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