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: There's a smell that hits you when you step into
Speaker 1: deep ozark.
Speaker 2: Timber in the summer.
Speaker 1: It's cedar and wet limestone and rotting leaves and something
Speaker 1: underneath all of it, something old, something that's been soaking
Speaker 1: into the ground for a thousand years. I haven't set
Speaker 1: foot in those woods since nineteen eighty five, but I
Speaker 1: catch that smell sometimes driving through the hill country south
Speaker 1: of Springfield, or passing a cedar lot after a rain,
Speaker 1: and every single time my hand's tightened on the steering
Speaker 1: wheel and my chest goes cold. And I'm twelve years
Speaker 1: old again, standing at the edge of a tree line
Speaker 1: that I know I should not walk into. My name's Kevin.
Speaker 1: I'm fifty three. I live in Kansas City. I coach
Speaker 1: my grandson's Little League team on Saturdays. Normal life, normal guy.
Speaker 1: But when I was twelve years old, something happened to
Speaker 1: my family on a piece of land in rural Missouri
Speaker 1: that none of us have ever been able to explain,
Speaker 1: and I mean none of us. My dad went to
Speaker 1: his grave without ever saying what he thought it was.
Speaker 1: My mom still won't talk about it. My older sister
Speaker 1: brings it up sometimes, usually after a glass of wine
Speaker 1: at Thanksgiving, and you can see the color leave her
Speaker 1: face when she does. I found your show about a
Speaker 1: year and a half ago. I was on a job site,
Speaker 1: had my earbuds in, and one of the guys on
Speaker 1: my crew told me to check out backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: I figured it'd be something to kill time on the
Speaker 1: drive home, but I sat in my truck in my
Speaker 1: own driveway for forty five minutes that first night, just listening,
Speaker 1: and then I came inside and stayed up until one
Speaker 1: in the morning going through episodes because these people were
Speaker 1: describing things I'd lived through, details that I'd never told anyone,
Speaker 1: because I didn't think anyone would understand the feeling of
Speaker 1: being watched, the sounds that don't match anything you've ever heard,
Speaker 1: the way animals react before you even know something's wrong.
Speaker 1: I want to be clear about something before I get
Speaker 1: into this. I'm not a guy who jumps to concl illusions.
Speaker 1: My dad was career military before he got into farming,
Speaker 1: and he raised us to be observant, to think critically,
Speaker 1: and to not let our imaginations run away from us.
Speaker 1: I spent twenty two years working on engines and mechanical systems,
Speaker 1: and I approach problems the same way. What does the
Speaker 1: evidence tell you, what makes sense, what doesn't. I've asked
Speaker 1: myself those questions about the summer of nineteen eighty five
Speaker 1: more times than I can count, and I still don't
Speaker 1: have a clean answer. But I know what I saw,
Speaker 1: I know what my family saw, and I know that
Speaker 1: whatever was on that property with us was not a bear,
Speaker 1: was not a feral dog, and was not a person.
Speaker 1: It was something else. We moved to the farm in
Speaker 1: early June of nineteen eighty five, I just finished sixth grade.
Speaker 1: My dad had taken early retirement from the army and
Speaker 1: used his savings and a VA loan to buy one
Speaker 1: hundred and twelve acres in Dent County, Missouri, deep Ozarks.
Speaker 1: The property sat at the end of a gravel road
Speaker 1: about nine miles outside of a town that barely qualified
Speaker 1: as a town. One gas station, a post office, a
Speaker 1: feed store, and a church.
Speaker 2: That was it.
Speaker 1: The nearest neighbor was a cattle rancher about a mile
Speaker 1: and a half up the road, an older man named
Speaker 1: Elden Krieger who kept to himself and didn't seem particularly
Speaker 1: interested in making friends. The house was old, built sometime
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties, maybe earlier, two stories, white clapboard
Speaker 1: that had gone gray from neglect, a wrap around porch
Speaker 1: that sagged in the middle, and a stone chimney that
Speaker 1: leaned just enough to make you nervous when the wind
Speaker 1: blew hard. There was a barn behind the house, bigger
Speaker 1: than the house itself, with a hay loft and old
Speaker 1: cattle stalls that hadn't been.
Speaker 2: Used in years.
Speaker 1: Beyond the barn was a fenced pasture maybe ten acres,
Speaker 1: and then the woods.
Speaker 2: The woods.
Speaker 1: That's where everything happened. The property backed up against thousands
Speaker 1: of acres of National forest land marked national forest, all
Speaker 1: of it unbroken timber rolling south toward the current river, oak, hickory, cedar,
Speaker 1: black walnut, dentse stuff, the kind of forest where the
Speaker 1: canopy closes over your head and the temperature drops five
Speaker 1: degrees the second you step into the shade. There were
Speaker 1: game trails threading through it, old logging roads that had
Speaker 1: grown over, and a creek that cut through the southeast
Speaker 1: corner of our property before winding deeper into the hills.
Speaker 2: My dad loved it.
Speaker 1: He'd grown up in rural Kentucky and this was everything
Speaker 1: he'd been missing during twenty years of army posts and
Speaker 1: base housing. He had plans for a garden, for livestock,
Speaker 1: for clearing some of the scrub timber, and selling it.
Speaker 2: My mom was less.
Speaker 1: Enthusiastic, but she'd agreed to give it a shot. She
Speaker 1: was a small town girl too, originally from southern Indiana,
Speaker 1: and I think part of her understood why he needed this.
Speaker 1: My sister Beth was fifteen and absolutely miserable about the move.
Speaker 1: She'd left behind a boyfriend and social circle in Fort Campbell, Kentucky,
Speaker 1: and as far as she was concerned, Missouri might as
Speaker 1: well have been the moon. And then there was me,
Speaker 1: twelve years old, skinny, covered in freckles, and honestly pretty
Speaker 1: excited about the whole thing. I'd been a boy scout
Speaker 1: for two years. I liked being outside. I liked exploring
Speaker 1: in one hundred and twelve acres of woods and fields
Speaker 1: with a creek running through it. That sounded like the
Speaker 1: greatest summer of my life. For about three weeks it was.
Speaker 1: I spent the first part of that June exploring every
Speaker 1: inch of the property I could reach. My dad gave
Speaker 1: me two rules. Be home before dark, and don't cross
Speaker 1: the creek. The creek was the boundary line between our
Speaker 1: land and the National Forest, and he didn't want me
Speaker 1: wandering off into timber that stretched for miles in every
Speaker 1: direction without any landmarks I'd recognize fair enough. I had
Speaker 1: plenty to work with on our side. I found an
Speaker 1: old root cellar dug into a hillside about two hundred
Speaker 1: yards behind the barn. The door had rotted off its hinges,
Speaker 1: but the interior was still solid, cool and dark, and
Speaker 1: smelling like wet earth. I found a natural spring bubbling
Speaker 1: up through rocks near the northwest fence line. I found
Speaker 1: deer trails everywhere, and the tracks to go with them, raccoon, apossum, turkey, rabbit,
Speaker 1: the usual stuff you'd expect in that part of Missouri.
Speaker 1: I found a massive red oak near the creek that
Speaker 1: had to be three hundred years old, with the trunk
Speaker 1: so wide I couldn't get my arms even halfway around it.
Speaker 1: I was comfortable in those woods. That's what I want
Speaker 1: to emphasize. I wasn't a nervous kid. I wasn't jumping
Speaker 1: at shadows. I spent hours out there every day, sometimes
Speaker 1: from right after breakfast until late afternoon, and I felt
Speaker 1: at home.
Speaker 2: The woods felt safe.
Speaker 1: And familiar and full of the kind of quiet that
Speaker 1: a twelve year old boy with an imagination doesn't get
Speaker 1: enough of. I'd sit by the creek and watch crawdads
Speaker 1: work their way along the bottom. I'd climb the easier
Speaker 1: trees and see see how far I could see from
Speaker 1: the upper branches. I built a rough fort out of
Speaker 1: fallen branches near the old Root Cellar. Nothing fancy, just
Speaker 1: a lean to shelter where I could sit in the
Speaker 1: shade and pretend I was a mountain man from one
Speaker 1: of those Jeremiah Johnson type stories. My dad loved. The
Speaker 1: birds were everywhere that first part of the summer, cardinals,
Speaker 1: blue jays, woodpeckers hammering on dead limbs, hawks circling up
Speaker 1: in the thermals above the ridge line. The woods were
Speaker 1: loud with life, and it felt like they'd accepted me,
Speaker 1: like I was just another animal moving through the territory
Speaker 1: and nothing out there paid me much mind. That changed
Speaker 1: in the last week of June. I was walking the
Speaker 1: fence line on the east side of the property, heading
Speaker 1: south toward the creek. It was a Thursday, I'm fairly
Speaker 1: sure because my mom had gone into town for groceries,
Speaker 1: which she did every Thursday. The sun was out, probably
Speaker 1: mid eighties, Cicada's buzzing everything normal. I was just walking
Speaker 1: and looking at the ground I usually did, checking for tracks,
Speaker 1: looking for interesting rocks, regular kid stuff. And then I stopped.
Speaker 1: I didn't decide to stop, My body just did it
Speaker 1: the way your hand jerks back from a hot stove
Speaker 1: before your brain even registers the heat. I stood there
Speaker 1: on the trail, and every muscle in my body locked up,
Speaker 1: and I felt something I'd never felt before in my life.
Speaker 2: I was being watched. Now.
Speaker 1: I know how that sounds. People say it all the time,
Speaker 1: and it sounds dramatic or made up. But I need
Speaker 1: you to understand that this wasn't a thought. It wasn't
Speaker 1: me imagining something or psyching myself out. It was a
Speaker 1: physical sensation, as real as the ground under my feet.
Speaker 1: The back of my neck went tight, my stomach dropped,
Speaker 1: and I had this overwhelming, almost crushing awareness that something
Speaker 1: was looking at me from the tree line to my left.
Speaker 1: I turned my head slowly. I scanned the woods. I
Speaker 1: didn't see anything. The trees were thick, there lots of underbrush, honeysuckle,
Speaker 1: BlackBerry tangles growing between the trunks. I couldn't see more
Speaker 1: than maybe thirty or forty feet into the timber.
Speaker 2: But I knew.
Speaker 1: I knew something was in there watching me, and I
Speaker 1: knew it was close enough that I should be able
Speaker 1: to see it. I stood there for maybe a full minute,
Speaker 1: just looking, listening. The cicadas had stopped. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you've ever noticed when that happens, but once you do.
Speaker 1: It's the most unsettling silence you'll ever experience. The woods
Speaker 1: go from being loud and alive to being absolutely dead quiet,
Speaker 1: and it happens all at once, like someone flipped a switch.
Speaker 1: Then I heard something move. It was deeper in, maybe
Speaker 1: sixty or seventy feet from where I stood, A single
Speaker 1: footstep heavy, Not the light crunch of a deer picking
Speaker 1: its way through dry leaves. This was something with real
Speaker 1: weight behind it, something that pressed down hard enough to
Speaker 1: snap a stick that sounded like it was as thick
Speaker 1: as my thumb. Just one step, then nothing. I didn't
Speaker 1: wait for a second one. I turned around and walked
Speaker 1: back to the house as fast as I could without running.
Speaker 1: I don't know why I didn't run. Something told me
Speaker 1: not to. Something told me that if I ran, whatever
Speaker 1: was in those woods would know I was afraid, and
Speaker 1: that felt dangerous. So I walked fast, my heart hammering
Speaker 1: in my chest, sweat running down the sides of my face,
Speaker 1: and that feeling of being watched boring into my back
Speaker 1: with every step. I got to the house and went
Speaker 1: inside and locked the door behind me. Beth was in
Speaker 1: the living room watching MTV on the Rabbit Ears. We
Speaker 1: could barely get a signal on. She looked at me
Speaker 1: and asked if I was okay. I told her I
Speaker 1: was fine, just hot. She went back to her show.
Speaker 1: I didn't go back to the woods for three days.
Speaker 1: When I finally did go back out, I told myself
Speaker 1: I'd been ridiculous. I was a twelve year old kid
Speaker 1: who'd gotten spooked by a deer or a coyote, or
Speaker 1: maybe even a turkey moving through the brush. The Ozarks
Speaker 1: were full of wildlife. Of course, something had been in
Speaker 1: the woods. That's where animals live. I was being a
Speaker 1: baby about it. I followed the same path along the
Speaker 1: east fence line, deliberately proving to myself that there was
Speaker 1: nothing to be afraid of. The sun was out again,
Speaker 1: the cicadas were screaming, and everything felt exactly the way
Speaker 1: it had before normal safe. I walked all the way
Speaker 1: down to the creek, sat on the bank for a while,
Speaker 1: threw some rocks in the water, and started to feel
Speaker 1: pretty stupid about the whole episode. I decided to head
Speaker 1: back along the creek instead of following the fence line.
Speaker 1: The creek bank was mostly clear, easier walking than the
Speaker 1: brush along the fence, and there was a nice breeze coming.
Speaker 2: Up the draw.
Speaker 1: I was maybe a quarter mile upstream from where our
Speaker 1: fence line met the water when I saw them, tracks
Speaker 1: in the mud along the creek bank, right where the
Speaker 1: water made a shallow band and left a bar of
Speaker 1: soft clay exposed. I noticed them because of the size.
Speaker 1: At first I thought they were dog tracks, because the
Speaker 1: shape was right, four toes each one tipped with what
Speaker 1: looked like a claw mark and a large central pad
Speaker 1: classic canine print. But the size was wrong, completely impossibly wrong.
Speaker 1: I'd seen plenty of dog tracks, We'd had dogs my
Speaker 1: whole life. A big german shepherd will leave a track
Speaker 1: about four inches long, maybe four and a half. These
Speaker 1: prints were enormous. I didn't have a tape measure with me,
Speaker 1: but I put my hand down next to one for reference,
Speaker 1: and the track was wider than my spread fingers and
Speaker 1: almost twice as long. I was twelve, so my hands
Speaker 1: weren't full grown. But still we're talking about prints that
Speaker 1: had to be at least seven inches long, maybe eight
Speaker 1: deeper than any dog track I'd ever seen.
Speaker 2: Too.
Speaker 1: Whatever made them was heavy. The impressions were sunk a
Speaker 1: good inch and a half into that clay, and the
Speaker 1: clay along the creek wasn't particularly soft. I counted six
Speaker 1: clear prints before they disappeared into the leaf litter on
Speaker 1: the bank. They followed the creek upstream, toward the deeper timber.
Speaker 1: The stride between them was long, longer than my dad's
Speaker 1: walking stride, and my dad was six foot one. I
Speaker 1: squatted there looking at those tracks for a long time,
Speaker 1: trying to figure out what could have made them.
Speaker 2: A wolf.
Speaker 1: There weren't supposed to be wolves in Missouri, not anymore.
Speaker 1: A really big dog, maybe some kind of mastiff or
Speaker 1: great Dane that had gotten loose from somebody's property. That
Speaker 1: was possible, I guess, but it didn't feel right. The
Speaker 1: stride length was too great and the tracks were pressed
Speaker 1: in too deep. Whatever left these prints wasn't just big,
Speaker 1: It was heavy and moving with purpose. I pulled a
Speaker 1: stick out of the undergrowth and laid it across one
Speaker 1: of the clearest prints to mark the size. Then I
Speaker 1: went home and got my dad. He was under the
Speaker 1: truck changing the oil, and he wasn't thrilled about crawling
Speaker 1: out to go look at animal tracks in the creek,
Speaker 1: but I was persistent. I told him they were huge,
Speaker 1: bigger than anything I'd ever seen. Stay tuned for more
Speaker 1: Backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. And
Speaker 1: eventually he sighed and said, all right, show me. We
Speaker 1: walked down to the creek together. I found the spot
Speaker 1: easily because of the stick I'd left.
Speaker 2: But here's the thing.
Speaker 1: In the maybe forty five minutes between when i'd left
Speaker 1: and when we came back, the best two prints had
Speaker 1: been disturbed. Something had walked through the area and scuffed
Speaker 1: the mud. The remaining prints were still visible, but not
Speaker 1: as crisp, not as dramatic. My dad looked at them,
Speaker 1: looked at the stick I'd placed, looked at the surrounding ground,
Speaker 1: and told me it was probably a big farm dog
Speaker 1: from one of the neighboring properties. He said, tracks in
Speaker 1: soft mud always look bigger than they are because the
Speaker 1: edges spread out as the mud settles.
Speaker 2: I tried to argue.
Speaker 1: I told him these weren't spread out, they were deep
Speaker 1: and clearly defined. He put his hand on my shoulder
Speaker 1: and said, son, it's a dog, A big one maybe,
Speaker 1: but a dog. And that was the end of the conversation.
Speaker 1: I should have pushed harder, I should have made him
Speaker 1: really look, But he was my dad, and when your
Speaker 1: dad tells you something with that kind of certainty, you
Speaker 1: figure he's probably right, so I let it go for
Speaker 1: a while. July came in hot and mean. Missouri in
Speaker 1: July is a special kind of miserable. The humidity sits
Speaker 1: on you like a wet blanket, and the temperature doesn't
Speaker 1: drop below eighty even after the sun goes down. The
Speaker 1: nights were worse somehow. You'd think it would cool off
Speaker 1: after dark, but the air just hung there, thick and
Speaker 1: still pressing against the house like something with weight. I
Speaker 1: spent most of the hottest hours inside reading or playing
Speaker 1: with the atari we'd brought from Fort Campbell, and then
Speaker 1: I'd go out in the late afternoon when it started
Speaker 1: to cool down a little. My dad had settled into
Speaker 1: a routine by then, up before dawn, coffee on the porch,
Speaker 1: then out to work on whatever project was next on
Speaker 1: his list. He was clearing brush along the south fence line,
Speaker 1: repairing the barn roof, fixing the WEHLL pump that kept
Speaker 1: losing pressure. He was happy, or at least he seemed
Speaker 1: to be. This was the life he'd wanted, the life
Speaker 1: he'd spent twenty years in the army dreaming about my mom.
Speaker 1: Had planted a garden near the house, tomatoes and peppers
Speaker 1: and squash, and it was doing well in all that heat.
Speaker 1: Beth had made a tentative friend in town, a girl
Speaker 1: named Jenny whose parents ran the gas station, and she'd
Speaker 1: ride her bike the nine miles into town to visit her,
Speaker 1: which meant she was gone most afternoons and slightly less
Speaker 1: miserable about the whole situation. It should have felt perfect
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways. It did, but underneath all
Speaker 1: that normalcy, something was wrong, and I could feel it,
Speaker 1: even if I couldn't name it yet.
Speaker 2: I was still going.
Speaker 1: Into the woods, but something had shifted. I can't pinpoint
Speaker 1: exactly when it happened, but at some point in.
Speaker 2: Early July, the woods started to feel different.
Speaker 1: Not every day, not every time I went out, but
Speaker 1: more and more often I'd be walking a trail or
Speaker 1: sitting by the creek and that feeling would come back,
Speaker 1: that prickling, electric awareness of being observed. Sometimes it would
Speaker 1: last a few seconds and fade. Sometimes it would settle
Speaker 1: in and stay for twenty minutes or more, this heavy,
Speaker 1: oppressive sense that something was tracking my movements from just
Speaker 1: beyond the edge of what I could see, and then
Speaker 1: the sound started. The first time was on a night
Speaker 1: in mid July, maybe the fifteenth or sixteenth. I was
Speaker 1: lying in bed with my window open because we didn't
Speaker 1: have air conditioning and my room upstairs trapped heat like
Speaker 1: an oven. It was late, probably eleven or so. My
Speaker 1: parents were asleep, Beth was asleep. The house was quiet,
Speaker 1: except for the usual creaking and settling that old houses do.
Speaker 1: From somewhere out in the woods south of the house,
Speaker 1: toward the creek, I heard something call out. It's hard
Speaker 1: to describe. I've spent forty years trying to put this
Speaker 1: sound into words, and I've never gotten it right. The
Speaker 1: closest I can come is that it was like a howl,
Speaker 1: but not a howl. It started low, almost guttural, like
Speaker 1: a growl, that built in volume and then climbed in
Speaker 1: pitch until it became something between a scream and a whale.
Speaker 1: There was a roughness to it, a kind of ragged,
Speaker 1: torn quality, like whatever was making the sound was pushing
Speaker 1: it through vocal cords that weren't built for it. It
Speaker 1: lasted maybe four or five seconds, echoed off the hills
Speaker 1: and then cut off abruptly, no fade out, just there
Speaker 1: and then gone. I lay in my bed, completely still,
Speaker 1: staring at the ceiling. My heart was going so fast
Speaker 1: I could feel it in my temples. I waited for
Speaker 1: it to come again. Five minutes, ten nothing. Eventually I
Speaker 1: got up and closed my window, even though it meant
Speaker 1: I'd swept through my sheets the rest of the night.
Speaker 1: The next morning, at breakfast, I asked my mom if
Speaker 1: she'd heard anything unusual during the night.
Speaker 2: She said she hadn't.
Speaker 1: My dad said he'd heard a coyote yipping around midnight,
Speaker 1: but nothing out of the ordinary. I asked him if
Speaker 1: it sounded like a howl that turned into a scream.
Speaker 1: He looked at me over his coffee and said, coyotes
Speaker 1: make all kinds of sounds, and that I'd get used
Speaker 1: to it, but it wasn't a coyote. I'd heard coyotes
Speaker 1: plenty of times. We'd had them around the base housing
Speaker 1: in Kentucky, and you could hear them at night almost
Speaker 1: every week. Coyotes yip and bark and howl, and even
Speaker 1: when a whole pack gets going at once, you can
Speaker 1: tell what they are. This was a single voice, one animal,
Speaker 1: and the sound it made was unlike anything I'd heard
Speaker 1: before or have heard since. Over the next two weeks,
Speaker 1: I heard it three more times, always at night, always
Speaker 1: from the same general direction, south and east, toward the
Speaker 1: deep timber along the creek. The second time I heard it,
Speaker 1: I was already awake, reading by flashlight under my covers,
Speaker 1: and I was able to get to the window and
Speaker 1: listen more carefully. It was the same call, that low
Speaker 1: building growl that escalated into something high and terrible and
Speaker 1: then stopped cold. But this time, about fifteen seconds after
Speaker 1: it ended, I heard a second call, fainter, farther away,
Speaker 1: coming from somewhere to the west, on the other side
Speaker 1: of the property.
Speaker 2: Two of them. There were at least two of them.
Speaker 1: I pulled back from the window and sat on the
Speaker 1: edge of my bed and felt a kind of fear
Speaker 1: that I didn't know existed. Not the fun, thrilling fear
Speaker 1: of scary movies and campfire stories.
Speaker 2: This was primitive, ancient.
Speaker 1: It was the fear of something out there in the
Speaker 1: dark that you cannot see and do not understand, and
Speaker 1: that is aware of exactly where you are.
Speaker 2: My dad bought the goats in late July six of them.
Speaker 1: He had plans to clear some of the brush in
Speaker 1: the pasture, and someone at the feed store had told
Speaker 1: him goats were the best way to do it. He
Speaker 1: built a small shelter for them at the far end
Speaker 1: of the pasture, near the tree line, and pinned them
Speaker 1: in with hogwire and a couple of strands of electric fence.
Speaker 1: The goats settled in fast. They were eating machines, just
Speaker 1: like everyone had promised, and within a week they'd already
Speaker 1: made noticeable progress on the honeysuckle and sumac that had
Speaker 1: been choking the pasture fence row. I liked the goats.
Speaker 1: They had personality. One of them, a brown and white
Speaker 1: nanny my sister had named Patches, would come right up
Speaker 1: to you and push your head against your hand looking
Speaker 1: for scratches. Another one, a gray billy that my dad
Speaker 1: called Hank, was an escape artist who spent half his
Speaker 1: time testing the fence for weak spots. They were funny,
Speaker 1: goofy animals, and taking care of them gave me something
Speaker 1: to do that kept me closer to the house and
Speaker 1: farther from the woods, which at that point I was
Speaker 1: grateful for. The first one went missing on August third,
Speaker 1: I remember the date because it was my mom's birthday.
Speaker 1: I went out to feed the goats that morning and
Speaker 1: counted five instead of six. One of the younger nannies,
Speaker 1: a solid brown one we hadn't named yet, was gone.
Speaker 1: The ping gate was closed and latched. The hog wire
Speaker 1: was intact on three sides, but on the backside, the
Speaker 1: side closest to the tree line, a section of wire
Speaker 1: had been pulled away from the bottom of the fence
Speaker 1: post and bent upward, leaving a gap maybe two feet
Speaker 1: wide and eighteen inches high. I called my dad out.
Speaker 1: He looked at the fence, looked at the gap, and
Speaker 1: said the goat must have pushed under and run off.
Speaker 1: But I could see his face while he examined that wire,
Speaker 1: and he wasn't as sure as he sounded. Hogwire is stiff.
Speaker 1: Bending it like that takes real force more than a
Speaker 1: sixty pound goat is going to exert pushing against it
Speaker 1: from ground level. The wire wasn't just bent either. It
Speaker 1: was twisted slightly, the way it would be if something
Speaker 1: had grabbed it and pulled upward. There were tufts of
Speaker 1: brown hair caught in the sharp ends of the wire,
Speaker 1: and some of it was stained with what looked like
Speaker 1: dried blood. Not a lot, but enough. My dad fixed
Speaker 1: the fence, added an extra strand of electric wire along
Speaker 1: the bottom, and told me the goat would probably turn
Speaker 1: up in a day or two.
Speaker 2: She didn't.
Speaker 1: A week later, Hank disappeared. Same thing, fence intact everywhere
Speaker 1: except one section along the back where the wire had
Speaker 1: been peeled back again. This time, my dad found drag
Speaker 1: marks in the grass leading from the gap toward the
Speaker 1: tree line, two shallow furrows about eighteen inches apart, cutting
Speaker 1: through the dew wet grass and disappearing into.
Speaker 2: The brush at the edge of the woods.
Speaker 1: There was more blood this time, not a puddle, not
Speaker 1: even a significant amount, but spatters and smears along the
Speaker 1: ground near the fence, and drops in the grass following
Speaker 1: the drag line. My dad stood there looking at those
Speaker 1: drag marks for a long time. He didn't say anything.
Speaker 1: He just stood there with his hands on his hips,
Speaker 1: his jaw tight, staring at the woods beyond the pasture.
Speaker 1: Then he went into the house and came back out
Speaker 1: with his deer rifle, a Remington thirty ought to six,
Speaker 1: and walked the tree line for about one hundred yards
Speaker 1: in each direction. He didn't find anything, or at least
Speaker 1: he didn't tell me he did. When he came back,
Speaker 1: he told me and Beth that we weren't to go
Speaker 1: near the woods until further notice. He said there was
Speaker 1: probably a big cat in the area, maybe a bobcat
Speaker 1: that had gotten bold, and he didn't want us taking
Speaker 1: any chances. I wanted to tell him it wasn't a bobcat.
Speaker 1: Bobcats don't bend hog wire. Bobcats don't leave dog shaped
Speaker 1: tracks the size of a man's hand. Bobcats don't make
Speaker 1: sounds that carry across a valley and stop your heart
Speaker 1: in your chest. But I also saw the look on
Speaker 1: my dad's face, and I realized something that scared me
Speaker 1: almost as much as the sounds in the night. My
Speaker 1: dad was unsettled. My dad, who had done two tours
Speaker 1: in Vietnam and didn't flinch at much of anything, was
Speaker 1: standing at the edge of that tree line with his
Speaker 1: rifle in his hands, and he was unsettled. I kept
Speaker 1: my mouth shut and stayed close to the house. The
Speaker 1: next ten days were tense. My dad started sleeping with
Speaker 1: his rifle leaned against the wall next to his bed.
Speaker 1: He put a padlock on the goat pen gate, which
Speaker 1: was absurd because the gate wasn't the problem, but I
Speaker 1: think he needed to feel like he was doing something.
Speaker 1: He drove over to Elden Kreeger's place one afternoon and
Speaker 1: asked him if he'd lost any livestock recently. My mom
Speaker 1: told me later that Kreeger had said no, but that
Speaker 1: he'd mentioned finding a dead whitetail buck on his property
Speaker 1: that had been partially eaten and dragged into a brush pile.
Speaker 1: He'd assumed it was a mountain lion. Kreeger said he'd
Speaker 1: been carrying a gun with him when he went out to.
Speaker 2: Check his cattle.
Speaker 1: Ever since, I didn't go into the woods at all
Speaker 1: during that stretch. I didn't go past the barn. I
Speaker 1: helped my dad with projects around the house, helped my
Speaker 1: mom in the garden, and stayed within shouting distance of
Speaker 1: the back door at all times. But the feeling of
Speaker 1: being watched didn't go away. If anything, it got stronger.
Speaker 1: I'd be standing in the yard hanging laundry on the
Speaker 1: line for my mom, and I'd feel it wash over me,
Speaker 1: that heavy predatory attention coming from the woods to the south.
Speaker 1: I'd look out there and see nothing but trees and shadows,
Speaker 1: but the feeling was undeniable. The vocalizations continued too. My
Speaker 1: dad heard one of them for the first time on
Speaker 1: a night in mid August. I know he did because
Speaker 1: I was awake when it happened, and I heard his
Speaker 1: bedroom door open, heard his footsteps in the hall, heard
Speaker 1: the back door creak as he went out onto the porch.
Speaker 1: I went to my window and looked down and saw
Speaker 1: him standing in the yard and his boxers and undershirt,
Speaker 1: his rifle in his hands, looking south toward the tree line.
Speaker 1: The sound had already faded. He stood out there for
Speaker 1: maybe five minutes, perfectly still, just listening. Then he came
Speaker 1: back inside and locked the door. At breakfast the next morning,
Speaker 1: he was quiet. My mom asked him what was wrong,
Speaker 1: and he said nothing, just tired. But he looked at
Speaker 1: me across the table and held my eyes for a second,
Speaker 1: longer than normal, and I could see it. He'd heard it,
Speaker 1: and he knew it wasn't a coyote. The third goat
Speaker 1: disappeared on a Sunday night in the third week of August.
Speaker 1: We heard this one happen, or rather we heard the aftermath.
Speaker 1: The goat started screaming around two in the morning. If
Speaker 1: you've never heard a goat scream in terror, count yourself lucky.
Speaker 1: It's one of the most god awful sounds in the world.
Speaker 1: High pitched, raw, desperate. They sounded like they were being murdered,
Speaker 1: every single one of them, all at once. My dad
Speaker 1: was out of bed and down the stairs with his
Speaker 1: rifle before I even got my feet on the floor.
Speaker 1: My mom was right behind him, telling him to wait
Speaker 1: to call the sheriff, to not go out there alone.
Speaker 2: He went anyway.
Speaker 1: I watched from the upstairs hall window as he crossed
Speaker 1: the yard, his flashlight bouncing, and headed toward the pasture
Speaker 1: at a jog. The goat stopped screaming about the time
Speaker 1: he reached the pasture fence. I could see the beam
Speaker 1: of his flashlight sweeping back and forth across the pen.
Speaker 1: He was out there for maybe fifteen minutes. When he
Speaker 1: came back inside, his face was white, genuinely white, in
Speaker 1: a way that I'd never seen on him before. He
Speaker 1: sat down at the kitchen table and put his rifle
Speaker 1: across his knees and told my mom that another goat
Speaker 1: was gone. The fence was torn open again. Worse this time,
Speaker 1: a section about four feet wide ripped away from the
Speaker 1: posts and folded backward, like someone had peeled open a
Speaker 1: tin can. The remaining three goats were huddled in the
Speaker 1: corner of their shelter, shaking. One of them had a
Speaker 1: gash on its flank, not deep, but long, like something
Speaker 1: with claws had swiped at it and missed a solid grip.
Speaker 1: There was blood on the ground near the fence, more
Speaker 1: than the previous times, and there were tracks. My mom
Speaker 1: asked what kind of tracks. My dad looked at me again,
Speaker 1: that same look. Then he said they were big canine,
Speaker 1: but big, too big to be any dog he'd ever seen.
Speaker 1: I didn't say a word. I didn't say I told
Speaker 1: you so. I didn't remind him about the tracks I'd
Speaker 1: found at the creek in June. I just sat on
Speaker 1: the stairs and listened to my parents talking low voices
Speaker 1: at the kitchen table, and I felt a cold six
Speaker 1: satisfaction that I'd been right, mixed with a much larger,
Speaker 1: much heavier terror about what being right actually meant. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. The next morning, my dad moved the remaining
Speaker 1: goats into the barn. Something changed in the house after
Speaker 1: that night. It's hard to explain the atmosphere, but it
Speaker 1: was like a pressure, like the air before a thunderstorm,
Speaker 1: that thick electric heaviness that makes it hard to take
Speaker 1: a full breath. Everyone felt it. Beth stopped complaining about
Speaker 1: being bored and started finding reasons to stay inside. My mom,
Speaker 1: who'd been making an effort to be cheerful about the
Speaker 1: move all summer, went quiet. She cooked, she cleaned, she
Speaker 1: did laundry, but she didn't hum while she worked anymore,
Speaker 1: and she started keeping the curtains closed on the south
Speaker 1: facing windows, the ones that looked out toward the woods.
Speaker 1: My dad threw himself into fortifying things. He put up
Speaker 1: floodlights on the barn on the back of the house,
Speaker 1: the big Haligen kind that lit up the yard like
Speaker 1: a car dealership. He strung more electric fence. He started
Speaker 1: driving the perimeter of the property every evening before dark,
Speaker 1: slow loops in the truck with the window down, looking
Speaker 1: and listening. He never told us what he was looking for.
Speaker 1: He didn't have to. I spent most of my time
Speaker 1: on the front porch, which faced the gravel road in
Speaker 1: the open fields to the north, away from the woods,
Speaker 1: away from whatever was back there. I read books, I
Speaker 1: drew pictures.
Speaker 2: I tried to.
Speaker 1: Pretend that everything was normal, and that we were just
Speaker 1: a regular family settling into a new home. But at night,
Speaker 1: when the sun went down and the darkness pushed in
Speaker 1: from the trees, I lay in my bed and listened,
Speaker 1: and the thing, whatever it was, kept getting closer. The
Speaker 1: sounds moved. That was the part that got to me
Speaker 1: the most. When I first heard the vocalizations in July,
Speaker 1: they'd come from deep in the timber, maybe half a
Speaker 1: mile away or more, echoing up from the creek valley.
Speaker 1: By mid August, they were closer, a quarter mile maybe less,
Speaker 1: and they weren't just coming from one direction anymore. I'd
Speaker 1: hear a call from the south, and then a few
Speaker 1: minutes later a response from the east. Then silence, then
Speaker 1: movement in the brush behind the barn, too heavy and
Speaker 1: too deliberate to be a raccoon or a possum. I
Speaker 1: started sleeping with my window closed every night, heat or
Speaker 1: no heat. I'd lie there in that sweltering upstairs room,
Speaker 1: drenched in sweat, with the covers pulled up to my
Speaker 1: chin like a little kid, and I'd listen to things
Speaker 1: move in the darkness outside my window. One night near
Speaker 1: the end of August, I heard footsteps on the porch roof.
Speaker 1: My bedroom was on the second floor, and the porch
Speaker 1: roof ran directly below my window. You could access it
Speaker 1: from outside if you climbed one of the porch posts,
Speaker 1: or from inside if you went through the hall window.
Speaker 1: I'd actually climbed out onto it myself a couple of
Speaker 1: times during the day, just messing around. I knew what
Speaker 1: it sounds like when someone walked on it. The old
Speaker 1: tin roofing would flex and pop under your weight, a
Speaker 1: very specific kind of metallic groaning. That's exactly what I heard.
Speaker 1: Three steps, slow, deliberate, moving from the edge of the
Speaker 1: porch roof toward my window, the tin flexing and popping
Speaker 1: under something heavy. Then it stopped right outside my window.
Speaker 1: I was lying on my side facing the window, and
Speaker 1: the curtain was thin enough that I could see the
Speaker 1: general shape of the window frame against the slightly lighter
Speaker 1: darkness outside. I couldn't see anything standing there, but I
Speaker 1: could feel it. That same feeling I'd had in the
Speaker 1: woods back in June amplified by a thousand. Every nerve
Speaker 1: in my body was firing. I was shaking so hard
Speaker 1: the bed frame was vibrating against the wall. I tried
Speaker 1: to call for my dad. My throat wouldn't work. I
Speaker 1: opened my mouth and nothing came out but a dry,
Speaker 1: strangled whisper that wouldn't have carried past the foot of
Speaker 1: my bed. Then I heard breathing, heavy, slow, rhythmic breathing
Speaker 1: right on the other side of the glass, deep and
Speaker 1: ragged and close, close enough that if the window had
Speaker 1: been open, I would have felt it on my face.
Speaker 1: I don't know how long it lasted. It felt like hours.
Speaker 1: It was probably three or four minutes. Then the tin
Speaker 1: popped again, two steps moving away from the window, and
Speaker 1: I heard something drop off the edge of the porch
Speaker 1: roof and land in the yard below. Not a small drop, either,
Speaker 1: The impact was heavy enough that I felt a faint
Speaker 1: vibration through the house frame. I didn't sleep for the
Speaker 1: rest of the night. I lay there, rigid, staring at
Speaker 1: the window until the sky started to lighten and I
Speaker 1: could hear birds singing. Then I got up and went
Speaker 1: to the window and looked at the porch roof. There
Speaker 1: were scratches in the tent long parallel scratches, four of
Speaker 1: them spaced about an inch apart, running in the direction
Speaker 1: of my window. They hadn't been there before. I told
Speaker 1: my dad that morning, all of it everything I'd been
Speaker 1: holding back, the feeling of being watched since June, the
Speaker 1: tracks at the creek, the vocalizations, the way the sounds
Speaker 1: had been getting closer, and what had happened on the
Speaker 1: porch roof during the night. He listened without interrupting. When
Speaker 1: I finished, he went outside and looked at the porch roof.
Speaker 1: He stood on a step ladder and examined the scratches.
Speaker 1: He walked the perimeter of the house, looking at the ground.
Speaker 1: Then he came inside and sat down at the kitchen
Speaker 1: table and was quiet for a while. My mom asked
Speaker 1: what was going on. My dad told her what I'd said.
Speaker 1: Beth was there too, and her face went from bored
Speaker 1: indifference to wide eyed fear in about three seconds. My
Speaker 1: mom started asking questions what kind of animal could climb.
Speaker 2: Onto a roof? Was it a bear?
Speaker 1: Should they call animal control? My dad said he didn't
Speaker 1: know what it was, but he was going to call
Speaker 1: the conservation agent in Salem and see if there'd been
Speaker 1: any reports of large predators in the area. He made
Speaker 1: the call that afternoon. The conservation agent told him there
Speaker 1: were black bears in the region, though they were uncommon,
Speaker 1: and that there'd been no recent reports of aggressive animal
Speaker 1: activity in Dent County. He suggested setting up a trail camera,
Speaker 1: which my dad didn't have, or putting out a live trap,
Speaker 1: which wouldn't do any good for something big enough to
Speaker 1: tear through hog wire. The agent said he'd make a
Speaker 1: note of the report and check in if anything else
Speaker 1: came up.
Speaker 2: That was it. That was all the help we got.
Speaker 1: My dad spent the rest of that day reinforcing the
Speaker 1: downstairs windows with plywood on the inside. My mom didn't
Speaker 1: say a word about it, which told me she was
Speaker 1: more scared than she was letting on. Beth helped without
Speaker 1: being asked, which told me the same thing. That night,
Speaker 1: my dad moved my mattress into my parents' room. He
Speaker 1: put Beth in there too, on a sleeping bag on
Speaker 1: the floor. He locked every door and window, loaded his rifle,
Speaker 1: and sat in a chair in the upstairs hallway with
Speaker 1: the weapon across his lap. He told us he was
Speaker 1: just being careful. He told us there was nothing to
Speaker 1: worry about, But he sat in that hallway all night,
Speaker 1: and I could see the outline of the rifle barrel
Speaker 1: against the wall every time I opened my eyes. He
Speaker 1: did the same thing the next night and the night
Speaker 1: after that. My mom would bring him coffee around midnight,
Speaker 1: and I'd hear them whispering in the hallway, their voices
Speaker 1: too low for me to make out the words, but
Speaker 1: the tone unmistakable. They were scared, both of them, and
Speaker 1: they were trying to figure out what to do without
Speaker 1: terrifying their children any more than we already were. The
Speaker 1: truth is, Beth and I were already past terrified. We'd
Speaker 1: gone through fear and come out the other side into
Speaker 1: something that felt more like resignation. We couldn't leave, not immediately.
Speaker 1: My dad had sunk everything we had into the property
Speaker 1: and the move. There was no apartment waiting for us
Speaker 1: back in Kentucky, no backup plan.
Speaker 2: We were stuck on.
Speaker 1: This piece of land with whatever was in those woods,
Speaker 1: and the only thing standing between us and it was
Speaker 1: a man with a bolt ast action rifle and a
Speaker 1: set of Halagen floodlights that only illuminated about one hundred
Speaker 1: yards of darkness out of the thousands of acres that
Speaker 1: surrounded us. Three days later, we saw it. I've been
Speaker 1: dreading this part of the story. I've been writing toward
Speaker 1: it like you'd walk toward the edge of a cliff,
Speaker 1: knowing you have to look down eventually, but putting it
Speaker 1: off as long as possible, because describing what we saw
Speaker 1: that night means committing it to something permanent. It means
Speaker 1: taking the thing that lives in the back of my mind,
Speaker 1: the thing I've spent forty years trying to rationalize away,
Speaker 1: and putting it into words that other people will read.
Speaker 1: It was September first, the last day of summer technically,
Speaker 1: though school in our area didn't start until the ninth.
Speaker 1: The weather had broken a little. A cold front had
Speaker 1: come through over the weekend, and the temperature had dropped
Speaker 1: into the seventies during the day, low sixties at night.
Speaker 1: It felt like relief after months of suffocating heat. We'd
Speaker 1: been on edge for days, all of us. But nothing
Speaker 1: had happened since the porch roof incident. No sounds, no
Speaker 1: missing goats, though they were locked in the barn now
Speaker 1: behind heavy doors that my dad had reinforced with two
Speaker 1: by sixes bolted across the frames. No tracks, no signs,
Speaker 1: no feelings of being watched. It was like something had
Speaker 1: pulled back, retreated to whatever part of the timber it
Speaker 1: called home, and left us alone. I was starting to
Speaker 1: hope it was over. Maybe whatever it was had moved on.
Speaker 1: Maybe the floodlights and the activity around the property had
Speaker 1: scared it off.
Speaker 2: Maybe it had been a.
Speaker 1: Bear after all, a big, weird, behaving bear that had
Speaker 1: found easier picking somewhere else. That hope lasted until about
Speaker 1: nine thirty in the evening. We were all in the
Speaker 1: living room.
Speaker 2: My dad was.
Speaker 1: Reading a Louis Lamore paperback. My mom was working on
Speaker 1: a cross stitch. Beth was lying on the couch with
Speaker 1: a magazine. I was on the floor drawing in.
Speaker 2: A sketch book.
Speaker 1: The TV was off, the windows were closed, but the
Speaker 1: curtains were opened because the evening was cool and the
Speaker 1: floodlights outside made the yard visible. We could see the barn,
Speaker 1: the fence line, and the first row of trees at
Speaker 1: the edge of the timber.
Speaker 2: The dog started it.
Speaker 1: We'd gotten two dogs in August, a pair of hound
Speaker 1: mixes from a guy at the feed store who had
Speaker 1: a litter he was giving away. They were young, maybe
Speaker 1: seven or eight months old, but they had good noses,
Speaker 1: and my dad figured they'd serve as an early warning
Speaker 1: system if nothing else. He'd set them up in a
Speaker 1: pen next to the barn with a doghouse and a
Speaker 1: chain link run. They started barking at nine point thirty.
Speaker 1: Not their normal barking, the kind they did when a
Speaker 1: raccoon came around or a car turned down the gravel road.
Speaker 1: This was different, frantic, hysterical, high pitched, yelping barks punctuated
Speaker 1: with long, keening wines, the sound of dogs that are terrified.
Speaker 1: My dad put down his book and stood up. He
Speaker 1: went to the window that faced the backyard and looked out.
Speaker 1: From where I was sitting, I could see his reflection
Speaker 1: in the glass, and I watched his brush and change.
Speaker 1: It went from alert to confused to something I'd never
Speaker 1: seen on his face before, something close to disbelief. He
Speaker 1: said one word, He said, Helen, my mom's name. My
Speaker 1: mom got up and went to the window. She looked out.
Speaker 1: She didn't say anything for about five seconds. Then she
Speaker 1: grabbed my dad's arm and said, oh my god. I
Speaker 1: was on my feet by then, so was Beth. We
Speaker 1: both went to the window and looked out into the
Speaker 1: floodlit yard. It was standing at the edge of the
Speaker 1: tree line about eighty yards from the house, right where
Speaker 1: the mode grass ended and the brush began, standing upright
Speaker 1: on two legs. I need to slow down here because
Speaker 1: this is important and I want to get it exactly right.
Speaker 1: The floodlights were bright, bright enough that we could see
Speaker 1: the barn clearly, see the goat pan, see the fence
Speaker 1: posts and the wire, and the individual blades of grass
Speaker 1: in the yard. The thing at the tree line was
Speaker 1: at the far edge of that light, partially lit and
Speaker 1: partially in shadow, but we could see enough. It was tall.
Speaker 1: I don't mean six feet tall, I mean tall. My
Speaker 1: dad estimated it later at somewhere between seven and eight
Speaker 1: feet based on the tree. It was standing near a
Speaker 1: ceaar that he'd trimmed the lower branches off of the
Speaker 1: week before, and knew the height of it stood upright
Speaker 1: the way a person stands with its shoulders back and
Speaker 1: its head up. But everything about its proportions was wrong.
Speaker 1: The legs were too long relative to the torso, and
Speaker 1: they were bent at the knee in a way that
Speaker 1: human legs don't bend. A reverse angle digitigrade like a
Speaker 1: dog standing on its hind legs. The arms hung down
Speaker 1: past its waist, long and thick, and the hands, if
Speaker 1: you can call them hands, looked enormous, even from eighty
Speaker 1: yards away. But the head, that's what made my mom
Speaker 1: grab my dad's arm. That's what made my sister start
Speaker 1: to cry without making a sound. The head was not human.
Speaker 1: It was along gate with a distinct muzzle, a snout,
Speaker 1: pointed ears that stood erect on top of the skull.
Speaker 1: It looked like a dog's head, a wolf's head sitting
Speaker 1: on top of a body that was built like a man,
Speaker 1: but proportioned like nothing I'd ever seen in any book
Speaker 1: or nature show or nightmare. The thing's body was covered
Speaker 1: in dark hair or fur.
Speaker 2: I should say.
Speaker 1: It was hard to make out exact color under the
Speaker 1: floodlights at that distance, but it looked dark brown, maybe charcoal,
Speaker 1: thick and uneven, the way a wild animal's coat looks
Speaker 1: in late summer. You could see the muscle underneath. That's
Speaker 1: the detail that sticks with me most stubbornly, more than
Speaker 1: the head, more than the eyes. You could see the
Speaker 1: musculature of this thing through its fur, the way you
Speaker 1: can see the muscles on a horse or a large dog,
Speaker 1: and it was massive.
Speaker 2: The chest was.
Speaker 1: Broad and deep, the shoulders were wider than any man's
Speaker 1: I've ever seen, and the arms looked like they belonged
Speaker 1: on something designed to break things, to tear things apart.
Speaker 1: Its eyes caught the floodlight. They reflected back, the way
Speaker 1: a dog's eyes do when headlights hit them, a yellowish
Speaker 1: green glow. Two points of light set wide on that
Speaker 1: canine skull angled slightly forward, staring directly at our house,
Speaker 1: directly at our window. No one moved, no one spoke.
Speaker 1: We stood there, the four of us, pressed against the glass,
Speaker 1: looking at something that should not exist. The dogs had
Speaker 1: stopped barking. They'd gone completely silent, which was somehow worse
Speaker 1: than the frantic noise they'd been making before. The thing
Speaker 1: stood there for probably thirty seconds, maybe forty five. Its
Speaker 1: head moved slightly, tilting to one side, the way a
Speaker 1: dog does when it's listening to something.
Speaker 2: Then it took a step.
Speaker 1: Forward, one long, deliberate stride, bringing it from the edge
Speaker 1: of the trees into the open grass. My dad's hand
Speaker 1: was on the window frame, and I could see.
Speaker 2: His knuckles were white.
Speaker 1: He said, stay here, he said, it quietly, firmly, the
Speaker 1: way he said things when he expected to be obeyed
Speaker 1: without question. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll
Speaker 1: be back after these messages. Then he moved away from
Speaker 1: the window and picked up his rifle from where he
Speaker 1: leaned it against the wall. My mom said, his name,
Speaker 1: just his name, one word, but it carried everything in it.
Speaker 1: Don't go out there, don't open that door. Whatever that
Speaker 1: thing is, you're not going to fight it with a
Speaker 1: rifle in the dark. My dad chambered around. The sound
Speaker 1: of the bolt closing was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.
Speaker 1: He didn't go outside. Instead, he went to the back door,
Speaker 1: unlocked it, pushed open the screen, and fired a single
Speaker 1: round into the air. The shot cracked across the yard
Speaker 1: like thunder, echoing off the barn in the hills beyond.
Speaker 1: The thing reacted instantly. It dropped, not fell, dropped. It
Speaker 1: went from standing upright to a crouched position on all
Speaker 1: fours in a motion so fast and so fluid that
Speaker 1: it barely registered. One second it was standing there like
Speaker 1: a man, seven or eight feet of dark mass against
Speaker 1: the tree line, and the next it was down low
Speaker 1: to the ground. Its posture completely changed, its silhouette, suddenly
Speaker 1: more animal than anything else.
Speaker 2: And then it ran.
Speaker 1: It ran toward the tree line on all fours, covering
Speaker 1: the distance between the open yard and the timber in
Speaker 1: maybe three or four strides, each one launching it forward
Speaker 1: an impossible distance. The way it moved, I keep coming
Speaker 1: back to that, the sheer mechanical impossibility of something that
Speaker 1: large moving that fast. Its limbs didn't churn the way
Speaker 1: a dogs do when it runs. They reached and pulled
Speaker 1: each stride, deliberate but blindingly quick. The body low and streamlined,
Speaker 1: eating up ground like the earth was on a conveyor belt,
Speaker 1: rolling backward underneath it.
Speaker 2: It moved with a speed.
Speaker 1: That but I've never seen in any animal, not a deer,
Speaker 1: not a horse, nothing. The way its body moved, the
Speaker 1: way its limbs coordinated, the way it transitioned from bipedal
Speaker 1: to quadrupedle like flipping a switch. There was a terrible
Speaker 1: fluid grace to it that still makes my stomach turn
Speaker 1: when I think about it. It hit the tree line
Speaker 1: and vanished, just gone, swallowed by the timber in an instant,
Speaker 1: and then the night was silent, completely, absolutely deathly silent.
Speaker 1: My dad stood in the doorway for a long time,
Speaker 1: the rifle at his shoulder, scanning the tree line.
Speaker 2: Then he came.
Speaker 1: Inside, closed the door, locked it, and put the chain on.
Speaker 1: He turned to look at us, and his face was gray.
Speaker 1: My mom was holding Beth, who was crying freely. Now
Speaker 1: I was standing at the window, still staring out at
Speaker 1: the empty yard, my heart hammering so hard I could
Speaker 1: feel it in my fingertips. Nobody said anything about what
Speaker 1: we'd seen. Not that night, we sat in the living
Speaker 1: room with every light in the house on and the
Speaker 1: rifle on the table, and we didn't talk about it.
Speaker 1: My dad sat in a chair facing the back door.
Speaker 1: My mom sat on the couch with her arm around Beth.
Speaker 1: I sat on the floor with my back against the couch,
Speaker 1: staring at nothing, running through what i'd just seen over
Speaker 1: and over and over in my mind, trying to make
Speaker 1: it into something I could understand. We stayed like that
Speaker 1: until the sun came up. We left the farm eleven
Speaker 1: days later. My dad found a rental in Salem, a
Speaker 1: small house on a regular street with neighbors on both sides,
Speaker 1: and street lights and traffic and all the things I'd
Speaker 1: never thought i'd be grateful for He told people he
Speaker 1: decided farming wasn't for him, that the property needed more
Speaker 1: work than he'd anticipated, that my mom missed being closer
Speaker 1: to town. Nobody questioned it, nobody had any reason to.
Speaker 1: He sold the property the following spring to a timber
Speaker 1: company that wanted the land for the trees. I don't
Speaker 1: know if anyone ever lived in that house again. I
Speaker 1: drove past the turnoff about fifteen years ago on a
Speaker 1: trip through the area for work, and I slowed down
Speaker 1: at the gravel road and thought about driving back in,
Speaker 1: just to see, just to know if the house was
Speaker 1: still standing, if the barn was still there, if the
Speaker 1: woods still felt the way they'd felt in nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: I sat at that turnoff for probably two minutes, engine idling,
Speaker 1: hand on the steering wheel. I didn't turn in. I
Speaker 1: drove on, and I haven't been back since. Some part
Speaker 1: of me is ashamed of that. Some part of me
Speaker 1: thinks a braver man would have gone back, would have
Speaker 1: walked those trails again, would have stood at that tree
Speaker 1: line in the daylight and faced the thing that had
Speaker 1: run him off forty years ago.
Speaker 2: But I'm not that man. I've made my peace with that.
Speaker 1: Whatever lived on that property earned my fear, and I
Speaker 1: don't see any reason to test it. During those eleven
Speaker 1: days between the sighting and our move, my dad didn't sleep.
Speaker 1: I mean that literally. I'd get up at two three
Speaker 1: in the morning and he'd be in the hallway or
Speaker 1: on the back porch with his rifle, watching the tree line.
Speaker 1: He put the remaining goats in the back of his
Speaker 1: truck and drove them to Krieger's place. He boarded up
Speaker 1: the downstairs windows permanently. He stopped going out past the barn.
Speaker 1: He stopped walking the fence line.
Speaker 2: He was afraid.
Speaker 1: My dad, who'd carried an M sixteen through rice Paddies
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty eight, who told me my whole life
Speaker 1: that fear was natural, but you don't let it make
Speaker 1: your decisions, was afraid in a way that I didn't
Speaker 1: know he was capable of. We never discussed what we saw,
Speaker 1: not directly, not in clear terms. Over the years, my
Speaker 1: mom would sometimes refer to that trouble at the farm
Speaker 1: and change the subject. Beth and I would circle around
Speaker 1: it at holidays, saying things like that was a weird summer,
Speaker 1: and nodding at each other and leaving it there. My
Speaker 1: dad never brought it up, not once in the twenty
Speaker 1: three years between that night and the night he died
Speaker 1: of a heart attack in two thousand and eight. The
Speaker 1: closest he ever came was one evening about a year
Speaker 1: before he passed, sitting on my back deck in Kansas City,
Speaker 1: when he looked at me out of nowhere and said,
Speaker 1: I should have believed you about those tracks.
Speaker 2: That was it.
Speaker 1: That was the only acknowledgment I ever got from him.
Speaker 1: I've spent a lot of years thinking about what was
Speaker 1: on that property with us. I've considered everything I can
Speaker 1: think of. Bear that was the first and most obvious explanation,
Speaker 1: and it's the one I tried to believe for a
Speaker 1: long time. But bears don't stand seven feet tall in
Speaker 1: an upright posture. Bears don't have elongated canine skulls. Bears
Speaker 1: don't move on all fours at the kind of speed
Speaker 1: I saw that night, and bears don't leave tracks that
Speaker 1: look like a massive dog's pawprint. Feral dog doesn't work,
Speaker 1: not even close. A dog on its hind legs is awkward, temporary, unstable.
Speaker 1: What I saw was standing upright with the comfort and
Speaker 1: ease of a creature that was built to do it,
Speaker 1: and no dog, no matter how large, could cover the
Speaker 1: kind of ground this thing covered on all fours in
Speaker 1: the span of three or four strides a person in
Speaker 1: a costume. I've heard this theory applied to other sightings,
Speaker 1: and it's insulting. A person in a costume does not
Speaker 1: leave claw marks on a tin roof. A person in
Speaker 1: a costume does not drag a sixty pound goat through
Speaker 1: a torn section of hogwire and into the woods. A
Speaker 1: person in a costume does not have eyes that reflect
Speaker 1: light the way an animal's eyes do. It's not something
Speaker 1: you can fake with a rubber mask. So what does
Speaker 1: that leave I didn't know what to call it for
Speaker 1: most of my life. I didn't have a name for it.
Speaker 1: When I was a teenager, I read some books about
Speaker 1: were wolf legends and thought maybe that was the closest fit.
Speaker 1: But the whole supernatural transformation thing didn't feel right. This
Speaker 1: wasn't something that used to be a person. This was
Speaker 1: an animal, a predator, a living, breathing creature that occupied
Speaker 1: a territory, hunted prey, made vocalizations to communicate with others
Speaker 1: of its kind, and had a physical form that was
Speaker 1: consistent and real and left tangible evidence of its existence.
Speaker 1: When I found your show, Brian and started hearing other
Speaker 1: people describe encounters with something they called a dog man,
Speaker 1: I felt like someone had turned a light on in
Speaker 1: a room I'd been sitting in for forty years. The
Speaker 1: descriptions matched. The elongated canine head, the upright stance, the
Speaker 1: digital grade legs, the disproportionately long arms, the speed on
Speaker 1: all fours, the vocalizations, the predatory behavior toward livestock, the
Speaker 1: way it watched and studied before it acted. I don't
Speaker 1: know what a dog man is. I don't know if
Speaker 1: it's an undiscovered species, a relic predator that somehow survived
Speaker 1: in pockets of deep wilderness, or something that defies biological
Speaker 1: classification altogether. What I know is that my family and
Speaker 1: I lived with one, maybe two of them, for an
Speaker 1: entire summer, and it was the most frightening experience of
Speaker 1: any of our lives. I'm not looking for val I'm
Speaker 1: not looking for anyone to tell me they believe me.
Speaker 1: I know what I saw, my mom knows what she saw,
Speaker 1: my sister knows what she saw, and somewhere in whatever
Speaker 1: quiet place my dad occupies. Now he knows too. I
Speaker 1: just wanted to finally tell someone the whole story, from
Speaker 1: the beginning to the end, without leaving anything out, and
Speaker 1: without softening it to make it easier to hear. I've
Speaker 1: been caring this for forty years, Brian, forty years of knowing
Speaker 1: that something impossible was real and not having anyone to tell.
Speaker 1: So there it is, the summer of nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: the Culture Farm, Dent County, Missouri. Whatever was in those woods,
Speaker 1: it's still out there somewhere. I believe that the Ozarks
Speaker 1: are vast and deep and full of places where people
Speaker 1: don't go, miles and miles of unbroken timber, where things
Speaker 1: can live and move and hunt without ever being seen
Speaker 1: by human eyes. And every once in a while, when
Speaker 1: the conditions are right, when someone moves into the wrong
Speaker 1: piece of life land or walks the wrong trail at
Speaker 1: the wrong time, those things make themselves known. I hope
Speaker 1: this story finds its way to someone who's had an
Speaker 1: experience like mine, someone who's been carrying the weight of
Speaker 1: something they can explain, turning it over in their mind
Speaker 1: at two in the morning, wondering if they imagined it
Speaker 1: wondering if they're the only person in the world who's
Speaker 1: ever seen something like that. If you're out there and
Speaker 1: you've seen what I've seen, I want you to know
Speaker 1: you're not crazy, you're not imagining things, and you're not alone.
Speaker 1: There are more of us than you think, keeping quiet,
Speaker 1: carrying this weight, waiting for someone to give us permission
Speaker 1: to say it out loud. This is me saying it
Speaker 1: out loud forty years later, but I'm saying it. Thanks
Speaker 1: for reading this, Brian, Thanks for doing what you do
Speaker 1: with your show. It matters more than you probably realize.
Speaker 1: You've given people like me a place to put something
Speaker 1: that doesn't fit anywhere else in our lives, and that's
Speaker 1: worth more than I can tell you.
Speaker 2: Kevin didn't di