Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in. But those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness, Bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: The truck's been quiet for the last hour. That's what
Speaker 1: happens when you cross into northern New England after dark.
Speaker 1: The radio stations thin out, the exits get farther apart,
Speaker 1: and the trees start crowding the shoulder like they're checking
Speaker 1: your plates. We came up root one out of Portsmouth
Speaker 1: over the Piscataqua River Bridge, that big green arch that
Speaker 1: drops you into Kittery, and the second the tires hit
Speaker 1: Maine asphalt. I rolled the window down salt pine, cold
Speaker 1: air with an edge to it, even in summer. Welcome
Speaker 1: to our latest stop on the backwoods cryptid road trip.
Speaker 1: I've honestly stopped counting how many states we've been to
Speaker 1: at this point. The map in the glovebox has more
Speaker 1: coffee stains than legend at this point, and the cooler
Speaker 1: in the back seat has been riding shotgun through swamps, deserts, hollows,
Speaker 1: and now, finally, the ragged edge of the North Atlantic
Speaker 1: Main is different from every state we've hit so far,
Speaker 1: and I want you to understand and why before we
Speaker 1: get one mile farther up this coast. Every other stop,
Speaker 1: the monster had somewhere to hide. Sure, a swamp, a ridgeline,
Speaker 1: a cave system, But you could, in theory, walk in
Speaker 1: after it. You could put boots on the ground where
Speaker 1: the witness stood and follow the thing's trail until the
Speaker 1: trail quit. Not here, not with this one, because Tonight's
Speaker 1: monster lives in the ocean, and the ocean doesn't give
Speaker 1: anything back unless it feels like it. Casco Bay drops
Speaker 1: away from those postcard rocks into black, cold deep water,
Speaker 1: and whatever slides beneath that surface is gone the moment
Speaker 1: it decides to be gone. No tracks, no hair samples,
Speaker 1: no trail cameras, just to swirl on the water and
Speaker 1: a story. The witness has to carry a loan for
Speaker 1: the rest of their life. They call her Cassie, the
Speaker 1: Casco Bay Sea Serpent. And before this night is over,
Speaker 1: we're also going to leave the water line and walk
Speaker 1: into the biggest unbroken forest in the eastern United States.
Speaker 1: Because Maine doesn't just have a sea monster. Maine has
Speaker 1: sasquatch reports going back generations, tucked into logging camps and
Speaker 1: potato country and the deep silence north of Moosehead Lake.
Speaker 1: Two monsters, one state, water and woods. We're heading up
Speaker 1: the coast to Portland, and the FOG's already coming in.
Speaker 1: Let me set the table, because if you've never stood
Speaker 1: on the main coast, I can almost guarantee your picturing
Speaker 1: it wrong. Forget the smooth sand beaches farther south. The
Speaker 1: main coast is granite ledges and shelves and broken slabs
Speaker 1: of rock stacked up like something got dropped from a
Speaker 1: great height a million years ago and nobody cleaned it up.
Speaker 1: The water that hits those rocks in July will still
Speaker 1: take your breath if you fall in fifty five maybe
Speaker 1: sixty degrees on a good day, cold enough to kill
Speaker 1: you in an hour or two if the boat goes
Speaker 1: over and nobody comes. Casco Bay sits right in the
Speaker 1: middle of the southern Maine coast, with the city of
Speaker 1: Portland on its western shore. It's not a small body
Speaker 1: of water. The bay runs roughly twenty miles along the
Speaker 1: coast and reaches back miles deep into the land, and
Speaker 1: it's littered with islands. They used to call them the
Speaker 1: calendar islands because an old story claimed there was one
Speaker 1: for every day of the year. The real count is
Speaker 1: lower a couple hundred or so, depending on how generous
Speaker 1: you are about what counts as an island versus a
Speaker 1: big rock with an attitude. But the point stands Casco
Speaker 1: Bay is a maze channels, ledges, deep holes, shallow flats,
Speaker 1: all of it braided together, all of it swept twice
Speaker 1: a day by tides that move enormous volumes of water
Speaker 1: in and out of the Gulf of Maine, and the
Speaker 1: Gulf of Maine itself is the engine behind everything. It's
Speaker 1: one of the richest, most biologically productive bodies of water.
Speaker 1: In the Atlantic, cold currents come down from the Labrador Sea,
Speaker 1: mix with warmer water and stir up nutrients that feed
Speaker 1: everything from herring to humpback whales. What Ever swims the
Speaker 1: North Atlantic can wander into the Gulf of Maine, and
Speaker 1: whatever wanders into the Gulf of Maine can nose its
Speaker 1: way into Casco Bay chasing bait. The people who work
Speaker 1: this water aren't tourists. Lobstermen out of Portland, Falmouth, Harpswell
Speaker 1: and the islands run their boats and fog you couldn't
Speaker 1: see your hand through in seas that would send most
Speaker 1: of us crawling for the dock. These are folks who
Speaker 1: look at the water all day, every day for forty
Speaker 1: or fifty years. They know what a sealhead looks like
Speaker 1: at three hundred yards. They know a basking shark fin
Speaker 1: from a porpoise, roll from a half sunk log without
Speaker 1: slowing the boat down. Their livelihood depends on reading the
Speaker 1: surface of the ocean correctly. So when one of them
Speaker 1: comes in and says he saw something he can't explain,
Speaker 1: that's worth more to me than one hundred blurry photos.
Speaker 1: That's the setting. Cold water deep channels, working boats, and
Speaker 1: a horizon that hides more than it shows. Now, let's
Speaker 1: go back, way back, because as he didn't show up
Speaker 1: out of nowhere in the twentieth century, New England has
Speaker 1: been reporting sea serpents for as long as there have
Speaker 1: been Europeans on this coast to write things down, and
Speaker 1: for a long time before that, if you listen to
Speaker 1: the people who were already here. Start in sixteen thirty nine,
Speaker 1: an English traveler named John Jocelyn came to the New
Speaker 1: England coast and later wrote up his voyages in a book.
Speaker 1: In it, he passed along an account he heard from
Speaker 1: men on the coast north of Boston. They told him
Speaker 1: about a sea serpent, a huge snakelike thing that lay
Speaker 1: coiled up on a rock at Cape Ann, which is
Speaker 1: the big granite fist of land that sticks out into
Speaker 1: the Atlantic below the main border, right where Gloucester sits today.
Speaker 1: Two Englishmen in a boat with some Native men wanted
Speaker 1: to shoot at it. The native men stopped them. They're warning,
Speaker 1: as Jocelyn recorded, it was simple. If the men fired
Speaker 1: and didn't kill it, they'd all be in danger. Don't
Speaker 1: wound something like that, Don't even try The Englishmen were surprised.
Speaker 1: The native men were not. They already had rules for
Speaker 1: this animal. You don't develop rules for something you've never seen.
Speaker 1: The Wabanaki peoples of what's now Maine had their own
Speaker 1: traditions of enormous serpents in the lakes and along the coast,
Speaker 1: water beings with their own names and their own reputations,
Speaker 1: long before a single English keel scrape these rocks. The
Speaker 1: colonists didn't import the sea serpent. They walked into a
Speaker 1: coastline that already had one. Moved forward seventeen fifty one
Speaker 1: Broad Bay, in the area of what's now Walderborough on
Speaker 1: the mid coast, German settlers reported an enormous serpent in
Speaker 1: the water. Scattered accounts run through the seventeen hundreds, most
Speaker 1: of them a sentence or two in somebody's journal, A
Speaker 1: thing seen off a point, a great snake in the bay,
Speaker 1: And then the writer moves on to the price of
Speaker 1: salt fish, because life was hard and paper was expensive.
Speaker 1: Then comes the one I love because of who the
Speaker 1: witness became. Seventeen seventy nine, during the Revolutionary War, in
Speaker 1: Panopscot Bay, farther up the main coast, a young midshipman
Speaker 1: was serving aboard in American warship when the crew spotted
Speaker 1: an enormous serpent lying on the surface of the water.
Speaker 1: The captain ordered a boat over the side and sent
Speaker 1: the midshipman with armed men to go after it. They
Speaker 1: rowed toward the theme, actually pursued it until it slid
Speaker 1: under and was gone. That midshipman's name was Edward Prebble.
Speaker 1: If you know your naval history, you know where this goes.
Speaker 1: Preble became one of the most respected officers in the
Speaker 1: early United States Navy. A commodore, the man who commanded
Speaker 1: the squadron against Tripoli, the officer a whole generation of
Speaker 1: famous captains called their teacher. There are ships named after him.
Speaker 1: There's a fort named after him, guarding, of all places,
Speaker 1: the entrance to Casco Bay. His sea serpent story survived
Speaker 1: because his biographers recorded it. And think about what that means.
Speaker 1: This wasn't a drunk on a wharf. This was a
Speaker 1: story attached to one of the most credible military names
Speaker 1: of the era, a man whose entire reputation rested on judgment, discipline,
Speaker 1: and accurate observation. Did he embellish it? Maybe did his biographer, possibly,
Speaker 1: but the account exists. It's specific, and it places a large,
Speaker 1: unknown animal in Maine coastal waters almost two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty years ago, with a future commodore in a rowboat
Speaker 1: chasing it. Now, all of that was prologue, because in
Speaker 1: August of eighteen seventeen, about thirty miles down the coast
Speaker 1: from the main line, the sea serpent stopped being a
Speaker 1: sailor's yarn and became for one strange season a matter
Speaker 1: of official scientific record. Gloucester, Massachusetts, August eighteen seventeen. Gloucester
Speaker 1: was a serious fishing town, one of the oldest in America,
Speaker 1: full of men who spent their lives on the water,
Speaker 1: and over a stretch of days that August, dozens of them,
Speaker 1: then hundreds of people in total, watched an enormous serpentine
Speaker 1: animal work the harbor and the waters off Cape Ann
Speaker 1: not one siding, not one witness, day after day, witness
Speaker 1: after witness, from boats, from wharves, from the shore. With spyglasses.
Speaker 1: The descriptions lined up to a remarkable degree. A dark
Speaker 1: animal enormously long estimates commonly ran from forty feet up
Speaker 1: past eighty a head raised out of the water, often
Speaker 1: compared to a horse's head or a big dog's head,
Speaker 1: in shape held a foot or two above the surface
Speaker 1: and behind the head. The detail that shows up again
Speaker 1: and again for the next two centuries a series of
Speaker 1: humps or bunches breaking the surface in a line, moving
Speaker 1: with a vertical motion up and down, not the side
Speaker 1: to side sweep of a snake or an eel. Witnesses
Speaker 1: said it moved fast, startlingly fast, faster than any whale
Speaker 1: they knew. A ship's carpenter named Matthew Gaffney got close
Speaker 1: enough in a boat to fire a musket at its
Speaker 1: head from what he judged to be thirty feet or less.
Speaker 1: He was sure he hit it. The animal reacted, turned
Speaker 1: toward the boat, sank, passed under them, and came up
Speaker 1: again one hundred yards off, apparently unbothered. Gaffney's account scared people,
Speaker 1: and it should have. That's a man shooting a large,
Speaker 1: unknown animal at point blank range and watching the shot
Speaker 1: mean nothing. Here's the part that separates Gloucester from every
Speaker 1: other monster flap you've ever heard of. The Lenaean Society
Speaker 1: of New England, a genuine learned scientific body in Boston,
Speaker 1: took it seriously. They sent a committee. They had witnesses
Speaker 1: examined under oath before a Justice of the peace, sworn depositions,
Speaker 1: legal instruments, Amos' story, Solomon Allen Gaffney and others sat
Speaker 1: down and swore to what they saw in detail, with
Speaker 1: the questions and answers written out, Where were you, what time,
Speaker 1: how far, how long did you observe it, what color?
Speaker 1: How did it move? Those documents still exist. You can
Speaker 1: read them today, and they read like careful people describing
Speaker 1: a real animal, disagreeing on the small stuff the way
Speaker 1: honest witnesses always do, and agreeing on the spine of
Speaker 1: the thing, long, dark head like a horse, humps in
Speaker 1: a line vertical motion fast. Then the Lenaean Society made
Speaker 1: one of the great unforced errors in the history of
Speaker 1: American science. That fall, somebody killed a small black snake
Speaker 1: near the shore at Cape Ann, a snake about three
Speaker 1: feet long with a strange, bunched, humped deformity along its body.
Speaker 1: The society's men examined it, decided it must be a
Speaker 1: juvenile of the great serpent everyone had seen, dissected it,
Speaker 1: and formally announced a new species. They gave it a
Speaker 1: scientific name Sculiophus atlanticus, the Atlantic humped snake. They published
Speaker 1: it was a common black snake with a diseased, deformed spine.
Speaker 1: Naturalists in America and Europe took the whole affair apart,
Speaker 1: and the laughter that followed didn't just bury the little snake.
Speaker 1: It buried the depositions. It buried Gaffney and Story and
Speaker 1: Allen and every sworn word they'd given from that point forward.
Speaker 1: Sea serpent testimony carried the smell of that blunder, and
Speaker 1: it never fully aired out. Scientists learned the lesson that
Speaker 1: touching this subject could end a reputation, and honest witnesses
Speaker 1: learned that coming forward brought you nothing but a nickname
Speaker 1: at the wharf. The Society's mistake was real, and it
Speaker 1: was bad, But the mistake was in the dead snake,
Speaker 1: not in the living testimony. Those depositions were taken before
Speaker 1: the snake ever turned up. Whatever hundreds of people watched
Speaker 1: off Gloucester in August of eighteen seventeen was never explained.
Speaker 1: It was only embarrassed out of the conversation. And here's
Speaker 1: your main connection. The animal or animals didn't stay in Gloucester.
Speaker 1: Sightings continued in eighteen eighteen and eighteen nineteen, enrolled up
Speaker 1: and down the New England coast for decades off Nahant,
Speaker 1: off Boston, off Portsmouth, and yes, off Maine. The Gulf
Speaker 1: of Maine was the highway, whatever it was, it commuted.
Speaker 1: The nineteenth century main papers are where this thing really
Speaker 1: settles into Casco Bay. And I want to read you
Speaker 1: some of these accounts the way they would a run,
Speaker 1: because there's a flavor to old newspaper sea serpent reporting
Speaker 1: that you have to hear to appreciate. These are the
Speaker 1: kinds of items that filled coastal papers through the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: when a serpent story was news the same way as
Speaker 1: shipwreck or a big halibut was news from a Portland paper.
Speaker 1: Summer eighteen thirties, Sea serpent again. The monster, which has
Speaker 1: for some seasons past visited our coast, was seen on
Speaker 1: Thursday last off the mouth of the Harbor by several
Speaker 1: gentlemen of unquestioned veracity, among them Captain Small of the
Speaker 1: schooner Dove, who observed the creature at a distance of
Speaker 1: not more than fifty rods. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
Speaker 1: Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Captain Small
Speaker 1: states that the animal appeared of the thickness of a
Speaker 1: barrel of a dark brown color, and that portions of
Speaker 1: its body to the number of eight or ten were
Speaker 1: visible above the water in a line of some sixty feet.
Speaker 1: Its head, which it carried erect resembled that of a horse.
Speaker 1: It moved with great rapidity toward Cape Elizabeth and disappeared.
Speaker 1: Captain Small is a temperate man, and his statement may
Speaker 1: be relied upon you hear it. Every one of these
Speaker 1: accounts has the same bones the named witness, the character
Speaker 1: reference temperate man, gentleman of veracity, because the editor knew
Speaker 1: exactly what readers would suspect, the measurement in rods or
Speaker 1: in comparison to a barrel or a hogshead, because these
Speaker 1: were people who measured the world in working objects. The
Speaker 1: humps counted the horse head, the speed, and then the vanishing,
Speaker 1: always the vanishing toward Cape Elizabeth or Seguan or the
Speaker 1: open sea down east had its own file. In the
Speaker 1: summer of eighteen seventeen, the same season Gloucester was boiling over,
Speaker 1: reports came out of the Eastport area, way up at
Speaker 1: the eastern end of the main coast near the Canadian
Speaker 1: line of a great serpent seen in the passages around
Speaker 1: Passamaquaddi Bay. Different witnesses, hundreds of miles apart, same season,
Speaker 1: same animal on the page. Either the story traveled faster
Speaker 1: than the coasting schooners that carried the newspapers, or something
Speaker 1: with a long, dark back was working the whole Gulf
Speaker 1: of Maine that summer and letting itself be seen. Here's
Speaker 1: another one, the serpent. Once more, we are informed by
Speaker 1: mister Josiah Truffon of Harpswell, a fisherman of thirty years standing,
Speaker 1: that on Tuesday morning last, while hauling his trolls off
Speaker 1: Mark Island, he and his boy observed a creature of
Speaker 1: prodigious length passing to the eastward at the rate as
Speaker 1: he judged, of ten knots or better. Mister Trufont states
Speaker 1: that the animal carried its head, which was of the
Speaker 1: bigness of a flower barrel, some feet clear of the water,
Speaker 1: and that its wake was such as a small steamer
Speaker 1: might make. The boy was for pulling after it, mister
Speaker 1: Trufont was not. He observes that he has hauled his
Speaker 1: gear in these waters, man and boy since before the war,
Speaker 1: that he never saw its like before, and that he
Speaker 1: is in no great hurry to see it again. We
Speaker 1: give the account as we received it, and remark only
Speaker 1: that mister Trufont's word is good at every store in
Speaker 1: the town. His word is good at every store in
Speaker 1: the town. That's a credit rating and a character reference
Speaker 1: in one sentence, and it tells you exactly what the
Speaker 1: editor knew he was up against. Nobody spends their good
Speaker 1: name on a joke, not in a town where your
Speaker 1: name is the only collateral you've got. The papers ran
Speaker 1: items like this for decades. Some seasons brought clusters of them.
Speaker 1: A serpent seen off Booth Bay by the crew of
Speaker 1: a coaster. A serpent seen from the beach at Old
Speaker 1: Orchard by summer visitors, which the locals dismissed because summer
Speaker 1: visitors would report a mermaid if you gave them a
Speaker 1: spyglass and a slow afternoon. A serpent that passed a
Speaker 1: fishing boat off monhegan so close the men could hear
Speaker 1: the water part around it, and the skipper asked why
Speaker 1: he didn't give Chase answered that he was in the
Speaker 1: fish business and intended to stay in it. That last
Speaker 1: line or something very close to it shows up more
Speaker 1: than once in the old accounts, and it might be
Speaker 1: my favorite detail in all of this. These were practical men.
Speaker 1: They saw something enormous and unexplained, and their overwhelming response
Speaker 1: was to keep a respectful distance and get back to work.
Speaker 1: That's not how hoaxers behave. Hoaxers chase attention. Fishermen then
Speaker 1: and now mostly wished the thing hadn't picked their boat.
Speaker 1: By the late eighteen hundreds, the reports thinned, steam replaced sail,
Speaker 1: the coastal papers changed, and the Great Atlantic Sea Serpent
Speaker 1: slid out of the news columns and into the folklore shell.
Speaker 1: A lot of people assumed the story died there. It didn't.
Speaker 1: It just went quiet, and in June of nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 1: in the waters off Cape Elizabeth, at the mouth of
Speaker 1: Casco Bay, it cleared its throat. The witness in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight was a fisherman named ol Mickelson, a Dane
Speaker 1: out of Portland, a working captain, not a publicity seeker.
Speaker 1: By his account, he was out near Cape Elizabeth in
Speaker 1: the approaches to Casco Bay when he noticed something following
Speaker 1: his boat, not crossing his path. Following he described a
Speaker 1: creature of great length, dark serpentine, with its head held
Speaker 1: out of the water. And he watched it long enough
Speaker 1: and close enough to rule out the ordinary suspects. He
Speaker 1: knew wales, he knew sharks, he fished for a living
Speaker 1: in these exact waters. He said this was neither. And
Speaker 1: he said it trailed him for a considerable time before
Speaker 1: it fell away and sank from sight, and he did
Speaker 1: not enjoy a single minute of it. Mickelson's siding got
Speaker 1: picked up in the Portland press and it became the
Speaker 1: anchor of the modern era for this animal. Years later,
Speaker 1: the researcher Lauren Coleman, who eventually settled in Portland himself
Speaker 1: and opened his cryptozoology museum right there in the city,
Speaker 1: gave the Casco Bay serpent the name that stuck Cassie,
Speaker 1: a friendly, almost affectionate name in the tradition of NeSSI
Speaker 1: and Chessie and Champ for an animal whose actual descriptions
Speaker 1: are anything but cuddly. I've got mixed feelings about the
Speaker 1: cute names. Honestly, they make the subject approachable. An approachable
Speaker 1: means people keep talking, and talking is how reports get preserved.
Speaker 1: But a name like Cassie can trick you into forgetting
Speaker 1: what the witnesses actually describe. Nobody who's looked at a
Speaker 1: horse shaped head rising off black water at dusk has
Speaker 1: ever described the experience as cute. So that's the lineage
Speaker 1: Wabanaki water beings, Joscelyn's coiled serpent at Cape Anne in
Speaker 1: sixteen thirty nine, Prebley's row boat chase in seventeen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: the Gloucester depositions of eighteen seventeen, a century of newspaper
Speaker 1: items Mickelson in nineteen fifty eight, and behind the famous
Speaker 1: names a long, quiet sediment of reports from lobstermen and
Speaker 1: ferry passengers and people standing on rocks, most of which
Speaker 1: never got written down anywhere except in a family's dinner
Speaker 1: table repertoire. The next few stories are modern era encounters.
Speaker 1: The first one comes from a lobsterman I'll call Roy.
Speaker 1: Roy fished out of a harbor on the eastern side
Speaker 1: of Casco Bay for over thirty years. Third generation. His
Speaker 1: grandfather fished under sail. Roy's the kind of guy who
Speaker 1: can tell you the depth under his hull within a
Speaker 1: fathom just by looking at the shoreline, and he'll tell
Speaker 1: you straight out that for most of his career he
Speaker 1: thought sea serpent stories were for the tourists and the
Speaker 1: gift shops. Late September, some years back, Roy was hauling
Speaker 1: his last string of the day off the backside of
Speaker 1: one of the outer islands, where the bottom drops off
Speaker 1: quick into deep water, flat calm evening, which matters. A
Speaker 1: flat calm sea is a lie detector. Nothing moves on
Speaker 1: it without showing itself. He just dumped a trap and
Speaker 1: was idling toward the next boy when he saw what
Speaker 1: he took for a line of pot boys where no
Speaker 1: pot boys should be four dark shapes in a row,
Speaker 1: maybe two hundred yards off, evenly spaced. His first thought
Speaker 1: was that somebody had set gear in his territory. And
Speaker 1: if you know lobstermen, you know that thought arrived with
Speaker 1: some heat behind it. Then the boys moved all four
Speaker 1: of them together in a line against the tide. Roy
Speaker 1: cut the throttle and watched the shapes rose a little higher,
Speaker 1: and he could see now they weren't separate objects. They
Speaker 1: were connected under the surface humps of one continuous body,
Speaker 1: dark wet, smooth looking. Each hump maybe the size of
Speaker 1: an overturned dory, rolled forward with an up and down motion,
Speaker 1: and the water between them stayed disturbed, a long, slick
Speaker 1: line of turbulence, maybe fifty sixty feet from end to end.
Speaker 1: Roy had seen thousands of whales, finbacks, minkeys, humpbacks, the
Speaker 1: occasional right whale. He'd seen basking sharks by the dozen,
Speaker 1: seen their fins wobble on the surface, seen two of
Speaker 1: them swimming in line, and understood exactly how that could
Speaker 1: fool somebody. He stood there, running the checklist out loud
Speaker 1: to himself in the empty boat. No blow, no fin,
Speaker 1: no fluke, wrong motion. Whales roll one arc at a time.
Speaker 1: This was four arcs at once, holding formation like the
Speaker 1: animal was too long to fit into one arc. The
Speaker 1: humps ran parallel to him for what he guessed was
Speaker 1: thirty seconds. Then the lead hump dipped and the rest
Speaker 1: followed it down, one by one, front to back, like
Speaker 1: a chain being pulled off a table. The slick sat
Speaker 1: on the surface for a while. Afterward he finished his string.
Speaker 1: He's a lobsterman, but he told me the part that
Speaker 1: stayed with him wasn't the humps. It was the size
Speaker 1: of the swirl where the last one went down. He'd
Speaker 1: seen the footprint a diving finback leaves on the surface
Speaker 1: that big, smooth boil of displaced water. This was bigger,
Speaker 1: and a finback is one of the largest animals that
Speaker 1: has ever lived. Roy never reported it to anybody official.
Speaker 1: He told his sternman, who'd been ashore sick that day,
Speaker 1: and his sternmann laughed at him for exactly one season,
Speaker 1: right up until the following August. Because the following August,
Speaker 1: Roy Sternman got his own look, and so did two
Speaker 1: other boats. But before we get to that, I want
Speaker 1: to give you the sailboat story, because it comes from
Speaker 1: the other end of the spectrum, not a professional fisherman.
Speaker 1: A retired school teacher and her husband summer people on
Speaker 1: a thirty foot sloop and their sighting is one of
Speaker 1: the most interesting long neck reports I've come across from
Speaker 1: this bay. Call them the Halarins. They kept their boat
Speaker 1: in Falmouth and they'd been sailing Casco Bay for twenty summers, careful,
Speaker 1: unadventurous home by cocktail hour sailors. This particular afternoon they
Speaker 1: were ghosting along in light air out past Halfway Rock,
Speaker 1: which is a bare granite ledge with a lighthouse on
Speaker 1: it way out in the outer bay, open ocean for
Speaker 1: a neighbor, Missus Hallerin, was on the helm, her husband
Speaker 1: was below making sandwiches. She noticed what she took for
Speaker 1: a mooring ball off the port bow, dark round, maybe
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty feet away. And her actual first thought,
Speaker 1: and she laughs at this now, was who on earth
Speaker 1: would set a mooring out here? The mooring ball rose.
Speaker 1: It came up on a neck. It came up smooth,
Speaker 1: no splash, like a periscope, and it just kept coming
Speaker 1: three or four feet maybe more. The neck was dark
Speaker 1: on top and lighter underneath, thick as a telephone pole,
Speaker 1: and the head on top of it was small for
Speaker 1: all that neck, whiter than the neck, but not by much.
Speaker 1: She said, it looked like a horse. She screamed for
Speaker 1: her husband, and this detail I love because it's so human.
Speaker 1: He came up the companion way holding a butter knife,
Speaker 1: ready to defend the family with cutlery. They both watched it.
Speaker 1: That's what makes this one strong. Two witnesses, daylight, calm sea,
Speaker 1: close range, and duration, not a glimpse. They watched the
Speaker 1: head and neck for what mister Hallerin timed afterward by
Speaker 1: walking himself back through it. At somewhere over a minute,
Speaker 1: the head turned. That was the detail that ended any
Speaker 1: argument about logs or debris. The head rotated the way
Speaker 1: you'd scan a room, and for a second or two
Speaker 1: the thing was looking down their course line at them,
Speaker 1: and Missus Hallerin said the boat had never felt small
Speaker 1: before that day, and never felt big again after it.
Speaker 1: Then it went down the way it came up, vertical, smooth,
Speaker 1: no splash, like something being lowered on a cable. The
Speaker 1: water closed over it, and the afternoon went right back
Speaker 1: to being a pretty afternoon sunlight lighthouse gulls as if
Speaker 1: the ocean had just shown them a card and slid
Speaker 1: it back into the deck. They told the yacht club.
Speaker 1: The yacht club told them it was a seal. Missus
Speaker 1: Halleran taught school for thirty four years, and she gave
Speaker 1: the commodore the look she used to give boys who
Speaker 1: claimed the dog ate their homework, and she said, young man,
Speaker 1: I know what a seal looks like, and a seal
Speaker 1: is not nine feet tall. I promised you the August story,
Speaker 1: the one where Roy Sternman quit laughing. It was the
Speaker 1: summer after Roy's evening with the four humps first week
Speaker 1: of August, and this time it wasn't one boat. It
Speaker 1: was three working the same stretch of bottom off the
Speaker 1: Outer Islands on a hot, flat morning, with Hayes sitting
Speaker 1: on the water. Roy and his sternman, a younger guy
Speaker 1: I'll call Pete, were on one. A father and son
Speaker 1: crew had another a half mile east. Bird was an
Speaker 1: older highliner. Everybody in that harbor deferred to a man
Speaker 1: in his seventies who fished through hurricanes and fish wars
Speaker 1: and had a reputation for never getting excited about anything,
Speaker 1: including hurricanes and fish wars. It started on the radio.
Speaker 1: The father on the eastern boat came up on the
Speaker 1: channel the harbor used and asked, in the flattest possible voice,
Speaker 1: if anybody else was seeing this? That's all he said,
Speaker 1: anybody else seeing this? Roy looked east. Petey looked east,
Speaker 1: and out between the boats, maybe a quarter mile off,
Speaker 1: something long was on the surface. Petey described it. It
Speaker 1: wasn't humps exactly, he said, it was more like and
Speaker 1: he stopped and started over. You know when a big
Speaker 1: tanker's been by and the swell from it comes through
Speaker 1: long after the ship's gone. One long low Ridge of water.
Speaker 1: It was like the ridge of water was a thing
Speaker 1: dark on top, sixty feet of it, seventy moving steady
Speaker 1: to the southwest, with no white water anywhere on it,
Speaker 1: and the haze made the far end of it hard
Speaker 1: to be sure about, which bothered him because it meant
Speaker 1: the far end might have kept going. Three boats, five men,
Speaker 1: all of them watching the same object at the same
Speaker 1: time from different angles, which is the setup every skeptic
Speaker 1: says never happens. The old highliner did something none of
Speaker 1: the rest of them would have dared. He swung his
Speaker 1: boat and steamed straight at it. Roy got on the
Speaker 1: radio and asked him what exactly he thought he was doing,
Speaker 1: and the old man's answer came back, dry as a chip,
Speaker 1: said he'd been hearing about this thing since he was
Speaker 1: a boy, and he was too old to die of
Speaker 1: anything interesting, so he might as well go. Look. He
Speaker 1: got by his own reckoning inside one hundred yards. Then
Speaker 1: the ridge sank into the water, the whole length of it,
Speaker 1: settling straight down like a submarine flooding its tanks. No roll,
Speaker 1: no fluke, no boil at the head end, just down,
Speaker 1: and the surface where it had been went smooth, stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more backwoods bigfoot stories. We'll be back after
Speaker 1: these messages. He circled the spot for ten minutes. Nothing
Speaker 1: came up, nothing bleue. On a flat, calm day. Inside
Speaker 1: one hundred yards, five experienced sets of ears and not
Speaker 1: one breath. Here's my favorite part of the story. When
Speaker 1: the old man got back to the harbor that afternoon,
Speaker 1: somebody on the wharf asked him if the rumor was
Speaker 1: true that he chased the serpent, and he looked at
Speaker 1: the guy and he said, chased what, and finished unloading
Speaker 1: his catch. He fished nine more years and never mentioned
Speaker 1: it again in public. P D asked him about it once, quietly,
Speaker 1: at a funeral of all places, and the old man said,
Speaker 1: some things you see are yours, and that was the
Speaker 1: entire conversation. Some things you see are yours. Half the
Speaker 1: reports in this episode never got made because of that
Speaker 1: exact sentence. And I'll never know how big the real
Speaker 1: file is because of men like him, And honestly, part
Speaker 1: of me respects it. One more from the water, a
Speaker 1: quick one, because it puts a different kind of witness
Speaker 1: in a different kind of boat, an experienced sea kayaker,
Speaker 1: a woman who'd paddled Casco Bay for fifteen years and
Speaker 1: taught paddling in the summers, early morning, late June, thick fog.
Speaker 1: The kind mane specializes in where the world is a
Speaker 1: gray sphere thirty feet across and every sound comes from everywhere.
Speaker 1: She was following a compass bearing between two islands in
Speaker 1: the Deep Channel when she heard the exhale. Kayakers know exhales.
Speaker 1: Seals pop up next to boats constantly, harbor porpoises huff
Speaker 1: along shorelines all summer. She could grate a marine mammal
Speaker 1: by its breath, the way you'd recognize a family member's
Speaker 1: cough in a dark house. And she told me this
Speaker 1: breath failed. The grating too long, too low, she said,
Speaker 1: porpoise breaths are a syllable, And this was a sentence,
Speaker 1: a slow, wet push of air off to her right, close,
Speaker 1: followed by a sound she'd never heard on the water,
Speaker 1: water running off something streaming off it like off a
Speaker 1: ledge when a swell drops, except there was no ledge
Speaker 1: within half a mile, and no swell in the fog.
Speaker 1: She just sat there with her paddle laid across the cockpit,
Speaker 1: her heart going like a bilge pump. The streaming sound stopped.
Speaker 1: Then the water under her moved, not a wave, a displacement.
Speaker 1: She called it the kayak lifting maybe two or three
Speaker 1: inches in settling, the way you rise when something very
Speaker 1: large passes beneath you in a pool, and along with
Speaker 1: it a smell. She still can't place low tide and
Speaker 1: something else, something animal, over the top of it. Then
Speaker 1: Awake came out of the fog and clapped against her hull,
Speaker 1: three or four slaps of it. She sat still for
Speaker 1: twenty minutes. Then she paddled her compass line to the island,
Speaker 1: dragged the boat above the tideline, and sat on the
Speaker 1: rocks until the fog burned off. And when it did,
Speaker 1: the channel was empty all the way to the horizon,
Speaker 1: blue and pretty and innocent as a postcard. She still
Speaker 1: paddles the bay, but she doesn't paddle it in the fog.
Speaker 1: This account comes out of the ferry traffic. Casco Bay
Speaker 1: Lines runs boats from Portland out to the islands year round,
Speaker 1: real working ferries, mail and groceries and islanders, and the
Speaker 1: crews on those boats log more hours looking at this
Speaker 1: bay than anyone alive. Most of them will tell you
Speaker 1: they've never seen a thing. A couple of them will
Speaker 1: wait until the wheelhouse is quiet. The account I've got
Speaker 1: is from a deckhand mid October run late boat, most
Speaker 1: of the passengers inside because the wind had that first
Speaker 1: real bite of winter in it. He was aft coiling
Speaker 1: a line and he noticed the wake looked wrong. There
Speaker 1: was a second wake inside their wake, off the starboard quarter,
Speaker 1: a long v of disturbed water, maybe forty feet back
Speaker 1: keeping station. His first thought was a whale riding the
Speaker 1: pressure wave, which happens, or dolls which stack up on
Speaker 1: bows all the time. But dolphins show themselves constantly. They
Speaker 1: can't help it their show offs. This didn't show anything,
Speaker 1: just the wake holding position, matching a ferry that was
Speaker 1: making a steady twelve knots or so. He watched it
Speaker 1: for the better part of a mile then, and he
Speaker 1: was very careful about how he said this. Something in
Speaker 1: the disturbed water rolled, not breached, rolled. A long section
Speaker 1: of back, dark glistening under the stern lights came over
Speaker 1: in an arc, and he said the arc kept going
Speaker 1: past where it should have ended. He'd worked on whale
Speaker 1: watch boats out of Booth Bay in his twenties. He
Speaker 1: knew the geometry of a whale's back the way you
Speaker 1: know the roofline of your own house. This roll was
Speaker 1: too long and too low, and it never ended in
Speaker 1: a fin, and there was no blow. And at twelve
Speaker 1: knots in cold water, anything with lungs that big has
Speaker 1: to breathe like a freight train. It stayed with the
Speaker 1: boat until the ferry slowed for the island landing. When
Speaker 1: the engines dropped off, the second wake didn't slow with them.
Speaker 1: It went straight, held speed, crossed their bow at a distance,
Speaker 1: and carried on out toward the open bay in a
Speaker 1: dead flat line. And the deckhands stood there watching a
Speaker 1: v of moving water with nothing visible, making it head
Speaker 1: out to sea like it had an appointment. Of course,
Speaker 1: plenty of skeptics over the years have made their case
Speaker 1: against Cassie basking sharks. The Gulf of Maine is full
Speaker 1: of them. In season. They're the second largest fish in
Speaker 1: the world. They run over thirty feet. They swim slow
Speaker 1: at the surface with a dorsal fin and a tail
Speaker 1: tip showing, and two or three of them feeding in
Speaker 1: a line, which they genuinely do. Produce a dead on
Speaker 1: multiple hump serpent at any distance. A dead basking shark
Speaker 1: rotting on a beach loses its gill structure and jaw
Speaker 1: in a way that leaves what looks like a small
Speaker 1: head on a long neck attached to a bulky body.
Speaker 1: That single fact of decomposition has manufactured more sea serpent
Speaker 1: carcasses than every hoke in history combined, or fish real
Speaker 1: animal ribbon shaped silvery documented at longer than twenty five feet.
Speaker 1: They live in the deep, but do occasionally surface when
Speaker 1: they're sick or dying. If one wabbled along the surface
Speaker 1: off Cape Elizabeth, you'd have a sea serpent report by
Speaker 1: supper time, and I wouldn't blame the witness one bit.
Speaker 1: Pilot whales and dolphins swimming in single file, line them up,
Speaker 1: catch them at range in low light, and you'll count
Speaker 1: humps all day. A pod surfacing in sequence produces exactly
Speaker 1: the front to back rolling dive roid described. Add in
Speaker 1: seals doing the periscope thing, which they absolutely do, head
Speaker 1: and neck straight up out of the water. Add wakes
Speaker 1: and standing waves because a tide swept bay full of
Speaker 1: ledges makes moving lumps of water that fool people constantly.
Speaker 1: Add sturgeon which run huge, look prehistoric and genuinely inhabit
Speaker 1: main waters had the human eyeball, which is a pattern
Speaker 1: matching machine that would rather be wrong than uncertain. That's
Speaker 1: the case, it's a good case. It probably accounts for
Speaker 1: ninety percent of what people have seen. But Roy's answer
Speaker 1: to all that comes in the form of a question,
Speaker 1: how many pilot whales hold a four hump surface formation
Speaker 1: for half a minute without one of them? Blowing whales
Speaker 1: are loud breathers. A calm evening carries a blow across
Speaker 1: two hundred yards like a door slamming. He heard nothing.
Speaker 1: Missus haller AND's seal would be the largest seal in
Speaker 1: the recorded history of seals, with a neck like a
Speaker 1: utility pole and a head that scanned from side to
Speaker 1: side and the deckhands. Animal held twelve knots for a
Speaker 1: mile without breathing at the surface, which rules out every
Speaker 1: air breather on the suspect list, and then departed in
Speaker 1: a straight line against the tide, which rules out every
Speaker 1: lump of water. The honest position, and it's the one
Speaker 1: eye hold. Is this? The ordinary explanations eat most of
Speaker 1: the reports, they do not eat all of them. There
Speaker 1: is a residue, There has been a residue on this
Speaker 1: specific stretch of coast since sixteen thirty nine, described the
Speaker 1: same way by Wabanaki paddlers, colonial fishermen, a future commodore,
Speaker 1: deposed witnesses swearing before magistrates, Danish dragermen, school teachers, and
Speaker 1: ferry crews, none of whom read each other's mail. Long,
Speaker 1: dark horsehead humps in a vertical line, fast, silent, and
Speaker 1: the ocean, remember, is the shield. Nobody can prove what
Speaker 1: disappears beneath black water, and nothing has to leave a track.
Speaker 1: Cassie could pass through Casco Bay once a year, once
Speaker 1: a decade, and the odds of a camera being pointed
Speaker 1: at the right acre of ocean at the right minute
Speaker 1: are close to zero. Absence of evidence in six hundred
Speaker 1: feet of cold dark water is just absence. Now dry off,
Speaker 1: grab your boots out of the truck bed. Because Maine's
Speaker 1: other monster doesn't have a shield of water. It has
Speaker 1: a shield of trees. And the shield is seventeen million
Speaker 1: acres deep. Here's a number that surprises people who think
Speaker 1: of Maine as a coastline with lighthouses on it. Maine
Speaker 1: is the most heavily forested state in the country, right
Speaker 1: around ninety percent of it is woods, not parkland, working
Speaker 1: forest and wild forest, spruce and fir and hardwood ridges
Speaker 1: rolling north from the coast in a green tide that
Speaker 1: doesn't really stop until Canada drive two hours inland from
Speaker 1: that Portland ferry dock and you're in a different world.
Speaker 1: The towns get small, then sparse, then they quit being
Speaker 1: towns and become townships with numbers instead of names. Unorganized territory,
Speaker 1: no local government because there's nobody to govern. North of
Speaker 1: Moosehead Lake. The road network belongs mostly to the timber companies,
Speaker 1: gravel highways, where the log trucks own the right of
Speaker 1: way and your cell phone becomes a camera and nothing else.
Speaker 1: The one hundred mile wilderness, the stretch of the Appalachian
Speaker 1: Trail between Monson and Katadan, is famous among hikers as
Speaker 1: the most remote section of the entire trail, one hundred
Speaker 1: miles without a paved road crossing Moose in that country
Speaker 1: outnumber people by a margin that should embarrass us. Black bears,
Speaker 1: thousands of them, whole watersheds where the annual human population
Speaker 1: is a game warden, some loggers, and whoever's lying about
Speaker 1: where they caught their brook trout. If you were designing
Speaker 1: habitat for a large, smart, dark furred primate that wanted
Speaker 1: nothing to do with us. You designed northern Maine, and
Speaker 1: you'd add long, brutal winters as a security system. And
Speaker 1: just like on the coast, the reports here didn't start
Speaker 1: with modern bigfoot culture. The Wabanaki peoples, the Panobscot and
Speaker 1: Passamaquaddy and Maliset and Mickmac carried stories of giant beings
Speaker 1: in the deep forest, wild men and cannibal giants of
Speaker 1: the north Woods. Beings you avoided, whose territory you respected,
Speaker 1: whose name you didn't say carelessly in winter. Different nations,
Speaker 1: different names, same underlying instruction. The deep woods have an owner.
Speaker 1: Mind your manners in them. Nineteenth century main papers ran
Speaker 1: occasional wild man items, same genre as everywhere else in
Speaker 1: rural America. A hairy man shaped figure seen by berry
Speaker 1: pickers or river drivers, a brief flap than silence logging.
Speaker 1: Camp storytellers had their whole bestiary, and most of it
Speaker 1: was pure entertainment for men stuck in the woods all winter.
Speaker 1: And I'd never hang an argument on a lumber camp yarn.
Speaker 1: But then there's Durham. Durham, Maine, nineteen seventy three. This
Speaker 1: one's documented. It was in the papers at the time,
Speaker 1: and people in that town talked about it for decades after.
Speaker 1: Durham's in southern Maine, farm country between Lewiston and the coast,
Speaker 1: not the deep wilderness at all, which makes what happened stranger.
Speaker 1: In the summer of nineteen seventy three, residents, a lot
Speaker 1: of them kids, but adults too, started reporting a creature
Speaker 1: around the fields and wood lots. The word that got
Speaker 1: attached to it in the local press was gorilla. A
Speaker 1: dark hair covered man shaped thing seen crossing roads, seen
Speaker 1: at the edges of fields, seen moving through brush upright.
Speaker 1: One group of children said had approached them near a
Speaker 1: road before loping off. Adults reported it crossing in front
Speaker 1: of vehicles. Searchers reportedly found tracks. For a stretch of
Speaker 1: that summer, Durham was genuinely stirred up, men going out armed,
Speaker 1: the whole small town. Monster flat package, and then the
Speaker 1: way these things go, the sightings tapered off, and the
Speaker 1: creature was gone, and everybody was left holding a story
Speaker 1: with no ending. The comfortable explanation offered then and since,
Speaker 1: was an escaped pet, chimp or some other exotic animal
Speaker 1: on the loose. Fine, show me the missing chimp report,
Speaker 1: show me the owner. Nobody ever did. And a chimpanzee
Speaker 1: loose in mained doesn't survive quietly. It raids, It gets
Speaker 1: seen constantly, It dies visibly. This thing did none of that.
Speaker 1: It walked through a summer and out the far side
Speaker 1: of it. Durham nineteen seventy three sits in the record
Speaker 1: as Maine's most public sasquatch adjacent event. But the file
Speaker 1: I care more about is the quiet one. Hunters, hikers
Speaker 1: and game wardens unofficial after hour stories. The reports that
Speaker 1: trickle into the databases from townships you've never heard of
Speaker 1: are Roostook County up in the Potato Country and the
Speaker 1: Big Timber along the border. November, some twenty odd years back,
Speaker 1: a deer hunter I'll call him Marcel. Marcel was still
Speaker 1: hunting a cedar swamp edge an hour before dark. Moving slow.
Speaker 1: It was spitting snow, small dry flakes, everything gray and quiet.
Speaker 1: He'd stopped against a furd to glass a cut. When
Speaker 1: the smell arrived. He described it as a wet dog
Speaker 1: rolled in, something dead with a sourness under it, and
Speaker 1: he set it arrived all at once, like walking into
Speaker 1: a room, not like catching a drift. Every deer hunter
Speaker 1: knows what a moose smells like, what a bare den
Speaker 1: smells like, what a dead thing smells like. He ran
Speaker 1: that checklist the way Roy ran his checklist on the water,
Speaker 1: and nothing on it matched. Then he heard the walking
Speaker 1: behind him and to the left in the cedars, footfalls
Speaker 1: in the frozen swamp litter two feet. He was absolutely
Speaker 1: clear on that, and it was the detail he kept
Speaker 1: coming back to. A moose and frozen swamp sounds like
Speaker 1: a horse in a china shop. Four beats. Crashing a
Speaker 1: deer is quick and light. This was heavy, and it
Speaker 1: was two beats step step step, unhurried, maybe forty yards
Speaker 1: in the thick stuff, keeping pace with the swamp edge.
Speaker 1: Marcel did the arithmetic every experienced hunter does. Another hunter
Speaker 1: had to be, except he was six miles up a
Speaker 1: gated road on a Tuesday. He'd cut no boot tracks
Speaker 1: all day, and no hunter alive walks a cedar swamp
Speaker 1: in a straight line at a steady pace. In the
Speaker 1: last hour of light hunter's sneak. This thing strolled. He
Speaker 1: never saw it. That's what makes me trust him. A
Speaker 1: storyteller gives you the face, the eyes, the roar. Marcel
Speaker 1: gives you footsteps and a smell, and the honest ending,
Speaker 1: which is that he stood against that fur with his
Speaker 1: rifle up and his thumb on the safety until the
Speaker 1: steps faded north. And then he walked out of that
Speaker 1: swamp in the dark, with his skin trying to crawl
Speaker 1: off his back. And he has not hunted that particular
Speaker 1: swamp since, and he's a little ashamed of that. And
Speaker 1: he told me, anyway, stay tuned for more backwoods big
Speaker 1: foot stories. We'll be back after these messages. Next morning,
Speaker 1: he drove his brother back in there. In the skiff
Speaker 1: of snow along the swamp edge, they found a line
Speaker 1: of impressions, melted out and shapeless by then Marcel's stride
Speaker 1: his thirty inches. He measured these against his own boots
Speaker 1: at something over four feet impression to impression in a
Speaker 1: dead straight line through blowdown that the two of them
Speaker 1: had to climb over and detour around just to follow it.
Speaker 1: His brother looked at the line, looked at him and said,
Speaker 1: we're not telling anybody about this, And for twenty years
Speaker 1: they didn't. The one hundred mile Wilderness story comes from
Speaker 1: a through hiker, a woman from Pennsylvania Trail named Compass,
Speaker 1: who was finishing her Appalachian Trail hike northbound in early September.
Speaker 1: She was alone, which is normal out there, camped in
Speaker 1: her tent a little off the trail, near a pond
Speaker 1: somewhere north of the barren chairback range, full dark, dead calm,
Speaker 1: loons earlier, and then nothing. She was half asleep when
Speaker 1: the rock hit the water, A big rock, A single
Speaker 1: loud splash out in the pond, the sound of rock
Speaker 1: the size of a bowling ball makes when it's thrown
Speaker 1: a long way. She sat up a minute later, another
Speaker 1: one one farther left, Then a third. Something was walking
Speaker 1: the far shore of that pond in the dark, throwing
Speaker 1: rocks into the water. That's what her ears told her.
Speaker 1: Was it another hiker goofing around at ten at night,
Speaker 1: miles from a road, alone, throwing boulders. Then the whoop,
Speaker 1: one long rising whoop from across the pond. A sound,
Speaker 1: she said, started like a man imitating an owl and
Speaker 1: ended like nothing. She had a file for too loud,
Speaker 1: too long with the volume. She felled in the tent walls.
Speaker 1: Silence after total, no frogs, no insects, the whole pond
Speaker 1: holding its breath. She didn't sleep at first light. She
Speaker 1: packed up in about ninety seconds, a personal record. Two
Speaker 1: days later, at apple Bridge, where the wilderness finally lets
Speaker 1: a north bounder back out onto a road, she mentioned
Speaker 1: it carefully, jokingly testing the water to an older local
Speaker 1: guy having coffee. He didn't laugh. He asked which pond.
Speaker 1: She told him. He nodded like she'd confirmed a delivery date,
Speaker 1: and said they hear that up there sometimes in the fall,
Speaker 1: and went back to his coffee. And that was somehow
Speaker 1: worse than the whoop. I've heard that rock throwing detail
Speaker 1: from Washington State to Georgia witnesses who've never met, who've
Speaker 1: never read a report describing rocks arcing into water in
Speaker 1: the dark. It's either the same behavior across a continent,
Speaker 1: or the same hallucination across a continent. One more from
Speaker 1: the woods, and it comes from a logger. I'll call
Speaker 1: him Denny. He ran a skiter for an outfit cutting
Speaker 1: north of Jackman, hard against the Canadian line. This would
Speaker 1: be the late nineteen nineties. Denny was the first one
Speaker 1: in one October morning, sent ahead to grease the machines
Speaker 1: He's driving the crew truck up the winter road, headlights on,
Speaker 1: frost on everything, and he comes around a corner onto
Speaker 1: the landing, the big open yard where the wood gets stacked,
Speaker 1: and something is standing at the log pile. His head
Speaker 1: lights hit it square. It was going through the tops
Speaker 1: the slash pile like a man looking through a bin
Speaker 1: at a yard sail, bent over arms in the pile,
Speaker 1: and when the lights hit it, it stood up and
Speaker 1: it kept standing up. And Denny's whole body understood the
Speaker 1: size before his brain did, because the log pile behind
Speaker 1: it was stacked over six feet and this thing was
Speaker 1: head and shoulders above the stack, dark reddish brown, massive
Speaker 1: through the shoulders in a way he compared to a
Speaker 1: bull moose stood on end. He never got a good
Speaker 1: look at the face because it turned away from the light.
Speaker 1: Then it moved off the landing and maybe four steps
Speaker 1: into the stumps and slash of the cut. Denny sat
Speaker 1: in the truck with the doors locked, a forty year
Speaker 1: old logger with a chainsaw in the bed, doors locked
Speaker 1: until the rest of the crew came up the road
Speaker 1: behind him. He didn't say anything that morning. What he
Speaker 1: did do and this is the corroboration such as it is.
Speaker 1: Was asked the boss to swap him off the early slot,
Speaker 1: and the boss, an older guy who'd cut that country
Speaker 1: his whole life, looked at him a beat too long
Speaker 1: and said, you saw something at the landing. Not a question.
Speaker 1: Then the boss said the thing that Denny carried out
Speaker 1: of the woods. And eventually to me, he said, they
Speaker 1: come to the piles after the cutting. My father used
Speaker 1: to leave the top spread out for them. Just don't
Speaker 1: feed it on purpose, and don't tell the office they
Speaker 1: come to the piles like it was a known thing,
Speaker 1: Like leaving the top spread was an old crew custom.
Speaker 1: Nobody wrote down how many of those customs are out
Speaker 1: there in the working woods of this country. Quiet accommodations
Speaker 1: between crews and something in the tree line kept off
Speaker 1: the record for one hundred years because the record laughs
Speaker 1: at people. I said earlier that Maine's winter empties the
Speaker 1: land of people, and it does, but not entirely. It
Speaker 1: leaves the ice fishermen. And the winter report is the
Speaker 1: one I saved for last from the woods because winter
Speaker 1: is when this subject is supposed to go quiet, and
Speaker 1: because snow does something no summer forests can do. Snow
Speaker 1: keeps records. Two brothers i'll call them Gary and Paul
Speaker 1: had a camp on a pond up in the Moosehead Country,
Speaker 1: north side end of a plowed to nowhere road. Every
Speaker 1: February they spent a long weekend up there fishing for
Speaker 1: toagu through the ice, which, for you flatlanders is what
Speaker 1: maners call lake trout. This was maybe fifteen years ago,
Speaker 1: deep snow year, the kind of cold where the trees
Speaker 1: crack at night like rifle shots, and the ice on
Speaker 1: the pond booms and groans as it makes. First night,
Speaker 1: they're in the camp playing cribbage with the woodstove going,
Speaker 1: and the dog starts in old beagle mix, deaf in
Speaker 1: one ear, scared of nothing on four legs. She got
Speaker 1: up off the floor, faced the door and growled in
Speaker 1: a register. Neither of them had heard from her in
Speaker 1: twelve years low continuous hackles in a full ridge. She
Speaker 1: didn't bark. Gary told me that's what put his stomach
Speaker 1: on the floor, because that dog barked at everything, chipmunks, snowmobiles.
Speaker 1: Her own reflection, she didn't bark at this. She backed
Speaker 1: up and she got behind the stove and she stayed there.
Speaker 1: Then something went around the camp. They both heard it.
Speaker 1: Steps in deep snow, that unmistakable crunch, squeak of weight
Speaker 1: punching through crust, moving along the back wall where there's
Speaker 1: no path, no reason for a path, four feet of
Speaker 1: snow against the logs, slow steps spaced way out. Whatever
Speaker 1: made them past the back window, and the window is
Speaker 1: five feet off the ground on that side because of
Speaker 1: the slope, and something blocked the starlight in it. Going
Speaker 1: by morning, clear brutal cold sun coming up, pink on
Speaker 1: the snow. They went out together and the snow had
Speaker 1: done its job. A trackway. It came out of the
Speaker 1: woods north of camp, crossed the open area, and went
Speaker 1: down the back wall exactly where they'd heard it, and
Speaker 1: went out onto the pond ice heading for the far shore,
Speaker 1: a dead straight line of holes in the snow center
Speaker 1: to center. The holes were better than five feet apart
Speaker 1: in snow past your knees. Uphill. The brothers followed the
Speaker 1: trackway across the pond. It ran arrow straight for most
Speaker 1: of a mile, crossed the pond, went up the far
Speaker 1: bank through a blowdown tangle, and the last thing it
Speaker 1: did before the soft woods took it was step over
Speaker 1: a down spruce that Gary measured at forty one inches
Speaker 1: off the snow stepped over it. One hole on the
Speaker 1: near side, one hole on the far side, no scuff
Speaker 1: on the log, no mark in between. Over the years,
Speaker 1: I've talked to a couple of retired main game wardens
Speaker 1: off the record, and I asked both of them the
Speaker 1: same question I asked, in all your years, did you
Speaker 1: ever take a call you couldn't close. One of them
Speaker 1: finally said, there's things in the north Woods files that
Speaker 1: got rolled up as Bear that the warden knew wasn't Bear,
Speaker 1: and we'll just leave it right there, rode up as Bear,
Speaker 1: filed and forgotten. The paperwork version if some things you
Speaker 1: see are yours and yours alone. So there's Maine, one state,
Speaker 1: two monsters. The FOG's in thick over the harbor. Now
Speaker 1: somewhere out past the islands, a fog horn is doing
Speaker 1: its one lonely job, and the bell boys are talking
Speaker 1: to each other in the dark, and the black water
Speaker 1: in between them isn't telling anybody anything. Keep your eyes
Speaker 1: on the water and your ears on the tree line,
Speaker 1: because up here you need both. The truck's warmed up,
Speaker 1: the map's on your lap pick us a road out
Speaker 1: of here, and we'll see you at the next state line.
Speaker 1: Did