Speaker 1: For decades, people have disappeared in the woods without a trace.
Speaker 1: Some blame wild animals, others whisper of creatures the world
Speaker 1: refuses to believe in, but those who have survived they
Speaker 1: know the truth. Welcome to Backwoods Bigfoot Stories, where we
Speaker 1: share real encounters with the things lurking in the darkness bigfoot,
Speaker 1: dog man, UFOs, and creatures that defy explanation. Some make
Speaker 1: it out, others aren't so lucky. Are you ready, because
Speaker 1: once you hear these stories, you'll never walk in the
Speaker 1: woods alone again. So grab your flashlight, stay close, and
Speaker 1: remember some things in the woods don't want to be found.
Speaker 1: Hit that follow or subscribe button, turn on auto downloads,
Speaker 1: and let's head off into the woods if you dare.
Speaker 1: I've been building this road trip state by state, and
Speaker 1: I like doing it that way because it puts a
Speaker 1: legend down in the dirt where it belongs, a specific county,
Speaker 1: a specific creek, a place you could drive to this
Speaker 1: afternoon if you had a full tank and nothing better
Speaker 1: to do. The problem is that the reports don't organize
Speaker 1: themselves by state line. They come in the way they
Speaker 1: come in, and most of them don't fit into an
Speaker 1: episode about the Ozarks or the Alleghenies or the Cascades,
Speaker 1: because the person telling it doesn't care what state it
Speaker 1: happened in. They care that it happened to them. So
Speaker 1: I've got five sitting in a folder that I've been
Speaker 1: wanting to tell for a while, and this seemed like
Speaker 1: the place to do it.
Speaker 2: Two of these are what people.
Speaker 1: Call upright canine, dog man, wolf man, whatever word you're
Speaker 1: comfortable with. The other three are sasquatch encounters or at
Speaker 1: least something large and hair covered that walked on two legs,
Speaker 1: four decades between the oldest and the newest, five different states,
Speaker 1: and no connection between any of them except that the
Speaker 1: people involved all ended up carrying something they couldn't explain.
Speaker 1: I've been collecting stories for a long time now. I
Speaker 1: had my own sighting in Washington State in the summer
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty four while we were filming a documentary,
Speaker 1: which changed the way I do this work more than
Speaker 1: I expected it too.
Speaker 2: Before that, I was.
Speaker 1: A man writing down and sharing other people's stories. After
Speaker 1: I was still a man writing down and sharing other
Speaker 1: people's stories. But now I'm a man who knows exactly
Speaker 1: what it feels like to walk back to a truck,
Speaker 1: understanding that you've crossed a line and that most of
Speaker 1: the people in your life are going to stay on
Speaker 1: the other side of it permanently. It's a lonesome thing,
Speaker 1: and it's a lonesome thing even when you host a
Speaker 1: podcast about it. So I try to keep that in
Speaker 1: mind when somebody's sitting across from me working up the
Speaker 1: nerve to start. Three of these five people never went
Speaker 1: looking for anybody to tell. They got found, or somebody
Speaker 1: in their family pushed them forward, or they answered a
Speaker 1: question at a table after an event when the room
Speaker 1: felt safe enough. Only two of them came looking for
Speaker 1: a place to put it.
Speaker 2: That ratio has.
Speaker 1: Held roughly steady for forty years, which is why I'll
Speaker 1: sit at a signing table until the building manager runs
Speaker 1: me off, because the story you actually want almost never
Speaker 1: walks up to the microphone on its own. And I'd
Speaker 1: also say that the apology is almost as common as
Speaker 1: the confusion about what they experienced. Most of the messages
Speaker 1: I get start with something like I'm sorry to bother you,
Speaker 1: I know how this sounds, or I've never told anybody this.
Speaker 1: I've read some version of that opening line, probably a
Speaker 1: thousand times by now. The first story tonight is from
Speaker 1: right here in my neck of the woods, the mountains
Speaker 1: of North Carolina, in the summer of nineteen eighty five,
Speaker 1: and it involves a front porch that didn't survive the week.
Speaker 1: He'd graduated high school that spring, and he was supposed
Speaker 1: to be getting ready for college. His mother had taken
Speaker 1: a job about fifty miles away, which was far enough
Speaker 1: that driving it twice a day made no sense, so
Speaker 1: she stayed near her work during the week and came
Speaker 1: home when she could. That left him alone in the
Speaker 1: house most of the time, which at eighteen is either
Speaker 1: the best thing that's ever happened to you or the worst,
Speaker 1: depending on the week. You're having no neighbors within shouting distance,
Speaker 1: a grandfather's place off through the trees somewhere, a telephone
Speaker 1: on the wall, and that was his whole connection to
Speaker 1: another human being.
Speaker 2: Once it got dark.
Speaker 1: The house sat up in the mountains, where the daytime
Speaker 1: temperatures ran into the eighties that summer and dropped into
Speaker 1: the fifties overnight, which is the reason people build houses
Speaker 1: up there in the first place. There was no air
Speaker 1: conditioning and no need for any He'd opened the window
Speaker 1: at the head of his bed, let the cool air
Speaker 1: come through the screen, and sleep with the mountain moving
Speaker 1: around outside the way it had every summer of his life.
Speaker 1: I need to give you the layout of that house,
Speaker 1: because the layout is most of the story. The couch
Speaker 1: in the den sat about five feet the front door.
Speaker 1: The door itself was a seven foot door with a
Speaker 1: narrow window set into it, roughly twenty four inches tall
Speaker 1: and six inches wide, running from the top of the
Speaker 1: door down to about the five foot mark.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a picture window. It was a.
Speaker 1: Slot about as wide as your hand, and through it
Speaker 1: he could see whatever was going on out in the yard.
Speaker 1: That first night, it was the last of the twilight,
Speaker 1: and then it was moonlight. After the twilight went he'd
Speaker 1: driven his girlfriend home that evening, he came back, opened
Speaker 1: his bedroom window the way he always did, and then
Speaker 1: went into the den and put his feet up. Anybody
Speaker 1: who spent a summer in those mountains knows what a
Speaker 1: house like that sounds like after dark, the screen breathing
Speaker 1: in and out with the air, the boards ticking as
Speaker 1: they give up the day's heat, whipper wheels going somewhere
Speaker 1: down the ridge, and a dog answering another dog a
Speaker 1: half mile off. It's a lot of noise, and you
Speaker 1: quit hearing any of it after about a week, the
Speaker 1: same way you quit hearing a train if you live
Speaker 1: near a track. He turned the television off and picked
Speaker 1: up his guitar and played for a while, and he
Speaker 1: hadn't been at it long when he got the feeling
Speaker 1: that somebody was watching him.
Speaker 2: So he put the.
Speaker 1: Guitar down and he listened, and what he heard was
Speaker 1: the porch boards creaking. That porch was small, twelve feet
Speaker 1: across or thereabouts, and the boards on it were doing
Speaker 1: what boards do when weight moves across them. When he
Speaker 1: looked toward the door, the window in it was completely black.
Speaker 1: No moonlight was coming through the bottom of it, and
Speaker 1: none was coming through the top of it either, which
Speaker 1: meant whatever was standing out there was covering the entire
Speaker 1: opening on a seven foot door frame. And then the
Speaker 1: door started to jiggle, so he shouted and asked who
Speaker 1: was out there, and nobody answered him.
Speaker 2: He said later that.
Speaker 1: The thing he couldn't get past sitting there in the
Speaker 1: dark that first night was the top of that window.
Speaker 1: A man on the porch would have blocked the bottom
Speaker 1: of it and left light at the top. Whatever was
Speaker 1: out there had it covered all the way up, and
Speaker 1: he was looking at a piece of glass that started
Speaker 1: at the five foot mark and ran to seven. What
Speaker 1: broke it was the dog's, his grandfather's dogs came in barking,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't a warning bark They were coming in wild.
Speaker 1: The whole port screeched at once, the way a structure
Speaker 1: screeches when weight comes off it in a hurry, and
Speaker 1: the moonlight came back through that slot in the door.
Speaker 1: The dogs went past the house, still barking, chasing whatever
Speaker 1: it was, and that was the end of it. He
Speaker 1: got his three point fifty seven black Hawk revolver and
Speaker 1: he stayed on the couch with it until daylight, without
Speaker 1: getting up and without going out to look. There was
Speaker 1: a softball tournament at the local field the next day,
Speaker 1: and he got home right as it was getting dark.
Speaker 1: He didn't turn on the television, and he didn't turn
Speaker 1: on any lights. He sat down on that same couch
Speaker 1: with the revolver and he waited, which is not what
Speaker 1: most eighteen year olds do with a Saturday night and
Speaker 1: an empty house. And it tells you where his head
Speaker 1: was after the night before hours went by a house
Speaker 1: that age ticks and settles, it cools off, and every
Speaker 1: time it did, he came up off the cushions. Around midnight,
Speaker 1: the porch started squeaking again, and this time he could
Speaker 1: hear the footsteps clearly. He described them as heavy. The
Speaker 1: window in the door went black, the same as before,
Speaker 1: and then something took hold of the doorknob and started
Speaker 1: shaking it. He was specific about that sound when he
Speaker 1: told it. He called it a jiggle, and he said
Speaker 1: it happened twice, which is a small detail, but it's
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that stays with a person. Nobody
Speaker 1: was pounding or slamming. Something was working a doorknob the
Speaker 1: way you'd work a doorknob if you were trying to
Speaker 1: get in.
Speaker 2: He pointed the revolver at.
Speaker 1: The door and yelled that he'd blow it to hell,
Speaker 1: and the thing on the other side of that door
Speaker 1: screamed back at him, and what he heard it scream
Speaker 1: was straight to hell. He'd been holding a gun on
Speaker 1: that door for two nights running, and he'd never once
Speaker 1: considered the possibility that whatever was out there might answer him.
Speaker 1: It hit the side of the house after that and
Speaker 1: it kept screaming the whole time it was doing it,
Speaker 1: And when the screaming finally stopped, he heard his grandfather's
Speaker 1: dogs coming again, and it left. He stayed on the
Speaker 1: couch the rest of that night and eventually dozed off,
Speaker 1: which is what happens to all of us, no matter
Speaker 1: how scared we are, And he woke up when the
Speaker 1: front door opened and came very close to shooting his
Speaker 1: own grandfather. It was daylight by then, and his grandfather
Speaker 1: had some questions. He wanted to know whether the boy
Speaker 1: had been drinking, he wanted to know whether he'd backed
Speaker 1: the jeep into the porch, and more than either of those,
Speaker 1: he wanted to know how in the world he'd managed
Speaker 1: to tear the siding off the outside.
Speaker 2: Wall of the house.
Speaker 1: So the two of them walked out and looked at
Speaker 1: it together, and the damage was worse than the boy
Speaker 1: had understood from inside. The porch had been knocked off
Speaker 1: as supporting pillars, not scuffed and not cracked, knocked off.
Speaker 1: The pillars that had been sitting on and beside the
Speaker 1: front door pressed into the damage siding. There was an
Speaker 1: impression that looked like an arm as thick as his
Speaker 1: own leg and about twenty inches long. He told his
Speaker 1: grandfather what had happened both nights, all of it. His
Speaker 1: grandfather didn't believe a word of it, and the old
Speaker 1: man's working theory was that his grandson had come home drunk,
Speaker 1: driven into the porch, and then gone after the siding with.
Speaker 2: A baseball bat.
Speaker 1: That's the part of this account I keep coming back to,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't involve the creature at all. This kid
Speaker 1: had spent two nights in a dark house with a
Speaker 1: revolver in his hands. He'd had something scream at him
Speaker 1: through his own front door, and the first adult he
Speaker 1: told looked at the damage, looked at him, and landed
Speaker 1: on drunk with a temper. They spent the day repairing it.
Speaker 1: New siding, porch back up on its pillars, everything squared
Speaker 1: away before supper, the two of them working side by side,
Speaker 1: with one of them furious and the other one trying
Speaker 1: to find a way to say it again that would land.
Speaker 1: There's something in that repair day I've never been able
Speaker 1: to shake loose. He spent eight or nine hours with
Speaker 1: a hammer in his hand, next to a man who
Speaker 1: thought he was a liar, putting new siding over the
Speaker 1: exact spot where an arm shaped impression had been, and
Speaker 1: every board they nailed up took away the only thing
Speaker 1: he had that might have backed him up. By supper,
Speaker 1: there was nothing left to show anybody. His mother got
Speaker 1: home from work before the third night, so we had
Speaker 1: to sit through the lecture two drinking, losing his temper,
Speaker 1: beating the house with a baseball bat, driving into the porch.
Speaker 1: Both of the adults he answered to had now told
Speaker 1: him that the thing he'd lived through hadn't happened, and
Speaker 1: that he was the one who broke the house. So
Speaker 1: he went to his bedroom and opened the window. He
Speaker 1: turned the lights off, let that cool mountain air come
Speaker 1: in the way he always did, and called his girlfriend, Kelly.
Speaker 1: He had his own telephone and his own number, and
Speaker 1: his mother had a separate line, which sounds like nothing
Speaker 1: right now, but turns out to matter a great deal
Speaker 1: inside of ten minutes. The two of them talked for
Speaker 1: a long time. Then the smell came into the room,
Speaker 1: and he described it as putrid, like urine and death.
Speaker 1: If you've listened to this show for any length of time,
Speaker 1: you know that exact comparison turns up over and over
Speaker 1: in these accounts different witnesses, different states, different decades, and
Speaker 1: somehow the same two words keep coming out of people
Speaker 1: who've never spoken to each other. He could hear footsteps outside,
Speaker 1: and he told Kelly they sounded like two legged footsteps,
Speaker 1: and she laughed at him and said it was a skunk.
Speaker 1: He told her no, that he'd smelled this before, and
Speaker 1: that he could hear it walking. And then less than
Speaker 1: twenty four inches from his head, on the other side
Speaker 1: of that screen, something started breathing.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 1: The inhale ran something like fifteen seconds, and then it
Speaker 1: exhaled with a low growl, writing on the end of
Speaker 1: it for about that long. Again, fifteen seconds is longer
Speaker 1: than it sounds when you say it out loud, long, slow,
Speaker 1: deep breaths right there at the head of his bed,
Speaker 1: close enough that he could feel the air moving toward him.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't in any.
Speaker 2: Hurry about it either.
Speaker 1: He told Kelly what was happening, and she joked at first,
Speaker 1: because what else does a teenage do when her boyfriend
Speaker 1: says there's a monster at his window. He told her
Speaker 1: he was going to shoot through the screen, but he
Speaker 1: didn't because he couldn't make himself move the breathing got
Speaker 1: louder and deeper, and the smell got worse, and then
Speaker 1: he watched a huge hand press flat against that window
Speaker 1: screen and push it inward. That's when the dogs came back,
Speaker 1: and he said they sounded completely different this time, not
Speaker 1: the wild, aggressive barking from the first two nights, but
Speaker 1: high pitched yelping, which he described.
Speaker 2: As pure fear. What ended it was a shotgun.
Speaker 1: Right after the blast, he heard BlackBerry bushes and grapevines
Speaker 1: being torn apart, and a scream going away from the
Speaker 1: house and fading off into the distance, And then his
Speaker 1: grandfather's voice came through the window, asking if he was
Speaker 1: all right. Here's how the old man got there. Kelly
Speaker 1: had hung up the phone and called his mother, and
Speaker 1: his mother called his grandfather. Kelly had heard the breathing
Speaker 1: and the growling coming through the telephone line, and she'd
Speaker 1: heard what her boyfriend's voice sounded like, and she decided
Speaker 1: this wasn't a joke and started making calls. In the
Speaker 1: middle of the night, his grandfather put a load of
Speaker 1: buckshot into what he later called the bear's rear end.
Speaker 1: The next morning, the two of them went out to
Speaker 1: look at the grapevines, and the witness said they looked
Speaker 1: like a truck had driven through them. Out in the
Speaker 1: middle of the garden, they found footprints five toes about
Speaker 1: twenty inches long, with the distance between them working out
Speaker 1: to a stride of around nine feet. Then he went
Speaker 1: back and looked at the screen on his bedroom window,
Speaker 1: and there was a handprint pressed into it, roughly three
Speaker 1: times the size of his own hand. His grandfather told
Speaker 1: him they'd never speak of it again, and as far
Speaker 1: as I can tell, for the better part of forty years,
Speaker 1: they didn't. The second one comes out of West Virginia,
Speaker 1: which is around seventy eight percent forest, mountains and hollows
Speaker 1: and creek bottoms folded up on top of each other,
Speaker 1: roads that run out into nothing, and more standing timber
Speaker 1: than most people in this country have ever seen in
Speaker 1: one place. Stay tuned for more bad back woods bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. The witness was twenty
Speaker 1: three years old, and he was the kind of fisherman
Speaker 1: who isn't really doing it.
Speaker 2: For the fish. There was a secluded.
Speaker 1: Spot he knew about beside the water, back in the
Speaker 1: woods where nobody else went, and if he got up
Speaker 1: in the middle of the night and hiked in through
Speaker 1: the dark. That spot belonged to him and nobody else
Speaker 1: for about three hours. Most serious fishermen I've known have
Speaker 1: a place like that, and most of them won't.
Speaker 2: Tell you where it is. So that's what he did up.
Speaker 1: In the middle of the night, in through the woods
Speaker 1: in the dark, and by the time the sun started
Speaker 1: coming up, he'd caught three fish. At some point, his
Speaker 1: mother called and asked him to pick up her medication
Speaker 1: on the way home, and he got off the phone
Speaker 1: and got ready to cast again. And that's when he
Speaker 1: noticed that something had changed. Everything around him had gone
Speaker 1: extremely quiet. He thought it was odd, particularly because he
Speaker 1: was standing in the middle of the woods, where quiet
Speaker 1: isn't the normal state of things. Birds, insects, water, wind,
Speaker 1: all of it had dropped out at once.
Speaker 2: He noticed it.
Speaker 1: He sat with it for a second, and then he
Speaker 1: let it go and kept fishing. Shortly after he cast
Speaker 1: his line, he heard splashing in the water, and he
Speaker 1: figured somebody else had come in, so he called out
Speaker 1: and asked if anyone was around. Nobody answered him. He
Speaker 1: waited a bit and cast again, and the splashing came back.
Speaker 1: Now he decided somebody was hidden nearby throwing rocks into
Speaker 1: the water, and he was annoyed about it because he'd
Speaker 1: gotten up in the middle of the night and walked
Speaker 1: in through the dark specifically to have this place to himself.
Speaker 1: He called out again and told whoever was doing it
Speaker 1: to knock it off and quit playing games. And he
Speaker 1: didn't get anything back that time either. Rocks landing in
Speaker 1: the water near somebody fishing alone shows up in these
Speaker 1: reports constantly, different states, different decades, different creatures being described.
Speaker 1: Somebody's on a bank or a gravel bar by themselves,
Speaker 1: and stof start coming out of the tree line and
Speaker 1: landing in the water near them, never on them, and
Speaker 1: it's one of the most consistent patterns in everything I've collected.
Speaker 1: He caught another fish and put it with the rest,
Speaker 1: and then he heard something different. Twigs and sticks were
Speaker 1: snapping somewhere back inside the woods, the way they snapped
Speaker 1: when something's walking through vegetation. The movement went a short
Speaker 1: distance and then it stopped. He called out again, asked
Speaker 1: whether somebody was walking around, told them to stop, and
Speaker 1: got no answer. That went on for several minutes, back
Speaker 1: and forth, movement and silence, and movement again. Then the
Speaker 1: pace picked up, and whatever was making the sound was
Speaker 1: moving faster and getting closer.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 1: The character of the walking changed right at the end.
Speaker 1: It had been the kind of movement you'd expect from
Speaker 1: a person picking their way through brush, And then it
Speaker 1: wasn't careful anymore, and whatever or whoever was in there
Speaker 1: quit worrying about the noise it was making and came
Speaker 1: on through the vegetation towards the water. The first thing
Speaker 1: he actually saw was an eye. There was an opening
Speaker 1: in the foliage, and through it he saw a single,
Speaker 1: bright yellow eye looking.
Speaker 2: Back at him.
Speaker 1: Then the leaves got pushed apart, and he was staring
Speaker 1: at what he described as an enormous wolf's head.
Speaker 2: He used the word werewolf.
Speaker 1: When he finally told it, and he said it looked
Speaker 1: like something out of a horror movie. The creature came
Speaker 1: out from behind the foliage and walked upright on two legs,
Speaker 1: down toward the edge of the water. He froze and
Speaker 1: the fishing rod came out of his hands, and he
Speaker 1: stood there staring at it while it stared back at him.
Speaker 1: What he described was an enormous head, bright yellow eyes,
Speaker 1: massive shoulders, and unusually long arms hanging down in front
Speaker 1: of the body. The hands were extremely large, and there
Speaker 1: appeared to be claws coming off the fingers. The lower
Speaker 1: body looked canine to him, and he was specific about
Speaker 1: the legs, which he said were like a dog's legs.
Speaker 1: That combination is.
Speaker 2: What wrecked him.
Speaker 1: A wolf's head, a heavy human like upper body, long arms,
Speaker 1: clawed hands, and dog legs underneath all of it. He said,
Speaker 1: he couldn't make sense of what he was looking at,
Speaker 1: and as far as I can tell, he never really has.
Speaker 1: There's a thing that happens to people in the first
Speaker 1: second of one of these encounters, and he described it
Speaker 1: as well as anybody I've talked to. He didn't run,
Speaker 1: and he didn't yell, and he didn't reach for the
Speaker 1: gun he was carrying. He stood still, with his hands
Speaker 1: empty and the rod down in the mud at his feet,
Speaker 1: looking at an animal that shouldn't exist, while it stood
Speaker 1: in the shallows looking back at him. Whatever the human
Speaker 1: body does first, it isn't any of the things we
Speaker 1: like to imagine it would be. He started backing away,
Speaker 1: and he left the gear and the rod right where
Speaker 1: they'd fallen and headed for the trail out of there,
Speaker 1: and as he moved he could hear the thing following him.
Speaker 1: Then he noticed the pattern that changed the whole situation.
Speaker 1: When he stopped, it stopped. When he started walking again,
Speaker 1: the movement behind him started up again. He was standing
Speaker 1: at the edge of the water, with everything he'd carried
Speaker 1: in scattered behind him on the bank, doing the arithmetic
Speaker 1: that anybody does when something's walking out of the woods
Speaker 1: behind them. How far to the trailhead, How fast can
Speaker 1: you move without running, because running is the one thing
Speaker 1: you know better than to do. How much of what
Speaker 1: you're hearing is behind you, and how much of it
Speaker 1: is your own boots in the leaves. He kept walking,
Speaker 1: and it kept walking, and every time he tested it
Speaker 1: by stopping, he got the same answer back. After he'd
Speaker 1: put some distance between himself and the fishing spot, he
Speaker 1: turned and looked back, and it was still there. Then
Speaker 1: it growled at him. He was carrying a pistol, so
Speaker 1: he pulled it out and started walking backward down that
Speaker 1: trail with his attention locked on the animal. Then it
Speaker 1: suddenly broke and ran through the grass and went into
Speaker 1: the tree line, and for a second it looked like
Speaker 1: it had given up, but that wasn't what was happening.
Speaker 1: He watched it move through the woods, and what it
Speaker 1: was doing was circling. It came back out onto the
Speaker 1: trail from a different direction, and now it was ahead
Speaker 1: of him, between him and the way out, and it
Speaker 1: started coming toward him. He fired three warning shots and
Speaker 1: it kept coming, so he aimed at it and fired
Speaker 1: twice more, and he heard what he believed were the
Speaker 1: sounds of the rounds hitting It stumbled backward, but he
Speaker 1: said it didn't look seriously injured. He said it looked
Speaker 1: more angry than hurt. Then it dropped onto all fours
Speaker 1: and ran into the woods, and he didn't follow it.
Speaker 1: He got out of there without a scratch on him.
Speaker 1: He didn't talk about it afterward. He just had the
Speaker 1: most extraordinary morning of his life, and he locked it up,
Speaker 1: and he said it was close to seven years before
Speaker 1: he could speak about it to anybody. The third one
Speaker 1: is short, and it happened out the window of a
Speaker 1: moving car in July of nineteen ninety two in Calvert County, Maryland.
Speaker 1: Calvert County is a narrow peninsula with the Chesapeake Bay
Speaker 1: on one side and the Ptuxent River on the other,
Speaker 1: and the county's own descriptions of itself talk about wooded terrain,
Speaker 1: creek valleys, wetlands, and steep sli It's the kind of
Speaker 1: place where the trees come right down.
Speaker 2: To the shoulder of the road.
Speaker 1: The witness goes by s he was sixteen years old,
Speaker 1: riding in the back right passenger seat with his brother,
Speaker 1: his mother and father up front, and the family was
Speaker 1: coming home from dinner in Chesapeake Beach. He was looking
Speaker 1: out the window as they drove a small road merged
Speaker 1: with the main road on the left, and they picked
Speaker 1: up a little speed after the merge, running somewhere between
Speaker 1: twenty five and thirty miles an hour, and then they
Speaker 1: came up on a small bridge that was bumpy enough
Speaker 1: that his father slowed the car down to about twenty
Speaker 1: That's when he looked ahead and saw something standing about
Speaker 1: seventy five yards off on the right side of the road,
Speaker 1: right at the edge of the woods. The thing that
Speaker 1: put this account in the episode isn't the height or
Speaker 1: the face or even the eye contact. It's the posture.
Speaker 1: It was standing with both arms raised outward and spread apart,
Speaker 1: its right hand against a tree at about shoulder height,
Speaker 1: and its left hand was braced against another tree at
Speaker 1: about the same height, holding that position while the car
Speaker 1: came down.
Speaker 2: The road toward it.
Speaker 1: I've read thousands of these reports over the years, and
Speaker 1: almost none of them describe anything like that. The standard
Speaker 1: sighting is something crossing a road or standing flat at
Speaker 1: a tree line, or turning to look. This one was
Speaker 1: braced between two trees watching. He put the height at
Speaker 1: approximately seven feet and thought it might have been more.
Speaker 1: It had a wolf like face, but the head looked
Speaker 1: bigger than a normal wolf's head, and the closest comparison
Speaker 1: he could come up with was a dire wolf from
Speaker 1: Game of Thrones. Broad shoulders, muscular arms, a barrel chest
Speaker 1: that narrowed down through the abdomen, dark brown, and covered
Speaker 1: in medium length hair. He never got a good look
Speaker 1: at the legs, and he explained exactly why it locked
Speaker 1: eyes with him. His first thought, in his own words,
Speaker 1: was what in the hell is that standing at the
Speaker 1: edge of the woods, And almost immediately after that, the
Speaker 1: two of them made eye contact. He said it knew
Speaker 1: he'd seen it, and it watched him. He picked it
Speaker 1: up from a considerable distance, and because the car was
Speaker 1: crawling across a bumpy bridge. He figures he had it
Speaker 1: in view for ten to fifteen seconds, and its eyes
Speaker 1: stayed on him the entire time. He said that when
Speaker 1: he understood what he was looking at, it took his
Speaker 1: breath away, and that his next clear thought, the one
Speaker 1: he still remembers word for word, was that the thing
Speaker 1: was ugly, very sharp pointed facial features.
Speaker 2: He was firm that it didn't look like a bigfoot.
Speaker 1: He said, it looked like an actual werewolf, and while
Speaker 1: some people would call it a dog man, he prefers
Speaker 1: wolf man. He asked if anyone else in the car
Speaker 1: had seen the same thing he did, and none of
Speaker 1: them had. He kept asking, and they got annoyed with
Speaker 1: him and told him to drop it. He was the
Speaker 1: only person in that car who saw anything at all.
Speaker 1: Seventy five yards on a bumpy bridge at twenty miles
Speaker 1: an hour in July in the evening. That's the whole encounter.
Speaker 1: He never got out of the car, nobody stopped, nobody
Speaker 1: turned around, and the car kept going the direction it
Speaker 1: was already going, while a sixteen year old twisted around
Speaker 1: in the back seat trying to keep it in sight.
Speaker 1: The rest of that ride home was maybe fifteen or
Speaker 1: twenty minutes. A kid in the back seat who just
Speaker 1: watched something seven feet tall hold onto two trees and
Speaker 1: stare into his eyes, and the only three people in
Speaker 1: the world within reach of him were irritated and wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about something else. He got home and went
Speaker 1: to bed, and nothing about the evening was different for
Speaker 1: anybody but him. He told people over the years and
Speaker 1: got ridiculed and teased for it, and eventually he just
Speaker 1: quit telling anybody. His family still doesn't believe him. Most
Speaker 1: people either think he's crazy or figure he's lying, so
Speaker 1: he almost never brings it up, but he'll tell you
Speaker 1: it was real and it was there. He said the
Speaker 1: experience changed his life, and that when he reads other
Speaker 1: people's encounter reports now he doesn't automatically discount them. His
Speaker 1: reasoning was simple enough. He knows what he saw, so
Speaker 1: who is he to question what somebody else went through.
Speaker 1: He still got questions of his own, what was it,
Speaker 1: where did it come from, and why was it standing there.
Speaker 1: He's driven past that spot hundreds of times since nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety two, and he's never once stopped and walked around
Speaker 1: out there. And he said, maybe he should. The last
Speaker 1: two are sasquatch reports, and they've got a different shape
Speaker 1: to them than the first three. Nobody gets chased and
Speaker 1: nobody fires a gun in either one. What they've got
Speaker 1: instead is time long looks in decent light by people
Speaker 1: who weren't running for their lives, and both of them
Speaker 1: end with somebody walking back to the spot the next
Speaker 1: day to see what got left in the ground. The
Speaker 1: first one comes out of the Kaiamichi Country in southeastern
Speaker 1: Oklahoma in the fall of two thousand and nine. That's
Speaker 1: rough country down there, steep ridges running east and west,
Speaker 1: hardwood on the north slopes, and pine on the south,
Speaker 1: creek bottoms full of white oak, and national forests stacked
Speaker 1: up against private timber company for miles in every direction.
Speaker 1: People have been telling stories out of that part of
Speaker 1: Oklahoma for as long as there have been people in it.
Speaker 1: The witness is a man named Ray, who was forty
Speaker 1: one at the time and working as a welder. He'd
Speaker 1: been hunting the same block of ground since he was
Speaker 1: old enough to get dropped off at the gate, and
Speaker 1: he knew every draw and every bench and every fence
Speaker 1: line in it. I'll also tell you that Ray isn't
Speaker 1: a storyteller. Getting detail out of him is work. He
Speaker 1: answers what you ask, and then he stops talking. And
Speaker 1: if you want to know what the light was doing
Speaker 1: or how the air smelled, you have to ask him twice.
Speaker 1: Between this show and the sixteen years I spent doing
Speaker 1: interviews with a badge on, That's the kind of witness
Speaker 1: I'd rather have. Every time he was hunting the muzzleloader
Speaker 1: season the last weekend of October. A cold front had
Speaker 1: come through two days earlier and dropped the overnight temperature
Speaker 1: into the high thirties, which is enough to move deer
Speaker 1: and enough to make a man in a ladder stand miserable.
Speaker 1: By four in the morning. His stand was on the
Speaker 1: edge of a white oak flow, about eighty yards above
Speaker 1: a creek bottom hung there three seasons earlier because the
Speaker 1: acorns were dropping and the deer were coming up out
Speaker 1: of the bottom to feed. He was in it and
Speaker 1: settled by five point twenty, well before shooting light. There's
Speaker 1: a stretch of time and a deer stand between when
Speaker 1: you settle in and when the light comes, where there's
Speaker 1: nothing to do but listen. You can't read, and you
Speaker 1: can't move much so you set thirty feet up a
Speaker 1: tree in the cold with your hands in your pockets,
Speaker 1: and you listen to a piece of country wake up,
Speaker 1: and after enough seasons you know what order it happens.
Speaker 1: In the owls quit, the first squirrel comes down, a
Speaker 1: woodpecker starts somewhere off the ridge. What Ray heard instead,
Speaker 1: down in that creek bottom in the dark was rocks clacking.
Speaker 1: Two rocks came together hard, the way they sound when
Speaker 1: somebody picks up a couple of creak stones and knocks
Speaker 1: them against each other. And it happened three or four
Speaker 1: times over about a minute, and then it quit. He'd
Speaker 1: heard that same sound and that same drainage twice before
Speaker 1: over the year, and both times he'd put it down
Speaker 1: to a cow in the creek or a hog rolling
Speaker 1: something over. This time he knew right away it was different,
Speaker 1: because a cow makes noise everywhere else in the process
Speaker 1: of doing anything, and all he was getting was.
Speaker 2: The rocks, he said.
Speaker 1: He sat there a while afterward, waiting for it to
Speaker 1: happen again, and when it didn't, he did what any
Speaker 1: of us would do, which was decided he'd probably heard
Speaker 1: a cow after all, and go back to watching the
Speaker 1: flat for deer. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, with the
Speaker 1: sky starting to go gray, something knocked on wood. He
Speaker 1: described it as a single, flat, hard strike, like a
Speaker 1: splitting mall, hitting the side of a standing tree, and
Speaker 1: it came from farther down the bottom than the rocks had.
Speaker 1: About a minute after that, there was another one from
Speaker 1: a different direction, farther off on the other side of
Speaker 1: the creek. Two strikes from two locations about a minute apart,
Speaker 1: on a still morning, with a front just passed and
Speaker 1: the woods dead quiet. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. He'd heard limbs come
Speaker 1: out of white oaks in October his whole life, and
Speaker 1: he knew that wasn't what he was listening to. He
Speaker 1: also told me that's the point where he quit hunting.
Speaker 1: He was still sitting in a stand with a loaded
Speaker 1: gun in the middle of deer season, but he wasn't
Speaker 1: hunting anymore. He was listening. By then it was full
Speaker 1: gray light that fifteen minutes. Every hunter knows where you
Speaker 1: can see shapes but no color, and Ray was watching
Speaker 1: the creek bottom because that's where the deer were going
Speaker 1: to come from. Something walked out of the timber on
Speaker 1: the far bank and started across the gravel.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 1: It was upright the whole way, and it never once
Speaker 1: put a hand down, and it walked at an unhurried,
Speaker 1: steady pace. What struck him first before he ever got
Speaker 1: to the size of the thing was the way the
Speaker 1: legs worked.
Speaker 2: He put it this way, that.
Speaker 1: It walked like a man who was in no particular
Speaker 1: hurry and was carrying something heavy, except that it wasn't
Speaker 1: carrying anything.
Speaker 2: He said.
Speaker 1: The arms and legs were moving in a rhythm he recognized,
Speaker 1: and that was the part his brain couldn't file, because
Speaker 1: it wasn't a bear's roll, and it wasn't a deer,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't a hog. It was the same walk
Speaker 1: he'd been watching people do his whole life, at a
Speaker 1: size that people aren't. It was dark, but not black,
Speaker 1: more like a dark brownish color that looked black in
Speaker 1: that light. The shoulders were enormously wide compared to the hips,
Speaker 1: The head sat down low with no neck he could see,
Speaker 1: and the arms hung long and swung as it walked
Speaker 1: without any exaggeration to it. He put the height somewhere
Speaker 1: between seven and eight feet And here's what Ray did
Speaker 1: that almost nobody does, which is that he didn't just
Speaker 1: guess at it.
Speaker 2: He marked it.
Speaker 1: There's a leaning water oak on the far bank with
Speaker 1: a lightning scar running up one side, and the animal
Speaker 1: passed directly in front.
Speaker 2: Of that tree.
Speaker 1: Ray watched where the top of its head crossed that scar,
Speaker 1: and he burned the spot into his memory. And when
Speaker 1: he finally came down out of the stand, he walked
Speaker 1: into the bottom and tied a piece of orange flagging
Speaker 1: tape around the trunk at the height he'd marked. He
Speaker 1: went home, came back the next afternoon with a friend
Speaker 1: and a tape measure, and the two of them ran
Speaker 1: it from the base of the tree up to the tape.
Speaker 1: It came back at seven feet four inches. I got
Speaker 1: ahead of myself, though, because there's more to what happened
Speaker 1: out on that gravel. The animal stopped in the middle
Speaker 1: of it. Then it turned to look up the slope
Speaker 1: toward him, and Ray said the whole upper body came
Speaker 1: around together, head and shoulders, moving as one piece. Because
Speaker 1: there wasn't enough neck there to crane.
Speaker 2: It rotated.
Speaker 1: He had a loaded muzzle loader across his lap, and
Speaker 1: he never brought it up. I've asked him about that
Speaker 1: more than once, and his answer doesn't change. He said
Speaker 1: he never considered it that the second he understood what
Speaker 1: he was looking at, the gun stopped being relevant, and
Speaker 1: what he actually did was press himself back against the
Speaker 1: tree and try to make himself small in a ladder
Speaker 1: stand thirty feet in the air. Then the wind came
Speaker 1: up the drainage and he got the smell, which he
Speaker 1: described as hot and sour, with an ammonia edge underneath it,
Speaker 1: like a hogpen in August, with something dead in it.
Speaker 2: He had the.
Speaker 1: Animal in view somewhere between twenty and forty seconds, and
Speaker 1: he's honest that he can't narrow it down any tighter.
Speaker 1: It went off the gravel up the near bank into
Speaker 1: the timber below and to the left of his stand,
Speaker 1: and he could hear it working through the leaf litter
Speaker 1: for a good while after he'd lost sight of it.
Speaker 1: He stayed in that stand until nine in the morning,
Speaker 1: three hours after it left. When he finally did come down,
Speaker 1: he came down fast, and he walked out to the
Speaker 1: truck the long way around, following the ridge and keeping
Speaker 1: the open ground on his left the whole time.
Speaker 2: He told me. The walk back down the ridge took.
Speaker 1: Him about three times as long as it should have,
Speaker 1: because he stopped every fifty yards or so and stood
Speaker 1: there listening, And twice he backed up and took a
Speaker 1: different line through the timber for no reason he could
Speaker 1: explain other than not liking the look of.
Speaker 2: What was ahead of him.
Speaker 1: Before he left, though, he went into the bottom and
Speaker 1: found tracks. There were four of them in the silt
Speaker 1: along the near edge of the gravel where the thing
Speaker 1: had come up out of the creek. Five toes on them,
Speaker 1: human in general shape, but broad through the ball of
Speaker 1: the foot, with no arch in them anywhere, and the
Speaker 1: clearest one measured sixteen and a half inches long and
Speaker 1: just under seven inches wide at the widest point. He said,
Speaker 1: what got him wasn't the length, it was the depth.
Speaker 1: He put his own boot down beside one and stepped
Speaker 1: on it as hard as he could, one hundred and
Speaker 1: ninety pound man in hunting boots, and he couldn't get
Speaker 1: anywhere near the same impression. He photographed them with his phone,
Speaker 1: and he used his own boot for scale. He also
Speaker 1: found hair. There's a stretch of old barbed wire running
Speaker 1: along the top of the far bank left over from
Speaker 1: when part of that country was grazed, And two days
Speaker 1: later Ray walked to that fence line on the chance
Speaker 1: that something might have hung up in it. He found
Speaker 1: a small clump of dark hair caught in a bar
Speaker 1: but about five and a half feet off the ground.
Speaker 1: He put it in a sandwich bag and carried it
Speaker 1: around in the console of his truck for a week
Speaker 1: and a half because he didn't know what else to
Speaker 1: do with it. Then he mailed it off to a
Speaker 1: research group he'd found online, and he paid the extra
Speaker 1: for tracking, and he watched it get delivered. He never
Speaker 1: heard back from them, and he never wrote to ask why.
Speaker 1: That's one of the most common sentences in this entire field,
Speaker 1: and it makes me angrier every time somebody says it
Speaker 1: to me. A man does everything right, walks the fence,
Speaker 1: finds the sample bags, it pays the postage, sends it
Speaker 1: off in good faith to people who say that's exactly
Speaker 1: what they want, and then he gets nothing, no result,
Speaker 1: no letter, no phone call, and no sample back. He
Speaker 1: did tell one person right after it happened, which was
Speaker 1: the friend who'd hold the other end of that tape measure.
Speaker 1: The following afternoon, he called him from the truck at
Speaker 1: the gate before he ever drove home, and that friend
Speaker 1: didn't laugh at him. He asked what time Ray wanted
Speaker 1: to meet. Ray still hunts that block of ground, and
Speaker 1: he still goes back to the same flat most years.
Speaker 1: He's never seen anything like it again, and he's never
Speaker 1: heard those rocks clack in that bottom since. He's also
Speaker 1: never told anybody in his family what happened out there,
Speaker 1: and he isn't planning to the last one takes us
Speaker 1: to the Missouri Ozarks in July of nineteen ninety eight
Speaker 1: on a river I'm not going to name exactly because
Speaker 1: the family that owns the access still lives out there
Speaker 1: and ask me not to. Two brothers, Dale was twenty
Speaker 1: six and Kevin was nineteen, and they'd been running trot
Speaker 1: lines on that stretch of water every summer since their
Speaker 1: father started taking them along as kids. If you've never
Speaker 1: done it, a trot line is a heavy main line
Speaker 1: strung along the river with baited drop lines hanging off
Speaker 1: of it. You set it in the evening, you run
Speaker 1: it in the dark, and you run it again at
Speaker 1: first light.
Speaker 2: And it isn't a.
Speaker 1: Sport it's a way to fill a freezer with flathead catfish.
Speaker 1: It also means being on the water at hours when
Speaker 1: nobody else in the county is awake. Their father had
Speaker 1: a rule about it, which was that you never set
Speaker 1: a line and leave it overnight without somebody within earshot,
Speaker 1: as a big flathead will drown itself fighting the line
Speaker 1: and you've wasted a fish. That rule is the whole
Speaker 1: reason those two were sleeping on a gravel bar instead
Speaker 1: of at home in their beds. They set the line
Speaker 1: at dusk, baited with live sunfish, and camped about a
Speaker 1: quarter mile downstream from where they'd tied off two sleeping bags,
Speaker 1: a fire, a cooler, and a fourteen foot john boat
Speaker 1: pulled halfway up on the rocks. An Ozark River at
Speaker 1: night in July is one of the finest places on
Speaker 1: this earth, and I say that as somebody who spent
Speaker 1: a lot of nights outside in a lot of states.
Speaker 1: The water runs cold out of the gravel, even when
Speaker 1: the air still holding eighty degrees.
Speaker 2: At midnight.
Speaker 1: There's fog coming up off the shoals and sycamores hanging
Speaker 1: white over the water where the moonlight catches the bark
Speaker 1: and frogs going the whole time, and every so often
Speaker 1: a beaver slapping somewhere downstream to remind you it's out there.
Speaker 1: Kevin was asleep, Dale wasn't because Dale had had too
Speaker 1: much coffee. Sometime around midnight, he heard something come into
Speaker 1: the water upstream. It was a two beat waiting sound.
Speaker 1: Anybody who spent nights on an Ozark river knows what
Speaker 1: a deer sounds like crossing a shoal, which is a fast, scrambling,
Speaker 1: foe count noise with a lot of splash in it.
Speaker 1: That's over in a couple of seconds. A cow's heavier
Speaker 1: and clumsier, but it's more or less the same rhythm.
Speaker 1: What Dale heard was slow and even, and it came
Speaker 1: in twos, with a pause between each step, long enough
Speaker 1: that he started counting them in his head, and it
Speaker 1: was coming downstream through the shallows in no hurry at all.
Speaker 1: He sat up and woke his brother. By the time
Speaker 1: Kevin was awake, it had gotten closer and they could
Speaker 1: both hear it, and Dale said the thing that turned
Speaker 1: his stomach was the amount of water being moved. He
Speaker 1: said it sounded like a man weighing. If a man
Speaker 1: weighed six hundred pounds. Then the smell came down.
Speaker 2: The river ahead of it. Both brothers described.
Speaker 1: That smell the same way when I talked to them
Speaker 1: years apart, and neither of them knew what the other
Speaker 1: had told me. They both said it was like a
Speaker 1: dead animal that had been out in the sun, with
Speaker 1: something sharp underneath it. Kevin added one detail his brother
Speaker 1: didn't mention, which is that it came in waves. It'd
Speaker 1: be there and then it'd be gone, and then it
Speaker 1: had come back stronger. Kevin was sitting up in his
Speaker 1: bag by then, with his boot still off.
Speaker 2: He told me the smell.
Speaker 1: Was what convinced him his brother wasn't messing with him,
Speaker 1: because Dale had a long history of messing with him,
Speaker 1: and no practical joke in the world produces that. Dale
Speaker 1: reached into the boat and got the spotlight. They had
Speaker 1: one of those rechargeable handheld spotlights, the kind everybody in
Speaker 1: that country used for running lines and looking for eyes
Speaker 1: on a bank. Dale said he didn't want to turn
Speaker 1: it on and couldn't think of a single other thing
Speaker 1: to do, so he pointed it upstream and hit the
Speaker 1: switch at about forty yards, standing in water up to
Speaker 1: the middle of its thighs. There was something looking back
Speaker 1: at them. Forty yards is nothing, by the way, it's
Speaker 1: the length of a decent cast. Put a spotlight on
Speaker 1: a deer at forty yards and you can count the
Speaker 1: points it was facing them square, And Dale said the
Speaker 1: first thing his brain tried to do was make it
Speaker 1: a man out in the river, and the second thing
Speaker 1: his brain did was throw that out because of the width.
Speaker 1: He kept coming back to the with every time he
Speaker 1: told it, and the way he put it was that
Speaker 1: the shoulders were wider than a doorway. The head came
Speaker 1: up to a slight ridge on top and sat down low,
Speaker 1: with no neck showing, and the arms were long enough
Speaker 1: that the hands hung lower than a man's hands hang.
Speaker 1: The hair was wet and dark and lying flat against
Speaker 1: the body. The eyes didn't glow the way a deer's
Speaker 1: eyes glow in a light, and Dale was specific about that.
Speaker 1: He said, there was a dull reflection off them, like
Speaker 1: light coming back off wet stone, and that was all.
Speaker 1: It stood in that beam for four or five seconds.
Speaker 1: Dale said he didn't move the light and couldn't have
Speaker 1: if he'd wanted to, because his hand had locked around it.
Speaker 1: And Kevin was on his feet beside him by then,
Speaker 1: and neither one of them said a word to the
Speaker 1: other the entire time it was standing there. Then it
Speaker 1: raised one arm up across its face, turned and walked
Speaker 1: out of the water toward the far bank. Kevin said,
Speaker 1: the piece he's never gotten out of his head is
Speaker 1: watching it climb that bank. It was a steep cut,
Speaker 1: four or five feet of undercut gravel and clay, with
Speaker 1: willows growing along the top of it. And he said
Speaker 1: the thing went up and what looked like one movement
Speaker 1: without ever using its hands. They heard it go through
Speaker 1: the willows, and they heard it working up the slope
Speaker 1: through the timber for a good while after, and the
Speaker 1: further away it got, the worse it was, because the
Speaker 1: further away it got, the more they had to imagine.
Speaker 1: Then they heard rocks, three of them over ten minutes
Speaker 1: or so, each one landing out in the water somewhere
Speaker 1: off the gravel bar, not close enough to hit anybody,
Speaker 1: but big enough to make a real splash. And Dale
Speaker 1: said the last one came in close enough that he
Speaker 1: felt the water on his arm. Dale said the rocks
Speaker 1: were what moved him, not the sighting. He said he
Speaker 1: could live with something walking down the middle of a
Speaker 1: river atight, But a rock coming out of a dark
Speaker 1: tree line and landing near your boat means whatever through
Speaker 1: it can still see you, but you can't see it.
Speaker 2: They didn't stay.
Speaker 1: They put the fire out, loaded the boat, and ran
Speaker 1: that river in the dark all the way down to
Speaker 1: the access, which is a genuinely dangerous thing to do
Speaker 1: on a shoal heavy ozark stream, and tells you what
Speaker 1: those two thought about. Spending the rest of the night
Speaker 1: where they were, neither one of them slept. They sat
Speaker 1: in a truck at the boat access with the doors
Speaker 1: locked and the windows up. At around five in the morning,
Speaker 1: Dale drove them to their father's house and woke him up.
Speaker 1: I asked him once what he said standing in that
Speaker 1: doorway at five in the morning, and he told me
Speaker 1: he said there was something on the river and they
Speaker 1: needed him to come look at the ground. Their father
Speaker 1: spent most of the drive telling both his sons they'd
Speaker 1: spooked themselves in the dark, which is what fathers do,
Speaker 1: and which is more or less what I'd have said
Speaker 1: in his position, He'd run that river his whole life
Speaker 1: and never seen it thing. The three of them were
Speaker 1: back out there at daylight, and there were three things
Speaker 1: waiting on them. The first was the trot line. It
Speaker 1: had been pulled. The main line was slack, one end
Speaker 1: had come loose from the willow it was tied to,
Speaker 1: and two of the drops were broken off. The second
Speaker 1: was up on the gravel bar. There was a catfish
Speaker 1: lying on the rocks, about thirty feet from where their
Speaker 1: sleeping bags had been. Kevin said it was about eight
Speaker 1: or ten pounds. It had been torn open along the belly,
Speaker 1: with part of it gone, and it was lying out
Speaker 1: in the open, up away from the water. Their father
Speaker 1: walked around that fish for a while without touching it.
Speaker 1: He'd been running that river since the fifties, and he'd
Speaker 1: seen every animal in the valley take a fish off
Speaker 1: a line at one time or another. And both his
Speaker 1: sons watched him look at it and say nothing, which
Speaker 1: they told me separately was worse than anything he could
Speaker 1: have said. The third thing was the tracks. They found
Speaker 1: them in a strip of wet sand where the gravel
Speaker 1: bar ran down into the river, and there were more
Speaker 1: of them, poorer ones pressed into the loose gravel going
Speaker 1: up the far bank. In the sand, there were five
Speaker 1: clear impressions in a line fifteen and three quarter inches long,
Speaker 1: six and a half inches across the ball. Five toes,
Speaker 1: with the big toe noticeably larger than the others and
Speaker 1: set almost in line with them. No arch they could
Speaker 1: see anywhere in the impression, and a broad rounded heel,
Speaker 1: and no claw marks in any of them. Their father
Speaker 1: did the measuring. Kevin held the dumb end of the tape,
Speaker 1: and Dale wrote the numbers on the back of a
Speaker 1: gas receipt, and that receipt went into a coffee can
Speaker 1: in a shed, and it's still in there in pencil
Speaker 1: in a nineteen year old's handwriting with the date and
Speaker 1: the name of the shoal on it. Heiled a heel
Speaker 1: between the prints, came out at fifty two inches. And
Speaker 1: then they did something almost nobody does. Their father drove
Speaker 1: all the way back into town, bought two bags of
Speaker 1: plaster of Paris at the hardware store, drove back out
Speaker 1: to the river, and the three of them poured the
Speaker 1: best of those tracks right on the gravel bar. Stay
Speaker 1: tuned for more Backwoods big Foot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. The casts sat in a shed for
Speaker 1: twenty two years. It's the kind of shed. Everybody in
Speaker 1: that part of the country has a push mower with
Speaker 1: a flat tire, coffee cans of bolts, a chest freezer
Speaker 1: running off an extension cord, and up above the workbench,
Speaker 1: under a folded feedsack, a slab of plaster about the
Speaker 1: size of a serving platter. It's heavy and it's ugly,
Speaker 1: but the shape of that foot is unmistakable, wide for
Speaker 1: its length, toes in a nearly straight row, and a
Speaker 1: break across the middle of it, about where the ball
Speaker 1: of your own foot meets your arch. Except there's nothing
Speaker 1: above that break, no arch at all, just a wide, flat,
Speaker 1: heavy foot that pushed off out of the sand and
Speaker 1: left a ridge behind it. There's one more piece to
Speaker 1: this one. An older man farmed a bottom about two
Speaker 1: miles down river from that gravel bar, and Dale knew
Speaker 1: him a little. Once the story got around, and in
Speaker 1: a county like that, it takes about four days, the
Speaker 1: old man went out of his way to say something
Speaker 1: to him. He said he'd been hearing about that thing
Speaker 1: on the river since he was a boy, and that
Speaker 1: his own father had called it the river man. And
Speaker 1: he told Dale it comes through in July. That's the
Speaker 1: rest stop. Five accounts, four decades, five states, and five
Speaker 1: people who all ended up having a version of the
Speaker 1: same experience afterward. The grandfather who said, will never speak
Speaker 1: of this again. The family in the car who got
Speaker 1: annoyed and told a sixteen year old to drop it.
Speaker 1: The friends who teased a man until he quit talking.
Speaker 1: The research group that never answered the letter. The seven
Speaker 1: years of silence from a twenty three year old who
Speaker 1: couldn't find.
Speaker 2: One person to tell.
Speaker 1: I think about that fisherman's tackle box more than you'd expect.
Speaker 1: It's a strange thing to fixate on. But a young
Speaker 1: man walked away from a rod and a box and
Speaker 1: four fish he'd caught that morning and never went back
Speaker 1: for any of it, And everything he owned out there
Speaker 1: is still lying on a bank in West Virginia getting
Speaker 1: rained on twenty some years later. That's what the moment
Speaker 1: actually cost him. Not the story and not the ridicule,
Speaker 1: but a rod he'd paid for and a place he
Speaker 1: loved that he could never go back to. What I
Speaker 1: keep noticing about all five of these is that it's
Speaker 1: never the big dramatic parts that stay with me. It's
Speaker 1: a doorknob that jiggled twice Instead of a door that
Speaker 1: got pounded on, it's dogs that barked one way for
Speaker 1: two nights and yelped a completely different way on the third.
Speaker 1: It's a man tying orange flagging tape around a water
Speaker 1: oak so he could come back the next day with
Speaker 1: a tape measure and a set of tracks and wet
Speaker 1: sand with no claw marks in them. And two brothers
Speaker 1: interviewed years apart, who both said the smell came in waves.
Speaker 1: If you're listening to this and you've got a story
Speaker 1: of your own that you've never let out of your mouth,
Speaker 1: my offer is the same as it's always been. I'll
Speaker 1: tell it the way you give it to me. I
Speaker 1: won't use your name without your say so, and I'm
Speaker 1: not going to laugh at you.
Speaker 2: You can reach me directly via.
Speaker 1: Email at Brian at Paranormalworldproductions dot com, or you can
Speaker 1: leave me a voicemail by clicking the button right here
Speaker 1: in the show notes. And if you can't get enough
Speaker 1: and want more incredible encounter stories, or maybe you want
Speaker 1: to dive into history they wish we'd forget, head over
Speaker 1: to our website Paranormalworldproductions dot com. You can sign up
Speaker 1: for our free newsletter and check out my other shows,
Speaker 1: Sasquatch Odyssey and Disturbing History. You can also search for
Speaker 1: them right now wherever you're listening, follow or subscribe to
Speaker 1: the show, and turn on auto downloads so you never
Speaker 1: miss a thing. All right, the sun's up over the
Speaker 1: truck stop sign, and there's a state line about forty
Speaker 1: minutes north of here. Let's get back on the road.
Speaker 1: We've still got most of a country left to cover.
Speaker 1: The PA