Speaker 1: My story takes place back in the nineteen eighties when
I was just a young girl growing up in Story County, Iowa.
Back in those days, I spent a lot of time
at my grandparents' farm. Grandma and Grandpa had a lot
of farm animals for many years, but in the late
nineteen seventies and early eighties they sold their horses, the
remaining cattle they had, and the pigs that they kept
in the pen. Although they sold almost all the livestock
they had, they kept their chickens in a large wooden
wire coop that was situated and built onto the side
of a wooden tool shed. Grandma or Grandpa would usually
be the ones to grab a basket and collect the eggs,
but when I was around, they'd let me do it.
It felt good to contribute in some fashion. Not that
my grandparents needed much help. They were spry and tough
and hard working, and they weren't afraid of physical labor.
Three hundred feet or so behind the house was a
big barn, and at one time it was where the
horses and the cattle were kept. In the very back
and off to the side there was an enclosed pig
pen and trough. It stunk to high heaven with all
the pig poop when they were there, but in the
early eighties that was all a memory. Not long after
all the animals had been sold off, aside from the chickens.
I went to my grandparents' house after school, and when
I got there, they said they wanted to speak to me. Well.
At first I was worried I had done something wrong,
but they assured me it wasn't anything like that. Grandma
was smiling the whole time, and Grandpa did the talking. Becky,
you might see one of them one day, and I
want to tell you about them now so you won't
be alarmed. He told me that for the past two
weeks or so, a large hairy man and a hairy
woman had been staying in the barn. He said that
early one morning, he was outside checking on the chickens
in the coop. He saw the barn door was open,
so he went in to check it out, and when
he reached the barn entrance he saw a tall hairy
man standing there and a tall hairy woman standing next
to him. He felt they didn't mean him any harm,
and he could see the intelligence in their eyes and
felt that if he spoke to them, they would understand him.
He told them they could stay in the barn, but
that he had three rules. Rule one was don't come
close to my family. I don't want them to be scared.
Reual two was don't eat my chickens. And rule three
don't damage my property. And if you're inside the barn,
closed the door behind you. Both of them exhaled softly,
and Grandpa took it as a pair understanding and agreeing
to his conditions. From what he had seen of these
hairy folks, they almost always left in the wee hours.
They went to the woods all day and came back
under cover of night. He told me from now on
I was only allowed to go as far as the
chicken coop, but that we could work out a time
for me to see them from the kitchen window with
the binoculars. Grandpa told me not to say a word
of this to my parents, or my aunt, my uncle,
and the kids at school. He said, don't tell anyone.
I wasn't ever a snitch, and I wouldn't think of
betraying the trust that my grandma and Grandpa placed in me.
So I agreed. It was hard keeping my mouth shut, though,
with what I knew. I still never spilled the beans,
and I didn't tell a soul. It wasn't long after
that when my grandparents let me spend Friday night at
their house. I remember Grandma all waking me up early
Saturday morning, telling me to quickly dress and come to
the kitchen. When I made my way down there, I
saw Grandpa already waiting, binoculars ready, and had me looking
out the large window, focusing my attention on the barn doors. Well.
I kept watching for a minute or two, and finally
the barn doors opened up slowly and I saw two huge,
hairy people walk out, first the male and then the
female right behind. I remember being so shocked seeing them both.
I remember their fur being a dirty brown and hanging
off their bodies. The male was a few inches taller
than the female, and while she was smaller than he was,
she was by no means short. As quickly as they appeared,
they moved around the side of the barn and they
were out of sight. They looked like Chewbacca, but much bigger.
I wasn't scared, though that might not have been the
case if I had seen them up close and personal
like he had. That was the one and only time
I saw them. According to Grandpa, they stayed just a
couple of more months, and then they left and they
never returned. He said that one time he heard a
few coyotes barking not far from the house, when a
deafening roar was unleashed, promptly shutting the canines up and
scattering them. Sadly, I lost my grandparents years ago, but
I will never forget the special times I spent with them,
and the time that I saw those two hurry, giant
people whom I think just needed a temporary place to
call home for a bit. Thank you for reading my
story and taking the time to share it with your audience.
And the woman signs off, what, that's a really good story.
I cannot imagine having that kind of memory. I don't
think that memory would ever leave me till the day
I die. And she had such good restraint not telling
her friends and her parents and other people. Keeping that
secret must have been brutal on her. It must have
been just a repressive because I would want to tell
everybody what I had seen. But this was a great story.
Thank you so much for sending it, ma'am. Hey, y'all,
Welcome back to the Dixie Crypti Channel. I've been gone
a while. I don't know how to explain it. I've
had a lot of work with my regular job, and
sometimes I just want to be quiet and relaxed a little.
So I took about a month and a half, did
a few shorts, couple of podcasts, but that's all I did.
But I'm feeling it now and I'm back. This podcast
has six stories from viewers and at the end there's
a little fictional short story that I wrote. It's not
a monster story. I'm just sitting here one day and
I just thought about some a couple of things that
could happen. I want to say it was Christmas Eve.
Maybe it didn't have anything to do, and I just
wrote a story. It's not very good, but I hope
you enjoy it. You deserve a long video, and I'll
keep cranking them out as usual, starting with this one.
All right, here we go. We had a tops that
drowned me. I grew up on a farm in Martinsville, Indiana.
My first encounter was when I was about seven years old.
I had an ice sized pond that my dad had
built by damming up a holler on the far side
of the property. It was overgrown with vegetation and only
a couple of small trees were cleared for our favorite
fishing spots. I left to go deep into the brush
to get my own little honey hole, where I'd catch
giant bluegill all day long. One day, my best friend
was staying over for a sleepover, and after school, we
grabbed our fishing gear and headed to my honey hole.
We fished till dusk, and when we started to pack
up our gear, my friend Josh asked, did you hear that? What?
I asked, a growl? I heard a growl, he said.
We looked around and waited for a minute. We heard
a twig snap, and then we grabbed our gear and
high tailed it across the field back to my house.
Being kids, our imaginations ran wild, thinking of the goosebump
stories we used to read. Five years later, I got
into hunting. My dad had passed away when I was five,
so I was pretty much on my own and learning
how to hunt. But I had a cousin who lived
just down the road. He had a couple of hundred
acres of land that had some of the best deer
hunting in the county. There were many times I'd be
out in those woods and I'd hear strange things like
whoops and tree knocks, But there was always someone else
hunting the property during deer season, so I just brushed
it off as them communicating to each other. Somehow, bigfoot
never crossed my mind. In two thousand and seven, my
best friend Tyler and I were hunting in the same area.
One morning. We decided to skip school because all the
other hunters would be at work, so we had the
whole place to ourselves. Well, we split up and I
took the stay at the far east end of the
property and he took the far west end. Around noon,
we had planned to meet at the drive that ran
up the middle of the property. I got there a
little early, so I waited on him. I saw him
working his way toward me, and several times I saw
him raise his twelve gage and pointed at something toward
the tree line. And when he finally got to me,
I asked him what he was pointing his gun at.
Did you not hear that clapping? He asked me, no,
I said, with a shrug. He said, someone was clapping
twenty yards away into the trees. Keeping pace with him.
They were walking in the tree line and he couldn't
see them. They did it three times and it was
making him nervous because no one should have been there. Well,
I shrugged that off and we started heading back to
the truck, and when we got about fifty yards from
the truck, we heard the clapping and then a loud grunt.
I figured maybe someone from the neighboring properties was screwing
with us, but it was still strange. A week later,
we decided to go coyote hunting, and Tyler's cousin came
along for the hunt. We went to my cousin's property
because we had a bad problem with coyotes. They were
killing new fahns in the spring, and he was happy
to let us do some pest control. That night, we
got into the field and got all set up with
our call and we waited fifteen minutes in though, the
wind kicked up and it ruined our chances for a
good hunt, and we started packing up when Tyler's cousin
got scared. What the hell he whispered looking up toward
the sky. Well, we looked up too, and we saw
a bright white light. At first, we figured it was
a low flying plane, but we quickly realized that it
was not. It was just sitting motionless in the sky,
and then in a split second, it vanished. We looked
at each other dumbfounded and agreed it was time to go.
As if that wasn't enough excitement for one night. When
we got into the truck, we saw four pair of
red eyes looking right at us from the tree line.
They were eight feet off the ground. We never went
coody hunting again there in the dark. In twenty seventeen,
I had moved away to Bozeman, Montana, and I was
on my first solo elk hunt up in Little Bear
Canyon on Wheeler Mountain. I'd got into the trailhead at
four am and got all my gear ready to start
my hike. The whole time I had an unsettling feeling
that I was being watched and that something was wrong.
My gut kept telling me, you don't leave the truck yet.
I got in my truck and waited. I'd never been
afraid of being in the woods when it was dark out,
but something just kept telling me something bad was about
to happen. If I had started my hike up the mountain.
Once it got a little bit led out. Feeling went away,
and I started my height. I could see elk one
thousand yards away across a draw, so I climbed higher
up to stay down wind from them. I came to
a clearing that was surrounded by trees, and I was
getting ready to enter the other side of the woods,
and I heard a loud crash of trees falling. It
was so loud it made me jump backward and draw
my side arm. I went over every possibility in my
mind of what it could be, but what followed was
complete silence. There was no moose charging me, no birds chirping, nothing.
I waited for five minutes, just frozen, and then I
looked over and I saw the elk were starting to move.
I tried again to enter the woods to get ahead
of them, when a branch about the size of my
arm came flying through the air right in front of me.
I decided someone or something had given me fair warning
not to try to come into those woods again, so
I turned around and I headed back to my truck.
The day wasn't a total loss, though I bagged ane
meal deer on the way back. This was the encounter
that made me start to really look into the possibility
of Bigfoot. In twenty eighteen, I was taking a load
of hay down to Idaho, following the Madison Rivers south
of Enes, Montana. It was around ten am on a
clear Sunday morning, and I was coming to a bend
in the road that looked out over an open field
and standing right next to the rivers to the biggest,
blackest hairriest thing I had ever seen. It stood up
on two legs, its hands hung down below its waist,
and it was looking right at me. And then it
turned and ran back to the forest with a speed
that I had never seen or could believe was possible.
Then and there, I knew exactly what I was looking at.
It was my first sighting of Bigfoot. Many more small
encounters that I could talk about all day, but I'm
writing all this on my phone, so my thumbs are tired.
Thanks for reading my story. Oh man, You're welcome. That
was a good story. That was a good series of stories.
To have all these encounters and little incidents happened that
kind of made you wonder, and then to finally confirm
that the creature is real with a full visual sighting.
Awesome story. I really appreciate it. My name is Ron
and I live in rural northern Kentucky. My county has
a population of about fifteen thousand souls, including my small
town of about two thousand. I live on twenty three
acres right on the river. My land is bordered by
several miles of heavily wooded river frontage upstream and scattered pasture,
land and woods downstream. Sometime in the late nineties I
had a dog named Jumper. It was a natural squirrel hunter,
born with the instinct to chase critters up trees and
bark loudly at them. One summer afternoon, I was walking
in the woods with Jumper ahead of me, sniffing and sighting.
I heard her familiar report, and I figured she had
treed a squirrel, a ground hog, or a raccoon, as
was common for her. I walked up on her and
I saw a large cat on a branch just out
of her reach. It was staring straight at her and
his tail slowly waving back and forth. Judging by the
size of its head and neck, it was a tomcat.
It was healthy and muscular and solid black with large
yellow eyes. It sort of looked like a feral house cat,
but it was a big as a bobcat, and I
had never seen anything like this. As soon as it
saw me, it ran over the top of Jumper's back
and the chase was on. I heard them running quickly
through the underbrush, and within seconds they were gone. A
few minutes later, Jumper came back, the cat apparently having escaped.
She seemed proud of herself anyway, while I was thinking
she was lucky that thing didn't catch her. Not long
after that, I was fishing in the river at the
downstream end of my property. My two friends were at
my house doing some drywall work for me. I knew
they would finish and be heading home soon, so I
packed up my gear and I headed back up the
hill toward the house. My friend Dave met me in
a small field overlooking the river, and we stopped for
a few minutes to talk. All at once, a loud
and long, howling, growling kind of call echoed through the valley.
Dave and I looked at each other and both of
us were confused, and neither of us had ever heard
such a thing. It sounded to be coming from across
the river, and it was loud as a train wreck.
I told myself that it must have been that giant
black cat I had seen getting into an awful fight
with another of its kind. I knew that wasn't true.
There was no way even the biggest cat could have
made such a commotion, but I had to tell myself something.
A week later, Dave called me he had seen a
news story that played a recording of a supposed sasquatch scream.
Dave pointed out that it was just like the sound
we heard, and I believe I could walk up that
river corridor all the way across the state without being
seen if I did not want to. So I think
it's possible a creature, perhaps with better hearing and senses
than mine, could easily do the same. Now I don't
really know what it was, but I'm telling myself it
was the damn cat. I know that's not true, but
I have to tell myself something. In August of nineteen
eighty one, I went camping and hiking along part of
the job on Mirror Trail at Mount Whitney with a
small band of my neighborhood friends and their parents. We
weren't your normal kids. We read field tactical manuals instead
of comic books. We were obsessed with the Vietnam War
and the parts of the Cold War that we were
exposed to. We used to challenge kids from other neighborhoods
to b begun fights at night at a park that
was suited to this type of activity. My friends Pat, Joe,
and John and I packed into a Volkswagen van with
Pat's parents and his little sister. We drove north until
we got to the three ninety five and passed a
military aircraft boneyard. There they have all kinds of different
planes sitting out in the Mahave desert sun where they
won't rust and can't be used for spare parts. We
drove through Lone Pine and then made the track up
a winding road to the Mount Whitney Campground parking lot.
Once we got out and got our packs ready, we
had lunch and started out on our hike. Our backpacks
weren't just filled with clothes and food and sleeping bags.
We hit our bb guns and camouflaged fatigues in there too.
It was our mission to play war while we were
out there. We hiked for what seemed like hours. The
trail was worn and the chirps and screeches from the
local wildlife made their presence known all around us. We
didn't see anything, though, with the exception of a few
birds and squirrels. Despite that, I couldn't shake the feeling
that we were being watched. Out of the four of
us guys, I was the only one who had a
fascination with Bigfoot that had started in the fourth grade
with some books in the library. There were short stories
about Mighty Momo and the fount Monster. I had also
seen the legend of Boggy Creek and episodes of In
Search of with Leonard Nimoy, those that fanned the flames
of my interest. During the hike, I came to the
logical conclusion that my feeling of being watched was on
account of all the stuff I had read and watched
on the topic of Bigfoot. Thinking about it spooked me,
and I never mentioned it to my friends for fear
of being ridiculed. The end of our height came when
we reached the flat meadows surrounded by trees. There was
still some snow on the ground that looked like it
was permanently frozen, and the clearing was next to a
salmon HATCHERI complete with a fish and game sign that
prohibited us from fishing there. Fishing wasn't on our agenda,
and my friend's dad decided that it was a good
place to camp for the night. We took off our
packs and helped set up the three tents. We helped
dig a camp fire pit a little deeper and dump
the ashes from other campers and the trash can left
there by fishing game. Late afternoon was starting to creep
up on us and a strong wind began to blow.
It was already a little chili too chili for a
summer hike, but the leftover snow over by the creek
was telling me different. Some of the adults started in
on dinner, which was an amazing thought. I was starving
and my buddies and I got inside of our tent
and arranged with our sleeping bags. I positioned myself just
inside the flap so I could poke an eye out
if I heard anything, because I was starting to get
the feeling that we were being watched again. We still
had some time before dinner was ready, so we decided
to take a quick look around while there was still
some light out. We walked along the creek, so we
couldn't get lost, and somewhere around one hundred yards away
from the campsite, I found what looked like an old track.
It was huge. It was too big to be a
man's track. The mud was dried, and it was cracked
where the toes would have been. I shrugged it off
as a coincidence, and we heard an airhorn that my
friend's dad used for emergencies and that dinner was ready.
We ran back and settled into plates full of hot
dogs and chili beans. I was in heaven, and after
dinner we helped clean up. I was charged with taking
the trash to the can left by the Fish and
Game commission. I made my way down the path with
a flashlight so I could stay on the path. I
found the can and put our traces of civilized life inside,
and when I closed it, I realized how quiet it was.
There was no noise whatsoever, except what noise the wind
was making as it passed through the trees and rattled
the leaves. Again, I got that distinct feeling that I
was being watched. I looked around with a flashlight, but
when I didn't see anything, I walked the short trip
back to camp. My friend's dad had a nice campfire going,
and we took fold out chairs and surrounded it, and
this man told us stories about being a customs agent
and some of the unclassified deal details of things going
on in Miami. We were riveted by the stories of
shootouts and bad guys who tried to get away. At
some point during the storytelling, my friend's dad paused and
looked into the forest for a moment. Since I was
the only one on his side of the campfire, I
looked where he was looking, and through the mist I
could see eye shine. They looked like they were pretty
up there in height. My friend's dad and I exchanged
the knowing look, and he continued with his Miami of
ice stories. The whole thing took about five seconds, but
we both knew we saw something. The wind picked up
later and things started blowing around the camp and we
worked together to secure everything, and then we went to bed.
The winds were strong and the gusts were hitting our
tent with a good amount of force. At some point
during this wind storm, I heard running footsteps coming toward
our tent. All of a sudden, the tent spikes on
my side of the tent were pulled out and the
tent came up, rolling us up like a burrito. We
screamed like little boys do and managed to crawl out
of the front door flap. My friend's dad was at
the ready, pistol and flashlight in hand, looking around in
a circle. We stood around looking for what in the
world could have caused that to happen, and then got
the tent set up again and reinforced the tent spikes.
The following summer, I took a road trip with my
dad to visit an old work mate who had retired.
Carmen had built a home in the mountains of the
oh I can't pronounce this new Trioso Newtrioso, Arizona. We
had to take a paved road from the main highway
and then turn onto a dirt road and trudge our
way up the mountain for almost an hour. Well the
drive was worth it, though, because the place was beautiful
and it was surrounded by thick, majestic trees. A Carmen
had a small group of mountain dogs that were all
and they didn't seem to like anybody. He introduced us
to them one at a time until the dogs were
all settled down from having strangers on the property. They
had been raining for most of this trip. It had
only stopped when we got to the paved road off
the highway. I figured that I'd be bored listening to
my dad and his friend trade old work stories, but
Carmen addressed me and asked me to follow him. We
went to the back porch and he picked up an
old plastic bucket. He told me that after the rain
you could find pieces of ancient Native American pottery on
the ground. He looked at the ground and pointed one
out to me. I brought it back, and he showed
me what made it different from any of the actual
rocks I might have found. I scampered off. The fortune
started my hunt for more Native American pottery. After a while,
I noticed that it had become unnaturally quiet, and I
got the feeling that something was watching me again, but
this time I could tell where it was from. It
was my ten o'clock. At that exact moment, Carmen's dogs
came up and formed a line in front of me.
They were looking in the same direction, and they were growling.
My mother didn't raise a fool, so I slowly backed
out of the area and I ran back to the house.
I sat on the porch and I started going through
my collection of pottery pieces, and the dogs came up
and took up positions around me, lying down and scanning
their ears as dogs do. Later, during dinner, I told
my dad and Carmen what happened. My Dad shrugged it off,
but Carmen took me seriously. You saw elvejejo, he said.
My Dad looked at him puzzled, and Carmen said something
to him in Spanish about the old man of the mountain.
I think he was trying to keep me from getting scared,
but I understood most of what he said. My dad
and I left. A couple of days later, I saw
a Native American roadside museum off the highway and asked
my dad to stop. He asked why, and I told
him that I didn't feel right leaving with all the
Native American history in this bucket. Well, he smiled, and
I hopped out of the truck and jumped in the
shop and I explained what I had, and they thanked
me for respecting their spirits. Before I left, I asked
him about the old Man of the mountain. Well, they
looked at each other like they knew something. I didn't,
and they asked me if I had seen him. No,
I said, and then they relaxed. But one of them
raised his eyebrows. It's a good thing you didn't see him,
he said. Oh, that's a cool story. This person, like
some of the other people in this podcast, have had
various encounters with these creatures, whether they see him or not.
But this was really good. It's a good, very detailed story.
I appreciate this one. In the fall nineteen seventy four,
I was a thirteen year old freshman and a small
town in South Georgia. I was a military brat. Our
family had moved back to Georgia after my daddy retired.
My grandfather had passed away in late October, and my
mother felt the need to move back home to help
look after Grandma. This was our first real home. Everything
else had been an apartment or a rental until Uncle
Sam was finished with my daddy's enlistment. It was a
two story house that had been moved into town years
before from a large farm out in the country. The
porches had fallen victim to the move, as well as
the kitchen and the larger dining area that were only
attached to the original house by a long porch. The
upstairs bedrooms were added after the house was moved. In
the bedroom where my brother slept was a closet, and
I hated that closet. It gave me an anxious feeling
in the pit of my stomach. And it was small,
and there was a square cut in the back wall
that gave access to the attic. If I were to
pass by the closet and the door was open, I
made sure to run and slam the door shut before
I would go into my room. And at bedtime, after
turning off the light, we would run and jump under
our cover so the boogers under the bed wouldn't get us.
Why we ever thought our covers would protect us, I
don't know, but that was the idea. In the fall,
in South Georgia, football is king and homecoming fell on
the last home game of the season. In those days,
it was accustomed to build floats for the homecoming parade
the week before. As a cheerleader, I was helping with
the class and cheerleading float. So I was a busy girl.
And on one particular night that week, I had at
eight o'clock curfew. After all, it was a school night,
my friend dropped me off and I went in and
started heating up a pot of chili that Mama had
left on the stove for us. Nobody else was home,
so I got my bowl of chili and crackers, and
I settled in front of the TV to eat. I
think it was about fifteen minutes after I settled in
that I heard a noise from upstairs. I thought it
was my sister, so I called out her name, but
there was no response. I called up to her that
I was onto her game and she wasn't going to
scare me. I still got no response, so I kept
eating and watching TV, and then I heard footsteps. There
were heavy footsteps going from our bedroom, which was directly
over the den, into my brother's room. I leaned forward
from my seated position in the floor of the den
just enough to see to the top of the stairs.
No one was there, but the closet door, the only
door upstairs, slammed shut and opened, and then it shut again.
You're not scaring me, I called out to my sister.
There's still no response, and I finished eating and took
my dishes to the kitchen sink, and I sat back
down in the den to finish the show I was watching.
Fifteen minutes later, I heard our back door opening, and
my daddy and my younger brother came in. They'd been
to my grandmother's house for supper, and we're just arriving
back home. Just a minute after that, Mama and my
sister came in the front door. Wait a minute, I thought,
looking over at my sister. Are you just now getting home?
I asked her. She gave me a strange look, reserved
only for older sisters to look down on their younger
siblings who have just asked a totally stupid question. Yes,
she said, Mama just picked me up from the barn
the baby club was building our float there. I jumped
up like a frightened cat, and I went to the
furthest spot from the foot of the stairs. What's wrong
with you, my daddy asked, there's somebody in the house,
I yelled. My father took out his gun that he
kept with him while he was working and checking his traps,
and he told Mama to stay with us. He went
up the stairs with his gun at the ready, and
then came back a few minutes later and gave me
a stern look. There was nothing to be found there
was no sign of a break in. By this point
I was crying and I promised him I was telling
the truth and my story never changed. I know what
I heard, and to this day, I know in my
gut it was the booger that was in the back
of the closet. In the spring of nineteen seventy five,
I was a freshman in high school. During that winter,
a Youth for Christ sharing group had begun meeting on
Tuesday nights to share our testimonies and meet with the
like minded high school students from the surrounding counties. For
the past two weeks, I had been burdened with a
gut feeling that I needed to pray for my father
at forty two. He was in excellent health and I
don't know why I felt this burden, but there it was.
I requested, for a second week in a row that
the group keep him in their prayers. I didn't have
a specific prayer, just please pray. When I was dropped
off at home that night, I tripped over a game
that had been left on the stairs. You okay, baby,
my daddy called from the bedroom. Yes, sir, I said.
Then I froze in my journey up the stairs, Go
tell him. You've been burdened with the prayer for him.
My gut urged me go tell him that you love him.
I stood there while I argued with myself and decided
not to disturb him anymore. I would tell him tomorrow.
But tomorrow came and went and I never told him.
And then over the next week, my sister and I
had the urge to clean up the house. I kept
having the urge to tell my daddy I needed to
pray for him, but I never said a word. Sadly,
that week he died in an accident. The night he died,
we were offered something to help us go to sleep,
but I didn't want any Much later, when the house
was quiet and everyone had left, I had to go
downstairs to go to the bathroom. Near the bottom step,
I noticed a light that had been left on, and
I looked up to see who it was, and seated
in the rocking chair he'd sat in earlier that afternoon
was my daddy. My brain was clear, I knew my
daddy had died that afternoon. I was having trouble merging
these thoughts, so I plopped down on the step and shot,
I know, baby, but it is me, my daddy said.
He let me come to talk to you to let
you know everything's gonna be okay and you're gonna be fine,
but there will be some bumps in the road. Now
be patient. I want you to remember to follow your dreams,
never take no for an answer, and keep trying. After
a few other messages for my brother and my sisters,
he looked at me and he told me he loved
me and would always be looking over us, and then
he faded away. I went back to bed that night
and telling myself that it had been a dream. And
the next morning, my oldest sister asked me who had
come to the house so late the night before. She
said that she had heard me talking to a man
and couldn't imagine who would have come at that hour.
I guess I wasn't dreaming after all. In nineteen eighty three,
I found myself living back in my small hometown after
finishing college and securing a teaching position at our middle school.
I'd gotten engaged in the fall to my fiancee, and
we moved in together into my family home. We had
added two rockwallers to our family and we allowed them
inside while we were home. After a nice Thanksgiving at
our house with my siblings and their spouses and my
mother and her new husband. My fiance and I were
in the den relaxing with our rotwallers from the long week.
The dogs were lying near the foot of the stairs,
playing with their trees when each of them stood up
facing the stairway with the hair on their backs raised.
Low growls started it in their throats, and the younger
of the two yelped and ran across the room and
jumped into my lap. One hundred pound rotweller is a
hefty load, but you've never seen a bigger baby. The
older one, Attila, remained at the foot of the stairs,
growling and barking and taking a small step backward and forward,
preparing to defend himself or flee. My fiance approached him cautiously.
What's wrong, boy, he asked. Attila felt a little braver
with my fiance there, and kept growling more confident. Now
they went up the stairs together and I could hear
the two of them exploring the rooms. They came back down,
and just as my fiance had gotten it out of
his mouth that they had found nothing, the closet door
slam shut and we both jumped. Both dogs headed for
the back door, and we headed to the truck and
went for a short ride to get our nerves settled.
Two weeks later, I duties as a cheerleading sponsor to
attend to had an out of town basketball game. I
was in a great mood when I arrived back home,
and I bounced through the back door and called out
to my fiance and friends, whose cars were parked in
the driveway, but I got no response. I passed through
the kitchen and dining room and stepped into the living
room and found my front door wide open. All the
lights were on and a Christmas tree, half decorated, standing
in the front window. I checked out all the rooms
to be sure they weren't hiding from me, and I
sat down to give them a call. My fiance answered
and told me he was over at our friend's house
and that I should come over late as it was.
I closed the doors and turned out the lights. I
loaded up my car and went over. This didn't explain
their cars in the driveway, but I figured i'd find out.
When I arrived. I found them all seated in the
living room, looking pale and shocked. What's going on. I
asked group, your house is haunted. My friend Val said, well,
what dang sure is? You all got to move? My
friend Kevin piped in. It was just like that night
after Thanksgiving, my fiance said. They went on to relate
that they were having a good time decorating the tree.
The dogs were lying in the dining area, watching the
activity and chewing on their new bones. They were drinking
and enjoying themselves until they heard footsteps in the upstairs bedroom.
Looking around the room taking a head count, everybody was
in the den. They thought somebody might have come in
when they went to get replacement bulbs and more beer.
So Kevin, being the one with a weapon in his car,
retrieved it and slowly went up the stairs with the
dog behind him. Then the door slammed, and the dog
and Kevin came tearing down the stairs and raced out
the front door. Everyone piled into VAL's suv and left
my house. All the doors were wide open and the
lights were on, and the dogs were cowering in the
back of the vehicle. If they hadn't been so dead serious,
and if Kevin wasn't on the verge of tears, I
probably would have laughed it off. We were all a
bit shaken, and we decided to stay the night with
the gang at Robbie and Vow's place. We went home
the next morning with no problems and were soon joined
by our friends and we finished decorating the tree. Later
that morning, I brave the upstairs to take the empty
boxes to be put away, but I didn't open that closet.
I placed the boxes in front of the door from
my own peace of mind. Our next trip to Savannah
Vile and I made a point of going to River
Street to visit a shop that deals with unusual items.
I purchased sage, holy water, and an abalone shell, the
items the vendor told me that were necessary to cleanse
the house. The vendor was gracious enough to make a
copy of a prayer that I would need during the
c I asked hundreds of questions, it seemed, making sure
I wasn't conjuring any bad juju into my home. We
were both born again Christians, and each had enough Cherokee
blood in our lineage to know that there were things
beyond our understanding. That afternoon, the boys and dogs went
somewhere anywhere away from the house. We opened up the
windows and began upstairs closing the windows and sealing them
with the holy water and the shape of a cross
on the pane. And we spent the most time on
the closet with holy water and sage, and sealed the
back passage in the door and made our way downstairs,
wereciting the prayer that we had learned. We covered the
bottom floor and ended the prayer with a plea that
those present who meant harm are forever expelled from these walls.
And as I was putting away the cleansing materials, I
opened the closet door in the spare bedroom, the room
my parents had used many years before. I caught the
smell of my daddy's old spice as I put the
supplies away. You're welcome to stay and look over us,
I whispered to him as I closed the door. I
have been reluctant to share any of these stories. Small
towns being what they are, everybody would think I was
a few bricks short of a load, and retaining my
position as an educator would be difficult. My maternal grandmother
told me my gut feelings and knowings are a gift
from our Native American blood, and it was not a
gift that everyone in our family had been given. As
these knowings and gut feelings continue, I'm sure to follow them.
I may not always know the why, but I have
learned to listen just the same. And then she ends
the letter. Sorry, excuse me, She ends her email looking
forward to more Steve Lilly. Uh, it's so funny to
come off a serious email like that and go, hey,
more Steve Lily. By the way, I am working on
the next Steve Lily, so stand by on that. But
this was a very descriptive and well thought out email
from a person who's been through a lot, seen a
lot of supernatural and experienced a lot of supernatural things.
And I appreciate her taking the time to write these
down for us to enjoy it, because I did enjoy
reading this story. Thank you very much. The white Gown
by cameraon Buckner. When I turned the key, I didn't
think anything would happen, but it did, and the old
tractor started. I connected the battery charger the night before,
not knowing if the cell was any good, but I
was hopeful. Smoke rolled out from under the shed water
in the lines and mixed with the diesel and it
burned off. I knew I could fix that with fresh diesel,
but I just let it smoke. I backed it out
and connected the bush hog, and I greased some bearings
and wiped the trash off the floor place that had
built up over three years. The engine sounded fine. I
needed to change the oil, but at the moment I
needed more to get outside and breathe in my freedom.
The old machine would make it just fine on three
year old oil. For an afternoon, while I cleared my head,
I started cutting the field behind the house. I'd have
to take my time. The equipment was old, and the
field had grown up with saplings every five or ten feet,
but not too much that my father's old equipment couldn't
handle it. If it had gone another year, I would
have had to have rented something bigger. Field roads flanked
the side of the field. I was cutting the roads
to find the field. On the right were thick trees,
and on the left was the property that belonged to
someone else. I'd spend the next day slowly working that
piece of land into a field. Again. I had nothing
else to do. At the end of this field was
a stand of hardwood timber that had grown taller since
I'd been gone. I loved that place. In the summer,
Mama and Daddy would take us kids down in there
and let us swim and play in the cool stream
that flowed all the time. Mama would pack leftovers or sandwiches,
and her and Daddy would sit in a long chairs,
smoking and talking while we ran wild. I should have
turned around and made another pass on the field where
I started, but whispers of nostalgia greeted me at that
old road that cut through there, and I went on
down into the woods. Wouldn't hurt to look at the
field behind the timber anyway, I would know what I
was up against. While I got this place back in shape,
water still ran in the creek, and I look forward
to the summer and a place to cool off, maybe
take my sister's kids back in there. I stopped and
walked aways into the woods, following the water, and I
looked around at the big oaks and hickorys. Then I
walked back to proceed to the next field, just to
take a look. It looked the same as the front field,
and I cut one strip right down the middle of it,
all the way back to our property line, and I
turned to go back. It was cloudy that day, one
of those days you'd be sure it would rain, but
it never did. The dust hovered above me and all
the way to the ground. But even still I could
see it moving on my neighbor's property. It was something white,
snow white, moving in a fluid motion, but it was
slow and contrasting with the dull, dusty greens of a
hot September day. And when it stopped, it went to
the ground, and I got off the tractor to get
her better look. I was afraid to cut the engine
because I wasn't sure it would start again. After climbing
the fence and wading through the brambles, I got to
the wide object and there lay a woman who had
to be over eighty, dressed in a dirty white gown
and nothing else. She was on her knees and rubbing
the cuts and scratches on her legs and arms. Ma'am,
do you need some help? She rubbed her arms, and
tears rolled down her face, and I moved closer. Let
me help you up. From behind her, I slid my
arms under hers and tried to lift her slender frame
to her feet. She felt like dead weight, like a
rag doll. I could have lifted her up, but I
wasn't sure how she would react, so I eased her
back down into the dry weeds. She had not said
anything to this point, and it wasn't plain she knew
I was even there. Who are you? She asked me.
The tractor was running a short piece away, and I
had trouble hearing what she said. Her voice was as
delicate as I had ever heard. I'm jet travers man.
Who are you? And why are you out here? I
need to get over there to see him. I have
to tell him something. Her hands rose to her face,
her long fingers moved down her cheeks. I didn't know
what she was talking about. I knew for sure that
she wasn't getting up. We need to get you out
of this field, ma'am. Can you stand up? She placed
her hands in mind trying to stand, but she was done.
I knew I could carry her, but getting her through
the briers I had come through would be painful. Sit tight,
I'll be right back. I used pliers to cut the
barbed wire and then drove the tractor to her. Wasn't
too far. The noise in the heat coming from the
machine bothered her, but that was better than pushing her
through more brush. She felt as light as a feather,
and her arms naturally slid around my neck and she
laid her head over my shoulder. I need to talk
to him, she said. Her eyes were closed when I
climbed back on the tractor, and it was awkward with
her in my lap, but we made it back to
the house. I put her on my couch and I
turned up the air so she could cool off. The
last call I wanted to make was to the Sheriff's office,
but I didn't know what else to do. I had
just finished three years of a five year sentence at
Parchment for whipping this shit out of a cop. There
was a girl in town I had grown up with,
always liked her, but I never had the nerve to
ask her out. A lot was six months out of
the Marine Corps and had a decent job at the plant.
She worked there too, and I saw her on my
way to the break room. One day. We talked, and
later that week we went out. There's nothing to do
in these small towns but to go to Sonic or
ride to gravel Roads and have a few drinks, and
that's what we were doing On that warm June Saturday night.
We parked at the watershed where folks had been launching
boats and made a natural parking lot. We talked and
watched the stars, and we had a few beers, and
that's when the law pulled in behind me. Apparently the
deputy had been going out with this girl and started
giving us a hard time. If he had just done
his job, I would have accepted my fate and spent
the night in jail for open containers. But he couldn't
do that. He was a jealous one, and he went
to work on me with one of those sticks they use,
until I snatched it out of his hands and put
that to an end. He was breathing when she and
I left the lake, and I figured he'd come to
and go on home. Now I was in trouble, but
I acted in self defense and I knew this girl
would back up my story. So the next day I
was arrested for assault assaulting a law enforcement officer, which
the State of Mississippi frowns on, and I never saw
the outside of a cell after that day for three years.
My date that night was no help. She never showed
up at my hearing. My sentence was five years, but
I got out in three. My lawyers said that I
should be thankful, said I could have gotten up to
ten years on that charge. I shouldn't have gotten a day,
but that's the way things go. I wasn't the first
man alive to go down over an innocent night out
with a pretty girl with a jealous boyfriend. But now
I was out and only been home for a week,
and I didn't want to deal with the law this
soon after being released. So I looked down at the
woman and her eyes were closed, but she wasn't sleeping.
I knelt beside her, ma'am, can you talk to me?
Can you tell me where you live? Her eyes opened
and I could see she was trying to talk. I
brought her a glass of water, and she perked up,
even tried to sit up, and I helped her and
she drank the water in small swallows. She mumbled a
few words I couldn't understand. Ma'am, where do you live?
I asked. Her eyes rose to meet mine, and she said,
I don't know where I live. Fantastic. I have a
half naked, elderly woman in my house and she doesn't
even know where she lives. I was going to have
to call the law. I had heard stories about old
people walking off and be gone for days, and that
dementia took a toll on them and their families. Well,
I knew a girl who worked at the nursing home,
but the problem was that I didn't know her number.
So I started calling the few numbers I had assembled
in my new phone, trying to find a way to
get in touch with her. Well, the second number I
called was Mandy Spade, and Mandy and I had been
for INDs since we were kids. I told her the
situation had described the woman, and Mandy thought she knew
who she was, and my day brightened a little bit.
Let me make a phone call and I'm gonna call
you right back, she told me. I sat next to
the woman. Her knees and shins were covered in dry
blood and dirt, and her feet were in terrible shape.
Where had she come from and how long had she
been out wandering the fields. I gathered towels and a
pail of water, and I started cleaning her up and
doing what I could for her feet. I didn't know
how she was going to walk out of my house,
because she wasn't walking on those feet. She winced a
few times as I cleaned her up where I could see,
but she never acted like it was unbearable. And I
wiped the dust from her face and arms, and the
cool rags seemed to calm her. The phone rang yet,
I think that's normal Wilson. Now. I just talked to
her daughter. Her name is Samantha Jones, and her and
I worked together at the hospital. She said her mother's
been missing since last night when she got off work.
They've been driving around the roads looking for She said
the police wouldn't help him. She'd been missing twenty four hours. Now.
Can you believe that? Yeah, I believe it. What does
she want to do? This woman can't walk? Oh. She
already called an ambulance and they're on their way now.
Should be there soon. Oh, I should have called an ambulance.
I don't know why I didn't think about that. I
wouldn't worry about it. Miss Wilson has dementia, and I
doubt she'll even know her daughter. I guess they're going
to have to put her in a nursing home. That's
what she told me. Yeah, that's probably a good idea. Listen, Mandy,
thanks for your help. I'm glad I called you. Lord,
I am too, Mandy said. The medics cleaned her feet
a little more while she sat on my couch, and
they wrapped her feet. The frail little woman was placed
on the stretcher and they took her out. When I
saw Samantha, we remembered each other from school, and she
thanked me over and over for bringing her mother inside
and looking after her. Miss Wilson had been gone since
last night. That meant she had been out all night
and had walked six or eight miles from their house.
It's hard to imagine that, but it happened. And what
I saw was when she had given up, she wasn't
able to take another step. And if I hadn't have
thought about going back to that field, I would have
never seen her. She would have died. So I felt
pretty good about everything. That was until the patrol car
pulled in my yard. Two uniforms got out and walked
towards me. As the ambulance pulled away. That scar I
gave him was still as red as a beat of
across his cheekbone, now grin looking at it. When he
got closer, his partner told him to back off into
stand in the yard while they talked to me. But
I never took my eyes off of him. Now, what's
the story? Yet? Ain't no story? How did that woman
end up at your old house? What makes you think
she was in my house? We hear all the chata
on these radios, and I drop the bullshit and tell
me what happened. I won't have anything to say to you.
I never looked at him. I kept my eyes on
that fat asshole in the yard, and I admired that
thick red scar on his face. Now you have to
admit it's strange. An eighty year old woman walks through
all these fields and woods and ditches all night, winds
up on your couch. Something stinks about this whole thing,
he said, How does she get in your house? He
looked down at his partner and got a grin out
of him. That's what I knew, what was happening. You
ever try rubbing vasilin on that scar, Maybe it wouldn't
be such a prominent feature on your ugly face. I
knew that wouldn't go over well, but I had to
say it. They were working some kind of angle to
provoke me into saying anything they could use against me
and charge me with something. I knew it. I needed
to change the subject in the mood. Hey, James, did
Leonard ever tell you the story about how I beat
the shit out of him with his own night stick
down at lou Ray Watershit a few years ago? Do
you ever tell you why that happened? The silence is
what I wanted. James had shut up and Leonard was
shifting his weight from one foot to the other. I
broke the lull in the conversation. Leonard's cat got you tongue.
I guess you and me and that girl are the
only ones who know what happened that night unless you
want to tell me. And James, now now why you
got to be that way? Jet said Deputy James, I
have some questions and I he'd answers. Stop stirring the shit.
You shouldn't have brought them here, and you know it, James,
I'm going inside unless you have something to say, I'm
just doing my job. Jet. We might need a statement
from you on this thing with miss Wilson. I walked
in the door and shut it behind me, and by
the time I got to the kitchen, I heard their
patrol car pull away. I cleaned up the bloody rags
and towels and I ran them in the washer, and
I fixed a sandwich, and I went to the back
porch and I sat thinking about what in the world
they had up their sleeve. Nothing came of that incident
for some time, and I didn't see the law, not once.
Samantha Jones stopped by a week later and she brought
me a pie. I thought that was nice. She said,
Miss Wilson was recovering in the hospital and they would
be moving her to a nursing home as soon as
the doctor's released her. Samantha, do you know where your
mother was heading? I asked, before she could leave. I
know where she was trying to get to. You know,
she has dementia. She doesn't remember anything much about the
last few decades of her life, but she remembers a
lot from when she was young. Jet It's almost like
she's twenty again. It took us a long time to
figure out what she was talking about the last year
or two, but she has friends who recognize some of
the names and the events that she does remember, and
we put it all together and now we understand The
doctors say this is normal, and they don't know why
they hang on to those old memories so tight and
let go of what's happening in the best years of
their life, you know, raising a family and children and grandchildren.
I would think that the memories of more recent times
would be the easiest to recall, but that's not the
way this is going. I think she recognizes my brother
and me about once a week now. She sees us,
and she calls us by other names. In a way
it's hurtful to us, but in another way, sometimes she
seems so happy being a teenager again, And I guess
I can understand that. Oh I'm sorry y'all are having
to deal with all that I said. You said you
know where she was headed? Can you tell me? Maybe
another time? A billy and the kids are waiting on me,
and I need to get back to the house. But
thank you so much for finding her, because you we
get to keep her for a little while longer. Oh
I'm glad to help, I said, And thanks for the pie.
Like most people in this town, I knew Leonard from
grade school hadn't changed since then, Still the same spoiled kid.
Children in school fractioned into groups His friends were about
appearances and how they dressed, and a class system that
put them in a category of snobs. That's what we
called them. Anything they had or did was better than
what you had or did, according to them, and they
wasted not one minute letting you know it all the time.
His folks, I think, had inherited landing money. My friends
and I were coming people whose parents worked at the plants,
the furniture factors, or small businesses in town. I'm older
now and I've seen some life, and there are two
things I know to be a fact. First, what you
think of your place in the community doesn't matter. It's
an illusion people creating their mind, and they believe it
so much and they never change. And last, kids act
just like their parents. Leonard had been an asshole all
his life, but he came by it honest because he
acted just like his daddy. I had humiliated him in
front of the girl that he was after, actually in
front of the whole town. Once the word got around,
and he wasn't gonna let it go. Every person who
saw that scar on his face remembered how it got there,
and I imagine he remembered every day when he combed
his hair. Three years in Parchment had not satisfied his anger,
and probably never would not have to be careful what
I did and not let him provoke, because I was
in the parole system, and what infraction would send me
straight back to Parchment. Leonard's father, Maynard Stilts, owned the
property on the backside of my family's land. I think
they owned as much as a thousand acres, and they
rented it to farm, and they took timber from a
few sections. It was land that had been in his
family for generations, and in the winter the family hunted it.
People were always back there. Now. I had cut his
fence to get my tractor to missus Wilson. The fence
served no purpose now, but they had once kept cows
on their place, and the fence remained. I wasn't ever
going to talk about that or give the story to
the sheriff unless I had to, and even then I
was going to lie and say I found the poor
woman on my property. Over the next week I finished
cutting my field and got them looking like something. And
then in October I disked food plots in several places.
One in the backfield. It backed up to the Stilts place.
It was the last field I turned over, and it
was late on a clear evening, just about dark, and
I saw Maynard Stilts and others back there cutting shooting lanes.
We never spoke, and we never waved at each other.
I didn't think much of him. He turned a few
small things into big issues while my father was alive.
He was a big, loud man who always got his way,
and if he didn't, he'd make you pay, one way
or another. He was hollering at me from his side,
waving his arms at me to stop and talk, but
I never stopped. I didn't want anything to do with
the whole family, so I just kept working. He eventually
walked away from the fence and stopped hollering and waving
at me. They were setting up a new shooting house.
Another man, who I think may have been Lenyard, stood
and watch me while a man on an excavator tilted
the shooting house up in the place. When I made
my last pass, they were nailing lighter rungs on the
wood stilts dark, so I went back to the house.
I'd throw out sea the next day and be done
with the food plots. Deer season had been open for
a couple of weeks. Only a few days after tilling
my fields, I had my stand set up, two of them,
both stands placed inside the trees a few yards close
to game trails. I could hunt the woods behind me
in the fields in front of me, and by Thanksgiving
I had taken two dough and had meat in the freezer.
The rest of the season would be waiting for a
big buck. The second Saturday in December, and after a
hard week at work, I got a day to get
in my stand. In the dark, I walked to the
backfield and climbed into my stand. By the time I
got there, I was sweating, and it was fifteen degrees
and it wasn't long before I was cold. I was
determined to stay there until noon. And I sat there shivering,
feet and hands numb, and I had to move more
than I should have to get comfortable. I should walk
slower and avoid sweating. I thought to myself. I made
it until ten, and I decided I wasn't going to
make it any longer, so I started to climb down
and head to the house. I heard a woman calling.
The pines were singing when the wind picked up, and
I thought I was hearing something that I wasn't. I
stepped down two more rungs and I heard it again.
It was a woman's voice, raised voice, and I stopped.
There were two voices, two women yelling, one louder than
the other, and then a male voice yelling. Had to
be a group hunting in the Stilt shooting house, so
I paid no attention and I got to the ground
and walked fast back to the house. I got warm,
fixed something to eat, laid on the couch watching the
game on TV, and I fell asleep. Banging on the
front door woke me. My watch showed one point fifteen PM,
opened the door, and James, the deputy, jerked me out
on the porch and handcuffed me. What the hell was
going on was my first thought, but I didn't say it.
I'd learned from my lawyer years ago to keep my
mouth shut. I was in sock feet and a T shirt,
and I was shoved in the back seat and we
drove away. You could have let me put on some shoes,
I said. Leonard looked back at me from the passenger
seat and he said, so you could grab a gun
and kill us. I'm a convicted felon. I can't own
a gun, dumb ass a standard procedure, Jet said, James,
we'll get some shoes on you at the station. Well
what's this about, I asked. Leonard looked back again, like
you don't know. Playing stupid is a good defense, isn't it.
I knew then that it was over. Whatever crime they
were about to charge me with would send my life
into a spiral once again. I never said another word
until my lawyer showed up, and that was Monday. He
sat across the table in the conference room, sipping coffee
and looking over some papers. Why they arrest me, I asked,
You don't know. Ain't nobody said a word to me,
I said, I haven't talked to the DA yet, so
I don't know they'll be charging you with anything just yet.
But I can tell you that a body of an
elderly woman was found on your property. I spoke with
sheriff for a few minutes. They think you killed her
and dumped her in the weeds of one of your fields,
says he has a witness to watch you do it. Well,
can you tell me now? I can't tell you anything
because I don't even know what you're talking about. Whose body? Well,
let me look here, let's see, he shuffled through the notes.
It's a white female, approximately eighty years old. She was
identified by her daughter as Miss Norma Wilson, a resident
of Magnolia Nursing Home here in town. Miss Wilson, I
asked you know her? He said, well, I can't say
that I know her. She showed up on my place
a few weeks ago. She's overheated and pretty beat up
from walking around in the woods. She's got to mention,
and she had wandered away from the house and I
helped her to the house, and her daughter came and
got her, or the ambulance came to get her. I
heard she was in that nursing home. Now, jet have
you seen her since then? No, I said, If they
charge you with her death, I'll try to find out
what evidence they have that makes them think it's you.
I'll be back with you after I talk to the DA.
I can't do anything until they formally charge you. And
if they don't charge you today, you'll be out of
here by tonight. Okay, I'll wait to hear from you.
Can you get a pair of shoes to me, maybe
a sweatshirt? It's cold in here. Let me see what
I can do. Don't talk to anyone, You know the drill, right.
I sat in that county sel for two much waiting
for my trial. Once a week I met with my lawyer.
The meetings were short because he never had anything new
to tell me. The only evidence the state had was
a witness who claimed he saw me place the body
in the weeds. My lawyer was a good man, and
he believed I had nothing to do with the woman's death.
The story that day and my movements up until I
was arrested, was told exactly the same every time he
asked me to tell it. That day back in September
when I found her was always the same too, even
though I kept my lie about where I found her.
At that point, it didn't matter where I found the woman,
but I had told her daughter that her mother had
collapsed on my property and not the Stilts place, and
if I ever changed that small detail, they would peg
me as changing my story. I knew no one had
seen me carry her back to my house that day,
so I stuck with the story. The dark sense of
the world consumed me in that cell. It was a cold,
lifeless place, constantly lit by fluorescent lights that hummed and
clicked twenty four hours a day. Sometimes there were others
in other cells. Some of them never said a word
to me, and that was fine, and some could not
shut their mouths, and I was glad to see him
released and gone. My brother and my sister were allowed
to visit, and I saw them two or three times.
My sister left some books for me to pass the time,
but I couldn't read them, couldn't get the ordeal off
my mind. The death penalty was talked about, and we
didn't know how the DA would proceed For a while.
The whole case hung on one witness, and if they
had physical evidence, we didn't know about it. And my
lawyers said they had examined miss Wilson's body and even
done an autopsy which included a sexual assault kit, and
they found nothing to put me in contact with her.
And he went on to say that if they had
a good case, they would have gone for the death sentence,
and that was the only hope I had. She had
most likely died from a blow to her head. According
to the coroner's report, someone had hit her with something.
My house in every field and patches of woods had
been searched looking for this weapon, but nobody had found anything,
and that surprised me. The witness was Maynard Stilts, and
if he wanted to set me up, he sure misseds
to lock everything down by planning something around my place.
He had not seen me kill the woman. That was
his testimony, and it would be that he watched me
from his shooting house carry Miss Wilson over my shoulder,
walk up to a wire fence, and cut all four strands,
and then place her body on his land and walk
away toward my house. Now I knew I had cut
those strands of wire months earlier to get my tractor
to Miss Wilson. The cuts would still look fresh, and
it did back up his story. I had done that,
but not the day Miss Wilson was found. He found
that wire cut and he knew he could use that
to add weight to a story. I couldn't believe that
I could be put away for life because one man
said he saw me do something that I had not done.
But this is small town, Mississippi, and these small towns
are virtually isolated from the world. They have their own personalities.
Most are ruled by one or more families, and the
Stilts family was one of them, and they were going
to get there revenge for what I did to Leonyard
years ago. You can't stop these things once they get started,
not in a little town like this. On the days
that I didn't obsess on what was happening to me,
I would think about missus Wilson. In the short time
I spent with her, I never got to know anything
about her. We didn't exchange a coherent sentence between us,
but her voice locked in my memory, and how she spoke,
and the soft tone of it all. And I wonder
if there were other men, even boys, who were drawn
to that gentle sound of a woman's voice like hers.
It starts with a voice, and it showers a man
with the warm affection and concern, as if she gives
a damn about him. The memory of her slender fingers
tracing the wounds on her face and legs, and never complaining,
even looking at me with a hint of a smile,
as if she didn't want me to bother with her,
and that she couldn't figure out where the scratches had
come from. And in a way I fell in love
with her spirit that day, and I thought about her
through the weeks before she died. I wanted to call
her daughter and ask about her, but not wanting to
put myself in the business of people that I didn't know.
I wish my mother had had that demeanor, and I
didn't feel bad about that. I sat in that cell
and I hoarded my thoughts and worries and the dread
of going back to parchment again, this time for good.
The days began to blur USh one, and by that
time I was beginning to accept my future of nothing
while pushing the thoughts of hope away. Might as well
get mentally prepared for a guilty verdict so I wouldn't
want to kill myself when the decision was made. I
wasn't going to be surprised if things went bad, and
I would be shocked and happy if I was found
not guilty. And then things changed. One week before the trial.
It was during the day when someone came into the
holding area of the jail. I had memorized every noise
in that place. Someone was heading to myself. I stood
from my bunk, half asleep and looked out the small
inch thick glass in the wall, and I saw the
green leaves of may blowing in the breeze. And then
look back to find my lawyer standing in front of
the bars. He was alone, which was odd because no
one was allowed back there without a cop I may
have good news for you, Jet. Actually I think it
is good news. I think you're going to be let
out of here by tomorrow. New evidence has come to light,
he said. Investigators are confirming what they have. But I've
seen it, and it's a matter of a few hours
and you'll be released. What happened, I asked, Let's get
it confirmed first, and then i'll feel you in. I
just couldn't wait to let you know things are looking good.
I hang tight, and I'll be back with you when
we're sure. This better be the real deal, I said.
I wouldn't have told you unless I was sure, he said.
I spent the next hours watching the green leaves blow
on a blushed gree day off the small opening in
the wall. The minutes ticked by and it got dark outside.
So with new energy, I started doing push ups and
set ups to try to drain my anxiety. I was
exhausted when two men came to the cell. They opened
the gate and released me. That night, and I was
giving her ride to my house several calls to my
lawyer went unanswered. I was afraid to get comfortable with
this new freedom, and I expected it all to change
within minutes. But the night went on and I fell
asleep on the couch. When I woke, I got a
shower and changed into my regular clothes, and I started breakfast.
There was a knock on the door, and it pulled
my attention away, and I invited Samantha Jones inside. She
looked happy, and she walked ahead of me into the
kitchen and sat down at the table. I stood there
staring at her, not knowing why she was there. You
got enough food for two, she asked, I can make
so there's enough. Are you hungry? We ate eggs and
bacons and biscuits, and she told me a story. My
family is not from here. My grandparents came here looking
for work a lot of years ago, and they stayed.
They never had much, but Granddaddy made a life for
us here. My mother was ten when they moved here.
She was seventeen and in high school when she met
a boy at a dance one night. He was in
his third year at Old Miss Fancy fraternity. Boy dressed
ice and drove an ice car and had money in
his pocket, had a powerful family here, and she knew
all that. He danced with my mother all night, never
asked another girl to dance. He must have told her
that he loved her at some point, made promises, you
know how that goes. After the dance, she left with him,
and when he was done with her, he dropped her
off on a county road somewhere, and he drove off
in the dark. It must have been a pathetic sight.
Every time I think about that night for my mother,
I feel like crying. Well, it wasn't too many weeks
after that night. She tried to see him again to
tell him that she was pregnant, but he wouldn't see her.
His father ran her off the property and told her
to never come back with those lines, and if she did,
he would have her arrested. And that scared her to death,
and she stayed away. And my family are good people.
They supported my mother and she had the baby, and
the baby was me. Yes, I am Maynard Stilts's daughter,
and I can prove it now with new technology, but
there's no need for that. Look at me Jet and
think about him, and you can see we share a
few features. I looked into her eyes and tried to
visualize Stilts. I'd not spend ten minutes with Maynard Stilts
in my whole life, but when she said that, I
could see it, and I nodded my head. The other
reason I haven't pursued this is because I know that
he knows who I am. For years, whenever I ran
into him in town somewhere, he would lock eyes with me,
and I never knew why. Sometimes it would make me uneasy,
but I could count on his stare each time we
were within shouting distance. But now I know why. Now.
I told you back in September that my mother seemed
to only remember things from sixty years in the past,
and hardly anything after that. Well, one night not too
long ago before she died, she had a lucid half
hour in the nursing home and she told me this
whole story. There was a shock to me because all
I ever knew was my daddy, and I thought I
belonged to him. Lord, I'm glad he's gone on account
of this, because he was such a good man, and
all this would Mama would have been a huge burden
on him. Now. Anyway, I had so many questions for
Mama when she told me this, But it wasn't long
before she slipped away to wherever dementia takes people. She
didn't even know I was sitting there anymore. Now, can
you imagine a woman carrying this secret all those years?
Imagine the shame she must have felt being a single
mother way back then. I'm just thankful my family are
such good people, and they loved her and me and us,
just like none of that had ever happened. Now, you
ask where my mother was headed back in September. She
was trying to get to Maynard Stilts. I don't know
why or what she wanted with him, and we will
never know. I suspect had she been in the right
state of mind, she wouldn't have thought twice about that
main old man and his family. Samantha stopped talking. She
dabbed the tears from her eyes. It was a good
time to ask a question. Is that why she was
on my place in December? How did she get away
from the nursing home or did someone give her a
ride out here? Samantha composed herself. We don't know how
she got over this way, but it looks like she walked,
you know, the home she was in is only a
couple of miles down the highway. She had had the
sense to put on a coat and shoes. We think
she just started walking like she had done the first
time you saw. There was a pause, like Samantha was
gathering her thoughts on what or how to say the
next thing. Jet, your lawyer called me. He asked me
to tell you that he should have been the one
to tell you why the case against you went away,
but after he heard this story, he thought it would
be better coming from me. I'm the one who turned
in the evidence that cleared you. I gave it to
him because he would know the channels and the way
to take care of all this. That was two days ago.
Last night they set you free. But before I tell
you the rest of it, I want you to know
that I never once thought you did anything to my mother,
not once. I knew that if she had been murdered,
that it was not you. Well, thanks for that, I said.
I worried about what y'all thought of me while I
was in jail. Well I know you, dear hunter set
up cameras all over the woods, and her murder was
on video. It even had audios captured on one of
those cameras. Now I couldn't watch it, but my husband did,
and we rushed it over to your lawyer's office immediately.
She was filmed on two cameras that are strapped to trees.
One shows her walking past the lens and that's it.
The other shows her coming into the frame and being
confronted by a woman, missus Stilts. Now this woman's all
bundled up, but it's plain it's her. She seemed to
have compassion for my mother. She even took off her
coat to wrap around Mama's shoulders. But it isn't long
before old man Stilts comes into the frame and Mama
starts talking about that night when they were young. You
can hear him tell her that she's crazy to shut
up over and over, but she tells him what she
wants on it to say anyway, and miss Stilt stands
there with her mouth open. This is all a big
surprise to her. The whole conversation is broken because that
video evidently shuts off and on again when movement triggers it.
But my husband says, she really gave it to that
old man, gave her a piece of her mind, and
that her daughter needed to be taken care of. Stilts's
wife runs out of the frame and we think she
went to get a vehicle to get Mama to someplace
warm because it was freezing out there that day. And
when she's gone, my husband says, you can see Mama
point her finger at Maynard's face. She says something that
he cann't understand. Once missus Stilts is gone for a minute,
Maynard Stilts turns his rifle around, he grabs it by
the barrel, and he hits Mama on the head and
she falls to the ground. Jet Maynard Stilts killed my mother.
All the mean things he's done to her through the
years by ignoring us, and he winds up killing her.
I just can't give my mind around it. The last
video is him dragging her towards your place. That's where
he left her, then called the police and then blamed
it on you. They arrested him and his wife yesterday
and they're sitting in the jailhouse where you were. I
bet they get released on bond before the day is over.
They have the money, and you know the judge will
be favorable to them because of who they are. I
imagine his wife would be released without charges. I don't
think she knew what he had done, but that story
will all come out soon. It was the oddest story
I'd ever heard, and the hell of it was that
I had somehow been mixed up in it all. I
didn't know what to say, so I just sat there
looking at Samantha jet. The last thing I have to
tell you is who gave us the video cards. But
you have to keep his name to yourself. I nodded
that I would. Leonard Stilts, Maynard's son, Leonard Stilts, my brother,
turned into evidence that will convict his own father. He
wanted me to tell you that enough is enough now.
He believed for months that you would kill mama. But
one day he remembered those cameras and it took the
cards out of him. Said he went a few days
before looking at him. That they wrote around in his
coat pocket for four or five days. But when he
looked at the videos and saw what had happened, he
knew he had to do the right thing. I think
he understands that you may never want to talk to him,
but he wanted you to know. I heard you went
to prison over something between you and him. Maybe he
feels bad about that I don't know. Well, now you
know the truth, and you can get on with your life.
Jet Samantha stood and hugged my neck. I can't say
I didn't appreciate her affection. Maybe it was in her eyes,
maybe the curve of her jaw that favored Maynard Stilts.
But she was still Norma Wilson's daughter all the way through.
I felt that from her touch she drove away, and
I haven't talked to her since. Maynard Stilts was released
on bond the next day. The day after that, he
hung himself in his basement. It was a big scandal
in town, and the talk went on for weeks. His
wife was not charged. She sold their place and moved
to another state. And I have new neighbors that I
have not met. I see Leonard from time to time.
We never talk, but each time I see him, I
nod or touch the brim of my hat and he
understands what I'm saying. I appreciate you listening to this podcast.
If you thought it was worthy and you enjoyed it,
maybe you can hit the thumbs up button or hit
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it's always a good story. Thank you for listening, and
we'll see you on the next one, and that next
one will be early. This whunnest oh very high. I
gotta lead our he ress racket. Take another one step down.