Speaker 1: Everybody, Welcome to the Dixie Cryptid Podcast. My name's Cameron Buckner,
and we don't ask for money, and we don't have
a membership program. All of this content is free, doesn't
cost you a dime, So if you don't like it,
send me an email and I'll give you your money back.
I usually go through these stories and just randomly pick two, three,
four or five stories to put in a podcast, and
I did that on this one. But I don't know
how it happened, but I picked three of the best
stories I have read in probably a year for this
particular podcast. So I hope you guys enjoy this. This
is a good one. This is a really good one.
All right, here we go. When I was growing up,
my mom and dad had a rule. When the son
started to set, my siblings and I had to come inside.
We had a small farm with chickens and goats and
rabbits and pigs, so all of our chores had to
be done before sunset. One day, I asked my mom
why I couldn't play out in the yard, and her
answer sounded like a mother trying to scare her child
into listening. She said it was because there were monsters
in the woods that wanted to take me. I wasn't
sure I believed her, but some of our animals started
to disappear at night, so I didn't push it very far.
My father was the president of the West Virginia Trappers Association.
He had let me hunt and run traps with him
since I was eight years old. I was sure I
knew every animal in our woods, but I was wrong.
One day, Dad got a call from our neighbor Den,
who raised a cattle. He said that one of the
cows was dead and her calf was missing. Dad took
me along to Den's house with him, who showed us
the dead cow. There were deep scratches on her front
quarter and her neck had been broken. Dad didn't know
what to make of this. There was no sign of
anything dragging the calf off, besides the trail leading into
the woods that connected to our property. I started to
track it, but Dad and Den both yelled at me
to stay put. Instead, I helped set some bear traps
around the dead cow, and Dad told Den, if it
comes back, these should hold it. Later that night, after dinner,
I overheard my dad tell my mom that whatever killed
Den's cow was probably what had been taking our animals.
Mom asked what we could do, and Dad told her
about the traps that he was confident they would catch
some thing and then we might finally see what was
killing the animals. The next morning, Din called frantically, telling
my dad that we needed to come back to where
we set the traps. We went straight out to the cow,
and this time my older brother joined us. We were armed,
expecting to find a large bear. When we got there,
Din was at a loss for words. The dead cow
was gone and there were clear large tracks leading back
into the woods. Dad was furious. Our traps were gone too,
and seven bear traps are not cheap. He told Den
that he'd never seen anything like this. The animal had
to be intelligent to spot and pull up the traps
from their steaks. About that time, life got stranger. None
of us kids were allowed outside unless someone was with us,
and we both had to be armed. I was eleven
at this point, and I felt safe by myself, especially
with my twenty gage shotgun with me, but we still
had to do our chores in pairs. Well, nothing happened
for about a month until one day I was out
on the porch drinking a soda After feeding and watering
the chickens and the rabbits, I was watching the upper field,
hoping to see a deer or turkey. I remember the
sun was already getting low and dusk was starting to
set in. I saw what I told Mom and Dad
was a large man sneaking across our field. It scared me.
He was wearing what I thought was a gilly suit.
Dad immediately grabbed his rifle and yelled for my older
brother Joe to grab his. They ran into the field
and looked for it, but it was long gone. Later
that night, we heard one of our rabbits screaming. We
could hear something banging against one of the cages and
making deep grunting noises. Joe and my father grabbed their
rifles and flashlights and ran out the door. I grabbed
my forty four mag brush rifle and I followed them.
The rabbits were going nuts and one of them was
still screaming, and before I made it to them, I
heard my brother scream and he started shooting. I froze
in my tracks just twenty feet from the house, and
I saw them running back towards me, and Dad grabbed
me with his free hand and he dragged me back inside.
He told Mom to bolt the doors and shut all
the windows and turn off the lights. Apparently they had
pissed off whatever the thing was. No one slept that night.
At first, the creature threw rocks at the house, breaking
one of the windows, and there was an ungodly roar
that gave us chills. Eventually the rackets stopped. We thought
it was over until we heard a loud thud against
the back of the house, and at the same time
there was a thud at the front. I remember Dad
turning white and he looked at my mother and he said,
my god, Judy, there's more than one. Mom started crying
and the kids asked what it was. Dad said he
didn't know, but that it looked like some kind of
a giant eight. The thudding against the doors went on
for hours, right up until an hour before sunrise. The
next day. We went to check out the damage, and
what we found was awful. There were large footprints all
over the house that looked like fists. That was nothing
compared to what we found when we checked our livestock.
Over thirty rabbits were dead. They were ripped in half
and half pulled through the wire on their cages. Two
goats were gone. There was no sign of them at all.
They were just gone. One of our hogs had been killed.
It's his neck was broken. Dad was furious. He called
our neighbors and told them what had happened. He called
two of my older brothers who had moved out, and
he told them too. Everyone came over to check on
us and check out the massacre, each of them as
livid as my father. Later that evening, everyone showed up
again and they packed everything from twelve gate shot guns
with deer slugs to high powered rifles, not to mention
the pistols that were on their belts. Mom fed everyone
a nice chicken dinner, and then we waited. Round ten thirty,
we heard grunting coming from the woods behind the house.
Knowing there would be more than one of them, three
of our large group went around the house to check
it out, while the rest of us waited inside at
the ready. Ten minutes later, we heard a scream. It
was like a woman shrieking mixed with the bear's roar,
and from the safety of the inside of a house,
we heard our neighbors open up gunfire, letting off round
after round until the scream turned again to a cry
of pain. Then we heard a second roar so intense
it vibrated our chests. It came from the other side
of the house. We ran to the windows in time
to see this thing tear through some of the bushes.
It had to be at least eight feet tall. And
then a third, smaller one, maybe six feet tall, came
running toward us. It took three rounds from us, and
it turned toward the first one, who was screaming. The
big one let out one more loud and long roar
as it lifted its mate and barreled into the woods.
Later that morning, we found blood in several places and
even tracked it for almost a mile to the stream
that was running around an old strip road, and we
lost it there And we never found the bodies, but
I know one had to be dead. Dad contacted the
DNR and reported what had happened. Two officers came and
looked around. They didn't even cross the woodline. They tried
to tell us that it was a bear and that
they could find us if we had tried to kill
it out of season. We all know what we saw
and shot, but no one believed us. Thankfully, nothing ever
came back since that night, and for years after that
we lived peacefully. I grew up and I moved out,
and the events of that time became a memory. I'm
thirty seven now, and just recently something has started taking
my dad's animals again without leaving a trace. Seems the
peace on the farm has come to an end. I'm
afraid they're back. I grew up in central West Virginia,
and my dad and I are big into coon hunting.
Almost every night during coon season we would go together
and run the dogs. In the summertime, when I was
on break, I would take the dogs every night to
get them ready for the season. Most of the time
I would take off walking, but every once in a
while my dad would come with me, even if he
had to work the next morning. We would take his truck.
That particular night was hot and muggy, but it was
clear and there was a full moon. Dad and I
loaded up the dogs and set out to try to
get them to strike. That night, we treed three or
four coons by one am. Seeing that we did pretty good,
and because Dad had to get up in a few
hours to go to work, we packed up and headed
back to the house. That's when my work usually began.
There were multiple things that Dad wanted done before I
went to bed that night. He told me to wash
out the kennels, and feed and water the dogs, and
collect the eggs from the chicken coop. Our house sat
right smack dab in the middle of a holler, and
on either side of the house was straight up hills
into the woods. I took off and did my chores
while Dad went in to go to bed. When I
was done, I started walking back to the front porch,
and I got a weird feeling that something was staring
right through my soul. I looked to my right up
the hill, and there, thirty feet higher in the trees
or a set of red eyes looking right at me.
They were so big. My first thought was that it
was a small airplane. I sat and stared right back
at it for a few seconds, completely mesmerized, before I
realized there was no way it was a plane. It
was too close, they were too big, and it was
far too silent. I think it was two thirty in
the morning by then. I hauled my butt inside, where
Dad was fast asleep on the couch, and I debated
on waking him up. That was a cardinal sin in
our house. So I sat there and stared at the wall,
contemplating what in the world I had just seen outside.
A few minutes passed and I heard a huge bang
on the roof, like a paratrooper had landed on top
of the house. Once it landed, it started walking toward
my parents' bedroom. It was so loud and heavy that
I could hear every footstep, and once it reached the
end of the house, it turned and it walked all
the way back to where my room was on the
other side. About that time, I decided, screw this, I'm
waking my dad up. I don't care if he will
beat my butt or not. So I woke him up.
I was freaking out, and he just groaned at me
and he went back to sleep. I sat there the
rest of the night, wide awake until we woke up
for work the next morning, and when I told him
what I heard the night before, he just laughed at me.
He thought I was crazy. I'm in my twenties now,
but ever since that night, every time I come home,
I stay inside. I barely go out at night, and
Dad hasn't been able to get me to go hunting
very much. Since then, no one has ever believed me.
Hopefully you all will. It feels good to get it
off my chest. I am a graduate of the University
of Kentucky's Veterinary Medicine program. I achieved my doctorate in
veterinary medicine, specializing in bovine, equine, swine, and small ruminants.
After working with some older veterinarians, I was able to
open my own practice at nineteen ninety five. Later, I
was offered a position with the Tennessee elk reintroduction program.
In two thousand, the state reintroduced two hundred head of
elk in the Northumberland Wildlife Area, fitting a portion of
them with radio callers. Later in twenty fifteen, we began
using implanted transmitters to help with the retention rates of
the calves born each year. In the early years, we
became proficient at monitoring the callers and quickly identified when
a specimen was distressed. We were able to catch several
poachers in the act of illegally harvesting bull elk, and
even monitored one bull elk that traveled into Kentucky and
set up squattersh writes in a peaceful valley and mountain
along Wolf Creek. Needless to say, Tennessee had something to
say about this and had to recover the runaway and
bring him back home to his family. On the morning
of September nineteen, twenty seventeen, I got the call to
meet a game warden and park ranger off one of
the service roads in a wildlife area. The collar of
one of our bull elk was transmitting some erratic data.
I was the last to arrive with my field pack
and tranquilizer gun. I had three darts loaded with enough
xylazine in fentanyl to immobilize a twelve hundred pound bull
in a matter of seconds. This bull was over ten
years old and he was one of the hurd's dominant breeders.
The park ranger's name was Brian, and he had the
radio telemetry equipment that detected the location of the callers
signal and the game warden. Rick was equipped with an
M four rifle just in case the signal came in strong.
As soon as Brian fired up his equipment showing us
we were within five hundred yards of the bull, we
slipped into the bush and began the trek toward him,
careful not to make unnecessary noise with our approach. We
were a little more than one hundred yards out when
Brian said the signal was moving away quickly, as if
it had hopped into a truck and was driving off.
Rick burst into action and ran forward with reckless abandon
When Brian and I finally caught up with him, he
was standing in a small clearing that was drenched in blood.
The smaller trees had been smashed to the ground, and
there in the midst of all this carnage lay a
single leg bone and a hoof of our missing bull.
It appeared that all the flesh was chewed off his
leg and cast aside. We all knew that this animal
did not run off on its own, missing a leg
to stand on, Rick again took the lead and began
to track the animal, following the droplets of blood and
broken twigs and tree limbs, and the moved leaf litter
on the forest floor. Occasionally Brian picked up the signal again,
but it would quickly disappear a moment later. Over the
next four hours of playing cat and mouse, the signal
came in strong and it was moving right at us.
Rick positioned himself to the side and took cover behind
some down trees. Brian and I followed his lead. Ten
minutes later, an older Native of American dressed in buckskins
and moccasins walked out of the dark woods on his
outstretched arms. He presented the collar and he said, I
believe this is what you're searching for. He laid it
on the ground and started to walk away. When Rick
told him to stop and turn around. The older man
did what he was told, and Rick identified himself. He
asked him what in the hell made him think he
could just walk up and drop the collar and walk
off like that. The older man looked at him, calmly
in the eyes, and he said, I answer to a
higher power than you. I am the uniony, the spiritual leader,
and the medicine man for our people, and the one
who oversees the sou Kaloo. He seemed to appreciate our confusion,
and then he added, the sou Kaloo do not wish
to be disturbed. He only took the elk to feed
his mate. She has recently given birth and is not
ready to travel. The answer wasn't good enough for Rick.
A law enforcement agent can't just take a stranger's word
and call it a day. The old man could have
been an innocent messenger, or he could have been trying
to distract us while his poacher buddies got away with
our bull. Rick asked the man, well, what is a Sukloo.
The old man was patient in his response. They're the hairy,
slant eyed devils of old. Their tribe and ours have
made peace many years ago, though we have yet to
reach peace with the Judicula tribe. But our alliance with
the Suklou keeps the Judicula away from our people. Rick
called his bs. He grabbed a man's arm and swung
him around and slapped a handcuff on one of his wrists.
My life changed then, and there, fifty yards away, a
monster stepped out from behind a tree and it roared.
It was unlike anything I had ever seen in my life.
It was a train horn, an elephant bugle, and a
lion's roar, all mixed into one enormous sound, and it
shook through our bodies in the entire forest. The three
of us were frozen. The old man didn't react at all.
This creature stood over nine feet tall and was almost
four feet wide, with the build of a linebacker. We
could see his muscles flexing as he roared, and we
could see his large canines as his mouth widened. His
hair was long, and it covered the majority of his
body except for the palms of his hands and the
bottoms of his feet. And his face. His face is
what got me. There was a hint of something human,
but also something ape or demon like. The eyes were
solid black with no visible white, and the nose was
flattened against his face, like a gorilla with dark gray
skin pigmentation, and there was no sign of ears on
either side of its head. My instincts kicked in, as
it has so many times in private practice, when a
large animal became unexpectedly uncontrollable, and I took aim with
the tranquilizer rifle, and I fired immediately after the first
one impacted the creature, I inserted the second dart and
readied myself for another shot. The beast stood stationary for
twenty seconds, not seeming to know what had hit him,
but realizing something was wrong, and began to fade back
into the dark woods. Brian stood there, slight jawed, not
doing anything. As Rick composed himself, he handcuffed the old
man's older wrists and secured him around a small tree,
and he left the man there and he took the lead.
Tracking the monster. We found it less than one hundred
and fifty yards away, was face down in the forest floor.
We approached it and the smell became overwhelming. It was
a mix of rancid trash, festerring road killed sewer, and
rotten potatoes. The three of us weren't strong enough to
roll it on its back, but we were able to
turn its head to the side so that it didn't
suffocate in the ground. Brian and Rick began taking pictures
with their phones as I pulled out a specimen kit
and took samples of blood and skin and hair. Within
just a few minutes, this beast had already started to
regain its awareness. I gave him a shot of something
to help with the opioid component of the tranquilizer, and
we began our retreat, with Rick covering our backs with
his M four. We moved out backwards the way we
came in, and our eyes trained on the beast as
we quietly slipped away, but we didn't get much of
a head start. Within seconds, the beast raised himself upright
and staggered off into the thick woods like a drunk
man stumbling home, picked up the pace and made it
back to the area where we left the older man,
but he was gone. We found Rick's handcuffs laying on
the ground in a mysterious cloud of fog around the tree.
We didn't know what to say, there was no sign
of him anywhere. Rick said a string of curse words,
and we quickly headed back to our vehicles. Brian called
the park office and informed them of what had happened,
stating that we had photos and specimens to validate the
existence of sisquatch, but we had a two hour walk
back to the vehicles. As we walk, we discussed how
we had evidence of a mythological species and that we
would be featured on every TV station around the world,
and we might even earn some money from all this.
I was just excited that we could be able to
put the laws in place to protect these creatures. This
was a green peace Christmas. Our excitement soon faded as
we approached our vehicles, we saw two black suburbans with
blacked out windows and government plates waiting for us. Four
men dressed in black suits and wearing dark sunglasses stepped
down and approached us. The one in charge presented his
credentials badge, and he told us that we had a
very forgettable day to day and that he needed my
field pack and our phones. They patted us down and
made it clear that we had not seen a thing
other than evidence that a pack of feral dogs had
taken down a bull elk, and that we were not
to mention anything or our jobs would be history. As
they were driving away, Brian told us that he was
afraid that might happen, so he emailed the photos to
himself and his parents and his girlfriend in Knoxville. We
were overjoyed, but it was short lived. When I got home,
I went to the and found that my email had
been entirely wiped out and my eye cloud was empty
as well. The next day I tracked down both Rick
and Brian, who told me the same had happened to them.
Brian's parents' email had been wiped out and his girlfriend's
phone quit functioning. She was unable to recover anything, not
even her contacts. The following week, I submitted my resignation.
I didn't want to work with or for an employer
with such questionable ethics. I re established my practice as
a livestock vet, and I will continue to seek the
answers I want on my own, including what I have
already discovered about the two tribes of Bigfoot. First, the
Soux Kaloo, they simply want to avoid humans and avoid
all contact. But the Judahicula are not the same. They're
the evil side of Sasquatch, and we'll take a human's
life if given the opportunity. I'm unsure of the motivation
behind the government's decision to keep the existence of Sasquatch
a mystery, or why they would confiscate our personal property
to maintain this secrecy, but I would truly like to
know before I leave this world. Okay, thank you for
listening to this podcast. I certainly do appreciate you, and
we will see you guys on the next one. Thanks