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: On the first day of April nineteen eighty seven, a
Speaker 1: disc jockey in Traverse City named Steve Cook put a
Speaker 1: song on the air that he'd written as a joke.
Speaker 1: It ran about four minutes, and it was about a
Speaker 1: creature with the head of a dog and the body
Speaker 1: of a man that walks the north woods of Michigan
Speaker 1: and comes back every seven years. He'd made the whole
Speaker 1: thing up over a weekend, and he figured he'd get
Speaker 1: a few laughs out of it. What he got instead
Speaker 1: were phones that wouldn't stop ringing, and the people calling
Speaker 1: weren't laughing. They wanted to tell him where they'd seen it.
Speaker 1: Some of them were crying. One of them had driven
Speaker 1: back up to a rented cabin outside Luther and found
Speaker 1: the door gouged from top to bottom, with claw marks
Speaker 1: starting higher off the ground than any dog he'd ever
Speaker 1: owned could reach. This is the story of what a
Speaker 1: joke dug up in Michigan, and what people up there
Speaker 1: say has been walking around long before anybody wrote a
Speaker 1: song about it. This is the next stop on the
Speaker 1: backwoods cryptid road trip. Michigan's a different animal, and it
Speaker 1: comes down to how how much of it there is.
Speaker 1: The state has somewhere around twenty million acres of forest land.
Speaker 1: The state forest system by itself runs about four million acres,
Speaker 1: which makes it the biggest in the country. Then you
Speaker 1: add the huron Manisty in the northern Lower Peninsula, the
Speaker 1: Ottawa and the Hiawatha up in the Upper Peninsula, county land,
Speaker 1: commercial timber, and all those big private hunting parcels that
Speaker 1: get posted every fall. What you end up with is
Speaker 1: a state where you can turn off a paved road,
Speaker 1: drive a two track for twenty minutes, shut the truck off,
Speaker 1: and be alone in the way. That means nobody knows
Speaker 1: where you are and nobody is coming. The reports out
Speaker 1: of there breakdown about three ways. Somebody driving a back
Speaker 1: road at night, somebody in the woods to hunt, or
Speaker 1: somebody inside a building after dark with the thing outside.
Speaker 1: Almost all of them come from the top half of
Speaker 1: the Lower Peninsula, and almost all of them come from
Speaker 1: people who were out there for a reason. Nobody in
Speaker 1: this episode went looking for anything. They were driving to work,
Speaker 1: ing up a camp, walking out of a stand, or
Speaker 1: checking a gas well. So let's start with the road.
Speaker 1: Ray Kazlowski drove a truck out of Grand Rapids for
Speaker 1: nineteen years, mostly food service, mostly over nights, which meant
Speaker 1: he spent two decades on two lane roads at hours
Speaker 1: when there was nobody else out there with him. It
Speaker 1: was the second week of November in twenty fourteen, somewhere
Speaker 1: between two and three in the morning, and he was
Speaker 1: running west on M fifty five between Cadillac and Manistee
Speaker 1: with a loaded trailer behind him. If you know that stretch,
Speaker 1: you know what it looks like, hardwood standing right up
Speaker 1: against both shoulders, no lighting, nothing on the road but you.
Speaker 1: He came out of a long left hand curve and
Speaker 1: there was an animal standing on the center line. Ray said.
Speaker 1: It was around seven feet tall, dark hair all over it,
Speaker 1: with a chest deeper and wider than the hips, arms
Speaker 1: hanging long, and back legs that bent the wrong way
Speaker 1: the way a dog's back legs do. The head was
Speaker 1: a dog's head, long muzzle ears standing up in points.
Speaker 1: It looked at the truck. Then it took three or
Speaker 1: four steps over to the north shoulder and walked into
Speaker 1: the trees, and it never once came down on all fours.
Speaker 1: He didn't stop. He drove on into the yard at
Speaker 1: Manistee and then sat there in the cab for twenty
Speaker 1: minutes with the engine running before he went home. He
Speaker 1: told his wife about it two days later, and he
Speaker 1: didn't tell another soul for six years. He kept running
Speaker 1: that route, and he'll tell you he never came around
Speaker 1: that curve again without looking. What finally changed his mind
Speaker 1: about talking was his son taking a job that put
Speaker 1: him on the same road at night. Steve Cook was
Speaker 1: a disc jockey and the program director at WTCM in
Speaker 1: Traverse City in nineteen eighty seven, and he was also
Speaker 1: a musician, which is the part that mattered. He wanted
Speaker 1: an April fool's bit. He'd picked up scraps of a
Speaker 1: local story about a dog headed man in the north Woods,
Speaker 1: the kind of thing that comes up at a bar
Speaker 1: and then gets before anybody thinks hard about it, And
Speaker 1: over a weekend he turned it into a song, recorded
Speaker 1: it on cheap equipment, and put it out under a
Speaker 1: made up name so nobody would trace it straight back
Speaker 1: to the station. The seven year cycle was his own invention.
Speaker 1: He needed a hook, and having the thing come back
Speaker 1: in years ending in seven gave him what he was
Speaker 1: looking for, and it also gave him a punchline, since
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty seven obviously ended in a seven. He worked
Speaker 1: northern Michigan place names into the lyrics because that's what
Speaker 1: makes people feel like a song belongs to them, And
Speaker 1: he pinned the whole thing to eighteen eighty seven so
Speaker 1: it would have a century standing behind it. Then he
Speaker 1: played it and the phones didn't stop. Here's the actual song,
Speaker 1: just as it hit the airwaves in eighty seven.
Speaker 2: A cool summer morning in early June is when the
Speaker 2: legend began. At a naval slogan camp in Wexford County
Speaker 2: where the Manisty rivet ran. Lumberjacks near the Garland Swamp
Speaker 2: found an animal. They thought it was a dog in
Speaker 2: a playful mood, and they chased it around until it
Speaker 2: ran inside a hollow lag A longer named Johnson grabbed
Speaker 2: him a stick, poked around inside. Then the thing let
Speaker 2: out an unearthly scream and came out and stood upright.
Speaker 2: None of those men ever said very much about whatever happened.
Speaker 2: Then they just packed up their belongings left that night,
Speaker 2: were never heard from again. It was ten years later
Speaker 2: in ninety seven when a farmer near Buckley was found
Speaker 2: slumped over his plow. His heart had stopped. There were
Speaker 2: dog tracks all around. Seven years passed the turn of
Speaker 2: the century. This say had crazy old wit a headed
Speaker 2: dream of dogs that strickled her house last night. They
Speaker 2: walked black.
Speaker 3: Men and screamed.
Speaker 2: In nineteen seventeen, a sheriff who was out walking found
Speaker 2: a driverless wagon and tracks of the dust like wolves
Speaker 2: and the stock him near the roadside. A four horse
Speaker 2: team lay dead with their eyes open wide. When the
Speaker 2: vent finished up his examination. Becau said it looked like
Speaker 2: they died of fright. In thirty seven, a schooner captain
Speaker 2: said several crew members had reported a pack of wild
Speaker 2: dogs Roman Bowers Harmy.
Speaker 3: His story was never recorded. In fifty seven.
Speaker 2: A man of the cloth found claw marks on an
Speaker 2: old church door. The newspaper said they'd been made by
Speaker 2: a dog.
Speaker 3: P'da had to stood seven foot four. In sixty seven.
Speaker 2: A van load of hippie stool a park ranger named Quenland.
Speaker 2: They'd been awakened in the night by a scratch at
Speaker 2: the window. There was a dog man looking in and grinning.
Speaker 2: In seventy seven, there were screams in the night near
Speaker 2: the village ship fell air. Could have been a bobcat,
Speaker 2: could have been the wind. Nobody looked up there. Then
Speaker 2: in the summer of eighty seven near Luther had happened again.
Speaker 2: Had a cabin in the woods. It looked like maybe
Speaker 2: someone had tried to break in. There were cuts around
Speaker 2: the doors that could only been made by a very
Speaker 2: sharp teeth and claws. He didn't wear his shoes because
Speaker 2: he didn't have feet. He walked up just to paws.
Speaker 3: So far this year those stories have appeared.
Speaker 2: Have the dog been gone away? Have they disappeared?
Speaker 3: Soon enough?
Speaker 2: I guess we'll know, because this is the time to
Speaker 2: fear for another ten years has come around. The seventh
Speaker 2: year is here, and somewhere in the north woods darkness,
Speaker 2: a creature walks upright, and the best advice you may
Speaker 2: ever get.
Speaker 3: Is done go out at night.
Speaker 1: The requests were the least of what came back. Inside
Speaker 1: of a few days, he was taking calls and opening
Speaker 1: letters from people who had no interest in hearing the
Speaker 1: song again and every interest in telling him what they'd
Speaker 1: already seen out there, farmers, hunters, a woman who wouldn't
Speaker 1: give her name. Some of those letters ran several pages.
Speaker 1: Some of them came with hand drawn maps and section
Speaker 1: lines on them. Cook has put the volume in the
Speaker 1: hundreds over the years that followed. He's been consistent about
Speaker 1: all of it for almost forty years now. He made
Speaker 1: it up. He's never claimed the song documented anything. He'll
Speaker 1: tell you flat out he doesn't know whether the creature
Speaker 1: is real. And he put the proceeds from the record
Speaker 1: toward animal shelter work in northern Michigan, which is a
Speaker 1: strange and fairly decent thing. To do with money you
Speaker 1: made off a monster. He also kept the mail, and
Speaker 1: that's the part that turned a novelty record into a
Speaker 1: forty year job. He had a filing cabinet going before
Speaker 1: he had any idea he was going to need one,
Speaker 1: and by the middle of the nineties he was the
Speaker 1: closest thing Michigan had to a clearinghouse for this, which
Speaker 1: is a lot to hang on. A man who wrote
Speaker 1: a joke song on a Saturday afternoon, and the letters clustered,
Speaker 1: not around the years the song said they would, but
Speaker 1: around the same fifty or sixty miles of the state,
Speaker 1: over and over and around the same short list of
Speaker 1: things happening. Something on a road, something at the edge
Speaker 1: of a field, something at a door. What Cook built
Speaker 1: without meaning to was a container. Before nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: a man in Wexford County who saw something upright in
Speaker 1: Canine on a two track had no word for it,
Speaker 1: no category to put it in, and no reason on
Speaker 1: earth to think anybody else in the state had ever
Speaker 1: seen the same thing. After nineteen eighty seven, he had
Speaker 1: a name for it and a phone number to call.
Speaker 1: Now that cuts both ways. When you hand people a template,
Speaker 1: you're going to get reports that fit the template. Memory
Speaker 1: isn't a recording, it's a rebuild, and it rebuilds using
Speaker 1: whatever material happens to be laying around at the time.
Speaker 1: So a man who catches a dark shape at the
Speaker 1: edge of his headlights in nineteen ninety after he's heard
Speaker 1: that song on the radio forty times is going to
Speaker 1: walk away with a memory that has a little bit
Speaker 1: of Steve Cook's lyrics baked right into it. I watched
Speaker 1: that happen in interview rooms for sixteen years. It isn't lying,
Speaker 1: and honestly, that's what makes it such a problem. The
Speaker 1: origin story always comes out the same way. You've got
Speaker 1: two lumberjacks working up in Wexford County in eighteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: and they come across an animal that they take for
Speaker 1: a dog, right up until the thing stands up. One
Speaker 1: of them hits it with a stick or a club,
Speaker 1: depending on who's telling it to you, and it turns
Speaker 1: around and looks at them with a face they could
Speaker 1: only describe as human. I went looking for the paper
Speaker 1: on that one, and I went looking hard, because if
Speaker 1: there's an eighteen eighty seven Michigan newspaper out there, describing
Speaker 1: a dog headed man outside of Catalot. That changes this
Speaker 1: entire case. It would mean the tradition beat the song
Speaker 1: by one hundred years, and Steve Cook backed into something
Speaker 1: real without knowing it. I couldn't find it, and as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, nobody else has either, and
Speaker 1: that includes Cook, who says right out that he doesn't
Speaker 1: know where the eighteen eighty seven story came from and
Speaker 1: can't source it. The date is in the song, It's
Speaker 1: in every article and every video, in every forum post
Speaker 1: written since the song. Where it isn't is in an
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty seven newspaper. That doesn't mean nothing happened out there.
Speaker 1: Michigan lumber camps were full of stories that never got
Speaker 1: within a mile of a printing press, and a lot
Speaker 1: of those little papers from that era only survive in pieces,
Speaker 1: if they survive at all. But a date doesn't turn
Speaker 1: into history just because it has been repeated ten thousand times.
Speaker 1: And you run into the same problem with the thing
Speaker 1: you'll hear constantly, which is that the dog man comes
Speaker 1: out of Odawa or Ojibwe tradition. I've seen that claim
Speaker 1: made in dozens of places, and I've never one time
Speaker 1: seen it attached to a named source or a community member,
Speaker 1: or a recorded telling or an ethnographic collection. The Innihionabe
Speaker 1: peoples of Michigan have deep and complicated oral traditions, and
Speaker 1: it's entirely possible that something in them relates to this.
Speaker 1: But taking a modern monster and gluing an indigenous origin
Speaker 1: onto it without a citation is something white cryptid writers
Speaker 1: have been doing for one hundred years, and they do
Speaker 1: it to borrow authority that the story hasn't earned. So
Speaker 1: I'm not doing it here. Send me a source and
Speaker 1: I'll read it on the air and tell you I
Speaker 1: was wrong. Robert Fortney told a story late in his
Speaker 1: life about something that happened to him back in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty seven when he was a teenager out near the
Speaker 1: Muskegon River outside of Paris, down in Macosta County. Five
Speaker 1: wild dogs came at him. He fired a shot and
Speaker 1: four of them scattered, but the fifth one stood up
Speaker 1: on two legs and looked at him. The part Fortney
Speaker 1: carried around for the rest of his life was the
Speaker 1: eyes stay tuned for more bad back Wood's Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages, because he said they
Speaker 1: were slanted, and they didn't look like anything he'd ever
Speaker 1: seen before or since. Now. That account didn't exist in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty seven. It surfaced decades later, after the song
Speaker 1: had already been playing on the radio for years. But
Speaker 1: the background underneath it holds up just fine. Michigan in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty seven had a genuine problem with feral dog packs.
Speaker 1: Counties were losing livestock to them. The depression had turned
Speaker 1: a whole lot of animals loose on the landscape because
Speaker 1: people simply couldn't feed them anymore. So a teenage boy
Speaker 1: running into five wild dogs along the Muskegon River in
Speaker 1: that year is about as ordinary a thing as you
Speaker 1: could ask for. The strange part is one of those
Speaker 1: five standing up and staying that way after a gun
Speaker 1: went off. The next cluster people always point out as
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven, and it's a lot thinner than the
Speaker 1: way it gets repeated. The accounts hung on that year
Speaker 1: involved Mannesty and a little place called Cross Village, which
Speaker 1: is up on the Lake Michigan shore in Emmett County,
Speaker 1: and the Cross Village version usually has something coming at
Speaker 1: a vehicle or a group of people and getting driven off.
Speaker 1: I got the exact same result there that I got
Speaker 1: with eighteen eighty seven. Everything I found was a retelling,
Speaker 1: and every one of those retellings sits downstream of the song.
Speaker 1: I'll say this much in fairness. Northern Michigan in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty seven was full of little weekly newspapers, and most
Speaker 1: of them have never been digitized. There could be something
Speaker 1: sitting in a bound volume at a historical society in
Speaker 1: Pataski right now that nobody has opened in fifty years.
Speaker 1: If somebody listening has access to that material, I'd honestly
Speaker 1: like to hear from you. The only reason the sixty
Speaker 1: seven cluster matters at all is because of the cycle,
Speaker 1: and Steve Cook made the cycle up. So the question
Speaker 1: isn't whether it's real folklore. The question is whether the
Speaker 1: reports actually pile up in years in in seven. Once
Speaker 1: you get enough of them together, they don't. What you
Speaker 1: get instead is October and November, which is deer season,
Speaker 1: when you've got tens of thousands of people sitting out
Speaker 1: in the Michigan woods before daylight and after dark. Then
Speaker 1: you get summer, when the campgrounds fill up and the
Speaker 1: seasonal places open back up, and then you get a spike.
Speaker 1: Every single time a television segment airs or a local
Speaker 1: station runs an anniversary piece about the song. Cook has
Speaker 1: never once defended that cycle as fact. He built it
Speaker 1: as a device, and then he spent forty years watching
Speaker 1: people treat it like data. The reports that came in
Speaker 1: after the song ran heavy in two counties, Lake and Wexford,
Speaker 1: in that corridor of state and federal forest that runs
Speaker 1: between Baldwin, Luther Cadillac, and Maynistee. If you've driven it,
Speaker 1: you know that country. It's rolling hardwood and pine with sand,
Speaker 1: two tracks running off everywhere, and oil and gas access
Speaker 1: roads and seasonal cabins and long, unlit stretches where the
Speaker 1: only buildings you go past are hunting camps. Lake County
Speaker 1: is one of the least populated counties in the whole
Speaker 1: Lower Peninsula, and something like two thirds of its public land.
Speaker 1: Baldwin has a few hundred year round residents, and it
Speaker 1: swells up every fall. The Pair Marquette and the Little
Speaker 1: Mannistee both run through there, and they bring fishermen in
Speaker 1: from April all the way through October. There are thousands
Speaker 1: of little parcels up in that country with a camp
Speaker 1: sitting on them, and nobody living there eleven months out
Speaker 1: of the year. So the people who are in that
Speaker 1: corridor at any given hour are mostly passing through, and
Speaker 1: they're mostly outdoors, and they're mostly out at the edges
Speaker 1: of daylight, and most of them aren't from there. That's
Speaker 1: who's producing the reports. The Luther case got more traction
Speaker 1: than anything else, and it's the only one in this
Speaker 1: entire file where somebody claims to have had a thing
Speaker 1: you could put your hands on. In nineteen eighty seven,
Speaker 1: not long after the song hit, a cabin near Luther
Speaker 1: was found damaged. There were deep parallel gouges running down
Speaker 1: the outside of the door, and there was damage around
Speaker 1: the frame, and in some tellings the inside was torn
Speaker 1: up too. Photographs got taken, and Cook has said he
Speaker 1: was given copies of them. What made it famous was
Speaker 1: how high up the marks went and how far apart
Speaker 1: the claws were, because the spacing was wider than any
Speaker 1: big dog's paw. I've never seen the original photographs. What
Speaker 1: circulates now as copies of copies, And there's no ruler
Speaker 1: anywhere in the frame, and there's no measurement off the threshold,
Speaker 1: and there's no record of who shot them, or when
Speaker 1: or under what circumstances. The door itself is long gone,
Speaker 1: and nobody have asked knows where it ended up. The
Speaker 1: skeptics landed on a black bear standing up at that door,
Speaker 1: working at food inside the cabin, and Lake County is
Speaker 1: bear country, so that's a fair place for them to land.
Speaker 1: It has been the standard answer for forty years, and
Speaker 1: the folks making it aren't quiet about it. What sits
Speaker 1: right alongside it. And Cook's tai is that the man
Speaker 1: heard something moving around the outside of that building first,
Speaker 1: and he heard a sound he couldn't put a name to.
Speaker 1: In September of twenty eleven, three people from downstate drove
Speaker 1: up to disperse camp in the Manistee National Forest. Aaron
Speaker 1: Voss was thirty one and he'd been camping in that
Speaker 1: forest since he was a little kid. His brother in law,
Speaker 1: Nick was twenty six, and Nick's girlfriend Bethany was twenty
Speaker 1: four and she'd never in her life slept anywhere but
Speaker 1: a developed campground. They took a two track off of
Speaker 1: a forest road and set up in a little clearing
Speaker 1: about a quarter mile in. They had two tents and
Speaker 1: there was an old fire ring. Somebody had built years before,
Speaker 1: and they had a cooler in the bed of Aaron's truck.
Speaker 1: There was nothing unusual about the spot at all. Aaron
Speaker 1: had camped within a mile of it a dozen times.
Speaker 1: Around eleven that night, the coyotes started up somewhere off
Speaker 1: to the north of them, and it spooked Bethany pretty good.
Speaker 1: So Aaron explained to her that four coyotes sound like
Speaker 1: twenty of them, which is true, and she settled down.
Speaker 1: They put the fire out around midnight and everybody went
Speaker 1: into the tents. Sometime after two, Aaron woke up because
Speaker 1: something walked past his tent. He'd been asleep maybe an
Speaker 1: hour and a half. There was no moon that night,
Speaker 1: and the fire had been dead long enough that there
Speaker 1: was nothing left in the ring to see anything by.
Speaker 1: He never saw a thing, and he's never once claimed
Speaker 1: that he did. What he had was footsteps in dry
Speaker 1: leaf litter, about fifteen or twenty feet off of his
Speaker 1: tent wall. It was two steps and then a pause,
Speaker 1: then two more steps and then another pause, slow, and
Speaker 1: even the whole way around. Then Nick's voice came out
Speaker 1: of the other tent, real quiet, just saying his name.
Speaker 1: The steps worked around the north side of the clearing,
Speaker 1: and then stopped for close to a full minute. Then
Speaker 1: they started back up, heading east, and then they quit
Speaker 1: for good. And somewhere in the middle of all that,
Speaker 1: the coyotes had gone completely silent. And Aaron and tell
Speaker 1: you when around three point thirty he couldn't take it
Speaker 1: anymore and he got out of the tent with a
Speaker 1: flashlight and there was nothing out there to find. The
Speaker 1: ground up in that country is sand underneath the leaf litter,
Speaker 1: and it won't hold a track. Then in the morning,
Speaker 1: before anybody had said one word to her about any
Speaker 1: of it, Bethany asked which of them had walked past
Speaker 1: her tent during the night. She said she woke up
Speaker 1: at some point and heard something breathing outside the fabric
Speaker 1: right by her head, and she figured it was Nick
Speaker 1: going out to relieve himself. But Nick never left his tent,
Speaker 1: and Aaron hadn't gone out until three thirty, and when
Speaker 1: he did, he went the other direction. Aaron got everybody
Speaker 1: into the truck before he did anything else. That morning,
Speaker 1: the tents came down with the poles still in them,
Speaker 1: and went in the bed loose, which is something he
Speaker 1: had never done before, and hasn't done since. They stopped
Speaker 1: for coffee at a gas station in Wellston and Nick
Speaker 1: asked him if they were still coming back up in
Speaker 1: November for deer season. Aaron told him he'd think about it,
Speaker 1: and then he started talking about the truck's transmission, and
Speaker 1: they talked about that transmission the whole rest of the
Speaker 1: way home. They didn't go back that November. Aaron still
Speaker 1: camps the Maynistee. He's never gone back to that two track.
Speaker 1: There's a whole category of encounters out of Michigan, and
Speaker 1: it comes almost entirely out of hunters. Wayne and Rick
Speaker 1: Petrie are cousins and they hunt a family forty up
Speaker 1: in Lake County. There's a hardwood ridge along the north
Speaker 1: end of it with a cedar swamp sitting behind that.
Speaker 1: They've been hunting it together since Rick got out of
Speaker 1: the Navy in the late eighties. In November of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, Wayne was sixty one and Rick was fifty six.
Speaker 1: Rick had dragged a dough out earlier that week and
Speaker 1: wrecked his back doing it, and that's the only reason
Speaker 1: those two were walking out together that evening. Normally they
Speaker 1: come off of opposite ends of the property and meet
Speaker 1: up at the truck. They were about three hundred yards
Speaker 1: from the gate. When Rick stopped walking. There was something
Speaker 1: moving through the leaves off to their left, back in
Speaker 1: the timber, maybe forty or fifty yards out. It was
Speaker 1: going the same direction they were When they walked, it
Speaker 1: walked when they stopped. It took another two or three steps,
Speaker 1: and then it went quiet too. So they kept going
Speaker 1: and it kept coming, and neither one of them said
Speaker 1: a word about it. Rick had a light on him
Speaker 1: and he never turned it on. About one hundred yards
Speaker 1: short of the gate, the thing moved. It crossed the
Speaker 1: two tracks somewhere behind them in the dark, and it
Speaker 1: was loud and it was heavy, six or eight strides
Speaker 1: through the leaves, and then it stopped. Rick started to
Speaker 1: turn around, and Wayne grabbed him by the sleeve and
Speaker 1: kept him walking. They got to the truck and Rick
Speaker 1: got in and locked his door. Wayne sat there behind
Speaker 1: the wheel with the key in his hand, and he
Speaker 1: didn't start it right away because he knew that starting
Speaker 1: it meant the headlights were going to come on. When
Speaker 1: he finally did turn the key, the road out in
Speaker 1: front of them was empty. They both hunted that forty
Speaker 1: every season since. Neither one of them has ever brought
Speaker 1: it up in front of the rest of the family,
Speaker 1: and Rick parks the truck facing out now. Dale Kreeger
Speaker 1: was a tool and die man outside of Muskegon before
Speaker 1: he retired, and he's hunted white tail up in Missauke
Speaker 1: County since the early eighties on the same one hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty acres. It belongs to a family he's known
Speaker 1: since he was a boy. He keeps a hunting log,
Speaker 1: and that's the only reason he's got an exact date.
Speaker 1: November fourteenth, twenty seventeen. He went in before daylight that
Speaker 1: morning and climbed a ladder stand that sits on the
Speaker 1: edge of a swamp bottom where a hardwood ridge drops off.
Speaker 1: He'd been hunting that same stand for better than twenty years.
Speaker 1: Around six point fifty in light, he'd call poor. He
Speaker 1: picked up a pair of eyes about eighty yards out.
Speaker 1: They were sitting five and a half or six feet
Speaker 1: off the ground, and they weren't down in the swamp
Speaker 1: where an animal ought to be. They were up on
Speaker 1: the transition where the ridge comes down in among the trunks.
Speaker 1: Dale figured it was another hunter, so he held still
Speaker 1: and waited to see some blaze orange. The eyes went
Speaker 1: off to the left ten or twelve feet, and then
Speaker 1: they came back to the right, and then they settled
Speaker 1: on him and stayed there. He says, they were amber,
Speaker 1: not the greenish white you get back off a deer
Speaker 1: at that hour, but amber, and they held steady instead
Speaker 1: of flaring up and fading out. So he got his
Speaker 1: binoculars up and what he had in the glass was
Speaker 1: a shape standing in between two trees with its head
Speaker 1: turned toward him. The head was narrow, and it was
Speaker 1: long from the front, and it was tilted over a
Speaker 1: little to one side. The shoulders on it were above
Speaker 1: five feet. He put the whole thing at close to seven.
Speaker 1: He chambered around and left the safety on, and he
Speaker 1: never came anywhere close to firing. He couldn't be sure
Speaker 1: that it wasn't a man. He had spent his whole
Speaker 1: life around men who hunt, and he wasn't going to
Speaker 1: be the guy who shot somebody in the dark because
Speaker 1: he got scared. So he sat up there and he
Speaker 1: watched it for about two minutes. Then it went backward
Speaker 1: out of the gap between those two trees without ever
Speaker 1: turning around, and he lost it, and then he stayed
Speaker 1: in the stand. That's the detail he leads with every
Speaker 1: time this comes up. He sat in a ladder stand
Speaker 1: for another twenty minutes with a round chambered, because climbing
Speaker 1: down felt worse than staying put. When he finally did
Speaker 1: come down, he walked out the long way instead of
Speaker 1: cutting through the bottom. He and the landowner's son walked
Speaker 1: that ridge in the afternoon and found nothing at all.
Speaker 1: The ground was frozen on top and buried in leaves.
Speaker 1: Dale hunted that stand again the next season and every
Speaker 1: season since nine years now, and he's never seen anything
Speaker 1: like it again. The one thing that did change is
Speaker 1: that he doesn't walk in dark anymore. He runs a
Speaker 1: headlamp the whole way in now, instead of feeling his
Speaker 1: way like he did for twenty years. And for a
Speaker 1: man who spent forty years learning how not to spook deer,
Speaker 1: that's a real price, and he pays it every single morning.
Speaker 1: He's got no use for the word dog man, and
Speaker 1: he said so more than once. What he'll tell you
Speaker 1: is that he saw an animal he couldn't identify that
Speaker 1: was tall enough to look him in the eye, and
Speaker 1: that he's been in the woods sixty years, and it's
Speaker 1: the only thing out there he's ever failed to put
Speaker 1: a name on. Something I didn't expect when I got
Speaker 1: into this material is how many Michigan accounts involve a building,
Speaker 1: not a road, not a stand, not a trail, a
Speaker 1: structure with people inside of it and something outside that
Speaker 1: won't leave, and they tend to run the same way.
Speaker 1: Somebody hears movement out on the porch or up against
Speaker 1: the wall, then there's scratching at the door, low down
Speaker 1: at first, and then higher up. The dogs inside go
Speaker 1: silent instead of barking, and anybody who has owned a
Speaker 1: dog will tell you that's the worst of those two things.
Speaker 1: Then there's some kind of vocalization and then it stops,
Speaker 1: and the rest of the night goes by quiet, and
Speaker 1: there's damage in the morning. Tom and Rachel Mercer have
Speaker 1: a place up in Lake County, not far from Luther
Speaker 1: that Rachel's father built back in the seventies. It's got
Speaker 1: two bedrooms and a wood stove and a well, and
Speaker 1: there's a generator shed out back. They were up there
Speaker 1: most weekends from spa go on through deer season with
Speaker 1: their two kids, a daughter who was eleven, and a
Speaker 1: son who was seven, and a six year old lab
Speaker 1: named Duke. Late October of twenty nineteen. They were in
Speaker 1: bed by ten thirty. Around one in the morning, Rachel
Speaker 1: woke Tom up because Duke was standing in the middle
Speaker 1: of the main room, facing the front door, and he
Speaker 1: wasn't making a sound. He was shaking all over and
Speaker 1: he'd urinated on the floor, which he hadn't done since
Speaker 1: he was a puppy. And then something scratched the door.
Speaker 1: It was three or four strokes, and they were slow
Speaker 1: and they dragged, and you could hear whatever it was
Speaker 1: catching in the wood on the way down. Tom figured raccoon,
Speaker 1: because raccoons get up on porches constantly. He took a
Speaker 1: flashlight over to the front window beside the door and
Speaker 1: put the beam right against the glass, and the porch
Speaker 1: was empty. He could see the yard and he could
Speaker 1: see the tree line, and there was nothing in between.
Speaker 1: Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back
Speaker 1: after these messages. He was crossing back toward the door
Speaker 1: when the scratching started up again, and this time it
Speaker 1: was coming from a level. Even with his own face.
Speaker 1: He's six foot one and he was standing on the
Speaker 1: other side of that door from it. Rachel had both
Speaker 1: kids in the back bedroom by then. Their son asked
Speaker 1: if it was a bear, and she told him, yes,
Speaker 1: it's a bear, go back to sleep. Tom grabbed the shotgun,
Speaker 1: but he never opened that door. The scratching quit, and
Speaker 1: about two minutes later, off the north side of the cabin,
Speaker 1: they heard something that Tom still can't describe to his
Speaker 1: own satisfaction. The closest he can get to. It's a
Speaker 1: dog's growl, coming out of a chest the size of
Speaker 1: a barrel. It started low and then it broke upward
Speaker 1: into a rasp. At the end of it. Rachel came
Speaker 1: out of the back bedroom and looked at him, and
Speaker 1: then went back in and shut the door. Nothing else
Speaker 1: happened after that. They sat up until it got light,
Speaker 1: and Tom went out around seven point thirty with the shotgun.
Speaker 1: There were five gouges in that door. Four of them
Speaker 1: were grouped together, and the fifth one was off to
Speaker 1: the side and lower down. He measured the highest one
Speaker 1: against himself and it came out right about at his
Speaker 1: eye level. There was nothing at all on the porch boards.
Speaker 1: There was a dent down in the soft ground at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the steps that he took a picture
Speaker 1: of and then rode off himself because it was a
Speaker 1: hollow and leaf mold with no toes in it, and
Speaker 1: he wasn't going to sit there and call that a track.
Speaker 1: The truck was loaded by nine and they were on
Speaker 1: the highway before ten, and they told the kids that
Speaker 1: weather was coming in. They still own that place. Rachel
Speaker 1: won't sell it because her father built it. Tom hung
Speaker 1: a steel security door on the front of it, and
Speaker 1: he put motion floodlights on all four corners, and he
Speaker 1: cleared the brush back another thirty feet. Dennis and Sharon
Speaker 1: by a like farm up in Osceola County, north of Avart.
Speaker 1: They run corn and hay and about forty head of cattle.
Speaker 1: There's a yard light up on a pole between the
Speaker 1: house and the barn, and it has been burning every
Speaker 1: night since Dennis's father put it up there. October of
Speaker 1: two thousand and five, a little after eleven at night,
Speaker 1: the cattle got up. Dennis knows what a herd getting up,
Speaker 1: and the dark sounds like, so he walked over to
Speaker 1: the kitchen window and there was something standing at the
Speaker 1: corner of the machine shed, right inside the edge of
Speaker 1: that yard light. It was standing upright, and it was
Speaker 1: tall enough that its head came up above the bottom
Speaker 1: of the gable trim on that shed, and he went
Speaker 1: out later and measured that trim at eight feet. It
Speaker 1: was dark colored, and it was heavy through the shoulders,
Speaker 1: and its arms hung down far enough that he could
Speaker 1: see they went past where a man's arms would stop,
Speaker 1: and the head was a dog's head, turned sideways to him.
Speaker 1: Sharon came up to the window behind him, and she's
Speaker 1: the one who said out loud that the thing had
Speaker 1: a tail. It just stood there. Dennis puts it at
Speaker 1: half a minute or better. Then it turned and walked
Speaker 1: out of the light toward the fence line behind the
Speaker 1: machine shed, and it went the whole way on two legs.
Speaker 1: He took a rifle out there when it got light.
Speaker 1: There's a low spot behind that shed that holds water
Speaker 1: in October, and he found two impressions down in it,
Speaker 1: but they were already filling in and blown out around
Speaker 1: the edges. He didn't cast them and he didn't photograph them,
Speaker 1: and he'll tell you straight out that's on him. The
Speaker 1: cattle wouldn't go into the back lot for eight days
Speaker 1: and Dennis lost to Heffer that November to something that
Speaker 1: opened her up at the flank, and the Department of
Speaker 1: Natural Resources called it dogs, and he doesn't argue with
Speaker 1: them about it. They're still farming that ground. That yard
Speaker 1: light is still up on the pole. Dennis added two
Speaker 1: more of them, one on the barn and one on
Speaker 1: the machine shed, and all three of them are on
Speaker 1: a photo cell now so that nobody has to remember
Speaker 1: to flip a switch. Jody vander Mullen is a nurse
Speaker 1: outside of Grand Rapids. Her family has eight acres northwest
Speaker 1: of Baldwin that her grandfather bought back in the sixties,
Speaker 1: and four siblings share it on a schedule that's taped
Speaker 1: up inside a kitchen cabinet. Somebody has to go close
Speaker 1: that camp every fall. You blow out the water lines,
Speaker 1: you shut off the propane, you pulled the batteries out
Speaker 1: of the smoke detectors, and you drained the generator. It's
Speaker 1: a full day of work. In November of twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: the job landed on Jody because both of her brothers
Speaker 1: were working. She drove up on a Friday straight off
Speaker 1: of a twelve hour shift and got there around six
Speaker 1: o'clock in full dark. She'd been to that camp a
Speaker 1: few hundred times in her life, and she'd stayed up
Speaker 1: there alone before without thinking twice about it. She got
Speaker 1: the lines done, she ate a sandwich, and she was
Speaker 1: asleep in the back bedroom by ten. What woke her
Speaker 1: up her brain filed at first as a diesel idling.
Speaker 1: There's a gas wheel pad about a mile off from there,
Speaker 1: and trucks run in and out of it at all hours,
Speaker 1: so that made sense to her half asleep. Then the
Speaker 1: pitch of it changed, and she came all the way awake,
Speaker 1: and she understood that the sound was outside the window
Speaker 1: at the head of her bed, about four feet from
Speaker 1: her face, with one wall in between. It was a
Speaker 1: growl that she could feel in the mattress springs. She
Speaker 1: counted it out afterwards and set it somewhere between eight
Speaker 1: and twelve seconds, and it never broke off for a breath.
Speaker 1: Then it stopped, and something dragged along the outside of
Speaker 1: that wall. It started at the corner of the building
Speaker 1: and it came toward the window, and then it went
Speaker 1: on past it. She got her phone off the night
Speaker 1: stand and called nine to one pint one. The dispatcher
Speaker 1: put it in as a possible prowler. Lake County is
Speaker 1: a big county with a thin road patrol at eleven
Speaker 1: o'clock at night, and it took a deputy somewhere between
Speaker 1: thirty five and forty minutes to get out there. She
Speaker 1: stayed on the line for part of that. Nothing came back,
Speaker 1: and nothing moved, and she never turned on a light
Speaker 1: or got off of that bed until she saw headlights
Speaker 1: coming up the drive. The deputy walked the perimeter with
Speaker 1: a flashlight. He was young, and he was thorough about it.
Speaker 1: He went all the way around the building twice and
Speaker 1: then out to the tree line. The ground was frozen
Speaker 1: and there was nothing to find. He asked her if
Speaker 1: she wanted him to stay while she got her things together,
Speaker 1: and he did stay, and she drove home to Grand
Speaker 1: Rapids that night and got in around three in the morning.
Speaker 1: She never got a report number for it. She's checked
Speaker 1: more than once as far as the county is concerned.
Speaker 1: That was to check the area call with nothing found.
Speaker 1: Her older brother went up two weeks later to finish
Speaker 1: what she hadn't gotten to, and he came back saying
Speaker 1: that the siding on the north side of the bedroom
Speaker 1: had marks on it that he figured were branch damage.
Speaker 1: There's no branch on that side of the building. The
Speaker 1: two of them have been arguing about it at Thanksgiving
Speaker 1: for over a decade now. Jody still goes up to camp,
Speaker 1: but she goes in the daylight, and she closes it
Speaker 1: in October instead of November, and she drives the three
Speaker 1: and a half hours up and the three and a
Speaker 1: half hours back the same day rather than sleep up
Speaker 1: there by herself. Doug warringa plowed county roads up in
Speaker 1: Masauk for twenty two years. He started at four in
Speaker 1: the morning. He ran a tandem with a wing plow
Speaker 1: on it, and he had the same route most of
Speaker 1: that time. February of twenty twelve, a little before five
Speaker 1: in the morning, he was running a gravel road east
Speaker 1: of Lake City and blowing snow. He had the wing
Speaker 1: down and the beacons going and he was doing maybe
Speaker 1: twenty five. Something came off the north bank into the road.
Speaker 1: Doug says he had no time to break and he
Speaker 1: didn't try. It went across in front of the blade
Speaker 1: and he caught it in his headlights standing up, and
Speaker 1: the top of it was above the hoodline of that truck.
Speaker 1: The wing caught something. He felt it come through the
Speaker 1: frame and he heard it, and he stopped about one
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty feet down the road and got out
Speaker 1: with the light he keeps in the cab. There was
Speaker 1: hair on the leading edge of that wing plow, and
Speaker 1: there was a smear along the top of it. He
Speaker 1: didn't see any blood on the road, although he'll tell
Speaker 1: you the snow was coming down hard enough that it
Speaker 1: wouldn't have stayed visible very long. Anyway, he got back
Speaker 1: in and finished his route. He didn't call any of
Speaker 1: it in because there's no radio code for what he'd
Speaker 1: have had to say. At the end of shift, he
Speaker 1: pulled into the county barn and he went and got
Speaker 1: his foreman, and the two of them stood there and
Speaker 1: looked at that wing. The foreman told him it was deer.
Speaker 1: Doug told him that deer don't leave hair four feet
Speaker 1: up on a wing plow. So Doug pulled some of
Speaker 1: that hair off with his fingers and he put it
Speaker 1: in a sandwich bag, and he left the bag in
Speaker 1: his locker. He retired in twenty nineteen. That bag was
Speaker 1: still sitting in his locker when he cleaned it out.
Speaker 1: And it went into the trash with everything else. And
Speaker 1: he'll tell you it's the dumbest thing he ever did
Speaker 1: in his life. People ask why nobody has a picture
Speaker 1: of any of this. Every one of these happened at
Speaker 1: night or right at the edge of the light, and
Speaker 1: most of them lasted somewhere between two seconds and half
Speaker 1: a minute, and the people they happened to were driving
Speaker 1: a truck or holding a rifle, or standing inside a
Speaker 1: house trying to decide whether to open a door. Doug
Speaker 1: Warringa had physical evidence in his hand, and he put
Speaker 1: it in a sandwich bag and a locker for seven years.
Speaker 1: Northern Michigan sits on top of the Antrim Shale, and
Speaker 1: there are thousands of shallow gas wells scattered back through
Speaker 1: those woods. Most of them are a fenced pad about
Speaker 1: the eyes of a two car garage, and there's a
Speaker 1: well head and a separator and a tank and a
Speaker 1: sodium light on it, and somebody has to drive around
Speaker 1: and check on them. Kyle Bauman ran that route in
Speaker 1: Antrim County for six years. He worked twelve hour nights
Speaker 1: in a company pick up with forty some pads on
Speaker 1: a rotation and most of them sit at the end
Speaker 1: of a sand road with nothing else out there. February
Speaker 1: of twenty nineteen, about two thirty in the morning, he
Speaker 1: pulled into a pad off a two track, and his
Speaker 1: headlights swung across the fence. There was something crouched down
Speaker 1: at the back corner of the pad inside the light.
Speaker 1: Kyle says, it came up out of that crouch when
Speaker 1: the headlights hit it. And the way it came up
Speaker 1: is what got him, because it came up the way
Speaker 1: a man comes up and not the way a bear does.
Speaker 1: He put it well over six feet standing there. It
Speaker 1: was dark colored and it looked wet under that sodium light,
Speaker 1: and it had a long face on it. Then it
Speaker 1: went over the fence, not through the gate, and not
Speaker 1: around the corner. It went over a six foot chain
Speaker 1: link fence with one hand up on the top rail,
Speaker 1: and then it was gone into the pines on the
Speaker 1: other side. He sat in that truck with the doors
Speaker 1: locked and the engine running, and he never got out
Speaker 1: to do the check. He drove on to the next
Speaker 1: pad and sat there a while, and then he called
Speaker 1: his supervisor and what he told the supervisor was that
Speaker 1: there was a bear on the pad. And he wasn't
Speaker 1: getting out of the truck. Kyle worked another two years
Speaker 1: on that route. He never did that pad alone at
Speaker 1: night again. He'd swap it onto day rotation and eat
Speaker 1: the extra drive. Deer camp in Michigan runs on ritual
Speaker 1: and one of the oldest rituals there is the meat pole.
Speaker 1: You hang your deer outside where everybody can see it.
Speaker 1: Every camp has one, and most of them are older
Speaker 1: than the men who are using them. Gerald Ostrander runs
Speaker 1: a camp up in Kalkaska County that his father put
Speaker 1: up in nineteen sixty one. There are four buildings and
Speaker 1: a bunk house and there's a meat pole strung between
Speaker 1: two jackpines that has been in the same spot for
Speaker 1: sixty years. Opening week of two thousand and eight, four
Speaker 1: of them were in camp and they had two bucks
Speaker 1: hanging By Tuesday night, Field dressed and hung by the
Speaker 1: head the way they've always done it. Wednesday, around two
Speaker 1: in the morning, the dogs went off in the bunkhouse
Speaker 1: and I don't mean barking. All three of them backed
Speaker 1: into the corner behind the stove and stayed there. Gerald's
Speaker 1: nephew got up and looked out the window over the
Speaker 1: sink and he said there was something standing at the
Speaker 1: meat pole with both of those deer right in front
Speaker 1: of it, and it was taller than the deer were hanging.
Speaker 1: He woke Gerald up, and by the time Jerald got
Speaker 1: over to that window, the thing was gone and nobody
Speaker 1: went out. You've got four grown men with rifles inside
Speaker 1: that building, and not one of them opened the door
Speaker 1: because of a feeling that none of them could explain.
Speaker 1: They went out at first light. The smaller of those
Speaker 1: two bucks was laying on the ground with the rope
Speaker 1: still tied to it and the knots still in the rope.
Speaker 1: The other one was gone off the pole completely, and
Speaker 1: they found it about sixty yards back in the pines,
Speaker 1: with the hind quarters torn off of it. A bear
Speaker 1: will hit a meat pole. Every man in that camp
Speaker 1: knew it, and said so before they'd finished their coffee.
Speaker 1: What they couldn't get past was the rope because it
Speaker 1: hadn't been chewed and it hadn't been pulled apart, and
Speaker 1: that deer had come down off the pole with the
Speaker 1: knots still tied and the loop still closed around its head.
Speaker 1: Gerald has been running that camp since his father died
Speaker 1: in ninety four They still hang deer on the same pole.
Speaker 1: The one thing that changed is there's a light on
Speaker 1: it now wired off the generator, and it burns all
Speaker 1: night long, from opening day to close. Most of these
Speaker 1: are one night and then it's over, but every so
Speaker 1: often you get one that runs a whole season. Bob
Speaker 1: and Terry Lanning bought twelve acres up in Wexford County
Speaker 1: in twenty fourteen and put a modular on it out
Speaker 1: at the end of a gravel road with state land
Speaker 1: on two sides of them. Terry kept chickens, Bob worked
Speaker 1: in Cadillac and he drove home in the dark eight
Speaker 1: months out of the year. The summer of twenty sixteen
Speaker 1: started with the garbage. Something got into the cans behind
Speaker 1: the house four or five times in June, which is
Speaker 1: nothing at all. What wasn't nothing is that it was
Speaker 1: pulling the lids off and the cans were staying upright.
Speaker 1: Then in July the two dogs quit going past the
Speaker 1: propane tank. Bob would put them out and they'd do
Speaker 1: their business on the near side of the yard and
Speaker 1: come straight back to the door, both dogs the same
Speaker 1: way all summer long. Terry lost six chickens in one
Speaker 1: night in August. That run has a wiretop on it,
Speaker 1: and the wiretop was still on it in the morning.
Speaker 1: Bob went to the county about it, and the county
Speaker 1: told him fisher or Raccoon the last week of August,
Speaker 1: around one in the morning, something hit the side of
Speaker 1: the house. Bob says it was one single impact flat
Speaker 1: and high up on the wall, like somebody had swung
Speaker 1: a bag of sand into the siding. He went out
Speaker 1: with a light and there was nothing to see out there.
Speaker 1: They quit sleeping in the back bedroom in September and
Speaker 1: moved out to the front room, Bob and the recliner
Speaker 1: and Terry on the couch, both of them for about
Speaker 1: three weeks. Terry wanted to sell, Bob wouldn't because they'd
Speaker 1: only been in it two years and the well alone
Speaker 1: had run them eleven thousand dollars. And that argument went
Speaker 1: on the whole month. Then Bob saw it on the
Speaker 1: twenty first of September in the afternoon in full daylight.
Speaker 1: He had walked back to the property line to figure
Speaker 1: out where the chickens were getting hit from, and the
Speaker 1: thing came up off the ground about thirty yards from it.
Speaker 1: Out of a blowdown on two legs. It was six
Speaker 1: and a half or seven feet tall. It was dark colored,
Speaker 1: he says, the face was long on it and the
Speaker 1: ears were standing up. He backed away from it. It
Speaker 1: didn't follow him. He got up to the house and
Speaker 1: he didn't go back to that property line for the
Speaker 1: rest of the year. The activity stopped in October and
Speaker 1: it never picked back up again. They still lived there.
Speaker 1: Terry got rid of the chickens the following spring, and
Speaker 1: if you ask her, she'll tell you it was because
Speaker 1: of the work. Stay tuned for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories.
Speaker 1: We'll be back after these messages. The Upper Peninsula turns
Speaker 1: out fewer dog man reports than the northern Lower Peninsula does,
Speaker 1: and I think that's mostly just a matter of how
Speaker 1: few people are up there to see anything. The ones
Speaker 1: that do come out of it are usually road sidings,
Speaker 1: and they're usually short. Marlene Koski is a retired school
Speaker 1: administrator up in Delta County, thirty years living up there,
Speaker 1: and she'd never had anything happen to her before or since.
Speaker 1: It was March of two thousand and nine, out on
Speaker 1: County Road four twenty six, around nine thirty at night
Speaker 1: and she was driving home from a school board meeting.
Speaker 1: Something came up out of the ditch on the right
Speaker 1: side of the road, about one hundred feet ahead of her,
Speaker 1: and crossed in front of the car. Marlene says it
Speaker 1: took two steps to get across. It was upright the
Speaker 1: entire time. It was dark, and it was covered in hair,
Speaker 1: and the head sat low and forward on it. She
Speaker 1: won't describe a muzzle, and she won't describe ears. She
Speaker 1: didn't stop, and she didn't slow down. She drove the
Speaker 1: last eleven miles home, pulled into the garage, put the
Speaker 1: door down behind her, and sat in that car with
Speaker 1: the engine off for a while before she went inside.
Speaker 1: She told her husband that night, and he asked her
Speaker 1: if it could have been a bear. She told him
Speaker 1: a bear doesn't cross a road in two steps standing up.
Speaker 1: He died in twenty eighteen, and he was the only
Speaker 1: person she ever told. Angela Preiscorn was driving her two
Speaker 1: kids home to Read City from a basketball game over
Speaker 1: in Big Rapids in January of twenty ten. It was
Speaker 1: around nine at night. There were four inches of new
Speaker 1: snow piled up on the shoulders, and the road itself
Speaker 1: was bear and wet. Something came off of the left
Speaker 1: shoulder into her headlights. She breaked hard enough to put
Speaker 1: the van sideways. Her son was fourteen and he was
Speaker 1: riding up front, and he saw it too. Her daughter
Speaker 1: was asleep in the back, and she slept through the
Speaker 1: entire thing. Angela says it crossed on two legs, and
Speaker 1: it was tall enough that her headlights were only catching
Speaker 1: it below the waist. Her son says the same thing
Speaker 1: about the headlights. He got over to the right shoulder
Speaker 1: and went down the bank. She drove home. Her husband
Speaker 1: took a flashlight and went back out and walked the
Speaker 1: shoulder where she told him to, and there was nothing
Speaker 1: out there but plowslop. Her son is a grown man
Speaker 1: now with a family of his own, and he'll still
Speaker 1: tell it. And the two of them agree on everything
Speaker 1: about that night except one thing, which is that he
Speaker 1: says it turned its head and looked at the van,
Speaker 1: and she says it never did. There's a woman outside
Speaker 1: of Cadillac who watched something cross her backfield upright in
Speaker 1: the middle of the afternoon in nineteen ninety two. She
Speaker 1: called the sheriff, and the deputy who came out wrote
Speaker 1: down large dog. Two teenagers on a snowmobile trail near
Speaker 1: Frederick in ninety six turned around and went home because
Speaker 1: something paced them along the tree line for a quarter mile.
Speaker 1: A pipeline crew working in Osceola County in two thousand
Speaker 1: and three quit early one afternoon after a machine operator
Speaker 1: refused to go back to his equipment. A woman in
Speaker 1: Newego County lost four goats in one night in two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve. The Department of Natural Resources called it dogs.
Speaker 1: She had the fence rebuilt at nine feet and she
Speaker 1: paid a contractor to do it in November, which isn't
Speaker 1: the month anybody in Michigan pays to have fence built.
Speaker 1: A mail carrier on a rural route outside of Evard
Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen quit delivering to one box at the
Speaker 1: end of a two track and made that family come
Speaker 1: get their mail out at the road. And she never
Speaker 1: gave a reason that anybody and that family ever heard.
Speaker 1: A toe operator working a ditch pull on M thirty
Speaker 1: seven north of White Cloud in two thousand and one
Speaker 1: left his truck running with the driver's door standing wide open.
Speaker 1: A campground host in the Maynistee in twenty fourteen moved
Speaker 1: a family out of a walk in site at eleven
Speaker 1: o'clock at night and refunded them and the paperwork says
Speaker 1: raccoon activity. A logging contractor in Wexford County in ninety
Speaker 1: nine had two men quit the same block on the
Speaker 1: same morning. He hired two more and finished the job.
Speaker 1: And a County Road commission crew grating a two track
Speaker 1: in Lake County in two twenty found a deer carcass
Speaker 1: hung up in the crotch of a maple about nine
Speaker 1: feet off the ground. They cut it down because it
Speaker 1: was going to smell. Not one of those is worth
Speaker 1: an hour on its own, but stack them up together
Speaker 1: and they're the real texture of this thing, which is
Speaker 1: people quietly rearranging their lives around one bad afternoon and
Speaker 1: never explaining it to anybody. In two thousand and seven,
Speaker 1: a piece of eight millimeter home movie footage surfaced with
Speaker 1: a story attached to it about an estate sale and
Speaker 1: an early seventies date and a film canister with the
Speaker 1: name Gable on it. Most of its ordinary home movie stuff,
Speaker 1: people standing around a cabin, a snowmobile, and then near
Speaker 1: the end of it, there's something out across an open
Speaker 1: snowy field, that gets up and comes at the camera
Speaker 1: on all fours and it comes fast. The camera goes
Speaker 1: down and the last of it's the frame laying on
Speaker 1: the ground. It went online and it detonated. Nothing in
Speaker 1: Michigan cryptid history has ever caused more argument than that film.
Speaker 1: And it landed at exactly the moment when this field
Speaker 1: was moving onto message boards and video sites, which meant
Speaker 1: it got in front of more people in a month
Speaker 1: than the song had reached in a decade. It made
Speaker 1: it onto television, including the History Channel program Monster Quest,
Speaker 1: and they brought analysts in to look at the gate
Speaker 1: and the film stock. Some of that analysis was careful
Speaker 1: and some of it wasn't. The fight over it ran
Speaker 1: three full years. People argued about the gate and about
Speaker 1: the shoulder height, and about the film grain, and about
Speaker 1: whether the way the camera operator went down looked like
Speaker 1: a man actually getting knocked over. Then in twenty ten,
Speaker 1: a Michigan man named Mica Grusa said publicly that he'd
Speaker 1: made it, all of it. A State sales story included
Speaker 1: he explained how he did it, and the reveal aired.
Speaker 1: So one guy with modest equipment and some patients built
Speaker 1: a thing that fooled a large audience, survived contact with
Speaker 1: television production, and got taken seriously in this field for
Speaker 1: three years. Dale Krieger brings the film up on his
Speaker 1: own every single time this subject comes anywhere near him.
Speaker 1: He had heard about the fake movie, and it's a
Speaker 1: good part of why he said nothing about his own
Speaker 1: morning in that stand for years. Michigan isn't the only
Speaker 1: place this comes from, either across the lake in Wisconsin.
Speaker 1: Over in Walworth County, there's a stretch of farm road
Speaker 1: outside of Elkhorn called Bray Road. On Halloween Night of
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, a young woman named Doris Gibson hit
Speaker 1: something out on that road and got out of her
Speaker 1: car to go look for it. And another witness, Lori
Speaker 1: Anne and Dreasey, had seen something along that same road,
Speaker 1: kneeling down at the shoulder, close enough that she got
Speaker 1: a look at the face. Linda Godfrey was a reporter
Speaker 1: for a little paper called the Walworth County Week, and
Speaker 1: they handed her the story as a Halloween piece. She
Speaker 1: ended up working it for the next thirty years. She
Speaker 1: wrote The Beast of Bray Road in two thousand and three,
Speaker 1: and Hunting the American Werewolf a few years after that,
Speaker 1: and she took reports out of Wisconsin and Michigan and
Speaker 1: most of the rest of this country right up until
Speaker 1: she died in twenty twenty two. Godfrey did more original
Speaker 1: interview work on upright canines than anybody else in the
Speaker 1: United States. And she never had a body either. What
Speaker 1: she had was a filing system. She logged where people
Speaker 1: saw them, and what the ground was like, and what
Speaker 1: time of year it was, and what the animals were
Speaker 1: doing when they got seen. And the pattern she came
Speaker 1: back with looks an awful lot like the Michigan pattern
Speaker 1: roads at night, field edges, fresh kills, and structures. Michigan
Speaker 1: isn't only a dog man state either. It's got a
Speaker 1: long bigfoot history, and some of that history is better
Speaker 1: documented than anything in the dog Man file. Sister Lakes
Speaker 1: is a little resort community down in the southwest corner
Speaker 1: of the state, over in the cass In Van Buren
Speaker 1: County area and its farm country with wood lots and
Speaker 1: swamp cut through it. In June of nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: reports started coming in about a large, hairy creature. A
Speaker 1: man named Gordon Brown and his brother describes something at
Speaker 1: a farm property, and not long after that, three girls,
Speaker 1: one of them named Joyce Smith, said a creature came
Speaker 1: at them while they were outside on a farm. They
Speaker 1: described it as tall and dark and covered in hair
Speaker 1: and heavy through the body. And then it became a circus.
Speaker 1: The newspapers picked it up, and radio picked it up,
Speaker 1: and people came, hundreds of them out of Michigan and
Speaker 1: Indiana and Illinois, driving into a rural township with rifles
Speaker 1: and flashlights to go shoot a monster. Deputies ended up
Speaker 1: directing traffic out there. Farmers had armed strangers standing in
Speaker 1: their fields at night. A local store sold what had
Speaker 1: advertised as monster bait as a gag, and the gag
Speaker 1: itself made the papers. One family had so many cars
Speaker 1: coming down their road that the traffic was the emergency,
Speaker 1: and there were shots fired in the dark by men
Speaker 1: who had no idea where the other armed men were standing.
Speaker 1: It got a name, too, The papers called it the
Speaker 1: Monster of Sister Lakes, and inside of about three weeks
Speaker 1: that name was doing more work than the reports were.
Speaker 1: There were monster hunts being advertised. There was a plaster
Speaker 1: track that went around a while and never held up.
Speaker 1: There was a man who came in from out of
Speaker 1: state with dogs. Nobody produced a body, nobody produced a
Speaker 1: photograph worth anything. It tapered off by the end of
Speaker 1: that summer, and by the next June the story had
Speaker 1: moved on somewhere else, and the families at the center
Speaker 1: of it stayed in that township and had to live
Speaker 1: in it afterward. That's the part of Sister Lakes that
Speaker 1: nobody tells, and it's the part that every witness in
Speaker 1: this episode is quietly avoiding when they decide not to
Speaker 1: say anything at Deer Camp. Sister Lakes ran twenty three
Speaker 1: years before Steve Cook ever wrote his song, and it
Speaker 1: went exactly the way everything after it went. A few
Speaker 1: witnesses described something, the media amplifies it. The amplification produces
Speaker 1: a flood of junk thrill seekers show up and hoaxers
Speaker 1: show up, and whatever the original signal was disappears under
Speaker 1: all that noise for good. By the time a case
Speaker 1: is famous enough that you've heard of it, it's usually
Speaker 1: too contaminated to work. In August of nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: down near Monroe in the southeast corner of the state,
Speaker 1: a seventeen year old named Christine van Acker was in
Speaker 1: a car with her mother on a rural road. A
Speaker 1: large creature covered in hair came out of the roadside
Speaker 1: and reached in through the driver's side window and grabbed
Speaker 1: Christine by the hair. Her mother laid on the horn
Speaker 1: and it let go and left. Christine came out of
Speaker 1: it with a black eye. The photograph of her with
Speaker 1: that eye ran in the press, and it's one of
Speaker 1: the very few pieces of physical documentation attached to any
Speaker 1: American bigfoot claim from that era, in the narrow sense
Speaker 1: that you've got a visible injury on a named person
Speaker 1: on a specific date. But a black eye is a
Speaker 1: black eye. It shows you that a girl got hit
Speaker 1: in the face. It doesn't show you what hit her.
Speaker 1: And Monroe went the same way Sister Lakes went, with
Speaker 1: armed men flooding the area and the whole thing running
Speaker 1: out out of oxygen inside of a few weeks. Her
Speaker 1: mother gave the same account and never moved off of it.
Speaker 1: Both of those women are gone now, and that photograph
Speaker 1: is what's left. The modern Michigan Bigfoot reports skewed north
Speaker 1: up toward the Upper Peninsula and the counties around Houghton
Speaker 1: Lake and Ross Common. Kurt Halloway hunts a family camp
Speaker 1: in Rosscommon County. It's four guys. It has been since
Speaker 1: the nineties, and Kurt is the youngest of them. Twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen firearm season, he was walking out around twenty to
Speaker 1: six in the evening on a two track between his
Speaker 1: stand and camp. It's six hundred yards that he's walked
Speaker 1: hundreds of times, and he had his head lamp on red.
Speaker 1: He came around to bend and there was something standing
Speaker 1: in the middle of the two track, about forty yards
Speaker 1: ahead of him. His first thought was a bear standing up,
Speaker 1: and he actually relaxed a little because he's bumped bears
Speaker 1: in that country, and a bear that stands up is
Speaker 1: generally a bear that's about to leave. Then it took
Speaker 1: a step and then another one, and it walked away
Speaker 1: up that two track on two legs with its arm swinging.
Speaker 1: It never came down onto all fours in the fifteen
Speaker 1: or twenty seconds he watched it, and then it went
Speaker 1: around the next bend and that was that. Kurt says
Speaker 1: it was close to seven feet. It was widest across
Speaker 1: the shoulders, and the head sat low and forward on
Speaker 1: it without much neck underneath. He couldn't see a face
Speaker 1: and he's never said that he could. He walked on
Speaker 1: back to camp, and he didn't say a word to
Speaker 1: the other three men that night. He went out to
Speaker 1: that same stand the next morning and he checked the
Speaker 1: two track in daylight, and there was a truck track
Speaker 1: through the sand and nothing else to read. His wife thought,
Speaker 1: going back out there was insane. It's the most ordinary
Speaker 1: thing I see all the time in this field. People
Speaker 1: see something that rearranges what they thought lived in the woods,
Speaker 1: and then they get up before dawn and go right
Speaker 1: back into those same woods because the camp's paid for
Speaker 1: and their father hunted that stand. That's just what people do.
Speaker 1: Arn and Mock. He fished the Fox River in Schoolcraft
Speaker 1: County his whole life, Brook trout mostly, and he liked
Speaker 1: being on the water before anybody else was awake. June
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty seven, before five in the morning, he
Speaker 1: was walking in on a trail he'd been using since
Speaker 1: he was twelve years old. It was light enough to
Speaker 1: see by, but not light enough that he had put
Speaker 1: the flashlight away yet, and there was something standing in
Speaker 1: the river. Arna put it about forty yards downstream of him,
Speaker 1: in water up to the knee, and it was facing
Speaker 1: the far bank. He said it was black, and it
Speaker 1: was big through the back and the shoulders, and the
Speaker 1: head sat down low on it. It was bent forward
Speaker 1: at the waist with both arms down in the water.
Speaker 1: He stood there on the trail and watched it. Then
Speaker 1: it came out on the far side, went up the
Speaker 1: bank and walked into the cedars. Arna fished that stretch
Speaker 1: of river for another twenty some years afterward. He told
Speaker 1: his brother about it in ninety one, and he didn't
Speaker 1: tell another person until he was in his seventies. He'd
Speaker 1: give the location to anybody who asked him for it,
Speaker 1: And a few people went out there and looked, and
Speaker 1: nobody ever found a thing. The Upper Peninsula bigfoot material
Speaker 1: is older, and it's quieter than what comes out of
Speaker 1: the Lower Peninsula, and a lot of it comes from
Speaker 1: people whose job put them out in the timber Ron
Speaker 1: sarkn and cruise timber for a paper company for twenty
Speaker 1: six years. Cruising means you walk a block ahead of
Speaker 1: a sale, and you run compass lines and measure trees
Speaker 1: and mark boundaries, and you do all of it alone
Speaker 1: all day in country that doesn't have roads through it.
Speaker 1: Spring of nineteen ninety eight, he was working a block
Speaker 1: in Menominee County. It was mixed hardwood with some hemlock
Speaker 1: in it and a creek bottom running along the east side,
Speaker 1: and he'd already been in it two days. Second afternoon,
Speaker 1: he was running the north boundary when something knocked on
Speaker 1: wood behind him. It was one sharp crack, the sound
Speaker 1: of hardwood limb makes when you swing it into a
Speaker 1: standing trunk. He hollered because he figured it was another
Speaker 1: crew and nothing came back. Ten minutes later, it happened
Speaker 1: to twice more from a different direction, and then a
Speaker 1: rock came through the canopy off to his right and
Speaker 1: hit the ground about fifteen feet from him. It was
Speaker 1: about the size of a grapefruit, and it was wet
Speaker 1: on the bottom and there was dirt still packed onto it.
Speaker 1: He didn't finish the line. It took him forty minutes
Speaker 1: to walk out to the truck. The next morning, he
Speaker 1: went back out with his crew boss, a man named Denny,
Speaker 1: who had been cruising timber since the sixties, and he
Speaker 1: told him he wanted a second set of eyes on
Speaker 1: a boundary question Down in a skid trail left over
Speaker 1: from an old sail, they found a track pressed into
Speaker 1: mud with water standing in the bottom of it. Ron
Speaker 1: set his own boot down alongside it. He wears an eleven,
Speaker 1: and that track was a good deal longer than his
Speaker 1: boot was. Denny looked at it for a while and
Speaker 1: then said they ought to get back to work. Ron
Speaker 1: never took a picture of it, and that's the part
Speaker 1: he choose on more than the rock. There was a
Speaker 1: camera sitting in the truck for documenting timber defects. What
Speaker 1: he'll tell you is that in nineteen ninety eight you
Speaker 1: had twenty four exposures on a roll and you didn't
Speaker 1: waste them. The company cut that block about two years later,
Speaker 1: and Ron ran the boundary line for the sale himself.
Speaker 1: The Michigan Department of Natural Resources has been saying the
Speaker 1: same thing about all of this for decades. They've no
Speaker 1: evidence of any unclassified large mammal in the state, and
Speaker 1: what people are describing lines up with black bears and
Speaker 1: with coyotes carrying heavy hair loss from mange. The wildlife
Speaker 1: biologists who get asked about the dog man say it
Speaker 1: in about the same words. That's the official position, and
Speaker 1: it has been the official position for as long as
Speaker 1: there has been a dog Man to have a position
Speaker 1: about Steve Cook's song is still the most requested record
Speaker 1: that station ever put on the air. What's left over
Speaker 1: after the bears and the mange and the hoaxes have
Speaker 1: all taken their share is a shape that keeps repeating,
Speaker 1: something that stands up and then stays standing up while
Speaker 1: it moves, a head that people keep calling a dog's
Speaker 1: head when they've gotten no particular reason to reach for that.
Speaker 1: And an animal that looks at people instead of running
Speaker 1: from them, and that has walked right up onto porches
Speaker 1: with the lights on. And the people in this episode
Speaker 1: aren't a type. You've got a truck driver, a nurse,
Speaker 1: a farm couple, a gas field operator, a plow driver,
Speaker 1: a timber cruiser, and four men at a deer camp
Speaker 1: who have been going up to the same four buildings
Speaker 1: since the nineties. What they've in common is that almost
Speaker 1: none of them told anybody for years, and every last
Speaker 1: one of them changed something afterward. A light, a door,
Speaker 1: a root, a season. In most of the places we've
Speaker 1: stopped on this road trip, the legend has been bigger
Speaker 1: than the reports. Selbyville has a legend and almost nothing
Speaker 1: standing behind it. The infield horror is a few weeks
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy three, and then silence. Michigan runs the
Speaker 1: other way around. Steve Cook wrote a novelty record as
Speaker 1: an April fool's joke and pulled the plug out of
Speaker 1: a drain, And forty years later it still hasn't stopped,
Speaker 1: and what keeps coming out of it are truck drivers
Speaker 1: and tool and dime in and retired school administrators and
Speaker 1: nurses closing up the family camp alone in November, and
Speaker 1: eleven year old girls whose fathers put floodlights on all
Speaker 1: four corners of a cabin. Tom Mercer never did replace
Speaker 1: that first door. The steel one went on the front
Speaker 1: where the old one had hung, and the old one,
Speaker 1: the one with the five gouges in it, went out
Speaker 1: to the generator shed. It's leaning against the back wall
Speaker 1: out there behind a chest freezer with a tarp thrown
Speaker 1: over it. He kept it because his father in law
Speaker 1: hung that door in nineteen seventy six and he wasn't
Speaker 1: going to be the one who burned it. So that's Michigan.
Speaker 1: We'll load the truck in the morning and hit the
Speaker 1: highway because there's another state out there with a road.
Speaker 1: Nobody likes driving after dark, and somebody living on it
Speaker 1: who's never told a soul what they saw. I'll see
Speaker 1: you back here for that one, and until then you
Speaker 1: might want to leave the porch light on.
Speaker 3: Didn' do