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 just finished recording an interview for Sasquatch Odyssey. I
Speaker 1: sat down with friend and fellow researcher named Natalie Smearman,
Speaker 1: and by the time we wrapped, I knew I'd be
Speaker 1: sitting back down at this mic and telling you about
Speaker 1: it over here too, because what she shared with me
Speaker 1: wasn't the kind of thing you keep to one show.
Speaker 1: Some encounters need a wider audience. Some encounters, frankly need
Speaker 1: a campfire and a long stretch of quiet woods to
Speaker 1: settle into. So that's what we're going to do tonight.
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you what Natalie told me, her words,
Speaker 1: her experiences, in the order she lived them, from the
Speaker 1: moment she started taking this seriously, all the way through
Speaker 1: the week she spent at land between the Lakes that
Speaker 1: fundamentally rewrote her understanding of what's out there. Natalie grew
Speaker 1: up in West Virginia, and, like a lot of us
Speaker 1: who came up in places where the woods pressed right
Speaker 1: up against the back porch, she heard the Bigfoot stories
Speaker 1: her whole childhood. Heard them at school, heard them from
Speaker 1: older cousins, heard them from parents trying to keep kids
Speaker 1: from doing the dumb things kids do.
Speaker 2: In the woods after dark.
Speaker 1: Don't go out to that party, don't run off into
Speaker 1: the trees, don't drag a keg out past the tree
Speaker 1: line and disappear for the night, because something out there
Speaker 1: will get you. She thought it was a joke, That's
Speaker 1: how she said it. They all thought it was a joke.
Speaker 1: Parental nonsense, the kind of thing grown up say when
Speaker 1: they're tired of arguing and want to scare you straight.
Speaker 1: She was raised hearing about this creature, and she filed
Speaker 1: it under the same drawer where most kids filed the
Speaker 1: Boogeyman and the closet monster, funny stories. Nothing more. Then
Speaker 1: life moved her down to Florida. She's settling into Central Florida,
Speaker 1: raising two kids, going about her business, and one evening,
Speaker 1: the local news comes on, not some grainy YouTube channel,
Speaker 1: not a friend of a friend on social media, the
Speaker 1: actual local news, and the anchor leads with a story
Speaker 1: about a bigfoot sighting in the Okalla National Forest about
Speaker 1: an hour and a half from where she's living. She
Speaker 1: told me her brain just stopped, because if the news
Speaker 1: is reporting it, somebody saw something. The news doesn't lead
Speaker 1: with the boogeyman. The news leads with what people are
Speaker 1: actually calling in about. And here was her local affiliate
Speaker 1: in central Florida, of all places, talking about bigfoot in
Speaker 1: the swamp pines like it was just another item on
Speaker 1: the rundown. That was the moment for her. That was
Speaker 1: the spark. She went home and started reading, and she
Speaker 1: didn't read casually. She read the way somebody reads when
Speaker 1: they've just realized that a thing they laughed at their
Speaker 1: whole life might be standing in the trees behind the house. Books,
Speaker 1: magazine articles, old interviews, documentaries on whatever.
Speaker 2: Channel was running them.
Speaker 1: Whatever she could find, she ran down. She started piecing
Speaker 1: together a picture of this creature from every angle she
Speaker 1: could pull. And then life moved her again. She landed
Speaker 1: up north of Boston for a stretch northern Massachusetts, and
Speaker 1: right around that time, the local site reports out of
Speaker 1: western Massachusetts started coming in heavy forest country out there,
Speaker 1: the Berkshires bleeding into the Vermont border, people reporting bipedal
Speaker 1: creatures moving through the timber. So she added that to
Speaker 1: her file, Florida sidings, Massachusetts sidings. The map kept getting bigger.
Speaker 1: By the time she'd move back down to Florida, the
Speaker 1: show Finding Bigfoot was on the air. Now, I'll tell
Speaker 1: you what she told me about that show. She knew
Speaker 1: it was entertainment, she knew it was a production. But
Speaker 1: even through the bits that played for laughs, there were
Speaker 1: nuggets in there that pointed her toward more serious sources.
Speaker 1: She'd watch an episode here, a researcher mentioned a methodology
Speaker 1: or a region or a name, and she'd go track
Speaker 1: that thread, pull on it, see what was at the
Speaker 1: other end. The thing was, she was a mom of
Speaker 1: two young kids. At that point, she wasn't packing a
Speaker 1: tent and heading into the National forest for a week. Couldn't,
Speaker 1: wasn't realistic, So her research stayed in books and on
Speaker 1: score theoretical studied. She built up years of reading without
Speaker 1: ever once stepping into the woods to look for one
Speaker 1: of these things herself. That changed in March of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four. Her marriage ended fast. She didn't dress it
Speaker 1: up for me on the call, and I'm not going
Speaker 1: to dress it up for you either. It went into
Speaker 1: the toilet, was how she put it, quick and ugly.
Speaker 1: And her birthday was March sixteenth, right in the middle
Speaker 1: of the wreckage. So she did something for herself. She
Speaker 1: bought herself a VIP ticket to the Great Florida Bigfoot
Speaker 1: Conference in Okalla two days Friday and Saturday, booked a
Speaker 1: hotel room, drove herself out there alone, and told herself
Speaker 1: she was going to learn as much as she possibly
Speaker 1: could and talked to as many people as she possibly
Speaker 1: could in the time she had on the ground. That
Speaker 1: weekend cracked her life open. She met Adam Davis there,
Speaker 1: She met RPG, She met Ken Gearhard, she met witnesses
Speaker 1: with encounter stories spanning Florida all the way up through
Speaker 1: North Carolina, people who had seen things, heard things, lived
Speaker 1: through things, and who were willing to sit and tell
Speaker 1: her about it. Because she was sitting and listening, the
Speaker 1: southeast was well represented. The Florida community came out in force,
Speaker 1: and by the time she drove home from that conference,
Speaker 1: her whole posture toward the subject had shifted. She wasn't
Speaker 1: a reader anymore. She was about to become a participant.
Speaker 1: Her next move was the Gatlinburg conference. She volunteered up there,
Speaker 1: worked the event, and then because of the people she'd met,
Speaker 1: she got an invitation that most folks dream about. She
Speaker 1: got to go out into the forest with Shane Corson,
Speaker 1: with Amy bou with Lester Kerr. Names you've heard on
Speaker 1: this show, names that mean something in this community. She
Speaker 1: told me, she felt like she'd won the lottery. They
Speaker 1: took her out for the day, showed her how they squatched,
Speaker 1: what to look for, how to read the ground, how
Speaker 1: to smell check in area, how rocks get arranged. The
Speaker 1: whole vocabulary of field research taught to her first hand
Speaker 1: by people who've been doing it for decades. She was
Speaker 1: soaking it up asking questions, watching how they moved through
Speaker 1: the timber. By the end of that day, she had
Speaker 1: more practical knowledge in her head than years of reading
Speaker 1: had given her. And that's where she made the mistake.
Speaker 1: I'm going to say this exactly the way she said
Speaker 1: it to me, because she was emphatic about it. Don't
Speaker 1: do this, Nobody listening should ever do this. She decided
Speaker 1: to go solo camping in the Everglades. There's a campground
Speaker 1: behind the Skunk Ape headquarters, just south of Alligator Alley.
Speaker 1: She booked it, drove down by herself off season, set
Speaker 1: up her tent. There were a handful of other campers
Speaker 1: way off in the distance, but for all practical purposes,
Speaker 1: she was alone in one of the most predator rich
Speaker 1: environments on the North American continent.
Speaker 2: She had her bare spray. That was it.
Speaker 1: She set up camp, and she told me looking back,
Speaker 1: she set up camp in a way that made her
Speaker 1: look as vulnerable as possible. A solo woman in a tent,
Speaker 1: off season, way out from any other human being anything
Speaker 1: in those swamps could have decided to come check her out,
Speaker 1: and there wouldn't have been a single thing she could
Speaker 1: have done about it. She knows that now. She knew
Speaker 1: it then on some level, but she'd just spent a
Speaker 1: weekend with the best researchers in the country, and she
Speaker 1: was riding the high Around one point thirty in the morning,
Speaker 1: she heard a chirp. Now she's awake, she's lying there
Speaker 1: in the tent listening, and she thought to herself, that's
Speaker 1: not a normal sound, not for the time of night,
Speaker 1: not for the spot, just a single sharp chirp out
Speaker 1: in the dark. So she lay there, listening for what
Speaker 1: came next. What came next was footsteps right beside her tent,
Speaker 1: heavy footsteps, close enough that the ground vibrated, close enough
Speaker 1: that she could feel something moving past the thin nylon
Speaker 1: wall a few inches from her face. And then after
Speaker 1: the footsteps, she heard what sounded like a small child
Speaker 1: trying to talk soft garbled, the kind of vocalization that
Speaker 1: doesn't belong in a swamp at one point thirty in
Speaker 1: the morning, when the nearest human being is half a
Speaker 1: mile away.
Speaker 2: She sat up.
Speaker 1: By the time she sat up and looked, there was
Speaker 1: nothing there. Now here's where Natalie's mind started working the
Speaker 1: way a researcher's mind ought to work. She got out
Speaker 1: of her tent the next morning, talked to some of
Speaker 1: the locals around the area. Some of them said, oh,
Speaker 1: you had a skunk ape, you had a big foot encounter.
Speaker 1: They wanted to plug it right into the most exciting
Speaker 1: box on the shelf. She wouldn't let them, She told me,
Speaker 1: And this is the part I want you to remember.
Speaker 1: You've got to look at it holistically. You've got to
Speaker 1: consider every possible explanation. Don't just pick the answer you
Speaker 1: want and call it a day. That's not research, that's
Speaker 1: wishful thinking. And she was determined not to fall into
Speaker 1: that trap her first time out. So she dug into
Speaker 1: it and she figured out what had actually happened. It
Speaker 1: was a male Florida panther. The chirp was a panther call,
Speaker 1: the footsteps were a big cat moved moving in to investigate,
Speaker 1: and the small child vocalization was the panther doing what
Speaker 1: panthers do when they're trying to figure out what's in
Speaker 1: a tent that they can smell from a distance. A
Speaker 1: lot of researchers would have walked out of those swamps
Speaker 1: the next morning, convinced they'd had a skunk ape encounter,
Speaker 1: would have dined out on that story for the rest
Speaker 1: of their lives.
Speaker 2: She didn't.
Speaker 1: She did the work, traced it back to the actual cause,
Speaker 1: and added it to her growing body of knowledge as
Speaker 1: a lesson in restraint. Don't claim what you can't prove,
Speaker 1: even when the story sounds better the other way. A
Speaker 1: couple months later, the call came Adam Davis from Relic Films.
Speaker 1: He'd been watching her, watching how she carried herself, watching
Speaker 1: the work she was putting in, and he told her
Speaker 1: they were looking for somebody to bring on for filming
Speaker 1: and they'd love to have her on the team. February
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty five, she joined them, and from that
Speaker 1: point on she wasn't a hobbyist with a tent and
Speaker 1: some bear spray. She was a researcher with a film crew,
Speaker 1: going into places most of us will never set foot in.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: From February through November of twenty twenty five, Natalie was
Speaker 1: out in the field constantly. She heard whoops, wood knocks, screams, growls, grunts.
Speaker 1: She heard them in pockets all over the country. She
Speaker 1: heard them in the Everglades, where she sat one night
Speaker 1: listening to two of these things vocalized back and forth
Speaker 1: across miles of open swamp, just talking to each other
Speaker 1: in the dark, and she couldn't get a visual on
Speaker 1: either one because there's no line of sight in that
Speaker 1: country at night. She heard them up north. She investigated
Speaker 1: graveyards and forest edges and ridge lines. What she didn't
Speaker 1: do in all those months was actually see one until
Speaker 1: November of twenty twenty five. And when she finally did,
Speaker 1: she didn't see one. She saw several. She saw things
Speaker 1: she still doesn't have words for. She saw lights, she
Speaker 1: saw orbs. She saw a creature charge her in the dark,
Speaker 1: and she saw a bigfoot the size of a small
Speaker 1: car walk behind her truck and appear into thin air.
Speaker 1: She and the team went to a place called Land
Speaker 1: between the Lakes. If you're not familiar with it, let
Speaker 1: me set the stage for you, because the geography matters.
Speaker 1: Land between the Lakes is a one hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: thousand acre stretch of forest sitting between Kentucky Lake and
Speaker 1: Lake Barkley along the Kentucky and Tennessee border. It's a
Speaker 1: National Recreation Area federally administered, and it has a reputation
Speaker 1: in the High Strangeness community that's hard to overstate. People
Speaker 1: go missing there, people see things there. Natalie told me
Speaker 1: the area has a long and violent history of death
Speaker 1: and bloodshed, going back generations, combat disease, the kind of
Speaker 1: small town tragedies that pile up over a century and
Speaker 1: never quite leave. And scattered across those one hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy thousand acres are a great number of cemeteries, old ones,
Speaker 1: forgotten ones, family plots that the forest has half swallowed
Speaker 1: and never given back.
Speaker 2: She has theories about why the area is the way
Speaker 2: it is.
Speaker 1: We'll get to those for now. Just hold the picture
Speaker 1: in your head. One hundred and seventy thousand acres heavy forest,
Speaker 1: cemeteries scattered through it like bones, and documented sightings of Bigfoot,
Speaker 1: of dog men, of crawlers, of UFOs, of portals of
Speaker 1: every category of weird this field knows how to name.
Speaker 1: That's where Natalie went in November. Before they ever set
Speaker 1: foot on the ground, she had a conversation with Greg Ogles.
Speaker 1: Greg is the producer, owner, and director of Relic Films.
Speaker 1: He's the man calling shots on what they film and
Speaker 1: how they film it, and Natalie had pitched him a
Speaker 1: series of experiments she wanted to run that week. Things
Speaker 1: She'd been thinking about things that, by her own admission,
Speaker 1: were on the outlandish side. She told me, Greg has
Speaker 1: never once told her no, not once. She'll come to
Speaker 1: him with something dangerous, something strange, something that any reasonable
Speaker 1: producer would push back on, and Greg wild look at
Speaker 1: her and say, let's try it. So when she pitched
Speaker 1: her ideas for Land between the Lakes, he didn't blink.
Speaker 1: He told her to go for it. Here was her plan.
Speaker 1: She'd been reading reports out of Land between the Lakes
Speaker 1: about attacks on people, specifically attacks where the victims were
Speaker 1: noted to be wearing heavy perfumes or cologonnes. That detail
Speaker 1: kept showing up in the reports. The victim was wearing
Speaker 1: something strong, something with pheromones, and Natalie's theory was that
Speaker 1: whatever was out there in those woods was being drawn
Speaker 1: in by the scent. So she ran the experiment. She
Speaker 1: drove to a department store and bought Obsession for Men,
Speaker 1: the cologne specifically because it contains pheromones. Obsession for Men
Speaker 1: has been used by big Cat researchers for years to
Speaker 1: draw cougars and jaguars in for camera trap photography. The
Speaker 1: stuff works. She picked that up. Then she went to
Speaker 1: Victoria's Secret and bought their teas line, also for the
Speaker 1: pheromone content. Then she added Jovanne Musk to the mix,
Speaker 1: three different scent products, all loaded with the chemicals that
Speaker 1: mammals respond to. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. Then she went to
Speaker 1: the dollar store. She bought brightly colored dog toys, the
Speaker 1: cheapest plastic ones she could find, and brightly colored feather
Speaker 1: boas because she wanted visual bait as well as scent bait.
Speaker 1: She wanted whatever was coming in to see something and
Speaker 1: to smell something at the same time. So she got
Speaker 1: back to camp and she saturated those dog toys with
Speaker 1: all three cents, drowned them in the stuff. Then she
Speaker 1: tied them around the trees that ring their base camp,
Speaker 1: saturated bait visible from any direction, strung in a perimeter
Speaker 1: around where they were sleeping. She told me, why not,
Speaker 1: might as well try to bring them right into camp
Speaker 1: and see what happens. The first night out, they didn't
Speaker 1: stay at camp. They ran their first investigation. They started
Speaker 1: in a graveyard. There's a logic to that. By the way,
Speaker 1: in land between the lakes, a disproportionate number of the
Speaker 1: sidings happen in or around the cemeteries scattered through the forest.
Speaker 1: Whatever's in those woods has a relationship with those places.
Speaker 1: So the team went to one of the older ones
Speaker 1: set up and walked in to establish a baseline. That
Speaker 1: standard practice, walk in, calm, look around, listen, see what
Speaker 1: the area feels like before you start any active investigation work.
Speaker 1: They didn't get to a baseline. The moment they were
Speaker 1: inside the cemetery, every single person in the group felt
Speaker 1: it at the same time, an intense pressure, the kind
Speaker 1: of pressure where you know you're being watched, and you're
Speaker 1: not just being watched from one direction, You're being watched
Speaker 1: from all sides at once, from the trees, from the ground,
Speaker 1: from angles that don't make sense for a single observer.
Speaker 1: Martin Groves was with them. Martin had walked a little
Speaker 1: ahead of the rest of the group, and he turned
Speaker 1: around and told them, calm the way a man like
Speaker 1: Martin says things, that he had a crawler in the forest.
Speaker 2: He could see it. So the rest of the group
Speaker 2: moved up to where.
Speaker 1: He was standing and they tried to get eyes on
Speaker 1: whatever he'd seen. They couldn't, but that pressure on them
Speaker 1: was getting heavier by the minute. Their security team was
Speaker 1: running about ten minutes behind. The security team came in
Speaker 1: with long guns, two or three men armed and ready,
Speaker 1: taking up positions on the perimeter of the group, and
Speaker 1: Natalie told me the moment those men with rifles took
Speaker 1: up their positions, every bit of the movement around them stopped.
Speaker 1: The pressure didn't fully release, but the activity, the sense
Speaker 1: of things moving in the trees halted on a dime,
Speaker 1: like it was being managed. Martin turned to her and
Speaker 1: told her to walk up the hill and start singing.
Speaker 1: She told me she looked at him like he had
Speaker 1: two heads sing out here in a graveyard in the
Speaker 1: middle of the woods, surrounded by armed men and whatever
Speaker 1: was in the trees. But Martin doesn't ask for things lightly.
Speaker 1: So she and Melissa, another woman on the team, walked
Speaker 1: up the hill together and they started singing, and everything
Speaker 1: went calm. The pressure released, the anxiety dropped, the sensation
Speaker 1: of being surrounded by hostile observers just evaporated. Whatever had
Speaker 1: been wringing the men like wolves around a campfire, backed
Speaker 1: off and settled down. It was, Natalie said, like a
Speaker 1: switch being flipped. Martin had a theory about why. He
Speaker 1: told her she'd calmed them the way a mother calms
Speaker 1: a frightened child. Most of the people who go into
Speaker 1: these woods to look for these creatures are men, loud men,
Speaker 1: armed men, men with bright lights and confident postures. And
Speaker 1: to whatever's in those woods, that whole package reads his threat.
Speaker 1: Three armed men with rifles and headlamps walking into your
Speaker 1: territory at night is not a friendly visit. It's an invasion.
Speaker 1: But two women walking up a hill singing that apparently
Speaker 1: registered differently. Natalie filed that one away, and she made
Speaker 1: a decision right there. If they wanted to make actual contact,
Speaker 1: they were going to have to go in differently. They
Speaker 1: were going to have to go in vulnerable, no long guns,
Speaker 1: no security perimeter, just researchers willing to be soft enough
Speaker 1: to get close. That decision is the reason for everything
Speaker 1: that happened next. It's also almost the reason none of
Speaker 1: them came out of those woods the next day at
Speaker 1: base camp. The activity started second night in Natalie's lying
Speaker 1: in her tent, and she hears heavy footsteps right outside
Speaker 1: the tent wall, big ones, not raccoon footsteps, not deer footsteps,
Speaker 1: the kind of weight that carries through the ground when
Speaker 1: something tall is walking past. She lay there and listened.
Speaker 1: Then she heard splashing. The team had a big bin
Speaker 1: of water set up at camp for showers, a big
Speaker 1: plastic tub of water with the day's heat soaked into it,
Speaker 1: and from her tent she heard somebody or something splashing
Speaker 1: the water hard, like a hand had gone in and
Speaker 1: started slapping the surface. Her first thought was that one
Speaker 1: of the guys had gotten drunk and was screwing around,
Speaker 1: because that would have been the boring explanation, the mundane explanation.
Speaker 1: She told me she was actually irritated lying there, thinking
Speaker 1: who is up at this hour playing in the shower
Speaker 1: water like a child. She was getting ready to climb
Speaker 1: out of her tent and go put a stop to it.
Speaker 1: Then she heard the scratching. The team had a big
Speaker 1: yetti cooler at camp. YETI coolers have these little molded
Speaker 1: indentations along the sides for grip, and whatever was at
Speaker 1: her tent had moved over to that cooler and started scratching,
Speaker 1: long scratches, methodical, like fingernails being dragged across the plastic,
Speaker 1: deliberately finding those indentations one at a time. She sat
Speaker 1: up pulled herself out of the tent. By the time
Speaker 1: she got out, nothing was there. The water in the
Speaker 1: bin was disturbed, the cooler was sitting where it had been,
Speaker 1: but whatever had been splashing and scratching was gone, and
Speaker 1: no human being had come out of any of the
Speaker 1: other tents. She checked. Everybody was asleep. It hadn't been
Speaker 1: one of the team. The pheromones were working, or at
Speaker 1: least something was working. Whatever Natalie had set up around
Speaker 1: camp with that bait was bringing things in, and those
Speaker 1: things were bold enough now to come right up to
Speaker 1: where the humans were sleeping, to play in their water,
Speaker 1: to explore their gear, to see what they were. That
Speaker 1: same trip, one night, she got up to use the bathroom.
Speaker 1: The bathroom was a structure about thirty or forty yards
Speaker 1: from where her tent was set, just a little outhouse
Speaker 1: with a hole in the ground, standard primitive camping set up.
Speaker 1: She had her flashlight. Everybody at camp knew where she
Speaker 1: was going, so she walked it. She got to the outhouse,
Speaker 1: did her business, and on her way back in the dark,
Speaker 1: she stopped because she heard something in the tree line,
Speaker 1: a growl low coming from the woods just beside the trail.
Speaker 1: She didn't run, she didn't shout. She turned faced the
Speaker 1: tree line, and she said, calm and steady, I hear you.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to come for you. I just need
Speaker 1: to use the restroom. And the thing in the woods
Speaker 1: didn't come for her either.
Speaker 2: It just stayed where it.
Speaker 1: Was, held its ground, like the two of them had
Speaker 1: reached a mutual understanding right there in the dark. You
Speaker 1: stay there, I'll stay here. We'll both get on with
Speaker 1: our nights. She walked back to her tent, and the
Speaker 1: whole way back she sang just a melody to let
Speaker 1: whatever was watching her know that she wasn't going to escalate.
Speaker 1: That she was the same calm presence from the cemetery
Speaker 1: and she was going to keep being that presence as
Speaker 1: long as she was on their land. By the time
Speaker 1: she got back to her tent, she was at peace
Speaker 1: with whatever was out there in the trees. That growl
Speaker 1: was a preview because the next night, that same growl,
Speaker 1: made by Natalie herself, became the trigger that broke open everything.
Speaker 2: Here's what they did.
Speaker 1: The next night, they split into teams. One team would
Speaker 1: stay at base camp running security. That was Martin Groves's job.
Speaker 1: Other teams would head to different locations across the area,
Speaker 1: and the team Natalie was on. The all female team
Speaker 1: plus two cameramen, was going back to that same cemetery
Speaker 1: from the first night, the one where the singing had
Speaker 1: calmed everything down. Greg Ogles and Jim were the cameramen.
Speaker 1: They each had a small pistol concealed under their jackets.
Speaker 1: That was the whole arsenal. No long guns, no security detail.
Speaker 1: Natalie had her bear spray, Greg and Jim had cameras
Speaker 1: and side arms. Everyone else was unarmed. The plan was Natalie's.
Speaker 1: She wanted to use the same growl she'd heard the
Speaker 1: night before at the bathroom. She was going to mimic
Speaker 1: that exact vocalization in that cemetery and see what came
Speaker 1: of it. They walked in, got about halfway up the
Speaker 1: slope of the cemetery, and Natalie did three growls. Everything
Speaker 1: broke loose from the top of the ridge line above them.
Speaker 1: There came a massive impact, a boom big enough that
Speaker 1: the ground beneath their feet shook, not a vibration, a
Speaker 1: shake like something the size of a refrigerator had been
Speaker 1: dropped from a height onto the dirt at the top
Speaker 1: of the hill. She growled again. It happened again, boom,
Speaker 1: the ground shaking, and now all around them in the
Speaker 1: trees movement, things shifting, branches moving, the kind of activity
Speaker 1: that tells you that the woods.
Speaker 2: Around you are no longer empty. This was it. They
Speaker 2: knew it. This was contact.
Speaker 1: Then Natalie looked up at the top of the hill
Speaker 1: and there was a light, bluish white, illuminating the back
Speaker 1: of one of the trees on the ridge line. Not
Speaker 1: a flashlight, not a lantern, a glow, the kind of
Speaker 1: glow that doesn't have a source you can point to.
Speaker 1: She asked the team if they were seeing it. Every
Speaker 1: single one of them said yes, they were seeing it too.
Speaker 1: None of them knew what it was. She told them
Speaker 1: to keep an eye on it. That's when the sounds
Speaker 1: got strange. They heard what sounded like a car driving past,
Speaker 1: the wish of a vehicle on a road, tires on pavement,
Speaker 1: but there was no road there. There hadn't been a
Speaker 1: road there in a hundred years.
Speaker 2: What they were.
Speaker 1: Hearing was a sound that didn't belong in the place
Speaker 1: they were standing. Melissa did a whoop, a long ape
Speaker 1: like vocalization, the way researchers do when they want to
Speaker 1: get a response, and the response came back as more
Speaker 1: booms from the ridge above them, But this time the
Speaker 1: booms had a rhythm to them, patterned almost like a
Speaker 1: drum beat, the way an indigenous tribe might pound out
Speaker 1: a beat at a ceremonial gathering. Not random impacts, coordinated ones.
Speaker 1: Then Jamie got sick. Jamie was another researcher on the team,
Speaker 1: and she suddenly turned to Natalie and told her she
Speaker 1: didn't feel well. She had a headache, she was nauseous.
Speaker 1: It had come over her and seconds Natalie told her
Speaker 1: to step in close, get behind her, use her body
Speaker 1: as a barrier against whatever was hitting her. Jamie did
Speaker 1: and she started to feel better. Then Jamie stepped back
Speaker 1: out and Melissa got hit with the same thing, same headache,
Speaker 1: same nausea, same suddenness. Melissa stepped behind Natalie and she
Speaker 1: started to.
Speaker 2: Feel a little better.
Speaker 1: Whatever was being directed at them, it was bouncing off Natalie.
Speaker 1: She wasn't getting any of it. Meanwhile, that light up
Speaker 1: on the ridge was changing. It was getting more defined,
Speaker 1: more intense. It was forming into a perfect oval shape,
Speaker 1: and around it now were tiny lights sparkling, moving the
Speaker 1: kind of thing she described as fairy lights dancing around
Speaker 1: the perimeter of this oval glow up at the top
Speaker 1: of the hill. She kept asking the team if they
Speaker 1: were seeing what she was seeing, because at that point,
Speaker 1: she told me, she'd entered a strange phase, a phase
Speaker 1: where she wasn't sure if her own eye were lying
Speaker 1: to her. She thought maybe she was hallucinating, Maybe the
Speaker 1: stress of the encounter, the adrenaline, the bad water, somewhere
Speaker 1: along the line, something had her seeing things that weren't there.
Speaker 1: So she kept checking, kept asking, and every single member
Speaker 1: of the team kept confirming, Yes, we see it, We
Speaker 1: see exactly what you're seeing. Then a dog started barking
Speaker 1: behind them, somewhere off in the distance, a dog. Now
Speaker 1: there was nobody living within miles of where they were.
Speaker 1: There were no homes, no campers nearby that they knew of,
Speaker 1: no farms, just one hundred and seventy thousand acres of
Speaker 1: federal forest with cemeteries.
Speaker 2: Scattered through it.
Speaker 1: But there was a dog somewhere in the dark, barking
Speaker 1: like it had something cornered. Greg decided to do a
Speaker 1: growl himself, a long, drawn out growl, mimicking the one
Speaker 1: Natalie had used. He let it ride out into the air,
Speaker 1: and that's when the crawler came out of the light.
Speaker 1: She was looking up at the hill, watching the oval glow,
Speaker 1: and out of that glow, on all fours a creature emerged, long, lanky,
Speaker 1: moving in a way that didn't belong to anything she'd
Speaker 1: ever seen. It came forward into the open and it
Speaker 1: stood there on all fours, swaying its body back and
Speaker 1: forth slowly side to side, with its head turned toward them.
Speaker 1: She called it out to the team. She said, I
Speaker 1: have a crawler at my twelve o'clock. She used the
Speaker 1: word crawler because she didn't know what else to call it.
Speaker 1: She didn't know what species this was. She didn't know
Speaker 1: what category to file it in. All she knew was
Speaker 1: that it was on all fours and it was moving wrong,
Speaker 1: long and lanky, head fixed on them, body rocking side
Speaker 1: to side. At the top of the hill, she asked
Speaker 1: the team again, are you seeing this? Is that thing
Speaker 1: actually moving up there? And again every member confirmed. Then
Speaker 1: Melissa and Jamie got sick at the same time. Both
Speaker 1: of them hit at once, both of them moving in
Speaker 1: close behind Natalie to use her as a shield, and
Speaker 1: while Natalie was looking up at that first crawler. A
Speaker 1: second one came out of the light, then a third.
Speaker 1: She told the team, I have three crawlers up there,
Speaker 1: three of them standing on all fours, swaying, watching the
Speaker 1: team in the cemetery below. Now nobody could get them
Speaker 1: on thermal nobody, not Natalie's thermal, not anybody else's. They
Speaker 1: were seeing all of this with their naked eyes. The light,
Speaker 1: the fairy lights, the crawlers, the movement, But thermal imaging,
Speaker 1: which should have lit up any warm body up on
Speaker 1: that ridge like a torch, was getting nothing. The thermals
Speaker 1: were blank. The eyes saw it, the instruments did not.
Speaker 1: The movement around them in the trees was closing in,
Speaker 1: and then.
Speaker 2: She heard Greg yell.
Speaker 1: Greg threw his camera from one hand to the other,
Speaker 1: reached under his jacket for the pistol. Natalie looked up
Speaker 1: and saw what he was reacting to. One of the
Speaker 1: crawlers was charging them. It came down off the ridge
Speaker 1: on all fours, a galloping kind of crawl, closing the
Speaker 1: distance in a hurry, coming straight at the team in
Speaker 1: the cemetery. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll
Speaker 1: be back after these messages. Natalie pulled out her bare spray.
Speaker 1: She told me she lunged forward as Greg was reaching
Speaker 1: for his side arm because she didn't want him to fire.
Speaker 1: She wanted to try the spray first. Bare spray shoots
Speaker 1: about fifteen to twenty feet. It comes out with a
Speaker 1: loud sound. A canister hiss combined with the propellant, and
Speaker 1: she pointed it at the charging crawler and let it go.
Speaker 1: The bare spray stopped it. The creature broke off, the
Speaker 1: charge retreated back up the hill. Whether it was the
Speaker 1: spray itself or the noise of the canister, something registered
Speaker 1: and it backed off. But now the team was in
Speaker 1: their own cloud. Bear spray doesn't discriminate. You can't fire
Speaker 1: it at something coming at you and then keep standing
Speaker 1: where you fired it. So the entire team had to
Speaker 1: retreat back down the hill away from the spray cloud,
Speaker 1: in a tight, close group, moving as one, making their
Speaker 1: way back down toward the trucks at the base of
Speaker 1: the cemetery. That's when the screaming started, a woman screaming
Speaker 1: in the field behind them. Jim whipped his camera around
Speaker 1: and he called out that there was something in the field. Kristin,
Speaker 1: who had her thermal up at that point, swung her
Speaker 1: thermal around to the same direction and she confirmed it.
Speaker 1: She had a large bipedal creature in the field watching them.
Speaker 1: The dog was still barking somewhere in the dark. That
Speaker 1: dog had not stopped. The three crawlers were still up
Speaker 1: on the ridge, moving back and forth, watching, and the
Speaker 1: activity in the trees around them was closing in tightening.
Speaker 1: Then Jim called out that his camera battery had died,
Speaker 1: not low dead. He swapped to his backup battery. The
Speaker 1: backup died too. In seconds. Greg said that his camera
Speaker 1: battery was dead too. Then phones started dying, every member
Speaker 1: of the team in sequence, watching their devices go to black. Cameras, phones,
Speaker 1: the thermals. Everything they had brought to document this encounter
Speaker 1: was dropping out of service simultaneously. They were dead in
Speaker 1: the water, standing in the dark in a cemetery, surrounded
Speaker 1: by closing movement, watched by three crawlers on a hill,
Speaker 1: watched by a bipedal creature in a field with no
Speaker 1: working cameras, no working phones, no working thermals. That's when
Speaker 1: she saw the bigfoot. She was looking around, trying to
Speaker 1: track everything, trying to keep her eyes on the ridge,
Speaker 1: on the field, on the trees, and she happened to
Speaker 1: look to her left. Two red orbs were sitting in
Speaker 1: front of her truck. She looked to her right, two
Speaker 1: more red orbs were sitting behind the other truck. Now
Speaker 1: she's tracking orbs. The light is still on the ridge,
Speaker 1: Crawlers are still on the ridge, there's a creature in
Speaker 1: the field, there's a dog barking. And in the middle
Speaker 1: of all of it, while every other member of her
Speaker 1: team was scanning a different direction, she saw a massive
Speaker 1: bigfoot walk out from behind her truck. It walked across
Speaker 1: her field of view, calm, in no hurry, and then
Speaker 1: it disappeared into thin air, just like that, midstride gone.
Speaker 1: And I want you to understand what kind of truck
Speaker 1: we're talking about. Natalie drives a Hyundai Santa Cruz. That's
Speaker 1: a small to mid size pickup. It is not a
Speaker 1: big truck. And the bottom of this bigfoot's rear end
Speaker 1: was sitting at the top of the bed of that truck.
Speaker 1: The arms were enormous, the chest was massive. When the
Speaker 1: creature was standing sideways, it was half the width of
Speaker 1: her truck side to side.
Speaker 2: She watched it walk.
Speaker 1: She watched it disappear, and nobody else on the team
Speaker 1: saw it. Every other person was looking somewhere else, tracking
Speaker 1: the field, tracking the ridge, trying to make their dead
Speaker 1: cameras work. She was the only one whose eyes happened
Speaker 1: to be in the right place at the right second,
Speaker 1: and by the time she could call it out, there
Speaker 1: was nothing to call out. The creature was gone. Greg
Speaker 1: called off the investigation due to safety concerns. He said,
Speaker 1: this is now a safety issue. We're getting in the
Speaker 1: trucks we're leaving. So the team piled into the vehicles,
Speaker 1: and the moment they were inside the trucks, every one
Speaker 1: of them got physically ill. Natalie told me it felt
Speaker 1: like somebody had a hand around her throat and was
Speaker 1: sitting on her chest at the same time. Couldn't breathe
Speaker 1: couldn't think, just nausea and pressure and the sense of
Speaker 1: something heavy on her body. Every single person in the
Speaker 1: trucks was hit with it. They drove out fast, climbed
Speaker 1: the hill out of the cemetery, made the turn onto
Speaker 1: the next dirt road, and the moment they made that turn,
Speaker 1: all of it stopped. The pressure released, the nausea was gone.
Speaker 1: Everyone in the trucks was suddenly fine. They had crossed
Speaker 1: an invisible line and left the whole field of influence
Speaker 1: behind them. They were trying to talk through what had
Speaker 1: just happened, all of them at once, trying to piece
Speaker 1: it together while it was still fresh. And what they
Speaker 1: kept coming back to was this, whatever had been at
Speaker 1: the cemetery had been actively trying to divert their attention.
Speaker 1: That's the language they all settled on. Diversion. Look here,
Speaker 1: look there, Look at this thing in the field. Look
Speaker 1: at the crawlers on the ridge, Look at the orbs
Speaker 1: in front of the trucks, look at the dead cameras,
Speaker 1: Look anywhere except at the thing that's actually happening. Because
Speaker 1: if your eyes are full of distractions, you're not going
Speaker 1: to see what's really moving. Natalie thinks that's why she
Speaker 1: was the only one who saw the Bigfoot disappear behind
Speaker 1: her truck. She just happened to look at the right
Speaker 1: spot during the one second they weren't successfully redirecting her.
Speaker 1: They got back to base camp, Martin Groves was waiting
Speaker 1: for them, and Martin had his own story. While they
Speaker 1: had been at the cemetery, getting hit with all of
Speaker 1: this the squatches had tried to come into base camp.
Speaker 1: I want to repeat that. While the team was off
Speaker 1: in the cemetery being charged by a crawler, two bigfoot
Speaker 1: had attempted to walk into base camp, where Martin was
Speaker 1: alone running security. The Pheromone bait had done exactly what
Speaker 1: Natalie hoped it would do. It brought them in, and
Speaker 1: they brought themselves in hard. Now, anybody who knows Martin
Speaker 1: Groves knows the man as a gentleman. He does not
Speaker 1: curse in front of women. He keeps his language clean.
Speaker 1: It's part of who he is. He looked at Natalie
Speaker 1: when she got back and he told her, and I'm
Speaker 1: quoting Natalie quoting Martin here. He told her, Natalie, I
Speaker 1: used bad language. I used language I would not say
Speaker 1: in front of you. He had to grab his stick
Speaker 1: and go after these two bigfoot to drive them out
Speaker 1: of camp. He was yelling at them, cursing at them,
Speaker 1: using language he was not proud of. He had his
Speaker 1: hand on his gun and was preparing to use it.
Speaker 1: He held them off with the stick and his voice
Speaker 1: until they finally backed off and left.
Speaker 2: The bait had worked.
Speaker 1: Now the team had a decision to make push forward
Speaker 1: or pull back.
Speaker 2: They pushed forward.
Speaker 1: The next night they went to a different cemetery, and
Speaker 1: this time they brought everybody, the whole crew, because they
Speaker 1: wanted as many witnesses as possible and as many cameras
Speaker 1: as possible in case the activity from the previous night repeated.
Speaker 2: This cemetery was set up.
Speaker 1: Next to a campable area that ran in a big loop,
Speaker 1: so they decided to split into two groups and approach
Speaker 1: from opposite ends. Half went one way, half went the other.
Speaker 1: Natalie was in the right hand group, Jamie was with her.
Speaker 1: Jamie's sister Amy was with her. A man named Sean
Speaker 1: was at the head of their group. The night was
Speaker 1: different this time. The previous night had been the day
Speaker 1: before a full moon. They'd had no flashlights on, just
Speaker 1: like the night before, because the moon was bright enough
Speaker 1: to navigate. Now the moon was full, they could see
Speaker 1: clearly in the timber outlines of trees, distant shapes. They
Speaker 1: were moving with all the light a full moon gives you.
Speaker 1: They got to a section of the loop where there
Speaker 1: were power lines. Jamie stopped the group. Jamie is one
Speaker 1: of those researchers who picks up on energy in a
Speaker 1: way other people don't. Some people have it, some people don't,
Speaker 1: and Jamie does.
Speaker 2: She told the group to hold up.
Speaker 1: She felt something. She didn't know if it was the
Speaker 1: power lines themselves throwing off some interference, or if it
Speaker 1: was something else. Amy raised her thermal. Amy started panting
Speaker 1: across the trees ahead of them, and then she stopped.
Speaker 1: She turned to Natalie quietly and said, I have a
Speaker 1: bipedal creature behind a tree. It's peeking out at us.
Speaker 1: Natalie looked at the thermal screen. There it was heat signature,
Speaker 1: tall behind a tree, peeking out and pulling back in
Speaker 1: the same way a person plays peekaboo with a child,
Speaker 1: except this thing was tall and it was hiding from
Speaker 1: them in the dark. Sean was at the head of
Speaker 1: the group. He decided to move forward to get a
Speaker 1: better angle. The thing growled at him. Sean stepped back.
Speaker 1: The growl was clear enough that he didn't need to
Speaker 1: be told twice, so they tried something different. They moved
Speaker 1: forward as a group, all together, same posture as the
Speaker 1: singing and the cemetery, calm presence, not aggressive, not threatening,
Speaker 1: just moving as a collective, and the creature didn't run.
Speaker 1: It moved away from the tree, and it started paralleling
Speaker 1: them in the forest, walking alongside them as they walked
Speaker 1: twenty five maybe thirty feet off into the timber. The
Speaker 1: forest was thick enough that they couldn't see it clearly,
Speaker 1: but they could hear it footfalls, branches, moving a presence,
Speaker 1: keeping pace with them through the trees. It walked with
Speaker 1: them for a while. Then they came to a service
Speaker 1: road that turned off to the right. Down at the
Speaker 1: bottom of that service road, a long way off, a
Speaker 1: man was camping. They could see his little campfire glowing
Speaker 1: in the distance, just a pinpoint of orange in the dark.
Speaker 1: And the moment they hit that intersection, the bipedal creature
Speaker 1: stopped paralleling them. It wouldn't go any further. Natalie's read
Speaker 1: on it, and I think it's a sound read, was
Speaker 1: that the creature had been working that area to scope
Speaker 1: out the camper, working out what kind of food was
Speaker 1: at that fire, whether it could be approached, whether it
Speaker 1: could be rated, and the team had just walked through
Speaker 1: its hunting ground. The creature had paralleled them for a
Speaker 1: stretch to monitor what they were doing, and it had
Speaker 1: stopped at the edge of the area it had been
Speaker 1: working because it wasn't going to give up on the
Speaker 1: camper for them. They kept walking, made their way around
Speaker 1: the loop, and right before they linked up with the
Speaker 1: other team, Jamie's sister, Amy spoke up again. Amy said
Speaker 1: she had just caught something on her thermal that she
Speaker 1: could not explain. Natalie asked her to describe it. Amy
Speaker 1: described it as a witch's hat, or maybe a small
Speaker 1: garden gnome, a small figure conical, floating across the forest
Speaker 1: floor and then moving out of sight. When they went
Speaker 1: to look, it was gone. Natalie told her to take
Speaker 1: a note of it. They'd come back to it. They
Speaker 1: didn't have time right then to investigate. They were on
Speaker 1: a clock to meet the other team at the rendezvous point,
Speaker 1: so they kept moving. Met the other team, did some
Speaker 1: yells together, got nothing in response, and then the whole
Speaker 1: crew broke down into smaller groups of two to four
Speaker 1: people each scattered across the area, just sitting and observing.
Speaker 1: Natalie didn't see another bipedal.
Speaker 2: Creature that night.
Speaker 1: What she did see was a full bodied apparition. She
Speaker 1: told me this casually, in the middle of describing a
Speaker 1: quiet stretch of the night, A full bodied apparition walking
Speaker 1: past her line of sight in the dark. She also
Speaker 1: saw faery lights all over the area and an orb
Speaker 1: whitish red floating through the trees. Other teams had their
Speaker 1: own sightings large orbs, shadow figures. One team heard something
Speaker 1: in the US they couldn't explain, possibly bipedal, but no
Speaker 1: visual to back it up. That's how that night went,
Speaker 1: quieter than the night before, but still alive with things
Speaker 1: that nobody could fully account for. Then they got back
Speaker 1: to base camp. Jim had been on camp security that night,
Speaker 1: just like Martin had been the night before, and Jim
Speaker 1: had bad news. He told them that the squatches had
Speaker 1: come in again, just like the night before, but this
Speaker 1: time they were more aggressive, significantly more. Jim is not
Speaker 1: a small man. Jim is not a meek man. He
Speaker 1: yelled at them, he cursed at them, he pulled his weapon,
Speaker 1: He tried every single thing he could think of to
Speaker 1: drive them off. Nothing worked. They kept pushing in, pushing closer,
Speaker 1: pushing into the camp itself. He had to get inside
Speaker 1: his tent and hunker down. That's the part that stays
Speaker 1: with me. A man with a gun with a clear
Speaker 1: sight line, with the confidence of his own training, decided
Speaker 1: the safest move was to go inside the tent and
Speaker 1: let them do whatever they were going to do. They
Speaker 1: wanted in, they wanted to observe, they wanted to be
Speaker 1: in the camp, and he wasn't going to win that fight.
Speaker 2: So they came in.
Speaker 1: And here's the part that I think tells you something
Speaker 1: about the intelligence of these creatures. The tents with people
Speaker 1: sleeping in them, they left alone, didn't touch a single one.
Speaker 1: But anybody in a hard camper, the kind with rigid walls,
Speaker 1: those they messed with. They went up to the hard
Speaker 1: campers and they pushed on them, knocked on them, shoved
Speaker 1: at them like they wanted whoever was inside to know
Speaker 1: they were out there. Every single hard camper in the
Speaker 1: base camp got pushed or knocked that night. Not one
Speaker 1: was missed. Methodical, deliberate. The team spent the rest of
Speaker 1: the trip just gathering what evidence they could, looking for prints,
Speaker 1: trying to understand the pattern of activity. They never even
Speaker 1: covered the whole area. One hundred and seventy thousand acres
Speaker 1: takes months to walk properly, and they a week. They
Speaker 1: covered a fraction of it. When she told me the
Speaker 1: whole arc of that week, I asked her what she
Speaker 1: made of it. She told me she went into land
Speaker 1: between the lakes with a handful of questions and came
Speaker 1: out with a basket full of them. She had more
Speaker 1: questions at the end than she had at the beginning.
Speaker 1: The crawlers, the rakes, whatever you want to call them,
Speaker 1: those were a complete shock. Nobody had been expecting them.
Speaker 1: The Bigfoot disappearing into thin air, that wasn't something she
Speaker 1: had a category for in her head before that night.
Speaker 1: The biggest thing that struck her was the cooperation. The
Speaker 1: bigfoot she saw walk behind her truck was massive. She
Speaker 1: told me point blank that creature could have killed every
Speaker 1: member of the team in a matter of seconds if
Speaker 1: it had wanted to, could have snapped every neck in
Speaker 1: twenty seconds or less, and it chose not to. It
Speaker 1: just stood back and let the rakes do the closing in.
Speaker 1: She compared it to a property owner letting the dogs out.
Speaker 1: You know how you've got pit bulls, she said, you're
Speaker 1: inside the house, strangers come into your yard, You let
Speaker 1: the dogs out, let them go handle it. That was
Speaker 1: the dynamic she felt that night. The Bigfoot was the
Speaker 1: property owner, the rakes were the dogs. And these two
Speaker 1: species or two whatever they are, is we're working together
Speaker 1: to manage a situation. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. She doesn't know how
Speaker 1: that works, she doesn't know what that means. She just
Speaker 1: knows she watched it happen. And here's where I want
Speaker 1: to tell you about another spot Natalie talked about because
Speaker 1: it's important context for everything she experienced. There's a place
Speaker 1: she calls the trifecta. It's the Amaeus Asylum in Missouri.
Speaker 1: It's an abandoned asylum. You can tour it. People go
Speaker 1: through it for the paranormal investigation crowd, ghost hunters, and
Speaker 1: so on. But the area around it, the forest around
Speaker 1: the building, has a documented history of bipedal creature sightings,
Speaker 1: both Bigfoot and dog Man. And on top of that,
Speaker 1: the area also get it's UFO sidings. That's the trifecta asylum, hauntings,
Speaker 1: cryptid sidings, UFO activity all in one spot. You can
Speaker 1: spend a few days there and probably hit all three.
Speaker 1: When Natalie went there last, it was overcast, so she
Speaker 1: didn't see any UFOs the cloud cover ate the sky,
Speaker 1: but she got plenty of paranormal activity inside the building,
Speaker 1: got growled at got pushed by something she couldn't see.
Speaker 1: There was an entity in the building, a doctor figure
Speaker 1: who was still hanging around the asylum because he believed
Speaker 1: he was needed there, believed he still had patience to
Speaker 1: care for, and he made it clear to the investigators
Speaker 1: that they were interrupting his patient care and they needed
Speaker 1: to leave. That was inside the building. Outside, in the forest,
Speaker 1: they heard growls, wood knocks, saw orbs in the trees
Speaker 1: in every direction. They sat out there for the longest time,
Speaker 1: listening to all of these noises, listening to movement back
Speaker 1: and forth across the timber. There was more than one
Speaker 1: of whatever was out there, There were many. The next
Speaker 1: morning they took a walk to see what they could find.
Speaker 1: They were still hearing noises. Up at the very top
Speaker 1: of the ridge, they could hear something large moving. The
Speaker 1: forest was too thick to push into safely, and the
Speaker 1: tick population was nasty enough that they weren't equipped for it,
Speaker 1: so they walked the tree line instead. That's when Natalie
Speaker 1: looked down. She saw something at her feet. She brushed
Speaker 1: the leaves away. Underneath was a perfect print. She described
Speaker 1: it to me carefully. You could see the heel, you
Speaker 1: could see the arch, you could see every toe, and
Speaker 1: along the edge of the print you could see the
Speaker 1: ridge of the foot where it had rolled off as
Speaker 1: the creature took its next step. A walking print, crisp, clean,
Speaker 1: the kind of print attracer dreams about finding. She took pictures,
Speaker 1: she took video, she took measurements. What she didn't take
Speaker 1: was a cast. Because the team hadn't gone there to squatch,
Speaker 1: they'd gone for paranorimal investigation. They didn't have casting material
Speaker 1: with them, So the print is documented in the video
Speaker 1: and the photographs, but there's no cast of it. People
Speaker 1: who have seen the print are split on what made it.
Speaker 1: Some say it's a dog man print, some say it's
Speaker 1: a bigfoot print. Natalie doesn't claim to know. What she
Speaker 1: does know is what she saw, a perfect heel, a
Speaker 1: perfect arch, perfect toes. Sitting in the dirt at the
Speaker 1: edge of a forest. She could hear something moving in
Speaker 1: They found what looked like a partial print further on,
Speaker 1: walking distance away, but it wasn't as clean as the
Speaker 1: first one. Could have been the same creature, could have
Speaker 1: been something else. That area, she told me, is loaded.
Speaker 1: The activity there is constant, and the good news if
Speaker 1: you want to call it. That is that you can go.
Speaker 1: The asylum is open to the public. There's some airbnbs nearby.
Speaker 1: People live in the area, but it's not heavily populated.
Speaker 2: If you want to.
Speaker 1: Spend a few nights up there yourself, you can. That's
Speaker 1: not the case for a lot of these hot zones,
Speaker 1: the really active places, the ones with documented histories of
Speaker 1: sightings going back decades. A lot of them have been
Speaker 1: bought up quietly by people with money and reasons. Natalie
Speaker 1: told me about places where the government has come in,
Speaker 1: purchased the land and posted it no public access. You
Speaker 1: can't get on it, you can't investigate it, and whatever's there,
Speaker 1: whatever's been seen there, is now off the books for
Speaker 1: anybody on the outside. She gave me an example in
Speaker 1: the Okala National Forest. There's a tiny piece of land,
Speaker 1: a postage stamp she called it, owned by the government,
Speaker 1: and it happens to sit right next to a river.
Speaker 1: She and a team walked down to that river one night,
Speaker 1: about one thirty or two in the morning, and they
Speaker 1: heard a whoop from one side of the river, then
Speaker 1: a whoop from the other side, then two tree knocks,
Speaker 1: and about two minutes after that a scream, coordinated communication
Speaker 1: across the water, multiple individual rules talking to each other
Speaker 1: in vocalizations researchers know well, and the team couldn't get
Speaker 1: any of it on thermal. Natalie told me they could
Speaker 1: see something on that postage stamp of land. They knew
Speaker 1: where to look, but the thermal kept coming up empty.
Speaker 1: Frustrating because this thing was right there and they couldn't
Speaker 1: put it on a screen to prove it. And of
Speaker 1: course this is Florida. The river was full of alligators,
Speaker 1: so you weren't going to swim across to investigate the
Speaker 1: property yourself. The eyes of the gators were all you'd
Speaker 1: see in the water if you tried. So you stand
Speaker 1: on your side of the river and you listen, and
Speaker 1: you accept that you're not going to set foot on
Speaker 1: that land. Whatever the government bought it for, it's theirs now.
Speaker 1: Then there's the Smoky Mountains. Natalie told me the Smoky
Speaker 1: Mountains are her absolute favorite place to investigate.
Speaker 2: She filmed up.
Speaker 1: There last year and the activity she got in those
Speaker 1: mountains was constant disembodied voices orbs, the sound of metal
Speaker 1: clanking somewhere in the timber where there was no metal
Speaker 1: source just the sound of metal on metal ringing through
Speaker 1: the forest on the Tennessee side. That filming trip turned
Speaker 1: into something bigger. She and Adam Davis ended up making
Speaker 1: a film called The Vanished. It's about two unsolved missing
Speaker 1: person cases in the Smokies, two of many, because the
Speaker 1: Smokies have a documented pattern of people just walking off
Speaker 1: into the forest and never coming out. People with experience,
Speaker 1: people with maps, people with families waiting on them at
Speaker 1: the trailhead. They go in and they're gone. The standard
Speaker 1: explanations get trotted out. It was the wild people, it
Speaker 1: was the feral folks living back in the hallers. It
Speaker 1: was Bigfoot, it was dog Man, it was a portal,
Speaker 1: pick your favorite. Natalie and Adam decided to actually investigate.
Speaker 1: They went in, not assuming, not committed to one explanation
Speaker 1: over another. They went in to find out and what
Speaker 1: they found was something they weren't expecting. It opened up
Speaker 1: a whole avenue they didn't know existed. The film is
Speaker 1: going to be streaming on two, Biroku and Amazon in
Speaker 1: the next couple weeks. As I record this, I'd recommend
Speaker 1: you go find it because what they uncovered changes the
Speaker 1: way you walk into a forest now. I want to
Speaker 1: come back to the rakes because when Natalie was telling
Speaker 1: me about those creatures coming out of the light up
Speaker 1: on the ridge at Land between the Lakes, my mind
Speaker 1: went to a story I covered recently over on my
Speaker 1: Sasquatch Odyssey podcast, a nine to one to one call
Speaker 1: out of North Carolina five or six years back that's
Speaker 1: been making the rounds again on social media in the
Speaker 1: last few months. A man called nine to one one
Speaker 1: in a panic. He'd been driving through the woods. He'd
Speaker 1: seen what he thought was a Civil War era figure
Speaker 1: standing by the road, bleeding, and then while he was
Speaker 1: still trying to make sense of that, something jumped onto
Speaker 1: the back of his truck, latched on started.
Speaker 2: Riding with him.
Speaker 1: People in the bigfoot community wanted to call it a Bigfoot.
Speaker 1: I don't think it was. The descriptions don't match, the
Speaker 1: behavior doesn't match what it sounds like when you read
Speaker 1: the call transcripts and listen to the audio. Is one
Speaker 1: of these rape creatures? Long, lanky, wrong shaped, aggressive in
Speaker 1: a way bigfoot generally isn't so, I asked Natalie. Was
Speaker 1: that what she saw? Was that what came out of
Speaker 1: the light at her Yes, she said, she didn't even
Speaker 1: have to think about it. She told me they'd come
Speaker 1: home from the trip and started doing research trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what the thing they'd seen actually was. Melissa,
Speaker 1: who hadn't seen it directly because she was behind Natalie
Speaker 1: when it charged, found something on the internet and showed
Speaker 1: it around asked was this it? And both Natalie and
Speaker 1: Greg stopped and said, that's it. That's exactly what we saw.
Speaker 1: Then it gets down on all fours, goes into that
Speaker 1: side to side rocking.
Speaker 2: That's the one.
Speaker 1: That's when she started asking the bigger question, why are
Speaker 1: these things in an area where bigfoot also live? What's
Speaker 1: the relationship between them? And the more she dug, the
Speaker 1: more she came back to that property owner and the
Speaker 1: dog's picture I told you about. That's the working theory
Speaker 1: that the rakes might be territorial muscle for whatever bigger
Speaker 1: thing is running an area that when something walks into
Speaker 1: territory that's claimed, the rakes come out. She interviewed a
Speaker 1: guy who had a rake encounter while driving home one night.
Speaker 2: He was on a road.
Speaker 1: The rake was in the road, he swerved to avoid it,
Speaker 1: and as he was going past, the rake reached out
Speaker 1: and tried to grab his jeep. He was rattled, got home,
Speaker 1: got inside, tried to calm down. The next morning he
Speaker 1: went out to.
Speaker 2: Look at his jeep.
Speaker 1: Down the side of the vehicle were claw and handprints,
Speaker 1: massive where the thing had reached for him in the
Speaker 1: moment of the swerve. There's no negotiating with these creatures.
Speaker 1: That's what Natalie kept coming back to with Bigfoot. You
Speaker 1: can sometimes find a peaceable register. The growl from the
Speaker 1: bathroom and the singing on.
Speaker 2: The way back. That's negotiation.
Speaker 1: That's two intelligences finding a way to coexist for a
Speaker 1: few minutes. The rakes don't do that. They stare at you,
Speaker 1: They click at each other.
Speaker 2: They charge. There's a story out of.
Speaker 1: Land between the Lakes about a man who heard clicking
Speaker 1: in the trees above him. He raised his flashlight and
Speaker 1: up in the branches, two of these rakes were watching him,
Speaker 1: clicking back and forth at each other, communicating about him,
Speaker 1: whether they were honing in, whether they were about to attack.
Speaker 1: He didn't stay to find out. When she described all
Speaker 1: of this to me, I asked her the question I
Speaker 1: always want to ask researchers who've crossed over. I asked
Speaker 1: her if her view of the subject had changed. Because
Speaker 1: I'm a flesh and blood guy, always have been. I
Speaker 1: want a body, I want bones, I want a creature
Speaker 1: you can take a tape measure to. That's been my
Speaker 1: position for a long time. But the more I talk
Speaker 1: to people who've actually been in the field for years,
Speaker 1: who've actually spent nights out in places like Land between
Speaker 1: the Lakes, the more I'm starting to shift, not to
Speaker 1: abandon the flesh and blood model, but to make room
Speaker 1: for what people keep telling me they're seeing. Natalie told
Speaker 1: me she used to be exactly where I was when
Speaker 1: she first got into this. Her working model was that
Speaker 1: this was an undiscovered ape, some great primate, maybe living
Speaker 1: in cave systems, maybe dinning underground. There was a DNA
Speaker 1: puzzle to solve, and there were biologists who would eventually
Speaker 1: solve it. That was her frame. Then she got out
Speaker 1: into the field and she started seeing things she had
Speaker 1: no slot for.
Speaker 2: The orbs, the lights.
Speaker 1: Things appearing and disappearing, a bigfoot the size of a
Speaker 1: small car walking out from behind her truck and stepping
Speaker 1: out of existence mid stride. Crawlers emerging from a glow
Speaker 1: on a ridge, which is hat figures floating across a
Speaker 1: forest floor, indigenous style drum beats coming from a hilltop
Speaker 1: with no one on it. None of that fit her frame,
Speaker 1: so her frame had to grow.
Speaker 2: She told me.
Speaker 1: She's a business woman, has been in business almost thirty years.
Speaker 1: A team, lives in spreadsheets and analytics and quarterly reports.
Speaker 1: She is not, by training or by temperament, a person
Speaker 1: who wants to believe in weird things. She wants the
Speaker 1: data to support what she's saying. She wants to be
Speaker 1: able to defend her conclusions. But the data she's collecting
Speaker 1: in the field is not the data she expected to collect,
Speaker 1: and so like any honest investigator, she's adjusting her conclusions
Speaker 1: to fit the data instead of the other way around.
Speaker 1: She doesn't have the answers yet, She's the first to
Speaker 1: say it. She doesn't know how the orbs connect to
Speaker 1: the bipeds. She doesn't know what the lights are. She
Speaker 1: doesn't know what's on the other side of the portals
Speaker 1: people have reported. She doesn't know what the rakes are
Speaker 1: or where they fit. She just keeps going back, keeps asking,
Speaker 1: keeps interviewing witnesses, keeps walking into the timber with cameras
Speaker 1: and bare spray, and a willingness to be wrong about
Speaker 1: everything she thought she knew. That's the kind of researcher
Speaker 1: I want on this subject. I want people who can
Speaker 1: change their mind. I want people who can walk into
Speaker 1: a panther encounter, walk out and be honest enough to
Speaker 1: call it a panther, even though the Bigfoot story would
Speaker 1: have made better dinner conversation. I want people who can
Speaker 1: stand at the bottom of a hill while three things
Speaker 1: they can't name stare down at them from a glowing oval,
Speaker 1: and instead of running, ask their team if they're seeing
Speaker 1: the same thing she's seeing. Because that's discipline. That's not credulity,
Speaker 1: that's the opposite of credulity. You can find Natalie on Facebook,
Speaker 1: on Instagram, on TikTok, and on YouTube under her own name.
Speaker 1: Relic Films Media is on Facebook, on TikTok, and on
Speaker 1: YouTube under that handle. They've also got a talk show
Speaker 1: now eight episodes deep, called Beyond the Ordinary.
Speaker 2: It's on YouTube.
Speaker 1: They interview folks across the field, bigfoot, paranormal, psychic mediums,
Speaker 1: the whole spectrum. She'll be at the Great Floor Ada
Speaker 1: Bigfoot Conference down in Okaala on June thirteenth. She'll be
Speaker 1: at the Smoky Mountain Bigfoot Conference in Gatlinburg on July
Speaker 1: twenty fifth. If you're going to either of those, find her.
Speaker 1: Tell her you heard her story here. She'd love to
Speaker 1: talk to you. That's the kind of researcher she is.
Speaker 2: Now. I want to leave you with one image.
Speaker 1: I want you to picture Natalie standing at the bottom
Speaker 1: of that cemetery in land between the lakes. Her cameras
Speaker 1: are dead, her phone is dead, her thermal is fried.
Speaker 1: Two members of her team are physically ill behind her,
Speaker 1: three crawlers are on the ridge above her, A bipedal
Speaker 1: creature is in the field behind her. A dog is
Speaker 1: barking somewhere in the dark for no reason. Four red
Speaker 1: orbs are sitting around her truck, and a big foot
Speaker 1: the size of a small car has just stepped out
Speaker 1: from behind her vehicle and disappeared into the air. She
Speaker 1: is the only person on her team looking in the
Speaker 1: right direction at the right second. She's one woman with
Speaker 1: a canister of bear spray standing in a graveyard at
Speaker 1: night in November, and she is the only witness to
Speaker 1: one of the strangest things any of us has ever
Speaker 1: heard described and Here's what she said when she finished
Speaker 1: telling me the whole story. She said, it just opened
Speaker 1: up so many more doors. She said, it just gives
Speaker 1: you so many more questions.
Speaker 2: She said.
Speaker 1: She keeps going out because she has to know. That's
Speaker 1: where I'm going to leave it tonight. Land between the
Speaker 1: Lakes is one hundred and seventy thousand acres. Most of
Speaker 1: it has never been investigated. Most of those cemeteries have
Speaker 1: never been sad at after dark by anybody with a
Speaker 1: thermal and the patience to wait. Most of those ridges
Speaker 1: have never been growled at to see what answers back.
Speaker 1: The country is full of places like that. Whatever's living
Speaker 1: in those places, whatever's working those places, whatever's cooperating across
Speaker 1: species in those places, it doesn't need our permission to
Speaker 1: keep doing what it's been doing. It was there before
Speaker 1: the people came in to look for it. It'll be
Speaker 1: there after we leave. Natalie's going back, She's going back
Speaker 1: as soon as she can. Some of you, after hearing this,
Speaker 1: are going to want to go too. Just remember what
Speaker 1: you said about the Everglades, about setting up alone in
Speaker 1: a place that's older and meaner than you are, with
Speaker 1: one canister of bear spray and a tent. Don't do that.
Speaker 1: Whatever you do, don't do that. Some of these stories
Speaker 1: don't get told because the people in them don't make
Speaker 1: it back to tell them. Luckily, Natalie made it back
Speaker 1: this time money by