Speaker 1: I was born and raised in what used to be
rural Madison County and North Alabama. It was a kind
of place where everyone knew everyone. That meant kids always
had to be good, because misbehavior would always make it
back to their parents. In nineteen seventy four, when I
was eight, we had some of the worst tornadoes this
area has ever seen. My grandfather, who lived in Mississippi,
died during those from a heart attack. Afterwards, there were
so many trees down it was hard to imagine it
was the same place. There was a family that lived
about a half a mile away from ours who had
girls close to my age. We would meet in the
woods and play. We made up names for different stands
of trees so we always knew where to meet. The
big stand that was the farthest from any of our
houses was called Big Pines. Little Pines was closer to
their house. Tiny Pines was right behind my house. Our
imagination in naming them knew no bounds. It's pretty original. Oh,
it just reminded me of a story about my son.
But I'll tell you all that another time. She writes.
The summer after the tornadoes changed the look of the
woods a lot, especially the Big Pines area. There was
one place where three trees had fallen together that we
decided to make our clubhouse. The trees had fallen in
sort of a triangle, with one on top and two
on the bottom. Once we got inside and started cutting
out the inner branches to give us room, it was perfect.
We started bringing in some stuff so that it was
more homey and to make it our clubhouse. It was
still a time when kids were giving free rein of
their days, and I could tell my parents that I
was going to meet Donna in Big Pines and they'd answer, okay,
that was enough for them. There was no checking in,
no specific time to be home, and no stranger danger.
Back then, I wish my daughter could have experienced that
easy freedom that's gone forever now. On this particular day,
Donna and I were going to meet at the clubhouse
in Big Pines. I don't remember what time it was,
but I got there before she did. I was playing
around inside the clubhouse when I heard something. I figured
it was Donna coming, so I didn't think much about it.
After a few minutes, Donna didn't show up. Well, I
got curious, so I peeked out through the branches in
the clubhouse, and I looked around. At first, I didn't
see anything. Donna's older brother was fond of harassing us,
and if it was him, I didn't want him to
know that I was there. That guy gave me the
creeps back to playing inside the clubhouse, but I kept
hearing small sounds, so I would periodically look out in
their direction. And I still didn't see anything, but I
noticed that all the normal sounds coming to the woods
were gone. It was eerily quiet. Finally, I caught a
glimpse of something that was large, black and tan and
about the same size as my German shepherd's Sindbad. Even
though he never followed me to Big Pines, I assume
it was him. I didn't call out to him. Instead,
I watched to see what he would do, or if
he would find me hidden in our little clubhouse. A
few minutes passed, I'm not sure how many. I was
only eight at the time. It didn't move much, so
I didn't get a good look at it. I was
considering just calling him to me so he could play
in the clubhouse with me, when I suddenly felt very
glad that I didn't. I was looking directly at it
when with no warning, it jumped onto the trunk of
a pine tree and climbed straight up. My dog could
do a lot of things, but he could not climb
a tree. Now froze and for a minute I just
sat there, and whatever it was, I never saw or
heard it climb back down. I didn't move for two hours.
Donna never came. I don't remember why. At that point,
I'm not sure I would have wanted her to. I
had heard of a mountain lion being caught in the
area over thirty years earlier, but there had been no
sign of one since. I've often wondered what it was
that I saw that day, but I'm convinced it was
not a mountain lion. I never went back to Big
Pines alone again. I still live within a mile of
that area. I lived way back off the road at
the edge of the woods and mountains, but I've never
seen anything that terrified me a lot that we do
have black bears and bobcats here, but it was neither
of those. I can still shut my eyes and see
it in my mind, and even as an adult, I
have no answers. Oh Beca, Becca Beca. What a great story,
And I'm sure it still haunts you today. And I
absolutely understand what you said there at the end. It's
like these images are cast in your mind forever. It's
like you never you never forget exactly. It's never hazy,
it's never far off in your memory. Whenever that memory
comes back, it is exactly the same and as exactly
as you saw it the day you saw it. I
have a few of those. They don't have to do
with monsters. They may have to do with my father,
or my mother, or you know, some event in my life.
I know exactly what you mean. And to see something
like that as an eight year little, eight year old
little girl, I'm sure that's something that scared you to death.
But I'll make one suggestion. And I don't know that
you know. I'm not always I never try to debunk
these stories. I just read them and we go on.
I remember when I was a kid, there weren't there
were hardly any any any turkeys at all in the woods,
and I saw this thing run up a tree, or
it looked like it ran up a tree. It was
a big big to me, it was big, a big,
dark object, and it made these weird noises when it
flew up in the tree, and it was right in
the evening. Like you, I remember that vision vividly, and
I can run it through my mind. And the more
I think about what I saw after years of hunting turkeys,
I'm pretty sure that's what I saw. But I didn't
even know turkeys were in the woods when I was
a kid. I thought turkeys were something that people raised
on a farm. I'm not even sure I knew what
a turkey. A turkey to me was a big, frozen,
giant heavy ball that you pulled out of the freezer
at the grocery store. Then I figured out what they
were and we started hunting them. By the way, a
wild turkey doesn't look like that when it's when it's
cleaned out. They're they're quite a bit smaller, but they're
but the meat is delicious. It is so good that
when you breast them out, they're just oh man, it's
some of the it's like the nectar of meat. To me.
That and venison just the best meat in the world.
It's clean and it's it. They don't they're not fed.
All right, I'm going off on a tangent again. I
don't mean to do that, but so maybe it was
a turkey, I'm not saying it was, but think about that.
You have the image in your mind, Maybe get on
YouTube and look at things climbing trees and kind of
zero in on a turkey and see if that's not
what you saw. But if that's not what you saw
and it was bigger and more menacing, then it could
have been a bigfoot, could have been a dog man
or some other creature that wanders those woods. I don't know,
but I love the story, Becca, and I really appreciate
you sending it. Nioma liked it too. She was telling
me that it's one of those stories it just kind
of makes her skin crawl because I don't know, especially
as it happens with little kids and stuff. It's you know,
it's kind of speaky. But Becca, thank you. I'll lave
quit yack and hear.
Speaker 2: My first encounter with what I believe was a bigfoot
happened in nineteen eighty five or eighty six, when I
was about three or four years old. My parents and
I were living with my dad's mom on a little
dirt road in western Georgia at the time, less than
a quarter of a mile from my grandmother's house. Was
a small graveyard. It seemed like people were always there
fixing headstones. I would watch as they reset stones that
had been pushed over and repair those that had been
broken in the process. Even in my late teens, I
remember writing past and seeing the people working on the headstones,
some for the third or fourth time. One evening, my
dad decided to walk to his mom's brother's house about
a mile down the road. I was a daddy's boy,
so I went with him. There was a full, bright
moon that night that hung in the sky like a
giant lantern. It was so big I felt like I
could reach out and touch it. Dad was walking in
front of me, maybe ten or twelve feet. As I
passed the lock gate to the cemetery. I jumped when
I heard what sounded like a wet rug being dropped
onto a concrete floor, followed by a heavy chuffing sound
like a bull when it coughs. I looked at my dad,
unsure if he'd heard it, but then he turned a
little to the right without quite turning, offered me his
hand without quite lifting it from his side, and said,
come on, son, and a soft voice that was not
quite ominous from the house to the graveyard. The little
dirt road as straight. There are no curves or hills
to obscure the view from the house where we stood.
Just before I moved to take my dad's hand, I
glanced over my shoulder, but I couldn't see our house
or the street light in our yard. I couldn't see
any of the neighbor's street lights either. I looked back
several times, but I didn't see anything until maybe the
fourth time I saw someone behind us. They were about
thirty or forty feet back. Who's that following us, I
asked my dad. Nobody, he answered in that same quiet voice. Then,
in an even softer voice laden with urgency, he added,
come on. I started walking faster to keep up with
my dad, but now I was suddenly aware of the
sounds of footsteps. They were getting harder, louder, closer, faster
with each step I took. I turned again to look
back over my shoulder. The distant lights outlined someone big
in what I took to be a wooly sweater. Before
I could fully turn back to my dad, I felt
him lifting me off the ground and swinging me onto
his shoulders. He began to run with me. I tried
to look back at the wooly sweater, but it was
all I could do to hang onto my dad's head
as he ran as fast as he could. Like I said,
I was only about three or four then. I wasn't
in school yet. I don't remember much beyond that. Clearly
we escaped our stalker, but my memory fails me beyond
my dad running with me on his shoulders. Years later,
when I was in my early teens, I found what
I thought and still believed to be a den in
the side of a creek bank. The whole head of
a cow was sticking out of the hole, half submerged
in water. As I stood there looking at it, something
snatched it from the other side of that hole and
pulled it out of sight. I didn't wait around to
see what had the ability to do that. I'm thirty
eight now, and I still have trouble sleeping. Sleeping meanstreaming about,
wooly sweaters chasing me, and cowheads disappearing into holes and
creek banks, and means remembering other things as well. I
once spoke on the phone with my dead aunt. I've
had two other bigfoot encounters too. I'd rather deal with
bigfoot than talk to dead people, but both terrify me.
The things I've told you here are the God's honest truth.
I'll be writing to you about the other two encounters
I have to tell someone. Maybe once I tell them
and get them out of my system, I'll be able
to sleep.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 2: I thought that was a fantastic story. Can you imagine
being only three or four years old and your father's
so frightened he sweeps you up on his shoulders and
starts to run, and you don't even know what you're
running from except for something in a big wooly sweater.
It must have been terrifying. And then later when he
saw the cow's head and the whole being just pulled in,
Oh my gosh, no wonder you don't sleep, Wara. I
wouldn't sleep either. Thank you for sending in the story,
and thank you Cam for letting me read it.
Speaker 1: When I was a young man growing up in central
New York, my uncle used to tell the family a
story of what he called the swamp monsters. This was
long before you could hear any talk about Bigfoot. He
would tell a story whenever the cousins would gather. He
and my aunt were working on a farm back in
the nineteen thirties. The family farm had big, open fields
surrounded by rolling forested hills, and he would tell the
story of two huge creatures covered with dark black hair
that came from the forest and walked in front of
he and my aunt across the farm fields. He estimated
the distance at seventy five yards. When they reached every fence,
they simply stepped over them, as if they were not there.
I never made the connection with Bigfoot at the time.
When I was eight, my dad was reading the newspaper
and he showed me an article of giant Bigfoot prints
found in California. The tracks were the first that I
had heard of Bigfoot. I can remember cutting out the
article and running down the street to find my friends
and show them the story. I remember us discussing that
it was way out in California and that it would
never come to New York. Well, time went on, and
when I was fifteen, my friend and I wanted to
go to a party that was twenty miles from our house.
The only way that we could get there would be
to sneak our whole. Doca Road towed one hundred motorcycle
out of the barn. We would take the back roads
and ride double since we didn't have driver's licenses and
the motorcycle was also not licensed. We were cutting through
a state forest about four miles from the nearest town,
and as we started up a large hill, the motorcycle
stalled out and was out of gas. We flipped the
reserve tank lever and attempted to start the bike, and
we could not get it to fire up. We began
pushing the bike up the hill. It was really and
very quiet, and as we pushed the motorcycle, we began
to hear something walking in the woods paralleling us. It
was loud and it sounded by a peetle. Whenever we stopped,
it would stop, and we could hear sticks breaking and
clearly something walking like a man. We both said, what
the hell is that? It started to move directly at us,
this time not stopping when we did. I started yelling
at my buddy to get that motorcycle started, and just
as we thought the creature was about to reach us,
the bike started and off we went. Every hair on
our body stood on end. We had no clue why
we were so afraid, and we did not talk of
this again. Time went on and I began to take
remote fishing trips to Quebec, and on these trips I
would always find topographical maps and try to reach an
even more remote lake for fishing, always trying to get
to where no one else had fished before. While fishing
a lake about one hundred miles from Oh God, here's
a here's a word, I'm gonna blow senataire s e
n n e t e r r e Quebec sentiary
sentataire senatire. That's all I can do help meet Canadians.
I found a lake that would take work to get to.
We headed down a small river that connected the two lakes,
and the path was blocked by many beaver dams. We
would break a small hole in each dam and then
turn and make a run at it and jump the dam.
It was a great adventure and fill with excitement of
virgin waters full of fish. I would have a chance
to pursue a trophy northern and incredible walleye fishing. When
we finally reached the lake, the fishing was awesome walleye northerns.
Cast after cast, there was a silence that I couldn't explain,
though everything was deathly quiet. Also, there was a feeling
of fear that I couldn't explain. I had reached one
of the fishing spots that I had dreamed about, and
all I wanted to do was leave. I didn't say
anything about this to my fishing partner, and I convinced
him to head back. A year later, I returned to
the same lake, and one evening we were jigging for
walleye close to the mouth of the river. Something came
over me and filled me with a sense of fear.
All of a sudden, we heard a great roar or
a scream louder than I can explain. I would estimated
it came from three hundred yards away, and it shook
my insides and every hair on my body stood on end.
My fishing partner said the same thing, it was, what
the hell moment? We pulled up the anchor and we
headed back to camp, and one of our guides liked
to sleep in a tent, and after we informed him
of what had happened, he moved inside and got out
of that tent. I returned another year later to the
same lil and was determined to face my fear and
head up the river and fish that distant lake. And
when I looked at the topographical maps. I noticed a lake.
Beyond the lake that had previously filled me with fear,
there was a river that connected the two, and I
decided that I would push it a step further and
travel to that lake. We started before sunrising headed down
that river. Just as the sun came up again. We
broke beaver dams and turned and made runs and jumped
the boat over each one. We crossed five or six
dams in this manner. We reached the lake and followed
them up to the small river or stream and started
pushing forward. We finally hit a shallow spot where the
boat was dragging on the bottom and I would need
to get out and pull it. My partner would stay
in the boat with the motor tipped up. I knew
why I was there to face my fear. As I
pulled the boat forward, I noticed a set of tracks
ahead in the water, mud lifted from the tracks. These
tracks were fresh, maybe a few minutes old. I reluctantly
pulled the boat forward to inspect the tracks, holding my
breath filled with fear. I reached the tracks and breathed
a sigh of relief, and I yelled back to my
fishing partner that it was only a bear. Imagine that
it was just a bear. I should still have been afraid,
but I was relieved. We finally got to the second
lake to find very good fishing. We turned back and
spent the remainder of the day fishing that lake that
originally filled me with fear. The fishing was great. I
had no feelings of fear, just caught a bunch of fish.
I made four more trips to these lakes and never
had another feeling of fear or dead silence. I was
talking to my cousin's husband, and he proceeded to tell
me a story that spun out of control and caused
him to hurt his father in law. My uncle that
had seen the swamp monsters today, he recognized them for
what they were. They were bigfoots or sasquatches. My cousin's
husband made a set of bigfoot prints and strapped them
on to his feet and ran through the woods in
the snow to my uncle's property. My uncle found the
prince and ran inside and began to call all the neighbors.
He told them to keep their children and pets inside
because he had found bigfoot prints and there was one
in the area. After he called all the neighbors, he
called my cousin and told her what he had found.
He explained that he had called all the neighbors and
warned them. My cousin's husband heard the news and didn't
know what to do. He said. My uncle never came
over to their house for an unannounced visit. My cousin's
husband was in the garage and still had the bigfoot
tracks hanging on the wall. My uncle walked in and
looked at the wooden feet with boots attached hanging on
the wall, and looked at his son in law and
didn't say a word. He simply turned around and walked
away with a sad, broken lad on his face. Since
my experiences, I have known there is something that I
don't understand that is out there. In my younger days,
I would travel deep into the woods to deer hunt,
and I would stay well after dark. Sometimes I would
make a kill at sunset and track and retrieve my
kills after dark, with no fear, no feeling of uneasiness.
But now I don't feel that way. I'm always uneasy
after dark. I'm always looking over my shoulder if I
make a kill at the end of the day. It
is not pleasant to track and retrieve the kill after dark.
I'm always looking over my shoulder, and, come to think
of it, I rarely hunt alone. One day, I was
hunting on my brother in law's property and I found
some stones up in the woods stacked in a formation.
I had heard stories of bigfoot and rock formations. I
decided I would change the formation and spread them out.
And I didn't think much of it, and I moved
on hunted the property again and I walked by that
spot and the rocks were stacked again. I thought, Wow,
that's strange. Who would return the rocks to that formation?
And I began to think if this could be a Sosquatch.
I changed the formation, and I continued to hunt the
property and change the formation every time I passed it,
each time wondering what it could be. One night, after
hunting with my daughter, we decided to stop and have
a beer with my brother in law, and after a
couple of beers, I told my brother in law, I'm
starting to get a little freaked out about a rock
formation that I'm finding on this property. I changed the
formation every time I passed, and it always returns to
the same formation. When I come back, he broke out
laughing and he said, damn, that was you doing that.
We marked our dog's grave with those rocks, and we
were starting to get a little freaked out ourselves because
something kept unstacking the rocks. Boy, did I feel stupid.
This year, I was camping in the Adirondez and my
son drove up to camp with us. He had made
a plan to wake up about ten thirty pm and
drive to White Face Mountain in the middle of the night.
He planned to meet a couple of friends there and
hike the mountain in the dark. The goal was to
be at the top for sunrise. I thought this was
a crazy idea. There was no cell phone reception there
and no idea how to find the trailhead. Well, it
took my GPS and I marked a route that I
thought would take him to the trailhead, and off he
went in the middle of the night. He returned the
next day at three pm to my campsite, and he
proceeded to talk about his height. It was amazing to
watch the sunrise from the tip of White Face Mountain,
he said, and that about halfway up the mountain they
ran into an intense smell. He said, it smell like
garbage and mixed with body odor. Oh, my gosh, these
oh never mind, it's the descriptions of these odors. They
catch me off guard and I start laughing. He writes,
it was so strong that they imagine garbage and body odor. Oh,
it's like some old bomb laying in a big pile
of garbage. I don't know, laying in a garbage truck
or something. Okay, I gotta get that out of my mind.
It was so strong that they had to cover their
face with a claw. The smell stayed with them the
rest of the night, and when the sun rose, the
smell went away. He said that on the return hike
down the mountain, they found no trace of the smell.
He asked me what I thought. I told him that
I thought they were followed by a sisquatch. That was
his thought too, and he just wanted to hear someone
else confirm his thoughts. Later that night, I sat by
my campfire, thinking I was possibly changing the rock pattern
again by telling him it was sisquatch. I know there
is something out there, but it is not behind every tree.
And he signs the regards Charles Charles I'm sorry I
laughed at your story, but I think you got a minute.
I think you were probably laughing at the whole thing too. Now,
this is a story I didn't edit. Normally, I get
these stories in and I read through them and some
lily hush, she's barking at a chicken. Sometimes it's like
the order of things is a little out and I'll
rearrange paragraphs. No, all you bigfoot purists, I don't change
the stories. I don't write every story. I do make
them where they sound good. I try to make them
where they're easy to follow and good. But anyway, all
that said, I didn't do that on this one. And
in the middle there's some and I couldn't quite understand
what was going on with the guy with the wooden
bigfoot feet walking around. I couldn't quite tell what was
going on in that part. Maybe you guys want to
go back and listen to it, but I just read
his letters straight off. I thought this was a good story,
and I thought it would include. It was a good story.
It was a really good story. So I hope you
guys enjoyed it, and maybe all can figure out how
his cousin or his cousin's husband. How that story went.
Somebody saw bigfoot tracks, they went and warned all their neighbors.
They found out that they were hoaxed, and they just
hung their head and walked off. But I couldn't quite
figure out how that fit in this whole story. But
that doesn't matter. It's a real good story.