Speaker 1: I was five years old in the summer of nineteen
seventy six and me and my brother were on a
two week camping trip with my grandparents in North Idaho.
I was born in North Idaho, but my parents moved
us to Seattle, Washington when I was four years old,
so visiting my grandparents in Idaho for a month or
two in the summer became a regular thing when I
was a kid. My grandfather was an avid out doorsman
and had all the gear, with a truck and a
camper and a couple of Honda ninety trail bikes. Both
my grandpa and grandma were loving and kind people and
loved to go camping in the mountains of North Idaho.
We were camped in my grandpa's favorite camping spot on
a creek near the Saint Joe River. There was another
party camping nearby and they stopped to let us know
that a cougar had been seen earlier that morning walking
down the middle of the gravel road, and they wanted
us to be aware that it could still be around.
My grandpa thanked them and let them know that he
would tell them if he saw it. My grandpa took
me fishing while my brother and grandma worked on collecting
firewood for the fire pit. There was a part of
the creek that my grandpa could walk in without getting
too wet and fish a really good area on the
other side of the creek. I followed a little bit
into the creek, and then I lost interest and started
looking for cool rocks. My grandpa wasn't very far away,
maybe thirty feet or so, when his line got a
hit from a pretty big trout and he yelled for
me to get the net that he had forgotten on
the camp side of the creek. All I ran and
got the net, and I started heading back through the
water to give it to my grandpa. And after tripping
and falling in the water, I quickly got up and
looked at my grandpa's direction. I heard him yelling to
me stay there. I saw a movement on the bank
of the creek in front of my grandpa. It was
a gigantic cougar reaching down into the water and grabbing
the fish off my grandpa's fishing line. It happened so
fast that I didn't know what to do. I froze,
and my grandpa started swearing and yelling at the Krueger
and waving his arms in the air, and the cougar
stopped and dropped the fish and started heading into the
water toward my grandpa. While it was looking over its shoulder.
At the bank of the creek, a large black figure
walked on two legs and crashed through the trees. My
grandpa dropped his fishing pole as the cougar ran into
his legs while running away from this a black creature.
The cougar was gone in an instant. My grandpa left
his fishing pole and he grabbed me by the neck
of my shirt and he picked me up and started
heading out of the water to the camp side of
the creek. He didn't say a word and didn't stop
walking fast until we were almost to camp. He stopped
and put me down, and he told me to be
quiet and let him talk to Grandma. Grandpa raised his
voice a little and said to Grandma that damn sysquatch
is back again. Grandma started laughing and said, well, you
tell him we're not leaving. I wasn't sure what to think.
I didn't feel scared, but more curious. My brother thought
that my grandpa was just kidding around and grabbed his
bike and went off toward the road. My brother was
nine years old and he was an independent kid. That night,
we had a campfire and I almost forgot what happened
earlier in the day. The air was warm, with a
slight cool breeze coming from the creek. We heard a
couple of strange noises in the bushes, but my grandparents
were really good at distracting us. It was time for s'mores.
Grandpa was an early riser and went out to see
if he could find his fishing pole. He looked around
a little bit, but he couldn't find it. My brother
was running around with a really cool stick that looked
like a machine gun. He was pretending to shoot the
enemy and was running in and out of the bushes.
My brother came out of the bushes and called for
my grandpa to come look at something that he had found.
So I ran over to see what was going on,
because my brother always had a way of finding really
cool stuff. My brother asked, Grandpa, is your fishing pole
really a tree catching pole? He pointed over to a
really big cedar tree, and the fishing pole was leaning
up against the trunk of the tree. It was almost
like someone had placed it there for safe keeping. The
line was broken and the metal loop on the tip
was bent, but my grandpa said it was almost as
good as new. The rest of the day was uneventful,
but that night I will never forget. We were all
sitting around the campfire listening to some music on a
radio tape player, and Paul said, the boys are back
in town. About two minutes later, we heard a whoop
coming from the creek area where we had seen the sisquatch.
Two more whoops came from the opposite direction, over the
gravel road that leads to our camp and then out
toward the Saint Joe River. The whoops continued for a
few minutes until it felt like they were right next
to us, and my grandpa told Grandma to take the
boys to the camper and get the beds ready. As
we were walking to the camper, a huge crash came
from the bushes where my brother found a fishing pole.
Two large black figures came out of the bushes, looking
like they were wrestling on the ground, and they were
making deep growling sounds. They didn't seem to be fighting,
but they were playing. I think the growling sounds reminded
me of two dogs playing together, but really deep sounding.
They acted like they didn't know we were there. My
grandpa was calm as can be, and my grandmother said
some swear words, and she pushed me and my brother
toward the camper, and I remember looking back, and the
two figures stood up and they walked toward the creek,
and I remember hearing them crashing through the water, and
then it was silent. There was no sound except for
the creek flowing. My grandpa said, the song was right.
The boys are back in town. He laughed and headed
to the cooler for a cold snack a beer, and
sat back down at the campfire ll I didn't feel
scared at all, maybe because my grandparents were so calm
and easy going about what was happening. My grandmother went
to bed, but us two boys and grandpa stayed up
all night listening to the radio and listening to the
night sounds. We didn't see her hear the sosquatch for
the next two days. My brother was oblivious about stuff,
and it seemed like he had forgotten what had happened.
And well, I was thinking about it all the time,
but I wasn't scared. My grandpa said, the boys the
Sasquatches were the keepers of the forest and they protected
everything there. My grandfather died when I was sixteen, and
I remember talking with my grandma about the cougar stealing
the fish and then running into my grandpa. My grandma
verified the story by reading from her diary. She kept
clearing detailed notes about all the times they went camping,
and that wasn't the only time sasquatch had visited them.
I ended up moving back to North Idaho when I
was twenty two, and I took care of my grandma
until she died when I was twenty eight. My mother
ended up buying my grandparents' house and she moved from
Seattle to North Idaho. My mother died several years later,
and my brother and I cleaned out the house and
we sold it. I have most of the diaries and
other things that my grandma I wrote about. I will
be compiling the information and I will eventually write about
the experiences my grandparents had as well as the experiences
I have had. I live in a small town in
north Mississippi. I'm not from here. I married a man
in the army in the mid seventies. I am from
Germany and I lived there until I was twenty two.
This year, I will turn seventy five years old. My
husband is gone now and I live alone, and I
do just fine. I've lived in the American South long
enough that if you met me on the street and
we spoke, you would have no idea that my first
language is German. I was determined not to stand out,
so I not only made sure to learn English quickly,
but I also spoke it with the local accent. The
German accent is difficult to overcome, but I did it.
I have no family in Germany, and I haven't spoken
the language in years to anyone other than my living children.
A few years before my husband died, he and I
vacationed out west. It was a great vacation and I
got to see some of the beauty of this continent.
We spent two days at the Grand Canyon. We drove
all across the southern Rim, stopping at every place of
importance or the places that had a view. The people
travel from all over the world to see the canyon,
and while we were there, I heard many different languages
spoken between family members. When I finally heard a couple
speaking German, I immediately approached them and explained that I
had not spoken the language in years. Did they mind
if I talked to them? Awhile? I think they were
as excited as I was. They had been in the
United States for three weeks, they didn't speak English and
had had a difficult time communicating during their stay. Well,
we were staying in Flagstaff for the night, and so
were they. They wanted us to join them for a
meal that night, and I accepted. Before I asked my husband,
I knew he wouldn't mind. We spent hours that evening
talking about everything from my home country. They were from
a town close to where I grew up. It was
a joy speaking to them, and even helping them, even
for only a short time, translate the menus and interpret
for them to the waitress who took our orders. The
conversation was lively, and I had no time to repeat
in English everything they had said in German. To my husband,
I know he felt left out, but he never complained.
I think he saw that it gave me a great
sense of pleasure to speak my native language again, and
it was a fun night that I will never forget.
Our life together we had three children, and I taught
each of them the German language. I saw an old
reason to deprive them of that part of their heritage.
Once the first two knew the language, teaching it to
my youngest son was a breeze. His brothers would fill
in the gaps, and there were many nights around the
table that German was the only language spoken. I have
no doubt that my husband had listened long enough that
he knew the language well enough to understand much of
what was said, but he always said he didn't. He
was that way. But when I would scream at him
in anger or frustration, he sure understood it then, and
I still laughed to myself about those times. Tragically, we
lost one of our sons in an accident. Nick crushed
both of us, and we spent a year grieving along
with his brothers. But it has been many years, and
while we never forget in the pain of that law
never leaves us, we learn to adjust and cope with it.
Now I've done that for years now. One thing that
helped me was to visit my son's grave on a
regular basis. Now my son is not there. I knew
this when I began my visits. My son is asleep now,
waiting to be raised again by our Creator. We are
Christians and we believe this or we know this to
be our hope. But even with the knowledge of our future,
in the state of my son's body and soul as
well now with my husband since his passing, going there
is comforting to me. I still drive and go there
once each week, still at the age of seventy five.
Now I talk to those men and I tell them
about my week, and I speak to them like they
are there, And even though I know they do not
hear me and know I'm not crazy, they don't speak
back to me, it still gives me comfort and hope.
My husband and my sons were and are hunters. Deer
season around our house was a festive time of year.
There's nothing a mother of three and joys more than
watching the excitement that came every opening weekend and even
throughout the season. My husband's family has land in the
Holly Springs National Forest. It's been passed down for generations
and remarkably, not one acre has ever been sold, and
that is where the boys hunt, and boy have they
taken some big deer from that area. My husband and
son are buried there with generations before them, some who
fought in the Civil War. So when I make the
thirty minute drive there once each week, it is a
serene and beautiful place to be, especially in the spring,
and to talk to the two men that I've lost.
My husband talked about a creature that roamed the woods
of their property. He called them buggers. For many years,
I didn't know what he was referring to. I didn't
really care. There were occasions I thought he was joking,
maybe to even get a smile from me. Once the
boys were old enough to hunt, he insisted that I
have apples on hands so that they could take them
into the woods on their hunts. They would drop a
few apples at the base of the tree from which
they hunted, for the boggers to pick up later. He
never made a big deal of these creatures, but he
would talk about them like you and I would discuss
the behavior of a dog, any common animal. He once
explained to me what they were. He didn't want to,
but I had pestered him for some reason almost the
entire deer season to tell me what they were. I
needed to get an image in my mind so that
my imagination wasn't creating a creature that was nice when
it wasn't, or one that was sinister when it wasn't. Finally,
one evening at the dinner table, an evening that we
were only speaking English, he and the boys, who were
teenagers at the time, explained what the creatures were. Later
that week, we watched a movie on VHS called The
Legend of Boggy Creek. Creature in that movie was not
nice or it didn't seem to be nice, although it
never harmed anyone. The boys explained that the Boogers lived
in the forest and had probably been there for many years,
maybe even hundreds of years. They had all seen one
and spoke about the creature with great authority, much like
they would talk about anything else they knew well. It
was important to them to leave an offering with each hunt.
They always feel dressed their kill on the spot, left
the internals, or they left apples. They would simply drop
them from their tree stands when they arrived so they
wouldn't forget. We bought the local grocery store out of
apples during deer season, and that is how I learned
about the Boogers. After my son's death, while at the cemetery,
I began seeing shapes move through the trees while I
was there. I wasn't sure what it was, and I
was never alarmed. They would come in and out a few,
never fully revealing themselves. I never put it together until
one day. I mentioned the strange events to one of
my sons while he and I met for lunch one day. Well,
those are Booger's mom, he said. They knew Jacob and
they see you visiting him. They know you're his mother.
I don't know how they know, but they know. Otherwise
they'd scare you away. Well, I remember sitting in silence
after he told me this. I wasn't sure what to
make of it. I had never fully believed in these boogers.
I suppose since I had never experienced them, they were
a joke in my mind, because I wondered for years
whether my husband and the boys were laughing at me
all the way to the woods with their backpacks full
of apples. You do know apples are a favorite food
for deer, right. Well, I finally verbalized this to my son.
He smiled at me and he laid his hand over mine. Mom,
they're real now you've seen them. You just said it.
You just didn't know what you were seeing now the
same thing happened to all of us, and I'm sure
thankful that Dad was there to explain them to us.
He said, well, should I be afraid, I ask? I
don't think so. He said, if they wanted you afraid,
you would know it. You should keep visiting and don't
change anything. They will someday let you see them fully.
If it takes ten years, then it takes ten years.
But they will show themselves. They've done that for all
of us. One year ago this week, I began bringing
a bag of apples with me on my weekly visits.
I leave half on my son's grave and half on
my husband's grave. They are a few plots part. The
next week, the apples are gone. Now. That could be
deer coming into the cemetery and eating them, or other wildlife,
but I don't think so. Last week, after many years
of visiting the cemetery and hundreds of words to those
men who never hear me, two of the creatures showed
themselves to me. The temperature was in the seventies, which
is nice in January, and I had been there an hour,
sitting at the cheap little picnic tables the boys had
placed there for me. When I saw the same movement
I had seen so many times before, and one and
then two walked into full view at the edge of
the woods that encompassed the area. They never gestured, nor
did they make any sounds. They didn't really look my
way more than a few times. They just stood there
in full view, almost shy in a way, shifting their
weight from one foot to the other, like a child
might on his first day of school. They were enormous animals,
and I should have been terrified, but I wasn't thanks
to my son's explanation. I sat there and I watched
them until they walked back out the way they had come,
and it was over. As I walked to my car,
I whispered to my boys in that cemetery, your bookers
came to see me today, Well, I hope they heard me. Now,
at age seventy five, I feel like a child again.
This spring, when the weather turns warm, I want to
begin to bring my grandchildren with me to the cemetery
and I tell them about the creatures that live in
the surrounding forest. They are teenagers, and one or two
are in college, but I will invite them to go
with me when they are in town. I don't know
if they'll go with me, but they should. I'm hoping
their fathers will encourage it. They need to see this
and hear the stories.