, we agreed we would shoot it. We ran
around the entire house and right into each other without
either of us seeing anything, but we could still hear
this thing screaming and banging around. We went inside through
the back door and closed and locked it, and then
went upstairs to their bonus room, which had a view
of the front and left side and the rear of
the property. There was a point at every window in
that room that you could open it up, step out
on the roof, and walk anywhere you wanted. And as
soon as we got in the room, we realized the
creature was screaming and banging around on the roof. John
opened up one of the windows, pointing his gun and
fired three shots into the air. That's when my fight
response kicked in and I climbed out the window with
the rifle in my hand, and I turned to the
left and started onto the roof, and I saw the
creature standing there, staring at me. I froze in fear.
At that moment, it seemed like Tom stood still, and
I was sure that I was going to die. This
thing's fists were clenched and his arms looked like clubs,
and he was growling and showing me his long, gangly teeth.
Behind me, John climbed out the window too, and he
saw me standing there, frozen and pointing the rifle at
the creature. And when John ran toward me, the creature
started to charge. I pulled the trigger as fast as
I could, and I fell backward. John grabbed me and
hoisted me back to my feet and started firing at
the creature while it was still charging us. He landed
a shot in the creature's left leg, right shoulder, and forearm,
and it let out a howl of pain, and I
pulled my trigger again, this time hitting him twice in
the chest. But it just kept coming at us. Even
after we had shot it. The creature jumped right over
us and off the roof and it landed on the
earth like it was nothing. We heard him running back
into the forest, screaming and growling as it went, crashing
through the forest away from the house. Back inside the
bonus room, we sat at opposite windows, holding our guns
in hand and talking until we both passed out sitting up.
We woke up the next morning, both of us startled
and looking out the windows to see if there was
anything out there that shouldn't have been but it all
seemed clear, so we went out of the windows to
look around on the roof to see if we could
find blood. We did find a little, and John took
pictures of them to prove to his dad that we
weren't just messing around. Since then, I have lost contact
with John and his family, and I no longer have
access to those photos on the camera. But after we
took pictures, we washed all the blood off the roof
and the grass leading up to the tree line, and
then we followed the path that the creature had made.
We found its massive footprints and took photographs of them.
We followed it all the way down to the water
that's where it disappeared. I stayed there another three nights,
with John at the house with absolutely no activity. We
called his father and his mother and explained what had happened,
and if it weren't for the pictures of the footprints
and the blood, they would have never believed us. We
never really spoke of it again, and this is the
first time I'm telling of it since I'm twenty nine
years old, and I still dream of that night and
I wake up shivering. I hope you enjoyed the story.
Not gonna lie. Reliving that moment isn't exactly a pleasant experience,
but I'd like my story to be out there. My
name is Bernard. I'm a sixty five year old retired
all field worker from South Mississippi. I've lived my entire
life in a small town about an hour south of Jackson, Mississippi,
called Bogacheetah. Bogacheetah is Chuck Tall for Big Creek. Many
Native American tribes settled here in the late eighteen hundreds,
and many property owners discover burial mounds on their properties here.
My family farmed all the land we owned, and as children,
we would spend the summer searching for arrowheads after the
fields were plowed. We probably found hundreds of them altogether,
and we still occasionally find them today. Once I graduated
high school, I set out to make a living in
the Gulf of Mexico all Patch. Looking back, I wish
I had continued to farm and kept up with my
family's dairy farm business. The hard, manual labor of drilling
rigs took a toll on my body, but it allowed
me to provide for my family and lived, for the
most part, an upper middle class life. Years ago, when
my son was seventeen years old, I called home to
check on him, as I did daily, and while I
was away at work, my mother and my sister looked
after him. On this day, he asked if he and
a friend could take a bigfoot researcher onto my property.
Apparently his buddy had seen a creature across the road
and enter an area of my property the week prior.
His friend reported the sighting to the BFRO and a
man wanted to take a look around. Well, I laughed,
and I told him that he could go and do
whatever they needed to do. I had spent the majority
of my life in those woods and never saw a
sign of a strange creature being there. The old men
in my town would tell tales of skunk apes that
lived in the Bogacheetah River swamps, and a few years earlier,
a preacher's daughter said the creature jumped from a tree
and slapped her carror late one night. I didn't know
if any of these stories were a fact, but I
later found out for myself that it was all too real.
The years passed, and fast forward to twenty twenty three.
I have a ten year old grandson who has become
the center of my universe. I wanted to spend all
the time I could with him and a couple of
COVID mandates. Later, I decided to retire and enjoy my
golden years. My son and grandson loved to deer hunt.
Knowing this, I spent months preparing deer plots and getting
them set up to have good places to hunt for
the upcoming season. A few weeks before opening day, I
started to notice that hogs were destroying one of our
plots near the river swamp. I went to my local
feed store and bought a hay ring, a net wire,
a spring loaded swing gate. I took these items in
my welding machine and fabricated an indestructible hog trap to
try and lessen the population of these pests. We kill
and eat these hogs all the time. Now I knew
I had takers for any that I would catch, because
properly cook, they're fine eating. I placed the trap beside
the food plot and attached the trigger wire for the
spring gate to a bucket of corn inside, and once
those pigs moved that bucket, the gates would close and
they would be trapped. My years in the oil field
afforded me some of the finer redneck things in life.
A four wheel drive pickup and a side by side,
and an arsenal of guns from pistols to semi automatic
ar style rifles, with many Wi Fi game cameras. I
had one camera that had seen better days. It would
take and send me pictures just fine during the day,
but had lost its ability to flash and take pictures
at night. So it was the perfect candidate to watch
my hog trap. It would send me pictures the next
morning to let me know if the trap had been
sprung and if I had any hogs to go and remove.
I set the trap up on Friday afternoon, and by
early evening I got a picture showing me I had
four hogs in the trap. The next morning, my son
and I pulled up to the trap just as the
sun peeked out, but we were greeted with an empty trap.
The gate was closed and there was no damage or
holes dug under it. This trap was anchored to the
ground using six t posts, each with four fence tie
wires fastening the trap, and all of them were intact.
We found hair on the top end of the net wire,
which was at my eye level and I'm six foot two.
Some of the hair was dark, it was almost black
like the hogs I had seen in the photos, but
some of the hair was long and light brown. After
handling it, the smell on my hand was enough to
make a maggot gag. It smelled like a crab house
a tune of boat Oh Man, that's a classic. We
reset the trap and headed back home, and just like clockwork,
when it was early evening, I received another photo telling
me there were more hogs in the trap. But the
next day I awoke to the photo from my game
cam of a hawk sitting on top of my empty
sprung hog trap. I was baffled, how were these hogs
getting out? Again? We reset the trap and around four
pm we arrived and found the empty trap with more
hair stuck to the wire. This time, we took more
time to investigate, and we noticed the grass was beaten
down in a path leading from the woods. Well this
got me thinking was someone coming in and taking these hogs.
I pondered on this the rest of the night. If
someone was taking them, then how were they doing it.
There was no blood inside the trap or around it,
and the hogs aren't exactly cooperative, so picking even a
small one up and handing it over to another person
outside the trap would be damn near impossible. I decided
to go back the next day and set the trap
and then get into my box Dowd with my thermal
scope equipped AR ten and see what I could see.
A few hours later, two large hogs entered my trap
and the gate shut. Now I had the bait and
I was going to wait and see if anything took it.
Night came and I scanned the woodline with my thermal.
Around ten PM, I heard what sounded like whistles coming
from the woods where the grass trail had led. I
pulled up my thermal again and I saw heat signals
moving through the trees, and after a couple of minutes,
I saw what sort of resembled a human emerged from
the tree line and walked toward the trap. When he
got there, he had his hands at waste level, with
his palms straight out. I tried to figure out why
he was standing like that when I realized he was
so tall that his hands were resting on the net
wire of the trout. The large hogs immediately went to
the opposite side of the troup, but I could see
that the top of their backs were just above this
thing's knee. It wasn't but a few seconds later that
I heard another series of whistles, and two more large
figures emerged from the woods and walked to the trap.
Once they arrived, the first creature gingerly climbed over into
the trap and grabbed one of the hogs, and within
seconds its loud squealing stopped and it was handed over
to one of the creatures on the outside of the trap.
The second hog was silenced and handed over, and the
creature climbed back out and walked with the others back
into the woods. Well I couldn't believe my eyes. I
stayed up watching until the batteries of my thermal died
and then I lay down on the floor of my
box stand and I tried to sleep, but there was
no way I was climbing down until after daylight. About
an hour after daybreak, I climbed down and walked to
my truck, and I called my son and I told
him what I had seen, and he wanted to go
back that night to see for himself, and that's what
we did, and the exact same thing happened again, only
this time three hogs were trapped, and instead of two
additional figures emerging from the woods, there were three. My
son watched in silence through my thermal binoculars while I
watched through my scope. After what we had witnessed, we
both agreed that we weren't climbing down until daybreak. And
when we climbed down that morning, we walked out to
the trap. Those things have to be nearly ten feet tall, Dad,
my son said. Just as he said it, we heard
something near the woods. A second later, a boar hog
with its nose to the ground, ran out. I quickly
shouldered my rifle and took it down, and my son
and I walked over to it. It was over two
hundred pounds. We had about a half a mile to
walk to the truck, so we decided to leave it
beside a tree stump at the base of our box
stand and then come back with the side by side
to haul it out. We got back home, loaded up
the side by side, and came straight back to remove
the boar. But when we got there, it was gone.
There were no drag marks, no pack of cod hees
tearing into it. It was just gone. That's when my
son noticed a pile of twenty or so pecans sitting
on top of a tree stump, each of them perfectly shelled. Wow,
they left us some pecans, Dad, my son said. I
asked him what he meant. He explained that last year
season he had been sitting in that stand eating pecans
and throwing the shells out the window onto the ground.
So the bigfoot must have assumed that would be a
good trade pecans for pigs. My son collected the gifted
pecans from their smell. He didn't eat them, but he
took them with us. Nonetheless, we didn't set the trap again,
and a few days later I brought a trailer and
removed it. In preparation for deer season in Mississippi, Youth
deer season opens a few days earlier than rifle season
for all ages. Opening morning, I took my grandson and
just after daylight, a six point buck and a doe
walked out. And my grandson is a crack shot with
a rifle, and before I could blink, he shot the
buck and then the dough with a Savage Youth Model
two forty three. We climbed down to assess his first
kills of the season, and when I told him we
had two to skin, he told me, no, pau Paul,
just one. Let's take the buck and leave the dough
for them, you know, the big feats. Well, how could
I argue with that. We loaded the buck, pulled the
dough over near our stand, and left, and we got
home and skinned his trophy. And later that day we
loaded up the corn to take to a nearby feeder.
My grandson asked if we could ride to see if
they had taken his gift, and when we got there,
we saw that they had not only that, but on
the stump laid a beautiful fox squirrel tail and a
large Indian spearhead. It's not like an arrowhead, it's bigger
and something. We searched and searched for as children, but
we never found them. My grandson was rightfully excited, and
quite frankly, I was too, And when I got him home,
he told his father about it. Those things won't forget anything.
My son said, what do you mean, I asked him,
This isn't the first time my son has been down
there near the swamp. Don't you remember me taking him
squirrel hunting down there last year? They were watching him
harvest squirrels, and I bet they've been around so long
that they remember you searching all that area for arrowheads.
My son's words re played in my head the rest
of that day. How long have these things been watching us?
How many of them are there? Since that day? We
have continued to hunt and gift. I recently put the
hog trap back down there, and I reset it a
couple of times a week for them. I hope those
hogs are feeding their group, maybe they're young ones. Also
hope that our friendship with them and kindness carry on.
Maybe when I'm gone, they will keep a watchful eye
over my son and grandson and other generations to come.
Thank you for reading my letter. Sign Bernard