Speaker 1: I have a twenty five acre ranch in southern Oregon,
surrounded by thirteen acres of virgin forest and twelve acres
of meadow land. I'm surrounded by other large ranches nestled
in and around many forested hills and mountains, and wide
expanses of b lm lands with millions of trees. There
are no cities out here, just a few small towns
scattered around in the countryside, connected by one major highway.
It's rural to say the least. I have a year
round creek along the back of my property and a
twelve foot deep spring fed pond toward the rear. Salmon
run in the creek, and the pond teams with resident beavers, turtles,
and migratory geese. There are all sorts of livestock on
the surrounding properties, and lots of typical wildlife in the
countryside that come down from the hills to grays and
forage or hunt and find easy prey. Many a house pet,
cows and sheep have either disappeared at night or have
been found dead the next day from predation. I had
a black lab named Jupiter that I would take for
walks twice a day down to the creek and back
up to our house. Jupiter was a good dog, never
barking at anyone or any other animal. He liked chasing deer, though,
because of the danger of our local predators, I would
never take him for a walk at night without my
flashlight and my side arm, both at the ready. Jupiter
would run ahead of me and glee, leaving me to
walk alone on the trail. One night, while we were
walking down to the creek and passing by the pond,
I heard something new. It was loud and guttural. It
was almost a growl. It came from the tree line
surrounding the back of the pond. I couldn't see anything
in the dark, even with my flashlight. Whatever this was,
it startled me and I pulled my gun. I caught
up with Jupiter and found him drinking at the creek,
and I told him it was time to go. He
wasn't bothered, but I was dreading having to walk past
the pond again. It was pitch dark, there was no moon,
and Jupiter bolted up the path ahead of me, leaving
me alone once again on the trail. Well, the pond
was coming up, and my pulse was nagging at me,
and when I got to the water, with my eyes
fixed on the trees, a massive boulder was thrown fifty
feet into the center of the pond. Whoever or whatever
through it had been waiting on me. The splash was big.
It was too big. Nothing I knew of could have
done that. I jumped out of my skin, too scared
to I think of firing a warning shot. I ran
all the way home, a quarter of a mile up
the meadow. I was so exhausted when I reached my
house that I collapsed at the door. I pushed inside,
panting and gasping for air, trying to catch my breath.
Jupiter burst in behind me and disappeared out of sight.
I closed the door and leaned against it, letting relief
wash over me. The night wasn't done yet. On the
other side of the door came an unearthly growl. It
felt wrong and unnatural. I knew bears and cougars, and
this was something else. It was the same growl I'd
heard at the water, only up close and personal. I
slapped my hand on the lock and didn't dare move
until it went away, nearly soiling myself, and then suddenly
it was gone. And it moved off into the night
to terrify something else. The rest of the night was quiet.
I know that because I didn't sleep wink. I've never
heard it since, and I hope I never hear it again.
I grew up in Holmes County, Mississippi, right outside Durant.
We lived on seventy two acres, and we shared the
land with black panthers and a family of boogers for
as long as I can remember. My first experience was
when I was seven. Our dogs chased a huge black
cat all the way up a pine tree. My uncle
shot it with a twelve gauge, and a game warden
came and took it away. Nothing was ever said after that.
A few years later, my cousins and I were jumping
on a trampoline dunking basketballs into the hoop. Straight out
of the thicket. Next to us, a creature walked out
on all fours. At first, we thought it was somebody's
pony that had gotten loose, until it saw us looking
and stood up on two legs. It was only about
six feet tall, but it was built thick, with dark
brown hair covering its face like an eighties rock star.
It took off back into the woods, and we hopped
off the trampoline and we hauled us back to Grandma's house.
My family knew these boogers were there, but we weren't afraid.
They never bothered us, and there was plenty of space
on our property for us to stay out of each
other's business. But after years of frequent brief sightings and
no real action, things took a turn. Either a young
booger grew up and became rowdy, or a rogue one
had found our little utopia and started causing problems. We
all made it home from school one day and found
our chickens dead and scattered around the property. Cattle started
coming up missing, and we started finding skulls and bones
scattered across the land. And the remaining cattle started sleeping
beside our house instead of resting in the barn at night.
Not long after that, the night howling started. I was
in my car one night listening to the radio when
something howled out from fifty yards away. It wasn't human,
it wasn't an animal. It was something in between. It
was disturbing enough that I killed my engine and ran
into the house. My mother was in the kitchen, shaking
her head, saying she thought I might come in. She
had heard that howling too. Tree knocking became a regular
sound around the property. It would come at all hours
of the night, and it surrounded us. When we went fishing.
Sometimes we'd find wooden structures carefully and meticulously built. We
never touched any of it, out of respect and fear.
The last time I saw one was just a few
years ago. It ran out in front of my car.
Its body was so enormous that it covered both of
my headlights. It took two steps across road and it
was gone. My cousin was in the seat next to me.
I turned to him and asked if he saw it.
He cocked his pistol, and he says, cuz, don't you
dare slow down. I grew up in the foothills of Colorado,
and my family owns thirty five acres in the south
central part of our state. It is as vast as
it is forested, and the nearest year round neighbor to
our humble cabin is a mile away. It's nestled in
a valley on the east side of the Sangrid to
San grid to Cristo Mountain range. It is deathly quiet
down there, and it even harbors some of the darkest
skies in the nation. It was Labor Day weekend in
two thousand and sixteen, and I was spending some time
on our property with my father. We were sheltered in
a canvas pop up and had retired for the night
pretty early. In the middle of the night, my dad
was awoken by something being caught between dreamland and sudden reality.
It was hard to determine what had woke him up.
After trying to go back to sleep, he heard a continuous,
steady chain of slaps against the side of the canvas
of our pop up camper. Not knowing if he had
been dreaming, he lay awake to see if it would
happen again. Sure enough, less than five minutes later, the
exact same thing happened again. There was a string of
hits against our canvas all along the trailer. He was confused,
and he continued to lay there wide awake. On the
third repetition, my dad sprung from his sleeping bag and
out the door and looked around to see what was
causing the sound. He saw and heard nothing. He never
heard any footsteps, and there was no wind that night.
A few seasons later and I was down there once
again with my dad. He was already asleep and I
was struggling to get to bed. I was lying there
and I heard what sounded like two rocks being clacked
together about twenty five yards away. This continued for more
than half an hour, all while circling our pop up.
This happened on many trips, and it happened for years.
In another season, we had just come down and set
up our camp on the previous trip. My dad and
his friend sat around drinking beer and threw their cans
on the ground for them to clean up later, which
of course never happened. That irritated me, but oh well,
we would clean it tomorrow. As I was laying there
trying to sleep, I heard an unusual rock clacking, sometimes
singular hits and sometimes quick successions of two or three.
Then I heard one of those beer cans get picked up.
Something rattled the small rocks and the pine needles that
had migrated inside the can, and then it crushed it.
And then I heard the can drop into the train
ssh bag that we kept outside right next to our
pop up. The next day, we found the crushed up
can in the bottom of an otherwise empty trash bag.
On a different occasion, my mother had woken to something
running into the side of the camper. There was a
long pause and then a mimic of a sound I
used to make when I was messing around. It was
a grunt mixed with a yell. I made that sound
whenever someone was being stupid or just acting silly. My
mom said something made that sound right outside the camper
when I was sleeping right next to her. Whatever it was,
it was copying me. Over the years, more strange things
have happened. On one occasion, my dad heard a loud growling,
murmuring vocalization down in the valley. Another time he found
a massive set of barefootprints in the snow, which he
still has a picture of. Today, we have found tiny
rock stacks on our tables and chair, and random tools
will be misplaced from the time we leave to the
time we return. And the last time I was down there,
I was by myself during a spring break of twenty
twenty four. I had arrived late when it was dark,
and I packed my stuff into the cabin we had
all recently built. As I was breaking firewood for the stove,
I started to feel like I was being watched. We
had a ladder at the cabin. It was one we
had used to build a cabin. I had gone inside
to build a fire when I heard the ladder being thrown.
I was blasting rock music on my speaker, and I
still heard it. I went out to check and found
the ladder far out of place, and that freaked me out,
so I tried to shake the nerves and go to bed.
As I was lying there on my back, staring at
the ceiling in the loft, I saw a shadow move
across the moonlit surface. That loft is twelve feet in
the air. Looked like a head had stepped in the
way of the moon and peered in and then stepped away.
A few minutes later, I heard knocking on the window
down below me. I thought at first it was a
bat hitting the window or something of that sort, but
then it continued sporadically, sometimes in knocks of two and four,
and then sometimes just one. Whatever this is, I don't
think it is malicious or has ill intentions. I will
continue to update you on my findings if you would like.
I'm curious about what the Dixie cryptid community thinks about
all of these events. Thanks for all you do, guys.
If you have opinions on what's going on, leave it
in the comment section. He's asking, and I know you'll
have plenty of great advice. And I'm serious about that.
A few years back, my family and I were on
our way to the Oregon Coast to visit my grandparents.
As anyone from the area knows, the drive out there
is heavily wooded with true he's so thick you can't
see past them, and so tall in spots that they
block out the sun. Driving along, my mind wandered to
my neighbor, who used to joke about all the sasquatch
there in the redwoods. I sort of laughed to myself
at the thought, and then glanced from the road into
the trees, and I started wondering if my neighbor might
be right, because right there, coming up the hill toward
the highway, I saw two giant figures. I blinked. I
was sure that I was looking at two men. I
looked at the road and snapped my head back at
the trees, and I blinked again. They were humongous, and
the bigger of the two was carrying a dead dough
by its neck. I don't know what they were, but
I knew they weren't human. I drove on past them,
eyes squinting in a did I just see that? Kind
of look on my face? The rest of the drive,
it was all I could think about that. And my
neighbor who told me about them. I guess he wasn't
joking about the sasquatches after all. In nineteen seventy six,
I went with my friend and his family to their
cabin in Monissing. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, y'all. I've been
doing this almost eight years now and I still can't
pronounce some of these words. In nineteen seventy six, I
went with my friend and his family to their cabin
in Monising, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula. We were thirteen
years old at the time. One night, he and I
were heading back to the cabin after goofing off in
the woods. We were heading through the trees and taking
our time when a crashing noise to our left cut
through the air and it startled us. We whipped our
heads towards the sound and saw a nine foot tall,
shaggy creature, back lit by the moon and pushing over
a tree. My friend was an athletic type, but I
was an overweight kid. But that night you'd have thought
I was the athlete. I was so scared that I
outran my friend. We burst into the safety of the cabin,
gasping and panting and wondering what we'd just seen. It
was way too big to be a bear, and if
it was some guy playing a trick on us. He
went through a lot of effort to do that, and
was strong enough to push a tree over. Many years later,
just before COVID hit, my wife and I went back
to Monasing. We were there for a boat tour that
would take us to Pictured Rocks, some of the most
incredible sandstone cliffs and sandy beaches in the world. I
vaguely remembered where the cabin was that I had stayed
with my friend, and we drove up there, only to
find it had been turned into a subdivision. We made
our way instead to the old downtown, where we found
large bronze statues of Bigfoot outside of a store. Asked
about it, and she said they put it up for
the tourists. I thought of asking her if she was
from the area, but I didn't. I bet the locals
have some interesting insights to share with the world. Okay,
here's a little short ghost story I thought was pretty cool.
In January of nineteen seventy one, my brother and I
had been sick for a while. I slowly recovered, but
my brother didn't. One night, my parents took him to
the hospital, where, sadly he passed away from pneumonia. His
funeral was packed with roses filling every corner of the space,
their scent carrying through the air, lovely and heartbreaking. Like
most families of that time, my mom was a stay
at home mom and my daddy worked. Prior to my
brother's passing, my mom would get up and make coffee
once my dad left for work. My brother would sneak
around the corner and peek at her until she would
tell him that he could come and sit with her.
That routine would eventually start up again. After the funeral.
My mother would be sitting at the table drinking her coffee, grieving,
I'm sure, and would smell a sudden rush of roses,
overpowering the coffee and the cigarettes. She was sure it
was my little brother stopping by it to check on her.
Around the age of nine, I started having trouble sleeping
and suffered terribly from sleep paralysis. I would be awake
and unable to move. I would try to scream, but
I couldn't. It may have lasted only minutes, but it
felt like hours. The lack of sleep exhausted me to
the point that I would pass out, only to wake
up the next day. After that, I started hearing voices
speaking to each other, though I could never understand what
they were saying. I could make out a word or two,
but could never make out the conversation. The only way
I could get back to sleep at that point was
with the TV on, drowning out the sound of anything
around me. I visited a psychiatrist, thinking it might be schizophrenia,
but I checked out clean. As far as the doctors
were concerned, I was healthy mentally and physically. My mother
and her sister share a similar gift, knowing when the
phone was about to ring and who would be calling,
knowing if someone needed help, and dreaming of an event
before it happened. I would love to connect with others
with similar stories. It can be isolating at times, feeling
that I'm the only one with this gift, if you
can call it that. Years later, I still sleep with
the fan and the TV on at night, and I
don't ever see that changing. Call it a good instinct,
Call it what you will. I believe something is waiting
for me in the silence. You guys, if you've had
any kind of experience like this woman, I would love
she would probably love to hear if she hears this podcast.
She would probably love to read your comments about what's
going on, and would probably appreciate it greatly. Obviously, all
these years later, she's still sleeping with a fan on
and a TV on. And I don't know I could.
I could never do that. I have to sleep in
complete darkness and complete silence. I've always been that way.
But I have people in my family that sleep with
fans on, fans on them. Holy crap, I'd have a
cold three hundred and sixty five days a year if
I slept like that. I know people need noise and
cool air and etcetera, etcetera to sleep, but I think
hers is from nerves or some anxiety as she has
over her brother. Anyway, give her a comment and tell
her what you think. Appreciate it. Okay, welcome to the podcast.
It's been almost a month since I uploaded anything on
my YouTube channel or my podcast office Spreaker, which goes
to Apple, Spotify, all the podcast apps that you use.
And here's what happened. Four weeks ago. We had an
ice storm. We lost power for two weeks. I couldn't
do anything. It was so cold and there was so
much ice on the ground. I couldn't even move around.
So we just kind of sat around. And we're neighbors
helping each other. We were loaning generators back and forth,
and I have given away so much pro paine propane
hoses and gone and found heaters and brought them back
and letting people use them. I mean, it was terrible,
but there were some people that went three weeks without utilities.
In other words, they just got their utilities back on
last weekend. And I bet you there's some still without
power because the utility company can hook back up the lines.
But if you had a tree fall on your house
and break your weatherhead off or whatever, you got to
find an electrician to get that wired back up. The
util company here isn't responsible for that. So anyway, it's
been a tumultuous time. I live in Tippa County, Mississippi.
You may have heard. We had. We had utility companies
coming from all over the country to help us get
our power back on. And how generous. You know, those
those linemen or those utility companies are good about sharing
their labor with other people. And we had volunteers come in.
I can't remember one organization, but they stayed here for
I think till last Tuesday, and they left and went
to another county. Also, Oxford, Mississippi got hit really bad.
That's an old town. Well every town of Mississippi is
an old town, but you know, it's full of giant
trees and stuff and real expensive houses. I think the
medium price for a house and Oxford, Mississippi is like
five hundred thousand dollars. I don't know who in the
hell could live there, but people do. Or who would
pay that for a house. I wouldn't. I just wouldn't
pay that for a house. I live in a camper
before I pay that much for a house. But I
don't have a lot of money. So you know, if
I had a lot of money, I might I might
think of it differently. But Oxford got hit pretty hard.
There's a strip through Mississippi from if you go south
and west of Oxford and just strike a line from
the Mississippi River down in Louisiana all the way up
into West Tennessee. Now there are towns that are fifty
miles east of us. It didn't get hit at all. Anyway.
The point is we got our power back on after
two weeks, and then I was two weeks behind on
work and I had missed a deadline because of the
power outage, and my customer didn't jerk the job from me.
They hung with me. And as soon as I got
the power on, I mean that day, I was out
here working and I've been going sixteen hours a day
trying to catch up, and I finally caught up two
days ago, and then I spent the last two days
picking up limbs and repairing stuff that got broken around here.
I'm still not through. I've still got a month worth
of cleaning up to do, but I've got my yard
looking fairly good and still quite a few limbs. But
it doesn't look like a hurricane came through here. So
it's been a crazy month. February has been nuts in
North Mississippi. I'm not complaining. I had to get you know,
It's funny. There were people. You know, after about three
days we could get out. I had to cut a hole.
I had to clear trees off my driveway just to
get out of the compound and get out on the
major roads. But there were big, giant trees laying across
the highways and stuff. It took two or three days
before anybody could be mobile. But after that we would
go to the grocery store. They had power somehow. They
had connected power to the main artery down the highway
within about three or four days, so that people could
sell groceries and you know, milk and bread and eggs
and all that stuff. And I'd run into people only
if I get offended at this. But all the dudes
that I talk to say, hey, man, how you doing well.
I'm doing fine. I did fine. I don't as long
as I have a little bit of light, a little
bit of heat, and a place to sleep, take a crap,
take a boil some water, and take a sponge bath.
You know, I'm okay. But every one of them said, man,
I'm doing fine. But if I could just get my
wife to quit complaining about this, like complaining is gonna
fix it. That's what us guys do when women start
fussing about this or that. We feel like we need
to fix it, but there's nothing we could do here
because we're not utility. We're not with a utility company. Anyway,
I just thought that was funny. Every single dude I
talked to, Man, if my wife would just quit complaining,
we'd be fine. Now she's got the kids complaining. And
there's one friend of mine he's got let's see, it's
him and his wife and they've got four or five kids,
and they're young, they're a younger family, and he's like,
now she's got the kids, come play. But anyway, I
just thought it was funny. And then I got my
taxes done. I could not. I was going to do
a podcast yesterday, but I had to get my taxes
together to take to my accountant. I got that done,
and man, that is a huge, huge burden off my back.
And I'm caught up on work and I was just
getting rolling after a big slug of work back in January.
On this podcast, I was putting out a podcast every
I don't know, two three, four days. I was putting
them out regularly like I used to do, and then
this ice storm hit. So now I'm out of work.
I got my work called up. I've got a big
job coming in. If y'all don't mind me talking a
little more, I'm sorry to drag this on with but
I'm just gonna tell you this. I put out a
video I guess it was late last summer that says
I'm quitting. And what I meant was I was quitting
my regular job and I was going to spend one
hundred percent of my time writing and doing this podcast.
Was just reading these stories for you guys. And I
actually told my customers I'm done. And it was that
way for about two weeks, and I was able to
do a little writing and on Steve Lily, working on
Steve Lily, and I was able to get podcasts out
on a regular basis. And then they called me. You
know what, this was early last summer, This was back
in June. I think they said, we got this one
really nice, clean job. We just we want you to
do one last job. Well, so let me let me
tell you. It's a good feeling knowing you're wanted, you're needed,
and you're good at what you do and people want
you to do work for them. So I looked at
the job and it was clean as a whistle and
it was going to go pretty fast. And they gave
me like six or eight weeks to get it done,
and I knew I could get it done in two
or three weeks. Well, it got all clogged up in engineering,
and which is a whole nother story. But I did
not finish that job. I was doing other stuff, but
that one particular job. There were three phases to it.
I had them all done. We were just waiting on
connection approvals and stuff like that, and the engineers couldn't
get their shit together. And so I got the job
in June and I submitted and finally finally released it
for construction this past January. They needed it. They needed
my drawings submitted back last like around the first of August.
Never heard anybody screaming. They weren't nobody screaming about the
schedule or anything. It was the weirdest thing. But anyway,
they were just offering to pay me good money for it,
and I just couldn't turn it down and it was
going to be so I haven't completely quit. I actually
been another job, a job out in California that I
think I'm gonna get and it's pretty profitable. And it's
a good job and it's a good customer out there,
so I'll probably do another few things. But I you know,
I've always been able to balance the job with the podcast.
But I'll say, you know, the last year or so,
I'm not spending I'm not working fifteen sixteen hours a
day to get them both done. My wife and I
had a talk and one thing we'd like to do
is kind of hang out together at night. I wasn't
doing that when this podcast was going real strong. It
was I mean, she never saw me. I'd come in
at nine or ten o'clock at night every night, and
I'd come out here and work early in the morning
on this podcast. And so I decided to just kind
of back off of it a little bit. Now she's saying,
you need to get these podcasts out more regularly, so
I may get to go back to going early mornings
and late nights, which I like to do. I like
to work anyway. That's kind of an update on where
I am, Like, you give a crap. I thought i'll
tell you about the ice storm, tell you that I
planned on retire and quitting, but I didn't. And you know,
I'm still able to work I'm still in good health,
good mental health good. You know, I don't have dementia yet,
I guess is what I'm saying. Now, I can do
the work. So I mean, while the money's there and
the economy is good, I might as well go ahead
and do the work and make that money. With all
that said, I am just about done with Steve Lily nineteen.
I'm even gonna probably have twenty done. There'll be two
Steve Lilly's released within thirty days or so, hopefully in
the next couple of weeks. I really am real close
on it. That's one project I just have not been
able to pay a lot of attention to. But I've
been thinking. I've been thinking nineteen's a pretty good story.
All right, That's all I've got to say. Let's get
back into this and get some stories going. Or rather
than that, I may just put this at the back
of the podcast so the people who don't like to
hear this stuff won't hear it. How about that. Appreciate you, guys.
I'm glad you tuned into this podcast. And I'll conclude
with this, I love you. There's more podcasts coming. I
haven't gone anywhere. It's just a fact of God that
kept me from doing this, but I love doing it.
I still love doing it as much as I ever did,
and there'll be more to come this week. Should have
two or three podcasts put out this week, so we're
back on track. Thanks everybody, I love y'all. We'll see
you on the next week.