Speaker 1: Back in the late seventies, I had just graduated from
college and was getting ready to move from Sioux Falls,
South Dakota to Houston, Texas. Back then, there was a
large group of us that hung around together all the
time since we got out of high school. One weekend,
we decided to go to a park just east of
the city called Beaver Creek. It was a wild prairie
park with natural restored prairie grasslands. These days, it's pretty
much in the city limits. A creek flanked this grassland
on three sides, with a couple of pedestrian bridges. Thick
old oak trees covered the steep bluff and a horseshoe
shape around this flat picnic area where there were a
few pavilions and a parking lot. I think that day
was a holiday because there were a lot of people
there throwing frisbees and playing at the playground. My group
had settled into a pavilion just across the creek from
the dense woods. There were bushes and trees so thick
you couldn't see into it at all. We were just
enjoying the day, grilling on the barbecue and having some
beers out of nowhere the bushes violently rustled, and a
flock of birds flew wildly up into the sky. It
sounded like Niagara Falls. It was really loud. It was
so startling almost everyone in the small park stopped and looked.
Then there was a monstrous, chest rattling growl that lasted
for probably fifteen seconds. It was like the rumble coming
out of an old steam engine. We were in absolute shock,
and then there were these earth shaking stomps that we
all felt through the concrete floor of the pavilion. Without
even thinking, we dropped everything and ran to the parking lot,
along with a dozen other people. I have no experience
with hunting, and I'm not familiar with wildlife, so I
asked one of my friends, who does hunt. Do you
think that was a deer or a cow? That was
no deer or cow, he replied. We stood there for
about ten minutes and didn't hear anything else. So we
eventually went back to the pavilion and got our stuff,
and everybody went home. Some of us were pretty certain
that we knew what this thing was. Just as a
side note, back in the seventies there were all sorts
of UFO sightings and strange lights in this area that
even made it into the newspaper. A friend of mine
was a park ranger who lived in the ranger house
at Beaver Creek, and he said he woke up one
night when there was a full moon and he saw
three massive black figures moving through the prairie grass. He
thought they might be cult members because they looked like
they were wearing robes with pointed heads. He never felt
comfortable there. I moved to Houston in nineteen eighty. I
have come back to retire. Compared to Houston, Sioux Falls
as a safe and convenient place, and I haven't read
or heard anything of such activity in the past twenty years.
There are other strange activities that took place at that time.
If you'd like, I'll send more of these events. I
just don't want to bore you. So I'm thirty nine
years old and I live in DeSoto County, Mississippi. My
family owns land near Jackson, Tennessee, and that's what turned
me onto your program. I always had a minor interest
in Bigfoot from a kid, but I remained quite skeptic
on the subject, and I thought if it was real,
that it would only exist in the Big mountain terrain.
My YouTube suggested a video of yours one day about
Bigfoot in the Hatchie Wildlife Refuge, an area that I
was familiar with that wasn't far from our family land
on the Forkadeer River. I have been in the woods
since my grandpa started dragging me around at two years old.
I've hunted and spent time in our isolated hunting cabin
my whole life. I'm still an avid hunter and river rat.
I hunt everything from gators to deer. I have spent
a lot of time, both day and night in the
woods of North Mississippi and West Tennessee. I have seen
many things in almost every animal that lives in these areas.
In twenty and sixteen, late in the hunting season, we
were hunting rabbits in Holly Springs National Forest. We had
called it today and we were headed home, my brother,
my stepdad, and me. It was late afternoon and still
light out. We just turned off Highway seven headed west
towards home when we passed a narrow side road just
off the highway. Crouching down in the middle of that
side road was something that I can only describe as
looking like a chimpanzee. With its back to us. It
appeared to be eating or rummaging through a trash bag
lying in the road. Its hair was black and matted
like a chimps and dirty looking. I say it was
crouching because it was on two feet, not four. We
immediately asked each other what we thought we had just seen.
We all agreed that it wasn't a dog, and it
sure wasn't a hog, and that it was in fact
some type of a monkey. We know chimps don't live
wild in Mississippi, although when we were kids there was
a man who lived in our subdivision that in fact
had a monkey living on a chain link cage that
took up his entire backyard, and we would oftentimes ride
our bikes over to look at it. So it didn't
seem impossible that someone may have had a monkey that
got loose, though it's highly unlikely. My brother did make
a comment that people have mentioned an ape man around
Holly Springs. We laughed a little and left it at
that and continued home. After coming across your program and
another that I listened to, I now think that what
we saw was possibly a juvenile bigfoot. If it would
have been standing, I would put it around six feet
in height. I enjoy your program, and when I started
hearing the stories from around this area and areas that
I hunt on your show, I was hooked. The President's
Island story got me too. We have a small plot
of hunting land near there in the Ensley Bottoms. I
once heard a scream that was very close to my
ladder stand, right before daylight one morning that really messed
with me, and that I could not identify. I spent
the rest of that day listening to Bobcat, Panther, Fox
and code sounds on the Internet trying to identify it.
It reminded me of a wild woman screaming in agony.
It was burned into my mind and only recently did
I hear it again. It was on a recording from
a YouTube of a bigfoot screaming. Thanks for your stories
and making my trips home go by so quickly. We
don't know everything God created, but I was always told
to keep an eye open and carry a gun and
a lighter in the woods because you never know what
situation you'll find yourself in, and you never know what's
out there. Thanks again. I'm not quite sure how to
start this series of encounters with what I now believe
to be bigfoot in Connecticut. It could be what is
termed repressed memories that I think must have been triggered
by something recently. But when I started writing down the
memories I had about this, more thoughts came back on
this subject. Specific My area, Seymour, where these encounters occurred
was a combination of medium sized farms which were slowly
giving way to the building of homes, so the area
was a mix, and that area was only a short
ride of way to the neighboring city of an Sonia.
We lived on old an Sonia Road, which backed right
up to a two thousand acre tract of watershed property
which now is a part of the Naugatok State Forest.
Divided by only one road, Connecticut State Route three point thirteen.
This tract of land includes two large reservoirs, numerous ponds, swamps,
and streams. This is where the encounters started. My earliest
recollection of something unusual was steering a family ride and
a car through this reservoir area with my mom and dad.
I was at best around six or seven years old
in the back seat as we passed one of these reservoirs,
back then, my mom and dad spotted something crouching down
to the reservoir looking down into the water. My mom exclaimed, John,
look at that, what is that? My father slowed the
car and said, I don't know. It looks like someone
in a monkey suit. Now, why would anybody be dressed
up like that? I was able to get to the
car window in time and remember seeing a dark figure
next to the waterline looking down into it. We had
no knowledge, experience, or any thinking at all that there
were such things as bigfoot. By the time I reached
ten years old, us and neighborhood kids were fully into
that forest, exploring, camping and hiking, and never ever leaving
trash or a mess. We were almost like stewards of
the forest. We were literally in that woodland area every
day that we could go, sometimes even on school nights,
and in the rain, no problem there either. We simply
put on our raincoats and we went out. Over time,
we camped deeper and deeper into the woods, and one
area became our favorite, nestled right into a grove of
tall evergreens, we pitched camp, made our camp fire, and
enjoyed ourselves for sometimes a week at a time. During
the summer. What we didn't realize was the way we
broke the branches and small logs for our fire was
to strike the branches against trees in order to break
them into smaller pieces. Again, we did not even have
thought as to what bigfoot was. But looking back now,
we broke sometimes a full quart of branches in just
one day, sometimes on and off for hours, and in
the nighttime two for our fire. It was fun. From
what I know now, this is one of the ways
that Bigfoot communicate. It was during the night during one
of these summer camping trips one of the younger boys
in our neighborhood group, called a Little Billy, started shouting
and then he was crying. He was visibly shaking. This
was no joking on his part. We had absolutely no
idea what had just happened to him. When his brother
and the rest of us got him calmed down, he
explained that he saw a monster in the woods let
by our campfire. Now, I've only seen one other time
in my life someone shake like that, and that was
years later when someone at work was having a seizure.
We convinced little Billy there was no such thing as
monsters and we got him calmed down. His reply was
very sincere. Then what did I just see? A minute later,
a rock came flying into the camp near the fire.
We thought it may have been a vagrant or someone
throwing things, so we grabbed our BB guns and opened
fire in that direction where the rock came from. Oh,
you guys were cowboys. Soon another rock came and we
again shot in the dark. At that point, little Billy
wanted to leave, so his bigger brother had to walk
him all the way home at night because he didn't
want to stay there. The rest of that evening was quiet.
During another camping trip in this same area, at night,
I smelled a very strong skunk oder come into the
camp when we were all sleeping in our six man tent.
I didn't hear any footsteps, but then someone started urinating
on the side of our tent. I sat up, did
a head count, and all of us guys were in
the tent. This lasted a good sixty or ninety seconds.
It was a very strong stream at one spot on
the tent. I didn't know what to think, attributing it
to maybe rain or something pouring out of a tree overhead.
I just didn't know, so I laid back down and
I went to sleep. During other times, while we would
go hiking, we would come across a number of branches
shaped like a blind that a hunter would set up,
and also sometimes shape very purposely into an X. We
wondered who would be doing this. There was absolutely no
hunting on this track of land. People were not even
allowed into this entire watershed area, and there were plenty
of no trespassing signs along the state highway. We also
would come across younger trees, perhaps ten or eight feet
high and maybe one to two inches in diameter, broken
in half and pointing in a certain direction. We would
stop and look at these trees and wonder why in
the world would someone do this. Some of those broken
trees were freshly broken, as sap would still be oozing
out of the broken limb. Other times we would find
broken branches and trees formed into some type of barrier.
This was not a random falling of trees because the
limbs were interwoven, definitely showing some type of intelligence, but
we had absolutely no idea what or who would do
this In the middle of these woods. A number of
times we would also find smaller, completely uprooted evergreen trees
pulled out of the ground with the root showing and
push back into the ground upside down. We would look
also at these and again could not understand why this occurred.
Through my later research, I learned possibly this is some
type of food signal. During more than a few of
our hikes, both in the summer and in the winter,
we would be walking in the woods and hear someone
trailing us off to the side. We would stop and
the noise would stop. A few times we caught it
as we would all stop walking at the same time
and the noise would travel another two or three more steps.
We would yell, hey, we caught you, but no one
answered back. At other times, we would be on a
hike to go play in the brook or one of
the swamps, and some of us got hit by acorns
as we walked. Of course, we blamed it each other
for this, and everyone would honestly deny it one hundred
percent of the time. If someone was fooling around, they
would fess up and the issue would be over. Not
when this happened, though, no one took credit for the acorns.
Other times I would go for a hike by myself
during the day and I would hear a very distinct
and clear whistle right near me. I stopped and would
look around, and I could swear someone was looking at me,
and I got a strange feeling that I wasn't alone,
but I couldn't see anyone. I turned around and I
went home. One warm, clear summer night, I decided to
go on a night hike all by myself, no flashlight, nothing,
just by moonlight. I got about a half mile into
the woods and peered into the darkness near our favorite
camping spot, and I froze. I could swear someone was there,
and among the evergreen trees, the literal hair on the
back of my next stood up and it stayed like that.
I didn't see any glowing eyes or anything like that,
but I could swear there were what I feel like
separate individuals present in the trees. I turned around and
ran back down the path as fast as I could.
As I was running, a rock came crashing through the
trees next to me on my right. I continued to
run got to the last part of the path, which
I needed to climb up a steep hill. All the
while doing this by moonlight, I kept saying to myself
don't turn around, don't turn around. I kept repeating this
to myself until I got to the top of the hill,
ran to my house, and I got inside. My mother
was there in the kitchen and said, what's the matter
with you? You look scared. Of course, I said nothing
at all, and I just sat down and I had
a cold drink of water. I believe this evening, heike
is what started a number of incidents that happened at
our house in the next years to follow. It could
very well be that these animals or bigfoot followed me home,
possibly by scent. Here is where things become more distinct.
One evening, my sister Carolyn, about eighteen years old, was
washing dishes by the kitchen window, and she started screaming
her head off. All of us ran into the kitchen
to see what the matter was. She was crying and
was almost disgusted that there was a gorilla face staring
back at her in the window. She said. She looked closer,
and it moved its lips and showed its teeth. My father,
combat promoted Bronze Star eighty second airborne paratrooper, had already
ran outside past us and said he saw something run
away from the house. Within a month, this happened again
to Carolyn. This time, my father was quicker to run
outside and apparently came face to face with something and
came shooting right back into the house and a fluster.
He said, I don't know what that thing was, but
it's pretty big. From that point on, we kept a
pot of water on the counter near the door, and
the garden hose was kept turned on and left on
the porch outside at night. There was one more time
I can remember. My father had waited in the kitchen
with my sister for another appearance of whatever this thing was,
and ran outside to meet it. When it indeed visited again,
he threw the pot of water at it and then
turned the garden hose on it. This time I distinctly
remember him dropping the pot because it clanged when he
dropped it, and he also dropped the hose when it
was still on when he jumped back into the house.
He only described it as something big and that he
didn't know what it was. About this time, two things
happened on our side of the fence, so to speak,
And I cannot honestly say for sure if these next
events are connected to these siding at our house. First,
my father bought a seven point sixty two millimeters rifle
for the house, which we never had guns in the
house before the second thing, we cut down a number
of trees in the backyard to make room for a pool.
We left a few tree stumps in the back. My
mom began leaving bread on them for the birds, and
then started leaving older fruit and vegetables there. I followed suit,
and always within a few days the food would be gone.
I took over this job and kept it up on
and off for a long while. Mom never told me
why she did this, except to feed the birds. On
at least three occasions, I remember finding a neat pile
of stones in our backyard near the stump, and once
on our back porch, very very close to the back door.
I remember thinking that it was my friends playing a
joke because the piles were very neatly done, very deliberately
put in place. Yet my friends were not the type
to do this or repeat doing this. One evening, when
I was still in my early teens, I was home
alone watching TV and I had the feeling I was
being watched through the window. I tried to shake it off,
but I couldn't. Just then, my normally protective dog came
whimpering into the room and hid behind the furniture, which
he had never done before. I decided to close the curtains,
and within a few minutes I heard a very loud
slap on the side of the house. I didn't know
what it was, so I went outside and I couldn't
see anything, but I did smell a strong musky skunk odor,
but not the usual sharp skunk smell. This was more doglike. Again,
I never made any connection to all these events until
only recently. This actually happened a second time again in
the same pattern. Home alone watching TV. Got another feeling
that I was being watched, so I closed the curtains again.
My dog came into the room and took up position
behind the furniture, whimpering. This time, a very loud wap
occurred on the side of the house. The next morning,
I went outside and found some brakes in the vinyl
where I had heard the sound come from. I thought
I was going to get blamed for doing this damage
to the house. At least twice a year, it was
my job to clean the gutters, and I did a
pretty thorough job. When I climbed on top of the
shed dormer we built for the second floor. I discovered
rocks in the gutter up there. Distinctly. I remember saying
to myself, why would anyone throw rocks up here? And
I cleaned them out. This occurred more than a few
times while I lived at my home. As I got older,
and especially since I got my driver's license, I no
longer spent time in the woods, and I started hanging
out with my schoolmates at the local McDonald's and at
their homes. These experiences tapered off as the same time,
my neighborhood friends and I grew up and took up
different interests, which meant we didn't spend time in the
woods anymore, and the incidents at our home declined as well.
We would occasionally get a wet dog smell, and my
dog was still occasionally hide behind the furniture near me,
but these also tapered off. As I write this, I'm
sure there'll be a few more memories that come back
to me, but this is the lion's share of what
I can honestly and straightforwardly write down. These events all
come back to me in the last two to three years,
so I thought it best to share them with you.
I've had many experiences in some stories that I can
share with you. I hope you don't get tired of me.
This is a story that was shared with me. She
was the sister of a coworker, and my coworker's name
is Tina and her sister is Susie. In nineteen seventy four,
I lived and work in Lakeland, Florida, for the original
Red Lobster restaurant. My coworker told me that her sister
was coming in to have lunch with us and was
excited about something that had happened to them, and she
wanted to share it with us. Here is a little background.
My friend's brother in law was a forest ranger and
was stationed in the Hilochi hilo Cche Hellochi Wildlife Preserve
east of Lakeland and south of Highway four. They had
a little piece of land that backed up to the
forest proper and they put a nice, double wide manufactured
home there. It was fenced in, nice and snug with
chain link fence. Her husband, Paul, was in the tower
most every day for eight to ten hours, except when
he had to check on various issues. And came home
for lunch. This arrangement was great because he could see
their home from the tower and it was walking or
bicycle distance from the tower. They had a four year
old son who was very precious, busy little guy, and
often talked of his buddy that he played with and
talked to all the time in the backyard. His mom
assumed that it was an imaginary friend. Susie came by
for lunch. The three of us sat in the back
corner for a private lunch to talk and visit. After
we ordered. Susie told us of how for the better
part of six months, her son talked all the time
about his buddy in the backyard. He could hardly wait
to go outside and play, and he would sit at
the sliding glass doors staring outside, sometimes crying that his
buddy would miss him when it rained and he wouldn't
go outside to play. A couple of weeks before this
lunch meeting, Susie said that her son went right out
to play after breakfast and was on his big wheel,
squealing with delight and zooming around the backyard. So she
went about her housework. The backyard was assumed by the
parents to be completely safe There was a six foot
chain link fence around the backyard with a gate on
either side of the house, and those gates were always locked.
The forest was just a few feet past the fence
on the backside, and on the north side it was
about fifty yards away. They felt like they were in
a safe spot. There were many sources of play items
in the fence yard. There was a swing set made
of wood, and there were multiple riding toys. There were
balls in even a pebble box. When her son went
out to play. Most of the time, she kept the
glass sliding door open so she could hear her son.
Susie was busy at that time mopping, and she heard
her son laughing and saying, you can't catch me, You
can't catch me, and he laughed and he laughed. This
sort of laughter from a child always makes the parents happy.
But she thought she heard another child laughing out in
the yard. It didn't sound like her son at all.
She walked to the door to see who else was
in the yard, and she dropped her mom What she
saw shattered the day. There was a small, hairy boy
a little bigger than her son, peddling another one of
the big will tricks chasing after her son, and they
were both laughing and having a great time. She opened
the door and she rushed out. At that moment, the
mama of the hairy little boy saw Susie come out
of the door, and she rushed from the shadows of
the forest, leaped over the fence with ease, ran to
her son, snatched him off the track, turned around and
looked at Susie. Susie jerked her son and held him,
and they both ran in different directions, Susie to the
house and missus Sisquatch to the woods. Out of breath
and her heart pounding, Susie sat on the dining room
chair holding her son, who was now yelling and crying
about how she had scared off his friend. He broke
free from her embrace and ran to the sliding rear door, yelling,
hey buddy, Hey buddy, come back, at which point Susie
snatched her son away from the glass and scolded him,
saying that he was not to play with Buddy ever again.
Susie then described fully what she saw, a little child sisquatch,
with no hair about its face or hands. Its hands
were firmly able to grift the handlebars of the track,
and its feet were peddling like any other child. She
recalled that the young sasquatch was laughing and talking even
more strange, Apparently her son understood him. They understood each other.
Its hair was not terribly long, but it was brownish
blond with a reddish tint from the sun. The mother
was similar, but darker brown and had more hair, but
while she had hair on her chest, it was sparse there,
and there was no hair on her face. She had
a flat nose. She had dark brown eyes, and a
pinkish tongue, with white teeth with some yellowing. She recalled
to clicking sounds the mama made, and her child responded
in kind. She also noted that both her son and
the hairy child seemed to call out the same words
to each other, and the two kids they actually called
each other buddy. Susie said. She called her husband and
told him what happened from the tower. He looked through
his powerful binoculars looking at the back portion of their property,
going back into the forest, and he didn't see anything.
He called additional forest rangers in his superiors, and that's
started a search. But nothing concrete was ever found except
some faint tracks. After that, Susie and her husband put
an eight foot wooden privacy fence across the back but
she said that her son was despondent over the loss
of his body, and from that day forward he lost
interest in playing in the backyard. Susie said that she
feels guilty for ruining his happiness.