We live in Spokane, Washington. One night, my husband and I decided to run away like a couple of kids with a day of freedom with no grandkids to watch. We ran around checking out some local host towns and ended our day going up to Mount Spokane. We were halfway up when nature called and we hit a pit stop. Afterwards, we were checking out the trail maps and musing about our younger days when a park ranger walked out of a trail and struck up a conversation. As he was answering some of our questions, we heard a loud whoop. We looked at the ranger and watched him turn pale. I tried to lighten the mood by saying, looks like Bigfoot's home, but the ranger didn't find that amusing. He started to stutter, said there must be a dog loose on the trail. I remember thinking, is this his first day? My husband and I are always camping and doing something in the woods, and we know that there was no dog. He and I looked at each other and we winked. We both have plenty of stories from when we were kids, and we know you don't have to see Bigfoot to know one's there with you in the woods. Woo! What's up, everybody? Hey, my name's Cam Buckner. This is the Dixie Cryptid Podcast that you can also find out on the Podcast Network, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean. That's the one I use. Whatever app you use on your phone. And it's called the What If It's True Podcast. You can also search for Dixie Cryptid. It'll pop up. We do story after story after story from real people who tell about strange things that have happened in their life. A lot of them are Bigfoot. Most of them are Bigfoot. Some of them are UFOs. Some of them are demon encounters, ghost stories. Did a story the other day about a mad trapper who was called by the local native people to be a kushtaka, which is a spirit that they recognize that'll just grab people's personalities and drag them into death. So we do all kinds of stories, but they're all really good. I hope you guys will stick around and listen to this whole podcast. I've got six good stories, and I'm going to put an archive story or two in the back. Got a big snowstorm coming. Today is Friday. I don't know what the date is. The 23rd. Everybody's going to be snowed in across the south and the east, and maybe this podcast will break the monotony a little bit. Hope everybody's staying warm. I expect that we will be out of power. If we get as much ice as they're predicting, we're going to be without power for at least a week. It could be two weeks. I've been through these ice storms before. We're ready. Plenty of propane. I got a generator with about 20 gallons of gas. Over the last few years, I've cut down every tree that could possibly drop a branch on my house or my office or my fifth wheel. Chicken houses could get clobbered, but we'll just deal with that if that happens. Anyway, if you're listening to this, you're probably snowed in somewhere. I hope you enjoy it. All right, I'll quit rambling. How about some good stories? All right, here we go. In 2010, my family and I relocated to Colorado so I could pursue a new job with better pay and benefits. Every year, we would venture into the local wilderness to take in the vastness of the Rockies and check out the critters. One day I found the perfect campsite on Google Maps and I decided that we would try it starting in the spring. The location bordered between Rawa Wilderness in northern Colorado and seemed to be an old hunting camp. Coincidentally the word Rawa is a Native American word meaning wild place. Not many people are seen in this area because you'd need a high clearance vehicle or an ATV just to get there. Even the road getting there is mostly overgrown, and often you'll find yourself having to move down to trees and creating makeshift bridges over creeks. Motorized vehicles are not allowed in the Robo wilderness, but we found our camping spot on its border on forest service land. I'm a combat veteran, and I'm a little paranoid. I go to the woods heavily armed with full tactical gear. They say paranoia is just the overactive sense of awareness, and in my case, it might be true. My son and I went to check out the camping spot in the spring of 2019. It took us five hours to get there. The place was beautiful with a panoramic view of the surrounding mountains and the valley below. It was right about 9,000 feet in elevation, and it could get very cold in the early spring or late summer. Thankfully, there was a large fire pit built beneath an old towering pine tree. Hey, y'all. If you don't think I mess up on these stories, I really do sometimes. Anyway, on with the story. We spent four days there hiking around. We saw a moose with a calf and a few elk, and we were really enjoying our trip. But we also saw some weird things that we couldn't explain. In the middle of the forest, 200 meters from camp, we found some old ripped-up pajamas. In the nearby tree, we saw a backpack 50 feet up, and it was stuck in the branches. My son and I both couldn't figure out how the hell that happened, but we moved on, and the rest of the trip was beautiful and serene and uneventful. After hiking and eating MREs, then it was time to head home. A year later, my wife and son and I went back to camp that same location. Since we are fans of the show Vikings, we decided to have Viking night during our stay, wearing period Viking clothing, armor, shields, swords, and spears. Whoa! We had a blast the first night listening to Viking music and sipping on mead and hanging around the fire till about 2 a.m. My son, just an hour before, blew our Viking horn, which echoed through the mountains and the valley below. I don't know if something came to investigate, but right when we were about to call it a night, a powerful, guttural scream from the ridge directly behind us cut the silence. We thought we were hearing a woman being murdered. It was horrible. It scared us and it put us on alert. Ten minutes later, the scream tore through the night again. A pack of coyotes started yipping along and then went abruptly silent. Right as I grabbed my night vision goggles, something started attacking the coyotes. We could hear them yelping and whimpering in pain and then silence. I told my family that it could be a mountain lion killing something, or it could be a Bigfoot. I was joking. The next morning, we woke up and walked around to see if there was anything strange to be found. From the south of the camp, there was a horrible smell of grass and rotten meat. My son and I hiked over the southern ridgeline, and we found a dead cow in a small meadow. It looked as if it had been dead only a few days. It was bloated up from decay but had no bite marks on its body from predation. Nothing seemed to want to go near it. This was strange to me knowing plenty of creatures in the wilderness out there would have loved a free meal I figured it must have been sick and passed by natural causes where it lay until I saw its head The bottom jaw and its whole tongue were missing. There was nothing natural about this. That evening around the campfire, we talked about the screams and the dead cow. Now what didn't help the situation was that we were listening to Bigfoot and alien abduction stories from various podcasts that night. We went to bed armed with booby traps around the perimeter of our camp with tripwires and 12-gauge shotgun blank rounds. Weapons were good to go and thermal and night vision goggles were prepped and ready to rock and roll if we needed them. If anything decided to come into our camp, I had assault shotguns and buckshots and slugs and flamethrower rounds ready, not to mention my 1911. I was the John Wick of the wilderness. Anyone paranoid yet? Very good. That night we slept well, no shotgun blast or blood-curdling screams in the middle of the night. The outside temperature was pleasant, and we heard the sounds of the owls hanging out with us in the camp. But the next morning we woke up to the smell of something burning. We quickly got out of the tent and we saw smoke and fire off in the distance. My son and I were walking up on the ridgeline where we saw the dead cow the day before when he screamed, What the hell is that? We were in shock and disbelief. I couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. Right in front of us, clear as day, we saw a creature, at least seven feet tall, walking on two legs, dragging a decaying cow carcass toward the woods. It was covered in dark hair and its hand had fingers just like mine, but much bigger. The head had a strange profile, had a small nose and a strong brow line and a conical-shaped head. At that point, we needed to pack up and leave, not because of the encounter, but because of the encroaching Cameron Peak forest fire. The smoke was so thick that it was gagging us and burning our eyes, and when we got into our vehicle, forcing us to take an alternate route through Wyoming to get home. My family now believes that sometimes legends may be true. We've all discussed this encounter in depth. At first, I thought I was a few fries short of a happy meal until my son gave me his account of what he saw. Well, a few years later, he and I went back. We went to the spot where we saw the creature enter the foliage and actually found the cow's remains. After that long, it was impossible to tell what the creature had done to it, but we were able to retrieve the ear tag and we kept it as a souvenir. ear. We still go to that spot to leave apples and candy, Bigfoot action figures and marbles, just little gifts to say thanks for letting us camp in their woods. Each time we return, everything is usually gone. We were never afraid. We were just in total awe. I grew up in Sonora, California and was an avid outdoorsman and hunter. As a child, I spent many nights around the campfire listening intently as my uncle told Bigfoot stories in and around the Yosemite National Park area, so I'm not new to the Sasquatch topic. But never in my wildest dreams could I have guessed I would actually see one of them with my own eyes. I'm still paranoid about stuff sneaking around our camp, and by nature I still pack weapons, never with the intention of killing anything anything unless it's in self-defense. My goal is to observe nature and hope to again witness a Bigfoot, the myth and the legend. Thanks, Cam, for all you do. And he signs off Mountain Mike. That's a great story. Sometimes it may seem like I poke fun at people who see a shadow in the woods and they claim they've seen Bigfoot. And you can kind of understand that, but this guy actually saw the Bigfoot. The way he writes is, I don't know, it's just there's something about the way some people write. Maybe they're a little self-deprecating. They don't act like an expert. They just act like an innocent, humble witness to something that does not fit in the woods. At least in our minds, it does not fit in the woods. I thought this was a good story. I had somebody comment the other day about all these fake stories on Bigfoot. He's probably up somebody else's butt on some other channel, and I think I know who that will be. But it's like my response was, can you give me one Bigfoot story that you can absolutely, without a doubt, prove is true? Nobody in this audience can give me a story they can prove is true. You either believe these stories or you don't. If you don't believe them, just enjoy them. I'm just reading them the way people send them to me. But this particular story from this guy, I kind of tend to believe what he saw, just basically because of the way he wrote the story. Anyway, I really appreciate the writer sending it, Mountain Mike. Thanks for taking the time to write this down. I've never been particularly interested in Bigfoot or Sasquatch until recently. I sometimes wondered how they could possibly be real because I thought people had roamed and explored every inch of this country. I'm retired now and I love to research on the internet. I came across information that made me want to research Bigfoot and that led me to your stories. That got me started and I listened to many accounts and I saw photos and footprints and I've been particularly impressed by the tree structures All of that research that I had been doing made me remember something Many years ago, my two daughters told me about a creature they saw in their bedroom As I said, I had never been particularly interested in Bigfoot, so I brushed the event off to the imaginations of my children But everything I've read about recently made me take a hard second look at what they saw. If I had only known then what I know now, I would have taken them more seriously. In 1980, we moved on to five acres of virgin land in the sand hills of Texas, about 45 miles east of San Antonio. Big ranches and forests surrounded us, and our land was so heavily wooded that we had to have a bulldozer come in and clear a space big enough for our home. After a few years, our home was built, and we quickly fell in love with the peace and quiet. My girls, who were six and eight at the time, slept in the corner bedroom. We didn't have air conditioning yet, so we slept with the windows open with screens to keep the bugs out. One day my older daughter Amy woke up in the middle of the night and saw a big black hairy Ewok-like creature standing over her little sister. It was just standing there watching her as she slept. Amy said she opened her eyes wide and stared and then she accidentally moved and made a rustling sound with her sheets. The creature was startled and looked at her and then it just disappeared. Poof, it was gone. She woke her little sister up and told her what she had seen I don know if it scared them or not but they didn come and wake me up They just told me about it the next day I figured Amy had just had a bad dream I didn't make much fuss about it, and life went on. But now, after listening to so many stories and other accounts, I wonder, was this a Bigfoot? After discussing it with my husband, he reminded me of a time that our son came running out of the woods behind the house. he was terrified. He told us that he had seen a great big black hairy creature in the woods but we reacted just like most people do today when you say that you may have encountered Bigfoot. We just rolled our eyes and told our kids that there was no such thing as big hairy monsters. Go figure. Thank you for sharing everyone's stories. You may use my name if you want. There may not be any blood or guts or terror in this story but it did happen just like I've told it. I was hired to drive for a Midwestern trucking company. My first truck was a single bunk freightliner and I had a load going west. The truck drove well. It was night, my favorite time to drive because there was less traffic. It was around 2 a.m. in New Mexico when I had driven into a storm like I'd never seen. It rained so hard that I could barely see 50 feet in front of the truck. The lightning lit up for miles. I noticed I was the only vehicle on the road. Nothing too unusual, but it was isolating to say the least. And then I couldn't hear my engine anymore. It died right in the middle of nowhere. I pulled over and set the brakes and turned off the headlights. I put on the four-way flashers and cursed to myself. Now what do I do? I'm no mechanic. I had a computer in the truck for dispatch information. or emergencies, but I knew it would be hours before any help arrived. I grabbed my flashlight and stepped out of the truck, and I started looking around. Gut instinct told me to check the power cord running under the trailer from the rear of the truck. The cord had a seam, and I pulled it apart, and I found that water had crept in, and I dried off everything with my handkerchief, and I put it back together. I hopped in the truck and soaked wet from the rain, and I looked heavenward, and I said, I could use some help to get my truck to the garage. I turned the key and hit the starter button, and the engine fired to life. I looked up again, and I said, thank you. I stopped for the night at Tucumcari, New Mexico, and changed into some dry clothes, and I fell asleep in the sleeper. I was out in an instant. Hauling a truck takes it out of you. Driving through the storm didn't help. well I slept hard and I dreamt too first time in a long time and in my dream I saw a beautiful native woman dressed in white fur bright and vivid and full of color there was an older native man beside her wearing a full headdress only he was black and white there was no expression on his face in the morning I went into the little store nearby for coffee and for the heck of it I told the clerk about my strange night. She turned pale. I asked her what the matter was and she pointed to a postcard right behind me. She told me there was a card there that I should take a look at. I found the one she meant. I saw the picture of a woman who looked a whole lot like the woman in my dream and I read the text on the back. It was the history of Tucumcari, New Mexico and how it got its name. An Apache chief was preparing himself to step down, but he couldn't make up his mind between Tukum and Tonopah, two warriors competing to be his successor. In the end, the chief settled on a duel. The winner would not only become chief, but he would also marry his daughter, Carrie. But Carrie was already in love with Tukum. The duel began, and both warriors fought, and Tokum was killed. Keri was so distraught that she killed Tonopah and then she took her own life. Her father, in his grief, killed himself too, but not before calling out Tokum Keri, hence the name of the town. I left that town rested, but I wasn't really rested. I had never been to that town before, but the dream I had was vivid and real. Somehow I was blessed with a visit from Carrie and the chief, and I will never forget it. Okay, that's not a Bigfoot story or any kind of monster story, but I had read it before Senator Rebecca. She cleaned it up and did a great job on it. And the writer's original story was fine, but sometimes we kind of rearrange things to make it more story-like. It's a very interesting story. Some of these Native American legends and the oral history of the Native people, you know, Native people don't have a written language. They never did. So everything was an oral history. This is one that goes, I don't know how far back, but it's real interesting. And that story, if it's put on the back of a postcard, I don't know, I guess some of them could be made up. I remember reading, I love to read about wildlife and I was reading a history of the coyote as far as we know about the coyote. And the native people out west almost look at the coyote and almost all the animals as some kind of deity. I'm not going to go deep into that because I don't fully understand exactly how they see wildlife. But the coyote was considered a wily, you know, wily coyote. He was crafty and knew how to survive. And boy, do they know how to survive. But anyway, there were so many different takes on the coyote. In one story, the coyote might be the highest deity or the highest spirit that they look to, maybe for guidance or for teaching them how to approach life. And then in other ones, the coyote is the lowest. So I guess from one tribe to another, they look at different animals, spirit animals in different ways. anyway I don't know why I told you that but it just made me think of what I had read about the coyote because when I got to the end of the book I'm like okay I don't have any definitive information really on the coyote other than different tribes think different things about it so I don't know that probably wasn't that interesting but it made me think of it anyway this story about this man's dream is interesting I appreciate you sending it I come from a devout Mormon family, and I was raised to believe in the spirit world, angels and demons, and I always saw these experiences through the lens of my faith. The supernatural is something I believe in deeply, and the spiritual aspects of my religion gave context to what I was experiencing. One night I was sleeping on my parents' floor when I woke up feeling tingly and cold and unable to move. I was scared and I didn't know what was happening and suddenly I saw something right in my face. It was a man and after a few seconds he disappeared and I was left terrified and paralyzed with fear. I didn't move until sunrise. This happened again another time and oddly enough my mom had the same experience not too long after mine. The last experience in my parents' room was when I woke up from a nightmare. I opened my eyes and I saw a man without a face sitting on my mother dresser She couldn see him but I saw him I think I scared the crap out of her when I told her My faith told me that this wasn just a bad dream but possibly a spiritual warning or a manifestation of something unseen Years later, when I was in the fourth grade, I had outgrown sleeping in my parents' room, and I now shared a bunk with my brother. One night, I opened my eyes and I saw a giant man standing in my closet. He watched me and as I stared at him, he moved into the closet. And when I looked away, he kept peering out and staring at me and he didn't disappear until daylight. This went on for months. I was terrified and my belief in the supernatural made it feel real in a way that I couldn't explain. My last experience in that house happened in the same room. My brother and I had shared an L-shaped bed in the corner. One night at around 11 p.m., I couldn't sleep. I opened my eyes and I saw something right in my face and it was growling. At first, I thought it was my brother playing a trick, but then I realized he was asleep. The thing disappeared shortly after that. It solidified my belief that what I encountered was more than just my imagination. It was something real, something spiritual. When I was a teenager in the suburbs of Toronto, my friend and I would sometimes sleep out in a pup tent in the backyard on hot summer nights. We would drag the sleeping bags out onto the lawn where it was cooler and we could watch the sky. This was back in the 60s, so there wasn't much light pollution. One night was so clear and had no clouds. We'd talk, pointing out interesting things as we saw them. There was a lot of time between those moments and we mostly quiet in our own thoughts, even though we were shoulder to shoulder. When it was good and dark in the southern sky, my eye caught what I thought at first to be a star. It moved slowly and smoothly for a few seconds before stopping. I didn't alert my friend because once it stopped, it was next to impossible to pick out. But within a few seconds, another light from the other direction did the same thing. Moved steadily in the direction of the first one and then it stopped. That's when I could make out a pattern with a third star that moved toward the others until they formed a perfect equilateral triangle. Nothing else in the sky was as perfectly arranged. After a few seconds, all three of these lights rotated slowly as a single triangle and then shot off in formation out of sight. The disappearance wasn't immediate like a light going off. I could see some acceleration was involved, but it was still over in just half a second. What I still remember to this day more than 50 years later is when I turned to tell my friend he was already looking at me, silent, with his mouth open. It was like one of those scripted moments you see in the comedies. He had seen it too, the whole thing. That was the satisfying part. This wasn't something I got wrong from a few mixed up observations or my eyes playing tricks on me. He told me what he saw happen, and it was exactly what I had seen. That same summer, in about the same area of the night sky, I watched one star go haywire. It seemed to arrive from outside my field of vision, and it stopped right over us. It rapidly moved up and down and left and right and diagonals and so on, and then it stopped moving altogether. These moves transversed the sky only with the width of two fingers of my outstretched hand and were incredibly fast. And then, like the previous sighting, it zoomed like a bat out of hell into the darkness. By 2005, I was an adult and I was living in a small town over an hour north of Toronto. The night sky was even better for stargazing and I made a point of taking the dogs out at 11 p.m. because I knew that some satellites traveled overhead around that time of the night. I'd sometimes see other things going on different paths and blinking. I knew they weren't aircraft and I later found out through much research that they were likely space junk and the blinking effect was due to it tumbling as it orbited. One night, walking the dogs and getting a wicked crick in my neck from having to turn my head toward the sky for so long, I saw something that weirded me out and it took me back to my childhood. There were three lights on the eastern sky traveling slowly in an equilateral triangle. I couldn't mistake what I was seeing. They were moving from north to south, staying level with one light in the lead and the other two behind like wingmen, if they were aircraft, which I knew they were definitely not. I couldn't wait to get back to the house to browse for an answer. I'm a real science guy. I have been since grade school. and I completed four years of science at university. I don't jump to conclusions. I weigh the evidence, even if it's not what I want to hear. I don't go on hearsay or conspiracy theories. I didn't browse for UFOs. I browsed astronomy topics, and I got my answer in less than an hour. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce and has been deploying satellites for a long time that survey all kinds of information about the oceans. What I saw was a system that I think has been discontinued. They put up trios of satellites that were tethered by cables to a fixed triangle and they orbited in that way running in a path from pole to pole. What I was seeing was them passing north to south over the Atlantic Ocean. My inquiry got some replies from enthusiasts who were pleased to read I had seen them, and they were surprised that I could spot them without the use of a telescope, because that is rare. I was just happy that I had gotten a rational answer, and that I wasn't getting a replay of those strange nights as a kid in my parents' backyard. My friend from back then never brought it up, and I didn't either. I wish I could have told him about the satellites. That's all I have, Cam. Have a good one. Signed, Charlie. Here's a guy who saw lights in the sky and could have made this a big deal. He could have made it like, oh man, it's absolutely aliens and all this stuff. But he did a little digging, some extensive digging. When I say extensive, more than I would ever do. And he finds out that these are satellites tethered together to maybe map out the ocean or study the Atlantic Ocean. I thought that was cool. I wonder if Bigfoot people ever do that. I wonder if Bigfoot people ever go, uh, maybe what I saw was the light moving in the woods. Maybe what I saw was a tree stump. Maybe what I saw was this or that. Maybe I'm going to go back and look in that same area and see what it looks like at different times of the day and make sure that lights and shadows aren't playing tricks on me. Nope. Bigfoot people never do that. But these UFO people do, obviously. Charlie did it, so I thought that was pretty cool. Charlie, thanks for the story. I really enjoyed it.
