SC EP:1192 Sasquatch, The Fog And The Haunted House

By early 1776, tensions between the colonial patriots and the loyalists were escalating in North Carolina. The colony was politically and socially divided. In the early morning hours of February 27, 1776, near Moores Creek, North Carolina, the loyalists attempted to cross the bridge. They were met by Patriot musket fire and artillery. The battle was over very quickly, possibly just in a few minutes. The loyalists suffered significant losses, many killed or wounded, and a large number taken prisoner. The site was federally recognized relatively early, established as Moores Creek National Military Park on June 2, 1926. Strangely enough, around this time, people were reporting seeing weird entities and ghost-like apparitions, including a man in a Revolutionary War military uniform covered in blood on the side of the road. Many witnesses over the years have reported that when they approached him or tried to speak to him, he vanished. July 31, 2021, in Pender County, North Carolina, near the Moores Creek National Battlefield. Pender County 911, what's the address of your emergency? I'm driving on 210, I just crossed the Black River and I thought I saw a guy standing on the side of the road bleeding. Okay, where are you at, sir? I'm on 210, I just crossed the Black River, I'm heading towards 53E. I just passed Patriot's watch. Okay, so you're over near Moores Creek? Sure. Okay. And did you saw a man standing on the side of the road? What was that, sir? That's not human! That's not human! Sir, are you okay, sir? There's something in the black truck! Okay, what's in the road? No, it's not in the road, it's in my truck! In the bed! There's something in the bed of your truck? Yes, ma'am, I just turned on my bed light, where my trucking is something in my bed. Okay, sir, when you say something, what do you mean? I just knocked it off of the bed of my truck and went over my roof. Okay, what was it? It looked like somebody was bent over and had their head in the window of the deer blind. And it either heard me or smelt me and he pulled his head out of the tent and stood straight up. And that shocked me. They don't make people that big. The way it moved... ...almost as if it was gliding across the beach. I've never seen anything move like that in my life. Who am I? What live you for? They were screaming at each other in gibberish. What? It sounded like a language and they were chunting away back and forth, back and forwards, back and forwards. I know what a bear looks like and there is no way on this planet for what I saw with bears. 911, what are you reporting? Jesus Christ, you better... Kara? Zia! Hello? Get somebody out here. What's going on now, sir? That son of a bitch is about 6'9". I don't know. Do you see him now, sir? Yes, I'm looking right at him. Hi, I'm Robert from England. You're about to listen to the greatest podcast on the planet. So grab a cup of tea, sit back and prepare to be entertained by Sasquatch Chronicles. Welcome to the show, everyone. Thanks for being here tonight. Got a great show planned for you. We'll be chatting with Chris. Chris comes to us from North Carolina. His grandfather owned 80 acres out there. Chris had told me that the house that his grandfather lived in was haunted. They thought not only was the house haunted, he thought the property was haunted. Because so many weird things happened on this property. Chris told me now looking back, he isn't sure what was happening on the property was Sasquatch related or not. And I'll kind of let him go into it. If you've had an encounter and you'd like to be on the show, shoot me an email. My email address is west at SasquatchChronicles.com. And if you get a chance to check out SasquatchChronicles.com, you can become a member and get additional shows. Let's jump into it tonight. I want to welcome Chris to the show. Chris, thanks for coming on. Thanks, Wes. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, and tell me a little bit about your grandfather's property. And if you would, walk me into some of the things that happened to you out there. Then the end of the nineties, my grandfather died and he had an 80 acre farm in Andersonville, North Carolina. And after he died, we started going out to the property, cleaning it up and we were getting ready to move into it. And when we moved into it, we just started noticing these strange things. A lot of the neighbors were telling us the house was haunted. They had seen this gray fog come up out of the lake and it had chased a couple people off the property that were trying to fish over there. And I'd had an experience like that one time. And then we had some friends over riding four-wheelers one night. It was snowing where you're out riding around school was canceled. And my buddy got separated from us in the woods and his four-wheeler stalled out and he started walking out and something chased him out of the woods. He never saw it, but he said it sounded big and it scared him. He didn't know what it was, but he just stared from this presence in the woods. And when he told me about that, I told him about the fog ghost I'd seen and we decided to go out camping in the woods to figure out what was out there. And this property was pretty big. We had a flat open spot in the valley that was about 30 acres and the rest of it was mountainside. And we had a five-acre lake on the property and that's normally where all the crazy stuff would happen is on that lake and then towards the top of the mountain. And some buddies and I went out to go camping and just see what was out in the woods. And my buddy Marcy had brought his van for us to camp in and we set it up next to the lake. We had us a bonfire and we were just hanging out there talking and telling ghost stories and it got late and we decided we were going to walk up the mountain and see if we couldn't find what was out in the woods. Well, we didn't have any flashlights, so we made a couple of torches, got those lit and started walking out the trail. And the lake was five acres and the trail started on the right hand side of the lake and it went halfway around the backside of the lake and then it started up the mountain on an old loggin trail. And when we got to the loggin trail, one of our torches wouldn't stay lit so we started taking it apart and making the first torch bigger. And while we were doing this, my brother's dog started up the trail without us. In about 20, 30 seconds after it went up the trail, it came running back just yelping and barking real loud like something had scared it, something had gooseed its tail or something and it was running out of there. And this dog ran past us, it ran past our camping spot and it went all the way to our house and you could just hear it yelping the whole way back over there. And we're sort of giggling, laughing, wondering what happened to the dog. Didn't think much about it, got our torch put together and we started up the trail. It's dark out, there was moonlight and stars, but not enough to where you could see and the torch was lighting up the area around us, but it was flickering. It wasn't a constant beam of light shining out. And we're coming up the trail and we're coming through a pine thicket and it was all white pine through there that my grandfather had planted. And we're getting to the edge of the pine thicket, getting ready to get into the higher elevation with it'd be more natural trees with oaks and poplar and stuff like that. And we were passing this big pine tree and as we came around the tree, you could see in the trail in front of us, something ran across the trail. And you know, it wasn't enough light to make out the entire shape. You could just see something scurry across the trail and you could see this grayish fur. It looked like it had a couple different colors in there, but it was sort of gray and it was bulky and it went running across and my buddy Marcy, he just reaches over and grabs my arm and he's like, what's that? And before I could say anything, we just heard this loud crashing up in the trees above us as something fell to the ground in front of us. And when it hit on the ground, there was just a big gust of air from it landing and it blew out the torch and we're standing there in the dark. And it just raises up straight up into the sky in front of us. You know, it just looms overhead of us and its arms are outstretched and it leans out over top of us and it's just this dark mass that no light, you know, is passing through it. It looks solid and I mean, we're just standing there petrified. And you know, it's probably 10, 15 seconds when all this has happened and me and Marcy turn around and we run past my brother and Adam, which were behind us in the trail. And that's when they see this thing standing in the trail. So we take off running and you know, we run probably 20, 30 feet and Marcy stops wanting to go back and look at it because I mean, it was the whole point we were up there in the woods was trying to figure out what this was. And as I ran past him, I just picked him up and threw him over my shoulder and kept running because there were but I wasn't going to stop, you know, and we made it back to the van and we're all just sitting there laughing. And we're all terrified and scared but you know, we feel safe because we're back at the van. The house is just, you know, 200 feet down this trail through the woods. We got a fire, we feel safe, everything's good. And we sit there, you know, we're trying to ask, you know, what did you see? And it's all the same thing, you know, we saw something run across the trail, then something fell out of the trees stood up in front of us. And that was it. We never saw any features other than just this dark shadow standing in front of us. And we go to bed and you know, we're probably asleep for about an hour, hour and a half, something like that. And I wake up and you can hear something walking around the outside of the van. And you know, me and Adam are in the back of the van and then Marcy and my brother are up in the front of the van and I whisper over to Adam, Adam, Adam, and I'm not hearing anything back from Adam. And he, I finally get a little bit louder and he responds back. He's just go to sleep, you know, doesn't respond what anything like that is just go to sleep. And I go, man, do you hear that? And he gets real quiet. And he's like, I don't hear anything. And I'm like, there's something outside. And he's like, I don't hear it. And I'm like, well, if you don't hear anything, look out the window for me. And he got real quiet and he goes, I'm not looking out the F and window, you look out the window. And I sort of got that reassurance that, you know, there he heard it outside too. You know, the whole time we were telling him there was something in this in these woods, he'd never believe us, you know, and now I knew that he knew there was something there and it just made me feel better knowing that it was actually happened. So we went back to sleep. We got up the next morning. Justin and my brother and Marcy, they had been awake when me and Adam were talking in the night. They were saying they heard it too. They weren't saying anything because they were afraid, whatever it was out there walking around might try to open the door or something like that. While it was walking around, you could hear it running its fingernails around the side of the van. And when we got out, we looked around the van trying to see tracks and you couldn't see anything on the ground. But on the side of the van, Marcy had painted it like a zebra. It was a white 70 Chevy van and he had painted black stripes around the front, the back and the sides and all around the van through the black stripes. You could see where the nails had scratched it off of the car and you could see the white underneath it. It was 25 years ago when I'm getting the tingles and the chills telling this story and it was crazy and it led to us going out there multiple different times over the next few years just trying to figure out what it was out there. We would see stuff and then it would be gone and we just started calling them ghosts because that's what we believed in up here was the devil and ghosts and spirits and stuff like that. And it wasn't until I started listening to your show that I was like, you know, hearing the details of how the Sasquatch stands straight up. It don't bend over, it don't push up off the ground. It just sort of raises straight up out of the ground. And then the dogs getting freaked out by stuff and then Sasquatch's circle and tents and rubbing their fingernails across it and stuff. And it was just those things that started making me look at this at a whole different light. That is a terrifying night. When this creature fell out of the tree, how far away from you guys was it? It landed right in front of us. So I mean, that torch stick I had in my hand might have been three feet long. So within six to 10 feet, something like that, it was just real close. And I mean, you couldn't smell anything. I didn't hear anything other than it sort of grunting a little bit when it hit the ground. And then, you know, we didn't stick around long enough for anything else after that. I wanted to ask you, Chris, so was there an actual haunting going on in the home? Or was it all this weird stuff going on around the property that made you think it was haunted? Well, there were hauntings in the house. You would be sitting in the house and the house was built back in the early 1900s and it had been in my family for at least three generations. And you would be sitting in the downstairs where the property had been in the family for three generations. You would be sitting in the house and upstairs. There was an old game called Jack's and it was these little metal pegs and a ball and you would bounce the ball and try to grab as many of the little metal pegs while the ball was bouncing. And that's what it sounded like. Somebody was playing up there. You'd hear the ball bounce. You'd hear the little metal pegs roll across the floor and then you'd go up there and look and there'd be nobody there. You'd set mouse traps. You'd never catch mice. There were parts of the house that you could walk into and the air would just be colder. The hairs on the back of your neck would stand up and you could just feel somebody in there staring at you. We had incidents where the lights would flicker. I had one friend that came over, walked through the house, couldn't find anything, went downstairs looking for us, couldn't find us. And when he came back upstairs, we were all sitting in the living room and he's like, I just walked through this entire house looking for y'all and y'all weren't here. We're like, we've been sitting in here watching this movie for the past hour. We've just seen you. It was a bunch of weird stuff that we just assumed the whole property was like that. And I know you said this was your grandfather's home or grandparents' home. Did you ever talk to them? Did they ever experience this? So my grandfather and my grandmother got divorced and it was a very bitter divorce. And like any time my grandmother would talk about my grandfather, she would just call him evil, mean and dirty. Every time that I was around my grandfather, he was a harsh, stubborn old man that had his rules and wanted it done his way. But I never saw any evil or nothing like that out of him. So I always just assumed Grandma was spiteful over the divorce. But after he died, I started hearing other family members start mentioning about there being something evil on that property. And even when I was a kid and we would go over there and visit him, he would send us out to the lake to go fishing and he'd be like, watch out for them boogers out there. And I just always assumed it was Grandpa telling us to be safe but messing with us at the same time. Yeah, it's odd your grandfather would say watch out for the boogers. Did you get the impression maybe he had seen them? Yeah, I'd say it's pretty possible because he was a hermit. He lives through the Great Depression and he would scrounge and save every piece of trash that you would think was trash. But to him it had a purpose and he would go to the grocery store and buy up all the out of date produce. And if he didn't eat it, he would throw it out in the yard and then he would tell us he was just feeding the animals, you know. Yeah, makes you wonder what he was actually feeding. There's many accounts of them with their nails scratching windows or scratching the side of the home. And you know, I don't know if they're trying to get people's attention or what. And I know that you don't know and I don't know but what do you make of that behavior? I mean, if it wanted to run you guys down, it could have but it didn't. And instead it comes up to the van where you guys are at and it's almost like tormenting you. What do you make of that behavior? Originally, to me, I thought it was a witch walking around outside. I thought we had went into the woods and discovered some witch and she had followed us back. It was terrifying to me, you know, like one of those, I know you're here but I can't get to you, you know. I grew up in a Baptist church, you know, and I guarantee I was probably sitting there praying to Jesus the whole time it was walking around us, you know. I mean, as a young kid, I didn't put much stock into that but every time I was scared, I wasn't afraid to pray. I don't know, like over the years as we interacted more with whatever it was out there, it almost became a game between us, you know. We were trying to find it, it was trying to scare us and I mean, there were other times that we saw it out there for like there was another night we were out there camping and me and another friend were coming out to the bonfire. And it looked like our other two friends were wrestling around the bonfire and when we shined our spotlight over on them to get a better look, we realized our two friends were sitting down next to the dying coals of the fire and this big gray thing was standing over top of them with its arms out like it was getting ready to grab them up. And when we put the light on it, it turned towards us, turned around, took three steps and disappeared and then we didn't see anything else for the rest of the night and that started at the first of the night. Yeah, that is really scary, especially with how close it was to your friends. Did anything else happen on that property? Like I said, we would go out in the woods and we would hear them running through the woods. We would see little blurs and stuff, but the only like other big incident that I remember happening, we had heard how you could get pictures of orbs and not like the glowing balls of light, but you could take an old disposable camera, take a picture and when you got it developed, you were supposed to be able to pick up the essence of a ghost and then pictures or whatever. And we went out into the woods and we were taking pictures without the flash and we ended up taking a couple of pictures of us out in the woods with the camera. And there was one picture that I took, I was standing on the steep side of the slope, looking down the slope at my friend and I took a picture of him. And when we got the picture developed, you could see him in the picture and his eyes were red from the flash. And above his shoulder, about two more feet, a hole in the trees, you could see these glowing red eyes that they were shining from the picture too, except they are a little bit wider apart. They were a lot bigger. And the red in them didn't look like the same red that was in his eyes. It looked more like taillights or something like that bright red and it didn't make any sense to us because we're on the side of a mountain in the middle of the woods. There shouldn't be anything up there reflecting that, you know, but we never saw anything at night. We just found that picture a week or two after we had them developed and we're like, what's that standing in the woods, you know. Going back for a moment, Chris, when you thought your friends were wrestling and you shined your light and you saw this gray thing standing over them, how big do you think it was? It was an easy six, seven foot, something like that. In my head, I started calling this thing my grandpa because my grandfather was six foot, 300 pounds. He was a big man. And I just started calling it grandpa's ghost, you know, and he's just out there messing with us, you know. So it was big. It was huge. Like the one that fell in the woods in front, I've got a cousin that's seven, six, and this thing was taller than what he is. And, you know, every bit, probably three feet in the shoulders when it had its arms expanded out, you know, I mean, it was huge. Not exceptionally tall, but just big and bulky for its height, you know. Do you think whatever it was, it was actually reaching to grab your friends? I don't know if it was or if it was just standing over top of them trying to scare it, you know. It's just, that was the impression I got was it looked like it was getting ready to snatch them both up and its arms. And it's arms, but they said they didn't hear anything, but they just got suddenly they got scared and they went from sitting there talking and joking to where they were holding each other and both of them were crying and they didn't know why they just knew something bad was out there. And I know we'll get into more of what was going on inside the home, but a lot of times, Chris, I'll talk to people and they'll have these creatures on the property and they'll say, I thought the property was haunted. They'll have weird slaps on their home in the middle of the night. They'll generally see like glowing eyes, kind of like what you were describing earlier. Around this property, did you ever hear any vocalizations you couldn't place? There was one night we were out in the woods and we heard some kind of yelping and yipping and we didn't have coyotes in the area until like 2005, 2010 they became more prevalent in our area. And this being, you know, more like 2001, 2002, one of the people with us was like, I think those are coyotes. And, you know, it's been so long ago, I can't remember exactly what the yelps sounded like that we were hearing, but I remember thinking, I don't think that sounds like any coyotes I've ever heard before. That's the only vocalizations I can remember out there. I can remember a few times being out in the woods thinking I heard somebody saying my name, but no one there was nobody around. That, you know, I always attributed to ghosts or spirits or something like that out in the woods, you know, but then I've heard where, you know, the Sasquatch imitates people's, you know, calling their dogs or something like that. So I don't know if that was what it was doing because I mean, our mom used to stand in the yard and yell for us. When I got out of the Marine Corps, my parents had moved to Tennessee, and my wife and I moved into that house and stayed there for about eight months. And, you know, she would yell for me when I wasn't around. And every time I went into the woods, like after I got off work, I'd take the dog on a walk. And, you know, while I was out walking the dog, I'd hear who I think was my wife hollering for me. And when I got back to the house, she wouldn't be there. Did the ghost activity ever stop inside the home? I mean, even when you and your wife actually moved back in? No, when me and my wife moved in, we experienced the lights flickering and stuff like that. We sort of realized a pattern. I know it sounds funny, but our ghosts were early birds. If you got loud after about 9 p.m., that's when you'd start seeing stuff, you know, like ceiling fans starting to spin with the switch pulled off and the light switch turned off. Lights flickering on. And you could go to the, to us, the ghost lived upstairs in the second story. And you could walk to the base of the stairs and say, I'm sorry, we'll be quiet and everything would quit. You know, they would go back to normal. After my wife and I moved out, we had some friends that moved in. And there was a little girl that lived upstairs in one of the bedrooms and she was probably three or four years old. And she would refuse to walk up and down them stairs to go up, up and down the stairs by herself. She would always yell for somebody to come and hold her hand and help her go up and down them stairs. Well, one day the dad was walking past the stairs and he saw Stormy. That was a little girl's name. He sees Stormy walking down the stairs and she's got one hand on the rail and her other hands up in the air. And he goes, what are you doing, Stormy? And she goes, my friends helping me down the stairs. Well, they just wrote it off to she had an imaginary friend. He's helping her down the stairs. That's one less thing we got to do. Everything's good. Well, Stormy starts playing with her imaginary friend everywhere in the house. She calls them Casper and they just all laugh and joke and say, oh, it's the friendly ghost, you know. Well, there's more weird things that start happening with Casper. At one point, Stormy's walking around talking on an old cell phone and they ask her, who are you talking to, Stormy? She goes, I'm talking to Casper and they just sort of laugh and say, OK, well, Stormy walks over to her dad and says, hands him the phone and Casper wants to talk to you. And this guy looked at me and he said, Chris, I know that phone was turned off. It didn't even have a battery in it. And I was terrified to pick up that phone because I might hear something on the other end of it. So when they told me all this, I called my mother and I said, hey, mom, does the name Casper mean anything to you? And she was busy, but she got real quiet and she was like, why do you ask? And I told her, you know, this little girl's got an imaginary friend named Casper and they're living in our house and they want to know. She goes, well, I'll call you back in 30 minutes. Give me some time. And when she calls me back, she informs me that back in the early 1900s, we had a uncle, like a couple of years ago, generations, you know, it was like her second uncle or something like that. His name was Jasper and everybody called him Casper and he was found hanging in a tree on the property and they never figured out if it was suicide or if it was murder. But she said that was his nickname was Casper, you know, and that he lived on that property. And that really freaked us out when we heard that, you know, it's like, well, is that who her imaginary friend is? And then the people that own it now, I talked to them a few years ago and when I asked him about, you know, you ever see anything strange in the house? He just cracked this smile and his eyes sort of sparkled and he goes, oh, I know what you're talking about. They're still here. And I was like, OK, you know, and again, this was all back when I thought it was ghost and everything. So I'm definitely positive there are ghosts on that property. Bigfoot, I'm 50-50 on. I don't know if that was Bigfoot that fell out of the woods, but it sounds a lot like it, you know. Yeah, I agree with you. I think at first glance, it does sound like there was Sasquatch on the property, especially with its behavior in the home. I'm assuming you think there's more than one ghost. Did they ever get violent? No, nothing in the house ever got like I said, other than the ceiling fans spinning real fast and the lights flickering and you're just freaking out. That was probably the most violent thing we ever saw out there. Other than just being terrified from something standing there with its arms up, you know, it's not like it chased us when I shined the light on that one. It just turned and walked away when Marcy was lost in the woods. He said the thing never came out towards him. It wouldn't let him come down the mountain. It kept chasing him up the mountain, but it chased him up to a cabin up there to where there was shelter for him to get out of the snowstorm. There was a telephone to where he could call us, you know, so it was almost like the thing was just like get out of here. We don't need you here. Yeah, and I want to come back to this incident you're describing that happened in 99 inside the home. Did you ever see an apparition? No, I never saw an apparition in the house. There was just always the feeling of a presence, especially upstairs. Upstairs. There was something about the upstairs that it just felt like someone was up there. You would hear the floorboards creak when nobody was up there. You'd hear doors open and shut, but I never personally saw anything. I've got four younger brothers. They all lived upstairs when we lived in that house together. And, you know, they all swore it was haunted, you know, but they never saw anything. It was just a feeling they felt when they were up there. It was a crazy property to live on. I mean, it opened my eyes to want to find out more about this stuff, you know. The reason why I was kind of curious if you had ever seen an apparition in the home. It feels like two different things going on. Like that first creature you ran into or whatever it was. It seems to be very physical. It drops out of the tree, hits the ground, and it's right there. I realize you didn't get a great look at it. It's dark. It's basically just an outline. And then the second incident when you shine your light, it's that typical Sasquatch behavior of them turning away and kind of retreating. I go to this incident in 1999. But before we do, in your email, you talked about your grandfather's ghost kind of living down by the lake. Were you referring to the Sasquatch when you called them grandfather or was it something else? No, they're so before we moved into the house, one of the neighbors was like our second cousin. Whenever my grandfather had built a five acre lake and he would not let anybody fish in it because he built that lake for his grandson. And he was very stingy about it. And when he died, this cousin asked if she could go to the lake and go fishing. And my mom told her, yeah, sure, you can go over there and go fishing. Well, she the next time we went out there to see her, she told us she was never going fishing over there again. And I was like, well, why not? And she goes because something chased me out of there. And we're like, well, what was it? And the story she told me, she was sitting on the bank and she was fishing and she saw this fog start to rise out of the middle of the lake. And she didn't think much about it because on cool summer mornings, a lot of the creeks and streams fog come off of it. But this fog came up and it started drifting across the water towards her. And something about it just scared her and she's drilled in her line and she started walking away. And when she turned around, the fog was following her down the road away from the lake. And it followed her all the way to the tree line and then it stopped. And she's like, I'm never going back over there. And we had went back over there before we moved in and we were cleaning up and doing stuff and we were camping out by the lake. And my dad had sent me back to the house to get some stuff. And I was riding my four-wheeler and I was coming around the corner of the lake when I saw this gray fog come up out of the water. And as I rounded the lake, I turned around and I saw it following me down the trail on my four-wheeler. And I've got this thing in fourth gear and I'm winding it out and this fog's just right on my tail. And when I get to the end of the tree line, the fog stops and I ride my four-wheeler up to the house. I grab what my dad wanted me to get and I jump back on the four-wheeler. And I'm like, I've got to go back out there, but that fog's sitting right there at the beginning of the tree line, you know. So I fire up the four-wheeler, I get going fast and I barrel right through the fog. And when I turn around and look over my shoulder, it's following me back out to the lake. And when we get to the lake, I take the left trail to go around one side of the lake. And when I take the left trail, I'm like, all right, my dad's up here, he'll see this, he'll know I'm not messing around and everything will be okay. And when I turn around and look, that fog follows me back to where I make my turn. And then it just goes back out over the lake and settles back into the lake. So that was the ghost that I thought lived in the lake was that fog. And that's what I was trying to tell Marcy was chasing him through the woods. But looking back now, I think those are two totally different things. Was the fog like in a form? I mean, when I think of fog, I think of it being everywhere. Would you describe it? I mean, did it have a form to it? It was more like a cloud of fog. So something that would probably be about four feet wide and maybe two and a half feet thick from top to bottom at its center. And then it sort of tapers down to the edges like a little cloud you'd see floating around. You could see through it and it just looked like a thin mist of fog. And in your email, you had talked about that being kind of like the spirit of your grandfather. Tell me why. Well, like I said, that pond he made specifically for me and my four brothers and my two other cousins on my aunt's side. And he would not let anybody fish in there. And he had some massive bass and brim because he built it. You know, when I was a kid, he built it 10 years before I was born for my oldest cousin, you know, and it had been stock ever since then. And I mean, people love to go fishing there, but he was mean about it and he made sure nobody but his grandchildren fished out there. And like to me, it almost felt like he was playing with me because that was the first time I saw it. I saw it every time I rode past that lake, that fog was hanging around and I'd wave at me, hey, Grandpa, and it would chase me for a little bit. And then it had its area. It was around that lake, you know. So to me, it felt like it was protecting the lake. And I know from your email, you had said your grandfather passed away in 97 or 98. You were in eighth grade. Prior to his passing, did anyone ever see that fog? No, nobody had ever said that or seen it before. But like I said, he was a bit of a recluse. He didn't allow many people over there. It was a beautiful property, but at some point he just decided to quit taking care of it. It got real thick and overgrown. You know, he rented out the lower part of the fields to a tomato farmer that planted tomatoes and peppers down there. But for the most part, everything else was just thick underbrush. You know, you couldn't see much over there and he didn't allow many people on the property. Yeah, I understand. Tell me about this incident that happened. I think it was in 99 or 2000 that happened to your friend. So it had snowed and Marcy lived down the road from us. We were on the wrestling team together and we had three, four willers and I went and picked them up and we brought them to the house and we were riding four willers all day. And we had login trails on the side of the mountain and there were probably 20 miles worth of trails on the side of this mountain that just kept interlocking and interconnecting and running all over the side of the mountain. And it got late and we were coming home and we got separated. And Marcy took the wrong turn on a trail and his four willer stalled out and he got stuck in the woods. And I had rode on back to the house thinking he had gotten the head of me and couldn't find them. So I was riding around the woods looking for them. And while I was looking for them, Marcy was yelling for me, but I couldn't hear him over the four-wielder. And after about an hour or so, we ended up finding them and I went to go pick them up. And as we were riding home, he was telling me what happened. He said he had taken this trail and it dead ended. And as he was turning the four-wheeler around, it stalled out and he couldn't get it started back up. So he started walking back out the trail towards where he knew he needed to go when he started hearing something in the bushes. And it never made any noise. He could just hear it moving around and it sounded really big. So he started backing up the trail and as he would back up, this thing would follow him. And so he'd walk up the trail some more and then he'd try to cut around another side. And it was like it was flanking him and not allowing him to go down or to the left. It just kept pushing him up and to the right. As he was going up, he could hear music playing at the top of the hill and he's like, well, there's got to be people up there. So he kept working his way up the hill and the whole time, whatever was in the woods was following him up the hill. And when he got up to the hill, there was a log cabin and there were some people soaking in the hot tub and he yelled to the house and they told him to come up and who had amused the telephone and he called and told me about it. And as we're after he got done telling me his story, I said, man, that sounds that might have been my grandpa and he looked at me and he's like, what are you talking about? And I told him my story about when I rode past the lake, how this group fog comes out of the lake and chases me around and he goes, I don't think this was a fog. This was something big. This was something moving the brush. This was not a ghost. And I'm like, dude, it had to be a ghost. There's nothing else out there. And that's what led us to go on the camp and trip and his van out there at the pond was us arguing over whether it was a ghost or something else. I agree with you, Chris. I mean, it sounds more like the behavior of these creatures than especially the ghost stuff you were experiencing in the home. Did anything else ever happen on that property? I had a cousin that told me one time he had snuck onto the property without my grandfather knowing he was out there. He had snuck a girl out there and they were making out in the car up on one of the there was a clay gully on one side of the lake and it overlooked one of the gullies overlooked where the pond was. And he had backed his car up in there. So if grandpa came out there, he wouldn't be able to see him from the corner of the pond. He would just look down the trail and not see anybody and him and this girl were in there making out. And all of a sudden he felt something slam into the back of his car and it pushed them to where the front of the car, the front wheels were in the water. And he ended up having to walk back to the house and get grandpa to come pull him out with the tractor. And, you know, everybody in the family talked about how Michael had gone out there, got drunk and drove off into the lake. But Michael swore something pushed him into the lake and I always thought, you know, Michael got drunk and drove into the lake. And then, you know, after thinking maybe this is Bigfoot, you know, sort of maybe Michael wasn't drunk. Maybe something really did come out after Michael because to us the side of the lake where that gully was was where we always found these things. It was never on the other side of the lake. It was always on this steep mountain side of the lake. And, you know, like my curiosity made me look into it. I discovered there is a local legend of a hairy man in the woods. It's called Bujum for North Carolina. And, you know, it's a legend in Haywood County of a hairy man that ran through the woods and he would hoot. And he had a love for pretty girls and gemstones that he used to, like back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, people would take baths in the creeks. And the girls would report seeing them hiding in the bushes, watching them take their baths. And, you know, the legend says he had, he found one girl named Annie that fell in love with him. And they had a cabin in the woods together. And he would go off looking for gemstones and leave Annie alone at the house. And Annie would walk through the woods hooting, looking for Bujum. And that's where hooting Annie is supposed to come from. It's from that legend right there. Yeah, I'll have to look into that term that you were saying there, Chris. How do you spell it? You said it was Buja? Yeah, it's B-O-O-J-U-M. Yeah, I'll have to do a little research on that. Obviously, you know, I know you don't own the property anymore and the ghost apparently are still there. Do you think the creatures are still there? I would say probably so because, you know, that area is still pretty much undeveloped. It's still pretty wooded back in there. The people that own it now, they don't allow a lot of people on the property. There's plenty of water. There's plenty of game. There's an apple orchard on top of the mountain where their area was that I would say the holler they lived in up there. My grandfather told me there was a cave up on the mountain somewhere. It was something I was always looking for when I was out in the woods and I never found it. But I've been on the other side of that mountain and I found many rock ledges where there were caves and stuff. So I'm sure there's plenty of space for them to still move around up there. There's reports of pets getting attacked. They were thinking maybe Bobcat or something had attacked a German Shepherd a while back. We do have those around there. So I mean, I think it's very possible because we've got Black Bear, we got turkeys, we got deer that are in the woods, you know, and they thrive real good around here. You know, the other thing I was kind of curious about, Chris, is the ghosts. Do you think that they were the departed family members? And what do you think happens when you die? See, that's something. All right. So yes, I do believe both of the ghosts there are family members. My mom's side of the family. There was a lot of strife and arguing and grief and pain. And I think that might be some reason why my grandfather is still here. Some unresolved issue or something like that. Like me personally, everybody on my mom's side has passed away. My grandfather, my grandmother, my mother and my aunt. And to me, I guarantee you their how their souls are in that house because there were some unresolved issues between them. As far as what happens after this life, I'm not really sure. That's an answer I've been looking for for a long time because, you know, not just what happened living in that house, just other experiences in life. This is more than just a physical world. We live it, you know, are there other realms, realities or dimensions? I'd say yes. Karma, do we come back around if we don't figure it out this time? Yeah, I think so. You know, I think there's something more than just you live this life, you're dead and nothing happens after that, you know. So I don't know. Maybe we'll figure it out one day. Yeah, I understand where you're coming from, Chris, and I appreciate your feedback on it. With regard to Sasquatch, I ask everyone on the show, what do you think it is? What's your take? Sasquatch, I'm not real sure, you know, to me, it's got to be something physical, but... Like, I always thought it'd be cool if there was a Sasquatch, and I'm in the woods a lot. I was in the Boy Scouts, I'm a Boy Scout assistant leader now, both of my sons are in the Scouts. I'm in the woods every month, at least with them. And I'm always looking for it, you know, I'm looking for the fairies, I'm looking for the little people. I'm looking for this stuff that there's legends about, and I've never seen them, but I got a belief in them. And, you know, Bigfoot, I don't know, I want to say it's something physical, but, you know, when that one was standing by the fire and it turned around, it took three steps and it disappeared. It was gone, it couldn't have... I don't know what it did, you know, maybe it laid flat and crawled out of there on its fingertips like people say they do. But for a second, it made me think that wasn't real because it's not there anymore. So, yeah, it's got to be something physical, it's something real, you know. I don't think it's coming in and out between realities, I think it just knows how to hide real good from us, you know. I'm actually really glad that you clarified that, Chris. You know, because when I was listening to you and you said, oh, it took three steps and it was gone, I figured it, you know, went behind a tree and it didn't really... it didn't really... it didn't really... But it didn't really click what you were saying because you guys were in a field. And so, when it turned and took those three steps, it just vanished. Yeah, it was just gone, you know. And I mean, the grass might have been knee-high on a person, you know. So, yeah, if it could low crawl on its fingertips and toes straight, it could have crawled out of there. But, yeah, no, it had another 20 feet to go before it got to a ravine or anything like that. It could have dipped into and it disappeared way before that. Yeah, unfortunately, I've heard that from many eyewitnesses, many credible eyewitnesses. And it makes Sasquatch a little bit more weirder than it already is. What a strange property to live on. Last question I want to ask you, when you and your wife moved out of that home, did any of the spirits come with you? No, no, nothing has. I do drive past that property almost every day. You know, like I said, I'm trying to figure things out. When I get done smoking, I roll my own cigarettes and stuff. I do little tobacco offerings, you know, and I sort of do this offering to appease my ancestors and the ones that come before. And I sort of hope that keeps any of that behind me, you know, because I'm good with this go around, you know. I don't want to repeat this or get this stuck. I want to see what's next, you know. So, I'm hoping none of those are hanging around me. I haven't. That's there's been other places I've gone to where I felt those energies that I felt in that house. But that place is the most consistent place that I was ever up where I felt that stuff. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. Man, I'd like to talk to the guy who lives there now. I almost wonder if he's seen the fog. Yeah, no. When I talk to that guy, you could tell. That he had seen stuff, but he wasn't willing to go into it there. They're very closed off people. They don't know. I'm surprised I even got on to the property to talk to him. I sort of sneaked on. I discovered he had a Craigslist ad and I bought what he had just so I could say, hey, man, I used to live here. Have you seen anything crazy? You know, so that was how I got to talk to him. And, you know, it was a good time. We talked to him. You know, he was real nice. I've talked to him a couple of times since then, but he don't really want to go into it that much. His wife is a very private person and he respects her privacy. You know, he's told me before he wished he could let me come over and go fishing on the lake with my boys, but his wife refuses to allow anybody over there. You know, yeah, it's kind of a shame they won't let you on there. Even to fish, I get it. It's their property now, but it's amazing account, Chris. I really enjoyed chatting with you and I can't thank you enough for coming on. Well, I appreciate you listening to me. Like I said, to me, they were always ghost stories. And then me and my wife went on a road trip back in February and I just needed some podcasts to fill my time. And I came across yours, downloaded a few. And after about the second podcast, I was sitting there going thinking to myself, man, there's a lot of similarities between this and my grandfather's place. And then after about the fourth podcast, my wife looked over at me and she said, this sounds like your grandfather's place. And I was like, I was thinking the same thing. So, you know, I've been listening to him ever since. And, you know, every once in a while, while my wife will hear me listen into one and she'll go, you need to email him, you need to email him. So I finally did. Thanks again, Chris. And that's it for tonight, everyone. Remember, if you've had an encounter, shoot me an email. My email address is Wes at Sasquatch Chronicles dot com. And if you get a chance to check out Sasquatch Chronicles dot com, you can become a member and get additional shows. And I leave you tonight with the rest of the 911 call, along with the backstory, including an interview with the witness. We start out though with the sheriff of Pender County, North Carolina. Have a good night, everyone. Pender County is a vast, big county. We've got around 900 square miles. On the east part of the county, we have the Atlantic Ocean and a more populated area. We have rivers that come through our county. And then we have what I call a country, which is the western part of the county. And that's where the area of Curry and the Morris Creek National Battlefield is located. Our office has somewhere around 160 some employees. We have about 90 sworn deputies and about 13 detectives. Our office is just like other sheriff's offices. We're responsible for 911 dispatch, the jail, court security, and the service of civil process. And we do answer calls for the public when we get those. Curry is an area on the western side of our county. It has a few small stores, residences, and about 11 o'clock p.m. that evening. A call came in to our 911 dispatch of an individual standing on the side of the road and it appeared to be bleeding. Now he stated he was traveling 55 or 60 mile an hour. So I can see how traveling at that speed in the dark, it would be difficult to exactly identify what he saw. But he stated that it looked like a human being standing there with streaks of blood coming down. It is very hard to listen to that call to that 911 tape without becoming somewhat unnerved. It actually bothered me the first time that I heard it. County 911, what's the address of your emergency? I'm driving on 210. I just crossed the Black River and I thought I saw a guy standing on the side of the road bleeding. Okay, where are you at, sir? I'm on 210. I just crossed the Black River. I'm heading towards 53E. I just passed Patriots Watch. Okay, so you're over near Moore Street? Yes. Okay. And did you saw a man standing on the side of the road? What the f***? What was that, sir? That's not human! What's not human?! Sir, are you okay, sir? There's something in the bed of my truck! Okay, what's in the road? No, it's not in the road. It's in my truck. In the bed. There's something in the bed of your truck? Yes, ma'am. I just turned on my bed light. Where my truck is, there's something in my bed. Okay, sir, when you say something, what do you mean? I just knocked it off of the bed of my truck and it went over my room. Okay, what was it? According to the CAD notes and the deputy reports, this thing jumped into the back of his pickup truck and began to actually beat on the top of the cab of his truck. You could actually hear something beating on the top of the truck. The caller stated that it was beating and scratching on the top of the cab of his truck. He actually stated that he was able to engage his bed light and was able to somewhat identify this object that was in the back of his truck. At some point, he was able to slam on his brakes and the force of inertia actually threw this thing out over his hood and onto the highway, where this thing stood up in the roadway, made its way to the wood line and disappeared in the woods. Hi guys, it's Rusty. I'm about to interview the young man that was driving the truck the night of the frantic 911 call. Tee, finally I get a chance to me. I gotta tell you, I heard the 911 call a couple of months ago actually. And it's been a little bit of a challenge to get the sheriff's schedule, my schedule, and finally now we've got your schedule all worked out so that we can talk to you and get you to tell your story. Obviously, we're not going to share your name or your face. Totally understand that. But after talking with you, clearly your voice is the voice that's on that 911 call. If you would just start wherever you want to. We want to hear the whole story. Take as much time as you need. I guess I'll start from the beginning of the trip. I was coming up from Florida to visit my family. At the time I was going to a trade school down there and when I was driving up here to where the incident occurred by the battlefield, it was already easily well into the morning. I wasn't looking at my phone. I just know it was pitch black outside and it was pitch, pitch black. I couldn't see the moon, stars, nothing, just barely the road through my headlights. And I had my window down because the AC wasn't working the best. And as I was coming around, there's a massive right curve right there before you cross the Black River. And then after that you have the battlefield. So on that massive black curve as I'm coming around, I just started the curve and I was about a third of the way through it. And I look over into the ditch on my right because I caught a quick glimpse of something. And as I take a further look, it looks like there's a, I'd say probably a 30-something-year-old man standing in that ditch wearing what looks like an old Civil War uniform just covered head to toe in blood. And the uniform was torn as well. That threw me off because I didn't expect to see it at like one, two, three o'clock in the morning. Well, I'm calling 911 after I see him to report that because for all I know it could have just been a normal guy that was injured and needed emergency help. It looked like what had happened is he hit his head on something and the blood was just pulling down over his face and torso. Okay. And well, as I was calling, you know, everything seemed perfectly normal. Just quit phone call to 911, let them know, hey, there's a guy out here and try to find somewhere safe to park so that way I can take them to him. Well, as you know from the 911 call, right as soon as I reported that, I already had my window up at that point. All of a sudden, I heard a massive bang on my truck and my truck bounced down from the rear like I was pulling a heavy trailer and I had a pothole. And so I'm sitting there going, what the hell was that? Which I'm pretty sure you heard me help. Yeah, what the hell? I turned on my bed light and I looked in my rear view mirror and all I saw was this. White, like snow white face right up against my rear windshield. Like it was looking into my truck trying to see where it could see. It had shallow, hunk, sunken eyes. Had no nose, just think if you took skin and put it on a human skull and stretched it then. Couldn't see any ears, just bad. And immediately, I just started screaming. I didn't realize until afterwards that I had said that's not human on the call because it was just the first thing I started screaming because I was terrified. I didn't have my firearm with me, nothing. All I had was a wood splitting axe. That's all I had. So, and my truck is loud as is and it picks up speed fairly easily. Well, my truck at the time, it had a gas powered six liter VA Vortac on it and it was a proper dual exhaust. Hence why I had the window up to that truck is nice and loud. Well, I'm doing in between like 5560 miles an hour when this happens and I just stomped on the gas for a second. When I looked at this pedometer before I slammed on my brakes, I was doing maybe 80. And I slammed on those brakes with all my might and I went from like 80 miles an hour down to like 35 in just like a couple of seconds. And all I see is this just a super scrawny long body just fly over my truck in a ball rolling. And as I'm I've been swerved to the left and get back in the traveling and I floor it. And as I'm swerving to the left, I see it stand up and it is easily taller than that truck. No, I'm five foot 10. The truck is about two inches taller than I am. And this thing was easily like maybe seven feet. And as and as I'm past it, I look in my mirror and I see a bolt to the left into the woods and and it looked like some. I don't even know what the hell because it had. It looked like somebody took a normal human and stretch them out starting with the lens. Wow. Like abnormally long legs and arms and it just took off into the woods. And I just I just said, Nope, I'm out of here. I'm not staying to figure out what this is. And there's a gas station all the way at the corner where the highway intersects. And I pulled into that gas station. I was doing like 90 all the way to that gas station because that was the only place with any light that I saw. Right. And I just stopped in that parking lot and waited like 10, 15 minutes for state troopers to show up. Well, next thing I know the state troopers show up at the gas station and I'm just staring back at that road. To make sure that it's not coming back. Right. So I told them what happened. They proceed to look at my truck, look in the bed of the truck, look on top of the cab. And on top of the cab clear as day, you can see like like it was scratching trying to get into my truck. Really? Or when it initially hit what it or if you another way to look at it is if it when it hit the back of the truck and landed in the bed, like it had latched onto the hood for a second and scrape trying to balance itself. And you can see that you could see that clear as day. I mean, there was a couple of scratches from like squirrels and tree branches, but those those stuck out because it looked like it had landed on the back of the truck. And it was like this and just ripped backwards. And well, they asked me to take to approximately where to take them approximately where it happened. And I mean, when it's the middle of the night and you're going the opposite direction where you just came, you're since the direction is a little off. So I took them back to approximately where I believe it was because I couldn't see. I didn't remember any landmarks because I was going from the other way. But it was there was an S curve and I think I took them. I think I might have taken them on accident to the to the S curve. But the incident happened before that S curve because I hit that S curve going about 65 miles an hour, 70 miles an hour. I still remember the jolt of the truck, the fear, everything. I remember pretty much everything just in that one moment. I looked at the truck the next morning. Sure enough, scratch marks are right there on the roof of the truck. What were the reaction of the law enforcement officers? The law enforcement officers when they showed up, they were skeptical. Although now they might not be as much. But at the time they the troopers especially seemed skeptical parts in wildlife when they flew the drone. They seemed more curious than anything. And EMS was more like, okay, are you okay? And they went and looked for the other guy and couldn't find him. So the state patrol were there. EMS. Wildlife. And the sheriff's department, I guess, because we interviewed the sheriff. And I think one of them might have broken off after the initial contact with me. But I know one of them was with me. I was still in fight or flight when they told me, hey, can you go back and show us? I do not want to go back. I don't blame you at all. I still refuse to drive through that area at night because I don't know what I saw. I don't ever want to see it again. For years, the residents and people out there in the Curry area near the battlefield have reported seeing things and hearing things that they couldn't exactly understand. The Moors Creek National Battlefield does sit well off the roadway. In the years past, we have had deputies responded at area, different noises on the battlefield of itself, things being seen on the battlefield that just couldn't be explained. The caller remained on a 911 call with my dispatcher. He stated he was traveling towards 421 to Johnson's Corner, where he met a deputy and a highway patrol. Judging by the distance and the time that it would have taken him to travel that, the timeline definitely matches up. Once our deputies in the North Carolina State Highway Patrol arrived at the scene of Johnson's Corner on 421 and made contact with the caller, our deputies spoke with him some. At that point, the Highway Patrol took over that investigation because it was a traffic-related incident.